Death of a Planet Read online

  Death of a Planet

  Preface.

  Earth is faced with total destruction by a threat from outer space which never in the entire history of the planet has been experienced by its inhabitants; neither man nor beast.

  Can Pat Buchanan and his strange young associate together with a motley crew of scientists, industrialists and national governments do anything to avoid a total catastrophe?

  Messages from the author.

  1. When I was editing this ‘masterpiece’ prior to publication I noticed several words and phrases, in common use in the English language, which I realised matched the titles of Beatles songs.

  ‘Ticket to ride’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘Help’, ‘Get back’ and ‘Let it be’ are just a five examples.

  It was not intentional, but it made me curious, so I obtained a list of their titles and did a word search. I was astonished to find no fewer than eighty-seven of their titles scattered throughout the narrative. There may even be more; my list was not comprehensive since their portfolio of songs is so vast.

  If you happen to be a Beatles fan reading this you might want to test your knowledge of their work and see how many you can spot.

  Otherwise just try and enjoy my first attempt at science fiction writing. You might find the storyline original since I have never read a Sci Fi book to colour my thinking.

  2. This is a work of fiction. Except in the case of historical fact, any character resemblance to real life individuals either by name or appearance, living or dead, is purely coincidental and a product of the author’s imagination.

  3. This publication is written in English using UK writing conventions. What you may perceive as spelling or grammar errors are not necessarily so. Thank you for your understanding. Enjoy your read.

  Copyright © James Duggan – 1st November 2018

  All rights reserved in accordance with the copyright, designs and patents act 1988

  The Author

  Jim is not a new author. However, following his only other fiction novel ‘An Impossible Liaison’ this is his first venture into science fiction. His fertile imagination is allowed to run riot whilst describing the challenges facing the main protagonists and the evolving relationships between them and others in the tale.

  He has previously written nine books on ‘Learner Driver and Instructor Training’, two on ‘Poetry and Verse’ and a couple on his ‘Interpretation of the Universe’, plus one other on ‘Veneers and Laminated Plastics’.

  If you are interested in any of the subjects mentioned all his publications can be found in the Amazon Kindle Book Store.

  Just enter James Duggan into the search bar which will then display all his publications. If you wish to see his full author biography, just click on his name beneath any of his titles.

  Extracts From Within.

  This was one such time and it would prove to be the beginning of the most significant event in the entire history of the world.

  ***

  When called upon to do so, amazing things can be achieved by the human species.

  ***

  Deciding who lives and who dies is something no one should have to do to innocent people.

  ***

  The race was on and with the finishing tape in sight. The prize was life itself.

  ***

  “Well Charlie, in the entire recorded history of the planet there has only been a handful of days when one conflict or another was not raging somewhere on its surface. It’s taken the end of the world to stop the self inflicted carnage and focus the minds of the people on the precious nature of life.”

  ***

  After wandering the surface of the planet for only a couple of hundred thousand years in the whole four and a half billion years of its existence humans would be doomed.

  ***

  When the moment of truth came all they would be able to see was the fierce light of the explosion signalling the death of the planet.

  ***

  Those who were in the know were able to reassure the worriers that the likelihood of hitting anything in the Asteroid Belt was about the same as dropping a pebble from thirty thousand feet and it hitting a bee in flight on the way down.

  ***

  The words appeared simultaneously on every monitor, television screen, laptop, tablet and mobile phone around the world; whether they were switched on or not.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  First sighting.

  The recognition.

  The dawning.

  The revelation.

  The incident room.

  The grand scheme.

  Operation migration.

  The Cube.

  The long wait.

  Live and let die.

  The cube of life.

  The pursuit.

  The wooing.

  Hope springs eternal.

  A private enterprise.

  Home from home.

  Outrageous physics.

  Thor.

  The strangest thing.

  The Strike.

  The race is on.

  The abduction.

  The exodus.

  The short wait.

  The diamond ring.

  Message from the author.

  Characters.

  Conclusion.

  Other publications.

  FIRST SIGHTING.

  THE silence was deafening in NASA’s Hubble control room at Goddard Space Flight Centre in Baltimore, Maryland. A dozen or so top astronomers sat focussed on their screens intent upon their various tasks.

  It was 4am and Kimimaru Takayama’s eyes were rapidly glazing over as he struggled to stay awake on what they called the ghost shift. It was the shift nobody volunteered for in the normal course of events, but the facility was a 24/7 operation. He was only there as a favour to his close friend and colleague Annie Casper who wanted a weeks holiday in Hawaii.

  “It’s a bargain.” she had said, pleadingly.

  How could he refuse her big blue eyes behind those long fluttering eyelashes? He had agreed without fully assessing the implications and was now beginning to regret it as the nights dragged on towards the weekend. He was looking forward to a round of golf in two days time, but it had been a hard day’s night and he was now wondering whether he would be able to do it justice. He pondered the thought trying to decide whether the better decision would be to cancel and reschedule it for some other time.

  “I’m so tired.” he muttered to himself.

  His golfing buddy would surely understand.

  He shifted uneasily in his swivel chair in front of an array of computer screens and swung around a few times to try and get the blood flowing. He needed to rekindle his enthusiasm for the job. He and the rest of the crew were there that night to monitor the data coming in from the Hubble Deep Space Telescope which had been trained on a segment of the night sky towards the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.

  Precious time had been booked months previously by a group of astronomers based at Jodrell Bank in England who were trying to get the definitive answers to a long disputed question.

  “When is a planet not a planet, or even just an asteroid?”

  Kimimaru’s job was not to answer that question, but to see that the ‘scope was functioning to its optimum capacity and to ensure that the research group had the best possible chance of reaching a satisfactory conclusion. To the uninitiated the work could be mind bogglingly boring, but to those fascinated by the mysteries of the universe it could be enthralling.

  His little spin around seemed to do the trick and as he sipped coffee from a styrene beaker he once more focussed his eyes on the screens in front of him. Something caught his attention. He put the beaker down and leaned forward on his elbows. His body tensed up with the conc
entration as he scanned one of the screens.

  “That image is different.” he thought.

  “But what’s different about it?”

  He strained his eyes in search of an answer. Like a man challenged with the task of spotting indiscernible differences in some photographic competition he brought up the image of the same grid from the previous night’s observations on an adjacent screen. He studied them for several minutes swinging his head back and forth between the two like a spectator in line with the net at a tennis match.

  “Ah, I wonder.” he murmured.

  He brought up the same image from the night before that and placed it on another screen adjacent to the most recent one and went through the same routine. Finally he sat back in his chair satisfied that he had spotted something significant which should not be kept to himself.

  “Hey, Mister Buchanan, come and have a look at this.”

  Pat Buchanan was the head of the whole operation. He would not normally be in attendance, especially on the ghost shift, but he was a hands-on leader who now and then would feel the need to bond with his crew. This was one such time and it would prove to be the beginning of the most significant event in the entire history of the world.

  Pat wearily wrenched his six feet three inch frame out of his chair. The Irishman stood and stretched to his full height trying to loosen the stiffness in his muscles and give the impression he was fully awake. He was a large man by any standard with a shock of salt and pepper hair atop an equally large brain. He was very well read; not just on run of the mill paperback writer material, but on a broad range of scientific and academic subjects. He was respected throughout the world for his knowledge and work in the field of astronomy.

  He was a man who was punching well below his weight and with his superior intellect and sharp brain he could have been at the top of some international conglomerate. Why he was doing this job nobody could tell. His closest friend, Kimimaru, was of the opinion that Buck had nothing to prove to the world and consequentially he would die a satisfied man. It was a theory he kept to himself and if anyone asked he would simply reply, ‘Let it be, you know how laid back the Irish are.’

  Buchanan ambled casually over to Kimimaru’s work station wondering what could be so important as to require his attention rather than that of another colleague in the room.

  “Hey, what’s up doc?” he said trying, and failing miserably, to imitate Bugs Bunny.

  He had spent two thirds of his life in America where his surroundings and associations had chiselled away at his Irish accent, but there was still a hint of his original brogue there which betrayed his origins.

  “Mister Buchanan I think you should take a close look at this.”

  “Charlie. We’ve known each other for twenty years or more. Our kids went to school together for Christ’s sake and still you call me Mister Buchanan. How many more times do I have to tell you, it’s Buck? Call me Buck; everyone else does.”

  “Okay Mister Buchanan. But I still think you need to look at this.”

  Buck sighed heavily. Charlie was obviously a lost cause steeped in childhood as he was in the traditional Japanese culture and etiquette. It didn’t cross his mind that calling the second generation Japanese American anything other than his given name was in some way contradictory to his formal upbringing.

  It was he who had christened him Charlie in the first place claiming there were ‘way too many vowels in Kimimaru Takayama’, not to mention too many syllables to get his Gaelic tongue around.

  “Okay Charlie. What am I looking at?”

  “Look at these two images Mister Buchanan. Tell me what you see different about them.”

  Buck leaned across Charlie who rolled away smartly to avoid being crushed by the huge frame of his boss. He studied the images closely with squinted eyes. Switching back and forth between the two until he thought he could see a difference. The inner light in his head flickered, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself to an assistant by getting the challenge wrong; or worse still having to admit to seeing nothing at all.

  “Hey Molly, get your ass over here.”

  Molly Flanagan jolted upright and turned sheepishly to look for the source of the command. As her short quickening steps carried her tentatively across the floor she wondered whether Buck had caught her out looking at social media rather than the wonders of the images beamed from across the universe.

  Molly needn’t have worried. She was a protégé of Bucks. He had persuaded her family to let her leave her little village of Feakle in West Clare in Ireland when she was barely twenty-two years of age to join him in his research in America. The codicil was that he looked out for her wellbeing at all times.

  He was glad to do so since it was her sharp mind for all things astronomical which he wished to tap into; not to mention in this instance her equally sharp young, and almost emerald green, eyes.

  “Spot the difference.” he said bluntly, pointing at the screen.

  She looked at him questioningly.

  “Tell me why. What am I looking for?”

  “Never mind why. Just do it for me.” said Buck, impatiently.

  He wasn’t used to having his instructions questioned. Molly only got away with it because of their custodian and ward relationship.

  Within seconds Molly picked up a pencil and pointed to a faint pinprick of light to the upper left corner of the screen.

  “Well, two nights ago that was barely a single pixel. Now it appears to be two or three pixels. Whatever it is, it’s growing.” she said, triumphantly.

  “Hmmm. Yes it is. I thought that too. Do you agree Charlie?”

  Charlie nodded without commenting. He didn’t want to pre-judge what he was thinking without further analysis. Phenomena like that usually meant something was heading in their direction; perhaps a wayward asteroid.

  Buck rose up to his full height and stayed silent for a full half minute as he stroked his chin in deep thought. Eventually he reached a decision.

  “Charlie, Molly, I want you to drop whatever it is you are doing and look into this. I’ll tell the others to monitor your stations in the meantime. I have a bad feeling in my water about this. I don’t want a speck of dust on the mirror screwing up the research of our friends at Jodrell Bank. We’d never live it down; worse still if it turned out to be a wayward microbe growing somewhere on the mirror or the lens. I want answers yesterday.”

  “Okay Mister Buchanan. Let’s get to work Molly.”

  It was a chance for both of them to get their teeth into something worthwhile instead of simply monitoring the day to day operation of a piece of perfectly functioning orbiting space hardware.

  Buck retreated to his desk with a parting shot.

  “Either way we don’t have the finance or the resources right now to mount a corrective operation like we did before.”

  He was referring to a mission in the early life of Hubble to put right deficiencies caused by an incorrectly ground mirror. He sat quietly brooding with fingers crossed and hoping against hope that nothing so serious would happen on his watch. There was little he could do but wait.

  He had complete faith in his chosen pairing to get to the bottom of the problem; if indeed it was a problem at all. It could be something simple in the earth based equipment which could be easily fixed. He leaned back with the spring loaded swivel chair creaking under the strain and with hands clasped behind his head reflected on what got him into all this in the first place.

  ***

  Patrick Buchanan was born and bred on a farm in central Ireland within hurling distance of the world famous racetrack known as The Curragh in Kildare. He had a love of horses and as a boy it was expected he would one day become a race jockey. It was not to be.

  As he grew older he grew bigger…and bigger. His ambitions of being a jockey were shattered as he not only grew bigger, but heavier. There had been successful six foot tall jockeys before, but none built like the proverbial brick shithouse. They fed them well
off the land in those days and it was clear he was still growing.

  With his ambitions dashed he turned his attention to less earthbound pastimes. One of which was star gazing. On a clear summers evening when vision was unhindered by local artificial light he would find a suitable hayrick in the meadow. Climbing on top he would hollow out a nest and lie for hours on his back looking up at the wonders of the universe.

  It was his ‘eagle’s eyrie’ as he put it, where he could lie undisturbed as he pondered whilst on his imaginary magical mystery tour amongst the stars what life and the universe was all about. He knew he would never know the answers to all his questions, but was determined one day to at least add to existing knowledge.

  As luck would have it his family finally gave up on farming and moved to America in search of a better life. They settled in Massachusetts where young Buck won a football scholarship to its Institute of Technology. His football career was cut short when he suffered a horrible knee injury, but his sharp brain and keen interest in astronomy was recognised by the powers that be and he was allowed to finish his degree course which led eventually to where he now was.

  ***

  THE RECOGNITION.

  TWO days passed without any further developments. Buck was getting the fidgets. There hadn’t been any complaints from Jodrell Bank. However, he knew the longer the phenomenon remained unexplained it would not be any time at all before it was spotted by other observers around the world. Even some keen eyed amateurs might pick up on it and awkward questions would be asked.