the Taurus vehicle was secure; Frank, George, Ken Mayr and Ravi Dutta strapped into their flight seats in the G-suits, stomachs empty, braced for the battering, searing atmosphere. The crazy shapes on the monitors might be the last thing they would ever see. Each privately surrendered to whatever fate might now deal them, and thought of the people left so far behind on the point of being bereaved - or cheering a hero.
When it came to what should have been the crunch, they hardly knew they had landed. How long had the descent taken? The self-imposed silence had almost been dream-like. It was Frank who first spoke.
"Big Bird has landed, gentlemen! Are you all okay?"
"Okay but feeling a bit weird," Ken answered. Ravi and George nodded agreement as they freed themselves from the flight restraints and stretched carefully.
"Right. Not rushing this. We must take twenty-four hours to adjust, get some rest, eat, rehydrate and check all the systems. But first we need to get that comms desk lit up and tell Houston we're safely down."
The best part of an hour later George gave up his efforts to resume radio contact. The transmitter would flicker into life momentarily and then die. He longed to hear Mary's voice, sweet and warm through the interstellar noise. Cut off from her his heart felt cold. Her face in his mind was all he had left of home. He buried his pain in the routines that now preoccupied the weary crew.
The four men slept till the sound of unfamiliar birdsong started a new day. Ravi cooked up the biggest breakfast they had had for weeks. Apart from the comms unit, all the vehicle's systems still checked out; should danger threaten, they were good for an emergency take-off. The video screen that dominated the flight deck showed the men little of their new environment; the light everywhere was unlike any sunlight or starlight they had ever seen. It was so pervasive, so non-directional that it seemed almost material. Within the light there were forms - maybe rocks, maybe trees. There were movements; wind currents? Creatures? The outside temperature registered a mere 19? Celsius. No heat sources. No apparent threats. The crew suited up for their EVA.
Very, very cautiously Frank opened the hatch.
And walked into the light.
"Frank?"
"Very strange out here, but no reason to believe it's unsafe. Come out, George."
"Ken and Ravi are right behind me."
Silver-suited amid the silvery light the four men could hardly see each other.
Ravi called to Frank, "We could easily get lost in this. We need to check intercoms away from the ship."
Warily they stepped twelve paces over the unfamiliar soft ground and re-tested their wireless transmission. There was no interference. They were cut off from Mission Control, but, thank heaven, not from each other.
"OK. Attach your Theseus lines to the hull clips, and we'll move outward."
Safely connected to Big Bird by fine, strong threads of graphene they tested the ground at each footstep, listening intently through the suit mics for any sound in this dreamlike environment.
"I can hear something ... surely not voices?" George turned to his friends. They could see the surprise, and the beginning of fear, in his eyes.
All four stopped. There were movements in the light; were they figures? Ravi stepped closer to a tall, still shadow amid the brilliance and reached out to touch it.
"I am sure this is plant life," he said," I think we are amid trees ... of a kind." The dark eyes of the exobiologist shone with excitement. "Do you think this light is some form of bioluminescence?"
The moving figures were coalescing into a blurred crowd that remained ahead of them. Fascinated, the men followed, every nerve tuned to shifts in the light, the sense of voices that sometimes became bells, the muted sounds of their own footfall. The light was becoming brighter, more intense. The soft ground was now hard and smooth and around them were not only the shadowy trees but the indistinct geometry of buildings.
"What kind of civilisation is this?" whispered Ken to Ravi at his side. "Why has nobody noticed us? Where are we all going?"
The level ground dipped; they were now walking downhill, each man beginning to tremble as the voices and bells resolved into waves of an indescribable music, and he saw the forms ahead disappearing into a blaze, a cauldron of brilliance. They were about to be swallowed up into - what?
"We should turn back," said George. "We don't know if the lines will last. Can we check what's left on the spools?" He looked round at the spool pack on his hip - and stared at his friends in shock.
"It's gone! They're all gone! The graphene has disintegrated! It was supposed to be indestructible! How on earth has this happened? We are utterly lost!"
"We're not on Earth," said Frank, trying to steady his voice. "This is what we signed up for. These are the risks we take. The only thing we can do now is keep going, and find out what is happening at the source of this extraordinary radiance. If the beings of this strange world believe it is safe, then there may be nothing to fear and everything to gain."
The four travellers from an alien world walked resolutely into the blinding light. People they could hardly see moved aside as they drew closer to its heart. Around and above them were other lights that shimmered and sang. Before them at last they could see ... a doorway ... and within, a sublime glory. Each man sank involuntarily to his knees at the silver feet of a slender being who held a child.
Now they knew. Frank knew. George knew. Ken knew. Ravi knew. They had arrived at the birth of a world's redemption, a moment which - just as on Earth millennia before - would inexorably resolve in tragedy and salvation. They had nothing to give but themselves. They were destined to stay, and learn, and try to survive in an environment that might be totally hostile.
"Help us," whispered Ravi. "And we shall help you. There is nothing else we can do."
There were sounds that none of them could understand, but a feeling of immense joy overwhelmed the men. They opened their visors, smiling as a soft silver hand touched each cheek, exploring the strangeness of a tear.
This was the last moment they remembered before walking through the doors at Mission Control into the astonished embrace of Mary and the cheering Houston team. How they had come home was never understood; some said they had never been away at all; but a small silver mark remained on each man's face for the rest of his life - a life spent in endless, intimate conversations with strangers.
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THE HAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE
An Interview with Roger Mainwaring DSO, JP, MP, PhD, DFAstrolS
The happiest day of my life? That would have been the time of the Solar Storm. You look shocked. Well, I suppose you would. But you asked me to be honest. 2020. The Solar Storm... the people at NASA had been keeping an eye on the sun for years, counting sunspots, logging the solar maxima and minima, measuring prominences; then one Sunday it was all over the media that we were in for a big one. I'm sure you remember; who could ever forget? Timing was uncertain, so all NASA and the other observatories could do was show us how large the coronal mass ejections had become and ensure we were at least psychologically prepared. In practice, you can't ever be ready for a thing like that. There was a lot of philosophising, much doom-mongering, and not a few suicides. Yes I know. Very sad. But when people are frightened, this is what can happen. I was in my garden when Valerie came out, in a state of considerable agitation, waving the Sunday Times. I remember looking up at the sky and thinking, 'Oh well, there goes the automatic watering system!' A ridiculous thought in the grand scheme of things.
And then it happened. Independence Day. I remember New York was planning its biggest firework display ever... what a joke! Compared to what hit us on 4/7, the famous 1859 Carrington Event was a sparkler. This was absolutely massive. Even the worst-case scenarios hadn't forecast the impact, and all we had was a twelve-hour warning from the space weather monitor at Stanford. Half a day to decide where to be, what - if anything - to do, who to be with, how to plan. Plan? How do you plan for undefined catastrophe? What did you do? ... OK. You're asking t
he questions. Well as it happens Valerie and I still had a stash of emergency stuff tucked away in the attic from the Y2K panic. Ah, you're a bit young to remember the 'millennium bug'! Nothing happened of course. All the computers just chuntered on. Anyway - you met my wife this morning? She's a careful soul. Likes to keep stocked up, 'just in case'. Bulk-buys when things we use are on offer. So up in the box room under the cobwebs we had candles, a camping stove, baked beans, tinned fish, soup, batteries, a First Aid box, dried fruit, jars of Valerie's preserves ... what else? Sugar, milk powder, tea and coffee ... Ryvita ... ammunition ... matches ... Oh! And the clever girl had even squirrelled several bottles of single malt.
So when it happened we were just sitting looking at each other in the breakfast room, waiting for the digital clock to stop. It was lunchtime here, and summer, so across the most of the Western world it was daytime. There was no sudden plunging of major cities into stygian darkness, no crashing at blackened traffic-lights, no real panic; that was all happening in the far East and places like Sydney ... Los Angeles ... No, on the day people were pretty sensible, didn't go in to work, disconnected appliances, avoided lifts and escalators, and came home from holidays if they could before all the flights were grounded. Of course there was a run on