Keller remarked, “So they crowd-sourced it? Very clever.”
Yeva said, “They think it is a history lesson of some kind. It talks about how they created something and it caused their society to run out of food and water. We haven’t deciphered what that creation was yet, but it is related to the extra signage found on the circular door. Those phrases are repeated several times.”
Adam and Keller looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.
Yeva continued, “By the way, you will laugh, but these ancient Mars people are now being called Curiosites by the media, named after the rover.”
Yeva chuckled after stating the new name.
“Anyhow, so the Curiosites planned to move many of their people to the third planet from the star. Obviously, we can assume they are referring to Earth. It had more land and water and could be used as a farming colony. However, that planet had some rather intelligent, yet violent, animals that needed to be dealt with before it could be a safe place for them to inhabit. They were also worried about the intense gravity on Earth.”
Keller said confusingly, “Are they referring to the dinosaurs?”
Yeva paused. Adam and Keller heard the muffled sounds of Yeva talking to somebody else.
She continued, “Okay, sorry, Molly had a question. So these Curiosites sent a team of explorers, but never heard from them again. It says they are still waiting for their children to return. It keeps referring to the explorers as their children. They miss them dearly.”
Adam and Keller sat silently contemplating the sad message.
Adam replied, “Sounds like things didn’t go well for them. Thanks Yeva. Is that, uh, is that everything?”
“No, there is more,” added Yeva. “Do you remember that Rosetta stone block with the alphabet on top and the serrated columns under each letter?”
Adam replied, “Yup. Keller and I can see it right now.”
He pointed his head-mounted flashlight toward the large table-sized block.
“Well, those serrated columns are audio strips. They encoded the sound waves required to pronounce their letters. They wanted to preserve not only their written language, but also the spoken form of it. That is very arrogant, yes?”
Adam started laughing.
Yeva asked, “Why are you laughing?”
“When I was a kid, they had birthday party balloons with hard plastic sticks as handles. Well, the sticks had serrated ridges on them and when you ran your finger nail down the edge it would literally sound out messages like ‘happy birthday.’ They never worked right and it always sounded like ‘yappee wormway.’ I guess there is nothing new under the Sun.”
Keller said, “Maybe they wanted to preserve as much of their culture as they could before the end came. They must’ve had time to see it coming. How awful.”
Yeva added, “One more thing. I saved the best for last. I completed a carbon dating analysis on those fossil bone samples. There is a problem with our original theory. They are not two million years old.”
Keller smiled proudly and said, “See, I told you. Dinosaurs. These fossils must be sixty-five million years old! Heck, these Curiosites are what killed off the dinosaurs!”
Adam questioned, “Anyhow, how far off did we get the date?”
Yeva explained, “To our surprise, they are still mostly bone. Not fossils. Our dating analysis says they are only about two hundred thousand years old. Not two million. And certainly not sixty-five million. Sorry Keller. A meteor still killed the dinosaurs.”
Adam furrowed his eyebrows in concentration and asked, “Are you sure? Only two hundred thousand?”
“Yes, give or take a few thousand,” said Yeva.
Keller grabbed Adam’s shoulder and asked, “I don’t get it, what does that mean?”
Adam stared into empty space and said, “That uh. That turns everything on its head, but it explains a lot. The timeframe coincides with the sudden development of Homo sapiens on Earth.”
“Us,” said Adam and Keller simultaneously.
Adam thought for a moment and continued, “So, this culture was having problems and sent explorers off to our planet at around the same time modern humans appeared on Earth? And they waited for their explorers to return?”
Yeva replied, “That is correct. That is what the report from the NSA says.”
Adam grinned as he looked at Keller and said, “I think we just fulfilled that promise.”
They both stood there with their mouths agape trying to comprehend all of this new information. Adam said, “I mean, there’s a lot of explanation for our own history if that message is accurate.”
There was silence from everybody.
Adam questioned, “So, Yeva, they haven’t deciphered what the creation was that caused their own demise?”
“No, the university expert said that the concept as written has no translation in either English or Russian. At least not yet. Whatever it was, they were very proud of it. Don’t worry, we have hundreds of world experts trying to figure it out.”
Adam sighed and said, “Okay, thanks for the update Yeva. That’s a pretty heavy message. Um, we’re gonna keep working here for about another twenty minutes or so.”
“All right guys, be safe out there,” said Yeva before signing off.
The two explorers walked back to the anti-gravity cube room and continued trying to photograph every granite panel they could see. The engravings went from the floor up to about ten feet and stopped. It would require a lot of photos.
When they finished taking pictures, Adam collected the memory cards from the cameras and put them securely into his pressure suit pocket and zipped it shut.
Rather than leave right away, they began to play with the anti-gravity cube. For such an advanced piece of technology, it sure was fun. Just as Keller flicked it with his index finger, the ground began to shake. The floodlight tripod rocked back and forth sending shadows bouncing on every wall. Another Marsquake. They felt a grinding roar and a clunk as dust fell from the ceiling.
Adam and Keller looked at each other frozen in fear.
They took off running toward the door. Their helmet-mounted flashlight beams bounced erratically illuminating the ground. There was no light coming through the door opening anymore; the round slab of granite had rolled back over the entrance. They were trapped.
Chapter 19
In the middle of the Big Turtle housing unit was an inexplicable round wall. It was only about six feet in diameter, but there it was like a giant redwood tree growing right up through the room. This was the droppable caisson room. It was a hollow elevator shaft of sorts sealed everywhere except the bottom. At the top were windows to allow ambient sunlight in. On one side was a hatch that would allow access to the empty shaft. The entire contraption resembled an upside down cup.
Any poor astronaut who wandered through that caisson door right now would be instantly exposed to the Martian atmosphere. They would fall out the bottom of the ship to their death.
Molly was listening to Yeva explain the NSA report over the microphone to Adam and Keller.
“All right guys, be safe out there,” said Yeva.
She put down the printed report from the NSA.
“Adam and Keller are busy at the pyramid. Shall we lower the caisson?” asked Yeva.
“Of course. Let’s play in the dirt,” replied Molly.
With the flick of a few switches, a loud rhythmic whirring sound was heard. The caisson started lowering toward the red soil very slowly.
Molly and Yeva were surprised at how much the moving caisson momentarily shook the entire Big Turtle vehicle. However, it didn’t shake very long. With a loud clunk the caisson’s bottom not only hit the ground but drove into it a few inches, powered by the entire weight of the Big Turtle on top of it. The whole building trembled again and then stood still.
Yeva typed a code into the wall computer near the caisson hatch. With the caisson floor now sealed off by Mars itself, this new outdoor room with a sandy red floor
was slowly flooded with breathable air.
Yeva checked a few old steam gauges and declared, “Pressure looks good. The temperature is still a bit cold, though. Let us give it a minute.”
The pressurization process was loud. Everything about the caisson was loud.
Yeva plastered her nose to the observation window looking down into the brightly lit cylindrical room. It was very surreal to see the red dirt with shadows cast across it from the skylight window frames above.
The temperature in the caisson finally rose to just above freezing. Yeva grabbed ahold of the round handle and spun it repeatedly. Once the mechanism let go, a wisp of air was heard escaping through the opening. She held her breath and stuck her head through the hatch and looked down. Red dusty dirt. She took in a deep breath hoping to get the first sense of what Mars smelled like. It smelled like rust. Each dramatic exhale of the cold air now sent a cloud of condensation from her lungs.
“Hey Molly, this looks like plain red dirt to me,” exclaimed Yeva whimsically.
She swung her legs through the hatch and began climbing down the ladder. Carefully at first and then accelerating. When she got to the bottom rung, she paused. She bit her lip in concentration and took the final step down to the dirt. It was much softer than she expected. It was like very dehydrated powdery soil back on Earth. A huge grin overtook her face.
Yeva bent down and scooped up a handful of the red soil. She stood up holding it cupped in her hand. No words could describe her childlike amazement. She was the first human to touch Mars, but nobody would notice. For reasons that not even she understood, Yeva stuck her tongue out and tasted the red dirt. It tasted like metal. After a few seconds, she turned her hand over and dumped the dusty stream of dirt to the ground. Then she wiped her hand on her pants.
Yeva took small steps at first walking around the circular extent of this room. She looked down and saw the shoeprints she was leaving. Yeva stopped to contemplate an idea she was hatching. At that moment, she started hopping up and down on her right foot while removing her boot and sock from her left foot. She was now standing on her right leg and slowly dropped her foot on the soft red Martian soil. She laughed out loud.
Yeva dug her toes into the powdery dirt, then looked up to see Molly’s head in the hatch looking down and laughing at her.
“You look like you’re having way too much fun down there,” said Molly with a smile.
Yeva removed her other boot and sock and began to walk in circles around the room. The ground was painfully cold. She was kicking up a cloud of red dust now. Each breath sent out huge billowing clouds of condensation.
Yeva yelled up to Molly, “Adam may have put the first shoeprint on Mars, but I am the first human to truly walk on this devil planet. I have touched it with my own feet!”
Yeva could only take the cold for so long, though. She put her boots back on her nearly frostbitten feet before climbing back into the housing unit to warm up a bit.
Yeva and Molly gathered several items of test equipment and took them one by one through the hatch and down the ladder. While Molly brought down more equipment, Yeva began setting up the machines.
First up were the spectral analysis machine, the seismic sensors and a whole host of compact soil study test kits. The tallest device looked like a standup vacuum cleaner, but it housed a core drilling machine that would take a four-foot-long core sample of Martian soil and rock.
After Molly delivered the last test unit, Yeva asked her to help run the spectral analysis machine.
Molly nodded and then said, “Hold on. We need some work tunes.”
She climbed up the ladder and disappeared through the hatch. Molly went over to the communications laptop and turned up the volume on the Pandora streaming music service which had been running for several hours already. She laughed as she considered that a multi-million dollar interplanetary data link was being used to stream Hotel California to the speaker system on the ship. She cranked the volume all the way up so they could hear it in the caisson.
Molly climbed down the ladder and the two began running their experiments and tests. Up in the room above them, a garbled message was coming in from Adam’s headset screaming that they were stuck and needed help. Unfortunately his pleas weren’t loud enough to overcome the classic rock songs from the 1970’s.
Chapter 20
“Stop breathing!” yelled Adam to a panicked Keller.
“What do you mean stop breathing!”
Adam closed his eyes to concentrate and said, “I mean stop breathing so fast. Look, we have plenty of oxygen in our tanks, but there’s no need to use it all up right now!”
Keller was clawing at the multi-ton door even though there was no way for him to move it. It hadn’t closed all the way; there was still enough room to stick a few fingers through. Perhaps enough to pry it open if had they had a prybar.
“Too bad we don’t have a prybar,” complained Adam.
He looked around to see what they could use, but the only thing in the room aside from granite was the floodlight on a tripod and two digital cameras.
Adam turned on his headset and screamed, “Yeva, Molly, we need help! The door closed and we’re trapped.”
Only silence came back.
“I don’t get it, the door shouldn’t completely block our signal,” said a frustrated Adam.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Keller.
Adam looked around and then said, “Nothing. We wait. That’s all we can do.”
Keller sat down on the floor and proceeded to breathe heavily as his stress levels skyrocketed.
Adam ran over to him begging, “Look, you’ve gotta calm down! If you keep breathing like that, you’re going to run out of air.”
Keller checked his gauge and then looked at Adam.
“I only have ten minutes left,” admitted Keller. His eyes showed sheer panic.
Adam looked at his own gauge and saw he had nearly twenty minutes left. Keller was using up his air too quickly. Without thinking, he blurted out, “Keller, did you bring your pills?”
“With me? Are you mental? What, am I going to rip off my helmet and slam down some meds with a handful of my own pee?”
Adam was pacing back and forth now.
“Look, I, I don’t know. Okay, you gotta slow down that breathing. Don’t worry, they will come for us.”
Adam plopped down on the ground next to Keller and said, “Think of your happiest memory.”
“What? Are you serious?” said Keller incredulously.
“Look, I’m trying to calm us down. Tell me your favorite memory,” explained Adam.
Keller stared at him and said, “No.”
Silence followed as Adam stood back up and wandered around the room looking for something that could help them out of this trouble.
Keller sat there shaking. He turned to look at Adam and said pathetically, “Okay, I’ll try it your way.”
Adam walked back toward him.
Keller continued, “It’s about the world’s tallest tree. Look, I’m telling you this is pointless.”
Adam scolded, “Just do it. Okay? Now tell me about the world’s tallest tree.”
Keller put on a smirk and said, “Yah, um, alright. Some of my high-school friends and I were competing in this big contest to have the world’s fastest bicycle. This was back in the 1990’s. Yah, our team went out to a big international race in California. Well, we crashed our bike on the first practice run so we had like three days to kill before the flight home.”
Adam could sense that Keller was slowing down his breathing.
“So we decide to go see the world’s tallest tree. It’s up around a town called Eureka, you know, in northern California. So, we drive way up this mountain. Like 45 minutes. We get to the entrance gate at the park where the tree is. It’s got a combination lock on it.”
Adam laughed and said, “And you didn’t have the combination, right?”
Keller added, “That’s right. Turns out you have to pa
y for access before you drive all the way up that mountain; and they were closed by the time we got there. So we’re parked there in the middle of nowhere wondering what to do. Then we see a car coming up to the locked gate from the other side; they were just at the world’s tallest tree!”
Keller laughed and then continued, “It’s like a three mile drive from that gate down a gravel road to the tree. So the car stops and it’s a family visiting from Korea. The Dad can’t get the lock undone, so, like he can’t leave the tree park! He sees us young punks there and asks us for help. So he gives us the combination and we open the gate for him. When they leave, we re-open the gate and drive down that gravel road. We saw that tree, yes we did.”
Keller was contemplating the scene. He was back there. It was 1994. He was listening to the new Pink Floyd album on his Walkman. It was the highlight of his teenage years.
Then Keller reciprocated, “Okay Captain Alston, what is your favorite memory?”
Adam contemplated and smiled as his mind flooded with memories of pleasant happy times.
“Um, I guess I have two really. The first is listening to music with my kids in the living room on a warm Texas summer day. So, one day, my daughter is standing on my toes and we’re dancing around the living room to the Rainbow Connection song. You know, that Muppets song? The one that goes ‘Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection’?”
Adam could almost hear Kermit’s voice singing to the banjo as he and his daughter danced through the dusty sunbeams flooding through the big arched windows.
Keller laughed out loud, “Yah, I remember that song.”
Adam looked wistfully at the ground. “I guess that’s more of a scene really. Not much story there, huh? Now, I also have a memory of being a kid watching MacGyver with my family and…”
“Oh crap, oh no!” exclaimed Keller as he looked over at Adam.
Feeling insulted, Adam replied, “Well, I know it’s not a tallest tree story, but give me some credit.”
“No, no. It’s not that,” said Keller. He had a look of realization and said, “We’ve got the golf cart. Yeva and Molly have no way to get here. They could walk, but they’d never make it in time.”
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