Clarion: The Sequel to Voyage (Paul's Travels)

by C. Paul Lockman

  Accurately predicting the awful weather, Hal had sent ahead instructions for the silo’s entrance to be tented with a high-quality canvas dome which would keep out wind and snow, as well as any prying eyes from the main road, only a few hundred yards away. Accompanied by the officer, Jem fought his way through the blizzard to the edge of the tent and was ushered in through a quickly-sealed zip flap. Inside, it was much warmer than he had the right to expect, and oddly, almost silent.

  “Thanks, lieutenant, I’ll take it from here.”

  “You have the option, Sir, of asking me to carry out a security sweep of the silo before you enter.”

  Jem stopped and looked at him. He was about twenty-two, slender and pale, with freckles which made him look even younger. “Lieutenant, you’re not going to make me repeat your orders to you, are you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’m the only person allowed into the silo. Go back and read the email from your CO, if you like.”

  “Understood, Sir,” the officer replied. “Sorry, sir.” Without another word, he unzipped the flap and made his exit. Relieved to finally be alone, Jem began the two-minute process of unlocking the thick security door with its heavy, metal wheel, and then braced his knees as he pulled the door upward and away, revealing a darkened, cylindrical space with a green ladder down one side. It always gave him a chill; this place was the home of a city-killer, a weapon which would have killed millions. Ten Minuteman-III missiles, flying from silos buried throughout this area, would have sounded the beginning of Armageddon. They had not found themselves tasked to the incoherently stupid attack on Dvalin, and so were deactivated, with all the others, as part of the START-V treaty. Good riddance.

  At the bottom of the ladder, some twenty meters below the surface, an object sat patiently underneath heavy plastic sheeting. Jem lifted the covers and folded them back, revealing a black and silver cube around a half-meter square and warm to the touch. Wires sprouted from its sides, nearly twenty altogether, of different colors and thicknesses, snaking away into the floor and disappearing into the deep earth outside the silo.

  It was time to check in. Jem pulled out his softscreen and spoke a passcode which placed a call to Hal. Within moments, they were connected, a flashing green icon indicating a strong signal, even in this subterranean place. “Hal, I’m ready to disconnect temporary power sources and engage the Blue Cube. Do I have authorization to proceed?”

  There was a moment’s pause, and then he heard, “Good evening, Dr. Kravitz. It’s good to be working with you again. Please continue.” Jem felt behind the silvery cube for a conventional electrical socket and gently pulled it out. Immediately, a flashing red light blinked quickly, indicating a power failure. Working quickly, Jem clicked open the briefcase and lifted out the Blue Cube, an iridescent power source a little smaller than a Rubix cube. Despite its modest size, Hal had assured Jem that it would last indefinitely.

  The final step always gave him a shudder. Holding the Blue Cube within an inch of the socket array on the back of the larger silver box, he watched yet again as its power port seemed to transform. The single power jack became a cluster of small, blue filaments. They reached out, searching for the edge of the Blue Cube, rather like a time-lapse movie of a plant angling itself towards sunlight. Once found, the Blue Cube extruded its own filaments which linked in with searching cables and fashioned a permanent connection. In moments, the silver box and the Blue Cube had created an unbreakable bond.

  The red flashing light ceased and a gentle, warm hum began to emanate from the silver box. The last of what Hal called his ‘delegates’ was now fully powered, and would remain so in perpetuity. Jem knew not to ask directly, but could speculate that these hidden boxes were Hal’s insurance policy in case, for whatever reason, he was called away. In three other US Air Force ICBM silos, in a submarine trench off Japan, in the foundations of Westminster Abbey and in a diamond mine in South Africa, Hal’s delegates could now operate secretly and securely. The great mind would now be free to begin whatever adventure had called him away, confident that humanity would not suffer by his absence.

  Back on the surface, the blizzard was wearing itself out. The young lieutenant on duty was surprised to see Dr. Kravitz finish his work so quickly. “All set, lieutenant,” Jem assured him as he signed another ream of paperwork. “Say, I think I spotted a sign for a bar – the 87 Grill? You think they’re still open?”

  “Yes, Sir! Best ribs in the state!”

  “Awesome,” he said tiredly. “Take care.” Jem handed back the completed forms and signaled to the waiting SUV that he was ready to go.

  ****

  Chapter 9: Rescue One

  Onboard the Phoenix, approaching Neptune

  Paul felt like banging his head repeatedly against something very solid. “But Hal, how is that not the worst kind of hypocrisy?”

  It felt as though they’d been arguing for a month, but in reality the discussion had absorbed merely the four days of their flight away from the Sun and into the gravitational influence of Neptune. The trip had been peppered with discord – largely good-natured but occasionally acrimonious – revolving around Hal’s decision to hugely limit Paul’s freedom to explore.

  “Because, Paul,” – and Paul always knew Hal was pissed when he used his name – “I’m trying to avoid the unforeseeable consequences of setting down on planets where, for all we know, bacterial life is flourishing. If you tread on it,” he explained, as if to a school child, “it might die. And then we’d fundamentally change the course of life in that location.”

  This was a point they had returned to repeatedly. Ad nauseum, in fact, but Paul remained unmoved on the principle issues. “First, I reject the claim that there might be galloping colonies of bacteria everywhere I might want to stop and do some exploring.”

  “We can’t know that for certain,” Hal retorted, yet again.

  “And second,” Paul pressed on, “how is this different from indulging in this rescue act you’ve got us involved in?”

  “I don’t see the connection.”

  “Well, I fucking well do, Hal. We’re intervening in the distant past.”

  “It’s only the past from the perspective of 2033,” Hal pointed out.

  “Thanks, oh Great Cosmic Pedant,” Paul quipped. ”So, you’re saying I shouldn’t make landfall anywhere in case I risk damaging a bacteria colony, even in places where we’re pretty sure there aren’t any.”

  “I’ll insist on a conscientious program of risk reduction, at the very least,” Hal said.

  “OK, I see the necessity of that, but how is landing amid a bacteria colony all that different from interfering in the fate of these stranded survivors you’ve got me searching for?”

  “These survivors might be intelligent,” Hal retorted. “As you saw, they’re sufficiently advanced to transmit a distress signal.”

  Paul wished the machine would just make sense. It was unlike him to dance around an issue like this. “What difference does their intelligence make? Aren’t bacteria and intelligent life equally valuable, in the great scheme of things?”

  “They might be able to help us. They’re probably very advanced, to be all the way out here. Perhaps they can provide technology which might prevent Julius from originally stealing the Larssen”

  “That’s a hell of a long-shot, Hal.” Paul was sitting cross-legged in the pilot’s seat. He’d cropped his hair very short in anticipation of hypersleep, and his scalp was itching slightly.

  “But we cannot turn our backs on such an opportunity. Preventing Julius from altering time is our primary mission. The wellbeing of all humans depends on it.”

  Paul scratched his scalp, annoyed both at the irritation and at Hal’s endless arguing. “But you’re always telling me to be careful with time. The Holdrian scientists were obsessive about following the rules, about never changing a timeline unless you could predict the outcome with 99% certainty.”

  Hal was unmoved. “Responding to the distress be
acon will not fundamentally alter the timeline.”

  “But we’ll change history as soon as they see us! Just by appearing in orbit! If they’ve got radar down there, they’ve probably already spotted us headed in, and that has changed history already.”

  “Perhaps for the better.”

  Paul felt, at that moment, very much at one with the large percentage of humans who have ever harbored thoughts of destroying their computer. “That’s irrelevant!” he cried.

  “I don’t agree,” Hal said simply. “And if I could return you to the matter in hand…”

  “You started the argument, Hal.” After so long, Paul actually wasn’t certain that was true. “OK, where are we?”

  Hal brought up the holographic display in the center of the cabin, zoomed in to show the remote sphere of Neptune and its family of moons. “I have two possible arrival vectors, both of which would put us down within a kilometer of their beacon.”

  Paul noted the trajectories. “OK, Hal, take us down.” It was a relief not to be arguing with him, but Paul felt apprehensive about their landing on Triton without at least making contact in advance. At any rate, their arrival gave them something to do other than argue about how best to preserve the integrity of the space-time continuum. “Who are these ‘survivors’ anyway?”

  “We don’t have that data.”

  “Explorers?” Paul speculated. “Maybe lost smugglers or a mining team?”

  “No idea,” Hal admitted. “But I guess we’ll know soon. Strap yourself in.”

  Phoenix rotated and began firing her engines at a modest thrust to bring it into Triton’s orbital track. The great moon, one of the solar system’s largest, span around Neptune in an unusual, retrograde orbit – the opposite direction to Neptune’s own spin – so that as the planet’s complex cloud systems turned away from them, Triton approached from the other side, dimly lit by the distant sun.

  Paul had time to marvel at the unique, deep-ocean hue of this remote gas giant. Bright white against its blue, scattered high-altitude clouds were being gusted at terrific speeds, their shapes stretched and diffused by the violent winds. Though they could have been mistaken for water clouds, like those of Earth, these were blooms of condensed ammonia, floating above an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. Triton began as a bright, highly-reflective dot, but then presented itself as a sphere dressed in pinks and grays.

  “Pretty place,” Paul observed. “Anything new, Hal?”

  He scanned all available frequencies but came up only with the original distress beacon. “It’s a graphical code which describes a single vessel, alone on the ice. I’m afraid there is information on the passengers or crew. It can’t be a very large vessel, as my cameras would have picked it up by now. Certainly smaller than Daedalus. Perhaps even smaller than Phoenix. We’re descending direct to its location.”

  Triton’s bizarrely salmon-pink terrain began to fill the cockpit’s windows. Hal banked the Phoenix so that Paul looked up at its surface through the cockpit windows. Broad patches of flatter terrain, the remnants of major impact craters, gave way to chaotic, jumbled shards, cliffs and canyons carved out of the rock by unusually active interior geology. Seismic heating from within forced upwellings of nitrogen from the deep interior which were funneled into geysers, shooting five miles into the Triton sky. Abruptly, on reaching the limit of their ascent, they turned ninety degrees and formed a band of icy particles which enveloped the moon, raining down elsewhere as a super-frozen nitrogen snow. Until the discovery of thousands of far more distant Kuiper Belt objects, Triton was the coldest place ever found by humans, at a mere thirty-eight degrees above absolute zero.

  “Glad I brought my thermal underwear,” Hal. “This is going to be chilly.”

  Hal was focused on the mission, and soon had something to report. “OK, I’ve found the source of the beacon. It’s at the edge of a patch of this jumbled terrain, but within reach of flatter, less arduous ground. We could posit that this was a choice on the part of the survivors; it gives them access to different land types, and therefore perhaps different resources.”

  Phoenix slowed markedly as they approached the beacon. Below, the terrain was a mess of abrupt shards, jutting up from the datum in crazy, knife-edge patterns, mixed with steep cliffs and overhangs which seemed to hide deep, dark fissures. Then, the dim sunlight glinted on something which didn’t belong. It was a conical shape, surrounded by five squares, arranged symmetrically around the cone and connected to it by stubby tunnels.

  “Hal, this looks like a base camp... an exploration setup...”

  “I agree.” He was astonished, Paul could hear. “I’m beginning to detect chlorophyll... significant warmth... the production of energy from a small, nuclear power source... There is life here, Paul.”

  Paul stared at the mini-station as it loomed larger in his windows. The exterior of the rectangular modules has been streaked with Triton’s ices, as if geyser fountains had deposited their snow here over a few months or years. At the center, the conical craft began to resemble one of the old Delta Clipper experimental spacecraft, a canceled McDonnell Douglas design from the 20th Century. It stood proud amid its attendant modules. The whole camp seemed to glow green from within.

  “Hal, someone’s got the lights on here. They’re alive.” As he spoke, Hal finally located a sufficiently flat patch of Triton’s crazed topography and set the Phoenix down on its sturdy, black landing struts.

  “Touchdown,” Hal announced. “Let’s get over there straight away. They may be in dire need of our assistance.”

  “Hang on, buddy,” Paul cautioned.

  But Hal was planning ahead. “If Neptune is at noon, seen from the base, then the airlock is at the outer edge of the nine o’clock module.”

  “Woah, cowboy. I might be old fashioned, but how about trying raising them by radio first?”

  “I’ve been trying that since we arrived in the system yesterday afternoon,” Hal reminded him.

  “Yeah, but if I show up there in my suit and knock on the airlock door, they might come out with laser guns blazing, and then you, me and the good old Earth of 2033 would be for the chop.”

  “Their radio is apparently non-functional,” Hal concluded.

  “Alright,” Paul said.’ Then how about something they can see?”

  A minute later, Hal sent up a major fireworks display from the top hatch of Phoenix. “If they’re looking out of the module windows, they should be able to see it.”

  It was a true spectacle but they would not, Paul knew, be able to hear the explosions in this wispy, thin atmosphere. “Let’s hope they’re not asleep.”

  They waited. Paul was becoming both hungry and impatient. Besides some refueling, there was little other reason to stop here, and if the camp turned out to be uninhabited, or the crew already dead, Paul would be forced to view this detour as a waste of precious time. I’m supposed to be chasing across the universe to intercept Julius, not hanging around here waiting for a bunch of plants to cheer at Hal’s fireworks...

  Then a light came on. “It’s a navigation beacon!” Hal was pumped. “On the main ship... rotating every 6.5 seconds. They’ve seen us!”

  Paul threw on his spacesuit with as much haste as the clumsy procedure allowed. Four layers of thermals, then the special cooling layer – paradoxically enough – which would ensure against an unhealthy buildup of his own body heat. Then came the main suit, which would keep out harmful solar radiation while keeping him warm enough to survive this ultra-frozen landscape. Hal checked every step of the procedure, making sure Paul didn’t miss a connection. “Thanks, Hal,” he said. “I’d prefer not to end up asphyxiating on some weird, icy moon.” Where I’m not really supposed to be, anyway.

  Outside the airlock, Paul took each step gingerly until he got used to the local gravity – about one-twelfth that of the Earth – and the crunchy, icy conditions underfoot. A heavy footfall would send him springing back as though he were riding a worn-out pogo stick; in the end, he almost s
huffled along, which was difficult amid the sharp, icy fragments which were scattered across almost the entire surface. Jagged edges, the enemy of anyone in a pressure suit, were simply everywhere. Paul moved slowly and with great caution. Each footstep was a slow, rolling, forward motion, almost like the Olympic walk, but enormously slowed down.

  “Paul, stop.” Hal sounded worried.

  “What have you got, Hal? I’m almost there.” The rectangular modules were perhaps two or three minutes away. And I’m about ready to get off this shitty surface.

  “There are two dead bodies in the ground near here. About three hundred meters from your position, on the far side of the camp.”

  Shit. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. They’re humanoid, and very dead. I found them by analyzing the ground-penetrating radar images we gathered on approach.”

  Paul glanced in that direction, but his view was obstructed by the camp itself. There would be little to see, he knew. “Any thoughts, Hal?”

  “Could be members of the expedition who didn’t make it?”

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “Impossible to say. It seems they were buried civilly, in deep ravines that were cut, and then filled in, robotically.”

  “How do you know?” Paul asked, resuming his slow shuffle toward the camp.

  “The digging is too exact,” he said. “Such precision which would be impossible for humans in these conditions.”

  “Roger that. Can we tell how long ago they were buried?”

  “Not without exhumation.”

  Paul frowned. “I can’t say I relish that idea, Hal.”

  “I would say that one was a full-grown adult, the other rather younger, but it’s hard to say more.”