CHAPTER ONE
Geosynchronous earth orbit
May 18, 2123
As Dr. Talmadge Rind reached for the main thruster controls, the pressure inside his skull suddenly spiked—intense pain stabbed behind both eyesockets, like something at the core of his brain was about to burst. He clamped his eyelids shut, his expression twisted into a teeth-baring grimace. Agony struck him in waves, accompanied by nausea: he tasted oysters and licorice, simultaneously.
Digging gloved fingertips into the form-fitting chair’s armrests, he hung on until the pain subsided. Gasping for air, he opened his eyes.
The inside of the spacecraft was even smaller than the front compartment of his 1974 Volvo 142 two-door sedan. The lone observation port was a third the size of the car’s side window; through it, an immense, cloud-speckled blue arc appeared to slowly rotate.
Clad head-to-toe in a bubble-helmeted, silver vacuum-suit and belted into the reclining chair, the African-American PhD was the first human being to orbit the planet in over a century.
Not a personal triumph.
Not a hard-won, technological comeback for his species.
But rather, the precursor to defeat on an unimaginable scale.
And if he failed to complete the mission he had been given, Miss Vicky would suffer unspeakable consequences.
LCD readouts on the backlit control panel indicated the capsule’s speed at 17,000 miles an hour; its altitude was a scant 50 kilometers above atmospheric re-entry and burn out. To regain a higher, safe orbit, he had to fire the thrusters. He moved his hand toward the controls, and the blinding pain returned. It flashed behind his eyes just for an instant—almost like a warning. It made him hesitate.
Am I dying? he asked himself. Dying before I can save her?
When the former Cal Berkeley professor entered the space capsule, he’d weighed in excess of 275 pounds, much of it belly flab. After ten days in orbit, without a bite to eat or a sip of water, the quilted protective suit hung loosely around his midsection. He wasn’t hungry, he wasn’t thirsty, but he was rapidly wasting away.
An umbilical from the machinery in the massive base of the chair kept his spacesuit pressurized with O2. Other umbilicals connected the base to ports along the sides of the suit, which in turn led to openings that had been laser-carved into his torso. Yellow, green, and purple liquids pumped into his body cavity through loops of clear tubing—in on one side, out on the other. The protein/carbo/fat hydrating-stew, if that’s what it was, left no residue to void: no bowel movements, no urination. He felt a slight chill every time the stuff pulsed in and out. Glug. Pause. Glug. Pause. Glug. Pause. It had occurred to him that the garish fluids might have nothing to do with nourishment, but served only to suppress pangs of hunger and thirst so he could fulfill his mission. Severe headache was a side effect of starvation and dehydration. Whether the machinery fed or simply anesthetized him didn’t matter.
Either way, by any measure, he was at death’s door.
Flying solo, but technically-speaking, not alone.
The atrocity stared at him, unblinking, with its ten-by-ten-inch cyclops’ eye. Shock-mounted to the control panel within arm’s reach, the gray plasteel cube’s LCD readout scrolled endless columns of data. As the spacecraft streaked around the planet, the device detected subtle changes in electromagnetic and gravitational fields. It recorded the positions of these anomalies, which the onboard computer then used to construct next-orbit flight paths and more detailed, pinpoint surveys.
The Electromagnetic-Gravitational Fluxometer (E-GF) epitomized his captors’ absolute technological supremacy, and their contempt for the suffering of all other beings. The central component—the main sensor—of the E-GF, an obscene perversion of his scientific discoveries, was a living human brain.
Dr. Rind had grown up in the 1950’s, overweight and uncoordinated. Breaking free of oppression and poverty through sports was out of the question, so he devoted himself to developing his intellectual gifts and interests. As a child he was convinced he would become the George Washington Carver of earth science.
Close, but no cigar.
As smart as he was, ten-year-old Rind couldn’t anticipate the insular, hidebound nature of science and academia. Couldn’t imagine that decades of effort and accomplishment would be rewarded with excommunication from his chosen field. Or that his genius and innovation would get him kidnapped, crammed into a tiny spheroid, and abandoned in orbit around the planet—a fate if not worse than his enslaved ancestors, certainly no better.
Dr. Rind’s career-changing, “Eureka” moment had come in the fall of 1976, when, halfway through a double pepperoni pizza, he had been struck by the idea that external geophysical forces—tectonic shifts, upsurges in magma, and electromagnetic and gravitational irregularities—might have the power to subtly influence and direct individual human brain activity, and ultimately, mass social movements.
His preliminary statistical analysis, which catalogued ideation and behavior in times of geologic upheaval, supported a correlation—but not cause and effect. Undaunted, the professor began mapping and quantifying brain response to specific changes in electromagnetic fields, which he could easily manipulate. He used grad students as guinea pigs. The results of his controlled study strongly pointed to the existence of an external motive force, previously unidentified—George Washington Carver territory.
When he presented the framework of his new theory to a national geophysical conference in 1979, the audience of his peers catcalled and yelled insults, then walked out en masse.
Publicly rejected, Dr. Rind’s Unifying Theory of Geologic and Social Forces (UTGSF) was then roundly ignored. No reputable science journal would publish his ongoing findings. His grad students drifted away. His lectures were poorly attended; sometimes no one showed up.
The Hayward Fault incident had been the final straw. Frantic to gather more convincing hard data, Rind had rented an Econoline van and hired eight Cal undergrads as test subjects. After packing the students into the rear of the van, along with half a ton of electronic gear, he drove back and forth over the fault line for hours—this while trying to monitor the readings from a CRT in the passenger seat. With eight young people crammed in the cargo compartment of a windowless van, some of them glassy-eyed, all wearing brain, blood pressure, and pulse sensors, all sitting on stacks of flashing, chittering instruments, he should have foreseen the consequences of a chance traffic stop by Oakland police.
The day after the Hayward Fault incident, the department chairman ejected him from his basement cubicle in the earth science building. Dr. Talmadge Rind, the world’s one and only “neuro-volcanologist,” was forced to hold office hours and rare, student conferences in the front seat of his Volvo, parked out in the hinterlands on the edge of the sprawling campus.
A career of limitless promise, half a lifetime of effort had gone square in the crapper.
Racial bigotry had had little if anything to do with the outcome. Radical, paradigm-shifting scientific insights took a long time to be accepted—if ever. And of course, there was jealousy and fear, the bricks and mortar of bureaucracy.
The command console bleeped a repeating, warning tone. Capsule altitude had dropped into the critical zone, 39 kilometers from reentry and burn out.
Warily, Dr. Rind reached for the thruster control. Long before his finger touched the red firing button, the pain behind his eyes spiked again. Muscles locked, body shivering, he clutched the armrests. It felt like something was ripping, tearing loose deep inside his head.
And this time, the nausea was much worse.
As his stomach convulsed, acid squirted into the back of his throat, mixing with the flavors of oysters and licorice. Upchucking inside his helmet in zero gravity was not an option. Droplets of expelled bile would float around his head, circulating until they smeared across the inside of the bubble and obscured his vision. Groaning aloud, he swallowed the acid; clenching his teeth and shutting his throat, he held it down.
Concentrate, concentrate, he commanded himself. Think about something else. Think about Miss Vicky. Remember Miss Vicky.
The night they met at a Cal faculty singles’ mixer, the first time she uttered his name, with a soft hand of greeting extended, she had pronounced it correctly: “You must be Dr. Rind.” Not “Rind” as in citrus peel. “Rhinned” as in “wind.” Blond, a teensy bit horsey-faced, Miss Vicky had a beautifully-toned body and rather large feet. She wore an ankle-length, super-gauzy, faded flower print dress, knee-high, lace-up boots, and a long, nubby-knit scarf—the Stevie Nix look, except Miss Vicky was tall and willowy.
Rind had blushed at the touch of her fingers, astonished that she would find him—out-of-fashion tweedy, balding, pudgy, perspiring—the least bit interesting.
As it turned out, she was interested in him and his controversial academic work.
At 26, Dr. Victoria Campion was a decade younger than Rind, the only child of trust-fund-baby, Berkeley Free Speech Movement/turned Hippie/turned Social-Activist perpetual students. From the age of three she had referred to herself as “Miss Vicky.” As an adult, that’s what she insisted her closest friends call her. Scary-brilliant, she had earned her Cambridge doctorate in under 15 months. Her thesis used Game Theory to accurately predict the locations of undiscovered, major Viking archaeological sites across the Middle East and the continental U.S. Cal’s Cultural Anthropology department had subsequently hired her to lecture on the Viking Age (800-1400 C.E.).
After an hour of unbroken eye contact and rapid-fire exchanges on wide-ranging topics in science and philosophy, Dr. Rind and Miss Vicky departed the faculty social arm in arm. They drove separate cars to his upstairs apartment in an Addison Way, circa 1920 four-plex. The wooden staircase was narrow and creaky, and the hall carpet smelled of cat pee and fried onions. Although the stairs and topfloor hall were fairly typical of Flatlands’ amenities, the professor had worried about her reaction to the state of his three-room domicile—one room of which was completely filled by rows of metal, free-standing bookshelves packed with his UTGSF research.
But she didn’t seem to notice the squalor. Immediately after entering his digs, she informed him she always sought out “big men” as love partners—her satisfaction was a matter of momentum, the impact of a heavy moving mass being the critical element.
In all things Miss Vicky only had one gear—overdrive.
The fireworks, physical and intellectual, had lasted until well past noon the next day.
To say they “fell in love” was like calling a perfect, dew-beaded rose “a plant.”
Lock and key.
Key and lock.
That was how Miss Vicky put it.
The sexual and mental stimulation was like nothing Rind had ever experienced, like nothing he had ever thought possible. To an eavesdropper, their mile-a-minute pillow talk that night would have been largely incomprehensible. In husky whispers, Miss Vicky exposed him to ancient Norse myths that seemed to describe UTGSF to a tee. He explained the intricasies of his experimental design and the nuances of his findings to her. Fact bounced off fact, one premise led to another, fresh insights appeared out of thin air, and before the break of dawn, lines of inquiry from two different scientific disciplines had miraculously merged.
After their liaison, both romantic and scholarly, became the subject of campus gossip, his earth science colleagues started openly referring to him as “the Runestone Cowboy.”
Everyone else mocked, but Miss Vicky believed in his genius.
His dearest friend had lived out the rest of her life without him, probably wondering to her dying breath what had happened, why he had deserted her after a year of their virtual inseparability, and where in the world he had gone.
Though Miss Vicky was certainly dead by now, being dead didn’t make her safe.
And that was the rancid meat of it.
Dr. Rind hadn’t “gone” anywhere of his own volition. He had been sucked from the Telegraph Avenue sidewalk on a pleasant spring afternoon in 1981, and transported a century into the future. They, the cadre of creatures who lay in wait on the dark side of the moon, had reached back in time and grabbed him up. In the approximately six months he had spent in the 22nd century, he had never seen the puppetmasters, but he knew them by their works—the abominations that populated their moon base. Crosses not just within earth’s myriad species, but between Phyla, between Kingdoms. And primitive humans and prehistoric animals sucked from thousands, from tens of millions of years past. Nothing was sacred to them, nothing was off-limits. In pursuit of their objectives, they chopped the laws of taxonomy and time into confetti and tossed it into the wind.
If they could reach back and take him, they do the same to Miss Vicky. They could enslave and torture her, as they had enslaved and tortured him. Or worse, steal her from the timeline before the two of them ever met, or before she blossomed into a woman—or before she turned three. In an instant, they could erase Miss Vicky’s glory. And he couldn’t stomach the thought of that. Though she was lost to him, he treasured every second of who she had been.
Dr. Rind was not a strong man. Not a physical man. To save Miss Vicky from threats by his captors, he had cooperated. At the moon base he had calibrated and fine-tuned the lone, functioning E-GF unit, the gray cyclops squatting on the control panel. Heaven only knew how many failed prototypes there had been, how many human lives had been sacrificed to produce the device; but he’d had nothing to do with any of that. He had consented to the laser surgery that disfigured his torso, and agreed to map the surface anomalies from space, with no hope of rescue. He had agreed to die to protect her past.
Miss Vicky had given him the chance to be a hero.
The warning bleep—bleep—bleep of the altimeter became a grating, continuous whine.
Orbital decay was accelerating. Twenty-seven kilometers before burn out.
I can’t die, yet, he thought. Not yet.
The pain started the instant he thought about raising his hand; when he didn’t relent, when he forced his arm to obey, it exploded inside his skull. It felt like his brain was being slowly sawed in two by a serrated blade, and a paralyzing ache shot down his jawline, his throat, to his sterum. He clenched his teeth but didn’t close his eyes. His arm trembled wildly as he extended a finger towards the red button; his body quaked so hard that it rattled the chair. Four more inches. The agony became a crushing weight, a piledriver that rammed his head down into the top of his neck, and his neck down between his shoulder blades. Six words drove him onward as he struggled to close the gap. Six little words, more precious to him than his own life.
Lock and key.
Key and lock.
Continue to Chapter 2