Dr. Michelangelo Yee, the President’s science advisor, was brought in to coordinate and vet the personnel Dr. Khawaja, whose background and contacts were mostly outside government in the scientific community, gathered for the project.
The chief of the White House Secret Service detail, Benton Fuller, who had been with to President Teller for his first term, was briefed and instructed to hand-pick three other trusted agents who would remain loyal and keep their mouths shut.
Caleb Harris and Margo McNeil schemed of ways to keep the inquisitive press at bay.
The Undersecretary of the Navy, Captain Thomas Walkly, one of the highest-ranking African-American navy officers on active duty, was brought in to coordinate the naval activity in the area of the Stones before, during and after the arrival of the Watership.
By the end of the day the White House group had grown considerably, defined the mission and potential problems, and had taken some firm decisions.
The Watership had to be screened as it approached Earth because its size and configuration made it easily detectable, even by unsophisticated radar.
A medical facility that already existed was required for the returning mothers and fathers-to-be. After some discussion it was agreed the recently completed wing at the NASA Space Medicine Center in Houston, Texas, could be effectively sealed off without attracting attention.
Everyone concurred that approaching private industry would be risky and difficult to control. Dr. Khawaja would discreetly contact some of his colleagues in the academic world. He had good friends at the Albert Einstein Hospital in New York, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of North Carolina in the Research Triangle and Stanford University in California.
The logistics after landing would be handled by the Navy under the command of Captain Walkly. The returning Brigade members and a few Antareans would be taken by a guided missile frigate to Elliot Key, a small uninhabited and inconspicuous island south of Miami. From there speedboats would ferry them to the Florida mainland, landing approximately twenty miles east of Homestead Air Force Base. From that unmarked vehicles would transport them to the base where a C-5A MATS cargo plane would be waiting to complete the final leg of their journey to the Houston Space Center.
By three A.M. everyone was beat, but they had made progress. Alma thanked them all. She would remain in Washington to coordinate their activities with her fellow commanders. Caleb offered her his bed for the night; he would sleep on the sofa. The President suggested she be a guest in the White House. Alma declined both offers, stating she preferred the privacy of her hotel.
After they had all left, Malcolm Teller and his Press Secretary had a drink alone in the White House’s Red Room, a baroque sitting room with a deep red carpet, plush red velvet Louis XIV chairs, black marble cocktail tables. The walls were covered with red flocked wallpaper and mundane oil landscapes by artists of the late eighteenth century. They discussed and marveled at the events of the day as they sipped twenty-year-old Chivas Regal Scotch.
Neither was tired. The stimulation of the historic day and the scotch eventually led them to the President’s bedroom, where they made love in the Abraham Lincoln bed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - RACING TOWARD MOTHER-PLANET
A week later the Antarean Watership entered Quad 3, Earth’s quadrant of our Milky Way Galaxy. In a few days the Parman guides would change over to light speed and keeping the planets and moons of our solar system our moon between them and Earth, make their final approach.
The idea to use the Watership had come from Chief Commander Ruth Charnofsky. After learning of the human pregnancies she circumvented the normal chain of command on Subax, a planet steeped in military tradition and strict obedience to unwritten common law, and contacted Amos Bright directly through the other commanders. It might have taken weeks had she gone through the proper channels. Her mate, Panatoy the Subaxian chemist concurred with her decision.
The plan was to contact all the pregnant Brigade women and gather them on Antares. Then, using the Watership, initiate a round-trip mission that would bring the humans home for birth on the Motherplanet and return the cocoons secreted undersea to Antares where they could be processed and reanimated. She convinced Amos Bright that it was foolhardy to leave the cocoons on Earth any longer than absolutely necessary. “There is an unstable, primitive political environment there,” she argued, “that could erupt into nuclear holocaust at any time, endangering the cocoons by poisoning the oceans with radioactivity.”
The destruction of those nine hundred twenty earthbound Antareans would be a great loss to their race that inhabits a planet that cannot support life on its surface. Antareans are underground dwellers who capture the heat and energy from their planet’s core. All food and water is artificially created without benefit of natural sunlight or atmosphere. Millennia ago, this thriving civilization made the decision to apply their energies and efforts to the exploration of space. Now they were known throughout the galaxy to more than one thousand races and civilizations. They revere and cherished life, having progressed genetically to the point where their life span is indefinite. They are a limiting society, which means that new life would not be created unless an old life died. Each death has to be confirmed and the body, or any remains, returned to Antares. From that inert tissue material the Antarean gene-splicers and in-vitro scientists extract and manipulate genetic matter that, in effect, recreates the dead Antarean. It is a clone, a replicate of the deceased, and a valued member of Antarean society but has no memory of previous life.
More than five hundred Earth years pass before a new Antarean reaches adulthood. During that time it is educated, trained and permitted to work in the Motherplanet, far beneath the barren, forbidding surface. After this apprenticeship, the new adult is allowed to begin space travel and exploration on one of the eighteen hundred Antarean space vessels now in operation throughout the galaxy. At the time that the Brigade arrived there were two hundred thirty-six thousand Antareans alive. At any given time more than fifty thousand of them are either traveling in space or serving on distant planets or Antares.
Ruth Charnofsky’s idea was accepted and a grateful Antarean high council granted her citizenship on Antares - a high honor for an off-planet being.
The expectant Brigade parents had gathered as planned and as they began the final leg of their journey home, Ruth, swelling with her Subax–Earth human baby in her womb, pondered just what this child might be, or become.
Ruth was ninety-one years old and until five years ago, had barely survived on her meager Social Security checks. Now she was a strong commander and citizen of Subax, Antares and Earth. She had traveled among the stars, witnessing sights and wonders only dreamed about by her fellow Earth-humans. She contemplated this embryo growing inside her. What was this baby? Her mate Panatoy might be called an animal by the bigoted cretins on Earth. She knew him to be a kind, thoughtful and loving humanoid male - as good and tender as her late husband, whom she had buried more than thirty years ago. What would their baby be? Earth-human? Subax? And what might the three other mixed matings onboard produce? For that matter, what would the fully Earth-human babies, about to be born to elderly parents, look and be like? What genetic changes had the processing for space travel wrought? This was all new ground, reaching into the unknown. But wasn’t that what she had seen and heard throughout her travels in the galaxy? Blending and mixing; evolving and changing. For unlike the Antareans, who opted for controlled genetic reproduction via cloning, most of the known life forms in the galaxy reproduced by means of DNA exchange. The blending of genetic material was possible among uncountable species resulting in great diversification. And yet, so much of it was similar. Humanoid was the predominant species - warm-blooded, mammalian, bi-pedal, gas breathing, with a relatively similar brain size and nervous system configuration. There were myriad variations arrived at by natural selection, environmental and climate change and solar spectrum. In other advanced civilizations genetic manipulation had flo
urished, producing incredible adaptations and varieties of humanoid life.
The animal and plant kingdoms stretched across the galaxy as well with millions of species and varieties that were also constantly changing...blending…becoming.
And beyond that, civilized intelligent life forms of crystalline design and non-carbon base thrived in gaseous vapor clouds and on planets with seemingly barren landscapes void of atmosphere.
It was also theorized, but not yet confirmed by the Antarean astrophysicists and astronomers, that another life form existed within the electrically charged solar winds and nebulae from which new galaxies and solar systems were formed as others aged and disintegrated into the void. A myriad of life spread across our vast galaxy and, it was believed, to that unending expanse called Universe.
Yet, if you opened your heart and mind to this endless dwelling place, as Ruth Charnofsky had when she fell in love with her blue Subaxian chemist, it was hard not to see that some grand plan was at work here. What appeared haphazard and evolving in swirling masses of gas and matter was, in fact, of brilliant design. New galaxies were created…new stars…new planets…and within it all, life becoming, blending, growing, changing and evolving while producing an endless variety of existence built by stardust.
Hurtling along at inexplicable speed toward her Motherplanet, Ruth Charnofsky contemplated the new life form growing within her body. She had but one desire - to give birth and nurture her child. This was, she believed, the ultimate Universal purpose.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN – A LANDING PROGRAM
Nobody would ever suspect that the modest log cabin set deep in a grove of tall Norway Pines on the rise above the Beaverkill River was, in fact, the think tank for Operation Earthmother, as the project to aid the returning elderly space travelers had been named by the Secretary of Defense. Upon close inspection, a trained eye might notice that aside from the usual white satellite dish sported by all the recreation homes in this area, this cabin had an additional black mesh dish hidden one hundred yards to the north of the cabin among thorny blackberry bushes. Its purpose was to receive and transmit high-speed encoded data from the DOD’s space computer main-frame facility at the Pentagon.
The misty rain that had begun at dawn continued to midday. Alicia Sanchez, a tall, thirty-two-year-old NASA project manager who had a Master’s from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in astrophysics, and Ph.D. in quantum mechanics earned at Stanford University in California, parted the kitchen curtains and peeked up at the low, moisture-laden clouds. They showed no sign of clearing. Her gaze then traveled down to the river where, at the edge of a deep pool on the far side, her partner and cohort for the past eight days, Phillip Margolin, cast a fly to trout rising along the riverbank. On the third cast a two-pound brown trout rose for his perfectly cast fly and within ten minutes Phillip had netted the sleek spotted fish. Alicia watched from behind the curtain as Margolin carefully removed the fly from the trout’s lip and gently returned the fish to the crystal-clear river. She experienced a mild rush of adrenaline, which told her she liked him even more upon witnessing that gentle act from the outwardly tough computer expert.
Smiling to herself, she turned from the window, walked out of the kitchen and sat down at the computer terminal in her work area. Her two assistants, Martin LoCasio and Oscar Berlin, both assigned to her from NASA headquarters in Houston, had gone into Roscoe, the closest town in this upstate New York community, to get the New York Times and to buy groceries.
It was hard to believe that only eight days had passed since Alicia had been secretly flown to Washington, introduced to Secretary of Defense Mersky and Phillip Margolin, an aide to the Secretary and a Ph.D. himself in chemistry, rocket sciences and computer analysis. Eventually she met President Teller when a briefing regarding Operation Earthmother was held in the Oval Office. It was there that she’d also met Alma Finley and heard the fantastic story of the Antareans, the cocoons and the pregnant women from the Geriatric Brigade on their way home to Earth.
Alicia brought up the latest computer reentry model on her screen. It had been refined last night. She began to run it against the parameters Joe Finley had supplied earlier this morning. He’s a really nice old man, she thought to herself as she leaned back, craning her neck to look into the screened-in porch where he bunked. He was still sleeping on the daybed they had set up in there for him. Phillip and she had spent hours pumping Finley about his travels in deep space. As they listened to his tales of planets and civilizations, it became apparent their education was inadequate to grasp the idea of this galaxy, perhaps the entire universe, teeming with life. Finley was kind and quick put the matter in perspective, reminding them that not too many years ago he was a taxi driver in Boston, struggling to get a fading acting career on track.
“We’ve spent pretty much our entire existence on this planet under the assumption that we were alone in the cosmos. Our assumed self-importance and self-centeredness has closed our minds, most of us that is, to the idea that we might be just one little populated planet in a universe of living beings on millions, maybe billions of planets. Give the idea some time and you’ll eventually understand how wonderful it is to be part of a living universe. And of course now we are witnesses to how foolish it was to hold that belief. Then again, seeing is believing, I suppose. If the people of Earth ever knew what dwells beyond their myopic vision it would change just about every narrow belief they hold.”
“But they don’t know,” Phillip had responded.
“Will you tell them?” Alicia asked.
“I cannot. A primary rule of the Antareans that we have promised to keep. No interference with civilizations until they are ready.”
“And we are not?” Phillip asked.
“Not by a long shot. But someday, if Earth gets its act together,” Joe had told them, smiling, “I’ll be the first to bring the word.”
Philip offered Joe his room, but he then insisted on sleeping on the porch even though it was damp and chilly. When Alicia protested, he told she about the weather conditions on Parma Quad 2, where the temperature differential was a full ninety degrees hourly and the humidity a constant state of super-saturation. “It was like living inside a steam bath that froze every hour on the hour, then thawed out for a while, then froze again. This porch is a delight for me.”
Satisfied that Finley was still asleep, Alicia went back to running the model against her own program which tracked the moon’s position relative to South Florida on the day projected for the Watership’s arrival. The initial results looked promising, but the rapidly approaching deadline worried her. According to Finley, the Watership could be in position on the moon’s far side in less than two weeks and they were scheduled to present a viable plan to the Secretary and President in two days.
A half an hour later, Phillip Margolin came through the back door into the kitchen on the run. He still wore his wet hip boots, tracking mud and sand across the cabin floor. The door slammed behind him, startling Alicia. She looked up from the computer’s monitor. The noise also awakened Joe Finley, who cocked one eye curiously open toward an animated Phillip Margolin.
“We missed a key element last night,” he announced as he carefully placed his bamboo fly rod against the wall behind Alicia’s computer terminal. He tossed his hat, a dirty plaid affair covered with trout flies, onto the nearby Early American knotty-pine sofa. Without further comment he slid a chair over next to Alicia’s and proceeded to clear the work she was doing off her TV screen, pecking furiously at the computer keyboard.
“Never completely accept all givens as immovable’s.”
“I beg your pardon!” she said, grabbing his wrist firmly. “I happen to be in the middle of something.” She was three inches taller than he, and a karate black belt.
“Just give me a second, okay? I think I know how we can do it!” He made no attempt to neither free his wrist nor fight her grasp. He allowed his piercing dark brown eyes to speak for him. She understood the passion and intelligence th
at lurked behind that gaze and eased her grip. He slid his hand out of her grasp and proceeded to enter and move data rapidly. Joe Finley, now fully awake, came into the room and watched Margolin as he furiously and precisely restructured the reentry model.
“What’s up?”
“Phil’s on to something more exciting than a trout…so he claims.” There was mild sarcasm in her voice.
“That looks like you’ve got something going here,” Joe remarked as he moved closer to the terminal.
“Not something, Joe. Everything. It’s THE answer,” Margolin stated firmly. “But it’s going to mean parking two of the Watership’s tanks, probably the ones with the atmospheres, on the far side of the moon. Then we have them configure the third tank this way.” He keyed in the program and a three-dimensional model of the Watership with one of her storage tanks nestled close up and crosswise against her stern came onto the screen. Phil Margolin keyed in another command and the model began to rotate, revealing its rising above what appeared now to be the moon’s surface. The Earth was far off in the background. “With this configuration we can mask the entry all the way from the moon and create the shadow we need with the reentry of the new shuttle Remembrance.”
“What about the atmospheres?” Alicia asked. “They’ll need them in Houston sooner or later.”
“I’m hoping they can manufacture what we need there. The three tank configuration is too large for what we have available for masking now. Or maybe the Probeship can shuttle down whatever gasses are necessary a bit at a time. What do you think, Joe?”
Finley studied the video screen. He understood what Margolin had in mind, but it would require conferencing with the others. His wife, Alma, was still in Washington coordinating the arrival of the Watership with the efforts now underway by a special Navy Seal team under the command of Undersecretary Walkly as they prepared a clear and secure an undersea area near the Stones.
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