“That’s it, Adrian. We’ve finished scanning both moons. No outposts. Nothing artificial. Same with the planet’s orbital corridors. No satellites, no manmade objects, at least down to the sizes we are able to detect at this distance. There are cities, and a lot of them. No frequency modulation, nothing more sophisticated than A.M. radio, low-grade television, and short wave. There is some primitive radar emission. Until we get closer that’s the best we can do.”
“Radar emissions? How broad?”
“Strictly elementary. Surface scans. Only a few areas. Nothing that could bounce off us on orbit.”
“An inhabited planet using the English language. You’re still getting hits on the Nasebian materials scans?”
“As strong as ever. All of this has to be related to the Nasebian ship somehow, but we need orbit for a closer look.”
“And you’re absolutely sure they can’t detect us?”
“Absolutely.”
I held to the ceiling and stared down at the engineering displays. Danica looked back from the pilot seat, waiting for instructions.
“Dan, go ahead and drop us behind the closest moon. Keep us in shadow.”
“With pleasure, Commander. All personnel, strap in for a microburst of stellar in one minute.”
I glided into the copilot seat as she set up. She tapped in her coordinates, hit the engage button, and brought us in a little too close, as usual. This time I approved. Someone in back gasped at the crescent of rugged, gray moon surface outside his portal. Using the OMS engines we gently nudged up to the horizon, peering across space at a complex, colorful planet rotating on its axis, transitioning surface into the shadow of terminator, sunlight on the dayside, the incongruous geometry of modest artificial lights on the night side where big oceans left big dark spots.
“My gosh, what have we found here?” said Shelly, appearing over our heads.
It took RJ only a few minutes. “Nothing artificial orbiting. No manmade objects, whatsoever. No space tracking detection radar. We can translate to orbit without being observed.”
I let out a sigh of apprehension, and looked back at RJ. “Again, are you sure?”
He nodded.
“Danica, jump us in, then drop to a high orbit, but not synchronous. Let’s take a few turns around and see. Remain ready to break away at any time in case things are not what they appear.”
Even that close it still required a microburst from the stellar drives. Once there, Danica did not wait for anyone to unbuckle. She switched to OMS and gracefully parked Griffin high enough to avoid the one-in-a-million chance of a telescope picking us up. We aligned on orbit and immediately the entire crew was plastered to the planet side of the spacecraft, staring down with binocs. Too few portals caused occasional grumbling. RJ and Wilson kept working intently at their engineering stations with half a dozen of their displays showing the planet’s surface. The view out the front windows was even more captivating: a diverse topography below, a crowded, colorful spacescape all around.
I rubbed my face with both hands and tried to convince myself everything was under control. I tapped the intercom button. “Okay everyone; remember this is not a sightseeing expedition. As you study what’s below, begin making mental notes. Use the handheld for areas of special interest. We need to know everything we can about what’s down there. We’ll complete a couple orbits and then meet around the table and compare what we’ve learned. Tarn out.”
Not one of them came forward or responded. I wondered if they had heard me at all. Even Danica appeared distracted by the secret world scrolling by below us. I had to wave the on-orbit procedures list to get her attention. Her eyes gradually refocused and a smile surfaced. “Wow!” she said. “An undiscovered people down there!”
When the spacecraft was settled in I placed one hand on Danica’s shoulder and said, “You have the spacecraft.” It was an unnecessary formality except to assure sobriety on the flight deck.
“I have the spacecraft,” she replied dutifully.
Back at the engineering stations RJ and Wilson had no less than four of their monitors showing radiological surface scans. The screens looked like weather radar sweeps, but in actuality the beams were searching for specific materials used by Nasebian spacecraft. Half a dozen other displays were showing magnified down-looking camera views.
In the habitat area I couldn’t get a window. I pulled myself into a seat at the table and set the wall display screen to the best-magnified view. Gray buildings and skyscrapers passing by. Busy traffic on paved highways. What looked like an open-air stadium.
RJ called out, “There are aircraft! Propeller driven. Nothing above twenty-five thousand that I’ve seen so far.”
Farmland. Populated beaches. As we passed into night, sporadic city and township lights. An airport rotating beacon. Low altitude lightning. A few faint lights over black ocean. Islands with more lights. Back into daylight, steep brown and green snow-capped mountains with trails cut across them. A seaport with large and small vessels at dock.
I had to put the brakes on my mind to stop it from overloading. My contrived expectation of searching some barren celestial rocks for the undisturbed two-thousand year old wreckage of a Nasebian spacecraft, and perhaps with luck finding the priceless Udjat within the wreckage, seemed to have slipped away. Maybe there was still a chance it was not down on this aberrant planet in the middle of dizzying unexplored space, but the odds were against me.
We could not make first contact. If these people believed they were the only-children of the universe as so many naive earthlings had for so long, destroying that security blanket was guaranteed to do widespread harm. Even to this day some groups on Earth refused to accept that any other intelligent species exist, and they adjust their isolation as necessary to preserve their ostrich hole.
We would now have to search a heavily populated planet without calling attention to ourselves. We were probably about to become actors in a strange, real life play: aliens among them. How many times Earth people had laughed and ridiculed that notion. It was as though every Trekker and Trekkie from the past was now staring back in time exclaiming “See!”
Even after the second orbit I had to drag them from the windows. It took a while. We sat around the oval table with pilot Danica piped in on a headset and display screen. Some of them had photos printed on mag-paper plastered to the tabletop. There was too much low-level conversation going on between some of them. Everyone wanted to speak first.
“Okay, let’s get started. RJ and Wilson, you guys have the most. Let’s start with you.”
RJ began. “Well, as we’ve all seen, black and white television, short wave, A.M. radio. Their only radar is military based. There is a significant military presence, but the radar stations are few and far between. Our scans were interfering with it on every pass, but it was only momentary, nothing that alerted them. There are no computers on the planet that we can see. This is a pre-computer civilization. No smart phones or long-range communicators. No satellites of any kind. No evidence of a space program at all. We do not have a population estimate yet because it is too spread out, but there are metropolis-level cities and large industrial areas. It does not appear they have jet engines, but there’s quite a bit of air travel. We have not isolated the Nasebian signature yet, but we’re scanning for anything down to the size of a matchbook, so it’ll take several days just to cover 80% of the planet. To sum it up, the closest comparison I can make is we are looking at a 1940’s, 1950’s Earth.”
It left a restrained silence. I looked at Wilson. He spoke solemnly. “There has been war. There have been some references to it on the broadcasts. Looking specifically for signs of it you can find some areas that still look bombed out, and just abandoned. In other areas, you can see where they’re still rebuilding. It appears it was a big conflict, comparable to WW2. I’d guess it’s been over for ten years or so. There’s still a lot of military assets down there but no indication of fighting.”
Shelly, sitting nex
t to Wilson, cut in. “It seems pretty peaceful down there to me. There are trolleys and streetcars, and steam locomotives. I’ve been monitoring their broadcasts, mostly. Some of it is pretty funny. It’s a post-war kind of starched-shirt mentality, everyone trying to be prim and proper. You can’t get too much out of the old fashioned sitcoms they put on. There are advertisements in between for cars and household items. They smoke cigarettes as though it’s a healthy thing. But there are subtle things missing.”
RJ was engrossed. “Like what?”
“For one thing, there are cowboy style shows but never ever a reference to Indians. I do not believe this planet ever supported Native Americans. On the other hand, I have seen Orientals and other diverse ethnic groups, although some cultures are missing entirely. There are horses here, but they have stubby horns on top of their heads. Dogs look more like wolves than dogs. Most of the animal species are similar to Earth’s, only with noticeable differences. People, on the other hand, appear to be identical to us. And, as you’ve already heard, the language is English. There have been no references to any other languages at all, but many, many words are slang, or simply mispronounced so it’s tricky. Since the animal life has differences to what we see on Earth but the people appear to be identical, that begs the question were humans from Earth brought here at some point to seed the planet?”
RJ nodded. “That has to be considered.”
Erin said, “I for one, would like to know how this planet came to be called Earth, that’s for sure.”
“Another good one,” remarked Shelly.
Paris leaned forward in his seat to get our attention. “That is the key. Something has happened here we do not yet understand. It is even more intriguing than any of you even realize. Look at these.” He slid two eight by ten photos across the table for all to see. On them were extreme close up images of two large pyramids. They looked familiar. “These are on the thirty-degree north latitude near the bank of a large river. The place is forest covered, surrounded by high plateaus. The pyramids are similar in size and design to the Cheops pyramids in Egypt, which also happen to be approximately on the same latitude. They are old. Commander, I want your permission to use the IR cameras to get a look inside these. If the interiors are the same as Earth’s, that will tell us something about the history of this planet.”
“You can see inside them with infrared?”
“I can with IRAI.”
“And what will that tell us?”
“If the interior of the largest one is the same as Earth’s Cheops pyramid, it will mean there are parallels between the history of this planet and that of Earth...”
Wilson asked, “Care to elaborate?”
“Earth’s Cheops pyramid is complex. There are many ancient pyramids on Earth, but none like Cheops. If the large pyramid we are seeing down there has an interior similar to Cheops, it would suggest that the history of this planet was deliberately made to follow that of Earth, at least in some ways.”
RJ raised one hand. “What if the pyramid down there is older than the one on Earth?”
“That’s a legitimate possibility. But either way it would not be coincidence. It would be a clue to unraveling what has happened here. It would mean the planet wasn’t simply seeded with humans, if that’s actually the case. The people here weren’t left to develop their own history. A history was provided for them.”
“Why would anyone do that?” asked Wilson.
“A dozen possible reasons,” said RJ. “If you wanted to experiment with history to see how certain milestones could have gone differently. Or, if you wanted a reenactment of something that happened to understand it better. Or, to test ways of controlling certain types of events. I can think of quite a few reasons to control something in this way.”
Shelly added, “In the laboratory we do the same thing with cell growth. We alter the conditions of growth to see what the results will be. This Earth could be a giant laboratory.”
Erin raised one hand. “Everyone, we’re piling up variables. We do not know that this planet was seeded at all. We do not know if there has actually been manipulation of events. We’re theorizing using assumed facts. It’s a bad way to make science.”
I nodded. “Erin is right. We’re getting off the track. Right now, we need to keep gathering information. Anyone else have any actual input for this first discussion?”
No one spoke.
“Well, please proceed with the IR cameras, Paris. Let me know what you find. In the meantime, we need to wait until the Nasebian target scans are in. Everyone keep observing and documenting. We’ll do this again at the next shift change, or if something significant comes up.”
One by one, they pushed up and headed off in different directions. RJ remained seated, staring at me, tapping one finger on the tabletop. I gave in to his stare. “You left your gears turning.”
“You must already be thinking what I’m thinking,” he replied.
“You go first.”
“Our Nasebian friends give us coordinates to find a lost ship from two thousand years ago. At those very coordinates, in the most crowded part of space I’ve ever seen, we happen to find a planet called Earth with inhabitants who speak English.”
“You’re already convinced this is all a result of that ship visiting here?”
“I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“That’s my line.”
“So it is.”
“Still, it doesn’t change what we came here to do…really.”
“Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless those people down there have what we want.”
“I was hoping not to think about that just yet. Thank you, Mr. Sunshine.”
“Sorry. It’s what I do.”
“And so well, at that.”
“You aren’t kidding yourself are you? You know you’re going to have to go down there eventually.”
“Only if you find that ship or pieces thereof.”
“Guess I’d better get scanning. I don’t want Wilson getting all the credit.”
“Okay; and I’ll get busy fretting about it all.”
Chapter 35