for Lakmal Siriwardana
1
“We’re receiving some very strange transmissions lately from out on the magnetic highway,” announced my friend Pushpak.
He spoke over the phone matter-of-factly, as though the magnetic highway was part of his daily commute and not the outer layer of the sun’s heliosphere.
“Oh?” I replied. “Hello to you, too, Pushpak.”
“Hello.”
“So you’re still on Voyager duty?”
“Yes, but these transmissions are different.”
“What else could be sending back signals to the Deep Space Network, if not one of the Voyagers?”
“What, or who?”
“What?”
“No, it’s a who. I think it’s J.T.,” Pushpak said.
“J.T. Waylon?”
“You always said, it’s like that guy dropped off the edge of the earth.”
“Wait! You mean he’s not just playing around trying to mess up your transmissions? He’s actually up there somewhere?”
“He’s already passed Voyager 2 and 1. No doubt about it.”
“And what makes you think it’s him?”
“Oh it’s J.T. alright, no question.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s been asking for you.”
2
J.T. Waylon had been one of my roommates at Caltech in 1973. We lived in a quad along with Pushpak and another, very quiet Indian student named Iri.
J.T. was a small, combustible sort of guy from Texas. He had wiry black curls which he allowed to grow out a few extra inches in defiance of his father, a Marine officer.
Fall of our freshman year, I suggested we form an intramural flag football team along with some guys on our wing. Iri didn’t care much for sports and took a rain check, Pushpak had never watched American football but was willing to try new things, but J.T. really went overboard and turned the games into serious business. He insisted on calling me “Coach,” a habit that stuck with him afterwards. We played five or six games, losing them all except the last one, in which J.T. was the star, rushing for three long touchdowns and actually spiking the ball when he scored.
We heard about that game from J.T. for a year afterwards. Then we all went our separate ways, Pushpak and I remaining roommates, J.T. and Iri moving into single apartments.
Despite his athletic pretensions, J.T. was a dead-serious, enthusiastic student. Whenever I bumped into him later, he was always in the middle of some new project.
Pushpak told me once that J.T. was becoming influenced by the Thecans, a radical campus group, but I assumed this would turn out to be another one of his temporary phases.
And then, after a couple of years, we never heard from J.T. Waylon again.
3
Theca Theory (@ 1971-1976) held that the heliosheath, the theorized outer layer of the solar system, acted not only as a magnetic field, but as a time-space barrier as well. It was said to constrain inhabitants within a “solar realm,” while by contrast, interstellar space was diffuse. Any object leaving the solar system was believed to enter a whole other dimension.
Theca theorists, or Thecans, were at the core skeptics. One of their tenets was that the cosmos really wasn’t so vast after all. It only appeared so, to our shrunken perspective. Once we exited the constraining influence of the heliosphere, our minds would expand along with everything else and be capable of greater perception and understanding. Clock time would become meaningless, as would distances measured in light-”years.”
The early Seventies was a psychedelic, turbulent time, so it seemed inevitable that this kind of thinking would cross over from astrophysics into the popular imagination to form a kind of liberation theology. Thecans took their name from the outer sheath of a plant pollen sac, or insect pupa; the idea was that the heliosheath, and heliosphere as a whole, served as only temporary incubators for the human spirit.
The Thecans were extremists, protesting that the government’s entry into space threatened the integrity of an open frontier. They lobbied NASA to stop wasting taxpayer money running errands to the moon, to invest instead in technologies designed to free us all from the constraining influence of the sun.
Political commentators tended to write off the radicals as “Thecalistas,” but the Thecans appealed to many well-heeled anti-government groups and paramilitary organizations, gaining some formidable friends before dropping out of sight.
4
“We think J.T. said, ‘Made it past the Termination Shock...you wouldn’t believe the turbulence of those solar winds!’ Or something to that effect. The Thecans had access to Voyager technology and even spendier stuff, but those magnetic fields wreak havoc with transmissions.”
Pushpak had never left Caltech, working at the Deep Space Operations Center (DSOC) in Pasadena, where we were now. There were a couple of other interested parties in the conference room with us, too--military men.
“The second transmission, weeks later, was easier to reconstruct,” Pushpak continued. “This time J.T. said, ‘...sailing across those bow winds like I’m riding Kon-Tiki. It’s been thirty-five years, Coach, and supplies are low, but interstellar space is just ahead! Wa-hoo!’
“He’s not kidding about those supplies,” Pushpak added. “The Thecans were involved in the biosphere project, developing methods of cultivating plants and mycoproteins as sources of renewable oxygen and food, but J.T.’s craft can’t be much larger than a motor home, or we would’ve spotted it long ago.”
“I’m still trying to get my head around the idea that J.T., our J.T., has been the first human being to pass by all the planets, not to mention the Kuiper Belt, and has kept his mouth shut until now,” I said. “Can he really have lasted in space for three-and-a-half decades?”
“Highly improbable, but it appears to be so.”
If J.T. had a problem with the heliosphere keeping human beings confined, as did other Thecans, how claustrophobic must it have felt for him to be locked in a tiny ship crammed with supplies? How long could anyone last?
One of the military guys had his hand up now.
Pushpak nodded to him.
“Could he have been frozen in a state of suspended animation?”
“Not unless the Thecans had an advanced technology we don’t. It’s theoretically possible, yes. But J.T. was probably just trying to conserve as much power as possible for as long as possible and didn’t wish to risk a transmission.”
“That, or sending a man on a suicide mission might have seemed like bad PR to the Thecan group, which was striving to become more mainstream at the time,” I speculated, knowing Pushpak wasn’t really up on his American politics. “J.T. might’ve been under orders not to attempt communication until he was reasonably sure of achieving success.”
“The boy’s either a damn hero, or a damn fool. How does he ever expect to get back to Earth?”
Pushpak and I exchanged a glance.
5
“Does any of this make sense to you, Coach?”
It took me a few seconds to realize one of the military men was addressing me.
I winced at the name “Coach”, but answered him in kind. “He’s taking one for the team, sir. J.T. fervently believes just on the other side of that heliosphere something momentous will happen that will be to the benefit of all mankind to know.”
“What sort of thing?”
“He thinks time will slow or stop, and the perceiver will assume different proportions relative to the universe,” said Pushpak.
“What’s that?” said the other uniformed gentleman in the room.
“Passing into the interstellar medium might make you feel like a dry sponge suddenly thrown into water,” Pushpak offered. “You expand.”
“Or you are like a butterfly finally leaving a cocoon,” I added, falling back on the Thecan’s favorite analogy. “To a caterpillar, a tree might define the entire world. But in becoming a butterfly, an organism crosses a threshold. Its ne
w territory might span thousands of miles.
“It’s not that J.T. Waylon expects to be able to fly, or to develop superpowers,” I added hurriedly. “He just thinks he’ll have a more expansive view of things, a clearer spiritual vision.”
“And that’s worth thirty-five years of solitary confinement?” snorted the officer.
6
“How close is he now?” the other man in the room asked.
“It’s hard to say,” Pushpak replied. “J.T. was nearing the edge of the magnetic highway when we last heard from him. That’s the area where solar particles become less energized, while particles in interstellar space begin to exert stronger influence. At the point where the polarities shift, the magnetic highway ends, and interstellar space begins--or so the Thecan group fervently believed.”
Pushpak and I didn’t tell the men the hypothesis that the heliosphere defined the edge of the solar system was problematic. J.T. was by now twelve billion miles away, but a thousand times further out was the Oort Cloud, a ring of ice and debris and planetesimals presently thought to mark the outer-outer limits of the sun’s influence.
“Can we get a fix on him?”
“We have already done so. We are receiving a signal that is about twenty times greater than Voyager’s, fortunately. But that still is about a billion times weaker than the signal from your digital watch.”
“Well, keep on it!”
“Copy that,” said Pushpak, with just a hint of a smile.
“Because we intend to send him our own message, very shortly. Give us a couple of hours or so. We want to move on this whole thing very, very carefully.”
7
“Well, that went well,” I remarked.
“Could have been worse.”
“Have you tried to contact J.T. yet?”
“We’ve sent several messages, and oh yes, I even signed off one from both of us: ‘Congratulations, please keep us posted, Pushpak and Coach,’ that chatty sort of thing. It takes seventeen days for our Voyager signals to reach the Earth; so of course, the kind of two-way communication these guys are expecting is never going to happen.”
“It’s possible J.T. has already exited the heliosphere, and the news just hasn’t reached us yet?”
“Correct.”
The two men came back unexpectedly quickly, demanding to know more details about J.T.’s investors, just who these Thecans were, any affiliation with the former Soviet Union, etc.
I told them the group had not garnered any headlines that I was aware of for three decades, but mentioned names of a few prominent financiers and politicians with whom they had once been affiliated. One just happened to be the recently-retired Republican governor of Florida.
That got their attention. I felt reasonably sure, from this point forward, Pushpak and I would hear no further whispers about Commies.
Just for good measure, I tossed out the name of J.T. Waylon’s father, who had been a Marine colonel back when I met him in 1973.
The men were out of their chairs even faster, leaving the room to make further calls.
“They forgot to say, ‘Catch ya later,’” I said, after the conference door closed.
“Hush, professor,” Pushpak scolded.
8
Three hours later, Pushpak and I were eating our Korean-Mexican take-out and I was beginning to wonder what my presence at the DSOC could possibly accomplish. Perhaps Pushpak had heard the word “cold” instead of “Coach?” He shook his head. Maybe J.T. had said he was flying coach class? Pushpak didn’t even dignify that one with a reply.
Then I realized how harrowed-looking my old friend was. He’d probably had little sleep since the first transmissions began.
After lunch, Pushpak gave me and the others a tour, a tour I had been on before. In the control room, he played us back J.T.’s messages.
Creepy, to say the least. And with a strange remoteness that sounded mechanical and muffled, like a drone sending signals from a cave.
At this point, we were waiting for the National Security Advisor to arrive, as well as a “special guest,” whom I deduced might be J.T.’s father.
Pushpak was miserable, trying to steal a nap in his chair every time the two men stepped out, which was often. He wasn’t the sort to enjoy a formal production of any kind and dreaded having to go over and over the story with each new cast of dignitaries.
But the fewer in on the discovery at this point, the better--and so I remained his only back-up.
9
I hated to do it, but I shook Pushpak awake when I saw an elderly man being wheeled along the hallway outside the glass-walled office. The man was not in full uniform but wore a military dress coat over blue pajamas.
There were four stars on each of the shoulders.
I prodded Pushpak to lose his computer-geek slouch and stand at attention.
“Greetings, General Waylon,” I said, as J.T.’s father was wheeled through the door.
He looked up at me with a sharp gaze from under his turtle-lidded eyes.
“Who are these two?”
Pushpak introduced himself. He introduced me, too, making me wince when he said I taught physics for poets. He hastily added that both of us had been J.T.’s roommates in college.
The General was not pleased. “This hippie fiefdom was the worst thing that could have happened to my boy. I raised him to be disciplined, not to go chasing wild ideas.”
We were shamed into silence by his tone, more so than by any lingering guilt we could have felt over being part of some conspiracy to blow J.T.’s mind.
“I understand you’ve received some messages from him lately?”
This time Pushpak’s recitation was crisp and clear, and I was glad for it.
“What’s that J.T. said again? Louder, boy, I’m hard of hearing.”
“He said, ‘It’s been thirty-five years, Coach.’”
The General now looked a little distracted. “Yes, yes it has,” he muttered.
10
J.T. was using Channel 18, the same channel and frequency as Voyager, knowing it would be readily picked up by the monitors at the DSOC. When Pushpak received a summons from his crew that the transmissions had resumed, we all excitedly headed off to the control room.
As we entered the room it was quite startling to hear J.T.’s words being broadcast, and it took me awhile to remember he was responding to an earlier message of Pushpak’s.
TRANSMISSION: “You can’t really mean Pushpak my old roommate, and you’ve brought Coach? Coach, I’m glad you’re alive to see this.” End transmission.
It took the full thirty seconds between messages to explain to General Waylon and the officers that J.T.’s voice was not live.
TRANSMISSION: “I know I was a disappointment to you, Coach. But please know I’ve dedicated my life to serving humanity in one small way.” End transmission.
I felt a very awkward silence all around me, until I noticed the General’s eyes becoming watery. He mumbled something about little J.T. always begging to try out for his football team.
Then I understood. I bent down and whispered to the General, “I bet he always called you ‘Coach,’ didn’t he?”
The old man nodded, suddenly looking forlorn in his pajamas.
11
TRANSMISSION: “The polarities have reversed! This time I know it’s not just another bubble. I’m about to cross the goal line!” End transmission.
“I want to see my boy,” the General said, very distinctly.
Some techs had been scrambling around us ever since we arrived.
“Why not, let’s try,” said Pushpak, speaking indirectly to his crew.
TRANSMISSION: “It does feel...different. Like a rope that’s been holding you back your whole life going slack. Like you could...” [transmission interrupted].
“We were able to record the images from J.T.’s previous radio signals, so we can dial it back,” said Pushpak, opening up another screen and positioning a cursor over a small blue oval
. “Light travels much faster than sound,” he added, “so these latest messages from J.T. are arriving perhaps ten days after our last stored video.”
We all stared fixedly at the blue oval, caught up in the illusion that J.T. was speaking to us directly.
12
TRANSMISSION: “...can’t see anything out of this tiny screen now. Time to open the hatch and shed this metal shell of a...” [transmission interrupted].
“What does he think he’s doing?” one of the officers snapped.
“That wasn’t a hypothetical,” the man repeated when no one answered him.
I looked at General Waylon and said, more to him than to anyone else, “He’s fulfilling his destiny. J.T. Waylon is the first human being to travel to interstellar space.”
The General gave a little half smile.
FINAL TRANSMISSION: “Signing off, Coach. Been a long ride! We’re all children of the sun, but ready to take a big step forward...” End transmission.
We watched in silence, riveted to the dot on the screen which marked the locus of J.T.’s final message.
The blue dot was supplanted by a larger red burst, like one firework following another.
And then we were seeing only a cosmic ocean of stars.
“My son was a great man,” the General marveled.
Author Bio
M.V. Montgomery is a professor at Life University in Atlanta. His most recent books are Beyond the Pale (2013) and A Dictionary of Animal Symbols (2014). His website is mvmontgomery.wordpress.com.
THE CHALLENGE
by Stoney M. Setzer
Nobody paid the stranger too much attention when he walked into the saloon from the dusty street. He walked through the swinging doors casually, neither too timid nor too bold, as if he had been here several times before. It was this calm demeanor that allowed him to escape everyone’s notice--that is, until he scaled a barstool to stand on top of the bar. “I’m looking for Jonathan Bain!” he announced.
In the blink of an eye, silence replaced the saloon’s usual din, and all of the eyes that had failed to observe the stranger only moments ago were now riveted upon him. Men had called Bain out before, but they had all been cut from the same cloth as Bain himself: Gunslingers with a lean, mean look about them, young and itching to prove themselves against an equal competitor. None of them, however, were equal to Bain. The rash of tombstones in the cemetery in the last year bore witness to his superiority.
This man couldn’t have been more unlike the gunslingers. His short, chubby build made it a wonder that he was able to get atop the bar in the first place, and he was older than anyone else in the saloon except for George the bartender. Rather than calling out Bain, he looked as if he should have been teaching school back East somewhere. In a word, he looked soft.
“Jonathan Bain!” he repeated. “Is he here?”
“Who wants to know?” retorted a gravelly voice from a table at the back of the saloon. From a chair facing the door stood a tall, slender man dressed in black from head to toe. The clothes were obviously intended to create an intimidating effect of death personified, but nothing could have been scarier than the eyes of Jonathan Bain. They were dark and cold, as if he were somehow missing some spark of life that everyone else possessed. Getting unnerved by those eyes had been the beginning of the end for many a deceased challenger.
Bain was now training those eyes on the newcomer, trying to intimidate him. This time, however, it wasn’t working. The stranger just grinned down at him. “Mr. Bain, please allow me to introduce myself. I’m Professor James Wright. Pleased to meet you, sir.” He proffered his hand, only to have his courtesy go unreturned. If it fazed him at all, he hid it well.
“What do you want?” Bain demanded. He was glaring at Wright even harder now, aiming his eyes as if they were pistols. Nobody had ever held up so well under that gaze before.
Shaking his head, Wright chuckled slightly. “What does anybody want when they seek you out, Mr. Bain? I want to challenge you!”
Now every eye went to Bain, looking for his reaction. Bain stared at Wright in disbelief for a moment before throwing his head back and roaring with laughter. After a nervous second or two, the other patrons joined in his laughter. “You want to challenge me?” Bain howled. “You’ll be dead before you get your hand on your gun!”
“Oh, I’m not talking about a duel, Mr. Bain,” Wright replied, yelling to make himself heard. “I want to give you a real challenge.”
Slowly the laughter died down as everyone became interested in Wright again. It was obvious that he was reveling in the moment. “See, Mr. Bain, nobody can challenge you with a gun, can they? ‘The devil’s own,’ isn’t that what they call you?”
“That sounds about right,” interjected Sheriff Eli Farr, who had been sitting in a corner table with a mostly full liquor bottle. Since Bain had come along and taken over, Farr had taken to spending less time at the jailhouse in favor of the saloon. It was as if the gunslinger had killed something inside the sheriff without firing a single shot.
“Now, I have a more, shall we say, interesting test in mind,” Wright continued. “Can we speak privately?”
“Why? Are you afraid to do it in here in front of everybody?” Bain snapped.
“No, but you might be,” Wright countered. “There’s safety in numbers, Mr. Bain. Let’s see if you’re brave enough to talk to me somewhere a little less safe. Who knows, you might be glad you did.”
Everyone’s eyes went back to Bain, who was beginning to sweat. “What is this, some kind of a trap?”
Wright opened his jacket. “As you can see, I’m quite unarmed. Feel free to bring your gun with you if you don’t trust me.”
+
They were in the alley between the saloon and the general store, the nearest place that could not be seen from the saloon windows. Bain began, “Now, listen here, I don’t know what you’re...”
“I know your secret, Mr. Bain,” Wright interrupted.
The gunslinger’s eyes widened with a fear no one in the town had ever seen. “You’re bluffing,” was all he could say.
“Bluffing! Such an interesting response! You don’t deny that you have a secret, but instead you accuse me of not really knowing it.” Wright’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve known for quite a while now that this day was coming, haven’t you?” He pointed toward Bain’s holster. “That’s no ordinary shooting iron, now is it?”
“You’re about to find out!” Bain reached for his pistol, only to come up empty-handed. He looked down at his hip to see that his holster was empty. “What the...?”
“Looking for this?” Wright taunted. He held Bain’s pistol, the barrel pointed at the sky instead of at the gunslinger.
“How did you get that?” Bain demanded, stepping forward.
“You might not want to do that,” Wright chided. “After all, we both know what makes this gun so special, don’t we? Just because I’m not pointing it at you doesn’t mean you’re safe does it? All I have to do is think about where I want the bullet to go, and it gets there no matter where the barrel is pointed, right?”
Bain didn’t say a word; he didn’t have to. Wright chuckled. “See, Mr. Bain, one of my colleagues is the man who sold you this weapon. To hear him tell it, you’re a really lousy shot with a normal gun. But with this, you’re the terror of the territory, as it were. I wonder what would happen to you if you had to face your next challenger without this. You’d be a dead man, wouldn’t you?”
After a long pause, Bain nodded. “What is it you want?”
“I want to see how brave you are without your little helper here. I’m sure you’re familiar with the town cemetery? You’ve sent enough men there, haven’t you?”
“What of it?”
“Suppose you show just how brave you really are by spending the entire night in the cemetery...without your gun, of course. You can have a knife if you wish, but no gun. I’ll stand guard at the gate to make sure you don’t try to leave, and if you want another wit
ness, that’s fine.”
“So what?” Bain scoffed. “It’s just a cemetery. Nothing in there but dead folks. So what are the stakes?”
“If you can’t make it through the night, I keep this special gun for myself, and then you’re on your own from then forward.”
Bain tried to maintain a poker face, but he couldn’t keep the worry out of his eyes or the tremor from his voice. “And if I do?”
“Then I give the gun back to you, and you can do as you please. If you want to put a bullet between my eyes after that, then you go right ahead.”
“I ought to.”
“So do you accept my challenge, then?”
“What if I don’t?”
“You did want this gun back, didn’t you?” Wright mocked.
+
“I need to know that this isn’t a double-cross,” Bain whispered across the split-rail fence of the cemetery as Sheriff Farr approached in the distance. “I still don’t know how you got it off of me in the first place, but I don’t trust you.”
“That was a mere matter of slight of hand, something a stage performer might do,” Wright assured him. “But if it makes you happy, I’ll prove it to you. I’m going to make the sign over the gate swing.” With that, Wright cocked the hammer, pointed away from the sign, squeezed the trigger...
...And pointed triumphantly at the sign, which swung from the bullet’s impact. “Satisfied?”
“I want to see you put it in Farr’s hands,” Bain snarled as the sheriff approached.
“But of course,” Wright smiled as he handed the weapon over to Farr. “On your honor, Sheriff, I direct you to hand this back to Bain if and only if he stays in the cemetery till sun-up. You’ll guard the other side of the cemetery, won’t you?”
“Yeah,” Farr replied. He walked around the enclosure, motioning for Bain to follow. “You really want to trust me to do this? How do you know I won’t take advantage of you being unarmed and kill you now?”
Bain smirked. “Wouldn’t be the first time you’ve gunned down an unarmed man, now would it? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten old Clint Reed?”
Farr’s lips tightened, and he began to shake a little. “You won’t let me forget,” he whispered. “Never mind that he was a wanted criminal, a thief and a murderer.”
“And yet you waited till he was drunk and unarmed to shoot him--in the back, I might add.” Bain locked eyes with the lawman. “For that matter, nobody did ever find that money he stole, did they?” he asked pointedly.
“I let you have the run of this town because you have that on me. Maybe I’m sick of it. Maybe this is my chance to make sure you never tell a soul.”
“Well, Sheriff. Your memory is getting terrible these days. How many times have I told you that someone else already knows? I’ve already spoken to my little songbird today. If you shoot me, then that songbird is gonna sing. If you want that secret kept, you’d better not double-cross me.”
+
As darkness fell over the cemetery and the time dragged along, Bain began to pace. He could kick himself for agreeing to go along with this hogwash. What would spending a night in the graveyard prove, anyway? It would be different if he were some sort of a superstitious fool. To Bain, it was just a parcel of land, nothing more. The fact that there just happened to be corpses buried six feet beneath made no difference.
What did bother him, however, was Wright. Bain’s formal schooling was short-lived, but he was a shrewd judge of character; his manipulation of Sheriff Farr was a prime example. All of his success in his life of crime had been born of his knack for reading a man. That knack told him something about Wright wasn’t right.