PERSONAL SPACE:
Return to the Garden
William David Hannah
© 2018 William David Hannah
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Mission
Quotes
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
About the Author
Mission
To seek to know the dark and light of each shadow, the mystery in the obvious, the wholeness hidden in time.
Quotes
“You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.” ~ Eckhart Tolle.
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"They are like people who have gone into the other world and have returned, and you sense they bear secrets that we will never entirely know, and that they will never entirely be able to explain." ~ Eric Sevareid, CBS journalist before the launch of Apollo 11
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“Margaret was dazed. She tried to reason, tried to bring logic to her thoughts that might explain what she had endured. She had slipped a bright yellow trail beyond anything she had known or had prepared herself to know. There had been no simulations, no amount of training, nothing that could have prepared her for these events, so alien in every sense of the word.
Now she was living a song on another world. A song from the past, earth’s past, her past. She had studied twentieth century music, and she remembered. Somewhere in a memory’s deep recess had been a song about a cavern, or the abandoned mine in which she now crouched like a threatened animal. She wondered which of these variables had first existed, or if they existed at all.
Her job had been to uncover and to try to understand. But right now, she wanted to return to a museum, to any or all the museums she had ever known. They were places where real objects had been kept, preserved, identified, cataloged, ordered, purposefully displayed, with meaning and with reason.
Now she was Clementine, lost and maybe gone forever. Just like an ancient song.” ~ Personal Space: Return to the Garden
Prologue
Personal Space is a sequel to the questionably fictional account of character Donald Henson’s “encounters of the universal kind” as told by Mr. Henson in his book, Angels of the Quantum Gate. As such, it is a continuation, many years later, of those galactic truths and universal mysteries that summoned Don Henson and destroyed him. Almost, but not quite. For Don then, and the reader now, will learn that space, the place and the concept, is both empty and full. It is nothingness, and it is everything. It is soundless without silence. It is aloneness, but its visitors may not be alone. Space may bring answers that ask greater questions, an awareness of unforeseen connections, and new definitions of life.
CHAPTER ONE
Joseph Jayden
“Launch systems are go for final count!” Joseph Jayden exclaimed this into his helmet mic. He said it with enthusiasm and energy despite his awareness that no one was listening. Yes, there was a control tower and maybe a sleeping controller. But the launchport in PTown was quiet. No inbounds, no outbounds, no nothing.
“I’m gonna blast out of here! Not that anybody cares. Maybe I’ll buzz the tower while I’m at it!” There was no reply.
He knew better than to buzz the tower, even if no one was present. The ever-watchful camera eyes had recorded his activities and alerted authorities to his “anomalous event”.
He proudly flew an AG!Super (A-G-Eye-Super) powered by X-fuelon High. It was exotic matter in a patented blend that cost a small fortune, but it went a long way. He always complained about the ever-increasing price, but his PSV, personal space vehicle, was tiny and stingy with fuel. It held only himself, although he once had carried a friend, very uncomfortably, in its small cargo area. When he had buzzed the tower, the exotic fuel exhaust had pitted the big glass windows with antiprotons. They all had to be replaced, and it cost him a hefty fine along with two weeks inside a force field set up in his home. It was house arrest with a kick, which is what he got if he tried to penetrate the EMR shield around the confines of his bedroom and bath. It also cost him to have meals delivered, since he could not get to the kitchen.
He had experienced much difficulty trying to get his spaceflight certification restored. It had been even harder to retrieve his impounded PSV, the temporary loss of which had made him restless and despondent.
His AG!Super could get him to the moon in less than a day and on less than one load of X-fuelon. One time he had actually taken his little spaceship to Mars by refueling at a Lagrangian point station along the way. Still, the PSV was uncomfortable for more than a few days travel with only the Lagrange stop. So little personal space, he thought, on the inside. But outside…OUTSIDE was unlimited, on and on until it curved back upon itself. The universe throws us its curves, he thought, in more ways than we know, in more ways than we can imagine.
He had not stayed long on Mars. Though he was relatively well-to-do, it was expensive to attend the theme parks with their fabricated Martian lifeforms, and hardly-authentic Martian cuisine. The reality was that it was mostly a dry desert, and a very cold one. He needed a good Mars suit to be out and about, and, as always, more credits. It was paradise for some of mankind, but it was punishment for him. As a result, he would stick to going to the moon. Alone. He would set his PSV down on the top of a lunar mountain, or in the bottom of a crater, and just admire the desolate beauty, the piercing starlight, and of course, the blue crescent, or maybe a globe, that for any particular location would always be in the same spot in the sky.
∆∆∆
PSV flyer Jayden flipped open a control panel guard and toggled a very important switch. The on-board computer shut off the inward flow of the multiple-particle streams that made up X-fuelon. The ground umbilical detached from the flyer and moved into its stable launch position. Each X-fuelon component had been separated into its appropriate cell and waited within its electromagnetic shield until it would be dispensed into his HP-302B engine in precisely the right proportions, at precisely the right times. Jayden initiated the launch sequence, and exotic particle physics took control. His delightful little PSV rose above a disturbed
cloud while the forces of flight sent it straight into the bright-blue sky. Several kilometers above the small launch platform, its attitude shifted as it approached an easterly orbit, and then, from high above the earth, it turned toward earth’s nearest celestial neighbor.
∆∆∆
Joseph was en route, pleased to be strapped tightly in the acceleration seat of his flyer, watching the earth recede and the moon grow. At the great speeds brought on by near constant acceleration, their change was almost perceptible.
The world had changed in cataclysmic ways since the early days of space travel. Electronics had grown ever more complex while becoming ever more accessible. Machines made machines that could design and build autonomously. The near, or actual, slave laborers of the world gone by were no longer necessary. Vast profits continued to accrue to the very few while vast deficiencies reduced the population as a whole. The planet itself would benefit from the decreased population of humans. Climate change, and the lack of useful water that had caused conflict and war, had diminished…along with the humanity. World hunger, poverty, and disease had vanished, but so had the people who had been affected by them.
Joseph was mindful of all this. Just because he could afford a Personal Space Vehicle, and the fuel to make it fly, did not mean that he thought himself deserving of such privilege. He would think on these things from the far side of the moon, when he chose to be there during its lunar night, when the only sights beyond those in his mind were the great star clouds seen in total darkness without sunlight or earthshine to fade them away.
There had been times when Personal Space Vehicles had been large and elaborate, spacious but clumsy, affordable only to the most affluent, un-flyable by all but serious pilots with extensive training. They crashed frequently, or experienced some kind of unrecoverable mishap, even though they had the best computers of their day linked to huge servers on the ground. The ground servers had been highly reliable, until they were hacked and destroyed by hostile actors. Still, their occupants had never suffered the dangers of the crowded space buses that took the first settlers to the moon, and then Mars. A voluntary life of great hardship had been welcome to those who were lucky enough to arrive at their destinations without being exploded into space dust or marooned until life support ran out. There had been too many potential settlers shoved through airlocks so that those who remained could have a few more weeks, days, or sometimes hours remaining to them.
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The diminished populations of humans had little need for the great spaceports of the colonization days. Launch facilities that still functioned, like the one that Joseph used for his departures, were automated and manned only by a perfunctory human, if at all. There were launch facilities that were completely derelict, overgrown, forested, returned to the earth from whence they were built when mankind reached for the stars, or at least for the moon or Mars. Yes, this is a different world, thought Joseph, who basked in his frequent solitary freedom while regretting the reasons for it.
∆∆∆
Joseph had reached the moon, or rather a close lunar orbit that was taking him around the far side at high speed. He reversed his engines to begin slowing the craft, and he could see the orbit widening as orbital mechanics came into play. It took some expert piloting, and some smart use of the computer on board the PSV, to slow the little ship and to fly lower at the same time.
Joseph checked radar for any particularly interesting places to visit. No features could be seen in the darkness, but the computer overlaid his radar images with current maps. Hmmm, he thought, that crater’s not on the map. He marked it on his screen and recorded the coordinates so that he could return to them.
Suddenly…the flight computer coughed! No more display…just a deep bluish screen streaked with white lines. He immediately increased his altitude. The starry sky was most certainly preferable to total darkness with no more radar, maps, or navigational assists. In moments the screen returned to normal. Thinking it time to check in at a moonbase, he rounded the earth-trapped planetoid and proceeded to Moonbase Alpha, aka Tranquility Base. It was the oldest of the moonbases, and the largest. The sun was brilliant after the darkness of the other side. He wished for some shadows and the contrast and depth they provided instead of the glaring, apparent flatness of the Sea of Tranquility in full sunlight. He decided on a manual approach and landing. He cursed his malfunctioning computer and its display screen that had not provided the expected welcome greeting to this usually benign earth-neighbor.
CHAPTER TWO
Dr. Margaret Yeardsley
Margaret Yeardsley, PhD., had developed an intense interest that, using considerable persuasive effort, she had managed to conjure into a series of assignments. At first, her department had told her not to bother. Earth was full of archeological targets, old buildings, old bones, plenty of things and people to dig up and study, all stemming from its frequently cataclysmic past. Her previous explorations had taken her to lost sites, old monuments, graveyards, and to other forgotten places all designed to honor remembrance. A newer assignment took her to the ruins of a property once owned by a certain farmer Donald Henson back in the days when high speed space travel was something very new.
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Don Henson had been no ordinary man. Extraordinary farmer Henson was credited with the very first manned flight aboard a spacecraft with the newly designed Pickering fusion/plasma drive, capable of huge accelerations and near light speed. He had quickly traveled to a region between Jupiter and Saturn and returned, although it was said, never completely confirmed, that he had suffered a medical emergency, a near death, as a result of the massive acceleration. It was never fully explained how he came to be selected for such a venture, but it was thought to have been connected to the existence of a mysterious structure under his cornfield, a structure that was seen on radar, partially excavated, and then was lost without explanation. Cults had grown up around these occurrences, and to complement the other mysteries, a whole group of cult participants had disappeared, never to be seen again.
Don, upon his return and rumored second chance at life, had created a garden where his cornfield had been, above the incredible disappearing structure, and where the cult followers steadfastly maintained that extraterrestrials had landed. Cult followers, tourists, believers, disbelievers, and miscellaneous denizens of all sorts had made his garden a very popular place.
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And so, on assignment, Dr. Margaret Yeardsley had made her way to a virtual ghost town once known as Grover, now in the North American Eastern Territory. With proper maps she had had no trouble finding the former Henson property, but no one had been able to establish an owner for it. The Henson property, and its dilapidated memorial garden, had remained in a state of limbo for a long time.
The Henson house was dilapidated also. What gave evidence of having once been a warm and attractive home on a family farm was now a sagging mass of peeling paint, moldy wood, and a caved-in roof. Beyond the house was a broken-down barn, a couple of platforms that once had been storage sheds, and a large field grown thick with brambles, bushes, and assorted stunted trees and undergrowth. The faint remnants of a path led into what used to be its famous garden.
There was little left in what once had been a popular tourist destination, nothing to indicate that a massive digging project had taken place under its wasted soil. But there were three small memorial stones and a broken statue. The statue had once been a horse, or the suggestion of a unicorn with its horn broken away. It stood alone, for decades staring at three severely worn, sculpted-stone markers. One of the stones suggested a list of names over a faded poem; another spoke of a woman with star-shaped tattoos and something about how important she was; and the third displayed a name. It seemed to mark the grave of a Col. James Drake, USAF. It was mostly obscured by a shrub with bluish flowers.
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As she walked back toward her rented automated transport, an antique van with an internal combustion engine roll
ed toward her on the broken pavement of the narrow drive. She waited for its arrival and for its inhabitants to appear. They were an interestingly attired and varied collection of travelers. Regardless of age, they all conspicuously bore tattoos of five-pointed stars.
“Hey, there! Are you the professor?”
“I’m Margaret Yeardsley. I’m on assignment from the Cartwright Archeological Institute. And you are?” She spoke with a clipped-but-worldly modified British accent.
“I’m Don. This is my group. We live here in these mountains. This is sacred ground to us.”
“I’d like to know more about your ‘sacred ground’. How long have you been coming to this property? Who owns it? What do you do here?”
An older female replied, “I’m Ann. I’ve been coming here ever since my parents brought me, when I was a child. It’s been a tradition for me. Have you read The Book?”
“The book?”
“The Book, about the angels and the quantum gate. Do you know it?” a third voice questioned.
“There was mention in my reference materials. I haven’t read it yet. It’s about Don Henson, the property owner here? The one who rode the first Pickering ship?”
“It wasn’t the first,” Don replied, “there was another, before that. It went to the quantum gate, in deep space, beyond this solar system. It was all hushed up, along with any mention of the glass tunnels excavated here. They were built by extraterrestrials, the enlightened ones and the hunters.”
“This is information I do not have. I would like to learn more from you, of these legends, um, accounts.”
Ann replied, “Join us for our meditation. We’ve been directed to seek out a professor who would visit us here. If you are her, you must go to the moon.”
“To the moon? Are you…sure of this? I have never been off this…planet.”
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