Terminal Event

by Robert Vaughan

  Terminal Event

  Robert Vaughan

  Contents

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  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part 2

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Untitled

  THE OTHER SIDE OF MEMORY

  THE OTHER SIDE OF MEMORY

  THE OTHER SIDE OF MEMORY

  A Look At Long Road To Abilene by Robert Vaughan

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  About the Author

  Terminal Event

  by

  Robert Vaughan

  Kindle Edition

  © Copyright 2017 Robert Vaughan

  Wolfpack Publishing

  6032 Wheat Penny Avenue

  Las Vegas, NV 89148

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, other than brief quotes for reviews.

  ISBN: 978-1-62918-740-2

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  Part I

  Now

  1

  Despite the dark glasses he wore, it was still necessary for Martin Nathanson to keep his eyes squinted against the vaulting blue sky, bright crystal light, and glaring white snow. Bundled against the brutal cold of Antarctica, Martin tried to will away an irritating itch that the heavy clothing made impossible to scratch.

  His eyes were fixed upon a cable which was being slowly and carefully withdrawn from a fifteen-inch diameter hole that had been bored deep into the Antarctic ice-sheet. He and his team were 23 miles from the permanent polar-research station of Amundsen-Scott. It was an inside joke that the site was 23 miles north of Amundsen-Scott, the joke being that every place on Earth is north of Amundsen-Scott.

  Dr. Nathanson was team director for the Jefferson University Polar Air Research project, known by the acronym, JUPAR. He was the only scientist on this particular drill team, the rest of the crew being mechanics, drillers, and electricians. All were adventurers however, and all contributed a particular skill that was essential for working in such physically demanding conditions.

  The work site was permeated by sound, from the constant roar of the gasoline engines of the Sno Cats, generators, and power winches, to the thump and squeak of the rotating cable drums. They were engaged in core sampling, a process of pulling up cylinders of ice from thousands of feet below the surface of the glacier. Entrapped within the ice-cores thus extracted were several bubbles of air. The deeper one went, the farther back in time the ice was formed, thus providing the researchers with an opportunity to take air samples that were hundreds of thousands of years old.

  “See any sign of it yet?” Nathanson asked.

  “Yes, here it comes,” Eddie Webb answered, as the top of the long ice cylinder appeared.

  “Careful, now, don’t contaminate it by breaking it,” Dr. Nathanson cautioned.

  “I’ve got it,” Eddie replied. Taking off the mittens so he could work with his gloved hands, he reached down to guide the ice core up from the hole. Suddenly he held up his hand. “Wait a minute, hold it! Stop the drum!”

  The cable-drum operator flipped a switch, and the cable stopped rewinding.

  “What’s wrong?” Nathanson asked.

  “There’s somethin’ strange here, Doc. Maybe you’d better come down here and take a look,” Eddie suggested. “There’s something inside the core.”

  Nathanson climbed down into the little thermal bowl around the drill-hole opening. “Okay, pull it on up, but be easy,” he called.

  The cable-drum was re-engaged and, moving more slowly now, snaked the two-meter-long ice core the rest of the way out of the hole.

  “How deep were we operating?” Nathanson asked as the bottom of the ice core cleared the hole.

  “We were at twenty-five hundred feet,” the cable-drum operator replied.

  Working carefully, Nathanson and Eddie freed the long tube of ice. Inside the ice core, they could see a gold-colored, apparently metallic, cylinder.

  “What the hell is that?” Eddie asked.

  Nathanson shook his head. “I don’t have the slightest idea what it is.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m going to send it back to St. Louis, just like we have been doing with all the other samples.”

  “You know what I would do? If it was up to me, I’d take it back to the station and melt it down to see what it is.”

  “We will follow procedure.”

  “Come on, Doc, I thought you scientist guys were curious.”

  “Curious, yes. Also cautious. If it is – something – ” He set the word something apart from the rest of the sentence, “ – then it should be examined in an environmentally clean room, under controlled laboratory conditions.”

  “Something? What do you mean by something?”

  “I don’t know, just – something,” Nathanson said, once more setting the word apart.

  “Doo-dee-doo-dum, doo-dee-doo-dum!”

  One of the other workers began humming the theme music from The Twilight Zone, and everyone laughed.

  “Hey, Doc, you think it’s something from outer space?” another asked.

  “We can’t exclude that possibility,” Nathanson replied, giving an earnest answer to a question that was only half-serious. “The only logical thing to do is examine it as scientifically as possible.”

  “I’ll tell you what it looks like to me,” Eddie said, as he continued to study the object through the ice. “It looks exactly like a beer can. Don’t know why you would want to go to all that trouble to examine a beer can.”

  “All right, suppose it is a beer can?” Nathanson replied. “You want to tell me how it got buried under half a mile of glacier ice?

  The smile left Eddie’s face. “Damn,” he said. “Damn, you’re right. How the hell did it get there?”

  Jefferson University, St. Louis, MO:

  Professor Damien Thornton folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against the front of his desk as he watched the young man’s face contort in an effort to pull an answer from what Damien suspected was an empty reservoir.

  “Come, come, Mr. Baker, you are making me feel bad. And here, I thought my lecture was quite thorough.”

  “What, what was the question again?” the student asked.

  “In the last game of the season, last fall, how many yards did you make against Austin Peay?”

  “One hundred forty-four. And I had two TDs.”

  “Well, see, you can answer questions. It’s just a matter of my asking the right one, isn’t it?” Damien goaded.

  “Yeah,” Baker said, smiling broadly. Then, as if realizing that Damien was setting him up, the smile faded. “But that’s not the question you asked, is it?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mr. Baker. Miss Potter, you’ve got the ball. What is the structure of DNA?”
<
br />   “The structure of DNA is a double-helix polymer, or a spiral of two DNA strands, each containing a long chain of monomer nucleotides, wound around each other.”

  “Touchdown!” Damien shouted throwing both arms up in the air. “You are absolutely right, Miss Potter.”

  The class laughed as the bell rang. Then, grabbing their books, they all made a mad rush toward the door. “Finals tomorrow!” Damien called to them.

  Damien Thornton was 40 years old, tall with brown hair, gray-green eyes, and totally unaware that half the coeds in the school had fantasies about him. Like Win Baker, Damien had played football at a small college. But that is where the similarity stopped, for in addition to being a starting quarterback, Damien had also been an outstanding student, maintaining a 4.0 average while pursuing four doctorate degrees. Today, Damien was an authority not only in biology, but geology, archeology, and anthropology. He could speak six languages, was a gourmet cook, and loved classical music.

  From time to time the caprice of media and public acclaim chose academicians for stardom. Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan had been stars. So was Stephen Hawking. Damien Thornton was also such a person. He had written six books and one of them, After Pangaea, was one of those anomalies ...a scholarly book which, like Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, had made the national and international best seller lists.

  As a result of his star quality, Jefferson University would often bring Damien out for show anytime they were making a push for government or corporate grants. But the relationship was symbiotic because Damien flourished in a university environment. He had not yet lost his fascination for learning, and even now, as Department Head and professor, Damien was studying law.

  If there was one drawback to Damien’s constant pursuit of knowledge, it was in his social life.

  He had none.

  Damien planned to play handball at noon, but when he went into his office to change clothes, his secretary gave him a message.

  “Professor Thornton, President McElwain asked me to have you come down to the cold room in the science lab as soon as you were finished with your morning class.”

  Damien looked at her inquisitively. “Are you sure he said the cold room?”

  “The cold room, yes, sir, that’s what he said.”

  “I wonder what this is all about?”

  “I have no idea, but I suspect it’s going to take a while, because he asked me to cancel all your afternoon classes.”

  “Well, then, I’d better get over there.” Damien looked down at his shirt, then pulled it away from his body as if checking for wrinkles. “Mrs. Sherman, do you think – ” he started, but Mrs. Sherman interrupted him.

  “There are some fresh shirts hanging in your closet,” she said, answering the unfinished question. “I picked them up at the laundry for you this morning.”

  ”Thank you, I don’t think I could get along without you.”

  “It’s called job security,” she said with a little laugh. “That’s exactly what I want you to think.”

  Spengeman Hall, the building that housed the cold room, was just on the other side of Shakleford-Jackson Stadium. Shakleford-Jackson, called “Shaky Jake” by the students, was built in the late 1920s. It had the distinction some said, ignominy others insisted, of being the oldest intercollegiate football stadium still in use west of the Mississippi River. Through the years there had been such additions as electric scoreboards, new lighting, and a new press box, but it still looked substantially as it did when Ronald Reagan played here as a member of the Eureka College football team in 1929.

  When the student body started an organized cheer, the stands would rock, giving rise to the nickname Shaky Jake. It was a glaring statement, if any such statement was needed, that Jefferson University stressed academics over athletics.

  Stepping inside the science building, Damien was assailed with the old and familiar aromas of Spengeman Hall. There was a faint hint of sulfur from the chemistry lab and a whiff of ozone from the physics department, countered by the smell of floor wax and disinfectant.

  He selected a parka from the many that were hanging on hooks just outside the cold room then put it on and passed through an airlock before going inside. The airlock was necessary because the cold room was also a multi-filtered, environmentally clean room. This was to avoid any contamination of the ice cores that were being shipped back from the JUPAR project.

  Gerald McElwain, president of the college, Walter Calhoun, head of the science department, and Adam Lewis, the faculty chairman for the JUPAR project were all waiting for him. Like Damien, they were wearing parkas, and emitting little wisps of moisture as they breathed, or spoke. They greeted him, then the president pointed to a small, golden cylinder, lying on the stainless steel table before them.

  “Glad you could come, Damien. We’d like you to take a look at that.”

  “What is it?” Damien asked.

  “We were sort of hoping you might have an idea,” Professor Lewis said.

  Putting on his glasses, Damien leaned over the table and examined the cylinder closely.

  “It looks like a canister of gold,” he said.

  “See there, men? It’s a canister of gold. I told you Dr. Thornton could figure this out,” Calhoun said.

  The others, including Damien, laughed.

  “Oh, you mean you want more than that?”

  “If you can give us anymore,” Lewis said. “At first, we thought it might be some sort of decorative container. But now we suspect it has some religious significance.”

  “Religious significance? What makes you think that?”

  “Look at the markings,” Dr. Calhoun said.

  “They obviously have some spiritual meaning. Perhaps an appeal to various deities,” McElwain added.

  Damien shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. They are numbers.”

  “Numbers?” the other three replied as one. “How do you get that?”

  “Because this is a key across the top,” Damien explained. “You see, one down stroke is one, a down stroke with a half-arrowhead is two, a full arrowhead is three. There is a logical progression to ten. Then you take the number 10, slash one, and that’s 11, ten, slash two is 12 and so on. That gives you the key to construct any number.”

  “That’s pretty cumbersome, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe a little more cumbersome than Arabic numbers, but much less so than Roman numerals.”

  “I’ve never heard of a system of numbers like that,” McElwain said. “Who used it?”

  Damien shook his head. “No one that I know of. Where did this come from?”

  “I can tell you where we found it,” Professor Lewis said, “but I don’t have any idea where it came from. That is, how it got there. It was sent back by the JUPAR team, and they retrieved it from the ice while taking core samples.”

  “You mean it was just lying there?”

  Lewis shook his head. “No, it wasn’t just lying there, as in all you had to do was bend over and pick it up. It was, in fact, buried twenty-five hundred feet below the surface.”

  “Twenty-five hundred feet below the surface?” Damien gasped. “That’s impossible!”

  “So it would seem,” President McElwain replied. He made a sweeping gesture toward the cylinder. “But impossible or not, there it is.”

  2

  “Is there a way of opening it?” Damien asked as he continued to examine the golden canister.

  “If you will look very closely, you can see that there is a fine line all the way around the canister,” Calhoun said. “We think it separates there.

  “Have you tried it?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” Damien said. “We’ll have to open this under very controlled conditions in order to make certain we don’t damage anything that might be inside.”

  “I’m a lot more concerned about whether there is anything in the canister that might damage us,” McElwain said.

  “We checked it for radiation and got nothin
g,” Calhoun said. “And if there was a bio or chemical danger, I think there would be a warning on the canister.”

  Damien shook his head. “Not necessarily. We are burying nuclear waste that will still be extremely hazardous one hundred thousand years from now. But, who knows what the world is going to be like in one hundred thousand years? What if there is no one left who can read English, or any other language that exists today? How do we warn them? It could be that whoever, or whatever left this cylinder had to face the same problem. How do they tell us, in a language that we don’t understand, what is inside?”

  “Damien, wait a minute, listen to yourself,” McElwain said. “Surely you aren’t suggesting that this cylinder may have been left by some sort of alien life-form?”

  Damien continued to study the cylinder. “At this moment, President McElwain, I’m not offering any suggestions as to what it is. I’m only saying what it isn’t. It is not an artifact from any civilization with which I am familiar.”

  “We tried to X-ray it, but the attempt was unsuccessful.”

  “Interesting. Whatever is inside has been shielded.”

  “Shielded? Against what?”

  “Who knows? Maybe against X-rays themselves,” Damien suggested.

  “That’s pretty unlikely, isn’t it, Damien?” Lewis asked. “Considering that this thing came from almost half a mile below the Antarctic ice-sheet. It had to have been there for at least fifty thousand years and, who knows how long before that? Your suggestion that it has been purposely shielded against radioactivity assumes the awareness of a technology that didn’t even exist until quite recently.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Damien suddenly said, rising up with a smile on his face. “They did leave us a message.”

  “What? What sort of message?”

  “This is a container of biological material.”