“Okay. Under these conditions, I will agree to the plan. I assume the ten of us will decide on our ultimate objective, with a simple majority deciding the winner?”
“That’s not important right now,” Judith said. “We can discuss it later. Right now, the moon crew only knows about our observations of the Earth. I haven’t told them yet that we’re coming to help them.”
“Even though you’d already made your decision?” Michael asked.
“True. I was assuming they’d have no objections to us coming to restock their provisions.”
January 13, 2035 – Moon Base Unity
“I’ve completed my inventory,” Yue said. “The results are—what shall I say?—unsettling. We have enough food for four weeks. If we halve the rations, we can stretch it to eight. And if we drop to a third of our regular calorie intake—”
“We can go twelve weeks, and at a quarter 16 weeks,” Wayne interrupted as he stood up. “Even I can do the math.”
Yue glared at him, unblinking.
“Wayne, sit down,” Maxim said.
Wayne remained standing.
“Now,” Maxim said sharply.
Wayne sat down in a very slow, deliberate, and confrontational way.
“I think we’re all a little on edge right now,” Maxim said. “But we can’t let that impact our working together as a team. As best we know right now, the promised transport ships will not be coming from Earth. So, we’ve got to reassess our options.”
“Thank you,” Yue said. “And to continue my statement from before, if we drop to a third of our regular calories, our work performance will decrease significantly.”
“When would it become harmful or dangerous to our health or lives?” Maxim asked.
“Every human body reacts differently, and some have more reserves than others,” Jonathan said as he looked down at his stomach that bulged slightly outward. He was one of those with more reserves.
“I’d say that it might become critical in twelve weeks,” Yue said. “Assuming we distribute the available food not strictly according to calories, but according to need.”
“All for one and one for all,” Maxim said.
“I guess you could express it that way.”
“Shouldn’t the greenhouse start delivering the first crops in four months?” Jonathan asked.
“That’s the plan,” Maxim said. “But the area isn’t big enough to feed all of us.”
“No?”
“The moon base could be self-sufficient if we had four greenhouses of that size. But building the first took three months. We’d run out of power by the third greenhouse at the latest. So, we’d have to expand our solar power plant before starting the fourth, but we don’t have any more solar cells for that. So, we’re not going to be able to rely on growing our own food.”
“Are there any alternatives?” Jonathan asked.
“What about mushrooms or algae?” Kenjiro asked. “Both are used as biomass in Japan. We’d only need to dig a tunnel under the surface. But we’d still need heating and an atmosphere. Maybe we could grow algae in the drinking water tanks.”
“We’ll need to study that. You willing to do that, Ken?”
“Yes, Commander.”
“What about our drinking water?” Maxim asked.
“Since our fuel cells are water-based, we’ve got no problem there. Supplies in the crater will last maybe 500 years.”
“Thanks, Yue.”
At least there was one problem they didn’t have to worry about. Two issues, in fact, as they could also split the water molecules to obtain oxygen for breathing.
“All this is just dicking around while we ignore the real problem,” Wayne said.
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said, Max, you know me. It seems to me that all this is just trying to delay our death as long as possible. I think we’d do much better trying to figure out how to solve the big problem.”
“The shell around the Earth?” Atiya asked. “Now just follow my thinking—”
“I’ll think for myself, thank you very much,” Wayne interrupted.
“Okay... well, this technology is so far ahead of us that I can’t even imagine how we’d begin to do anything against it.”
“A nuclear bomb always helps against anything,” Wayne said.
“We don’t have any nuclear weapons here, unfortunately,” Maxim said. “Don’t you remember the treaty against the militarization of space?”
“Then we’ll just have to build one ourselves. I’m sure there’s plenty of fissile material around here.”
“And I’m sure that our military or yours will test that option from the inside of the shell. Maybe they’ve even already tried it. But I don’t see any hole.”
Jonathan imagined an intercontinental rocket impacting the barrier and igniting a nuclear weapon. The fallout from an altitude of 120 kilometers would contaminate large swaths of the Earth. He hoped there were some reasonable heads down there who, if they decided to try it, would try it only once.
“There must be some countermeasure, some weakness we can exploit,” Wayne said. “There’s always something.”
“Always? How many times has the Earth been encased by an extraterrestrial shell before?” Jonathan asked. Wayne was starting to get on his nerves.
“It’s true. We shouldn’t completely forget about the shell,” Kenjiro said. “We need to find out what it’s made of. Maybe that could even tell us about its purpose. Why would somebody—or something—that we didn’t know anything about before, want to put our whole planet inside a thing like that? It must’ve required a tremendous amount of energy. Nobody would do that just for fun.”
“It’s very clearly an attack,” Wayne said. “Maybe the shell is right now sucking all the life energy from the people.”
“You’ve watched too many bad movies,” Maxim said.
“The shell is giving off no radiation whatsoever. We see it only because it has perfect reflective properties,” Kenjiro said.
“Okay, then it’s absorbing and storing the life energy, and when it’s full, it’ll transport it back to its lords and masters,” Wayne said.
“Or maybe ladies and masters,” Atiya said. “We don’t want to discriminate against anyone.”
“They could be dogs for all I care,” Wayne grumbled.
“I agree with Wayne that we can assume a hostile, malicious intent,” Ken said. “Whoever sent this shell to us has probably been watching us for a long time. So, they must’ve known how very dependent we are on solar energy.”
“Sounds right,” Maxim said.
Something started making a ringing noise. The old-fashioned telephone sound coming from Yue’s terminal made Jonathan smile. He hadn’t known she was this nostalgic.
Yue started to blush, swiveled her chair to look at her screen, and pressed a button. Then she sat bolt upright. “It’s a message from the ARES,” she said.
Her excitement was contagious. Atiya and Kenjiro jumped up, and Jonathan grabbed onto his chair tightly. Please be good news. We could all use some good news right about now, he thought.
Yue’s eyes moved quickly from left to right.
“Well, come on, read it to us,” Wayne said.
“Looks like they’re turning around and coming to us. They also attached a list of their supplies. The Mars expedition was planned to be two years long, and they were also given a six-month buffer. That means ten people could survive on that for at least a year.”
“Thanks, Yue,” Maxim said. “That might be enough time for us to build more greenhouses and get them up and running too.”
“They also wrote that they’re considering continuing the Mars mission and bringing us along too.”
“That... that’s not going to work,” Ken said. “I promised my daughter that I’d be home again before it’s time for her to start school.”
Jonathan froze. Making such a decision would mean giving up on the Earth, and with it, all the people whom he loved.
He wasn’t ready to do that. Would he ever be prepared to do that?
“It’s the best thing we could do,” Wayne said. “That world down there. Nothing’s going to survive.”
“We’ll make that decision when the time comes,” Maxim said. “Right now, we have to concentrate on surviving until the ARES arrives. Did they say how long they’ll need to get here?”
“Yes. It depends on a corrected mission plan, of course. If everything goes smoothly, they’ll reach lunar orbit in six weeks.”
“Understood. You all know what that means,” Maxim said.
“Starting from now, half the calories for everyone,” Yue said.
Jonathan looked down at his stomach. Every gram of fat tissue would provide him with seven calories. It had just become a good thing that he’d been neglecting his exercising in recent weeks.
“One more thing,” Yue said. “I’ve had an idea on how we might be able to find out if there are still people under the shell. Knowing that would be very important for our survival strategy.”
“Survival? Didn’t you just say that we were all going to run out of food in sixteen weeks?”
“Be quiet, Wayne,” Atiya scolded. “What’s your idea?”
“Obviously, the moon hasn’t changed its orbit around the Earth. So at least something is getting through the shell—the planet’s gravitational force, or gravity in general. Fortunately, we’ve had the ability for a few years now to detect gravity pulses with a gravitational wave detector.”
“Aren’t they all on Earth?” Wayne asked.
“No. One of them is in space, at the Lagrange point. It’s called LISA.”
“What are the arguments against using it?” Maxim asked.
“We’d have to physically go to it first. Do we have a spaceship I can use?”
“Unfortunately, no. But maybe the ARES could do it,” Atiya said.
“First we have to hope that it can get here quick enough, so we don’t starve,” Maxim said.
January 14, 2035 – Mars Ship ARES
O Man! Take heed!
What says the deep midnight?
“I slept, I slept—,
from a deep dream have I awoken:—
the world is deep,
and deeper than the day has thought.”
An alto voice resounded through his cabin. Originally written down by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the words sounded as if they were emerging out of nothing. It was the fourth movement of Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony in D-minor. Michael felt almost as if he were addicted to it. In the symphony, the Austrian unveiled his own cosmology musically. What else would be a better fit for the pioneering journey they were currently undertaking? It had to be a sign that, out of all people, he was one of the four who would survive the great annihilation.
He had brought along almost all the musical classics—Mahler, Wagner, Schumann, and hundreds of other composers. Each of their works would survive. How would it feel to play them on Mars for the first time? Would Mahler fit just as well to the rocky red plains as to the endlessness of space?
Deep is its pain—,
joy—deeper still than heartache.
Pain says: Pass away!
Yes, the world was waning, as Nietzsche had foreseen in ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra.’ Mahler had selected the text for his cosmology perfectly. Michael had thought it through thoroughly. Without sunlight, the plants would die, then the animals, and finally, most of the people. Would they have deserved that? It was a moot question. Maybe they had been in the way of a higher power. But they, themselves, were free, and everything pointed to that being intentional also.
Whoever could have placed a shell around the Earth could have certainly also annihilated the tiny seed that was currently making its way toward Mars. That hadn’t happened. So, it appeared that they had also been selected somehow in a way his monkey brain could not comprehend.
And JR wanted to risk all that, or just simply throw it all away?
He shouldn’t have agreed—ten people instead of a group of four. That was, of course, a strong argument. But ten people... that also meant eleven opinions and twelve ideas on how to shape their future. Their job was clear to him—make Mars inhabitable and spread themselves across the Red Planet. Be fruitful and multiply. What if the six moon inhabitants want to stay there, as close as possible to their families and friends they think are still on Earth under the shell?
Hope can be unbelievably resilient, even in the face of all reality, and with the resources from the ARES, they could sustain these false hopes and themselves on the moon for decades. But building a new civilization on the moon was impossible, because it was much too light for any form of atmosphere. Only Mars offered any kind of chance for that. Michael wasn’t afraid of work. He knew it would be difficult there too. But Luna would always be just a companion to Terra, an appendage.
A children’s choir started singing, imitating bells. The fifth movement had begun. The voices of women sang an ancient children’s song.
The heavenly joy is a blessed city,
The heavenly joy, now unceasingly.
Yes, the heavenly joy, it will be a city on Mars. Thank you, Gustav Mahler. You’ve shown me the way once more. I’ve got to do something.
When Michael started his shift, his three colleagues were also sitting in the command center. That was unusual. Their shift schedule sometimes meant that they didn’t see each other for weeks. Had they been meeting without him for some reason?
“Good morning, Mike,” JR said.
“Good morning. Why wasn’t I told about this gathering?” he asked with an annoyed undertone in his voice.
“Your shift was scheduled to begin now,” JR said. “So, I didn’t think it was necessary.”
Not necessary. Aha! Am I not even worth the effort of trying to come up with a better excuse? “So, what’s this about? New problems?” he asked.
“Just an addition. Unity sent us a very interesting proposal,” the captain explained.
“We’re not even there yet,” he said.
It was definitely a mistake that he’d agreed to this plan. We give them an inch and they take a whole mile, he thought. They were probably already planning on how they could use the ARES for their own purposes.
“It’s about LISA,” JR said.
“The gravitational wave detector?”
“Yes, Giordi.”
“But that hasn’t even been finished yet!”
“It’s not missing much. If we’re able to make it operational, we might be able to use it to communicate with Earth. It appears that gravitational waves can pass through the shell without a problem.”
“That’s a brilliant idea,” Giordano said.
It’s a terrible idea. We’d have to work for months, only to discover at the end that there’s nobody alive down there anymore. Meanwhile, we’d consume valuable resources that we wouldn’t then be able to use to build a new civilization on Mars.
“I’m against it,” he said. “We should get the Unity crew on board, refuel, and continue our trip to Mars as quickly as possible. Anything else just endangers our survival and has no identifiable purpose. And even if we do hear something from the people down there, it’s not going to make a difference, or help anything at all. Or do you seriously believe we can somehow punch a hole in that shell?”
“I’m for it,” Giordano said. “I believe humankind will be able to survive, even during an eternal night. Sure, billions will die. But it’d mean a whole lot to me to know that there was still someone alive down there. It makes a difference to know if there are only ten of us or ten million.”
The Italian has no idea, Michael thought. He probably just wants to know whether his family is still alive or not. As if that makes any difference! The shell was impregnable. It didn’t matter whether the people inside it lived or died. They no longer factored into the universe—it was as if they had crossed the event horizon of a black hole.
“I think we owe it to them,” François said.
“Who knows... maybe millions of people are down there trying, right now, to come up with some idea on how they can free themselves from this shell. All it takes is one person to have some ingenious idea. And then, what if they need our help? I don’t think we should continue on to Mars until we’ve exhausted all those possibilities.”
Michael moaned. So much stupidity in one place! If only he had been made captain. He should really have shown some restraint during training. But he hadn’t learned until the end that NASA’s selection process placed more value on humility than competency. And when you’re trying to show your competency, you won’t get very far by being humble. JR had played it very cleverly, and now she was calling the shots.
But that didn’t mean that he’d have to accept all of her decisions. Even the most coherent decision can’t stand up to the facts. So, he only needed to create the proper set of facts, and everything else would fall in line as he envisioned.
He yawned on purpose.
“Excuse me, fellas, these meaningless discussions are making me tired. I can see that I’m outvoted, so I guess we’ll be flying to the moon. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to get to my work.”
“I’ll initiate the braking phase in three hours, then,” Judith said. “We’ll need to make several corrections before we enter a lunar orbit. Current estimates say it’ll take six weeks.”
Michael had laid out various tools in front of him. They were sorted by size. Monkey wrenches, screwdrivers, rubber mallet, and pipe wrenches, among other things, floated peacefully side by side. He liked the order. He was holding the maintenance instructions in his hand. They had to inspect every subsystem every four weeks.
Today, he was responsible for examining the life-support system in the workshop. Actually, the schedule said he should be inspecting the laboratory. The workshop wasn’t scheduled until the day after tomorrow. But that didn’t fit into his plan, so he had to trust that nobody would check the schedule very carefully. He saw no reason why anyone would do that—none of the others would think to suspect anything.
The Wall: Eternal Day Page 10