by Ray Hammond
‘Can we look at those land formations in more detail?’ Steve asked. ‘Let’s start with that large mass at the top.’
Perdy inched forward a joystick controlling a twenty-ton telescope that floated in space almost 400,000 kilometres away. As the image of the unknown continent enlarged, they could see mountain ranges and what looked like canyons bisecting the land. Several volcanoes were erupting simultaneously.
‘It’s still pretty active down there,’ observed Steve.
‘And everything else is so brown and grey,’ added Emilia.
‘That will be volcanic ash,’ said Chelouche, now more subdued. ‘Seventy per cent will have fallen into the ocean, the rest has come down on dry land.’
The new geography of the Earth appeared wholly alien to those on the moon. Giant mountain ranges alternated with vast plateaux and apart from the spewing volcanoes everything seemed dead and blasted. It was a primeval landscape.
For five hours Perdy panned the three ultra-high-magnification telescopes slowly across the two large continents that were currently in view. Then she focused on a few of the many islands that dotted the strangely shaped oceans.
Nowhere seemed to show any signs of life. There was no evidence that any civilization had ever existed on Earth. It was like looking at computer-simulated images of imagined planets in distant galaxies.
By noon, people had started drifting away, and an air of despondency had replaced the earlier excited optimism. Perdy Curtis handed over vision control to Narinda Damle, while Michael and Emilia returned to their room for belated showers.
Later that afternoon they were in the Hilton’s gym, forcing themselves to undergo workouts that neither of them had the heart for, when Emilia’s communicator pinged again in her earpiece.
‘Get back here,’ said Steve Bardini urgently. ‘We’ve found something else down there.’
Ten minutes later they were back with Perdy and Narinda Damle in the vision control room.
‘Look at that smudge, just there – ahead of the dawn line.’ Steve pointed to the central screen. ‘It’ll be light there in a few minutes, so we’ll be able to see more detail.’
The Earth had turned through half a revolution since they had first been summoned out of bed to gaze down at the newly smoke-free planet. Now a large continent that was shaped a bit like Canada – but positioned just north of the equator – was starting to move into the daylight zone.
‘There,’ said Steve, highlighting the eastern shoreline of the land mass.
‘Can’t you go in closer?’ asked Emilia.
Perdy zoomed in, and the dawn light revealed a much smaller dark mass in the water, like an offshore island.
‘Now, look at this.’ Steve nodded to Perdy, who added an infra-red overlay to the image. Red and yellow patches suddenly appeared. The dark mass was glowing with its own heat.
Then they spotted other smaller masses further north along the coastline of the new continent. They too glowed yellow and red under the heat-sensing camera.
‘That must be a string of volcanic islands,’ said Emilia. ‘But they’re remarkably close to the coast.’
Finally the sun’s rays reached the new continent’s edge and all of the offshore island masses became brilliantly lit. The land here was also grey, but they could also see what appeared to be a sandy-coloured region close to the coastline.
Michael laid a hand on Perdy’s shoulder. ‘Can you zoom right in on the largest of those hot islands?’
Perdy removed the infra-red overlay, selected the most powerful of the Earth-orbit telescopes, and zoomed in until the dark mass that Michael had indicated entirely filled the screens. Everybody within the gallery let out a gasp, and they heard shouts from outside in the assembly hall where a few people were still watching the wall-screens.
‘Can you go in still closer?’ asked Michael, his voice trembling with emotion. ‘Right into the middle, to where that white dot is?’
Again, Perdy nudged the joystick forward, zooming in to maximum magnification. This time there were no gasps from the observers. All were left in awe.
Revealed on all the screens in the gallery, and on those outside in the meeting hall, was the image of a huge white ship surrounded by old, battered hulks of oil tankers and container ships. It was the Global Haven: the hulk people, or at least their ships, had survived.
Cheering broke out in the hall. Through the observation window people could be seen sprinting back into the meeting area as word of this miracle spread.
Michael pulled his communicator from his sweatsuit pocket. ‘Are the phone satellites still working?’ he asked Damle.
‘They were until a few months ago. Do you want me to patch you through to one?’
As the television producer completed the necessary interfaces, Michael selected a number from his personal database.
‘You should be getting a network signal now,’ said Damle.
‘Put this out over the speakers.’ Michael touched the number on his communicator screen.
Everybody in the gallery and out in the assembly hall could hear a phone ringing: once, twice, three times. It was answered on the fourth ring.
‘Chanda Zia here,’ a nasal voice sounded clearly over the loudspeakers. ‘Can that really be you, Counsellor Fairfax?’
Chapter Twenty-Four
All five of the scattered hulk communities had survived the cataclysm. Their long-practised technique of loosely chaining their vessels together to ride out the mountainous storms of the southern seas had saved them even when the oceans had risen up and destroyed every other vessel afloat and swallowed up every continent.
Ash, smoke, fumes, atmospheric debris, freezing temperatures and falling oxygen levels had all taken a heavy toll on the sick and vulnerable members of their communities, yet a great number had survived. Chanda Zia estimated that almost two million people had ridden out the floods on the five separate hulk platforms.
There was jubilation on the moon. It now seemed that the marooned space communities were no longer fated to live as lonely bands of survivors, forced to eke out a declining existence on hostile worlds. The Archbishop of Boston conducted a service of thanksgiving.
For days following the discovery, all talk was of how best the humans trapped in space could get themselves back down to Earth and begin again – to start building new lives, despite the ongoing instability of the home planet. The need was urgent; there had been seventeen more suicides in the marooned moon community and a growing number of people were suffering repeated bone fractures as their skeletons weakened in the low gravity. Doctors now recommended that everybody should work out for at least three hours a day, but many were coming to the conclusion that it would be impossible for the community to maintain its health over the long term. Some had even started to talk gloomily about the eventual extinction of what was left of the human race.
Even from the moon, it became easy to see that as weeks went past life was returning quickly to Earth’s new continents, despite the repeated volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis that Geohazard’s satellites were reporting. Apart from the extensive planting already undertaken as the former hulk refugees transferred crops and livestock from their many floating farms, vegetation seemed to be springing up spontaneously all over the globe, bringing a sudden renewal of oxygen to the atmosphere.
‘It’s the ash,’ explained Emilia Knight. ‘Volcanic cinders are high in nitrogen, the richest fertilizer known to Man. That’s why, historically, so many poor people have chosen to live beside volcanoes.’
Using the network of solar-powered video cameras that Michael Fairfax had presented to them, Chanda Zia’s surviving community proudly relayed up pictures of their new settlements.
Wood, plastic and recoverable metal had been stripped out of the hulk ships to construct buildings in the new villages, while many useful items of debris had also been collected from the surface of the ocean after the storms had subsided. Driftwood was continuously being washed up onto the beach
es, all of it to be reused in this high-speed construction programme.
From the television studio on board the Global Haven – which still had its own supply of hydrogen fuel – Chanda transmitted surface-level video images of the cataclysm to those watching up on the moon.
Trapped in the Southern Ocean, the hulk people had been far away from most above-ground volcanic activity. But their video had shown the skies darkening, the seas growing to monstrous heights as tsunami waves collided with each other and as freshly melted icy water streamed up from the Antarctic. Then had followed the many months of cold darkness and a slowly failing atmosphere.
*
The news that almost two million humans had survived the cataclysm on Earth energized and uplifted the 2,067 humans stranded in space – including those on Mars. Plans were drawn up for the new society that they would create when they returned to Earth. The first requirement would be to identify areas of seismic stability on which to build, and then housing, hospitals and social infrastructure would have to be constructed immediately. A new generation of children would have to be produced – and quickly. Then the necessary schools, universities, factories, laboratories, courts and prisons would be needed. Biodiversity audits would have to be carried out and DNA repositories on the moon, Mars and on the larger space stations would have to be raided to facilitate the reintroduction of lost flora and fauna. There was a whole new world to be created.
By far the most important of the many planning groups established was the one made up of shuttle pilots, navigators, technology experts and space engineers. Its role was to examine all possible methods of getting the marooned extraterrestrial population back down to the Earth’s surface. The problems of re-entry without the help of ground-based guidance systems could be overcome by the careful injection of a spacecraft into the Earth’s atmosphere. The insoluble problem seemed to be how to land safely.
All the heavy orbit shuttles, moon ferries and Mars spacecraft were designed to fly themselves through the Earth’s atmosphere using a combination of on-board and ground-based computer systems. Their meagre aerodynamics were designed primarily for airless space, and were too unstable at low speeds for the craft concerned to be flown manually. In addition there was the necessity for extensive landing areas.
Modern spacecraft took off horizontally from long runways, and then used the enormous power of hydrogen-plasma engines to boost themselves out of the Earth’s gravitational grasp and on into space. This was far more efficient, comfortable and safe than the old brute-force methods used in vertical rocketry. But very long runways indeed were required, both for take-off and landing, and the newly emerged land masses boasted no such facility.
Although there were still six emergency-rescue spacecraft with vertical-landing capability hangared on the moon or at the Mars colony, all had been designed to land only in low-gravity environments – and none of them was constructed to withstand the awful heat and buffeting that would be experienced during re-entry into Earth’s thick atmosphere. The technical problems of returning to Earth seemed insurmountable.
*
Michael Fairfax was sharing a Hilton restaurant meal one evening with Emilia Knight and Steve Bardini when Perdy Curtis arrived to join them.
‘There are still no bright ideas from the space experts,’ she reported, glancing down at the dispiriting menu of rations. ‘I don’t see why they can’t just fly Negromonte’s Apollo Eleven back home, the way Neil Armstrong did. The capsule’s just going round and round up there, not doing anything.’
Once again, her three companions turned towards her as one.
‘I presume you’ve suggested that to them?’ said Steve in a hushed tone.
Perdy shook her head. ‘No, of course I haven’t. It’s far too obvious for them to have overlooked. There must be some technical objection.’
But it had been overlooked. Whether that was because such antique technology did not register on their high-tech radar, or because of its unfortunate association with the disgraced Nicholas Negromonte, the fact remained that none of the committee members had thought of using the refurbished Apollo command module. It was still orbiting the moon seventy-three nautical miles up where its pilot had parked it during his re-enactment of Armstrong’s descent to the lunar surface.
A cargo ferry was immediately dispatched to collect the circling spacecraft. As soon as it had been unloaded at the Luna City maintenance facilities, work began to examine the current state of its fabric and systems.
Within a week of the command module’s recovery, the director of flight maintenance declared herself satisfied with the integrity of the antique space vehicle. All its original components had been stripped out and replaced with modern systems for Negromonte’s flight but the command module’s own vitally important ablative heat-shield had been left in place. Even the three parachutes intended to slow the module during its descent into the ocean were in perfect working order.
Over the months it had become clear that James Underwood’s natural qualities of leadership were still very much needed. So he reluctantly agreed to chair what had now become known as the Apollo Mission Planning Group.
‘We’d have to try for a splashdown as close as possible to one of the hulk platforms,’ explained the communications engineer who had been appointed Director of Recovery for the planned mission. ‘And they’d need to pick up our crew quickly. They couldn’t be left floating in that old command module for more than thirty minutes. After that it will probably sink.’
‘But a far bigger problem is who’s going to pilot it,’ said the newly appointed Mission Director. ‘We can ferry the module back to Earth orbit and launch from there, but nobody’s been properly trained to fly the damn thing down to the surface. It’s got twelve goddam engines. And we only get this one chance!’
Then followed a long discussion among the pilots about which of them was best suited to fly the Apollo capsule. In the sixth decade of the twenty-first century, piloting spacecraft had become almost entirely a matter of computer management and practising disaster procedures. As an examination of the old craft had quickly revealed, despite its upgraded systems the Apollo module, with its dozen engines for controlling speed, direction, pitch, yaw and roll, would require a great deal of primitive-style manual piloting to guarantee a safe return to Earth.
On the following evening Underwood invited Michael Fairfax to his hotel suite.
‘What we need to be sure of is that the hulk people will genuinely attempt to recover the command module once it ditches into the ocean,’ Underwood explained. ‘Do you think you could persuade them to help us out?’
Both men saw the irony of the situation. If those now stranded out in space – a group of castaways that included many former political leaders – were ever going to return to Earth they were going to have to beg the help of a long-persecuted people whom all their nations had previously and cruelly shunned.
*
Unsurprisingly, the more radical members of Chanda Zia’s hulk community were strongly against helping their former persecutors to return to Earth.
‘Those bastards forced us to remain at sea for thirty years,’ yelled John Gogotya. ‘Let them remain in space for thirty years – then we can think about it.’
Many of the younger men meeting in the Global Haven’s former ballroom were still brandishing weapons, as if nothing had changed and they still had enemies roaming the world.
‘We are many, they are few,’ Chanda reassured his noisy audience. ‘In total, there are two million of us, and they are just a few thousand. They can be no threat to us – or to our way of life. It is our human duty to welcome them.’
A few other members of the ruling council nodded agreement, but a large number of the audience were booing or shouting protests. Some even looked ready to start firing their weapons.
‘Remember that they have technologies we desperately need,’ argued Chanda. ‘They can give us the means to produce hydrogen fuel from water, to revive the DNA of animals
and crops that no longer exist, the skill to produce medicines that will treat our illnesses. There are Western-trained doctors up there on the moon.’
Now there were additional nods from the council members and even the cries of protest diminished. The hulk community knew full well that it had already exhausted the Global Haven’s stock of antibiotics and pharmaceuticals. Sickness was now the dreaded common enemy.
*
Perdy sat nervously on the side of Nicholas Negromonte’s bed. Two burly male nurses stood watchfully at a respectful distance. She was visiting at James Underwood’s request.
The Apollo mission planners had concluded that Negromonte was the obvious choice to pilot the command module back to Earth. Not only had he spent months in simulators training for the earlier Apollo mission, he also had the experience of flying and landing the Lunar Module. Underwood himself had gone immediately to the Medical Center, to enquire about the patient’s health.
‘He keeps weeping inconsolably all the time he’s conscious,’ Dr Andrea Cohen had explained to him. ‘We have to keep him locked in his room, and under observation at all times. Given the opportunity, I think it’s very likely he would kill himself.’
‘Doesn’t sound like he’d make a very reliable pilot,’ sighed the former president, ‘but we have no choice.’ Then Underwood suggested that he himself should put the proposition to Negromonte.
‘He feels immense personal guilt,’ objected Dr Cohen. ‘Being confronted with the former leader of a world that no longer exists wouldn’t be ideal.’
After much discussion, Perdy Curtis had been recommended for the task by Hanoch Biran, ERGIA’s former director of corporate communications. Over the few months leading up to the moon broadcast, he had quietly observed the easy familiarity that Nick Negromonte and Perdy had developed together.
‘He really seemed to relax with her,’ Biran explained. ‘And I got the impression that she rather liked him too.’
Now Perdy gazed down at the patient’s pale and puffy face, still irregularly blotched by the purple blood-bruises caused by sudden decompression. Having been confined to bed for months, she noticed how his muscles had been wasting away in the weak lunar gravity.