The Falling Comet
Dear Susannah
The opening of the Lander’s door was one of those dramatic moments which only space exploration can provide. We stood there, arms hanging loosely at our sides, like two gunfighters about to enter a saloon and pick a fight with the bad guys. Thus Spoke Zarathustra should have been plying over our helmet comms. As it was we had something far more appropriate: the eerie hiss of the planet’s electromagnetic voice, parsel tongue in our ears, as though we were approaching the coils of a great serpent to parlay for safe passage over the surface of this strange moon.
There were two thresholds to cross: the first, the outer door in the small airlock, the second, the edge of a curious circular formation that we’d spotted from orbit, a geological surface feature that had prompted much debate.
The first was easy enough, though we then had to negotiate the ladder on the module’s exterior, harder than it may seem in a semi-flexible spacesuit. Once managed, the walk to the circle — a journey of no more than a thousand metres — was also simple enough, at least on the body. The mind had to cope with a view we were no longer accustomed to: a planetary horizon, a sky of sorts and ground underfoot, all as alien as land to a mermaid, or the sky to a mole.
With Tanya to my left I felt like one of the Earp brothers walking through town on the way to the eponymous corral. For side arms we had various hand-held sensors and scanning devices, which we pulled as one when we neared the edge of the circle. Buttons and type keys for triggers. A flurry of activity as various emissions and signals were launched at our target. Nothing came back. The anomaly was as inert as marble, which on first inspection was exactly what it appeared to be. Smooth, white marble. Cold and lifeless. We stopped ten feet from the solid geometrical circumference, looking at the rim like climbers eyeing the edge of a precipice.
Oddly, I felt a sudden reluctance to go any further. When our hand-helds drew a blank, Tanya began to move closer. I halted her in mid step. “Careful.” I was more hesitant to cross the threshold than she was, sensing that the circumference, for all its passivity, was a demarcation point that should be approached cautiously, almost reverently, as one does a baptismal font, or a long-sealed tomb. Such thoughts, if they occurred to my companion, must have been quickly brushed aside. She smiled at me (that disarming smile that seemed willing to forgive so much) and resumed her approach.
I don’t know what I expected to happen when she put her foot inside that immense ring. The white, heavily insulated boot went down slowly, sending up a small cloud of dust. We both looked around, waiting for something to happen. When nothing did, Tanya stepped all the way over and started walking towards the middle of the feature, aiming for the locus, stepping through the cosmic minefield, as if it were nothing more than what it appeared to be: a circle drawn in the sand. She moved with all the confidence of a carnival roustabout sauntering along the Midway. I had to admire her courage. Why are the women closest to me always braver than I am?
I began to follow. It felt like pure Leone, as if we were characters in one of his grand operatic westerns, approaching the climatic shoot out. This might indeed have been the stone circle at the centre of Sad Hill Cemetery, the location of all that buried Confederate gold. All that was missing was the Morricone score, with those unforgettable motifs.
I looked around at the destination we had travelled so far to reach. The Circle was just as it appeared to be, a great ring or… "It helps if you think of Time in non-linear terms, as a loop, a temporal curvature or plane on which every moment of Time is joined to every other moment...” I stopped abruptly, my eyes still sweeping around the far circumference, remembering the words, a fragment overhead long ago on the DreamStrip.
“This is a temporal domain, a Gateway, just like on the Highway. I’m convinced of it.”
“If it’s a gateway,” asked Tanya, “how does it work?”
I shook my head, the movement feeling strange and cumbersome inside the helmet. “I have no idea.”
Tanya glanced towards the rim of the circle, following my gaze. “It looks so empty; like the foundations for something that was never built.”
“By us?”
“Who knows.” After a moment she added: “I get the feeling I’m missing something.”
“I agree” I replied. “There’s something here we’re not seeing. We could always start to dig, to excavate. Maybe the answer lies beneath us, underground.” I pressed my own toe into the dust. It didn’t go far before meeting solid resistance.
Tanya looked unconvinced. “I think the answers are above ground.”
As if in response a slight tremor, the merest vibration at the very edge of perception, shook the ground. I looked at Tanya to see if she had felt it too. One glance was enough to tell me she had. Perhaps it had been there all along, a tremor too subtle to notice until we were inside the circle’s perimeter.
Tanya’s helmeted head turned in my direction, the first faint hint of uncertainty visible in the eyes I knew so well. The vibration faded and then came back, stronger than before. This time it didn’t stop. Tanya’s voice over the helmet circuits. “I think we should get out of this circle.”
“I agree.”
It’s difficult to run in a spacesuit. They are made for walking not sprinting; at best for bounding across lunar terrain. But there was something about the vibration that induced a sense of urgency, as if we’d looked up and seen an enormous wall of water moving towards us, or fire erupting from the summit of a volcano. A force of Nature was approaching, zeroing in on the circle, which now seemed to resemble nothing so much as a giant target, a cosmic bull’s eye.
“Run!” I shouted, even though such encouragement was hardly necessary. The imperative was difficult to obey. The suits resisted our hurried movements, fighting against rather than cooperating with us. I could hear the sound of laboured breathing over the suit’s mike, together with an occasional oath.
The Lander suddenly seemed a very long way away, and the shelter it offered flimsy indeed, as fragile as a spider’s web or a butterfly’s wings. We might get half way if we were lucky. With no cover on the open plain, we could only throw ourselves to the ground when the moment of impact came and hope for the best. And I was certain that some sort of impact was imminent. So it seemed was Tanya, for she had not let up one jot in her race for shelter. We leapt the circle’s rim almost as one and began to hurry over the ground, performing slow leaps through the air. The rapid motions of a headlong sprint were a physical impossibility in the reduced gravity. Run we could not, as much as we wanted to. I turned to look back and knew in that instant we were already too late. A shout of alarm came to my lips. It was a cry I never finished. The warning died in my throat as the once still ground within the circle erupted, exploding upwards as if an enormous subterranean charge had just been detonated.
I threw myself to the ground, pulling Tanya with me, covering her body with mine as best I could, certain that we were about to be crushed by falling debris, as if a comet had disintegrated above our heads.