The Hole

by Brandon Q Morris

  “You are correct. That’s where our partners come in,” Fourcat said. “Virgin and Blue Origin will provide the cargo capsules and bring the passengers on board. Our Russian friends at RB will send an additional engine module. Could you say something about that, Grigori?”

  “Our fusion reactor was meant to power a large spaceship that we wanted to use to colonize the asteroid belt,” the Russian said. “As that won’t happen now, we can employ it for another meaningful purpose. It will accelerate the Ark to the velocity it needs to escape the catastrophe. The fuel, helium-3, is just sufficient for that.”

  “Our schedule assumes we will be ready to start in two months,” Fourcat continued. “That is an ambitious plan, particularly since it does not allow for any delays. Therefore we ask you to decide quickly whether you are available to be the official leader of the mission. I think that you, Maribel, will be the best person to embody the hopes of humanity.”

  That would have been a nice compliment, if it were intended seriously. But wasn’t this meeting all about making a selfish project appear in a better light?

  “Are you also going to be on board, gentlemen?” she asked.

  Crewmaster was the first to shake his head. “I am too old for something like this.”

  “I am not,” the Russian said, “but Nikolai Shostakovich, the owner of our corporation, insists on his daughter going along. She will supervise the handling of the fusion reactor. That is not negotiable. However, she will not occupy one of the 100 passenger cabins.”

  Maribel nodded and mentally counted along: Motive number 1.

  “We are still discussing this,” Fourcat said. “Right now a raffle among all SpaceX employees seems most likely.”

  “We are also planning a similar method,” Broadstone said, “and if I am correctly informed, this also applies to Blue Origin.” The CTO of his competitor confirmed this with a nod. Maribel was pleasantly surprised, because she had expected more selfishness.

  “You probably thought we were just doing this to get ourselves out of the line of fire, didn’t you?” the man from SpaceX asked. “At the beginning that probably was the case. Who wouldn’t want to survive a foreseeable catastrophe? But then we performed a detailed analysis of what this survival would look like. Yes, it offers a chance to save humanity from extinction, but that chance is small, very small. The ship, the Ark, will only have a certain amount of resources. The survivors will be able to live off the supplies for two or three years, but then they will be forced to become self-sufficient. I don’t even want to talk about the more remote future. Our experts don’t believe a civilization could survive on board a spaceship. There would be conflicts and fights once the resources ran short.”

  “But you expect me to suffer through that?” Maribel asked.

  “To be honest, it is mostly about being able to offer mankind a small measure of hope now,” Fourcat explained. “All of us are also worried that the last six months on Earth could otherwise get very unpleasant.”

  “Thank you for your blunt words,” Maribel said. “I will tell you my decision the day after tomorrow. And now, if you will excuse me, I’d like to do some sightseeing in Seattle.”

  “Certainly,” said the man from Blue Origin, whose corporation owned the building. “Do you need anything for it? Your lodging and your return trip are already taken care of. Of course you are our guest.”

  “I would like to have a tour guide for the city,” she said.

  “My office will book you the best available tour guide.”

  “If possible, I’d like to be accompanied by a gentleman named Chen. He picked me up from the limo.”

  The man turned around and whispered to a woman who wore a blouse with an upturned collar. “Mr. Chen will be waiting for you at the exit,” he said then. “Your backpack is already in your room at the Westin.”

  “Thank you very much,” Maribel replied.

  “Think about it carefully,” George Crewmaster said as he shook her hand to say goodbye. “It is not us old fogeys who need you, it is the world.”

  Her face felt hot. Maribel turned around and left the room.

  February 9, 2072, Seattle

  The phone call interrupted Maribel’s dream. At first it jangled dimly from afar, sounding like a wind chime, but then it made a loud and painful noise directly next to her ear. She opened her eyes. Clad only in black underpants, Chen stood at her side of the bed, and held the horribly loud device close to her. Maribel realized she was completely naked and pulled the blanket up to her chest in surprise. Chen smiled.

  “Why me?” she asked, groggily. “You answer it.”

  “Nobody knows I am here,” Chen replied. “The call must be for you. But if you prefer, I can...”

  “No. Give me the thing. Answer without video,” Maribel loudly requested. Chen handed her the ball-shaped device, and she placed it next to herself on the bed.

  It was Crewmaster. “We always seem to catch each other at inconvenient times!”

  “Looks like it, Professor,” she replied.

  “Are you in the bathroom right now?”

  “One could say that.”

  “Do you still have the old article from Nature?” he asked.

  “You mean the one that was published in 2019?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “Why?” Maribel asked.

  “I have an old friend who needs a few sections from it… and quickly. Could you take a look?”

  “It’s in my backpack.”

  “Then take it out,” Crewmaster instructed. “Or didn’t they take the backpack to your room as promised?”

  “Oh yes, the backpack is here,” she replied.

  “It would be very nice if you could do this,” he insisted.

  It didn’t matter. Chen had already seen her naked earlier, last night. Maribel pushed the blanket aside, got up, and walked toward the backpack that was standing next to the entrance. The communication orb followed her at head height. Chen shyly turned aside and looked out of the window. She rummaged inside the backpack and pulled out a stack of papers.

  “I’ve got the article,” she said.

  “The last two paragraphs on the third page,” Crewmaster said.

  “Just a moment, Professor.” Maribel gradually lost her bashfulness. She walked to the table in the middle of the room, sat down, and leafed through the article. “Okay. There it is.”

  She read Crewmaster the data from this section.

  “Was this all?” she asked at the end.

  “Not quite,” he replied. “You did ask me for something.”

  “The Enceladus creature.”

  “That’s right. I found someone who might be able to establish contact with it.”

  “That sounds great,” Maribel said.

  “However, you would have to go to West Virginia for that purpose.”

  “No problem.”

  “That’s a long way from Seattle. Are you aware of it?”

  “Listen, according to your wishes I am soon going to fly 75 million kilometers away from here,” she said. “I should be able to make it to the East Coast.”

  “Great,” Crewmaster said. “I won’t be able to be there myself. Therefore I wanted to introduce you to your new contact person today. Could we have a talk around noon? By then you might actually be dressed.”

  Chen still stood by the wall, chuckling quietly. Maribel turned around and stuck out her tongue at him.

  “What...” she said.

  “That doesn’t sound like the acoustics of a bathroom,” her former professor said. “But I don’t mind you sleeping in. The world still needs you.”

  “Then I’ll see you in a while. End connection,” she ordered. The hovering orb blinked green and moved toward its base station near the window. Maribel stood up.

  “And what are we going to do until noon?” she asked.

  “I have an idea,” Chen said and pointed at the bed.

  “You lecher,” Maribel said with a laugh. “I am going to
take a quick shower and then you can show me the city in daylight. We’ve got three hours.”

  An hour later they were standing on the outside section of the Space Needle observation platform, at a height of 158 meters. The air smelled salty, and the wind was whistling through the steel cables that fenced off the platform. Maribel pulled her coat closer around her body. Chen embraced her from behind, and she enjoyed the feeling. She gazed into the distance and remarked, “Over there… that must be the Pacific.”

  “Elliott Bay,” Chen explained.

  “I like the ocean,” she said with a sigh. She could no longer watch the seemingly infinite, shiny body of water without thinking about the future.

  “It’s still there,” said the man behind Maribel, the man whom she had just met yesterday, the teller of fairy tales. Yesterday he had told her stories for such a long time she could not help but invite him up to her room.

  “What we did was stupid,” she said.

  “No,” Chen said. He softly placed a hand on her shoulder, “it was the right thing.”

  “This story won’t have a happy end, and you cannot rewrite it.”

  “It’s not about the end, Maribel. It’s never about the end.”

  “For me it is,” she said with a sense of frustration. Maribel felt like stomping her foot and acting like the little girl of long ago, when she had incessantly clamored for that red coat! The happy ending had to come! But then she simply leaned back, while Chen gently held her.

  “What matters is what happens before the end,” he said.

  “I am going to insist that you will be allowed on board,” Maribel said. “I am only going to do this if you get a place on the Ark.”

  “At some point you would regret it,” Chen said. “I barely know you yet, but I am sure about that. You definitely won’t get your happy ending that way.”

  “As you said, you barely know me. I am strong. I can make it happen.”

  “That I know. But you also know it’s not right to give me preferential treatment. You would succeed, but you will also manage to leave me behind. That is the more difficult task, but you will succeed there as well.”

  “But—” she began, turning to face him.

  “Shhhhh,” Chen said as he placed a finger on her mouth. What matters is what happens before the end, Maribel heard him think, but his lips did not form words. Instead, he came closer and kissed her.

  At one o’clock sharp they were back in her room. On short notice, her former professor had postponed the conversation by an hour, but now the communication orb vibrated in its base station.

  “Accept connection,” Maribel said. The orb turned red, which was the indication that the camera was activated. It floated into the center of the room. From this vantage point, its built-in laser projector displayed the image of her conversation partner on the wall.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize you were not alone,” Crewmaster said. His eyes twinkled with mischief.

  “This is Chen,” Maribel replied.

  Crewmaster gave a slight wave and said, “Hello, Chen.”

  “Hello, Professor.”

  “After clarifying the important things, could we move on to the irrelevant matters?” she asked.

  “Maribel, don’t be so impatient, please,” Crewmaster said.

  “We don’t have all the time in the world, unfortunately,” she said. It sounded harsher than Maribel had intended.

  “Sorry,” Crewmaster replied. “I would like to introduce you to an old friend of mine. I just have to warn you that he is really old. He might seem frailer than he is, so please don’t be shocked. I will establish the connection now.”

  The communication ball split the display area on the wall. On the left, Maribel and Chen could still see Crewmaster, while on the right a gray area appeared. The ball blinked yellow twice. Now the gray area showed a location that looked like a hospital room. The couple saw a very old man sitting upright, but obviously in a bed.

  “May I present Robert Millikan,” her former professor said. Millikan pushed aside a keyboard that was hovering in front of his belly.

  “And here we have Maribel Pedreira and her friend Chen, who does not have a last name,” Crewmaster added.

  Millikan smiled. “Pleased to meet you,” he replied. His voice sounded like the croaking of an old raven. “I’ve read a lot about you, Ms. Pedreira. Excellent work!”

  Maribel blushed. The man somehow looked familiar, but she was not sure where to place him.

  “Cancer of the larynx,” Millikan said, “you have to excuse my speech. But my head is still working properly.”

  “Robert still publishes at least one scholarly article per year,” Crewmaster added.

  “On what subject?” Maribel asked. “I must admit I...”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Millikan said. “It’s radio astronomy.” This was not her field, so it was no wonder that he was unknown to her. Yet she had the feeling she had heard his name before, sometime during her childhood. Oh yes! Crewmaster wanted to establish a connection to Enceladus for them. This must be the legendary radio astronomer who had kept in contact with the Enceladus expedition back then. That was in the late 40s, before she was born.

  “I was very happy when my old friend George asked me to contact you,” Millikan rasped. “It turns out that I happen to have a few questions for you.”

  “What a coincidence,” Maribel replied. “How can I help you?”

  “I am worried, not about myself, as I will soon be dead anyway, but about the being on Enceladus,” Millikan replied. “Does it have a chance to survive this cataclysm?”

  “I can’t answer that right now. I would have to run some calculations,” she said. “It all depends on where Enceladus is located when the solar storm moves through. If it is behind Saturn, as seen from the sun, the planet would protect its moon.”

  “So, roughly speaking, a chance of one in three?” Millikan asked.

  “Yes, but I can calculate it by tomorrow, and then we’ll have something more like a definite answer, even though there is still some probability involved,” Maribel offered.

  “That would be great,” Millikan said.

  “We could even drop off the data in person.” Did Maribel just say ‘we,’ and did she really mean it? Should she take Chen along, so she would grow more used to him and then only suffer even more in the end? She had to think about that, and of course she would ask him whether he even wanted to accompany her.

  “Yes, gladly,” the elderly man said. “I assume that in exchange you’d like me to get you time with the Green Bank telescope?”

  “That would be almost perfect,” she said.

  “In practical terms that is no problem. However, I cannot guarantee it will do you any good. We haven’t established contact in a very long time. Maybe the antenna dish on Enceladus isn’t working anymore.”

  “We can handle it if it turns out to be a disappointment,” she said, “and at least we want to try it.”

  “Great, then I’ll be expecting you there tomorrow. End transmission.”

  Millikan’s image disappeared. Did he really say he would be expecting them in person, or was that meant metaphorically? Maribel hoped he would not leave his sickbed just for her. She did not want to be responsible for the premature death of the legendary radio astronomer.

  “Have a good trip,” Crewmaster said.

  “Thanks, Professor,” she replied. “For everything.”

  “I am only doing this so you will accept the job. You realize that, Maribel?”

  “End transmission,” she said.

  February 10, 2072, 2003 EH1

  The stench was becoming intolerable. They had been carrying supplies from the base into the spaceship for five hours, and on the return trips they moved anything from the ship into the station if they were sure they would not need it during the journey. Their loads did not weigh anything, thanks to zero gravity. Nevertheless, Doug was dripping with sweat, and the life-support system of his suit coul
d no longer suppress the unpleasant odor. He urgently needed to take a shower! After that, he would prefer a good meal and a long, quiet night, but that was not going to happen. Yesterday Sebastiano cooked a farewell dinner, vegetarian meatballs, and rice with a spicy sauce. Now the kitchen was shut down, because today they would all take off in Kiska and fly toward the black hole.

  Only yesterday Doug had tried one more time to talk the others into letting him go on this mission all by himself. He had not been particularly surprised when his attempt failed. For a moment he even considered telling Maria the plain truth. If she only knew his past, she might want to stay behind in the station on her own—but then he had been too self-serving to do it. He wanted to have her by his side, even if it meant exposing her to danger. Doug hated himself for it. Maybe he would try it again later...

  “Finished,” Sebastiano announced via helmet radio. “The kitchen is stocked.”

  The Italian cook had been able to bring along a few of his utensils, but during the crew’s trip they would have to do without any fresh ingredients. Four months of packaged food—even Sebastiano’s cooking tricks could not replace the taste of fresh spices. This would not be their biggest problem, though. Watson had calculated their flight to Object X would take about seven weeks. And what was going to happen then? They still had no idea what they would have to do once they were there. Shostakovich wanted to come up with a research strategy by that time, but unfortunately Kiska was no research vessel. Apart from the instruments needed for navigation, the ship had no scientific measuring devices onboard.

  Nevertheless, Shostakovich had insisted on the journey. Doug figured that the Russian was still a scientist at heart. Humanity had never been so close to such a strange phenomenon as this. They would have the chance to gain completely new scientific knowledge. The fact that Doug and his crew would not be able to profit from it was an entirely different matter.

  “Are we meeting at the station?” Maria asked via radio.