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  "So?" Mary said, frowning.

  "So, we put a design limit. Eighteen months and it would go down unless recalibrated. That was to prevent false signals mystifying our computers, but don't you see? That means they all went down because no one recalibrated them."

  Max stared at her, but Mary firmed her lips and started tapping at the keyboards again. "We've got something more here than some puzzle about signal failure. I'm going to run the whole mission program."

  "Take some time." Max commented. "What for?"

  "We've got the time." Linda told him. "Mary's right, there's something we don't know."

  "Only one thing?" Max enquired, unfolding his arms. "I'm getting feelings as if I'm a Captain again. You three," his deep blue eyes fixed themselves on us. "You keep your mouths shut until we know what the hell is going on. David, you know the systems, help these two. I'm going to entertain the biology club with funny stories. Let me know as soon as you have results."

  His easy rumble of a voice had changed to incisive command. The usual white toothed smile vanished and lines of decision appeared on his face. We didn't speak but we accepted his authority as the slowly ripening sense of foreboding, of coming disaster began to take hold of us all. From a small technical puzzle, the unexplained contradictions started to crystallize as something much more, a looming threat to all our lives and hopes.

  Max kept putting his head through the hatch in the hours that followed but he said little, leaving us absorbed, almost buried in vast printouts. Linda and Mary put their heads together arguing in whispers over abstruse data while I ran the programs they wanted. It took us all of twelve hours and we hadn't slept or eaten by the time Linda pushed her sweaty hair off her face and leaned back to stare at Mary.

  "Call Max." Linda told me. Her normal bright persona was muted, the chestnut hair lank and falling in tendrils around her face.

  "Don't do it on the intercom." Mary said seriously. "Go yourself."

  My surprise was dampened by seeing their faces. I knew they had found what we didn't want to find because I had watched their deepening dismay over many hours. Wordlessly, I lumbered out of the clinical flight deck with its array of screens and went to find Max, collecting food and drink on the way. He was busy irritating the bio crowd, bursts of laughter coming out of their hideaway when I poked my head round the hatch, seeing Selena sitting with a slight smile as her work force was convulsed with near hysterics. Max, his broad grin on his beefy face, glanced up at my entrance and rose to depart. Selena produced a frown and immediately started giving out instructions as we left.

  "Knew she would do that. They're itching to find out the secrets of all life and I've been holding them up." He told me jovially. "They'll be out of all public view for hours, just what we want."

  It occurred to me that behind that bland and cheerful countenance was a devious and perhaps ruthless personality that had not needed to exert itself during our mission because every damned thing had worked out to plan - except for Hans and Maria and he had buried them with full Captain's dignity and reverence.

  "Well?" He asked quietly, regarding Linda and Mary with what seemed to me to be tranquil enquiry.

  "You're not going to believe it." Mary said, shaking her head.

  "We didn't." Linda confirmed. "We've had the brain run it a dozen times." She looked at Mary who nodded. "First of all, the Deep Sleep. Do you know there's over three million lines of program? Impossible to check them all even if we knew how, but the parameters are fixed and we've been told the biggest lie in history."

  Max and I stared at her. "Lie?" He repeated. "They worked, didn't they? I mean, here we all are."

  "The design limits were not twenty years. There was no limit!"

  "No limit?" I heard my own voice rise to a cry of disbelief.

  Mary nodded. "No one of us thought to check the full program, why should we? It was all set up for us. You see, the hibernation puts us in stasis, neither living nor dying. As long as the machines are on line, that's the way it stays, and it doesn't matter if it's a day or a century, time is not a limiter. The twenty-year target was a prudent ambition but with solid state technology and sentient computers there's no limit at all."

  "How long?" Max's mouth was set in a hard line. "How long have we been asleep?"

  "Four hundred and thirteen years."

  Chapter 2

  TIME TO REFLECT

  "Four hundred years!"I gazed at the two women, astounded. "Impossible."

  "It's all here." She waved the mass of paper at us. "We'd better explain." She looked down at her hands, appearing to gather thoughts that were difficult to express. "We are the crew of this vessel, we are not the designers. We use the hardware, we do not need to know how it was created or its precise scientific base. Oh," she waved aside my impending interruption. "We understand the theory of nuclear fusion and girder strengths, radiation shielding, many other things but we are like people who fly giant airliners, we know what to do to make the plane fly, but we could not sit down and make one from scratch, we wouldn't know how."

  "It's too compartmented." Mary added. "This ship has over fifty million parts, some so esoteric they can only be manufactured in conditions of absolute vacuum and zero gravity." She waved at the screens. "Those computers have trillions of bits of data, more than any one of us can comprehend and when they built this ship they tried to think of everything."

  "There is a program in the main control system that only activates if certain very specific and unusual circumstances occur." Linda put her hands together in an attitude of prayer. "It took us hours to find it and more hours to understand it." She rocked herself to and fro, her hands white, fingers interlocked. "It's called NATIVITY, a nice touch. What it does is watch over what happens back home, you remember we were talking about the beacons and the rest of the terrestrial outpourings? The vast output of radio waves from Earth? Yes, well the fact that they keep going is proof to this program that the Earth is still alive and kicking. If every, and I mean every broadcast stopped that would be proof to this program that some catastrophic event had destroyed human civilisation."

  Max still said nothing but for me, a coldness was creeping over my brain, a dreadful awareness that something unspeakable and appalling had happened and it was going to hit us as well. Linda lifted her eyes to me, tears glistening. She didn't tell me why but I knew. Our secret hopes of laughing kids and a happy future was gone. "It's clever. A pity they didn't tell us about it, but the idea is if an event such as we suggested like a solar flare or orbital collision destroyed the living biosphere then if we arrived less than ten or fifteen years later we would be stranded in orbit over a world we couldn't live in. They knew, of course, that some life would survive, seeds, insects, life in the seas and unless the planet was totally disintegrated, an almost impossible scenario, life would recover, and the atmosphere would regenerate. All it needs is time."

  "The flight records?" Max's face was like stone, unmoving and set.

  "We took it for granted. We only had to ask the right questions. The ship simply slowed down, reduced its velocity, altered the navigation parameters to allow for interstellar movement. The four centuries delay is a calculated period we think, a predicted span of years during which even after the most devastating catastrophe, life on Earth would be blossoming again. It might not be the same life as when we left but seeds which were dormant under years of darkness would spread like living fire. Various grasses, all kinds of vegetation, some fungi, micro-organisms in vast numbers, algae, the list is long." Mary's voice was low, her normal school teacher tone absent.

  "It was a survival program for us, it wasn't a stab in the back, they wanted to be sure that we, at least, would survive if the worst happened." Linda finished miserably.

  "There was no threat when we left." I said slowly. "The comet monitors and the asteroid watch were all working fine, there wasn't any danger."

  "No. It was an insurance policy against a chance in a million, a billion, I don't know." Linda
explained. "There are other programs we found. For example, if the inertia navigation system failed and we went off course, we would be utterly lost and bound to die. If that happened," she stared at me. "We were all to be quietly killed in hibernation. It seems we were not quite the masters of our fate that we thought we were."

  "So, this has all been for nothing." I muttered.

  Mary shook her head. "What we did still stands. We proved what clever apes can do even if there's no crowds to cheer. But in reality, we don't know anything except the journey time, not a damned thing." She stared at me. "And no one is talking to us."

  "We'll soon find out." I reminded her. "What about that spectroscopic analysis of Earth? Normal readings, yes?"

  "After four hundred years the whole planet could be one giant forest by now. Even the KT event, the dinosaur extinction comet didn't kill off everything." Linda stated.

  We sat and gazed at each other. It didn't take a genius to tell the thoughts thrashing through each of our heads. The silence lengthened into minutes before Linda roused herself, took a long drink and pointed her chin at Max. "What do we do?" She asked.

  "Is there a choice?" He raised that massive chin and locked us all into his command persona. "We've got to go home." He started rubbing his chin again, the fingers scraping over the bristles of his unshaven skin. "The Martian stations would have died of starvation, so would the Moon." He seemed to retreat into himself, nodding as if confirming some inner conclusion. "What are we going to find?" He murmured, almost smiling, a grotesque expression that flitted across his face and was gone so quickly I wondered if I was mistaken, but he stood up and stared down at us. "Whatever it is, we have the technology to start again. A new Genesis, eh?" He looked at the screens with an oddly abstracted expression. "Get Selena in here."

  Linda stared at him, frowning as I palmed the intercom circuits, Selena's face appearing on the screen with a bad-tempered grimace as she saw who had interrupted the work of genius. "You again, David? Max was bad enough but he's the Captain and you're not." She was half angry and half amused.

  "I'm on the bridge. Max wants you here. Leave what you're doing and get down here now." I told her. The face on the screen stared at me for seconds before the picture went blank.

  "It's going to hit her like...like..." Mary petered to a stop.

  "Like us." Linda said, glancing at me, seeing my drawn and stricken face reflecting hers.

  Max grunted just as the hatch hissed to admit Selena's cloud of blond hair and mutinous expression. "What the hell...?" She started before coming to an abrupt stop. Max grabbed her arm and sat her down while Mary and Linda went through the story. Even hearing it again, the chills ran through me. Max says we carry on but doing what? Roaming over a dead planet? Then the lander problem hit me. We had two of them remaining but not much fuel, only enough to get us down to the surface and cramming eighteen people in them was far above the design limit. If things down there were toxic, deadly, we couldn't come back but even if we could what would we do? Sit in orbit in an interstellar ship, waiting for the first one of us to die?

  Selena was a biologist, an exo-biologist, the finest in the Solar System. She was also under thirty years of age, alarmingly beautiful and possessed a figure that constantly derailed my line of thought as it did every other man she looked at. But now she sat, almost crumpled, in the navigator’s chair, running her eyes down the remorseless data on the printouts Mary had given her. I noticed how her hands shook as she turned the pages. Being the supremo over all matters concerning biology, living things that is, she examined the Deep Sleep mystery with frowning attention before finally throwing the heavy folder of paper on to the deck and staring, grim faced at the main screen showing the yellow star we were approaching.

  "It's just numbers, isn't it? We don't know anything for certain. That computer could be telling us anything if it was programed the right way. I know we have quantum computers, but the old saying is still valid - you put rubbish in you get rubbish out."

  Linda stirred, her chestnut hair catching the light as she sat up. "You're saying what? We imagined all this? There's no radio or video emission from Earth or any of the space stations, that's a fact. Are you saying it's not so?"

  Selena turned her magnetic blue eyes on Linda and smiled, but it was an odd smile. "No, I'm not saying that, but you found plenty hidden in the system, programs that we didn't know about. Who is to say there isn't something else?" She swept her blue gaze round all of us. "There's no way of confirming the length we spent in Deep Sleep, no test we can do. How do we know it's telling us the truth? Is it true? What is there down there?" Her gaze settled on Max, a look of pleading, of entreaty almost.

  Max leaned forward, his big hands clasped together. "What would be the point? We have a known fact that does not depend on computer interpretation. Whatever caused the total loss of all radio emissions, it certainly happened after we left and before we got to Alpha Centauri. The NATIVITY program makes sense, if anything does."

  "You say the planet looks normal?" Selena peered at the Earth's image floating on our main screen. "No unusual spectroscopic characteristics? If a comet had hit you would expect to find oddities in the magnetic field, or the ozone layer." She continued to gaze at the familiar picture of our home in silence when no one answered. "My God." The words came out as whisper. "It's really happened. Everyone is...I didn't really think...what are we going to do?"

  "We are going home." Max told her sharply. "It's what we planned to do, isn't it?"

  "Home?" Selena smiled a crooked smile. "Everyone we knew, every living soul...it can't be...surely it can't have happened like this...." She gazed fixedly at Max, her face suddenly drained of colour. "They've all been dead for over four centuries. We didn't...what did you mean? Everyone...oh God."

  "Get your act together!" Max interrupted sharply. It sounded like a warning to me and I supposed it was, a warning not to spread alarm and despondency. "We are all going to face this as the highly trained, brainy experts that we are supposed to be. The Earth chose us as the best. We don't panic, we keep calm even if aliens pop up and shake hands." His fingers pressed into her shoulder. "Remember, we keep calm!"

  Linda looked up at the sharpness of his tone but Mary was in tears. "All we found, the marvellous life, that magical planet." She stared at him, the tears rolling down her cheeks. "All we did was for a world that has been dead for centuries."

  "How can we? We'll go mad...we'll never...Oh God." Selena muttered, apprehension, naked fear, flicking across her normally serene countenance. "There's been no preparation... I mean... can we? What have we... it's a matter of conviction." She hesitated, her face whiter still and seemed about to add something but Max intervened again.

  "Get them all to come to the meeting room. Make it an hour." He said coldly, propelling her off the bridge, leaning over her, whispering things we couldn't hear, while Linda and Mary watched her depart, both of them with faint looks of puzzlement, a sentiment which I shared.

  The meeting room sounded grand but was in fact a claustrophobic compartment originally full of equipment, most of which we had dumped on our target planet. Eighteen of us made a crowd in there, sitting uncomfortably against bulkheads. Linda was next to me, of course, her features still showing a kind of frozen misery that others noticed as soon as they came in. The babble of questions and loud complaints died as Max put his back against the hatch and waved at Mary to retell the story.

  She had brought in a portable screen and remote to run through the graphics and I can remember, even now, the silence as she reached the inevitable conclusion. Disbelief was the first reaction, then dreadful comprehension as no questions altered the facts. Then fear.

  "Enough!" Max's booming bass silenced the frenzied talk. "You know everything now. You are all specialists. Doctors, plant experts, physicists. You were sent to dissect an unknown planet. You didn't know what to expect." He let his huge hands spread out in front of him. "Now, you have to do it again. You have the skills, we all do
. I want you to examine the Earth as if it was an alien world. Reassemble in teams as we did when we reached Alpha Centauri. Man the scanning stations, start the recorders. There has got to be an answer and you have to find it." He paused, looking round at each face. "Because there's no one else."

  Day by standard day we crept closer to the inner planets. The scientific crew argued interminably, tried to take the Deep Sleep units apart, scrutinised the trace brain records of us all under hibernation, reran all the navigation tapes and checked star patterns and at the end of all this they looked at us and each other with tense faces. There was no mistake. By every test we had been asleep for many centuries and something, no one knew what, had abruptly switched off the Earth.

  Presently, we coasted past Jupiter, that vast world of bright colours still spinning with its own miniature solar system of moons whirling round, all unchanged and supremely indifferent to our worries. Then Mars came within close scanner range and we focused the full instrument pack on the red surface.

  "The domes are still there." Mary breathed.

  "Dust piled up against the solar arrays." Linda said, biting her lip. "The hydroponics lab is open to the atmosphere, see the wreckage? Dust inside."

  "No tracks. Nothing." Mary peered at her screen. "Looks like someone set up the cargo barge. There's a crater."

  "There's been a big explosion, there, that's what caused the crater." Linda pointed at the scattered debris around the launch complex.

  "They were trying to use a booster, a cargo booster to lift off the lander." Max said. "See the power lines? They were trying to escape."