Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  … Or is that classified too?

  The space-probe evidence, naturally, was covered up. I should be used by now to our natural disposition for secrecy. But over an issue as immense as this, it utterly dismays me.

  That’s why I fight on.

  (Teletype uncovered during review of FOIA material:)

  FBI DALLAS 10–20–1983 4–28 PM

  DIRECTOR AND SAC, CINCINNATI URGENT

  NEVADA EXPLOSION, INFORMATION CONCERNING (blanked) TELEPHONICALLY ADVISED THIS OFFICE THAT (blanked) SATELLITE OBSERVED DEBRIS AND DESTRUCTION AT (blanked) TELEPHONIC CONVERSATION BETWEEN THIS OFFICE AND (blanked) FAILED TO BEAR OUT BELIEF PHOTOGRAPHS AND NEGATIVES BEING TRANSPORTED TO THIS OFFICE BY SPECIAL PLANE FOR EXAMINATION PROVIDED BY THIS OFFICE BECAUSE OF NATIONAL INTEREST IN THE CASE AND FACT THAT NATIONAL BROADCASTING COMPANY ASSOCIATED PRESS AND OTHERS ATTEMPTING TO BREAK STORY OF EXPLOSION AND/OR AIRCRAFT CRASH TODAY NO FURTHER INVESTIGATION BEING CONDUCTED

  END.

  Here’s the story, as best I can reconstruct it.

  In 1971 – armed with space-probe information about a secretive, advanced and possibly hostile civilization on Mars – President Nixon ordered preparations to begin for covert missions to Mars, manned and otherwise. These were to include the possibility of launching a pre-emptive nuclear attack against the planet. The project was under the command of the USAF, and would use Apollo moon-rocket technology with nuclear-rocket stages.

  (And that, sir author, is the truth about Nixon’s decision on going to Mars after Apollo. He didn’t decide we wouldn’t go. He decided we would – but the program would be run by the USAF, not NASA, and it would be run in secret. Even the publicly declared Apollo follow-on program, the Space Shuttle, had a military flavour and had a role in the defense of Earth against the Martians, which I’ve yet to determine.)

  Elliott Becker trained as an astronaut in the 1960s. In 1971 his death was faked in a T-38 airplane accident, and he was assigned to the secret man-to-Mars program.

  But Nixon fell, and the project was abandoned, the Nevada launch complex and the space hardware mothballed. Elliott was moved into senior Air Force positions, with a central responsibility for maintaining the integrity of a Mars program cover-up.

  In 1981, things changed.

  By now the additional Viking data was in hand. President Reagan ordered the mounting of a secret manned flyby scouting mission to Mars, under the command of the USAF, using what was left of the 1970s-era Saturn technology. This limited-objectives mission was achievable relatively easily. Meanwhile Reagan revived preparations for a nuclear attack on Mars.

  The flyby mission was launched in 1982 from the secret Nevada base. It carried two men, and it would pass by Mars on the planet’s night side.

  The funding was covered as an SDI project. But when SDI funding came under scrutiny, and Reagan’s attention moved on to other issues, the project was again abandoned. I guess the logic was that the Martians didn’t after all pose an immediate threat. This time the Nevada launch complex was destroyed.

  And that’s the truth behind the 1983 explosion out in the desert.

  … But Elliott Becker got to fly his mission.

  Inspector General, Department of Defense,

  400 Army Navy Drive, Arlington,

  Virginia 22202-2684. April 29, 1997.

  Mr John E Proctor, Director-in-Charge, National Security Issues,

  General Accounting Office.

  Dear Mr Proctor:

  The Department of the Air Force July 1984 report is the DoD response to questions posed in your April 2 letter related to GAO C 91165. If you have any questions, please contact my action officer, Janet Fromkin, at 703-604-7846. If she is not available please contact Ms Frances Douhet at 703-604-7543.

  Sincerely

  Richard S. Dupuy, Deputy Assistant Inspector General for GAO Report Analysis.

  Tad Jones told me that in 1981 he heard a rumour that the program he had worked on was being revived. But nobody was hiring in Cross Fork.

  Tad Jones was kind of a bitter man. So he got himself an off-road vehicle and went hunting.

  The nuclear rocket site is on no map. Jones had to break through wire fences and skirt mine fields (he told me). Then he found himself in an area of high radioactivity (he’d taken along counters).

  He approached the centre of the site.

  And there he found the white needle-shape of a nuclear-tipped Saturn V rocket, assembled in secret, standing on a rusting gantry out there in the desert. Hell of a thing. He showed me a photograph.

  Jones said that after the demolition the site was seeded with radioactive waste. He said it would be impossible to return to the now-lethal site, and the evidence is lost.

  But the program lasted long enough to send Elliott Becker to Mars.

  He and his crewmate used Apollo-class spacecraft, enduring the year-long journey in an adapted Skylab habitation module.

  Think of it. Becker must have watched Earth and Moon recede like twin stars, every moment travelling further than any human before him. I wonder what he imagined he would find at journey’s end.

  Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC 20505.

  May 22 1997.

  Mr John E Proctor, Director-in-Charge, National Security Issues, General Accounting Office.

  Dear Mr Proctor:

  In a letter dated 15 April 1997, this Agency advised you that it would conduct a comprehensive record search to aid in the completion of your investigation of an explosion in Nevada, October 1983. In accordance with your request we have searched all of our databases. The search did not yield any documents related to either of these terms other than the report returned by our field worker Frederic K Durant in 1983, which remains classified. Therefore this Agency has no information relevant to your investigation.

  Sincerely, Nora Franck, Executive Director.

  It goes to prove there is hope. Even the most gigantic fraud and cover-up, no matter what the investment of time and money, is going to flake at the edges after a couple of decades.

  Look, you can verify most of this stuff from the public records for yourself, as I’m trying to do. Right? And I’d welcome it if you did and let me know. I mean, it was our hundred billion dollars.

  I have an instinct to blow a hole through every veil of secrecy I come across. That keeps me busy. It’s a point of principle. But aside from the principle, I just want to know. I mean, here we have two guys who went all the way to Mars, for God’s sake, and they’ve never been allowed to tell their stories.

  I’ll go to my grave wondering what Elliot Becker saw. Just cold, lonely emptiness? Or perhaps glimpses of structures, lights in the ochre deserts on the dark side of Mars?

  We grope for truth, and make our progress slow. William Davenant, 1606–1668

  (Author’s note: I guess it’s fairly obvious why I was the target of this particular hoax. And my correspondent is right about our culture’s excessive fondness for secrecy, as this stonewalling document itself demonstrates; as long as secrecy remains, rumours about what is being hidden are going to flourish.

  (But like all good hoaxes, this one is rooted in enough fact to make it at least remotely plausible – for there are a few oddities in the story of human involvement with Mars.

  (Before the first space probes, Mars was thought to be Earthlike. Many expert telescope observers were convinced they had seen networks of canals, swathes of vegetation. The Mariner 4 flyby probe of 1964, however, glimpsed a Moon-like world with a thin atmosphere, and craters where the Earth-bound observers thought they saw canals. In 1971 the Mariner 9 orbiter really did find a global dust storm obscuring the surface. And later, the Viking landers found a surface not just lifeless but apparently sterilized, perhaps by solar radiation. The US Mars Observer did fail as it reached Mars.

  (And there were proposals, mooted in the 1960s, for manned flybys of Mars, an interim program to follow Apollo. The flyby would have passed the planet’s dark side… )

  United States
General Accounting Office.

  Summary to GAO report GAO/NSRAF-96-244 addressed to the Hon. W.X. Lambie.

  Cover note (concluded):

  … Our search of government records was complicated by the fact that some records we wanted to review were missing and there was not always an explanation. Further, the records management regulations for the retention and disposition of records were unclear or changing during the period we reviewed.

  We conducted our review from March 1997 to May 1998 in accordance with generally accepted government-auditing standards. If you or your staff have any questions about this report, please call me on (202) 512-7858.

  Sincerely yours,

  John E. Proctor, Director-In-Charge, National Security Issues.

  THE WE WHO SING

  Reid Malenfant wrote to his grandson:

  Sure, you can spin conspiracy theories forever. Sometimes I think we’re just little bitty creatures who think too small. We can’t see the truth that’s all around us.

  Maybe there is life everywhere, and everywhen, but we just can’t see it. Maybe there was life as far back in the history of the universe as you can look.

  Shine joined the chattering, swarming throng. The excitement was enormous. ‘The Wave is approaching,’ the people sang. ‘The Wave …’

  Shine’s people called themselves the We Who Sing. For that is what they did, and how they knew themselves.

  And here came the Wave itself, a vast swell of light, crashing endlessly forward with a noise like a vast groan. As it progressed the Wave broke over a bank of frost, effortlessly smashing apart its lifeless filigree structures.

  Now the people rose up before the Wave, sparks rising before a vast firestorm. But there was structure in the songs they sang, and in their dance, as if they were a flock of glowing swallows.

  The Wave was a vast acoustic pulse that spanned the Ocean – but the Ocean was the world, and so the Wave was the song of the world itself.

  Swept up by anticipation, Shine added a whoop of joy to the people’s complex electromagnetic harmonies, and she dove deeper into the glowing crowd.

  In this Ocean of plasma, a place filled with light and heat, Shine was a creature of ball lightning. Her body was a thing of sound itself, her internal structure maintained by criss-crossing standing waves and solitons. And as she swelled joyously, her song advertized her strength and beauty, the depth and harmony of her structure – and her readiness to triple.

  Potential partners clustered around her, tense, eager.

  … But here was the one she thought of as Cold.

  Shine danced away.

  All around Shine, firework bursts of death and life lit up the sky. Already the We Who Sing had begun to triple. They came together in their threes, their structures merging and briefly dissolving, before the bright compounds flew apart in sudden happy explosions. And from the shining shrapnel emerged triple-daughters, small, eager, like their vanished parents yet subtly modified, their essences shared.

  Shine longed to dissolve in that final happy glow.

  But Cold had followed her. ‘You must not do this, Shine,’ Cold said.

  Cold was small and ugly. The potential triple-partners had no wish to share their terminal love with this etiolated creature. Subtly they began to back away.

  Shine’s angry shout pulsed over Cold. ‘Leave me alone!’

  But Cold stayed close to her. ‘To triple is to lose yourself,’ she said, insistent. ‘It is to dissolve in that final madness, from which nothing emerges but immature triple-daughters, as mindless as a clump of frost.’

  ‘It is the way of things –’

  ‘It is our tragedy. As we make new life, we forget – even the best and brightest of us. I have seen it happen, over and over.’

  Shine swooped and spun, her agitation growing as the Wave approached and the dance reached its climax. All her life Cold had pursued her like this, baffling her with an incomprehensible, dismal chatter of patterns and memory. ‘You are nothing but talk. The Ocean is without end! It will last forever! What use is a long life if there is no change?’

  Cold said solemnly, ‘Listen to me, Shine. The Ocean is going to die.’

  It was an ugly thought, discordant, incomprehensible. Unacceptable.

  ‘No.’ Shine sailed away from Cold, jetting through the plasma soup, seeking to rejoin the throng.

  But still Cold pursued her. ‘It is the truth, Shine. The next Wave will be the last. Please, Shine. You are one of the few who can understand – even though you deny it.’

  The giant Wave loomed closer, and people bobbed before it like flecks of surf.

  ‘This is my time,’ begged Shine. ‘Let me go.’

  Cold said, ‘I think there may be a way –’

  But now the Wave’s immense compression front hit them.

  The people crashed through the great glowing wall. Swooping, singing, immersed in the world’s booming voice, the We Who Sing fed on dense plasma, and they tripled madly. It was a shrieking, joyous frenzy.

  And when the Wave had passed – and the people, illuminated by the brightness of a new, bewildered generation, began to sing their songs once more – here was Shine, alone.

  She swept away from Cold, away from the creature who had kept her from the tripling, angry, bitter, frightened.

  The universe was young.

  It had been just three hundred thousand years since the formative singularity. Now the universe was a knot of spacetime, unravelling at lightspeed, yet still little larger than a single galaxy.

  And everywhere it was as hot as the interior of a star.

  All matter here was in the form of plasma: an electrically charged mist crowded with protons, electrons, simple atomic nuclei. And the plasma made the universe opaque. A photon, a bit of light, could not travel far before it was impeded by a charged particle, just as sunlight scatters from the droplets of water that make up a fog.

  So the plasma glowed, an ocean of light.

  But the intense radiation bath likewise assailed matter. True, wherever it got the chance – in pockets of relative cool – atomic matter formed, electrons clinging to nuclei like long-separated siblings, the new atoms gravity-tugging each other. But, bombarded by the blistering photons, any matter cluster was quickly shattered. The brief frost banks evaporated, the atoms smashed, the plasma restored.

  In this ferocious heat there could be no solid structure: no planets, no stars, no galaxies.

  But the plasma ocean was not uniform. Not featureless.

  Cold said she would take Shine and Harmony to a place where, she said, they could see the future.

  The two of them joined her reluctantly, in the place where the people hung in a great cloud, rippling on the Ocean’s softly swelling currents.

  There was a full ecology here. Instabilities generated little pockets of turbulence, like spinning flowers in the plasma, and on these small structures fed greater forms, which were consumed in their turn. The pinnacle of this food chain was reached in the dense, complex, hot-as-sun bodies of the We Who Sing. And so they fed now, browsing on the turbulence and scurrying, mindless forms.

  Cold, with Shine and Harmony, moved out of this glowing crowd and away into swelling emptiness.

  Soon they were alone, three points of brightness swimming through a sea of yellow-white light.

  Harmony was younger than Shine, her sparkling structure less subtly developed. But she was nevertheless a handsome creature who, like Shine, had somehow been snared by Cold’s discordant words. She sang as they jetted along, but her songs betrayed her unease and boredom.

  Cold’s body was smaller than Shine’s or Harmony’s: small, ugly, her inner structure decaying, her circumference ragged. Denying the dissolution of the triple, she had been subject too long to the great pulses of heat and cold that washed through this Ocean-sky.

  They were an odd trio, uncomfortable with each other.

  ‘ … Here,’ said Cold at last. ‘This will do. Look now …’

  Th
ey had come to a place where the Ocean glowed with a little less vigour than elsewhere. Instinctively Shine contracted, compressing the warmth of her own structure.

  Here was a great sculpture of frost, a wispy glimmering spiderweb. But already the Ocean’s turbulence was closing this random pocket of coolness, and the frost, twisting, crumbling, was breaking up.

  Harmony grumbled, ‘There’s nobody here.’

  Cold said, ‘It isn’t people I’ve brought you to see.’

  ‘Nothing, then,’ said Harmony. ‘There’s nothing here.’

  ‘Nothing but frost,’ Shine said.

  ‘Who cares about frost?’ said Harmony. ‘Frost is dead. Frost cannot sing.’

  She said, ‘There has always been frost – wispy structures like this, gathering in the transient cold pockets. But there is more frost now than in the past.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Harmony said haughtily.

  ‘Nevertheless it is true.’

  Shine struggled to find the right questions. What is ‘past’? What is ‘future’? What is ‘change’? ‘How can you know such a thing?’

  Cold’s ragged body pulsed. ‘Because I have lived long enough to see it. Time is a great gift. I have seen the frost gather, Shine … I have built my memory, so that I may understand the world. And I have learned that there is a deeper sort of memory, that lingers even when we are gone.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Cold began to sing, quite beautifully. Her body glowed with colour.

  The song was part of the standard canon of the We Who Sing, and it had structure: subtle rhythms, themes composed of repetitive phrases, ‘notes’ expressed in a discrete suite of colours, even a kind of refrain like a rhyme.

  A human could have appreciated the song’s beauty. A whale could.