Cosmonauten
Fedeyrov’s hands moved clumsily in the insulated gloves, fumbling across the metal surface, the lights on his chest washing it pure white. This lock had no atmosphere in it yet. Still sealed from the time it had been built, though God alone knew when that had been.
He turned the iron handle, fingers brushing the copper inlay. Like most of them it depicted abstract shapes, curves and circles, with a hint of Aztec influence. It turned easily, like the lock of a submarine, the metal gleaming as if new. No corrosion in the vacuum. He felt the great round door swing inwards, nearly a hundred feet wide, dwarfing him in his human insignificance. Braced himself for the equalling of atmospheres. The air pressure tugged him forward as usual, bringing the long cable linking him to the Shuttle taut, though it stayed firm, floating there behind him.
He pulled himself back, hand over hand until he reached the Shuttle airlock, opened it and disappeared inside. He had hoped this room would be one with some localised gravity as he wanted to walk, feel the pull on his bones. Though the extra effort of taking the ageing Shuttle out and around the gravity well of the chamber would have tired him more than usual.
He sat at the controls, looking at the small black and white screens that showed him all sides of the small shuttle. The launch control scientists had modified it for this most special of missions, they had tried to cover any eventuality of this voyage into the unknown. The Shuttle itself had only really been in the experimental stages, an almost knee jerk response to the US Shuttle program, an example of how sclerotic the Soviet space program had become. They had filled it with technology bought from other nations, computer components from Japan and Europe, innovations and ideas lifted in Industrial espionage missions across the world. It was the only way they could guarantee any kind of reliability, the technology simply did not yet exist in the Soviet Union. Though it was fair to say no amount of technology could have ever made them ready for this vast unknown quantity hanging in the depths of space.
Fedeyrov early on had realised it was pointless to try to understand the purpose of the long tunnel, or to even try to plan for what it might contain. The bureaucrats back home with their Military uniforms and expanding waistlines knew they had found something big, but their only thoughts were on its use in military terms.
How can this help us win the cold War? They would say, their eyes glittering greedily. The scientists too had little enough imagination, they only saw it as a tool, but for the gaining of knowledge alone. Knowledge cold and dead like a knife. Fedeyrov thought perhaps because this was such a step up in the experience of mankind, such a paradigm shift they could not even begin to rationalise it, it simply did not fit into their blinkered and primitive view of the universe
He pushed the Shuttle through the airlock with only a slight touch of the rockets. Another mystery of the tunnel was its providence to the mission. The other Cosmonauts had been terrified in those early chambers when they had found the liquid oxygen tanks and the refills for their breathing filters. Afraid they were being watched, drawn in.
It all went against their exhaustive tests that showed the tunnel had been built at least two hundred years ago, though the results had varied so wildly it was difficult to trust what they had been measuring. The mortar between the bricks that made up the superstructure of the tunnel registered an age of approximately a hundred and fifty years ago, whereas the intricately adorned airlocks gave something completely different.
Siprova had been especially vocal, her cheeks reddening as she found instructions in Cyrillic, Arabic and what seemed to be Chinese pictograms on the side of the tanks. Her insulated gloves brushing away ice from the side.
“How did they know?” she had said “All of the things we have found so far have been spread across the recent history of man. All these artefacts, in no order. What purpose? What reason?”
They had only just calmed her down when the lights of the Shuttle picked out the stack of tinned food, reaching high up the curved brick walls of the chamber.
Federov went out to look at them, they were stacked as if in a supermarket, cardboard crating crumbling under his touch. The sell by dates were in Western numbers, dated for twenty years hence, yet the way they had been manufactured seemed like the canned foods they had known from childhood, he saw brands he thought had disappeared, ones the agricultural combines had stopped producing in the early 1970’s.
They radioed the information along with everything else back to Earth, they had received no replies since the order to enter the long tunnel, but had been assured this was to be expected, no radio waves could penetrate the thick dark brick of the tunnel walls. The mission inside was to be brief, not part of their original orders which were merely inspect the vast entrance of the tunnel. They had been reassured they would be back, this was merely reconnaissance for a later mission.
And now Federov was on his thousandth and something room. All the details carefully logged and beamed back to arrive at some time, God knew when, back on Earth. He had found that despite their wild differences in size the chambers all had three airlocks, set vast into the thick brick of the tunnel. One he would enter from, the airlock silently and eerily shutting behind on some automatic circuit, the second would be directly opposite and lead on into the infinite depths of the tunnel. Chamber after chamber for hundreds of thousand of miles. The last airlock was set in the curve of the wall and lead back out into the studded darkness of space, to see the Earth like an anchor, giant yet far away. He found those trips out, to report back and to speed along the outside of the tunnel, soothing. To know the life he came from was still there.
Each chamber differed wildly in size, some the size of an aircraft hangar and some so long they took a day for him to cross. Then he relied on the radar signal and the picture it built up, white lines on the black screen in front of him. He would try sometimes the goggle set they had rigged up, tiny screens in front of his eyes showing the image of the radar signal, two slightly different points, the illusion of depth. The world then to him was all in lines, like the concentric curves showing hills on maps or sedimentary layers, he could turn and look as if they shuttle was not there, that it was only he floating though the endless tunnel. Though the goggles were unreliable, low resolution, and gave him headaches.
Many of the rooms were well lit, by either electric bulbs or fluorescent strip lighting, turning on through some automatic process that followed the opening of the airlock. Sometimes they would fail to go on, the strip lighting had proved to be more reliable than the older, antiquated bulbs. Often the bulbs would light up quickly only to explode in a shower of glass fragments and white powder, floating like a halo in the zero gravity.
It had caused so much consternation to the crew that human objects should be arranged in this way, thousands of miles above the surface of the Earth. That the tunnel had seemingly been constructed of bricks and mortar, the vast airlocks from cast Iron, each with a makers plate claiming they had been constructed in Sheffield or St Petersburg, complicated and infuriated their theories. How could something like this exist? Was it some extra terrestrial construction, either to ape mankind or as a homage to him? There had been no attempt to communicate with them, either when the tunnel was first discovered or when they broke the seal on the first Airlock and entered inside. They had almost begun to accept the mystery of the place, the accretion of human things in this most inhuman place. To no longer feel so unnerved by it all.
It was the discovery of the chambers with air and gravity, though, that had ended their complacency.
It was perhaps the fifth room in the chain, the one they had been in held nothing but elaborately carved pink quartz rock, as if a million types of erosion had weathered them to fantastic shapes. The strange intelligence they felt seemed to be at its most abstract, they could almost reliably believe it was something merely extraterrestrial, or that this rock had just been brought here and dumped. Purposeless.
They were tense anyway, the rest of the crew. Their orders had only asked them to explore the first few rooms, it was not assumed there were many. They had only enough food and fuel for a limited foray. Yet the appearance of the Oxygen tanks and tinned food had made it look possible they could go in further. The Captain and Federov were in favour of going forward, Siprova and Danilov the scientist wanted to leave, fearing the worst if they went further.
“I feel we are being deliberately drawn in, like prey for something horrible.” Danilov said, his large hands pointing to the photos they had taken. “We do not even begin to understand any of this. These human objects are like bait. We have no way of judging what is dangerous, or what any of this is about. What if this is some sacred temple? Just being here could be considered an act of sacrilege or a declaration of war”
“But what if this is an invitation? A test of how advanced we are as a species.” The Captain had spoken up, “Whoever built this must have left this for a reason, it is up to us to follow the clues. Who knows what prizes lie at the end? What glories are open to mankind if we continue?”
They agreed to see the next room, and then to decide whether to go further or turn back. The Captain went out of the shuttle on the trailing cable, hands feeling for the wheel that seemed to turn so easily in human hands. They watched him brace himself for the equalising of atmospheres, each feeling the small sense of fear as the door behind them clanged shut. Pressure always had to remain absolute. As one opened another closed. The motion like locks on a canal.
As the new door opened they watched the Captain, slowly at first, then with alarming speed plummet to the floor. His hands scrabbled on the elaborately carved iron, trying to find a handhold and slow his descent. They had not felt gravity for five months and it hit him like a hammer.
He had been unprepared, they all were. It was like having everything sucked down to their feet. The shuttle had begun to move forward and they watched helplessly as its nose was tugged down toward the floor by the gravity leaking in from the next chamber. Danilov felt his hands pulled to his sides, unable to do anything but gasp as the force pulling on him slowly increased to that of earth.
It was Siprova who had the foresight to pull down the landing gear, silently thanking whatever prophetic instinct that had made them rotate the shuttle when they first entered the tunnel to make them the same way up as their surroundings. The hour they had spent doing that had now saved their lives, they could never have righted the shuttle if it had landed on its back.
The shuttle sighed onto the floor, rubber wheels on curving brick. There was silence for some minutes, then the sound of Federov trying to raise the Captain over the radio.
“He is probably unconscious. We need to get to him as soon as possible.”
It took half an hour just to get out of the cabin. They were thankful the gravity was below that of Earth, it seemed heavily concentrated toward the open chamber and the Captain had taken the worst of it, falling almost a hundred metres.
“Go to the back of the chamber, the gravity will be less there. It looks highly localised. I will go to the Captain”
The rest of the crew headed towards the back of the chamber where the gravity was more like that of the moon, Siprova feeling as if weights were being lifted with every step before her and Danilov collapsed thankfully at the back of the chamber. He rued again that his large size meant the gravity affected him worse than the others. The months in zero gravity had ravaged them. They looked at Federov, only a hundred or so metres in front, lit by the strip lighting in the chamber beyond. He was crawling now, the gravity up to that almost of Earth. The Captain lay, unmoving, not responding to their frantic radio signals.
As Federov reached him he thanked God the Captain was not on his front. He pulled himself up to look into his visor. He was conscious, mouthing but he radio was clearly broken. Federov placed his helmet against his companions, hoping the vibration would carry between the two solid objects.
Shouting he was able to get the Captain to hear. He was not badly hurt but was afraid of the oxygen tank on his back, his levels had been going down steeply, it must have been broken in the fall. It was why he was so still, afraid of severing the line completely. Federov checked the line, it was leaking, the Captain had at best a few minutes supply. He radioed this to the rest.
Siprova immediately began running towards the shuttle to pick up the spare oxygen, visibly slowing as she came into the glare of the gravity. Feeling it pull on her organs, her head, the space suit become unbearably heavy. She cursed its primitive design. It took all her effort just to climb into the shuttle, grab the spare, fall from the airlock, free hand grabbing at the rungs. She crawled agonisingly slowly across the floor, pulling the oxygen tank behind. Watching almost helplessly as the Captain’s oxygen supply went lower and lower, barely hearing the noises of encouragement from Federov and Danilov. She passed out twice, from the effort. As she felt herself going for the third time she was close enough to roll the cylinder to Federov, before her eyes rolled up and she gasped into unconsciousness.
She came around again an hour later. At first she did not notice that she was not wearing the suit and that she was still outside the Shuttle, and it took her several seconds to realise what was wrong. The strain of moving so much had made her muscles spasm and she tried not to hyperventilate. Her first thought was to wonder how the crew had filled both chambers with air. Danilov was the first person she saw, his large form moving about in the orange rubberised jumpsuits they wore in the shuttle, his face was pinched, grave.
To her first question he shook his head, and tears rolled down her face. She had not been in time for the Captain, it had been close but there had been no way of reviving him, Federov had tried to drag him to the ship to attempt resuscitation but had stopped when he realised it was pointless.
Some time later, when she had the strength to sit up, she asked about the air.
“How did you fill these two rooms?”
“The air was here all along” said Federov solemnly, and pointed to a large pale plastic unit mounted on the wall, its surface aged brown at the edges.
“I don’t know how it works. We only found out when it was too late, the instruments showed some anomalies, we were trying to understand about the gravity.” He trailed off.
“All that, and all we needed to do was open his visor.”
Now in the rooms with air Federov would walk without his suit, smelling the delicate fragrances wafted in by the strange air pumps, they were of a vastly complicated design, yet put together from common components, configured in a way no human would have thought of. He would play chess against himself, sitting on the curved brick of the chamber. He told himself that was how he stayed sane. Kept his mind on the mission.
He knew the others would not have survived this far in. He had been chosen for his ability to live through long periods of isolation, his childhood in the Siberian steppes, where it was remote and undeveloped. He was the child of exiled Christians, they spent all their time working the iron hard soil. There had been no other children for him to play with, the adults silent in their exhaustion and wrapped in personal trauma.
In the 1970’s they had been rehabilitated, his rising talent at chess playing no small part. His parents had taken him, hair smoothed down and the beginnings of an adolescent moustache, to national tournaments. His flair for chess was a product of his mathematical mind, a unique mind they had told him, able easily to think around corners.
He entered university and was able to get into cosmonaut training as the cold war heated up in the late 1970’s. Even then they had remarked on his love of isolation, the trend of thinking then was moving towards flights to the moon, to Mars. Long range pipe dreams. They left him in Arctic for a year in an experimental station with thirty other hopefuls. He was the only one not to show a marked deterioration in mental health, in fact he told them it was like a return to childhood, and that he missed it when it was gone.
It was a Venus probe that discovered the long tunnel, in the spring of 1980, a relatively small anomaly several thousand miles closer to Earth than the moon. The probe merely brushed past, but was able to be close enough to pick up enough data to show this was not a system malfunction but in fact a giant, hitherto unknown, artefact.
Another probe was launched, in utmost secrecy. Making contact with the great circumference of the outer door. The probe was able to run along the length of it for a thousand miles or so before losing contact. It was the visual data coming back that blew the minds of the scientists.
The tunnel itself was cylindrical, running back away from Earth in a way that did not interfere with any known planetary orbits. In diameter it was perhaps five hundred metres with a great round airlock set in it, held in place by what looked like massive iron rivets running along its edge. The door had in its exact centre a wheel like that of any Submarine airlock, as if designed for human hands. They could not even begin to calculate its length.
The tunnel had been placed as if deliberately directly above the Earth, outside the plane of which most of the solar system operated, it seemed unaffected by the gravity of any other body. It just hovered there, impervious and almost invisible.
The theories of the scientists who discovered it ran wild. Very few in fact knew of its existence, the research crew of the Venus probe had been sworn to secrecy on pain of death and the later crews were handpicked from a very small and trusted group. The only politicians aware of it had been those around Chernenko and Andropov, the most senior within the Politburo.
The Soviet space bureau were able to launch a human crew within a year. The system had become so adept at secrecy it was no more difficult than hushing up the death of a cosmonaut to put a group together and drill them in what little they knew about the long tunnel. Less than fifty people were aware of the true nature of the mission. Others were told it was to be a test launch, trying out the new Buran Shuttle prototype.
They were terrified of the US learning of the tunnel, they did not want another space race. They knew the Americans would pursue it with a single mindedness they just could not match. The stakes were incredibly high, as the first real evidence of extra terrestrial existence it was vital to establish a beach head, to be there first to exploit the advantage.
The mission could have failed a million times before the gloved hand of the Captain turned the lock of the first door. The logistics of the operation challenged even Federov, the main reason he was on the mission was that he had the sheer mental will to imagine things outside the scale human beings could usually deal with. He had no trouble visualising the tunnel in its geo synchronous orbit high above Earth, or of calculating how to bring the shuttle neatly to dock with something that was, in the scale of these things, miniscule.
Without him the mission would surely have been a failure, ending in either their deaths or utter humiliation. The fear of again losing out to the US high in their minds. It was more than a pride or a nationalist thing. They knew this was bigger than the moon landing, or man in space. This was what they had dreamed of for so long, the twentieth century secular equivalent of seeing the Messiah.
It came only as something of a disappointment that they only things they saw looked as if they had been manufactured on Earth, and seemed to have no definable purpose. They had supposed on Earth that the tunnel was a listening station, or a some kind of gateway leading somewhere to another world, or at least contained some kind of message.
After nearly twenty years inside the tunnel Federov was firmly convinced there was no purpose to it. The Aliens they had so striven so hard to find remained opaque. Nothing existed beyond those things required to maintain human beings alive to continue the journey. That was what drove Federov on beyond the limits of normal endurance, the mystery. That there should have been some explanation, not necessarily a logical one, some kind of conclusion in these endless empty rooms. Or maybe it was the journey itself, a pilgrimage with no real destination beyond the travelling.
And perhaps what kept him sane were the almost random smattering of human comforts, the child’s chess computer that claimed to be from the time of Federov’s launch yet was able to play at a level of skill beyond any human mind. It had been casually placed atop a table with a single chair, in a vast gravity filled chamber. He now carried it with him everywhere
Federov had begun to learn from the inscriptions which doors led to rooms with air and gravity and which did not. Even though when he entered them it took him a while to physically recover, the blood supply to return properly, the muscle wastage to reverse. He was sure it was slowly killing him, the transition from free fall to gravity and back again. Yet he always took the opportunity to feel its pull, he could not resist. His body was attuned to Earth alone, he reflected. We were not made for space flight. This is as close as we will we ever get.
Some times he cruised for months on the outer edge of the tunnel, following its curve in the blackness of space, sun glinting of its glazed surface. Just floating with it next to him. He could only get so far though, until curiosity and the need to see human things brought him back into the chambers.
He realised, surprised at his own emotion, that it had been exactly twenty years since they had launched. He was in a chamber that was devoted to time, full of alarm clocks and timepieces, some even in Faberge eggs. There seemed to be none made after 1961, he wondered idly why they had found nothing that seemed to be newer than the first flight of man beyond the atmosphere of Earth. All the objects of long tunnel seemed to date between the discovery of steam power and the start of the space race. Was this a golden time? He pondered. Had whoever designed this thing considered that the pinnacle of mans achievement?
There were clocks that told him the day and the year, some in brass and enamel. He checked with the Shuttle’s own clock, it seemed that an anniversary was at hand. It was early October, most of the Northern hemisphere would be facing Autumn, snow would already be over large parts of the Union. In a month would come the anniversary of the revolution, he had been no great Communist but knew many of his countrymen cared deeply about such things.
He remembered when they had launched it had still been hot, the oppressive heat of the Kazakh autonomous region reaching them even on that long ride to the launching platform, scorching them when they got out for the obligatory stop in memory of Gagarin. To urinate in the gritty sand as he had done.
He had never had any great affinity for the seasons, as a child he had never known any beyond winter and a brief moment of insect filled thaw. He did not mind the constant darkness of space, he had grown up to the feel of six months of black and the feeling of permanent cold. Even the ailing suits in the shuttle he could survive, where their ability to repel the cold had always been in doubt and they had resorted to using thick animal furs. Cavemen going to the stars, as Danilov had said.
He held a little celebration then, as a courtesy more to the memory of the others. He knew if they had made it this far they would have been glad. Such achievements he had made, such discoveries. There was more data stored on his ship about the artificial creation of gravity, the recycling of oxygen, scientific principles beyond even himself that he had faithfully recorded. He had thought of himself as a miner, tunnelling deeper underground, dredging to the surface finer and finer gems. Thinking not of the glory or even the advancement of man but just that he was doing it. The action was its own reward.
He thought back to that last day, after they had wrapped up the body of the Captain, that effort had nearly killed them, still not being used to the sudden gravity and glad now of the oxygen, of not being encumbered by spacesuits. They had realised the door would block out the effects of the gravity and that they could exit back into space. The debate of returning seemed to be over. Only Federov wanted to continue it.
They had spent two weeks in the chamber, mourning and recovering from the physical effects of the sudden gravity. It was good for their bodies, the wasting of free fall reversed. Federov claimed this was evidence they could go further in, that they could stay out for a longer mission. The presence of air and occasional gravity would offset the effects of prolonged space exposure.
But the decision had already been made, Danilov was now in charge and only the Captain and Federov had been in favour of further exploration.
“It’s too dangerous for us on our own”, he explained. “They will send other missions, this is the most exciting find of any people since time began. This is a treasure trove. We will be back here, better equipped, more Cosmonauts. As it is I don’t think we can risk being stranded out here. What with the chambers further on contain? Can we even comprehend what the makers of this place have in store for us? We have to go back. It is too risky.”
And so they tried to complete the survey of the new chamber with its intricate air pumps, vast plastic and ceramic machines, veined with thin organic lines and the other mundane wonders it contained. Small, ugly trees that had grown in soil, carefully suspended in tanks, complicated arrays of rubber and steel cabling linking up automatic sensors. Everything to keep the perfect harmony of a small ornamental garden, dwarfed by the massive length of the chamber.
“We will not go back empty handed,” said their new Captain as they taxied the shuttle out of the chamber and back into the night. “Our names will truly be remembered.”
It was when they had expelled the Captain’s body from the airlock and fallen into sedated sleep that Federov acted. It was simple to switch the tubes that fed oxygen to Carbon Monoxide. He retreated inside his suit and waited for the others to die quietly. Their bodies too were gently pushed from the airlock, wrapped in winding sheets, personal possessions in there with them. He took great care to treat them as per their instructions on the event of death.
Federov had allowed himself regret, but he knew they would never get another chance to come back here. The age of man in space was over. They had all known at Baikanur and the other launch sites, the Soviet Union had only scraped together this flight on the last reserves of its 1960’s glory.
Federov could see change would come. The old guard were dying away, Andropov had been on his last legs at the time of the launch, and had expired by the time they had reached the tunnel. And the US too could not be guaranteed to come, they too were living in past glories. They talked of space but only to fill the air above Earth with satellites and weaponry. They thought only space in terms of domination and making money.
Though the writing on the tunnel had given him faith there would be nations after that would one day come here. The Chinese pictograms on each vast airlock and the writings in languages he did not know gave him some faith the makers of the tunnel knew he was the first to come but would not be the last.
So he sat in the room full of time, recreating in his mind the Cosmonauts who he’d sacrificed and looking at the date, the 21st century now, and wondered about all that was left behind.
The mission was considered lost soon after entering the long tunnel, an explosion in the launch control centre at Baikonur killed several key personnel and destroyed most of the Communications equipment, meaning only automatic messages were sent out and nothing could be received. The very secrecy of the project meant it was impossible to find the proper co-ordinates of the long tunnel, or of the Shuttle inside, as no copies of them had existed outside of the launch Control.
The project was cancelled a year after the death of Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Soviet Union, on February 9, 1984. After all attempts to contact the missing cosmonauts failed a listening station was manned until 1991 when budget cuts meant that too was cancelled. The families of the Cosmonauts were told their loved ones had died during a test flight, and that they had been buried with full honours.
The location of the long tunnel is considered lost and any hard information on it is at best considered fanciful. Though there have been several salacious memoirs by Scientists claiming to have worked on the project they are impossible to verify and considered either hoaxes or feeble attempts to make money.
Spring 2004
He turned the iron handle, fingers brushing the copper inlay. Like most of them it depicted abstract shapes, curves and circles, with a hint of Aztec influence. It turned easily, like the lock of a submarine, the metal gleaming as if new. No corrosion in the vacuum. He felt the great round door swing inwards, nearly a hundred feet wide, dwarfing him in his human insignificance. Braced himself for the equalling of atmospheres. The air pressure tugged him forward as usual, bringing the long cable linking him to the Shuttle taut, though it stayed firm, floating there behind him.
He pulled himself back, hand over hand until he reached the Shuttle airlock, opened it and disappeared inside. He had hoped this room would be one with some localised gravity as he wanted to walk, feel the pull on his bones. Though the extra effort of taking the ageing Shuttle out and around the gravity well of the chamber would have tired him more than usual.
He sat at the controls, looking at the small black and white screens that showed him all sides of the small shuttle. The launch control scientists had modified it for this most special of missions, they had tried to cover any eventuality of this voyage into the unknown. The Shuttle itself had only really been in the experimental stages, an almost knee jerk response to the US Shuttle program, an example of how sclerotic the Soviet space program had become. They had filled it with technology bought from other nations, computer components from Japan and Europe, innovations and ideas lifted in Industrial espionage missions across the world. It was the only way they could guarantee any kind of reliability, the technology simply did not yet exist in the Soviet Union. Though it was fair to say no amount of technology could have ever made them ready for this vast unknown quantity hanging in the depths of space.
Fedeyrov early on had realised it was pointless to try to understand the purpose of the long tunnel, or to even try to plan for what it might contain. The bureaucrats back home with their Military uniforms and expanding waistlines knew they had found something big, but their only thoughts were on its use in military terms.
How can this help us win the cold War? They would say, their eyes glittering greedily. The scientists too had little enough imagination, they only saw it as a tool, but for the gaining of knowledge alone. Knowledge cold and dead like a knife. Fedeyrov thought perhaps because this was such a step up in the experience of mankind, such a paradigm shift they could not even begin to rationalise it, it simply did not fit into their blinkered and primitive view of the universe
He pushed the Shuttle through the airlock with only a slight touch of the rockets. Another mystery of the tunnel was its providence to the mission. The other Cosmonauts had been terrified in those early chambers when they had found the liquid oxygen tanks and the refills for their breathing filters. Afraid they were being watched, drawn in.
It all went against their exhaustive tests that showed the tunnel had been built at least two hundred years ago, though the results had varied so wildly it was difficult to trust what they had been measuring. The mortar between the bricks that made up the superstructure of the tunnel registered an age of approximately a hundred and fifty years ago, whereas the intricately adorned airlocks gave something completely different.
Siprova had been especially vocal, her cheeks reddening as she found instructions in Cyrillic, Arabic and what seemed to be Chinese pictograms on the side of the tanks. Her insulated gloves brushing away ice from the side.
“How did they know?” she had said “All of the things we have found so far have been spread across the recent history of man. All these artefacts, in no order. What purpose? What reason?”
They had only just calmed her down when the lights of the Shuttle picked out the stack of tinned food, reaching high up the curved brick walls of the chamber.
Federov went out to look at them, they were stacked as if in a supermarket, cardboard crating crumbling under his touch. The sell by dates were in Western numbers, dated for twenty years hence, yet the way they had been manufactured seemed like the canned foods they had known from childhood, he saw brands he thought had disappeared, ones the agricultural combines had stopped producing in the early 1970’s.
They radioed the information along with everything else back to Earth, they had received no replies since the order to enter the long tunnel, but had been assured this was to be expected, no radio waves could penetrate the thick dark brick of the tunnel walls. The mission inside was to be brief, not part of their original orders which were merely inspect the vast entrance of the tunnel. They had been reassured they would be back, this was merely reconnaissance for a later mission.
And now Federov was on his thousandth and something room. All the details carefully logged and beamed back to arrive at some time, God knew when, back on Earth. He had found that despite their wild differences in size the chambers all had three airlocks, set vast into the thick brick of the tunnel. One he would enter from, the airlock silently and eerily shutting behind on some automatic circuit, the second would be directly opposite and lead on into the infinite depths of the tunnel. Chamber after chamber for hundreds of thousand of miles. The last airlock was set in the curve of the wall and lead back out into the studded darkness of space, to see the Earth like an anchor, giant yet far away. He found those trips out, to report back and to speed along the outside of the tunnel, soothing. To know the life he came from was still there.
Each chamber differed wildly in size, some the size of an aircraft hangar and some so long they took a day for him to cross. Then he relied on the radar signal and the picture it built up, white lines on the black screen in front of him. He would try sometimes the goggle set they had rigged up, tiny screens in front of his eyes showing the image of the radar signal, two slightly different points, the illusion of depth. The world then to him was all in lines, like the concentric curves showing hills on maps or sedimentary layers, he could turn and look as if they shuttle was not there, that it was only he floating though the endless tunnel. Though the goggles were unreliable, low resolution, and gave him headaches.
Many of the rooms were well lit, by either electric bulbs or fluorescent strip lighting, turning on through some automatic process that followed the opening of the airlock. Sometimes they would fail to go on, the strip lighting had proved to be more reliable than the older, antiquated bulbs. Often the bulbs would light up quickly only to explode in a shower of glass fragments and white powder, floating like a halo in the zero gravity.
It had caused so much consternation to the crew that human objects should be arranged in this way, thousands of miles above the surface of the Earth. That the tunnel had seemingly been constructed of bricks and mortar, the vast airlocks from cast Iron, each with a makers plate claiming they had been constructed in Sheffield or St Petersburg, complicated and infuriated their theories. How could something like this exist? Was it some extra terrestrial construction, either to ape mankind or as a homage to him? There had been no attempt to communicate with them, either when the tunnel was first discovered or when they broke the seal on the first Airlock and entered inside. They had almost begun to accept the mystery of the place, the accretion of human things in this most inhuman place. To no longer feel so unnerved by it all.
It was the discovery of the chambers with air and gravity, though, that had ended their complacency.
It was perhaps the fifth room in the chain, the one they had been in held nothing but elaborately carved pink quartz rock, as if a million types of erosion had weathered them to fantastic shapes. The strange intelligence they felt seemed to be at its most abstract, they could almost reliably believe it was something merely extraterrestrial, or that this rock had just been brought here and dumped. Purposeless.
They were tense anyway, the rest of the crew. Their orders had only asked them to explore the first few rooms, it was not assumed there were many. They had only enough food and fuel for a limited foray. Yet the appearance of the Oxygen tanks and tinned food had made it look possible they could go in further. The Captain and Federov were in favour of going forward, Siprova and Danilov the scientist wanted to leave, fearing the worst if they went further.
“I feel we are being deliberately drawn in, like prey for something horrible.” Danilov said, his large hands pointing to the photos they had taken. “We do not even begin to understand any of this. These human objects are like bait. We have no way of judging what is dangerous, or what any of this is about. What if this is some sacred temple? Just being here could be considered an act of sacrilege or a declaration of war”
“But what if this is an invitation? A test of how advanced we are as a species.” The Captain had spoken up, “Whoever built this must have left this for a reason, it is up to us to follow the clues. Who knows what prizes lie at the end? What glories are open to mankind if we continue?”
They agreed to see the next room, and then to decide whether to go further or turn back. The Captain went out of the shuttle on the trailing cable, hands feeling for the wheel that seemed to turn so easily in human hands. They watched him brace himself for the equalising of atmospheres, each feeling the small sense of fear as the door behind them clanged shut. Pressure always had to remain absolute. As one opened another closed. The motion like locks on a canal.
As the new door opened they watched the Captain, slowly at first, then with alarming speed plummet to the floor. His hands scrabbled on the elaborately carved iron, trying to find a handhold and slow his descent. They had not felt gravity for five months and it hit him like a hammer.
He had been unprepared, they all were. It was like having everything sucked down to their feet. The shuttle had begun to move forward and they watched helplessly as its nose was tugged down toward the floor by the gravity leaking in from the next chamber. Danilov felt his hands pulled to his sides, unable to do anything but gasp as the force pulling on him slowly increased to that of earth.
It was Siprova who had the foresight to pull down the landing gear, silently thanking whatever prophetic instinct that had made them rotate the shuttle when they first entered the tunnel to make them the same way up as their surroundings. The hour they had spent doing that had now saved their lives, they could never have righted the shuttle if it had landed on its back.
The shuttle sighed onto the floor, rubber wheels on curving brick. There was silence for some minutes, then the sound of Federov trying to raise the Captain over the radio.
“He is probably unconscious. We need to get to him as soon as possible.”
It took half an hour just to get out of the cabin. They were thankful the gravity was below that of Earth, it seemed heavily concentrated toward the open chamber and the Captain had taken the worst of it, falling almost a hundred metres.
“Go to the back of the chamber, the gravity will be less there. It looks highly localised. I will go to the Captain”
The rest of the crew headed towards the back of the chamber where the gravity was more like that of the moon, Siprova feeling as if weights were being lifted with every step before her and Danilov collapsed thankfully at the back of the chamber. He rued again that his large size meant the gravity affected him worse than the others. The months in zero gravity had ravaged them. They looked at Federov, only a hundred or so metres in front, lit by the strip lighting in the chamber beyond. He was crawling now, the gravity up to that almost of Earth. The Captain lay, unmoving, not responding to their frantic radio signals.
As Federov reached him he thanked God the Captain was not on his front. He pulled himself up to look into his visor. He was conscious, mouthing but he radio was clearly broken. Federov placed his helmet against his companions, hoping the vibration would carry between the two solid objects.
Shouting he was able to get the Captain to hear. He was not badly hurt but was afraid of the oxygen tank on his back, his levels had been going down steeply, it must have been broken in the fall. It was why he was so still, afraid of severing the line completely. Federov checked the line, it was leaking, the Captain had at best a few minutes supply. He radioed this to the rest.
Siprova immediately began running towards the shuttle to pick up the spare oxygen, visibly slowing as she came into the glare of the gravity. Feeling it pull on her organs, her head, the space suit become unbearably heavy. She cursed its primitive design. It took all her effort just to climb into the shuttle, grab the spare, fall from the airlock, free hand grabbing at the rungs. She crawled agonisingly slowly across the floor, pulling the oxygen tank behind. Watching almost helplessly as the Captain’s oxygen supply went lower and lower, barely hearing the noises of encouragement from Federov and Danilov. She passed out twice, from the effort. As she felt herself going for the third time she was close enough to roll the cylinder to Federov, before her eyes rolled up and she gasped into unconsciousness.
She came around again an hour later. At first she did not notice that she was not wearing the suit and that she was still outside the Shuttle, and it took her several seconds to realise what was wrong. The strain of moving so much had made her muscles spasm and she tried not to hyperventilate. Her first thought was to wonder how the crew had filled both chambers with air. Danilov was the first person she saw, his large form moving about in the orange rubberised jumpsuits they wore in the shuttle, his face was pinched, grave.
To her first question he shook his head, and tears rolled down her face. She had not been in time for the Captain, it had been close but there had been no way of reviving him, Federov had tried to drag him to the ship to attempt resuscitation but had stopped when he realised it was pointless.
Some time later, when she had the strength to sit up, she asked about the air.
“How did you fill these two rooms?”
“The air was here all along” said Federov solemnly, and pointed to a large pale plastic unit mounted on the wall, its surface aged brown at the edges.
“I don’t know how it works. We only found out when it was too late, the instruments showed some anomalies, we were trying to understand about the gravity.” He trailed off.
“All that, and all we needed to do was open his visor.”
Now in the rooms with air Federov would walk without his suit, smelling the delicate fragrances wafted in by the strange air pumps, they were of a vastly complicated design, yet put together from common components, configured in a way no human would have thought of. He would play chess against himself, sitting on the curved brick of the chamber. He told himself that was how he stayed sane. Kept his mind on the mission.
He knew the others would not have survived this far in. He had been chosen for his ability to live through long periods of isolation, his childhood in the Siberian steppes, where it was remote and undeveloped. He was the child of exiled Christians, they spent all their time working the iron hard soil. There had been no other children for him to play with, the adults silent in their exhaustion and wrapped in personal trauma.
In the 1970’s they had been rehabilitated, his rising talent at chess playing no small part. His parents had taken him, hair smoothed down and the beginnings of an adolescent moustache, to national tournaments. His flair for chess was a product of his mathematical mind, a unique mind they had told him, able easily to think around corners.
He entered university and was able to get into cosmonaut training as the cold war heated up in the late 1970’s. Even then they had remarked on his love of isolation, the trend of thinking then was moving towards flights to the moon, to Mars. Long range pipe dreams. They left him in Arctic for a year in an experimental station with thirty other hopefuls. He was the only one not to show a marked deterioration in mental health, in fact he told them it was like a return to childhood, and that he missed it when it was gone.
It was a Venus probe that discovered the long tunnel, in the spring of 1980, a relatively small anomaly several thousand miles closer to Earth than the moon. The probe merely brushed past, but was able to be close enough to pick up enough data to show this was not a system malfunction but in fact a giant, hitherto unknown, artefact.
Another probe was launched, in utmost secrecy. Making contact with the great circumference of the outer door. The probe was able to run along the length of it for a thousand miles or so before losing contact. It was the visual data coming back that blew the minds of the scientists.
The tunnel itself was cylindrical, running back away from Earth in a way that did not interfere with any known planetary orbits. In diameter it was perhaps five hundred metres with a great round airlock set in it, held in place by what looked like massive iron rivets running along its edge. The door had in its exact centre a wheel like that of any Submarine airlock, as if designed for human hands. They could not even begin to calculate its length.
The tunnel had been placed as if deliberately directly above the Earth, outside the plane of which most of the solar system operated, it seemed unaffected by the gravity of any other body. It just hovered there, impervious and almost invisible.
The theories of the scientists who discovered it ran wild. Very few in fact knew of its existence, the research crew of the Venus probe had been sworn to secrecy on pain of death and the later crews were handpicked from a very small and trusted group. The only politicians aware of it had been those around Chernenko and Andropov, the most senior within the Politburo.
The Soviet space bureau were able to launch a human crew within a year. The system had become so adept at secrecy it was no more difficult than hushing up the death of a cosmonaut to put a group together and drill them in what little they knew about the long tunnel. Less than fifty people were aware of the true nature of the mission. Others were told it was to be a test launch, trying out the new Buran Shuttle prototype.
They were terrified of the US learning of the tunnel, they did not want another space race. They knew the Americans would pursue it with a single mindedness they just could not match. The stakes were incredibly high, as the first real evidence of extra terrestrial existence it was vital to establish a beach head, to be there first to exploit the advantage.
The mission could have failed a million times before the gloved hand of the Captain turned the lock of the first door. The logistics of the operation challenged even Federov, the main reason he was on the mission was that he had the sheer mental will to imagine things outside the scale human beings could usually deal with. He had no trouble visualising the tunnel in its geo synchronous orbit high above Earth, or of calculating how to bring the shuttle neatly to dock with something that was, in the scale of these things, miniscule.
Without him the mission would surely have been a failure, ending in either their deaths or utter humiliation. The fear of again losing out to the US high in their minds. It was more than a pride or a nationalist thing. They knew this was bigger than the moon landing, or man in space. This was what they had dreamed of for so long, the twentieth century secular equivalent of seeing the Messiah.
It came only as something of a disappointment that they only things they saw looked as if they had been manufactured on Earth, and seemed to have no definable purpose. They had supposed on Earth that the tunnel was a listening station, or a some kind of gateway leading somewhere to another world, or at least contained some kind of message.
After nearly twenty years inside the tunnel Federov was firmly convinced there was no purpose to it. The Aliens they had so striven so hard to find remained opaque. Nothing existed beyond those things required to maintain human beings alive to continue the journey. That was what drove Federov on beyond the limits of normal endurance, the mystery. That there should have been some explanation, not necessarily a logical one, some kind of conclusion in these endless empty rooms. Or maybe it was the journey itself, a pilgrimage with no real destination beyond the travelling.
And perhaps what kept him sane were the almost random smattering of human comforts, the child’s chess computer that claimed to be from the time of Federov’s launch yet was able to play at a level of skill beyond any human mind. It had been casually placed atop a table with a single chair, in a vast gravity filled chamber. He now carried it with him everywhere
Federov had begun to learn from the inscriptions which doors led to rooms with air and gravity and which did not. Even though when he entered them it took him a while to physically recover, the blood supply to return properly, the muscle wastage to reverse. He was sure it was slowly killing him, the transition from free fall to gravity and back again. Yet he always took the opportunity to feel its pull, he could not resist. His body was attuned to Earth alone, he reflected. We were not made for space flight. This is as close as we will we ever get.
Some times he cruised for months on the outer edge of the tunnel, following its curve in the blackness of space, sun glinting of its glazed surface. Just floating with it next to him. He could only get so far though, until curiosity and the need to see human things brought him back into the chambers.
He realised, surprised at his own emotion, that it had been exactly twenty years since they had launched. He was in a chamber that was devoted to time, full of alarm clocks and timepieces, some even in Faberge eggs. There seemed to be none made after 1961, he wondered idly why they had found nothing that seemed to be newer than the first flight of man beyond the atmosphere of Earth. All the objects of long tunnel seemed to date between the discovery of steam power and the start of the space race. Was this a golden time? He pondered. Had whoever designed this thing considered that the pinnacle of mans achievement?
There were clocks that told him the day and the year, some in brass and enamel. He checked with the Shuttle’s own clock, it seemed that an anniversary was at hand. It was early October, most of the Northern hemisphere would be facing Autumn, snow would already be over large parts of the Union. In a month would come the anniversary of the revolution, he had been no great Communist but knew many of his countrymen cared deeply about such things.
He remembered when they had launched it had still been hot, the oppressive heat of the Kazakh autonomous region reaching them even on that long ride to the launching platform, scorching them when they got out for the obligatory stop in memory of Gagarin. To urinate in the gritty sand as he had done.
He had never had any great affinity for the seasons, as a child he had never known any beyond winter and a brief moment of insect filled thaw. He did not mind the constant darkness of space, he had grown up to the feel of six months of black and the feeling of permanent cold. Even the ailing suits in the shuttle he could survive, where their ability to repel the cold had always been in doubt and they had resorted to using thick animal furs. Cavemen going to the stars, as Danilov had said.
He held a little celebration then, as a courtesy more to the memory of the others. He knew if they had made it this far they would have been glad. Such achievements he had made, such discoveries. There was more data stored on his ship about the artificial creation of gravity, the recycling of oxygen, scientific principles beyond even himself that he had faithfully recorded. He had thought of himself as a miner, tunnelling deeper underground, dredging to the surface finer and finer gems. Thinking not of the glory or even the advancement of man but just that he was doing it. The action was its own reward.
He thought back to that last day, after they had wrapped up the body of the Captain, that effort had nearly killed them, still not being used to the sudden gravity and glad now of the oxygen, of not being encumbered by spacesuits. They had realised the door would block out the effects of the gravity and that they could exit back into space. The debate of returning seemed to be over. Only Federov wanted to continue it.
They had spent two weeks in the chamber, mourning and recovering from the physical effects of the sudden gravity. It was good for their bodies, the wasting of free fall reversed. Federov claimed this was evidence they could go further in, that they could stay out for a longer mission. The presence of air and occasional gravity would offset the effects of prolonged space exposure.
But the decision had already been made, Danilov was now in charge and only the Captain and Federov had been in favour of further exploration.
“It’s too dangerous for us on our own”, he explained. “They will send other missions, this is the most exciting find of any people since time began. This is a treasure trove. We will be back here, better equipped, more Cosmonauts. As it is I don’t think we can risk being stranded out here. What with the chambers further on contain? Can we even comprehend what the makers of this place have in store for us? We have to go back. It is too risky.”
And so they tried to complete the survey of the new chamber with its intricate air pumps, vast plastic and ceramic machines, veined with thin organic lines and the other mundane wonders it contained. Small, ugly trees that had grown in soil, carefully suspended in tanks, complicated arrays of rubber and steel cabling linking up automatic sensors. Everything to keep the perfect harmony of a small ornamental garden, dwarfed by the massive length of the chamber.
“We will not go back empty handed,” said their new Captain as they taxied the shuttle out of the chamber and back into the night. “Our names will truly be remembered.”
It was when they had expelled the Captain’s body from the airlock and fallen into sedated sleep that Federov acted. It was simple to switch the tubes that fed oxygen to Carbon Monoxide. He retreated inside his suit and waited for the others to die quietly. Their bodies too were gently pushed from the airlock, wrapped in winding sheets, personal possessions in there with them. He took great care to treat them as per their instructions on the event of death.
Federov had allowed himself regret, but he knew they would never get another chance to come back here. The age of man in space was over. They had all known at Baikanur and the other launch sites, the Soviet Union had only scraped together this flight on the last reserves of its 1960’s glory.
Federov could see change would come. The old guard were dying away, Andropov had been on his last legs at the time of the launch, and had expired by the time they had reached the tunnel. And the US too could not be guaranteed to come, they too were living in past glories. They talked of space but only to fill the air above Earth with satellites and weaponry. They thought only space in terms of domination and making money.
Though the writing on the tunnel had given him faith there would be nations after that would one day come here. The Chinese pictograms on each vast airlock and the writings in languages he did not know gave him some faith the makers of the tunnel knew he was the first to come but would not be the last.
So he sat in the room full of time, recreating in his mind the Cosmonauts who he’d sacrificed and looking at the date, the 21st century now, and wondered about all that was left behind.
The mission was considered lost soon after entering the long tunnel, an explosion in the launch control centre at Baikonur killed several key personnel and destroyed most of the Communications equipment, meaning only automatic messages were sent out and nothing could be received. The very secrecy of the project meant it was impossible to find the proper co-ordinates of the long tunnel, or of the Shuttle inside, as no copies of them had existed outside of the launch Control.
The project was cancelled a year after the death of Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Soviet Union, on February 9, 1984. After all attempts to contact the missing cosmonauts failed a listening station was manned until 1991 when budget cuts meant that too was cancelled. The families of the Cosmonauts were told their loved ones had died during a test flight, and that they had been buried with full honours.
The location of the long tunnel is considered lost and any hard information on it is at best considered fanciful. Though there have been several salacious memoirs by Scientists claiming to have worked on the project they are impossible to verify and considered either hoaxes or feeble attempts to make money.
Spring 2004
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home