Orb

by Gary Tarulli

  Thompson peered around his side of the boulder, then asked, “You good with determining distances?”

  “Yes.”

  “How far to Melhaus?”

  I took a long look from around my side of the boulder. “Thirty-five to forty meters.”

  “That’s what I estimate.” But Thompson looked again.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “Wish to hell I had a couple of practice shots. There’s no wind. That’s good. Air resistance is slightly more than Earth’s. Gravity is less. The trajectory will be altered. The arrow will carry further.”

  “Sounds like physics. You want I should get Melhaus’s opinion?”

  “Sure … if you think you two can … what’s that damn word again?”

  “Communicate?” I said, willing myself to smile.

  “Yeah, that’s it, communicate.”

  “Now what’s he doing?” I asked.

  From our respective sides of the boulder, we both turned to look. We had an unhindered, oblique angle view of our adversary. His face drawn, appearance wild and unkempt; Melhaus probably had not eaten and slept in a couple of days. He was hastily tapping entries on the controller.

  “Without question,” Thompson said, “that device also regulates the laser’s power supply. But look there, look what’s happening in the distance.”

  Our attention had been centered on Melhaus and the nearby Orbs he was provoking. We had ignored the dozens of other groups, some of which had also coalesced and had grown to a most impressive size, nine meters in diameter, as tall as a house. The concerted activity was the clearest indication yet that what affected one group, was affecting all. This development was not the only thing attracting Thompson’s scrutiny, however, for his keen eyesight picked up additional movement along the horizon which I had failed to notice. The continued merging of Orb groups into progressively larger and larger entities. Didn’t Melhaus see this? Was it not a further warning for him to desist? If he saw, he chose not to care, the resumption of his invective making this abundantly clear.

  “I have your undivided attention, do I? I see everybody is watching?!”

  I whispered to Thompson, “Exactly who is he talking to, us or the Orb?”

  Thompson just shook his head. “We’re running out of time,” he said. “Whatever happens after he fires again—”

  “Twelve million little joules coming right up, a veritable bolt of purple lightning, yes indeed.”

  “—whatever happens…” Thompson continued, talking through Melhaus’s rant while reaching for the quiver, withdrawing the two arrows, handing one to me. I looked at him questioningly.

  “In due time. You’re nervous enough,” is all he said.

  But just as Melhaus made final computations to boost and discharge Desio’s laser, the nearest merged Orb group (that which included the Orb he had been harassing) commenced to sink below the OceanOrb surface until, without so much as a ripple, it disappeared from sight.

  This was the very last thing the physicist wanted to see happen. With his invented nemesis gone, together with hopes of a revelation, he began venting his frustration by repeatedly discharging the laser upon the placid surface left in the Orbs’ wake; to the empty sky he began shouting something resembling “test your theory” or “at best a story.” No, it was both. He was talking not just to himself, but to Paul and me.

  What transpired next had me doubting my sanity.

  The lasered ocean (for that’s all it was to Melhaus) came to life in a roil, upwell, and tumble. And yet the churning motion produced no surface foam or froth of any kind. In the turbulence, iridescent cords of color emerged, twisted, and intertwined as they caught the sunlight. I had seen the colors in the OceanOrb before; these were more intense and more numerous. The region affected, the area of a soccer field, but circular, was beyond that which could have been roused by the discharge of laser energy. Melhaus, realizing this, ceased firing—the overwhelming oddity of the phenomena temporarily captivating his interest and suppressing his single-minded rage.

  Almost as soon as the disturbance began, the troubled area reverted to a tranquil, perfectly flat sheen.

  The world, in anticipation, went dead calm.

  “Be ready,” Thompson said.

  Suddenly, a large, circular area of the OceanOrb smoothly concaved, then heaved and undulated, sending out a surge that crashed on the rocky shore; where the upwelling had been, now a dome—massive, shiny smooth, sparkling—broke through the surface.

  Slowly, rising like a second sun, colossal as a giant oak, rose the Orb: Belying a watery birth, not a drop of liquid clinging to its textureless surface; belying gravity, floating on one tiny point as if light as a feather. In front of this mammoth stood Melhaus, diminutive, pathetically so, forced to gaze up in astonishment at what he presumed to have wrought.

  Thompson was moved to action. He was standing next to me, bow in hand. Drawing back, letting an arrow fly….

  A hypnotizing arc, a blur, went whooshing through the air. There was a loud clanging sound as the arrow, whizzing past Melhaus’s shoulder, clashed, deflected, and shattered against the metal shell of Desio.

  A large splinter came to rest at the physicist’s feet.

  Shaken from his trance, he stooped down, picked up, and stared at a wood stick with some feathers stuck to it.

  “Arrow,” I heard Thompson say from above me.

  A bewildered look showed on Melhaus’s face, then a dawning, a recognition. And fear.

  “Arrow,” I heard Thompson repeat. “Missed high. Told you I needed a practice shot.”

  “What?” I said. But I reflectively did as he bid.

  Melhaus, realizing his danger, began wildly entering laser commands.

  Thompson, exposed, remained standing. Ice water in his veins, he pulled the bowstring back until it rested against his jaw, sighted, held steady, held steady, and released.

  I lost a second or two of my life. Then I noticed an arrow protruding from the side of Melhaus’s chest near the shoulder. For a second he looked at it in utter disbelief. His hand involuntarily opened sending the controller clanking onto rock. His eyes glazed and rolled to the back of his head and he slumped to the ground.

  Thompson reached him first. To stem the loss of blood, he began immediately applying pressure to the wound. Anguish in his eyes, he turned to me. “He has a fighting chance. The tip has come completely through.”

  Of course, our other immediate concern was the Orb. By the time Kelly, followed by Diana, and Paul, holding Angie, reached us the Orb had departed, either having disappeared over the horizon or beneath the surface. All were gone save one, the constant, unfathomable OceanOrb.

  “You almost gave me a heart attack, but you damn well saved our lives!” Diana said, addressing Thompson, although it’s likely he never heard her.

  To Kelly, also, all else except saving Melhaus went unnoticed. She took over.

  “Hypovolemic shock,” she said after assessing his injury. “Keep applying pressure. The amount and color of blood indicates no damage to a major artery or lung penetration. He has a chance.”

  “Make the most of it,” Thompson said, as if making the words an order mattered. “Sorry. I know you will, Kelly.”

  Without responding, Kelly entered Desio. A minute later she emerged holding a large medical kit in one hand and wound dressings in the other. From the kit she removed a flexible thick metal band and clamped it to Melhaus’s wrist. A display on the kit’s lid immediately lighted with several biometric measurements. “Fourteen percent blood loss,” Kelly said. “Manageable. I have some time.”

  A long tube protected by a sterilized wrapper was removed from the kit. Inside the tubing was a light green liquid. At one end of the tube was a small synthetic rubber bulb. “Break off the arrow shaft and pull back his shirt,” Kelly commanded, and Thompson complied. “This procedure will go better before I bring him out of shock.” With a sure and steady hand Kelly removed the arrow and inserted the su
rgical tube deep into the bleeding wound. Once satisfied that the tube was fully inserted she deftly withdrew it, simultaneously squeezing the bulb, depositing the tube’s contents along the entire length of the injury. “Crude, but effective,” she said.

  “What’s in the liquid?” Paul asked.

  “Biochemicals. A sterilizing agent, an anticoagulant, and a new drug that promotes rapid healing.”

  “Do you have his consent?” Diana asked. As Kelly frowned, Diana placed a comforting hand on her shoulder and said, “You can have mine.”

  As she continued to monitor vitals, Kelly applied a surgical dressing to the wound and started an AI regulated IV.

  “I have one bag of pre-made fluid for the shock. More can be made up as needed. Let’s make him comfortable right in place. We can move him inside before nightfall. It’s as sterile out here as inside Desio. ”

  “Prognosis?” Thompson asked. His hands, yet to be washed, were stained red with blood.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Kelly responded. “Did you deliberately aim for a portion of the anatomy that would cause the least amount of trauma?”

  “That, doctor, would be absurd,” Thompson remarked.

  “For the record,” I remarked, “not a complete answer.”

  “Uh huh,” Kelly said, sharing my skepticism. “If there are no complications, he’ll do fine … physically. That’s only half the battle, of course.”

  During Kelly’s expert administrations we waited expectantly for her patient, who had remained unconscious, to open his eyes. This was prompted not only out of concern for Melhaus’s welfare, but with a healthy curiosity for what he might have to say, if anything, concerning his actions.

  Eventually, with a moan and a fluttering of eyelids, the physicist gazed up at five crewmates staring at him—and slowly comprehended that he was flat on his back, somehow injured, but very much alive.

  “Good to have you with us, Doctor Melhaus,” Thompson said.

  The voice provided a focus for Melhaus’s attention.

  “Thompson … I can’t believe you shot me … with, with … an arrow…?”

  “My apologies,” Thompson responded, “for not being a bit more high-tech.”

  Diana leaned in and, with a conspiratorial voice, said, “Larry, I know what you think of drugs. I told Doctor Takara to go easy on the pain medication.”

  Melhaus rasped out a laugh or a cough, grimacing from the effort. The last thing he said before Kelly ushered us away was, “Paul, you were right. You were right.”

  Nobody believed this more than Thompson. I noted with interest that he washed the blood from his hands inside Desio, not at the shoreline, which would have been much more convenient.

  Heartfelt

  A COMPLETE TOP-DOWN inspection of Desio was ordered by Thompson to determine if the ship was in any way damaged or sabotaged.

  “Nothing amiss in my cabin,” I reported.

  “I’m a bit surprised,” Kelly said. She had just completed inventorying her ransacked drug supply. “You’re lucky Larry made no attempt to expunge your chronicle of the mission.”

  “Lucky?” I said with mock chagrin. “Actually, I’m rather offended.”

  “Offended?” Paul and Kelly simultaneously asked.

  “Yes, offended,” I replied. “I have a theory. That Larry didn’t consider my work worthy of reading. In fact, the more I dwell on it, at least you scientists had your work judged sufficiently valuable to destroy or at least have threatened.”

  “You realize,” Paul said, “there is a perverse logic to what he’s saying.”

  “There is a perverse logic to everything he says,” Diana observed.

  “You bet there is,” I said, persisting with my argument. “I mean, even Bruce thought enough of my work to offer it up to Larry for sacrifice.”

  “Whoa,” Thompson said, “That was an act of sheer desperation. I wouldn’t let it go to your head.”

  “And Larry did scoff at the offer,” Paul emphasized. “Almost instantly, as I seem to recall.”

  “See? There you have it then,” I said. “I rest my case.”

  “Yes, there we have it,” Thompson echoed. “Finally, with a little help, a theory you have proven. Bravo!”

  I graciously accepted the honor for what it was worth.

  The inspection of Desio revealed, for the most part, alterations which we had been expecting, including several quite clever changes made to the laser power supply and firing circuitry. One notable exception: The ultrasonic humidifier, which was now in serious need of repair. Per Thompson, Melhaus had removed the unit’s piezoelectric transducer, installing it in a high-frequency sound-emitting device of his own creation. With it, he had attracted the Orb. Another example of his warped brilliance. For all the right reasons, further use of his invention was never considered.

  In a bit of good news, none of the collected samples, onboard experiments, or saved files were compromised. Better yet, there had been no tampering with the ship’s operating systems. If we could manage to get through one more full day without misadventure, we could safely depart for home.

  And because of this, and despite the other setbacks and damage done, we were in an ebullient mood; nobody more so than Doctor Diana Gilmore.

  “I may not have to pummel Melhaus into another dimension after all,” she said.

  She didn’t seem to mind that he was recuperating close by and might be listening. We were once again collected at the outside worktable, each of us digging into, and actually enjoying for a change, the processed food displayed in front of us. We had only missed one day of meals, but we weren’t accustomed to such ill-treatment. This especially applied to Angie. Of all of us, she was the hungriest, and I spoiled her with a big extra portion of her favorite dry food. Having eaten a stomach full, she was now spread out across my lap, belly up and legs spread apart, looking very much like a spatchcocked chicken.

  “And so, tell me, Bruce,” Kelly prodded. “You stood there realizing that any moment you could be toasted by the laser, with an Orb the size of a small building hovering nearby, having an absurdly difficult shot to make, all the while realizing the dire consequence of failure. Seriously now, what planet did you come from to pull that off?”

  “I can’t take full responsibility for my actions.” Thompson contended. “One part of me, the one that gets all of that, I forced into submission. Another part of me became convinced that I was taking practice shots at an archery range.”

  “Oh, great,” Diana said, unsatisfied. “You held our lives in the balance based on the mere pretense of fooling around at an archery range?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “You reckless SOB,” Diana hissed, staring hard at Thompson and sounding indignant; but in the next breath, and deliberately loud enough for all the world to hear, she said, “Gutsiest damn thing I ever saw.”

  “You both were brave,” Kelly said, draping her arms around my neck and leaning over to peck my cheek.

  “Was I there?” I said. “Just what the hell was I thinking?”

  “May I join the chorus of praise?” Paul said. “You both have our undying gratitude.”

  There were groans, then more groans when I congratulated him on his deadpan delivery.

  “And just how big was the Orb, in your estimation?” Kelly asked.

  “Upwards of forty meters, diameter,” Thompson ventured. “Born right before our eyes, right out of the maelstrom.”

  “That matches our estimates from further away,” Paul stated. “Amazing. And I assume you also observed the Orbs skimming along the surface, combining into ever-larger entities?”

  “Remarkable, was it not?” Thompson understated. “There were, however, two things we did not see, and one may be dependent on the other: The Orb, despite repeated provocation, never acted in an overtly aggressive manner; merged Orbs, no matter how large they became, never left contact with the OceanOrb.”

  “And just how large can they become?” I asked.

  �
��Oberon.”

  I just about choked on the reconstituted grape juice I was drinking. The unlikely utterance came from Melhaus. I was familiar with only one Oberon.

  “As big as the King of the Fairies?” I said, having a pretty good idea that’s not what he meant.

  “I don’t follow,” Melhaus remarked.

  “Oberon,” I said. “A whimsical character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. King of all the fairies. Not very big, though.”

  “The Oberon I refer to is much more massive.” Melhaus’s deadpan delivery, completely unintentional, was much better than mine.

  “How much more massive?”

  “I should tell you that Oberon is a moon. A moon orbiting Uranus. It has a diameter of fifteen hundred twenty six kilometers.”

  “That is bigger than Shakespeare’s Oberon,” I replied, casting a glance at Thompson. I recalled the day when he told me he was an avid reader of the Bard. He was having difficulty suppressing his laughter. Melhaus, however, was oblivious.

  “The volume of Oberon,” he continued, “when rounding off, is one point nine billion kilometers cubed.”

  “A very big number,” I commented.

  “A number,” Melhaus insisted, “comparing quite favorably to the volume of water—two point four billion kilometers cubed—contained by this planet’s ocean.”

  “Are you claiming one Orb can reach that size?” He certainly had captivated my attention, but when he didn’t respond right away I assumed I had lost his. This was not so, for he was carefully considering a reply.

  “It is theoretically possible. The entity can bend the laws of physics to its own advantage, making rapid changes to the molecular density of its surface, perhaps to its entirety. This is not only plausible but completely evident. I would otherwise be at a total loss to explain the perfectly round shape, textureless surface, resistance to the laser, and the way they can merge at will. By controlling its molecular density, the entity is able to overcome the size limitations we typically associate with Earth organisms. I doubt the Orb are restricted by anything but the total volume of water in what, through force of habit, I will call the ocean. As Paul astutely pointed out, the entity is the ocean.”