“Rose,” Nick said firmly. “There is no time for arguments. I just perceived a change in Comet 195F’s trajectory. Over the years I had thought, if the comet were indeed heading to Earth, scientists would have figured it out long before it posed an immediate threat. But I didn’t know there is remote control.”
Rose gasped. “You mean, the comet is coming at us, now?”
“Not yet. It’ll take a while for it to finish the turn. We have some time, but not much. There is a toolbox in the closet next to the door. I believe you can find an axe inside.”
Rose left the counter and walked to the closet. “It won’t work!” she heard Eve shouting behind but ignored her. Nick was right. It took her no effort to find the axe and bring it back.
“Now what?” she asked, suddenly realizing what he was asking her to do.
“Crack the counter,” said Nick, “so that it can no longer send signals to the comet.”
“You stupid humans!” Eve cried. “You have no idea what you are facing at!”
“Do it, Rose. Don’t listen to her.”
Rose knew that was the right thing to do. “But, does that mean I’ll have to kill you?”
She thought she had lost him. She had missed him terribly in the first year after he left, but slowly the wound began healing. Time dilutes everything. It blanches colors from old photos, numbs our senses, persistently convinces us that nothing in the past is unforgettable. Now all of a sudden she had him back. Brain copy or not, he was the Nick who had shared her success and happiness during the good days, and made the bad ones more tolerable.
“I can’t do it.” She looked away.
“You can’t kill someone who’s already dead, Rose. Would you rather die with the rest of the world just to have me live happily ever after inside a container?”
Rose raised the axe and swung it down at the counter. Nothing happened, except that her arms were shaking with sours. The counter remained an impeccable gem.
“We call it Maura’s Gate,” Eve said, her voice carrying a type of indifference usually found on people who talk about dreaded things—things that they wish to stay away from by being verbally distant.
“At the time it happened, I was out for mining in another system, with a total of twenty-three ships from five countries. When we came back four months later, our world had been turned into hell …”
As Eve said the words, her large blue eyes widened, like a mirror reflecting a horrible scene taking place in front of it. “Sky disappeared. A thick orange mist filled everywhere, blocking your vision and muffling your voice. Purple lighting slithered inside the mist. If you got hit, your skin would start bubbling. Your eyeballs burst. The unbearable pain would turn you into a zombie. You attacked one another for no reasons, or hurtle your car on the street until it crashed into something …”
“What caused this to happen?” Rose asked. She had to interrupt because she could no longer stand the description.
“Gravity is essentially curved spacetime around large masses. Just like the rupture of geological faults can cause earthquakes, space can be torn by interactions among two or more enormous celestial groups. We call it a gate because it appears as a thin layer. Terrible things will happen when a planet travels from one side of the plane to the other.”
With the sadness on her face, she now looked more like a human than a robot. “We didn’t know this when it occurred. By the time we arrived home, the mist had largely receded. I found my fiancé on the street, beating an old lady with another guy. I tried to stop him before all of us got hit by a truck …”
“So you think the same thing may happen to us?” Nick asked.
“Ten years from now, your planet, the whole solar system, will go through a similar gate. That was what we figured out after half of us had decided to settle here. The other half had left for Mollus 17b. So we created the anti-gravity bacteria. This was one of the few techniques we had in hand. And you know why this thing looks like a bar counter? It used to be a bar counter on one of our ships. I was chosen for the brain copy since I was dying from the earlier accident.”
“Can’t we hide underground to avoid the mist?” Nick asked the question Rose also had in her mind.
“Some of you may survive the mist, but all the plants and animals are going to be killed. Oceans and rivers will be filled with dead bodies. Trees no longer produce oxygen. Is this how you wish to end your life?”
Nick exchanged looks with Rose before he said to Eve, “No matter what, we don’t want to give up yet. We may or may not find a solution by that time, but I can guarantee I’m representing most of my fellows.”
After a moment’s muse, Eve said, “I can’t shut the program at this stage, but there is a way for you to destroy it.”
A blue line emerged on the counter’s surface next to where Nick was standing. Beneath the line a cubic box with sophisticated substructures was highlighted amid the pink material.
“That’s the battery, which can be charged through the interface marked by the line. The only brittle spot on the surface.” After Eve had said the words, she turned around and began walking away.
“Thank you, Eve!” Nick said to her back.
A sour pain grabbed Rose’s chest. “Nick, I know you love her, don’t you?” she said loudly.
Eve came to a stop but didn’t look back. “Love is not about learning each other’s secrets, or sticking together every living day. You think I didn’t know that?”
With that said, her image disappeared.
“Rose, be quick!” Nick urged.
Forcing herself not to look at him, Rose raised the axe and hewed at the blue line. This time a notable crack occurred, and darkness was spreading out. She repeated it, more darkness. With every cut she felt as if she were chopping his flesh. After a while, she took a break, seemingly catching her breath, but was in fact trying to delay the inevitable.
“Rose,” she heard him calling her gently. “Remember the first time we went out to dinner? You were wearing a blue-printed dress, weren’t you?”
She turned to look at his image, half fading, and he was looking back. For a short moment, she no longer remembered the surroundings, or the catastrophe that loomed ahead. She was back to the twenty-six-year-old girl, sitting at an Italian restaurant and having a seemingly ordinary dinner that had determined her life for the next twenty years …
“Yes,” she murmured. Then she bit her lips, raised the axe, and made a hard hit. The entire counter flashed for a few times before it went completely lightless.
She dropped the axe and collapsed to the ground.
* * *
“Devin, Kenton wants to speak to you.”
Inside the bridge of Rosetta, Devin was sitting in front of the navigation panel, his hands pushing on two levers. Having flown away from the comet and turned around, the ship was now accelerating toward it.
“Crash anticipated in four minutes!” A mechanical voice blared inside the room. “Please change your course!”
That was why a person had to remain here. Devin didn’t need to navigate the ship. He had simply locked the ship’s destination to the lander’s current position. However, without someone manually pushing the levers, the ship’s Collision Avoidance System would have overturned the preset destination and improvised a different course.
“I don’t want to talk to him,” he said to the intercom.
Whoever wasn’t physically here wouldn’t be able to grasp the situation. He had no time left for explanations. And for the time being, Devin didn’t feel like talking to anybody. Not even to Tracy. What would he say to her? That I’m sorry? How pale the word sorry is, when you know what the other person is supposed to take!
The warning signal reoccurred over and over, and the levers trembled in his hands. The image of the comet quickly grew in his view and filled the front window. Now he could even discern the lander on the surface. To protect Earth from a lethal bomb, he himself had become a bomb …
“Devin! Stop it and come back!” he heard Connor and Matt shouting in the speaker.
“What?”
“We think the comet has ceased turning!”
Devin checked a monitor on his right. The comet did seem to fly in a straight line now. If it remained this way, it would bypass Earth at a close distance but wouldn’t crash onto it. He then looked through the front window. The several exhaust holes were no longer spouting gases.
It didn’t make sense, but he had no time to dwell on that. He reversed the acceleration and pulled on a different lever. The image in front of him changed rapidly as the ship slowed down and veered in an upward direction. Up, up! He prayed. He was never trained as a pilot. He held the levers with all his strength and closed his eyes.
Somebody must have helped him. He remembered the earlier conversations. Who were those people? What happened to them? Whether he survived or not, he knew he probably would never find out.
When Rose arrived at her company on Monday afternoon, she was uncertain of what to expect. Today could have been marked as the third post-apocalyptic day in the modern human history. Were coworkers celebrating that they could still see one another? Friends and relatives making long-distance calls and speculations of all the “what-ifs”? In fact, would anyone even come to work besides her?
To her surprise, nobody acted differently. It was just like a typical business day. More specifically, a typical Monday filled with aversions of a full week’s work ahead, as well as fatigues left by a convivial weekend.
Upon entering her office, the secretary told her that Mr. Perez had called during lunch time.
“I’ll call him back.” She headed to her room and heard footsteps catching up from behind. Needless to say, it was Leo.
“Rose, you’ve got to hear about this movie! And I’m sure you’ll like it. It has space travel in it.”
She paused at the door, turned, and put a hand on the doorknob.
“A team of miners arrive at a barren planet. After they’ve been digging for a day, they suddenly fall into a giant underground facility that has a zoo, a few real-estate agencies, and an interstellar strip club—”
Rose slammed the door in his face.
She sat down at her desk and turned on the TV. A news channel was conducting a remote interview. The speaker was a man probably in his late fifties, with stiff gray hair, dark eyes carrying an air of unassailable authority, and the name Kenton Clifton written below his face.
“Mr. Clifton,” a woman said rapidly in the background. “Over the weekend we have received thousands of reports from professional and amateur organizations, as well as individuals, claiming that they had observed unusual activity with Comet 195F. Is there a scientific explanation for this phenomenon?”
“First, we admit that over a short period of time, Comet 195F had deviated from its presumed trajectory. It was possibly due to some unknown force that had transiently appeared in the nearby space. But other than that, it’s an ordinary and almost mundane object. You can find all the test results on our—”
“That sounds scary!” the woman interrupted. “What kind of force was it?”
“We don’t know the answer, but it’s not as disconcerting as it sounds. Remember, the comet nucleus is tiny. Similar forces would not have generated any measurable effect on Earth or even on our moon.”
“Hmm … Could it have been a spontaneously-created small black hole, as some people have suggested?”
Kenton shrugged.
“How are the three astronomers who have landed on the comet? Did they find anything unusual?”
“They came home Saturday evening, all in good conditions. In fact, only two landed on the comet. When the deviation occurred, the two tried to identify the cause but nothing unusual popped up.”
“There are also hypotheses saying that the comet has been in someone’s control.”
“Controlled?” Kenton chuckled. “By whom? People have wild imaginations.”
Rose turned off the TV and sat back in her chair. Liar! She called in her head, but she probably would’ve said the same thing if she were in his position.
She grabbed the phone from her table and dialed Perez’s number. “I’m sorry, Dave. There was a personal issue I had to deal with over the weekend.”
And it wasn’t over yet, she reflected. The Rosetta project had ended, but soon she would have to start contacting those guys about the so-called Maura’s Gate, and she didn’t look forward to it. How were they going to react? This time she would not be welcomed as a generous donor.
“Whatever it was,” he said, “I hope it went well.”
That was why she liked him. He never pressed her for things she didn’t want to talk about.
“How about this weekend?” he asked. “Would you like to deal with another personal issue?”
“Only if it’s pleasant.” And she was sure it would be, given what had just happened.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Your boat.”
“Out to the ocean?”
Rose revolved her chair to face the glass wall behind her. The autumn sky was a refreshing blue, but she thought she could see Comet 195F traveling in the dark space toward the sun, with its sparkling long tail dragged behind. A few months later, it would turn around the sun and head off to the periphery of the solar system, back to a vapid stone, back to its lonely journey, flying, in a cold abyss long after Rose and the others died. But prior to that, there would be a moment of glory, a moment of splendor, though not as bright or eternal as a star, still memorable enough for the thousands of years that were yet to come.
“Out to the deep, deep ocean.”
（第二部完）
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