“Okay, settle down, everybody,” The expansive figure of Hal Morrison dominated the room with his big frame and even bigger voice. “Quiet! Quiet, please! We are ready to start.”
The hubbub died down in response to the order and everyone obediently took their places. Hal flopped heavily into his chair, causing it to creak in complaint, caught Harrison’s eye and nodded. “Okay, you’re on.”
***
“And you are? “Harrison glances up testily from his notes, watery eyes peering over half-moon spectacles at Casey, who has just interrupted his opening speech.
Flustered, she closes the door behind her and casts a wary eye over the small group – experts in their fields – assembled around the table. She looks down self-consciously at her work overalls and lab boots before meeting Harrison’s eye – the others are all garbed in business suits with their rank and profession proudly displayed on their lapels. Breathless from her recent walk, she clutches the video disks to her chest as she gathers her thoughts.
“Technical Officer Casey,” she pants. “Sorry I’m late, I’ve been assimilating some new data.”
Harrison frowns, taking in the red collar tabs denoting her junior status. “I was expecting,” he shuffles the papers before him. “Section Officer Lyons.”
“I’m sorry, he was taken ill. I have all the necessary information to deputise…”
Harrison waves his hand irritably, interrupting her. “Well sit down girl, sit down.”
She pouts, annoyed at his patronising tone – and sits. Still, the recordings that she has brought will give the old toad a jolt.
“I’ll start again, for the benefit of everybody,” Harrison resumes his disrupted monologue with a sidelong glower directed at Casey. “We have reached a turning point in our history – an unprecedented ecological disaster faces us, threatening to destroy all life on the planet. At their present rate of deterioration, the polar ice caps will have completely melted within approximately twenty years. I do not need to remind you of the seriousness of our situation. The temperate land masses will be almost completely submerged, leaving only a few mountainous areas above water – and our atmosphere will be virtually unbreathable by that time.” He pauses morosely. “I would not like to make any predictions about the survival of mankind in such a hostile environment.”
His audience listens in pessimistic silence. Harrison’s rheumy eyes flick from face to face, assessing their reactions. Mostly though, they know it already. No one could have missed the erosion of the atmosphere over the previous hundred years or so, or the eternal summers – broiling and humid during the summer months and mild but moist in the winters. The hydrocarbons pumped out by the internal combustion engine and countless fossil fuelled power stations are finally taking their choking toll. Man’s relentless advance into the wild places of the world demolished the lush foliage that once filtered the carbon dioxide and replenished the precious oxygen. Acid rain consumed what was left.
By the turn of the century, the use of fossil fuels was outlawed throughout the planet in a unique example of global legislation. With that legislation, the internal combustion engine died. Too late though, for the equatorial forests were long gone, leaving the carbon dioxide gently warming the globe and the poisonous hydrocarbons hanging in the air, nibbling away at the ozone layer that once shrouded it.
So high has the pollutant level risen, that filter masks are now essential when venturing outside the sanctuary of air-conditioned buildings. The planet is perishing as it awaits the judgment of governments absorbed with political point scoring – and missing the point.
***
“Take a seat, Ted,”
“Madam President,” Harrison acknowledged her obsequiously as he sat and waited.
“Coffee?”
He shook his head. Will the woman ever come to the point?
“Ted, you are aware that the World summit is just a few weeks away…”
“Ma’am.”
“I have a little job for you.”
“Ma’am.”
“The third world nations are currently accusing the developed world of hypocrisy regarding the ecology…”
Harrison sighed. “With some justification, Ma’am. After all we were screwing up the planet when they were still tribesmen. We can hardly blame them if they now feel aggrieved. They’re paying the price for our greed – and getting precious little benefit from what I can see.”
The president studied him with mild surprise for a moment. Ted Harrison was usually renowned for his reticence. “Two wrongs hardly make a right. If they carry on in the manner that they have been, there will be no planet to argue over.”
Harrison shrugged. Sooner or later the reason for this discussion would become clear.
“Ted, I can’t go into this summit empty handed.”
“Which is where I come in?”
“I need you to provide me with something, anything that I can use to persuade the other heads of state just how important this is. Not to mention a solution, if possible.”
“Such as?”
She smiled, “I leave that entirely to you.”
With the World Summit on Ecology now less than a month away, Harrison has still to produce a practical proposal for the President to place before the other heads of state. Harrisons’s dour opinion of the project is that he has been handed an impossible task. An honour though it is, to work so closely with the President, failure will be catastrophic – for his career, for the President’s credibility and, ultimately, for the people of the world. Failure worries him. With each new scheme and improbable idea placed before him, his mood becomes steadily more bilious. It never occurs to him that his own solution, frequently voiced, is as unfeasible as many of the others – creating ribald humour amongst his subordinates.
***
Technical Officer Casey, in her haste to reach the consultation meeting in time – having waited for the computer to analyse the latest incoming probe reports, had forgotten her filter mask. Consequently she is breathless as she listens to Harrison’s dark prophesy.
“Forget your mask?” the man to her right whispers. She nods with a wan smile, her eyes moving down to the silver rank flashes on his lapel, Aeronautical Development Agency. She wonders what their involvement is. Harrison is continuing his discourse.
“The time has come for us to consider the practicalities of seeking other worlds to colonise.”
Someone groans. So, Casey muses, having screwed up our own planet, he wants to start again with someone else’s. Harrison glares at the assembly. “There is no alternative. In twenty years, those of us who have not succumbed to cancer, radiation sickness or suffocated, will drown. Not a pleasant prospect.” He sits back, pleased with the theatrical effect of his statement. “Mr Moran?” He turns to the aeronautical engineer. Moran coughs nervously.
“Since the culmination of the space race, last century, the finance made available for space travel has been extremely limited. In my opinion, interplanetary exploration is out of the question.”
“Given the resources, could such an enterprise be attempted within the timescale given?” Harrison persists.
Moran shrugs. “Possible, I suppose, but not probable. I wouldn’t like to open a book on it.”
“You’re not being asked to,” Harrison remarks dryly. “We will make available whatever resources you require.”
Moran nods. “Even so, given our present technology, it would mean a journey time of, say, thirty to forty years to reach anywhere habitable.”
Harrison gestures towards the flip chart on his right, at the head of the table. “Sector Four,” he announces. “On the outer reaches of this galaxy. You will see that there is a solar system very similar to ours, with, I might add, a habitable planet.”
Sector Four. As familiar to Casey as her own world. During the previous three decades, Man had despatched probes to this distant sphere. For the past six months, the images had been streaming back for analysis – Casey’s job.
***
The machine bleeped. Across the light years of dark emptiness, the digital signal returned unerringly to its source. A darkened room, where a machine could read its encoded message – and a world that had been waiting for decades to hear voices from the void. A single word; Access, flashed on the screen. Otherwise, the silence and the subdued lighting in the room remained undisturbed. Merrick burst into the lab several hours later and switched on the strip lighting.
“Jeez,” he breathed as the screen caught his eye. “Casey, Casey! It’s bloody happened!”
“What is it this time?” she laughed, suspecting another of his pranks as she strolled into the lab behind him.
“Look at the screen,” he stabbed excitedly at the single flashing “access”.
“Good God, this is it.” Stirred by the catalyst of discovery, Merrick’s elation mixed with her own enthusiasm as she sat at the computer desk and typed the password. “Is there life on other planets?” She wondered aloud, turning to smile at her colleague. “We could be the first to find out.”
“I guess we’d better tell Lyons,” Merrick replied.
“Mm, probably a good idea.”
***
“Technical Officer Casey,” Harrison’s voice returns her to the present with a start. She stands, and shuffles the disk cases until she locates the one that she wants. “Er, I have some new data…”
“Yes, yes, later. For now, just tell us about the target planet and its inhabitants. The new data can wait.” Biting back a retort, she shrugs and removes a disk from its case and loads it into the viewscreen next to the flip-chart. Using a remote control, she fast forwards through the technical data, reciting the salient points from memory. “Atmosphere; Nitrogen/oxygen, large land masses with a mostly temperate climate and humanoid life forms.”
“Intelligent?” Harrison queries.
“It would appear so,” she replies flatly, pressing the play button on her remote control. The screen fills with an image of a bustling metropolis…
***
“Similar to our society of about a hundred years ago,” remarked Lyons as he watched the pictures moving on the screen from over Casey’s shoulder. “Fascinating. You see, they still use internal combustion engine vehicles – their roads are choking with ’em.” He shook his grey head sadly, his voice heavy with irony. “Some people never learn.” A flashing cursor in the top left-hand corner of the screen caught Casey’s attention.
“Hello, hello, probe two wants to talk to us.” She entered the relevant password and the screen changed. Moving to a desert scene where a gantry reached up, silhouetted against the moody sky – it, and the squat, ugly aircraft reposing vertically alongside it, were surrounded by a group of single storey buildings. The whole area was a milieu of unhurried activity.
“Preparing to launch,” Merrick murmured.
“A space shuttle?” Lyons frowned. Casey turned in her chair. “Still us, a century ago?”
“Mm, Merrick, any theories?”
“Well sir, what about a parallel planet, developing a hundred years or so behind us?”
Lyons chewed his lower lip. “Okay, I could buy that. Analyse all the transmissions – keep me informed.”
“Strange,” Casey murmured.
“What is?” Lyons raised an eyebrow.
“Well, these are two of the most recent probes, there’s at least one despatched since and several before.”
“Meaning?”
“I don’t know. Curious, don’t you think?”
“These images confirm that this civilisation is at an early stage in the development of manned space flight,”
***
Casey presses the eject button on her remote control as she speaks, causing the image to fade from the screen. “The first three probes returned similar information. The intelligence provided by the fourth and subsequent probes was disturbingly different.” She loads a second disk into the machine and the screen is filled with a view of a factory churning dense, black smoke from its soaring chimneys. Back-to-back cottages creating a network of narrow alleyways surround it. Urchins run begging in the streets, pleading with the workers as they file miserably through the imposing gates – summoned by the mournful wail of the early morning siren.
***
“Probe four chaps,” Casey called out, tapping vigorously at the keys. The cityscape moved before them.
“Odd,” Lyons mused, leaning forward. “Same planet, Sandra?”
Puzzled, Casey looked up, meeting his eyes. “Yes,” she said slowly. “No doubt about it.”
“I’d say,” Merrick added, “That this is the same place about, oh, two hundred years previously. Identical to the industrial revolution period of our own history. Architecture, fashions – the lot.”
Lyons sat in the chair next to Casey and proceeded to swing from side to side as he lapsed into thought. “Which was the most recent probe we despatched?”
“Seventeen,” Merrick replied.
“Five hasn’t responded yet,” Casey murmured.
“No,” Lyons stood. “I will be very interested in what probe five has to say. In the meantime, we have food for thought.” That had been the start.
***
As the Jurassic twilight descended, a humid mist lifted itself from the shores of the lake and enveloped the land, like a formless predator devouring all before it. Stegosaurus was uninterested in the mist. Something else was worrying him. He stopped chewing on the ferns and listened. The thud in the bushes to his right hadn’t sounded like Allosaurus. Nor did the whirs and clicks currently emanating from probe five as the casing flipped open and a small helicopter whirred into the sky on four tiny rotor blades. As it lifted, the camera on its underbelly swung around, catching stegosaurus in its lens and adjusted its focus. Stegosaurus raised his head and his nostrils twitched as he tested the air. His tiny, confused brain attempted to make sense of something that he could hear but not smell. He snorted and lashed his spiked tail from side to side. That usually did the trick. When nothing happened, unable to cope with both scientific discovery and the need to satisfy his stomach, he gave up the unequal struggle.
Dismissing the strange noises in the bushes, he lumbered away in search of fresh vegetation. Probe five hovered and watched.
***
Landor’s sword flashed in the watery sunlight as it arced through the air and crashed onto the delicate fleur de lys painted on his opponent’s shield. The sky darkened with a rain of deadly arrows seeking indiscriminate targets. Landor lunged at his enemy, slicing his blade below the shield and striking the chain mail beneath. The man swayed in the saddle and fell as his horse struggled to retain its balance in the slime clinging to its hooves. Landor hadn’t struck a death blow, but the weight of the man’s armour would ensure that he remained in the cloying mud – amongst the hooves, boots and blood.
There was no time for pity. A pikeman attempted to run him through and promptly tasted Landor’s bloodied sword for his pains. Probe eleven went unnoticed as it watched, recording Landor as he fought for his life.
***
Sergeant McCaffery watched as probe fourteen fell through the night sky, leaving a luminous crescent in its wake. He clambered back into the turret of his tank and turned to Corporal Powell. “Did you see that?”
“Yes sarge.”
McCaffery glanced at his watch. “Twenty one hundred hours. Too early for a flare. I think we’d better wait.”
“Fine by me, sarge.”
“What do you think, Gunner?”
“Meteorite Sarge?”
McCaffery looked across the inky desert and shivered. The falling temperature wasn’t the only reason for his physical reaction. “Is that what a meteorite looks like then?”
“Dunno, Sarge. Never seen one.”
A red luminescence lit up the night sky as a flare announced zero hour. Probe fourteen was promptly forgotten as McCaffery gave the order to advance and his tank charged across the freezing sand.
***
The images mesmerise Casey and her colleagues as the violent, destructive history of a civilisation unfolds before their eyes.
She smiles with amusement as she watches her audience, equally rapt, as they too, witness the development of this distant culture.
“It would appear, that like ourselves, they engaged in two global conflicts – with the same terrifying consequences.” The familiar mushroom cloud dissipates from the screen as she ejects the disk from the machine.
“Conclusions?” Harrison asks curtly. This is new, it disturbs him.
“Well, the probes have been showing us the planet as it was – over a period of millions of years.”
“How?” he snaps. “Are you saying that they travelled in time?”
Casey tugs at her lower lip – this is the unanswerable question.
“Well, girl, are they travelling in time?” Harrison prompts peevishly.
“I don’t know. We’ve theorised, of course, but the fact is, the more that we discover, the more we come to realise just how little we really do understand…”
“The theories then.”
Casey takes a deep breath and launches into her supposition – Lyons and Merrick had taken her seriously, why shouldn’t Harrison?
“That space travel over a distance of thousands of light years can involve an irregular distortion in time.” She shrugs at the inadequacy of her reply. Harrison snorts and drums his fingers on the table as he absorbs the new information.
“Curious how they’re so much like us,” Moran remarks.
“Hardly,” Casey snaps. “The laws of nature are the same throughout the universe. I am amazed that people either deny the existence of life on other planets, or presume that aliens will manifest themselves as little green men. Logic, gentlemen, and the laws of nature, suggest that they will be much like ourselves. The probe results would appear to confirm that hypothesis.”
“Will this affect our plans?” Harrison asks, breaking the ensuing silence. “Can we integrate into their society?”
Piteous, Casey thinks to herself, how he clings to his dream of colonisation. She feels a brief pang of anguish and coughs uneasily. The rest of the assembly absorbs her mood.
“Go on, go on,” Harrison urges testily, having failed to elicit a response to his query. Casey loads a new disk.
“This is the most recent recording to return.” The viewscreen erupts into a bright amber light, settling eventually into a swirling pattern of red and orange – breaking up intermittently to reveal the distant outline of a city on the horizon.
***
Nothing moved on the planet’s surface. Casey, Lyons and Merrick stared in silent awe at the prophetic past of a world’s end. Stark against the ruddy orb of a setting sun, the city, silent and deserted, stood as a testament to the greed of man. Unheeding, it witnessed the sun as it sank on the wasteland of a world too spent to care. As the clouds shifted and swirled in their broiling atmosphere, Casey watched in wondering horror.
“What’s the radiation level?” Lyons asked at length. Casey tapped the keys and a series of figures flashed along the bottom of the screen. Lyons swore softly.
“No chance of life there, then,” Merrick commented.
“Why did they do it? Couldn’t they see? Couldn’t they?” Casey wailed.
“Why didn’t we?” Merrick replied phlegmatically. “We’ve spent centuries political point scoring – and missing the point.”
“Harrison will need to see this,” Lyons thrust his hands into his pockets and rocked on his heels. “He’s got some crazy notion that this place will be the salvation of mankind.”
“He always was a weird old buzzard,” Merrick observed. Lyons shot him a sharp glance.
“Sorry,” Merrick apologised.
“I should think so.”
“When will you tell him?” Casey asked.
Lyons consulted his watch. “I was supposed to be in a meeting with him five minutes ago.”
Lyons sighed. Casey was aware suddenly, how old and tired he looked as he sank into the chair next to her. “I’m not sure that I’ve the heart to do it,” he said. “Sandra?”
She swung round in her chair to face him. “You want me to go?”
He nodded wearily. “Would you?”
“Sure.” She removed a recording disk from the computer, picked up the earlier copies and stood, placing a hand on Lyons’ shoulder. He cupped his hand over hers momentarily – there was nothing more to say, so she turned and padded silently from the lab.
***
“Atmosphere, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, sulphur dioxide, water, ozone and benzene. The planet’s moisture has evaporated into the atmosphere and is steadily boiling away. During daylight hours the temperature rises to two hundred and twenty degrees Celsius. At night, it falls to below minus one hundred degrees Celsius. Humidity, at present, about 50 per cent and falling. In short, gentlemen, an ecological nightmare.” She pauses for effect – and gets it. “We had presumed that the first three recordings were showing us the planet much as it is now – allowing for the time lag in transmission. However, this is the present state of the target planet.”
She stops and studies their faces, commanding their absolute attention. The power stirs in her as she delivers her coup de grâce. “That desert is our future, fifty years from now. I’m sorry, but there is no planet to go to, no escape from the fate that awaits us here – and, there’s no one out there. If we had started doing something fifteen years ago, maybe, just maybe, we could have stopped what is happening here.
Any questions?”
There are none – not that she had expected any.
She sits, alone in the room. The others have all gone, leaving a dazed silence in their wake. That final bleak prophesy, faded now from the viewscreen, impressed indelibly upon their stunned minds. The vitality that had coursed through her body has gone now, leaving her deflated as she regards the diagram of Sector Four. Throughout her short life she had wanted to reach out to other worlds. Seeking the life that she knew in her heart to be there – and when she finally found them, they proved to be as greedy, careless and stupid as her own people.
Casey stands and lifts a marker pen from the table. Sector Four, so like her own solar system, light years distant, once an oasis in the void, is now just another insignificant pin-prick in the vastness of space.
“Damn you!” she cries, tears of rage streaming down her face, as she runs a thick red line through the planet marked Earth.
She turns then, and walks away, pausing to look briefly back at Sector Four, before switching out the light and closing the door.
***
“Cut! That’s a wrap.” Hal Morrison sat back as the studio lights came up and the actors relaxed, his hands clasped across his ample waist. “I want this edited and out for distribution in time for schools and universities to see it before the Copenhagen conference,” he instructed. “We need to influence those young minds – get ’em agitated.” Studio hands nodded to his barked orders and the players walked the short distance from the set to the caravans and camper vans that made do as dressing rooms.
Hal stood and ambled across to intercept Monica Lewis, his leading lady, and reached an unwelcome arm across her shoulder. “You made me believe in Sandra Casey, love,” he said. “Very good stuff. Magnificent. I’m exceedingly pleased. Hopefully it will make a huge impact at Copenhagen.” He squeezed her gently as he spoke.
“Thanks,” she replied flatly without breaking her stride and flinching slightly at the familiarity and bad breath. She just wanted to remove her makeup, get changed and be out of here. This was a job, nothing more, and Morrison made her flesh creep.
“What do you reckon, then?” He asked, waving an arm expansively, pumped up with the performance he had just filmed. “Powerful stuff, eh? Fifteen years to save the Earth.”
“It’s bullshit,” she said. “No one will believe it.”
Hal dropped his arm from her shoulder and stepped back. “Why?” He asked, deflated.
“Because that’s what you said fifteen years ago.”
***