Chapter 09: Reconnaissance
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Cole couldn’t believe his eyes! He was standing alone in Admiral Chan’s office, and the very thing he hoped to enlighten him was being shown to him, against the rules, by a computer program emulating the Admiral’s late mentor. Cole’s experiences had taught him that strange things occur daily throughout the solar system, perhaps throughout the whole universe, but this just seemed so unlikely that it boggled his mind!
“We have the alien vessel locked down in our secured bay, and I have to tell you that it is completely unlike anything I have ever seen,” the commander continued. “To be perfectly frank, sir, it appears to be a flying saucer, in the classic sense I mean. It is essentially a classic wing design, only circular. There do not appear to be any lines where metal is joined together, and the landing gear appeared to be poured down to the ground rather than just being extended and landed upon. Words cannot explain the strangeness of it.”
The Militia Commander’s hologram paused briefly and looked around, as if to make sure there was no one else in the vicinity while he recorded. “This appears to be another one of the ships we studied, only fully operational. I saw it in the air, and it was amazing! There were no aliens aboard though, just a kid. A human kid. He says he was raised by them, but he couldn’t explain it any more than that, because he started having seizures. They seem to have stopped now, but he has been unconscious for hours. I tried to contact you directly, but you were away. Please contact me as soon as you get this message, because I need you to come out here and take control of this operation. I won’t be able to keep my men quiet about it for very long.” The commander saluted, and the hologram vanished.
Cole was confused, and he sat down at Chan’s desk to collect his thoughts. This obviously had no connection whatsoever to his firing. It was certainly a puzzle, but it was Chan’s puzzle, not Cole’s. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
Dr. Smith spoke first, “Not what you were expecting I assume?”
“No. No, it wasn’t anything to do with me at all.”
“Well, if it had nothing to do with you, then I would suggest that you not mention it to anyone. You do not seem the type to gossip, but then we have really only just met.” The doctor’s face appeared as a hologram on the console again. “What are you thinking then, since this did nothing more than waste some of your time? Do you have a Plan B, as they call it?”
“I could go back in time to before he left for Earth, but then it would be even more difficult to stay hidden. There’s no way to know that anything would be turned up if I did that anyway, and for the probability of detection, it’s just not worth the risk. No, I have to find out in this time.” Cole was lost.
“Is there anyone you could question that might know something about it, as you say, in this time?” asked Dr. Smith.
Cole thought about it. There was really only one person that Chan might tell, and she was with him now. “He might have said something to Audrey about it. She’s not around though, not until he gets back.”
“When do you suppose… let me rephrase that, Future-man. When will that be?”
Cole checked his watch. “They will be here in about an hour.” The wheels started turning in his head. He might be able to corner Audrey outside Chan’s ship after they land. She always brings his baggage through the front entrance of the lab, while Chan always comes down the private corridor. Chan will bring Val down the corridor with him, since he remembered meeting them in the lab, leaving Audrey alone at the ship. “I could meet Audrey at the ship, once Chan and Val head down the corridor. She won’t have arrived in the lab yet, and I didn’t see her after she arrived back from Earth, so I won’t need to stay hidden at all as long as I am with her!” Cole jumped out of the chair and ran for the door, completely neglecting any stealth he might have used before. “Thank you Doctor! You may have just saved my sanity!”
Cole rushed out the door. Before the door closed, he thought he heard the doctor say, “Chalk another to the win column,” but Cole didn’t spend very long trying to figure out what that meant. He started feeling very ill, and his hands were trembling. He grabbed on to the wall to steady himself and looked around at the hall he was in. At one end was the exit into the lobby, and the other end opened into the main lab. As he watched, he saw himself walk by, carrying a TekBoard past the end of the hall without stopping to look up from it. He ran the opposite way, in case the other him came back, and when he arrived in the reception area and the door was closed, he took another deep breath.
It occurred to him suddenly that he didn’t need to be as frightened as he just had been. He had experienced Novikov’s effect again, only had been too excited to recognize it for what it was. It would have gotten worse if he attempted, or even considered moving toward the lab. He didn’t remember seeing his future-self earlier, but he had just seen his earlier-self. He knew that if he actively sought to change something in that series of events he would be setting up a paradox, and since the chance of that happening is zero, he would not be able to succeed in doing so, not even by mistake. Novikov’s Effect had done exactly what it should have: made every fiber of his being feel the urgent need to get as far from that situation as possible. Even considering the possibility of going back toward the lab made him uneasy, but he understood the uneasiness is merely a cosmic necessity. He would have to log this information down when he sorted out this mess.
This mess. Even after he solved it, Cole didn’t have a plan. His life work had been stolen from him. Even if, by some miracle, he was successful in finding out why, he still would no longer have the ability to continue his work, not with the prior funding anyway. When Cole re-entered the reception area, he had an idea. He walked up to the kiosk and said, “Reception, I need an empty TekBoard. Are there any extras in here?”
“To your left, Cole,” the machine replied, and opened a cabinet that had a few extra office supplies and equipment. He pulled out a TekBoard, connected it to the hard-plug port on the kiosk and downloaded the majority of his most recent work onto it, as well as the basic blueprints and diagrams for the inner workings of the time-ship. It took about 15 minutes to fill the TekBoard near to capacity with information from the project. He disconnected the board from the kiosk and left reception, heading into the lane beyond with his now stolen work under his arm.
He followed the same path he had taken earlier to the administration dock. He walked to the large door at the back of the elevator bank and pressed the lit call button for the Administrator dock. In a moment the door opened, and the familiar release of gravity allowed Cole to rise slightly from the floor, as if he had tapped his toe unknowingly. He landed again and the back door opened to the dock. It appeared he was just in time to see Chan’s ship emerge from the airlock at the far end of the large room.
Cole took it slow this time, allowing the ship to land and the computer to link the ship up for fuel and oxygen exchange, as was normal procedure for this part of LunaBase. It never ceased to amaze him how big this base appeared on the inside, despite how small it appeared on approach from space. He supposed everything looked small from space though. He held the TekBoard under his arm as he advanced toward the ship, following the same bar he had used earlier when Val and he had rushed through here to access the hall ahead leading to the apex of his work. The stairway had just descended, so Cole ducked behind a nearby ship to watch the party leave. Audrey stayed at the top of the steps, seeing Chan and Val out. As they reached the doorway to the long, white hall, Cole thought that Chan looked his way. There was no way to be sure, but he thought that Chan had spotted him hiding.
As soon as the hall door shut, Cole jumped up, and then sprung off the ship he was near, flinging himself high and far through the dock. As Audrey came down the steps, Cole landed a few feet in front of her, catching her by surprise.
“Hi, Superman. I think Lex Luthor just headed down that hall with Lois Lane,” she said, without so much as smiling at him.
“I can talk to them later. I need to ask you a few questions though, and I don’t have much time left.”
“I don’t know what kind of things I can help you with, but I’ll do what I can.” Audrey was always very nice, but he knew she was Chan’s kid, even if nobody ever discussed it, so Cole never joked very much with her. He preferred to keep conversations to the point, so that she wouldn’t try to be his friend or anything. Everybody did that to her, and it seemed to suit her just fine. She came across as all business anyway, so what she said next didn’t surprise Cole at all. “I have luggage to deliver, so you can either help me, or you can talk while I work.” She stepped past Cole to the luggage compartment and opened it, lowering out a large crate labeled with Val’s ID and the lab’s address.
“I’ll take that one if you’d like,” Cole offered.
“OK, but it’s heavy,” she answered, neither looking at him for a reaction nor cracking her shell of professionalism. “That will allow me to gather the Admiral and my things.” She set her TekBoard down on top of it and shoved the heavy crate toward Cole, who realized it likely weighed twice as much as him, but seemed fairly light in the low gravity. There were wheeled carts in some places along the walls for these heavy items, so he waited for Audrey to collect the matching rolling suitcases that she and Chan always used, and as she walked over to him he set his board on the crate as well to push it with both hands over to the wall. He slid it onto a set of wheels, and when he pressed the wall-latch, the wheels lifted the crate off the floor, rolling away from the wall a little. Audrey grabbed her TekBoard off the crate, placed it on top of her rolling case and pulled both pieces of luggage behind her. Speaking over her shoulder as she started walking away, she asked, “What did you need to talk about that couldn’t wait until we were in the lab?”
Cole hadn’t really thought about how he was going to talk to Audrey, just that he needed to. He put his weight, what little he had here, into pushing the wheeled crate and it started rolling. It would take a similar effort in the avenue he knew, the ratio between his weight and the crate’s being the same regardless of gravity. He considered it a moment as he saw Audrey rushing ahead, and then called out, “Has Chan made any other staff decisions recently, besides Valentina I mean?”
She glanced over her should and saw that she was leaving him behind, so she slowed a bit and told him, “Nothing that I am aware of. The Admiral leaves me out of those things however, so I’m really not the person to ask. When we get to the lab, I’m sure he will have a moment or two to discuss it with you though.” She was silent until she reached the lift to the main street. She pressed the button to call the lift and asked, “Was that your only question?”
“Well, it certainly does make the rest seem not worth asking.” Cole couldn’t think of any better way to say it, so after he pushed the crate into the lift and the door closed behind them he just blurted out, “I’ve been getting the impression lately that the Admiral isn’t happy with the progress I’ve been making on my work. Do you think he’s going to fire me.”
With the door shut, the lift seemed very full. The crate took up the majority of the floor space, and Cole was in one corner of the back wall. Audrey had placed one of her two suitcases between them, and one on the other back corner. She turned her back on the crate, facing the back door with only inches to spare, and looked like she was speaking to the recently closed door when she said, “This is your work. Without you, there wouldn’t even be a project. I might still be stuck down in Arizona if we hadn’t come here to work on your project.” She looked over at him, her brow furrowed with a frown on her young face, “There’s no way he could fire you.”
Cole appreciated her honesty, and he knew honesty when he heard it. He still had no idea what might have caused Chan to kick him out of the project though.
The doors opened and Audrey leaned into the crate to start it rolling out of the lift and through the bank of elevators. At the end of the hall, they turned to head to the lab. “I appreciate you helping me with that,” Audrey told him. “I had no idea how much stuff Val would actually need, so I basically emptied her apartment into that. It’s easier to get it all in one trip than to go back down there to get the rest.”
“I suppose.” Cole couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing here. He had only about a half hour until he would be fired, but he still had no clues whatsoever. He thought he had explored every angle to the problem, but had still come up short. Val hadn’t been informed, and neither were the doctor or Audrey. The message from Mars colony wasn’t related, and there didn’t appear to be anything else that Cole could determine had happened to make Chan decide to fire him. The only answer he could think of was that maybe it had been Chan’s plan all along to fire him once he had a pilot to take over Cole’s research in the realm of reality rather than speculation.
As they approached the main entrance to the lab again a few minutes later, Cole was struck with the idea that maybe he should just corner Chan about it after everything had been settled and ask him. Maybe that was what he should have done all along. There would be no way to ascertain the truth of the matter by travelling further back in time, since there is no way to tell when Chan had formulated his firing plan. Cole would have to live in hiding for days, weeks, or months even to work out those details. It just wouldn’t be worth all of that effort.
Audrey opened both doors to the reception area and Cole rolled the crate into the room. When Audrey walked in, the computer greeted her, but still ignored Cole, who had been in this room so frequently in the last several hours that the computer took no audible notice of his passing through anymore. Audrey pressed a button on a wall to the left of the main entrance and a panel slid open, revealing an opening large enough for the crate.
“Reception, please use this crate as the attic space for Valentina’s apartment.” Cole shoved the crate into the opening, wheels and all, and grabbed his TekBoard off the top before Audrey pressed the button again to closed the door on it.
“Is that what my attic is like? Portable I mean?”
“Yes,” Audrey responded. “It’s the only way to get some large items into the rooms. I have to go into Val’s quarters and unload some of it for her. If you have any other questions, I can keep answering.”
“I think you’ve answered them all.”
There was no tricking this girl. Her job was to keep all the facts straight all the time, and she never missed a trick. “I doubt it. Why don’t you follow me a few more minutes and tell me what you have been hiding since you cornered me while no one was around to hear?”
Cole was struck suddenly with a bad feeling. He couldn’t go back into the lab now. He’d have to go hide out and wait a little while for the old Cole and old Val to leave for the past so that he could meet Val again after she docked the ship and snuck back out. Additionally, he certainly couldn’t just come out and tell Audrey the truth. On the other hand though, Doctor Smith already knew everything and Chan was bound to find out one way or the other. His time was running out, he had no other options left to find out what was happening, and Audrey was holding the door for him to re-enter the lab complex, waiting.
