by H. G. Stratmann
* * * *
Life is a neverending series of tests, but it’s not always obvious what’s being tested—or why
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman—a rope stretched across an abyss.
—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
* * * *
Earth was doomed.
Katerina Savitskaya, the woman responsible for her world’s impending destruction, knelt alone and miserable on the metal floor of the sole dwelling on Mars. The filthy blue jumpsuit shrouding her shapely thirty-three-year-old figure like sackcloth reeked with sweat and fear. Tears stung her ashen cheeks as she prayed before the colorful religious icons attached to a closed locker door in the habitation module’s science lab.
The young cosmonaut’s trembling hands clutched the heavy golden three-barred cross hanging from her neck on a gold chain. Her hazel eyes gazed penitently upward—begging for humanity to be spared and for her to be forgiven.
But the devout grandmother who’d inspired Katerina’s fervent Russian Orthodox faith had never taught her orisons for a sin this great. Greasy lifeless strands of long auburn hair draped Katerina’s shoulders like a cloistered nun’s veil as she waited for some heaven-sent sign that her prayers were heard. But no soothing miraculous whisper murmured from the mouths of the sacred icons before her. The painted pinpoint eyes of the Savior and her patron saint, St. Catherine of Alexandria, stared blindly back at her.
Katerina rose to her feet. Her black boots tapped the muffled rhythm of a funeral march as she passed through the openings in the habitation module’s compartments. She paused at the module’s open exit and viewed a spectacle only two humans had ever beheld. Though it was afternoon twenty-five million kilometers away in her native St. Petersburg, here the young Russian watched the rosy light of a Martian dawn gradually brighten the surrounding reddish-orange plain.
But today, on what was March 9, 2036 in the city of her birth, she was oblivious to this scene’s beauty. Her throat ached as unbearable grief turned the warm, moist, oxygen-rich air filling her lungs into sobs.
Katerina trudged down the short ramp that led from the module, a compressed cylinder nine meters wide by five meters tall supported by multiple short legs, to the barren ground. Her boots kicked up clumps of paprika-tinted mud that fell back to the rocky plain almost as quickly as they would have on Earth.
She stopped, wondering if the mysterious aliens who’d terraformed Mars were listening to her thoughts now. Because of her they’d condemned this world and Earth to mutual annihilation. Perhaps she should pray to the aliens—not to the God who’d abandoned her and might as well be dead.
Over the past ten years those enigmatic beings had used godlike powers to change Mars from a frigid stillborn world to a wet balmy “paradise” where humans could walk its cinnamon-colored surface without protection. With superhuman skills they’d increased the planet’s gravity to 0.91 g and moved it to a circular orbit only seven million kilometers farther from the Sun than Earth’s average distance. After devoting such enormous energies to those projects, perhaps the aliens might still be persuaded to reconsider their decision to destroy their work by obliterating both Mars and Earth in a titanic collision.
But first she had to plead her case. The aliens appeared and disappeared at will. Yesterday afternoon they’d passed judgment on her and vanished before she realized she was responsible for their decision to sentence the entire human race to death. Throughout the longest, darkest night of her soul she’d tried repeatedly to summon them back by her thoughts and words. She’d even set the main transceiver in the module to transmit a continuously repeating recorded message on the frequency the aliens themselves had suggested to call them on her first day on Mars.
So far her appeals were unanswered. There was one more thing she could try to get the aliens’ attention—even if it meant her own death. Before taking that desperate measure, Katerina closed her eyes and extended her arms straight out from her sides like the transverse beam of a cross, in a humble gesture of supplication. She murmured, “Please answer me. Do whatever you want to me—but don’t destroy billions of innocent people because of what I’ve done!”
A low, dark voice replied, “Nothing you say or do will change anything. Earth is doomed.”
* * * *
Katerina opened her eyes and turned around to face the only other human on Mars.
Martin Slayton stood several meters away and returned his slightly younger fiancée’s gaze. The expression on his clean-shaven face now showed more disappointment than the anger and contempt it held yesterday when the aliens revealed how she’d deceived him. The boots and blue jumpsuit he wore matched Katerina’s, though his uniform was cleaner and filled out a taller, muscular frame. After a troubled night’s sleep he’d just finished showering, dressing, and mustering enough courage to track down the woman he’d loved.
The farmboy-turned-astronaut from Marshfield, Missouri ran a hand through his close-cropped black hair. “I heard you praying and moving around in the module every time I woke up last night. After I cleaned up this morning I went to use the transceiver to check in with Mission Control and found that message you’re transmitting. It won’t work. If the aliens wanted to see us beg for mercy, they would’ve reappeared by now.”
“I agree, Martin. That’s why I’m going to them.”
“Good luck finding them! Who knows where they come from when they pop out of nowhere or go when they disappear? Even the few times they’ve talked to us, it’s like they’re barely there. Just a telepathic voice in our heads and sparkly psychedelic lights like the cheap special effects in a late-1960s acid-trip movie.”
“They appeared after we explored the two artifacts we found here. If they created a third artifact, I expect I’ll find them there too.”
“If they decide to make another artifact. Or they might reappear if you tick them off again like you did yesterday!”
The fury in Martin’s eyes dissipated as quickly as it appeared. “Sorry, Katerina. I know you were trying to do the right thing when you tricked me. I never disagreed with you that the power the aliens gave us could be dangerous in the wrong hands.
“But it hurts that you didn’t trust me enough to believe I wouldn’t misuse those powers—that you didn’t think I was smart enough to avoid inadvertently using them to destroy the world. Sure, I saved millions of people from dying due to natural disasters, disease, and famine. But what if you’d let me use those powers to change human nature—to eliminate our capacity for violence and war, to instill a sense of empathy and conscience into every person?”
Martin shook his head. “It’s too late now. You renounced your powers because you never wanted them in the first place. I made the worst mistake of my life and gave them up because you made me think I’d used them to temporarily destroy the human race. And because the aliens believe we’re cowards or worse for giving up that chance to improve humanity, they’re going to destroy it and search elsewhere for a better, more ‘suitable’ species than us.”
“I realize what I did was wrong, Martin. I know that being sorry and asking forgiveness isn’t enough. I’ll do everything I can to make things right again—or die trying.”
Martin studied the determined look on Katerina’s lovely face. “And I’d die trying with you—if there were anything we could do to save the world. But there isn’t.”
“There is, Martin. The aliens have created a third artifact. We can go to it together. And if the aliens are there, they’ll have to either listen to us—or kill us.”
* * * *
Martin stiffened. “How do you know there’s another artifact?”
“I kept in touch with Mission Control while you were sleeping. Twelve hours ago the Scout orbiter spotted a new anomaly on top of Olympus Mons. Our superiors in Houston said that based on imaging and radar data it looks like a building four hundred meters high.”
“And I bet it suddenly appeared when nobody was looking, just like the aliens’ other artifacts. But why’d they put it there? Their other two artifacts were designed to attract our attention and lure us to explore them. They were also in locations we could reach easily.
“The top of Olympus Mons definitely doesn’t qualify as easy to reach. If I remember correctly, it’s about three thousand kilometers away and almost twenty-seven kilometers above sea level. Even with the atmosphere on Mars being similar to Earth’s now, we’ll need our spacesuits at that elevation. It also took us over two days of fast traveling in the rover the other week to reach just the outskirts of its base—and that was over three hundred kilometers from the caldera complex at its top. Even if we drove to Olympus Mons, there’s a steep escarpment six kilometers high surrounding the central plateau on its top. We don’t have the skill or equipment for that level of rock climbing!”
Katerina sighed. “Mission Control said the same things when I talked with them. Then I told them how we could reach the top of Olympus Mons.”
“Unless you found the transporter NASA forgot to tell us they built into our habitation module and plan to beam over to that mountaintop, there’s no way—” Martin’s eyebrows arched. “Our ascent vehicle. You told them we could use the only way we have to get off this planet and back to Earth.”
“It’s perfect for a short suborbital flight. We have plenty of propellant for a round trip and enough reserves to refuel it for whenever we need to reach orbit. I’ve already moved all the equipment we’d need into the vehicle and programmed the flight path. We can start launch procedures immediately.”
“Silly question, but did Mission Control or your bosses at the Russian Space Agency approve your suicide mission?”
“Of course not. But they can’t stop us.” Katerina’s hazel eyes bored into her fiancé’s darker ones. “And only you can stop me.”
* * * *
“Launch systems go. T minus 50 seconds and counting.”
Martin listened to Katerina’s calm voice over their helmets’ communication link and tried convincing himself he wasn’t making the second-worst mistake of his life. Katerina, rubbing shoulders besides him on his right, showed no trace of the doubts distracting him from his pre-launch tasks. She calmly checked the ascent vehicle’s instrument displays through her clear helmet and continued the countdown.
Though the form-fitting white plastisuits Katerina and he wore were less bulky than a standard-issue spacesuit, they were scrunched together so tightly in their padded seats within the rocket’s tiny windowless cabin that it was hard to move. Normally he would’ve enjoyed sitting so close to his fiancée and the way Katerina’s suit accentuated her curves. Instead it felt like they were strapped together in a flying coffin.
“T minus 45 seconds.”
Even if they managed to reach the top of Olympus Mons, find the aliens and persuade them to not destroy Earth, then fly the vehicle back to the vicinity of the habitation module—well, in the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo, they’d have some ‘splainin’ to do to Mission Control. Then again, getting on NASA’s naughty list was the least of his worries.
“T minus 40 seconds.”
Martin checked the propellant pressure gauges and reflexively pressed a switch with his gloved hand. He wondered if the aliens were peering inside the rocket right now—laughing at the puny humans who thought they could still save their world.
Maybe those omnipresent extraterrestrials were also watching when Katerina talked him into going along with her crazy scheme. She’d said the last word from Mission Control was that Mars was still spiraling slowly inward toward the Sun. Data from the orbiters overhead and ground-based observations indicated the planet would cross Earth’s orbit within a year.
“T minus 30 seconds.”
The margin of error in those measurements was too great to determine if the two worlds would collide when that happened in the ultimate Torino 10. But neither the two of them nor anyone on Earth could come up with a more optimistic reason why the aliens had decided to move Mars again. Martin shuddered as he remembered the last words they’d directed at humanity through Katerina and him.
You have failed our test. You are like the animals you call cattle and sheep. Your kind has no future.
We grant you enough time to prepare for your end.
“T minus 20 seconds.”
Martin wondered when the aliens would end this quixotic farce. Those beings from beyond could move planets at will. They’d terraformed Mars in a decade and were well on their way to doing the same to Venus. They could read minds, create illusions, control weather, perform miraculous cures, and build gigantic artifacts out of nothing. Surely annihilating a spaceship and its crew was child’s play to them.
Still—if this was the end, at least Katerina and he had spent these last few hours together. He remembered her shouting at him, “You can be like the cattle and sheep the aliens called us if you want. I’d rather die trying to save the world than cower here doing nothing like you!”
Common sense crumbled before that kind of argument and determination. And so, freshly encased in their plastisuits, they’d exited the habitation module for probably the last time and trudged the half kilometer north to the ascent vehicle. The rocket had landed on the ochre Martian plain over sixty sols before Katerina and he descended in the habitation module nearly four months ago. It was the most advanced single-stage-to-orbit craft ever developed—a distant descendent of the venerable Delta Clipper from the early 1990s.
A recent shower had washed most of the fine coating of reddish Martian dust from the vehicle’s white surface. It was shaped like a blunt-nosed cone over fifty meters tall, with its broad base resting firmly on five stubby landing legs. After Katerina and he sealed themselves inside they’d started the same protocol used before a spacewalk—switching the internal atmosphere to pure oxygen for them to pre-breathe and gradually reducing the cabin’s pressure to meet the lower pressure requirements for their suits before finally putting on their helmets.
“T minus 10 seconds.”
Martin squinted at the OLED screens showing the scene outside caught by the vehicle’s external cameras. The rocket began to vibrate as Katerina’s countdown reached zero and the engines ignited. He felt himself pressed back into his seat as the two of them headed up face-first into the clear Martian sky. The ground displayed on the screens receded and vanished in a billowing cloud of exhaust and dust as they rose higher and faster.
With the displays still showing all systems nominal, Martin glanced at Katerina. Her lips were moving in prayer behind her helmet. As the rocket arced gracefully toward Olympus Mons he thought of Alan Shepard’s fifteen-minute voyage back in 1961. Their suborbital flight would last only a few minutes longer than his. Martin grimly recited the bowdlerized version of the prayer America’s first astronaut said when Freedom 7 blasted off.
“Please, dear God, don’t let me mess up.”
* * * *
Katerina stopped praying as the vehicle began shaking and warning indicators flashed on the display console. The attitude jets were malfunctioning. They’d been designed to maneuver the rocket primarily in space so it could dock with the fully fueled return vessel waiting in orbit to take them back to Earth. But until now they’d done well adjusting the craft’s orientation for a nose-up landing on the summit of Olympus Mons now only ten kilometers away and three kilometers below them.
Martin’s hands beat hers to the controls. His voice crackled through the transceivers in their helmets, “Switching to manual.”
Katerina scanned the display. “Propellant levels still good. Orientation still go for landing—”
Suddenly she was thrown against Martin’s shoulder as their craft jerked down toward the left. The rocket threatened to go into an uncontrolled tumble as her crewmate strained to right it. Though the vibrations rattling the craft stayed strong, Katerina relaxed slightly as the instruments showed the rocket was back in the base-downward direction needed to fire their main engines.
Then a reading on the display grabbed her attention. She cried, “The attitude jets aren’t the problem! Look at the wind speed and atmospheric pressure around us!”
Martin grimaced as he fought to maintain control of the ascent vehicle. “That’s impossible! It’s like we’re in the middle of a windstorm! There’s not enough air at this altitude to do that—unless the aliens are—”
His words were cut short as they both stared at the images on the OLED screens. The cameras on their craft’s outer hull were pointing down toward the layered caldera complex on top of Olympus Mons. But beneath them a raging dust storm roiled like a dense reddish-orange fog—covering and obscuring over thirty square kilometers of the cratered landscape rushing toward the rocket.
Katerina cried, “We’re heading right toward that storm!”
Martin nodded. “And we don’t have enough leeway in our trajectory to avoid it.”
He stared at a display, then flicked it futilely with his fingers. “Great! Radar’s on the fritz so we can’t measure exactly how far above the ground we are! No telling how high the dust is above the surface or what visibility is like inside it. Let’s hope we can see the ground well enough to use the jets to maneuver us someplace that’s level enough to land!”
“At least we’re on target! There’s the artifact!”
One screen showed the uppermost end of a gigantic solid shaft poking up out of the swirling opaque cloud of dust. It looked like a gleaming gray metal cube one hundred meters on a side floating on a billowing ocean of fog the color of dried blood.
Katerina shouted, “The artifact’s supposed to be four hundred meters tall. Based on how much of it we’re seeing, the dust storm must go up about three hundred meters above the ground!”
“Thanks for the info, but we’re still in big trouble!”
They jerked back in their seats as the main engines fired. The vibrations rattling their falling, decelerating craft grew stronger as they entered the dust storm and the pictures on the screens showed only a thick, gritty red mist.
Martin glanced angrily at the malfunctioning radar altimeter and fought to keep their rocking craft upright as he yelled, “I can’t see where we’re landing! Hope it’s not in a crater or on a slope—”
A deep bass thump rattled the base of the rocket and quickly shot upward to shake its two occupants high in the vessel’s nose section. Katerina cried, “Main engines off!” Then she looked at Martin, sitting frozen at the controls.
The craft quivered as gusting winds flung themselves against its outer shell. Silence filled the tiny cabin. Katerina murmured, “Touchdown.”
Her smile vanished as she realized her body was slowly listing forward. The restraining straps keeping her confined to her seat strained to keep her from falling toward the display console. Someone outside the rocket would’ve seen it tilting like the Leaning Tower of Pisa—and then, like a towering oak felled by the last stroke of a lumberjack’s ax, the craft toppled over. Katerina’s cry as they fell was choked off as they smashed against the cold hard Martian ground...
* * * *
As the rocket tumbled over, Martin’s mind flashed back to when he was thirteen. He was sitting in the log flume ride at an amusement park in nearby Branson for the first time—slowly ascending to a point nearly twenty meters high. Suddenly he was plunging down a steep chute toward the waiting waters below. As the ascent vehicle accelerated downward with him seated at about twice that height, Martin felt the same sickening tightness in his stomach he did as a teenager—but this time there was no thrill, only terror—
His teeth rattled and head whipped forward as the rocket’s side struck the ground. For an instant his consciousness faded—then a brief pounding headache made him realize he wasn’t dead after all. The lights and glowing displays in the cabin flickered but stayed on—for now. If the craft’s batteries failed it would be as dark as a coffin with its lid closed.
Martin winced from scattered bruises—but nothing felt broken. He twisted his body rightward to check on Katerina. Though the blinking face peering out from her clear helmet looked stunned, it showed no sign of obvious pain.
A terrifying second memory flooded his brain. He remembered reading about the last day of the modified Delta Clipper, the DC-XA—their craft’s ancestor. A faulty landing strut made the vehicle tip over when it landed. After it fell on its side, liquid oxygen from the unmanned rocket’s damaged fuel tank fed a fire that destroyed the craft. In a wave of frenzied déja vu Martin imagined smoke filling their cabin and the flames of a raging inferno engulfing them.
“We’ve got to get out!”
A calmer voice replied, “Yes, Martin. Help me with my oxygen pack.”
Katerina unfastened her restraining straps and leaned forward. Martin released the small square metal oxygen pack attached to the rear of her seat and secured it to the back of her plastisuit. As she returned the favor with his pack, he wondered what they could’ve done to escape if their craft had toppled over with them sitting upside down.
His crewmate stood on her seat and wriggled up through the small open hatch in what was now their curved ceiling. Martin followed her into the short, narrow crawlway that led to the storage compartment just behind their cabin. As he squirmed through the cramped passage, Martin saw Katerina lower herself feet first into another open hatch close to what used to be the floor of the compartment but now, with the vessel lying on its side, formed a wall instead. He looked down through the hatch and saw Katerina using the gear and supplies secured to the compartment’s cylindrical side and erstwhile floor as impromptu footholds and handholds to reach its bottom some five meters below.
She opened a storage container and extracted a large coil of rope. Her voice came over his suit’s radio. “I’m going to toss you the end of this rope. Then I’ll tie the heavier equipment and supplies we need to the other end so you can pull them up to the crawlway.”
They worked rapidly, bringing up tool chests, food, water, and spare oxygen packs. Martin yanked each item through the hatch, untied it, then pushed it ahead of him just beyond the sealed access door directly above the crawlway and several meters down toward the rocket’s base. He tried not to think about any fire that might be raging about the rocket as they worked—or the threat of an explosion.
Finally Martin used the rope to pull the last and most precious cargo through the hatch—Katerina herself. She crawled in front of him and then flipped into a supine position to depressurize the crawlway and unseal the access door above her. It opened outward—letting in a fine mist of reddish dust.
Katerina lifted her upper body through the open hatch and twisted around to scan their surroundings. “This dust storm is like a dense fog, Martin. The wind doesn’t feel too strong now. But visibility is only about four meters and we’re too high to see the ground through this dust. At least I don’t see anything that looks like a fire in the direction of our fuel tanks and engines.”
“Thanks for the weather report. Now let’s get our supplies and us out of here!”
After looping one end of the rope around the base of the open access door Katerina rappelled down the side of the fallen rocket to the ground. Over the next few minutes they repeated cycles of Martin pulling the rope back up, tying equipment and supplies to it, then lowering the rope to where Katerina could untie those items and stack them near her.
Finally Martin used the rope to join her on mars firma. Then he employed a long-unused skill he’d picked up before a rodeo competition during high school—flicking the looped end of the rope off the door until it fell at his feet. He wound the rope into a loose coil, then he slipped it over his right arm and onto his shoulder.
Martin looked at the fallen ascent vehicle. “So much for our ride home. Hope our bosses don’t take this out of our paychecks.”
He examined the containers piled nearby. “Good thing we have enough oxygen packs to last each of us over seventy-two hours. There’s plenty of water to resupply our suits’ reservoirs and power packs for temperature control—but we’re going to have to find some place where we can take off our helmets to use our food rations. You’re used to fasting a couple of days at a time during Lent, but I’m not. Maybe the atmosphere will be breathable inside the artifact when we—”
Martin glanced around him. “Katerina? Where are you?”
Only static crackled over his helmet’s radio. Dust swirled thickly around him like a bloody mist as he stood alone beside the wrecked rocket on a desert-like plain.
A nightmare vision of Katerina falling off the nearby edge of the caldera to shattering death kilometers below overloaded his imagination. Or perhaps she’d fallen prey to bloodthirsty sandsharks from an old Outer Limits episode erupting from the Martian soil. Maybe the aliens had returned and snuffed her out of existence with a single thought—
Suddenly he spied a wraith-like figure floating toward him. As he shivered and faced his doom the apparition spoke.
“The damage doesn’t look as bad from out here.”
Martin’s jaw dropped at Katerina’s presumably unintentional quotation from Episode IV. Her plastisuit’s form-fitting exterior coated with a patina of reddish-brown dust made her resemble a copper-colored version of C-3PO.
For an instant he was six years old again on a family vacation to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. He’d wandered away from his parents and older brother and hightailed back to a favorite exhibit. They’d found him sitting inside the mockup of a Gemini capsule working the controls as he orbited Earth. Now he reflexively repeated his mother’s words.
“You scared the daylights out of me! Don’t ever wander away like that again!”
He saw Katerina’s eyebrows arch through her dusty helmet. She replied, “Two of the landing struts fell into a small crater about a meter deep. If we’d landed a few meters to one side we wouldn’t have fallen.”
“Unfortunately we did, and there’s no way we can get the ascent vehicle upright again. But I think we have enough rope and supplies to climb down the escarpment to an altitude where we won’t need our suits or supplemental oxygen anymore.”
“First we need to do what we came here for, Martin—find the artifact and talk to the aliens.”
“Right. Just one problem, Katerina.”
Martin looked out several meters into the opaque dust storm swirling around them. “Where is the artifact?”
* * * *
Katerina frowned. “We were heading toward the artifact when we crashed. I’m not sure how far away it is, but if we follow the direction the nose cone is pointing, we’ll come to it eventually.”
Martin shook his head. “Not necessarily. Those winds we went through on the way down blew us sideways and spun us around. I wouldn’t trust using the rocket as part of a game of ‘Spin the Bottle’ to point where the artifact is.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Martin walked over to a metal case on the ground and opened it. “Maybe. Remember when we explored that first artifact the day we landed? The metal platform the aliens made emitted lots of RF energy, like an analog radio transmitter.”
He extracted a rectangular palm-sized transceiver. A short flexible plastic-coated antenna extended from the device’s top.
Katerina smiled. “That’s right, you used one of those to pick up their signals!”
Martin turned the handheld transceiver on and pressed small buttons on its front. One of the buttons wirelessly linked the transceiver’s audio with the radio in his helmet.
He scanned through several bands. “I still remember what frequencies that other artifact used. Good, there’s a strong am signal at 700 kHz with what sounds like a test tone ... and some fm carrier waves between 824 MHz and 894 MHz with a weird warbling sound!”
Martin held the transceiver in a fixed horizontal position in front of his chest. He slowly rotated his body back and forth in short arcs—listening to how loud the transmission was and checking the signal strength bars on the device’s small display. “The signal’s strongest in that direction—right in front of me and about forty-five degrees to the right of where the rocket’s nose is pointing. Now to do some triangulation and estimate how far away the artifact is.”
Katerina watched Martin walk sideways to his left, measuring off the distance with meter-long strides while he kept the transceiver’s antenna oriented toward where the artifact’s signal was strongest. Two minutes after he’d disappeared into the dust storm he hadn’t returned.
“Martin?”
Only static answered her. She reassured herself he was simply out of range. The radio frequency energy the artifact produced could be interfering with the signals from the radios in their helmets—reducing the distance they could communicate.
Three minutes later he still hadn’t reappeared. “Martin! Are you all right?”
No answer. She began edging away from the ship in the direction he’d vanished. As she lost sight of the rocket, Katerina tried to keep her bearings so she could retrace her steps before becoming hopelessly lost—
A shadow moved at the very edge of visibility several meters away. It resolved into a spacesuited figure walking toward her with a slight limp.
“Martin!”
The figure stopped. “Thank goodness! I was moving in the right direction!”
Martin frowned. “Wait a second. Where’s the rocket?”
“Right over there—I think!”
He grabbed Katerina’s hand. “Hope you’re right!”
She was. Safely back with their ship and supplies, Martin said, “I was coming back after triangulating the artifact’s position when I stepped in a crater the size of a gopher hole and took a tumble.
“The transceiver flew out of my hand. Took me a while to find it—and when I did it wasn’t working. Might’ve hit a rock when it fell. Then I realized I wasn’t sure which direction you and the ship were. Fortunately I guessed close enough to find you before we both got lost!”
Martin placed the damaged transceiver back in its metal case. “No way to repair it here. At least I know from my signal strength measurements that the artifact is about three kilometers away.”
He oriented himself beside the ship. “This is the approximate direction I was facing before when I got the strongest signal. Guess that’s the way we should go. Still—it’d be nice to have the transceiver working to make sure we weren’t veering off enough to miss the artifact in this storm.
“But even if we find the artifact, how will we know which way to go to get back to the ship? We can carry several extra oxygen packs and supplies with us when we go meet the aliens—but we’ll need some of this other equipment here to climb down the side of Olympus Mons afterwards. Too bad we don’t have any breadcrumbs to leave as a trail back here.”
Katerina bent down and opened a metal case on the ground. “I went over the ascent vehicle’s cargo inventory list last night. This case should contain—yes!”
She handed Martin the spare transceiver and smiled as its display lit up when he pressed the power button. “I hope you like your gift, Martin.”
“I’ll treasure it always—and keep it away from rocks!”
Katerina opened her other hand and displayed a small circular object. “You’ll like this compass too. It wouldn’t have worked on the ‘old’ Mars—but when the aliens terraformed the planet they gave it a magnetic field complete with north and south poles similar to Earth. Now we have everything we need to keep our bearings.”
“We make a good team, Katerina. I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be marooned on Mars with more than you.”
“Let’s hope we can impress the aliens too.”
* * * *
The dust storm grew murkier around them as they trudged cautiously across the rock-strewn plain. Martin led the way with his transceiver directing them towards the signal transmitted by the artifact. The coil of rope lay draped around his shoulder. He’d cut off a short piece of the rope and used it to tie two extra oxygen packs together. Then he’d hung the cord across the back of his neck. The metal oxygen packs rattled across his chest as he walked. His free hand clutched a toolbox’s handle.
Katerina carried a similar chain of two oxygen packs across her neck. She walked hunched forward slightly, trying to keep the packs from bouncing against parts of her chest more prominent and sensitive than Martin’s. Her left hand carried a case containing spare water and supplies. The compass rested in her right palm.
Several meters ahead of her Martin said, “Too bad we don’t have a pedometer. I think the artifact’s close now—what the—!”
Suddenly Katerina couldn’t see him anymore. She trotted forward shouting, “Where are you?”
Suddenly she stopped—dazzled by bright glaring light. Her raised right hand cupped the compass and shielded her vision from the awful radiance around her. Then she realized where that blazing brilliance high above her originated.
It was the Sun.
Katerina stared up at a clear blue sky with a pinkish tinge dominated by that golden orb at its noontime zenith. She turned her head and saw the opaque dust storm she’d just exited seething a meter behind her—as if separated from her by an invisible curtain. She was in a column of still air and light like the eye of a hurricane that extended up to the heavens and across a circular plain three hundred meters in diameter. In the center of the plain stood the tall dark structure whose top they’d spotted during their descent—its full form and immediate surroundings now cleared of the dust storm still raging outside this oasis.
Martin cried, “Look at that!”
He stood near her—gazing up at a tower formed of gleaming gray metal. Its height was every centimeter of the four hundred meters the orbiter had estimated—a rectangular prism with a square base a hundred meters on a side. Halfway up the artifact, beginning two hundred meters above the ground, a pair of solid cubes one hundred meters in all three dimensions jutted out from the main tower. Each of those cubes was attached to one of the tower’s two visible sides.
Martin snorted. “Let’s hope the aliens didn’t get the idea for that artifact from one of the 1950s monster movies in my collection. Don’t think I’ve shown you that one—it’s called Kronos. I can’t see from this angle if that thing has a really big rabbit ear antenna on top—but if it starts coming toward us on humongous pillar legs moving up and down like pile drivers, we’re in big trouble!”
Martin squatted, laid his tool chest and transceiver on the ground, and removed the chain of oxygen packs from around his neck. Then he opened the chest and removed a pair of high-resolution image-stabilizing binoculars. He raised them to his helmet and adjusted their focus to compensate for the longer-than-usual distance between his eyes and the device’s eyepieces.
Katerina set her burdens down too. “Do you see any markings on it or an entrance anywhere, Martin?”
“No. Looks all solid—just the same gray metal the aliens used to make the other two artifacts. Except—there’s a thin horizontal line indenting it about a quarter of the way up from the ground—then another line halfway up...”
Martin lowered the binoculars. “The main tower isn’t one continuous piece. It looks like four cubes stacked on top of each other—like some gigantic child’s building blocks. Then Junior put some glue on one side of those two cubes most of the way up the main tower and stuck them on the sides of that third cube from the bottom...”
He groaned. “Oh, no!”
“What’s the matter, Martin?”
“Wait here!”
Katerina watched him run toward the artifact and disappear around its right corner. He didn’t answer when she called to him over her helmet radio. Just as she decided to go after him, he rounded the left corner of the tower and trotted toward her. His panting voice reached her several meters before the rest of him did.
“I was afraid of that.”
“What, Martin?”
He pointed toward the artifact. “See those two cubes attached to each side of that third cube from the bottom? There are two more just like them attached to the other two faces of that cube.”
Katerina frowned. “Then that structure is really a tesseract—a four-dimensional hypercube—that’s been unfolded into eight three-dimensional cubes. I remember Salvador Dali used that form in his painting Crucifixion.”
“Yeah, I read about that painting in a classic turn-of-the-century SF novel. No telling why the aliens made their artifact in that shape—but I hope they haven’t been reading early Heinlein lately!”
They moved their equipment and oxygen packs to the middle of the artifact’s nearest wall. Martin grumbled, “No sign of a doorbell or an entrance. Didn’t see any obvious door on the other sides either when I ran around this thing.”
“Maybe there’s some hidden button on it we could push to make a secret panel slide open, like you thought there might be in that pyramid the other day.”
“Could be. But I’m not going to touch this thing until I’m sure it’s safe to do it. Just because the aliens didn’t electrify their other artifacts to zap us like Emperor Ming tried to do to Flash Gordon in the third serial doesn’t mean they won’t do it this time. And I brought this tool chest with us because it has what I need inside it!”
Martin extracted a multimeter, high-voltage probe meter, and a short metal rod. He placed the multimeter near the artifact and pushed the metal rod into the soil close to the tower’s side. Then he clipped the high-voltage probe’s ground lead to the rod, gripped the probe’s insulated handle, and said, “When the other end of this thing touches the artifact’s side I’ll see if there’s high voltage running through it. If the reading’s low enough, the multimeter will tell us exactly how much voltage and current is present.”
The far end of the probe reached toward the artifact—
Martin froze. He said, “Didn’t expect that!”
“Let go of it, Martin!”
Instead he retracted the probe, studying its apparently undamaged distal end. Before Katerina could warn him not to repeat his experiment, he thrust the probe like a rapier back at the artifact. Its point passed through the unscathed gray metal as if the wall in front of them wasn’t there. The end of the probe vanished from view—then partially reappeared as Martin worked it in and out of the artifact, as if he were using a fork to check the doneness of a juicy steak.
Finally he extracted the probe completely and said, “The aliens have used illusions on us before—but not on this scale. Or maybe this wall is real but is permeable to solid objects ... as if what I’m saying makes any sense!”
“Let me try something, Martin.”
Katerina walked a few paces back and picked up a baseball-sized rock. She lobbed it at the metal wall—and watched the rock disappear through it without a sound. Several more rocks thrown at the wall met the same fate.
Martin said, “Pretty obvious what the next experiment is.” Before Katerina’s horrified gaze he passed his left arm up to the elbow through the wall, then extracted it.
He wiggled the extremity. “No pain—still five fingers—looks okay.”
Katerina shouted, “That was a stupid thing to do! What if that wall turned solid when your arm was inside or sliced it off like a guillotine blade!”
Martin shrugged with nervous relief. “We came here to explore the artifact, Katerina. No point holding back now. And you know what comes next.”
“Yes. We go inside and look for the aliens.”
“Right—except for the ‘we’ part. I’m going inside and you’re staying here.”
“No, Martin. We’re in this together. We succeed and live or fail and die as a team.”
“Being a team doesn’t mean we should jump out of a plane together to see if the parachute we’re testing works. Better for one of us to test it—and if the parachute fails only that person gets splattered, not both. You jumped solo on that first artifact we found. We went into that second artifact together—and both got trapped. Now it’s my turn to go first—and if I strike out, there’ll still be one last out in the bottom of the ninth for you to try hitting a home run for our team.”
Katerina’s face turned crimson behind her helmet. She stamped her boot and shouted, “I’m not interested in taking turns or your silly metaphors! If only one of us goes inside it should be me! I’m the one who made the aliens angry and put Earth in danger! I’m responsible, I should be the one who takes the risk first!”
“No, you’ve just given the best reason why you shouldn’t go in there. If the aliens are still mad at you, they might zap you before you have a chance to play Portia and use your oratorical skills on them.
“On the other hand, I didn’t give them any flak when they offered me their gift. I didn’t want to give up the power they loaned us—and they know I only did it because you tricked me. Even if they bring that up, I’ll quote Scripture and say, ‘The woman made me do it.’ I know that’s not an excuse, I take responsibility for what I did—but maybe it’ll mollify the aliens long enough for me to pretend I’m Perry Mason and save H. sapiens.”
Katerina started to reply—but everything she tried to say tasted wrong. She knew her greatest objection to Martin’s plan was really based on her love for him and the fear she’d lose him forever. She was willing to die if it meant saving him and Earth. But if he really did have a better chance than her of saving the world—and she couldn’t honestly argue against his point—she’d be putting her own personal good over that of the entire human race.
It’d be less terrible to die than to live without Martin—but even if it meant more pain for her, she couldn’t let others suffer because of her.
Behind her helmet, tears trickled down her cheeks. Katerina murmured, “Let’s get you ready.”
* * * *
“It’s time, Martin.”
Katerina checked the gauge on the full oxygen pack she’d just helped him replace on his back after he’d helped her replace the one on hers. “You have enough oxygen for eight hours—if you don’t exert yourself too much.”
“Okay. Now let’s set up a backup communication system in case we lose radio contact once I go inside.”
Martin unwound one end of the rope coiled around his shoulder. He knotted it tightly around the middle of the short length of rope connecting their two remaining full oxygen packs.
“Remember, Katerina. I’ll play out the rope until I enter the tower. After I’m inside, I’ll put some slack in it. If I need you to come in I’ll give the rope a tug and you’ll see the oxygen packs move toward that wall. Hopefully I’ll find the aliens right away, get the answer we want, and leave without needing you to come in after me.
“But if I’m not back or you don’t see the rope pulled by seven hours from now, come in with an oxygen pack. That’ll mean I’ll either need it soon—or I never will and it’ll be your turn to deal with the aliens.”
Martin removed a flashlight from his tool chest and stuck it into the belt around his waist. “It could be dark in there, like it was most of the time we were in that pyramid. You’d think the aliens would put a few cheap fluorescent lights from Galaxy Depot in their artifacts—but I bet they don’t need them.”
As he turned to go Katerina said, “Wait, Martin.”
She opened a small pouch secured to the belt circling her waist and extracted her most precious possessions. “It wasn’t practical to wear these on the way here—but I didn’t want to leave them behind.”
Katerina reached toward Martin and fastened her gold chain around his neck. He looked down at his chest and the two golden objects hanging from the chain—his fiancée’s diamond engagement ring and her three-barred cross.
She said, “These will remind you that I’ll be thinking of you and praying for you while you’re gone. My grandmother in St. Petersburg sent me that cross before we left Earth to protect me here. I hope it’ll keep you safe too.”
Martin fingered the cross—remembering how Grandma Slayton gave him a scapular for his First Communion back in second grade. She’d told him that if he died while wearing it he’d go straight to heaven.
But though he knew his saintly grandmother gave him those bits of blessed cloth with the best intentions, he wasn’t a child anymore. “I don’t believe in magic, Katerina.”
“I don’t either, Martin. But I do believe in love.”
The plastisuits made their last hug awkward and a final kiss impossible. They exchanged a last “I love you”—and then Martin Slayton marched toward his fate.
* * * *
Martin didn’t dare turn around to look at Katerina again as he reached the gray gleaming wall and played out more of the diminishing coil of rope in his hands. Seeing her again for what might be the last time would hurt so much he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on what he was risking his life to do. He calmed himself by imagining he was the Golden Age superhero Doctor Fate preparing to walk through the wall of his sealed tower in Salem.
Then Martin plunged through the wall into darkness. He reached down to retrieve the flashlight in his belt—but stopped when he realized he wasn’t alone.
For an instant Martin thought he’d found the aliens. Then the room exploded with light and the entire universe crumpled and turned inside out around him.
He was surrounded by countless three-dimensional visions writhing and floating in every direction like an infinite cascade of manic macroscopic amoebas. Chaotic images in the form of undulating amorphous blobs and shapeless bubbles of kaleidoscopic colors saturated his sight as if he were trapped inside a monstrous lava lamp. They swelled and contracted like balloons being twisted into distorted animal shapes by an invisible insane clown—shifting with hyperactive energy from pinpoint size to that of Number Six’s nemesis Rover and everywhere in-between. Those surrealistic nightmares engulfed his mind—rapidly darting toward and away like a swarm of angry bees stinging the deepest recesses of his brain.
To his oversaturated senses, existence was distorted into a hallucinogenic reality infinitely more intense than any psychedelic drug could induce. Every sound and noise in the entire cosmos seemed to murmur at once in his ears. He heard the voices of countless unseen creatures whispering their secrets to him. Martin felt himself drowning at the bottom of a crystal-clear ocean with gigantic polychromatic globules like immiscible oil swirling everywhere around him with superheated Brownian motion. His right arm swept out and frantically tried to bat them away—and then his mind recoiled at a new horror.
He saw the muscles, bones, blood vessels, nerves, and other tissues in his arm simultaneously in a rapidly shifting series—as if an unseen hand were swiftly flipping the pages of an anatomy textbook in front of him. With the slightest effort his eyes could focus on each layer of that limb from the innermost cavities of its bones to the outer fibers of his plastisuit—as if he were wearing overpowered X-Ray Specs from a classic comic book ad. Closing his eyes did nothing to blot out these sights—this unwanted ability extended to seeing through his own eyelids.
Martin lowered his arm and stared once more into the face and fury of infinity—teetering on the brink of madness. But his will power was just strong enough for his consciousness to adjust slightly to the chaos enveloping him. For fleeting instants the blurred hues of several floating scenes bobbing around him resolved into images he could almost understand—like the stream-of-consciousness happenings in a vivid dream.
In one ballooning shape he glimpsed a brightly lit room loaded with archaic mainframe computers replete with jerkily rotating reels of magnetic tape. The next glob of scenery contained a reddish-orange desert reminiscent of the Martian plain near the habitation module he knew he’d never see again. Another pulsating blob showed a placid beach scene of the planet’s new Boreal Ocean that lazily rotated until its gently swaying waters were upside down without spilling. Yet another showed verdant fields of young wheat that reminded him of his boyhood farm.
That montage of confusing scenes ranging from vaguely familiar to incomprehensibly alien flashed toward and away from him in a never-ending deluge. Then his vision lingered on the image of a great spiral galaxy that might be the Milky Way viewed from far above its plane, like the last scene in Episode V—its hundreds of billions of stars whirling together like God playfully blowing an enormous pinwheel. In an instant his mind raced through its multitudinous jewel-like stars and dust mote planets—penetrating their knobbly surfaces and molten cores like an early twentieth-century watchmaker using his loupe to examine the exposed gears of a pocket watch.
On some of those atom-like worlds he sensed countless tiny mites crawling on their crusts, wriggling in their oceans, and soaring in their skies in endless seething cycles of birth and death. Those planets and the animalcules living on them were all different yet all alike—except for one minuscule splotch of matter and energy dabbed into an unremarkable spiral arm. There a collection of creatures that resembled humanity in thoughts and aspirations though not in form occupied a small cluster of planets and solar systems. Slowly ... tentatively ... painfully, with enormous and difficult effort, they extended their presence, hopes, and dreams from one star to another in a continuing journey of exploration.
But Martin’s fascinated study of that extraterrestrial race’s history suddenly stopped as a nebulous black shape eclipsed and blotted out those inspiring scenes. Unlike the colorful, formless blobs that still writhed randomly around him, this one sensed his presence—and somehow he knew he was its prey.
The coil of rope in his hands jerked as he tried to sidestep the approaching menace coming to devour him. He dropped the rope and raised both arms to protect himself as the expanding ebony globule reached and engulfed him. Martin fell into an endless blackness that wasn’t filled with stars. Instead a bleak cratered landscape like the Moon’s rushed toward him head-on.
If he’d had several more seconds to think, his last thoughts would’ve been of Katerina. But just before he struck that world’s jagged surface only two words formed in his brain.
“The horror.”
* * * *
Martin sprawled face down and motionless on a desolate plain. Wisps of carbon dioxide and nitrogen wafted against his plastisuit beneath a cold ebony sky whose untwinkling stars gave no warmth. The puff of dust stirred up by his impact languidly settled back onto the surface of the shallow crater where his body lay.
Rumbling tremors sporadically shivered the landscape as the faintest glow of sunlight peeked over the horizon. Here time had no meaning without anyone to measure it—then suddenly an invisible clock started...
A clear helmet rose from the gritty ground and shook itself. Limbs creaked and stretched like an unfolding deck chair until Martin wobbled to his feet. He brushed dirt from his faceplate and studied his surroundings.
The dim pockmarked landscape around him had a ruddy hue. Its low dunes and small scattered rocks suggested he was on some unexplored region of Mars. But the oddly sparse stars shining above him formed no familiar constellations. Still peering up at the heavens, he turned around—and knew he wasn’t on Mars anymore.
The gibbous alien world overhead spanned nearly ten times the Moon’s angular diameter as seen from Earth. It was shrouded by sunlit featureless white clouds with a lemon tinge—like a monstrous Venus. That gigantic world seemed to grow gradually larger as he stared at it...
Suddenly Martin realized where he was and how well the aliens could manipulate matter, energy, gravity—and time. He laughed with horrified appreciation at the karmic joke they’d played on him. The aliens had made him the only one of humanity’s doomed billions who wouldn’t have to wait a year to see what happened when Mars smashed into Earth.
For the world high above him must be the Earth of over four billion years before his birth—and he was on the smaller planet rushing toward a Moon-making collision with it.
* * * *
From the corner of his eye Martin saw a puff of dust billow up behind a nearby dune. He wondered if a meteorite might’ve slammed into the ground there—and if one with his name on it might be streaking down through this world’s thin atmosphere even now.
He grunted. It was already a race which would kill him first—suffocating when his oxygen supply gave out in around eight hours, or ending up as road kill in an interplanetary collision. What did it matter if another lethal danger beat them to the punch?
Still—he wasn’t dead yet and wondered what produced that cloud of dissipating dirt. Fortunately this small world was too young and inhospitable to have produced life big enough to create a miniature dust storm that size. But maybe the aliens had transplanted some large predators here to make his last moments of life even more interesting. Hopefully they hadn’t plucked a memory about Coeurl from his mind—
Martin stepped warily toward the summit of the nearby dune. As expected, this doomed world’s gravity seemed similar to the “old” Mars. He reached his new vantage point—and bounded down the dune’s far side toward the plastisuit lying prone at its base.
Just before he reached Katerina she shook herself unsteadily to her feet. Martin cried, “Are you okay? How did you get here?”
“I think I’m all right. But where’s here?”
A brief survey of her surroundings and the looming death hanging high in the sky convinced her that Martin’s theory was all too plausible. She said, “A few minutes after you entered the artifact I saw the rope and oxygen packs get pulled partway to the wall. I followed you in, just as we agreed.”
“It’s my fault! I must have accidentally yanked the rope just before the aliens shanghaied me here. Now we’re both trapped!”
“Perhaps the aliens maneuvered us both here for a reason, like they’ve done before. We just have to figure out what they expect us to do.”
“That’s obvious, Katerina. They expect us to die!”
She ignored his pessimism and climbed to the top of the dune. There she surveyed the landscape in every direction. “I wish I’d brought our binoculars—but I wasn’t expecting to need them inside the artifact.”
Then she pointed excitedly in front of her. “There! I saw a flash of light near the horizon! It looked like sunlight reflecting off metal—just like that pyramid you found the other day. It must be another artifact!”
Katerina rejoined her fiancé on level ground and said, “If this world really is the same size as Mars, the horizon should be the same distance on both planets—about three kilometers. We both have about eight hours worth of oxygen—plenty to reach the artifact and explore it! Maybe the aliens are there—or it might even be a way home!”
“Thanks for the realistic mission appraisal, Pollyanna. Still, going exploring is better than waiting here to suffocate or get splattered. I—”
He stared at the oxygen pressure gauge on Katerina’s plastisuit, then checked his own. “Oh, no.”
“What’s the matter, Martin?”
“You know that eight hours of oxygen you said we had? Make that about one hour for each of us.”
The infant Earth gradually blotted out more of the sky as they trotted toward the artifact.
Katerina sighed, “It doesn’t make sense. You weren’t in the artifact more than a few minutes, and it seemed I was transported here almost instantaneously. How did we each lose seven hours worth of oxygen?”
“No logical reason for it. Probably just one more thing we can thank our extraterrestrial ‘friends’ for.”
As Martin trudged ahead of her, Katerina stopped to rest for a moment. “That artifact ahead of us looks like the twin of the one on Olympus Mons. If that one could transport us here, maybe this one can get us home!”
“Or it might send us somewhere even more dangerous. What did you see when you entered the artifact back on Mars, Katerina?”
“It was a nightmare—like someone cut out chunks of space from all over the universe and threw them at me. Something like a three-dimensional shadow swallowed me—and then I was here.”
“Same thing happened to me. It reminded me of ‘—And He Built a Crooked House,’ only scarier. If we were being manipulated through a fourth spatial dimension inside that unfolded tesseract it would explain a lot. Like why I could see through my arm and, with a big twist in time added to the mix, how we wound up here—”
Martin staggered as the ground around him suddenly rocked and quaked. A terrifying vision of the planet tearing itself apart before they reached the possible safety of the artifact flashed through his brain. He dropped to all fours and pressed his knees and palms against the powdery soil—desperately hanging on to the bucking world.
A scream crackled in his helmet. “Martin!”
He twisted around until he saw Katerina—then crawled back toward her as fast as the convulsing landscape around him allowed. Her fingertips were dug into the shallowly ridged edge of a gaping rift where the planet’s tortured crust had just cracked. Katerina’s helmet bobbed above the surface as the rest of her body dangled over a wide deep chasm.
As he neared her, a long thin fissure appeared parallel to and just over a meter from where she desperately clung to the rift’s edge. Katerina cried out as the slab of rock and packed dirt where her fingers maintained a tenuous handhold slowly buckled downward until it rested at a shallow angle with the nearby solid ground.
The tremors subsided as Martin reached her. He laid his legs flat against the soil as best he could and stretched his right arm and torso towards her. “Grab my hand, Katerina!”
Her left hand swept upward and he grabbed it with his right. As Martin started to pull her out of the dark deep pit threatening to swallow her, the meter-long plane of rock his upper body rested prone on collapsed to a nearly forty-five degree angle. A wave of dizziness rippled through him as his torso jerked downward on the hard shifting slab. His waist teetered precariously on the fulcrum formed by that tilted sheet of rock and the firm level ground his legs rested on.
His free left hand clawed at the ground, trying to use it to brace himself so he could pull Katerina up. But his blunt gloved fingers couldn’t dig into the tightly packed soil covering the rock. Now her weight was slowly pulling him down toward the bottomless pit too—
Katerina screamed, “Let go of my hand, Martin! We’re both going to fall!”
“No! I’ve got to save you!”
As he felt his body sliding gradually downward toward their mutual doom, the fingertips of his left hand clawed again at the dense soil for a firm grip it couldn’t find. Then something brushed against that searching hand. Martin glanced over and saw Katerina’s cross hanging from the chain he’d forgotten was still around his neck.
Instantly he grabbed the cross and thrust its long end into the hard soil. The golden relic was narrow enough to act as a blunt stiletto yet thick enough that it didn’t bend as he used it to stabilize his body and pull Katerina closer to him without sliding down himself. He scooted back a little until his waist was back on firmer ground, then rapidly pulled his impromptu spike out and jammed it into the soil again closer to him. Several more cycles of pulling on Katerina and using the cross like a rock climber’s wedge finally brought them both back to firm flat ground.
No more tremors rocked the landscape as they lay close together catching their breaths. “You should have let go of me, Martin!”
“Well, excuse me for saving your life! It sure didn’t look like you were going to make it back up by yourself!”
“No, I probably wouldn’t have made it. But you could’ve fallen too!”
“Hey, it worked, didn’t it? And look, I didn’t even bend your cross—I think...”
“Yes, Martin, I’m glad we’re still alive—but if we’d both fallen into that pit, who’d be left to save the Earth?”
“If you died, I’m not sure I’d care if it were saved or not!”
Katerina stared at him. Then she got up and said in a tight voice, “It’s time to go.”
* * * *
By the time they reached their goal each had about fifteen minutes of oxygen left. Martin walked up to the towering artifact’s closest gray metal wall. “No way to tell what we’ll find inside. Maybe we’ll see the same weird stuff we did at the other artifact. We could meet four-billion-year-plus-younger ancestors of the aliens—or maybe the same aliens—working inside. Maybe we should go in one at a time, like we did on Mars.”
Katerina tapped her oxygen gauge. “No time for that, Martin.”
They walked hand in hand toward the beckoning wall, prepared for anything that might happen—except what did. Their bodies bumped against a hard unyielding wall.
Martin bounced back from that impenetrable barrier and stared at it. He ran his palms over the cold metal surface—then beat his fists against it. “It isn’t fair!”
Katerina pressed her fingertips against the wall and examined it closely. “Maybe this wall has a hidden button you press to open a secret panel—”
“Even if there were one, we don’t have enough time to find it! We’re each down to about ten minutes of oxygen!”
Katerina frowned. “This bottom cube looks about one hundred meters on a side, like the one on Mars. Maybe there’s an opening farther along this wall, or on one of its other three sides. You go left and check this wall and the one around the corner. I’ll go right and do the same. We’ll meet at the wall on the other side of this one. Hurry!”
Martin nodded. He walked away from Katerina, carefully examining the wall for a door he doubted was there. Then he turned the corner and did the same for the left side of the cube. But its featureless metal sheen gave no hint of any entrance either.
He turned another corner and arrived at the side opposite where he and Katerina had started. She wasn’t there—no doubt still scrutinizing the right face of the cube with methodical precision. Martin jogged parallel and close to the wall—still seeing nothing that looked like an entrance. After traveling the wall’s entire length he peeked around the far corner to see if Katerina had been more successful.
She wasn’t there.
“Katerina! Where are you?”
Only static crackled inside his helmet. Then Martin was racing along the side of the cube Katerina should’ve been exploring—panting as he turned another corner to view the empty space in front of the side they’d started from. Sweat beaded over his body and he knew he was using up his sparse oxygen supply more rapidly in this frantic search—but he didn’t care. The planet’s lower gravity helped him accelerate and bound at a dangerous speed along the rocky ground as he skidded around yet another corner to the side where he’d started his own exploring.
Finally he stopped, standing and gasping for breath along the face of the cube where Katerina and he had agreed only minutes ago to meet. Martin gulped mouthfuls of precious diminishing oxygen and croaked out her name over and over. There was no answer.
Katerina was gone. In these last few minutes of life before he suffocated, Martin impulsively grasped the golden cross still hanging from his neck and prayed that she was somewhere safe. For an instant he was tempted to fall to his knees and beg for a miracle for her sake. But instead he stared up to see the approaching Earth mocking him—and screamed his defiance at the uncaring heavens.
* * * *
Martin glanced at his oxygen gauge. “Running on fumes now,” he muttered to no one on the empty planet. He glared at the blank metal wall in front of him, curled his hands into fists, and flung himself forward to hit the artifact as hard as he could—
Suddenly he plunged through an instant of blackness into an ocean of dazzling white light. He staggered and tried blinking away the pain in his eyes. His forehead throbbed like a pounding heart.
Something he couldn’t see grabbed his left arm. He pictured a slimy tentacle attached to a hexadecapod from War of the Worlds yanking him towards its slobbering maw. He jerked away, dimly sensing a gray metal floor rushing up towards him as he fell. His head rattled inside his helmet as he struck the cold hard surface. Then a voice from beyond the grave echoed in his stunned mind.
“Martin! Are you all right?”
Two gloved hands helped him back to his feet and a lithe body embraced him. He glimpsed a tear-moistened smile through Katerina’s clear helmet.
Martin stumbled a step back from her. “Where did you go? I thought you were dead!”
He blinked his sight back nearly to normal in the brightly lit surroundings. “We aren’t dead—are we? All this light—if this really is Heaven, I wouldn’t mind if you rubbed it in and said ‘I told you so!’ for eternity.”
“No, Martin. The first wall we reached on that other artifact was solid. So was the one on the side I checked. But when I reached the far side of that cube and touched its wall I felt myself pulled through it and back here. You must have reached it and went through too!”
She pointed towards nearby objects on the floor. “We’re back in the aliens’ artifact on Mars. There’s the coil of rope you dropped before being transported to that other planet.”
Martin squinted, following the trail of the end of the rope as it snaked across the floor and disappeared through the wall closest to them. Then his gaze swiveled around the chamber they stood within—scanning its walls and peering up into its heights with growing puzzlement. He gasped, “What the heck are those—”
“Never mind that now, Martin! We need to get out of here and get to the two full oxygen packs we left outside!”
Martin glanced at Katerina’s oxygen gauge and then at his own. Their ominous readings made his breath come quicker. “Right. Let’s go change our packs and then come back in for some more exploring. All least the aliens turned off those weird home movies they were playing inside here.”
He trotted away following the path of the rope on the floor to the nearby wall—and bounced off it. Once again his fists pounded rigid unyielding metal.
Several meters away on the other side of that barrier, two full oxygen packs lay waiting on the sandy cinnamon soil of Mars. But as one final joke the aliens had contrived the wall to allow passage only one way—and Katerina and he were trapped on the wrong side of it.
“It isn’t fair!”
* * * *
Martin’s fists struck the wall one last futile time. The massive metal didn’t even vibrate beneath his blows. He wobbled with the same queasy wooziness he’d experienced during his first microgravity simulation on the latest iteration of the Vomit Comet during astronaut training. There was no point checking his oxygen gauge to see how many seconds of life he had left. If he died first at least he wouldn’t have to see Katerina suffer when her oxygen gave out too—
Katerina scanned the floor, then picked up part of the rope halfway between the coil and the wall. “Even if we can’t get out, we were able to get in. And when you tugged on the rope before—help me, Martin!”
He stumbled toward her and grabbed another section of the rope. They pulled it together and watched a growing length of the cord appear through the wall—until the two oxygen packs still tied on its other end clunked onto the floor.
A moment later Martin took a deep breath of his replenished oxygen supply and felt his head clear. “Okay, the clock’s reset. We’re still trapped inside here, but we have eight more hours to figure out what’s going on.”
Katerina nodded, refreshed by her own new full oxygen pack. She looked up and around, scrutinizing the intricate interior of the huge chamber they stood inside. Fluorescent-white light just bright enough to illumine their surroundings glowed softly around them from no obvious source. There was nothing on the gray metal floor except the rocks she’d thrown into this room ages ago and the few items they’d brought with them.
The wall through which they’d entered the artifact was made of the same smooth metal. But about five meters above the floor the wall’s blank surface merged into what looked like a colossal cat’s cradle suspended above them and extending as high up as she could see. It was constructed of close-packed zigzagging gray metal planks that filled most of the huge structure’s volume. They formed an irregularly perforated ceiling obscuring what lay at the very top of the artifact.
Each plank in this massive lattice was approximately one meter wide and about twenty centimeters thick. They ranged from five to seven meters long. The planks were joined together at their ends at odd angles—gently rising and falling as they crisscrossed and interlaced with each other like the skeletal beams of a skyscraper designed by M.C. Escher. They wound around an empty central metal shaft with a square opening eight meters on a side extending up into dark unseen heights.
Katerina’s first impression was that this intricate framework resembled a gigantic metal version of the Gordian knot. But closer examination showed it was really a fiendishly elaborate spiral stairway. Several isolated planks were welded along one side of their narrowest dimension to each of the chamber’s three other walls. They formed shallow ramps leading up from ground level into the innermost recesses of that baffling maze.
Martin shook his head at the spider web of beams above them. “Looks like somebody’s been playing with the biggest Erector Set of all time.”
He peered up into the blackness of the vast structure’s square hollow central core. “That would’ve made a great shaft for an elevator—but then, the aliens always make us do things the hard way. Hopefully those planks really lead up to the top of this thing and aren’t like the recursive stairways in ‘Castrovalva.’”
Katerina frowned. “What?”
“No, Who—oh, never mind. We’ve got lots of climbing to do. Let’s go.”
* * * *
There were no handrails on the alien-made stairway. Martin took the lead while Katerina followed him single file. Each of the gently sloping planks they walked on held their combined weight easily. But they quickly reached the point in their steady climb upward when a fall over the side would result in bone-shattering injury or death.
Fortunately the planks had short poles the length and greatest width of a baseball bat set into them that served as handholds. Those metal rods jutted vertically upward a bit off-center every one to two meters apart, like the posts for a wire mesh fence.
Each individual plank angled mildly at its end to join with the next one or, more often, branched into two separate paths. Several times Martin and Katerina had to backtrack when the route they’d chosen turned out to be a dead end. One time the last plank in the path terminated in empty space, with only a wide chasm between it and the other planks. Another time the end of the final plank wound up welded into the wall of the artifact itself. But as their climb continued they became more adroit at picking out the path that kept them moving upward.
Martin paused, adjusted the coil of rope circling his right shoulder, and tentatively glanced down. It looked like they’d reached the halfway point in their climb. He grabbed one of the nearby poles and tried to forget his memories of the movie Vertigo. Looking up, he still couldn’t glimpse what lay at the top of the artifact. Too many twisting planks still hid their goal from sight.
Katerina came up behind him. “Anything wrong, Martin?”
“I’m just wondering what’ll happen if we do find the aliens. Before we entered this artifact I hoped every ‘miracle’ they’d performed from terraforming planets to manipulating matter, energy, and gravity could be done if they only had sufficiently advanced technology and knew a few more laws of physics than we do.
“I know it’s silly, but I fantasized we’d find the humongous superscientfic machine inside here they’ve been using to do all those amazing things. Then we could study it and learn enough about their science to turn it against them—like spunky earthlings routinely did in the old-time SF pulps. Or maybe we’d be like James Bond and his sexy Russian counterpart breaking into the secret citadel of the latest world-conquering megalomaniac, finding his doomsday device, and punching the big red button on it marked ‘Press This to Save the Earth.’”
“That’s not realistic, Martin.”
“Obviously. But if the aliens are so advanced they can send us back through space and time over four billion years, they’re way too powerful to fight. The only weapons we can use against them are our own words. But how do we figure out what to say when we don’t know how the aliens think—and when we can’t even be sure what their motives are or what they want from us?
“Heck, we’ve been calling them ‘aliens’ all this time—but we really don’t know what they are!”
Katerina studied the intricately interweaving planks and beams above them. “I don’t know either. But if we do find the aliens, remember that our first priority is to save the Earth. If there’s no other way to do it, each of us is expendable.”
“I know, Katerina. I hope this isn’t a suicide mission—but if I have to, I’ll throw myself on the grenade.”
“I’m not talking about that. You pointed out before that the aliens are angrier with me than they are with you. If the only way to save humanity is for me to give up my life to appease them ... you’re going to have to let me do it.”
“I’d never let them do that, Katerina! Okay, I know I really couldn’t stop them if they made up their minds to kill you. But if they try, I’ll do everything I can to save you or die trying!”
“Don’t be foolish, Martin! If we both die, who’s going to save Earth? If something happens to me you need to stay alive to convince the aliens to spare humanity! Promise me you won’t do anything that might endanger you too!”
Martin said nothing. He resumed their upward trek as if he hadn’t heard her. But after they’d climbed together for several more minutes Katerina thought she heard his voice whispering inside her helmet.
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
* * * *
Martin scowled. “End of the line, Katerina.”
He shook his head at this final obstacle at the top of the spiraling stairway. Below them the network of interlaced metal planks they’d just climbed filled most of the artifact’s lower three one-hundred-meter tall cubes and its quartet of side cubes. The horizontal plank they now stood on was twelve meters higher than the upper opening of the square shaft running vertically through the center of the artifact. The plank extended to the outer edge of the middle of one of the shaft’s eight-meter-long sides. There it connected to a final short beam slightly less than two meters long that angled downward at forty-five degrees, forming a short ramp pointing toward the dark bottom of the shaft far below.
Directly in front of them at the same height, another long horizontal plank like the one they stood on beckoned to them from eight meters away across empty space and the open mouth of the deep shaft. At that plank’s near end another shorter one angled downward, mirroring the ramp attached to the beam they were trapped on. At the other plank’s far end a vertical metal ladder five meters high led to a meter-square opening in the gray metal “ceiling” above them, formed by the otherwise solid flat base of the artifact’s highest cube. Bright pale light emanated from that opening, from the interior of what promised to be a new chamber inside the uppermost cube.
Martin grasped the vertical rod at the end of his horizontal plank for balance and studied the similar beam eight meters away across a black abyss. The plank on the other side had a rod set perpendicular into its end that looked similar to the one he was using as a handhold. He muttered, “All these hundreds of beams and girders inside here—so why couldn’t the aliens make one more so we’d have a bridge to the other side?”
Katerina sidled up behind him. She held the rod just behind his and studied the scene. “I know how we can get across, Martin.”
He slipped the coil of rope off his shoulder. “So do I—but I don’t like it.”
Martin formed a slipknot in one end of the rope and whirled his lasso with flair worthy of a young Hoot Gibson. On his second try he snagged the post on the other side and pulled the rope as hard as he could—tightening the loop circling that post and satisfying himself the metal rod wouldn’t pull free under the strain he’d soon be putting on it.
The rope was just long enough to do its job. With barely a meter of it to spare Martin tied his end of the rope tightly to the base of the post by his feet. The rest of its length was stretched taut across the dark chasm as a makeshift, shaky bridge. He said, “If I make it across I want you to stay here until I see what’s inside that opening over there.”
“No, Martin. I’ll go first. We don’t know how much tension that rope can take before it reaches its breaking point. I’m lighter than you and the rope is more likely to hold my weight than yours.”
After several heated moments Martin finally accepted that he couldn’t argue with the laws of physics or an obstinate Katerina. She slipped past him and sat on the edge of the plank with her legs stretching along the much shorter one angling downward. Both of her gloves reached up to grasp the rope tightly. Then she carefully eased herself down the short ramp until her whole body dangled over emptiness.
Katerina’s arms stretched up vertically, clutching the rope. She kept both knees bent and legs close together to stabilize her body and minimize any bobbing or swinging. Her front palm slid forward along the rope, pulling the rest of her behind it in repeated jerky motions toward the beckoning ledge on the other side.
Martin’s heart pounded as he watched Katerina reach and pass the halfway mark on her nerve-racking journey. As he focused on her assiduously shifting hands gripping the rope, he sensed a flickering in his uppermost field of vision. He glanced up—and felt an ice pick of terror puncture his heart.
The previously solid rod anchoring the rope on the other side of the abyss shimmered out of existence. The loop encircling that now-vanished support hung suspended in mid-air for an instant—and then Katerina’s mass on the rope pulled its newly freed end down. Martin watched petrified as she swung back toward him, still gripping the rope. Katerina arced out of his view like the weight on a pendulum as the length of rope in front of him collapsed onto the short ramp just below where he stood. The ramp hid the far end of the dangling rope and kept him from seeing whether she was still holding onto it—or had been flung off to her death.
* * * *
Another instant and Martin snapped back into action. He leaned to one side and peered toward the far end of the rope. Relief and fright flooded his brain as he saw Katerina clutching the rope with both hands a meter from its dangling looped end. Her body twisted and rocked as she struggled to keep her gloves from slipping lower on that tenuous lifeline.
Martin watched helplessly as her hands slid even lower on the rope until she managed to damp her body’s oscillations and steady herself. He yelled, “Don’t try to climb up the rope, your gloves might slip! Hold on tight and I’ll pull you up!”
Martin reached down and grabbed the length of rope just beyond where it was tied to the pole beside him. Carefully, trying to keep Katerina from slipping or swinging again if he tugged too hard, Martin gradually pulled the rope toward him over the short ramp’s far edge. There was a fine line between pulling the rope so slowly she might become too tired to hold on versus jerking it too fast and making her lose her grip. As more rope accumulated at his feet he hoped he was tugging it at the right speed—and that the edge of the ramp wasn’t sharp enough to cut into and fray the rope.
After an eternity compressed into seconds, Martin gasped in relief as the top of Katerina’s right fist peeked over the far edge of the short ramp. But as her left hand reached up for an instant to paw at the ramp’s smooth slick surface he realized she’d never get a handhold firm enough to raise herself up onto it. And the vertical position of her body and the ramp’s angle made it impossible for Katerina to get her elbows and enough of her upper body on the ramp so he could pull her up along it with the rope.
Martin’s mind raced through his limited options on how to save her. He rapidly considered and rejected sliding the rope to one side and off the edge of the short, meter-wide ramp. In theory that would let Katerina swing to a position directly below the side of the long horizontal plank where he stood at its junction with the ramp. If he was strong enough, he could pull her up vertically from there until she could grasp the edge of this long plank—then he could grab her wrists to jerk her safely onto it. But what if she swung too violently and lost her grip—or what if he couldn’t hold on to the rope with her unsupported weight on the other end—or what if he lost his balance and fell with her into the pit below—
Martin swiftly studied the rod beside him, the rope in his hands with Katerina at the other end, and the short ramp in front of him. Maybe if he’d had more time to think he would’ve realized this plan probably wouldn’t work either—but he had to do something to save her!
“Hang on, Katerina! I’m coming to save you!”
Still clutching the rope in a death grip Martin lowered himself to his knees. His upper body descended face down towards the ramp’s metal skin. Finally he was lying prone with his face pointing toward its far edge. He scooted his chest down the ramp’s slightly less than two meters long surface while simultaneously inching his hands up the rope—keeping it taut so that Katerina remained hovering just below the ramp’s edge. Then he turned his ankles until his boots were locked behind the rod set near the edge of the horizontal plank he’d been standing on. He kept both feet at right angles to the rod—anchoring and preventing him from sliding off the ramp’s far end where Katerina dangled.
The ramp was just short enough for Martin to stretch his left arm out over its edge and grasp Katerina’s right wrist. In one swift motion his right hand let go of the rope and lunged out to grab her left wrist. Then he jerked her numb fingers off the rope she’d been holding much too long. Now he was her only support—like a circus trapeze artist hanging down with knees bent around the bar after catching his somersaulting partner in mid-air.
Martin braced his boots against the rod far behind him and kept them locked around it. He tried with all his strength to use his knees and torso to scoot back up the ramp with Katerina in tow. But the ramp was too steep and he wasn’t strong enough to pull her up onto it. Maybe she should grab the rope again while he figured out what else he could do—
But that was no longer an option. Sometime after he’d grabbed Katerina, the rope she’d been holding had slid to the side and off the edge of the ramp. Now it hung along the ramp’s right side out of reach of either of them.
As Martin tried pulling Katerina up one more futile time, the loud cries inside his helmet he’d been ignoring until now finally resolved into words. “This won’t work, Martin! Let go of me before you fall too!”
“No, I won’t! I have to save you!”
He felt Katerina struggling to free herself from his grip. But his hands grasped both her wrists even tighter as she shouted, “You have to stay alive and find the aliens! Only you can save the world!”
“No, I have to save you first!”
Gritting his teeth, Martin braced himself to push the top of his boots once more against the rod they were locked behind and use the rest of his body to pull both of them up. Then in a horrified heartbeat he realized his boots weren’t locked behind anything.
Though he couldn’t look behind him Martin pictured the rod he’d been using to anchor himself shimmering and fading out of existence—like the rod on the other side of the chasm had done. Then his prone body was scooting with tortoise-like speed down the short ramp as Katerina’s weight pulled him down. Another few seconds and he’d slide off the end of the ramp to join her in a final fall together and an end to every problem—
“MARTIN! LET GO OF ME!”
Suddenly he stopped moving. Martin lay still along the cold metal surface with his chest hanging halfway over into empty space. Eventually his brain registered where his palms were—clutching the sides of the ramp to halt his downward slide. As his hands methodically worked their way back up the ramp helping him scoot back to safety, teardrops dampened his forehead. The only sound within his helmet was a single sobbed word.
“Katerina.”
* * * *
Martin stood safely back on the long horizontal plank Katerina and he had shared only moments ago—staring down into the crushing blackness where she’d fallen toward the floor nearly three hundred meters below. Only wordless static came from his radio.
He watched dully as a long metal plank shimmered into existence. This new beam connected the one he stood on with the horizontal one on the other side—bridging the gap over the shadowed abyss at whose bottom Katerina lay. The plank felt solid beneath the testing tip of his boot. Then he was striding stiffly across it like a walking corpse—wishing it would disappear with him halfway across so he could join his beloved far below.
No—not yet. It’d be easier to die—but he had to live long enough to make her death mean something. Martin choked down the wrenching agony inside him and reached the long plank on the other side of the chasm. He grabbed the ladder at the plank’s far end and climbed toward the bright opening above him. If he did find the aliens in that uppermost chamber it’d be hard to keep his grief and anger under control. But for Katerina’s sake he’d even cower and plead in front of her murderers if it’d fulfill her last request to save the Earth.
As he ascended the ladder Martin glimpsed the golden cross still hanging from his neck and wondered if it was too late to pray. Reason and skepticism had been enough when life was happier and still held hope. But when existence turned into tragedy, those modes of thought gave little consolation.
And if Katerina was right and miracles weren’t always just delusions created by the devout, the gullible, or the wounded heart—he needed one now.
* * * *
Martin peeked cautiously through the meter-wide square opening on the floor of the artifact’s highest cube. He scanned its brightly lit surroundings—and blinked.
The chamber’s walls were lined with what looked like obsolete mid-twentieth-century computer equipment. Tall steel monoliths studded with multicolored flashing lights and jerking reels of magnetic tape surrounded him. They stretched up several meters toward a flat ceiling one hundred meters above him.
Martin pulled himself up into the room and wandered from one archaic mainframe to another. The room resembled the set from the old Time Tunnel TV series—or a compact transistorized version of Multivac. But what were these electronic antiques doing here?
He walked toward a large typewriter-like printer sitting on a wooden stand. A sheet of paper stuck out of its carriage. There were two black words printed on the sheet.
Welcome Martin.
He roamed further—exploring this museum of forgotten technology. The aliens must’ve created these machines from his memories. But why—
Then Martin noticed writing etched onto the machine in front of him—and lost his last sliver of self-control. His palms lashed out and struck the dinner plate-sized red button on the computer’s panel marked “Press This to Save the Earth.”
Martin screamed, “So you jerks think this is a big joke! Play with the funny little humans until one of them breaks and then taunt the other one until he goes crazy! I wasn’t able to stop you from killing Katerina and I can’t keep you from smashing Earth like Kane’s snow globe! But if you’re watching me, here’s what I think of you!”
The glove made it hard to flex his fingers completely. But he managed to curl most of them and wave his right hand around the room at the unseen aliens.
At first there was no response to his words and actions. Eventually Martin stopped his tirade—drained of energy and any idea what to do next. He watched listlessly as the chamber’s colorful contents blurred into an Impressionistic palette of softening hues. The artificial illumination within it faded away until he was immersed in a raven-black darkness he didn’t want to leave. Stripped of hope—nevermore to see Katerina—oblivion would be a blessing.
Then Martin sensed something as empty of light and love as Satan’s soul approaching him. He stood silent as it reached out toward his unresisting body. As that amorphous mass of Stygian blackness engulfed him he glimpsed a familiar scene within it. The setting Sun gently illuminated the habitation module Katerina and he had shared for several ecstatic months. The rocky russet ground surrounding their former home glowed with beckoning warmth.
With that last vision of paradise lost shimmering in his mind, Martin plunged gratefully into nothingness...
* * * *
In his dream Martin stood by the ramp leading up to the open entrance of the habitation module. Fading sunlight glistened off its metal shell and bathed the ruddy soil around him. He could almost feel a gentle breeze riffle his hair through his helmet.
Martin pictured himself as the protagonist of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge—falling with a last flicker of remembered happiness and hope an instant before the noose snapped his neck. Like that doomed man’s last vision of his beloved wife, Martin saw Katerina stepping toward him with matchless grace and dignity. The plastisuit she’d worn at her death still flowed around her Grecian curves like a modest statue of Aphrodite. Her long auburn hair, released from the confines of the helmet lying discarded on the soil nearby, flowed gauzily behind her as she rushed to greet him.
Then Katerina’s loving face was pressed against his own helmet. He saw this gorgeous phantasm’s tantalizing lips form his name—her hazel eyes alive with tender love. Faint vibrations penetrated his plastisuit and resolved into muffled words...
“Martin! Take off your helmet!”
Her delicate fingers reached around his neck and released the seals bonding his helmet and plastisuit together. Martin gasped as the helmet came free and flew to the ground. His first gulp of open air was cut short by a kiss smothering his mouth. He reeled as two slim arms enfolded him and pressed his chest tightly against hers—
He dimly heard more words caressing his naked ear. “—and just as I was about to hit the floor I fell into one of those black blobs the aliens use as portals. The next thing I knew I was standing here by the habitation module!”
With percipience rivaling Mortimer Snerd’s, Martin stammered, “You’re alive!”
After giving her fiancé another kiss, Katerina sighed, “Definitely.”
Martin hugged her tight. “I don’t get it. The aliens nearly killed us again and again—then they bring us back here! Are they still testing us—and are they still going to destroy Earth?”
Suddenly Martin tensed with an uneasy electric sensation he’d felt three times before. His skin prickled and the hairs on his arms rose like when he’d played with the Van de Graaff generator in his college physics lab. His breathless body felt pressed in the tightening grip of an invisible vise. He separated from Katerina and looked around.
Several meters away, a sparkling iridescent swarm of countless multihued pinpoint lights writhed with limitless, irresistible power. From within that chaotic kaleidoscope of colors an uncountable number of beings perhaps older that the universe itself peered deep into the naked souls of the two humans.
Martin and Katerina stood side-by-side—waiting for the aliens to pronounce their Last Judgment on them and the human race.
* * * *
Martin broke the simmering silence. “So you finally decided to show up.”
A hollow, genderless voice emanated from the luminous entities and wafted through the minds of the two flesh-and-blood creatures arrayed before them. We are always with you. We observe your actions and read your thoughts. We know your feelings and fears.
Katerina said, “Then you know how sorry I am for what I did. I was wrong to trick Martin so that we failed your test to see if he could change human nature for the better. Punish me if you must—but don’t destroy our world because of my sin!”
We do not punish. We train and tend.
Martin’s frowned. “How does repeatedly putting us in danger and threatening to destroy Earth do that?”
All we have done was a test to determine if your species is suitable. Since the birth of time we have watched matter and energy coalesce into life with wide-ranging degrees of self-awareness. Simple forms of life are common. Complex beings with at least your level of sentience are rare. Your species possesses a combination of mental and physical abilities unmatched within this local group of galaxies.
We nurture all such exceptional creatures as you throughout this universe. We wish you to grow to your full potential. Your kind has the curiosity, intelligence, and rudimentary technology to venture off the world of your creation. We have tested you to see if your species has the other essential traits needed to expand throughout this galaxy. If the two of you with your great desire to explore and bring your species into space could not pass our test, there is no hope for others of your kind.
Katerina murmured, “And I made us fail your test.”
You did not fail our test, Katerina Iosifovna Savitskaya. Until now it is you who have failed it, Martin Albert Slayton.
Katerina stared at the discombobulated expression on her fiancé’s face. He sputtered, “Me? What did I do?”
It is what you could not do that would have condemned your kind to extinction. Both of you have forgone other goals and pleasures to come to this world. Each of you was willing to die if necessary so that your fellow beings might live. Such attributes make your species worthy to receive dominion over this galaxy.
But being worthy is not enough. You humans must also have the strength and will power to do whatever is needed to establish a permanent presence away from your native world. You must not only risk danger and death for yourselves. You must also be willing to endure any pain and suffering you must cause your fellow beings in pursuit of that goal.
Katerina said, “I don’t understand. Most of our philosophies, religions, and traditions teach that it’s wrong to intentionally inflict pain and suffering on others. Are you suggesting the end justifies the means—that it’s ‘good’ to hurt others if it means reaching the stars?”
It is neither good nor justified. It is merely necessary. You performed such an act when you deceived your companion. You did not wish to hurt him yet you knew it would if he discovered your deception. You did it because you believed it was needed to protect your fellow humans. You were willing to accept responsibility for your actions though it caused you great pain.
The aliens focused their attention on Martin. Until the end of our test your greatest concern was for your companion’s safety and well-being. You accepted our gift to manipulate matter, energy, gravity, and time only to save her life. When you thought you could also use that power to help your entire species you renounced it because you did not wish to risk hurting her or only a few of your kind. You were willing once to risk your entire world being destroyed rather than let her die. When you finally chose to try to save your planet over losing her, you passed our test.
No further tests are needed. If enough of your kind are able to make such difficult choices, your species has all the skills it needs to fill this galaxy. We have encouraged your first steps by making your two neighboring worlds easier to reach and inhabit. Before we depart we will leave behind new artifacts on this and your second planet for you and those who come after you to explore. Studying these artifacts will help you acquire technology that will make travel within your solar system and galaxy much easier.
Katerina smiled. “This must mean you’re not planning to destroy Earth after all.”
On the contrary. Earth is doomed.
* * * *
Martin shouted, “What? You said we passed your test! I even pressed that ridiculous button you made to save the Earth!”
By passing our test and pressing that button you have indeed made it possible for your world to be saved.
Martin glanced at Katerina, who looked as confused as he was. He said, “You’ve lost me.”
If you had failed our test there would have been no further need to make you believe your world was in imminent danger from a collision with this one. We would have returned this planet to the orbit we previously gave it. We would have departed and left you and your fellow beings alone to fulfill your destiny.
But if that had happened, your kind would have had no future. Within a century your current civilization will collapse. You will lose enough of your technology to make it impossible for you to ever live permanently beyond your world. You will condemn yourselves and your descendents to mere existence and eventual extinction.
Katerina said, “Then what have we accomplished by passing your test?”
You have proven you are capable of following a different path. Like many others we have observed and helped throughout this universe, your species has reached a critical point in its development. It must either grow into a galaxy-wide civilization or wither by confining itself solely to its world of origin.
Your population and technology are at a stage where your planet’s limited resources and you yourselves are the greatest threats to your survival. To survive, you must soon make use of the far greater resources of your own solar system and beyond. You must quickly transplant your kind and cultures onto new worlds.
Martin said, “You’re preaching to the choir about that! But did we save Earth or not?”
If you had failed our test we would have done nothing more for your species. Because you passed it we have a final gift for you. We have seen that you humans find it difficult to look beyond your immediate needs, desires, and dangers. Our gift will motivate you to devote greater effort to venturing off your world so that your kind can continue and flourish.
When you pressed the button in our artifact it initiated a chain of events that will lead to either your destruction or salvation within a generation. The artifact is now returning this world to the more stable orbit it had until yesterday. In twenty-nine years our device will once again make this planet move gradually closer to yours. We have programmed the artifact to make Mars and Earth collide one year later.
Katerina bit her lip. “It sounds like we’ve just delayed doomsday.”
It is in your power to decide whether your kind continues to exist. You cannot return to the artifact you just explored. It has already reconfigured itself back into a spatial dimension you cannot reach at your current level of technology.
But other artifacts we will leave on your second planet and this one contain information that will allow you to regain access to the artifact you just left. Then you will be able to alter its programming to prevent your world’s destruction and keep this planet in a stable orbit. That same information on how to move outside what you call space-time will also allow you to travel easily from star to star.
The aliens seemed to tower over the two humans. Inform your leaders and people of what we have said. Tell them they must quickly send as many of you as possible to this world now and to the second planet when it becomes habitable soon. If you devote as much energy and resources as possible to colonizing your two nearest worlds, you will have sufficient time to find and explore the artifacts we leave there and save your own.
Katerina said, “But what if our governments and people don’t listen? What if they don’t believe us and keep treating human space exploration as a frill—as something optional they can delay indefinitely?”
Then on June 6, 2066 every human on Earth and your moon will die. Even if a few of your kind are on the second planet, that remnant will not have the resources to re-create a spacefaring civilization. Your sun is young enough that, without our help, sentient life could still possibly develop on one of its remaining worlds after your species is destroyed. If so, we hope that next one will be wiser than yours.
Martin said, “Sounds pretty drastic.”
If your species does not care enough to ensure its own survival, neither will we.
Katerina glanced at the golden cross still hanging from Martin’s neck. She said, “In case we fail, I’d like to know if our deaths would have at least some meaning outside this life. It sounds as if you’ve been observing humanity since our earliest existence. Some of our major religions are based on the belief that specific events and miracles have actually occurred. Tell me—is my faith or the faith of others in vain?”
We have seen the events that inspired your beliefs and those of other humans. We know what is fact and what is myth. But it would not be helpful for any of you to believe what we could tell you. You would only be exchanging faith in your different conceptions of deity for faith in us.
It is better for you to consider what is beneficial and useful in your beliefs, even if you cannot be certain of them. Keeping the possibility that some of your beliefs are true may bring you greater comfort and inspire you to greater things than knowing their truth.
Martin said, “I have a simpler question. You’ve moved planets, put Katerina and me through the wringer with these tests, and hopefully given humanity the kick in the rear it needs to get our space programs into high gear. What I want to know is—why have you bothered to do it? Why do you care what happens to us?
“What’s in it for you?”
The aliens hesitated. Then they said five final words—and vanished.
* * * *
After the end of that longest day, two spacefarers wearing blue jumpsuits stood holding hands beneath a clear night sky. Myriad multihued stars beckoned the young couple across the vast gulf of space, inviting them to come for a closer look.
Distant Deimos shone as a bright speck of light sewn into that celestial tapestry. Dazzling Phobos arced a more rapid path from west to east. But both moons paled compared to the azure orb that shone with a steady glow twenty-five million kilometers away. There word of the aliens’ warning and challenge was spreading from NASA’s Mission Control and the Russian Space Agency through a burgeoning number of nonplussed government leaders. Soon, whether announced through official channels or leaked to the press, humanity would learn that the clock was ticking towards its destruction—or its self-created salvation.
“Do you think our leaders will listen, Martin?”
“Let’s hope so for everybody’s sake, including us—and any children we’ll have.”
Katerina frowned pensively. “I wonder if it’s right to bring babies into a world that could be destroyed in a generation if we all fail this last test. But if we do pass it, someday our descendents may be scattered among the stars.
“I’d rather be an optimist. After we return to Earth next year and get married, I think we should make some descendants.”
Martin grinned. “Sounds good to me! But first NASA needs to land another ascent vehicle here so we can return home. It’s a good thing Mission Control wasn’t too upset about us taking the other one out for a joyride and crashing it. I guess hearing we’d pushed the potential end of the world back from one year to thirty years distracted them from focusing on what else we did. And thanks for not telling them about my pushing that button and starting the countdown to doomsday.”
“You’re welcome. And there’s something else I’ve been thinking about, Martin. I think I know who the aliens are.”
“For a while it seemed you thought they were devils tempting us to destroy humanity. Don’t tell me you’ve decided they’re really guardian angels practicing the ultimate in tough love!”
“No, they’re probably not supernatural. But I remembered some passages in Genesis that may fit. ‘Let us make mankind in our image and likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, over all the wild animals and every creature that exists on the earth.’ Then later, ‘The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to till it and to keep it.’”
Katerina touched the golden cross hanging from her neck. “Change a few words and perhaps those verses describe the aliens and us—only they are Adam and Eve, and we’re one of the kinds of animals they’re tending in a universe-wide ‘Paradise’!”
Martin decided to say nothing. Though he was skeptical of the theological implications of her analogy, the aliens’ last words made him wonder if there might be a speck of truth in what Katerina said. She probably interpreted their farewell as a vindication of her faith that existence had both a human and divine meaning. But to him those nearly omnipotent aliens’ five parting words held mystery—and a little fear.
We too are being tested.
Copyright © 2010 H. G. Stratmann
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(EDITOR’S NOTE: Katerina, Martin, and the aliens appeared earlier in “Wilderness Were Paradise Enow [December 2009].)