Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  Apparently, the shallow coastal waters are full of “whales”. The low-orbit robots inform us that the seas are heavily populated with these and similar creatures. According to the scanners, they give off heat and thus are warm-blooded. They are uniformly white. Marine biologists conjecture that they are calving at this season, and may usually, throughout most of their lives, live in the deeper waters of the oceans. Manned oceanography teams begin their research next month when the shuttles will offload mini-subs on the north coast.

  Day 65:

  Due to the loss of one staff member to snake bite, all teams must now wear fang-proof protective apparel and carry venom antidote with them whenever they venture beyond the compound. I wish them good luck, because antidotes are not infallible.

  The unfortunate soldier was buried at a specially designated cemetery site on the rise of ground at the edge of the compound, beside the flag. He was given full military honors, recorded music, a stirring speech by the Captain, and suitably mournful words by Skinner. Marking the grave is an aluminum obelisk, surmounted by a blue orb on which is inscribed the soldier’s name.

  Stron was interred the following day, with the same honors. I was not permitted to attend physically, despite the fact that he was a close friend. The entire astronomy team was shuttled down for it, as well as numerous other star performers. I watched the ceremony on my max. I shut the thing off when Skinner began to recite his artificially grieving and genuinely self-serving eulogy.

  To console myself, I opened Stron’s book on quasars, the copy he’d left to me before he died. Since his death, I haven’t had the heart to open it. To my surprise, I found a personalized inscription penned in the flyleaf:

  To Neil, fellow voyageur,

  Whoever looks deeply into the cosmos, and continues to look, cannot rest content with what he observes through the telescope. If he persists with courage and honesty, he will ask himself about the meaning and end to which the whole of creation is oriented. Once one veil is removed and our gaze penetrates deeper into “space”, we are faced with intellectual challenges and metaphysical ones.

  Time is not omnipotent. Time is not our god. The Grand Theorists of Stultifera Navis assert that, given enough time, anything is possible—anything! In a world lousy with epistemologists, no one thinks to ask how we know that time is endless.

  Call me a throwback, if you wish.

  Fraternally,

  Strachan McKie

  “Stron, Stron”, I murmured to myself, closing the book. “Where are you now?”

  Day 70:

  Metaphysical? Time is not our god? What’s that supposed to mean? His message to me reveals an aspect of the man that I hadn’t expected, despite the fact that in his preface to his book on quasars he refers to “intelligent design” and the “theory of evolution”, both of which are still politically charged expressions. Even so, in the main text, he never reveals where he stands on the matter. I find it difficult to believe that Stron was a “Creationist”. He was quirky enough to enjoy playing around the fringes of the Flat Earth Society, just for fun, just for its shock value. I think he may have been telling me to look further and deeper than (he presumes) I usually look. Judgmental right to the end, he was. Still, it’s hard to dismiss the questions posed by a genius.

  There is so much to be learned from the seemingly limitless forms of life we have found that it would be easy to overlook the implications of context, that is, the universal patterns. First of all, there is life here. Why life? Why not just a periodic table of elements, as is the case with most of the planets discovered by man? Unmanned probes to the other seventeen planets of AC-A have sent back images that demonstrate there is no teeming life on any of them. However, on the two planets closest to Nova (AC-A-6, one step nearer to the sun, and AC-A-8, one step farther from it), landing modules obtained dust and rock samples that contained primitive “nuclei-bearing eukaryotes”, which Maria Kempton tells me are a form of life. Atmospheres on the seventeen are inhospitable to higher forms of life.

  Second, it is phenomenal that Nova has produced organic life with ranks identical to Earth’s—kingdom, phylum, class, genus, species, etc. As on Earth, there is an astonishing diversity of specific living organisms, yet they are all within distinct categories, either plants, fish, reptiles, birds, mammals, fungi, or bacteria. Without exception, the properties common to them are their carbon- and water-based cellular composition, with complex organization and inheritable genetic codes.

  I say phenomenal, as in a phenomenon according to the strict meaning of this term. Yet it is undeniable that behind each and every dimension of phenomena there is order, coded or otherwise. Stron seems to consider (at least as a possibility) a universal or meta-universal Designer using a common “language”. I prefer to stretch myself further, to comprehend a necessity entirely based in atomic determination. Totally outside my field, of course, but I can speculate.

  Day 75:

  The soldier guys have set up a basketball court. First, they mowed the entire compound, then they worked for days grading a level spot into a regulation court, sprayed it with fast-set syntho concrete, set up poles with basket hoops, and without further delay threw themselves into the game. Some of the younger science guys have joined in. I’ve been watching hours of the stuff, wishing I could be down there.

  Day 76

  A mini golf course has been made. A mini electric golf cart whirrs around it. A mini Trillionaire putters away on it.

  Ay caramba!

  Day 85:

  More exotic creatures on the big screen:

  Hundreds of butterfly species have been captured and categorized, though there must be many more kinds, since several new ones are found each day. Some are very tiny and luminescent at night, like fireflies, though they display a range of colors, not just our home planet’s pale green neon. Some flash off and on, others are constant. Generally, the majority of butterfly species are two to three times larger than Earth’s common ones, such as the monarch. Others, though few by comparison, are three and more feet from wing tip to wing tip. One bizarre species has a tiny head and beak that looks disturbingly like a hummingbird’s—though it is without doubt a kind of insect. Its head is ruby red, its wings magenta with black edges.

  Very common is a bird like a turkey in appearance and habits. It has a call that’s different from ours (raucous as a crow’s), and it can fly short distances on its huge wings. Earthlings are slaughtering them in great numbers, and for the first time ever, we are served real meat in the cafeterias. I am told it is quite tasty, though not quite like turkey or chicken; more the flavor of a free-range ostrich that’s been too greedy in a cabbage patch. Easy to kill, they gaze at you calmly as you walk up to them while they’re pecking in the grasslands, gorging seeds even as they are hit over the head with a stick; they look momentarily surprised then drop dead without a quarrel.

  There is a benign lizard north of here in the warmer zones, as large as a komodo dragon, slow moving, with five-fingered “hands” and opposable thumbs. It climbs trees at snail pace and eats mainly the antlike insects that swarm the branches. It also has chameleon characteristics. Put any color beside it, and suddenly its skin looks as if someone threw a bucket of garish paint over it. Zoologists have tried using artificial color swatches designed by the computers, and to these the chameleon skin swiftly adapts (though a bit slower than its instantaneous response to colors native to its surroundings). It matches the artificial colors exactly within a few seconds, hues that we haven’t yet found on this planet. What on earth is happening at the cellular level, or molecular level, is anyone’s guess. The labs are busy night and day on this one. Some vivisection experiments are underway, I hear. Not very “green” behavior, if you ask me. However, the pursuit of knowledge tends to sweep aside the objections, since knowledge is ever the deity to which sentiment must pay obeisance.

  There have been some outraged cafeteria discussions, which I picked up from nearby tables. I overheard one lab person telling a fr
iend that the “chameleon” screams like a human baby when it is subjected to the scalpel—even under anesthetic.

  The “giraffes” continue to fascinate the zoologists, since they have a more complex social organization than other mammals we have so far found. One team isolated a very young one on the edge of a “tribal” group, intending to sedate it and bring it back to the base camp. When the dart brought it down, it emitted a single alarmed squeak. Without warning, the thirty or forty larger animals broke into a gallop and came to the rescue, surrounding the afflicted one. They did not attack the scientists, who had backed off, some at a run. Instead, the animals commenced a rapid high-step pounding of the earth all around the victim, flattening the grass, chopping it into fibers, as if seeking to destroy invisible predators with their hooves. One scientist suggests that this is behavioral adaptation as protection against snakes. Needless to say, the team beat a hasty retreat, leaving the young one asleep. Its two parents stood over it trumpeting from their long necks, a sound we hadn’t heard until now, very different from their usual low-pitched bovine noises. Even as the AEC got airborne, the team saw dozens more of the creatures converging from all directions.

  Day 86:

  A knock at my door late in the evening. There in the hallway stood a man, looking at me with a mixture of worry and uncertainty.

  “Can I come in?” he mumbled, showing me the sheet of paper that my fellows and I had distributed a couple years ago.

  “Let’s go for a walk”, I said. We headed toward the nearest staircase, went down to Concourse C, and along it until we found an art alcove. It was one I hadn’t visited before. Or maybe the exhibit had been changed. I don’t pay much attention to that sort of thing. A quick glance at the “art” within convinced me that this was an excellent place to talk, since it was a hologram sound-and-light display by someone unavoidably famous named “Artanarchist” who had lived in the early twenty-first century. It was noisy and distracting, but good cover.

  “Do you remember me?” my visitor began.

  “Sorry, I don’t.”

  “Remember the day you were handing these out at the maintenance elevators? I told you that I recognized the picture as Dave Ayne’s. At the time, I believed he’d been transferred to Propulsion.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember you now.”

  “At first, I thought it was a case of bureaucratic mix-up.”

  “Bureaucratic mix-up? But they said your friend didn’t exist—never had existed.”

  “I know, but I felt it must’ve been a case of misspelled names—you know, some kind of dumb clerical thing. I figured DSI’d solve the problem. I didn’t waste any more time on it. Figured I’d bump into Dave at the fish’n’chips place one of these days, so I just put it out of my mind.”

  “After all, the accuser was out of his mind, right?”

  “Uh, right. I’m not so sure now. I’m kind of certain you aren’t crazy, doctor, and I have this feeling that something not good has happened.”

  “Any proof?”

  “No, but it’s how long since Dave was transferred? It’s gotta be at least two years now. I sorta forgot about him, and I feel bad about that. The thing is, lately it hit me that we haven’t crossed paths once in all that time—not once—and we used to see each other fairly often outside of working hours, usually at the Irish pub or the Brit’s fish’n’chips place. And then there’s the computer files. My max and the main computer say he wasn’t with us—ever.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as rather odd?”

  “Yeah, it’s weird. So I’ve been asking myself where the hell he got to. I did some checking on the quiet with the maintenance people who work in Propulsion, the cleaning people, I mean. They all say the same thing. He never showed up. They never heard of Dave, and they say no one was transferred into their department as far as anyone knows. And P and M are sealed off from each other for safety reasons. Of course, sometimes duty rosters and personnel schedules can get messed up, and a name could slip through the cracks, so maybe he got transferred to another place on the ship. The Kosmos is pretty big.”

  “But this doesn’t explain why you haven’t bumped into him. Do you know where he lived?”

  “His room number you mean? No, we weren’t close friends, just working buddies. But then most of us are like that down in M.”

  “Do you know if anyone else was close to him, a girlfriend maybe?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not saying he didn’t have a girl, but I didn’t see it. He was the kind of guy who kept to himself mostly, liked to read his book on lunch break, went straight home at the end of shift. Nice guy, but never said much. You know, the sort who doesn’t get invited to parties—not that we can have much of a party in our rooms. A four-people party ain’t no party.”

  “How did you find my private room number?”

  “I followed you home one day. Saw you in the cafeteria and trailed you back here.”

  “Why didn’t you just stop me in the hallway and talk to me?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. Maybe I had a feeling it wouldn’t be a smart move.”

  “Well, you’re right about that.”

  He glanced nervously around the alcove.

  “I think places like this are safe”, I said. “What’s your name?”

  He told me (I won’t write it here).

  “So, what do we do?” he asked.

  “I ran out of ideas a long time ago.”

  “Maybe he had an accident, and the authorities aren’t broadcasting it because they don’t want to upset people.”

  “I can assure you that the authorities definitely do not want to upset people.”

  “But I don’t get why they’d erase his records. Are they hiding something?”

  “Oh, yes, they’re hiding something. And I think it’ll stay hidden. DSI knows that most people avoid getting upset unless they feel personally endangered. All the tracks have been covered, and we have no way of finding out what really happened. My advice to you is, stay calm and look for opportunities to discuss this with people you trust. But don’t tell anyone you’ve had a chat with me—not anyone.”

  He peeked out the alcove entrance and scanned the corridor. “Okay. I gotta go.”

  Later, I went to the library on Concourse A and browsed a few sites that listed Kosmos personnel. I checked some of the departments, a slow roll through hundreds of faces and names without pausing at any, and then went to the list of maintenance people. Here too I casually scrolled down the page, and when I spotted my visitor I didn’t change my pace. My eyes took in the fact that his face matched the name and employment position he had told me. I kept going to the end, then switched to Medical and scrolled down it. This way, no monitors would register that I had paused over the man I had just spoken with. If he was legitimate, then no one would take a second look at him. If he was a DSI scout, then I was sunk anyway.

  Day 91:

  We have been here three months now. I’m weary of idleness. At times, I feel I will go insane from frustrated yearnings to experience what every other person on this barge is now experiencing, or soon will be. I suppose there is some compensation in my respiratory system. The ship’s oxygen generators have been recalibrated to increase the onboard O2 and humidity to match the planet’s. This, I presume, helps relieve the adjustment discomfort of people who are back and forth between Base-main and the Kosmos. It’s also a very welcome change for those who don’t leave the ship often—or at all. I seem to have more energy these days, and generally, when I’m not feeling frustrated, my mood is showing some improvement. The shuttles are constantly descending and ascending, day and night. The base has been enlarged to twice its earlier size, double the living space. There are now forty “pods” with ten private rooms in each. At any given time, about four hundred people can be in residence there. The on-ground labs are growing in number as well. According to the media presentations, the Kosmos holds are continually being stocked with Nova’s animal and plant life, as well as tons of mine
ral samples. We are told that geologists have found rich deposits of precious metals in the mountains and staggering oil reserves beneath the surface. New and exotic chemical compounds have also been discovered, and samples obtained for bringing back to Earth. Even so, a year will not be enough time to fill the holds to capacity.

  At our usual study session and bistro drink this evening, I asked Dariush if he knows when he will be able to land on Nova. He sighed and told me that the archaeologists and language people now have bottom position in the scientific hierarchy, since there still is no indication of native sapient beings on the planet. However, all scientists (in fact everyone on board except me) will be able to land at some point. His week at Base-main is scheduled for next month, unless it is bumped by new discoveries that other science teams may make. When he does finally touch ground, it will be as a tourist.

  He seemed patient enough about the matter, but I could tell he was low in spirits.

  Day 92:

  Placebo at the clinic as usual today. Pia handed me a note, and said aloud, “Here’s a list of some good exercises for your leg muscles, Dr. Hoyos. Please consider doing them.”

  “All right”, I murmured.

  Back in my room, I read the sheet of paper without interest, then noticed that penciled on the margin was the following:

  Wedding soon. Will you come?

  Will I come? Whaaaat! I wouldn’t miss it for the world—for two worlds actually.

  Day 93:

  I went swimming last night, hoping to see Paul. He was there with another man about his age, both of them trying to outdo each other in laps. I dabbled my toes at the edge while they thrashed up the water. Later, there was a scant minute to speak together clandestinely.