The Spolding Conundrum, page 1
part #4 of Mark Noble Space Adventures Series
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
THE SPOLDING CONUNDRUM
First edition. January 17, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 Tony Harmsworth.
ISBN: 978-1386454656
Written by Tony Harmsworth.
The Spolding Conundrum
Mark Noble Space Adventure 4
Tony Harmsworth
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1 Story so Far (Contains spoilers for previous books)
Note for non-British readers – Tony writes using UK English spelling, punctuation and grammar, plus some US English words where appropriate as there are various nationalities within these stories. Metric and British imperial measurements will be used in the story.
It is essential that you read Trappist-1 before starting this sequel and it is strongly recommended that you also read Moonscape and Moonstruck as events in each of the stories are linked. Thank you.
Tony Harmsworth, 1st December 2020
In Moonscape, the first book in the series, Mark Noble, John MacIntosh (Tosh) and Mary Carter are introduced to us.
While working on the surface of the moon, a tiny hibernating creature is found which infects one of the Moonbase crew. It is thought to be a parasite and there is concern that it is trying to infect all of the astronauts and will then try to find its way to Earth.
Mark and his partner, Linda, escape the infection in a Dragonstar, only to discover that one of the parasites has escaped from the secure container they had taken with them. On their way back to Earth, it infects Mark, and Linda attempts to burn up the Orion capsule on re-entry to prevent the parasite reaching the population of Earth. However, she was just too late as the capsule had already begun its automated atmospheric entry and could no longer be guided manually to destruction.
On Earth, scientists discover that the parasite was, by a stroke of pure luck, killed as the Orion passed through the Van Allen radiation belts which surround Earth, protecting the world from the sun’s radiation.
The parasite is surgically removed from Mark’s head and it is found to bear a remarkable similarity to the hippocampus, a small organ found in pairs at the top of the spine in all vertebrates.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
In Moonstruck, the second book, an international team headed by Mark returns to the moon to recapture Moonbase from the six infected humans. Bill Wright, Chi Wang and Anna Stanbury, three more of Mark’s current team, are introduced to us in this book.
During the expedition, they discover that the creatures are not parasites after all, but are actually symbiotes related to the hippocampus which, it now seems, arrived on Earth and enhanced all vertebrates in prehistory.
These later, fresh symbiotes, however, add immensely to the intellect and intelligence of their enhanced humans.
The military on Earth become paranoid that the entities will arrive from the moon and take over Earth, but on the moon, Mark and his closest advisors, Bill and Anna, try out the symbiosis and soon become convinced that they have to stop the military’s plan to wipe out the aliens.
By subterfuge, the enhanced humans manage to fool the military and NASA into believing the entities have been destroyed, but, in fact, when they return to Earth, they are all already enhanced and carrying more entities to pass on to key people.
The entities are able to reproduce every two days and within a few months, most humans have their own symbiote.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
In the third book, Trappist-1, Mary Carter, enhanced by her entity, manages to perfect the spolding drive (a space-folding mechanism which permits travel as if faster than light).
NASA work with Boeing, SpaceX and others to build the first spolding ship, Spirit, and its two shuttles, Rimors, which will be used to land on and lift off from other planets.
Mark, Anna, Bill, Chi, Mary and Tosh set off on a test flight to Mars which seems to be a total success if one near-disastrous, aborted take-off is ignored.
The second expedition is to the dwarf red star, Trappist-1, which has seven interesting planets, including three which are potentially habitable.
On Haven (Trappist-1E), the first planet to be explored, Mark, Bill, Tosh and Chi land and carry out experiments. They discover that the planet has a very invasive plant which grows near the lakes, seas and oceans. The seas are home to vicious animals, the size of elephant seals, which prove extremely dangerous.
On the day they plan to leave, pollen is emitted from the plant. All but Chi have their visors down, but some of the pollen is breathed in by the Chinese pilot. It kills her within minutes, despite her entity trying to stop its invasion of her lungs and digestive system. She drowns in her own blood in Tosh’s arms.
There is much anxiety about how to return to orbit and to get from the shuttle into the main craft without bringing the plant with them. Eventually, they manage to do so, abandoning the shuttle and having to go through horrendous disinfecting routines to get back into the starship safely.
While they’d been on Haven, Anna and Mary had been observing planet F and had found an orbiting craft circling Haven. They believed it had come from planet F which might have a spacefaring civilisation.
The starship, Spirit, travelled to planet F and they found that there was, indeed, a sophisticated civilisation, but their efforts to make radio contact were unsuccessful. The planet also had many satellites, but all were ancient and running out of power. It was as if the people had given up space exploration.
It was decided to send down a rover-probe which was directed to a coastal city. It landed in a park within the city boundaries but could see no life at all. Eventually, it found that piles of rags which were lying around the streets were the remains of people who had died in the distant past. Even their bones crumbled when touched. Something had wiped out the inhabitants of F, which they renamed Quietus.
They went on to discover the same plant that originated on Haven. It seemed that a space mission, taken in antiquity by the people of Quietus, went to Haven and might have accidentally brought back the plant, without realising how deadly its pollen was. It established itself on Quietus and wiped out the entire population when it released its pollen clouds.
Planet G was considered uninhabitable owing to its icy surface, so the crew decided to visit the only other habitable planet, the small planet D, to see if there was any colony of the people of Quietus still living there in exile, but, from orbit, there was no sign of any intelligent life.
Somewhat depressed, the remaining five of the Spirit crew decided to head back to Earth where they would need to be thoroughly disinfected before landing.
2 Home (Trappist-1 Final Chapter)
This time, before making the hyperjump to the solar system, we all prepared containers of fruit juice, holding straws in the corner of our mouths so that, even if we had no physical motion, we’d still be able to drink. We’d been somewhat shocked at the effects of being in the dark matter universe. It looked as if spolding would always have to be done in relatively small stages. If we’d had a method of targeting a world five hundred light years away, instead of forty, we’d have almost certainly died from dehydration en route. Astrophysicist Mary was determined to discover why the time dilation occurred as soon as she got back to her laboratory.
‘Three, two, one, go!’ said pilot Anna, and we were once again in the dreadful stasis.
I couldn’t resist trying out my straw idea immediately and was pleasantly surprised to discover that the orange juice could be sucked without a problem, even though the rest of my body was frozen.
A fraction over ninety minutes passed, and our journey ended. The Earth, welcoming us back with its beautiful creams and browns and greens in addition to the familiar dozens of shades of blue and the pristine white swirls of clouds. A gorgeous world. Our home world.
‘One hundred and sixty thousand miles,’ said Anna.
‘Take us in,’ I said. ‘Once we’ve discussed the problem with NASA, we can soon put in a course to the moon for decontamination.’
Imperceptibly slowly, the globe began to fill our view. So lovely, incomparably beautiful compared with the dirty black and brown worlds of Trappist-1. I wondered if Quietus would have looked like Earth if we had arrived prior to their fatal discovery of space flight. Probably not. The dull red light of Trappist-1 meant that green plants would always likely be at a disadvantage. I was sure, however, that the world would not have been as dead as it had been when we explored the streets of that devastated alien New Liverpool.
‘Odd,’ said Tosh.
‘What?’ asked Bill.
‘Not picking up GPS transmissions.’
‘I’m not getting the ISS beacon either,’ said Anna.
We all turned our attention to the sensors, particularly Tosh’s console which was designed to detect transmissions of any type. What could this mean?
‘Is there nothing at all, Tosh?’ I asked.
‘No. Airwaves, or rather, space-waves are dead. Completely dead.’
‘Fault with the sensors?’ I asked.
‘Don’t think so,’ Tosh said. ‘This is worrying.’
‘That’s daft,’ said Bill. ‘Must be a console fault.’
‘Don’t tell me what’s daft or not!’ retorted Tosh. ‘Check it yourself. There’ s not even radio coming up from the surface.’
By now we were through the Van Allen belts and approaching a three-hundred-mile orbit.
‘No satellites,’ said Anna.
‘None! You’re sure?’ asked Mary.
‘Certain,’ she replied. ‘Orbit established.’
Mary’s fingers became a blur above her keyboard. Pages and pages of reference documents flashed across her screen.
‘No. It isn’t possible,’ she said under her breath.
Now was the time to be concerned. If Mary was shocked by something, it was sure to have serious repercussions for the rest of us. I grabbed the high-power binoculars and studied Africa, which was directly in front of us. Not a good continent on which to search for signs of habitation, but our orbit continued north-eastwards, showing us the Sahara, and soon the Nile delta was coming over the horizon. Plenty of forests and lush greenery in the delta and along the Nile, but no sign of Alexandria and, following the Nile southwards, there was no Cairo and the lake at Aswan had vanished. What the hell did it mean? An awful pit opened up in my stomach. It didn’t make any sense.
‘Come on, Mary. What’s happening? The cities have vanished,’ I said and floated through to the recreation area, unbolted the Celestron telescope and brought it back onto the bridge.
‘Don’t know,’ said Mary. ‘Working on it.’
Within a minute I had the telescope fixed in position and examined the Nile again before it disappeared from our view. ‘Nothing. Even the pyramids are gone!’
‘How can that be? It’s crazy. Pinch me, someone,’ said Tosh. ‘How can all of the thousands of satellites have vanished? It makes no sense. Mary, what’s going on?’
‘It is Earth, isn’t it?’ asked Bill. ‘We couldn’t have returned to the wrong planet.’
‘Don’t be bloody stupid, man!’ said Tosh, becoming agitated. ‘Look at it! Of course, it’s Earth!’
‘Look, there’s the Dead Sea and Galilee!’ said Anna.
‘But where’s the Suez Canal?’ asked Bill
I noticed Mary had gone very quiet indeed. ‘Mary,’ I said. ‘What have you found?’
She looked at me like a child who’d been caught with her hand in the candy jar. She’d gone pale, considering her Pakistani origins, very pale. What was wrong with her? She looked at her console again.
Fear rose within me. ‘You know, Mary? Don’t you? You’ve figured it out!’ I said.
Everyone looked at the astrophysicist. She glanced up from her screen, like someone who had a dreadful life-changing secret which was about to become public knowledge.
‘I can guess,’ she said extremely nervously.
I’d never seen Mary behave like this. What had she found? Four anxious pairs of eyes stared at her, awaiting some sort of explanation.
‘Sorry,’ she continued, ‘but if I’m right, none of us is going to like the answer!’
3 A Wrong Turn
‘Come on, Mary,’ I said. ‘Spit it out. Where are we?’
‘We should have reversed our turns. We always turned the same way in the dark matter universe.’
‘How the hell do you mean that we turned the same way?’ said Tosh. ‘No one said anything about fucking turning being involved.’
‘Can you explain, Mary? We need to understand,’ I said, putting a hand on Tosh’s arm to suggest he should calm down.
We all freed ourselves from our harnesses but stayed in the cockpit where we could look down on the beautiful Earth, a pristine planet which was evidently not ours.
‘Okay. I’ll do my best,’ said Mary.
‘You can get us back?’ asked Bill.
‘I don’t know,’ the astrophysicist said.
Anna floated quietly and silently, probably mulling over her thoughts.
‘Mary,’ I said, ‘no one’s apportioning blame. Let’s try to see what situation now faces us and what we can do to correct what’s happened.’
‘Basically, each time we spolded, we turned the same way into the dark matter universe, turning the same way again as we came out at the other end. The only explanation I have is that we turned into a parallel universe,’ she said, timidly.
‘But that’s daft,’ said Tosh. ‘We went to Mars and back and everything was normal.’
‘Was it?’ I asked. ‘I’m not so sure about that. Had any of you ever heard of EBC before we went to Mars?’
‘What’s that?’ asked Bill.
‘The British film crew who interviewed us,’ I said. ‘Don’t you remember that I asked them why it was now English Broadcasting Corporation instead of British Broadcasting Corporation and they ignored me as if it was a frivolous question?’
‘So maybe the BBC never existed on the world we returned to,’ said Bill.
‘What the fuck?’ said Tosh. ‘You’re saying the world we returned to was the same as our own except that the BBC had always been the EBC? That’s mad!’
‘A slight change,’ said Mary. ‘Perhaps all that happened on that first trip.’
‘No, there’s more,’ said Anna, suddenly coming to life. ‘Only minor, but I borrowed my father’s car while I was in Connecticut and it was a manual shift. My father had always used automatic cars and used to get annoyed that I preferred a manual.’
We all looked at Anna in amazement. ‘Anything else?’ I asked.
‘Yes, now I come to think about it. It was my birthday, which was why I’d gone to my parents. One of my best friends, a friend from school, sent me a card signed Mike and Betty Hill.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ asked Bill.
‘She’s been married for five years to another friend, Jake Watts!’ said Anna. ‘I’d never heard of Mike Hill. I was going to ask her about it, but time ran out and I had to get back to the Kennedy Space Center and never got the chance.’
‘Yes,’ said Mary, ‘the taps – faucets to you guys – on my kitchen sink at home had changed into a mixer tap. It puzzled me at the time, and I even had my entity give me memories of the kitchen before the Mars trip and they were definitely individual taps.’
‘And you didn’t think it was strange?’ asked Bill.
‘Of course, but I assumed that my brother, who came in to water my plants while we were on Mars, had had a problem and called a plumber. It’s one of those stupid things that you intend to find out about but never do. Now I know what happened. Our two left turns on the Mars trip.’
I saw frown lines on Tosh’s brow. ‘Tosh?’ I asked.
‘Well now we know something’s gone wrong, it reminds me that I rang my parents and the number was unobtainable. I checked my address book and the number was different. I dialled it and got through fine. My address book didn’t go to Mars. Their number changed while we were away.’
‘Maybe you remembered it wrongly,’ said Bill.
‘Don’t be bloody stupid!’ Tosh said, dropping into one of his bursts of irrational anger. ‘They’ve lived in that house for fifteen years and I always rang them once or twice a week if I was on Earth. I’d never have forgotten their telephone number! The number had definitely changed.’
‘You haven’t had any similar experience, Bill?’ I asked.
‘No. Not that I’m aware of,’ he replied.
‘Mary,’ said Tosh, in hushed tones, ‘could that mean that, somewhere out there, Chi could still be alive?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mary said. ‘Possibly, I suppose.’
We all lapsed into silence, looking down at the shadow of night approaching on the mysterious and unfamiliar Earth beneath us. None of us could see any lights. Any fires or lights would have shone brightly. Humankind appeared to be completely absent.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘we have an emergency. It isn’t an imminent threat, but we must treat it as such. We have only two tanks and one Rimor shuttle remaining. We dare not use those until we are certain we are home. We have supplies for a year on Spirit, in fact, longer than that now we don’t have Chi with us. We have plenty of water which we can make from the contents of one of the tanks and we also have an almost inexhaustible supply of oxygen – so, both pretty limitless. The nuclear power plant on Spirit will also outsee our food supply, so it’s food which will become critical first.’
