Passage

by Thorby Rudbek

  Karen slipped her breather on while Richard settled the tiny air tank on her back, then she helped him get his on. She passed him a long rod with red, white and blue fabric rolled around one end, and picked up another with pale blue around it. Both of them took a deep breath, and then stepped out together on the sand.

  Neither of them spoke for quite some time. They just stood there, drinking in the unique feeling of being the first people to step onto a strange new planet. The breeze felt good, as the air was dry, and the stillness and emptiness of it all was like a scene in a huge deserted cavern, except it was far wider and more open. Still without speaking aloud, though they did share their thoughts, they reached out and held hands, and walked slowly up the gentle grade of the coarse sand to the top of the dune ahead of them. Once there, they turned around slowly and surveyed the rolling sand stretching into the distance, where, in one direction, the towering mountain range which formed the edge of the crater was just visible, poking above the farthest dunes. Then, continuing their turn until they were facing towards Scout Craft Seven once more, they looked at the black bulk where it rested, having settled into the sand so that it looked a little as it must have looked when it first landed on Earth, so many years before.

  “Quite the place.” Richard sounded muffled as he spoke through the breather, more to try it out than because he had anything significant to say.

  “It’s beautiful!” Karen decided. “Very bleak, and oh, so empty, but somehow I find it very restful, like all of my fears and worries are somehow blowing away with the breeze, leaving me freer than I’ve ever felt before.” She pushed the rod she held into the sand, turned to him and took his other hand in hers. They watched the pale blue fabric slowly unwind, until it flapped free and spread out, floating gently beside them. The flag looked blank at first glance, until the starlight - or sunlight - from the ‘Desolation’ sun warmed it and revealed the ring of white wavering on it.

  Richard stepped closer and held the material still, so he could focus on it. Around the ring, no, actually forming it, were at least a hundred tiny human figures, some small, some bigger, standing and holding hands. Fainter still, but becoming clearer as the flag seemed to come to life, were the shapes of various living creatures, crawling, walking, swimming and flying around and within the circle of humanity. Richard released it and watched it fluttering for a long time.

  Stepping away from Karen, and slightly down the slope of the dune, Richard planted his flag and watched it unfurl. Karen had added a little touch to the stars, making them sparkle as the fabric caught the light. He found he had an unexpected difficulty swallowing, and something strange happened to his vision, causing the colours to blur before his eyes.

  Karen watched him, feeling his sadness and wondering how he would like Arshonna, whether it would feel like home to him, as she was so confident it would to her. She walked over the far side of the dune and sat down, sifting some of the large grains of dark brown sand through her hands. After a while, she looked up and saw that the shadows had started to lengthen. Sand crunched behind her and Richard slid down and sat next to her.

  “Thanks,” he said simply.

  Karen smiled. “We should get going.”

  “Okay,” Richard nodded, his mind still far away.

  “But before we do,” she continued, “I’d like to see one more view.”

  Richard caught her picture more easily this time and smiled in anticipation. He helped her to her feet and they walked hand in hand over the top of the dune, past the two flags, and down to their Citadel. Once they were back in the Control Centre, Richard powered up the Drive and lifted them slowly from the sandy bottom of the crater. Turning towards the gradually descending sun of ‘Dee-two’, he continued their upward flight towards the westward rim. The dunes faded out, to be replaced by scattered shingles and shattered stones, then the ground rose slowly up to meet them. Holding Scout Craft Seven over the edge of the crater, Richard shifted them sideways until he found a flat patch large enough for their ship, then he put her down gently. They went outside once more and found that the black bulk had somehow sunk into the solid rock, allowing them to exit directly onto the surface as usual.

  Walking slowly across the cracked rock, they made their way to the edge of the cliff and sat down against a flat wall of deep, dull brown in contemplative silence to watch the sunset. The purplish-blue sky became tinged with the faintest hue of magenta as the fiery ball sank behind the far-off peaks of another crater, then the stars came out suddenly, and in a few minutes their glow was all that remained to light the rocky terrain. Richard found he could almost imagine he was back on Earth, in Colorado, or maybe Utah. The constellations were unfamiliar, however, and the friendly flickering of stars near the horizon was not evident.

  Richard took a deep breath and removed his breather.

  He listened.

  Karen did the same, having heard his thought and being of like mind. They both sat perfectly still; the only sound that could be heard was that of the wind, moving the last traces of warm air up the crater wall. Finally, as the cold started to seep into them and the silence seemed to swallow them up, they replaced their breathers, got to their feet reluctantly, and returned side by side to the warm intimacy of their craft. Neither of them spoke while Richard activated the Star Drive once more, lifted them from the rocky ground of that empty – but surprisingly – strangely beautiful world, and set course for Outpost Twenty Seven.

  Chapter Twelve

  Quantum Lasers offer incidental illumination – Karkydon, early Arshonnan ablation scientist

  Latt stared out through the bars at the bright blue sky. The intensity of the colour still moved him, but welling up inside was a great sense of frustration at the interminable delays, none of which made any sense to him. First they have to test us to find out if we are really who we say we are, as if we could be lying about our descent from Mars, when they witnessed it with their own tracking systems; then they have to lock us up, not to protect us, as they claim, but to prevent us from telling anyone else about our experience. Next, they ask us each to tell them what happened, so they can spend hours comparing our stories and wondering why it took longer for Terry and myself to return to the ‘Railcar’ than it took us to get to the Controllers’ ship, or why we remember eating different meals at different times. Finally, they leave us to ‘stew’, as Isaac so colourfully describes it, while they confer with the real leaders of this country – the ones who can make decisions. Latt glared at the black paint that still adhered to parts of the rusty rods that stood between him and what appeared to him to be paradise.

  He fingered the new clothes he had been given the previous day on his release from the hospital; he was now wearing rather loose, dark blue jeans and a pale blue sports shirt with some kind of animal emblem above the left breast. It was much more comfortable than the garb he had worn all his life - the rough, dull fabric his own people had produced for the hated Controllers - but he could not figure out why the strange curly beast with flames coming out of its mouth was considered appropriate or desirable for decoration. He turned around and stepped the two paces back to his bed, where he sat down and idly contemplated the dragon once more. Perhaps we do need protection, if beasts such as these are out there.

  The short sleeves of the sport shirt exposed his left arm, where a massive bruise now covered everything visible from the shoulder to his elbow – amazingly the medical officers had assured him there was no fracture, but the entire area was very tender. In contrast, the rest of his skin looked a lot less grey – perhaps due to the sunlight that was so much brighter than the artificial lights in his previous habitations, the utility/power module they had come to call the Railcar, the Controllers’ massive ship, or Warrnam, or the perpetual overcast on Rhaal. And perhaps the change in his diet was the biggest reason of all.

  The sound of yet another person walking towards his door down the tiled passageway disturbed the silence once more. As Latt unconsciously taped his foot in tim
e with the rhythmic beat, the door swung open suddenly and Major Gregor Ulrique stepped into the small room.

  “You are to come with me,” he said curtly.

  Latt looked at him curiously.

  “Where do we go?” he asked.

  “I am not authorized to tell you,” the Major said smugly and somewhat predictably. Latt slipped his sock feet into the runners he had been given and stuffed the partially installed laces down the sides. (He had never seen laces before and had no idea what to do with them). He got up and followed Major Ulrique out regardless of the lack of information on their destination, glad of any chance to escape from the claustrophobic atmosphere of his tiny room. Gregor led him out of the building and back past the Officers’ Club, in the direction of a newer structure that he had not seen before, located several hundred yards away.

  Latt drank in the gorgeous colours of the fall leaves – yellow, orange, even bright red; he took in the varying shades of blue, from the whiter tint near the horizon to the deep serene colour high overhead. He breathed in deeply, savouring the clean, fresh air, then the tang of jet fuel assailed his nostrils temporarily, reminding him of the fragile atmospheric craft which flew from the Cold Lake Military Base. He saw a dark, almost black-furred animal just a few inches long, with an incredibly bushy but gossamer-thin tail, run across the narrow road in stuttering bursts of frantic speed and then disappear in a spiral climb up a large tree as he walked past. Finally he saw an even smaller, striped animal sitting on an over-hanging branch holding something up to its mouth in its tiny, hand-like paws. By the time Latt reached the new building, he felt a new sense of energy, and was ready (or so he thought) for anything that might transpire.

  Major Gregor Ulrique showed him into a long room almost filled by a large, polished, dark wood table. Around the table sat a number of people in uniform; he recognized Colonel Bayard and Flying Officer Morton, but most of the others were new to him. More importantly, his friends Isaac and Ruth were there; they stood up when he entered and indicated the seat between them as one they had saved or that had been allocated for him.

  Latt smiled with relief; he had started to wonder if the authorities would ever let him see his friends again. As he sat down he studied the new faces on the other side of the shiny woodwork. The nearest one looked to Latt to be quite old, which to him meant over thirty. He was equipped with a veritable battery of tiny coloured squares on his jacket, and was almost entirely bald. As Latt turned his head to study the next addition, Colonel Bayard coughed loudly.

  “I would like to thank our visitors for coming to this meeting,” the Colonel began, as if they had been given a choice concerning it. “Mr. Justinals is the only one here not to have been introduced, so I will deal with that formality and then turn the time over to Marshal Thurlow.” He turned to Latt and began. “Mr. Latt Justinals, may I present Marshal Gifford K. Thurlow, Marshal of the Royal Canadian Air Force.” He turned to the man Latt had been looking at first. “Marshal Thurlow, this is Mr. Latt Justinals, the man who claims to be from a planet called ‘Raale’, the location of which relative to Earth is unknown.”

  Colonel Bayard continued, introducing the next person, a rather overweight, short man of about fifty years with shaggy blond hair and thick glasses, as the Minister of National Defence, Franklin C. K. Ludlow, and the next, the only one not in uniform, an olive-skinned man of medium build, as one of the Prime Minister’s personal secretaries, Nikolaos Sebastian. Following these notables, several more military personnel were introduced, including the severe-looking but helpful Captain Sylvia Osgood, who had abetted Ruth in her attempt to get permission to stay with Terry on Saturday night, when his life was still in the balance.

  “Thank you, Colonel.” Marshal Thurlow’s deep voice was a surprise to Latt; it seemed to command attention, yet allowed the listener to feel relaxed. “Mr. Justinals?”

  “Latt Jusstinalss,” Latt corrected him boldly.

  “May I call you Latt?”

  “Pleasse do.”

  “I think we would all benefit from the experience of hearing you describe, first-hand,” the Marshal of the Royal Canadian Air Force smiled easily. “What life is like on your home planet, ah…” he paused to let Latt provide the correct pronunciation of the name.

  “Rhaal, it is called Rhaal by the Controllers.”

  “And do the humans, your fellow-prisoners, do they have a name for it?”

  “Some of the old ones call it ‘Forn’; they say that is what our people called it when they were free, before the Controllers came. Others ssay thiss is just a legend.”

  “Thank you… and as well as a description of your home planet, could you also tell us what you estimate the likely response of these ‘Controllers’ would be to any attempts we might make at proposing a peaceful solution to this hostility towards Earth’s inhabitants that you insist they are presently and inexplicably caught up in.”

  Latt stood up and walked over to the vertical blinds cutting out the morning sunlight. He parted them slightly and looked out at the glorious fall colours. “Thiss view, is this typical of how your Earth looks?” he began a little hesitantly, directing his question at the Marshall.

  “I’m not sure I follow you; there’s a lot of variety…” Gifford Thurlow responded.

  “I mean the clear air, the living things, the sunlight, the stars that blaze across the sky at night…” Latt paused again.

  “There are some places where the air gets pretty polluted,” Thurlow said in response. “But most of the planet is quite pleasant – desert areas and the like excepted.”

  “On Rhaal, the air is so badly polluted that it is impossible to see the sky clearly enough to know the colour above the grey and brown clouds… most of the time you cannot see further than to those trees there,” he indicated the calendar quality scene across the road outside. “We lived halfway up the side of a deep, ssteep valley; the bottom was constantly filled with fumes. To go there was to invite a sslow and painful death, choking in the poisonous yellow gas. I remember a few growing things outside from when I was young; they were just thin, sstraggling, dull green things which clung to the rocks outside the cave we lived in. I doubt there are any left now. There were some insects, mostly ssmall with hard sshells; I understand they are almost impossible to kill on Earth, also. And those strange black little things with fuzzy tails that run from tree to tree, and the birds… Ruth told me about the birds… These I have never sseen anything like, until I landed here on Ssaturday.” Latt walked back to his seat and sat down again. “That is why the Controllers want to take Earth from you, why they will take it from you or die in the attempt; their home planet has been destroyed by their industries and they musst leave it before they are killed, like almost every other living thing has been, by the pollution they created sso callously.”

  “And their response to an attempt at a negotiated settlement?” the Marshal persisted.

  “My people are considered expendable by the Controllers;” Latt laughed humourlessly. “They expect immediate and total obedience. And any who disobey are executed insstantly. There have never been examples of leniency; many of my family died because they were too old to perform the simple tasks required to ensure their own survival, others I knew failed to provide ssatisfactory sservice to the Controllers, sso they were killed. I myself wass resigned to meeting a ssimilar end before my friends here and Terry Sstadt persuaded me to help them fight the Controllers.” Latt’s blazing blue eyes looked bleakly at Marshal Thurlow. “You are of the same sspecies as my people. Your doctors have confirmed that with many, many tests. They will deal with you jusst as they have always dealt with us.”

  As Gifford Thurlow stared down his beak-like nose at Latt, he realized that the stranger that had so recently and spectacularly arrived at CFB Cold Lake was deadly serious. Thurlow discovered that he believed every word Latt had said, despite the outrageousness of his claims. He was also influenced, of course, by the collaboration of the stories extracted from the others and
tabulated in point form for his perusal, and the radar evidence that the people in front of him had really come down through Earth’s atmosphere from space, and not immediately after being launched by some secret rocket base somewhere else on this planet, as he had at first assumed.

  [Thurlow’s evidence: (mostly in the form of negative points)

  There were no radar images before the earliest ones, which showed the Railcar at incredibly high altitudes, altitudes only a couple of sleek spy aircraft could attain.

  Initial velocities determined from the radar exceeded that of any conventional aircraft, including the record-breaking Blackbird spy plane.

  There was no prior indication of any craft along the ‘back track’ from this discovery point, so this box-like craft did not originate anywhere on Earth.

  All subsequent radar data indicated a glidepath which the craft had followed.

  Box-like objects do not follow such a glidepath; they fall, essentially vertically.

  Preliminary examination of the box-like craft showed no conventional means of propulsion.]

  He sat in silence for some time, contemplating the scene painted in his imagination by Latt’s words, until Nikolaos Sebastian nervously cleared his throat.

  Gifford glanced at the Prime Minister’s secretary for a moment, then turned back to Latt.

  “If you were in my shoes, what would you do?”

  Latt looked puzzled by the expression; he shuffled his feet beneath the table as he considered his response.

  “What I mean, Latt,” the Marshal continued helpfully. “Is, how would you proceed if you were commanding officer of an organization designed for the defence of a significant portion of this planet against enemy attack, and you had just been informed of an impending attack, from space, by aliens with a highly advanced technology, and a policy of destroying and enslaving the populations of any planets they conquer?”