Four more minutes passed, and Donovan still hadn’t reached the bottom. At that moment he realized that he hadn’t heard from Zell or Soong and thought it odd.
“Zell, Soong, can you hear me?”
His only answer was static. But he wasn’t sure if they couldn’t hear him, so he continued to transmit, likely as much for his sanity as anything.
“I don’t know if you can hear me, but I still have no sense of what the interior of the fissure looks like. Repeat: I can’t see anything at all. There seems to be nothing at all down here—almost as if the entire fissure is a vast cavern, as NASA suggested. I guess we’ve proved this part of the Moon is hollow, at least—wait, wait. There’s something over there.”
Donovan turned his helmet and wrist lights to full.
“Elias, there’s a wall here! It’s about thirty yards in front of me. It’s like, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Black, obsidian. It’s open at the top. I can make out three—no, four—very large circular objects in that opening. My God, each of those circles must be an eighth of a mile in diameter, but the wall—it goes on forever. I can’t see the ends of it with these lights.”
Donovan shone his lights to his left and to his right. It was useless. No matter how bright the lights or how far he stretched over the ends of the basket, he still couldn’t get a sense of the wall’s width. He arced the lights above him and below him. As he drifted down past the top, he could make out his lights dancing on the edge. But when he flashed his lights below him, all he could see was an endless black wall.
“There are no grooves of any kind—nothing to indicate that it was bolted together. No plating, no panels. Nothing. I think it’s metallic—but it’s not like any metal I’ve ever seen. But it was definitely made by some kind of intelligence. Elias, Soong—I don’t know if you can hear me; I don’t know if I’m getting through—but this thing, this object . . . I think it’s what opened the fissure.”
Soong and Zell never received Donovan’s transmissions. In fact, they had no idea about what he had discovered until they too climbed into the basket and lowered themselves into the fissure via remote control. The massive object came as much as a surprise to them as it had been for Donovan. The main difference in their experience was the comfort derived from the arc lights Donovan had set up, which grew brighter as their basket descended.
When the basket reached the floor of the ravine, Donovan was there to greet them. He had been signaling them the entire time, each call growing more desperate as he spied the tiny basket above his position. Now on the ground, they still didn’t answer his hails. In fact, they hardly noticed his presence. Their eyes were fixed on the unearthly wall before them.
“In all my life,” Zell finally muttered, “I’ve never seen anything like it!”
“It’s almost beyond comprehension,” Soong continued, “as if it couldn’t possibly be real at all.”
Donovan took a step forward and ran his gloved hand down the surface. “Except for the opening at the top, it’s perfectly smooth. Flawless. I’ve looked and looked, but I can’t find any markings—not even a groove to indicate how it was assembled.”
Soong approached the wall and slowly placed her hand against it as well. “But it has to have some kind of seam, plating. This is obviously man-made.”
“Careful with your terminology, Dr. Soong,” Zell reproached her as he held his helmet lights on a specific area of the wall. “This object wasn’t made by man. No human being has ever made anything like this.”
Soong turned to face them. “But what is it? A weapon?”
“Can’t be. Not buried this deep,” Donovan mused. “It didn’t do anything but blast a very large hole in the Moon and cause a lot of electronic damage on Earth. If someone had wanted to destroy the Earth with this object, they would’ve put it on the surface, where it would do the most damage.”
“Perhaps they hid it on purpose, Alan,” Zell suggested. “Some form of sneak attack.”
“A sneak attack planned two and a half million years ago?” Donovan shook his head inside his helmet. “It doesn’t make sense. I think it was meant to go off at a specific moment in time. But how would anyone know when we were capable of going to the Moon?”
“A valid point,” Zell added. “So it wasn’t meant to hurt us, but just to get our attention?”
Soong thought of that horrible day in Hong Kong. “Tell that to all those who died.”
“I can’t believe that was intentional,” Donovan responded. “I can’t explain why I believe that, but it just doesn’t seem like they wanted to hurt others. This was put here to bring us to the Moon.”
“But why?” Zell demanded. “To see it? To see its power? Their power?”
“And why dig this cavern?” Soong asked as she flashed her helmet lights around the massive cave. “Look at it—smooth walls. I think those are some kind of braces down there keeping the roof up.”
“I don’t know,” Donovan muttered. “But I do know now that they didn’t bring us all the way here just to see this thing or this cave.”
Zell turned to him. “Then what?”
“Come with me.”
Zell and Soong trailed Donovan as he made his way deeper into the cave. They followed in his wake, careful to step where he had stepped, their gaze darting between the path before them and the lights on his helmet leading the way. Donovan had already ventured this far into the cavern, setting up lights here and there that revealed footprints from his previous walk. After about a quarter mile, Donovan stopped. He hadn’t yet set up lights in this area. Their only illumination came from their helmets.
Donovan turned his helmet lights to full and held up his activated wrist lights to a corner of the cave’s back wall. “I think they brought us here to find this.”
Soong and Zell came up beside him and brought their lights to bear on the same spot. What the lights revealed was a smooth curvature, perhaps one hundred yards wide, poking out from the cave wall. The curvature was composed of the same seamless obsidian material the wall-like object had been made of.
“My God in heaven,” Zell gasped. “What is it?”
Donovan’s eyes never left the curvature. “I think it’s a ship.”
Chapter 13
Elias Zell took some careful steps toward the smoothly curving surface before him and crouched down as best he could in his space suit. He had made some remarkable discoveries in his years in the field and been involved with countless others, including his father’s historic expedition to find Cleopatra’s tomb. Nothing had prepared him for this. His chest felt tight, as if he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. He checked the digital pressure gauge on his wrist just to make sure.
“A ship,” he repeated. “It makes sense. After all, whoever sent the signal had to come from somewhere. As far as we know, the Moon’s never been capable of supporting indigenous life.”
“Maybe not as it is now,” said Soong as she flashed her right wrist light along the length of the curvature, “but there are some who believe the Moon was once part of Earth, broken off after an asteroid impact.”
“That’s a possibility,” agreed Donovan. “We knew that whatever was down here was considerably old. And some schools of thought argue in favor of outside influences on human evolution. History is rife with such examples.”
“Yes,” said Zell thoughtfully, getting out of his crouch, “the wheel of Ezekiel, Elijah’s fiery chariot, the Baghdad Battery.”
“Baghdad Battery?” said Soong. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”
“An earthenware jar found outside the Iraqi capital in 1938,” said Donovan. “Thought to be around two thousand years old. It contained an iron rod surrounded by a copper cylinder. When filled with an electrolyte-rich liquid, it produced a charge of about two volts.”
Soong squinted at him. “So Alessandro Volta just reinvented the battery?”
“Maybe so.” Donovan nodded. “Of course, some people also believe that the Ark of the Covenant was some kind of ancie
nt capacitor capable of generating a powerful electrical charge.”
“Maybe finding the ark should be the Zell Institute’s next assignment.”
Donovan winced. “His father already tried. Twice.”
“We’re floating off on a thousand theoretical tangents,” Zell suggested, his eyes still fixed on the object. “While this could be some form of advanced terrestrial civilization that we’ve so far not detected, it isn’t likely. I’m certain someone would’ve found some hint of that civilization’s existence on Earth by now. I think Alan’s right, that this is some sort of ship from an extraterrestrial civilization, which landed—or crashed—here on the Moon ages ago.” He turned to them suddenly. “Could we have intercepted some kind of distress signal? An advanced SOS?”
“Possibly,” said Donovan. “But why now?”
“Maybe they’d been trying for years and only now have reached us?”
“With an electromagnetic pulse that crippled the planet?” countered Soong. “I don’t believe it. No, whatever signal they sent, they meant to send it when they did. Why they sent it is another question.”
“Wait!” said Donovan. “My light just caught something. Hold it . . .” He shone his left wrist light on the hull again. “There it is.”
“What’ve you got?” asked Zell.
“Writing.”
Donovan approached the curvature. He reached into his supply bag and pulled out a brush, which he gently applied to the craft’s surface, sweeping away sediment with care and precision. After a few moments, the symbols were more legible.
He scanned the symbols on the hull again. Could he be the first human in history to be glimpsing the language of another world?
“What do you make of it, Alan?” Zell asked.
“I don’t—” Donovan began, then shook his head. “Wait a minute.” He brushed away some more sediment until the symbols could be read clearly. “I can read this, and so can you.”
“What?”
Donovan laughed at their foolishness. “It’s Farsi.”
“It’s not possible.” Zell approached the curvature and read the writing for himself. “In all the annals of history, there’s never been a record of two completely separate civilizations coming up with the exact same language. Alan, this isn’t possible!” He read the writing again. “Khôsh âmadid.”
“‘Welcome,’” Donovan translated.
“But why Farsi? What’s the significance?” Zell demanded. “Why not English? Or Chinese? Or Spanish? After all, Farsi isn’t the most common language on Earth.”
“You’re forgetting, Dr. Zell, that this object was deposited here more than two million years ago,” Soong noted as she flashed her wrist light at the word. “No language on Earth had been invented at that time.”
“Which leaves us with even more questions,” Zell mused.
“Hold on,” said Donovan, brushing away more dust. “Look, here it is again. ‘Willkommen.’ In German.”
Without further discussion they began applying their brushes to the surface in earnest. Upon closer inspection they dismissed the idea that the material they were uncovering was any known type of metal. While it had metallic properties, the very gracefulness and fluidity of its shape suggested it could also be a form of advanced molded plastic—or some other material not known to humanity. As they cleared away more of the lunar dust, they found that the entire exposed area was covered in writing, all messages of greeting, in every language of the world, including ones neither Donovan nor Zell recognized. Even odder was that none of the symbols or letters seemed to be burned or chiseled into the surface, but were instead embedded there as if they had been natural details of the object itself. The words were the only imperfections on the entire surface.
“‘Ya’at’eeh?’” Donovan read. “Don’t know that one.”
“It’s Navajo,” said Soong from behind them. “Loosely translated it means, ‘It is good,’ but the Navajo use it as a standard greeting.” Seeing their admiring looks through their transparent helmets, Soong responded, “I studied the World War Two code talkers as a child. Fascinating subject.”
Zell smiled. “So what do you make of our little discovery here?”
“Obviously whoever deposited this boat here wanted to make sure we knew they were friendly. All over this area it seems to be the same thing,” Soong observed. “Greetings, welcome. I even found a few translations of ‘friend’ here and there. Except . . .” She led them down a few yards and shone her wrist light on another embedded symbol.
“Mandarin,” Donovan noted.
“It’s the symbol for turtle,” said Soong.
Zell suddenly thought of the old anecdote in which a woman informed a prominent physicist that the world was a flat plate poised on the back of a turtle. “What is the turtle standing on?” the scientist of the tale asked bemusedly. The woman didn’t flinch and answered, “It’s turtles all the way down.”
“Why a turtle?” Donovan asked.
“Turtles are significant in many cultures for many different reasons,” Zell began.
“In Chinese mythology,” Soong said, “a turtle was said to have risen from the depths with the eight trigrams on its back.” She paused and turned to them. “A message of divination to the human race.”
“A messenger,” Zell said thoughtfully as he crouched down. He went to scratch his beard, as he often did when puzzling over a conundrum, only to have his hand brush over his space helmet. “I’m almost afraid to ask what the message might be.”
“It still doesn’t make sense,” Donovan mused as he approached Zell. “Could it be possible that our languages are far older than we realize? That this is some relic from an ancient human civilization we never knew existed?”
“It can’t be, Alan,” Zell replied. “You know as well as I do that we can trace the evolution of languages, that Latin, as an obvious example, initially formed the basis—”
Soong had moved several feet away from Donovan and Zell as she spotted a fragment of a word that was poking out from the lunar dust. As she cleared more of the area, her very audible gasp made them turn their attention to her.
“What’ve you found?” Donovan wondered aloud as he approached her, Zell a step behind him.
Soong paused. “An airlock.”
“How can you be certain?” Zell asked.
Soong took a step back and gestured at the newly revealed area with her brush. “Because it says, ‘Airlock.’”
Donovan and Zell flashed their lights on the area. A series of words in various languages formed a rectangular pattern approximately eight by ten feet.
“This is too easy,” Soong suggested.
Donovan turned to her. “Unless whoever built this wanted us to go inside.”
“First dig I’ve ever been on with instructions built into it.” Zell shook his head in wonder. “But I’m not one for looking a gift horse in the mouth. If this is an airlock, that means we can get inside.”
June 28
7:44 p.m., Houston Time
5 days, 13 hours, 29 minutes, Mission Elapsed Time
“Houston, this is Copernicus. How’re you guys coming with our little fuel-line problem? Over.”
Lieutenant Colonel Franklin Wilson rubbed his eyes and strained to stare out the Copernicus’s window at the airless black sky over the Moon. As tired as he might be looking at computer consoles, he was even more tired of waiting for responses from Earth. Rationally he knew radio signals traversed the space between the Earth and the Moon in only a couple of seconds, but each time he radioed Mission Control, the delay felt longer. This one felt interminable. Benny and Yeoh had found the ascent engine’s malfunction hours ago and were now doing a thorough survey of the ship’s hull. They had relayed streaming video and still photographs of the damage to Houston at least two hours ago, but Mission Control still hadn’t sent back protocols for making repairs.
Maybe they think it can’t be fixed, Wilson thought as he scratched a half week’s length of stubble on hi
s face. Maybe they’re looking for a way to break it to us gently.
The lieutenant colonel sucked tepid water through a straw. He exhaled and kicked the console with his good leg.
Son of a bitch . . . If I could only just get out there.
“Copernicus, this is Houston. Sorry about the delay,” John Dieckman’s voice echoed in his headset. “We’re working out a number of repair scenarios right now and should have something to you before the day’s out.”
“Deke, are we on a private comm?”
“We are, Copernicus. Go ahead.”
“Good. I don’t want Benevisto and Yeoh to overhear us.”
“What’s on your mind, Frank?”
“What’s going on down there? Are you guys giving up on us?”
There was another delay. “Of course we’re not, Frank. We’re just running a lot of sims down here and assessing the damage to the Copernicus and the Tai—”
“I know how busy you are, Deke, so skip the bullshit. How’re we really doing?”
Dieckman cleared his throat. “Frank, as I told you—”
“You know they wouldn’t have you on the horn with me every minute if it wasn’t serious. So give it to me straight.”
“Okay.” Deke paused. “Right now we think the fuel line can be repaired. Once we’ve got it in working order, we’ll be able to activate the system and see the situation. Most educated guesses down here think that you’ve got enough fuel to get back into orbit—but you’ll be cutting it pretty close.”
“And what about the Tai-Ping?”
“Frank, maybe we should worry about one problem—”
“The Tai-Ping. What’s her status?”
“We’ve run the sims on the reboot procedure Yeoh told us about. It seems solid, but it’s hard to tell without knowing what went wrong in the first place. If we’re even one or two amps over on the power, the whole ship could be fried.”
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