Chapter Twelve

El Capitan, USA

“No, Major, you are not passing this barrier, even if you are who you say you are,” said the army sergeant. He gripped his XM8 rifle, as did the five soldiers behind him.

“Sergeant, I was at the sphere a couple of days ago.” Kallandra sighed at yet another obstruction, but the officious guard was good at his job.

“Major, I have strict orders to allow no one, even if they could prove they were the president. In fact, especially if they were the president. It could be dangerous.”

“I could go over your head, Sergeant.”

“Yes, we heard about a chopper that got into trouble. Was that you, Major?”

Raised eyebrows indicated he was impressed, but his intelligent, steady eyes showed he wasn’t going to let her through. In spite of his obstinacy, or because of it, she liked him.

“OK, I understand. But soldier, two more astronauts are following me here.

That’s three from the Mars mission. Don’t you think you’d better ask your superior about us? We’ll be happy to be escorted to the site.” Not a sure thing but he nodded and spoke into his radio. She’d had to shoulder her way through a large crowd to get to this barrier. Her loaned airport jeep had to be parked among hundreds of vehicles in what looked like the Glastonbury Festival a couple of weeks before that seemed like years ago. Family picnics, religious groups on their knees sending missives to the Almighty for salvation, and New Age believers crowded the valley.

“Hey, Kallandra,” shouted a short black woman with vermilion hair. There was something familiar…. TV? Journalist?

“I’m not in the mood for interviews, Miss—?” Kallandra looked for cameras: she hated being on TV.

“Honey, don’t fret. I’m with newspapers not TV.” She held out a red-finger-nailed hand, which Kallandra shook briefly. “Tabitha Wish, The Clarion Ledger, nothing to stir you up. But I hoped to hear your view on the religious angle.”

Kallandra, looked past her for Claude, who was supposed to be following her.

She turned to the reporter, whose unnatural red hair grabbed her attention.

“I’m sorry, what religious view?” As a representative of NASA, she knew how to be guarded.

“The spheres. Do they represent Good, a symbol of God’s beneficence?”

“Um, how?” Kallandra was too scientific for such loaded questions, but had an inkling how to answer them. “Maybe.”

“Or, are they Evil being driven out of the Earth by God, to save us?”

While she floundered for an answer she saw salvation shouldering his way through the throng. “Claude, over here!”

They hugged and Claude overdid the greetings embrace with kisses. Tabitha ogled and then rapid-spoke into her Dictaphone. Kallandra dug Claude in the ribs to draw the journalist to his attention, and whispered, “Press.”

He picked up her signal and held out his hand. “Hello, I’m Derek, Kallandra’s old man.”

While Kallandra’s eyes widened, Tabitha shook his hand, and looked disappointed. She hadn’t a juicy affair story to break. Then she clearly noticed Claude’s name badge and pursed her lips in a knowing oh.

Before Kallandra could re-arrange the charade, the Sergeant rescued her.

“Major, your party is allowed in under escort.”

* * *

Five jeeped kilometres later they saw the sphere above the remains of El Capitan, again.

“It’s as high as a sky scraper now, why didn’t the engineering and physics people do their tests when it was easier to reach?” Kallandra said.

“When we were here, Kal,” Claude said, “they were preparing equipment. Whoa, there’s the heavy-duty boys.”

The army driver slowed at another barrier while speaking into his headset.

Tanks and missile launchers circled the exit hole, all pointed at the sphere.

“It must be scared to death,” Tabitha said, sitting in the back of the jeep.

“Hey, who said you could come?” Kallandra said, turning from her front passenger seat.

“No one said I couldn’t.” She smiled, but not at Kallandra. And Claude winked back.

Shrugging, Kallandra scanned the faces of the dozen engineers and scientists, both army and civilian. She recognized none. She turned to Claude.

“Why are there no NASA people here?”

“There should be.” He walked over to an army Captain, nattered, and returned.

“It’s OK, they’re over in that blue tent, preparing to launch the sensor-missile.”

“Right. What? They are not going to fire a missile at our sphere?”

“Sorry, to inform you, Kallandra, but it isn’t our sphere. It isn’t anyone’s.”

Tabitha thrust her Dictaphone closer to Claude. “Could the sphere explode?”

“I doubt it.”

“Anything is possible,” said Kallandra. “We have no idea what it is. Oh, right, we know it isn’t life as we know it, and not made by humans. They should be pointing all the other sensors at it, like at Glastonbury.”

The captain had overheard Kallandra’s overheated reaction, and came over. He saw her flying suit insignia. “Major, we’ve tried everything else. The sphere’s vibration varies between seven and eleven Hertz, just like the others, making us feel a bit queasy and accounts for the blurred look. Its surface temperature is usually three above ambient, and with negligible short wave radiation. No long wave emissions either beyond light—not a single radio transmission.”

“Maybe they use TV,” Tabitha said to the stares of the others. “What’s wrong with that?”

Claude smiled. “TV is just another set of frequencies in the same electromagnetic spectrum as radio and light.”

“So it is,” she said. “So, how do the spheres talk to each other? Semaphore?”

“Good question,” Claude said, “we’ll let you know when we find out.” He turned to the Captain. “It’s a par excellence question, bien sûr.”

The Captain agreed, and looked up at the sphere. “We can only test the range of emissions for which our science knows about. The spheres are non-magnetic, but we haven’t been able to sample one to test its composition.”

“How about the temperature differences,” Kallandra said, trying to seek ways to prevent them firing a missile. “Is it possible their variations are used to signal to an orbiting alien satellite? No, scrub that. There might be undetected satellites but the temperature variation would be too small and interfered with too much in the atmosphere.”

“Even so,” the captain said, “everything else about this phenomenon is unearthly too. How is it rising? What’s it made of? How did it get down there two billion years ago? So what’s a few degrees for it to detect? But I agree it seems too prone to error.”

“Could it be the way it’s vibrating?” Tabitha said.

“The vibrations make infrasound we cannot hear, but we can detect with instruments. It’s what’s making us all feel queasy. It’s called—”

“The brown note,” Kallandra said, remembering the British engineer saying the same thing.

Tabitha held up a hand, like in school. “Like whales? They can sure as candy talk over huge distances.”

“You might be right,” the Captain said, “but only on Earth—sea or air. Sound doesn’t travel through space.”

“We don’t know they need to communicate in space,” Kallandra said, “or if they did, they could switch to radio.”

Claude shook his head. “If they did, we’d be able to pick it up. They’re obviously advanced. If they want to keep their communications secret, they’d never use something simple like radio. But something has to be done by sphere A to be detected by sphere B.”

“But for all we know, they only exist here on Earth,” Tabitha said. “Lord, they might be one of God’s creatures we’d not heard about.”

Everyone laughed…except Tabitha, who slowly smiled so as not to look out of phase.

Kallandra’s cellphone chimed, obliging her to walk away from the noisy discussion. She saw it was Derek, back at Johnson. “Hi, Derek,honey, is our spaceship still in one piece?”

“Hello, Kal. I’ve news about those two locations I told our bosses to search. They think they know where a sphere might be in the South Pacific near Tahiti.”

Before he could give Kallandra details, a warning klaxon sounded followed by the start up whine of a rocket motor making her put a finger in her ear. Then she realised the implication. She shouted: “No!” into her phone before closing it, and ran back to Claude, who in the collision threw himself on top of her in the grass.

“For Christ’s sake, Claude, it’s not going to explode.”

She wriggled free in time to see the flash of the rocket as it shot into the sphere.

Although she didn’t expect any pyrotechnics, there remained the unexpected. Her stomach tightened and her mouth hadn’t felt so dry since she nearly failed to pull out of a dive a month before at White Sands. Holding her breath, she listened intently for any change in sound. The silvery surface continued its blurred image but the entry point of the rocket looked no different. It had healed itself. Her eyes looked at the wisps of remaining rocket exhaust drifting down before flicking to the sky on the other side of the sphere in case it had made it through.

Kallandra felt the ground quivering, bringing back memories of Glastonbury. But it lasted only a few seconds, sending a few puffs of dust into the air and a leaves spiralled down from worried trees. She noticed her fellow Americans had hardly blinked through it, their quake muscles already familiarised having reacted to the high frequency of tremors in California.

Elbowing Claude to allow her to stand, she heard whoops from a couple of soldiers. Thinking the sensors on the rocket had told them something new she rushed over to the command tent. The screen snowed.

“Nothing? Then why the cheers?” She looked first at the officers who stood looking foolish, and then at a corporal, who pointed in the direction of the sphere.

“We thought it would explode, or kill us. But It just took it in without so much as an oops.”

“Something did happen,” said the captain. Tabitha held up her Dictaphone, but he waved it away and wagged a finger.

Claude pointedly tapped at his watch, while lifting his eyebrows at the captain.

“Yes, Sir. Our computer went a bit haywire while I was monitoring the rocket launch. The screen blanked momentarily, but when it came back, everything seemed normal. However, when we ran the rocket sensor data through again, there’s a two- second gap, leading up to impact. Though a disappearing trick hardly counts as an impact. Consequently there is no data.”

Tabitha, annoyed at her Dictaphone having to be turned off, said, “You mean you lost two seconds’ worth of information. So what?”

“No, Ma’am,” said the captain. “We all lost two seconds. That computer, all the computers and time-related equipment show a leap forward, so to speak.” He stopped for a while to let the time factor sink in, but Claude and Kallandra already had a notion from Johnson.

Claude said, “We experienced time irregularities yesterday in Houston. Do you know if the time jump was local or general?”

“Well, that’s the odd thing isn’t it?” said the captain. “How could only us time travel forward? Surely observers at the edge of the time-field, or whatever you call it, would notice if we vanished for two seconds?”

“But we mightn’t vanish to them,” said Kallandra. “They might experience a peripheral disturbance decreasing in distance from us; a blurred vision type event. Hey, maybe that’s why the sphere is blurred. I wonder if it’s shifting time in increments but just on its fringes?”

“I don’t see how that would help the sphere move upwards,” said Claude.

“It might if it is skipping time while the Earth moves,” said Kallandra. “But I’m only floundering here, not making a reasoned hypothesis.” She noticed the captain had turned away to talk on his cellphone.

“What did Derek say?” Claude asked Kallandra.

“He said they’ve found another sphere. Or they think they have. I don’t know details. I’ll ring him back now.”

The captain beamed at them when he finished his call.

“Good news, we have a ‘go’ to use explosives.”