Overture (Earth Song)

by Mark Wandrey

  “Alicia Benjamin, speaking from her hand-built 'Worth Hill Observatory' claims the asteroid sped up for unknown reasons, emerging from behind the sun at the expected time, but much closer to the sun, and coming at us much faster. She speculates a non-terrestrial force has acted upon LM-245 and aimed it at us. Such a change in the course of an asteroid of this size is unprecedented.

  “LM-245 is almost 14 miles long and 5 miles wide. Shaped like a bowling pin, this behemoth weighs five billion tons and is hurtling toward us at more than fifty kilometers per second. When asked what the effects of such a collision with Earth would be, Ms. Benjamin gave this answer.” The scene changed to show Alicia Benjamin seated in front of a bank of monitors and computer equipment. Several showed images of the offending asteroid, as was likely the intention of the interview setting.

  “If LM-245 were to directly hit the Earth at this speed, it would make the K-T event that killed the dinosaurs look like a stone in a pond by comparison. We don’t know for sure what this rock is made of. If it’s just rock we might make it. If it’s a nickel iron slug, we’re all bloody toast.”

  The scene cut back to the commentator. “Our scientific analysis experts, while unable to either confirm or deny if the asteroid will hit Earth, did concur with her assessments of the danger to our fragile planet. LM-245 is big enough, and fast enough to punch a hole in the Earth quite like a gun shooting an apple. Years ago scientists hypothesized on the effect of such an impact and suggested it might well result in the planet breaking up!

  “We attempted to reach NASA but at this late hour no one was available for comment. A number of prominent astronomers refused outright to comment on LM-245, stating that Alicia Benjamin’s theories are highly dubious at best. But on the other hand, two highly renowned amateur astronomers located here in the states said they were made aware at the same time as a number of their colleagues and they are taking this threat much more seriously.

  “We will continue to follow this breaking story and bring you more updates as they become available. We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.” When the late night shows returned it was to a man who had a pair of portly dogs that danced when music was played. The juxtaposition this frivolity created was comical. It was obvious the show was taped earlier.

  Across the country, despite the late hour, millions watched the special report. Five people in particular all had varying reactions.

  “The game is afoot,” Mark Volant said and turned back to his report.

  “This could get out of hand,” said Dr. George Osgood.

  “The time draws nigh,” Victor said and went back to his meditation.

  “Does this connect with what they’re doing in the park?” Billy Harper asked the noisy New York night.

  Mindy looked at the screen displaying the computer results as gigabytes of data she’d fed into them were processed. Skinner hadn’t told her everything about the Portal, of that she was certain. While she might not yet be in the bag, she was more or less sitting on the edge staring in. And it was all starting to feel like some kind of an elaborate puzzle. While Alicia Benjamin from Britain was no longer talking much about how LM-245 had changed course, she'd shared the images with Mindy. It looked like something out of Star Wars. It was hard to think of that beam of light as anything other than some sort of energy weapon. Such things didn’t occur in nature.

  As the computers worked tirelessly, she used the open workstation to review the pictures again. More than a thousand individual images were provided, most of which she had simply fed into her image detection software to isolate the stars. Now that the job of assembling the views was finished, she went back and sifted for clues.

  The software was flexible and the computer powerful. In only two hours she assembled an image of the Portal. There was no detail of the dais, and the center was a nightmarish mishmash from hundreds of pictures, each one giving her a tiny piece of the puzzle. But it was otherwise complete. “Well,” she said with a smile of satisfaction, “there you are.” Then her smile faded as the full implications of what she was looking at began to drive home.

  Other bits and pieces she’d seen set her to work again. There was a partial image of someone tossing a crate through the Portal. And there, even more significant, was someone standing on the other side. He was dressed in military fatigues with a big ugly looking rifle over his shoulder. This thing was more than some kind of window; it was a two-way Portal. It was only a minor leap from that fact to bring the asteroid into the equation as well. A killer asteroid had been placed on a collision course with Earth, and now a convenient way to escape.

  When I call Skinner tomorrow, we’re going to have something to talk about, she thought and began shutting down the extra image processing computer, turning it back over to its normal job of sifting signals from space. Two machines were set to continue looking for her fixing point in the star fields, comparing the alien sky endlessly with Earthly astronomical observations.

  Among

  the vast array of images she'd uploaded into SETI’s computer was one that had been corrupted in the transfer. The system put the corrupted picture in a holding file to be reviewed by a user. Long after Mindy went home, the computer’s housekeeping routine checked the file, which was no longer there. Devoid of human curiosity, the computer’s operating system dutifully logged the “error” and moved on.

  Intermission

  Deep under a nondescript office building in Tel Aviv, a counterpart to Mark Volant worked feverishly. Thanks to high level intelligence pipelines that gave reciprocity to the Israeli government, sharing to such a degree that would stun most people in the US government, he was looking at the same files that Volant had access too. Pictures, notes, summaries by top scientists. In the bag, even the president’s own reply to the briefing he’d been given recently was all there for the reading. Five days ago the facts of the American Portal had been brought to his attention. On his own initiative he’d looked through the world intelligence network and found many of the other Portals. A few short hours ago a report had been handed a vital clue. Now after hours of analysis he’d just reached a stunning conclusion. He knew of another Portal that no one else was aware of!

  As he put aside the intelligence files and rubbed his eyes, he admitted to himself that there had to be others who were aware of this Portal. The ones who controlled it must know what it was; otherwise, why bother hiding it so carefully? One picture tacked to a bulletin board was his smoking gun. What had once been an open grassy park was now closed off with red cones, yellow tape, and guards armed with concealed weapons. Visible in the center of the park was a quickly erected obscuring shield of fabric panels. No one living in that city would give it a second glance. The same day this picture had been taken a sign was erected announcing the park was temporarily closed while a new statue was installed. The fabric panels had since been replaced with plywood, but he had examined those fabric panels and found a somewhat circular shadow inside. Strange statue, indeed.

  If what the American scientists were saying was true, then these Portals were a one-way transportation device to an unknown world in a distant star system. Add to that the story last night about a killer asteroid that might hit the Earth in just months, and it sent a chill up his spine. There was no indication that a similar Portal had been found anywhere in Israeli territory, of that he was certain. This secret Portal looked to be the closest one to their nation by thousands of miles.

  His mother and father had been two of only eleven Jews to survive from a small German town that once held two thousand Jews. The rest had gone up in smoke inside the ovens of Dauchau. His people had faced possible extinction once before, and survived it to come out stronger. He took a deep breath and began writing a letter to the Prime Minister.

  At a military assembly area near the Indian city of Mumbai, an elite force was being put together. It was comprised of a dozen soldier, engineers, doctors, scientists and academics. They had been working around the clock since the
announcement of LM-245’s imminent arrival on Earth. The scientists who had been examining and experimenting with their own Portal only a few miles away quickly learned what it was capable of. Unlike most of the other Portals scattered around the globe, the arrival of theirs had been more widely witnessed and a few moments of footage of the alien was caught as well. This information made its way to someone who was prepared to understand what had happened. The notice of the approaching meteor was the final piece of the puzzle.

  While they prepared and spent every waking hour making sure their equipment added up to the last kilo, another person worked just as hard to pass on everything he saw to his boss in the Pakistani Intelligence Service. There were few in the Indian government aware of the Portal and what had brought it, but in just days there were hundreds in the Pakistani government that knew far too much for anyone's good.

  Inquiries were made at the highest level in Pakistan, each new official memo accidentally making another handful of people aware of the Indian Portal. Fear rushes forward like wildfire, paranoia just a few steps behind. All the inquiries confirm there is no Portal in their own country. Fear begins to feed on itself.

  The Portal located in Buenos Aries was a better-kept secret than most of the others. Long a safe harbor for scientists developing 'fringe' theories, Argentina afforded more power to its scientific community than just about any other place on Earth. When a police officer found their Portal on February 9th, there was no military or secret police power play. Instead, the scientific ministry was contacted and the situation gratefully handed over to those more qualified to figure out what it was. Investigations began with the public none the wiser.

  The scientists did figure it out, and faster than the Americans had. By the time the impending collision was announced, they were fully versed in Portal operation and already had thirty colonists on the other side exploring, sending data back via laser and building permanent structures from local materials. Their schedule called for all one hundred forty-four to be across a month before the collision. Everything was under control.

  Several million miles out in space a rock the size of Manhattan was bearing down on Earth at fifty kilometers per second. The frenzied masses hurried about their lives, mostly oblivious to the huge mass of rock hurtling at them. A precious few individuals and the press watched its approach. As its orbit arched it away from the sun, it seemed to make a series of minor course corrections. The NASA chief astronomer tasked with watching the asteroid stated that he believed these course changes to be random out-gassings, a side effect of such a close approach to the sun. There was even a possibility that these gas blasts could alter LM-245's course away from the Earth. In the same statement NASA said they could not yet confirm if LM-245 was even headed for an impact. They stated that the meteor's course had been studied and while there was indeed a risk, it was remote in the extreme. At the same time another NASA spokesman was explaining that the shuttle fleet launch schedule was being adjusted to meet unexpected obligations.

  April 22

  The backhoe was a special design intended to be used in tunnels. Osgood suppressed a scowl as the clumsy machine was trundled into the dome. The crude machine’s intrusion created a feeling of violation in his purely scientific realm. Much of the delicate equipment had been moved back or out of the dome entirely to make room for the machine. As it approached the dais, the driver looked with obvious apprehension at the project before him. The man was not in the bag, and had not been briefed on what to expect. He thought this was the strangest thing he’d ever been asked to dig up in his military career.

  “You must use extreme caution not to hit the dais,” the man in a white lab coat warned him, “there is some risk if you should hit it.” The driver nodded his head, eyes wide with complete attention as he inched closer. Once he was where his skilled eye said was the ideal place he dropped the spades and spun his chair around to face the strange pearly white dais. He was ready to dig.

  As if on cue, Mark Volant walked in to watch as the backhoe’s hydraulic pumps came whining to life. Parked in an alley only a few blocks away was an overly large semi-truck, its trailer sporting twice as many axles as normal with a beefed-up air ride suspension. If the operation here proved successful, it would be rolled in and the Portal loaded onboard. A C-17 waited on the tarmac at JFK, fully fueled, crew on standby.

  The backhoe went to work, its unusually small bucket scooping earth up and depositing it in wheelbarrows where good old-fashioned muscle power rolled them away. He was sure some scientists would be going over the dirt looking for alien microbes or something. Volant had vetoed the army corps of engineers’ suggestion that the dome simply be taken down to facilitate the move. He had a feeling it wasn’t going anywhere.

  In no time there was an eight-foot deep hole next to the Portal. As agreed in advance, the digging stopped at this point. The bucket was moved to the side and large steel plates were moved in. Once the plates were slid down into the hole and jacks installed between them to secure against cave-ins, two men were lowered into the hole to perform an inspection.

  Cameras on their hard hats with lights gave those above a view of what they found. Using a trowel they shaved away at the Earth until coming in contact with the bottom of the Portal where it met the Earth. They then attempted to remove dirt from under the Portal. Sparks flew from the point where the trowel met the dirt, leaving the ground unaffected. A second try a few inches to one side met with the same results. “Take it up a notch,” Volant suggested. Osgood consulted with one of the ever-present particle physicists who said there were no dangerous spikes in the radiation emissions. With some reluctance, he gave the go ahead. A pick was passed down to a man and swung at the Earth.

  The dais gave off a dull purple pulse, which caused the particle physics team to perk up. The pick was swung again with even more force, this time creating a brilliant spray of sparks, a brighter purple flash, and no effect at all to the ground. The pick would have had more effect on a three inch plate of chromium steel.

  “It’s no good,” Osgood announced after examining the radiation readings. “It’s got some sort of electromagnetic field extending down into the ground.”

  “How deep does it go?” Volant asked.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say all the way to the center of the Earth.” Volant laughed but Osgood just stared at him. “I’m not kidding. With the kind of power this thing has at its disposal, it would be no small stretch to suggest that it’s both locked itself into the planet’s magnetic field, and is throwing out a force field to keep us from digging under it. The force field underneath doesn’t seem to be as strong as the one holding the pure energy under containment. Could be a weakness.”

  “We could conceivably blast it loose then?”

  “We could indeed. But the power spikes we’re getting from a pick ax are disturbing enough for me to say we better just stop here and fill in the hole.”

  “Damn it, doctor, I’ve been ordered to get this thing out of Central Park and to a more secure location. What am I going to tell my superiors?”

  “Tell them it does not want to be moved.”

  “Very funny, doctor.”

  “You want to risk setting loose several cubic meters of pure energy, or antimatter? Don’t be a fool.”

  Volant scowled, looking from the scientists to the obstinate dais and back. He liked things cut and dried. 'Move the Portal,' was his order, it should be just that simple. “Well, doesn’t this just suck!” he complained.

  “Life’s not fair,” Osgood countered. Volant said something rather ungentlemanly about Osgood’s parentage and turned to stalk back to his trailer. Once inside he opened a secure link with his office in Washington DC.

  “Get me the big boss.”

  “What’s the sit-rep, Mark?” his boss quickly asked after only moments. He'd been waiting.

  Volant always had to pause for a second whenever he spoke to the director of the NSA, just to be sure that what he said was worth taking the
time to say it. This was even more important; the man didn't like to hear that his orders weren't going to be carried out. “We can’t move the Portal, boss.”

  “Is that fact, or opinion?”

  “Fact. I observed the attempt. This thing is hooked into the Earth’s magnetic field somehow. It’s like trying to pull a ten ton steel plate off an electromagnet with a pair of tweezers. From what they say, and I believe them, it’s a massive risk to even continue trying. Besides being a galactic Portal, it’s also probably the biggest bomb ever. I never got to the level of these guys in college, but I know enough to realize that this much pure energy could pretty well erase New York City and vicinity from the map.”

  The line was silent as the other man thought it over. “That’s not good news, Mark. We need to get that thing out of there. New York is about as secure as Beirut. If solid news hits the air that this asteroid is heading our way, I don’t want to even think about what will happen in that cesspool.”

  “So there’s a chance it could hit the Earth?”

  “NASA is still saying it’s a remote, at best. A lot depends on what it’s composed of. Nickel iron maybe? There are too many variables in the trajectory at this stage of the game.” Volant swallowed and tried to concentrate, a deep feeling of doom settling in his stomach. His boss continued, “Look, I’ve talked to a few others on this and they think it’s a genuine extra-terrestrial artifact. That makes it a powerful commodity. We need to protect it for whatever exploitation is deemed the most logical. You know our agency’s policy of inspiring those in power to use that power for the betterment of the American people. In that pursuit we ourselves become powerful. It might well be a unique moment in history, my old friend.”