Blue Hope: (Book 2) (Red Hope) Page 14

  “Hi, fellas. These are our bags,” she explained. “Hey kids, come on, time to go.”

  The men picked up the suitcases like picking up toys and transported them out to the black Cadillac Escalades lining the street. Connie and the kids got into the middle one. They drove out of Wanigas and to the Meacham Business Jet airport a few miles away.

  The convoy of Escalades approached a large chainlink gate at the edge of the airport. The driver handed his badge to the security guard manning the gate. The guard looked over the ID and eyed the driver before finally signaling for him to go on through. The vehicles rumbled through the gate and out onto the tarmac, pulling up next to a large white business jet. The kids piled out after their Mom. They looked in awe at the jet.

  “This is for us?” Connie asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the driver assured her.

  She walked up the small flight of stairs and onto the airplane. Sitting in the back was Chris Tankovitch, typing on a laptop. He looked up to see Connie and her brilliant smile.

  Chris looked confused.

  “Is it just you?” he asked.

  Just then, two loud children rambled up through the door, fighting about which of them would fly the airplane.

  “Hi, Chris. It’s the whole Alston clan today,” she laughed.

  “Great,” Chris said. “Buckle up and we’ll be off. It’ll take us about three hours to get there. It’s good to see you again, Connie.”

  “Oh, you’re too sweet, it’s good to see you too, Chris.”

  After everybody buckled in, Chris walked up to the cockpit to let the pilots know it was time to go. The kids watched out the windows as the Cadillac convoy drove away from the airplane. Excitement filled the cabin as the engines spun up and the airplane taxied out to the runway.

  Connie leaned toward Cody and Catie.

  “Next stop is your Daddy.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Quarantine hangar

  Wright Patterson Air Force Base

  Dayton, Ohio

  A long beam of sunlight illuminated the floor of the hangar like a laser – turned on briefly and then dimmed back to darkness, turned off with the closing of the main door. A woman and two children stood just inside the main entry door to the quarantine hangar. They hesitated for a moment, but then quickly walked and then ran toward the center of the large cavernous building.

  The quarantine tank sat prominently in the room, slightly larger than the classic silver airstream trailers of the previous century. Adam had been laying down on the cot in the quarantine tank. He’d popped up when he heard the squeak of the door; the scientists and physicians never used that entrance – only the few visitors that had come. Adam walked over to the window. A smile took over his face. Walking toward him, yes walking toward him, was the love of his life and the two little children that caused him to fall in love all over again. Uncontrollably, tears of relief streamed down his face – for months he thought he’d never see them again and yet, here they were. He hadn’t seen his wife walk without crutches in years. All his dreams were coming true at once.

  Connie walked straight to the window, her smile outdoing even his. Her hand lifted up and pressed on the window. Adam lifted his hand and pressed it on the glass, matching hers.

  “Daddy! Daddy!” yelled both kids at the same time. They jumped up and down and slapped at the glass. Adam knelt down and slapped the glass, too.

  “Hey kiddos! I’d give you a big hug if I wasn’t potentially carrying a deadly alien virus,” he laughed.

  Both kids suddenly backed away.

  “Your hair, Daddy! It’s all white!”

  “I know, right? Who knew Mars would turn my hair white?”

  They giggled with laughter.

  Connie looked at the kids and then back at Adam.

  “Well, I…” she trailed off.

  “Yes?” Adam asked whimsically.

  “What do I say to the man that I thought was dead, but has miraculously come back to life?”

  Adam shrugged his shoulders. “Halleluiah?”

  She laughed. “Nice. How long do you have to be in there?”

  Adam stood back up.

  “About twenty one days in total. It’s not so bad. I have all the creature comforts.”

  “Aren’t you bored?” Connie asked.

  “After the trip I just took?" Adam laughed. "I crave boredom. Seriously, I want zero excitement.”

  Adam pointed his finger behind him to a guy sitting on a sofa. “Besides, I’ve got Tim here. He was the boat driver that pulled me out of Lake Erie. Now he’s contaminated, too. He’s pissed.”

  “Oh my,” she said, snickering. Then she yelled, “Thank you Mr. Tim for saving my husband!” It echoed off the cavernous hangar walls.

  Tim gave her a two-fingered peace sign before returning to his magazine.

  Adam suddenly remembered his recent VIP visitor.

  “Oh, and the former NASA director came to visit. Chris Tankovitch is still a top-notch guy.”

  “Chris has been our savior all these months. He kept us informed whenever anything happened.”

  She shook her head from side to side with a pitying look.

  “You’ve had such a rough journey, honey,” she said. “I want to know everything about it, but part of me doesn’t care. I’m just glad you made it home.”

  “Me too,” Adam said. He leaned closer to the glass. “To be honest, I’m having a hard time hearing you. Can you pick up the phone?”

  He pointed down. Connie followed his direction. She picked up the phone and held it close.

  “We thought,” she paused as a tear ran down her cheek. “We thought you were dead all this time.”

  “I know, sweetheart. I’m sorry I ever left.”

  She lifted her other hand up to the window. Adam mirrored her movement again.

  “We even cashed-in your life insurance policy.”

  “Oh, really?” Adam said with a grin. “How much was I worth?”

  Connie leaned her head to one side.

  “Unfortunately, not much,” she admitted with a frown. “But none of that matters now.”

  She caught herself smiling again, ear to ear. The kids tugged at her hand.

  “Connie, I noticed you walking over here. I take it the surgery was a total success?”

  “I had the surgery several months ago and the stem cells worked like a charm.”

  “That’s awesome. I’m glad Keller Murch’s million dollar bonus was put to good use.”

  Connie grimaced at the thought of that million dollar bonus. It was all gone, but now was not the time to tell Adam. She reached down and picked up Cody.

  She furrowed her brow. “Has NASA provided you with some professional people to talk to about the trip?”

  “You mean a psychiatrist?” Adam asked.

  Connie nodded.

  “Not quite that bad. They did send in a couple of psychologists to chat with me for a bit. They were friendly. I mean, I’ve only been back for what, 12 hours? But yeah, they’ve got some good people helping me. They say I have mild PTSD, you know, from being stranded on a foreign freakin’ planet fifty million miles away.”

  He saw that she didn’t like his humor or language.

  “Sorry, sorry. Yes, I’m talking with a doctor here.”

  “I’m glad. Well, do you mind if we just have a seat here while you go about quarantining yourself?”

  “For how long?” Adam asked.

  “For as long as it takes,” Connie answered.

  Adam gave a chuckle.

  “Sure, hey I have a few books here. How about I read to the kids?”

  “Yeah, Daddy, read us a book. We’ll sit right here,” Catie said.

  “Your hair is really scary,” Cody added.

  CHAPTER 31

  Conference room

  NASA Jennings Fort Worth Manned Spacecraft Center

  Fort Worth, Texas

  “Adam Alston lost the damned anti-gravity cube,” Chris Tankovitch said to
the crowd of engineers and managers sitting around the table. A palpable groan cascaded through the audience.

  “I’ve just returned from his quarantine hangar in Dayton,” he explained.

  “Why didn’t Alexis go up there?” the red-headed engineer asked. He glanced from Chris to Alexis.

  Alexis leaned toward her microphone.

  “Because I wanted Adam to see a familiar face. He doesn’t know me from Adam, no pun intended,” she said with a chuckle.

  “Tell me,” Alexis said, “do you have any contingency plans?”

  “Well, I’m just the vending-machine services director,” Chris replied.

  “No, you’re my unofficial deputy now. You’re my liaison to Adam,” Alexis confirmed.

  Chris looked around to see a few heads nodding approval.

  “Okay, then,” Chris said with authority. “Here’s the situation. Cancer deaths are skyrocketing and the key to a potential cure was just lost. Plan A is to find the anti-gravity cube. It was last seen travelling down at an angle toward either Indiana or Ohio. Adam couldn’t remember.”

  “He couldn’t remember?” Alexis asked.

  “I guess the Little Turtle was literally ripping apart during that stage and we’re lucky Adam isn’t somewhere in Indiana… and Ohio. But I have other news. Perhaps a Plan B.”

  Chris nodded toward the long-haired engineer named Nathan, known as MapGuy to his coworkers.

  “Nathan Cannon is a cartographer here and he’d like to share the big news about what his team has discovered.”

  Chris sat down as MapGuy stood up and handed out a small packet of papers.

  “Hi, I’m NateGuy,” he said nervously. “I mean Nathan, but everybody just calls me MapGuy.”

  “Hi, MapGuy,” Alexis said, leaning her head to one side to show she was paying attention.

  “Well, okay. I’ll just say it right up front. The translation of the Martian text states that they had a laboratory here on Earth and it even gives the coordinates. Given the news about Adam Alston losing the anti-gravity cube, we hope the laboratory may have a similar example of that technology that we can use instead.”

  A mumble of side conversations snowballed around the room.

  “But it’s not that easy,” MapGuy interrupted everyone’s excitement. “If you look at your packet, you’ll see a set of coordinates. Exact longitude and latitude. But wacky huge numbers, right?”

  The people in the room looked down and studied the stack of papers in front of them.

  “Are you assuming that the Martians used a similar method to map their globe like we do?” Alexis asked skeptically.

  “That’s right. We tried several methods using various cartographical standards, but settled on our human method because the numbers made more sense. It turns out that history often picks a winner based on technical merit. Not always, but sometimes, what works best does indeed become the standard. We’re assuming.”

  Alexis thumbed through the paperwork again and then looked back up at MapGuy.

  “What’s the importance of 660?” she asked.

  “Ah, yes, you jumped right into the meat of things. Their circles are divided up into 660 degrees,” MapGuy said.

  “That seems silly,” the redheaded engineer laughed, his shirt embroidered with the phrase Flight Controls.

  “Well, maybe at first, but ask yourself why we divide our circles into 360 degrees,” MapGuy asked. “That seems pretty silly, too, right?”

  Everybody shrugged their shoulders at this seemingly trivial pursuit.

  “Let’s talk about our circle first. We think it may have been originally based on the early Persian calendar which had 360 days — maybe even further back to Babylonian times. Each month had 30 days. For example, to go once around the Sun took 360 days, according to the ancient Persians.”

  Alexis chimed in, “Yes, but our years are 365 days — wouldn’t their calendar have drifted off as the missing days piled up?”

  “Yes, of course, but they fixed that by adding an extra month every six years.”

  “Oh, okay,” Alexis laughed at the seemingly arbitrary solution.

  “We guessed that the Martians may have followed the same logic. It takes about 668.6 days to go around the sun.”

  “I think you made a mistake,” Chris retorted. “Mars takes 687 days to go around the Sun.”

  “No, that’s how many Earth days it takes for Mars to go around the Sun. The Martians didn’t know about Earth when they developed their early geometry. So they used their own definition of a day which is roughly 24.6 Earth hours. Obviously we don’t know what units they used to divide each individual day into.”

  “Okay,” Chris said, embarrassed at the correction.

  MapGuy continued.

  “So, as I was saying, if we assumed that the Martians followed a similar line of logic in their early days, then their circle would end up with somewhere between 660 and 670 degrees, depending on how much error they accepted.”

  The red-headed engineer laughed, saying, “They could’ve had 666 days in their year?”

  “Yes, that’s very possible… but unlikely. I think it was 660 because it’s an even number, easily divisible.”

  “But so is 666,” the engineer said.

  “True, but we think it was likely to be 660 because it’s sexagesimal”

  “Sexa-what?” Chris asked.

  “That just means a base-60 counting system, similar to early mathematics on Earth thousands of years ago. You know, just like the Babylonians? These ancient base-60 mathematics are pervasive throughout modern day society. After all, it’s why we have sixty minutes in an hour and sixty seconds in a minute.”

  “Whoa, information overload,” the redheaded engineer laughed nervously.

  “Cut to the chase, please,” Alexis said.

  “Of course,” MapGuy said. “If you convert what the Martian translation tells us — I mean convert it to our 360 degree circles, then you get a rough angle of 100 degrees East for longitude and 17 degrees South for latitude.”

  Alexis turned to the laptop on her desk and began furiously typing.

  “Alexis?” Chris asked.

  “I’m typing them into Google Earth,” she said. “Okay, that puts us right in the middle of some ocean water west of Australia. Nowhere special.”

  MapGuy laughed.

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “I am?” Alexis asked.

  “Yes, and you’ve discovered our biggest problem,” he said. “We have what is essentially a treasure map and it tells us how far the X is from the start, but the problem is we don’t know where to start.”

  “What do you mean?” Alexis asked, squinting her eyes at the screen.

  “You just typed into Google Earth a longitude of 100 degrees East and 17 degrees South. But our longitude is based on an arbitrary starting point of Greenwich, England. When the Martians were here, Greenwich was just a forest on the southern bank of what we now call the Thames River.”

  Alexis laughed at her assumption.

  “So what did they use as the zero-degree location for longitude?” she asked. “The so-called starting point?”

  “That is exactly what my entire team has been struggling with. The Martians left out that bit of information.”

  “And what do you think the answer is?” Chris asked.

  “Well, if you were putting coordinates on a foreign planet, what would you use as a starting point for longitude?” MapGuy asked.

  “Some prominent geographic landmark?” Chris asked.

  “Bingo,” MapGuy confirmed. “And we think we’ve figured it out. But I need to check one more thing to confirm that theory.”

  CHAPTER 32

  New York City

  “After you, Captain Alston,” Connie said to her husband, now wearing his astronaut uniform (minus the helmet) and standing in the lobby of the Grand Morgan hotel in New York City. With the quarantine period over, it was time for Adam to celebrate.

  “No way! Af
ter you, Mrs. Alston,” Adam said. “And after my lovely children, too.”

  The concierge opened the door to a cheering crowd of thousands gathered in front of the hotel. Adam and his family walked out and climbed aboard a parade float made up to look like the Little Turtle spaceship. While in quarantine, Adam dyed his hair black to get rid of the pure white that had grown in during the return voyage. He and Chris agreed that the stark white would’ve been disturbing to the general public.

  One of the largest ticker-tape parades in New York City history took place on August 13, 1969 to celebrate the triumphant return of the first astronauts to walk on the Moon. Just as the Moon landing achievement had been overshadowed by Adam’s achievement of being the first to walk on Mars, the current ticker-tape parade record was being smashed this day – celebrating the miraculous return of Captain Adam Alston, the apple of America’s eye. Adam was the hero for a troubled time.

  He sat proudly atop the parade float, waving to the mass of humanity lining the streets. His family sat in seats near the front. The float moved slowly down Broadway. A downpour of glitter and ticker tape filled the sky. The crowds cheered him on, maintaining a deafening roar. Catie and Cody smiled while covering their ears.

  Adam finally felt the pride he’d searched for his entire life. Like a sponge, he soaked up every hoot and holler, every cheer and yell. He looked to his side to see if Yeva was enjoying her newfound fame, too. Just as if getting punched in the gut, it all rushed back. The terrible final weeks of their voyage. How could he forget. He must forget. The truth was too awful. She was still in her suit, in a lonely field somewhere in the Midwest. NASA search teams hadn’t found her yet. A sudden wave of panic set over Adam. He breathed heavily.

  Calm down. Breath slow, he told himself. That’s exactly what Yeva told him to do.

  As the convoy of floats rounded the last corner near the end of the parade, Adam spied a Catholic church and signaled for the driver to stop. The crowd watched in confusion as Adam clambered down the side of the float, nearly falling off the final step. The crowd caught him.

  “Thank you, kind people,” he said to them.