Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall

by Thomas P Hopp

CHAPTER 2

  “So the day has finally come.” Diedre Porter stared out the kitchen window of her home in the Pasadena hills, watching flashes of light lance down from the moon. “From the south pole, of course,” she muttered. Feeling suddenly dizzy, she braced herself with both hands on the counter edge and hung her head. She closed her eyes and the memories of three years ago came rushing back as if they were happening right now.

  “Send the commands, Diedre,” Lloyd had demanded.

  Pressing the Return key on her computer had been such a simple thing and yet Diedre’s fingertips had hovered over the keyboard. She hadn’t been able to muster the nerve to push it down.

  Things had a way of becoming do-or-die in space exploration. That was true even when you were sitting in a flight operations room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Under bright fluorescent lighting, among rows of computer monitors, Diedre hadn’t been worried about her own safety. But Clementine 3 was orbiting the moon, waiting for orders from that particular keyboard and Diedre had feared that her command sequence would be the end of the little space probe. Within an hour of receiving the transmission, Clem would either relay the first close-up pictures of the mystery at the bottom of Phaeon Crater, or lie twisted and broken in a new small crater of her own.

  “Are we waiting for something in particular?” Lloyd Andersen, her boss, had leaned over her with a scowl on his face, his jacket off, his tie loosened, and the armpits of his white shirt soaked. As he mopped sweat from his high forehead with a handkerchief, Diedre had snapped, “Don’t rush me. I won’t send these commands until I’m sure we didn’t forget something.”

  “They’re fine. Send them now,” Lloyd had demanded. His strength as Project Manager was the ability to smooth ruffled feathers when events got critical, but this night he excelled at making things worse.

  Diedre glanced at the digital clock in the corner of her computer screen: 3:58 am. At this late hour of a long day she could only say, “If we lose Clem it will be your fault.”

  “I’m prepared to take that chance.” He leaned so close his perspiration sickened her.

  The Clementine Mission team was in turmoil. Nearing the end of a long and successful lunar south-polar mapping mission, the team, usually twelve scientists and technicians, had thinned down considerably tonight at Lloyd’s insistence. He had recently dealt half the team to the Mercury lander project and then allowed two people to go on vacation simultaneously. That left only four active team members, all of whom were overworked, sleep deprived, and stuck in the control room at this ungodly hour. Diedre was the ACE, the person responsible for communications with Clementine, and that responsibility would put a few more gray hairs in her brown pageboy by morning.

  “Go ahead, Diedre,” said Frank Johnston in his big, husky, soothing voice. “It’ll be okay. We’ve thought of just about everything.” Frank, whose printed-circuit creations made up most of Clementine’s computer brain, was a massive human being. He hovered over her left shoulder, looking like a cross between a biker and a teddy bear with his scraggly beard and curly long brown hair, wire rimmed glasses, baggy blue jeans and an ample gut spreading his suspenders.

  Diedre shot him a thin smile, but noticed that Frank’s suspenders framed a black Clementine Team T-shirt with a white outline drawing of their little fly-shaped space probe. White block lettering above the drawing read, “OH MY DARLING,” reminding Diedre how delicate Clementine was. Frank probably could have lifted Clem by himself, back when she was here and under construction. But now their darling was hurtling through the vastness of space, tiny in comparison to the moon’s immensity. The fly analogy was good. Clem’s cylindrical body had a pair of outstretched solar panels attached like insect wings and her head end bore three goggling camera eyes.

  Diedre’s computer screen was split into two windows, a sidebar with data written in it and a larger window with an image of the moon on a black background. Circling the moon from pole to pole, a red arc traced the orbit of Clementine 3. At the bottom of the screen a single white code line flashed on and off, demanding a response: Transmit Command Sequence?

  “I don’t get what the hurry is,” Diedre protested. “In the morning, we can get some people to double-check our calculations.”

  “Send the commands,” snapped Lloyd. “This maneuver has been pre-approved at the highest levels.”

  Diedre wanted to jump up and refuse to cooperate. But she didn’t. She drew a deep breath, pressed the Return key and then slumped back in her chair. “Okay, Lloyd, you win. The commands are on their way.”

  The line at the bottom of the screen changed to: DSN; CLEMENTINE3; UPLINK 041219; 02, signifying that their pre-coded command set was streaming out from the control room over a cable line to the giant radar dish at Goldstone, which by now was already radiating the commands into space toward Clementine.

  Frank murmured, “There’s no turning back now.”

  Lloyd said nothing.

  Diedre sat frozen through slow seconds while the command sequence traveled into space as far as the moon. More seconds elapsed while Clem digested the sequence in her robotic brain. Another breathless moment went by while the spacecraft transmitted her response back to the Deep Space Network dish and DSN passed it back to JPL. Then a single line appeared on the screen: ACQ100935*156499.0045D.

  “That’s it,” Diedre wheezed, having nearly asphyxiated from neglecting to breathe. “Clem’s acknowledged the command sequence, for better or worse.”

  On Clementine’s trajectory arc, a small blinking dot of brighter red signified Clem’s progress down from the north pole of the moon. The dot moved across the lunar equator in infinitely small increments while the mission control room became so silent Diedre could hear the hum of the fluorescent lighting. Everyone knew Clem was about to make what might be her last move.

  “C’mon Diedre,” said Frank. “We’re all used to this kind of anxiety. Remember twelve hours after launch when Clem’s logic circuits sent those random signals to her main computer? That had me pretty uptight. Led to some misaligned rocket firings and off-kilter star-navigation events, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My point is, we’ve already had a year of sleepless nights. It was amazing Clem managed to get into lunar orbit at all. How many times did we make heroic efforts to keep her from careening off into space on some useless trajectory?”

  Diedre was resolutely glum. “Those were team sessions with everybody involved. Tonight is all on Lloyd’s say-so.” She glared at Lloyd, who flinched and looked at the wall.

  “Sure,” Frank agreed. “But despite all Clem’s been through, she’s managed to hang in there. Now she’s dragging details out of the blackness in those south-pole craters, right? Our objective was to settle the controversy once and for all about water ice on those crater floors, and she’s gone us one better. Right in the bottom of the deepest, darkest crater of them all, she spotted something that’s got us all pretty excited, including Lloyd.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Frank,” Diedre resisted. “We all know there’s something weird at the bottom of Phaeon Crater.” A chill ran along her spine. In Greek, phaeon meant “the dark one,” in recognition of the fact that sunlight never touched the depths of the small kilometer-wide crater, hidden in perpetual shadow not far from the moon’s south pole. The bottom of the crater lay so deep that it never saw even the faint blue-green glow of earthlight. But that wasn’t what had focused their attention on Phaeon or gave the crater its dark mystery.

  Clementine had gathered some pretty baffling information about Phaeon. Radio-spectroscopic measurements gave the strongest water signal yet detected on the moon and that alone might have justified their current risk-taking. But there was more. Clem’s high-resolution radar maps showed that the floor of Phaeon was not like other craters. The bowl-shaped depression and central pyramidal mountain peak were not surprising but there seemed to be a whole crop of smaller lumps and bumps covering the floor, each no more than a hundred meters across—and these were
arranged in a regular hexagonal array. Nothing like this had ever been seen on the moon, and theories to explain it had proliferated at JPL.

  Lloyd cleared his throat in a guilty way. “So that’s why I decided leaving Clem in an orbit 55 kilometers above the surface wouldn’t get us the definitive answer.”

  Diedre’s hackles rose. “And, without warning today, you insisted we write a command code to bring Clem down as close as possible. Too close, if you ask me.”

  Lloyd resisted. “With no atmosphere to contend with, you could theoretically lower Clem’s orbit all the way to the surface before she’d be in danger.”

  “Yeah,” Diedre sighed, “and we’re sending her somewhere just a hair short of that, suicidally close to the crater rim. I hope you’re satisfied.”

  For support, Diedre turned to Frank, who looked like a witness to a cardiac arrest: grim, scared, and yet hopeful. In the synthetic daylight of the control room it wasn’t easy to mask emotions, but Diedre noticed the fourth person in the room was doing just that. “And what about you, Major? You never have anything to say but you sure like to hang around.”

  Major Paul MacIlvain stood far from them, leaning on the jam of the hallway door. His dark blue Air Force uniform was as sharp and stiff as he was. His face was expressionless, as usual. Liaison Officer assigned by the National Defense Service, which funded the Clementine 3 project, he was one person Diedre could easily have done without. For his part, he apparently felt his thoughts and the purpose of his constant presence were to be kept to himself.

  “She’s heading in,” Frank said.

  Diedre swung back to the screen. The red trajectory arc began to curve noticeably closer to the moon’s surface. Clem had fired her rockets as ordered and was descending toward the moon. Beside the moon map was a digital readout from Clem’s laser altimeter. It had hovered at approximately 55 kilometers for weeks, but now it read 20.3 kilometers.

  According to their plan, Clementine would skim just 100 meters above a low point in Phaeon’s rim at a speed better than 6,000 kilometers per hour. Any errant command interpretation or incorrect guidance thruster firing would be the last thing Clem did. As she moved past 80 degrees south latitude, her altimeter reported 6.23 kilometers and falling. Then it was down to 5.98.

  “This is crazy,” Diedre muttered, but there was no point in grumbling now.

  Frank put a big warm hand on her shoulder. “Hang tough, Diedre.”

  “I’m okay,” she lied. Her palms were sweaty. “Remember all the time we spent putting Clem together in the assembly lab? The months building her, programming her. The system checks, launch preparations—”

  “Every minute,” Frank replied.

  “I can’t believe it’s all come down to this.” She put her hand on top of his and squeezed his thick fingers, trying to imagine what Clem was doing a quarter-million miles above them.

  Starlight glinted off Clementine 3 as she moved above the cratered surface of the moon. She seemed to float motionlessly and yet hurtled at an increasing rate of speed that would bring her down over Phaeon in a matter of minutes. Stark sunlight filled her solar panels with power. The little craft’s radar dish pointed in the direction of earth and blue-green earthlight softened the contrast between the sun’s glaring heat and bitterly cold darkness around her.

  Clementine methodically executed the sequence of instructions sent by her earth-bound teammates. Main engine burn completed, she occupied herself with more detailed matters: firing jets of propellant gas from her guidance thrusters, pointing herself in the precise direction required to make observations in the blackness of Phaeon’s interior. Diving toward her objective, her laser altimeter registered the distance to the surface at 1.765 kilometers. Seconds later the energy readings from her solar panels plunged as she dipped into the shadows of the moon’s south pole. Detecting the power loss, she toggled her main circuits over to her onboard batteries. Deep within the shadow cast by the rim of Phaeon she switched on her radar emitter and began sweeping an arc over the floor. Her photo-sensor retinas, able to see in the wavelength of radar light, recorded one image and then another as she skimmed through the interior of Phaeon. Then, as she approached the crater’s far rim, she began to process the images and prepare them for transmission to earth. Her calculator brain translated the photos into strings of coded dits and dahs and she activated her antenna dish transmitter in preparation for relaying the data.

  But her laser rangefinder indicated an anomaly as she approached the far rim of Phaeon. Her altitude was 25.78 meters above the surface: nearly 75 meters lower than planned. The altitude decreased to 19.72 meters. Clem recalculated her velocity relative to ground. It was 6,520 km/hr. Her altitude was down to 15.94 meters, 11.05 meters, 7.66 meters…

  “My heart’s gonna explode,” Diedre wheezed. The flashing red dot had vanished from the orbital trace on the monitor screen. All that told her was the radio carrier signal from Clem was out of sight beyond the crater rim. But the trajectory plot on the computer display was down so close to the surface of the moon that it seemed to touch.

  After what seemed too long a time Diedre moaned, “She’s gone.”

  Then the red dot reappeared and a new string of characters blinked at the bottom of the screen. “REACQ100989* 206413.0095D.” Clem’s radio carrier-signal was back.

  “She made it!” Diedre cried. Whoops of relief went up from Frank and Lloyd. She jumped up from her chair, knocking it over, and threw her arms around Frank’s stout neck. He swept her off the ground and spun her around in a bear hug that squeezed the breath from her. Over Frank’s shoulder she saw Lloyd wiping his forehead again but smiling.

  Frank set her down. “She did it, Diedre! She survived and she’s headed out to a higher orbit. I knew she’d make it.”

  “Oh, sure you did, Frank.” Diedre was giddy with relief and not the only one feeling emotional. Frank grinned from ear to ear and his bifocals were fogged with moisture from his eyes. The biker was gone. He was all teddy bear.

  Then a flicker drew their attention back to the monitor screen.

  “The data are coming in,” Diedre said, setting her chair upright and sitting to await Clem’s first radar image, now being decoded by JPL’s mainframes. Frank and Lloyd crowded close behind her, watching the image grow line-by-line down from the top of the screen. At first they saw only the blackness of the lunar sky, flecked here and there with bright points of starlight. Then the hummocky outline of Phaeon’s crater rim appeared in a ghostly green monochrome like a view through night vision goggles. Finally the deepest recesses of Phaeon began filling the lower part of the screen with foreground detail.

  Diedre’s heart pounded again, this time with the thrill of discovery. Beyond merely surviving, Clem had photographed a landscape that hadn’t seen light in a million millennia. And now, at 4:02:35 in the morning Diedre was among the first people ever to see it. They had anticipated cliffs of ice or geometric terraces with alternating layers of dust and snow. Indeed, forms appeared in the foreground of Clem’s photo, but as the green image unfolded Diedre knew something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.

  The objects weren’t the rounded hummocks of dust and ice she had expected to see. They were too steep, too straight-sided…

  “They’re buildings.” Frank’s words exploded in Diedre’s head. She knew instantly that he was right.

  “Buildings.” She sank down in her chair. “That’s impossible.”

  Completely, utterly impossible. But there they were, outlined in detail by the glow of Clem’s radar. Towers, domes, pavilions. Dozens of them, a whole city stretched out in a hexagonal pattern on the bottom of Phaeon Crater, centered on a stupendous central step-pyramid.

  She scarcely breathed her next words. “Who could have built something like that?”

  “Russians?” Frank ventured.

  “No,” said Lloyd. “Nothing like this could be kept secret for decades.”

  “Ancient Egyptians?” Frank tried again, leaning close
to the computer and adjusting his glasses as if squinting might help him make sense of what he was seeing.

  Diedre shook her head. “There has to be some rational explanation. Those must be natural formations.” But they weren’t natural. There were perfectly square outlines along the sides of some of the structures and rectangular openings like dark windows. With only the radar beam to light them, the nearest buildings looked surreal in their flat green color, while the more distant faded into black obscurity. But there was something foreboding about the scene. Everywhere, the buildings were pockmarked by craters and meteor impact scars.

  Frank muttered, “The place looks abandoned. Or destroyed.”

  The desolation of the pocked buildings, cracked towers and broken causeways gave Diedre a dizzy feeling. She began rethinking every assumption she’d made about the world, the universe, and time. “Now wait a minute,” she said. “The age of an object can be determined from the number of meteor impacts on its surface, right?”

  “Sure,” Frank nodded. “They accumulate over time so the more hits you see, the older an object is.”

  “But there are too many impact scars.” Diedre eyed small craters covering the roofs of buildings, penetrating domes, yawning as shattered holes in the walls of the central step-pyramid. “Hundreds, maybe thousands. We’re looking at eons of time, millions of years of accumulated damage.”

  “True,” Frank agreed. “To be that heavily cratered, this place must pre-date human civilization.”

  “It would have to be older than humanity itself,” Diedre murmured.

  The ghostly image flickered out as the mainframe prepared to decode the second transmission. Momentarily, Diedre’s mind went as blank as the screen. As she waited for the next image to appear, she became aware of a man’s voice speaking in subdued tones behind her. Not Frank. Not Lloyd. The major. She’d all but forgotten Major MacIlvain was in the room, and now she realized he hadn’t joined them at the computer. She tore her gaze from the screen and spotted him, still in the doorway, unobtrusively talking on a cell phone. He looked away and continued speaking urgently with someone on the other end. She stood and walked toward him and he turned to keep her from hearing what he was saying. She stopped a few paces from him.

  “Who are you talking to?” She couldn’t disguise a note of alarm in her voice.

  He said a few more inaudible words, then clicked off the phone, slung it on his belt, and replied in a flat voice. “My superior officer.”

  He fixed his cold grey eyes on her and made no effort to explain. She became unnerved and looked down and what she saw unnerved her more. The major had opened his coat to put away the phone and there, under his arm, was a brown leather shoulder holster with a pistol in it. As his fingers reflexively touched the holster snap Diedre said, “This is why you’ve been here night and day. You’ve been waiting for this, haven’t you?”

  The major hesitated. Then he said in a level voice, “We already had some suggestions of this sort of thing from Clementine 2.”

  “And you have a say in whether anyone talks about this, is that right?”

  “You’re very perceptive, Ms. Porter.” His tone was icy.

  Alarm filled Diedre to bursting. “How can you do that? Are we under arrest?”

  “Not necessarily.” The major’s voice seemed chillier.

  “But you’re not going to let this out, are you?” Tears of frustration welled in her eyes. How could Clem’s triumph turn to nothing in so few seconds?

  “Look at it this way, Ms. Porter. The Pentagon feels there could be some unrest. Certain elements, religious fanatics, anarchists, the lunatic fringe, might cause trouble.”

  “But you don’t know that for sure.”

  “Top brass’s fairly certain. They made some models of public reaction, ran some focus groups. Tell people there’s an alien outpost on the moon and the effect is going to be bad. End-of-the-world kind of thing. Maybe violence. Brass felt they couldn’t chance it. Didn’t want to deal with public hysteria. President agreed.”

  “But this isn’t some Area Fifty-One hoax!” Diedre protested. “This is reality. You can’t stand in the way of science—of the truth.”

  “In this case we can, ma’am, at least until the Pentagon can send an expedition up there to see exactly what’s going on.”

  “But that’ll take years!”

  He nodded in cold concurrence. She suddenly felt woozy and sank toward the floor. Frank had come in time to hear the end of the conversation and catch her by an elbow, helping her settle into a chair. He confronted the major. “What’s going on here?”

  “Nothing I can’t explain in a few minutes.” The major gripped the gun butt as if Frank’s size threatened him.

  Diedre buried her face in her hands and let out a half-sob, half-laugh. “He’s been waiting for this all along, Frank. That’s why he’s here.”

  It was all too unreal, too horribly unbelievable. Major MacIlvain had joined the team as a watchdog over the military’s little secret, assigned to observe and wait for this moment if it ever arrived. Well, here it was and she’d been none-the-wiser. She and Frank and Lloyd—

  She wheeled around in the chair and looked at Lloyd, who had stayed at the computer. His face looked stricken too, but he wasn’t watching the major. He was staring at her, wide-eyed. It dawned on her like a peal of thunder. “You’re in on this, aren’t you Lloyd?”

  He closed his eyes and nodded. “Sorry.”

  “How could you, Lloyd?” Tears streamed from her eyes. “You’re a scientist. You’re supposed to be one of us.”

  Lloyd straightened defiantly. “How do you think I talked them into giving us two hundred and eighty million dollars for this mission? I made a deal, Diedre. And we’ve had quite a little party on their bankroll, haven’t we? Now it’s time to pay the piper.”

  “My God.” Diedre turned disdainfully from Lloyd and looked up at the major again. “What are you going to do with us, and with Clem?”

  “Clementine is the easy part,” the major said in a carefully measured voice. “The story will be that she crashed.”

  “Of course.” Diedre felt a numb resignation creep through her. “No one will expect to hear from Clem again if we say she smashed into the moon.” She wanted to scream or fall on the floor and cry. Instead, she wilted deeper into the chair. “So that’s it, then. Nothing more out of Clem, forever.”

  The major nodded.

  “And us?”

  “That all depends.”

  Frank sank down in a chair next to Diedre and looked up at the major like a chastened schoolboy. “Depends on what?”

  MacIlvain glanced at each of them sternly, his fingers still fidgeting with the holster snap. “It depends on how cooperative you want to be.”