Tag: short story

Echoes in the Vacuum: Part V

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The last part!!!

Catch up: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

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Part V

rocket ship

Image by Jurvetson

The old man had made his own discoveries before the boy did. He had, in fact, seen the bird people on Gallun-Z not two years ago. But he, too, had sought photos on the webs, and made the same discovery the boy had. But being older and wiser, he had realized what it meant.

For awhile, he watched them anyway, determined to learn what he could. But there was only so much you could learn observing from afar, and he soon lost heart, afraid each time he looked would be the night he’d see their destruction.

Sometimes he wondered why it happened, why he’d seen it. What was the point? But God gave no answer, and science was indifferent.

Then the boy came. And he insisted on watching the winged people in their last days.

“It’ll only upset you,” protested the old man.

“But you said the past was important. I want to learn everything they can teach me, before it’s too late.”

So the man only sighed and walked away.

What an eerie feeling, watching a civilization that didn’t know it was about to die. Nothing changed in their behavior. They worked. They played. They scuffled. They danced in the light. Just like every day of their lives. They didn’t know it would be their last.

More than once, he considered that the old man was right; that he couldn’t handle watching them die. Their world grew blurry when he thought about it, and it wasn’t a problem with the scope.

But there was no way around it. The old man was right, of course. He should have realized. They all died long before he was born. Before Spacial Disruption was even invented.

Then a curious thing happened.

Ships appeared.

Men came out.

Men walked upon the surface of Gallun-Z.

The boy had not seen them land; he had missed the moment of meeting, but there they were. It looked as if they were communicating with the bird creatures.

And over the next several days, the whole planet seemed alive with activity. The winged people flew doubly fast, flitting this way and that, carrying packs with them.

Now the boy was watching as long as he could each night, until Earth and Gallun turned their faces away from each other, and he had to wait another several hours before he could look again.

Then the day came that everyone was gone. The ships. The men. The winged people.

Every city was empty. Still.

The rickety joints tottered in.

“What this time?” the old man asked him.

“They’re gone.”

The old man sensed something in the boy’s expression, which he didn’t understand. “Hmph,” he grunted to conceal his interest. “Did you figure out where the ships were from?”

“They were from Earth.”

“Couldn’t be.”

“They looked like men. And the lettering on the ships…it was like our lettering.”

“That’s not possible. They didn’t have Spacial Disruption that long ago.”

“They weren’t marked S.D.”

“Of course not.”

“…They were marked T.D.”

The man watched him a moment. “And what do you suppose that means?”

The boy hesitated. Then he looked the rickety joints in the eye.

“That one day,” he said. “I am going to save the people of Gallun.”

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Echoes in the Vacuum: Part IV

  By

This is the penultimate chapter! Read Part I, Part II and Part III first.

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Part IV

time lapse photo of stars

Image by Dhilung

 

For two days, the boy did nothing. He couldn’t sleep. He barely ate. He swept the same section of floor twenty times before remembering to move. He watched the comet; he watched the winged people. And he felt a cold sickness grow inside him.

What was he to do?

If he said nothing, those beautiful winged people would certainly die. But he could go on living his life.

And who knew if telling anyone would even save those people? If someone had covered up their existence, would that someone not also cover up their destruction? And would they not have to kill him to do it?

But the more he watched the winged people through the great telescope, the less he could stand it. Until finally, when the pile of rickety joints arrived at the observatory one night, he found the boy sitting on the metal steps instead of sweeping the floor. The boy’s face was pale. He trembled ever so slightly.

The old man walked in and stood in front of the boy. He folded his arms.

“What’s the matter with you?”

The boy looked up at him. His eyes and nose were red, as if he’d been crying. He took a deep breath.

“I looked at Gallun-Z,” he said softly. “There are people there. Wonderful, winged people.”

The old man swore. “I told you not to use the scope when I’m not—”

“They’re all going to die!” interrupted the boy. “There’s a comet. I calculated…”

“Forget it,” snapped the old man, turning toward the supply closet. “There’s nothing you can do. This is why I told you—”

“But we can have the entire S.D. fleet there in an instant!” protested the boy, jumping to his feet. “If we only told them. There’s time to evacuate. Or destroy the comet with a missile or something. Twenty-one days. That’s time.”

He was breathing heavily, heart pounding. But the old man moved with characteristic slowness as he opened the closet door and drew out the broom.

He held out the broom to the boy.

The boy stared, ready to cry. Did the old man not hear him?

“I looked on the webs for Gallun,” he tried to keep his voice steady. “The pictures were all wrong. Someone in the S.D. program is trying to cover it up. But we have to do something; we have to find someone who’s willing to save them.”

The old man shook his head. “There’s nothing wrong with those pictures.”

“But I saw. Through the scope. Look for yourself!” The boy ran up the steps and began throwing switches and turning knobs to aim the scope at Gallun. “There’s thousands of creatures there. Like birds, but they’re people. They have cities, and…”

“You can’t help them.”

“But someone—”

“They’re already dead.”

“We have twenty-one days!”

“They all died already, boy,” the old man’s voice was softer. “Thousands of years ago.”

The boy blinked at him.

“Don’t you know what a light-year is, boy? You haven’t been looking at people. You’ve been looking at echoes; light that’s been traveling since before you were born. You’ve been looking at the past. We could send the whole S.D. fleet there today and find exactly what you saw on the webs. It’s a dead planet. There’s nothing we can do.”

The boy cried.

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Tune in tomorrow for the final chapter, Part V!

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Echoes in the Vacuum: Part III

  By

Read Part I and Part II first.

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Part III

meteor or comet

Image by Ed Sweeney

The boy went through the motions, pointing the scope at Kepler-3b, at Kepler-43b, then setting back to zenith and angling to focus on Lutwidge-7, then Asimov-5a. Finally, satisfied, the old man left him alone with his broom.

The boy aimed the scope at Gallun-Z. He had only one hundred times more magnification to go before the scope failed him.

He used every bit of it.

He zoomed in on an area that covered about twenty-five city blocks. The buildings were bulbous and layered, like stacks of flattened pearls. Each had an iridescent sheen of pink on gray, or green on white, wafting in the dim light of the setting star. And…yes! Movement.

Winged creatures flitted or wheeled between the towers, their feathers glinting gold.

Some flew in groups, each clutching the edge of a great net full of metallic rocks, or of a purplish substance that looked like plant fibers. They carried these to the east side of the city, where they seemed to be building another one of the pearl towers.

Closer to the center of the city, there was an open space where more of the winged creatures flocked, swooping about. He noticed several of them collide with, or latch onto each other, and he thought at first it was some kind of battle. But others came and perched on the towers at the edge to watch, every now and then fluttering their wings in unison. Then he spotted a great black ring being passed back and forth between the creatures, and he concluded gleefully that it must be a game.

So the boy watched the city for hours, enthralled. He found them at times awesome, and at other times humorous, the way you or I would find a lion’s pride or an ant mound.

He came back the next night, and watched them until it was time for the rickety joints to make his inspection. And the next night, and the next night.

He watched the new tower built. He watched new windows (or doors?) cut into others. He saw a real fight break out, and saw as other creatures flew in to stop it. He saw a line of smaller creatures following their parent, in a V shape, to a pond, where they splashed and dove and showed off with astounding backwards free-falls.

The boy spent most of his summer nights studying them. And during the days at home, he sketched pictures and made copious notes, which he hid in a hole he’d sliced at the bottom of his mattress.

A month before school was to begin again, as he angled the scope toward the correct position in the sky, he noticed something. A streak of light.

A comet.

Was it the same comet he’d tracked weeks ago? He saw no other in the system. It was the comet he’d seen just before finding the civilization. Like a herald announcing the marvel to come.

He smiled a little as he peered at that streak of blue ice, just for a moment before once again adjusting the scope to point to his city of winged creatures. He wondered for the hundredth time why this had not been reported, why it had been hidden. He entertained thoughts of claiming its discovery.

Epileptic Makes First Contact! Eugenics Exception Makes Greatest Discovery in Human History!

But these were only dreams. He continued to hide his notes. Someone had already made this discovery. Someone had covered it up. And the boy had no doubt that if he tried to uncover it, Someone could easily have his living license revoked.

The boy couldn’t sleep the next day. But it was not thoughts of conspiracy and government-sanctioned execution that kept him awake.

It was thoughts of the comet.

How near it seemed to his fantastical bird world.

How much nearer than before.

The next night, he looked for the comet again. He began the process of calculating velocity.

This process took him two days, and a great deal of research on the webs. He checked his numbers thrice and four times and ten times, but no amount of recalculating would change the results.

The comet was heading for Gallun-Z.

The comet was two hundred and fifty million cubic miles in size.

In approximately twenty-three Earth days, the comet would collide with Gallun.

And there destroy all life.

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Tune in tomorrow for Part IV.

Echoes in the Vacuum: Part II

  By

Continued from yesterday.

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Part II

canyons

Image by Snowpeak

The boy started small at first, looking at just Campbell-38. It didn’t look so very different from the photos.

You’re a fool, said the boy to himself. Nobody’s hiding anything. He’s just a crotchety old man who wants everything done his way.

But the second night, he looked at two more worlds that were not on the old man’s list. The third night, four, and so on, until he was looking at ten or a dozen different stars and planets and moons every night, noting them on a pad he hid in his pocket, so he didn’t waste time looking at the same world twice. He pushed the limits of the scope’s power, further and further, until he was spying worlds thousands of light-years distant—worlds no one else could see unless they traveled there themselves by Spacial Disruption. He peered at the swirling neon gases of a nebula. Tracked a comet for awhile.

He didn’t know what he was looking for.

Until he saw it.

It was on Gallun-Z. It was big. Unmistakable.

It was a city.

Actually, several cities, cluttered all over the planet’s land masses. There were honeycombs of winding roads, and bulbous, yet symmetrical structures, and artificial lights twinkling on the night side. And—maybe—movement.

His gut grew tight with excitement and disbelief. Impossible. Yet there it was. Countless men and women had hop-scotched across the universe, discovering strange plants, beasts and diseases, yet he, planet-bound, had discovered what none of them had.

Or what none of them had reported.

It was late, and the man would be in any moment. The boy reset the scope and slipped down the stairs and picked up his broom.

Had the man ever seen what he just had? Did he know?

The boy ached to run home, to search Gallun-Z on the webs and to find out if it had yet been landed by human pilots. But he had to finish his shift—his pointless, sweeping shift—and it was another two hours before he could finally leave.

He typed in the planet’s coordinates. There were, indeed, shuttle mission photos, taken three years ago, according to the logs. He saw craters and mountains and canyons. Nothing else.

He thought for a moment that he had miscalculated, and the world he’d seen was not Gallun-Z after all, but he checked the starmaps and was sure he’d been correct. Surely the S.D. program had discovered it. Yet there was no news of it anywhere.

Someone, somewhere, was hiding an entire alien civilization.

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Tune in tomorrow for Part III

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Echoes in the Vacuum: Part I

  By

Well, I promised you a sci-fi short, and here it is. It ended up being too long for flash fiction, though, so I’m posting it in five parts.

I’m not sure how I feel about it.

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Part I

observatory beneath a starry sky

Image by Chris Samuel

The most powerful telescope in the world was a relic. Once man’s only window to the further reaches of the universe, now a third-rate museum presided over by a pile of rickety joints who had never completed his Ph.D., and the boy he had hired for the summer.

Sometimes in the fall and winter, the train would bring a wash of sixth graders from the local middle school to liven up the place for an hour or two. The rickety joints would lean on the stair rail at the telescope’s sight, rasping the history of the space program over a chorus of whispers, giggles, and bored sighs.

“But eighteen days after its completion,” he said, “Harmon Graham successfully tested the first Spacial Disruption engine. And that,” the rickety joints paused, staring at nothing for several seconds, until some of the children began to snicker. “…Was that,” finished the old man at last.

It wasn’t that modern schoolchildren had lost their longing for the stars; most thought themselves destined to be explorers in the S.D. fleet. But they hardly found it interesting to look through a device at the boring old moon (all that could be seen in the middle of the school day), when on the webs they could find hi-res photos and video of truly distant planets, taken by astronauts who were actually there.

The boy was different. The other kids could try their luck with the S.D. program when they were old enough—he couldn’t. Even the ones who failed the rigorous flight school could save up their pennies and visit the safaris on Kepler-62f. But he could never leave the skin of the Earth.

Of course, there were a lot of things he couldn’t do. By law, he couldn’t be a surgeon. He could never have children. His parents had to apply for special dispensation just to give birth to him.

But the stars were closed to him by more than the law of man. The miracle of technology that gave mankind access to even the most distant worlds in the blink of an eye—that technology would fire in his brain like the seizures that sometimes plagued him. But stronger: strong enough to kill him.

Yet it was the stars he longed for most.

Have you ever craved something you were deathly allergic to? That was the boy and space travel. He sometimes prayed and asked God why he had this longing he could never satisfy. Sometimes he searched the webs for some scientific rationale. But God gave him no answer, and science was indifferent.

When it was his class’s turn to visit the old observatory, and he had stared through the great glass lenses at that daytime moon, he knew this telescope was the closest he would ever get. And that summer, he begged the rickety joints for a job. The old man had frowned at him, his deep wrinkles nearly hiding his eyes.

“No.” He was firm. “Nothing for you to do. Why’d you want to work here, anyhow?”

“Why’d you?” shot back the boy.

“’Cause the past is important,” snapped the rickety joints. “You can’t hold on to what you have if you don’t know how you got it.”

“Teach me,” said the boy. And the old man sighed, flicked his hand dismissively and limped over to the supply closet. He drew out a broom and shook it at the boy until the boy came and took it from him.

“Two rules, kid. One, if you open your mouth, it better be to ask a question. You’re here to learn, not to yammer in my ears about what you already know. Two, no looking through the scope when I’m not here.”

The boy opened his mouth, then closed it and nodded.

“Well get going then.”

So the boy came every night and swept the floor that didn’t need sweeping. Once each night the man tottered in and sat in the chair in the corner, and told the boy how to angle the telescope to see Asimov-5a, or Lutwidge-7. And the boy could look through and see craters and canyons and seas. Soon, the old man taught him the use of the more powerful lens, and he could pick out pebbles in a dried river bed. Hundreds of light-years away, and it was like he could reach out and touch it.

There were maybe a dozen different stars and planets that they looked at over and over. Eventually, the rickety joints would say “aim at Kepler-3b,” and the boy would have to do it from memory.

One night, the boy diverted from the old man’s instructions. He twisted the knob to aim the scope just slightly higher. “Why don’t we look at Campbell-38 tonight? We always look at Kepler-3b, but never Campbell-38.”

The rickety joints shot out of his chair and bellowed. “No! Away from there!” he grabbed the broom and rapped at the boy’s ankles. “You look at no worlds but those I’ve taught you.”

The boy rubbed his ankle. “But why?”

“Because I say. If you want to see Campbell-38, you can find pictures on the webs. Not through my scope.”

So when the boy went home in the wee hours of the morning, he searched the webs for photos of Campbell-38. There had only been one expedition there, but there were plenty of photos. And there were mountains and canyons and strange rock formations. Much the same sights he had seen on the other worlds.

But photos were photos. They could be made to look like anything. What you spied through a lens was the real thing.

The boy knew this.

And he wondered what the old man—and what the entire S.D. program—was trying to hide.

The old man spent more time in the observatory for several nights after that, keeping one eye on the boy as he read his books. But the boy did everything he asked and nothing he didn’t and so the old man eventually left him alone again, to sweep the floor that didn’t need to be swept.

That was when the boy made his move.

—

Tune in tomorrow for Part II!

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