Dragon Dawn (Dinosaurian Time Travel)

by Deborah O'Neill Cordes

  “Not if I fall flat on my ass!”

  The memory made her grin. Gus was a study in contrasts, professional and unflappable in tight situations, NASA’s golden fly-boy, yet he was also known for his irreverent sense of humor.

  But now, it was obvious to Dawn the magnitude of the first step was really hitting him. She regarded the unprecedented solemnity in his expression, and her grin faded. He stood there, a ruggedly handsome, intelligent man of thirty-eight. Eric Gustav Granberg, the great-grandson of Swedish immigrants. Born in Boston, but raised in Houston. Master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas. Former Navy pilot, then American astronaut. Boyhood dream of being the first man on Mars now, fantastically, coming true.

  What must he be feeling?

  Dawn knew everyone else in the Solar System believed that a thousand years from now, names such as Armstrong, Aldrin, and Granberg would be spoken in the same breath, with the same reverence.

  But Gus was in fact dismissive of such talk when it came to his legacy. The commander shot Dawn a nervous look, and she paused, studying his features. Would he ever be ready for such fame and adulation?

  The capcom’s voice crackled into her headset. “Destiny, this is Houston. You are go for Mars walk. Do you copy?”

  “Yes, Houston, we copy,” Jean-Michel, who was still orbiting in the Destiny, enunciated the words precisely. He followed with a message of his own to the ground crew. “Valiant, this is Destiny. You are go for the Mars walk.”

  “Roger that, Destiny,” came Gus’s reply.

  “You are go,” Jean-Michel repeated. “Good luck, Commander.”

  “Thanks, pardner. Wish me luck.”

  Dawn smiled to herself, imagining Jean-Michel’s reaction. The prickly Frenchman disliked a lot of things, but Texas talk most of all. Yet she knew he would suffer it from Gus because they were friends.

  Slowly, the hatch of the spacecraft opened. Gus moved forward until he stood in front of the door and then Dawn heard him murmur, “Well, here goes nothing.”

  ***

  Jeez, don’t fall. Looking down the stairs, Gus took one careful step, then another. At one-third Earth’s gravity, the tug of Mars felt light, almost moonlike. He lowered his foot to the ground. Like a puff of magician’s smoke, the ruddy Martian dust drifted from beneath his boot.

  “I’m standing on Mars,” he said, aware his voice wavered with emotion. He brought his other foot down and steadied himself. A pinkish haze lingered in the air.

  And Gus knew billions of other souls, all over the Earth, Moon, and asteroids, would soon be experiencing this moment, too. Twenty minutes from now. Billions.

  But only one really mattered. Just one.

  He looked back at the hatch and spotted Dawn staring through the airlock window. Her green eyes sparkled, her dark hair framing a sweetly pretty face. He felt a deep jolt to his gut. He wanted to do this right and make her proud.

  He turned away from the lander and glanced at the salmon-tinged sky. Taking a breath, he prepared to recite something he’d memorized when he learned he would be the first man on Mars.

  “We may mount from this dull Earth,” he began, quoting the seventeenth century astronomer Christiaan Huygens, “and viewing it from on high, consider whether Nature has laid out all her... finery upon this small speck of dirt.”

  Gus stared at the immense volcano, silent and brooding.

  “We shall be less apt to admire what this world calls great... when we know that there are a multitude of such Earths inhabited and adorned as well as our own.”

  ***

  What’s that old expression Grandpa uses? It blows my mind? Dawn thought as she let her gaze roam over the landscape.

  She looked up, staring at a countryside caught in constant Alpenglow. In the shadow of a boulder, she lowered her gaze and spotted a trace of frost, pearl white against the rust-red soil. With the Martian daybreak came deposits of mixed frost composed of carbon dioxide and water, which settled on the ground and persisted in the shadows.

  In fact, there was water everywhere on Mars; in addition to vapor in the air, it had been found frozen as ice layers or permafrost beneath the ground and in the great, glacial stratum of the polar ice caps. Because of this life-giving abundance, someday, in the not too distant future, mankind would start to terraform Mars. It could take hundreds or thousands of years, but eventually humans might be able to throw away their spacesuits, to breathe Martian air and drink Martian water, and feel sunshine on their skin once more.

  And Dawn was part of the first group of explorers here. Gramps is right, she thought. This really is a mind blower.

  She took a seat in one of the Mars Rovers parked near the Valiant. Feeling tired, she realized she needed a break from her initial exploration of the area. She stared out at the looming volcano, her mind brimming with questions. Who had constructed the laser beacon, and where had they gone? Were the builders indigenous to Mars, or had they originated somewhere else in the galaxy? And were there still vestiges of other life-forms, no matter how small and primitive, remaining on the planet? In other words, were there still living, breathing Martians?

  Dawn and the other members of the crew had spent the last few hours conducting the initial scientific surveys of the landing site. Although several dozen robot landers had already touched down on Mars, doing everything from testing for the presence of exotic Martian “bugs” to bringing rock and soil samples back to Earth, as far as scientists could determine, no living creatures, not even rudimentary microorganisms, survived on or near the surface now. Biologically, the red planet appeared to be a dead world, as lifeless as Earth’s Moon.

  But Dawn knew that view could change. Once, there had been free-flowing water on Mars; in fact, water still flowed on the surface in rare bursts, as evidenced by channels and eddies coming off the sides of crater rills and canyon walls. And billions of years ago, before the atmosphere thinned and deadly ultraviolet radiation blanketed the planet’s surface, life may have existed in now-vanished Martian seas. Since no one had drilled deeply into the core, there was a chance Martian extremophiles, possibly resembling microbes on Earth called archaea, still existed underground, especially in sub-surface water.

  But drilling’s not in the cards for this mission, Dawn thought. She looked off, trying to catch sight of Harry. He was out there somewhere with Kris, using their infrared spectrometer in the attempt to find organic molecules, even flipping over rocks and looking for visible evidence for something akin to the soil microbes found in Antarctica’s Dry Valleys. A quick check, he’d said, before the real work started; they planned to find the nearest field of gypsum, the best place to look for the fossilized remnants of ancient Martian sea life.

  “Hey, I found something!”

  Gus’s excited voice broke into Dawn’s thoughts. She faced north again. Shovel in hand, the commander stood in the distance, waving to her from a small hill, near a huge drift of sand. As far as she could tell, no one else was within her range of vision.

  “Hey, Dawn!” Gus’s voice rang out again over the com-link. “You gotta see this.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Something alien.” He patched a feed into her helmet’s Google glass. It was a monolith.

  Her heart raced with excitement as she started up the Rover. “I’ll be there right away.”

  A minute later, she pulled up and saw the real thing: a rectilinear monolith, the base covered by a pile of red dirt, the top exposed and jutting out at an angle. Dawn immediately thought of the classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. But while that fictional monolith had been huge, this one was human-sized, reminding her somewhat of stelae found near ancient Mayan ruins.

  What struck her as really peculiar was the metallic sheen on its surface. Even through the glaze of dust, she could see it glowed with all the hues of the rainbow.

  Harry and Kris arrived in the other Rover. Harry gave a low whistle as he reached Dawn’s side.

  “Whoa,” he said
, glancing at Gus with a smile. “What the heck did you find?” He started to wipe dust off the monolith. “About one meter is exposed. I wonder how big this sucker really is.”

  “Some kind of granite?” Gus asked.

  Kris shook her head. “Nah, see the weird shine? It looks synthetic.”

  “I started digging,” Gus said, “then felt my shovel hit something hard. Thought it was a rock.”

  “Some rock, eh?” Harry gave another whistle.

  “Let’s dig deeper,” Gus said as he placed his foot on the shovel.

  “Hold on,” Dawn said. “You know the drill. We’ve got to excavate this thing scientifically.”

  “Okay, you’re the boss.” Gus took a step backward, then relinquished the shovel to her.

  “Mother of God, what is that?”

  Dawn turned as Tasha trudged up the slope, Lex trailing behind her.

  “I am thinking of 2001 movie,” Tasha said, echoing Dawn’s thoughts. “Do you remember scene with ape-men?”

  “Uh huh.” Gus stooped as much as his pressure suit would allow and took a closer look at the monolith. “Only I hope this won’t have us dancin’ around like monkeys.”

  “But I think it does have a message for us,” Lex said. He pointed to the spot unearthed by Gus’s last push with the shovel. “Isn’t that a picture?”

  ***

  The excavation of the monolith took nearly three hours, and now Dawn and her crewmates headed back to Lowell Base. Once there, they would analyze the images of the monolith’s alien message.

  Before entering the Valiant, they stopped to watch their first Martian sunset. For a moment, time seemed to stand still, as if the laws of physics had somehow been suspended in the alien firmament. The Sun hung low in the sky, a fiery, canary-yellow ellipsoid – dust particles in the atmosphere caused it to take on the peculiarly flattened shape – then it dropped beneath the horizon, and the sky dimmed to deep purple. An evening light, shimmering and blue, took its place in the heavens. The Earth!

  Surrounded by night, the astronauts stood for a long moment watching their distant home, then they took the stairs of the lander one by one, Gus bringing up the rear. After entering the hatch, they removed their spacesuits in the airlock as a necessary precaution against contamination by the pervasive Martian dust, then cleaned up, ate a quick supper, and checked for any messages from home. Afterward, they analyzed the data acquired from the monolith.

  Kris Jefferson stood back from the com-screen set up on the tabletop display and let the group take a look. There were several distinct drawings on the monolith, as well as a script written in a sequence of dots and dashes. It didn’t take a genius to realize the Martians had used binary code, like that used in the old days for computers.

  “The representation of Earth is dead on,” Kris said. “And take a look at the other picture.” She grinned. “How cool is that? It depicts the entire Solar System, all the way out to the start of the Kuiper Belt.”

  Jean-Michel’s face came up in a split/screen image on the com. “Oui, I agree with Dr. Jefferson’s assessment.”

  In silence, Dawn studied the monolith’s picture. There were spherical symbols for the Sun and the inner and outer planets – including a long string of pearl-like marks stretching between Mars and Jupiter, representing the dwarf planet or plutoid called Ceres and the rest of the Asteroid Belt – and then beyond Neptune, the other plutoids and innermost Kuiper Belt objects, chief among them Pluto and its largest moon, Charon.

  “Notice the fourth planet is set a little above the rest,” Jean-Michel said. “Might that signify Mars as their home world?”

  Everyone stared at the screen as Kris said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Dawn leaned in. Something tugged at her memory, something familiar, like a feeling of déjà vu, and she swore she’d seen the Martian representation of the Solar System somewhere else. But where?

  She pursed her lips in puzzlement and then it came to her. Long ago, she’d read a book about the two Voyager spacecraft. With a grand leap of forethought, the scientists and artists of Voyager, including Carl Sagan and Jon Lomberg, decided to include a record on each, with images and messages for any alien civilizations encountered on the spacecrafts’ journeys through the cosmos.

  The records could last a billion years in space, maybe even longer. If and when they were found, mankind might be long extinct. Perhaps the Earth would be a cinder, the charred remnant of the dying Sun. But the aliens would still be able to decipher the Voyager records, because Earth’s scientists had recorded information in the logical and decipherable binary code.

  Dawn studied the com display with new insight. Just what were the Martians trying to tell them with this message?

  The middle of the picture held a line of dots and dashes going from left to right; they were the binary representations of the numbers one through ten, matching the planets of the inner Solar System. In binary, each successive position after the number one had the power of two, so as you shifted to the left, you got multiples of two. As a result, the number one would be written as “1”, the number two as “10”, while ten would be “1010” (8 plus 0 plus 2 plus 0).

  She focused on the first planetary symbol. Beneath Mercury was a single dot and then under Venus was a dot/dash. This was followed by a dot/dot for Earth, then a dot/dash/dash for Mars. The Martians had done this to give clues as to processing the rest of the code.

  “Here. Let me switch this to the more familiar 0s and 1s,” Dawn said. “A 0 stands for dot, and a 1 for dash. That way, we can see this in a more familiar light.”

  Her fingers flew over the tabletop display, rearranging the data. “Now look,” she said as she pointed to the completed image:

  Mercury (one) = 1 (first planet from the Sun)

  Venus (two) = 10 (second planet, etc.)

  Earth (three) = 11

  Mars (four) = 100

  Ceres (five) = 101

  Jupiter (six) = 110

  Saturn (seven) = 111

  Uranus (eight) = 1000

  Neptune (nine) = 1001

  Pluto/Charon (ten) = 1010

  “Well, I’ll be!” Kris laughed. “The aliens decided to make it simple. I guess this was their message for kindergartners.”

  Dawn smiled. “That’s right.” But then, her expression grew thoughtful as her eyes lingered on the extra symbols above Mars and Earth. There was more to consider here. There was a six (in binary – 110) above the Earth, while the number above Mars was very large. That number would take some time to compute.

  “What are those extra symbols above the third and fourth planets?” Gus asked, echoing her thoughts. “They can’t be moons.”

  Dawn nodded. “The numbers don’t fit any pattern, as far as I can tell. Besides, the spaces above the gas giants are blank. There’s nothing to indicate the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, or the rest of the outer Solar System.”

  Everyone frowned as they pondered the com display. Dawn went to work on the long string of digits above Mars.

  Just then, Jean-Michel said, “It’s the binary representation of 410,353.”

  “That’s a pretty big number.” Dawn’s eyes focused on the third planetary symbol. “Since six is far smaller, maybe we can figure out it’s meaning more easily.” She stood there, scowling. “Hmm, I still don’t get it. What’s a six doing there?”

  The question gave her pause. She focused on each member of the crew, then turned impatiently back to the com. Six, huh?

  Striving for some sort of connection, Dawn began to tick off numbers, tapping her fingers lightly against her thigh. At that instant, her gaze veered to Gus’s face. The commander’s number one, right? She looked over at Tasha and Lex. The docs make two and three.

  Unconsciously, she touched her own chest. Four.

  Her gaze widened as she glanced at Harry and Kris. Hey, wait a minute!

  “Do you know what this might mean?” Dawn asked.

  Kris looked up. “What?”

  Dawn’s b
rain throbbed with the possibilities. “Maybe it’s population data. Look here. That’s one heck of a big number above Mars. Perhaps it means there were hundreds of thousands of Martians when the monolith was created.” She pointed to the symbol above the Earth. “And there were six––”

  Kris gasped. “They had traveled to Earth! There were six of them. Six Martian astronauts were exploring the Earth!”

  Chapter 12

  All right, said the (Cheshire) Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail; and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

  ~Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  The next morning, Dawn and the ground crew had mundane yet necessary tasks on Mars, including the retrieval of the rest of the equipment from the cargo barge. In fact, everything from the barge would be used in the establishment of Lowell Base; eventually even sections of the hull would be buried in the ground for use as habitat modules, providing an excellent shield against deadly space radiation and the ferocious winds caused by the sporadic, planet-wide Martian dust storms.

  Meanwhile, Jean-Michel orbited in the Destiny and busily prepared for the next few months. In addition to monitoring the activities of his crewmates and providing a communication link with Mission Control from orbit, he was responsible for the upcoming deployment of new Martian weather and communications satellites, the depositing of several scientific probes on the Martian moons, Deimos and Phobos, as well as the establishment by remote control of a robotic rocket fuel factory on Phobos, providing a cheap, efficient means of making propellant for landings and take-offs for future missions.

  By the afternoon, however, the lure of the unknown proved too strong, and the ground crew reconnoitered out on an informal survey of the foothill where the monolith had been found.

  As the pair of Rovers approached the area, Dawn felt overwhelmed. With only eighteen months of study on Mars, she knew her time was precious. Although it would take decades for her to analyze the anticipated findings, she wished she could stay a lot longer.