Phobos

by Steve Alten

  “BT-13 Valiant. The Navy retired them after the war. With a bit of work, I think I can get this old girl back in the air. This her?”

  “Lew Jack, Dominique Vazquez. Lew’s ex-Navy, a former pilot. According to my father, he was also a decent shortstop way back when they were in high school.”

  “Second baseman, and quit buttering me up. So you’re Dominique Vazquez? Nice to see Mick interested in women again, especially a looker like you. Of course, the last Mexican beauty yanked his pecker so hard I’m surprised he has any teeth left.”

  Mick shoots Lew a look. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Yeah, it was. Dominique, are you a US citizen?”

  “Yes. Why? Was this former pecker yanker of Mick’s an illegal alien?”

  “All right, enough.”

  Lew grins. “She’s got some kick in her. I like that.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Your ride’s out back ready to go; there’s sandwiches and water in the cooler.” He glances at Dominique, pointing to a rusted steel door next to a ransacked office. “Bathroom. I suggest you use it, it’s a long ride. I ran out of toilet paper, but there’s some paper towels.”

  “Thanks anyway, but I peed in the twenty-million-dollar jet.”

  “Feisty, I like that in a woman. If Mick disappoints you, make sure you come back here, I’ll take you for a ride in my Piper.”

  Dominique chases Mick across the hangar and out the back door. Anchored out back is Julius Gabriel’s hot air balloon, ready to launch.

  Dominique backs away. “This is your ride?”

  “It’s perfectly safe.”

  “Are you kidding? There’s more patches on this thing than my foster mother’s quilt.”

  Mick swings one leg over the basket. “Trust me.”

  “Forget it. And the whole trust thing—it’s getting old. Now call a cab or something, it’s hot out here.”

  “Dominique, we’re crossing the Nazca plateau, the place with all the cool lines and animals. You can’t drive on the desert, and it’s too hot and way too far to walk.”

  “And I’m afraid of heights. Seriously. I get real panicky.”

  “You were fine on the jet.”

  “That was a jet. This is more like a bad carnival ride.”

  “Fine. Stay here with Lew. Maybe he’ll show you his tattoo.”

  “Wait!”

  The balloon soars effortlessly over the pampa, the late morning sun baking the desert’s flat round stones to its yellow geology.

  Dominique remains seated in the basket, her limbs trembling.

  “We’re about to pass over the Nazca whale. Come on, Dom, take a look, it’s not so bad.”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  Mick pulls her up by her elbows, dragging her onto her feet.

  She punches him hard on his deltoid, nearly dislocating his shoulder. “Don’t manhandle me. Ever.”

  “Sorry.” Mick rubs his throbbing arm. “I just wanted you to see the drawings. At least take a look.”

  She steals a quick glance below, her eyes widening. “Wow. Is that a fish? Who made it? And those lines. I’ve seen photos before, but they’re so perfect. How old are they?”

  “The more sophisticated images are several thousand years old. They trace back to Viracocha, an ancient wise man who taught the Inca astronomy and agriculture. Viracocha preceded Kukulcan and Quetzalcoatl. It’s his blood that runs through my maternal ancestors’ veins.”

  “Why are the drawings here? What’s their purpose?”

  “There are many theories, but my father believed they were part of an ancient message intended for extraterrestrials.”

  “Extraterrestrials? Like in little green men?”

  “Gray, actually.”

  She shakes her head. “You know, every time I begin to feel comfortable around you, you have to go and ruin it by saying something stupid.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t realize you knew everything there was to know about human existence and the cosmos.”

  “Here I thought you were this amazingly intelligent guy, not someone who believed in aliens. Oh wait, Lew said something about your last girlfriend being an alien.”

  “Cute. Very cute. For the record, my last girlfriend worked for Pierre Borgia. She was paid to occupy me—occupy being defined as sex, love, and a fake wedding ceremony, all so I wouldn’t be around to help my father. As for your opinions about man’s existence, like most blissfully ignorant people your knee-jerk reaction is based on fear—an emotion that retards all rational thought and prevents any new knowledge from seeping into your brain.”

  “Hey, I’m not some wetback who just snuck over the border to pick strawberries. I’m six months away from earning my doctorate!”

  “And we’re six weeks away from being annihilated. But hey, you know better, so just keep relaxing in that warm bath, Mr. Frog, while the heat simmers your flesh into soup.”

  “Whatever the hell that means.” She turns away in anger, questioning for the hundredth time why she has allowed herself to be manipulated by this man. Forget about him, forget about Sam and your crazy biological mother. The moment you get home, call your advisor and request a transfer to another facility. Who cares if you graduate late. I need to get away from all of these Doomsday wackos.

  After several minutes of mutual silence she realizes they are descending to land.

  The mountain blemishes the flat desert plateau like a mole on flesh, its Y-shaped ravine dividing the smooth mass of rock into three sections. Carved into the southern face is the ten-story image of the Nazca astronaut.

  Mick lands the balloon at the entrance to the widest ravine. Within minutes he has deflated the bright orange and blue envelope so that it cannot be seen from above.

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “You wanted to know who Sam is—I’m about to show you.” He leads her into the ravine, a shadowed avenue of desert slicing between rock walls.

  The object is as large as her freshman dormitory—a red and white winged aircraft concealed from above by camouflage netting. An enormous pair of afterburners in the tail section leads to the rest of the hull and an insignia.

  “Project H.O.P.E.? What is this? An old airplane? Are you saying Sam’s a pilot?”

  “The ship is old, only it’s not an airplane, it’s a space plane. Its technology is far more advanced than any space shuttle that was in NASA’s fleet.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning, it’s a paradox, a statement of fact that conflicts with the universe as we know it. Project H.O.P.E. built this ship. Project H.O.P.E. doesn’t exist. Samuel Agler piloted this ship. Samuel Agler doesn’t exist.”

  “Of course he exists. We may not know where he comes from, but—”

  “I know where he comes from. Come with me and I’ll show you.”

  He leads her up a narrow set of steps built into the open starboard hatch, the two of them entering the dark confines of the vessel’s main cabin. They work their way forward to the command center cockpit.

  “It took me four years to figure out these controls. Not sure I could pilot this thing, but I know how to access the ship’s video log. You’d better sit down.”

  She occupies the copilot’s seat, watching as he removes a helmet from a hidden storage space. “Everything’s based on thought control, the relays are in this headpiece. It’s similar to an Apache chopper’s fighter pilot controls, only far more sophisticated. The difficult part was hacking into the mainframe to create a new password.”

  Strapping himself into the pilot’s seat, Mick dons the headgear. “Activate voice command, authorization Gabriel, Immanuel, Beta Alpha Gamma Delta Tango.”

  “Did you say Immanuel?”

  The console lights up like a Christmas tree.

  Dominique smiles. “Very cool.”

  “Prepare yourself. What you’re about to see isn’t easy to watch.” He closes his eyes, focusing his thoughts.

  A small rectangular flat screen
blinks to life on the center console.

  “This is the ship’s last recorded log entry.” The screen darkens. A date and time code appear:

  JULY 04, 2047—19 HRS. 06 MIN.

  “July 2047? How is that possible?”

  “Keep watching.”

  The nose of the shuttle appears in the lower left corner of the screen, the ship suddenly accelerating down a runway through a blistering gray haze. Mick mentally advances the playback until the dust clouds are replaced by velvety-black space, a billion stars … and the Earth, rotating like a giant blue beach ball.

  The small, clear, marblelike object hovers beneath its southern pole … moving closer.

  As Dominique watches in horror, it begins consuming the planet.

  “Oh God … oh my God. What the hell is that thing?”

  “It’s a type of juvenile black hole, called a strangelet. Sort of an unwanted afterbirth created by a bunch of physicists who decided it was worth $10 billion and the future of our planet to collide atoms, just so they could win a Nobel Prize. Keep watching, this next scene is important.”

  A wormhole materializes, appearing in the void of space occupied by Earth only moments earlier. The space plane alters course, heading straight for the open portal.

  The screen goes blank.

  Dominique shakes her head, unnerved. “Sam comes from our future?”

  “Correct.”

  “He came to warn us about the strangelet.”

  “Correct again.”

  “But this is a good thing. Thanks to Sam, we have thirty-five years to prevent the problem from ever happening.”

  “Incorrect. The strangelet has already been conceived, its due date is December 21 of this year.”

  “Wait … what? How is that possible?”

  “This may be hard to grasp, but try to imagine your life traveling down a highway linked to countless intersections. Every path is fully charted, your future is simply based on whichever path you choose to engage. Some paths dead-end in tragedy, others lead to fame and fortune, and everything in between.

  “Human existence travels along a similar path. The Mayan calendar predicted the highway would dead-end on December 21, 2012. That dead end was somehow averted in the 2012 that belonged to the occupants in Sam’s world. The off-ramp wasn’t perfect—it dead-ended from the same cause that now threatens us, annihilating the planet in 2047.”

  “Then how are we alive?”

  “We’re alive because the wormhole deposited Sam back in time to the pre-2012 highway, only the variables have changed.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I’ve spent months in this shuttle, poring over historical accounts. In Sam’s version of 2012, a cosmic rift opened between Earth and the underworld of Xibalba. What saved the planet was a weapon fired from an even larger spacecraft buried beneath the Kukulcan Pyramid. Six weeks ago I was in Chichen Itza when the Gulf floor collapsed. The quake caused the sacred cenote to drain. I was part of an excavation team that explored the pit—searching for an entrance to an aquifer that runs beneath the pyramid. In Sam’s 2012, that aquifer led to the spacecraft buried beneath the Kukulcan Pyramid—a starship referred to in these historical records as the Balam.”

  “Balam? As in Chilam Balam?”

  “Yes. Only the ship isn’t here in our 2012.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because time shifted down a different exit ramp in Sam’s 2012—an exit ramp that looped time back to our own 2012 after Earth was destroyed in 2047. Only our 2012 is the 2012 where the strangelet appears. The seaquake in the Gulf was actually caused by the strangelet passing through the planet’s core. I know it’s confusing, but we’re in some serious trouble here, Dominique.”

  She sits back, numb. “This is unbelievable.”

  “Unbelievable? That train hasn’t even left the station yet. According to the ship’s historical records, two people entered the Balam in December of Sam’s 2012 and activated the starship’s weapon. One was a female graduate student from Florida State who was working at a Miami mental asylum.”

  “What?”

  “The other was the mental patient she helped to escape.”

  “Sam?”

  “There was no Sam back then. The guy who piloted this ship through a wormhole in 2047—the same guy my father and I found on this desert in 1990 who is currently sitting in a cell in a Miami asylum—wasn’t born in 2012. I was the mental patient!”

  Dominique smiles, then breaks into bouts of hysterical laughter, the sheer absurdity of the situation too much to handle. “This is a joke, right? I’m on one of those new reality shows that sees how far they can screw with your mind. Because none of this can possibly be real.”

  Mick closes his eyes.

  A new image appears on-screen—a newspaper headline. Beneath the New York Times ledger is the date: September 22, 2013, followed by the lead story:

  Vazquez-Gabriel Gives Birth to Twin Sons

  DNA confirms Jacob and Immanuel’s father as Michael Gabriel

  The photo reveals a smiling Dominique in a hospital nightgown, cradling her two newborn sons.

  “Oh my God …”

  “See the dark-haired one? That’s our son, Sam, only his name is really Immanuel. Look at Jacob’s eyes, see how blue they are. Same color as your biological mother, Chicahua, and my Aunt Laura. Just by his appearance, you can tell Jake’s farther along in his development. According to the article, I disappeared on the 2012 winter solstice … Dominique? Hey!”

  He grabs her as she falls forward, unconscious.

  31

  This truly is a new age of physics and the understanding of our universe—we’ve never before seen these unprecedented energies that the collisions will be at the Large Hadron Collider. The idea is that it accelerates particles to close to the speed of light and then it smashes them together. Now this doesn’t sound necessarily very interesting but actually if we go to Einstein’s equation, E=mc squared, if we’ve got loads of energy we can make really massive particles—particles that might not have been around since the very beginnings of time. So we can create these massive particles and we can actually study them, and this gives us our whole plethora of information about the early universe and how it began and how nature really works on a fundamental scale.

  —CLAIRE TIMLIN CMS PHYSICIST, IMPERIAL COLLEGE, LONDON

  THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON, D.C. NOVEMBER 22, 2012

  Located in the West Wing of the White House, the command center known as the Situation Room is a five-thousand-square-foot complex designed to link the president and his cabinet with key personnel and sectors throughout the world. Born out of President Kennedy’s frustration after the lack of reliable intelligence that led to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Situation Room fuses communication among Homeland Security, the intelligence sector, and the military. There are three conference rooms designed to accommodate national security meetings, acrylic privacy booths for secure international phone calls, five secure video rooms, and two tiers of curved computer terminals that handle incoming data from around the world.

  Vice President Ennis Chaney makes his way through the complex, pausing as the privacy fog lifts on a sealed booth, revealing a physician removing a blood pressure cuff from President Maller’s arm. Pretending not to notice, Chaney continues on to the main conference room, the high-tech chamber a rectangle of smart walls adorned with flat screens set around a large mahogany table.

  The new VP takes his place in the empty gray leather chair opposite Secretary of State Pierre Borgia. The uncomfortable silence is broken by President Maller, who hustles inside, sitting at the head of the table before a video control center.

  “Before we discuss Iran, there’s an important item in this morning’s daily briefing that we need to go over. If you’re not familiar with the situation in Yellowstone Park, there’s a summary waiting in your e-mail, make sure you read it. For those of you not familiar, in essence nature deposited a ticking time bomb beneath Yell
owstone in the form of a supervolcano, called a caldera. To define this as a Doomsday scenario would not be exaggerating—should the caldera ever erupt, we’re looking at devastation that would equal ten thousand Mount St. Helenses. The USGS monitors the situation around the clock, and though there’ve been a few concerns over the years, overall the situation has remained reasonably stable … until now.”

  The president presses a switch on his control panel, broadcasting a live feed from Yellowstone Park over the conference room’s six flat-screen plasma TVs. A man in his forties appears on-screen, wearing a black USGS collared shirt and matching baseball cap. “Dr. Mark Beckmeyer is the associate director of the United States Geological Survey–Earthquakes Hazard Program and the man in charge at Yellowstone. Dr. Beckmeyer and I have been speaking since late last night. Doctor, if you can give my staff a brief summary of what we discussed?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m not going to get into defining the caldera or Yellowstone’s substructure as I’ve included all that in the e-mail. Our biggest concern is an earthquake triggering an eruption. Earthquakes come in swarms at Yellowstone, most of the clustering due to the size and shape of the caldera’s ring fracture. For instance, during the month of July we recorded 152 earthquakes in the Yellowstone region, seventeen more than in 2011. Fortunately these events tend to be benign, and in fact our ground deformation data shows that uplift of the caldera beneath Yellowstone Lake has ceased. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the September 22 seismic event not only affected the Gulf of Mexico but Yellowstone’s geology as well, triggering the collapse of the caldera’s three volcanic chambers, in essence creating one massive magma pocket. Pressure within the pocket continues to rise. Our geologists have been working with the Army Corps of Engineers in an attempt to design ways to vent the chamber, but should another earthquake event occur like the one on the fall equinox, then an eruption would be imminent.”