Haven

by Vincent E. Sweeney

  “...and don’t forget to do a head-count before we take off,” Michael was saying. “There should only be three empty…”

  A second explosion boomed and Michael paused, irritated. He looked back at the rock wall and saw the two boys playing in a dangerous situation. “Childish,” he said, in disgust.

  The pilot he had been talking to piped up. “Excuse me, sir. But why did we bring them along?”

  Michael shook his head again. “According to Hedrick, we needed them. I just hope they don’t get themselves killed.”

  The pilot smiled at his commander. “How about hurt?”

  Michael raised an eyebrow briefly. “At least they might learn something that way,” Michael replied. He looked the pilot directly in the eye. “A wise man once said, ‘whatever doesn’t kill you, will only make you stronger’.”

  “Are you ready?” Mandel asked.

  Stephen stared upward still. He thought for a moment, wiping sweat away from his upper lip. “Not really, but ok.”

  Mandel laughed. “Let’s just do it.” He pressed a lever on his gun barrel, and a small engine inside the stock began to whir. The slack in the rope quickly disappeared, and soon Mandel was being lifted up, along the rock face. “Whoa!” he shouted, as he was being dragged. He let off the lever and stopped about ten feet up, regaining his composure. He placed his feet perpendicular to the wall and leaned back. “You coming, Steve?” he asked.

  Stephen nodded. “Yeah.” He pushed the lever on the side of his gun, and the rope began to straighten out. When all the slack was gone, Stephen was jerked towards the wall. He had no time to yell, or else he would have. He almost fell, but regained his balance and began running with the gun. As he came close to the wall, he heard Mandel yell some kind of warning, but he was preoccupied with what he had to do next. When he guessed he was close enough, Stephen jumped into the air and landed with his left foot planted on the rock face. Before he could be dragged, Stephen lifted his right foot above his left and began running up the wall.

  A laughing Mandel began climbing the rock again, but much slower than his comrade. Halfway up, Mandel caught up with Stephen, who had finally slowed his own pace.

  “Isn’t this great?” Mandel shouted, as they began climbing in sync.

  Stephen’s hand was trembling as he pressed the retractor lever gently. “Yeah, a real party.”

  Mandel laughed again, and the two friends ascended the final distance.

  As they reached the top, Mandel swiftly lifted his leg up to the grassy plateau and stepped up to it, never having to slow his pace. A moment later, Stephen appeared behind him, letting out a grunt as he was dragged over the top. He finally let off the retractor switch and lay in the grass, groaning. Mandel, with a broad smile, walked over to his friend and offered a helping hand. Stephen took it aggressively.

  “I say we just jump down,” Stephen said, rising.

  Mandel laughed at his wearied friend and turned around to look at the field below. He walked to the edge and gazed in amazement.

  “Steve, come here,” Mandel said.

  Stephen walked over to the edge and realized just how far up they had come. “Wow,” he said, quickly taking a step back.

  “What’s the matter?” Mandel asked. “Afraid of heights?”

  Stephen peered cautiously over the edge again. “I guess so.”

  Mandel smiled and took off his backpack full of equipment.

  Stephen watched the shuttle below, amazed at how small it looked along with the tiny specks of men all around it. He felt his stomach sink and then stepped back again.

  “Yeah, I am,” Stephen said, turning to face away from the edge.

  Mandel snickered as he adjusted the switches on his camera and focused in on the shuttle below, documenting the first rest stop of the expedition.

  Stephen closed his eyes and placed a hand over his unsettled stomach. He would never have guessed how strangely mere images, when viewed from a great distance, could affect his body. He swallowed a large lump in his throat and slowly opened his eyes to gather his bearings.

  When he opened them, Stephen was awestruck by the beauty displayed before him. For miles, all he could see was lush forest, speckled with occasional fields or hills. The rolling landscape captivated him, especially at the point where it blended in with the crystal ocean, which stretched forth into a virtual eternity. He breathed in deeply and closed his eyes again, enjoying the most serene moment of his life. As he opened his eyes, he noticed something strange off in the distance. A large brown area of land amidst hundreds of miles of green caught Stephen’s eye. He found it odd that there would be such a massive patch of dead earth along the cliff-shore, where so much lush grass grew.

  Stephen shook his backpack off and began rummaging inside it for his own camera. He found the device and raised its scope to his eye, magnifying the image in the distance. At first, all Stephen could see was a dim green blur. He panned the scope around until it came to rest on a brown blur. Stephen then adjusted the focus on his camera until an oddly regular structure came into view. All Stephen could make out was a flat brown surface, perpendicular to the ground, with dark square sections spaced in intervals along its face. Stephen pressed a button on the camera, and the image zoomed out to reveal one side of an enormous edifice. Confusion then gave way to realization, and Stephen rose slowly to his feet.

  The base of the city was at least a full kilometer in diameter, and its massive skyscraper apartments rose to well over two hundred feet into the sky. The city was nestled right along the edge of the grassy precipice that dropped to the ocean below. Stephen knew he had discovered a civilization, and before he could think, the words had left his mouth.

  “Up here!” he screamed.

  A surprised Mandel nearly lost his balance from the cry, and he turned, angrily at first, to see what Stephen had found. He saw his friend transfixed with something off in the distance, so Mandel rose to his feet and examined the brown patch of countryside through his own camera. Then, his mouth fell open to accompany Stephen’s, and the two stared in bewilderment at the peculiar patch of familiarity in the midst of a foreign land.

  Mandel excitedly rushed back to the edge of the cliff and peered down at the men below.

  “Up here! Get up here!” he raved.

  The annoyed-but-curious soldiers looked to their leader. Michael sighed loudly, and then motioned for the men to board the shuttle again.

  4

  The shuttle was docked on the edge of the cliff that overlooked the field, facing the city. To Stephen it looked like some kind of metallic watchdog, observing them from afar. Michael decided it would be best to approach on foot, so as not to appear threatening to whatever beings inhabited the city. However, he left his transmitter turned on and patched in to the shuttle cockpit at all times - in the event a quick reconnaissance was needed.

  Stephen and Mandel had not been allowed to carry weapons, although all the other men had rifle-packs slung on their backs. The rifle-packs were powerful weapons, but also bulky. A thick black cord ran from a softly whirring generator on each man’s back to a hand-held rifle. Now a soft hum resonated from twenty men, all of whom were taking cautious, observant strides through the sparsely wooded section of forest that led to the city. As afternoon sunlight poured down through the waving leaves, Stephen noticed peculiar shadows that appeared to dance across the ground at his feet. He realized he was filming them and quickly put the camera’s focus back on the gradually growing buildings, which seemed to become more eminent and more dominant with every step of the way. Mandel was also filming the buildings as they approached, but he was particularly fascinated by a prominent, glowing aura around the structures, produced by the oncoming sunlight. This frame of radiance gave each building a kind of glorious halo.

  Up ahead, Stephen could see the entrance to the city through a five-meter-high mortar wall that seemed to encompass the entire perimeter of the township. The wall was gapped in one section where a sliding iron gate had b
een left open. Michael put his hand up as a signal for the men to halt. When he did, all motion in the woods abruptly ceased, and the men were still.

  All was silent across the land. Michael’s hand was still raised in the air as he listened closely for any sounds of life. After several minutes of deadly stillness, he finally turned his hand to the side, spread out his fingers, and motioned for the men to disperse and leave the woods. All the men, including Stephen and Mandel, were obliged to follow Michael’s commands. With their weapons always ready, the men slowly stepped out of the woods and into the broad field in front of the silent city.

  Stephen knew he was not fully aware of the tactics and procedures that must have been rolling through Michael’s mind, but he knew for certain that one pervading question had been begging for an answer for several minutes now: where were the inhabitants?

  The city was entirely deserted. Whoever had constructed its enormous apartment-style buildings had left no sign of their presence there. No tools, no articles of clothing, and no bodies were anywhere to be found amongst the dusty streets, which were spotted with weeds. All the buildings seemed to be constructed of an adobe material - involving no bricks or wood, only a hardened compound.

  As the tiny party entered the city gates, each man stared upward in awe at buildings with no glass or screens in the windows and no doors to open or shut. However, every building had portals on its ground floor that were tall enough for a man to walk through. Michael took this as an immediate sign as to what beings had created the city, and he frowned at his suspicion.

  Michael motioned to two men in his party. “You two, check inside one of these buildings, and look for any artifacts,” he commanded.

  “Yes, sir,” the men replied.

  Michael led the party on, further into the city limits. On either side of them, the massive buildings took on the eminence of inspecting giants, just waiting to squash a human who looked at them without reverence. Michael sighed and nodded at his conclusion.

  “I think I know who used to live here,” he announced to the crowd, who turned in attention to his voice. Some of the men had already begun to formulate the same answer, but had kept silent. Michael had stopped the party in the center of the city street, and they began to gather closer as he spoke.

  “Notice the size of these doorways and think of the size of the ship’s doorways,” he began. “Look at the shape and size of those windows, and compare them to the ones back on the ship.” He paused as the crowd looked around. “Remarkably similar aren’t they? We know there was one other ship like ours sent out almost fifty years before us in the exact same direction we were. Now there’s no definite proof yet, but it looks to me like they landed here too, and constructed this city.”

  The small crowd stirred with motion as people looked around at the buildings, but no one spoke. The pair of scouring soldiers emerged from a dark doorway and approached the Commander.

  “Nothing inside sir,” one of them reported. “Only stairways and empty rooms.”

  Michael nodded. “Stairways…”

  The afternoon sun was low to the ground and almost touching the water of the infinite ocean beyond the city. It cast an orange glow over the tops of the skyscrapers and sent intense rays down through the alleyways, urging the humans to squint as they scanned the area.

  Somewhere in the crowd of people, an unknown voice resounded, “If our predecessors made this place, then where are they, sir?”

  Michael turned back to face the city entrance and peered past it, into the darkness of the forest. Something about the woods had come to captivate him, and it seemed at every moment to call him into its shadows - desiring to swallow him up amongst the leaves. He trembled slightly from an inner chill and turned back to face the men.

  “I don’t know,” he announced, “…but let’s return to the ship for now…before it gets any darker.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Mandel said, just loud enough for Stephen to hear. The boys were being jostled back and forth in their seats from some turbulence outside the shuttlecraft. “It’s awfully amazing that they ended up here too.”

  Stephen turned away from the window. He had been staring into the horizon as the remaining half of the sun dipped slowly out of sight.

  “Well, why is that so hard to believe?” he asked.

  “Because…” Mandel started. “Think of all the dozens of solar systems our ship passed through, just in our lifetime. There are millions and millions more of them out there that we never came anywhere near. How do we know the other ship didn’t go off and find another planet like this one? Or how do we know they’re not even still out there somewhere?”

  Stephen shook his head. “Man, think of it. Of all those systems we passed through, how many did we find that were inhabitable by human beings? None, right?”

  Mandel nodded. “Yeah.”

  “The reason we never stopped on any other system is because we couldn’t live on any of them. The course our ship flew on since it left… um… Earth, however many centuries ago, is the exact same course the other ship started out on. So unless it veered off its original path for some reason, we should have been hot on its trail all our lives. If they came across this planet, they should have stopped here too.”

  Mandel shook his head stubbornly. “Awfully lucky coincidence if they are here.”

  “Ah, whatever,” Stephen said as he turned to look out the window again.

  “We’re approaching the ship,” said the pilot over the intercom system.

  Mandel joined Stephen and looked out the window at a rapidly approaching hillside. They both recognized it and knew the ship was just beyond it.

  “Well if the others are here by some chance,” Mandel began. “I want to know what happened to them.”

  As the shuttle soared over the crest of the hill, the mother ship and the field came into view. Stephen smiled at the sight of his ship from the outside, and he noticed with particular interest the gorgeous way the light from the setting sun was reflecting off of it. But Stephen’s smile slowly faded as he saw, covering the field next to the crashed ship, over a hundred crude headstones with irregular, man-shaped mounds underneath each. Mandel and Stephen looked at each other grimly.

  “Take a long look, men,” Michael ordered over the loudspeaker. “Those are the men and women who died when we crashed here.”

  Even with the unearthly noise of the shuttle’s shrill engines pounding everyone’s ears, the uncomfortable silence could be felt by all.

  “They never saw this world,” he continued. “It’s our duty to remember them as we see it, and to live for them.”

  Some of the men nodded in agreement. Others merely watched the scene with silent respect for what he had said.

  The shuttle zoomed across the landscape, coming ever closer to the ship. It decelerated rapidly as it neared the open hangar doors. As the sun finally set over the horizon, the shuttle disappeared into the gaping mouth of the hangar bay. Then, the doors creaked slowly with movement and, after a moment, clanged shut with a loud, resounding echo.

  “What was it like, Michael?” the Governor asked, as he swiveled in his chair to face the Commander.

  “It was amazing, sir,” Michael replied. “If the other humans aren’t here…if they didn’t build that city, then a species much like us with very high intelligence did.”

  The Governor smiled, thoroughly pleased with the news. “I believe they are here.”

  Michael shrugged as he looked around the Governor’s office. There were no pictures or images hanging from the walls. Only monitors and consoles that targeted each section of the ship could be seen, and the office itself seemed to buzz with electricity. A single, bright dome light in the center of the ceiling lit the room well.

  “If they are here, I would really like to know why they abandoned their city,” Michael said. “For all we know they may have been driven out by something.”

  The Governor thought on Michael’s words only for a moment before declaring his
own theory. “If they had been driven out, they wouldn’t have taken time to pack everything up now would they?” he asked. “You said yourself there were no remnants left in the city…nothing but shells of buildings.”

  Michael shook his head, annoyed. “Why did they leave then? And where did they go?”

  Hedrick shrugged with a boyish smirk on his face. “Maybe they just felt like moving to another location. You know, we can’t always take such a pessimistic view of things around here.”

  “That’s the best way to avoid danger,” Michael replied. “We can’t just assume nothing bad happened. Any number of things could have happened.” His voice was growing louder and angrier. “And we don’t even know for sure yet if they were even humans that built the city! What if there’s some other life here?”

  The Governor rose from his desk, sensing that his authority was being disregarded. “What do you expect me to do then, Michael? Hmm?” he asked bitterly.

  Michael nodded, hoping that the Governor might listen to reason. “You should take care of your people. We should stay away from the city. We should stay here at the ship, where it’s reasonably safe, until we determine exactly what’s going on.”

  Hedrick was appalled. “Nonsense, we’ll move into the city tomorrow.”

  “What?!” Michael shouted, furiously. “You could be putting us all in danger! We don’t know what’s out there!”

  “Exactly why you’re here, Commander. I have total confidence in you and your men’s ability to protect the people.”

  Michael could take no more, but he suppressed his rage for the sake of civilized confrontation. With trembling hands, he leaned against the back of a chair. “You’re crazy. I don’t understand you.”

  Hedrick shook his head. “Michael, all the people here trust me, why won’t you?”

  “Because you’re not acting wisely, Governor. You’re in charge here only because the people have had no reason to usurp your authority until now.”