1
‘We aren’t far from the opening,’ said Tip excitedly.
‘Can’t be more than twenty steps,’ Fin assessed.
‘You girls seem mighty perky after such a long climb.’
Both girls giggled as they hung on a rung on the vertical wall of the mile-deep, black shaft. They had been on the ladder for nineteen hours. They tried to sleep in the slings, but couldn’t, so they rested as best as they could. The final two-hundred feet were measured by the number of stars that appeared in the ever increasing in size, silver rectangle of light. Suddenly Griff called out,
‘I see the last rung. There are only eight left.’
2
Area 51 was located 80 miles north-north-west of Las Vegas and 445 miles southeast of Green River. The final crater radius from the catastrophic impact of the comet, that happened one hundred years before, was 120 miles. Area 51 and Las Vegas were vaporized in radiant heat, 17,000 times hotter than the sun, minutes before they were blasted out of existence by a 900 mph windstorm.
The most destructive thing about the windstorm was the debris it carried within it.
Uncountable billions of 900 mph projectiles smashed everything in their path to dust.
A huge earthquake and land tsunami rolled over the ground as if the Earth was made of jelly. All three, mile-deep shafts should have snapped like twigs, and two of them did, however as incredible as it may seem, one of them, the left one, stayed intact.
If a person with a more faith-based perspective was to explain this miracle, he might have said that it was just God’s little reminder to the human race that they couldn’t have done it without Him. An individual with a more unhinged disposition might have conjectured that without a shaft there was no story. And who knows? Maybe even for the Almighty it is always about the story, because manifest reality can never be anything else other than a story. Can it?
The melted desert cooled into sheets of glass that cracked in the wild, diurnal temperature variations. As the decades passed, the glassy layer of the desert slowly
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became covered by windblown fallout and sand. There was no vegetation as all life, including seeds, was vaporized.
The huge, concrete bunker, on the surface, that contained the three shafts and lift mechanisms, had been disintegrated out of existence. Like a mysterious, bottomless hole in the middle of a flat, windblown desert, the solitary shaft lurked in ambush, for a hundred years, for an unsuspecting wanderer. One never came.
3
Griffin had his hands on the last rung. The opening now nearly surrounded him. He was overawed by the size of the space they were approaching. He felt gusts of breeze on his face. There were thousands of intense points of light. Five generations of his kin had never seen what he was looking at right at that moment. He looked at the ladder and called out,
‘The last three rungs are missing. It looks like the top of the ladder melted away.’
‘How far is it to the top?’ Fin asked.
‘About three feet,’ he replied. He assessed the situation and suggested that they take,
‘time out.’
They all clipped onto a rung and rested. They ate a Bar and had a sip of water as they thought about the long climb, their lives, the base, and how they were going to negotiate the final few feet to the surface. Griffin was now bathed in silver starlight. He focused his headlamp on the edge.
‘That looks like solidified, molten glass along the edge there. See the way it cooled?
It’s going to be tough getting a handhold.’
‘Maybe I can lift you on my shoulders?’ suggested Fin.
‘You think you can climb with me standing on your shoulders?’
‘Yes … slowly,’ she confidently replied.
‘I just need a handhold,’ he said.
They hung there for a few more minutes and gazed in wonderment at the firmament above, still having no concept of what awaited them beyond the rim of the shaft.
Griffin’s hands were on the last rung, just three feet short of the top. The edge of the shaft opening was vertical concrete fused to solidified glass. The glass beyond the edge was covered by windblown sand. There were no handholds and the surface was slippery.
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Fin climbed up the ladder so her shoulders were level with Griffin’s feet. He lifted his left foot off the rung and gently placed it on her left shoulder. He then placed his right foot on her right shoulder. He was still holding onto the top rung.
‘How far out can you move your shoulders?’ he asked her.
Fin tightened her handgrip on the rung as she adjusted for the weight on her shoulders. She then slowly let herself hang out from the ladder until her arms were outstretched. This brought Griffin’s feet far enough out from the wall to allow him to stand without having to hold onto a rung. From now on, Fin would do the climbing for both of them. She understood that if Griffin overbalanced and fell, neither girl could stop his freefall back into the shaft.
She clenched her teeth and gave a mighty lift with her right leg. Griffin released his handhold and lifted precariously towards the top.
‘One more, please, Fin,’ he said.
Fin strained another lift and hung out as far as she could. Griffin’s eyes were now less than a foot from the edge. He could feel a cold wind blowing his hair around. The feeling was completely foreign to him. He sucked in deep lungsful of the sweetest air he had ever breathed. ‘Good filters,’ he thought.
‘One more, please, Fin.’
Fin lifted him one more rung.
‘I only have two rungs to go, Griff.’
Griffin’s head poked into a new space. He was awestruck.
‘This is the biggest chamber … there are no walls … and I can’t make out any ceiling.
One more, please, Fin.’
Fin heaved to the second-last rung. Griffin’s arms and shoulders rose above the glassy edge.
‘It’s all glass and sand … slippery … nothing to get a hold of. One last one, please, Fin.’
Fin grunted up to the last rung for her handhold. She lifted Griffin to where he was up to his waist out of the hole. He fell forward onto the slippery, sandy surface. His torso and backpack provided enough weight transference to the surface that he was able to take his weight off Fin’s shoulders and pull himself completely out of the shaft.
‘Made it!’ he yelled in a whisper.
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He felt an overpowering urge to look around, but resisted. He immediately dropped his backpack and removed his sling. He uncoiled the rope, tied the karabiner to one end and a few knots along the other. He lowered the karabiner to Fin. She clipped it to the chest-strap of her backpack. He stepped back from the hole and took a strain on the rope.
‘OK, Fin,’ he called out.
Fin transferred her weight onto the rope.
‘You OK up there? How’s the foothold?’
‘Not the best.’
She let go of the rung and took a step up. The only thing preventing her from toppling one mile into the bowels of the Earth was the rope and Griffin, slipping and sliding, on the other end of it.
Another step and her head was out. She quipped,
‘You know, Griff, this is what being born must feel like.’
One more step onto the top rung and she was out to her waist. He pulled her out the rest of the way. She rose to her feet and hugged him. ‘Thanks,’ she said. Griffin unclipped the rope from her and let it down the shaft to Tip. She clipped on and was similarly assisted to the surface.
4
For a century, nothing alive had traversed the sandy desert. Then, on one cool night, in secret, with no witnesses, the Earth gave birth to triplets. It was a couple of hours before dawn, on Thursday, September 23, 2123.
They moved away from the hole, took off their packs and stretched out on the ground.
‘ God that feels good,’ said Tip resting her head on her pack.
‘I could stay horizontal forever,’ added Fin.
‘How long did we spend on that ladder, Griff?’ Tip asked.
‘Twenty hours,’ came the weary reply.
As they lay there, they felt a slight rumble in the ground.
‘Bit of a shaker,’ said Griffin. They had experienced earthquakes in the base and were accustomed to them.
As they settled, their minds calmed and they closed their eyes and tuned into the feel and sound of something completely foreign to them. A gentle breeze soon wafted them off into an exhausted sleep.
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5
‘Don’t open your eyes,’ exclaimed Griff. ‘Do not open your eyes!’
The girls were shocked out of their deep sleep.
‘Don’t open your eyes. The light in this chamber is unbelievable. If you open your eyes everything will glare. You’ll need the shades.’
Griffin was talking about the special, dark-tinted lens attachments for their facemask goggles. In the base, the shades were mostly worn for welding and laser work.
Griffin and the girls’ eyes had never experienced more than the subdued lighting of the base and were thus completely un-adapted to the daylight on the surface.
The girls retrieved their shades and clipped them over the clear lenses. They pulled the masks over their faces and opened their eyes. The first thing they saw was Griffin wearing his shades already. They removed their headlamps, packed them away and pulled out three, black, baseball caps, each of which had a NASA logo embroidered on the front of it. Rip acquired the caps as part-payment for a job well done for a descendant of a NASA astronaut. He saved them ‘for the kids.’
It was morning twilight on Thursday, September 23, 2123. They had no way of even conceptualizing that. The sun had not yet risen. The light above the mounds in the distance enraptured them. Even with their shades on, they could marvel at the purples and reds and oranges. The whole nothingness was lighting up and the stars were disappearing.
‘The stars are fading,’ noted Tip.
‘Yes,’ Fin agreed with her head cocked back.
Suddenly, a blindingly bright point of light appeared on the horizon in the centre of the brightness.
‘Ahh, don’t look at it,’ Fin screamed, ‘it’s blinding.’
‘And it burns!’ exclaimed Tip.
They all felt the burn on their highly-sensitive, totally un-adapted skins. They pulled their hoods over their heads and turned their backs to the rising Sun. With all their skin completely covered, they sat on the ground facing west.
‘Read the Hail Mary chapter, Griff,’ requested Fin.
‘The long-shot chapter is what Rip called it.’ Griffin pulled RG3s journal out of his pack and flicked through the pages until he came to the one titled, The Hail Mary. He began to read,
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‘In the unlikely event that you have made it to the surface and are standing beside the shaft, this is for you. It is about navigation across the surface. The bright thing you can’t look at is called the Sun. It lights up everything. Where it rises, that direction is called east. It will traverse across the big nothing and touch the surface 180 degrees opposite from where it rose. That is called west. That is the way you should go. With the Sun at your back at the rise. Everything is not flat like here inside the base. You will see mounds.
They are called hills. And just when you thought that you saw the biggest mound there could be, you’ll see another one that dwarfs it. They’re called mountains. If you walk west, over the hills and mountains, you will come to the ocean. Water as far as the eye can see.
All around, whether land or water, where the big nothing meets the surface, this is called the horizon.’
‘Water for as far as the eye can see. I can’t even imagine that,’ expressed Fin.
‘I can’t imagine anything bigger than our pool,’ said Tip.
‘So that is east,’ said Griffin pointing over his shoulder with his thumb. He then looked straight ahead and asked, ‘What is this direction called?’
‘West,’ answered Fin and Tip in unison.
‘Correctomundo,’ Griffin replied. Correctomundo was a word RG3 liked to use around the kids and it stuck right through the generations. ‘The journal says we head for those mountains over there . . on the horizon.’
The girls were amused by how casually he used all the new words. He looked at them and shrugged his shoulders,
‘What? … It’s called the horizon. Haven’t you ever heard of a horizon?’
‘We’ll have to go around those mounds,’ said Tip. She pointed at the northern extremity of a spine of hills, which lay just to the south-west of their location.
‘It’s getting warmer,’ said Fin. ‘We should head off.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Griffin. ‘Let’s walk an hour and have rest time then.’
They rose to their feet and put their packs on their backs. Griffin helped each girl with her pack.
‘Thank you, Griffonickel.’
‘Thanks, Griffi.’
Both girls hugged him.
They set off headed due west, across the lifeless, featureless, debris-strewn, flat plain, following their long shadows.
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They felt a little stiff at the beginning. Gradually, though, their slender, sinewy bodies loosened up and straightened into a purposeful walking gait.
They were tall and leanly muscled. This was due to the ‘correct’ cocktail of growth hormones in the food bars. All the kids in the base grew tall and lean, and energy efficient.
6
The base had a military-only section. Right from the beginning, when it was being secretly constructed, no expense was spared on the scientific laboratories and medical facilities. Everyone was health-checked regularly and progress statistics kept on their condition. All in all, the system was surprisingly benevolent. It tried to keep everyone healthy, both physically and mentally, and have them enjoy a long, productive life, with healthy children.
Part of the research-thrust was into better, more efficient nutrition. The Food Bar Project was considered the blue-ribbon research project in the base. The big breakthrough came in 2101, 78 years after the collapse of tunnel one and five years before Griffin’s birth. They named it Energite, and technically it was not a food, and not a drug either, it was something in-between. It was most ‘efficient’ in newborns, through their mothers’ milk, and children who were weaned on it. A tiny amount of it provided a huge amount of slow-release energy. Energite allowed them to reduce rations from six bars per day to two bars per day, and everyone felt better. The classified additive, called sponge, had also been included in the bars. This was a self-balancing, water-retention drug, which cut the requirement to drink water by 75 percent. The Food Bars had evolved to be 98 percent ‘burnt up’ in the body, substantially reducing latrine visits. Waste minimization, in general, was a primary objective when they began planning the base back in 1947, and human waste minimization was on top of the list.
Although many in the base liked to swim in the pool, there was never any racing.
Sport of any kind was prohibited. This was done chiefly as an energy conserving measure.
All elevated physical activity needed to be associated with functional work, although they could never stop the kids playing their games.
Part of the daily work routine was riding the generator bikes for two hours. The generator bikes re-charged the batteries powering the base. This, though, was just a token measure compared to the main power supply that came from the nuclear reactor.
The ranks liked the bikes because they kept everyone fit.
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7
‘It’s such a biiiiiiiig chamber,’ Fin said with a voice full of wonderment.
They walked with an easy, smooth motion with the golden orb directly at their back.
Their tough, light-grey, euro-cut, Gore-Tex-Titanium (GTT) overalls shielded their bodies from the burning rays. Their hoods completely covered their heads and the facemasks their faces. They wore dark-grey, GTT gloves and carried a GTT backpack. Their ‘shades’
allowed them to see without being blinded in the glare.
Their skins were so non-adapted to sunlight that even a few minutes exposure would have induced painful burns. The girls’ skins were alabaster in colour while Griffin’s was light tan due to the African-American ancestry on his grand-grandfather’s side.
The Gore-Tex-Titanium, making up their apparel, was the latest evolution of the miracle fabric. It was foil thin, light, waterproof, it breathed, it stretched, and it was almost indestructible. It could not even be penetrated by a 22-caliber bullet, fired point blank, and could not be cut by scissors or a knife. A suit made of GTT kept its wearer cool in heat and warm in cold. Special laser cutters, sewing machines and thread needed to be used to tailor items out of the fabric. Rip serviced those machines and, over time, traded his services for the three sets of GTT suits, gloves and backpacks.
The suits velcroed in front, from crotch to collar. They wore shorts and T-shirts underneath. For extreme cold, they carried lightweight, full-body, thermal underwear in their packs.
They walked west, toward the hills.
‘So, this is the surface,’ said Fin.
‘And all around us is the horizon,’ said Tip.
Griffin looked up and said,
‘And that is the great blue nothingness. It is … it is … incomprehensible.’
‘The sky,’ said Fin.
‘And the great light that shines … it’s so bright …’
‘That is the Sun,’ said Tip.
After an hour of walking, they stopped. They looked immediately ahead. All they could see was featureless, sandy, rock-strewn, vast plain with patches of exposed glass.
The Sun was higher in the sky now and was beginning to really bake.
‘There is no shelter from the light,’ said Fin.
‘We could erect our bivouacs,’ suggested Tip.
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‘Good idea,’ Griffin agreed.
They dropped their backpacks and opened them. They retrieved a thin, triangular sheet of GTT each, incorporating eyelets, four tent pegs, a length of rope and a light, extendable pole. They placed the sheets on the ground and hammered in the pegs with the side of the pick-mattock. They extended the poles and propped up the openings of the bivouacs. There was enough room for them to crawl inside and be out of the Sun. They had a sip of water.
‘We might be better off travelling in the dark,’ said Fin.
‘You could be right there,’ responded Griffin.
The three half-tents were the only feature on an otherwise featureless plain. With their backs to the Sun, they were the only shelter from the glaring big nothing.
The air above the ground began to shimmer in the heat. They sat quietly until finally, one by one, they all lay down and went to sleep.
8
‘Aghhhhh!’ exclaimed Griffin, shocked from a deep sleep.
The girls woke up.
‘The Sun, it’s moved. It’s shining into the tents.’
‘We’ll have to turn them around,’ said Fin.
They had slept all morning like babes. They would have slept right through the afternoon had the Sun not woken them. They were really fatigued and some of their muscles ached from the extended exertion on the mile-deep ladder.
They turned their bivouacs around. The Sun was still high in the sky and there was just enough shade under the thin, reflective half-tents to give them complete shelter.
It was a brilliant, sunny, September day in the desert. The sky was cloudless and the wind gusted from many directions. It produced sounds in their ears the like of which they had never heard before. They lay down and drifted back to sleep.
…….
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