by WADE, T I
“I can’t believe this whole area was once lush and fertile,” said Ryan.
“I must now go back in time to our history books, and centuries before I was born, and up to when Cavern Inventor Blog showed us his new invention: the shield.”
“These blue shields?” VIN asked.
“Yes,” replied Joot. “It had taken him 220 years of designing to make the first shield. I was born a year afterwards. My father was Ruler Don Mak, who was the ruler when I was born. Before my father had become Ruler, and when he was a child, Cavern Inventor Blog searched all over the land for metals and materials needed to make the shields. He had two hundred of the outside people who he went out searching with. He had his own inventing team of sixty scientists who often searched with him. These people headed out to search for these new rocks and metals. I remember as a boy that he left for years at a time. One year a rock from space flew over the crater and landed several miles away, causing a large explosion. In those years we didn’t have spaceships taking off. A second team under Inventor Fob was designing them, but they needed a shield to protect the craft from the vacuum of space.”
“How did you know about space in the first place?” Ryan asked, now wearing normal clothes. He enjoyed a cup of coffee as he listened to the story.
Commander Joot hadn’t told them much on the journey back from Titan or Mars. It seemed that he had wanted to get a lay of the land at home base first before he gave out all their Matt secrets. What he then said shocked Ryan, Igor and VIN to their cores.
“From our own visitors from space,” Commander Joot replied.
“We Matts learned about our early visitors through our education, and when I was young and on the blue planet,” interrupted Elder Roo. “We were never told where they came from.”
“You mean real aliens?” VIN asked.
“No,” replied Commander Joot. “The aliens arrived in a spaceship and landed among our outside people about 1,000 years, or four generations, before I was born. We were not so modern in the early times. This silver bird arrived from the heavens and had a blue shield around it. Our farmers were inquisitive, and after a few days met with the newcomers, who looked exactly like we did. Many were invited into the spaceship over the first year. Several of our tribe went into the spaceship and never returned, or came out missing legs or arms, the story was told to us. Several were carried out by others without their heads. It seems that the aliens were inspecting our farmers. They either learned our language, or we learned their language, nobody could tell which. They stayed for seven years, and they took pity on us as long as we gave them people to eat. Over time, three of our leaders were taught in the arts of these space Matts.”
“And they looked like your people?” Ryan asked. “And ate them?”
“Just like us, and they told our elders that they came from another area of Earth many thousands of years earlier than us. The stories say that they taught us how to live longer, to eat meat, to collect drinking water from the morning dew, and gave us plans to make our own power systems. They taught us how to design spacecraft, and about the metals and fuels we needed to find to make the shield around a spacecraft. The visitors told us how to travel away from this world, and that they now lived on another world. Once they left, they never returned.”
“Could they be older Matts?” Igor asked. “From an older generation?”
“We believe so, but we had very little in common. They ate animals and often us. They liked our women, and did painful things to them. They liked us, but like you, they liked to hurt and kill each other. They always fought and killed each other with weapons over our women. That is how the story goes. They ate so many of our outside people that they caused most of our farmers to leave and head south. A few months later, and with few farmers left to eat, the aliens left. They couldn’t get at us inside the cavern, no matter how hard they tried. Our doors kept them out. The farmers who left told us that they would leave a trail of paintings in the caves they slept in, if we needed to follow them one day.”
“Maybe the Bushman paintings?” interrupted Ryan. “I believe archeologists found dozens of cave paintings of helmeted people and spaceships in central and southern Africa.”
“The leaders who had been taught everything began to run our tribe. One was to be called Supreme Ruler, two were to be called Inventors. Over their lifetimes we returned to being vegetarians. Life returned to normal and the farmers grew in numbers again. It was interesting that all their children from the women we were forced to give them left with them.
“For five generations of Rulers and Inventors we worked on what they had learned, but it with was the arrival of the rock from space that the fourth generation Inventor made the first shield a few years later. He gathered up the broken rock with many others, but unfortunately died a year after his invention, of a horrible disease that ate his body. We thought that the rock was a gift from the aliens, as it ate his and many other of our tribe’s bodies. Now you have taught us that this disease was radiation sickness.”
“Go on,” pleaded Ryan.
“Inventor Blog had two children, both boys who were too young to go out and collect the rocks, and they took over his work when he became sick. Inventor Blog’s children made dozens more shields, and one of the shields allowed Inventor Fob’s spacecraft to finally lift off the surface. It didn’t have enough power until the blue shield sealed it from the atmosphere and gave it lift. After crashing many times and killing many astronauts, they kept improving the spacecraft. Today my craft looks similar to the spacecraft those meat-eating Matts arrived in centuries earlier, although slightly smaller. Finally, after a century, Commander Dun flew into space for the first time, and returned successfully.”
“Did the aliens drink the fuel?” Igor asked, piecing pieces of a large puzzle together.
“Yes, just like we have seen Mr. Jones drink our fuel. They drank their fuel and had parties, going wild and killing and hurting us and themselves. We learned how to make the fuel and the flight controls and computers from their power systems they had taught us. Without a shield around the spaceship, it wasn’t powerful enough to fly. The weak craft just made large dust clouds. Then the last of the farmers left, as I explained earlier. By this time, the rains sometimes brought floods, and other times the ground became so dry that our crops couldn’t grow. The aliens had taught us how to make gases and bottle them. That led Inventor Blog’s children to set up one of the new shields on the ground, and many of us cavern Matts died trying to fill it with air.
“It took twenty years after the first flight, but one day there was success. The Inventors both walked into the shield and lived. From that day on we formed lines of shields, and after 100 years, when I was made Commander, there were 20 shields on the ground giving us beautiful crops. The water we lifted in with our new spacecraft from a river to our west wasn’t lost as fast, and we needed far less. Our closest water was over a hundred miles away.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t see much of the outside. I was in the other group learning to fly to collect water, and to fly into space. In my first 100 years, I saw seventy space flights with shields take off, and all seventy returned. My father, the Ruler, one of the first astronauts, wanted to thank the aliens for the rock, so he tried to send up gifts for them. The first ship with a Commander Zing and supplies to make a base in space never returned. After waiting for many years, my father flew on our second attempt. My father also wanted the aliens to return to us on Earth, so he took up several women and children for the aliens with building materials and fuel for Commander Zing.
“Where was he heading to?” Ryan asked.
“Nobody knew,” Joot replied. “My father, I assume, just believed that he would fly straight into the aliens. We didn’t know how big space was. It was pure luck that he found the small planet you call DX2017, which we now know was on its way to Mars. Orbiting the small planet, he saw a blue shield and thought it the aliens. It wasn’t. It was Commander Zing out of fuel. The commander and hi
s copilot had built a small underground base on the blue planet, and with his shield, a little water and ground from Earth they had managed to survive. My father and his Matts joined and help grow the base with his supplies, and both ships returned when they neared Earth 14 years later.
“How did they dig underground?” VIN asked.
“Due to the space vacuum the aliens had warned about, the Inventers had thought out a plan to live underground. They had invented digging machines. Commander Zing, with two of the diggers, had taken a year to build a small hole inside the planet. Commander Zing had released atmospheric air under pressure into his shield, used a machine to produce heat, and had lived in the shield with his copilot for the first year while the diggers worked. After surviving on the small planet for two entire orbits, on the second orbit he taught my father when it would pass Earth and how to meet it. The third expedition fourteen years later was all five craft going up three times to deposit earth, water, and internal building materials to increase the size of the base.
“Then they stopped on Mars and decided to build the next base there, and then on Titan on the next round. As I said, seventy launches took up our supplies and crew. On the last flight, I left to be commander of the transport planet, DX2017. That was the last time I saw my father. My father died as the Titan base was completed. He was 241 years old. I did not become Ruler, as I was commander on Mars at the time, and a new Ruler was chosen in my absence. The bases were to all be a tenth the size of one level of our base, with enough room for 50 people. All the machines were copied from below to be a tenth of the size to run the base. The same sleep chambers the aliens had used to return to Earth were copied and used to transport our crew over the long distances.
“Every time the little blue planet came close to Earth, all five of our spaceships headed up carrying ten people in each, plus two more launches with supplies to feed them. Once the blue planet’s base was complete, we began building on Mars, then Titan, then the last one, Mercury, as you call the hot planet. Somebody thought that the aliens might be on Mercury. The ship never made it to Mercury. I believe that Igor was right about the temperatures inside the shields. If the temperature on the last flight was as hot as on Mercury, then our people and ship would not have survived. Once the planet bases were in place, my new job as commander was to supply them, and now I am back here on Earth. Just like Commander Zing, I have finally returned, but unfortunately, 7,000 years or more too late. I feel very tingly thinking about my story. All our space flights, for nothing more than to find those aliens. We never did.”
“Where do you think they could be?” Ryan asked, checking on his watch.
“Anywhere out there. They told our forefathers that they had several bases. I’m sure there must be one on Mars,” Commander Joot replied.
That worried Ryan. “Why didn’t you stay on Earth? Why did your tribe decide to head into space? All you had to do was to move to a new location when the ground dried up.”
“We listened to the men who traveled with Inventor Blog, and judgments were made on his and their reports,” replied Joot. “All he and his men ever said was that everything out there was like the aliens. Everything out there was inimical, from flying insects that ate your blood to large cats who dragged his men off one by one. Even water animals rushed out of the rivers and dragged any unsuspecting man away. Every living animal wanted to eat us, and we didn’t eat them. He lost one man nearly every week. They learned how to protect themselves, but there was always something new that wanted to eat them. Around our area, I believe that there were so many farmers, that the eaters, especially the big animals, stayed away. Some died, but not many. As you see, we are not a big and strong powerful race like you, VIN and Jonesy. Even your females and many of your children are bigger than us Matt males. You could have protected us, but once my forefathers heard that there weren’t any insects, or cats, or large flat water animals out in space, that was when the decision was made to head out there instead of relocating down here. Also, for hundreds of years we never heard back from the farmers who had left us, so we believed that they were all eaten as well.”
The Homo sapiens agreed with the logic.
Two hours had gone by since they had left the open second floor to breathe, and after a meal it was time to get back into the semi-charged spacesuits again.
The four men, completely suited up, entered the cavern to find a more favorable quality of air on both levels. The suction of air into the second level had certainly helped.
The first thing Ryan did was to carry the five black boxes from the middle level up to the surface so that his technicians could place them in Commander Joot’s craft. Then they opened all the doors on the second level and went through the rooms one by one.
Memories flooded back to the commander and Elder Roo. Elder Roo remembered joining an invention club with other boys in one room, and being schooled in another. Commander Joot had his apartment on this level, and it was a poignant moment for him to enter his old single quarters. Nothing looked as if he had left it. He had never officially married. Most of the families lived on the safest third level, and the unmarried Matts, of which to Ryan seemed more than expected, the middle level.
The commander told him that several of the higher ranking Matts, once flying, didn’t have time for families. They often were away from Earth for fourteen-year periods and sometimes had children with single female crewmembers to add new generations and blood lines to the crew numbers in space.
It seemed to VIN that their ideas of sex were as varied as their ideas on most other things: relaxed. Nobody really took an interest in how other Matts conducted their lives, and there seemed few or no rules in place.
The middle level of the cavern was large, nearly the size of a football field. There were two hundred apartments, mostly smaller than on America One, with single beds, and in each one was nothing more than well-preserved metal beds, desk frames and wooden chairs. Here and there were cases of what looked like food supplies. In one room was a perfectly preserved apple, a green one, and when Elder Roo went to carefully pick it up, it turned into dust as he touched it.
“It looks like these rooms were carefully cleaned and most of the softer materials, such as clothes and blankets, placed elsewhere,” suggested Ryan.
“We Matts never had many material items,” replied Joot. “Apart from clothing, a few pieces of jewelry to show our rank, and our gold chests of valuables, we didn’t believe in having more unnecessary items. These we haven’t found yet, so the search on the next level will show us the chests. I must admit, the rooms were very empty, so somebody had prepared for something.”
“SB-III and then SB-II will be down tomorrow,” said Ryan an hour later, and once the whole area had been checked, they found nothing of interest. “I suggest we wait until then. Dr. Nancy and Dr. Walls, return in case we need medical support. Let’s call it a day. Are we are running short of suit time?”
Within an hour they were out of the suits. The suits needed to be recharged, and so did VIN’s legs. On a hot desert afternoon, brown bottles of Australian beer were welcomed by the team, except the two Matts of course, who grabbed the darker, cold plastic bottles with red labels.
Joot had realized that it certainly would take a lot of mental and medical help to get these Homo sapiens off their alcoholic beverages. They always seemed to partake of some form of alcohol or another. Also the feasting of burnt and fired cooked meat, what they called a barbeque by these Tall People here on Earth, was now a daily occurrence. Maybe he had again found the fuel-drinking, meat-eating aliens who had visited them many years ago? Maybe these aliens had just grown into different colors and become taller?
The desert nights were perfect. There were no insects, and the dark hours until midnight felt warm and comfortable, which really brought the memories back to the Matts. As Joot said, he had slept most of his 10,000 years. So had Elder Roo, and it was only the 60 or so years traveling on several occasions out in space that had dulled his memory
. To Roo walking around the crater and cavern, being here felt like only a year or two ago.
“What fuel changes do you think the shield will cause?” Ryan asked in Matt over the radio with his first cup of coffee the next morning. Everybody was monitoring what was going on in the crater. Above, Jonesy and Maggie were already in a low orbit; Boris and Vitaliy were in charge of refueling. Fritz Warner, the entire astronaut crew, and Captain Pete had worked most of the last day in America One on Commander Joot’s recommendations for shield reentry.
“We figured thirty percent of the usual fuel usage for a round trip, but it all depends how accurately the computers get the shuttle to the crater,” said Vitaliy.
Somehow the Matt craft seemed to know where to go, but the shuttle’s computers weren’t telepathic, so this was a more complicated scenario.
Jonesy had the computers and the records of every reentry into the atmosphere on command. The computers would be more in control than the astronauts, but the problem was in descending, something the craft didn’t want to do at high altitude, as Maggie had found out. The craft just wanted to head upward above 30,000 feet.
“We have to solve the ‘I can’t get down’ problem,” said Jonesy, which made everybody smile. “If we are just floating up there, I could turn the shuttle upside down and use the thrusters in the opposite direction. Gee, the shuttle is protected by the shield, and it’s just like being in a space vacuum. As long as everything is tied down, I could do somersaults in SB-III, and it wouldn’t hurt the shuttle.”
“Ryan. What fuel reserves do you have down there?” Captain Pete asked.
“We have the two hydrogen Dewars we saved from the attack fifteen miles away. We have just enough fuel for one normal launch. If we launch with the shields, we could double that. We must get both shuttles back into space. If not, then we must ask the Aussies for liquid hydrogen. I can’t risk both doctors in the first flight, but we need them down here. There is one flight of alcohol left down here, so Captain Pete, we are in a bit of a fuel bind.”
