Dinosaur Thunder (33 page)

“Really?” Maven said, exaggerating surprise. “Then you must be talking about the Pumpkin Seed,” he said, smiling. “External combustion pulse detonation engines that push that ship to thirty-eight thousand miles per hour in the atmosphere.”

Perez-Roberts smiled and said, “Damn Internet.”

When Puglisi came on the screen, Perez-Roberts and Puglisi exchanged friendly greetings. The Puglisi and the Roberts families were friends. Perez-Roberts was a bit vague about the reason for that friendship too, since the Puglisis lived in Hawaii, and Perez-Roberts in Alexandria, Virginia. As far as Watson could discern, sometime in the past, the two families had worked together on a project that was as secret as the one Watson now found himself involved with.

“How are Carrollee and the kids?” Perez-Roberts asked.

“Doing well,” Puglisi said. “How about yours?”

“They’re with Grandma,” Perez-Roberts said. “They’re being spoiled.”

“Does John know you’re flying the Aurora again?” Puglisi asked.

“No, and you’re not going to tell him,” Perez-Roberts said. “Do you know where John is and why I can’t get hold of him?”

Puglisi looked uncomfortable, and changed the subject. “We’re all set on this end,” Puglisi said. “Is the Aurora flight ready?”

“Took her suborbital, and she behaved like the lady she is,” Perez-Roberts said. “They are finishing the inspection and systems checks as we speak.”

The checkout flight was Watson’s first actual flight in an Aurora, and it was every bit the gut-checking ride that the simulator put pilots through.

“Commander Watson, how about your assembly team?” Puglisi asked.

“Maven and Chandra are ready to go,” Watson said. “Mating the capsules and the PAM booster is pretty simple.”

“Obviously it’s easy,” Maven said. “I can do it.”

“Then we need to go as soon as possible,” Puglisi said. “Conditions are changing rapidly, and we need to get this material off planet as soon as possible.”

“When you say ‘conditions,’ just what are you referring to?” Watson asked. “Is there a risk to the mission?”

“Honestly, I don’t know, but I don’t see how this could impact the mission. Put simply, we have a minor connection with a different time period—kind of a microversion of what happened with the Time Quilt.”

Everyone stiffened now, hearing details they did not know.

“What is different this time is that there is a time differential between this time period and the time period on the other side,” Puglisi explained. “Time on the other side is running slower than on this side. So a day over there could be a month here. What has changed is that the differential is changing. The two time rates are coming together. Soon the flow of time in that time period will match the flow of time in this period.”

“Wouldn’t that be a good thing?” Chandra asked.

“I don’t know, is it?” Puglisi said.

“You’re asking us?” Maven said. “I’m barely smart enough to connect a PAM booster to a couple of capsules.”

“The point is that this is new territory for us,” Puglisi said. “Until this event, as far as I knew, time was a constant. So, it could be that whatever caused the differences in the rate of time is dissipating, and time is resuming its normal state. Or, it could be that this is a countdown to something catastrophic.”

“I’ll go with the former,” Maven said.

“You believe that the material we recovered on the moon has something to do with this effect on time?” Watson asked.

“Getting it off the planet is a precaution,” Puglisi said. “Something we need to do soon.”

“We’re ready,” Watson said. “Let’s get it done.”

“Very good,” Puglisi said. “Then we’ll launch tonight. We’ll meet you at Cape Canaveral with the cargo.”

The oldest member of the team, Watson had been an astronaut for nearly twenty years, and gray for the last five. Balding like Puglisi, he kept his hair short, barely different from shaving his head. Shorter than average, with a barrel chest and thick arms and legs, Watson was an ex–fighter pilot turned astronaut. Watson had had more flight time than any active astronaut, and in all his experience, he had never seen a mission like this one. NASA normally overtrained its crews, had overtrained backup crews, and in some cases, overtrained third crews. NASA also went over launch vehicles with a fine-toothed comb, replacing even functioning parts if there was even a suspicion a part might function below optimum. With this mission, there was minimal training, only one crew, and a launch vehicle that had to be pulled from mothballs and reconditioned in less than three weeks. That suggested urgency to Watson, and that Puglisi was genuinely concerned about what would happen if the two time periods ever matched.

Even though retired, the Aurora could be flown only at night. The first leg of the flight plan was suborbital. The Aurora would take off from Area 51, fly sixty-two miles into the sky, and then drop back down and land in Florida. The flight would take fifty minutes. After picking up the cargo, they would fly into orbit, deliver the cargo, and then return to California, again landing at night.

They ate dinner together in a dining room with an old wooden table and metal folding chairs. While the furniture consisted of Goodwill rejects, the food was good: garden salad, chicken and steak, potatoes or rice, broccoli or carrots, and apple pie or raspberry sherbet for dessert. No wine, since they were flying, they drank soft drinks and coffee. After dinner, most of them napped or wrote messages for family, which would be screened by censors and then sent.

Mike Watson e-mailed his wife, assuring her that he would be home soon, since the mission was essentially a one-night mission. Twice before, he had taken classified cargos to orbit, so his wife was relaxed about the mission. Watson, on the other hand, was nervous. Not about the mission, but about Puglisi’s countdown.

Built for hypersonic flight, the Aurora had a torpedo-shaped nose that widened out into a delta wing configuration, and twin tails. Dull black in color, the skin converted heat to electricity, partially powering the craft, and at the same time absorbing electromagnetic energy, thus making it invisible to radar. Watson climbed into the cockpit, taking the second seat. Configured to reduce drag, the pilot seats were tandem. Watson’s instruments would mirror Perez-Roberts’s displays, and he had his own stick. The Aurora was fly-by-wire, as were most modern jets. Watson was used to flying ships with essentially radio signals, but the thought of the computer controlling the ship even when they were flying on “manual” still unnerved him.

Maven and Chandra were loaded into the cargo bay, Chandra essentially sitting between Maven’s legs. Also married, Chandra was as immune to Maven’s flirting as Perez-Roberts was, and ignored his suggestive comments as she was helped into her seat. Once airborne, no one would have a window, since windows created drag. Instead, video displays provided an external view, although Perez-Roberts had a retractable periscope that she could use to line the airplane up with the runway. They would take off with no runway lights, the Aurora not even equipped with wing or tail markers.

“Let’s run the checklist,” Perez-Roberts said, Watson picking up his one important duty.

While they worked through the list, the ground crew buttoned up the cockpit hatch, covered the Aurora with a tarp, and then removed the chocks, pulling the ship to launch position with a small yellow tractor. Invisible to Watson were other preparations, including radar scans of surrounding airspace, security patrols of the perimeter, and sweeping of the mile-long runway. High above the site, a Crystal Seven satellite stood guard, ready to destroy any snooping satellites that moved into position over Area 51.

Finishing the preflight checklist, Perez-Roberts fired up the engines, which sounded something like normal jet engines, although instead of a rapid burn, the propulsion consisted of a series of detonations just behind the plane, driving the ship with shock waves. With the engines warmed up, Perez-Roberts requested clearance, and was given permission immediately. Then they were moving.

All of the crew were experienced, either as astronauts, pilots, or both, so they were used to violent acceleration, and accelerate they did. Perez-Roberts took them vertical as soon as she cleared the runway, giving the Aurora just enough time to reconfigure her wings and then giving her full throttle, the pulse detonations more distinct as the ship climbed. Eventually the sound of the engines changed, the Aurora switching to onboard fuel, since the oxygen-poor atmosphere starved the engines. It was smoother flying than a rocket launch, and Watson watched his external monitor, the clear sky growing blacker, the stars brighter, until they were white-hot pinpoints in the black of space. Then, the engines cut off. They continued to rise, becoming weightless. Watson ignored the fluttery feeling while scanning instruments, as Perez-Roberts let the ship reach apogee and then slip back to begin free fall.

The plan was to bring the ship in dead-stick, using the Aurora’s lifting body design, and land unnoticed at Cape Canaveral. Once refueled, and the cargo in the hold, they would be off before the public knew they were there. The string-of-pearls contrail left by the Aurora’s pulse detonation engines, the only evidence of its existence.

Coming in under computer control, the Aurora was as stable as a shuttle, and they touched down softly. Without jet engines to reverse, and undersized brakes, they needed most of a mile to stop the Aurora. Trucks raced out of the darkness, the Aurora partially covered by tarps to camouflage its shape. Crew from Area 51, flown out ahead, opened the cargo hatch, Maven and Chandra supervising the loading of the canisters.

“We didn’t bring this much crap back from the moon,” Maven said over the intercom.

Seeing the canisters on the monitor, Watson agreed. One canister would hold all the material returned from Flamsteed crater. Curious, but not surprised, Watson had guessed they were getting only as much of the story as they needed to do the mission.

Tanker trucks replenished the fuel tanks, including the internal oxygen tanks. Other technicians looked over the skin of the Aurora for any pit or blemish. Two orbital flights in less than two hours were unprecedented, although within specifications. Running internal diagnostics, Watson and Perez-Roberts checked all systems, and then updated guidance data. With only fifty minutes on the ground, they were buttoned up and ready to go.

“Now it gets real,” Maven said over the intercom.

“Stand by,” Perez-Roberts said as the tractor disengaged and she checked the Aurora’s alignment.

Takeoff permission came, and they were roaring down the runway again. Flying out over the ocean, they turned nearly vertical and shot into the air. Even with only two previous flights in the Aurora, Watson could feel a difference in the performance of the Aurora. Scanning the instruments, Watson found no lit warning indicators, no warning messages, and heard no warning buzzers—but something was different.

“Rosa, everything nominal?” he asked.

“I feel it,” she said.

Perez-Roberts said nothing more, since they were switching to internal oxygen, and the pulse detonations increased in power and frequency. They shot into orbit, g-forces pressing them deep into their seats, pressurized flight suits inflating to keep them conscious. Watson continued to watch for warning indicators, and then he saw the anomaly—it had to be an error. Through the vibrations and g-forces, Watson watched the anomalous readings, becoming more puzzled with each minute. Then the engines shut down, and they were in orbit. Shutting down flight systems, Watson and Perez-Roberts set the Aurora up for orbital flight.

“Look at the fuel usage,” Watson said.

“It’s a false reading,” Perez-Roberts said. “It has to be.”

“Maven, Chandra,” Watson said. “Check the readings on those tanks back there.”

“We’re already doing it,” Chandra said.

“We’re getting the same reading,” Maven said. “Unless you want me to unscrew a cap and measure it with a stick, everything says these tanks are nearly full.”

Sitting behind Rosa, Watson could not see her face, but she had to be as surprised as he was.

“We used only ten percent of our fuel,” Perez-Roberts said.

“A little more,” Watson said, “but not much.”

“That’s impossible,” Perez-Roberts said, struggling to understand how they could reach orbit and have nearly full tanks. “Just what is in those cylinders?”

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Watson said.

“No one’s seen anything like it,” Maven said, “and the sooner we get rid of it, the better.”

“I’m going to have to contact Houston,” Perez-Roberts said, “because we’ve got a problem.”

“Problem?” Maven asked.

“Too much fuel,” Perez-Roberts said.

“Isn’t having too much fuel like having too much cake?” Maven asked. “A good kind of problem?”

“Usually, yes,” Perez-Roberts said. “But there are no simulations for landing an Aurora with nearly full tanks. There would be no conceivable reason for doing such a thing. Who would pick up liquid oxygen and hydrogen in orbit and return it to Earth?”

“Let Groom Lake and Houston sort it out,” Watson said. “In the meantime, we’re sixty-seven minutes from rendezvous with the PAM. Let’s be sure we’re ready to send this stuff on its way.”

“Send it way, way away,” Maven said.

40

Reunion

Our Sun is about 4.6 billion years old, and Earth is just slightly younger, at 4.5 billion years old. The first, most basic cells are thought to have formed on our planet about 3.8 billion years ago, although the
Homo
genus, to which humans belong, did not appear until about 2.5 million years ago. And modern humans are only about 200,000 years old. For more than 80 percent of the Sun’s existence, life has existed in some form on Earth. It seems the timescales of biology and astrophysics have favorably aligned in our case. According to the anthropic argument, this coincidence means that Earth, and its life, are unique.

—Clara Moskowitz

Unknown Time
Unknown Place