"We should find that out."
Behind her apprehension, Jamie felt a tingle of excitement lurking. She had once dreamed of being an astronaut, and the question of space travel in her new body had been lingering in the back of her mind.
"Let's say we get someone there," said Secretary Bridger, "and they spot an alien spacecraft. What then? Rush back here to tell us about it? Take pictures? Attempt to contact it?" He paused. "Or destroy it?"
"That might be a bit precipitous, General. Wouldn't want an interstellar war on our hands."
"Especially since we aren't an interstellar civilization as of yet," John Ellenberg added.
"But we do have people who could conceivable defeat them," said Bridger. "That appears to be what the Object was warning us about and why it spread the nanovirus."
"Your thoughts, Paul?"
The Defense Secretary stirred from his blind gaze into space. "The craft or creature pictured in the Object represents in my opinion a vastly greater threat to our country and the world than our squabbles among ourselves. I think we should get someone up there as soon as possible. For all we know, that's what the Object intended when it gave people space flight capabilities. And if it comes down to a fight, better out there than here."
"Agreed. Let's develop a superhero space program." President Morgan laughed under his breath. "Words I never thought I'd hear myself say."
THEY GATHERED on a hilltop over the Advanced Research Complex/DARE headquarters in the late afternoon. The full moon hung like a pockmarked white softball in the blue fall sky. It was one of those moons that Jamie had often felt she could reach up and touch, and today she just might.
Jay Utrecht, Zachary, and two NASA scientists stood nearby, bracketed by a select group from Team One: Tildie, Jeremy, Belinda, Barry Apple, Terry Mayes, and – swallowing her distaste – Hulk Horner. A deadly bodyguard combination in case someone was foolish enough to attack them while the experiment was in progress. No one saw much chance of that, but General Bridger had classified it as an operation that rated full protection. Terry was there for medical backup in case something went wrong.
Jamie was up first, on her insistence. She was confident she would survive even if she failed to reach her goal. The scientists sat with their laptops directly linked to all the latest NASA telemetry, though one of them had joked "It's not exactly rocket science" when it came to her maiden journey. As far as they could see, it was a "point and shoot" operation, and they weren't sure they could add anything to it. All they could do was tell her the current distance and relative speed of the moon, but no data or math equations would help her keep her eyes on the target and generate the speed necessary to overtake it.
Nor would any in-flight instructions, since no one wanted to spend the time figuring out how to rig up a communication link between her and NASA/DARE. They settled for powerful, state-of-the-art transponders strapped to both her and Telly's backs. At least "Mission Control" would know where they were, with any luck. Both would also be carrying Truesense Mast cameras – the same imaging system used on the Mars Rovers.
Zachary reached out and held her hand. No one showed any reaction – not even a smirk from Hulk. Their relationship was old news now.
"Ready?" Zachary asked, giving her hand a squeeze which she ever-so gently returned. She knew the calculus of their bodies now.
"See you soon," she said.
Jamie lifted off with the speed of a helium balloon at first, picking up velocity as she rose. When she hit the upper atmosphere it was on. She reached out to the moon and imagined herself pulling it to her. The sphere enlarged so fast that for a terrified moment she thought she might actually be pulling it down on them. But of course that was impossible, even for her. Wasn't it?
But no, a glance back in the ionosphere showed the Earth retreating behind her. No resistance and no discomfort. A slight zing that she thought might be the inner Van Allen belt. The barriers her dad was confident would've prevented the Apollo Missions. That might be a problem for her, except they'd tested her resistance to radiation – in tiny gradations and with extreme caution, of course, and in far greater than Van Allen levels – without effect. The same general result with any conventional force they'd tested against her.
It was hard if not impossible to accurately judge her speed, but by the rapid approach of the moon she guessed she was traveling in excess of two hundred thousand miles per hour. Unless this was all a dream or illusion, which wouldn't have surprised her.
The moon continued to swell at a daunting speed. Jamie was tempted to slow down, but screw it. She could slow down any time she wanted.
The moon hung in magnificent silence before her. This silence seemed to magnify its majesty. The lack of sound was far beyond tomb-like: it was a palpable thing, something that she could've sworn made a noise of its own. Maybe if she focused her ears she could hear something – the music of the spheres?
Jamie unstrapped her high-tech camera and started filming. This is happening. It's really happening. She slowed, circling the moon at maybe a few thousand mph. It was like every fantastic flying dream she'd ever had taken out to the tenth power. She zoomed in her vision, searching where she believed the Apollo Missions had landed, but it was a big haystack and small needles, and she saw nothing. Then she rounded the dark side of the moon.
There were structures on the moon.
That bald fact hit her harder than any physical blow she'd experienced since her change. It was impossible to believe, yet impossible to deny: tall, crystalline structures, dark monolithic projections, building complexes... Jamie would've believed they were illusions but her zoom-in eyes could make out the inescapable details, even in the near-blackness. She couldn't say what the structures were for or what they were made of, but there was no way they could be natural. Nature not only abhorred straight lines but also towering, transparent, multi-chambered structures.
Camera whirring soundlessly on video mode, capturing everything she was seeing, Jamie dropped down to the crystalline cathedral – what the structure reminded her of - a tall, creepy silhouette jutting up in the darkness. She ran her free hand along one wall – so smooth it was as if high-grade lubricant had been polished into it. Like the Object. She peered into the transparent structure and made out multiple empty rooms or compartments of various sizes like bee catacombs stacked onto and into each other.
She tapped the wall. The structure hummed. Not a hum she could hear, but a vibration like a tuning fork against her palm that might've had a pitch if there were air. She tapped the wall again, harder. Splinters branched out from her hand. The vibration intensified, and the cracks began retreating – but not quite restoring the dent, as if the wall had run out of energy. She backed off, feeling as if she had desecrated an ancient monument.
Jamie flew over to a nearby building – square structures of various sizes mounted on top of each other. Though it seemed clearly to be a building, she couldn't recall ever seeing one that resembled it. It was both alien and familiar. She found what appeared to be an entrance – a rectangle with seams along its edges but no visible handle. Or maybe the dark square in its center was an entry device? She touched it. No response.
Was this the alien presence they were trying to detect? A presence that was responsible for the satellite outages? She doubted it. Her instincts, for whatever they were worth, were telling her that what she was seeing was ancient. And wasn't this pretty much exactly what her dad and his conspiracy friends claimed was here? Ancient alien buildings and artifacts? If her instincts and her dad were right, this wasn't the threat she was looking for.
And the people who sent me up here would know about them. Which might've explained why she'd been asked to sign the non-disclosure agreement saying she would reveal nothing of what she might see in her flight.
Whatever the case, no way was she leaving without seeing what was inside. If someone objected, she could say no one had told her not to investigate alien buildings. If the aliens objected, well...what c
an they expect building stuff in our backyard? But she doubted the builders of these structures were around to object.
Jamie willed the door open. She felt an instant of resistance – this was a magnitude stronger than any ordinary door – but then it blew inward. She gazed into pitch blackness. Too bad I didn't bring a flashlight. It dawned on her that the lack of light was no minor impediment. Without it she might as well not bother. She could see nothing.
Then she remembered basic physics – and her own experience: force against mass creates heat which emits light. She wasn't sure how well it would work, but she could definitely create light, just as she had while making diamonds and squeezing metal bars on Earth. But more recently, on behest of her DARE testers, she'd experimented with heating objects telekinetically – learning she could do that with devastating if not yet quite controllable force. That could work well for her here.
She felt along the entranceway to a section of wall. Stepping back from it, she willed it to heat. In the lab, a sheet of thick steel had mildly resisted her feverish thoughts, requiring a bit of concentration before starting to glow and then melt. Not surprisingly, this wall resisted her mental suggestion much more. She focused harder. A small glowing circle formed and slowly started to expand. Jamie smiled and put a bit more "heat" into her thoughts. The glowing circle expanded and grew brighter, like a giant, flat incandescent bulb.
Jamie added more glowing walls, and a stadium-sized room with a hundred-meter ceiling surrendered shadow by shadow to the light. The room was, as far as she could see, completely empty. Not only empty, but preternaturally clean, as if freshly mopped and scrubbed just after moving day. She took a moment to pan her camera around the chamber before flying to the far end, heating its wall to incandescence and blowing out another door.
Which led to another huge, empty room. But as she fired up the walls, she spotted what appeared to be a series of control panels running along the far end. Up close, she couldn't see any handles or knobs or buttons, just different patches of color.
Jamie had the sense of being on an archeology expedition – but on a different world where almost nothing she discovered had a known import. She could be inspecting bones that were really the inner workings of some giant computer. About all she was sure of was that this was a building. Its purpose would be determined by better minds than hers. Assuming those minds didn't already know.
But I'm not supposed to be on an archeology mission, she reminded herself. This was supposed to be a test flight. If she gave in to her curiosity, Zachary and the other people on the hill would be in for one long, cold night. She could come back here anytime in a matter of minutes – which she certainly planned to do soon – but for now it was time to complete her assigned mission. She didn't want to worry anyone, and she was looking forward to a quiet evening of bending poor Zachary's ear about what she'd seen.
She ascended into space filled with wonder, for the first time feeling good about her new powers. Better than good. She saw a grand purpose in having them. The universe beckoned like a liberation, to borrow Einstein's words. She could boldly go where no woman or man had gone before! One small flight for a woman, one giant journey for womankind. She wondered how many other quotes she could steal. The discoverer of new worlds and new civilizations. It was mind-blowing. Or maybe she was suffering from space-giddiness?
She dropped back down on her boyfriend and the others with a quiet canary-eating smile she might've stolen from President Morgan. But then maybe what she'd seen had something to do with his smile during their last meeting?
Zachary rushed up to her and they did their soft but impassioned embrace thing while everyone looked on with held-breath expressions.
"What happened?" Zach asked. "You weren’t even gone an hour. Couldn't get there?"
"Got there and back." She grinned. "And yes, in the immortal words of Jim Lovell, there is a Santa Claus."
"I always wondered what he meant by that," said Zach, giving her an uncertain smile. "Now I'm wondering what you mean."
Jamie glanced at the others. Now what had her non-disclosure document said? She couldn't disclose anything she saw to people below a "Q" security clearance. Did these people, including the NASA scientists, qualify? She had no idea, but she was going to guess yes. Somehow she doubted the government was going to prosecute her over it.
"I mean," she said, now grinning, "we are definitely not alone. I found alien structures on the dark side of the moon! I can't believe my dad was actually right about that!"
The response wasn't quite what she'd expected. They stared at her and each other as if they weren't sure she wasn't joking.
"No joke," she assured them. "I saw alien buildings. And video-recorded them."
"And Santa Claus is living in them?" Tildie ventured in a shocked little girl's voice. Then she laughed at Jamie's scowling face. "So you're serious?"
"Completely serious." She faced the NASA scientists, who seemed as surprised as everyone else. "You didn't know?"
They exchanged looks and shook their heads.
"You're sure they weren't natural formations?" asked Walt Jennings, a lean guy about her age with a stringy blond comb-over that would've been Donald Trump's worst nightmare.
"If those were natural formations, then so is the Empire State Building."
"They were never saying anything about that," said Walt's compatriot, Reyansh Chambal, whose Indian accent people mercilessly imitated. "I thought it was just another stupid internet conspiracy theory."
"So did I." Jamie made a silent note to apologize to her father for all the scorn she'd heaped on his crazy beliefs over the years. Not to say some of them weren't crazy.
"Maybe we weren't supposed to know about it?" Walt was starting to look worried.
"I'm sure it will be fine," said Zach. "Everyone on this planet already knows that aliens exist." He faced Jamie. "Any indication they had something to do with the Object?"
"No. Other than that their construction materials were smooth and exceptionally strong. Not as strong as the Object, though."
"I want to see this." Jay stepped up, breathing hard, as if readying himself to launch. "I need to see it!"
"Fine," said Zach, "but take it slow. We don't know how a vacuum or intense radiation will affect your teleportation. Stay in phantom mode, needless to say. Even a momentary exposure could be enough to injure you."
"I'll try to resist my urge to expose myself to a vacuum."
Zach gave him a thin smile. "Okay. And please don't linger too long. We don't want to sit out here all night worrying about you."
"Shouldn't take more than a few minutes."
Jay dematerialized. They all stood staring up at the moon as if imagining his progress. An owl hooted.
"You flyers are so damn lucky," grumbled Hulk Horner. "I always wanted to be a fucking astronaut."
"You could always take a flying leap," Tildie suggested. "You might end up in space like Jamie did trying to dunk a basketball."
"How about I throw you into space instead?"
"Nope. Space is creepy. Especially when your eyeballs burst."
"That probably wouldn't happen," Zach chuckled. "You're about five times stronger and tougher than you were, if I remember your personal measurements. More than enough to hold together in a vacuum."
"Ah, shucks. You remember my personal measurements? I feel flattered."
"With you that's easy," Horner snickered. "12-18-23, the same as my high school locker combination."
"I'm surprised you graduated high school."
Horner rolled smoothly to his feet. Tilda faced him.
"Cut it out, you two," Jamie snapped. "That's a freaking order."
Horner looked like he was going to say something, but thought better of it under her stern stare. He paced away, muttering to himself.
Jamie and the others resumed gazing at the heavens.
JAY WAS in trouble. Most of the trip to the moon had gone okay, about as breathtakingly fast as he'd expected, b
ut as he circled around to the dark side of the Moon, eager to explore the same buildings as Jamie, he noticed a strange drag, for lack of a better word. Then his containment field seemed to fizzle. Something was going horribly wrong. Flashing waves of color around him made him think his Phantom Zone was short-circuiting.
He about-faced, hoping to teleport back to Earth, but instead found himself plummeting to the pockmarked surface of the moon. He retained some control of the descent – enough to propel him to the bright side where his transponder could connect with Earth if it came to that. Though it was hard to imagine how it would from within what the DARE physicists were calling N-Space (or "No Space"). And if he left N-Space, knowing where he was wouldn't help him.
The short-circuiting waned, but he couldn't manage much motion, not to mention teleporting off the small world. He noted that he was feeling heat, probably from the surface of the moon. Feeling anything while in his phantom phase could not be a good thing.
Normally, this would be the biggest moment of his life so far. How many people had walked on another planet? But it was hard to appreciate the austere beauty of the moonscape and the monumental majesty of the moment when your protective shield appeared to be disintegrating around you.
Jay wasn't feeling optimistic. His theory for what was happening didn't lend itself to optimism: his physical energy was simply inadequate to fuel long trips. It wasn't the rigors of space, not heat or cold or radiation or vacuum – though he supposed they might play into it – but simple energy drain. Unlike Jamie and others with stronger constitutions who got their energy from the sun or wherever and didn't need to eat or breathe or perform other bodily functions, he still needed to do those things. And that, he guessed, would prove to be his downfall.
Jay looked up at Earth. It was much larger than he'd expected, much larger than any of the famous photographs he'd seen taken from the moon, and he could actually see it spinning, which was freakily beautiful.
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