“You have any new data, Atiya?”
The others knew that their lives were in the balance right now. They’d left the decision up to Judith. Nobody had wanted to be in her position, not even Michael, even though she would’ve voluntarily given up her post.
“Yes, but still nothing definite, unfortunately.”
“Thanks. Tell me as soon as you know something for sure.”
Predicting what was going to happen in this case was extremely difficult, even for an experienced astronomer. The piece of the shell wouldn’t move on a straight trajectory—that’d be impossible. Due to the still relatively large distance from the moon, minor deviations could lead to very different outcomes.
“I’m hearing lots of excitement from everywhere on Earth, by the way,” François said. “For the first time in a long while, it’s starting to get quite bright across a large land mass.”
“Well, it’s too bad that winter will soon be starting in Antarctica then,” Kenjiro said.
“I think I’ve got something,” Atiya said.
“That was fast. What is it?” Judith asked.
“The piece has struck an old geostationary satellite. It looks like the impact’s left a significant dent.”
“Kenjiro, can you do anything with that?”
“Working on it, Judith.”
A satellite like that would probably weigh about a ton. If that was enough to dent the piece of the shell, then its material was tough but not very inherently rugged.
“Okay, this is looking good,” Kenjiro reported. “After it detaches, I think this piece of the shell is going to be more like a Kleenex floating in the wind than a solid object. If these circumstances hold, we can rule out any danger to the moon base. It might even be a stroke of luck if it lands on the moon. Then we might even be able to mine the stuff for our own use.”
Shouts of joy broke out behind her.
Judith was happy. Just simply happy. She would live to see her boys and Lisa again. She couldn’t have wished for anything more than that.
May 12, 2036 – Mars Ship ARES
The ARES and the Jules Verne, the ESA’s transport ship, docked in low-Earth orbit. The European capsule came with a three-person crew but was designed for six astronauts. They had worked out to meet in the Jules Verne to spare the newcomers the poor conditions on the crowded ARES. Judith was the first to float over to the docked ship and flew straight into Lisa’s arms.
“Come on, we should make some space for the others,” her wife said after a minute.
Behind her, Maxim was already waiting. The Jules Verne had brought along Irina, his wife. Judith watched the two briefly, and realized she had never seen Maxim so happy and relaxed. She was almost a little sad that she wouldn’t be able to see them together as a couple for very long.
“So, I think it’s best we get the official part over with now,” the commander of the Jules Verne finally said. “My name is Elżbieta Czyżewska, but before you trip over pronouncing my Polish name, you can just call me Ella.”
“I’m Commander Judith Rosenberg of the ARES.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you. You are a legend, Judith, and my role model. You were the reason I wanted to become an astronaut,” Ella said.
“Did you hear that, Lisa? I’m a legend.”
Ella laughed and tried to tame her long, flowing hair that wanted to spread out in the zero gravity. She appeared to still be under 30.
“We brought you medicine primarily. Otherwise you seem to be almost better equipped than we are down on Earth.”
“When we left the moon, we had to shut down the greenhouses, so we’ve only been eating freeze-dried food for a while, but otherwise, all we need is medicine.”
She was still using the word ‘we,’ even though tonight she would no longer be part of the moon crew. She would have to change her thinking. If she wasn’t looking forward to seeing the boys so much, it would’ve been a somber farewell.
“But I’ve been told you’re flying back with me?”
“Yes, Ella. It might be best for you to tell all this to Maxim. He’ll be the commander again, I assume.”
“The politicians down on Earth aren’t so sure about that. They’ve already begun fighting again about what country should have what part of the moon base.”
“If only they’d cared that much about us before. They seemed to prefer giving everything to the Mars expedition,” Maxim said.
“I think the new moon base crew should decide who their commander should be,” Judith said.
“If all of you are in agreement, I don’t think the Earth can force you to change,” Ella said. “So, shall we get started? Are we transferring the supplies to the other ship? I want to be back on Earth tonight.”
She was right. The young woman had her priorities straight.
They emptied the Jules Verne.
Two hours later, they were sitting on the Jules Verne’s comfortable reclining seats. As the commander, Ella had a seat in the first row. Lisa was sitting next to her. François and Michael were in the second row. Michael hadn’t said anything about his family or friends, but NASA had offered him a job in the administration. The way he was, she was sure he had a long and illustrious career ahead of him. And if there was ever another Mars expedition, he would surely be picked as the commander. It didn’t matter to Judith. She would not fly into space again. At least not until her kids were grown. She’d already missed too much time with them.
“Any last words?” Ella asked.
“No. Let’s go home,” Judith replied.
There was a clicking noise. Then she felt vibrations in her back, telling her that the primary propulsion system had been switched on.
June 16, 2036 – Moon Base Unity
“Hey, you don’t have to go so fast,” Maxim said.
“Oh, let me have some fun, will you?” Wayne replied. “The quicker we find this blasted piece of the shell, the quicker you can be back in the arms of your dear, sweet, lovely Irina.”
Maxim smiled, just thinking of her. Maybe they had been a little too lovey-dovey the last few days. They were almost across Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Rain Showers. To the north, he could already see the slopes of the Montes Alpes, ‘the moon’s Alps.’ The piece of the shell that had been covering the Earth’s South Pole six weeks ago should’ve landed somewhere around here, a short distance from the Bay of Rainbows, Sinus Iridum.
Maxim looked behind them. The rover’s tracks were easy enough to see. The sun lit up the cloud of dust thrown up by the rover’s tires, and the cloud hung there stubbornly over the tracks. It would still be visible there for days before it would settle down again on the surface.
Slowly it was getting brighter. The Earth was just now rising over the horizon. It still shone just as bright as a second sun because almost all of the shell’s surface continued to reflect the sunlight.
Just then the arc over Antarctica appeared on the horizon. They could see a brown spot there. That was all that remained of the former ice mass. It was too bad that they couldn’t have opened up the North Pole, because then at least they could have seen some of the beautiful, blue-colored water. But this was, of course, better for those down on the Earth. They were probably already fighting over partitioning up the Antarctic continent.
“Do you have any idea what this thing might look like?” Wayne asked after another hour.
“Honestly? No.”
“So, we’re not going to find some new mountain sticking up somewhere or something like that?”
“I doubt it. The material must be relatively flexible.”
“So, a large crumpled up wad of stuff, lying around here somewhere?”
“Or a small one. I have no idea. I guess we’ve just got to keep an eye out for something that looks like it doesn’t belong. The surface is extremely reflective. That’s all we know.”
“That’s not going to help us at all if our whole trip is always in shadow.”
Wayne had a good point. The sun was so low tha
t the Alps were casting very long shadows. The rover’s headlights were lighting up the path in front of them.
“Maybe we should stop for a while.”
“Man, Maxim, I’m sorry, but I’ve got no desire to spend any extra nights camping with you.”
“Huh, you don’t like cuddling with me? Now I’m offended.”
“Just stay away from me,” Wayne said with a laugh.
They’d have to spend at least two, maybe three more nights in the cramped but air-tight tent. Even if one of them slept while the other drove, their bodies had needs that required them to shed their spacesuits for some time at least every 24 hours.
Maxim looked back behind them. Now, in shadow, the darkness swallowed up the moonscape after only a few meters. He used his helmet lamp to light up their tracks. Something didn’t seem quite right. He tried to bring back what he’d seen before from his memory. There’d been a cloud of dust hanging over the rover’s doubled-wheel tracks. And now there wasn’t. He moved his helmet lamp back and forth. There was no more dust anywhere along the tracks now.
“Hey, stop,” he said.
“What’s up? You need to take a leak?”
“Wiseass. I might’ve found something.”
Wayne stopped the rover and used his helmet lamp to light up their surroundings in front of them and to their sides. “There’s nothing here,” he said.
“Exactly. What’s not here is what I’m curious about.”
“Huh?”
Maxim jumped off the rover. His feet sank a bit into the lunar dust. Everything seemed the same as always—except for the fact that they weren’t stirring up any dust. “You try it,” he said.
Wayne jumped off too. “What am I supposed to try? Nothing looks any different.”
Maxim lit up Wayne’s boots. “Wipe the dust off your boots.”
Wayne bent down and wiped his boots. “There’s no dust.”
“You see! Our rover’s not leaving a trail of dust behind it, and even though we’re standing here right in the middle of the dust, our boots are still clean.”
“Mare Imbrium? Maybe the dust here is special somehow?” Wayne asked.
Maxim had an idea. “Give me a handful.”
Wayne bent down again to put his hand into the dust. But he couldn’t do it. Something was stopping his hand from touching the ground. Then he stood up again.
“This is crazy,” he said. “We’ve been searching and searching, and now you’re telling me we’re standing on top of it? For how long? What do we do now?”
“Now we turn around and drive back slowly until we get to the edge of the material. And then we’ll just roll up whatever’s left of this piece of the shell. The scientists on Earth will drop to their knees to thank us.”
“And how are we supposed to know when we get to the edge?”
“As soon as the rover kicks up dust again, we’ll have reached our prize.”
“And... pull!”
On Wayne’s command, they pulled with all their strength. But it didn’t work. They tried it a few more times.
Maxim straightened up and stretched his back. “The plan was simple... but unsuccessful,” he said.
“Kenjiro predicted it.”
“Yes, he was right, as usual. The thing is just too heavy for the two of us.”
“Three million square kilometers, that’s almost a tenth of the entire lunar surface, according to Ken’s preliminary calculations. Even if the stuff’s only a few atoms thick, that makes more than the two of us can move. We can’t even overcome its coefficient of static friction.”
“Experiments are better than calculations in my book. We don’t know the coefficient of static friction for this material. Maybe it’s extremely low.”
“Now, that’s something I can call you out on, Max—you’re not thinking. If the coefficient of static friction were that low, we wouldn’t be able to walk on it. We’d keep falling on our faces.”
“Ugh, you’re right. I guess I made a mistake.”
“I think maybe your wife has been a bit of a distraction for you.”
“Away team to base, please come in.”
“Irina here. What’s going on, Maxim?”
“We’ve found the shell piece, but we can’t move it ourselves.”
“Kenjiro already told me that you would be saying that. He’s working on designing a machine that can move it for us.”
“How long does he think he’ll need to build it?”
“Two, maybe three months.”
“Then please grant the away team permission to return to base.”
“Permission granted. But only this time.”
“Well, then, let’s go, get on, Maxim!”
“Can’t you wait a minute, please?”
“I really don’t want to have to shit in this suit another time, Maxim. What do you want to do?”
“We’ve been fighting against the shell for over a year now. Don’t you want to take a closer look at it while we’re here?”
Wayne groaned. “Actually, no. But I’m not going to stop you. You’ve got fifteen minutes. Knock yourself out, Commander.”
“What if I need more time?”
“Then I swear I’ll tell your wife that you sexually harassed me.”
“Hey, you asked for it. I heard you very clearly.”
“Enough joking. Go take a look at the damn piece of the shell and then let’s head back.”
Maxim sat down in the dust. He knew he was actually in the dust when he moved his hand around in it, and this caused the dust to whirl up into a cloud. He then moved his hand around until it stopped making new dust clouds. That was how he knew he’d found the edge of the shell fragment. Maxim turned his head and illuminated the shell material from different directions. Looking at it like this, the material looked bright white, just like the light from the helmet lamp. The stuff reflected better than any other material he’d ever seen.
He moved his fingers from the side under the edge of the shell piece. Then he raised his hand. He pulled as hard as he could, but the material only raised two, maybe three centimeters. He could feel it between his thumb and index finger, but it was impossibly thin. It was a skin made of nothing, it seemed. The particles of dust on his fingers were hundreds of times thicker.
Maxim laid down on his stomach and positioned his helmet lamp next to his head so that it was directed precisely onto the edge of the material, just like his eyes. There was absolutely nothing to see. But it was there, thinner than any film. He took some moon dust in his right hand and let it trickle from above and onto the material. The material was so thin that the dust simply appeared to remain floating in the air. It was a fascinating effect.
“Maxim?”
“Yeah, just a minute, Wayne.”
He scooted a little closer and let some more dust trickle out of his hand. The tiny particles moved downward, attracted by the moon’s gravity. But shortly before they landed on the shell’s material, they slowed down some. They didn’t just fall and strike the material, they slowed down. That was cool! Maxim had never seen such a behavior before. Was the material somehow statically charged and applying a repelling force against the dust?
He grounded it with the help of his radio that had a metal enclosure. Then he repeated the experiment. Again, the grains of dust slowed down before they came to rest on the material. The shell was getting more and more mysterious. He would have to tell Kenjiro about this. Maybe this had something to do with why the bombardment with antiprotons had taken so long? Was it some kind of defensive mechanism? But the effect seemed too minimal for that, because the grains of dust did eventually land on the material. They only slowed down before landing. Either the material had some kind of anti-gravity, or it could slow down the progression of time for the grains of dust. Both were impossible. Oh well, he’d let Kenjiro solve this problem if he could.
“Wayne? Let’s go,” Maxim said.
Author's Note
Dear reader,
The Internet is
such a fantastic invention. For example, it allows me to release my books to you without navigating the cumbersome and energy-draining process of going through a publishing company. And it enables two authors to collaborate without even a single meeting. Joshua T. Calvert visited with me in Germany right in the middle of authoring this book, and we’d met each other before in Bangkok.
I no longer remember who came up with the idea, but for a long time I’ve wanted to work on a story where two authors wrote from two different sides of a problem, both giving their perspectives independent of each other. All that we agreed upon in advance were a few basic plot points, what happened when and why, and what the solution to the problem might look like. We were responsible for filling in everything else.
Could this process produce two exciting and interesting novels? I hope so! Of course, the challenge is that for you as the reader, the crux of the problem is new only when you’re reading the first book. With the second book, you might feel like it’s supposed to be a mystery, but you already know the crime, the victim, the culprit, and the motive. In fact, there are some mystery books that are written that way intentionally, and with outstanding results. Did we succeed? I’ll have to leave that up to you. I found Joshua’s The Wall: Eternal Night hard-sf.com/links/1841895 exhilarating, and I know the story inside and out, but, of course, I’m not a neutral party.
By the way, it’s not at all out of the question that there might also be a sequel. There are already hints at this in the book. If you don’t want to miss anything, the best way to stay informed would be to subscribe to my newsletter at hard-sf.com/subscribe.
As always, I cannot say goodbye without a heartfelt request. If you liked the book, please leave a review. You wouldn’t believe how vital readers’ ratings are for a book’s visibility in online stores. All you need to do is enter the following address: hard-sf.com/links/1799412
The Wall: Eternal Day Page 27