Orb

by Gary Tarulli

  “Favorably,” Melhaus responded, “P5’s sun radiates a light that is—both in spectrum and intensity—more beneficial to human health. Blue, green, and yellow wavelengths of four hundred seventy to five hundred seventy nanometers predominate. The average intensity of surface sunlight as the planet reaches its perihelion is a relatively bright three hundred ten watts per meter squared.”

  “Thank you for that information,” Kelly said.

  Melhaus, avoiding what he believed to be useless discourse, failed to acknowledge the gratitude. Instead, he addressed me.

  “As to the idea prompting this conversation. First off, Mr. Lorenzo, your proposition should be identified as conjecture, not theory. Never a theory. A theory is formulated after careful observation and measurement. You’ve done no measurements and scant observation.”

  “You’re correct, Larry,” I replied, careful to keep any trace of irritation regarding his blunt manner out of my voice. I was grateful he appeared willing to give my non-theory consideration. “I should have been more careful with my choice of words.”

  “That being said,” he continued, “a well-designed study would entail submitting human subjects to conditions duplicating extrasolar spaceflight with subsequent administration of psychological tests on these same subjects. Barring that near impossibility, a more logical starting point is examination of those individuals who have left the solar system in order to determine if they experienced behavioral problems. A very rudimentary question follows: Excluding this crew, what information, if any, do you have on individuals that have been on extrasolar missions?”

  I hesitated a moment. “Not much,” I answered. I was being evasive, not sure if the information Thompson shared with me concerning the previous expedition was for general consumption.

  “Earlier today,” Thompson interjected, “I informed Kyle that I had gained the confidence of the prior mission commander. He alerted me to the inordinately high levels of stress, cause unknown, seen within himself and the members of his crew. That disclosure coincided with what I considered to be unusual attempts by the Agency to address stress on our mission.”

  “And you were going to notify the rest of the crew of this when?” Melhaus said in an accusatorial tone.

  “When I judged the need to know arose,” Thompson responded in an even voice. “Are you questioning that?”

  “And what prompted the release of information at this juncture?” Melhaus continued. His anger was building, but for the moment he was avoiding an overt challenge to Thompson’s authority.

  “An answer can be found in your recent deportment.”

  “I see,” said Melhaus, not at all satisfied. “Carefully phrased in what Kyle here would call a riddle.”

  “No, Larry, you’re way too intelligent to say that was a riddle. Intelligent enough to understand that if I have a problem with you, plain and simple, you’ll be the first to know.”

  The ship’s eerie silence descended—to which nobody ventured a disturbing word.

  “Kyle, I’m not sure you got what you wanted here,” Thompson said after a moment, “but unless you or anybody else has something to add I suggest we go about the pressing business at hand.”

  I thanked everyone for their input but failed to keep an expression of dismay from my face. As the crew dispersed to go about their work, I caught a brief look of sympathetic understanding from Kelly.

  Despite my best intention, broaching my hypothesis with the crew did not have the positive effect I hoped for. On the contrary, the ensuing conversation culminated with everyone ill at ease. Worse, I may have inadvertently helped widen the divide developing between Thompson and Melhaus.

  Several hours had elapsed and Desio, now in a lower orbit, was companioning the planet as it entered into night.

  What was awaiting us down there? Would the unknown conveniently fit within the realm of human experience or, more likely, would it rise to challenge, perhaps surpass, our imagination? One tantalizing mystery had already presented itself.

  Desio was passing over that portion of the planet which was spinning away from the steel blue sun into blackness. The crew, anxious to see a world without a dense web of artificial light marring its surface, had crowded at the main viewport. But as we transgressed the thin terminator line dividing day from night, instead of total and uninterrupted blackness, there appeared on the planet’s surface countless tiny flecks of colored light. They emerged slowly at first, like early evening fireflies; then with ever greater rapidity as we progressed further into the realm of expected darkness. Diana said there was no evidence to suggest the phenomenon was produced by the plankton-like organisms that were prolific in the planet’s ocean. Paul suggested that the colors were some type of atmospheric disturbances. At the same time he wondered why there were no lights above the steadily shrinking icecaps.

  Teloptics further resolved each speck as perfect circles of varying sizes, ostensibly residing on, or very close to, the ocean surface—as seen from our top-down view. None were greater than twenty meters across.

  Thompson and Melhaus, after reviewing every scrap of sensor data, could offer no plausible explanation.

  In the end, a consensus was reached: A similar phenomenon had never been observed before; that our present altitude rendered it unamenable to explanation. This, truth be told, gave the four scientists secret satisfaction, for they wanted nothing more than a great mystery to unravel.

  The others had turned in for the evening and I found myself alone in the darkened mission room, again drawn to the unspoiled world. The inscrutable mystery of the glowing lights, the distant and untouched beauty, the surrounding panoply of stars—these were captivating wonders to behold. Together they conspired to affect in me a singular thought—not of science and solutions, but of fancy, of literature. An ancient compilation of fables, One Thousand and One Arabian Nights (Alf Laylah Wa Laylah) came to mind.

  The ancient fable is framed around the storytelling ability of a vizier’s daughter, Scheherazade, who marries a Persian king who has an unfortunate history of wedding—and executing the following morning—a succession of virgins so as to exact vengeance for the actions of his unfaithful first wife. Scheherazade, to save herself from the same unjust fate, each night tells the king a fantastical story, only to leave it unfinished, or claim a more imaginative story will follow. By doing so, night after night, for a thousand and one nights, she postpones her own death until she is pardoned.

  No untimely thought, this. Evocation of a collective work of Middle Eastern folklore needs no apology. Not in an age where science rules and the precious few storytellers are bereft an audience.

  As I stood at the viewport self-absorbed in (admittedly) unstructured thoughts, Kelly quietly entered the room. Approaching from behind, she wrapped her arms around my waist and pressed herself tightly to my back. Resting her chin on my shoulder, we looked at the planet together. Softly, she whispered in my ear.

  “Thinking of a name?”

  “Beautiful, isn’t she? Hard to believe that a few months ago she was encased in ice. I will find a name befitting such a world, but she will have to settle for second best. I will never find a name as sweet sounding to me as yours.”

  “Hmmm. You’ll have me melt.”

  “Can you stay with me tonight?” I abruptly asked.

  “I’d like nothing better. You seem lonely.”

  “I’m very often lonely.”

  “Sorry. Why?”

  “Sometimes, I guess, my inner thoughts isolate me.”

  My response was cryptic. It didn’t really explain anything. Nevertheless, Kelly accepted it gracefully; even giving me an easy way out if I chose to take it.

  “Maybe,” she said, “you’ll someday share those thoughts with me.”

  I said nothing, letting her wish disappear into the emptiness of space.

  As we walked to my cabin I silently criticized myself for having missed another opportunity.

  Not only for what I said, but for what I so
mehow couldn’t say.

  Landing

  EARLY THE FOLLOWING morning (for the first time in a hundred days the word took on real meaning, for we eagerly awaited the advent of sunrise) Desio, in the capable hands of Commander Thompson, sliced a path through the planet’s atmosphere.

  Safely transported to within one hundred meters of P5’s surface, we became the first humans privileged to behold the moving, living ocean in liquid form. Our elevated perspective revealed to us a strangely placid expanse of widely interspersed, low rolling swells remarkably unmarred by wavelets, sea foam or disturbance of any kind. Highlighting and bisecting this elemental scene was the endless unbroken line of glare cast upon the water by the planet’s slowly rising blue sun.

  I found myself mesmerized by the overwhelming serenity of the ocean and my mind began wandering into uncommon imaginings and fanciful abstractions: The water … shiny-smooth, metallic-colored, fluid-moving … transforming itself into a boundless, polished sheet of cobalt blue steel slowly undulating solely through the will of a fundamental and unknowable authority.

  I don’t believe I was alone in my daydreaming, for there was an undeniable calming feel to this tableau, a quality possessed and imparted by the muted blues and grays, the simplicity of shapes and lines, the grandness of scale, the timelessness. There was also something just beyond my comprehension here, something intangible at play. We were not original to this picture; we knew it, we felt it, and we were humbled into silence by it.

  And in that silence, Desio’s instruments performed the vital process of sampling the planet’s atmosphere, the resulting tests ruling out the presence of chemical or pathogenic threats and bolstering our shared hope to experience what had for so long been denied: To walk on solid ground; to breathe fresh, unrecycled air; to see another sunrise, and later, to see it set. In short, if only in part, a return to the natural cyclical order of life.

  We traveled onward as the sun—twice the size of Earth’s—continued its slow rise, growing dominant in appearance, completely emerging from the ocean as a distorted disc hovering on the horizon. Then, with the young planet dutifully spinning one new day, the last vestiges of dawn began to recede. The disc began brightening. Fully rounding. Accomplished both in manner and in form that had been repeated nine hundred billion times before.

  And so, in awe, we venerated the start of the new day.

  Thompson, taking pleasure in ignoring automated piloting, decreased Desio’s forward velocity to two hundred kilometers per hour and brought us to within a ship’s width of the water surface. The regained experience of motion was exhilarating—despite the fact we were traveling at a mere one ten-thousandth the velocity of the last three months.

  A group decision had been made to select a landing site based on satisfaction of three criteria: A relatively flat landing surface, geological significance, and (Melhaus would deny it) natural beauty. The first land mass encountered was a tiny island no larger than five kilometers square. A collection of sharp rock slabs rising dramatically from the ocean, it was unanimously deemed unacceptable. A neighboring island, twice the size, was a bit more interesting—but not sufficiently enticing for Thompson, despite our protestations, to put down.

  A few moments later Desio’s control panel displayed yet another isolated island, out of eyesight, over the horizon. This became our new destination, only minutes away. We had become increasingly impatient to land, and so, despite Thompson’s obvious best efforts at finding a suitable location, Kelly felt obliged to make him the object of some divertissement.

  “Diana,” she said, “I was wondering if you, like me, agree with this basic and universal premise: That most men are too stubborn to ask for navigational assistance.”

  “Well, Kelly,” Diana responded, “I’m not so sure I can agree.”

  I could see by the looks exchanged between the two conspirators that they were going to work this theme … and work it good. Paul and I exchanged our own glances and leaned back to enjoy.

  “And why is that, Diana? Why don’t you agree? Do you think I’m being a bit sexist?”

  “Why no, Kelly, not exactly. You see, I’m having a little trouble with the word ‘most.’”

  “Perhaps that is a bit extreme, Diana. Perhaps I should have said ‘many’, or ‘a lot’, or perhaps ‘a high percentage’”.

  “No, Kelly, that won’t do. That won’t do at all. No, I was thinking more in the line of words such as ‘all’, or ‘every’ or ‘a staggeringly high percent.’”

  “And I,” interrupted Thompson, “am thinking of words such as “stifle”, “muzzle”, and ‘gag.’”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Kelly, feigning surprise, “you don’t think we were referring to you, do you?”

  “What could give me that crazy idea?” Thompson responded. “But if either of you would like to assume the flight controls….”

  “Oh, no!” Diana said in shock, “We would never think of such a thing, would we, Kelly?”

  “Never.”

  “Personally,” Paul said, “I’d give the man a break. Being ten kilometers off out of seven-hundred-trillion isn’t too shabby.”

  And so the little comic scene played out, the actors knowing full well that Melhaus was the only other crew member rated to pilot the ship. Moreover, Thompson would never relinquish control.

  A minute later he pointed out a land mass lifting itself from the horizon.

  “I see it!” shouted Diana.

  As we approached and obtained our first close-up view of the island, Thompson, an excited edge to his voice, asked, “Have any of you been to Moscow?”

  “No,” Diana said, confused. “And I’m not likely to get there any time soon.”

  “That’s what you think,” Thompson replied, further reducing our forward speed. “Make preparations. We’ll be landing on Red Square in two minutes.”

  There, lofting into the sky in front of us, were crudely sculpted replicas of the spires, towers and twisted turrets of St. Basil’s and Kazan’s Cathedrals—two of the iconic buildings bordering Red Square. Stone testaments resisting time and the elements, the towering pillars, six score or more, varied in height from fifty meters to those soaring two hundred meters; all were bathed in muted tones of yellows, browns and golds with striking darker veins of like color spiraling throughout.

  In front of these impressive natural formations—and requiring us to use a bit more imagination—was the Square itself: Not nearly as level as its Russian counterpart, but dwarfing it in size. Here, an immense plateau of flat rock had fissured and cracked, forming steps and accessible shallow inclines that spanned the distance between the base of the spires, which formed an imposing backdrop, to the water’s edge and beyond. The clarity of the ocean water allowed for an unimpeded view of the stone slabs as their random size and structure formed inviting pools and shallows beyond the shoreline, and outward further still, where they descended steeply into the abyss and disappeared from view.

  “Incredible,” said Kelly.

  Even Melhaus, who had characteristically shown little emotion, shifted in his seat to get a better look.

  “How weathering alone could produce such unusual formations,” Paul said, “I am presently unable to venture a guess. Do you believe you can come up with a purely geological explanation, Bruce?”

  The casual remark, viewed as a challenge by Thompson, was more than sufficient to clinch the island as the preferred landing site. There was, however, one task that required tending to first and it was arguably the most important task of the entire mission.

  Thompson purposefully headed Desio away from the island to locate deeper water. With the assistance of Doctor Melhaus, Ixodes was forcibly detached and sent plunging headlong into the ocean, where it became fully operational, as planned and without mishap.

  Moments later, on 11 June 2233, after six months of training and three months of travel, at a place we were now calling Red Square, the crew of Desio gently touched the ocean planet.

  “W
e have arrived,” said Thompson, and with these simple words he activated the external hatchway, six steps thudding mechanically into place.

  “Captain, sir,” said Diana, inflating her deference to Thompson by providing him a military rank he did not have. “May I have your permission to be the first to leave the ship?”

  The request was unusual, a departure from long-established protocol: Being first on the planet was the prerogative of the expedition leader. Thompson, who had little use for formality, could not deny her.

  “We’ll be right behind you,” he said. The look on his face said more. He knew Diana well enough to expect she had an ulterior motive hiding behind her request. He wasn’t disappointed.

  As she set foot on the surface of P5, with Thompson and the rest of us close behind and an onboard camera recording for all posterity, she exclaimed in a clear, steady, voice, “That’s one small step for woman, one giant leap for womankind.”

  Thompson, unperturbed, raised an eyebrow at her and said, “Working on the male-female theme today?”

  Diana gave him an unabashed look. “What can I say? Waited two-hundred-fifty plus years to rectify that.”

  The prior expedition had been comprised of five males. Diana was not only the first female on P5 but, remarkably, the first female on a planet outside of our own solar system. There was no reason to be anything but amused at what she said. Only for some reason, maybe nervous tension concerning what we were expected to accomplish, Melhaus wasn’t at all entertained.

  “What I…” he began, then corrected himself, “…what we are about to accomplish here doesn’t deserve to be trivialized by you, or anyone else, in some ill-conceived attempt to right some perceived wrong.”

  The remark did not go over well. This time Thompson, Paul, and Kelly all seemed intent on wading into the pending fray. Diana abruptly preempted them.