The Last Dive
Sean Hardy was the only other man who had experience at the required depth, but his last dive had gone very, very badly.
“There is one other man we could consider for the job.” said Hoffman.
“Does he have the experience we need?” said Riffkin.
On the table in front of them was a stack of papers containing profiles of sixteen different candidates. The problem was, they needed two elite experts of the very highest calibre, and they had only managed to find one.
“He … does have the necessary experience.” said Hoffman slowly.
“Well let’s hear it then. Why haven’t you mentioned him before?”
“Sean Hardy, he’s, well he’s …”
Riffkin glared at Hoffman in surprise.
“What?”
Hoffman stared back at him, attempting to arrive internally at a decision on how best to explain the situation. Finally he said, “I think it’s best if you see the video.”
Ten minutes later they had a projector screen pulled down at the front of the almost-empty conference room with the image of a man projected onto it. He was sitting in a chair in a room in what looked somewhat like, and may very well have been, a police station.
“Tell us, in your own words, what happened.” said the voice of an unseen interviewer.
Hardy inhaled shakily.
“We assembled at the top of Upton Hole. Me, Gerald and Susan. The plan was to spend twenty minutes at twenty metres depth. I checked the equipment; the canisters and regulators in particular. Everything was fine.”
“You were the only one who checked the equipment?” asked the off-screen voice.
“Gerald checked his own stuff. I checked mine and Susan’s.”
“Was Susan nervous?”
“Yes. But that’s normal. Most people are nervous before a dive. You get used to it with experience. After that I went over the rules of cave diving with Susan.”
“Could you tell us those rules, Sean?”
“There are five key rules. Don’t exceed the limit of your training. Have three dive lights. Have a guideline all the way to the surface and don’t let it out of your sight. Plan your gas supply. Stay within the depth limits.”
“But you were exceeding the limits of Susan’s training.”
“I considered this part of her training. She was with two world-class experts.”
There was a slight unevenness in Hardy’s voice. He seemed to be struggling to maintain control of himself.
“Did Susan express any reluctance to make the dive?” asked the voice.
“Some.” said Hardy. “I guess I convinced her.”
The statement sounded like an accusation of guilt, directed against himself. His eyes were wide, and slightly bloodshot.
He reached for a coffee cup offscreen and drank some of it in a trembling hand.
“What happened next?” asked the voice.
“We put the equipment on and went through the pre-dive checklist. Everything was OK. Then we lowered ourselves into the water and began to follow the guideline downwards. I went first, then Susan, then Gerald. We reached the bottom three minutes later.
“There was a lot of silt in the water. More than usual. But the visibility was OK, at first. I checked Susan’s oxygen level repeatedly. I checked her pulse, and her remaining oxygen. Everything was fine. Completely fine.
“About ten minutes in, visibility declined sharply. I’m not sure why. A lot of dust got into the water. Maybe Susan kicked it up, or Gerald. I don’t think it was me. It wasn’t me.”
Hardy seemed to freeze, his eyes focused on some imagined scenario that appeared to be unfolding in front of him.
“Please continue.” said the voice.
Hardy didn’t react, lost in thought.
“Continue please, Sean.” said the voice.
Hardy began to speak again, his voice slow and halting.
“I was pulled to the side, suddenly.” he said. “There was no warning. It was as if … as if someone had dumped a huge quantity of extra water into the Hole. Or …”
His eyes flitted from side to side, as though searching for an explanation.
“Or as if a rock shelf had collapsed somewhere. There was a sudden huge current. When it settled, visibility was zero. I looked for Susan. I found Gerald, hanging onto the line. I couldn’t find Susan. She was gone. It was as if she had just vanished.”
Hardy ran a shaking hand over his face.
“What happened next?” asked the voice.
“Gerald went to the surface to call for help. I searched for an hour, then I had to surface because I was almost out of gas. The rescue team was there by then. I went back down again immediately with the spare bottles from the car to help the team search. The visibility was still bad, no more than a metre, but I looked everywhere. I did everything I could.”
Hoffman paused the video, the projection freezing on Hardy’s distressed face.
“He looks like a complete wreck.” said Riffkin.
“Yes.” said Hoffman. “Susan was his fiancé. They were due to be married two months after this.”
“I assume they found her eventually?” said Riffkin.
“No. That’s the strange thing. Her body was never found. They conjectured that it got sucked into a hidden crevice somehow. No-one’s been able to come up with any better explanation. Hardy himself spent six months searching Upton Hole.”
“And this …” Riffkin rifled through the papers in front of him, “Gerald that he mentions, would I be jumping unnecessarily to conclusions if I were to assume that this is the same Gerald whom we have currently listed as our only other option for the mission?”
“It’s the same man.”
“Dear God.” said Riffkin.
“You see the problem. That’s not even the end of it. Sean met Susan through Gerald. It’s possible they were even romantically involved before Sean came along. We have reports there was some tension between the two men; the dive that killed Susan may have been some kind of attempt to patch up their friendship. The whole situation’s a total mess in about ten different ways.”
Riffkin made a show of thinking ostentatiously, as was his habit. Hoffman had always thought there was something theatrical about him. He placed his hand against his mouth, fingers tightly curled into a fist, and stared into the middle distance. Suddenly he came to a decision.
“This happened, when?” he said. “Two years ago?”
“Almost to the day.”
“Do we really have no-one else who has experience at those depths?”
“There’s no-one comparable to these two men. There’s an Egyptian guy who got down to four hundred metres, but he spent a matter of seconds at that depth. These two have extensive experience below three hundred metres. You have to be a bit crazy to try that sort of thing. You also have to have the right genes. Most people go loopy at those depths. It’s something to do with gasses in the bloodstream.”
“Well, he has had plenty of time to get over it. These cave divers are used to people dying, anyway. There’s not a man in our shortlist who hasn’t been involved in at least one fatality. What kind of state is he in now?”
Hoffman inhaled slowly.
Two days later Hoffman alighted from his transatlantic flight at Yeager Airport, West Virginia, USA, together with Commander Roger Gibson. Their driver drove them away from Charleston and into the middle of endless green heavily-forested hills.
“Reminds me a bit of Yorkshire.” said Gibson.
“One massive Yorkshire.” said Hoffman, laughing.
“What I don’t understand is, what the devil is an Englishman doing out here? Does he have some sort of connection with the place?”
“He’s familiar with the local cave systems. Other than that, It appears his object was to make himself as hard to reach as possible.”
“He’s certainly succeeded with that. No phone, no computer, out in the middle of nowhere. It would be good if he’s kept his training up to date at least.” said Gibson. “Otherwise …”
He let the sentence trail off, not knowing how to finish it.
After several hours they pulled up at an old farmhouse on the side of a hill.
“This is it?” said Hoffman.
“Yep.” said Gibson.
“I’d imagined it different somehow.”
“How did you imagine it?”
“Not like this. It looks abandoned.”
Hoffman surveyed the farmhouse with a despairing eye. Bits of rusty machinery stood on the lawn at the front, alongside some rusty children’s swings that couldn’t have been used for at least forty years. The grass was extremely overgrown. One of the window panes was missing and another cracked.
“Better get on with it then.” said Hoffman, and they got out of the car and went to knock at the front door. There was no reply.
They knocked again, and again.
“Doesn’t look like he’s at home, sir.” said Gibson.
“He’s at home.” said Hoffman. “We’ll have to break in. Have at it. Shoot the lock if needed.”
Gibson pushed the door, gently at first, and then with a hard shove. It opened.
“Seems to be open.” he said.
Inside a multitude of flies buzzed around discarded chicken bones and other half-eaten scraps of food. The house smelt of mould and decay.
“I suppose it’s possible we’ve got the wrong place.” said Gibson. “Seems like no-one’s been here in a while.”
“I’m afraid it might be the right place.” said Hoffman.
They found him in the bedroom, unconscious, sprawled half on a bed and half off it, surrounded by empty bottles of whisky.
“My word.” said Hoffman quietly.
“Is that him?” asked Gibson.
Hoffman took a photograph from his pocket and held it out in front of him, comparing the face of the man on the bed with the photograph.
“That’s him.” he said. Then he shouted, “Hey!”
The man woke up suddenly and, upon seeing them scrabbled about underneath a yellowed pillow, producing a gun. Hoffman deftly pulled it out of his hand.
“No need for that.” he said. “We’re British.”
Gibson shot him a sideways glance, raising his eyebrow.
“I mean, we’re British military intelligence. I am Cyril Hoffman and this is Commander Gibson.”
“And I’m the King of Spain.” said Hardy. “Get the hell out of my rustic farmhouse.”
“We have orders to take you back to the UK with us. You’re needed on a matter of national importance.”
Hardy looked at them unevenly with bloodshot eyes. He looked the same as in the video, thought Hoffman, but worse. Much, much worse. He had a scraggy beard and his hair looked like he had cut it himself with a pocketknife, while blindfolded, three or four months ago.
“Tell His Majesty I’m busy.” he said, picking up an almost-empty bottle and taking a swig from it.
“We can do this the easy way,” said Gibson, producing a pair of handcuffs, “or we can do it the unpleasantly disturbing way.”
“Oh, for crying out loud.” said Hardy.
“How’s he doing?” said Riffkin, when Hoffman arrived at his office at the base.
“He’s a mess, Peter.” said Hoffman. “The man’s a basket case. They’re having to give him valium shots to fend off delirium tremens. He has deficiencies in five different vitamins, he’s underweight, two of his teeth have fallen out recently, and he’s … well, he’s uncooperative.”
“I want all of our finest resources brought to bear on this.” said Riffkin. “Assemble a team of psychologists. I want doctors, nutritionists, fitness experts, whatever it takes.”
“Larry’s been working on him. He thinks it might take a year to fix him up, if it can be done at all.”
“Not good enough. We launch in six months. I’m holding you responsible. Make it happen. Or find someone else with his skills and experience, and do it quickly.”
“There is no-one else.”
“You’d better hurry up then. If it’s a question of money, offer him more.”
As Hoffman was leaving, Riffkin added, “Oh, and bring him together with our other fellow. Gerald Parsons. They’d better start getting on with each other again. And tell him lives may depend on him sorting himself out.”
Five months later, Peter Riffkin stood in front of Cyril Hoffman, Gerald Parsons and Sean Hardy in the conference room.
Riffkin was in full theatrical mode, Hoffman noted, enjoying his role every bit as much as any Broadway actor.
Hardy had undergone a dramatic transformation. He appeared healthy, muscular, and alert. They had replaced his missing teeth with implants and his formerly-bloodshot eyes now appeared clear and focused.
“Gentlemen,” said Riffkin, “one month from now you will travel to the location known as Point 15, whereupon you will dive to a depth of three hundred and fifty metres. You will traverse a series of passageways approximately one mile in length, at the end of which you will find the, ah, target of our enquiries. Naturally, Mr. Hardy, Mr. Parsons, you are anxious to know where Point 15 is located, and what type of entity may be found there.”
“Antarctic.” said Gerald. “It’s the Antarctic, isn’t it?”
“No.” said Riffkin. “It is not the Antarctic.”
He pressed a button on a remote control and a photograph of Mars appeared on the projection screen.
“Point 15, gentlemen, may, in fact, be found on Mars.”
“Bloody hell.” said Sean.
“Quite.” said Riffkin.
“What’s on Mars that you’re so desperate for us to go and look at it?” said Sean. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the money and everything you’ve done for me, but my understanding is there’s very little on Mars worth seeing.”
“I can assure you there are things on Mars worth seeing, but beyond that, at the moment, we can give you only preliminary information.” said Riffkin. “Suffice to say that we are rather keen on the necessary research being performed by Britain and her allies. There happens to be a certain level of interest from, shall we say, other parties, and for that reason, your mission must take place in the context of a regrettable level of secrecy.”
“Well, when are you going to tell us?” said Gerald. “Or do you just want us to have a swim and report back?”
“You will be briefed in full upon your arrival on Mars.” said Riffkin.
Gerald and Sean exchanged frustrated glances.
“How long will the journey to Mars take, then?” said Sean.
“Approximately five hours.” said Riffkin.
“Five hours?” said Sean. “Isn’t it a million miles away or something?”
“Closer to a hundred million. We have craft that are capable of constant acceleration, reaching a substantial fraction of the speed of light.” said Riffkin. “Courtesy of the Americans. The journey to Mars will be easy. The difficult part of your mission will occur only after you have reached Mars.”
He pressed the button again and a blurry image of a metal door appeared on the screen.
“Approximately five hundred metres below Point 15, three hundred and fifty metres below the surface of an underground lake of extremely salty water, you will locate this door. We believe it to be the door of an airlock. Your mission will be to traverse this airlock, report back on the contents of the, ah, chamber, and return safely.”
“Who built the airlock?” Sean asked.
“That information will be given to you when you arrive on Mars.” said Riffkin.
“We’d need days to decompress at those depths.” said Gerald. “Is this airlock up to the task?”
“You will be breathing a specially-designed gas known as X-ox.” said Riffkin. “It will completely eliminate the need to decompress. It’s perfectly safe, as long as you only use it once or twice.”
“Very reassuring.” said Gerald dryly.
“None of this makes any sense at all.” said Sean. “You want us to go to Mars, penetrate an airlock designed by unspecified people at the bottom of a lake that you can’t even reach without our help, and report back on what’s on the other side of it? What if we meet a bunch of Chinese soldiers down there?”
“We believe the facility in question is unmanned,” said Riffkin, “and that’s as much as I can tell you, for the moment.”
After Gerald and Sean had left, Riffkin said to Hoffman, “Well, I think he’s cleaned up rather nicely, wouldn’t you say?”
“Physically, yes.” said Hoffman. “The doctors say he’s in great shape, all things considered. He hit the bottle pretty hard for about a year, but there’s no serious lasting damage. Probably lost a few brain cells. It’s fortunate he had some to spare in the first place.”
“And mentally?” said Riffkin.
“Mentally …” Hoffman shook his head. “we aren’t going to know for sure until he’s actually on the job. If there was anyone else who could do it …”
“But there isn’t.”
“No.”
A month later, Gerald, Sean and Hoffman stood on the launchpad, waiting for the engineers to complete their pre-flight checks.
“That thing doesn’t even look like it could get off the ground.” said Gerald.
“Oh, it can, I assure you.” said Hoffman. “As a matter of fact, she’s already completed six flights. You happen to be looking at the fastest manmade object ever to have existed.”
“Personmade.” said Gerald. “I’m sure women were involved in making it too.”
“Oh, don’t start that again.” said Hoffman. “Anyway, all our engineers happen to be men.”
“Disgraceful.” said Gerald.
“No women applied for the job,” said Hoffman. “and it’s hardly surprising. Our engineers are constantly covered in filth, the work’s dangerous and unpleasant, and most of them have inhaled enough ionic propellant to have significantly shortened their lives.”
“Why, it’s regressive attitudes like this —” began Gerald, but at that moment Riffkin appeared, marching up to them with his hands behind his back and a determined expression on his face.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “it is time to board the Hesperus.”
Sean cast one last glance over the massive ship. Gerald was right, it didn’t look as though it could fly at all. The Hesperus was an enormous cuboid assembly of vast pistons and metal plates, with what looked like, and indeed was, three feet of solid lead mounted on the front, surrounded by huge coils of wire. At the rear was something resembling the grill of an antique electric heater.
Once Sean and Gerald had boarded and the pre-flight checks had been completed, Riffkin and Hoffman watched from a safe distance as the grill lit up with blinding violet flames and the huge spacecraft began to trundle along the runway. After a minute the vertical jets ignited and the ship was completely obscured by sheets of flame and smoke and it began to gradually rise into the air.
“Quite a sight, don’t you think?” said Riffkin.
“Glad I’m not on it.” said Hoffman.
The Mars base was a squat metal construction at the foot of Mount Tharsis, an inactive volcano. Tharsis rose a dizzying nine kilometres into the air, making everything around it seem completely insignificant. The interior of the base had a distinctly claustrophobic feel due to its low metal ceiling and narrow corridors. Like being on a submarine, Gerald thought.
They were greeted by the base commander, Uri Vostok. Uri had thinning grey hair, spectacles that weren’t quite straight, and the air of a schoolteacher who’d accidentally found himself on Mars.
“Follow me, please.” he said, marching off into the interior of the base.
“Can you tell us why we’re here?” said Sean.
“It’s best if I leave that to Pat.” said Uri. “She has all the details.”
“Pat?” said Gerald.
“Dr. Patricia Arnold.” said Uri. “She’s a linguist. She knows more about it than any of us.”
“A linguist?” said Gerald, puzzled.
Uri place his hand on the rail of a metal door with studs around its edges and pushed, but it didn’t open. He pushed harder, failed to open it and then began to bang at it with both of his hands.
“Stupid thing.” he said. “Many of our interior doors are airtight, in case of a leak.”
He tried to push it with his shoulder, and when that didn’t work, he kicked it, making a resounding clang. “It’s a similar idea to fire doors in a hotel.” he added.
Then he paused and slapped his head. “Oh, it’s locked.” he said, and he dialled in a code on a keypad at chest height by the side of the door.
The door sprang open, and there stood a woman of around sixty years of age, grey hair pulled back in a ponytail behind her head.
“I was coming to see if you needed any help.” she said, with a laugh. “Do come in. I’m Pat.”
The men introduced themselves and the four of them sat down at a small plastic table that was riveted to the floor. A computer screen stood on a stand on the table.
“What I’m about to tell us is highly classified.” said Pat. “If you breathe a word of it back home, they’ll probably shoot you.”
She laughed pleasantly.
“We’re all ears.” said Sean.
“Five years ago, American colonists discovered a cave two hundred kilometres from here containing definitive proof of …” she paused and glanced at the men nervously. “… well, of an extremely ancient, and long since extinct, Martian civilisation.”
“You’re joking.” said Gerald.
“No.” she said, with a brief smile. “We have since uncovered three more caves. Actually, these caves are really more like bunkers.”
She tapped the computer screen and a video appeared. The footage showed an underground facility curiously reminiscent of something humans might have built, except the scale of everything in it seemed strangely off, as though constructed for people who were abnormally tall. In places there were strange hieroglyphs on the wall, resembling ancient runic writing.
The video veered into a room filled with rows of plastic slides on shelves.
“This is a kind of library.” she said. “We’ve decoded millions of data storage tablets. By feeding them into our most advanced language models, we have been able to gain an extensive understanding of their culture and technology.
“We believe these people lived around half a million years ago. In form they somewhat resembled modern humans.”
She tapped the screen and the image of a pair of round-headed humanoid creatures appeared on it, clearly male and female, the male with a reddish beard and both with pronounced brow ridges.
“The climate of Mars underwent a steady deterioration, for reasons that we don’t completely understand. The inhabitants retreated underground, where their civilisation continued to progress remarkably in terms of culture and technology, we believe likely for millions of years. However, they became completely dependent on a certain mineral found in the rocks here, and that mineral became in shorter and shorter supply. Without it, they could no longer generate enough energy to sustain their life support systems, and they began to die. Eventually, they were unable to keep themselves alive at all, and around half a million years ago, they died out completely.”
She stopped, smiling at the expressions on Gerald and Sean’s faces.
“I know, it’s a lot to take in.” she said.
“What does any of this have to do with us?” said Sean.
She tapped the computer screen again and an image appeared of kind of studded hatch with a metal hand ring, apparently for opening it. The photograph was clearly taken underwater.
“Same one Riffkin showed us.” said Gerald.
“We found numerous intriguing hints that the Martians had developed, or were developing, a technology that they believed would save them. Apparently they didn’t manage to finish it in time. You’re looking at a hatch that was photographed by an underwater drone at a depth of over three hundred and fifty metres. We believe that behind that hatch lies their key research facility; the very facility where they developed, or tried to develop, this same technology. We don’t know how far they got but we believe they had, by the time they died, made discoveries far in advance of our own technology.”
“Basically,” said Uri, “we want you to go down there and try to get into the alien research facility, and find out what’s down there.”
Sean let out a hollow ironic laugh and shook his head.
“When do you want us to do this?” Gerald asked.
“In a week.” said Uri.
“That gives us time to familiarise you with the automatic translation devices and the layout of the flooded area above the research lab.” said Pat.
“And the use of X-ox.” said Url. “If you can get past the hatch, you may have very little opportunity to decompress. Our hope is that, with the aid of the translation devices, you’ll be able to use the hatch as it was intended, but it may be that you’ll have to blast a hole in it, then seal the hole from the other side and pump the water out. Either way there won’t be much time to adjust to the pressure inside the lab, which imaging shows to be nearly an atmosphere.”
Later that evening, Sean and Gerald met in Gerald’s assigned room to discuss the shocking revelations of Dr. Arnold, and their proposed mission.
“I don’t understand why they couldn’t have got a robot to do this.” said Sean.
“Probably couldn’t get one properly organised in time.” said Gerald. “They’re frightened someone else’ll figure it out before they do. We’re the fastest option.”
“Everything’s a competition with this people.”
“You should talk.”
Sean gave a hollow laugh.
“Listen, Sean, we’ve never talked about what happened, but I think we should.”
“I don’t really want to, mate.”
“I tried to find you after you went away. No-one knew where you were. What happened to you?”
“I got a little lost.” said Sean. “But I’m all better now.”
“I never told you this, but I know what it’s like to lose someone.”
Sean tapped his fingers nervously on the edge of his chair.
“Yeah?” he said, politely.
“Before I went freelance, I worked in the energy facility at Loughborough. They needed people to replace the fusion cylinders. I had to dive in there and replace them.
I had a colleague, name of Julia. We were madly in love. I mean, madly. You know what it’s like. Anyway one day she was in this room where they kept the rods. The ignition rods had to be irradiated once a week or they went off somehow. Lost their potency. She had to go in there to check the rods and replace any that were overheating.
“I went up there with her sometimes. She needed someone to work the controls on the outside.
One time I was up there, waiting for her to come out, and something went wrong. The radiation turned on.”
Gerald stared down at his feet.
“They had five different safeguards and all of them failed.”
“Christ.” said Sean.
“She died three days later. I didn’t even get to be with her when she was dying from the radiation. They blamed me for the incident. Took them six months to figure out I was innocent.”
“I’m sorry, mate.” said Sean.
“So you see, I understand what you went through.” said Gerald. “You know, it helps to talk about these things. You shouldn’t just bottle it all up. I know you and I have had our differences but that’s in the past now.”
Sean abruptly rose to his feet.
“At least you knew where her body was.” he said, and he opened the door.
“Hey, Sean.” said Gerald.
Sean paused. “Sorry, I’m just not much good with talking about this kind of thing.” he said. Then he left, slamming the door behind him.
For half an hour the caterpillar bumped over the uneven Martian surface, Sean guiding it with a joystick while Gerald made last-minute checks on the diving gear.
Soon they entered the mouth of the cave that led into the bunker complex. If the entrance had once been engineered by the Martians, it showed no sign of it. It looked like any other of the many cave entrances that littered the sides of Tharsis.
Inside, the cave soon smoothed into a tunnel that was clearly of intelligent origin. It led slowly downwards. Soon they reached the outer door of a vast airlock. Sean pressed a button in the dashboard and it began to open with an enormous grating noise. Once inside the airlock the door closed again behind them.
“So this was built by aliens.” said Sean thoughtfully.
“So they say.” said Gerald. “Should get the pressure up to thirty kPa. Three hundred millibars.”
Soon they found themselves driving along a road that circled around a vast abyss. The sides of the abyss were lit by lights left by previous exploration teams, and lined with what looked distinctly like apartments or offices, with open apertures in place of windows. The walls were lined with innumerable alien artworks and hieroglyphic text, and in places ancient corroded wires splayed out from patches of damaged rock.
“This is incredible.” said Sean.
“I always thought the Romans were pretty amazing.” said Gerald reflectively. “An ancient civilisation, two thousand years before our time, and they left us with at least a few dozen complete written works. Blows my mind. But this … this is something else. These people weren’t even human.”
“They look surprisingly human though.” said Sean.
“Must be some kind of convergent evolution. We should ask Pat about it when we get back.”
“If we get back.” said Sean.
“There’s no reason why this mission should be more dangerous than half the other stuff we’ve done.”
Eventually they arrived at the bottom of the abyss, or what was now the bottom of it. The caterpillar stopped at a flooded terrace. On the other side of a low fence was an inky black body of water.
“That’s where we’re going, then.” said Sean. “Two hundred metres down we’ll need to find a marked corridor running north, and that’s as far as anyone’s been apart from drones.”
After putting on their equipment and exiting the vehicle, they attached one end of their diving line to the railings, and plunged into the freezing water.
For two hours they navigated the underwater corridors, sometimes encountering strange statues, and the remains of machines of unknown purpose.
Eventually they arrived at the hatch that led to the submerged lab.
Gerald tried to turn the wheel that looked as though it might open the hatch, but found it obdurate. They banged at it with a hammer until finally it shifted.
A slight current in the water around them indicated that water was being drawn into vents around the edges of the hatch. After a few minutes the current stopped, and they successfully pushed the hatch open, revealing a metal chamber. They swam into the chamber and pulled the hatch shut. Inside was a small lever next to the inner door. Sean pulled it and the pressure began to slowly drop. Sean made the OK sign to Gerald, who nodded. They had both been afraid that if the airlock still worked at all, the pressure might drop rapidly enough to kill them.
Soon the chamber emptied of water and their devices indicated a breathable atmosphere. They removed their mouthpieces.
“This gas tastes like a donkey’s rear end.” said Sean.
“At least we’re alive.” said Gerald, turning the hand wheel of the inner airlock door.
The door opened, revealing a dark interior. Gerald stepped into it and lights blinked on.
“Half a million years and everything still works like it was abandoned yesterday.” said Sean.
“Whoever these people were, they knew how to build stuff to last.” said Gerald.
They found themselves in a long corridor with rooms leading off to the sides. Their surroundings appeared strangely familiar, but also oddly alien, as if designed by a human culture that had been out of contact with the rest of humanity for unfathomable millennia.
For two days they explored the complex, until finally they discovered what appeared to be the main control room — but of what, was unclear.
Banks of switches, screens and dials surrounded them on three sides, while at the end of the room were metal steps leading down into something resembling an enormous swimming pool, ten metres deep and a two hundred in length and width.
“What is this place?” said Gerald.
“A reactor, maybe.” said Sean.
“Then why is it empty?”
“Perhaps they cannibalised it when everything went to pieces. Used the parts for other stuff.”
“Then why didn’t they take the computers?”
“Haven’t the foggiest. Let’s try to switch something on. If the lights still have power, this ought to have enough power to at least tell us it’s not working.”
They wandered around trying switches randomly, until finally Sean announced, “I think I’ve found it.”
He pulled a small lever that had been hidden inside a plastic box, and the dim lights of the facility brightened and the screens lit up, displaying charts and figures.
“Try the translation unit.” he said.
Gerald produced a small device and spoke into it.
“Computer: status report on all systems.”
The device produced an incomprehensible babble of sounds. In response, a deep, booming electronic voice replied in equally incomprehensible tones. Then the translation device spoke: “All systems functioning normally.”
“Incredible.” said Sean. “Hey, ask it if it can drain the water outside.”
“Computer: the area outside the lab is flooded. Can you drain it?”
After another exchange of alien sounds, the device said, “Draining will use 80% of available power. Shall I proceed?”
“Do it.” said Sean. “I don’t want to breathe that revolting gas again.”
“Computer: proceed.” said Gerald.
“Draining will be complete in one hour.” said the device.
“They must have built the airlock just to economise on energy.” said Gerald. “Imagine that.”
“It makes no sense that they still had any power at all.” said Sean. “Wouldn’t the last of them have drained every bit of power they had in the effort to stay alive? And shouldn’t there be corpses lying around? Skeletons, at least.”
“Maybe they killed themselves once they knew it was hopeless.” said Gerald. Threw themselves into a pit somewhere.”
“Ask it.”
“Ask it what?”
“Ask it where the last of their kind went. Ask it what happened to them.”
Gerald pressed the button on the device and after thinking for a minute, said, “Computer: what happened to the last remaining people who lived or worked here?”
After more alien babbling, the device said, “The controls were set for Earth, twenty thousand years into the future at that time. The last remaining people departed via the portal.”
“Portal?” said Sean.
“Computer: what is the portal?” said Gerald.
“The portal is a device capable of creating a bridge in spacetime to past and present positions in the continuum.” said the device.
Gerald and Sean exchanged stunned glances. After a pause, Gerald said to the device, “Computer: what happened to them after they arrived on the Earth?”
“No data available.” came the reply.
“They clearly didn’t create a thriving technologically advanced civilisation.” said Sean. “We would have found some trace of it. Unless it’s buried under the Arctic ice or something.”
“Probably died out eventually after living in caves and hunting mammoths for a bit. Listen, if this thing can really open portals across space, there’s nothing stopping us going home right here and right now.”
Sean seemed to have frozen with a look of wonder on his face, as though receiving some divine revelation.
“Sean?” said Gerald.
“If it can transport living beings across space and time, I can go back to the moment before we went on that dive. The one where Susan disappeared.”
“That’s crazy.” said Gerald. “The past is the past. We can’t go meddling with it.”
“Is it?” said Sean. “Ask the computer if it’s possible.”
“We’d need the exact time and the coordinates.” he said.
“I have them right here.” said Sean, producing his communicator. He switched it on and scrolled through it till he found the video he’d made just before the dive. The video was tagged with time and geospatial coordinate data. He showed it to Gerald.
“Do it.” he said.
Gerald made an exasperated noise, but complied.
The reply came after a further exchange of alien sounds.
“The portal transfer arrays have been unstable for the past 380,000 years. Opening the portal to the specified time and location will work unreliably and will introduce serious and possibly fatal instability.”
“Open the portal.” said Sean.
“You heard what it said.” said Gerald. “We don’t know what we’d be letting ourselves in for, if it works at all.”
“I don’t care, tell it to open the portal.”
“I’m not going to do it, Sean. It’s too dangerous and we can’t mess with the past.”
“Give me the translator.” said Sean.
“No.” said Gerald.
“Gerald, there are two ways we can do this. You can give me the translator voluntarily, or I can chase you down and fight you. I haven’t fought anyone since I was a teenager but I reckon at least one of us will come out of it badly if we have to go down that route.”
He walked up to Gerald and snatched the device from his hand. Gerald offered no resistance.
“I strongly recommend against this.” he said.
“Recommendation noted.” said Sean. He pressed the button on the device. “Computer: open the portal to the coordinates on my communicator.”
He pointed the unit’s camera at the screen of his communicator.
“Opening portal.” said the device.
For a minute it seemed as though nothing was happening, except for a low, almost subliminal drone that gradually grew in strength.
“I’ve got a very bad feeling about this.” said Gerald. “We need to cancel it.”
“We’re not cancelling it.” said Sean.
“Cancel it!” Gerald shouted and he tried to grab the device out of Sean’s hand.
But at that moment there was a sudden bang followed by the sound of a vast, rushing torrent of water.
“What’s going on?” said Gerald.
Sean ran to the tank-like structure at the end of the room.
“It’s filling with water!” he shouted in reply. Then, activating the device, he shouted into it, “Computer: close the portal!”
The device babbled in the Martian language. There was no reply from the alien computer.
“It can’t hear over the noise of the water.” said Gerald. “We have to get out of here.”
“Where’s the microphone?” said Sean, looking around wildly.
“We don’t even know if they use microphones.” said Gerald. “I’m getting out of here.”
“Computer: close the portal.” said Sean, speaking into the device again. He ran to the nearest bank of lights and dials and held the device up in the air almost against it while the device translated his words.
“Confirmed.” came the reply, and the torrent abruptly ceased.
“Panic’s over.” said Sean.
“You almost got us killed.” said Gerald.
Sean shook his head.
“Pressure would have equalised eventually.”
Suddenly the alien voice rang out again. The device crackled into life.
“Cores ten and fifteen dangerously unstable. Detonation imminent. Recommend evacuation.”
“That settles it.” said Gerald. “We’re leaving.”
“Wait. There’s something down there.”
Sean peered into the tank, which was now half-filled with water.
He raised the translator unit to his lips, pushing the button.
“Computer: how long till detonation?”
“Estimated time to detonation: three hours.” came the reply.
“What’s down there?” said Gerald.
Sean was already running down the staircase into the tank. Floating face-down on the still-churning water was a human body, wearing diving gear.
He turned it over.
“Susan!” he exclaimed.
Susan Evans was unconscious, but she was alive. Sean dragged her back to the steps and carried her up them. In the low Martian gravity, a third of the Earth’s, she weighed no more than perhaps twenty-five kilos even with her heavy diving equipment. He placed her down carefully on the floor of the facility, which was now covered in a fine spray.
“She’s breathing.” said Sean.
“We’ll have to carry her out of here.” said Gerald.
“Give her a few minutes.” said Sean.
“There isn’t time.” said Gerald.
For ten minutes Gerald paced about, arguing with Sean as to the best course of action. Then Susan opened her eyes.
“What happened?” she said.
“Susan!” said Sean ecstatically. “It’s really you.”
“We have to get out of here!” said Gerald.
“Five minutes, OK?” said Sean.
To Susan, he said, “I don’t have time to explain but we have to leave here, quickly. Can you sit? Try to sit up.”
It took fifteen minutes for Susan to finally regain the ability to walk, but eventually they left the facility, Sean and Gerald supporting Susan on both sides. She was dizzy, and weak.
Sean placed her gas cylinders on his own back, discarding the X-Ox tank, in case she needed supplemental oxygen.
“You’d better hope the water outside really drained.” said Gerald.
“I’m not leaving without her.” said Sean.
For an hour and a half they wandered through the endless corridors of the alien laboratory. At the hatch they waited till a full hour had elapsed since the system had begun draining the water outside, Gerald biting his nails while Sean tried to explain to a dazed Susan that they were now in an alien bunker on Mars, a revelation that initially resulted only in her collapsing into peals of groggy laughter.
When they opened the hatch, they found the bunker outside completely dark, but drained of water.
By flashlight they made their way up through the twisting corridors that led to the abyss and then round and round the spiral road that led up the sides of the it.
They were sitting safely in the caterpillar on the other side of the enormous airlock in the cave on the side of Mount Tharsis when an vast resonating boom signalled the destruction of the bunker.
A week later, Sean and Susan sat in a hotel room in London, still unable to stop talking about the astonishing events of the past two years, and making plans for their wedding.
“Hey,” said Susan, “Gerald wants me to have lunch with him at his house. Do you mind?”
“Why would I mind?” said Sean.
“Thought you might be jealous.”
“Should I be jealous?”
“Definitely not. He did used to have a thing about me though, before I met you.”
“Really? You kept that quiet.”
“It’s ancient history.”
“So he’s not your type then?” said Sean, laughing to cover a slight twinge of very real jealousy.
“I only like him as a friend, and back when we went for that dive, I was starting to think I wasn’t sure even about that, but you two seemed to be getting on so well. He just seemed a bit obsessive. He has kind of a dark side to him.”
“I was only trying to get on with him for your sake.” said Sean.
They laughed.
“Anyway, I owe him a lunch. I might not be alive if he hadn’t stayed and helped us.”
“I suppose.” said Sean.
“You know, I still don’t understand what happened. I get that the calibration of the portal was off and it opened underwater and sucked me clean through to Mars. It’s crazy but at least it makes sense, sort of. What I don’t get is, if you hadn’t opened the portal, I would have stayed in Upton Hole.”
“But if you’d stayed in Upton Hole, I wouldn’t have opened the portal. You would never have gone missing in the first place.”
“It makes no sense.”
“Maybe it was just destined to be. Riffkin thinks we need a new theory of time, incorporating time loops. They’re attempting a massive salvage operation on the bunker system. Maybe they can retrieve enough material to figure out how it works, or maybe not.”
“Riffkin makes me laugh. He’s such an odd fellow.”
“Yeah.” said Sean. “What about his theory on what happened to the aliens?”
“He thinks they’re Neanderthals. If that’s true, then they’re ancestors of ours. But then what happened to their advanced technology?”
“Maybe he’s onto something. If someone put us down in a primeval forest I’m not sure how much knowledge we’d actually manage to preserve. A few generations and maybe we’d be living in caves and making knives from flints.”
They sat quietly contemplating the idea, sprawled on a couch, arms around each other’s shoulders.
“So what are you going to do for lunch?” said Susan, breaking the contemplative silence.
“Room service.” said Sean. “I need to relax.”
When Susan left to meet Gerald, Sean fell to thinking about the paradox of the time loop, muttering to himself in the hotel room.
“If I hadn’t opened the portal, she wouldn’t have disappeared.” he said quietly to himself. “But if she hadn’t disappeared, I wouldn’t have opened the portal. Makes no bloody sense.”
On the floor, stacked in a neat heap, was the diving equipment Susan had used in Upton Hole. It had travelled all the way to Mars and back again. Susan hated the sight of it but Sean had begun to feel oddly drawn to it, and strangely superstitious about it.
He took out a notebook and began to make diagrams of the time loop. No way of looking at it really seemed to make sense out of it.
To amuse himself, he lifted Susan’s gas supply off the folded wetsuit and fitted the regulator to it, then he opened the valve. The escaping gas made a satisfying hiss. He smiled to himself. The hiss of a mouthpiece always brought back memories.
And then, abruptly, the hissing stopped. He tapped the regulator, then began examining the pipes for kinks. Finding none, he checked the valve fittings. Then he looked at the regulator again.
There was something wrong with it.
With the flat screwdriver of his Swiss Army knife he prised the back off the regulator. Then he froze, staring. A vital working part of the regulator had been partially sawn through and had finally burst apart under the pressure of the gas.
Sabotage.
But he had purchased Susan’s equipment himself, and he had put it in Gerald’s car himself before the dive. But then, they had stopped at a service station, Gerald telling them he had to have a meeting online for twenty minutes, and they had left him alone in his car with the equipment.
With a sudden terrible burst of nervous energy, Sean ran out of his hotel room, down the stairs and into the carpark below, the hotel staff watching him in surprise as he ran out of the door like a man possessed by demons.
As Sean’s car approached Gerald’s house, two figures abruptly ran in front of him. The first was Susan, bleeding profusely from a cut somewhere beneath her clothing on her abdomen. The second was Gerald, chasing her, carrying a large screwdriver.
Sean couldn’t stop in time. The car hit Gerald and he flew spectacularly to the ground, his head hitting it with a crack loud enough to be heard inside the car, above the sound of screeching brakes.
Sean leapt out of the car.
“He tried to kill me!” shouted Susan.
Hoffman and Riffkin sat in Riffkin’s office, laughing.
“Fine selection of men you found us, Hoffman.” said Riffkin, wiping a tear from his eye. “One of them we had to rehabilitate and he then proceeded to blow up the most important archaeological find ever made, and the other turned out of have murdered one woman and probably would have just murdered a second if his brains hadn’t ended up all over the road.”
“Now, hang on, Peter.” said Hoffman. “We can’t be absolutely certain Gerald Parsons murdered the first woman.”
“Well, they’re reopening the investigation and it certainly looks that way.” said Riffkin.
They found themselves suddenly sober.
“The man was an obsessive psychopath yet he went straight through our vetting with top marks.” said Hoffman.
“Half of our astronauts are obsessive psychopaths.” said Riffkin. “They just haven’t got a taste for murder.”
Hoffman laughed again, quietly this time.
“Susan Evans was awfully lucky.” he said. “She managed to give the bastard a good kick but not before he’d stabbed her twice with a ruddy screwdriver. They say she’s going to be OK though.”
“And what about our alien laboratory?” said Riffkin.
“I think you can stop worrying about the Chinese or the Russians getting their hands on it.” said Hoffman. “Most of it’s just blobs of glass and metal now.”