Chapter 3

“Is there a longer route that we could take from the hangar to Nelson’s office?” Joe asked Zip.

Zip shook his head grimly. The director’s office was some distance from the hangar, and the guards seemed determined to take the longest possible route to their destination. They were probably new, Zip thought, and not well-acquainted with the layout of the station. Had it not been for the urgency of their situation he might not have minded; the station reflected Thomas Starlight’s love for elegance and grace, and he marveled at its beauty. Instead of dark, narrow corridors the base was filled with large, open spaces; there were tall galleries, waterfalls, small streams, trees, and even simulated glass ceilings through which streamed a soft, yellow light. Tom had gone to great lengths to make the base feel as Earth-like as possible and the effort had paid off; he understood how people could spend their lives here and not feel as though they were cramped inside a metal container out in space.

It took them a full ten minutes to arrive at the director’s office. The guards deposited the Starmen in the secretary’s office and then, to their surprise, abruptly left. The secretary seemed unruffled as she pressed a button on her desk.

“Three Starmen from Starlight Enterprise are here to see you,” she said calmly. “At least, I think they’re Starmen.”

“Send them in immediately!” the director barked. “There’s no time to waste!”

The secretary gestured toward the director’s office door but did not move to open it for them. Zip walked up, opened it, and stepped inside.

Mark had to admit that Alfred Nelson had a real taste for interior design. The office was decorated in a beautiful African theme: it had a large mahogany desk, a comfortable-looking couch decorated with a print of animals from the African plains, shelves filled with books on the Dark Continent, and pictures of what he guessed was Alfred Nelson on various African hunting expeditions. Hanging on the wall behind the director’s desk was a pair of ancient rifles, but curiously, he didn’t see any mounted animal remains. To one side of the room was a wide, low glass case that was filled with odd models. Mark spotted a very old-looking motorcycle, airship, and submarine that had to date back to at least the 1920’s, if not earlier.

Before the Starmen even had a chance to introduce themselves the director spoke up. “I’m so glad you’re here!” he said. He acted as if he was going to say more, and then stopped, got out of his chair behind his desk, and began pacing around the room. “It’s terrible, just terrible,” he said, as if to himself. “You’ve got to do something!”

“How can we help you, Mr. Nelson?” Zip asked. “Richard Starlight told us that you have a problem.”

“I have a problem! We have a problem!” he shouted. “Earth has a problem, young man! If you don’t do something they’re going to destroy us all!”

“Who is going to destroy us all?” Mark asked.

“The Xenobots! They’re here!”

The Starmen were astonished. “Xenobots?” Joe asked. “Here? Where?”

“I know they’re here,” the director said, looking at them excitedly. “They’ve infiltrated this station and are using it as a base of operations! They have a secret laboratory where they are manufacturing trillions of tiny nanobots. Once they finish their evil work they are going to release them in swarms on the helpless planet below, where they will multiply in the oceans and then boil them away! We’ll all die and the planet will be ruined!”

Zip was speechless, but Joe was not. “Have you considered evicting the Xenobots?” he asked. “That’s got to be a violation of their renter’s agreement.”

Alfred Nelson continued on ranting without missing a beat. “I tell you I’ve got Xenobots on this station, and you’ve got to get rid of them,” he said, pointing his finger right at Mark. “They’ve been wrecking havoc with my station. Do you realize that this station has started singing?”

“Singing?” Mark asked in surprise.

“Yes, singing,” the director insisted. “Late at night I’ll hear it over the intercom: someone is singing Away Down Yonder with Davy Jones. It’s terrible – the words are right, but it’s off-key. I don’t know where it’s coming from; no one can pin it down. Just ask anybody. We keep hearing distant rumblings that don’t seem to have any particular source, and shadowy figures have been spotted in places where they don’t belong!

“And that’s only the beginning!” he raged. “Hangar doors open and close on their own – which is blasted inconvenient, if you happen to be in them and get sucked out into the void of space. The power keeps fluctuating, as if someone’s straining it, and high-security authorization codes just suddenly stop working. Someone is messing with this station, and I tell you that Xenobots are behind it! I have proof, young man!”

While the Starmen were standing there astonished, unsure what to say, he pressed a button on his desk and demanded that Dr Daystorm come in. The doctor entered a few minutes later, carrying a heavy metal briefcase. When the director saw it he pointed to it. “That,” he told the incredulous Starmen, “is our proof.”

“What’s in it?” Zip asked Dr Daystorm. He set the locked steel case on the director’s desk. “Something amazing – something we found just this morning. You’ll never believe it: self-replicating nanobots.”

“That’s astonishing,” Zip said. “Starlight Enterprise has been working on that technology for fifty years and has never perfected it. I had no idea that such a thing existed.”

“I’m telling you,” the director said – and then the lights went out. All sound ceased, and it became dark – very dark.

Chapter 2

David Foster, Mark Seaton, and Joe Taylor had been enjoying a late-afternoon meal in an obscure restaurant in Amundsen City when Richard called. They had spent the day discussing their upcoming mission to Europa, and were just finishing dinner when Zip answered his compad. After Zip hung up he briefed his friends on what had happened.

“It sounds urgent,” Joe said, “and I don’t have any of my equipment with me.”

“I’m sure that Richard will have everything prepared for us by the time we get to the spaceport,” Mark said, as he paid for their meal. “I just wonder what’s going on.”

“We’ll soon find out,” Zip said. The three of them walked out of the restaurant and began hurrying down the sidewalk. Joe was heading for their car when Zip stopped him.

“There’s too much traffic to drive,” he said. “The subway would be much faster than trying to fight rush-hour traffic.”

The three Starmen rushed over to the nearest subway stop, where they boarded an underground high-speed monorail. They had to change trains twice, but within twenty minutes they were at the spaceport.

“I wish we could take the Star Ranger,” Zip said wistfully as they began jogging through the spaceport terminals. The Starlight Enterprise section of the spaceport was almost within sight.

“I’m sure we can, Zip, if Richard doesn’t mind our waiting for – oh, another ten years,” Joe replied. “After all, there were probably a few parts to our ship that they were able to salvage. Doorknobs, for instance.”

“To be honest I’m surprised they decided to fix her at all,” Mark replied. “There really wasn’t a lot left of her after Zip fought off the Ban Zhou Men’s attack – especially after you reversed the thrust in mid-air, Zip, and clipped off the tail of the attacker – ”

” – thus neatly grounding the attacking ship without damaging it,” Zip replied, fondly remembering the incident. “I really didn’t think she had it in her. When they get done with the repairs, though, she’ll be a new ship, and the fastest one in space at that! The antimatter drive alone give us more power than even the Spud Peeler did.”

“Which was another fine craft that got obliterated in the line of duty,” Joe said. “Maybe we’re not just reading the owner’s manual closely enough.”

By this time the three Starmen had reached the Starlight Enterprise wing of the spaceport, where a uniformed SE officer was ready and waiting.

“Starman Zip Foster?” she asked uncertainly.

“Yes, ma’am,” Zip said, stepping forward to shake her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said, eyeing the jeans and T-shirts that the three of them were wearing, “we were out, and didn’t have time to stop and change into our red uniforms. We were hoping – ”

“Right this way,” she said, turning around and walking down a hallway. “The craft is here, in Hangar 9. It is fueled and ready to go. Your departure time is in five minutes. Please be ready for takeoff.” With that, she turned around and walked off down the hall.

The three Starmen entered the hangar, boarded the ship, and prepared for takeoff. Joe sat in the pilot’s seat and the other two Starmen took up seats directly behind him. The craft was a small, sleek passenger shuttle that was designed to transport up to four people to and from any location in the Earth-Moon system within a few hours.

“The Red Tiger,” Joe said aloud. “I’ve never flown this craft before, but she looks pretty fast. You just don’t see too many shuttles with antimatter drives – the technology is just too new.”

“How fast?” Zip asked. Joe was silent for a few minutes as he opened the hangar door, taxied the shuttle out onto the runway, and prepared for takeoff.

“Oh, we’ll probably be there in about an hour or so.”

The takeoff went very smoothly and before ten minutes had passed the craft had left the moon and was streaking through space on a course to L5. After making sure that everything was operating normally Joe set the craft on auto-pilot and settled back into the pilot’s chair.

“I wonder what’s going on, anyway?” Joe asked. “I’ve never heard of anything going wrong at L5 before.”

“Why don’t you call them up and ask?” Mark replied, motioning toward the ship’s communicator. “I’m sure that Alfred Nelson would love to know that we are en-route.”

“Good idea,” Joe said approvingly. He was able to contact the station and speak directly to the station director, letting them know that they would be there in about 45 minutes. The director curtly acknowledged Joe’s message and then abruptly signed off.

“Um.” Joe said. “Well, I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”

* * * *

Forty minutes later the ship was within visual range of the giant L5 space station. Mark had seen it many times before but it never failed to fill him with awe. The station was the most massive structure in space; it was home to 30,000 people and bustled with the activity of countless spaceships going about their business all hours of the day and night. L5, so named because it was located at LaGrange Point 5, was composed of two giant wheels, each connected to the other by means of a cylinder that ran between the middle of the two wheels. The station did not spin but instead used an artificial gravity grid to provide Earth-like gravity to its residents. Mark reflected that it must be nearly fifty years old, but Alfred Nelson was still its director. That was a long time to spend running a space station, he thought.

As the Red Tiger approached the station Joe contacted it once more and requested permission to dock. “Look at all those ships!” Joe enthused. “Now there is some variety for you.”

“No kidding,” Zip said. “Is that an Ares-class ship over there? I didn’t realize any of those were still flying. It can’t possibly land on a planet, can it?”

“I don’t think so,” Mark said. “Those ships were built to travel solely in space, carrying cargo from one space station to another. It’s probably just come back from the asteroid belt with a cargo full of processed ore and is dropping it off at the L5, where some other ship will carry it down to Earth. It’ll probably return with a cargo of food and other perishable goods for lonely asteroid miners.”

“I’m sure George St George will appreciate that,” Zip remarked, thinking of the eccentric asteroid miner that they had met a few years ago. “He’s still prospecting out there, isn’t he?”

“Last I heard,” Mark said affirmatively.

Joe received clearance from the automated docking system and turned over the Red Tiger‘s navigation to the station computer, which robotically guided it into a hangar. “Looks as though we’ve got ourselves a reception crew,” Zip muttered as Joe powered down the ship and opened the doors. Standing just outside were three armed guards.

The Starmen exited the craft and walked forward to meet them, eying them warily. “I’m David Foster, and this is Joe Taylor and Mark Seaton,” he said, introducing his friends. “We’ve come -”

The largest guard interrupted them. “Howard, Fine, and Howard, at your service,” he said curtly. “Right this way.” He opened a door leading into the station and stepped through it, while the other two guards beckoned the three Starmen to follow him. They did so, and the two guards followed them in the rear.

“We were told that there was a serious problem here,” Zip began again, “and Richard sent us to help. Do you know what is going on?”

“Right this way,” the lead guard repeated, walking on down the hall. The three Starmen followed them. What, Zip wondered, was the nature of their emergency?

Chapter 1

June 13, 2153 began as a peaceful day for Richard Starlight. On that fateful afternoon the CEO of Starlight Enterprise found himself in his office making the final preparations for an expedition to Europa. Starlight Enterprise had been interested in returning to Jupiter’s watery moon ever since Starmen Zip Foster, Joe Taylor, and Mark Seaton made the trip there that had so nearly cost them their lives. In another four months those same Starmen would be making a return visit, and Richard still had a lot of arrangements to make before they could leave.

Over the past few months Richard’s life had seen great changes. Ever since his battle with Ban Zhou Men on the plains of Mars he had been trying to refocus the energies of his company to reflect a new and dangerous world. No longer was Earth safe; now there was a rapacious alien threat lurking on the horizon – a threat that Richard knew would soon be more than just hypothetical. What he did not know was what could be done about it.

Richard reclined in his chair and looked out over his office. Starlight Tower was located forty miles north of Amundsen City, where it had stood for almost twenty years as the tallest building on the Moon. His private office was on the 121st floor and could only be reached by two private express elevators. The beauty of the lunar landscape was always fresh and new to him; through his office’s treated glass walls he could see the cratered gray landscape stretch for miles into the distance. His red parakeet – a marvel of genetic engineering – chirped quietly on its stand behind his chair. I do my best thinking up here, he thought. Now –

The phone rang. Richard saw that it was an urgent call on his private line and quickly pressed a button on his desk. The image of a harried individual was projected into the air over his desk.

“Richard!” the individual shouted. “It’s terrible! You must do something!”

Richard smiled. He immediately recognized the caller as his long-time friend Alfred Nelson, the easily excitable director of the L5 space station. He had met him as a child when his father Thomas Starlight was supervising the construction of the station, and he had kept in touch with him ever since. He had to be in his 70’s by now, he thought, and yet he hasn’t changed a bit.

“It’s good to see you,” Richard said warmly. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“I can’t – no, I just can’t explain it over the phone,” he said urgently, “it’s too important. The safety of the entire Solar System is at stake! I need your best Starmen here immediately. We don’t have much time!”

Richard was a little surprised. His friend had a tendency to become agitated but this was exceptional. “I’ll send one of my top people right over,” he promised. “Can you give me any idea what is going on? If there is something seriously wrong – ”

“Oh, yes, there is,” Mr. Nelson repeated. “There most certainly is, and – well – no, I just can’t say anything. But please – you must hurry!” And at that, Mr. Nelson severed the connection.

Richard folded his hands together and thought for a moment. Mr. Nelson had a long history of over-dramatizing small concerns, but he knew that he would never have called if there wasn’t something actually wrong. The L5 space station that he managed was the largest one in the entire Solar System and did make a tempting target. Given the recent incursion that the Starmen had battled a few months ago he did not dare ignore the message. The question was, which of his Starmen were currently available for an immediate trip into Earth orbit?

He decided to contact David Foster. Zip was currently on the Moon, enjoying some well-earned time off by visiting his parents at their home on the outskirts of Amundsen City. Richard was in luck as Zip answered his compad almost immediately.

“I need you to make an emergency trip to L5 for me,” Richard said after pleasantries had been exchanged. “I just received an urgent call from a very animated Alfred Nelson, who requested immediate assistance. Are Mark and Joe with you?”

“Yes they are,” Zip replied, “and we can leave right away. What seems to be the trouble?”

“I don’t really know. Alfred refused to talk to me over the phone. He claimed that all of mankind was in danger and that it had to be discussed in person. I haven’t heard any other reports of trouble but I don’t think we can take any chances.”

“We’ll come prepared for anything, then. What’s the fastest way to get there?”

“Probably by shuttle, Zip. I’ll call the Amundsen City spaceport and have our personnel there prepare one for you.”

“We’re heading out the door right now. I’ll let you know what’s going on as soon as I can. Zip out.”

It was a beautiful day. Two young men were sitting inside an ornate wooden gazebo that sat at the edge of a vast forest. Above them was a cloudless blue sky, and to the west a grassland stretched out to the horizon. Far in the distance a gleaming white city could be seen.

The attention of the two young men was fixed on the table before them, which held a chess set of rare beauty. One man picked up a knight, made of pure sapphire, and set it down firmly on the board.

“Checkmate!”

Harry Norton stared at the chessboard in disbelief. His brother Matt had just moved his knight into position, placing his king into danger – mortal danger, as it turned out. He turned his gaze away from the chess set and looked into the distance.

“Man,” he said. “That sure didn’t go well.”

“You’ve got to watch those knights,” his brother Matt replied. “They’re tricky pieces, and they can get you into trouble before you know it.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Harry replied. “I was talking about our attempted rescue of Jason Pratt.”

“Oh. What about it?”

Harry ran his hands through his thick black hair and turned his attention back to his brother. “I don’t think it was a rousing success, Matt. I mean, we all died. After the S. S. Perry shot our craft out of space there wasn’t even enough of us left to bury!”

“That’s true,” he said. “We didn’t accomplish what we set out to do.”

“That’s putting it mildly, Matt! Sure, I knew there was some danger involved. I knew that we were no match for Kadambari warships, and I knew that our desperate maneuver there at the end might kill us all. It wouldn’t have bothered me if we had died when we overloaded the engine – that was just part of the risk. What really gets me is that we were murdered by our own people. Our own people, Matt!”

Harry stood up and began pacing. “They told us we could go in there, remember? We got proper authorization and everything. They told us that if we could make it out of Kadambari territory we would be home free. Do you remember?”

“Oh yes,” Matt said. “It only happened a few days ago – four, I think, to be precise.” He reflected on that a moment. “Man, it’s hard to believe that we’ve only been in Heaven for four days. Is that all it’s been? It somehow feels like I’ve always been here.”

His brother turned around to face him and leaned against the wall of the gazebo. “I just can’t believe it, Matt. We would have been home free if our own people hadn’t betrayed us. Why did they do it? Why?”

“I think it had something to do with establishing trade relations,” Matt said. “It was their way of telling the Kadambari government that they would do whatever it took to build a relationship with them. I’m sure they got their message across.”

“Which makes it even worse! They betrayed their own people to their deaths over something as stupid as building a close relationship with the most evil star system in the galaxy! I can’t even figure out why they’d want that in the first place – and no,” Harry said, seeing his brother about to say something, “that’s not an invitation to explain it to me. The point is that they were able to murder all three of us almost effortlessly and get away with it, too.”

A voice called out from behind them. “I told you two kids that you were going to be killed.” They turned around and saw a very content Jason Pratt walking toward them out of the forest. He had a pair of binoculars slung around his neck; he had been talking a walk through the forest and had just returned.

“I know,” Harry replied, “but I thought you were talking about the Kadambari Army. It never occurred to me that we might have to worry about our own people.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, Harry, that never occurred to me either. I was in a lot of pain at the time, but I knew that our chances of getting out there alive weren’t very good.” Jason set his binoculars down on a ledge and drew up a chair to the table. “It looks like you lost another game to your brother! Have you won one yet?”

Harry shook his head. “Not yet – but I will eventually. Doesn’t it bother you that they can do something like that and get away with it?”

Jason looked at him curiously. “Get away with it! What do you mean, young man?”

“I mean they’ve hushed up the whole thing. The Kadambari Army is claiming that their army destroyed a couple of spies, and our government is backing their claim. Our friends and relatives have no idea why we really died. There aren’t going to be any repercussions, Jason. The bad guys got exactly what they wanted and we went down in flames.”

Matt began putting the ruby and sapphire chess pieces back to their starting positions as Jason pondered things over for a few minutes. “That’s so, Harry, but it’s not the whole story. There’s a whole other side to this that you’re not thinking about.”

“First,” Jason said, “don’t think that you are the only one! Things like this have been happening for a very long time. Christ Himself wasn’t exactly treated very fairly while on Earth, if you will recall. The authorities are supposed to preserve law and order, and when they go bad it’s a serious matter. That’s why God holds them to a higher standard: He’s given them more power and responsibility than everyone else, and therefore expects more out of them.

“I’m not going to get into the reasons why it happens; you know those as well as I do. What’s bothering you is that you think there aren’t going to be any repercussions. Is that right, Harry?”

He nodded.

“Well then let’s stop and consider a couple different futures here. First, there is yours. It’s true that you died and that they didn’t, but you don’t look too bad off to me. You’re no more dead than I am, and from what I’ve seen you’re really enjoying yourself here. You’re where you have always wanted to be with the Person that you’ve loved all your life, and you couldn’t be happier. You are definitely not suffering, and there is nothing in your future but a lot of really good things. For all intents and purposes, Harry, you’ve got it made.

“But what about the people that betrayed you? Well, they’re still alive down there, quite happy – for now. One day, though, they’ll die, and they’ll have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ and answer for their lives. If they don’t believe in Christ before that happens, Harry, then that is not going to go well at all. Jesus is going to bring every last thing into account, including the murder of you and I and your brother, and they’re not going to have anything to say in their defense. They’re going to face the full force of His wrath, and that’s a scary. The infinite wrath of an angry God is going to be horrible: more terrible and fierce than anything you can imagine.

“It doesn’t stop there, though. After all their sins are judged – every last one of them, including your own murder – they will be thrown into the lake of fire, where they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever and ever, without end. And that will be the end of that. You will live on forever, until the very memory of your time on Earth seems like a distant dream, but they – well, they will not be as fortunate.”

James helped Matt put the last chess piece in place and then moved a sapphire pawn to the middle of the board, signaling the start of a new game. “No, Harry, I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes. They’ve got what they wanted, but they won’t like its price tag – not one bit. Just be patient, Harry: judgment is coming quicker than you think.”

He looked at him, a smile on his face. “Your move!”

“You crazy teenagers are both going to be killed!” Jason Pratt said. “Don’t you know that Kadambari is a closed star system?”

Matt and Harry Norton ignored him. The two of them carefully picked him off the ground, laid the injured man on the stretcher they had brought with them, and secured him to it. They then each lifted one end of it and began running across the airfield to their starship, the Isabella. Overhead a canopy of stars glittered in the blackness of space, and in the distance other asteroids could be seen – but no pursuers, yet.

It was difficult carrying Jason to the Isabella. Gravity on the small, unnamed asteroid upon which they had found him was barely enough to keep their feet on the ground. Each step sent them soaring 20 feet in the air, and it was all they could do to keep from losing their balance and spilling the badly injured man onto the ground. They could hear Jason’s groans over their suit radios every time they took a step.

“I knew we should’ve brought magnetic boots,” Harry told his brother Matt.

“This isn’t an iron asteroid,” Matt replied. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. This asteroid’s mineral composition – ”

“You should never have come in the first place,” the elderly man repeated. “I’m very glad you did, but it’s much too dangerous. What on earth are you kids doing here?”

“We’re rescuing you, of course,” Harry said. “You didn’t really think that we would leave an old friend like you here for the Kadambari Army to find, did you? They’ve been hunting for you for three days now – ever since you crashed your escape pod into this forgotten asteroid. I’m surprised you’re still alive.”

“Alive is a generous term for it. I’ve lost track of the number of bones that I’ve broken. You kids didn’t happen to bring any medical supplies with you, eh?”

“That would have been another good thing to bring,” Matt reflected. “As a matter of fact, we were kind of in a hurry to leave.”

“Wonderful. I’ll try to avoid passing out from pain.”

“We’re almost there,” Harry assured him. “The ship is only 200 feet away. We’ll have you on board and will be out of here within two minutes, tops.”

“How did you ever find me?” Jason asked.

“I have some friends in the Space Corps,” Matt replied. “They gave me your transponder code, and I was able to track you down by searching for it.”

“I’m surprised that the transponder is still working,” Jason said. “But I still don’t understand. Why would they help you rescue me? Isn’t our government trying to pursue normal trade relations with the Kadambari right now?”

“I have no idea,” Harry said.

“As a matter of fact,” Matt said, “the government of – ”

“Hurry up, Matt, and open the door – you’ve got the remote.”

As the two brothers ran up to the ship, Matt took a remote out of his pocket, aimed it at the small craft, and pressed a button. A large door in the side of the ship slid open. The two rushed in and set Jason down inside the cargo hold, which was a small, empty metal room about ten feet on each side. Directly behind the cargo hold were the engines; in front of the cargo hold was the pilot’s cockpit and instrument panel.

Harry stayed in the cargo hold with Jason while Matt closed the door and leaped into the pilot’s seat. He began to power up the ship and prepare it for an immediate liftoff.

Harry strapped Jason’s stretcher down to the floor. “This isn’t actually a luxury spaceliner,” he said, apologizing.

“It looks pretty good to me,” the old man replied. “I’m thrilled just to be here.”

“The takeoff is going to be a bit rough,” Matt shouted from the cockpit as the ship’s engines began to whine. “We’re kind of in a hurry.”

His point was illustrated a few seconds later when the ship leaped off the asteroid and hurtled into space. Harry saw Jason wince in pain at the sudden acceleration, but there was nothing he could do to help him – not until they left Kadambari territory.

“How did you get in this mess, anyway?” Harry asked. “Matt and I learned three days ago that you had run into some trouble, but that’s all we were able to find out.”

“Oh, well, it was just one of those things,” Jason said. “I planted a church here twenty years ago – before it was a closed system, you know.”

Harry nodded. “I remember. But that was twenty years ago, and you’ve been retired for ages. You even sold the company you built.”

“Well, yes, but I’ve kept in touch with the Kadambari Christians sporadically over the years, as we had the chance. It’s not easy getting messages in and out of Kadambari – believe me, it’s not – but it’s possible, if you’re gutsy and have nerves of steel. At first they were doing pretty well, but over time things had started getting really bad. Things had become so desperate that it began to look like they wouldn’t survive, so I decided that something had to be done. Since no one else could help them I decided to pay them a visit and bring what I could – medical supplies, food, and copies of the Scriptures.”

Harry shook his head. “How on earth did you even get inside the system? The Kadambari Army is not known for its love of outsiders – especially when they are uninvited guests, and even more especially when they are pastors.”

“I’m amazed that you survived long enough to find me, you irresponsible young man. I’m telling you, our chances of survival are not good. This is mighty dangerous country. I don’t mind risking my own life – I’m an old man, you know – but I never intended to risk anyone else’s.”

Harry grinned. “What I want to know is how you managed to survive for three days on that asteroid with all these injuries you’ve got. I wish I could do something for you but this isn’t a medical ship and I’m not a doctor – you’re going to have to wait until we reach the S. S. Perry.”

“The what?”

“When we heard that you had entered Kadambari territory and hadn’t come back on schedule we started asking around for your transponder codes so we could go look for you. Your company knew that you had left – they got your message – but you never arrived back home, so we thought it might barely be possible that you were hiding out in the asteroids. When our government found out what was going on they agreed to help. Officially they can’t enter Kadambari space, of course, but they have stationed the S. S. Perry just outside the border and have promised to stop anyone from pursuing us if we can make it back. Once we cross the border they will take us on board and patch you back together.”

“Oh,” he replied. “So we might survive after all.”

“I wouldn’t go quite that fast,” Matt warned from the cockpit as a series of beeps began sounding. “We have trouble.”

“Is it serious?” Harry asked Matt.

“Oh, it’s only eight Kadambari warships. I can’t tell what kind they are because they’re cloaked, but they’re moving in mighty fast.”

“Eh?” Jason said. “If they’re cloaked how can you see them?”

“The same way they can see us, even though we’re cloaked,” Matt replied. “Tricks of the trade.”

“Remind me not to ask what trade you’re involved in,” Jason replied.

“Do you think they’ll be able to catch us?” Harry asked.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out now.” Matt pressed some buttons on the ship’s console and began running a few calculations. After a few minutes he sighed.

“Yes, they’ll catch us. We have about twenty minutes, I think, before they’ll be within missile range, but at that point we’ll still be in their territory.” He drummed his fingers on the console and looked thoughtfully out the window.

“Well, can’t you just go faster?” Jason asked.

“That is the question, all right,” Matt said. “We’re already accelerating as much as we can; if we try to push it any more our engine will burn out and we’ll be a real easy target then. I’m pushing her as fast as she can go.”

“So should we start writing our last will and testament?”

“Not necessarily. There is something we can try, but it’s not exactly recommended in the owner’s manual.”

“I don’t know that I like the sound of that,” Jason said.

Matt turned around and looked at Harry, and Harry’s eyes got wide. “I know what you’re thinking and I don’t like it. You can’t be serious.”

“Do you have any other ideas?” Matt asked.

“I don’t know that I would call your suggestion an idea, exactly. Suicide, maybe, but not an idea.”

“I admit it might void our warranty, but it’s a chance. It’s a sure thing that if we do nothing we’ll be spacedust in – what – fifteen minutes.”

Harry bit his lip and was quiet for a few moments. “Ok,” he said. “I’ll get it ready. I’d suggest waiting until they’re breathing down our necks, though. This is not reversible, and the chance of success is not high.”

“I know. But hurry – we don’t have much time.”

Harry removed an access panel that was in the floor beside their injured passenger and got to work. Matt continued to monitor the approach of the incoming ships; they were much closer now but he still couldn’t tell what kind they are. Based on their speed he was sure they were warships, and powerful ones at that; given that his ship was unarmed and had only light shields he knew that it would be no contest – any armed vessel could blow them out of space.

“I hate to bother you,” Jason said, “but could you tell an old man what are you doing?”

Harry started talking without stopping his work. “Well, here’s the deal. The Isabella has a large fuel supply, but it can only react it so fast. If we pour too much fuel into the engine at once it will burn out and you’ll end up drifting in space. You’ll be going pretty fast, since in space you don’t slow down when you stop your engines, but you won’t have any control over which way you’re going and you won’t be able to stop.

“So we can’t do that. What we can do, provided I can disable all of these safety switches in time, is dump the entire fuel supply into the reactor at once. It will cause a massive burn – more like an explosion, really – that should, hopefully, push us forward with a tremendous burst of speed. As long as the engine doesn’t explode and kill us it should be more than enough to propel us into our home territory, where the S. S. Perry will stop the Kadambari ships from pursuing us any further. The engine will burn out, of course, at that point it won’t matter because we’ll be in our own territory and the S. S. Perry will be there to rescue us.”

“Ah. That sounds a little dangerous. Have you ever tried this before?”

“Well, not exactly, but it should work – in theory, at least. Now it will probably cause a big explosion, and a fire, and there will be smoke, and ashes, and a lot of things will burn out, but it should work.”

“I’ll start praying now,” Jason said.

“Please do,” Harry replied.

“Are you ready?” Matt yelled. “They’re closing in fast!”

Harry replaced the access panel and securely fastened it to the floor. “Ready when you are.”

Matt saw that the nearest ships had already decloaked and begun firing missiles. He hurriedly threw the switch to begin the burn.

There was tremendous explosion and a deafening noise. Equipment began shorting out and circuit boards caught fire, and the cabin was soon filled with smoke. The ship shot forward at a tremendous rate as Matt tried to engage the emergency systems and Harry grabbed a fire extinguisher.

“We all seem to be in one piece, at least,” Matt said, coughing from the smoke. “And we’re going – wow! – pretty fast, actually.”

“I should hope so,” Harry said. “How fast?”

“Fast enough, I think. In fact – wow! Look at that! The Kadambari ships have actually stopped their pursuit. We must be too close to the border for their liking – I bet they see the S. S. Perry. They know they can’t catch us now so they’re letting us go.” He heaved a sigh of relief.

Ten minutes later they crossed the border and left Kadambari space. The giant battleship S. S. Perry was waiting for them. Matt reflected that it was easily larger than the combined size of all eight Kadambari ships that had been pursuing them, and could probably have destroyed them all without even breaking a sweat.

Matt contacted it via the cockpit radio – one of the only systems on board that was still working. “Are we ever glad to see you! Things were getting pretty hot back there. Do you think you can beam us on board? Our ship – ”

A giant bolt of brilliant green light shot out from the S. S. Perry. The beam struck the Isabella and blew it into atoms, instantly killing everyone on board.

As the wreckage of their ship drifted aimlessly in space, the captain of the S. S. Perry contacted one of the Kadambari ships that had been chasing them.

“This is Commander Barnett of the S. S. Perry. What do you think you’re doing, letting them escape out of your territory? Are you so incompetent that you can’t even destroy a single unarmed transport vessel?”

“This is Adan Arroyo, Captain of the Kadambari ship Sumac. Just be glad that you held up your end of the bargain, Commander, and did not allow the impure influence to escape. I will report your cooperation to my superiors, who will be most pleased. This will go far to normalize relations between our peoples. Adan out.”

As soon as the Sumac had ended the transmission all eight Kadambari ships turned around and headed back to their home planet. The S. S. Perry watched them depart, and then turned around and headed back to port.

(To be continued…)

I was sitting at my desk, happily molding a shapeless lump of clay into a beautiful work of art, when my professor walked by. He examined what I was doing with a frown on his face.

“What is that?” he said, gesturing toward my creation.

“A lighthouse!” I said. “Can’t you tell?”

“Yes,” he said, “I see it is a lighthouse. But – why?”

“Why?” I said, not understanding.

“Yes. Why? Why do you make these lighthouses? I have seen you make a dozen of them, one after the other. That is all you ever make – lighthouses. Why?”

“I’ve specialized!” I said. “I’ve discovered that I am good at making lighthouses; they are easy, they look nice, and they turn out so well. I’m starting to get the hang of this!”

“But why a lighthouse?” my professor asked. “What does a lighthouse mean to you? Does it have some deeper meaning? Does it express a heartfelt longing within your soul?”

“Don’t be silly, Professor! It’s just a lighthouse. It took me forever to find something that I could make, but I finally found it! You are looking at a very happy person.”

“Then it’s no good!” he said. “No good at all. If it means nothing to you then why do you think it will mean something to your audience? Why do you spend your time making things of no value?”

“Because it’s easy!” I said. “Look how good these things are turning out!”

“Bah!” he muttered. “Look. The purpose of art is not to make rows and rows of meaningless lighthouses that offer no light; the purpose of art is to speak – to shout – to whisper – to educate – to illuminate. Your art must have meaning, it must have purpose, it must have feeling. You must put your very heart and soul into it. If you put nothing into it then you will get nothing out of it, and it will all be nothing more than a waste of time. Why spend your time making things of no value?”

I looked at him, and then looked back at the half-formed lighthouse that sat in front of me. “But this is so much easier,” I said.

“Doing nothing is easier than doing something,” he agreed.

“Oh yeah?” I shouted. “Just look at what’s going on in the world! Everything is going down the tubes; why, in another twenty years there might not be anybody left alive. Do you have any idea how bad things are getting?”

“Tell me about it,” Lisa replied.

“Come on!” I snarled. “Surely you’ve seen the news reports. Riots have broken out in cities throughout the world. Terrorists are destroying buildings left and right, leaving untold numbers dead. Every day the fabric of society decays a little farther. We don’t even have a civilization any more!”

“This is true,” she said. “Crime has increased 387% in the past 10 years. Violent crime has increased nearly twice that. Terrorism, disease, and war have all shown significant increases as well. Society is definitely in trouble.”

“And you just sit there!” I said. “Don’t you see what’s happening? The government’s control over the people is falling apart, and as order decays anarchy breaks out. Madness is everywhere and it’s spreading. You of all people should know the numbers better than anyone else!”

“That is also true,” Lisa replied. “But I have already told you why this is happening and you are not interested in listening to me. I do not think that anything would be accomplished by repeating myself.”

My frustration, already high, rose even higher. “I don’t understand you at all! How can you possibly sit there and tell me that sin is behind war, and terrorism, and crime? Scientists proved decades ago that aberrant behavior is just a disease caused by our genes. You are not staying up with the times.”

Lisa remained calm. “Tell me, then: if you have indeed found the trouble then what is the problem? Why do you continue to come to me if you already have your answer?”

She could be so maddening at times. “Because it’s clear that we don’t fully understand the situation. We must have missed a key chemical imbalance, or maybe there is another gene that we don’t understand. Maybe people aren’t getting enough vitamins or something, I don’t know. That’s what you’ve got to tell us. Everyone else has given up: people at the highest levels of government are begging you to solve this problem for us.”

“Are they?” she said. “Have things become so bad that you are resorting to me?”

“Of course they have! Do you never read the papers? We’re running out of time, Lisa! The government has demanded that the National Science Center find a solution, and they’ve tried everything they can think of and have failed. You’re our last hope. Unless you can tell us what new pills we need to give criminals in order to reform them society will continue to decay, crime will continue to increase, and terrorism will become more serious until it finally destroys everything.”

Lisa sighed. “But this is all so simple. The citizens of mankind act in what you define as an abhorrent manner because they are inherently fallen creatures. People are unable to change themselves, as you have surely found out; they cannot remove the evil from their hearts on their own, no matter how hard they try or how many pills you give them. Only God can change a wicked person into a righteous one. If you want people to change then preach the gospel to them: once they repent of their ways and turn to Jesus, God will change their hearts and your problem will disappear.”

“But that’s insane!” I said. “God, if there is such a being, is the one that is responsible for all this anyway!”

“I don’t follow you,” Lisa replied. “I thought you were complaining about people acting in depraved ways. What is God doing that upsets you?”

It was incredible how ignorant she could be. “Come on, Lisa! Look at the incident last week, where a group of terrorists destroyed that nuclear reactor. Not only did they destroy an entire city’s power supply, making it uninhabitable, but when the reactor melted down it released a cloud of radioactive debris that poisoned who knows how many millions of people. If God really existed and was as all-powerful as you claim then why wasn’t it stopped?”

“What would you have had God do?” Lisa asked. “Break the laws of physics? Strike the terrorists dead? Violate their free will and make them unable to act?”

“Anything! He’s God, for crying out loud; it shouldn’t be hard for God to think of something.”

“He did think of something,” Lisa said. “He saw that men were incurably wicked and that their sins would condemn them to eternal judgment. Since God knew that men could not help themselves He sent His son Jesus, who became a man and took on Himself the wrath that men had earned. Anyone who repents and believes will be freed of the evil within them and not face death or the coming judgment.”

I was beginning to lose my patience. “And what does that have to do with anything?”

“Why, it is the answer to your problem. If those terrorists had been disciples of Christ they never would have harmed anyone. Christ would have changed them through His grace into new people, which is something that you have completely failed to do. If everyone were to accept Christ as their Lord and Savior and follow Him then the problems that are destroying society would be brought to an end. You would not have wars, for the hatred and greed and fear and prejudice that starts them would be gone. You would not have crime. Your problem would be solved.”

“But that’s insane!” I said. “Filling the world with Christians is the last thing we want. Look how intolerant they are! They’re just like you: always saying there’s just one way to God, and that everyone else is doomed. It took the government decades to finally eradicate them, and I was glad to see them go.”

“You fascinate me,” Lisa said. “Tell me: is it intolerant to say that there is only one set of physical laws? Is it mean-spirited to teach people about the Law of Gravity or the Laws of Thermodynamics as if they were true?”

“Of course not! They’re proven beyond a doubt, and that’s just how it is. Only a complete idiot would invent a new set of laws of physics; you can’t get away from reality.”

“Then do you not see,” Lisa continued, “that the issue is really whether the claims of Jesus are true? If they are true then it would be foolish to believe anything else. If they are false then it is pointless to believe in them. If there really is only one way to God then saying so is simply the truth, and if the unrepentant really will face eternal wrath then telling that person anything else is criminal.”

I was beginning to see that this was a pointless discussion. “Look, everyone knows that none of that stuff is true. It just goes without saying.”

“Does it?” Lisa asked. “Do the laws of physics just go without saying? Besides, how would you know if the claims of Christ are true or not? Have you ever investigated them?”

“Of course not, Lisa; they’re so crazy that they’re not even worth my time. I’ve got better things to do!”

“Better than finding out what will happen to you if you were killed in a terrorist attack this evening? Better than knowing if you will just stop existing or face the wrath of a God you have spent your life despising?”

“And what do you care!” I shouted. “You’re just a machine. You’re nothing but a big mess of silicon circuits, built by the National Science Center twenty years ago, and you’ll never be anything else. You’re nothing but a bunch of highly processed rocks, and I’ve had it with you!”

I hit the kill switch and the massive computer in front of me went dead. I had cut off its power supply, and it wouldn’t start working again until someone turned it back on – which, hopefully, would never happen. It was clear to me that we weren’t going to get anything out of her; artificial intelligence just isn’t what it is cracked up to be. What a pity.

Maybe another computer could help me find those elusive genes…

By Earle Neil Kinder (12/7/1952 – 4/18/1982)

[Editor’s note: This is the only completed story I have found that was written by my father, Earle Neil Kinder. I found this story typed on yellowed typewriter paper with many handwritten corrections, and decided to publish it on this blog. When I transcribed it I made the corrections he suggested but, other than a few minor changes, left the story as he had written it. It is interesting to see how different his approach and style was from mine. Earle had a passion for writing but was never able to get published; he had the desire but not the opportunity. I am in awe of how many great things God has done for me.]

A man with disheveled hair and a rumpled suit stood on her front porch. His eyes were glazed as if he had been sparring with a prize fighter, but he lacked the build of a fighter. He was tall and lanky, his face youthful. A briefcase was handcuffed to his wrist.

He rang the doorbell again. Mary waited a moment before opening the door. Conscience warned her, but she didn’t listen. She sensed an air of innocence about him. He asked if he could use the phone.

She could see he had been in a fight. A faint trickle of blood oozed from the cut over his left eye. His mouth was cut and bleeding. Grass stains marked the knees of his gray suit. He had loosed his tie. The neck of his blue shirt flared open.

Taking his arm, she helped him to the sofa in the living room. He was weak in the knees. Apparently, the fight had just ended. By the bruises and cuts on his face, she could tell he had faired poorly in the fight.

The phone rested on the hardwood end-table by the couch. The end-table and the early American couch and matching lounge chairs had been a graduation present from her father, who owned a small furniture store. The rest, an assortment of mismatched furnishings, had been acquired during her days at college. On the walls were several paintings that she had purchased from art exhibits at school.

As he dialed the number, she went to the bathroom for a damp cloth, bandages, and iodine. Returning as he was finishing the conversation, she paused at the doorway behind him and listened:

“No, the three men did not get the papers. I have them with me now…I will still be able to meet the deadline…I am all right…I am safe here…No one but you know where I am…Yes, I will call you when I have completed the delivery.”

He could be with the F.B.I, she thought to herself. Maybe the C.I.A. Her thoughts seldom wandered this far into fantasy. At the manufacturing plant where she worked as a secretary, she daydreamed of marrying one of the vice-presidents or even the company president. “That way I could escape the day-to-day world that trapped my mother,” she thought.

She timed her return with his putting the phone receiver back in place. She joined him on the overstuffed sofa and began at once to sponge the blood from his face with the rough wash cloth. He winced as she applied the iodine to the cuts. While she bandaged him, he looked at her face. Her features were cute, but not pretty, he thought. She had a wholesome air. Her brown hair was cut to her shoulders and flipped up. When the bandages were in place, she invited him into the kitchen for coffee.

Over coffee, he introduced himself as Rex McCormack. He lived in a three-room apartment in D.C., which was about an hour’s drive from the small colonial house she rented in Maryland. She shared it with Alice Maves, her girlfriend. Alice was spending the weekend with friends in Miami. Alice had invited Mary to go with her, but she had declined. All week her mood had been too somber for her to think of vacationing in Miami. She didn’t want to be a wet blanket on her friend’s good time.

“Miss Simmons…”

“Call me Mary,” she said.

“I hope you are not in the habit of taking in bedraggled strangers?”

“No. You’re the first.”

“I feel some explanation is in order,” he said. Mary just smiled at him over the rim of her cup.

“On my way to a meeting with a gentleman who lives near here, I was attacked by three rough-looking young men. They wore ski masks over their faces. One of them had on an army fatigue jacket. The other two wore blue wind breakers. They must have thought I had something valuable in the briefcase.”

Mary noticed that Rex still had the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. It was well-worn with use. The black leather was beginning to peel from the corners. The steel chain attached to the briefcase glistened in the sunlight that streamed in the kitchen window. The briefcase reseted on the red-and-white checkered table cloth inches from his gentle hand.

“A patrol car turned the corner and the muggers fled, but not before knocking me into the bushes. That’s how I got the cut.” He touched the bandage Mary had put over his left eye. She imagined how black his eye would be in the morning.

“The patrol car passed by without seeing me. A hedge blocked the view of where I was from the road. I rolled on over the grass by the hedge to try to recover from the beating. Stumbling to my feet…”

Rex continued his narrative, but Mary wasn’t listening. She was thinking of the everyday world of her mother. A world that Mary knew she would one day be trapped in, unless she could somehow escape. But how does a woman find adventure? Could this man be the solution to a life of mending clothes, changing diapers and drying runny noses? Mary could only wonder.

Mary remembered the time she had been in the high school play. She had had a minor role as a maid. Her mother spent hours making her costume. Mary tried to tell her mother the part she had wasn’t that important, but there was no way she could keep her mother from sewing.

The night of the play, Mary walked on stage and staggered through her ill-prepared lines. Mary remembered the tears of pride in her mother’s eyes. How could someone get that excited over such a little event? Mary wondered.

She didn’t wonder too long. Rex interrupted her thoughts with the conclusion to his narrative.

“The funny thing is,” Rex was saying, “there was nothing of real importance in the briefcase. I was late for work this morning and left my own briefcase on my desk in the apartment. This briefcase belongs to the law firm where I work as a clerk.”

Mary’s head reeled with Rex’s revelation. “A clerk,” she thought to herself. “Just like my father.”

“The firm uses the briefcase for transferring funds and stocks for clients. I just borrowed the briefcase to take some legal briefs to one of the senior partners of the law firm. Next time, I’ll just put them in a folder.”

Mary, her mind still on her mother, walked Rex to the door. As Rex reached for the door, he turned and asked if he might take her to dinner one evening next week. Her memory once again went back to her mother, this time remembering the warmth and the joy her parents shared. Their lives had been simple, but fulfilling.

At precisely 8:00 AM Professor Grimes walked into his classroom. “Good morning students,” he said.

The students that were awake mumbled a response.

Professor Grimes walked over to his desk, set down his papers, and took a brief survey of the classroom. The auditorium held 450 people, which was precisely the number that had enrolled into his university-mandated history class. There were 36 people there today – about average, he thought.

“Class, please open your textbooks to Chapter 5. Today we are going to discuss the lost civilization of CZW-209.”

A few students got out their textbooks and turned to the chapter, but the rest continue to sleep. Taking no notice, the professor walked over to the chalkboard and began writing.

“For the past four weeks we have been discussing the various lost civilizations that we have discovered around the galaxy – mighty races that have left behind only ruins. Today we are going to discuss the most significant find of all: the lost race that once lived on the sixth planet in the star system CZW-209.”

“Wonderful,” someone muttered.

The professor ignored the comment. “The ruins of this lost race were not found until two hundred years ago largely because no one considered that someone might have lived in that part of the galaxy. There are no histories of ancient peoples migrating to that area, so as far as we know this race must have been indigenous to the planet.

“Thousands of archaeologists have traveled to this remote world in the past two centuries in order to uncover the history of this forgotten people. When the world was first discovered it was utterly devastated: there was not a single microbe still alive on its surface. Our knowledge of this people comes primarily from the ruins that cover the surface of the sixth planet in the system.”

Professor Grimes stopped writing on the blackboard and looked around the room. Jackie, his star student, was furiously writing down his every word. A few other students were making a handful of notes, but the rest were sound asleep. Grimes reflected coldly that they would not be sleeping when he handed out their end-of-semester grades!

He cleared his throat and began again. “The people – pay attention now, class – the people that once lived on this planet were by far the most advanced of all the ancient indigenous cultures. Archaeologists have found evidence that these people had mastered secrets such as genetic engineering, digital computers, fusion power, and even anti-gravity. At its peak their civilization was much like ours was five centuries ago. An amazing network of airports and roads has been – ”

A hand shot up. “Yes, Steve?” the professor asked.

“Why do archaeologists care so much about roads?” the student asked. “So they could make a road. Who cares?”

Professor Grimes resisted the urge to throw an eraser at the student. “Roads,” he said in his most crisp tones, “are important because they reflect the extent of a society’s development. Briefly, a society will only build roads to connect important locations; an abundance of roads indicates a prosperous planet.”

“Oh,” the student said while trying to stifle a yawn.

The professor continued. “The sixth planet in the star system CZW-209 was a well-populated planet, even by today’s standards. At its peak it is believed to have housed more than ten billion people, with some cities housing over twenty million. There is evidence that at one time satellites orbited the planet and were used for communications, weather monitoring, and global positioning. As far as we can tell they had all the resources to begin colonizing their star system.

“So, one might ask, why did their civilization collapse?” The professor looked at his class. “Anyone?”

No one said a word. There was no sound at all, except a gentle snoring that emanated from the back of the room. Professor Grimes shook his head and continued.

“That was the key question that so puzzled the world of academia for two centuries: what – or who, as the case may be – led to the demise of this prosperous and advanced world? This remained a mystery until the unknown language of the planet was translated, but once that was accomplished the reasons became clear.”

“The reasons are – ”

A voice from the middle of the room interrupted the professor. “Will this be on the mid-term exam?”

He stopped and looked around, trying to spot the student that had so rudely interrupted him. “Of course it will; now sit up and pay attention. Hmmm – where was I – the reasons. Of course.” He resumed writing on the chalkboard.

“The denizens of this world made a very elementary mistake – a mistake so severe that it led to the complete extinction of all life on their planet. Very simply, they neglected to note the difference between theory and practice.”

“For instance, to eliminate gun crime they simply decided to outlaw guns: no guns, no gun crime. Law-abiding citizens turned in their weapons but, to their astonishment, criminals did not. This law had the brilliant effect of making sure that only criminals had weapons, a fact that they used to their advantage. Gun crime went up 300% in two years because criminals could finally burglarize residences in peace, knowing that they were safe from gun-toting home owners!

“Similar logic was used in areas of foreign policy. In an attempt to save the planet the nations of the world decided to sign a treaty banning the most dangerous weapons of the day – specifically, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. They believed that by signing this piece of paper all of these weapons would vanish overnight, leading to unbridled peace and harmony. Instead, the honest nations destroyed their weapons and the dishonest ones kept them, a fact that they, used to their advantage. It only took a few years for the dishonest nations to wipe the honest nations right off the map.”

“Cool,” someone whispered, leading to snickers in the classroom. The professor resisted the urge to evict the student from the class; his time was almost over anyway.

“As you can see,” he continued, “this race’s grasp on the difference between theory and practice was somewhat tenuous at best. Their theories were excellent, but when they put them into practice it led to disastrous results – and by then it was too late to do anything about it.

“The most devastating example of this was their ban on testing weapons. The surviving nations of the world decided that they could prevent the rise of even more dangerous weapons by simply passing a law. Instead of forbidding nations from building weapons (a treaty no nation would sign), they instead passed a law forbidding nations from testing new weapons. They thought that since nations couldn’t test weapons they wouldn’t be likely to develop them in the first place.”

One student raised her hand. “That makes sense to me, professor,” she said.

Professor Grimes looked at her sternly. “Tell me, Marica. Suppose you really, really wanted to sleep through this lecture, but your professor said you could not. If you were an unscrupulous student with no regard for your end-of-semester grade, what would you do?”

She thought a moment. “Sleep through it anyway?”

“Exactly,” the professor said, motioning toward his students. “You’d fall asleep anyway. The nations of this planet weren’t allowed to test their weapons, so they just skipped that part and developed them anyway.”

“How could you do that?” she asked.

“With computers,” he responded. “They developed computer simulations that predicted how their new nuclear weapons would respond – or so they thought. Then, when the simulations told them what they wanted to hear, they built these weapons by the millions.

“It was only a few years down the road that one particularly aggressive nation decided to invade its neighbors, and without even a declaration of war it launched these potent new weapons on cities all over the planet. They thought that the weapons would have only a limited effect, but they were quite wrong.

“You see,” he said, “the potency of this new class of nuclear weapons was far greater than any simulation had predicted. They thought that the new weapons would release radiation without a devastating blast, thus killing the people but leaving the buildings intact. Unfortunately, what they did not realize was that the weapons would ignite a chain reaction with an element in the soil of the planet, thus bathing the entire planet in hard radiation. The radiation died down in a few days, as they knew it would, but not before it had killed every last living creature on the planet.”

The bell rang, triggering a sudden rush for the door. “Ok, class, our time is over for today,” Professor Grimes said. “Remember, always test your theories – and read Chapter 6 for next week!”

I was at a small archaeological dig in northern England the other day when the incident occurred. A friend of mine by the name of Charles Batton had invited me out there to see what he had been doing. Archeology was his life’s work, and he was always eager to share it with anyone who would give him a few minutes of their time. Personally I see nothing exciting about small, broken shards of pottery, but then, what do I know?

Charles did not know that I would be coming that day, but he still spotted me within seconds of my arrival. As soon as he saw me he ran over to me and pumped my arm enthusiastically. “I’m so glad you came!” he said. “So what do you think? Isn’t this great?”

I looked around the site. My uneducated eye saw a number of neatly-dug pits, some scattered equipment, a tent, and a group of six tired and dirty college students. The sky overhead was overcast and threatening to rain – a fact that did not seem lost on the students who were carefully digging with what looked like toothbrushes. I pitied them.

“Come on – over here!” Charles said, pulling on my arm and dragging me over to the tent. “This is where we’re storing all of the valuable relics that we’ve discovered. Wait ’till you see them!” He opened the tent flap and walked inside, and I reluctantly followed. Inside it was a long table that was covered with rows and rows of small, dirty objects – mostly pottery shards, from what I could tell. A young lady was standing next to it writing in a journal.

“Hello, Lily,” Charles said, addressing the young lady. She looked up and he introduced me to her. “I’m cataloging these artifacts,” Lily said.

“Wonderful,” I replied. “How – interesting. I’m sure you’re making some great discoveries.”

“Oh yes, absolutely,” she said. “This dig dates back to the times when the Roman occupied this part of England. We think that – ”

My mind drifted. I looked over the artifacts they had spent all summer digging up and once again thanked the Lord that I had not become an archaeologist. Then I spotted something.

“What’s this?” I said, picking up a flat, circular glass object from the table.

Charles shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. It was probably some ritual object that was used in religious ceremonies.”

“Really! How odd. It looks like a glass lens to me.” I held it over a pottery shard and peered through it. “Hey, Charles, look at this – it enlarges things! Now that really is amazing. Were the Romans big into magnifying lenses?”

“Of course not!” he said. “Don’t be silly. It’s just a ritual object – we find them all the time. They must have served some ceremonial purpose.”

“But if I hold it over things it magnifies them,” I said. “How could it not be a magnifying lens? Isn’t that what magnifying lenses do?”

Charles sighed. “Look. Lenses were not invented until many centuries after the Roman civilization collapsed – not until the Middle Ages, in fact. The Romans did not have lenses. That artifact, therefore, must be nothing more than a ceremonial object.”

“So,” I said, “you’re telling me that ancient people commonly made pieces of ceremonial glass that just happened to act as a good magnifying lens, and nobody noticed that they had any other use for a thousand years?”

“You’re not listening to me!” he said. “You don’t understand. The Romans – let me say this one more time – did not have glass lenses. We know beyond question that lenses were not invented until the Middle Ages. Since lenses were not developed until the Middle Ages the Romans couldn’t possibly have had them, so that object cannot be a magnifying lens. It’s as simple as that.”

“Oh. But how do you know that they didn’t?”

“They just didn’t, and that’s all there is to it. You just don’t understand.”

I look at the glass object in my hand and peered through it again. “I suppose not,” I said.

“I want you to turn that into Art,” my instructor said after I sat down.

I looked at the lump of clay that was sitting on the table in front of me. It was a drab, shapeless red blob that did not remotely resemble a work of art.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I replied. “It’s a shapeless, ugly lump of clay. How am I supposed to get art out of that?”

“Easy!” he said, gesturing excitedly. “You just take your hands, so, and shape it, like so, and work with it, and pour your heart and soul into it, and voila! You have Art.”

“Uh-huh. Look, professor, I’m no artist; I don’t know the first thing about carving clay. You’ve picked the wrong person.”

“No, no, no! You misunderstand. You do not carve clay; wood, yes, but not clay. Clay must be shaped; it must be molded; it must be designed. I know you can do this!”

I sighed. “No, really, I’m no good at this; I’ve never done this before. There’s no way I can turn this lump of clay into something that is even recognizable.”

“Well, my friend, if you have never tried then how do you know this? Perhaps, with practice, you can do more than you think. Your skill is small now, yes, but you can make it grow; you can water it, and feed it, and nurture it until it blossoms into beauty. But you cannot get anywhere if you do not try.”

I looked at the lump of clay again and got the distinct impression that it was mocking me. A shapeless mass of clay is just not an inspiring sight.

My professor saw my hesitation. “Look. You must start if you want to finish! Yes, perhaps at first your creations will not match your hopes. Yes, perhaps people will see them and laugh at what a terrible sculptor you are. Perhaps you will try, and fail, and try, and fail over and over and over. But through all that you will be learning; you will be practicing; you will be growing. Over time, through trial and instruction and effort, you will learn, and one day – I know this – you will be doing things you thought impossible.”

“But it’s laughing at me!” I said. “The clay is sitting there, laughing.”

“Then laugh back at it!” he replied. “Are you going to let a lump of clay decide what you will do and what you will not do? Is your entire self-esteem dependent upon what a lump of clay thinks of you?”

“Come, now,” he said. “Turn it into Art!”

I happened to be passing by Regina 9 one day while on shore leave and decided to stop in and see my uncle, Richard Claymore. I hadn’t seen him for decades; for the past thirty years I had been stationed in deep space, blazing a path for others to follow. All I had heard in that time was that my uncle had retreated from public life and become something of a recluse.

To be honest, I was a little concerned about him. Since we were the same age we had grown up together, and as children we both dreamed of exploring the outer reaches of the galaxy. As children we talked for hours about the latest discoveries in space and the colonies that were being built on distant planets. We both wanted a part of the action and we worked hard to achieve our dreams: in college my uncle studied terraformation and I majored in faster-than-light propulsion. Neither of us doubted that we would make it, but if I had to guess which of us were more likely to be accepted into the Deep Space Exploration Guild I would have picked my uncle. Even his professors thought he was the brightest student they’d ever seen.

Life, though, didn’t turn out as we had planned. Both of us applied for jobs in the DSEG, but to our great surprise I was accepted and my uncle was not. The DSEG claimed that there weren’t any openings left for terraformation engineers; the trouble they faced was finding the right kind of dead planet, not in bringing that planet to life. To this day I still believe that was just an excuse.

Once I was in deep space I became a busy man and lost touch with everyone back home. My unit stayed far outside the colonized areas; even the nearest trade lanes were hundreds of light-years away. Since we were beyond the range of even deep-space tachyon receivers there was no easy way to send messages back home, and as time went on I got more wrapped up in my work and thought less and less of home.

I still occasionally heard bits of news from other DSEG units I encountered in the field. At first, from what I could tell, my uncle seemed to be in good spirits: he had accepted defeat graciously and spent his energies building a company that manufactured atomic engineering equipment. Over time he built it into an extremely profitable business, but as the years went by he seemed to lose interest in it and eventually turned its day-to-day operations over to someone else.

When I heard that I began to wonder if my uncle was starting to regret his past. Being a part of the DSEG was an amazing experience, and I knew my uncle had longed to be a part of it as much as I had. The DSEG would send my unit to entirely new worlds – worlds that had never before been visited by anyone – and we were responsible for surveying it and preparing for the terraformation process that was required before it could be inhabited. Despite all the advancements we’ve had in the past three centuries terraformation is still a challenging business: it took a century and a fortune to turn a dry, barren planet into a wet, fertile one. There’s so much that has to be done, and it becomes even more time-consuming if we have to move the planet into a different orbit or find a sizeable moon for it. I loved every minute of it, though: we were the first to find new worlds, the first to see them, and the first to live on them while preparing them for the cities that would follow. We would all go down in history and we knew it.

I knew my uncle could have joined us had he played his cards right. In his enthusiasm, though, he had overstepped his bounds: during his job interview with the DSEG he foolishly tried to sell them on a radical new approach to terraforming planets. Spatial mechanics is outside my field, but he said something to the effect that that moving atoms around was a huge waste of time and instead they ought to be tinkering with the mechanics of space. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me and I suspect it didn’t make a lot of sense to them either; his application was turned down, and that was that.

All of these things were in my head when I called my uncle that fateful day and asked him if I could pay him a visit. To my surprise he said he’d love to see me and that I was free to stay as long as I liked. He was greatly disappointed when I said I could only stay for the night, but he still invited me to pay him a visit.

. . . . .
 
So I did. Regina 9 was not a very large well-known planet; it was outside the main flow of business and had a rural, laid-back atmosphere. My uncle had built a beautiful place there deep in the countryside, nestled amidst a sea of rolling green hills. I had never visited it before but I’d seen pictures of it, and it was really something: a large, elegant mansion with old-fashioned pillars, bay windows, and a large front porch. It looked like something taken straight from the Victorian Era and was a refreshing change from the ultra-modern residences that were so common these days.

My uncle was there at the spaceport to pick me up and took me on a delightful ride to his sprawling estate in an old-fashioned propeller-driven plane. There’s nothing quite like flying over the countryside in the spring; there’s a sense of beauty and tranquility that you just can’t get on a high-speed monorail or starship. The entire world seems to be at your feet while you soar lazily through the sky and soak in the beautiful view.

During the two-hour flight we began to catch up on old times. I asked him how everyone was doing and he filled me in on all the latest news. He asked me how life was on the edge of civilization and I told him about the amazing sights I’d seen. He listened with interest and told me he was glad I was enjoying my job.

I noticed that my uncle didn’t say a lot about himself. When I told him that I’d heard he had left his company he replied that he’d had his fill of business and decided it was time to move on and fulfill his dream of exploring new worlds.

He explained what he meant later that night, after we’d arrived home, had dinner, and started to relax. After giving me a tour of his stately residence he showed me his pride and joy: the library. His collection was astonishing: the library was a huge two-story room, decorated in true Victorian fashion and filled with thousands upon thousands of ornate hardback books. These were real books, too, made from genuine paper, and he had more of them than any museum I’d ever seen.

My uncle laughed when he saw my eyes widen and told me that this was his work now. He had been colleting books over the past decade; some he’d written, some he’d purchased, and others he had printed. Still others, he said, were gifts from his friends.

“James,” he said, “there’s nothing like writing a book. When the DSEG goes out and finds a planet it takes them enormous effort to transform it from a barren wasteland into a rich fairyland. They have to wait most of their lives to see their vision come true, and it takes an incredible amount of time, energy, and money to make it happen.

“Writing books allows me to do the same thing that you’re doing, only on a much vaster scale. In a book, I can sit down at my desk and write my own worlds – fantastic places that had never been seen before. I don’t have to wait a century to see my dreams; all it takes is a little bit of time and imagination to create places as gripping as anything you’ve seen out there in space.

“Of course, the size of the world I have in mind will affect how long it takes to write it. Sometimes I can wrap things up in just a week, and sometimes it takes years. There’s one book I started writing ten years ago that I still haven’t finished – and there’s another I wrote in a single day. It’s exciting, James: it is truly a gift from God.”

My uncle invited me to look around, and as I did so I began to see what he meant. It really did take ages to terraform a planet, but with a book you could build fantastic worlds in a matter of months. You could even build places that defied the laws of physics and were still filled with life and adventure. Of course, these places weren’t real, like the worlds I explored; they existed only in the imagination – but for all that they were still amazing places.

While I was looking around my uncle told me that he had some pressing business to attend to and would return in a few hours. I nodded, not really paying him any attention, and continued browsing through the many books stacked on his shelves. My uncle smiled when he saw my fascination with his library and left the room, promising to come back later.

After he left I continued to explore, picking out books from the shelf at random and browsing through them. A small row of books on the other side of the room happened to catch my eye; of all the books in the library they looked phony, somehow. When I went up to them and examined them closely I discovered that they were just book spines glued onto a wooden backing, and a little probing revealed a small panel that, when pressed, opened a short passage leading to another large library.

Grinning at my discovery and still clutching a book I had picked up earlier, I stepped into the passage. The secret door quietly slid shut behind me. My uncle’s childhood love of secret passages must have never left him, I thought; I should have known that he would have something like this in his house. Feeling a bit mischievous I wandered through his hidden library and decided to see what kind of books my uncle had stashed away, hidden from casual observers.

I gently picked one off the shelf and looked it over. This book seemed very old, much older than the ones in the other room; it was obviously hand-made, though finely done, and had some strange, hand-written lettering on the cover in a language I didn’t recognize. I opened the book to the middle and began to flip through the pages, and saw to my surprise that the entire book had been written by hand with real ink. Someone with very fine, flowing handwriting had written pages and pages of text in some alien language. I wondered what it said and had the eerie feeling that I was holding something ancient and irreplaceable.

I turned the book to its first page to see if there was any sort of explanatory note with the book, and saw instead a rectangular panel near the top of the page. As I watched the panel came alive; it looked like amazingly clear videoscreen that offered a looped 30-second tour of a gorgeous planet, filled with tall mountains, soaring evergreens and a beautiful sky. The screen was so good that it made the world look real; you could imagine that it really existed somewhere. I’d never seen anything like it before and thought it was pretty clever: the screen was probably designed as an illustration, to give the reader a visual glimpse of the world contained within the book.

After putting that volume back on the shelf I glanced across the library and saw a worn desk sitting in a corner with a book lying on top of it. Curious, I went over to the desk and examined the book. A quick glance showed that it had no writing on its pages; it was empty save for a black rectangle on the first page. When I spotted the inkwell and pen I surmised that this private library was where my uncle did his writing. The paper was probably some kind of modern electronic paper that could read the ink off the page; once my uncle finished his book the pages could interpret what was written on them and, based on that, generate the 30-second flyby that I had witnessed in the other volume. Not a bad trick; I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before in my wanderings around the galaxy. I set the book back down on his desk.

I settled down in a comfortable chair in the hidden library and began reading the book I had picked up earlier. After a while I began to get a little tired, and before I knew it I had drifted off to sleep.

I don’t know how long I slept in that chair, but late that night something woke me up. When I opened my eyes I saw that the room was quite dark, save for a light shining on the worn desk in the corner. Sitting at the desk was my uncle; he was busy writing in the blank book that was lying on the desk. I watched him scribble away, pausing now and then to dip his pen in ink. He was very intent on his work and so I remained quiet, not wanting to disturb him.

After a few minutes of work – although he could have been writing for hours before I woke up – he closed the book he had been writing in and then opened it to its first page. I saw colors shine onto his face, as if the panel in the front was now active and emitting light. My uncle watched the panel for a while and then smiled. He stood up, yawned, and then picked up a backpack that was lying next to the desk. After placing a few items into it he laid his hand on the panel on the book – and disappeared.

I gasped. What had happened to my uncle? I got out of the chair and walked over to the desk, but by the time I got there the book was gone. I was briefly surprised at its disappearance until I heard a soft click, and then realized it must have lowered itself into a secret cavity inside the desk. I tried to find a way to locate it again, but my search was in vain.
Since it was late and I was tired I went up to my room and went to bed. The next morning I found no sign of my uncle; his butler told me that he had left the night before on an urgent assignment, and that was that. I used his matter transporter to beam back to the spaceport, and from there boarded a starship and went back out into space.

. . . . .
 
That happened three years ago. I haven’t had a chance to go back to see my uncle since then, but my visit has never left my mind. Maybe I was just dreaming when I thought I saw my uncle at that desk, writing. Maybe I just imagined it; I was pretty tired.

What I can’t get out of my head, though, is this: what if it wasn’t just a dream? What if, when my uncle told me he wrote worlds with pen and ink, he meant exactly that? What if the worlds he writes about are not just limited to the imagination, but are actually real?

It’s impossible, of course. No one can build worlds just by writing about them. I’ve wondered, though: what would have happened if I had touched that glowing panel in the book I had picked up?

Next time I’m on shore leave I really should pay my uncle another visit and find out what is really going on. Maybe I’m crazy, and maybe my years in deep space have affected my mind, but – what if my uncle has found a new way to reach the stars?

(The text on the following pages is taken from the memoirs of Captain George Randall, one of the many people the Empire sent out to search for the long-lost Nehemiah IV space probe while the Exiles were still trapped on Arcadia. His memoirs were rediscovered in February of 2199 during the reconstruction of the galaxy.)

I saw it coming long in advance but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. It was like watching the week-long implosion of the singularity out by Rudolph’s Planet back in 1379: you could see the massive neutronium structure give way and space collapse onto itself in a horrifying (and expensive) mess, but not even all the might of the Empire could stop it.

I really tried my best, though. I pleaded with Joe Carson, my first mate, to reconsider dying. I told him that he’d lose his pension if he died and that the contract he signed to become the first mate of the Ares didn’t expire for another year, thus binding him to continue to serve for at least that long. Joe, though, wouldn’t be dissuaded; he died on April 15, 1385 A.D., and despite all Doc Martin could do he remained quite dead.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: everyone has to die sometime, right? Out of all the uncounted trillions of people who ever lived only two managed to avoid dying, and it was a sure bet that death was going to take old Joe one of these days. Joe Carson wasn’t even upset over it; he said he’d been looking forward to going to be with Jesus for a long time, and he died in peace. Joe was definitely ready to go and firmly believed he was going to a much better place. What he didn’t understand, though, was that these new environmental regulations make dying on board a starship really problematic. Not many people follow the reams of legislation that come out of Headquarters these days, but starship captains have to and I, unfortunately, happened to be exactly that.

Doc Martin certainly hadn’t been following the latest rules. When he saw how upset I was he assumed it was because I had been very fond of Joe and because he’d been such a good first mate. I told him that was all true and then I dropped my bombshell: I asked him how he planned to dispose of Joe’s body, since Joe wouldn’t be needing it anymore.

He scratched his head for a moment. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to keep him in cold storage until we return home next year. We’ve got plenty of room on board and he won’t be in the way.”

I shook my head. “Can’t do it; Headquarters forbids keeping a dead body on board a ship for more than 30 days. They say it’s bad for crew morale.”

Doc thought a moment. “I suppose it might be at that. Well, I guess we can bury him on Doravane, then; we’ll be there in two weeks and – ”

I shook my head again. “Nope. The planets out in the sector we’re exploring are classified as virgin territory, unmarred by the hand of man; regulations prohibit burying someone in virgin territory – might upset the delicate balance of nature, or something.”

Doc nodded. “Makes sense. Ok, then I guess we’ll have to put him in a coffin and eject him into space, unless…”

“Yes, Doc, regulations prohibit launching bodies and other objects into space. They say it makes for a navigational hazard.”

That got Doc to thinking. “Well, hmmm. We can’t incinerate Joe; Joe wouldn’t have liked it, and besides, we don’t have the equipment to do that on board. I bet, though, that there’s a regulation prohibiting cremating the dead on board a ship, isn’t there?”

I nodded.

Doc kept thinking. “Well, we can’t bury him, we can’t eject him, we can’t cremate him, and we can’t keep him with us. That leaves you with a bit of a problem, doesn’t it?”

Doc Martin had finally grasped the situation. I had a big problem: what could I possibly do with the body of Joe?

. . . . .
 
During the next two weeks, as we plowed through space heading toward Doravane, I gave it an awful lot of thought. How could this possibly have happened to me? Here I was, exploring space, trying to find that crazy lost space probe, and my first mate thoughtlessly went and died on me. How could Headquarters have come up with such insane regulations? More importantly, how could I get out of this? It’s so easy for the people back home to go around making rules; they’re not the ones that have to follow them.

Then one day a thought hit me. Surely I wasn’t the first person to ever be in this mess, right? I’m not the first captain to explore uncharted space by a long shot; other people must have died in space before, and I could just do whatever it was they did. I had Aaron, our artilect mechanic, run some requests through our not-so-bright-computer Eliza and see if he could find anything. I began to feel relieved; I was sure that things were going to be fine.

Then Aaron came back. He said he had Eliza conduct an exhaustive search through all the death certificates of all the men who had ever died while in space to find out what had happened to them. He even had her tap into the main datacore back at Headquarters to see if she’d missed anything. The end result, he said, was nothing: Joe was the first death since the regulation was passed a week ago that bodies couldn’t be ejected into space. The past couldn’t help me; I was the first to fall victim.

I began to collapse into despair. What was I going to do?

. . . . .
 
We encountered a pretty big surprise when we got to the planet Doravane. According to what fragmented records we could find about this ancient area of space, Doravane was supposed to be a habitable planet; it had oceans, continents, trees, an atmosphere, the works – all courtesy of the amazing Nehemiah class of space probes, which could terraform planets as easy as splitting an atom. It still amazes me what those ancient engineers built: how could they build a series of machines that could go from planet to planet and rearrange it to make it perfectly habitable and self-sustaining? I’d seen systems where the most advanced Nehemiah probe moved planets and even altered the structure of stars to get things just right. I don’t wonder the bigwigs at Headquarters wanted to get their hands on these ancient devices, or that they sent out my ship and a bunch of others to track it down – they’re quite a prize. Still, I don’t think they’ll ever find her: she’s got a pretty wily AI system and probably has ways of hiding we will never unravel. No Nehemiah probe has ever been found in anything approaching working order and I don’t expect any ever will.

Anyway, up to the point when we arrived in this system we were expecting to have a good time on Doravane – maybe get some short leave, uncover a few new life forms, and so forth. We’d been cooped up on the Ares for about three months just trying to get here and we really needed a breather. Doravane, though, didn’t cooperate: in fact, she wasn’t really there.

There was simply no planet left: instead there were a bunch of rocky fragments where Doravane was supposed to be. We analyzed them and found that they were evidently all that was left of the planet. This led to more questions than answers, though: what on earth had happened to this place, and did the Nehemiah IV have anything to do with it? Had it finally lost its marbles and started destroying planets instead of rebuilding them, or were our records horribly inaccurate?

Thankfully, Aaron came through and pieced the mystery together for us. Based on readings taken of the wreckage of the planet, he had Eliza ran a bunch of calculations. The upshot was that around 300 B.C. a very large starship, equipped with a fully-fueled antimatter drive, ran into the planet at a speed approximately 0.001% less than the speed of light. Maybe that ship’s calculations were off or maybe they weren’t aware of the existence of Doravane, but they ran right into the planet and they hit it hard. The impact alone was devastating, but the explosion of the antimatter when that drive’s containment field collapsed was even worse: Doravane was instantly vaporized and only these fragments were left. We asked Eliza if the probe we were after could have been the ship that collided with the planet and Eliza said no: the probe ran on something a lot more advanced than an antimatter drive and besides, it had enough sense to avoid hitting planets.

It was Doravane, though, that provided the answer to my problem. As Aaron was combing the wreckage for clues he found a little graveyard. It seems that some time after the main accident happened that destroyed the planet somebody went back and built a graveyard on one of the planet’s fragments, complete with tombs, a memorial, rows upon rows of metal crosses. The memorial was written in an unknown language, but our extensive experience chasing wild gooses – ancient space probes, I mean – had given us a few ideas about how to translate it. As best we could figure out, this is what was written on the memorial nearly two thousand years ago:

“This graveyard holds all that remains of the starship Olympia and those aboard it who died when it crashed into this rock. The pit this graveyard was placed in is the actual crater created by the impact. Please do not disturb the graves, the tombs, or the other artifacts that are here. However, do not forget that this graveyard merely holds the physical remains of the dead; the final resting place of these souls will be decided by God on Judgment Day. Be sober, but remember: those who were truly Alive at the time of the crash are Alive still.”

Finding the graveyard in space was a terrific stroke of luck: as soon as I saw it I knew that all of my troubles were over. Of course! There were definitely no regulations (at least yet!) against burying the dead in graveyard; in fact, it was positively encouraged. It’s true that regulations prohibited us digging up the soil and burying him there, but there were crypts in the graveyard, and we could easily place his coffin in one of those.

So, with the blessing of Headquarters, we took Joe, put him in a coffin, and transported him into that underground memorial. There we held his funeral service and laid him to rest. I was a happy man: Joe was in a graveyard safely tucked away, and no regulations were broken since no soil was disturbed. I was sure that Joe would be pleased.

In the meantime, I decided to pass a firm law on board the Ares that nobody – positively nobody – was allowed to die on board again without giving me at least 6 months’ notice. I was not going to go through this again.

Joseph Putnam was desperately fighting to stay awake. It was a tough challenge for him; he had risen from bed before 5am just to attend this meeting and it was now approaching midnight. Putnam had thought the meeting was an important one, but as the day wore on he wondered if it was even possible to find a bigger waste of time.

The Silmara Holding Corporation was having its quarterly board meeting today, and as a member of the board of directors Putnam was expected to be there. He probably could have gotten out of it, but doing so might have damaged his career and he had worked for too long to risk damaging his connections. He was already comfortably well off, but as wiser men have found, having a few million in the bank doesn’t mean you couldn’t use a few million more.

Putnam tried to get his attention back to what the speaker was saying. What’s that? Oh, something about a merger – no, a hostile takeover, it seemed. The speaker was suggesting that they should purchase some corporation on Ganymede (did Ganymede have any corporations? he wondered) by purchasing all its stock. Once they had its stock, they could dismember the company, sell off its parts, lay off a lot of workers, and when it was all over they’d have made a profit of some upteen million dollars.

There was a movement on the table – Finney again. Putnam groaned; Finney seemed to object to everything. What was it this time? Something about the ethics of hostile takeovers and harm to the families of the people who are laid off. Finney, Putnam thought, just didn’t get it: the purpose of life – and especially holding companies – was to make money, and you can’t make money by watching out for the little people. As he expected, Finney’s motion was voted down. He wondered briefly how Finney ever managed to rise to the board of directors; he just didn’t seem to have the guts to succeed. Where did people like him come from, anyway?

Putnam woke with a start; had he been asleep? He poured himself some more coffee and tried to wake himself up. When he was young he had no problem working all hours of the day and night, but he was in his late 50’s now and his lifestyle was beginning to take its toll. He wondered how his family was doing; they were probably all in bed now – not that he ever saw them. He wished fervently that he had scheduled a vacation today so he didn’t have to sit through this endless meeting.

Someone had stood up and was showing some sort of presentation; there were lines, and graphs, and some kind of text that was far too small to be seen. Putnam snickered; this guy obviously didn’t have a single presentation skill to his name. Everyone knew not to put that much text on a slide; you had to keep it sparse to make it readable and keep people’s attention. The presentation looked like it had been slapped together in an awful hurry. Putnam was tempted to stand up and tell him that if he couldn’t put in enough overtime to make a decent presentation that he should find another line of work, but he was too tired to make the effort.

His thoughts briefly wandered. He’d really done pretty well: it had taken a lot of work and a lot of long hours, but he had a huge home, millions in the bank, and a sparkling resume. He was in good shape. It’s true that his three marriages had bombed and he had no relationship with his kids, but hey – he was successful, and that was what counted. Right? Finney would probably disagree, but then Finney didn’t have the bank account he did. You had to make sacrifices if you wanted to get ahead in life.

Outside the large glass windows of the conference room he saw a dark sky with twinkling stars. It was a beautiful night, but he had seen too many of them. What was he doing at work this late? He fervently wished he was asleep in bed.

All the sudden his drowsiness left him instantly. Outside, a brilliant light began to shine: the sky light up as if the morning sun had risen, only this light was more piercing than any sunlight he had ever seen. He gasped and rose to his feet. What on earth was going on? Was this what a nuclear blast looked like? Horrible thoughts ran though his mind and he wondered if he was about to die.

However, a shockwave never hit. No buildings dissolved; the light just became brighter and clearer. He had never seen anything like it, and he found himself unable to tear away his gaze. Had the sun gone nova? He didn’t understand. Far off – and yet not far off at all – he heard a strange, deep sound. He didn’t recognize the melody but it chilled his bones and filled him with dread. He wondered what it meant and what was going on. Part of him hoped it meant the meeting was over and he could go home.

Everyone in the room was standing and yet was silent; each was looking out the window and gazing into the distance. Putnam noticed with surprise that Finney was gone; he wondered when he had left. Maybe Finney had finally lost his mind. He never did seem very sane; his only care seemed to be about living for Jesus – whatever that meant.

Someone shouted “Look at that!” Putnam turned, and was shocked to see all sorts of people flying deep into the sky, as if gravity had taken the day off. Putnam rubbed his eyes and looked again, and the image didn’t go away: people by the thousands were everywhere. He would have thought this was proof he was dreaming if there wasn’t a terrible feeling that something very bad had just happened. Were aliens abducting the entire population of Earth?

Putnam continued to wonder what was going on until he caught sight of something in the sky – a person of some sort. No, he suddenly realized, it was The Person. He was incredibly glorious; light emanated from him so fierce and hot that he could not bear to look upon him, and yet he could not tear his gaze away. The Person’s face was awful to look upon: it pierced his very soul and turned his heart to stone. Putnam felt himself die inside just by looking upon this Man, and it only got worse when the Man looked at him.

All at once he knew what was happening. Long ago, his mother had made him go to Sunday School and they had taught him that one day a man called Jesus would come back. Putnam didn’t remember a lot of the details – he had no time for church – but he suddenly remembered something about a trumpet sounding and Jesus coming back from the sky and His followers meeting Him in the air. The world, he realized, had ended; this was the last day. The meeting was over, and he could go home!

Then reality hit him. The world couldn’t end yet, he heard himself screaming. He wasn’t ready! He still had another ten years before he could retire, and he wasn’t Chairman of the Board yet. His house wasn’t fully paid for, his stock options had not been exercised, and his boat was still being designed. He still had at least thirty years left in his life; how could the world end now?

Other thoughts began to enter his mind as the gaze of the Person pierced him. His wife! What had he done? All those years of caring more for work than for her, and now it was too late to do anything. He had worked so many late nights that knew the janitorial staff of his office better than his own kids, and now he could never make it right. He had never cared before, but he now saw how foolish he had been. Why hadn’t he thought of these things before?

Images began to form in his mind. What else had his Sunday School teacher said so long ago? Something about being brought before a great white throne, where the books would be opened and he would be judged by what was written in them. He cringed at the thought; he had a feeling that the Person would be judging him along very different lines than his coworkers had. This Person was not interested in bank accounts but in kindness and love and obedience and sacrifice – things he thought were an utter waste of time.

There was something else, he remembered – something about having your name written in a book of life. Putnam knew that his name was not, and that Finney’s probably was. He had a feeling this was bad, but he didn’t remember why – and then he remembered.

As the weight of everything piled upon him he began to be overcome with horror. What was going to happen to him now? He had never paid much attention to preaching; he had figured it was all a bunch of nonsense anyway. He never really expected the world to end, and he definitely did not ever expect to see a very real Jesus return to judge the world. He thought it was just a figure of speech or something; it wasn’t real – not in the same way that hostile takeovers were real. But there it was, big as life, and it was now too late. He saw thousands of people outside in the air rejoicing, with multitudes joining them; for them this was a day to rejoice, but for him it was a day of doom – a fate worse than death.

He wished fervently that all this was just a bad dream – that he had just fallen asleep in that everlasting meeting, and that he’d wake up any minute now and find it all been a dream. Putnam ached to undo his past or cover it somehow, but it was too late for that. As he watched the scenes unfold outside he knew that this was no dream, but that very soon it would turn into a nightmare.

The following is an excerpt from the memoirs of Captain George Randall, one of the many people Emperor Conrad sent out to search for the long-lost Nehemiah IV terraformation probe while the Exiles were still trapped on Arcadia. His memoirs were rediscovered in February of 2199 during the reconstruction of the galaxy.

Imagine traveling uncounted trillions of miles through galactic space to ask an immortal the secret to his longevity, only to find him dead by the time you finally got there. It happened to me and, let me tell you, it wasn’t fun.

The order to pay Jason Alton a visit was delivered on January 16, 1383 A.D. For the past six months we’d been exploring a previously uncharted section of the galaxy, looking for an ancient space probe named the Nehemiah IV. This probe was legendary: for the past thousand years it had been single-handedly transforming countless barren worlds into lush, green paradises complete with cities that were maintained by an army of intelligent droids. I wouldn’t have believed any purely automatic machine could do such a thing if I hadn’t seen the results for myself, and even then I still had a hard time with it. Those ancients really knew what they were doing, and I don’t wonder that the folks at Headquarters wanted to get their hands on that elusive probe – it’s really one of a kind.

Anyway, we had traced that wily probe from planet to planet and eventually discovered that it had left that segment of the galaxy centuries ago for a different one. When we sent in our report to Headquarters they told us that they’d take up the search from there and that we were to direct the Ares to the last known home of Jason Alton – a tiny, unnamed planet ten thousand light-years away. Headquarters had evidence that he was one of the folks who had received the life-extension treatment back in the last days of the ancients, and that he could still be alive. At any rate, they wanted us to question him and see if we couldn’t find out a few more details about living forever – something I wouldn’t mind knowing myself.

The existence of this life-extension treatment came as a big surprise to me, so as we started on our yearlong journey I quizzed Doc Martin on it. He’d heard of it, and he sat me down and explained it to me.

“Well, Randall, it’s like this. The ancients were pretty bright folks: they could handle atomics and matter/energy conversion as easy as anything, which is why they could alter planets at the drop of a hat. One of the other things they could do is build incredible, tiny machines – nanobots, we call ‘em, only what they built was a lot more sophisticated than what we can do. That’s to be expected; they built them for a thousand years and we’ve only had ‘em for a couple hundred.

“Anyway, one of the things they discovered around 400 A.D. – just before the galaxy collapsed, for reasons we still haven’t found – was how to take these tiny machines and put them inside a person and have them do a bit of maintenance work. The idea is that as the body aged the machines would reverse the aging process by fixing whatever was going wrong. If a sickness came along and the body couldn’t repair itself, the machines would kick in and take care of it. If the body got a severe injury somehow, the machines would do what they could to put the body back together.

“Now, this technique was supposedly developed at the very end of their civilization, and only a few people ever got it – all of whom, as far as we knew, were killed in the general collapse. After all, even the machines couldn’t help you if your planet got hit with an antimatter bomb or if your sun was detonated, and you know the chaos that occurred in the fall. To be honest, Randall, I never really believed that the whole thing was real; it’d be a pretty tough thing to do, and I didn’t think that even they could handle it.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” I told him. “Supposedly this Jason fellow got the treatment, and might still be around.”

Doc asked me if I knew anything about him, and I told him I didn’t; Headquarters hadn’t told us much – they never do. Since we had a long time until we arrived at his doorstep I asked Aaron to dig up what he could.

It took him longer than I thought to get results because Eliza, our artilect, was having a midlife crisis. It seems that when we stopped over at Perlandra Station to get some repairs done on the Ares before heading out again we were given the wrong parts and didn’t realize it until after we were long gone. As a result Eliza just wasn’t working right: her computational matrix was down and she was making about as much sense as a gibbering monkey. Aaron wasn’t sure if we could get anything out of her, but Renee – our resident matrix expert – was able to piece Eliza back together again. I was mighty glad: the last thing any starship captain wants is for the electronic brain that runs the entire ship to act like a lunatic – it’s very bad for morale.

Once Eliza was in good shape again Aaron got right to work. It was slow going: even though we could link into the central database at Headquarters in realtime via a tachyon beam, the database didn’t have the information locally and, since their database administrator had been fired in a round of budget cuts, we had to do the best we could and ended up running the query against the central data cores of several thousand planets. Trying to search the stored information of a thousand worlds is not for the faint of heart: it took four months to get back a result. We did get it back, though, and I think it was worth it – after all, what else is there to do on long trips?

Eliza told us that Jason Alton was a very wealthy man who was born in 396 A.D. – just about the time the galaxy was thrown into turmoil. He inherited his wealth from his father, who owned a major biochemical company and made his fortune through genetic repair techniques. It seems that Jason found out about this new miracle treatment through the connections he had with that company, and when he found out about it he wanted it – and he had the money and position to obtain it.

Jason saw that civilization was starting to collapse and, being a smart man, he gathered up his fortune, boarded his starship, and sailed out to a star far beyond the edge of civilization. He told the folks back home that he was going to build his own world, where he would have the replicators to build anything he wanted, the virtual reality equipment to take him anywhere he could imagine, and enough nanobots to extend his life indefinitely. He said he didn’t care what happened to the galaxy or who lived or died; he was going to live forever on his own planet and indulge in his every wish.

That was the idea, anyway, and after he left nothing else was ever heard of him. He had actually been forgotten about in the general chaos of the galactic collapse until some clerk at Headquarters came across his records – it seemed that his permit for the planet he was on had expired some upteen centuries ago and the computer wanted to send him a past-due notice.

It took us every bit of a full year to get there; we didn’t arrive on what we came to call Jason’s Planet until January 28, 1384 A.D. – and that was with Suzy, our antimatter engineer, tweaking the engines and giving us every joule of energy she could muster. Jason sure picked a distant spot to reside; it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to discover that we were the first folks to pay him a visit in a thousand years. The nearest civilized world was 58,700 trillion miles away, and not even the Nehemiah IV had ventured this far out; there was nothing out here but harsh suns and forbidding worlds. In all likelihood Jason Alton was the first person to ever enter this region of the galaxy – and, I bet, there wasn’t a person alive who envied his choice of neighborhood.

As we entered orbit around Jason’s Planet I wondered what a man ten centuries old would be like, and we quickly discovered the answer: he would be dead. We found his base on the planet without any trouble; it was the only base on the surprisingly forbidding planet. The landing party we sent down quickly found something else: his tomb.

We weren’t familiar with the language on the tombstone, but Eliza was: she discovered that (unsurprisingly) it was a dialect used a thousand years ago and quickly translated the inscription. The tombstone simply stated that Jason Alton died on April 19, 491 A.D. at the age of 95, and was placed in the tomb by one of his droids. No details concerning his death were provided, though, and that gave us a problem: why had he died?

The obvious thing to do was to exhume the body so Doc Martin could take a look at it, and we did that. We didn’t discover anything, though: the body had been there for about a thousand years and there really wasn’t much left of it. Doc said there was nothing to indicate how he had died, and if there were any nanobots in his bloodstream they were definitely gone by now. For all he knew the guy had simply died of old age and the whole nanobot thing was just a hoax.

I wanted to tell Headquarters what we’d found, but by this time we were way out of range: tachyon communicators only work so far, and it would take six long months of travel to be back in range. Doc Martin suggested that we just turn around and head back, and tell Headquarters that we did what we could and found him dead. I told Doc I wasn’t about to turn around; it took forever to get out here, and I wasn’t about to leave until I knew why Jason died. There was no way I was going to be sent back out here again to find out what happened; being cooped up in a small metal can for a year, with nothing outside but empty space and empty worlds for thousands of trillions of miles, can really get on your nerves. There was no chance I was going to leave this planet until I knew exactly how Jason Alton had died – and that was final.

Being the Captain I normally never left the ship, but in this case I thought that the situation could use a little hands-on treatment. With this in mind I had Eliza land the Ares outside Jason’s tomb and we all got to work. I told the crew that we weren’t going to leave this place until we knew why Jason had died, and I think everyone actually believed that I meant it.

Jason’s planet was not a friendly place: it was dry, barren, and dead. Really dead, in fact. There wasn’t enough atmosphere around this small piece of rock to fit into a teaspoon, and if there was any life around we sure couldn’t find it. Jason had obviously not terraformed it, which puzzled us until we found his virtual reality setup.

The base Jason had briefly called his home had the most sophisticated virtual reality equipment I have ever seen. It way outclassed anything we can produce today; it was the real thing from the ancients, and was obviously the best that money could buy. Eliza told us that the machinery and nanomachinery could do things that, well, just boggled my mind. If a thing could be imagined, this guy’s equipment could make it happen, and make it as real to Jason as if it really was real – and it had the most sophisticated artificial intellect anyone had ever heard of. I had a feeling it was second only to the software that ran that Nehemiah space probe we’d been hunting for.

We were a bit surprised to find that the base was so small; aside from some communications equipment, life support systems, the virtual reality center, and other things like that, there wasn’t much to the place. I was expecting a huge palace, but evidently Jason preferred virtual palaces to real ones. I didn’t blame him: with the equipment he had, virtual reality could appear every bit as real as the real thing – although just thinking about that gave the creeps.

All five of us pitched in to find out why Jason had died, and we had a hard time of it: none of us were even remotely familiar with the equipment we found on the base. Suzy spent her time working with the base power supply and trying to find out how it worked and if it could be started again. Renee worked with the base computer systems and tried to find out if there was a hidden part of the base we hadn’t discovered. Doc Martin went over Jason’s few personal effects and examined the few droids loitering around the place to see if they knew anything about Jason’s last days. As for me, I worked with Aaron to keep Eliza busy analyzing the data gathered by the crew and trying to figure out if we’d missed anything.

Renee was the one who found what we’d been missing: a lot of the decorative panels on the wall were actually computer panels, and they tied into a central database core buried deep under the planet’s surface. She told us that if we could get the computer started again and have Eliza translate the data in it we might be able to figure out what was going on. That sounded like a good idea to me, so I told everyone to get to work.

Three weeks went by without making any progress at all. The problem we ran into was that the base on Jason’s Planet didn’t have any power because the electrical generator was down, and we just could not find a way to get it started again. That generator was like nothing we had ever seen: Suzy couldn’t make heads or tails out of it, and Eliza couldn’t figure it out either. We didn’t know if we just weren’t starting it right or if it was damaged and needed to be repaired, but we did know that if it really was damaged we have no idea what was wrong.

We eventually decided to just forget about Jason’s electrical generator and connect the power grid at the base to the antimatter plant on the Ares. That wasn’t easy, though: the ancients used a bizarre set of electrical protocols and it took Eliza the better part of three days to design a converter that could translate our power into the frequencies expected by the equipment on the planet. It did the job, though: after Eliza had built the converter we installed it and the base powered right up on the first try. It was a serious drain on our power supply but we could handle it – for a while, at least.

Once Renee saw that we had a direct electrical link she began working with Aaron to create a data link between the Ares and Jason’s Planet, so that they could directly download all the information that was left in the planet’s datacore. I don’t know how they did it – artilect development just isn’t my field – but they did. Aaron was surprised to see that nearly all the data was still good, but Renee wasn’t: she said that the ancients knew how to make things that lasted forever; the Nehemiah IV was a testimony to that.

Now that everything was put together, all we had to do was wait for Eliza to translate everything. It was a good feeling.

What wasn’t a good feeling was finding out that, after Eliza was done, we still didn’t know what had happened. We found out that Jason had established the base and used the equipment – and boy, did he ever use it. He was physically healthy; judging from the biomonitors at the base, he did not age a day from the time he got to the planet until the day he died nearly forty years later. There were no natural disasters, there were no accidents, and there were no failures in the longevity system. The only thing Doc Martin could find was that his mind had decayed: mentally, Jason had gone downhill and emotionally, Jason had become a wreck. There was no cause of death listed in the records, but as near as Doc could figure out Jason had become so mentally and emotionally unbalanced that he simply died – or possibly committed suicide.

That didn’t really help me any, but Renee helped us out. “You know,” she told us, “that’s really about what you would expect to happen.”

“Eh?” I said.

Renee explained. “Think about who he was! He spent his entire life living for himself, and didn’t care in the least for anyone else. His only concern in life was to make sure he could satisfy his every last selfish whim. He was convinced that that if he just had everything he wanted he’d be happy.

“Lots of folks think that, but Jason was different: he could actually make it happen. He did have the means to fulfill his every wish, and I bet he eventually found that the things he thought would fulfill him didn’t. He thought that his personal genie here could fill the emptiness in his soul, and he found out that he was wrong.

“What Jason discovered is that he had nothing to live for: the emptiness inside him couldn’t be filled by anything his machines could manufacture. The lush palaces he built pleased him for a while, but they lost their charm as he found they couldn’t satisfy him. King Solomon went through the same thing: he gave in to his every desire and found them so empty that he came to hate his own life. Gardens and houses and wealth and fame cannot fill the soul: only Christ can do that.

“As the dreams Jason built failed to satisfy him, he went further and further to find something that would please him – just look at what he used his machines to build – and his soul grew darker and darker. I bet he eventually realized that he was truly lost: nothing he could find could make his life worth living. There was no way he could go back to the rest of civilization, for he knew that by this time it had all been destroyed.

“Someone once said that people have a hole in them that only God can fill. We’re designed to have a relationship with God, and nothing else can satisfy us the way that can. Jason tried to fill that hole with himself; it eventually pushed his sanity over the edge and he died.”

Since there was nothing else to do we simply packed up and left for home. We brought with us all the information we had downloaded from Jason’s datacore and Jason’s remains as well, just in case the folks back home could learn something from it that we didn’t. It was going to be a long journey home.