Phase Space
Page 38
Then the power failed, all over the ship. Dim emergency lights came on, and the cabin lights and instrument panels went dead, and the banging of the pumps and fans fell silent.
My ears started to pop again, and I could feel my lungs pulling at the thinning air. Some seam had split wide open.
Gurzadian pulled out the last cables by main force, and dived into the biotech module. Before I could stop him he pulled the hatch closed behind him, and held it there until the pressure difference forced it closed. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do to get it open.
I worked fast. I got that transfer node sealed off, suited up, and went in after Gurzadian. Too late, of course.
The Demograph Draft put us back to work. But it was work you wouldn’t want to expend a young life on, or even an expensive qubit AI.
So you had spry eighty-year-olds riding plastic cars across the Mid-East deserts, clearing mines for the combat soldiers marching behind. You had ninety-year-olds in flimsy rad suits going in to clear out Hanford, and the closed Russian cities near Chelyabinsk and Tomsk where they used to manufacture weapons-grade uranium, and so forth.
You had centenarians sent off in one-way Rube Goldberg spaceships to the Moon and Mars and the stars.
But if you were too frail, if you failed all the suitability assessments, there were always the happy booths, a whole block of them in every grey gulag. The final demographic adjustment.
Here’s what always brought tears to my eyes: the fact that we always marched into the places they sent us – even the happy booths – singing and waving and smiling. Mine is a generation that understands duty, a generation that risked their lives over and over to leave a legacy for our children, and we are doing it over again now. You can call that a small-town value if you like. The first American astronauts all came from out-of-the-way communities, and small-town values marked us out. It seems to me that values diminish in proportion to the growth of a community, which explains a great deal of the world we see today.
In my opinion it was those core values which led Gurzadian to sacrifice himself for me and the mission. And I would have done exactly the same for him.
I wrapped him in his country’s flag and said a few words. I pushed him out through a science airlock. I could see him receding from the ship, into the darkness, lit only by the lights of the cluster. Just before I lost him he became a smudge against the grey stars, smeared out by the funny space around me.
I grieved, of course. But I won’t dwell on the loss. Test pilots have always been killed with regularity. And that, whatever the designers of this mission intended, is what we have been: the test pilots of man’s first starship.
I went through Gurzadian’s stuff. It was like when Jenna died. All his jumble and clutter was where he left it, and when I sorted it I knew he was never coming back to disorder it again. I found a couple of last messages for his family – a handful of grandkids – and downlinked them, in hope.
I moved into the base block, because that’s closest to the ship’s centre of gravity, and it’s about the bulkiest piece of shit anyhow. It should survive the space-time stress longer than the other modules. If anyone wants my skinny ass because I gave up the science programs, they can have it.
A couple of days ago I heard a bang, which could have been the materials science module failing. But the instruments in the astrophysics module are working still. I can even get an image out of the Cassegrain.
All I can see is grey light. Quasars.
Here’s what I think.
I think I’m coming out the other side of the barrier that surrounds the solar system. I think I’m seeing the universe as it really is.
Young. Still in its dark age, just as Gurzadian described it.
We – the solar system – are stuck in some kind of M-theory bubble. What we see from the Earth, looking out through the enclosing barrier, is an image of a much older universe. But it isn’t real. It can’t be.
I think this is all some kind of experiment. Somebody out there in the real, young, dark-age universe is fast-forwarding a chunk of space, to see how it all turns out. And we live in that chunk.
I like the irony, incidentally. Here I am, the first star traveller, sent out here because I’m an old and useless fucker. And yet I find the universe is younger than anyone thought.
Anyway that’s your resolution to the Fermi paradox, Gurzadian, old buddy. They were here all the time, all around us. Playing with us. I wonder what they think of us, of a society that sends its old people out to die in the dark, alone.
I’ve considered cutting this short. I have a number of options from the medical kit. Or I could simply open the hatch. Sitting in this metal tube and waiting for the walls to cave in doesn’t appeal.
It’s time to get off my soap-box. I had the great good fortune to participate in a common dream to test the limits of mankind’s imagination and daring. It is, I hope, a dream I have passed on to those who read this account. The stars may be gone, but we still have the sun and its children; and what lies beyond this barrier may be far more strange and wonderful than we ever imagined.
You see, I’ve come to think this bubble around our universe is maybe some kind of eggshell we have to break out of.
Or maybe it’s no coincidence that we’ve gotten stuck like this just as we develop a space-bending star drive. Maybe this is flypaper.
Whatever, I’m confident that someday – in bigger and better ships than Geezer – we’ll be able to break out.
I will say that we are not the same America I grew up in, but we can be again. Maybe the challenge of taking on whoever it was dared to put us inside this cosmic box will be the making of us.
I’ve decided I will stick around a little longer. Maybe I’ll luck out and see the first stars come out, that Christmas tree light-up Gurzadian talked about. I always did like Christmas.
MARGINALIA
(Author’s note: I was sent the document below anonymously. The document itself, a photocopy, is government-speak, bland to the point of unreadability. But the notes scribbled in the margins are intriguing.)
Title page:
United States General Accounting Office
GAO report to the Honorable William X. Lambie,
House of Representatives
June 1998
GOVERNMENT RECORDS
Results of a Search for Records Concerning the 1983 Explosion
near Cross Fork, Nevada
SUMMARY ONLY
GAO/NSRAF-96–244
Cover note:
From: United States General Accounting Office, Washington, DC 20548. National Security and International Affairs Division. June 24, 1998.
To: The Honorable William X Lambie, House of Representatives.
Dear Mr Lambie:
After fifteen years, speculation continues on the truth of the large explosion which is alleged to have taken place at a covert US military research facility in Nevada.
Some observers speculate that the explosion was the destruction of a conventional rocket; others that it was caused by the crash of an aircraft, perhaps of an extraterrestrial nature; others that agencies of the government have been engaged in a misinformation campaign to conceal some deeper truth, such as a successful launch of some space vehicle; others that this was the demolition of a covert military facility.
In its 1984 official report and since, the Air Force has denied the reality of the explosion.
Concerned that the Department of Defense may not have provided you with all available information on the incident, you asked us to determine any government records concerning the incident. We examined a wide range of classified and unclassified documents dating from 1965 through the 1980s. The full scope and methodology of our work are detailed in the full report …
Sir:
I read your counterfactual ‘novel’. About NASA going on to Mars in the 1980s, instead of shutting everything down after Apollo? What a crock.
Counterfactuality does not serve the needs of the trut
h. But now, at last, the truth is starting to come out.
And the truth is, people have been to Mars.
They are walking around among us right now. And nobody knows about it.
Of course much of the data returned by the old Mars probes has always been kept from the public. These include:
1) Grainy photographs of what could be structures on the surface taken by the space probe Mariner 4 in 1964.
2) Mysterious surface glimpses through the global dust storm encountered on the planet by Mariner 9 in 1971.
3) The strange readings from the Viking landers of 1976, which found a supposedly sterile Martian surface.
And of course the Mars Observer of 1992 was deliberately destroyed. (The jury is out on the Russian Mars 96. Maybe that really was a screw-up. The later NASA probes definitely were.)
Only a handful of people know that the US General Accounting Office – that’s Congress’s investigative arm – recently published this, the results of a search for records concerning the Cross Fork, Nevada incident, generally thought to be at the centre of the Mars cover-up. Search meaning forced through by white-hat Congressman Bill Lambie, who’s as sick of cover-ups as anyone. Published meaning hurried out and buried. I owe my copy to [illegible].
Here’s how I started this.
I got an e-mail from a Janet [illegible] of Albuquerque. She said she had met a hooker from Reno in the 1970s. This lady had worked at a cathouse close to Cross Fork, Nevada. And she told Janet there had been an awful lot of ex-NASA engineers in town at that time.
And one night two NASA guys talked too much.
NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL, WASHINGTON DC 20506.
APRIL 18, 1997.
MEMORANDUM FOR MR JOHN E PROCTOR, DIRECTOR-IN-CHARGE,
NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES, GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE.
SUBJECT: Request for Records.
I am responding to your April 2, 1997 request for information or NSC records related to the supposed explosion near Cross Fork, Nevada in October 1983.
The NSC has no records or information related to the incident.
For information about any government records that may document the explosion in Nevada, we suggest you contact the National Archives, Textual Reference Division, 8601 Adelphi Rd, College Park, Maryland 20740.
– Albert D. Steele, Executive Secretary
There were four categories of key staff involved in the Mars cover-up:
1) top-level management, including CIA, FBI and DIA operatives
2) interface personnel
3) technical personnel
4) the astronauts.
Only recruiting the astronauts would have posed any challenge. These were, after all, brave and dedicated men.
Secrecy would not have been a major problem, even for such a gigantic enterprise. There were precedents. More than three hundred thousand people were directly involved in the building of an atomic bomb in 1942–5, and no significant information reached the public.
And besides America had been sliding towards a police state for years (wire-taps, surveillance of civilians) and it was a simple matter to apply these cloak-and-dagger methods and precedents to the Mars program.
(I was e-mailed with the news that someone had called into a talk show in Phoenix, Arizona, and claimed to be the man who had run the security operation for NASA during that period. He claimed that four astronauts died in missions that were squelched by NASA. And he said he had the truth about Apollo 13. Never heard from again. Probably a flake.)
The entire Mars program was run out of Southern Nevada, at a (so-called) atomic test station called the Nevada Test Site: a thousand square miles of Nevada desert.
Why there?
It is an area of hills, mountain peaks, desert valleys draining into dry lake beds. The lunar-like terrain is a warren of dark tunnels and secret facilities. You’d spot a car miles away from its dust cloud; anybody walking would be the only moving object in the landscape. And who would go there? Even by 1970 it had a reputation as a forbidden region, soaked in radioactivity.
The most likely sites of the USAF Mars facility are those least used by the AEC, notably Yucca Flat and Camp Desert Rock, aka Area 22.
Here’s another good reason: Vegas – just sixty miles to the southeast.
Those astronauts weren’t children, and they weren’t shrinking violets. The clerks and secretaries for the Mars control centre were babes recruited from Las Vegas casinos, which added to the general appeal of the place.
Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology
Policy,
Washington DC 20500. April 20, 1997.
Mr John E Proctor, Director-in-Charge, National Security Issues, General Accounting Office.
Dear Mr Proctor:
In response to your recent query of April 2, 1997.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy reviewed its records concerning the ‘Nevada Incident’. OSTP has no direct knowledge of what occurred at Nevada and no records, except for the information I received from the Air Force. I look forward to receiving the GAO report.
Sincerely, Joseph V. Ververk, Director
At Cross Fork, Nevada, I found that hooker.
And through her I found a guy called Tad Jones.
Tad Jones claimed to have been a minor worker, in the early 1970s, on a covert government nuclear-rocket program. This program continued after the shut-down of the public-domain NERVA program, following Nixon’s (supposed) decision not to go to Mars.
Jones, and other workers, were bribed and threatened to keep them quiet about their work on the program. Jones lost his job in 1972, I gather for personal reasons. Now, more than two decades later, radiation injuries were killing him.
The thing of it is, Tad Jones told me he once met a man who told him he had been to Mars.
He was called Elliott Becker, and at the time he was an Air Force colonel, and he made the mistake of getting too drunk one night.
Under false pretences, which I won’t go into here, I got to meet Elliott Becker himself. He is now a senior Air Force officer. He is aged around 60, and he suffers from premature-ageing symptoms: atrophied muscles, osteoporosis.
He threw me out fast. But not so fast I didn’t manage to notice some oddities. For instance at one point Becker let go of a glass in mid-air and looked startled when it fell.
This sort of thing happened to the Skylab astronauts and Mir cosmonauts, conditioned to long periods in zero G. Furthermore his illnesses are consistent with the proposal that Becker endured a long-duration spaceflight in the early 1980s.
But he was not on any spaceflight made public.
So where the hell did he go?
I only met Tad Jones the once.
I wasn’t so surprised. Ageing, poor, stricken by pain, Jones was becoming less discreet. I don’t know how he died. His old radiation injuries must have baffled the coroners.
Of course he could have been lying through his teeth about the whole thing. But if so, where did he get his injuries?
US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation,
Washington DC 20535
April 22, 1997.
Mr John E Proctor, Director-in-Charge, National Security Issues, General Accounting Office.
Dear Mr Proctor:
This is in response to a letter dated April 2, 1997, from Simon J Holusha, Director, Administration of Justice Issues, General Accounting Office, to Kathryn G Keyworth, Inspector in Charge, Office of Public and Congressional Affairs, FBI, regarding government records concerning the large-scale explosion near Cross Fork, Nevada in October 1983 (Code 91183).
A search of FBI indices has determined that all FBI data concerning the incident has been processed under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and is available for review in our FOIA Reading Room. If your staff wishes to review the material, please call Margaret Feeley, a member of my staff, at least 48 hours in advance of the desired appointment.
Sincerely y
ours,
Eric G. Dower, Supervisory Special Agent, Office of Public and Congressional affairs
The truth about Mars, at least, is now obvious.
The space probes did not observe any evidence of an inhabited Mars because it was deliberately concealed. The Mariner 9 dust storm was no coincidence! – it was thrown up to conceal hasty efforts by the planet’s inhabitants to fake a Moonlike landscape. And the surface was sterilized by neutron bombs before the Vikings could land, and the Mars Observer was shot out of the sky.
We didn’t go back to Mars for twenty years. And by the time we got there, with Pathfinder and the rest, there was nothing to see. Of course not. The Martians had completed their mock-up.
And nobody told us about all this.
We worship secrecy in this country.
Get this: last year the US government produced 6,300,000 ‘classified’ documents. The least restricted bear the stamp FOUO, ‘For Official Use Only’. The next category – the first technically classified – are ‘Confidential’. After that comes ‘Secret’, and some of them are ‘NATO Secret’, meaning they can be shared with NATO nations. Then comes ‘Top Secret’ and ‘NATO Top Secret’.
Above ‘Top Secret’ there is ‘SCI’ – ‘Sensitive Compartmented Information’, open to still fewer individuals. And there is some information that you can only see if you are on a BIGOT list – if you have your own specific code word.
And then there are qualifies like ‘NOFORN’ – no foreigners to see – and ‘NOCONTRACT’ – no contractors, ‘WNINTEL’ – ‘Warning Notice – Intelligence Sources or Methods Involved’, ‘ORCON’ – ‘Originator Controls Further Dissemination’.
What’s the cost of all this secrecy? When does secrecy increase military strength, and when does it weaken security?
We should be told.