“But who flew this shuttle back to the Kosmos?”
“Vladimir. You see, he was unharmed. When his shuttle fell into the sea, the hatch had been open, though he was able to close it with his controls in the pilot’s cabin, leaving the craft partly submerged. But he was trapped in an air pocket in the cabin, and the command controls became inoperative. He could not open the cabin door. Jan used his remote to open the hatch, and then he swam inside the ship and opened the pilot’s door. A moment longer, and they would both have been pulled to the bottom and drowned.”
“Jan’s badly burned. It looks like radiation burn.”
“It must be. He never came close to the blast, not even to the secondary fires far out from it. He went around the rim of the whole continent, stopping at every base that still existed. He saved many people, though it now looks as if he and they were exposed to radiation.”
“You say you went to N-i on another shuttle.”
“Yes, I transferred to this one in order to accompany the survivors. The other shuttle went back south to the geology base, the only station Jan hadn’t checked. I hope they have got away.”
“I hear they’ll soon be lifting off, or maybe already have.”
“On the return flight, Jan collapsed, and the symptoms of burn appeared. His sufferings are only beginning, Neil. I must go to be with him.”
“Yes, of course.”
I followed Dariush as far as the medical clinic, where we met the Captain leaving.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
“Very bad”, he said quietly. “Fr. Ibrahim, I suggest you see the people in the clinic. Some are calling for you. Dr. Hoyos, you are welcome to join us on KC deck. I think Pia would appreciate your presence.”
We boarded the flight staff elevator, and in the KC lobby, we parted. Several executive officers were waiting for him there, crowding him with requests for instructions. He hurried forward to the command center, and I went in the other direction, toward Pia and Paul’s apartment.
I found Pia sitting alone on the sofa with the baby sleeping beside her, the tiny face serene, the little hands raised as if in surrender. The sleep of total trust. Only moments before, I had seen Jan in the same position, his hands reaching upward, not in surrender but beseeching relief from intolerable suffering.
Pia looked up as I entered the room.
“Dariush is alive”, I said. “He’s on board.”
I sat down in a chair opposite and told her what I knew. “Thank God”, she breathed. “Thank God.”
“Where’s Paul?”
“He’s gone forward to the command center.”
For an hour, we remained in the silence of waiting, as if we floated in a zone without orientation, neither up nor down, forward nor backward. When the insistent cry of the baby grounded us at last, Pia nursed her. I tried to make small talk, straining to find hopeful things to say. But in the end, it was she who comforted me:
“We’ll get through this, Neil. We’re going home soon, and then this nightmare will be over. We’ll have many good things to remember.”
I couldn’t keep my eyes off Katherine Theresa. Her face and miniature hands were so beautiful, so completely dependent—a world reborn in that tiny form.
Paul returned and told us the latest developments.
“The Captain just addressed the ship”, he began. “The other shuttle crashed during take-off from geology base. No one survived. Now only Vladimir is pilot, and we have one shuttle safe with us. Everything we bring to this planet is gone.”
For a moment, I felt a pang of loss for my turquoise cube. Then I thought of Kitha-ré and Pho-rion, and lamented them too. I did not think of the missing Kosmos staff. Perhaps their deaths were still an abstraction, as if the shock wave of the detonation had not yet passed through me.
But Pia felt it. Paul and I maintained compartmentalization, our male brains enabling us to function in the midst of catastrophe. Were we to collapse in a state of horror or grief, it would help no one, least of all the dead. We needed to remain strong, to preserve order, to ensure the survival of the expedition.
“More than four hundred are missing”, Paul continued. “Maybe more will die from the radiation, those who have returned to us. We have lost most scientists, all but two pilots, and Jan is now very ill. All military are gone, some DSI, many maintenance people on mission bases, some cook, some doctor.”
“And Kosmos flight staff?” I asked.
“Most are safe. Few were on ground. All navigation people are here. We will go home. Soon, when robot surveys finish record of radioactivity and damage to C-1.”
“Is there any hope for more survivors?”
“There is a little. We have receive only two distress signals. Two subs in the northern sea were underwater when the blast wave pass. When they realize what is happening, they turn and go away from C-1. They have some damage from seismic turbulence in ocean, but nothing bad. They are together near shore of C-2, five people, marine biologists. They stay inside subs because of fall-out.”
I suddenly thought about Maria Kempton. I asked if they knew where she had been when the bomb went off. Had they heard from her?
“She’s in her room”, Pia said. “She’s fine, though shaken like the rest of us.”
“Volodya goes down to C-2 now”, said Paul. “Is dangerous but he will bring biologist back.”
I could see that they needed to be alone for a while. I said goodbye and returned to my own room.
Though I wasn’t hungry, I knew I should eat. Around the usual suppertime, I wandered into the deck-B cafeteria and came upon kitchen staff sitting at the tables, talking quietly among themselves. Some sipped from cups of coffee, a few openly smoked cigarettes. Where had the tobacco come from? Had it been smuggled from Earth, or had it been grown on Nova? They glanced at me then looked away. Some were red-eyed, some looked angry; most were still stunned. One responsible cook pointed to the row of steaming containers at the food counter. I served myself, sat down alone, and forced myself to consume whatever it was.
Throughout the evening, I watched the satellite view of the planet on the panorama screen. People wandered in and out of the hall, shook their heads, covered their mouths with a hand, stifled their sobs, left for elsewhere.
The high winds generated by the blast were still raging, but I could see that a good deal of airborne debris was falling into the ocean in the west. The atmosphere above C-1 was still too dense to make out ground details. When sunset in that hemisphere darkened the continent, it was clear that countless fires still burned beneath the clouds of smoke. I wondered if all the forests would be gone by morning.
Restless, I went down to PHM to see if Vladimir’s shuttle had returned to port. It was there. A flight technician told me the pilot had brought the biologists back safely. I returned to my room and fell into an uneasy sleep.
*
The next day, I tracked down Maria Kempton and returned her Bible to her without comment. She was stressed and distracted, and I was glad she didn’t ask me if I’d read it. If she had, I might not have been able to restrain my bleak thoughts about life, providence, and the fate of the universe.
I returned to my room and flipped through Xue’s Chinese edition, examining annotations he had penned neatly in the margins, his underlined passages, and some inserted notes, all in Chinese script, as alien to me as the temple codices. It struck me how closely the letters resembled cuneiform. Had his people come from one of the sons of Noah? I closed the book and put it onto my shelf beside the deer and the slide rule, realizing they were no longer on loan. They were mine, and I didn’t know what to do with them.
*
Three days later, a message from the Captain was hand-delivered to me at my room. Maybe the courier had been chosen because he was Hispanic like me. It was the young waiter who had served our table in the Captain’s dining room, weeks ago. I had written my address on a table napkin for him, not seriously expecting that he would ever turn up at my mountain cabin.
He seemed happy to see me, like a long-lost cousin. Who knows, maybe he was a long-lost cousin, if you traced us both back to the Aztecs and the Conquistadores.
I asked him how he was coping with it all.
“I have lost friends”, he said, his face falling, tears in his eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
“You lost friends too, Señor Hoyos. I am sorry for this.”
What could one say? We were sorry. Everyone was sorry. To change the subject, I asked him if he was regular KC staff or just borrowed from the kitchens on lower decks.
“I was an ensign in the navy”, he replied. “Then I was seconded to space fleet and chosen for the voyage.”
He left and I read the message, an invitation to dine that evening with the Captain.
It was a downcast group of people who met in his private quarters. The Captain, the Commander, Vladimir, a few other flight staff, Pia and Paul and the baby, Dariush, a nuclear physicist named Barton, and myself.
Barton, it turned out, had planned to be in the temple on the day of the explosion, but at the last moment, he had decided to remain on the Kosmos. I could see well enough that he was a taciturn, cautious kind of man, which was probably why he had held back that day. British, fortyish, and afflicted with classic academic myopia, he told us that he had considered it unwise to clump all the nuclear physicists in a single room in proximity to a highly unpredictable experiment. He had been influenced to some extent, I now learned, by conversations with Xue.
As we ate a meal of simple vegetables and nova-salmon (the last we would probably eat), he gave an account of the current condition on the planet’s surface.
“Low-orbit scans have been tracing the spread of radiation. Significantly, it is declining sharply as it moves westward over the sea, and has fallen to less than 3% strength as it touches C-2. The fall-out is heavier material than we first thought; it and dust are descending by gravity or being precipitated out in the tremendous storms caused by the blast. This is extraordinary good news, to say the least.”
No one around the table responded. It was hard to think of anything post-blast as extraordinary good news.
“What’s the condition of the epicenter?” I asked.
“It’s certainly the worst event in recorded history. The crater is more than thirty kilometers in diameter, and unmanned probes sent into it tell us that it’s basically a shallow bowl of fused glass—green and purple glass. The temple mountain is gone, and all the nearby mountains have changed shape as a result of combined blast, earthquakes, and avalanches. The pass through the western mountains is twice as wide now and nothing remains of anything on the temple side of the range. The land everywhere is absolutely barren. It’s like a moonscape. Only on the outer rim of the continent are there any remnant forests—however, these are no more than blackened stumps. A few fires are still burning.”
“What was radioactivity at the epicenter?” asked the Captain.
Barton gave a figure. “Surprisingly low after four days”, he said. “I simply cannot imagine what fuel they were using, or how, precisely, it was brought to the state of chain reaction. This is unknown physics, but in my estimation it would have been a smaller fission bomb driven into the mass of nuclear fuel which became the fusion bomb.”
“I agree”, I said. “That’s the only way it could have happened. You saw the two so-called reactors in the tail of the ship, I’m sure.”
“Yes. And I’m guessing the innocent blighter on top was the fission bomb. Even so, consider this, Hoyos: They may have found some elements not on our periodic table—which, according to our current state of knowledge, is absurd—or perhaps not—I don’t know. Now the larger ‘reactor’ was certainly immense, and if it contained only fissionable material, then it could have created an explosion larger than any mankind has made. And so it did. But this would not account for the colossal size and effects of the explosion. My guess is that the designers of the bomb had interred a much, much larger cache of fuel in a chamber beneath the ship, connected by a hidden channel or channels. Add to this the fact that there are significant seismic faults running into those mountains, and. . .”
“What’s happening with the seismic aftershocks?” I asked.
“Declining in number and magnitude. Lava flow from the three erupting volcanoes is decreasing. Two other unstable volcanoes on the closest continents are venting steam but exhibiting no immediate threat of massive eruption.”
He went on to say the tsunamis in the southern hemisphere had done some damage to coastal regions, but the seas had absorbed the waves and were nearly back to normal patterns. The planet was big and resilient—magnificent, actually. The other continents appeared to have suffered no great harm, and in ten years time, even C-1 would have regenerated its flora, possibly tree saplings. Perhaps some fauna had survived as well. In a hundred years, all that would remain as evidence of the blast would be the immense glass bowl, though it too would be slowly covered by wind-blown dust, soil runoff, and subsequent organic growth.
Barton had just concluded the above when a flight officer came into the room and addressed the Captain in a quiet voice. “Sir, Sobieski is dead.”
Vladimir half-rose from his chair and exclaimed in a stricken voice, “Jan!”
Dariush stood and excused himself, saying he would go to the clinic now.
Paul covered his eyes, and Pia put a hand on his arm. The Captain stood, speechless for the moment. Then, in a quiet voice, he too excused himself and left the room.
Soon after, we all went our separate ways.
Barton suggested we find a place to talk. We took the elevator down to deck D, the concourse on which he lived. He wanted another drink, he said, and I had no reason to object. We entered the Indian restaurant, the doors wide open and no sign of customers or serving staff inside. I took a seat at a table, and he went behind the counter to see what could be found in the way of alcohol—anything to numb our feelings. He brought back two cold beers.
“What a bloody disaster”, he snarled. “We’re in a hell of a mess. We have one shuttle left and only one pilot for it.”
“That’s more than enough for when we get back to Earth. Besides, the base in Africa will have other shuttles to come up and fetch us.”
“True”, he nodded. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound bitter.” Bitter? I wondered. What was his bitterness compared to mine? Mine was a vat of acid. He didn’t know yet. He hadn’t added it all up. He was sharing a drink with the man who had made it happen.
I knew this was false guilt, or half-false. I hadn’t made it happen. But there were a whole lot of people dead or dying because I had made it possible for them to come along on this great adventure. “Have you seen any DSI staff?” I asked. He scowled. “None so far. Hopefully they all got fried.” It was a harsh thing to say, wishing people dead. It matched my own emotions of the moment. How satisfying to see the bad guys shot, just the way it should be, just like a cheap western.
“You know,” Barton continued, oblivious to my thoughts, “Oppenheimer said it when he observed the first nuclear explosion, the bomb he helped make. As the fireball and mushroom cloud rose up into the sky over New Mexico, he quoted the Hindu scriptures.”
“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”, I said.
“That’s right. That’s the one.”
“It was from the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God.”
“What god was that, I wonder?” Barton snorted.
“It was Krishna”, I said, pointing to a blue-skinned deity in one of the wall paintings. “The supreme being in disguise, you see. He was quite a slaughterer, this supreme being.”
“Aren’t they all? One wonders which of them is the front-runner in the body-count department.”
“Oh, Krishna was right up there with the best of them. For example, he explained to a warrior named Arjuna, riding into battle on a chariot, why it was permissible for him to slaughter his grandfather, his teacher, and his other relatives. You see, when
Arjuna spotted his family among the enemy host, he got cold feet, dropped his bow, and refused to fight.”
“Decent of him.”
“Then Krishna the great lord of the universe gave him a stern lecture. ‘Arjuna,’ he said, ‘this isn’t worthy of a hero like you. Your duty is to fight. Those who have joined forces against us must perish. Attachment to friends and relatives should not stand in the way of your duty.’
“ ‘How can a man know his duty?’ asked Arjuna. And Krishna replied: ‘Don’t think of the results. Don’t say, ‘These people are yours, and others aren’t yours.’ You have to understand, my boy, that everyone who is born has to die. Justice is more important than people.’ And then the zeal to fight returned to Arjuna—he picked up his bow, and went forth to the battle.”
“Lovely”, said Barton sourly. “And where’s the justice down there on Mundus Novus?”
It was a good question. It was rhetorical, of course, but it needed to be asked, and indeed I asked it, though I kept my thoughts to myself. It struck me that people are always real and that Justice, by contrast, is a debatable topic. Justice, justice, so often reshaped by those who would wield it, depending on their cultures and myths, depending on whether they think they are supreme beings or isolated bio-mechanisms floating alone in the universe. Which one were you, J. Robert Oppenheimer? And why did the occult mythologies of the East have such appeal for you? Was Krishna better than the God of your ancestors? Or was he just a lot more like you? You considered yourself beyond guilt, didn’t you? You looked original sin in the face, as you once confessed in a candid moment, and you didn’t recognize it.
“Original sin”, I murmured, realizing that Barton was staring at me, waiting for a response.
“What?” he said as if he’d never heard the term before. Maybe he hadn’t.
I shrugged. He finished his beer in a gulp and pushed back his chair.
“Good night, Hoyos. I need some sleep.”
After he left, I found another bottle of beer in the cooler and drank it on the spot. I also searched for vodka and found a flask of the synthetic kind. I took it with me to my room and sat down on my bed, staring at my feet. I sipped from the neck of the flask, and I thought a little. Then I took some swigs that burned all the way down, and I thought some more.
Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel Page 54