Caught Somewhere In Time

Start reading from the beginning…

“Archaeology, on Mars?” Audrey questioned. “Humans have only been here less than a hundred years. Why would there be a team digging around down there for ancient civilizations?”

Chan looked at his daughter and said, “That is the other reason we are here. I was going to wait until they made a discovery, but with the arrival of Adam, I moved the trip up sooner than I would have normally come to look into it. I think what they have found is not actually a human civilization, but more like what was discovered on Luna.”

Adam was lost in this conversation. It wasn’t until Audrey spoke next that he understood what any of this meant. She said, “You think that they found alien ruins here like they did on the moon. And you think that is where Adam may have come from.”

Adam was starting to catch on to what they were saying. He knew they thought maybe they found where the Protectors were keeping the humans. “Does that mean we can go rescue the other humans trapped there? My friends?”

Chan looked at Adam and soberly told him, “I am afraid that might not be possible. The ruins on Luna, Earth’s moon, are hundreds of years old. We have determined that they were abandoned sometime in the middle twentieth century, probably when human spaceflight began. I expect these will be the same, vacated before they could be discovered by humans roaming the solar system.”

“What is a century?” Adam asked. “I really want to understand what is happening.”

Audrey took over the explanation. “A century is longer than the entire lifespan of a human. Almost nobody lives for one hundred years. If you had lived on Luna with your Protectors, you would have died, a wrinkled and gray-haired man, long before humans ever arrived on Mars. If these Martian ruins are the same as the Lunar ones, there would also be no way you could have lived there. Only the oldest humans alive remember before humans had settlements here. Anybody living in whatever is down in that canyon would have left long before humans colonized this planet.”

Adam looked hopefully at the Admiral. “They are alive, just like I am alive. Maybe they are not in that ruined place, but they are somewhere, wherever I came from. I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t from Mars, but I came from somewhere, and I have to go back and rescue the other humans from the Protectors.”

“Adam, what numbers did you put into the spaceship that brought you here? You said that you entered some numbers into a hidden control.”

“They were Protector Numerals. They use different symbols than humans use for writing. I don’t understand all of it, but have figured some of it out. It looked like I was changing a number to be greater than it was before, it was about 300 I think, if I was doing it right. That’s when the planet disappeared.”

“Would you be willing to show these controls to Val and Cole, the two people that were here a little while ago?”

Adam thought about it, but couldn’t figure out what their interest in his ship is. “I don’t know why my ship is so important to you. You have lots of ships, people living on different planets.”

“Adam, your ship is different. It was built by a civilization that humans have never met, and do not understand,” Chan explained.

Audrey added, “You and your ship came together from the same place. It would be impossible to find the place based only on your memories of it, but maybe your ship has other information that will help. We can’t help you rescue your friends if we don’t know where they are.”

The young man was happy with that explanation. “Sure, I’ll see if I can help them figure out my ship.”

“You and Adam go to the ship. I need to check on a few things, and then I will join you there,” Chan said to Audrey. Then to Adam, “It was very nice talking to you. I hope we can talk again soon.”

With that, Chan stood up and walked over to the door. Audrey and Adam followed him out into the entry area of the hotel, but they went different directions on the street. Adam noticed that the Admiral seemed to be heading back toward Central Works, but Audrey was leading the other way, apparently to the port. “Do you really think this will help us find the other humans?” Adam asked.

“I think so. Although my father is more interested in finding your Protectors than he is in putting together a rescue mission,” Audrey replied. “Alien life has always been something he has focused on, sometimes even to the point where other things are overlooked.”

“They are not all bad, you know. The Protectors I mean. They fed us and clothed us. They cared for us when we were too small to care for ourselves. They protected us from, well, I guess they protected us from nothing, but they kept us alive. I know I have made them seem cruel to us, locking us away from the rest of the human race, but they weren’t mean about it.” Adam fell silent, but kept walking with Audrey, looking at the ground rather than at where they were going.

“You don’t have to defend them to me. I know what you mean. When I was a child, I lived in an orphanage, a home for children without parents. I didn’t have the same kind of life that other people did. I was always mad at the people who worked there, even though they took care of me. They weren’t my family, not really. I felt like I belonged somewhere else.” Audrey paused and caught Adam’s gaze. Her eyes looked like they were watering a little, like she might cry. “I always wanted to escape from them, and sometimes I did. They always brought me back though. Other kids got adopted into families, but I think parents steered clear of me because I kept running away.” She paused again. “That’s something that I admired about you right away, that you got away. I was never able to do that.”

“But the Admiral took you in, and you stopped running away, right?” Adam felt his eyes burn a little, feeling that he and Audrey had this in common. Unusual childhoods, raised by strangers, wanting to escape, these were connections he felt with her.

Audrey smiled, “I never wanted to escape from him. When he picked me up from the orphanage, he took me into space. We were a little nomadic at first, not staying in one place very long. There were always new places to go. We didn’t settle down until we moved into Cole’s project, and even then we still travel quite a bit. Moreover, we live at the busiest port there is, Earth’s moon. There are always new people coming and going there, always something new going on.”

They stopped walking and stared at each other for a moment. Adam tried to imagine what that must be like, always on the move, adventure all around, and humans everywhere. He had only dreamed of these things, and here was someone who had been living it. “That sounds wonderful.”

Audrey smiled, wiped her eyes with her index fingers, and straightened her uniform. “The ship is right through here,” she said as she motioned toward a doorway marked as restricted. They had arrived at the port without Adam even realizing it.

Adam opened the door and led the way inside. He recognized the short, wide hall he found himself in as if it were from a dream. Just a walkway with an communication device on the wall. He walked to the door at the other end and turned around facing the way he had just come in. “This, I remember. The man who coaxed me out of my ship stopped right here, and used this panel to notify Admiral Chan about my arrival.” Adam stepped to the side a couple of steps. “I was right here. I was very scared, and I started shaking. I couldn’t control myself. The whole room was spinning, and I think I fell down. The people were all around me, and I couldn’t stop shaking. And then… I woke up in the Central Works.”

He could tell Audrey was watching him as he turned around in place, and then he walked through the door that led into the hangar, and his ship was there, right where he had left it, in the middle of a giant room. The ships that had parked around him when he landed were gone, leaving his alone in the huge room. He ran over to it, suddenly excited to see it again. Audrey must have jogged to keep up, because when he stopped, she was still right behind him. He turned to her, and she smiled and led the way inside.

“Hey guys, I brought Adam,” she called up into the ship as she started walking up the ramp. He followed her up into the dim room he remembered so clearly. There wasn’t very much room in the ship, being only a little bigger inside than the conference room he had previously met this man and woman in. The instrumentation all over made it seem smaller than it was however. The woman was sitting in the control seat, and the man had the back of her seat pulled open to expose a glowing intricate something that Adam didn’t think he’d be able to figure out even if it was explained to him.

“Adam!” Val exclaimed as she turned in the seat to look at him. “It’s good to see you again!”

“Good, you’re here,” said the man, obviously his mind on what he was doing because he didn’t even look over. “Do you know what any of this is for?”

“Um, I don’t actually. I only know how to make it go.” Adam looked at the jumbled mess of glowing tubes and crystalline shapes that he was trying to sort through.

“Adam, this is Cole. I don’t think you’ve been formally introduced yet,” said Audrey. Then more quietly, although everyone could still hear her, “He’s always like that, messing around with something and too distracted to talk.”

Cole didn’t reply, he just sort of grunted a little as he poked around a little deeper in the glowing whatever-it-was. Val spoke instead, “I wonder if you can show me what you have to do to make it go? I have flown probably a hundred ships, but for some reason I can’t begin to figure out how to make this one fly.”

“Sure.” Adam answered, and then he walked around Cole to stand beside Val. She got up and let him have the seat, which he slid into quickly. “The first thing to do is to close the ramp, and you need to be able to see the ship for that.” He put his right palm down over a metallic sphere that seemed to serve no purpose other than decoration, gripped it, and turned his hand over picking it up. In his palm, the sphere became a three-dimensional glowing model of the ship standing in his hand as if it had always been that shape. “Once you have the ship in front of you, you can do all kinds of things with it. At least I think you can. I have only done a few things with it.” He set the ship down on the console in front of him, and reached under it and poked the ramp with one finger, which caused it to retract. In reality, the room became much darker as the light from the hangar no longer shone from the opening at the bottom of the saucer.

“That’s amazing,” Cole said looking over Adam’s shoulder, apparently no longer engrossed in what he was working on.

“To leave the ground, you just have to move the things that touch the ground, like this.” Adam touched the three posts that the model ship was sitting on, and they retracted, leaving the model hovering over the console. “That’s about all I can do with the outside of the ship. It would be easier too if I had longer, skinnier fingers like the Protectors have. I don’t think they built this with a human in mind.”

“Don’t do it, but tell me how you tell it where to go,” Val whispered to him.

“First, I had to open this panel and change the numbers on it, then I had to drag the numbers onto the ship.”

“What panel?” Val asked. As an answer, Adam slid his fingers along the console in front of him, which rippled open as if it were liquid, and out slid a panel almost into his lap. When the movement stopped, the metal looked as if it had always been that way.

“That must be where this stuff leads.” Cole said. “This all looks a lot like my design!”

Val was obviously in awe of what she was looking at. “That just can’t be…”

Adam continued, “So then I changed these numbers here,” he said, showing the red display with the Protector’s numerals on them. It had different characters from the other two displays, but all three were slowly changing numerals.

“Those are numbers?” Cole asked. “This is my design! They even used the same color coordination that I did!”

Suddenly, interrupting the shock that the two adults had just begun to have, there was a banging on the hull of the ship, near where the ramp extends. Adam pushed the panel shut, and then on the model he lowered the landing poles and opened the hatch. The ship, which didn’t need a fifth person in it to make it feel cramped, received one anyway once the real ramp was down.

“Cole, I need you to escort Val back to Base right away. We need to get going on her mission,” Chan said, a little out of breath.

“Admiral, the boy just showed us…” but the Chan cut Cole off.

“No Cole. It has been postponed too long already. I should have waited until she had left to come to Mars. Now Adam, Audrey and I will stay behind and finish up here. We will tow the ship back when we return to base in a few days, but there is no room in the bay there until the other ship is away. I have arranged a transport that leaves in an hour. You will need to finish her briefing on the way.”

Adam didn’t understand what was happening, but whatever it was seemed very urgent. Reluctantly, and angrily, Cole stomped off the ship into the hangar. Val squeezed Adam’s shoulder, touched Audrey on the arm, and followed Cole out. Adam picked up the model of the ship, turned it over in his hand making it into a simple sphere again, and placed it back where it belonged.

“Why the sudden urgency, Father?” Audrey asked him.

Chan responded simply, “I have just made a most disturbing discovery.”

Continued on June 19, 2010