Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  In anticipation of a jet black cave, Holly asked Viola to lift the flashlight from her backpack. But as the group crossed the threshold, with Holly leading and Robert and Bo maintaining a safe distance, the darkness never materialised.

  There was no pool of water and no evident cracks overhead. In the distance, it looked like there was a faint sign of light up ahead. This was confirmed very quickly as the end of the tunnel became visible.

  “Called it,” Viola said, hurrying ahead until Holly called her back. They proceeded together, far ahead of the rest.

  “The ground’s getting dusty,” Holly said.

  Viola slowed down and took hold of the flashlight. “That’s not dust. I think it’s sand.”

  A desert, Holly thought. Just what we wanted to find on the other side.

  With the end of the tunnel in plain sight, Holly saw a huge jagged rock-face up ahead. She couldn’t yet see the ground outside. Continuing forward, she then gasped audibly.

  “What?” Viola asked. She momentarily looked up at Holly, whose slight height advantage had allowed her to see the ground first.

  And that was why Holly had gasped: there was no ground.

  All around the base of the towering rock, which she now realised was just one of several, Holly saw nothing but shimmering water. The sight was spectacular; almost tropical. She hurried forward.

  “Is that water?” Viola excitedly yelled as it came into her view a few steps later.

  The tunnel’s path then began to slowly descend, changing their view and revealing the final and even greater surprise. At the end of the tunnel, before the brochure-ready crystal-clear blue and green water began, there was a broad stretch of fine white sand.

  The panorama that met Holly when she took her final step out of the tunnel would have rendered her speechless on Earth. But here — wherever here really was — she was positively dumbfounded.

  Waves rolled gently up the sand to Holly’s left and crashed more aggressively into the island-like pillars of rock straight ahead. She turned around to look up at the hills and was amazed to see that they stopped almost vertically, more like walls than the gentle slopes of the other side. The air felt drier and much warmer than it had minutes earlier, but she was aware this may have been down to the stuffiness of the tunnel’s interior clouding her perception.

  Viola arrived at Holly’s side a few seconds later and interrupted these thoughts. Evidently overwhelmed by the sight and equal parts confused and excited, the girl said the only thing she could think of:

  “Holly… why is there a beach?”

  twenty-six

  Robert, Bo and Dante caught up within a minute or so and reacted with precisely the kind of open-mouthed wonder Holly had expected.

  “Woah!” Bo exclaimed, his eyes taking in the horseshoe shaped beach and crystal-clear water. “You don’t get this on the Venus station!”

  Viola still looked just as excited. “I know, right? Why couldn’t our lander have touched down here instead of in that stupid canyon?” She then turned to Holly and asked if she could take off her shoes to walk on the sand.

  Holly deferred to Robert, who replied with an unfocused nod.

  The three adults stood pensively as the children stepped onto the sand at the tunnel’s opening and raced to the broadest section of the beach.

  “Can we go in the water?” Bo yelled when they got there. Though his shouting voice lacked strength, it easily rose above the gentle sound of the water lapping on the sand.

  “Absolutely not,” Robert boomed without hesitation, his focus apparently sharp enough to know a bad idea when he heard one.

  As Holly watched Bo and Viola playing in the sand, she was glad that they remained able to enjoy the simple things; positives were few and far between in the group’s grave situation, so it was important to take them whenever they could be found.

  “This place…” Robert went on, talking quietly to Holly and Dante, “… it has trees, grass, oxygen, water, space, manageable temperatures. If we make it off and tell people what we found, we could solve so many of Earth’s problems. This place could be a—”

  “Why are those rocks so tall and narrow?” Dante interrupted abruptly, pointing to the pillars with a fully outstretched arm.

  “Erosion,” Holly said, inflecting her answer somewhat in a clear sign that she didn’t really know. She turned back to Robert. “But that’s a good point about what this planet could offer if—”

  “But why were those giant pillars left behind?” Dante pushed, once again proving too intrigued by that to care about the impoliteness of cutting someone off mid-sentence. “And how were they so tall in the first place?”

  “I’m not a geologist, Dante,” Holly said. She saw Viola and Bo talking about something between themselves, and a few seconds later Viola called over to ask what the adults thought was on the other side of the ocean.

  Dante stepped down onto the sand and replied as he walked towards the children: “It might not be an ocean. It could be a lake.”

  “The tide looks too strong for a lake,” Robert replied, automatically following Dante. Holly joined them, too.

  Dante, who had been conservative to the point of obstruction over the last few hours, then surprised everyone by crouching to the ground, dipping his finger in the shallow water, and tasting it. “Fresh,” he said. “No salt, no ocean.”

  “On Earth,” Robert replied. “This planet doesn’t exactly fit the rest of our understandings.”

  Dante shrugged. “You’re the one who just said the tide is too strong for a lake. That’s based on what you know about Earth.”

  “I thought tides were something to do with the moon, anyway,” Viola said, joining the conversation as the adults reached the spot where she was now lying outstretched on the soft sand. “But I haven’t seen a moon. Has anyone else?”

  “I think we all have more questions than answers,” Holly said. An unexpected tide and absent moon were certainly issues worthy of further consideration, but the broader wonder of having unceremoniously discovered an entire uncharted planet left little mental energy for immediately breaking down these latest discoveries. “The best we can do right now is take samples of everything and bring them back to the lander for analysis. We have good equipment to test the samples, and Yury and Rusev will have some ideas about the bigger picture.”

  After taking several photographs of her surroundings from various angles using her wristband’s built-in camera, Holly removed her backpack and placed it on the sand; her strap-marked shoulders thanked her as she did so. She then took out some small expandable containers and handed one to each person. She asked Bo to collect dry sand from near the tunnel and Viola to collect some damp sand from near the slowly receding water. Dante, who had already touched the water, was given the instruction to collect a small amount while Robert was tasked with gathering as many different-looking rock fragments as he could find near the tunnel’s opening.

  “Holly, there’s stuff that looks like seaweed,” Viola called out. “I dunno if I should touch it.”

  Holly lifted out another container and walked over to take a look. It did look like seaweed.

  “What do you think?” Viola asked her.

  “We’ll take it. There might be a lot of it, and it might be edible.”

  Dante, sealed water sample in hand, approached from a few metres away. “Even if it is, it can’t be more nutritious than Rusev’s packs of powder. And when we find the Karrier, we’ll have more packs than we’ll ever need. It’s not like we could shape and flavour this stuff like the machine does to the algae.”

  “I never thought I’d look forward to eating algae,” Viola laughed, “but we really need to find the Karrier and fix that machine.” She pointed to the slimy seaweed in Holly’s container. “Because I’d rather drink the powder stuff every day for the rest of my life than eat that.”

  “It’s worth taking a sample,” Holly insisted. She glared at Dante, silently urging him to stop being so pointlessly
argumentative. In an effort to spare Viola any worrying thoughts, she chose not to remind them of Rusev’s comment the previous day: that the group’s priority in the event of failing to find the Karrier intact would become finding a local food source.

  Holly handed the container to Dante and asked him to put it in his largely empty backpack with the other samples, since hers was already heavy enough thanks to the drinking water she’d been carrying since leaving the lander.

  “Are we leaving?” Viola asked.

  “Yeah,” Holly said. “Once we get back to the lander, depending on what Grav and Rusev have found, we’ll either head out in another direction or follow them to the Karrier. There’s plenty of daylight left.”

  “Can we stay for five more minutes?” Bo begged as he handed his sample of dry sand to Dante. “Pleeease?”

  “She’s the boss,” Dante said, tilting his head towards Holly.

  “Five minutes,” she agreed; Bo was the group’s slowest walker, and Holly knew that keeping him upbeat would likely save more than five minutes over the course of the return trip to the lander.

  The walk back past the bulbous trees and jellyfish-like fungi certainly felt quicker than the outward leg, with Bo thinking out loud about all the things he could do on the beach between the time they would call the Venus station for help and the time the rescue crew would arrive.

  The boy’s chirpiness and positivity, though not quite contagious, did help to temper Holly’s crushing disappointment over not finding the Karrier. Yet another direction could now be crossed off Yury’s map of search routes, and the group’s lack of vehicles meant that they couldn’t travel any further than a half-day’s walk in any direction.

  In simple terms, they were running out of places to look.

  As the lander came into view, Holly’s anticipation grew. Would Rusev and Grav be back? Would they have already gone back out, as she was planning to? And either way… what had they found?

  Her first two questions were answered as soon as she re-entered the lander and saw Rusev sitting at the table with Yury and what looked like some kind of testing kit.

  “Did you find the Karrier?” Grav’s voice boomed.

  Holly turned to see him sitting on the floor in the corner. She shook her head solemnly, knowing that his question obviously meant that he hadn’t found it, either.

  “Did you find anything?”

  “A beach,” Holly said. “White sand, fresh water, a tide. It looks tropical… like a photo of what a perfect beach should look like. I’ll show you the photos from my wristband. And we found an aquatic plant that might be edible, but I didn’t see where it was growing. There were other weird plants on the way to the beach; I didn’t want to touch them, but we got photos of them, too.”

  Rusev turned away from what she and Yury were doing. “You found a beach? A tropical beach?”

  “Yeah,” Holly said, surprised by just how… surprised… Rusev was. “Why? What did you find?”

  Grav pushed a container along the floor towards Holly’s feet. The sealed container was metallic and extremely cold to the touch. “What the hell is in here?” Holly asked.

  Rusev and Grav answered in unplanned unison: “Snow.”

  twenty-seven

  “The sample is from the ground, but snow was falling,” Grav said. “Heavily.”

  “So there’s snow lying on the ground?” Bo chimed in from the top of the ladder, having overheard their conversation as he climbed up. “Deep enough for snowmen and igloos?”

  Grav nodded. “Deep enough that we could not walk through it. It got deeper and deeper as we walked on until it was up to my waist.”

  “I haven’t even seen a cloud since we landed,” Holly said, trying to make sense of what she was hearing.

  “Oh, the sky was blanketed,” Grav said. “Just like the snow, the cloud coverage got denser as we walked on. We did not expect to get so wet, so we had to collect a sample and turn back. It has only been fifteen minutes since we arrived.”

  “Which isn’t enough to be sure,” Yury began, “but the tests so far strongly suggest that this is regular snow… for want of a better word. Tell me more about the aquatic plant you found. I’ll see the photos in a minute, but did you bring some samples back?”

  Holly took the container from Dante’s backpack and brought it to the table. The Harringtons all sat on the floor next to Grav, with Bo excitedly telling him how warm the sand was at the beach and trying to describe the weird trees and fungi he’d seen on the way.

  “Hmmm,” Yury said, eyeing the seaweed-like sample. “Aside from nutrition and digestibility, which we can test for, there is the question of toxicity. Even if we detect no known toxins, I would be very hesitant to eat this until we truly have to. Still, to find something like this within walking distance is more than I expected. I’ll test it thoroughly tonight.”

  Holly couldn’t hide her confusion over the delay. “Tonight?”

  “I’m going on the next search,” Yury said. “I want to see some of this craziness for myself.”

  The group, save for Rusev who agreed to stay behind in Yury’s place, prepared for the second excursion of the day. Holly joined the Harringtons in the extension as they packed some warmer clothes in case the next direction of travel took them to a cold environment.

  “Having to pack three sets of clothes for the changeable weather,” Robert mused with a quickly widening grin. “This is worse than when we went to Scotland.”

  Outside, after navigating the ladder with less difficulty than he feared, Yury wasted no time in taking control of the search. “We proceed as one group,” he said. “We sweep forward in one line, spread as widely as possible while remaining within sight and within hearing distance. Pay attention to the ground; if you see anything that may be debris from the Karrier — or indeed anything else of interest — you will call your neighbours to check it with you. You will not touch it. Is this clear? Those at the outside have the greatest responsibility to scan the distance. Grav, Holly, I think you are the obvious choices.”

  “Holly might want to stay on the inside,” Dante said. “Nearer the kids. I can go at one of the edges if she does.”

  “Okay with you, Holly?” Yury asked.

  She nodded, glad that Dante had volunteered.

  The group then set off in a direction some 45 degrees between the route to the beach and the route Dante had taken in his first-day attempt to locate Holly’s lander. Dante flanked one end of the line, with Bo to his right followed by Holly, Viola, Robert, Yury and ultimately Grav.

  The landscape in the early stages was relatively barren; closer to the sterile canyon which had surrounded Holly’s lander than the grassy area that led to the beach. Rock formations were dotted around, some of which were quite substantial. The lack of conversation caused by the distance between each member of the group made time pass slowly, and after the better part of an hour neither Holly nor either of her immediate neighbours had found anything of note on the ground.

  Before long, the ground became slightly softer and broken by the occasional tuft of yellowed grass.

  Holly looked again towards Viola, marching steadily forward several hundred metres away, and saw that there were trees not far ahead of the girl. She then looked the other way towards… nothing.

  Where Bo should have been, there was a gap.

  Frantic, Holly looked backwards to see if Bo had left his position and walked sideways to check on something. He hadn’t. Dante continued forward in the distance beyond Bo’s previous position, as oblivious to the boy’s absence as Holly had been moments earlier. Around one hundred metres behind where Bo should have been, Holly saw a boulder that looked higher than a person.

  He must have found something, she reasoned. He must have found something and forgotten that he was supposed to call out.

  Holly ran towards the rock. As she neared, she heard Bo’s voice calling her name. A wave of relief crashed into her when she heard him, but his tone — pained — sent her back
towards worry just as quickly.

  “I’m here, I’m here,” she called. She reached the boulder, which was in fact a medium-sized formation, and found Bo on the other side with his foot lodged between two large ground-level rocks.

  “I just wanted to climb over,” he said, his voice full of sorrow. “I didn’t think I’d get stuck.”

  “How did your foot get in if you can’t get it out?” Holly asked, leading with the obvious question rather than berating him for acting irresponsibly. There would be time for that later.

  “I slipped. I don’t know… my foot was straight and now it’s not. Now it’s flat on the ground and there’s not enough room to move it.”

  Holly crouched down and tried to move the smaller of the two rocks, which was still substantial in size. She failed to budge it but felt enough movement to know it would be possible.

  “Dante,” she yelled.

  He alone was close enough to hear, and he hurried over without hesitation. “What the hell happened here?” he asked when he arrived, looking more confused than concerned.

  “His foot got lodged,” Holly said, looking at Bo as his face turned ever deeper shades of red. “I need you to help me move one of the rocks.”

  Dante cracked his knuckles and performed a series of exaggerated stretches to prepare himself for the task.

  “On three,” Holly said.

  They moved the rock with ease, freeing Bo’s foot.

  “Don’t do that again,” Dante said, suddenly serious.

  Bo nodded timidly. “Are you going to tell my dad?”

  Dante and Holly shared a look. “Are you going to do it again?” Holly asked.

  “No! I promise: I won’t touch anything.”

  “Okay,” she said. “We won’t.”

  “Thanks.”

  Holly looked at Dante again. “You better get back to your position. Take a few steps inside so there’s less distance between the three of us.”

  “Good idea,” he said, setting off.

  In the shadow of the rocks, Holly spotted what was by far the most mushroom-like fungus she had seen so far. She wasted no time in snapping a photograph and then placing a sample in one of the empty containers in her backpack, taking care not to touch the fungus. Fungus was the word in her mind, but she knew there was no firm justification for assuming the organism could be neatly classified in such Earth-based terms.