We put down on the very same launch apron used for departure so many months before. It had rained during the night and there were patches of water on the tarmac. The buildings and greenery glistened in the morning light. The air was cool without wind. With the rear airlock hatch open and the loading ramp deployed, the whine of the Griffin’s engines wound down. I secretly had a touch of regret in knowing they would not restart any time soon.
It was 06:10 EST. There was much more of a reception than any of us expected. Dignitaries in formal wear, Genesis people in great numbers, a few family members who had traveled long distances to be there. A surprisingly large crowd behind them even topped by a few welcome back banners. It was such a boisterous ceremony, I was grateful they had not hired a band. We had to stand on the tarmac and endure unnecessary people at the portable podium. We were quietly taken aside and told how the Akuma crew had been placed in induced comas in a cryogenics facility while doctors perfected their recovery treatment. In a curious coincidence, the last of them had been awakened in just the past month. They had recovered completely. Captain Mako Hayashi had also made a full recovery, her memory more intact than the others as a result of her self-imposed isolation in an Akuma cold-storage locker. Recovery of the Akuma crew had dominated the news for the past several weeks. Between approvals of our mission from the Nasebian ambassador and delayed accolades related to the Akuma, our return was too much of a political wildcard for politicians to ignore.
When the torture of it finally whimpered to a close, there were no shuttles to take us home. There were limousines. The most expensive floater limos I had ever seen. No tires, no suspension, gravity repulse ride. The crew fled each other like fleas off a sprayed dog. In my limo was a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice with a card attached.
‘I’ll give you a day or two in gravity, but be ready. I’m coming, -Nira.’
There was to be no debriefing. The Nasebians would provide any debriefing information required. We were quietly told never to mention Earth II or anything related to it. At the time, I could have cared less. My primary thought was for a hot whirlpool soak and a stiff drink. The rest of the crew did not disclose their destinations. We did not even say goodbye. That’s not what it was. Most of them planned to head out of state immediately. It’s not so much that you actually want to be that far away from your former crewmates. It’s more that you wish to prove to yourself that you can get that far away from your former crewmates.
The cover on the Vette had such a layer of dust I had to roll it up slowly. She glistened black at me and dared me to the open road. I patted the glass top and resigned myself to a beer and bed.
The next afternoon I drove to Genesis to pick up a few things left behind. At the gate a different guard waved me in. To my surprise, RJ sat in the corner of my office, his feet propped up on a chair drinking steaming black coffee, staring at a tablet magazine article about the Akuma.
“You wouldn’t believe what just happened to me,” he said, without looking up.
“RJ, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“Aren’t you planning on living in the woods or something for a while?”
“Yep. Forever Florida. Gonna do some volunteer work there with the animals. Get some dirt under my fingernails. Eat wild radishes. Probably catch a cold. Chase naturalist women, sit around a campfire and tell tall tales.”
“So why are you here?”
“Thought I’d stop in on my way back from the doctor’s.”
“Which doctor is that?”
“The medical report you brought back from the place we never were. I took it to my primary care guy. He had a lot of trouble with the strange terminology. I told him it was a bad translation from a foreign language. He called in his associates. They gradually deciphered it. They became alarmed. Brain scans needed to be run right away. They were probably misinterpreting the data. They ran the scans right there in the MD’s office. They became even more alarmed. The patient began to be concerned. It was a tiny aneurysm waiting to happen in the worst possible place. A beam treatment needed to be done immediately. They made the patient take an ambulance. Hundreds of light years out and back and I wasn’t allowed to drive five miles to the hospital. The treatment took forty-five minutes including the undressing and dressing. A routine procedure. The area in question could have ruptured at any time. The hi-res scans showed no other problems. The doctors celebrated their intervention and went to lunch with several of the female scanner technicians. They forgot to tell me I could leave, but, here I am. So, how’s your day been going?”
“Jesus, RJ.”
“Played a part in all of that, I have no doubt. What about you? Any life changing events scheduled?”
“Nira is on her way.”
“Well, that answers that. There’s something else I probably shouldn’t tell you.”
“Oh no. There’s more?”
“Well, do you want to know or not?”
“Go ahead. It’s too late now.”
“Mr. Bernard Porre is in Julia’s office.”
“Oh shit! Do I have time to sneak out?”
“Nope. He’s here to see you. He’d just follow you like a stray dog.”
“I’d prefer the dog.”
Just then, there was a timid tap at my door. It was Bernard. He opened and slid inside, forcing his briefcase through as the door tried to close, then brushing off his too-blue Nehru suit jacket, becoming completely distracted with it when it was not to his liking, and finally looking up at us.
“Mr. Tarn. Mr. Smith.”
“Mr. Porre. How is it we are graced with your presence?”
He began to say something but became distracted with his suit jacket again. Finally, he refocused. “Gentleman, greetings and salutations. I require just a few moments of your time, Mr. Tarn, if you have that much available. Mr. Smith, you are welcome to remain.”
“Bernard, on your last visit you promised you would leave forever.”
“Mr. Tarn, the humiliation is mine. Not only must I endure the aberrance of your presence yet again, to make my indignation complete I must also present you with a reward. Can there be a crueler fate for anyone? I ask you that.”
“Reward me? You’re here to reward me? How can your being here in any way be considered a reward?”
“I wish only to take my leave of you. To be rid of me, you need only to sign this receipt.” He pulled out a stack of printouts stapled together and dropped them onto the desk in front of me.
“Just the last page, please.”
“Paper? You’re using paper for this? You’re asking me to sign a paper document?”
“Bravo!” piped RJ.
“Bernard, there must be two dozen pages here.”
“Twenty-seven to be exact. They just say that you accept delivery and will comply with all appropriate conditions.”
“I have to read all twenty-seven pages of this?”
“Only if you wish me to remain with you for that long. If you simply sign it, I shall depart with vigor.”
“God, you’re good at getting people to do things they don’t want to, Bernard.”
“It is a gift, I think.”
I grumbled and signed. Bernard said nothing. He drew a small box from his briefcase and slid it across my desk. It looked like a gift box for a watch. This had to be the gold watch ceremony. I popped it open and stared inquisitively. “There’s been some mistake here, I think. These are the flight deck keys to the Griffin. Oh, I get it. This is a souvenir. But why all the paperwork, Bernard? Is this classified technology or something?”
“Oh, the indignation of it. It is a gift from our grateful Nasebian friends, Mr. Tarn. Like you, they made us an offer we could not refuse. We have a set of stellar drives in Washington now to study as we please, though we are not allowed to use the technology until such time as we can reproduce it. The condition was that the Griffin be transferred to you, with ground support as needed. An old han
ger near the VAB has been set aside. Though it pains me greatly to say it, the Griffin is there, at your disposal.”
“Are you saying I own the Griffin?”
“Please, I can barely tolerate the thought.”
“And I can go wherever I want?”
“Beyond the current Earth star charts, you will be required to file with a Nasebian agency for approval.”
“This is another joke. Like when you took the Vette’s lug nut key.”
“I do not know how you managed to recover that. The asteroid field I chose should have been dense enough to destroy that probe completely. It is yet another injurious neuron set in my mind that will fund my confusion about your undeserved successes for years to come.”
“I own the Griffin?”
“The agency may request your assistance from time to time. You are not obligated to accept, God forbid. The Nasebians have also instructed that you bring the Griffin to their Enuro service port some time within the next six months for installation of artificial gravity. They were not perfectly happy with the constraints you had to endure without it. They also may ask you for special assistance in the future and again you are not obligated to accept.”
“I own the Griffin?”
“It reminds me of something my wife once said.”
RJ interjected, “You have a wife?”
“It was when my youngest daughter returned from her fourteenth driver’s test, holding the signed certificate out for all to see. Can you imagine what my wife’s comment was, Mr. Tarn?”
“Bernard, I cannot imagine anything about your wife.”
She said, and I quote, “Oh my God, the airways will never be the same.”
He began to add something but paused to brush an errant ant off his trousers. “I now understand fully what she meant, Mr. Tarn. Handing you those spacecraft administrator keys, I can only think the galaxy will never be the same.”
I looked at RJ. He was staring wide-eyed, his coffee cup tipped, a small flow of coffee streaming down the side.
Bernard gathered up the documents from my desk and headed for the door. “Mr. Smith, how’s the Corvair?” He turned at the door to add something, thought better of it, waved the two of us off, and disappeared out.
RJ looked at me with coffee still dripping from the side of his cup. “Holy crap!”
My visit to Genesis was supposed to have been a quick stop, barely a footnote to the day. I headed back home with my mind in state of numbness. I could not process what had just happened. I parked the Vette in the garage and for no reason stood and watched the big door roll shut. Inside, I grabbed a bottle of bourbon, scooped ice into a glass and poured myself a stiff one, my hand shaking a small bit, overpowered by visions of the Griffin sitting in a hanger at KSC waiting for me. In my living room I snapped on a light and froze from a completely new kind of disbelief. There sitting on a recliner was Reeves ‘Doc’ Walker. He was smiling.
I had to brace myself against the arm of the couch. I tipped my drink and some of it ran onto the carpet. I rubbed my eyes with one hand and refocused, expecting him to disappear. He did not. He held up one hand and spoke, “You’re okay. It really is me.”
“What the hell?”
“I’ll explain. You’ll want to sit first.”
I took a belt of the bourbon and slowly sat without taking my eyes off him for fear he’d disappear.
“I’m not really here. I’m sitting in a control seat in the center of a humongous pyramid on Nasebia. Incredible, isn’t it?”
There was still a chance this was a hallucination. I sat with my glass still held near my mouth and tried to think of a way to test reality.
“I’ve got about thirty minutes before the Earth rotates outside the transmission window. But that’s plenty of time.”
“You weren’t killed on ZY627a?”
“Nope.”
“But I saw that thing capture you. You were submerged in slime and then you were gone. There was nothing we could do.”
“Yep. One second I was immersed in green crap, the next second I was standing on some kind of Nasebian transport pad, clean as a whistle.”
“A Nasebian ship? A Nasebian ship rescued you at the last minute?”
“More like the last second. The Nasebians secretly escorted you in stealth mode all the way to the void. If you don’t know they are there, you do not think about them and that’s less of an intrusion to them. The void was as far as they could go. It was the best they could do. They were monitoring our landing when the giant grasshopper showed up. Here’s the deal. When the Nasebians asked you to take this mission, to them that was like meddling in someone’s destiny. It’s very unusual for them to make that kind of request of a lower species like us. They could not allow my death or they would be responsible for a major screw up in my life’s timeline. When a human dies a whole bunch of complex science happens on levels we do not understand yet, and to interrupt that particular timeline is a really big deal, but that’s a whole other story. When the big grasshopper decided I was lunch, they pulled me out and brought me back to Nasebia. They could not return me to the Griffin or to Earth because that would be another violation of their rules. After all, the grasshopper won fair and square, right? To put me back on the Griffin would have conflicted with what naturally happened and they don’t do that. So, I get to live the rest of my life on Nasebia with the Nasebians. This place is one step away from heaven, by the way.”
“My God, Doc. That whole affair was a hurtful damned thing.”
“Yeah, sorry to put you through that, but it’s what happens sometimes when humans go exploring, eh?”
“But don’t Nasebians abhor being near humans?”
“Pretty much. Truth is they don’t like being next to each other all that much, either. The thing is, their auras, if I can use that term, have expanded so much over the centuries that they are in each other’s space even when they’re not in the same room. So all of us here on Nasebia sense each other all the time. Actual personal presence just makes it that much stronger. In a way, you are never alone on Nasebia. The other thing is, there’s a feeling of euphoria here all the time. So for me, it’s like living in a heavenly euphoria with a bunch of ghosts. But after experiencing that, nobody would want to leave. I sure don’t.”
“But how will you live?”
“I will be a new kind of emissary for them. I can provide them with a better way to communicate with humans. It’s not so much them needing to understand us, it’s us needing to understand them. Contacting you is my first official job. Otherwise, I’m here learning at my own pace, enjoying the hell out of myself. I can experience things here you cannot imagine.”
“Can I tell the rest of the crew about this?”
“Please do. Their life cycles were affected by my untimely demise. Knowing I’m more than okay is important for them.”
“Can I contact you if I need to?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact you can. Go through the agency's Extraglobal Affairs group. You and the rest of the crew will be warmly received. Tell them you are requesting a contact. I’ll pop up somewhere convenient as soon as I’m able.”
I realized I was still holding the bourbon near my mouth. I took a drink and lowered my hand. “We did okay with the Akuma, didn’t we?”
“Yes. We did. A really good mark in time, as they would say. Another thing, the Earth II mission turned out to be a really big deal here. The Nasebians did not know about Amoura. When they got wind of a half-Human half-Nasebian hybrid coming it was the first time I’ve seen them show excitement. She will take over Earth’s galactic management. It will be a big status boost for Earth.”
“What about Earth II?”
“It’s being sorted out. It’s so far away it’s a challenge, and that area of space is a bit incompatible with Nasebian spiritual biology. They are compelled to oversee it, though. It’s Amoura’s home. There will be a plan. They don’t consider anything to be an accident, but they seem to still be trying to fit this into
the scheme of life. There is also the matter of Capal. I have not been able to understand their feelings about him. Sometimes I get the impression he’s a rebel, but that doesn’t really fit.”
“Doc, there’s one thing I’d like to know. Do the Nasebians believe in God?”
“Ah, such a good question, Adrian. You sure wouldn’t want to ask them that and have the answer directly downloaded into your brain, would you? It’s not a question of belief with the Nasebians. God is a fact to them. God is defined as the basic laws of the universe or cosmos. God is everything that existed the instant before the Big Bang took place. They contend that all humans believe in God, too. If you believe you are real and alive, then by default you must believe that the universe and everything around you is real, therefore you believe in God. They also concede some humans do not believe God is intelligent, that God is just some natural laws at work. I’ve struggled to get a handle on their discourse about that. It’s a mind-bender. In studying it I am reminded of something I once read in a very old science fiction B-novel. It went like this: can a desert completely void of water give birth to a garden, and can a universe completely void of intelligence give birth to billions of intellects?”
“Doc, I’m glad I didn’t lose you.”
“I’m just about out of time here. One thing, Adrian. I’m not afraid of people anymore. I understand now that the mix of immature souls and mature souls is the fastest way for both to learn. Remember to keep an eye on the airspeed indicator, buddy. I’ll see you around.”
And he was gone. The room suddenly felt empty. My glass of bourbon was almost empty, most having run out onto the floor, the ice nearly melted. I walked dazed back into the kitchen and made a new drink, deciding I needed it even more now.
In the days that followed, I turned Paris’ memory module over to the Office of Extraglobal Affairs. Three weeks after our landing text messages began flying around about a one-month reunion for the Griffin crew. Wilson had taken an apartment in Satellite Beach, as near as he could get to Heidi’s. Shelly bought a condo on Merritt Island. Erin returned home to her cat and parents, apparently in that order. Danica flew herself home in a borrowed antique T38 trainer jet. RJ was still camping out at Forever Florida.
On the day of our reunion, Nira and I cruised south on A1A until the turnoff for Heidi’s came into view. The place was busy. I had to park in the rear to find a safe spot for the Vette’s paint job. As I locked the car, RJ’s faded blue Corvair pulled in and parked next to us. He got out wearing baggy jeans, worn work shoes, and a T-shirt that read ‘Back To Analog’. It made me feel like my white dress shirt, tan sports jacket, and black slacks were overdress. Nira just laughed. A bouncer greeted us at the door, a man who looked like he could handle himself. No cover charge for the Griffin crew.
They had set up a big table in a far corner. Danica and Erin had come in on the same connecting flight. They were already seated and saw us through the noisy crowd. They held up wine glasses as we approached and clinked them. Danica was in jeans with a white cotton blouse covered by an open gray cardigan sweater. Shelly had chosen a light tan business-styled suit with a ruffled white blouse. Erin wore a turtle-necked blue and black flowered dress that stopped above the knee. We arrived at the table as Wilson emerged from the crowd holding two amber beer bottles. He craned his neck against the collar of his black turtleneck and worked his way back into his seat where he raised a bottle to us. “Captain Nemo and the Farmer In The Dell, escorted by the Princess of Mars, glad you could join us.” Jeannie, in her server outfit, pushed in and plunked drinks down in front of us, then stood behind Wilson resting her hands on his shoulders.
We took seats and our table quieted. We looked at each other with silent affection that can only be understood after months of exotic confinement together. It is a combination of family and friendship, and when danger has been a strong part of the experience, that friendship becomes tempered like the heated, folded blade of a tuned Excalibur. It will not break.
RJ raised his glass. “Ladies and Gentleman, let us begin with a toast to Doc, a good friend not with us today.”
They quietly raised their drinks, called out in agreement, but before they could seal the toast, I held up one hand and said, “Wait!”
They paused and looked at me with questioning stares. I motioned them to put their drinks back down. I leaned forward, and as best I could, told them the epilog of Reeves ‘Doc’ Walker, the man who had so unexpectedly greeted me just days before in my living room. As the story unfolded, they became speechless. Erin wiped a tear away. Wilson sat with his head cocked to one side fearing it was all a bad joke. Danica looked at me with threatening eyes as if to warn it had better not be. RJ remained expressionless. Shelly, eyes wide, held one hand over her mouth. I finished up by telling them if anyone had any doubts they too could get in touch through the agency’s Extraglobal Affairs office.
The silence remained heavy. They continued to stare as if there might be more. RJ broke the spell. He raised his glass and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, to friends not lost.”
One by one they joined the toast. We clinked our drinks and sat back, relaxing from the effects of surprise.
Erin was next. “I would like to propose one for Mr. Paris Denard. A man who traveled farther than anyone ever has to get back home.”
We toasted in agreement once more. The celebration broke up into smaller conversations that spread around the table. As the night wore on, the stigma of having been cooped up together for too long gradually faded away. We became a fresh crew again. Some of us were enjoying the drinks too much. RJ and I remained respectable. At one point, the owner came in a back door and waved. I grabbed Jeannie and told her I wanted to speak to him to be sure things were okay between us. She escorted RJ and I over and introduced us over the crowd noise.
It turned out he was an avid Griffin fan. There were no hard feelings from our last visit. No credits were needed. There was one thing we could do for him however: a picture of the Griffin crew together, signed by each of us. I explained we’d be glad to do that but no such picture existed. He said tonight was the perfect time to take one. He could hang the only photo of the Griffin crew, signed by all of them. It would be a treasure. We agreed. We shook hands. He lifted the bar to go find his camera, but was suddenly stopped by the sound of glass breaking, followed by Wilson’s booming voice above the crowd noise.
“Now I don’t want any trouble!”
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