7. For a long time I stared ahead, saying nothing. Eventually Cloe turned to me.
“I think Dieter always knew it. I suspected for some time.”
“It was brave of Trinny to tell us.”
“I’m sorry about Sylvia, Jason.”
We fell silent again. It was strange, and I was ashamed of it, but the one emotion I felt was relief. I had been married to Sylvia for twelve years. We had both been Class A students in university where I majored in Computer Science and she in Mathematics. We had met at NASA. Our union had been something inevitable, like getting a degree. It was only after the honeymoon that we became aware of a profound incompatibility between us: two minds that did not have the same outlook on life.
The downward spiral had been almost inevitable: arguments that lost their acrimony as the reconciliations became more and more halfhearted. Finally a truce of sorts built around our profession. Our temperaments adjusted. We made space for each other but the space cemented the distance. If it hadn’t been for the Mars programme we would have divorced. Just one of those things.
“I won’t lie,” I said. “I’m not turned upside down by it. If she has to go it’s better this way than what would happen—later.”
“It was easy to see you were not close.”
“I was fond of her and stood by her. The marriage just wasn’t what I had expected it to be, that’s all. Some don’t draw the lucky ticket, I suppose.”
“No, they don’t.”
I glanced at her and opened my mouth to speak, but thought better of it.
“Just how bad is Ganymed for Earth?” she asked. “I don’t know who to believe anymore.”
“You don’t trust the NASA report?”
“You trust it?”
“It seems accurate enough. I did a little research myself. Energy released, about 10 billion megatons of TNT, a three-hundred-kilometre wide crater, a 10.9 earthquake, four-hundred-foot high tidal waves, and an airblast of about three hundred kilometres an hour that will blow down all high rise buildings and any wooden structures besides flattening about ninety percent of the trees. A dust cloud that covers the Earth for at least a year, stopping photosynthesis and killing plants, bringing food production to a standstill. Really bad food shortages for some time. But here’s the point—nothing that actually kills off humanity.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s the physics. Any big asteroid will punch a hole through the Earth’s crust and bury itself in the magma. Most of its energy gets dissipated there, with no effect at all on the rest of the Earth. The damage to the surface really depends on its diameter and doesn’t increase that much if the asteroid is ten or thirty kilometres wide. It would need something much bigger than Ganymed to disturb the magma in a way that would affect the crust. Heck, asteroids nearly as big as Ganymed have hit the Earth before and life still survived.”
“So it’s bad, but it’s not that bad. The human race will survive.”
“True, though in what condition?”
“But it will survive.”
“They still need us to survive too.”
She glanced at me. “What for? We are not an ark.”
I looked at her speculatively. “Not literally. We’re to be an IT one. I got an eyes only message that our hard drives are to store any sensitive or useful information that might not survive the impact. A whole lot of data will be transmitted to us now it’s confirmed Ganymed will hit.” I paused. “Sorry, it’s not something to smile about.”
Cloe was staring at me. “You mean they want to use us as a backup?”
“Exactly.”
She shook her head. “Jason, that’s nonsense. They could store information like that on the moon, or on any of the bigger satellites. They don’t need us.”
“They need someone alive who can access that information.”
“Who? Who has the expertise? The clearance? You? And what will you do with it if everything capable of processing it has been destroyed on Earth? If they can’t access it themselves then they have no use for it. What kind of a rubble belt will we find round the Earth when get back? We may not survive. But the moonbase is underground so it’s quite safe and its computers are bigger than ours. It is easy to work out they will store the data there.”
“You may be right.”
“Of course I’m right! Think, Jason. They still treat us as fools.”
“Why would NASA do that?”
She hesitated. “The same reason they gave us the strap-on boosters story. This is all about keeping the mission going while they deal with the asteroid.”
“Why lie now? The asteroid will hit so we don’t matter.”
She shrugged. “Je pas. Maybe they use us for propaganda. We smile. We do our job. So they can tell the world, don’t worry, we continue with the Mars mission. We can deal with Ganymed. It gives them more time.”
“That’s cynical.”
She looked back at me. “T’es mignon. The thing I like about you the most is your naiveté.” She held her palm up in front of her face. “A big IQ who can’t see two inches...bon, all right, sometimes you can. But that is why they make you commander. You trust them too much.”
“‘Them’?”
She held my look. “Them.”
I smiled. “I appreciate the ‘sometimes’. As it is I did kind of notice the story was leaking sawdust all over the place.” I rubbed my chin. “I read somewhere, where was it?—‘The first instinct of a government in trouble is to lie.’”
“Of course. Pretend everything is normal. No riots in the streets.”
I gazed back at the screen. “So what do we do?”
“You tell me. You’re the commander.”
“OK. We’ve got some aliens to meet. And if we keep NASA and the US government happy it’s a bonus. We land on Mars.”
Cloe just smiled at that.
The Terra Nova followed a path that did not quite line up with Mars’ axial tilt. It was necessary not only to slow the ship down into a circular orbit, but also change its orbital angle. This would enable the ship to match orbits with the alien vessel, if necessary. It would use slightly more fuel without however compromising our return journey to Earth. Not that it mattered. Earth might survive the devastation inflicted by Ganymed, but we would not. A massive shell of rock and dust spewed thousands of kilometres into space by the asteroid’s impact would pulverise the Terra Nova long before we could use its re-entry capsule to return to the Earth’s surface. We accepted the fact and filed it way, and henceforth concentrated our thinking on short-term problems.
My first priority was to tell Dieter what was happening. Once we had done our burn and entered into a circular orbit we would no longer have the fuel to wait out the next two years and return to Earth at its following line-up with Mars. Killing me would not change anything. I hoped that would oblige him to see things in a new light. The less potentially dangerous he was the better. And heck, he had a right to know.
I expected him to be depressed or angry at the news. I did not expect his wholehearted support.
“Ja, do it,” he said.
“You know what it means,” I replied.
“Of course. It means we are dead, but we are dead anyway.”
I didn’t respond to that.
He leaned forward from his couch. “If we must die, why not do something worthwhile? Besides they might just welcome us on board.”
“Presuming they do, there’s no guarantee they have anything that can sustain us.”
“I think they have something. They go to Earth for a reason. Ten to one they have the same basic life form that we have. A good chance they have something on the menu we like.”
I shrugged. He might be right.
He grinned. “It is worth doing. Just be polite when you meet them.”
A full-on burn has a kick of a G and would reverse the orientation on the ship, requiring that we be settled in our couches on the PriFly deck before I hit the fire button. Orientation on a spaceship can be confusing. There were four decks, or stories, in the habitable section of the Terra Nova: the Upper Equipment Bay, nearest the main fuel tanks; then below it the crew compartment level where the staterooms were situated; then the Annex deck, with the Wardroom, the Rec room and the Medical Bay; and finally the PriFly deck.
Entering the PriFly required that one change one’s sense of direction by 180 degrees, with up becoming down. The reason for this was simple. When the Terra Nova was rotating to create artificial gravity, everything in the habitable section was drawn by inertia towards the front end of the ship, making the PriFly deck the ‘bottom’ level and the Upper Equipment Bay the ‘top’ level. During a burn, however, everything for a short space of time would tend to fall in the opposite direction, towards the fuel tanks and main motor. Hence the couches in the PriFly deck were welded to what, in ‘normal’ periods, would be considered the ceiling. There was no question of spending a burn in any of the three other decks, unless one wanted to be stuck to that deck’s ceiling like a fly on a windscreen.
As we strapped ourselves into our PriFly couches none of us said anything. Once secure, I swung out an articulated wall monitor I would use to keep an eye on the progress of the burn. Near my hand a joystick and small keyboard would enable me to manually override the burn if necessary.
I began to read out the countdown procedure. Normally it would have been Domingo performing the actual manoeuvre. In this case I doubled for him. “Removing damping rods…core temperature rising…1300 degrees…1400 degrees… 1500 degrees…”
Dieter gazed at the window above us. The PriFly lighting was dimmed, allowing for a bright starry vista to be visible, with the stars solid, unwinking points of light.
“2700 degrees…2800 degrees…optimum temperature reached. Stabilizing it. Done. Activating hydrogen feed sequence.”
I watched the clock. The countdown timer approached zero. “Ready for full burn one minute forty-three seconds commencing in three…two…one…”
I pressed the ignition button on the joystick. Weight gripped my body and pushed me into my couch. Simultaneously a slight tremor took hold of the ship. I turned my head to look at Dieter. He caught my eye and gave a wink.
I turned back to the monitor. “Burn proceeding normally.” Nothing to do but wait. The seconds passed. One minute…one minute twenty seconds…thirty seconds…forty seconds, and…”
My body was released from the weight whilst simultaneously the ship’s tremor ceased. I scanned the ship’s new speed and trajectory then followed up with a systems check. Everything was as it should be. This should have been the moment for the crew to give each other high fives. I glanced at Dieter then back at the monitor. “That’s it.”
Dieter smiled. “Mars here we come.” Cloe looked away, saying nothing.
It was as we were preparing to dock with the Shepard Mars Lander that I made my decision. Cloe was doing her workout on the treadmill—its pedalling arrangement complemented by stretchable elastic handgrips to exercise the arms. I drifted over and held on to a wall handhold.
“I think we should let him go.”
Cloe did not pause in her pedalling. She took time to speak. “I suppose so.”
“Do you think it’s the right thing to do?”
“I suppose we have no choice. We can’t keep him tied up for another eight months. But I don’t want to talk to him. You tell him that.”
“I will.” I hesitated. “Second thing. He and I will be going down to Mars. You need to stay here.”
She stopped in mid-pedal. “What?”
“He must know that if he tries anything when we’re down you will take the Terra Nova back to Earth and leave him behind. I’m sorry, Cloe, but I can’t manage it any other way.”
There was a long silence. Finally she nodded.
“I’ll go and do it then,” I said.
She did not reply.
Before I undid Dieter’s bonds I said one thing to him first. “You and I are going down to the surface. Cloe stays on Terra Nova. She communicates with me only. Anything happens and she takes the ship back to Earth alone. Is that clear?”
“Ja, clear, commander.”
“And keep away from her until we go. Anything you need to know ask me.”
He said nothing to that.
When the bonds were off he rubbed his wrists. “Is there news?”
“The alien elevator has nearly reached the surface. It’ll land about 12 kilometres from the Hab. We dock with the Shepard in forty minutes and go straight in.”
“What do you need from me?”
“Do a thorough systems check on the Shepard when we dock. As soon as you’re done we’ll make the descent.”
“Gut.”
Conversation lapsed. I was about to push my way to the hatch when he murmured “Thank you.”
I turned back to him. “Keep in mind that we are releasing you out of necessity. On return to Earth you will be arrested and stand trial. You understand that?”
“I understand. One must make restitution for what one has done.”
I didn’t quite like the remark but let it go.
Martian entry is about the most dangerous manoeuvre a spacecraft can engage in. The trouble with Mars is its atmosphere. With a surface pressure of less than 1% of Earth’s it is thick enough to raise the external temperature of a ship to a sizzling 1600 degrees, requiring the use of a heat shield. However it is too thin to rely on parachutes alone for landing. A ship descending by parachute to Earth travels at about 28 kilometres an hour. On Mars the descent speed is more than ten times that, hence the need to jettison the parachutes whilst still well above the ground and use retro rockets for the last phase of the entry. But rockets require fuel, which adds weight, needing more rocket power. It was necessary to fine-tune things to a hair, building a landing ship as light as possible, with just enough fuel for touchdown and scarcely a drop more. There was no room for error at all.
As I strapped myself into my seat in the Shepard the thought came to me that what I was doing was utterly insane. Here I was, two hundred and thirty eight million kilometres away from home, about to make a perilous landing on a barren rock in deference to a mission nobody cared about anymore, to meet something about which we knew absolutely nothing other than that it had spent thousands of years in space in an enormous container made of rock. My sense of unreality was not helped by the fact that my co-pilot was a murderer and half my crew were dead.
I shook my head. We were committed now. For better or worse the decision was made. I spoke into my helmet mike. Both Dieter and I were in our spacesuits for the duration of the re-entry.
“Cloe?”
“Yes, Jason.”
“Start detach procedure.”
A few moments passed then a momentary tremor ran through the Shepard.
“OK, Terra Nova detached.”
“Right, you’re far enough away. Another five minutes to re-entry burn. Dieter, final check on our orbital position.”
“We are good. Automatic burn in four minutes thirty-two seconds. All systems normal.”
“Then let’s wait for it.”
The seconds passed. You can still abort now, a voice told me. And then do what? my mind replied. Go back to Earth and die? Or try docking with a five-kilometre-long piece of alien rock without an invitation? None of the choices were good.
“Ten seconds,” said Dieter. I remembered that I had not left any last message for Sylvia. Sorry, sorry, Sylvie. Too much on my mind. All so futile. If everything had been different I would have been less of a failure. Why did I think that?
A gentle pressure pushed me into my couch. The Shepard’s engine, much smaller than that of the Terra Nova, kicked in with a force of about half a G. I looked at the thumbnail video image on my monitor. The Terra Nova fell away, gradually then more rapidly as the Shepard’s speed slowed and it dropped behind the bigger ship. We were about a hundred and fifty kilometres above the surface of Mars, going in on a shallow trajectory that would make maximum use of the atmosphere to slow the ship down from 19 000 km/h to just 1500 km/h, when it would be possible to deploy the parachutes. From the moment we touched the atmosphere, about a hundred kilometres up, we would have just six minutes to drop our speed to zero. Timing was crucial.
A slight vibration took hold of the ship. “Here we go,” said Dieter.
The vibration increased and with it the feeling of weight. A large part of the heat shield of the Shepard was in the nose, rather like the old Shuttle, and was designed to enable the vessel, which looked like a rounded, stubby missile, to be steered to a limited extent once it was in the lower atmosphere. Right now I knew it was white-hot from the friction with Mars’ tenuous air. Even at one percent of Earth’s pressure, that air was slowing the ship down with a force of several Gs. Our speed dropped rapidly, from nineteen thousand kilometres an hour to twelve thousand, nine thousand, seven thousand...
There was a violent jolt. “Hypercone deployed,” I said. The hypercone was a kind of inflatable extension of the heat shield: a wide, aerodynamically-shaped disc of heat resistant material whose function for a few critical seconds was to further reduce the ship’s speed, enabling parachutes to be released. Time passed, then another jolt ran through the ship.
“Chutes deployed. Heat shield and hypercone dropped.” I intoned. My running commentary was superfluous with only two of us on the ship, but it helped me feel a little calmer. So far everything was on track, but the riskiest part was still to come. As the seconds passed the three parachutes slowed us down from fifteen hundred kilometres an hour to three hundred and fifty whilst our trajectory dropped towards the ground. The ship-to-ground radar monitored our precise height, waiting for the moment to jettison the parachutes and fire the retro-rockets. I watched the screen. At twelve hundred metres height the rockets would kick in. I waited. Fourteen hundred metres, thirteen hundred, twelve hundred, eleven hundred…
“Retros aren’t firing!” I yelled.
“Do a manual override!” Dieter shouted.
I hit the firing button on my joystick. Nothing happened.
“Manual’s dead!”
“Scheisse.” Dieter’s gloved fingers tapped methodically at the keyboard in front of him. “I need to reset the manual system. Wait...wait...done. Try again!”
If you can hear us, help me, I thought and pushed the button, hard. The sudden increase in weight told me the engines had kicked in.
As we were pressed into our seats I scanned the map. “How close are we to the Hab?”
“Five kilometres off. Do not gimbal the thrust. Just feed the fuel into a full burn straight down. We can walk.”
“Why didn’t they fire on automatic?”
“Ich weiss es nicht. Timing error maybe.”
I stopped talking. The retro rockets had fired perhaps too late. Even on full power the burn might not be enough to stop the ship before it hit the ground. Help me again, I mouthed wordlessly as the altimeter dropped rapidly, too rapidly. Six hundred metres… five hundred...
“Komm schon, komm schon,” Dieter snarled.
Three hundred—visibly slowing now—two hundred…one hundred and fifty…one hundred…fifty…thirty…ten…
At three metres above the ground the Shepard’s descent finally stopped. I eased off on the power and dropped the ship gently onto the surface with hardly a bump. It might have been a textbook landing by a lunatic.
Dieter swung his head over to me, sweat on his forehead. “As an amusement park ride, I do not recommend it.”
“Bloody crazy,” I said. “What the hell happened?”
“I do not know. Truly I do not. If I want to kill us there are easier ways.”
I winced at that.
8. I stood in the doorframe of the opened airlock. Mars is at once strange and familiar. Its sky, a combination of carbon dioxide and fine ochre dust, is a light blue-tinged salmon on the horizon, darkening as one’s gaze travels upwards. The sunlight, without the diffusive effect of Earth’s atmosphere, chisels the ground with raw light and sharp, black shadows, yet it is not oppressive, being only forty percent the strength of the light that reaches Earth. The familiarity comes from the awareness that this is a world, not a strange, bare, rock-and-dust surface like the moon with its black, starless sky.
I was the first human being to set foot on Mars. My first words were, “Well I’m down. Coming?”
Dieter joined me a few moments later. We both stood side by side surveying the land before us. The safest and at the same most interesting site chosen for the landing had been the Echus Chasma, a wide flat valley surrounded by canyon-like walls. All around us a flat-topped chain of cliffs rose up, the sky a creamy glow on their summits, deepening to greyish violet above our heads. It was unutterably beautiful.
“Strange,” I said.
“What is strange?” Dieter asked.
“It’s just rock, dust and gas, yet it seems to be so much more than that. Makes me understand why our ancestors believed in magic.”
Cloe’s voice came over the suit radio. “Do I record that as humanity’s first words on Mars?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot the script. ‘We who are here are the first but we shall not be the last’.”
Dieter chuckled. “Somehow that does not work either. ‘We come in the name of humanity and progress. A very good thing or a very bad thing depending on your point of view.’”
Cloe’s voice cut in. “The elevator will land in about an hour.”
We were slightly over five kilometres from the Mars Habitat, or Hab, our living quarters during our stay on the Martian surface. The mission programme called for the two SEVs, or Surface Exploration Vehicles, to come over from the Shirase and pick us up. The problem was that they were far away and would move slowly on automatic pilot. With the alien object nearly on the ground I wanted to reach the Hab as quickly as possible.
That meant a walk, more accurately a kind of bouncing jog. Mars’ gravity is a little over one third of Earth’s. Walking is too tedious and one instinctively breaks into a loping run, as we had discovered when exercising in the Mars gravity simulator during training. We performed a final internal and external check of the Shepard, without finding what had caused the burn initiation failure, sealed the hatch and set off. We moved slowly at first then quickened our pace as we gained confidence. We would reach the Hab in less than an hour, plenty of time as our suits’ oxygen would last a minimum of five hours.
As I jogged a feeling of exhilaration came over me. I had not been out on an open surface for nearly a year. True, I was in a spacesuit and could neither feel nor hear anything of Mars, but somehow that didn’t matter. I was able to move freely in a way I had not done in a long time, and let my eyes relax upon a wide vista uninterrupted by walls or equipment. For the first time in a long time I was happy.
“You are well?” It was Dieter’s voice.
“Fine. Yourself?”
“No complaints. It is a change from the treadmill.”
In the distance, visible against the brownish-grey slopes behind it, was the tubelike outline of the Habitat, with the Shirase supply ship about a kilometre further north. They were not far, the Habitat being about two kilometres off. There was no sign of the alien visitor.
I stopped jogging and stood, my gaze on the Habitat.
“Something is wrong?” asked Dieter.
“Nothing. Just thinking how small it is to keep us alive for two months.”
“The Terra Nova is not much bigger.”
“I’d probably be saying the same thing if I had a chance to see it like this. It’s the perspective. We’ve come a hell of a long way to very little, humanly-speaking.” There was a silence. “Never mind, I’m getting maudlin in my old age. Main thing is that it’s functional.”
“It seems fine from here,” came Cloe’s voice.
“Good. Let’s get inside.”
The interior of the Habitat was essentially a short hi-tech tube, with a dining table and porthole at one end, bunks in the middle, and a spacesuit storage bay and airlock at the other. Space was kept to a minimum, but now that there were only two of us it seemed luxurious. After the inevitable systems checks I made us coffee and a snack. We sat at the table in silence for a few minutes. My inclination to talk had passed, probably because of the empty seats around us. As he sipped his coffee Dieter glanced at the two chairs beside him. He did not speak. There was nothing to say.
I moved over to the console seat and switched on the mike. “Cloe?”
Her face appeared on the monitor. “I’m here.”
“Any developments with the alien ship?”
“Nothing…wait…the latest scan by the Orbiter shows the object has reached the surface. 11.5 kilometres from your position. Co-ordinates are zero, zero, twelve south by eighty, twenty-eight, zero-four west. No other observable activity. I’ll watch it.”
“No point. It’s too late for us to travel to it now. Go get some rest. Have the orbiter page me if anything happens. I’ll give you a call if necessary.”
“OK. Good luck. Out.” The monitor went blank.
“What do we do now?” asked Dieter.
“It’s evening. First thing tomorrow we refuel the Shepard.”
To keep it as light as possible the Shepard carried only enough fuel to land on Mars. A year and half previously a fuel plant had been landed near the Habitat. The fuel plant came with five tons of liquid hydrogen. It spent the next eighteen months compressing carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere, stripping off the carbon and distilling fifteen tons of liquid oxygen to burn as a fuel with the hydrogen. The problem remained of how to get the oxygen and hydrogen to the Shepard. The solution was to equip the fuel plant with wheels and a motor, drive it to the landing site of the Shepard and use pipes to transfer the oxygen and hydrogen into the Shepard’s tanks. The motor would be powered by the onboard fuel.
The fuel plant was about 900 metres away from the Habitat, behind a low rise. No point losing the Hab if the plant blew sky-high. The original mission plan had us land much closer to the Habitat, in the morning rather than late afternoon, and refuel the Shepard then and there. But it was late and Mars was no place to work in the dark, especially not with rocket fuel. We would have to wait until sunrise.
“Once we refuel then what?” asked Dieter.
“If the alien hasn’t done anything by then we head out. We’ll get an SEV over here tomorrow morning first thing.”
I was becoming uncomfortable. We had escaped death on the Shepard by a whisker and our mutual survival had left me flushed with a sense of comraderie. But the euphoria had dissipated. I didn’t want to talk to Dieter or even see him. I needed to keep myself busy. I decided to draft a message for Mission Control confirming we were in good health and outlining our next move. Our landing was a historic moment even if history as we knew it was about to come to an end.
The message took some time to draft. Finally I was happy with it and hit Send. Dieter in the meantime had cleared away the table and was lying on his bunk, apparently asleep. I stayed at the console and wrote another message for Sylvia. This was a much more difficult task than my previous missive to Mission and I was sorely tempted to abandon it. Our marriage had been dead for years and now she had just a few weeks to live. I found it nearly impossible to write without appearing false or unfeeling, but somehow I could not just put it aside.
An hour later I leaned back in my chair, as dissatisfied with my effort as when I began. I was wavering between the choice of sending an unsatisfactory message or no message at all when the thought came to me: Just tell the truth. You love her or you wouldn’t be taking so much trouble over her. Start from that.
Armed with the thought I deleted the text I had written and started over.
Sylvie,
Trinny told me just a short time ago about your condition. I’m on Mars and tomorrow I’ll be going out to try and make contact with the alien craft that has dropped an elevator to the surface about 10km from us. I don’t know what will happen. We may have very little time. I’ve been thinking about the two of us and I’ve come to see that the kind of marriage we’ve had just wasn’t what it should have been. You must see this too. We got used to a kind of live and let live. It seemed to work and we seemed happy.
I realise now that it is not enough. Life is too precious just to be content with getting by. There is a significance to things, even trivial things. There must be something important behind them - “deep” is perhaps is the right word. Being married to you is a deep thing, I realise that now.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I love you and wish I was with you now. That sounds strange coming from me, but it is the truth. I don’t want you to be alone at a time like this. Tessa was not alone. Domingo was with her, and carried her through. I think it had a big effect on me, seeing his faith in action. I am not like him but the least I can do is let you know that I am with you in heart even if I’m two hundred million kilometres away from you. Hope that helps.
Jason
Not perfect but the best I could do. As I sent it I prayed that the idiots at NASA would have enough sense to pass it on to her. There was nothing in it the whole world did not already know or would not soon know, and with civilisation about to end what did it matter anyway? I wished Trinny would contact me. That at least would be proof NASA had overcome its bureaucratic paranoia.
The reply came sooner than I expected, not from Sylvia, but from Trinny.
Director Eugene Trinny to Commander Jason Montague
Yes, I am still Director. Firing me would shake public confidence it seems, and I’ve promised to co-operate provided my family are taken to one of the bunkers being constructed. That seems to have mollified everyone.
Congratulations on a successful landing. Try to identify the cause of that burn failure. You don’t want it to happen again.
You’re cleared to approach the alien artefact and attempt to establish contact with it. There’s no real protocol for a situation like this. Just be cautious, take your time and do nothing that might be construed as aggressive behaviour. We’ll have experts available to assist with communication. Start with mathematical concepts and go on from there. We’ll send you a list of sequential numbering concepts to begin with. Use a flashlight to convey them. We can’t think of anything better at present. Keep us informed of everything as it happens.
I suggest employing the rest of your time doing some of the more important experiments. You might as well make use of all that multimillion dollar equipment. Best you both keep busy. And yes it will help keep up the public’s confidence. We have no choice but to do that for as long as we can.
Your message was passed on to Sylvia on condition that she doesn’t repeat it to anyone. Expect to hear from her soon.
Trinny out.
Good man, I thought. You came through in the end. I set up my tablet alarm to wake me if any message came, then turned in for the night. Dieter was silent in his bunk. I thought about him. What makes a man throw away the most fundamental good he has, the bond with his fellow men? Was he fool enough to think that not being found out was the same thing as not suffering any consequences at all? But he had been found out. Everyone he had ever known, his family, his friends, his colleagues, everyone who had made his life a life, now knew him for a killer and could look on him only with a kind of horror. A murderer. The loneliest individual of all. I felt a touch of pity for him.
Then I remembered Domingo and Tessa’s last, gasping struggle for breath and my pity evaporated. That had been a cruel, calculated homicide, and would have been followed up by my own equally clinical murder had Cloe not intervened. There could be no pity for one like that. I made up my mind. I would interact with him as necessary but would have nothing further to do with him. It was going to be a difficult eight months.