Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  What we knew about the Tiberians had also increased enormously, but it had a tendency to change drastically every couple of years. My last year at the Air Force Academy, there had been a no-credit class, taught by a history prof who had just returned from the dig on the Moon. The thinking at the time, based on the shelters and equipment they had found, was that the Tiberians had established their main base on Phobos and then set up a secondary base on the Moon. The thousands of broken pieces of everything that the Gander expedition had found all over Phobos tended to confirm this; possibly their base there had exploded, leaving the forward team on the Moon stranded. But then why was there no evidence of an explosion or meteor strike anywhere near their cave habitat on Phobos? And why was there no one inside? Had they all been working at a power plant on the other side of Phobos when the explosion happened? Then why were there no corpses or body parts among the debris? And hadn’t anyone been able to abort to Crater Korolev, or anyone from Korolev been able to come up and help?

  Whatever stopped the Tiberian base on Phobos from relieving their base on the Moon, it must have happened early on, the archeologists said, because the lunar base seemed half-finished and cobbled together, as if the Tiberians had had to improvise without any external support. Their mission had come to an ignominious end there at the lunar south pole. Their lander, with its strange mixture of aerostatic, aerodynamic, and rocket flight, was clearly capable of reaching the Earth, and the message seemed to say they had done so but then left. Why had they not returned to a world where at least they could breathe? Moreover, the base seemed never to have been fully staffed, because there were twice as many beds as bodies.

  The way they had died was a mystery as well. It looked as if they had starved, since the little automatic farm was one of the few Tiberian devices there that didn’t seem to have been abandoned in working order. And why had they brought what appeared to be young children with them—in such great numbers? Had they intended to colonize the Earth? “The great mystery,” the professor had said with a flourish, “is why, with a working spacecraft and the Earth’s surface just hours away, they didn’t fly down and collect more than enough to feed themselves—or better still, move to our planet. With their technical superiority over us, given that dust on the shelter surfaces tends to indicate a date around 7000 B.C., which is confirmed by the counter in the Message itself, they could have been our rulers and masters. Why they chose not to … or could not … well, for the answer to that, we may very well have to wait until we get a look at Crater Korolev, or perhaps something will turn up in the analysis of the debris from Phobos that will be coming back on the special cargo return craft.”

  I was in flight training in January of 2021 when the Phobos Two expedition landed and set up Phobos Base. A lot of us stayed up late, in an all-night coffeehouse in town, to watch the landing, but due to problems with the transmission, they couldn’t show us much of it and we had to be content with interviews with all sorts of people telling us that this was important. We all noticed that the lunar archeologists were already complaining that not enough archeologists were getting to Phobos; it seems to be an early part of pilot training to deal with the complaints of mission specialists. No doubt they feel the same about us.

  Meanwhile, everything I had heard at the lecture two years before had fallen into question. Xenobiologists—a field that had come into existence in four years flat and now boasted four monthly journals—had managed to establish that the tissues of all the dead Tiberians had various kinds of damage brought on by the way their immune systems reacted to long-term exposure to Earth proteins, so they not only had to have been to the Earth, they had to have spent years here eating the food. Now the idea was that the Moon was some kind of refugee camp or quarantine area for sick Tiberians being rescued from a failed Earth colony. But then why hadn’t they finished the job? And how could a starfaring race not have a big enough ship to just take everyone off the Earth and put them into shipboard quarantine?

  Part of the answer came from Walter Gander himself. Some people called him a dinosaur, even then; he had been a rookie astronaut the year my father was killed. He was of the old school, with a doctorate in orbital mechanics and some years as a military test pilot, and there were allegations that he had been picked as mission commander in part just to remind people of NASA’s glory days of fifty years before.

  On the return trip on the cycler Aldrin, with about six months during which the major things the crew had to do were routine course corrections and life-support maintenance, Gander had gotten interested in a problem in orbital mechanics. He later said that what had first gotten his attention was just an idle interest in the complexity of figuring orbits around Phobos; the L1 and L2 points were located about seventeen kilometers from the center of gravity of the Martian moon. As he used up a lot of spare time and computer time figuring orbits, it occurred to him that since they had recorded the exact location on Phobos of each object they picked up, he could write a genetic algorithm in orbital mechanics, to find the minimum number of different places that the thousands of identified scraps of Tiberian material scattered over Phobos could have come from.

  The answer was just one—a body orbiting a mere ten kilometers above its surface at closest approach—and suddenly everyone’s favorite hypothesis was that the Tiberians had left a starship there, in orbit around the tiny moon. Orbital positions around Phobos are intrinsically unstable; sooner or later the ship had brushed the moon’s face and started to break up, first into large pieces. Most of the big pieces had probably bounced into irregular orbits around Phobos, been captured by Mars, and fallen into the atmosphere and burned up; a few had collided with Phobos instead, breaking up further, until finally they had ended up as the scattered, patterned swath of debris we had found.

  A couple of years later, as a lieutenant, I had a temporary rotation job in Washington, which meant I was seeing my mother and Sig a lot. That also meant I was constantly trying to deflect Sig’s pointed suggestions that someday I might want to come and fly for ShareSpace, since the Starliner was nearing its test phase, and as he pointed out, he could just hire me, whereas NASA might keep my applications dangling forever. By that time it was generally agreed that even if they didn’t know much about the Tiberians just yet, the archeologists had at least identified the right questions for whenever it was that we got down to Crater Korolev; in effect, we had a list of known mysteries to solve.

  Narihara Nigawa’s dissertation, Anomalies in the Tiberian Technical Matrix, caused an explosion of controversy, because he reopened a bunch of settled questions and argued that more needed explaining than anyone had tried to explain. According to Nigawa the Tiberian base on the Moon seemed to include several cases of duplicate devices in which one looked like a more advanced version of the other—“The equivalent of finding a Sopwith Camel and a Starbird together, or a crank telephone and a cellular phone,” as he put it. And, he said, if we accepted the little indicator at the upper right-hand corner of some of the Great Volume frames as a date, it had been decades between the arrival of the first and second Tiberian ships.

  The next year, when I was accepted into training as an astronaut-pilot for the rapidly expanding space program, scientists had finally cracked the operating principle of Tiberian solar power panels; within a few months the price of electricity on Earth was half what it had been. Some of the crew had spent a full year at the lunar south pole.

  I had been flying space missions for a year when the famous research group of Ilsa Bierlein, Vassily Chebutykin, and Dong Te-Hua (the “BCD team,” as the media dubbed them) had worked out a plausible interpretation of the system of writing from the few pieces of written Tiberian we had, finally confirming that the accordion-folded piece of fabric with symbols on it, found under the pilot’s seat, was indeed the operations manual for the lander.

  I sort of chuckled as I thought about that one. It all seemed like yesterday to me—I’d been so busy between space flying, advanced training, and a busy-bu
t-never-serious love life—but it had been several years, and unfortunately no one had advanced matters any farther than the BCD team’s original work. Though other linguists, cryptologists, and xenomathematicians were saying that eventually they expected great things, right now matters stood where they had with BCD’s publication: about thirty percent of the common words in the manual were still unreadable, and another ten percent of the manual’s vocabulary were unique occurrences: words that were only found once. They had deciphered most of the inscriptions on the lander itself, but they were such informative things as “Be sure to check! Is the (UNKNOWN WORD) turned off? Is the hatch closed?”, “To open turn left and lift,” and “Check for blue lights on panel before throwing switch.”

  In 2025, the Mars One Mission, incorporating concepts first proposed by a fellow named Zubrin way back in the 1990s, finally brought human beings to the face of Mars, and to the rim of Crater Korolev, almost twenty years after humanity had first heard the message from Alpha Centauri. The landing was, as scheduled, on July 20, fifty-six years after Neil and Buzz landed Eagle at Tranquillity Base. I heard the news while I was bringing a reusable lander up from South Pole Base to the Armstrong L1 Port. But that first Mars landing was a bit of a disappointment, for all the pride we took in knowing that humanity’s third world beyond the Earth had been reached first by an American—so far we still had all the firsts.

  Crater Korolev is roughly circular and about fifty kilometers in diameter—about the area of a midwestern county—and filled with ice as deep as three hundred meters. There was nothing on the surface, and even after the expedition made a traverse following the rim, still nothing showed up. For the first time, we had gone to a place where the message told us to go, and we had found nothing.

  The Mars Two expedition of ’27 had better success, in part because during the time it was on its way, the researchers operating surface robots on Mars by radio from Phobos had made a couple of interesting discoveries. First and foremost, in many of the ice fields of Mars, including the one in Crater Korolev and the one covering the north pole itself, there was what the seismic researchers called a “discontinuity,” a depth at which the ice changed its character and composition. Tentative dating put it around the time the Tiberians should have been active on Mars. It looked as if a large part of the water on Mars had thawed very quickly, then refrozen within a short time and gradually redeposited into the craters and at the poles.

  So when the Mars Three expedition of 2029 got to Korolev, it had a highly specific mission in addition to setting up and crewing a permanent Mars base. Using robots and treaded tractors, they installed a network of seismic listening devices all over the deep frozen lake; with sound generators, they probed the whole surface of the discontinuity, anywhere from five to eighty meters deep. The process was slow and the analysis was difficult, but they had time—we were on Mars to stay.

  When the Mars Four team was added in 2031, the work went faster, and finally they were rewarded: they had an anomaly lying right on the discontinuity, a few meters under the surface of the ice in the middle of Korolev, and the anomaly was exactly the shape of the Tiberian lander that still sat on our Moon.

  Only a few months ago, about the time that my superiors were writing all sorts of nice things about me in reports, making me likely to come to the attention of mission planners, the news had been that the crew at Korolev Base, using microprobes designed to very carefully penetrate the ice, and very low energy ultrasound, had definitely established that it was the second Tiberian lander—under four meters of solid ice, but otherwise unharmed as far as anyone could tell. It seemed to be lying on its side. Near it were the graves of about twenty Tiberians, all frozen solid, which meant that for the first time our scientists would be able to study a Tiberian body that had not desiccated in vacuum. Also there were eight stone buildings, fairly crude affairs, and further keyhole archeology of their interiors seemed to show more frozen Tiberians inside each of them.

  Everything we had wanted to know since the message first came, thirty years before, was potentially there at that site. The one thing that wasn’t there was the Encyclopedia; like the one on the Moon, it had landed at some considerable distance from the base. Now it had been found, and our team on site thought they knew enough about Martian arctic conditions to know how to get something out of there without destroying it. Our habitat would set down less than five kilometers from the site. Another Terence was going to go after a piece of Tiberian hardware. I hoped, wherever he was, Dad wouldn’t mind if I improved on his performance.

  It was finally time. I had been preparing for this for most of my life, and on this first day of finding out I would be going, I didn’t quite believe it. I sat and sipped the diet Coke as it grew warm and flat, and I fell asleep, fully dressed, on the couch.

  2

  “OKAY, JASON, WHEN YOU’RE ready.” Captain Gander had the same bland drawl for everything, so there was nothing to indicate that the next step I took would start us moving, and that we wouldn’t stop until we were tens of millions of miles away. I picked up the cooling pack beside me and stepped forward onto the metal ramp that led out of the waiting room and into the side of the Yankee Clipper, where it rested on the launching pad next to the gantry. It was a longish walk—more than a city block—and I had the chance to appreciate all over again how huge anything that can get a person into space has to be. The cooling pack hummed a little louder, working harder to compensate for the bright Florida sunlight.

  It occurred to me that I was breathing my last natural Earth air for more than two years to come; it was nice that it smelled of the sea, at the moment, for where I was going it might be a long time before I was near a sea again.

  “Don’t forget to wave,” Captain Gander said behind me. “We don’t want any Public Affairs Officers to get mad at you.”

  I was grateful for the reminder. Nowadays, with flights to orbit a few times a day, nobody came out to watch us, let alone television news. I’d flown Yankee Clippers for three years, six or seven flights a year, and the only people who’d ever come out to see me take off were Mom and Sig, and they’d only come out the first time.

  But this was different, obviously. We were going to go get the Encyclopedia, and that made us as big a deal as the Phobos One expedition in ’18, or the Mars One expedition in ’25.

  I looked up at the little camera they had mounted over the hatch and, as we had been told to do, smiled at the camera and waved. I took a second to take a good long look off to the side, at the green foliage and the iron-gray sea, locking the memory in place, and then went into the cool dim artificial light of the Yankee Clipper.

  I was the first one aboard because the crew cabin in a Yankee Clipper had never been intended for long-term occupancy, there wasn’t room to pass, and the ship boarded from the left. Since the pilot sits all the way forward and right, that meant I had to get in before anyone else could. I made my way along the corridor, noting only that what I could see of everyone’s gear seemed to be where it was supposed to be, and around the captain’s seat to my place.

  My pressure suit helmet was in place and tied down; the boards showed that we were getting electric power from the gantry, just as we were supposed to, so, right on schedule, I started the power-up sequence to put us on independent. As the pressurized air came on, I hooked my suit to that and put my cooling pack carefully into seat bin four, lower left, the bin that was supposed to hold things we wouldn’t be taking. Something felt odd, so I pulled it out, looked, and there was my keep-sake box. I clicked off my microphone and said a couple of words Mom wouldn’t have approved of, then leaned in and pulled out the box.

  “Something wrong?” Captain Gander said, taking the seat next to me.

  “The packing crew put my personal possession kit in the return-to-Earth bin,” I said.

  The captain grunted. “That’s not good.” He leaned back and shouted down to Olga, who was just coming aboard, “Hey, check to make sure everything that’s supposed to g
o with you is in the right bins. They screwed up Jason’s.”

  I looked around in time to see her make a face. “Packing crews,” she said, with disgust. “When are we going to reinvent the sea chest?” She climbed down to her station and opened the bins. “Looks like they got my stuff right.”

  Though Olga and I had flown two training missions together, I didn’t yet know her well. Some bright psychologist had the idea that since planetary manned missions would be years in duration, it might be better if we had to spend some time making friends and forming relationships on the way, rather than knowing each other thoroughly before going. It would give us something to do and help prevent boredom. So though we trained together, we were encouraged to spend most of our time away from the rest of the crew, and our individual studies and practice were often at separate locations. The idea was to have us all comfortable with each other but not too familiar.

  It had already occurred to me, anyway, that Olga was fairly attractive and, like me, had no romantic attachments. She was also going to be the first officer while we were in flight, and thus my superior, which might be a considerable problem.