Offworld (7 page)

Two years had clone practically nothing to change the Administration Building; it was exactly how Owen remembered it. On the top
floor he found the door to the director's office unlocked, as it must've
been when everyone disappeared. The wide room was covered floor
to ceiling with fake wood paneling and still carried the faint smell of
the director's favorite brand of cigar. A large window offered a view
of the support and operations grounds. Far off in the distance and
to the west, Owen could see the faint plume of black smoke rising
from what was left of the Ares, still smoldering.

He didn't waste time looking for anything that might prove helpful.
He already knew he would find nothing of the sort here. Instead, he
sat behind the director's desk, pulled out the shallow center drawer
containing pens and paper clips, and set it aside. He reached a hand
into the space where the drawer had been and retrieved something
that was attached to the underside of the desk.

It was a manila folder, bright red in color, and it was sealed. It
was not labeled with words or images on its outside. It was hefty
in weight, filled with more than a hundred loose pages and bound
with a rubber band.

Rather than open the red folder and examine its contents, Owen
located the director's cigar lighter inside another drawer and lit the
folder on fire. Once it was successfully burning, he tossed the folder
into a metal trash can beside the director's desk, watching it until
only ash remained.

Once the last ember was out, he rose from the desk and left
to report back to the others that the Administration Building had
proven useless.

Late that afternoon, their investigations complete, the four astronauts gathered at a table in the central outdoor court at the Visitor's
Center. In the parking lot to the south sat hundreds of cars. All of
them abandoned. This was normally the busiest area at Kennedy, but
now the place was deathly silent save for the occasional trace of wind.
It was an odd sensation, a silence that went deeper than auditory. It
was like an infection in the air they breathed, as if everything was
familiar and yet completely alien and very wrong.

As it often did in Florida, clouds built up quickly as the four of
them sat contemplating their next move. The light gray haze obscured
the sun and threatened to drown their already dismal moods.

Chris salvaged something from a backpack he carried and placed
it in the center of the table. It was a matted frame, with three large,
rectangular portrait holes side by side. The first two holes contained
front pages of local newspapers; the third was empty. The major news
organizations had stopped printing on paper over a decade ago, but
it wasn't uncommon for small-town trades to still run presses daily.

The first newspaper was dated February 15, 2031, the date the
Ares was launched, with a picture of the rocket and its boosters lifting
off amid a plume of smoke and fire. It bore the headline, Humanity's
Longest Stride.

The second paper, in the center of the frame, boasted a gigantic
headline in a thick font that read, MAN WALKS ONMARS. It was dated August 30, 2031, and contained a large picture of Chris in his heavy
space suit, placing an American flag on red Martian soil.

"Found this at VAB," Chris explained. VAB stood for Vehicle
Assembly Building, the largest structure in the complex, capable of
housing an entire spacecraft and its massive rocket boosters. "Looks
like one of the engineers made it. Guess he was saving the third
panel for our return."

The four of them sat quietly and stared at the framed newspapers.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about the pages behind the
glass. They were wrinkled and rough around the edges from much
handling. The one on the left had a few small grease stains and tiny
spots from drops of some kind of liquid. Coffee, maybe. The frame
was a marker of two days in history that they had helped make
happen, but its contents showed signs of being roughly handled,
displayed before friends and family, and buried under other papers
and books.

It was a silent symbol of the futility they were all feeling.

Trisha let out a long, weary breath. "Guess this doesn't really
matter anymore," she said.

Terry looked up at her. "Why not? Why shouldn't it matter?"

She gave a single, mirthless chuckle.

"We still did it," he argued, turning to Owen and Chris for support. "We traveled to another planet and lived there for a year and a
half. We proved that it can be done. We made important advances,
strides in-"

"There's no one left to care, Terry," Trisha said, smiling ruefully
as if all of this were some grand cosmic joke.

"We made history!" Terry cried, his voice echoing in the
emptiness.

Owen mused without making eye contact, "Is history still history
if no one is around to remember it? Learn from it? Continue building
the future on its foundations?"

Terry looked as if he was about to argue the point, but Chris cut
him off with a wave of his hand.

"I think we're all agreed that we've learned everything we can
from this place."

Somber faces of agreement. No one would look him in the eye,
all of them lost in their own private worlds.

"We're all in shock, I know," Chris went on. "That sounds pretty
dumb, actually, because this is so much bigger than shock. I'm not
sure there are any words that can describe the situation. Under ordinary circumstances, we'd be undergoing debriefs and physical and
psychological re-acclimations. But this world left `ordinary' behind
about two months ago. So the only question remaining is, if we're
not staying here, where do we go?"

"Wherever we want," remarked Owen. "There's no one to stop
us."

"Maybe we should go to D.C.?" Trisha asked. "Or New York? Someplace that might hold more information about what's happened."

"How about Maui?" Terry attempted a joke. No one laughed.

"Houston," Chris said. It wasn't a question or a suggestion, and
he didn't realize it was coming out of his lips until it had already
happened.

A silence spread among the other three as this one word lingered in the air. When Chris had said "Houston," what they heard
was "home" Houston, Texas, was where all American astronauts
were trained, and almost every astronaut made his or her home in
Houston, venturing to Florida solely for launches. The four of them
were no exception.

"Because of that light we saw on the satellite view?" Trisha voiced
the clear question.

"That crazy bright light is the only real clue we have," said Chris.
"We have to follow it."

`Agreed," Owen said, somber. "Let's head home."

"I don't want to go home," admitted Trisha. "My family isn't waiting for me there. Let's investigate the big light, but Houston won't
be home. Not now. Not like this."

More silence.

Owen leaned back in his seat. "I haven't been to the place where
my family lives for two and a half years ... and I need to ... be there.
For a little while. I need to see with my own eyes and feel with my
own hands that that place is still there." When no one responded,
he kept talking. "I've been away from my family for a long time. Too
long. I know I'm not going to find them there, but if I can't have them,
I just need to feel ... home."

"Okay," Trisha conceded. "But I'd like to make a brief stop in
Orlando on the way there."

Even Terry didn't comment on this; they all knew what it meant,
and no one was in the mood to make light of it: Trisha's did-he-ordidn't-he-wait boyfriend Paul lived in Orlando.

"So would I," said Chris, though he did not elaborate. `But then it's
straight on to Houston. Assuming we have transportation, we should
be able to do it in a day and a half, two days. Whatever that light is,
it isn't natural, and I want to know what's causing it."

When no one argued, Chris sighed, but not in a tired way. "Then
Houston it is. Let's get to work. Terry, Beech, you're on supply duty.
Pack up anything you can find that might be useful, especially food,
clothing, medical supplies. Trisha and I will find our rides."

"Speaking of supplies ..." Owen said, pulling a laptop out of a
backpack beside his seat. "Trisha and I put our heads together and
patched this into the feed from that high-tech satellite we looked at
yesterday-the one orbiting over the U.S. This remote view will give us
a twenty-four-hour eye in the sky, so we can keep tabs on the weather,
that light in Houston, and anything else that might come tip"

"Nicely clone," Chris replied, impressed with their forward
thinking.

As they were rising from the table, Terry looked at the sky. "Where
are the birds?" he asked no one.

"What?" said Chris, and everyone turned to face Terry.

Terry pointed up. "We're standing on a wildlife preserve. There
are always birds; I see them when I come down to the Cape. Where
are they?"

Owen turned, intrigued. "You know, I haven't noticed any gators
or manatees either." Both animals were frequently spotted among the
creeks and marshes throughout the grounds. "Not even a squirrel."

The four of them glanced at each other and at the sky. As usual,
it was Terry who voiced what everyone was thinking.

"Did the animals vanish too?"

It was midday by the time a red pickup truck and a black SUV
sped around the stationary cars on Highway 50, entering Orlando.
Terry was behind the wheel of the truck, Owen at his side; Chris
drove the SUV in front with Trisha riding shotgun.

They traveled largely in silence, though Terry and Owen had found
some two-way radios so they could stay in contact on the road. In
the time they'd been away, the technology had improved, and these
were small enough to fit just inside the ear.

Chris couldn't believe it hadn't occurred to them before now that
the roadways would be clogged with vehicles that had been rendered
out of control when their drivers disappeared. It made for very slow
going, dodging so many abandoned automobiles. They were everywhere-trucks and cars and motorcycles and buses, stopped in the
middle of the road, slid off the side of the highway, or rammed into
barriers and poles and buildings. More than once, Chris and Terry were
forced to go off-road to get around the piles of stationary traffic.

Eventually they both turned north onto 417 toward Jamestown,
the suburb where Trisha's boyfriend Paul lived.

"Hey, Chris?" Terry spoke into his earpiece.

"Yeah?"

"Isn't 417 a toll road?"

"Why? You out of change?" Chris quipped.

It wasn't long before the toll appeared, six lanes for differing kinds
of drivers-some with electronic credits, others with radio-enabled
passes that deducted funds automatically as a vehicle passed, which
didn't even require the driver to stop.

Every one of the six lanes was blocked off with a long line of
vehicles. Concrete barriers prevented any attempt to slip around the
roadblock.

They had no choice but to stop and take the time to move each
car individually until one of the lanes was cleared. Fortunately, every
car still had its keys in the ignition. Unfortunately, the electric or
hydrogen-fueled engines on almost all of them were dead, having
idled until there was no power left. Shifting the cars into neutral and
manually pushing them aside by hand was often their only option.

An hour later, when the work was finished, Chris froze where
he stood in the middle of the road. He had just moved an old station
wagon out of their path but now stood completely still, the hairs on
his arms standing at attention.

The dead calm of the highway had been disturbed by a new
sound. A sound not coming from the four of them. One of the first
he'd heard at all besides the wind.

The others were already back in their respective vehicles, waiting
for him to return so they could resume their trek. But he didn't move,
listening carefully to the new sound. It clicked.