Chapter Sixteen

A month later, near Alice Springs, Australia.

Rob Summers accepted the cigarette from his friend, Mandu, although he’d told the NASA doctors he’d given up in plenty of time for the Mars Mission. But that was on hold, and, in any case, the urge for the intake of nicotine was secondary to the need for a social bonding with the aboriginal leader of the Anangu clan that owned Uluru.

“It’s a bloody bummer, Rob,” said Mandu, as they swung on his shack’s porch seat looking at the rubble of Uluru in the distant sunset.

Rob agreed. “I used to enjoy coming to the hotel here—always paid the extra dollars to grab a view of Uluru and watch its glory shimmer from red to blue with all the shades between.”

“That was the Tjukurpa energy of the dreamtime. Our ancestors’ spirits were looked after by Tjukurpa, until….” Tears filled his brown eyes.

“Where have the ancestral spirits gone, Mandu?” said Rob, his psychiatric skills on auto, keeping his friend talking to work through the disaster. It wasn’t as if the abos could blame the White Man this time. They could point at and blame metallic spheres for the destruction of one of their most sacred places, but they knew any retribution moment had passed.

“The spirits have gone on walkabout, Rob. I tell you what, our ancients were right about Uluru being hollow, right?”

“Too right. Do the Anangu clan leaders consider the ancient spirit—this Tjukurpa—may be related to the sphere? Hah. By that I mean—”

“Don’t worry yourself. You mean the sphere must have been down there dancing its rhythms so that we could feel it. The sphere was our hidden soul?”

“Metaphorically, perhaps. Am I going to be allowed access to the hole tomorrow? I’ve been patient, Mandu.”

“Why ask? Them buggers didn’t.” He waved a fist at the Australian Army encampment that supported the engineers and scientists who’d examined the sphere while it was near ground level. The sphere had now reached three hundred and fifty metres and the human investigators had given up. The army remained, pointing their weapons and a residual science team listened with their sensors, but from afar since the Fiji time event, which remained worrying.

“I’m a different kind of bugger. You coming with me?”

“As long as all we’re doing is to take a gander.”

* * *

Although Rob wasn’t a geologist he’d understood that the spheres somehow cut their way vertically through any rock strata they found themselves beneath. He’d seen photographs of smooth sides, including those at Uluru. But the ancient red rock was friable. The structure had become so unstable the hallowed tourist attraction had become a rubble heap.

It took them two hours to reach what used to be the plateau. They’d gained very little height but the scramble over the newly crumbled Uluru with large friable sandstone blocks exhausted them. Curiosity drove Rob’s perseverance, and Mandu found amusing his friend’s need to know what happened to the hole.

“Are you sure your leaders won’t mind me climbing this sacred heap?” said Rob, stopping below the last steep slope for a breather.

“The spirits have left. Probably gone to Kata Tjuta. So Uluru might as well be trampled over.”

“Ah, they’re the rocks bigger than Uluru. Where abouts are they?”

As he stood to conclude their hike, Mandu waved his arm in a general easterly direction. Rob was a psychiatrist for NASA, not a geologist, but he was expecting a neat hole at the top, not the ragged crater they found.

“I don’t get it, Mandu, why should this rock disintegrate so much when, by the images I’ve seen of the other sphere exit holes, it should be relatively intact?”

“The spirit put up a damn good fight, Rob.”

“Of course, silly of me.” Rob tried not to be too flippant. He had a lot of respect for the ancient religions. In his professional capacity he’d witnessed Caribbean witchdoctory, and although the aboriginals here were more discreet, he knew of the power of autosuggestion with people getting better, or worse, merely on a spiritual leader’s say so.

While Mandu set off walking around the rim, Rob laid on a warm slab of ochre rock so he could look safely down the pit. He leaned over sufficiently to feel the seemingly polished wall. It felt like glass, but to his amazement he could see the bottom of the hole. Many small and some large rocks had filled it to within thirty metres of the rim. The vibrations must have opened up all the faults and cracks in the stone. He saw a cascade of gravel slither down the opposite rim eighty metres away. He felt connected with the earthy aroma, but he always did when lying on bare ground.

“Hey, Mandu, be careful.”

“Yeah, I noticed. It’s the bloody sphere making those noises. It’s disturbing the Earth.”

Rob looked up at the sphere directly above the hole. A perfect metallic globe over three hundred metres up. How could Mandu hear the low frequency noise that it emitted? When the spheres weren’t so high many people felt nauseous from the vibration but not when they were so high. It looked like a hydrogen balloon except it didn’t drift in the wind, just slowly rose. He aimed his camera and took both movie and stills at different settings. With the zoom he could see the warped reflection of the ochre rocks he lay on. Did the sphere know the ructions it caused? It would be ironic if it had no notion, no concept of humans or life on Earth.

One aspect of the reflected image of the rubble remains of Uluru made him gasp.

The exit hole had the look of a crater. Inexpert as he was, he’d seen hundreds of images of Lunar and Martian craters. This one had a deeper and more rough base than most but the similarity sent a shiver playing xylophones on his spine. The shiver tingled again as he tripped through a series of concepts resulting in the realization of the uniqueness of the images. Of course satellite images were available of the spheres, but not of the ground, including the holes, directly beneath. Oblique aerial photographs from airplanes lost the circular nature of the holes, and so his opportunist upward-yet-down-reflections of Uluru was special. No doubt others had photographed the spheres from beneath but maybe they needed the height to have the reflected crater view appreciated.

Of course the other exit holes on Earth were much deeper—the spirits hadn’t fought as hard, or maybe the rock was harder but, in time, they would fill. All the exit holes would look like craters, even if temporary.

He sent the image with an accompanying text message to Colonel Disraeli’s data-coordinator, Matt Stevens, and to the others most interested including Kallandra and Claude.

* * *

Tabitha Wish woke to her cellphone appealing for attention. Her budget was stretched to the limit but one of her backhanders had sent her some interesting pictures.

No doubt Matt Stevens blundered in his decision that crater-like photographs along with written observations from Australia were not a problem to National Security and so worth a few bucks. But they were gold in her hands.

She lay in bed with a silly grin, composing a breakthrough story that would rock the planet more than her religious-conflict report that led to trouble last time. But this was different. She’d gone freelance to rid herself of being dominated by do-this-that editors.

Deciding to make an early start, she threw back the bedcover only to find Roma curled up in the bed with her. A late night thunderstorm had driven the thirteen-year-old into her mother’s bed. Not that Tabitha minded. In fact it was great. Always on the go, leaving childrearing to her poppa, her guilt was assuaged only by the large but irregular checks for her exposes and audacious reports. What she lacked in accuracy she made up for in exuberance. She noted that Charlie, Roma’s twin’s street cred, had made him stay in his own bunk although he too was more scared of thunder.

Successfully deserting her daughter, after stroking her sleek hair, Tabitha fired up her laptop, copied the message and image from her cellphone and started research.

By the time she turned the laptop around because the morning sun made it unreadable, she’d hit the Send button.

* * *

It missed the first two editions, but by mid-morning The NY Times splashed the front page with:

“Spheres have been on Moon!

World Exclusive by Tabitha Wish

NASA scientists, studying the cavities left behind by the enigmatic spheres, have determined they are the same as craters on the surface of the Moon, and probably, the other heavenly bodies in our Solar System.

Dr. Rob Summers took the photographs on this page, showing the reflected image of the Uluru (Ayers Rock). Instead of the gaping deep hole he expected to find, the sides had crumbled in to fill it so it became a crater.

Measurements checked by NASA found hundreds of similar-sized craters on the moon. It would seem our spherical friends, who so far have only succeeded in desecrating the special religious sites on Earth, had already been to the moon. Why?

Perhaps they couldn’t find what they sought there, and came to our planet and found time. At least that’s the theory going around NASA at the moment. Can you believe it?

Nor me. Maybe though, they found essential stuff in the ground that now they’ve taken it, is affecting time.

I tested my theories by interviewing Claude Lapointe, 30, a NASA geophysicist and astronaut. He confirmed that sphere craters exist not only on the moon but on Mars and other planets in our Solar System. He should know, he was on the scratched Mars Mission. It makes me wonder if someone at Johnson knew all along about the spheres, maybe on Mars, and created a hidden agenda to go investigate them there before we were surprised by their appearance on Earth.

All attempts to communicate with these aliens have failed—they are not listening or we don’t know their wavelength. Trigger-happy chancers apparently tried to nuke the South Pacific sphere but that didn’t bother them either.

So, we civilians are subjected to timequakes. Mostly they are only inconvenient—even bizarrely cute, such as when we arrive at a bus stop before we set off from home. Annoying when the bus has already gone beforehand, but hey, the death rate is nothing compared to our soldiers continuing to fight ghosts in the Middle East. But when will NASA do something to stop these spheres before we are zapped so far back or forward in time that the Earth is a million kilometres away? No one hears you scream in space.”

* * *

Tabitha’s sigh stretched across the lunch table to her father, who gnawed an unlit cigarillo and growled at the copy of the Times thrust at him ten minutes before.

“Tabitha, this is crap.”

“Sure, Poppa, but it might be true, and it definitely evened up my bank balance.”

She leaned over and eased the paper away from him, before spittle dampened any more. She reread her article, smiling at her own mischievous words, which she knew would incinerate those more sensitive minds that hung on to the notion Earth was prime, and the spheres an aberration yet to be explained. There was bound to be trouble, but investigative journalists revelled in controversy—enriching themselves in the process.

Her cellphone jangled the keys in her purse.

“Tabitha, we’re in deep shit,” said Matt Stevens, Colonel Disraeli’s data-coordinator.

“Correction, Matt, it’s you who is in trouble, I only used information you passed on to me.”

“Information you bribed me for and that makes you an accomplice. There’s a big stink about who leaked the photographs to you and then there’s all your claptrap analysis. I bet you didn’t know there’s an item about you in Astronomy Now, wondering how you knew more than they did? I don’t recall sending you all that crap about the spheres having been on the Moon and Mars.”

Tabitha dropped her cellphone; partly because of her inability to grasp it while elated that she’d made the big-time. She’d become not only the writer of the headline story but the subject of the headline. What a hoot!

She gnawed at a knuckle to stem her hilarity and said, “You didn’t, Matt, but it needs a creative mind to take the dry NASA data for a run and see where it takes us.”

“Laugh at this then, Miss Wish, they want you for an investigative hearing on the leak.”

“Really? It’s a bit late for that—unless they want to give me more information.”

She heard coughing at the other end followed by Stevens, who said: “Doesn’t it occur to you that you might be prosecuted for illegally obtaining security data?”

“No, I’m totally covered—hey, I’m a professional journalist, ya know. I don’t have to reveal my sources.”

“Maybe not, but I’d be careful if I were you, Tabitha. Some, let us say, difficult people have had to take very early retirement, if you know what I mean?”

“Matt, are you suggesting I shouldn’t be fixin’ to come to Johnson for this enquiry?”

“That’s up to you, but if you decide to come, maybe you should be escorted at all times. Perhaps at other times, too.”

“Not my style. Send me the details for this meeting, and I assume they’re making flight arrangements for me from Jackson-Pearl international?” She waited for his response but heard only crackles.

“Matt, are you there? Come on you bastard, stop fucking me about.”

“…escorted at all times. Perhaps at other times too.”

“Just a minute, Matt, you said that word for word five minutes ago.” She waited again, but only heard more crackles and possibly shouting, crashing in the background.

Having experienced some micro time decoherences, or timequakes as she liked to call them, she guessed Johnson was experiencing one. Tabitha felt torn between concern for fellow humans, some of whom she’d met, and grateful she’d switched her call to record. If something really bad had gone down at Johnson, her cellphone evidence could be another headline. The dilemma of using tragedy to advance herself lingered for a moment as she rubbed her chin. It meant food for her kids; at least that was how she justified her journalistic intrusion. Besides, the old cliché, if she didn’t do it, someone else would, came partly to her lips before she chided the awful ethics it implied.

“Hi, Tabitha, you still hanging on there?”

“Hey, Matt, I thought you were all gone up there. Was that one of those time decoherences, or had you dropped your cellphone in the shredder?”

“Time messing us up again, but it’s back and forward this time. Whoa! We seem to be a having tremors too. I have to go.”

* * *

Tabitha played with the computer mouse with one hand while using the other to phone other personnel she guessed were at Johnson. Her stomach tightened when the Earthquake Watch website sprung onto her screen. The last time she pointed her cursor there, the red spots of daily seismic activity followed the usual Pacific Ring of Fire, and other tectonic plate boundaries with a few hotspots here and there. Nothing unusual there, as compared with Roma’s school Earth Science textbooks. Now it was as if the screen had contracted measles. Every continent and ocean bed seemed to have a rash of earth tremors randomly distributed. She adjusted the scale so only those with Richter Magnitude five were displayed, the level at which minor damage was noticed, but no loss of life. The red spots reverted to the normal pattern with a few odd spots, including one at Houston in the last ten minutes.

The phrase timequakes revisited her from science fiction movies, but they were not the same. They referred to aberrations in time travel rather than the physical shuddering and displacement of parts of the Earth as a result of one bit suddenly moving forward or backwards in time. She was sure NASA and others would know about this. A mere Mississippi journalist couldn’t come up with technical explanations, surely? She found references in the logs of NASA meetings Matt had sent her. If part of the Earth had stood still for a second, the rest would’ve been thirty kilometres further in its orbit around the sun. Clearly that hadn’t happened, yet. But something akin appeared to be affecting some parts.

Happy that she had sufficient pseudoscience to throw together another article under the heading: Are we in for more timequakes? she knocked off a few words while fresh. Her cellphone interrupted her, again.

She didn’t recognise the incoming number, but risked allowing the call. The house phone had been targeted by a few crank calls since she’d started her revelations on the spheres. Strangers from New World Religions would regale her with their views of what was really happening with the spheres, as would High School science teachers and local politicians. Others assumed she had inside information and really knew what the spheres were. She’d had a phone call from a toy manufacturer prepared to pay her for the rights to how the spheres levitated. The call she really wanted never came—a mission statement from the spheres.

“Hello?” She never gave away her name until she knew who called.

“Mizz Wish? Ted Williamson here, a commissioning editor for the New York Times. We want you to cover the latest events at El Capitan. My sec has e-mailed you a contract, and details where to pick up flight and travel arrangements.”

“Hey, hang on there, Ted Williamson, I’ve to be in Johnson…” She hesitated as two thoughts zipped through. What new events were happening with the sphere? And this was a paid job while appearing in front of an investigation at Johnson wasn’t, although it would keep her in the loop. She didn’t believe she was in danger or in trouble with NASA; Matt merely tried to frighten her off so she couldn’t point a ‘that’s him’ finger in his direction. But she only needed to be up-to-date in order to earn the bucks. Maybe she could do both.

“Sorry about that, Ted, the front door hollered at me. Any chance of you letting me arrive there the day after tomorrow?”

“No way. Something unusual is happening, as you should know, and so you need to be in Yosemite for us, immediately—no options.”

“In that case I’ll have to disappoint folk more important than you, but what the hell? Twice the usual fee, then, or you’ll have to find someone else.”

“We could easily do so, Tabitha, but your inimitable style has caught the public’s imagination. Agreed on double the fee in the contract, but I want it good and fast.”

Tabitha rocked in her chair, laughing to herself. From barely scraping one assignment a week on the local rag, to The New York Times demanding she work for them. A warm satisfied feeling grew in her stomach; a justification of the hard evenings of studying had blossomed. Her nose wrinkled as a sickly sweet odour, like synthetic raspberry, assailed her nostrils. A tug on her blue cardigan sleeve tore her attention from her searches for what had excited the editor over the spheres. The webcams seemed to be stuck on yesterday’s images.

“Momma.”

“Hi Roma, sweetness, careful with that lolly on my cardigan, darling. Did grandpop get that for you? Yeah?”

“Momma, take me to the pool today?” Eyes as big and brown as her rabbit’s.

Her coffee-coloured face had been recently scrubbed and shone; probably to increase her chances of a successful plea.

“I can’t, honey, Momma has to work to buy your clothes. I’ll get grandpop to take you and Charlie.”

“But you promised.” Tears leaked from practised yet genuinely pathetic eyes. At least, Tabitha assumed they were genuine; the girl had learnt to be a superior actor over the last couple of years. They hugged.

The embrace continued longer than usual as Tabitha tried to impart love through their clothes and skin. She had an urge to promise a trip at the weekend, maybe to Disney World, but her pledges had fractured so often lately she dared not set herself up for another fall.

A raucous coughing from the kitchen heralded her father bringing out their cordless phone. “There’s some God man here wanting you. Probably after rescuing the rest of your soul before you sell another portion of it to the devil.”

“Newspapers are not the devil’s work, Poppa, maybe money is.” She took the white phone off him, but held her hand over the speaker for a moment wondering who it was, like she did with the mail—playing detective with the postmark and handwritten address before tearing open the envelope.

Perhaps it’d be that Denzel Washington look-alike who’d winked at her at the El Capitan site. That Kallandra Harvard bitch kept touching his arm. What was his name?

Claude. She’d given him her business card; twice. She felt heat rising in her face in anticipation of his French Canadian accent. A rasping Irish male voice dampened her passion.

“Are you there, Miss Wish?”

“Yes, who is this?” Who was her letdown? It’d better be damn good.

“Kearney, Religious Affairs editor at the Washington Post. We want you to cover a crucial multi-faith conference on the significance and response to the spheres.”

“Really? When?” She could hardly believe her luck, but surely another plane ticket didn’t bear her name at the airport?

“Tomorrow, here in Washington.”

Damn. Everybody seemed to be offering her work but simultaneously. The religious angle was very interesting especially if disparate faiths were, at last, putting aside differences in the face of a common foe. On the other hand, they wouldn’t be paying as much as the Times or as important for connections as NASA. Anyway, her Baptist upbringing hardly qualified her to weed out the angles. They only wanted her there because she’d made a name for herself with her scoops. This could be the job too many that would undo her.

“I’m sorry, I have other commitments. I could try and find someone else to be there?”

“That’s OK Miss Wish, there’ll be other journalists there, and we’d provide briefing notes. You would just have been back up. Goodbye.”