In a small field on the outskirts of Modesto, almost two thousand people had gathered to hold a small service to pray for the Phoenix team. Nearly every major religion was represented. Priests, rabbis, and imams each gave readings from their respective books and encouraged others to do the same. Even those who had no formal beliefs were moved to get up and offer words of encouragement. The whole of America was gathered there in that field, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, blacks and whites, gay and straight, young and old, immigrants and the native born, rich and poor. Their gathering was a microcosm of the breadth of American society, which in itself was a microcosm of the remarkable diversity of the human race.
As all eyes turned upward, someone called out, “There it is! I see it!” Every head shot upward and was awed at the sight that greeted them. A ball of fire, streaking downward toward the Earth like a shooting star. Almost instinctively, many people joined hands, clasping on to the closest person to them in the dark. One little boy perched on his father’s shoulders shook the sleep from his eyes and cried, “Daddy! Make a wish!”
On board the Tai-Ping, the crew heard the heat roaring around them as their ship forced itself through Earth’s atmosphere. Although it was hot enough to melt titanium outside, they only felt a mild increase in temperature, barely enough to break a sweat. The heat shield’s pushing the inferno away from the craft, Donovan thought with some relief. It’s holding. Still, nothing could protect them from how bumpy the ride was. To Wilson, a veteran of so many missions, the sensation was comfortingly familiar. To everyone else, the ship seemed ready to fly apart at any second.
Soong looked out the portal; all she could see was a cascading wall of flame. She thought of the fairy tale she heard as a child in which a girl became a dragon, incinerating Anchin, the boy who refused to return her love. She knew how Anchin must have felt.
Benny, thrust back in his seat by the incredible g-forces, barely heard Wilson give the order to deploy the chutes over the roar. Straining his hand against the force, he reached forward and pulled the lever.
There was a powerful jolt, and suddenly all the tumult stopped. The landing capsule of the Tai-Ping was floating gently down toward the ocean. The chutes, far from being blocks of ice, were working perfectly. Donovan peered out the portal and could make out the green phosphorus churned out by the carrier that had been sent to pick them up. As much as he couldn’t believe it, they had come home.
“Houston, this is Phoenix,” Wilson said. “We’re on approach, and everything looks five by five.”
The cheers that broke out at Mission Control came over the VOX with deafening clarity. All around the world a similar sound was heard as people welcomed back the astronauts with unbridled joy. On board the ship, Benny and Yeoh looked out the front viewport at the lights of the West Coast, now coming into view.
“California, here I come,” Benny sang, and everyone on board cheered in agreement.
A moment later, the capsule splashed down into the ocean, its heated and charred outer shell sizzling on contact with the water. At once, Wilson, Benny, and Yeoh got to work, securing the ship and powering her down.
“Houston, this is Phoenix,” said Wilson. “We are at stable one; the ship is secure.”
“Roger that,” replied Dieckman. “Welcome home, team. We’re glad to see you. Sit tight awhile. The carrier Ronald Reagan is on its way to pick you up. She’ll be looking for your tracer flares.”
“Copy, Houston. This is Phoenix signing off.”
The crew spent the next few minutes collecting what they would need to take with them. As they packed up, Donovan stole a look at Benny, who nodded in understanding as he tucked the backup flash drive into his space suit. When they were done, Benny climbed up to the hatch and burst the seal. Fresh ocean air rushed into the cabin, the sweetest thing they had ever smelled or felt. The spray of the ocean washed in, dotting their faces with salt.
Wilson looked out at the approaching carrier, her lights sparkling on the horizon. He turned to Zell. “Here’s to coming home.”
“Amen to that, my friend.”
Chapter 17
August 10
Johnson Space Center
Houston, Texas
9:35 a.m.
Donovan sat in the office of Ted Bremer, special liaison from the NSA, and one of the seemingly endless string of people in charge of debriefing the Phoenix team. In the five weeks since the crew had returned to Earth, many of his days had played out in rooms much like this one. Not only had they not been allowed to talk to the press, who had been clamoring for interviews, but they had also been unable to leave the confines of the space center since they arrived home. Each night they gathered around the television and flipped from station to station as a parade of familiar faces from NASA gave the various talking heads standard lines about how the Phoenix crew was eager to tell their story and vague promises about granting interviews in the near future. He suspected these lines were designed solely to mollify the press long enough until they lost interest. Right now he didn’t care if he talked to the press, NASA, or a brick wall; he just wanted to get out of Ted Bremer’s office.
Bremer had the pinched, worried face of a lifelong bureaucrat. What made matters worse was the fact that he had one of those pendulums with metal balls that clicked and clacked against one another endlessly. After sitting in his office for nearly forty minutes, Donovan began to suspect that Bremer had timed all of his movements to the metronomic precision of the knickknack. With every click, he would loudly lick his thumb and turn pages of the report he had been given. He would then exhale and read for exactly two cycles of clicks and clacks, only to repeat the entire process again. At first Donovan had found this an amusing diversion from the tedium. Now the pendulum was beginning to slowly but surely drive him certifiably nuts. Finally, and perfectly timed, Bremer exhaled again and looked up at Donovan, staring at him a moment over the silver rims of his bifocals.
Click.
“So, Dr. Donovan, you stand by everything that’s in this report?”
“Absolutely. As far-fetched as it may seem, everything we’ve told you is true.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Bremer said. “You realize that this kind of a story might be extremely hard for the public to swallow?”
Donovan squinted at him and shook his head. “Harder to swallow than prehistoric aliens sending a signal so powerful it causes a worldwide blackout?”
Bremer paused again. Donovan could tell that he was not used to people questioning his opinions or suggestions.
Clack.
“What I’m saying, Dr. Donovan, is that the world was prepared to accept the idea that we are not alone in the universe. What they are not ready to accept is the notion that we are headed into a civil war with some sort of superintelligent clones who will ultimately drive us to extinction.”
“But Joshua came here to prevent—”
“That’s immaterial at this juncture, Doctor,” Bremer said. “Right now, the world is entering into a period of reconstruction. The news that it may all be in vain could cause a global panic and plunge us right back to where we were.”
“Look,” said Donovan, “I’m not saying that we should climb every bell tower and shout that the sky is falling. But we have a responsibility to learn from what Joshua told us. To tread carefully from here on out.”
“And we will, rest assured. As you are aware, there are a number of biotechnology corporations the government has already asked to study the materials you brought back from the Moon.”
“With respect, Mr. Bremer, that knowledge is not a comfort to either myself or my fellow crew members. We have reason to believe that Joshua picked this particular time to contact us because he felt that one, if not all, of those very same biotechnology companies may begin the chain of events that will lead to mankind’s destruction.”
Bremer wiped his glasses with a monogrammed handkerchief as he leaned back in his chair. “Surely, Dr. Donovan, you don’t expect us to believe that these companie
s are secretly—what?—planning the downfall of humanity? The very notion is, forgive me, absurd.”
Donovan leaned forward. “But I’ve already told you it was an accident. At least these people from the future thought it was. The division of humanity into various factions was simply a by-product of their experiments to prevent us from suffering from the effects of chemical, biological, and nuclear terrorism. They didn’t know . . .”
Click.
Bremer held up a hand. “We’ve already gone through that,” he said, shuffling his papers. “Your report is satisfactory, but please keep yourself available should the NSA or any other US government agency need to question you further, Dr. Donovan.”
Clack.
Donovan laughed. “That’s kind of funny. Keep myself available. You guys have us locked up.”
Bremer stared at Donovan blankly across his wide mahogany desk.
Donovan got up and began walking toward the office door but thought better of leaving so abruptly. “You have to get a team back up on the Moon. There’s more research that needs to be done.”
Click.
“We have people looking into it as we speak,” he said.
“You’re going to blow it,” Donovan said. “You people have the opportunity of a lifetime here, and you’re going to throw it away and cover it up under some government-issue party-line bullshit.”
Clack.
“Might I remind you, Doctor, that you have been a paid consultant to the United States government for the better part of a year and lived quite comfortably at the expense of the American taxpayer.”
“That’s beside the point.”
Click.
“Might I also remind you that the government is prepared to fund whatever projects you and Dr. Zell choose to embark on.”
“We don’t need your payoff,” Donovan said. “The Zell Institute is more than self-sufficient.”
Clack.
Bremer leaned his thin elbows on his desk. “Then let me be candid, sir. This project is a government-funded operation. Like it or not, you are a government employee for the duration of your involvement. Further, as part of your astronaut training, you were required to sign nondisclosure agreements pertaining to your lunar mission if you encountered anything there which might prove a threat to national security. The government has read your report, as well as the reports of your fellow crewmen, and has come to the conclusion that your findings indicate a threat to the security of the American people, if not the entire human race. We cannot afford to make any public disclosures until such security threats have been analyzed and neutralized.”
Click.
“Is that a threat?” Donovan asked.
Clack.
“We’re the United States government, Dr. Donovan. We don’t make threats.”
Almost four weeks later and what seemed like several thousand pages of nondisclosure forms later, the Phoenix team was released from their “quarantine.” Despite government hopes to the contrary, news agencies had been unrelenting in their efforts to find out what the crew had seen and experienced on the Moon. Following a carefully guided script, the crew had been brought together for their first news conference, also marking the first time that any of the American team had seen Soong or Yeoh since members of the Chinese government had hauled them off.
At the news conference, the crew members each took turns describing their mission. They recalled in full detail the deaths of Commander Yuen and Lieutenant Commander Mosensen. Wilson gave a very technical description of their attempts to reboot the Tai-Ping remotely and their efforts to repair the ascent engine. And that was where the omissions began. No mention was made of the fact that the Copernicus was sucked onto the bridge of the Astraeus through a wormhole. No mention was made of their generating spare parts for the ascent engine through the future ship’s extraordinary matter-energy converters. And no mention at all was made of Joshua and the message he brought from the twenty-eighth century.
Neither Donovan nor Zell liked lying to the press. But they did as they were told, careful not to mention anything about what the Astraeus was. They regaled the press corps with a detailed analysis of the enormous engine that was used to blast a hole in the Ocean of Storms to emit an electromagnetic pulse. They showed a photographic record of the inside of the ship. And they admitted to not knowing who or what had built it or what its purpose was—but kept stressing that it was immensely old and contained no evidence of an imminent attack on the Earth.
The press corps had more questions at the end of the conference but left more or less satisfied. The nightly news reports and editorial pages seemed content with what had been revealed. Donovan and the others had helped pull off one of the most elaborate deceptions in the history of civilization and were released from their captivity with no injuries except those inflicted on their consciences.
They had decided to play along for the sake of humanity. But none of them expected to stay quiet for long.
Donovan’s suitcase hit the bed with a decisive thump. He was glad to be leaving the confines of the government facility that he had reluctantly called home since returning from the Moon. He was aching to get back to the Zell Institute, to see familiar things again. But he had hoped that Benny or Yeoh would have uncovered something in those backup files by this point. He knew that there was more on those records than they had already seen.
Just then there was a knock on the door. Figuring it was the Reuben he had ordered from room service, Donovan strolled over. When he opened the door, he was surprised to see Benny.
“Merry Christmas, Doc!”
“It’s September, Benny. What are you doing here?”
“That may be,” said Benny, “but I’ve got a gift that keeps on giving.”
“Okay, okay, come in,” said Donovan. “Thrill me.”
Benny walked into the room, looking around suspiciously. He pulled out his phone and tapped out a number. Suddenly Donovan’s own phone rang. He picked it up and then showed the display to Benny.
“Why are you calling me?”
“Just answer,” Benny said.
Donovan complied, and Benny put his phone on speaker, holding it up and waving it around the room, near the lamps, television set, refrigerator, and windows.
“Care to explain?” Donovan asked.
“Uncle Sam could be listening,” Benny said. “Cameras and microphones give off an electromagnetic field. If we hear a click, it means the phone is interfering with the field.”
Benny searched the room a bit longer, then hung up the phone, satisfied. “You got a laptop here?” he asked.
Donovan reached over to his bag and pulled his computer out, popping it open and starting it up. “What’ve you got?”
Benny hopped over to the laptop and inserted a flash drive into the USB port. His fingers danced over the keys, going through a number of decryptions before opening the needed files. “Something you’re never going to believe. Remember how Joshua said there were other survivors from his era?”
“What’re you saying?”
“Wait for it.” Benny tapped a few more keys and turned the computer toward Donovan. He peered at the screen and was surprised to see schematics for another vessel.
“There’s a second ship?” he asked.
Benny grinned broadly. “There’s a second ship. The Eos. They came through the portal not long after Joshua’s team did, in hopes of completing the mission.”
Donovan’s eyes went wide as he studied the schematics on the computer screen. “Why didn’t Joshua tell us about this?”
“Remember, you only got the overview of what Joshua wanted to tell us in that download. He knew we would eventually look at the complete logs.” Benny tapped on a few more keys and punched up a series of transmission logs. “But he was in contact with the captain of the Eos. It seems that it was pulled through the same unstable wormhole that the Astraeus had gone through. Except that instead of crashing into the Moon, it crash-landed on Earth.”
“Jesus,
are you sure?”
“The logs confirm that much,” said Benny. “And as to where, I reran some diagnostics on the energy pulse that came from the Moon, and there it was. A major electrical surge concentrated on one fixed point on the globe.”
“How come no one else found it?” asked Donovan.
“No one else was looking for it. Once the word got out about the Ocean of Storms, anomalies on Earth seemed positively Victorian.”
“I’m confused,” admitted Donovan. “Are you saying the EM pulse powered up this second ship?”
“I think it was accidental. Both ships were made from the same technology. My guess is that when the pulse arrived it simply recharged whatever circuits and gizmos this one had on her.”
“So where is it?”
Benny hit a few more keys, then sat back, cracking his knuckles. “Tanzania,” he said. “In East Africa.”
At that moment, the bathroom door opened and Zell stepped out, freshly showered. He was clad in a terry cloth robe and clutching a tumbler of scotch.
“Pack your bags, Elias. We’re taking a trip,” said Donovan.
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