Come Back

  COME BACK

  G. Erlynne

  Chapter 1

  DEAD SILENCE

  "We're home!"

  Linda stared excitedly at the dazzling display, billions of bright white dots on a background of darkness. Among these brilliant spots of light, one was brighter and tinged with yellow fire.

  "The sun." She breathed.

  I smiled and reached out for her hand. "We're still a long way out." I said quietly. "Another month at least." But she was not to be deflected from her moment of joy and gave a small wriggle of pleasure. We stood and gazed at the immensity in front of us until noises from behind heralded the approach of the others.

  It had been two standard days since the ship's brain had woken us from the near death of hibernation, the Deep Sleep of interstellar travel. Each one of us had offered up a short prayer of relief at our survival, or at least I did, and I assumed the others had. Over twenty years in stasis was the planned programme, but we had been warned that this was uncharted territory and we were the first humans to put our toes into the cold water of Deep Sleep for such a time. We were the first at a lot of things.

  Ours was a starship, the first but not, we hoped, the last. The huge investment that this vast construction represented was proof of humankind's unquenchable lust for exploration. After many years of international wrangling and ill-tempered protests, the ship had been built and the crew chosen. All this was because the new deep space detectors had found an oxygen planet swimming round Alpha Centauri, our twin star four light years away. It would have been exciting to those who cared about such things but no more, had not the final breakthrough arrived in the struggle to produce controllable fusion. Now, the Earth had the power to drive a ship to the stars and a reason for doing it. The idea that we, the humans, the clever apes, could colonise another star system was overpowering. We had an escape, an opportunity to spread our special brand of intelligence and vandalism. We could become almost immortal, spread our seed beyond the reach of chance.

  But it was experimental. We knew, theoretically, that the technology of fusion was safe, that Deep Sleep was as effective over ten years as over ten days but no one, no one, had ever tested the systems as we had done. It could all have gone so badly wrong. But it hadn't. In the twenty third century after Christ we came back, alive and well, bursting to tell our home planet what we had found. Of course, our reports had been beamed back but we had physical proof, living things, captured air, water from the seas of that empty, verdant planet we found waiting for us. We were the most successful explorers of all time, we really, literally had found a New World and it was just waiting for the multitudes to come.

  There had been twenty of us, ten men and ten women. Two had not come back but they were not the victims of alien virus, just bad luck. Hans had fallen off a cliff and dragged Maria with him. Negligence in not taking proper precautions but nothing more sinister than that, an accident that could well have happened back home. We had had three landers, vehicles that would go through an atmosphere while the main ship rotated in stately orbit. One of them had developed some kind of nervous seizure that defied our instruments and refused to start. We had been forced to abandon it and it was still sitting, silent but reflecting the light of an alien sun on the rock we had landed on.

  Our vast journey, so immense that even we could hardly comprehend it, should have taken us just under twenty years real time, if there is such a thing. To the Earth when we got back twenty years would have passed but to us, courtesy of Mr. Einstein, much less. Our effective maximum velocity had been 85% light, but the journey profile made the average a lot less than that because over a third of the time was spent slowing down or speeding up. You can't arrive in a solar system doing 85% light speed and the ship's mass was huge, many thousands of tons which takes a long time to slow down if the fragile cargo (us) wasn't to be damaged. All this added up to a relative time difference of about four years, four years which had passed on Earth but not for us although the whole of these relativistic equations was superfluous anyway because hibernation stopped the ageing process. We were just as young (or old) when we came out of the caskets as when we went in.

  Max Sorenson was the Flight Captain and Mary Delgardie was the astro navigator which meant she gazed at masses of data telling us what the computers had already decided. He basically told it when to start and when to stop. It was a very relaxed discipline on board but we all had skills or thought we did. I was the rock man, the geologist plus the gunsmith. We hadn't needed the guns and the rocks had been very disappointing from my point of view. They were all so ordinary on Alpha Centauri Four, so like our own rocks, some volcanic, some sedimentary, some metamorphic, nothing really exotic, or at least nothing I found. Plenty of iron ore, other metallic ores, bauxite, silica, it could have been an exploration to Africa. The biology teams were the real winners and they were all back in the lab sections, too fascinated by their finds to even come and see the yellow dot the four of us were staring at.

  Max sat and tapped away at the main interface while Linda continued to stare with a rapt expression at the yellow star. "We're fifty-one AU's out, dead on track, nineteen degrees off the ecliptic." He confirmed, a small frown creasing his high forehead.

  "Problems?" I enquired, looking at his frown.

  "Problems?" He glanced up. "No, no problems, we're all systems go, this old girl works like a dream."

  Linda gazed at him and frowned her own frown. "Odd though. We haven't picked up the outer system beacons." She said, switching her eyes from Max to me.

  Mary ran her eyes down the screen displays. "The ship should have picked them up months ago." She muttered, a small furrow appearing on her own smooth brow as she ran her hands through her thick, rich, black hair, a familiar gesture. "There's no reception fault, I've run the error programs, it's not us, it's them."

  Max grunted. "Maybe the damned things just went phut."

  But that didn't seem likely and we all knew it. Part of the preparation for interstellar exploration included parking nuclear powered beacons, satellites really, among the outer planets in a fixed pattern. Designed to emit extremely powerful radio signals on a very narrow band, they were to help the intrepid explorers - us again - to identify just where they were or rather allow the computers to calculate Doppler shifts, vector angles and so on. They were like invisible searchlights pointing out from our home system and they were designed to last for centuries.

  "Anything else?" I enquired, peering at the data running down the navigation screen.

  "Looks normal." Linda interposed.

  "Mmm, the ship didn't use them on the way back." Mary pointed to rows of figures. "It used the pointer stars, you see? Our old friends Altair, Betelgeuse and Deneb." She tapped her teeth with a pencil, an irritating habit. "We used the beacons on the outward trip, though. Or did we?" She sat down abruptly and began to type in commands with lightning speed, her fingers flying over the touch boards. "This is very strange." She muttered after scrutinising the resulting array of coloured digits

  "Well, don't hog it." Linda said sharply. "What's so peculiar?"

  Mary stared at her screen and started to write notes. "We all slept the Deep Sleep before the engines lit up, remember?" She began in a lecturing tone. I stifled my retort because experience showed that nothing would divert her from explaining things as if we were nine years old. "We set up the systems, we checked everything a hundred times. The ship was locked on the beacons then, I know damned well it was." She pointed an elegant finger at a row of red figures on her nav screen. "You understand that the beams overtook us? They went at the speed of light, but we didn't, so we rode them like a missile, that was the idea."

  Max smiled down at her, a calm smile of affection tinged with something else. "And then?" He asked gentl
y.

  "After five hundred and forty-seven standard days, the signal changed." She said, her teeth ringing faintly as the pencil increased its tempo. "The signal went off the band."

  "Impossible." Linda stated. "Unless..."

  "Unless what?" I demanded, feeling more than mystified.

  "Unless the command broadcast from Earth ordered the change." Mary interposed. "They could do it, you know." She stopped her tooth symphony and started scratching her chin instead. "But why would they?"

  Linda, being the communications expert, looked at Mary with a slightly irritated expression. "Those beams were set and tuned to nanometer wavelengths, it was that precise. Someone would have had to deliberately scramble the programs. They would have needed to rewrite the command codes. Why would they do that?"

  Mary shrugged, glancing at Max. "How can we know that? It's a fact, isn't it? They're not working."

  Max smiled his big, all-encompassing smile, the blond grin that flowed over everyone like soothing sun cream. "We'll have to ask them when we get back." He chuckled, placing one of his huge hands on Mary's shoulder. "Maybe the batteries ran out, eh?"

  Mary shook her head, but her eyes looked into his as they had ever since we had come on board. They drifted off the bridge, Max saying they were going to view the marvellous pond life the biology crew were so excited about. Left to ourselves, Linda fidgeted and kept watching the screens as well as me.

  "It is odd, damned odd." She told me after minutes of mental arithmetic that proved the computers weren't wrong. I was used to her sudden descent into suspicion that machines were all liars but this time she wasn't reassured. "Doesn't make sense." She glared at me as if I was responsible.

  "Don't look at me like that, I only understand rocks and guns. Max's right, we'll find out in a month so why worry?"

  But she was like a terrier, never letting go of any puzzle until she had shaken the truth out of it, I knew that. Receiving no answer, I started to run one of the constant check routines, running through all the ship's systems, getting the computers to match their error programs. We had quite a payload, many tonnes, which had generated a daunting mass of equations before we started our homeward journey. More mass equals more thrust to balance the velocity curve but those terrifying engines had simply increased power, it was as simple as that. Sitting watching the scrolling data run up the screens, I amused myself by calculating how many ships the Earth could build in a decade and how many eager colonists would cram themselves aboard to populate our new Eden. It wasn't going to be easy, they couldn't take their washing machines with them, every pound of cargo was like gold dust, but the vision was there, and we were itching to tell it to the teeming millions.

  Days passed slowly as we coasted, throttled right down, towards the inner system. I peeked into the ants’ nest of the bio labs once or twice before Selena threw me out. She had her team permanently scowling through microscopes and staring at complicated DNA spirals from the spectrophotometer. "Out!" She cried, her silky blond hair swirling around her head in emphasis. "David, go and count your rocks."

  Elizabeth, her number one, looked up from her papers and grinned at me. "Go and pester Linda." She said. "She likes being pestered by you."

  Returning her grin and slapping Mike Zelenov on the back as I departed, I slid off. "It's a dictatorship, the Amazons are in charge." I told him, shutting the hatch before their combined fury hit me and went to find Linda.

  We had all been together for twenty years but not awake. We had spent nearly a year on our new planet and around a month in total on the ship, but the rest of the time was a blank, the deep blank of hibernation, so we hadn't spent half our lives throwing insults at each other. In truth, I didn't know the bio team that well, they kept themselves not exactly aloof but they all spoke some special language and stared at anyone talking about anything else as if he was defective. Max boomed his laugh at them and they all shuffled their feet when he did but then they retreated into their huddle again, which left Max and me and Linda and Mary as a sort of down to earth working sect, only there to give them a chance to exclaim what marvels they had found.

  Of course, we were all carefully matched before we were chosen and as far as Linda and I were concerned, the match was good, nearly perfect except she complained about my antisocial habits like drinking - severely restricted by a dearth of hard stuff on board - and smoking aromatic cigars, a rare vice in these antiseptic days. As for her, she gave me moments of supreme irritation by being right all the time and eating at odd hours. For all that we gave each other more than we ever thought we could and it was still growing. Our secret promise to each other was children, lots of children when we got home, visions of happy laughter and a house of monumental untidiness filling our days.

  She was chewing her pencil into splinters, frowning again at Max, when I came through the airlock. Mary was tapping away at her teeth again, so they had found another puzzle, or so I thought as I drifted up to Linda and touched her shoulder lightly.

  "David?" She looked up with startled eyes. "I'm glad you're here." She was so serious that I glanced at Max, wondering what was going on.

  "It's not just the beacons." Mary lifted her head, her black hair reflecting the spotlights. "We're getting close to Neptune and Linda has been monitoring all the wavebands."

  Max didn't say anything, so I looked from her to Linda, slightly taken aback at their solemn expressions. "What's up? Is there a war? Earthquakes?" I found myself suddenly alarmed.

  "No." Linda answered me, staring at her fingers. "It's not that. There's no evidence of anything. Nothing." She looked up at me, her eyes wide. "There are no transmissions at all."

  In the silence after her statement, I tried to digest what she was telling me. We were four light hours away from the sun, say two hundred and twenty light minutes from Earth, assuming it was in opposition. Earth was blasting away at nearly every audio-visual wavelength, a colossal outpouring of TV and radio junk that was flooding the surrounding space with signals. Earth was, in fact, much brighter than the sun at certain wavelengths, this being reason for the careful selection of our beacon signal bands. How could we not be picking this up, even at the orbit of Neptune? And besides, they were supposed to be talking to us.

  "Got to be reception." I muttered.

  "My first thought." Max agreed, rubbing his massive chin. "But Linda won't have it and I'm forced to agree."

  "David, we have receivers so sensitive they can pick up the radiation from a neutron star and they are still doing it. We can receive everything from the background waves from the Big Bang to X-ray stars." She stared at me. "We're getting all that, the lot. I've tested everything" She waved a hand at her monitor screens. "But nothing from Earth."

  "Something blanking out their transmissions?" I was trying to find sense in a slowly dawning feeling of disaster.

  "Impossible." Mary said softly.

  "The short-wave stuff would get through anything and what about the satellite repeaters?" Linda said firmly, but her face reflected my own growing alarm.

  "A global catastrophe." I said uncertainly. "A comet? Asteroid?" It was an explanation of despair but a glance at Max's unusually grave countenance told me they had already thought of it.

  "They've been running through alternatives for two days now." He told me, his eyes oddly calm. "You've been writing up your report and the biology club is in full swing so don't think they haven't thought of every damned scenario while you've all been occupied." He pointed at Mary. "Bring up the Earth, maximum gain."

  We all peered at the bright blue globe that appeared on the master screen. Mary tapped at her keyboard and the image sharpened. "Out here, we're seeing up to half a klick." She explained. "Any higher gain and we lose definition. You see?" She lifted her chin. "The main continents are intact. The atmosphere shows no change, the gas values are the same. There's the usual emission lines." She leaned back. "It looks perfectly normal."

  "But silent." Max said. "Saying nothing."

&nbs
p; A thought hit me. "What about the Moon bases? The Martian domes?"

  "Nothing." Linda confirmed.

  "Nothing?" I stared at her. "But...but what the hell could have caused every damned thing to shut down?"

  "The only thing I can come up with is a solar flare." Max flexed his powerful fingers, lines creasing his forehead. "But Linda doesn't like it and neither does Mary."

  "It would have to be huge." Mary said. "Enough to wipe out all life, or at least all higher life. The sun has never behaved like that, it's not a flare star, and anyway..."

  "The ship would have picked it up." Linda finished.

  "And," Mary added. "The spectrum strongly confirms plenty of life down there. The oxygen values are the same and there's chlorophyll..." She gazed at me miserably.

  I slumped down in the command chair, looking up at Max's serious face as he stood with arms folded by the display screens. "Let's summarise." I ticked off points on my fingers. "One, no beacons despite a design limit of centuries. Two, no Mars or Moon transmissions, and finally, no emissions at all from Mother Earth." I brooded for seconds while they all looked at me as if I was about to produce a rabbit from a hat. "What about the ship's brain? Surely it can tell when the transmissions cut off? I mean, it wasn't just receiving beacon signals, was it?"

  Mary nodded. "Good point." She started to punch away at her keyboard. "We know when the beacons cut off but what about the rest? mm? There was a lot of red shift when we were at full power, you know but still..." She tailed off and scrutinised her displays. "Even the beacons weren't meant to be received at full power, the engine flux and ion trail would have cut them off."

  "Wait a minute." Linda put her hands on her cheeks. "How many days did you say? Five hundred and forty-seven, wasn't it? Of course!" She looked at me with round eyes.

  "Of course, what?" Max demanded.

  "Eighteen months, a year and a half, don't you see?" Since we all looked blank, she shifted impatiently and pointed at Mary's screen. "I was on the design team for the beacons. We built in a fail-safe. No transmitter is reliable for centuries, they all drift or get amplifier indigestion, there's hundreds of circuits and components and it only takes one. OK, we could find the fault and put it right but waiting for failure is bad economy, so the idea was a regular renewal and recalibration in a fixed program. That way they keep on line."