Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (39 page)

“I doubt you’ll need this, since the whole shuttle’s pressurized”, he explained. “It’s just a safety precaution in case there’s a breach. I’ll be flying the shuttle itself, way up front there, so you’re going to be alone for the trip. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. I’ll see you on the ground.”

He went out the sub’s portal, pressure-locking it behind him. Through the pilot’s window, I watched him making his way forward through crates of gear in the shuttle’s hold. He climbed a few steps into the craft’s big cockpit, and the door closed behind him.

Then the shuttle’s loading door was shut and pressure-locked. The hold was windowless. I couldn’t see a thing. A few minutes later, I heard the massive bay doors closing, followed shortly by beeping and an intercom voice announcing depressurization of the bay. I was sealed inside the belly of a sardine, which was inside the belly of a tuna, inside the belly of a whale. Nervously, I checked my vital signs, sniffed the air inside the sub, and concluded that all was well.

Then I felt a rumble, which I presumed was the
Kosmos
’ outer port doors opening. The seat beneath me begin to vibrate, and after that, the sensation of gravity gradually declined. It was the first time in my life I had experienced this, and it was both thrilling and disturbing. I began to hyperventilate, as if the loss of gravity meant the loss of oxygen, which of course it didn’t. Within a minute or so, I got the hang of the thing.

During the foregoing embarkation sequence, I had been twiddling with my fountain pen as a distraction from nervousness. Now it slipped from my grasp and went spinning in a time-lapse cartwheel, then it slowed to a hover in front of my eyes. I retrieved it, clipping it securely inside my breast pocket.

In what seemed like no time at all, I felt gravity returning. My body was again a weight pressing into the seat. Then came a gradual increase in sound, a dull roaring, which I presumed was the shuttle hull meeting with Nova’s upper atmosphere. It continued for some minutes, the noise and force of gravity increasing as the engines propelled us down and forward in an arc of descent.

Where were we going?

As if in response to my unspoken question, I heard a disembodied voice say over the sub’s communication system, “How are we doing, Dr. Hoyos?”

“Just fine, just fine”, I answered.

“Good. We’ll be landing in about five minutes from now. Don’t undo those safety belts until I come and get you—face to face, understand?”

“Understood”, I murmured.

With that, the roaring increased, and then the forward propulsion eased off, replaced by the sensation of a soft vertical descent. In less than a minute, the seat shuddered, and there was no more motion. The engines ceased, and I was left staring out the windows at nothing but packing crates.

I sat there for some minutes until the sub’s portal whisked open and in stepped the pilot. He helped me unbuckle and then handed me a bright orange jumpsuit.

“Please put this on over your civvy clothing, sir. That way, you won’t be so noticeable when we go outside. There’s a lot of activity out there, mostly engineers and marine biologists. They’re all wearing these, so you should blend in okay.”

“Is this really necessary?”

“For you, it is. Mobs of people are taking off-duty joyrides these days, but you’re a marked man. You’re not supposed to be down here, and if you get spotted, I’m in big trouble.”

Standing up demanded a little more effort than was usual with me—the weight gain—and I thought to myself that given enough time on this planet my body would adjust by growing more muscle. For the moment, I felt as I sometimes did after packing in too many carbohydrates during a holiday.

When I had finished putting on my camouflage, Loka handed me a polyplast construction hat, also bright orange. I put it on my head, and without further ado, we left the sub and proceeded to the shuttle’s offload ramp. As I walked down it onto solid ground, my heart beat faster and my mouth dropped open, sucking in air. I couldn’t get enough of that air—so sweet, so pure. I stopped in my tracks at the bottom of the ramp and just took in my surroundings.

The dome of the heavens soared over us, cloudless except for a few feathers of high cirrus, the horizon unbroken by hills or mountains. I heard bird calls and the faint rhythmic rush of waves striking a beach or perhaps rocks, though I could not see the ocean. The day was very warm, and I began to sweat.

The shuttle had landed in a field about a hundred yards from the mission base, which looked from a distance to be well along in construction, since half-a-dozen residence pods and lab buildings had already been erected inside a wire fence. LECs and motorized trolleys were heading toward us along a graveled road, each of them carrying several orange-clad men, the crew who would offload the shuttle. As they approached, Loka raised his hand in greeting, and there were a few jolly exchanges between him and the crew. But we did not slacken our pace as we walked toward a parking lot adjacent to the shuttle’s landing pad. This was a compound where air-exploration vehicles had been lined up beside a traditional runway.

“It’s going to take them a few hours to offload”, said the pilot. “I have permission to do some sightseeing until they’re finished.”

He headed straight to the closest AEC with its distinctive jets, tail fin, and retractable wings. When we entered its portal, I found that the interior was the same as that of the sub, though its collection chamber was lined with empty cages. The pilot went forward to the cockpit and took his seat before a bank of instruments. He told me to take the copilot’s seat beside him, and I gladly complied.

As I belted myself in, Loka talked into his communications system, telling the computer where he wanted to go. It was all given in degree coordinates, so I was none the wiser for this. However, I could tell from the digital map screen between us that the computer was tracing our route in an illuminated blue line even as he dictated it. We would cross the north coast and go out over the sea for some distance, then fly parallel to the shore for a while, then loop around and head due south into the heart of the continent. Flight plan completed, he pressed a button, and the engines began to hum.

Speaking into his communications again, this time to a responding human, he informed the other that he’d be away from base three or four hours and would be back before nightfall, when he would take the shuttle back up to the
Kosmos
.

“You got my flight plan?” he asked.

“Got it”, came the reply. “No other traffic for 400 k’s. The sky’s yours.”

“I may deviate a little and do some sightseeing. Haven’t seen those mountains yet.”

“No problem”, said the voice. “But keep your eyes open. There’s a lot of traffic around those ranges—geology teams and off-duty sightseers. Switch to satellite tracking as soon as you’re in the mountains. Have fun.”

“I shall do.”

The view through the front window rotated, and then the AEC began to roll forward to the end of the runway.

“I could have lifted us vertically before powering the jets,” said Loka, “but I love the feeling of the old-fashioned take-off, don’t you?”

“I’ve never experienced one”, I replied. “But I’m willing to learn.”

“Super, let’s go!”

The jets hummed more intensely, and suddenly my body was flattened against the seat as the grasslands raced past. Within five seconds, the craft was airborne. Glancing out my side window, I spotted the base camp, with the huge body of the shuttle beyond it shrinking fast, then a line of beach stretching from east to west, and below us the rippled surface of the ocean. Numerous white creatures were breaking the surface and diving. I exhaled, exhilarated.

“It’s a thrill”, my companion said. “I never get tired of it.”

Ahead on the vast expanse of the ocean there were no islands, nor could I see the mainland of another continent, though I knew there was one beyond the arc of the horizon. The ocean floor sloped downward, turning the water from turquoise to amethyst blue.

“How deep is it?” I asked.

He checked an instrument on his dashboard.

“Two hundred meters and dropping fast toward the rim of the coastal shelf. Close to the shore, it’s about thirty meters deep. You can see the bottom with the naked eye, the water’s that clean. Want to see the wildlife?”

He switched the map to vidscreen. Suddenly, the calm empty ocean was crowded. Sonar, radar, and other scanners were digitally integrated to give near-virtual pictures of what the unaided eye could not see. He zoomed the image, and despite our speed, I could see that beneath the surface the white “whales” were present in great numbers, traveling in groups of ten to twenty, with smaller calves cavorting around them.

“How big are the white creatures?” I asked.

“Very big. They average about forty-two meters long when mature. That’s bigger than Earth’s blue whale, which is the largest mammal that ever lived on our planet, bigger even than the largest dinosaurs.”

“So they
are
mammals.”

“Absolutely. Warm-blooded, nurse their young, travel in family groups, as you can see.”

“Amazing. Have the marine people got close to any?”

“Not yet. They tried to, but the whales are pretty good at preserving their privacy. They’re smart. They’re very smart.”

“Maybe they’re intelligent.”

“Oh, they’re intelligent all right. But it’s simple animal intelligence, same as the giraffes the zoologists found. They don’t have a developed language, though they have a variety of calls. The underwater blokes have begun recording it, and they’re wracking their brains to decipher the patterns. So far, there’s not a broad range. They think it has to do with simple communication about food, mating, travel and social order, just like our whales.”

“Do they resemble our whales?”

“Here, have a look—this was our first close-up shot, three days ago.”

There appeared on the screen a series of vids taken underwater from a distance (the whole body), and it did look like a whale or perhaps a narwhal minus the tusk. Intermediate distance showed various sections of the body. A single, brief close-up of the head revealed that it had a high frontal cranium like a dolphin’s, indicating massive brain size. It turned its blue eyes on the sub approaching it, then heaved away in an astounding parabola into deeper waters, disappearing in seconds.

“Apparently, they aren’t hostile to us in any way,” Loka said, “not even defensively so. But they are extremely shy.”

Now he switched from vid to map screen and banked the AEC to the west. We flew in this direction for ten minutes, with the mainland on our left, a flat expanse with no discernible rises in the topography. Inland, there were forests, threaded by rivers draining into the sea. On the southern horizon, the atmospheric haze thickened, pale pink with a hint of low purple shadow beyond it. We were now flying at an altitude of three thousand meters, and I guessed that the shadow was the beginning of the highlands leading to the mountains, hundreds of kilometers south of us.

After crossing a narrow peninsula that jutted far out into the ocean, the pilot banked again, and we headed back toward the shore and into the continent.

The next forty minutes captured my attention totally. This was the largest of the continents, with its northern coast just below the equator and its southern coast near the pole. We crossed a variety of climate zones, ranging from coastal equatorial to subtropical to the regions of dense forest, territory that steadily rose above sea level into foothills of the mountains. There were three parallel ranges, each of them thousands of kilometers long, the central massif crested by the planet’s highest peaks. Near the midway mark of our north / south trajectory, the pilot slowed the craft to less than half speed and banked into the east, dropping between two of the ranges. We flew on for a time, cruising down a wide valley and descending ever lower. Below us, I could see countless waterfalls pouring from the snowfields on the heights, the headwaters of great rivers. In the valley bottom, there were lush marshlands and copses of deciduous trees on “islands” of slightly higher ground.

When we were only a hundred meters above the treetops, the pilot flipped a switch and said, “We’re invisible to radar because of the mountains.”

“You turned on the satellite locater signal, right?”

“No, I think we can dispense with that.”

“Oh, then the satellites will spot you visually.”

“No, I just turned on masking.”

“Why?”

“This way, nobody traces the flights that are meeting today and asks why we all converged in one obscure spot. It also avoids the satellite scanner pointing a zoom on the wedding. We’re about to commit a crime, you realize.”

“Yes, isn’t it splendid!”

Without warning, he banked to the left at a terrifying angle and flew into a canyon. Now we began to climb at a steep pitch, and shortly after, we passed over a ridge, at which point, he cut the jet power, dropping us precipitously into an alpine glen. Suspended thousands of meters above sea level, it was a bowl of grass, ringed by very high white peaks. In the center, there was a lake that one might be able to throw a stone across, brilliant turquoise in color. Surrounding it was a little grove of pale green trees.

The AEC descended by hover onto a gentle slope near the edge of the woods. When we came to a halt, the pilot killed the power and decompressed. The portal whisked open, and cool, perfumed air poured in.

Leaving the craft, I saw that the ground underfoot was moss, speckled with purple and red flowers. Bees hummed all around us—stingerless, I hoped. There were birds too, small warblers of various colors darting here and there.

“You can take off the monkey suit”, said Loka, to which I readily complied.

“Have you been here before?” I asked him.

“A few times. Paul’s been here with me, and that’s why he chose it for the wedding.”

“Where’s the happy couple?”

“They’ll be arriving soon. Let’s go look at the lake.”

We walked into the woods on a soft carpet of moss. There was little other undergrowth, only a few ground-hugging berry bushes. I was fascinated by the trees most of all. They were white-barked, like birch, though their leaves were spear shaped. From every branch, there hung clusters of what I took to be either an unusual arboreal flower or the tree’s seeds. They looked like elongated crystals, and the effect of the whole was that of a chandelier. They were semitransparent, and as they swayed in the breeze, they created a lot of light refraction and a quiet background tinkling. I plucked a handful and shook them, listening to the little chimes within. I smiled and felt a spontaneous desire to sing, to dance. I decided to take them home and stuffed them into the outside pocket of my suit jacket. The whimsy or nostalgia passed quickly, and I walked on through the trees.