Coming Home

by Jack McDevitt

  “I told him it wasn’t a good idea. That ancient power systems tend to get unstable when they’re not shut down.

  “He said not to worry. That he’d gone through a lot of old airlocks and never had a problem. ‘It’s a myth,’ he said. He told me if I wanted to, we could go back to Galileo and see if we could hire a good electrician. Then he went on about how I shouldn’t worry and aimed his cutter at the hatch. I backed off.

  “I just stood and watched while he cut a hole in the thing, tried again to open it, gave up, and enlarged the hole until it was big enough for us to get inside the airlock. Then he did the same thing with the inner hatch, and that got us into the dome.

  “There’d been a garden at one time. The trees were still there. Frozen, of course. And a bench. A walkway led up to the house.

  “We pointed our lamps at it. The windows, except for one, were still intact. The place had a porch. We climbed up onto it and looked through the windows into an ordinary living room, with a sofa, a coffee table, and a couple of chairs. There were pictures on the walls of people posing and waving. And another of a young couple standing in front of a house surrounded by trees.

  “We walked over to the front door. Garnie pushed the pad that should have opened it but nothing happened. So he aimed the cutter at it. The beam touched the door, and lights came on both inside and out. They flickered a couple of times and went off again. Then electricity rippled across everything, and the place ignited. We both jumped away from it and landed on the ground probably fifteen meters away. We were lying there trying to decide what was happening when something exploded inside. The house literally erupted. We were on the ground below the level of the deck, which is the only reason we survived. Pieces blew past us. Some hit the dome and ricocheted around.

  “When it was over, everything went completely dark. Heli was screaming at us over the radio asking whether we were still alive, telling us to hold on, she was coming, and Garnett was lying on his back asking God what he had done.” He fell silent.

  “The artifacts were inside the house?”

  “Yes. Everything was wrecked. They’d put the artifacts into a couple of storage rooms in back. Both were blown out and flattened. The contents were scattered around inside the dome. If it hadn’t been there, most of the material would probably have been blasted into space. Garnett staggered around in the wreckage, trying to find something, anything, screaming curses, and finally collapsing in tears. ‘My God,’ he said again and again, ‘I can’t believe I did this.’ He got onto his knees and began sweeping up charred metal and plastics. At one point he lifted a blackened helmet like the ones they’d worn on the Apollo missions. We found frames, but there was no way to know what they’d held. The only thing we came across that was reasonably intact was the transmitter. Ironically, it was in a closet on the far side of the house. Everything around it was scorched and burned, but the transmitter looked okay.” His eyes were closed. “He told me he wished he hadn’t survived.”

  Alex looked pale. “You were lucky to walk away from it.”

  “Yes. We looked through the wreckage, hoping to salvage something, but Garnett was hurt. He was limping from the blast, and I wasn’t in very good shape either.”

  “Why did you keep it quiet?” Alex asked. “To protect Baylee’s reputation?”

  “And mine. Yes. I didn’t really have a reputation to protect, I guess. But Garnie did. He pleaded with me not to say anything.”

  “And that’s what this was all about?”

  “He was a friend, Alex. I gave him my word. And now I have to ask you again: Are you willing to keep this quiet? It will cost you nothing, and it will preserve the reputation of a good man.”

  Alex looked in my direction. He knew I’d been keeping notes and planning another memoir. “I can’t do that,” he said.

  “Why not?” Southwick’s tone took on a sharp edge. “Is it because you want some publicity? Son of a bitch, Alex, how can you be so selfish?”

  “It’s all right, Alex,” I said. “Whatever you want to do is okay with me.”

  That earned me a glare from Southwick. “Do you have a veto?” he asked.

  “She’s not involved,” said Alex.

  Southwick took a deep breath. “Alex,” he said, “do you still want to go out to look at the asteroid?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll take you there, on condition that you and Chase agree to say nothing.”

  “Look, Baylee’s reputation won’t suffer. He did exactly what every other archeologist I’ve ever known would have done. If anything, he’ll become an icon. They’ll make a movie about him. But that’s not the point.”

  “What is?”

  “People have been looking for these artifacts for eight thousand years. If we keep this quiet, they’ll continue to look. With no chance of ever finding anything. I can understand your wanting to protect him, but you have an obligation to the truth as well.”

  He stared at Alex. “I have an obligation to him.”

  “And I have one to his granddaughter.”

  Southwick hesitated. Finally, he nodded. “Okay.”

  “Lawrence, did you ever go back? To the asteroid?”

  He shook his head. “It would have been too painful.”

  “And nobody else knows about this except you and Tokata.”

  “That’s correct. I’ve told no one. And I don’t believe anyone could have gotten it out of Heli. She’s a good woman.”

  “My perspective,” I said, “might be a bit different.”

  Alex looked my way. Don’t start anything.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  In the end, we retain nothing. Every act of fidelity, of courage, of sheer selflessness, is forgotten. Even the few that make it into the history books lose much in the translation, and ultimately disappear into a quiet library. In time, the libraries themselves go away. Who can name any of the Saxon women who faced down the barbarians during the reign of Probus? Who even knows they existed?

  —Alexander Meyers, The Human Condition, 10,122 C.E.

  We saw no lights as we approached Larissa. And we were greeted by no voices.

  I overheard Southwick, sitting back in the passenger cabin with Alex, say that when he’d left here, he’d sworn he would never come back.

  The scopes revealed nothing until we were virtually on top of the place. Then, gradually, I caught reflections off the dome. And, finally, I could make out the skeletal remains of the house.

  I brought us down about fifty meters away. We’d brought an extra pressure suit for Southwick. But he shook his head. “I have no interest in going back out there,” he said.

  Alex nodded. “I understand how you feel, Lawrence. But I’d prefer having you with me.”

  Southwick’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t trust me.”

  “You dumped us into the Atlantic.”

  “I explained about that.”

  “I know. Just call it an abundance of caution.”

  “I’m not a pilot. I couldn’t make off with this thing.”

  “I know. But I’d feel better if you were with us.”

  “All right. Whatever you want.”

  * * *

  We switched on our lights. I’d wondered whether some parts of the house, and possibly the artifacts, had torn through the dome and left the asteroid altogether. But no holes were visible, save the one at the entry hatch that had been cut by Baylee. That was where we entered, and made our way past the frozen trees.

  “I don’t think,” said Southwick, “there’s much chance that anything survived.”

  We went around to the rear of the house. That was where the debris was thickest. Alex had brought a staff, which he used to poke at it. We saw parts of a lamp and a computer and a showerhead. A broken door had been thrown against the side of the dome. Support beams, plumbing fixtures, scorched furniture were pil
ed high. Southwick found an electrical device in the wreckage. We didn’t know what it might have been, but VOYAGER 8 was engraved on its base. Another black box read MOONBASE. “Pity,” Alex said, “Baylee didn’t show a little patience.”

  Southwick agreed. “I know. I feared for a while that he’d become suicidal. He was never the same after this.”

  We moved carefully, trying not to walk on anything. One side of the house was still standing, more or less. We crossed onto the area that had constituted the storage rooms. It wasn’t as dangerous as it might sound because gravity was almost nonexistent, so we didn’t need to worry about falling through damaged flooring or having what remained of the house collapse on us. “Look at this,” Southwick said. He’d found something inside some plastic packaging.

  Alex shined his lamp at it. “It’s a game, I think.” The packaging was mostly intact. The lettering was ancient English, but there was a picture of a ringed planet and a primitive spaceship. We opened it and found model rockets and astronauts and a set of dice. He produced a plastene bag and placed the pieces inside. Then he held the box to give us a better look. There was an inscription, most of it not legible, but I could make out a date: 2203.

  “Coincides within a few years,” Alex said, “with the first manned flight to Uranus. This would have been worth a small fortune.” He put the box into the bag with the pieces.

  We found a few more objects, all damaged, plaques with names and dates, more toy space vehicles, shredded uniforms, magnets with images of stars and planets, framed photographs of planetary landscapes, and a handheld computer. There was an intact package of arm patches, depicting a rocket liftoff. Alex examined one. “First manned Mars flight, maybe,” he said. Later, we came across a couple of scorched shirts commemorating a mission somewhere.

  And there were pieces of equipment. One was obviously an imager designed, it looked like, to be placed on a hull. And an early version of a scanner, which would also have been outside the ship. Most of the gear, though, was unidentifiable. If there’d been placards or anything indicating what they’d been, they were gone.

  Alex switched over to a private channel so we wouldn’t be overheard by Southwick. “I just can’t believe it. Baylee was in a hurry, so we lost all of this? No wonder the guy started having bouts of depression.”

  “You telling me you’d have been willing to go back and chase down an expert you could bring out here? Wait all that time?”

  “Oh, Chase, I feel sorry for him. But we’ve lost so much.” He switched back to the general channel as he lifted something else out of a pile of rocks. A framed picture. The glass was broken, but we could make out the picture. It was a woman, and she was in uniform. Her identity, which had been engraved at the base of the frame, was no longer legible. He showed it to Southwick. “Any idea who she might have been?”

  “None whatever, Alex,” he said.

  “Here’s another one.” This time most of the photo was burned. “Wait,” he said, “here’s something else.” A plastic container. The container carried a description of the contents, and had pictures of rockets and a comet. There were two disks inside. He held it in front of his imager, which was clipped to the suit just below his shoulder. “Belle,” he said, “can you translate?”

  “Alex, it says: Centaurus: Flight to the Stars. And below that: ‘Join Adam Bergen for a virtual reconstruction of the first interstellar flight.’”

  Alex looked at the two disks. “The Centaurus flight. I don’t believe it.”

  “You know there won’t be anything left on the disks,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He sounded as discouraged as I’ve ever heard him. “I know.”

  * * *

  We’re pretty sure people knew extraterrestrial life existed as far back as the twenty-first century because they were able to do spectrographic analysis. But the first encounter with actual life-forms came on Europa when we cut through the ice, and the automated submarine Diver slipped into that world’s tempestuous currents. The Diver had a distinctive sensor array mounted on its forward deck. We found a broken model of it. I had no idea what it was, but Alex recognized it immediately.

  Eventually, we returned to the Belle-Marie and ate a quiet dinner. “This is exactly,” said Southwick, “what happened to us. Going through that pile of junk and not finding anything intact. Garnett was hurting, physically and otherwise. We tried. But, finally, he gave up, and we just cleared out.”

  “I can understand it,” said Alex.

  I refilled the air tanks, and we slept for an hour. Then we started again. Southwick found the charred cover of a children’s coloring book displaying vistas from other star systems. And Alex came up with a coffee cup marked GUMDROP. We showed it to Belle.

  “Gumdrop,” she said, “was the name given the command module for Apollo 9. It was the third manned mission in the Apollo program. And it was the first—”

  “Good enough.” Alex wrapped it and slipped it into his bag.

  I found another electronic device that I could hold in my hand. But again I had no idea what it was.

  “Probably,” said Alex, “an early version of a link.”

  “It was called a cell phone,” Belle said.

  I opened the lid. It had a tiny screen and some buttons. “Where’s the projector?” I asked.

  “The pictures appeared on the screen,” said Belle. “They did not do projections.”

  “It was a primitive time,” said Southwick. “I don’t know how they ever managed to get to the Moon, considering the kind of technology they had.”

  * * *

  I know it doesn’t seem as if moving broken furniture and electronic equipment and parts of walls around should have been difficult in low gravity. But it was a struggle. There was no easy method for getting the junk out of the way. I found bits and pieces that none of us could identify that might have come out of the cache, or might have simply been part of the house. It didn’t really matter since they were thoroughly hammered.

  There were more frames, but usually their contents were burned beyond recognition. I stopped periodically to watch the lights that marked the progress of Alex and Lawrence. They both grumbled and sighed and occasionally kicked something.

  Then I heard Alex get excited: “Oh, God, Chase, look at this.” His imager was on, and I could see what he’d found: Burned hardcover books scattered through a lower deck area on the side of the house that had escaped the worst of the blast. He was pulling a burst tank of some sort out of the way. Lawrence knelt beside him and turned his lamp on them. He began lifting the books from the rubble, one by one, opening them, and looking inside at scorched pages. I could make out only two titles: Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and NASA’s First Fifty Years: Historical Perspectives, edited by Steven J. Dick.

  They were looking frantically for surviving text. There was some, but not much. “You know,” said Alex on our private channel, “I am having seriously dark thoughts about Baylee.”

  Lawrence realized what was happening and guessed why it was being kept from him. “Nobody got hit harder than he did, Alex.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay. We need to have a team come up here and take a serious look around. There might still be something that can be salvaged.”

  “You’ve spent a lot of time on the home world, Lawrence. You have people here you can trust?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’d start with Heli.”

  * * *

  “When we put it together, Alex,” Lawrence asked, as we lifted away from Larissa, “do you want to be part of it?”

  “No,” he said. “I’d like to be informed what you find. Other than that, it’s your project.”

  “All right. Thank you. I appreciate it.” He was silent for a minute. Then: “I have one more question. When you get back to Rimway, what will you be saying about this find?”

&
nbsp; “What do you want me to say?”

  “I’d prefer you say nothing.”

  “We’ve already been through that.”

  “I know. Can I ask you to leave Garnett out of it? Just say you discovered the wreckage here and that you don’t know how it happened?”

  Alex looked straight ahead. “No,” he said. “I’m not comfortable lying. I understand you want to protect him, but you’ve done all you can. It’s out of your hands now.”

  Lawrence took a deep breath. He looked resigned. “All right,” he said.

  “What about Bill Garland?” I asked.

  “Who’s he?” asked Southwick.

  Alex responded: “A reporter who was helpful. I promised I’d let him know if we found the artifacts. I should be able to manage that without going into too much detail. I’ll go this far, Lawrence. I won’t mention Baylee’s name if I can avoid it. But we’ll have to inform his family. Marissa is the one who came to us. She deserves to know what happened. But if the word gets out, and I don’t see how that could not happen, I’ll have to tell what I know.”

  “All right.”

  Alex turned toward me. “Is that okay with you?”

  I doubt that I looked very happy. “I can live with it.”

  “Were you planning on doing another memoir, Chase?”

  “Of this incident? Sure.”

  Lawrence’s bewilderment was obvious. “Chase has written several memoirs of our efforts to locate lost artifacts,” Alex said.

  They both looked at me. “All right,” I said. “I won’t release anything until it becomes public knowledge. Okay?”

  Lawrence nodded.

  Alex was still watching me. We both had a pretty good idea how long that would take.

  FORTY-NINE

  Life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans.

  —Attributed to twentieth-century singer John Lennon

  So it was over. We took Lawrence back to Galileo Station, had dinner there, and wished him well. Then Alex called Bill Garland, gave him an account of what we’d found and left him with the impression that no one knew precisely how it had happened. Then we started for Rimway. We kept the coffee cup from the Gumdrop. Lawrence had everything else. It had been a remarkably unsatisfying conclusion.