Buck Rogers- A Life in the Future

by Martin Caidin

  "I'm sure you want me to be straight with you," Buck said cautiously.

  "Anything less and I'd have you tossed right out the front door," Barney told him, looking down through half-closed eyes.

  "You're cute, Admiral, you know that?"

  "I think we're on the same frequency, Buck. The last thing I want is for you to return to Niagara and be tossed to the wolves—"

  "I think I would prefer sea wolves," Buck countered.

  Barney boomed with laughter. "You're even better than I gave you credit for. You figure out yet where you are?"

  "Not precisely, at least not in terms of location. Nothing to do with triangulation or latitude or longitude, which would be meaningless in any case. But in another sense? Sure I know. We're several hundred feet beneath the sea. Or within the sea, I should say."

  Barney leaned across his desk and stabbed a button. The

  Buck Rogers

  lights dimmed to only a trace. Slowly and steadily the walls began to lose their solidity. What seemed to be metal and stone changed before his eyes to glass.

  "You're looking through a piece of zoron-glassite," Barney said with noticeable pride. "Actually, the glassite was developed in the mid-twentieth century."

  "I was a kid then," Buck remarked, "but I've heard of glassite. Our scientists first used it in their deep bathyscaph experimental deep-diving gear. Flotation tanks of gasoline were on top of the vehicle. Pressure equalization kept the extreme depths from collapsing the tanks, and underneath the tanks—or usually, one tank—was the spherical vessel for the human crew."

  "Very good," Barney said with open admiration. "You remember the vessel?"

  "Look Admiral Barney, I'm no seer. This was common knowledge in my time for any advanced science programs. And in addition to aerod3niamic engineering, I spent two years at Annapolis doing deep-diving sub research. I—"

  "That comes as a welcome surprise. There isn't anything in your dossier on that," Barney noted. "I'll let you read the whole package later. But how did that tie in with the Trieste'? That is the vessel to which you're referring, I presume."

  "Sure. I also did a stint flying B-IB bombers out of Guam and Saipan for a while. We flew long range by refueling in midair with KC-lOs. But we also had extra time on the ground, so we went scuba diving. There were a couple of old-timers there who had supported the deep dives."

  "Details, please."

  Buck shrugged. "It was in early 1960. One navy man, Walsh, and Jacques Piccard. They went all the way down in the Marianas Trench—right to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, in fact—and—"

  "How deep?"

  "Thirty-five thousand, eight hundred and three feet. They touched bottom."

  "Pressure?"

  "Seven point one-five-two tons per square inch."

  "What was their biggest surprise?"

  "That science was all wet—no pun intended—about water being incompressible. I remember that point clearly, because

  A Life in the Future

  later, when I went into astronautics studies and got into extrapolation of alien liquid planets, that fact could be critical. It turned out that seven miles down, water could compress as much as five percent. And compression equates to temperature increase. Sure as rain, the temperature went up by one degree Centigrade."

  "How would you describe a bathyscaph?"

  "Clumsy, awkward, dangerous—like a thin-skinned balloon."

  "Good. That's what it was and what it is now."

  "What has all this got to do with one, me, and two, Atlantis?"

  "It depends," said Black Barney, frowning.

  "You're leaving me pretty much in the dark, sir."

  "You've got plenty of company. Together we may just be able to bring some light into the picture."

  "Sir, are you serious about this search for Atlantis?"

  "As serious as I know how to be."

  "Then you must know a hell of a lot more than anybody before you."

  "Could be," Barney replied noncommittally. Buck had no choice but to ride it out.

  "Ace, if you believed Atlantis was real, at least at some time in our past, where do you think is the most likely place it would have been located? That's a lot of ocean out there."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Don't patronize me, Rogers. If you just want to listen to my comments without being aware of what the hell I'm saying, then I've got to understand that. Got it? It stinks, but I've got to buy whatever is your position."

  "One hundred forty million square miles, accuracy within one percent, of liquid surface area."

  Barney's eyes narrowed at this sudden recital of the total square miles of ocean surface on the planet. "Good start. Keep going, but I want everything you say to point to Atlantis. For the moment, we'll accept the theory that it once existed, even if there's no trace left of it. Which," he added with a thin smile, "may not be the case. So what about this hundred and forty million square miles?"

  "It's the liquid surface area of the planet, sir," Buck said, knowing full well Black Barney knew it as well as he did.

  "And?"

  "There are three hundred and thirty million cubic miles of

  Buck Rogers

  water covering the planet. Four-fifths of the oceans' volume is below nine thousand feet, and the average depth is thirteen thousand feet."

  "What does this tell you?"

  Buck smiled. "Give me enough bulldozers and enough people to run them so I could level the land mass of this planet, and I mean leveled down to what is now mean sea level, and—"

  "And what would we have?"

  "A world covered by water to a depth of about two miles."

  "A water world."

  "Of course."

  "Give me some more of these wild numbers, Rogers."

  "Well, sir, salt is one of the best ways of getting the point across."

  "Do tell."

  "Yes, sir. In the oceans and seas of the world, there are about fifty quadrillion tons of salt."

  "Spread that salt out over the land surface area of the world and we get. . . ?"

  "If we spread that much salt over the entire land mass, we'd have an ocean of salt over every inch of land from the surface to a height of five hundred feet."

  "I'm glad to see you studied your textbooks, Rogers."

  "I wonder why you're tweaking me. Admiral?"

  "Call me Blacky. Ask me what the hell I'm after."

  "Okay. What are you after?"

  "Atlantis."

  "Wrong answer, Blacky. I'm as dumb as they come in that game."

  "No way. Obviously you have well-grounded knowledge of this little planet of ours. Concentrate on this being a water world, as we both agree—the only water world in the entire solar system. There are liquid oceans on some of the outer planets and their moons, such as Titan, but that's not water. Methane, ammonia . . . inhospitable crud like that."

  "Are we that sure of what it's like on those worlds, Blacky?"

  "Hell, yes." His next words rattled Buck to his core. "I've grav-floated across the oceans of Titan. That crazy moon has seas, rainfall—poisonous to us, of course—and some appreciable land mass as well. Big islands, small islands. Colder than the

  A Life in the Future

  backside of a frozen penguin."

  Buck stared. 'Tou've really been there?"

  "Would I kid a new member of the Black Gang?" scoffed Barney. "By the way, that's the name of the outfit you just joined."

  "The Black Gang."

  "Specialists in deep undersea exploration."

  "Frankly, Blacky, I'd much rather be outbound than inbound. Like the moon, for example."

  "Lousy view. Dusty, airless, no trees, no hamburger joints. Makes even the Gobi Desert look like an oasis. I should know. Busted up one of our cargo loaders on the far side. Radios dead, couldn't even contact the main base through comsats orbiting the moon. Dark, nasty. Recent meteorite shower obliterated most landmarks. We couldn't ride, we couldn't fly, we couldn't grav-f
loat. The inertron supplies messed up when our old-fashioned reactor irradiated the inertron into slag. We had to walk one hundred and sixty-two miles in pressure suits in a race against dwindling air and water supplies. The only thing that kept us going were the rolls of solar cellsheets we had. We dragged them behind us like bridal gowns. That kept us alive. When searchers scanned the surface, they found us by sheer luck; the cellsheets reflected light and set off the photocell alarms in the roboscouts hunting for us." Barney shook his head. "Hell, man, go somewhere else if you're going outbound—someplace like Mars."

  "I want to go there, too," Buck said with sudden heat. "When I was wiped out in that crash back in my time, we had sent probes out through the solar system. Six manned teams had walked on the moon—"

  "That was Apollo?"

  "Yes. But we never went back with men after that. Not while I was there, anyway. We landed probes on Mars and Venus and—"

  "I know the details," Barney interrupted. "Schoolboy stuff compared to today. Antiquated, even quaint."

  "My point was, Admiral, I've requested space duty with Commodore Kane in his Deepspace outfit. It's being dangled in front of my nose as 'sometime in the near future.' "

  "And you'd rather be in that outfit than this one?"

  "Yes, sir. I've nothing against this operation, Blacky, aside from the fact that this really isn't my bag, and—"

  "And you believe this mission is a wild-goose chase," Barney

  Buck Rogers

  finished for him."

  "Yes, sir."

  "You remember the Hubble telescope from your time, Rogers?"

  "Yes."

  "Then you remember that it confirmed the existence of planets orbiting stars within a fifty-light-year radius of our system?"

  "So our astronomers claimed. But as good as the Hubble telescope was, it couldn't get us anything close to detail of such worlds. Too far away for the optics, even across the full spectrum."

  "When did you mash yourself into hamburger, Buck?"

  "Nineteen ninety-six."

  "Too bad you weren't around for another forty or fifty years. By that time, the Hubble 'scope was a museum piece. In fact, it still is. Kids look at it all the time in holo studies in school. To them, it's like the Wright Brothers plane was to the jetliners you flew."

  Buck waited in silence. Barney would get to his point in his own good time.

  "Imagine a jump of scientific advancements of fifty, even a hundred years. Buck. About thirty years after you bought the farm, astronomers made a quantum jump in the light-gathering powers of new telescopes. Liquid helium systems, maser collectors, mirrors that made the Hubble mirrors look like rough-cut glass. The details don't matter, but what they got was a detailed look far out from our planet. We found other worlds with the spectral lines emanating from our own planet. You see the connection?"

  Buck eyed Blacky cautiously. "When you say the spectral lines, are you including the emanations from industrial systems?"

  'Yep." Barney looked a tad smug; it was obvious he was cherishing this conversation.

  He's leading up to something, mused Buck, and I'm just getting the first real hints. . . .

  "High atmospheric?" Buck asked.

  "Contrails from high-flying machines of some kind. Chemical traces of rockets. A whole wide band of chemical elements from nuclear drives. Fluctuations in the gravity fields that don't relate

  A Life in the Future

  to planetary or other celestial phenomena."

  "In other words, manipulated energies."

  "Along the lines of what we do with our antigrav systems," Barney added, "but the lines are sufficiently different to lead us to believe that our systems are horse-and-buggy hardware compared to what we've detected."

  "Blacky, you're about to explode with what you're leading up to," Buck said.

  "Are you jerking my chain. Buck?"

  "No way. That grin keeps escaping your mouth. You can't even hold it in. What's the real surprise?"

  "Clear signs of antimatter drive. The energy release is so violent it threw some warbling effects into the gravitational fields. We saw pulses of gravity waves we've never detected anywhere else out in space. And they're repeated."

  "Explosions?"

  "Hell, no!" Barney exclaimed. "They seem to indicate regular runs between not only planets, but also nearby star systems. And the best of all is that in an area of galactic collision, two spirals grinding together at least twenty to fifty thousand light years from Earth, we traced what seemed a long, thin black hole. By long I mean several light years. By thin I'm talking the width of a human hair for comparative purposes."

  "But that's impossible!" Buck's burst out.

  "Not if what we have observed is FTL," Black Barney said very slowly and deliberately.

  "You mean faster-than-light drive?" Buck asked in awe.

  Barney leaned back and poured another two glasses. Buck needed it this time. He drained his glass in one long swallow.

  "Fifty thousand light years from Earth," Buck repeated, his voice sounding hollow.

  "Or more. What I have found most interesting is that the most likely source—considering the time interval between when light from that system started out on its trip to us and when it arrived—is that it's a galactic area of binary stars."

  "Hold it. Blacky. That's hardly earth-shaking. Even in my time we knew that two out of every three stars we could see with our instruments were binaries—really two stars in close proximity, each orbiting about a central gravity point."

  "Neatly said, lad. You just made the jump to what this is

  Buck Rogers

  really all about."

  "Which is?" Buck asked quickly.

  "Not quite yet," Barney said, his voice making it clear that Buck had yet to pick up on unspoken keys in their discussion. "You've left out a few important points. First, nearby stars don't mean a bloody thing. It's what type of star that matters. An F or G—"

  "Yellow, G-type, like our sun," Buck interrupted quickly. The look on Barney's face told him he'd spoken the right words at the right moment.

  "What else?" Barney asked with mock innocence.

  "Distance from the parent star. Size, mass, density, rotational speed, water content, axial angle, moon or moons—for beginners. All the ingredients necessary for a planet to support conditions for life and allow it to evolve."

  "Right on the button," Barney exclaimed, pleased. "Now let's go back in time a bit. The earth-type planet—three of them, actually—revolved about a yellow G-type sun, just like ours. But it had a binary companion. It was small and blue-white, which meant it was a young star, burning intensely—burning so intensely, in fact, it was going to rip itself apart. It was already shedding some of its outer gas layers."

  "Caused by what?" Buck asked.

  "A rogue star traveling through their system. It yanked the blue-white out of gravitational balance, causing it to swing inward toward the yellow. It didn't take long for the interactive energy of two powerful gravity engines—the mass of the stars themselves—to start raising havoc on those planets, all three of which seemed to be occupied by advanced cultures of some kind."

  Then it hit Buck. He was so stunned by the conclusions that for several seconds he sat in silence. Barney didn't intrude on his thoughts, waiting to hear what Buck had to say. Finally Buck stirred, climbed to his feet, and began walking slowly about the room.

  For the first time, he noticed the walls had become fully transparent. Just beyond the glass extended a huge enclosure through which several giant sharks swam slowly. He stared long and hard at the powerful animals.

  "I suspect," he said slowly, "you've gone through all this just to prepare me for the finale."

  A Life in the Future

  "You're faster than I gave you credit for, Buck. Those sharks perk your interest?"

  "Yes. They're not sharks."

  "Oh?"

  "Not like anything else on this planet. They're breathing through nasal inlets i
nstead of gills. In fact, they don't have any gills. This is crazy. What I'm seeing is impossible—a cartilage-based creature in the water, extracting oxygen, but not with gills, that looks like a shark, swims like a shark—"

  "And kills at a distance by electrical charge, like some immensely powerful electric eel," Barney finished for him. "These sharks, in fact, lack the DNA with which every terrestrial creature is linked, from midge to whale. Nature could never create this animal from our ancestral heritage of amino acids. And there's one more thing."

  Buck knew his voice sounded hollow. "You're no end of surprises, Admiral."

  "Our Earth sharks, especially the makos and the great whites, have an inbred, fanatical hatred for these creatures. The great white isn't supposed to be capable of emotions like hatred, but if it even senses these things, from miles away, it moves with all possible speed to attack, and it won't stop fighting until these things are torn to shreds."

  "Who usually wins?"

  "The Earth sharks. These things are just as tough, but when they're sighted, it's as if an alarm bell clangs through the ocean. The makos and great whites come in droves. It's a slaughter. So most of these fellas have gone into hiding or remain away from the main action."

  "That means they're no longer loose in the open ocean."

  "I thought you'd never get there," Barney said, showing a hint of admiration.

  "So they congregate in one or two main areas? That's a question, not an opinion."

  "Either way, you're right."

  "Is all this fitting together the way I'm starting to think it's fitting?" Buck asked.

  "Try it. Short and sweet. Ace, like sound bites."

  "There were intelligent, advanced life-forms on this planet we're discussing. A passing rogue star knocked out the gravita-

  Buck Rogers

  tional balance, and the local binary solar system was doomed. There was radiation buildup, planet-wrecking tidal gravitation— the whole nine yards."

  "Keep going."

  "Their solar system was dead, or it soon would be, even the outermost planets. So their only hope of survival was to find another world within their reach that could sustain their form of life. They'd need a yellow F- or G-type stable star like ours."