Year’s Best SF 15 (42 page)

And that had been the end of the inquiries.

But not the end of the discussion.

Five years later, when Joe made his first trip back to Houston as a civilian, to take his annual physical, he heard at the clinic that Chuck had come through earlier in the day. Naturally Chuck would be in Houston around the same time…the target date for physicals was that shared birthday. Strangely, Chuck had left a message for him:
meet me at ops at 0800 tomorrow
.

Ops was Ellington Air Force base five miles up the road, where NASA kept its fleet of aircraft. Somehow Chuck had convinced them to give him a T-38 for a hop…with Joe.

It was only when they were in the air, bouncing their way through the clouds of an approaching Gulf storm, that Chuck broke his usual radio silence: “Five hundred million years old.”

“What?”

“That pink coral we found at Aitken? The mysterious ob
ject we found on the Moon and kept secret all these years? It's five hundred million years old.”

“That's really not old by lunar standards. Last I heard that thing was four billion years old. Or five.”

“Joe, that coral is from
Earth
.”

Through God knows how many contacts and cut-outs, Chuck had arranged for samples to be tested at three different facilities. Age, composition, carbon dating, all tests had the same result: it was just like material found on Earth's sea floor five hundred million years in the past.

The knowledge changed nothing—Alpha and Omega kept their silence—but it did inform later discussions between the Apostles in various ways. Over the next thirty years, on his own and in conversation with like-minded souls such as the Visionary and, somewhat to Joe's surprise, the Shark and the Aviator, Joe developed a conceptual model of the entities who had left the pink coral at Aitken Basin.

They were amphibious at least, possibly even aquatic.

Earth in five hundred million BC—aside from being a blue-white sphere (as seen from the Moon)—would have been unrecognizable: the continents were still smushed together in some version of Gondwanaland. What would later be the Antarctic was ice-free—possibly even the home of the Beings.

(Although a civilization robust enough to launch at least one flight to the Moon would logically require more than a single landmass. “Why?” the Shark said. “What is the basis for that conclusion?”)

The Visionary was more troubled by the lack of evidence of past civilizations. Here the Aviator showed an unexpected grasp of archaeology and geology. “How much of the land we see and excavate was above water that long ago?” Before the Visionary could suggest a ballpark figure, the Aviator had one: “Under 5 percent, maybe as little as 2…maybe zero.

“And even if you had 5 percent of the Coral People's land still dry, suppose it was in the Andes? Or the middle of the Takla Makan?”

“Or in Albania,” the Shark said, to general laughter.

“One of the reasons we find any evidence of past civilization is that we're digging where we know they lived. Besides, these civilizations only existed during the past ten thousand years.

“We seem to find dinosaurs,” the Visionary said, stubborn as always. (And, Joe remembered, from a Fundamentalist family.)

“By accident,” Joe said. “And keep in mind…the oldest dinosaur—Cambrian Era—is only half as far back as these Beings lived.”

“At a minimum,” the Shark added.

“But we do find fossils from that era, long before the dinosaurs. And they're all small. Shouldn't we find, hell, I don't know…pottery? A fork? The equivalent of an oil rig or even a temple?”

“I did a rough calculation on this,” Joe said. “You know how Heinlein said, ‘The surface of the Moon has an area equal to the continent of Africa. Our missions have explored a neighborhood in Cape Town'?

“If you just assume that the surface area of our Coral People civilization was the continent of Antarctica, which is surely too small, we have turned soil in less area than Vostok, Byrd, and the other half dozen South Pole stations cover: about a hundred square miles.”

“Ultimately, though, it's a matter of belief. Based on admittedly skimpy—”

“—One sample? Yeah, that's taking the word skimpy and giving it a good squeeze—”

“—evidence, we believe the Moon was visited by terrestrials at least half a billion years before you two.”

“Or the rest of us.” Shark always liked to remind people that Apollo was a
program
, not a single event like Lindbergh's flight.

“I'm completely comfortable with that statement,” the Visionary said. “Which makes it the discovery of the Epoch! Like Noah's Ark or a piece of the True Cross! Why not make it public?”

“Because Chuck and I are still concerned about what it
would do to the program.” Here Joe extended his hand to the Shark. “Shuttle's flying, space station program is in the works, lunar exploration's on the drawing boards.

“Right now things are fine! It's like being on flight status when you go to see the doctor—the only thing you can do is make it worse.”

Mention of flight surgeons, especially in the absence of the Doctor, won the day.

Joe almost believed it.

In April 1998, Joe arrived in Houston for another physical, checking into the Kings Inn right outside the Johnson Space Center gate. He found a blinking light on his room phone with a message from Chuck—good old Alpha—inviting Omega aka Joe to his house that evening.

In all their time together, Joe had never been in the Alpha's house. It wasn't an issue: Joe felt the two had seen enough of each other to last two lifetimes.

The Alpha and his third wife, Laurie, had a three-bedroom condo on an inlet of the misnamed Clear Lake (“neither clear nor a lake”) in a gated community developed by the Shark himself.

In spite of his blue suit, flyboy background, the Alpha had taken up sailing, buying a forty-foot sloop which he named
506
. After a suitable number of drinks, a round of sea stories, they headed out.

The first thing to became clear was that for a natural aviator and astronaut—literally a sailor of the stars—the Alpha was a total landlubber. Joe, of course, was no better, preferring water in swimming pools or ice chests. His sole advantage was that he didn't pretend to be a sailor.

After numerous misadventures with the sails and riggings, the
506
headed down the ship channel toward the Gulf on engine power. Real sailors swept past, white sails flapping in the breeze, their captains offering half-hearted salutes—until recognizing the name on the boat and the identity of its
“captain.” Then beer bottles were raised and pretty women waved with enthusiasm. “Well,” the Alpha said, “it's a good thing we didn't have to
sail
to Aitken Basin.”

They reached the gulf, and Joe's stomach began to protest. “Let me get something.” Leaving Joe at the wheel, the captain went below. When he emerged, however, it wasn't with a bottle of Dramamine.

It was with a suitcase. “Going on a trip?” Joe said, trying to joke through the nausea.

“There ain't no clothes in this case, old pal.” The Alpha opened it: there was the pink Aitken Coral, what looked like the entire set of samples—including three chunks returned from the institutes that had done the analyses.

“Wow,” was all Joe could say. He was trying not to heave.

“Well, good buddy…it seems I've got a choice to make.” Joe noted the Alpha's reference to himself, alone, not the team. “Turn this stuff over to the world and see what sort of waves it makes…”

“It'll be a cultural tsunami!” Joe said, proud of the metaphor, especially under the circumstances.

Even the Alpha seemed impressed. “Yeah! A cultural tsunami! The world will never be the same, all that shit.”

There was a long moment when neither moved, though the
506
rose on a swell. Then, with a casualness that Joe would always remember, the Alpha simply raised the suitcase and dumped its contents into the greenish-brown soup that was the Houston ship channel.

Joe pulled himself to his feet, managing to blurt, “What the hell are you doing?” before throwing up.

As the greenish spatter of partly digested chicken sandwich and beer floated away on the water, the Alpha said, “Is that an editorial comment? Or the seasickness talking?”

Joe wiped his mouth. “Dammit, Chuck!”

The Alpha smiled tightly, his eyes a mass of crow's feet caused by a life in pressurized cockpits. “Look at it this way,” he finally said, unusually quietly. “It's just gone back where it came from.”

With a television network offering substantial money for the exclusive rights, Joe had made the obligatory visit to the Pathfinder landing site during his first week back on the Moon, driving in the enclosed rover with Kari, who served as camera operator.

It was strange how different it looked from the images seared into his fifty-year-old memory: of course, he and Chuck had landed when the Sun was lowest, throwing features into relief (the better to be avoided during landing). This second time, the Sun was as high as it ever got in the Moon's polar region. The flat top of Pathfinder's descent stage looked strange, scorched from the blast of the ascent motor.

The flag they had planted had been bleached white by the Sun, but still stood. Proudly waved, if you allowed for the wave to be frozen.

“Don't mess up your original footprints,” Kari had warned.

On that first traverse down the lunar memory lane, Joe made sure to avoid the place where he and Chuck had found the Aitken Coral, not with a camera on him. And especially not after the Alpha himself was patched through, live, offering congratulations and asking a favor: “Could you look for my sunglasses? I think I dropped them.”

Now, as Joe Liquori visited the landing site for the third time, it actually looked familiar. Thank God. At his age, in these circumstances, his memory needed all the help he could get.

Why had he kept the secret for so long? Because Chuck—the Alpha Apostle—wanted it that way. Because the man who had charged through life, playing the game at a higher level than anyone Joe knew, had said so. Period. Because men who possessed the skills to brave a lunar landing shared a unique ability to make the right decisions.

But now the Alpha was gone. The stone had rolled away. Death had released Joe.

Joe stopped the rover briefly a hundred yards south of Pathfinder, and it all looked familiar now, like main street in your hometown. Looking at the tracks from his second visit, he gunned the rover again, turning left and steering a path parallel to that of his and Chuck's second EVA.

In 1973 it had taken the two of them the better part of two hours to reach Great Salt Lake, but today Joe covered the same ground in forty-five minutes. He had the advantage of aiming for a destination—and not stopping every kilometer to set up an instrument package or take pictures.

He slowed the rover near the cleft. With habits born of twenty-five years of operational flying and space training, Joe checked, double-checked, and triple-checked his suit and consumables, to Kari's approval (she followed via telemetry and video): “We don't want to lose you,” she said.

“Me, neither. Besides, think what it would do to future tourist flights.” This was a joke: space fatalities only raised public interest, like the deaths of climbers on Mt. Everest. The stranger and more poignant, the better!

Joe had no plans to feed that particular public appetite.

He exited, marveling again at the improvements in technology over the past fifty years. Not just the rover, which had the solid feel of a classic Mercedes automobile compared to the Pathfinder's flimsy golf cart, but the suit—slimmer, more rigid, it practically did the walking for you.

He took one of the standard sample cases—yes, the commercial Aitken Enterprise at least pretended to do some scientific sampling—and started out.

It was like walking on a beach in boots. But soon he breached the passage easily, to stand once again in the center of Great Salt Lake.

He wondered about that long, long, long ago visit from Earth—what kind of vehicle had they used? Hell, had they even used a vehicle? His sci-fi mind was filled with wild images…maybe the Moon was closer to Earth. Maybe they'd climbed here on some kind of space elevator or tower.

Stupid. Let others worry about that.

He reached the cleft and looked into the shadows—

Nothing but bare gray black rock with shiny flecks. Where was the pink coral? It had lasted millions of years! Surely it hadn't faded away in fifty! Could the damage he and Chuck had inflicted—

No, no, no. Then Joe thought he saw other footprints.
Christ, Kari and the others had found it!

Come on, Joe…re-group
! Once he allowed himself to catch his breath, to stand back, it was obvious he had gone to the wrong cleft! He'd gotten turned around!

Here it was! Here was a heap of that magical, historical material from Earth's ancient floor—

Joe got busy collecting.

It only took twenty minutes to fill the case, the time expanded to let him take images and add voice-over at every step. What he should have done during his first return.

Now, back to the rover—and to the new world he would create.

Step. Step.

He had to halt. He was feeling sick to his stomach, sick in his chest. His vision was blearing.

Keep going—

With a grunt, clutching the last sample from the very last Apollo, Joe Liquori fell down.

For uncounted minutes he lay in the lunar soil, hearing nothing but the steady hiss of the airflow, the gentle click of the pumps. How long would that last? Two more hours?