Personal Space- Return to the Garden

by William David Hannah

  “Can we fly to another launch complex? One that is actually manned this time?”

  Joseph was in his PSV again while Margaret stood just outside. “This can’t be. I’m still getting nothing from these controls. They won’t reset or restore defaults.”

  Joseph started checking other buildings. Margaret looked around inside the control tower. When they met again, Joseph looked very discouraged. “This place is dead. I mean, everything. It’s all dead. All the hangers are locked shut. There’s no evidence anybody’s been here in a long time.”

  “Where can we go now? And how can we get there?”

  “We’re miles from a small town. And the way to get there apparently is to walk.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Walk

  Joseph manually closed the canopy of his PSV. He did not lock it because its face scanner was not working. He and Margaret had gone over the station for food or other supplies. Not even the vending machines would work or be opened, so although they had shelter, they would soon need a supply of water and some food.

  The road from the launch station was old and, like most things, in disrepair. It led through a dense forest where only a few clearings revealed abandoned, dilapidated houses and other buildings. Joseph had never paid any attention to an area he had traversed only by autocar, and now he realized that, without his PSV, he lived in a mostly empty and lonely world.

  “There’s nothing left here but old machines that don’t work,” Joseph said. “And trees.”

  “Trees are not a bad thing. They still work, producing oxygen. Filtering out the CO2.”

  “I guess. I prefer this to cities, but without transportation….”

  “It’s limiting. You can’t head from here to the far side of the moon when you want. You can’t even get to a nearby town very easily.”

  “And right now, I can’t even call the nearby town.” He had not been to the nearest town in a long time. He shuddered at the thought that the nearest town might no longer exist.

  “What happened to us on the moon, Joseph? What do you think? Was there a ship? Or was it an illusion? And the man in the straw hat and overalls?”

  “And the plaid shirt.”

  “The one I saw was wearing a mustard-colored t-shirt.”

  “So he changed his shirt in between our visions?” Joseph managed a weak smile. A very weak smile. “What about the cornfield? And your museum?”

  “I loved the museum. It was a very pleasant dream.”

  “Are we still dreaming? And if we are, just where are we, really?”

  “We could be in a quantum gate for all we know.”

  “Your quantum gate. I should have read that book. Listen, maybe you can answer this, since you read the book: if the universe is expanding forward toward infinity but causation can move backwards as well as forward, then can it contract infinitely toward the Big Bang, and if it does, does that mean that the Big Bang itself is never reached? So there is no Big Bang, just an infinitely increasing expansion from an infinitely decreasing point?”

  “Joseph, I’m an archeologist. And the Henson book doesn’t answer a question like that, which is an interestingly clever one…I think.”

  “Well, I hang out on the far side of the moon. I have plenty of time to think there. So I have these questions.”

  “Then answer my question: are these dreams coming from within us, or do they represent communications?”

  “I don’t know. What would your book say?”

  “Henson’s book dealt with extraterrestrial encounters, and some very terrestrial efforts to keep them from becoming known.”

  “So maybe they are talking to us. In our dreams. Or in these illusions that never seen to leave any evidence behind, so no one will ever believe us.”

  “Now that is what Henson was writing about. They didn’t believe him either, except for one. Well, that was another story. They didn’t believe you, and as for me, they don’t even know if I’m alive. Evidence or not, they can’t believe it if they don’t even know about it.”

  “That applies to everything,” said Joseph as they walked on.

  ∆∆∆

  “Look! It’s a store of some kind.”

  The store was old like everything else. It didn’t look open, but by now they would consider breaking and entering.

  “It’s not locked.” Joseph pushed the door inward and Margaret followed.

  The merchandise consisted of a large assortment of items, much of it of a camping, hunting, or survival nature. There were tents and sleeping bags, backpacks, fire starters, knives, and the like. But most importantly to them now were bottles of water and energy drinks and various nutrition-dense hiking-type foods.

  “Wow! This old place is amazing. It has all the things we need, well, except for transportation or radios.”

  “No guns either. I hope we don’t need one.”

  “Why would we need a gun, Margaret? There’s nobody around.”

  “I mean, if we need to hunt. For food. We can only carry so much. And how do we pay for what we take.”

  “I have credits, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to use them. There’s no pay station, and of course no attendant.”

  “And no one to stop us. Does that make it right?”

  “Is anything right or wrong now?” Joseph was chomping loudly on an Xtra bar and washing it down with a DeadBull.

  “Maybe we should just stay here, for a while. We have everything we need for now.” Margaret was exhausted. Joseph was too, but he tried not to let it be known.

  “That’s not a bad idea, for tonight anyway. We could use some rest. But power bars will get old after a while. We’ll need to find communication, or transportation, eventually. Or maybe before the farmer shows up again. Or the straw man.”

  “The straw man?”

  “Yes, in the museum. The farmer morphed into a straw man, like a scarecrow.”

  “I never saw a straw man. I saw, well, it was…this is ridiculous…a tin man. And he was talking about…a brain and a heart.”

  “And courage. We both know this old tale evidently. But we saw its illusions differently. And who was StarTat?”

  “She was in the book.”

  “Another character of yours. And we shared the sight of her, even though I’d never heard of her before.”

  “This is all illusion. I am convinced of it now. But it’s providing us what we need, even if it's not what we want.” Margaret sounded firm in this conviction.

  Joseph was unrolling a sleeping bag. The plushest he could find.

  ∆∆∆

  The next morning brought bad weather to the store. The rain was intense, and so was the lightning and thunder. There was even some hail.

  “I guess we’ll stay here a little longer,” said Margaret.

  “Do you suppose they don’t want us to leave?”

  “Joseph...who is ‘they’ and why do ‘they’ want us here?”

  “Doesn’t it seem that if some…entity, the straw man or tin man, whatever…if they want us to remain here, this would be the perfect weather to do it with?”

  “We should have kept our moonsuits. For the rain.”

  “They’re way too heavy. Don’t you remember? You could be staying in the back of the PSV?”

  “Or stuck in that damn tube.” Margaret actually laughed. She realized that despite the current difficulties, things had been much worse. “Okay, things could be worse, but if they want to keep us somewhere, why couldn’t it be in the museum?”

  “Careful what you wish for.” Joseph said as he picked up a toy space shuttle. Now where did that come from? He quickly put it back.

  “I am going to find some clothes that fit better than this weird orange mechanics thing.” Margaret was looking at the rack of women’s apparel, an appealing collection in just the right size. She picked out several and headed off to the restroom to change.

  Joseph found some jeans and a polo shirt. He changed quickly while Margaret was away. They fit fine.
The clean clothes reminded him that he needed a shower about the time that Margaret appeared, wearing a towel.

  “There’s a shower in the restroom. I thought you’d like to know before you get dressed.”

  “There wasn’t one there yesterday!” He didn’t know whether to be disgusted or delighted, but he was off to the shower. When he returned, Margaret was looking at a book illustrated with 3D pictures of the cosmos.

  “We haven’t been very far away, have we? In the whole cosmic picture? Just to the moon and back, as far as we know. There is so much more. Have you been to Mars?”

  “Yes…once. I used the PSV and refueled at a Lagrangian station.”

  “What was it like there? On Mars?”

  “The parts I saw were very artificial. I didn’t like it very much. I saw no point in going all the way to Mars just to experience earth of long ago. Or myths based on what earth was thought to be like before all the stuff happened to it. There were nine billion people. Great cities. Great resources. But the over-population and competition and wars…well, you’re an archeologist. You know all this better than I do.”

  “According to Don Henson’s book, there were extraterrestrial beings that tried to help us. They did help us avoid the worst things that could happen.”

  Suddenly a huge flash and booming thunder took their minds away from their conversation. They sat in silence on their respective sleeping bags and waited for the storm to end.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Yellow River

  That night brought a shared dream. Or was it a dream? They never really knew. They were outdoors looking up at the sky. Strangely, a piece of twentieth century music was playing in the background, a song about sleeping underneath the moon.

  They stared at a night sky filled with stars. And on the horizon lay a pale, pumpkin-colored orb of seemingly great size. This moon should have diminished in size as it rose into the sky to grow brighter. But it did not. It grew larger and larger and brighter and brighter until it enveloped them.

  They were blinded by brilliant light reflecting off a smooth expanse extending to a near horizon. They closed their helmet sunshades and looked behind them at Joseph’s open PSV.

  A streak of yellow seemed to stream from a crater wall. It flowed and widened until it churned the lunar dust into a gray and amber swirl. This yellow river flowed to the near horizon, but it did not drop beneath it. It continued to flow into the space above and onward into the cosmos.

  They opened their sunshades to better see the mystery they were witnessing. This dream, it seems, was a special space for them. And it was personal.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Elmherst

  Joseph and Margaret awoke in silence. They were still in their sleeping bags, still in the camping and variety store, but they knew that they had shared a special communication. With whom, or with what, remained a mystery, just as their entire journey had become.

  Margaret was the first to speak. “You saw it, didn’t you? The yellow river on the moon?”

  “Yes,” Joseph quietly replied.

  “It’s time for us to go.”

  “Yes, it is.” Joseph arose and rolled up his bag. He would shower and change to fresh clothes and start packing as much as he could carry. Margaret did the same. Lastly, they shared a meal of energy bars, nuts, and dried fruits.

  The broken pavement outside the store had been washed clean by the storm. There were puddles of clear water interspersed among larger puddles of red mud. Big water drops were falling from the leaves of the crowded trees, but by staying in the middle of the forgotten road, they managed to stay mostly dry.

  At long last they reached what remained of a town.

  Elmherst

  population 751

  Funny, Joseph thought. Joseph had never known the name of the town nearest his favorite point of departure. His official residence was miles away on the coast in Argane, and he had always used a public autonomous vehicle to carry him back and forth. But he spent more time in the solitude of the hanger that housed his PSV than at his home. There, using the launch station computers, he would order whatever supplies he needed and research places and facts relevant to his interests. Most of the time there was no one else at this launch station, and the ones who did arrive did not care if he lived there or not.

  “There’s no one here either.” Margaret frowned. “None of this is real, is it? Will anything work?”

  Nothing worked at the police station, not a radio, not a communicator. It was an empty place, without a function. That is almost symbolic, thought Joseph without bothering to know why.

  But a stove and automatic oven did work at the town’s only cafe, and they were able to have hot coffee and bacon and eggs. Their breakfast was delicious after the power bar and nut diet they had been on at the store.

  Elmherst did not have a museum, but it had a library. Margaret wanted to find some information, and since nothing worked, including accessibility to online reference services, she could only use books.

  Books, she thought, the information stores of past times. Once there had been billions of them. But most information had been transferred to various electronic sources, and since the means of accessing them were always changing, and previous means discontinued, much had been lost. So much history, she thought, vanished with the populations that made it, recorded it, and then lost access to its records.

  “Do you realize that we’ve entered the Dark Ages once again?” Margaret asked. “I mean, we’re almost prehistoric. Nothing is being written, recorded, or kept, not in a way where it’s accessible.”

  Joseph had not thought of this before. He knew that there were vast amounts of data available through his PSV, and in records on the moon and on Mars. In fact, he believed the Mars theme parks were full of history, which he found to be boring.

  “It’s not real history, Joseph. What is on Mars is myth, made up history, representations as mythical and unreal as all that we are experiencing now. In many ways, it’s less real. In our minds we’re seeing symbols of realities we cannot comprehend. On Mars, where there is physicality, it’s the physical that lies. In which is there more truth?”

  “Look!” Joseph said. “It’s a copy of your book. The one about the quantum gate that you are always referring to. It’s under science fiction. So it’s fictional.”

  “Let me see it. It’s classified as fictional. But aren’t we living it now?”

  She placed the book back on its shelf, almost reverently.

  “Here’s a book on the Cartwright Institute. Where you work.”

  “Where I work has apparently decided that I’m dead.”

  “We’ll find a way to contact them. Eventually.”

  “Joseph, what do you do? When you’re not flying around in your PSV? You never told me.”

  “I don’t do anything, Margaret. Well, I don’t have to do anything. I guess I’m very fortunate. My family was fortunate, when they were still alive. They’re all gone now.”

  “It’s hard to be an orphan an any age. I’m one myself. But I never knew my family. I had my books and my studies. But they’ve been wonderful companions, much like your spaceships have been to you.”

  They exited the library.

  “Look there’s a pharmacy with an ice cream counter. It was a traditional setup in the distant past. And the coolers work! And there is ice cream! What do you want, Joseph? My treat.”

  “How nice of you to offer since you don’t have any way to pay for it anyway.”

  “But I’m scooping. Oh here’s pistachio.”

  “I’ll have a double-nut fudge. Or is that a double-fudge nut?”

  “You’re the double-fudge nut, Joseph. And it can be a quadruple if you like. And macadamias.”

  ∆∆∆

  No one was behind the desk at the local BnB. But the keys were all available and so was any room. Joseph’s bed was very comfortable, and he was tired. Margaret was in an adjacent room. They left their doors open to the hallway, not ex
pecting any other guests, but a little worried about potential dreams.

  Nothing happened, and they awoke rested and refreshed. That in itself seemed unreal. There was food in a pantry and in the refrigerator in the kitchen. Everything worked, except for a telephone.

  “I haven’t seen a phone like this one before.”

  “It’s a twentieth century rotary dial. I wouldn’t expect it to work even if other communicators did. It’s very old.”

  “How do you contact someone?”

  “You dial a number. See. The rotary returns to its home position each time you rotate it. You have a unique number for each location you are calling. Unless it’s a party line.”

  “A line for parties?”

  “Not exactly. Before that, you had to turn a crank to reach an operator.”

  “What kind of operator?”

  “A telephone operator, of course. That was a job, for someone. Mostly for women.”

  “Why were the operators mostly women?”

  “It was just that way back then. That was the reason for lots of things, back then.”

  “Hmmm…what did the men operate?”

  “Oh, big things, machinery, shops, ships.”

  “And women operated little things. How quaint. I’m glad you know so much about those times. I had no idea.”

  “I’ve studied the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries a great deal. It’s been my job. My specialty. Especially the beginnings of space flight. Do you know that in the early days of rocketry it wasn’t unusual for them to explode?”

  “Like in the colonization days? During the famines and wars?”

  “When humankind sought to relocate themselves for a better life.”

  “Why did they think the moon and Mars would bring them a better life? The hardships must have been immense.”

  “The hardships have always been immense, whether the goal was a different country, or continent, or another world. And many of those who arrived first did not want newer arrivals. The newer arrivals almost always won out.”

  “Are we undergoing that now? Are the extraterrestrials, if that’s what they are, the new arrivals? Are they going to win out?”