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It was mid-morning on Wednesday, September 30, 2123. Tip and Fin cried as Griffin and Noah entered Noah’s intergalactic cruiser. Griffin’s weakness of movement was plainly apparent.
‘Good luck,’ Trixie called out.
Everyone mumbled ‘good luck’, or something to that effect. They began to appreciate the seriousness of the situation. Some of them even understood the life or death nature of the mission Noah was undertaking and that it was quite possible that they would never see young Griffin again.
As they watched the hatch close, they were amazed at how quickly, and how much, they took a liking to Griffin and the girls. Also, as they thought about these things, a realisation of what the young trio represented began to dawn on them. These three kids were the last survivors of the human race that did not have the benefit of alien time travel technology. These three had to do it the hard way. They had to pass through the extinction-level event and then survive, through five generations, in some deep, underground rat hole. Then, one hundred years later, as the life-support machinery began to fail, they had to find a way out and escape to the surface. And out of eight billion people, only three remained, not counting the time shifters. In awe they realised at that moment that these three kids were very special indeed. Noah realised it way back in the Mojave Desert. That is why he would have done anything to save Griffin’s life, a life threatened by the stupidity of his ancestors. That thought, in Noah’s mind, was always accompanied by a small wave of anger.
Once in the ship, Griffin removed his backpack. He pulled the hood off his head and the facemask from his face. He did not need these inside the ship because the light was subdued enough for his sensitive skin and eyes to handle.
‘The light in here is very similar to that in the base,’ he informed Noah.
He stored his facemask into his pack and retrieved his NASA cap, which he placed on his head. He then secured the backpack in a storage pocket on the side of the inner hull where Noah suggested.
‘It’s nice to see your face,’ said Noah.
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‘It’s a relief to get the mask off,’ Griffin replied.
The silver ship rose into the sky not making a sound. When it rose to well above the treetops it shot upward and out of sight like it had got shot out of a cannon. It seemed to disappear in less than a millisecond. Had the Pinecrest group been able to see it, they would have seen it come to a stop, after one second, roundabout fifty-thousand feet above the surface of the Moon.
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‘This is the Moon,’ Noah said as casual as can be. He then turned the ship around.
‘And that is where we came from.’
‘It’s round,’ said Griffin almost too unamazed.
‘Er, that is affirmative,’ replied Noah.
Noah’s immediate intent was to probe into the nature of Griffin’s perception of reality. He fully understood that two people may be looking at exactly the same thing but be seeing something completely different. It all depended on their history of experience.
Every new experience was put up against the bank of memories one carried within him.
And the perception, translation if you like, of the experience was totally dependent on prior experiences. Noah needed to know where Griffin was at, mentally speaking. He figured that he should get the basic gist of it by the time they made it to Rama, about one hour away in terms of time.
It became evident to Noah that Griffin’s total lack of dismay at arriving at the Moon in just under one second was due to the fact that everything was new to him. He didn’t know how long it should take. He had no idea what was normal because, Noah realised now, Griffin’s whole universe, for virtually all his life, was a hole in the ground. So, because everything was new to him, he cleverly adapted to it by accepting that it was all as it should be. Noah looked at Griffin’s face. He noticed that it remained completely nonplussed, calmly observing the floating spheres rendered perfectly on the holographic display. He thought nothing about his massless state either, or the velocity of flight, or anything else for that matter. Griffin simply existed in a subdued state of wonderment where nothing was amazing because everything was amazing.
‘Tell me, Griffin,’ Noah asked, ‘did you know anything of the world above while you were underground?’
Griffin calmly turned to Noah and looked him square in the eyes. To Noah the look and demeanour of his young companion was far too much like that of a wiser, older man,
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not that of a seventeen-year-old kid. Noah’s impression was not only derived through the physical plane but the mind plane as well.
‘No one knew anything of it,’ Griffin replied. ‘Some of us, a few of us, only heard myths which were read to us as children from RG3s journal. We were read incredible tales of sky and wind and sun and moon and stars. We heard of trees and animals. You cannot imagine how enchanted we were as children listening to those myths, although we didn’t ever really completely believe in them, not at first. They were just too …’ Griffin searched for a word, ‘fantastic.’ He continued, ‘We were told of a world above where there was no ceiling. We couldn’t even imagine that. All we ever knew, all our lives, was ceiling, you see, Noah, and we were told that the sky, the great nothing, went on forever. Even the word was foreign, how much more the concept. There was no such thing as forever in the base and the base was our whole world, from birth to death.’ Emotion began to creep into Griffin’s voice. Noah asked,
‘Are you talking about RG3, the quarterback who became president?’
‘The very one as I have been told. He was my grand, grand, grand, grandfather, give or take a grand. That last part has been a running gag for as long as I can remember. He wrote the journal and kept it secret. It was passed from father to son until it got to me. I am now its custodian. I have it here. It’s in my backpack over there.’ Griffin pointed to his pack in the storage pocket.
‘May I see it?’ Noah requested.
‘Sure,’ said Griffin. He floated out of his seat and retrieved the journal from the pack.
‘Wow, I feel like nothing,’ he observed.
‘That is the feeling of being massless. Er, don’t try to understand what I just said except that it’s part of how we travel, that is all.’
Griffin returned to his seat and handed Noah the old journal. ‘It’s a hundred years old,’ he said, ‘so please be careful with it.’
‘Believe me, Griffin, I and my people shall revere this document more that you.’
Griffin looked deeply into Noah’s iridescent, almost-shining, eyes. In an apologetic, but assertive, tone, he said,
‘I cannot let you keep it. It is to stay in my possession until I give it to my firstborn son.’
‘Oh, of course, of course, Griffin, I … we … would never … may I have a quick glance through it?’
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‘Sure.’
Noah turned some pages. ‘It’s handwritten,’ he observed full of veneration.
‘Yes.’
‘And there are drawings.’
‘It was kept secret from everyone in the base, especially the military.’
‘Really? Oh, look here … a poem.’ Noah read,
‘It matters not
What is going on
It matters not
If the road is short or long
It’s even not important
If we are weak or strong
As long as we remember
And accept with grace
That His will be done
And that the road of truth
Will lead us home’
‘That is truly beautiful, Griffin. Your grandfather, many times over, seems to have been a man of faith. I can sense his strength of spirit even now.’
‘Yes, well, we certainly still love and revere our dear grandfather, all our grandfathers. Without them and the journal we would have never, even remotely, imagined the surface, or anything else beyond the base. Everyone in the base, except for Rip’s family and my family, believed that the base was all there had ever been, all there was and all there ever would be. The true knowledge died out before I was born. In the end, RG3’s journal remained the last and only link to the truth.’
‘Did the military know about the surface?’ Noah asked.
‘It’s hard to say. Maybe some of the top ranks knew, but I doubt if the regulars knew.
There must have been secret documents buried away in their archives.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Noah. ‘And tell me, you mentioned that the equipment was failing when you escaped.’
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‘Yes. You see the twin’s father was a very sought-after maintenance man because he was so competent at his job. He really understood the state of the life-support machinery, and he told us that it was all falling apart. That is why he prepared us and sent us in search of the way out of the base and up to the surface. Even that word, the surface, did not exist in the language generally spoken in the base. It just did not exist. We only found it in RG3s journal.’
Emotion filled Noah’s heart as he listened and attempted to imagine what a hundred years deep underground, with no known way out, could possibly feel like. He closed the journal and handed it back to Griffin.
‘One day,’ he said very respectfully, ‘when things settle down and life becomes routine, we would like to copy it, but always in your presence. I promise you this one thing, Griffin, no one will ever attempt to take this precious thing from you.’
‘Thank you, Noah.’
Griffin replaced the journal in his pack.
For a brief moment, Noah had forgotten that Griffin’s life hung by a thread. The overwhelming urgency and priority of the mission re-focussed itself in Noah’s mind as he watched him awkwardly return to his seat.
A lime-green X suddenly popped up pretty much dead centre of the screen. It represented the distant location of Rama. Noah looked at it and said,
‘It’s a two-stage process from here, Griffin, sub-G to the outer limits of your solar system, then G to the outer limits of ours.’
‘What is G, Noah?’
‘It is the speed of light squared, which happens to be the velocity of a gravity particle. Double Dutch? Don’t worry, I’ll sit down with you one day and try to explain some of these things. Basically, G is the cosmic speed limit as we understand things at the moment. In terms of gravity sailing, which is what we do, G is as fast as we can go.’
‘Double Dutch? What is double Dutch?’ Griffin queried.
‘Oh, that’s right, for you there was no surface, therefore no countries. Do you know what country means?’
‘I’ve never heard the word,’ Griffin replied.
‘Not even from the journal?’
‘No.’
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‘Hmm,’ Noah speculated, ‘I suspect that RG3 might have dreamed about a world with no countries, so he avoided the word altogether in order to not introduce the concept. He would have been pleased with us, I think, because that is what we have on Rama, no countries and no governments. Everyone takes care of themselves, and each other.’
…….
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