Ils l'appellent la Base Archimedes. Et c'est là où les ennuis, les très gros ennuis, ont éclaté si violemment.
Archimedes est un cratère plat muré sur la bordure de Mare Imbrium, la "Mer des Ombres" de la Lune. Il a un diamètre de 50 miles environ et, contrairement au cratère Aristillus d'à côté, a une surface au sol relativement douce. C'est pourquoi, d'après les informations de Trojan, il fut développé comme le camp de transit principal sur la Lune — l'endroit où les gens étaient normalement emmenés pour la portion finale de leur voyage vers Mars.
L'homme ne peut survivre dans l'atmosphère naturelle de la Lune. La NASA l'a dit il y a des années de cela et la NASA, en cette occasion, disait la vérité. Donc la plupart de la Base Archimedes fut scellée hermétiquement sous une bulle transparente dans laquelle l'air et la température étaient contrôlés aux niveaux habituels sur Terre. La construction prit 2 ans et fut un triomphe fantastique pour l'ingéniérie spatiale.
Les conditions sous la bulle étaient semblables à celles visualisées par le docteur O'Neill pour ses mondes artificiels du futur. Les hommes et les femmes pouvaient y vivre confortablement pour des périodes indéfinies — protégés dans une serre gigantesque à la forme de dôme.
Il y avait 2 énormes [airlocks] dans la section Sud de la bulle. Les navettes arrivant de la Terre et de Mars entraient par ces [locks] avant de [taxiing] vers le Terminal d'Arrivée situé au centre. Une série de routes partaient du terminal vers les zones de stockage et de service et les 3 "villages de quartier de vie" séparés — un pour les pilotes et le personnel résident, un pour les ["designated movers"] et un pour les ["batch-consignment components"]. Et au-dessus de tout ça était une dispersion de camouflages, réminiscents de ceux utilisés duant la 2nde guerre mondiale, pour s'assurer que la Base Archimede ne pourrait pas être vue par des observateurs non autorisés depuis la Terre.
Il y avait un autre camp de transit, celui d'origine sur la Lune, dans la cratère connu sous le nom de Cassini mais il était maintenant considéré comme trop petit. La plupart de ses équipements et fournitures avaient été déplacés sur Archimedes. For Archimedes was the bustling center of activity...
Trojan's cryptic message about possible sabotage was soon followed by this report:
Stringent security ensures the complete segregation of Designated Movers from Batch-Consignment Components until after disembarkation in the new territory.
They are transported in separate craft and, while awaiting transportation, they are quartered in different areas of Archimedes Base. This is as a result of an order from the Policy Committee.
It is felt that among the Designated Movers there may be those who initially harbor reservations about the morality of the mental and physical processing considered necessary for Components.
"Components"! Let us not be confused by the jargon euphemisms. Trojan uses them. Trojan, like most others in Alternative 3, has been brain-washed into accepting such words as normal. He is revolted by what has been done, by what is being done, but he has unwittingly absorbed the obscene distortion of language. So, just for a moment, forget "components". Trojan means people. He is writing about slaves, about men and women who have been mutilated mentally and physically, who have been programed to obey orders. And who have been condemned to a life of sub-human degradation.
His report continued:
These Designated Movers can have their doubts put into "proper perspective", after they have become acclimatized to life in the new territory, by representatives of the Committee in Residence. They can, according to official reasoning, be persuaded to recognize that the ultimate survival of the human race must take precedence over the fate of a limited number
of low-grade individuals.
Consider the appalling significance of that paragraph! It means, if "official reasoning" is right, that Ann Clark and Brian Pendelebury and others like them can be taught to regard fellow humans as expendable beasts of burden. It means, surely, that natural compassion must be systematically eradicated, that the minds of "designated movers" are also moulded to match the needs of Alternative 3. Orwell's vision of 1984, it seems, has already come to fruition - millions of miles from Earth.
Trojans report then went on to detail the curious circumstances which resulted in Earthly efforts to undermine Alternative 3. And which eventually culminated in carnage at Archimedes Base ...
Bacteria are far more tenacious than humans when it comes to clinging to life. They survive the seemingly impossible. They can apparently retreat into a form of hibernation for centuries. For millennia even. Then, when conditions are right, they wake up, as it were, and they flourish. That is apparently what happened on Mars.
The "dynamic changes" recorded in 1961 and described by Gerstein provided the ideal conditions. And across the silent wastes of the empty planet there was a great awakening of the minute unicellular living organisms. They developed and they spread. they were too small to be seen but they were there, waiting, when Man first arrived...
These were alien strains of bacteria, pernicious and voracious strains never before encountered by humans, but they were not numerous enough noticeably to damage the imported and carefully-cultivated crops. Not until late 1976. That, as we now know, was the time of the great blight...
Attempts were made to fight them with bactericides and even by bacteriophages which involved the introduction of ultra-microscopic organisms normally parasitic to bacteria.
But the Committee in Residence realized it was a losing battle. And that was when the super-powers decided they needed The German.
The German, whose name we have agreed to withhold, is possibly the most imaginatively successful bacteriologist in the world. That is accepted by his contemporaries in the East and the West. He has probably achieved more than any other man in his sphere - not only in combating bacteria but in harnessing them into the service of man. That was why he was needed so urgently in the new territory...
But he refused to go. He was seen by the Alternative 3 regional officer and, eventually, by the West German Chief Executive Officer. They argued with him, offered him every possible inducement, but he remained adamant. Certainly he would respect the confidences he had entrusted to him but he had work to do, work on Earth, and he had absolutely no inclination to become involved in Alternative 3.
They did recruit his principal assistant, an American in his mid-thirties, who travelled as a designated mover in February, 1977. He went willingly, enthusiastically even. But he is another man whose identity it would be unfair to reveal for, if he is still alive, he is today being hunted.
He is being hunted by agents of the East and the West.
He will certainly have changed his name by now, and
probably his appearance as well, but he must know that for him there can be no permanent hiding place. He is the man
chiefly responsible for founding the guerilla group known as Anti-Alternative. He was also responsible for the
eventual disaster at Archimedes Base. We call his The Instigator.
It soon became apparent to the Committee in Residence that The Instigator, although competent and experienced, lacked the intuitive flair needed for the new-territory task.
They still needed The German. But The German was still refusing...
Urgent meetings were convended in the Hall of the Committee in Residence. there were consultations with the Policy Committee on Earth, with key men in Department Seven.
And eventually a decision was reached. The German liked and respected The Instigator. He had confidence in his judgement. And if any man could persuade The German to become a designated mover it was The Instigator. He should go back to Earth, they decided. He should go back to talk to The German. That, as it turned out, was their biggest and most disastrous mistake...
They had made one serious miscalculation over The Instigator. they had failed to realize that he still had not got the plight of the Components into "proper perspective". Maybe that would have changed if he had been allowed more time for there had been others, many others, who had needed months to become completely accustomed to living with an enslaved sub-species. All of them had eventually accepted that this was part of the essential balance. But The Instigator had not been allowed time, not enough time, and he was tormented with secret guilt. What right, he wondered, did he have to be one of the Chosen, on of the Superior Select? He was racked with disgust and with doubts and he knew then that, somehow, he had to shatter the component system...
And then they told him they were returning him to Earth.
There was a stop-over at Archimedes Base on his return journey and he was temporarily housed with a new group of designated movers awaiting transportation to the new territory. They knew nothing, these people, about the components - quartered, as usual, in a different "village" - who were being condemned to spend the rest of their lives as slaves. He told them. He told them exactly what was happening and exactly what to expect. He described the kidnappings and the mutilations being carried out on Earth- for their benefit and comfort. And they were not ready for such horrendous information. They were normal people, highly intelligent and sensitive, and they had not yet been exposed to the skilled and persuasive arguments of the Committee in Residence. They were uncertain about whether to believe him. It all sounded so lunatically outrageous. Yet this man was strangely convincing...the truth. They decided surreptitiously to visit the village he'd described. And that is what sparked the holocaust at Archimedes Base...
The Instigator did not contact The German when he returned to Earth. He fled into hiding. And then, with a small group of trusted collaborators, he founded his action group, Anti-Alternative. This group, unlike organizations such as the IRA of the PLO, could make no public statements for such statements could lead to them being rooted out and destroyed. They dedicated themselves to disrupting, by guerilla tactics, all work connected with the exploration and exploitation of space. Their actions, they felt, might force an eventual re-think on Alternative 3.
On October 1, 1977, the Daily Telegraph carried a story, written by Ian Ball in New York, which was headlined: SATELLITE ROCKET No.2 BLOWS UP. It said:
A second communications satellite was reduced to debris over the Atlantic yesterday after another spectacular rocket failure at the Cape Canaveral space center in Florida.
Within two and a half weeks, the failures have destroyed communications satellite projects, one European, the other American, worth a total of $91.4 million (about +54 million).
An Atlas Centaur rocket, carrying a $49.4 million Intelsat 1V-A satellite built by Hughes Aircraft, was destroyed minutes after its launching late on Thursday. The failure was similar to the September 13 explosion of a Delta rocket carrying a $42 million European Space Agency orbital test satellite.
"We had indications of trouble in the engine area within seconds after lift-off," said the Atlas Centaur launch director, Mr. Andrew Stofan. "At 55 seconds the Atlas lost control and broke up. It flipped, broke apart, and then the Atlas blew up."
The remainder of the Centaur stage was destroyed by an Air Force range safety officer, ending the mission four miles high and four miles down the range. The debris from rocket and satellite fell into the ocean.
The next Intelsat 1V - a launch scheduled for November 10 - and other Atlas Centaur launches have been postponed until an investigation into the latest failure is completed.
Similar problems were being experienced by Russian space-teams. On October 11, 1977, the Guardian carried this Reuter report from Moscow:
Two Soviet Cosmonauts failed yesterday to dock their Soyuz-25 craft with the Salyut-6 orbiting laboratory.
Mission commander Vladimir Kovalyonok and flight engineer Valery Ryumin, thought to be planning a long stay aboard the new space station, were ordered back to Earth after abandoning the link-up.
Tass, announcing the latest in a series of troubles to affect the Salyut series, said there had been "deviations from a planned docking regime" during the approach while the Cosmonauts' Soyuz-25 capsule was 120 yards from the station. The Soyuz-25 failure has come as a blow to Soviet space chiefs...
So that is what happened. Did it happen because of The Instigator? That is a question we cannot answer. We simply do not know. We do know, however, that the catastrophe at Archimedes Base can be traced back directly to The Instigator. And that was incomparably more devastating.
Leonard Harman died at ten minutes past two in the morning on Wednesday, November 16, 1977. He died, wearing his pyjamas, in the dining-room at his home.
His widow, Mrs. Sarah Harman, gave this evidence at the inquest:
My husband had been depressed and rather withdrawn for some time, possibly for six months or more, but he never confided any reason to me.
I knew there had been some friction between him and Mr. Godwin, Mr. Fergus Godwin, at the studios and at first I thought that was possibly making him feel the way he did. But the trouble at the studios, whatever it was, seemed to pass over and still my husband was no better. I urged him on several occasions to see a doctor but he told me that it was nothing serious and that I was not to fuss.
I never, at any time, thought he might be likely to take his own life.
On the Tuesday evening, I mean the evening of the 15th of November, we watched television and then went to bed as usual just before midnight. I didn't notice anything particularly unusual about him. He behaved just as he normally did.
We read in bed for a while and it must have been nearly one o'clock before we settled down for sleep.
Just before two o'clock I was disturbed by him getting out of bed. I assumed he was going to the bathroom. But then he seemed to be gone a long time and I can't really explain why but I began to get rather worried. I had a feeling that something wasn't quite right.
I called out to him but there was no reply so I got out of bed. The bathroom door was open and, because of the street lights outside, I could see that he was not in there.
Then I heard a movement from downstairs. I called out to him again but still there was no reply. By this time I thought that he must be feeling unwell and that he'd probably gone down to the kitchen to make himself a hot drink. He'd done this once or twice before and it had always soothed his stomach.
I decided then to go down and make the drink for him. But he wasn't in the kitchen. The house was completely silent. I called out to him again but there was still no reply. I was a bit frightened by this time because I couldn't possibly imagine what he could be doing.
There weren't any lights on, not until I switched on the one in the hall, and my husband had never done anything like this before. He'd never walked in his sleep or anything.
Then there was a sort of scuffling noise from the dining-room. I went in and he was standing there in the darkness in the middle of the room. I switched the light on and spoke to him but he didn't seem to hear. His eyes were open - they were staring straight at me - but he didn't seem to be aware of me or of anything else. It was as if he was in a trance.
He had a gun in his hand, a little pistol, and he put the barrel to his head and pulled the trigger. And that's all that happened. The next second he was dead.
Mrs. Harman also told the coroner that her husband had not owned a gun, that he'd never had one in the house. But the coroner reached his own conclusion. Wives, in his experience, didn't necessarily know everything about their husbands.
The verdict was "suicide".
Disaster hit Archimedes Base on a cataclysmic scale. The Arrival Terminal ... the service centres ... the buildings of the three villages ... they were all ravaged and wrenched from their foundations by the sudden and cyclopean clash of uncountable tornados. They crumbled and disintegrated, these buildings, as they juddered and somersaulted high in the air. And people spilled from them. The living and 'he dead - they all looked the same in that great spasm of destruction. They were all flailing limbs and buckled, distorted bodies. Many of them exploded far above the ground and bits of them whirled around in the dust and the debris before being sucked out into the eternal blackness of space.
And all of it, we now know, had been sparked by a gentle and compassionate marine biologist called Matt Anderson. He had meant well. He had been inspired by the highest motives. By consideration and humanity, by raw and spontaneous pity. And he had unleashed a nightmare.
That is clear from documents analyzed by Trojan. Very little else, however, is certain. there were few survivors and their accounts were so disjointed and confused. The full facts, now, will probably never be known.
Here, however, is what we have been able to piece together:
Anderson, a thirty-three-year-old single man from Miami, Florida, was one of the designated movers at Archimedes Base who listened to The Instigator. He was one of the small group who secretly visited the segregated Components Village. He talked to the people there, heard enough to realize that The Instigator had been telling the truth. It was grotesque and barbaric but it was, unquestionably, the truth.
That whole party of designated movers was scheduled for transportation to the new territory that night. And everything would have been different if they had all gone. there would have been no disaster.
They would certainly have posed a bigger "conscience problem" to the Committee in Residence but, in time, the Committee would have converted them into accepting the necessary realities of Alternative 3.
But Anderson did not travel with the others. He stumbled on the return journey from the village of the slaves. He stumbled and hurt his spine. And it was decided that he was not fit to travel, that he should stay for a while at Archimedes Base.
Ten days later he slipped unseen from his room and again visited that village. It was not difficult for there were no guards. There was no need for guards around the village. The people temporarily there had been instructed to remain their quarters. And they had been programed to obey, unquestioningly, every order they received.
Anderson wanted to talk to them at length, to understand them, to see if he could possibly help. And that was when he got his great shock. By then there was a new Batch consignment in the village and in that Batch was a man he knew, a man who, years earlier, had been a colleague at school.
The man recognized him, could obviously think fluently and intelligently, but all the vital personality had been gouged out of him. His bearing and his attitude showed that he knew and accepted his position. He was a slave. That was when Anderson knew he had to take action...
Trojan's report says:
Two of the Components who did survive have revealed under interrogation that they heard Anderson talking to the man of two occasions, on that first day and later when he returned with details of the plan for the intended evacuation. This is principally how Department Seven has been able to establish much of what did happen before the disaster...
There was an aerospace technician in the latest group of designated movers, a highly-qualified man who had been trained by NASA, and Anderson, it seems, sought him out and
explained the whole situation. He told this man of the atrocities to which they were all, unwittingly, a party. He elaborated on how they had been lured towards a debased and de-humanized future, on how they would be battening for the rest of their lives on the misery of the mutilated slaves. He convinced him it was their duty to rescue the people from the village, to return them to their families on Earth - and to ensure that this traffic in human life was stopped for ever.
Trojan's report continues:
The main depot for craft on the Earth-run was south of Archimedes Base on the far side of the mountain range known as Spitzbergen. Most long range vehicles were maintained and parked there and smaller craft were used to convey passengers to and from Archimedes, rather in the style of airport buses on Earth.
There were invariably a number of these smaller craft on the tarmac at the Archimedes Arrival Terminal and the plan was for Anderson and Gowers, the aerospace technician, to steal one of these craft and use it to evacuate as many of the Components as possible.
Another sympathetic designated mover, briefed on the technicalities by Gowers, would operate one of the airlocks in
the southern section of the bubble to allow them through. They would then travel to the main depot where by force if
necessary, they would commandeer a
vessel in which to make the journey back to Earth.
So that, apparently, was what was meant to happen. But it all went wrong. Horribly and hideously wrong. Gowers found a suitable craft and he checked it, established that it was fueled and ready for flight. And Anderson was in charge of discreetly marshaling the people in the village of slaves, of supervising their march to the Terminal.
Everything went well at first. There were a hundred and fifty-five slaves in the village at that time and the small craft could accommodate only eighty-four of them, so Anderson selected the youngest, including his former schoolmate, for in his opinion they ought to have priority. When he returned to Earth and publicly exposed this sick side if Alternative 3 there would be such an international outcry that the other slaves would also be returned to their homes. Yes, and those who had already been taken to the new territory. The vast majority of human beings would never tolerate the obscenities being committed in their name. That, according to the evidence from Trojan, is what Anderson really thought.
There was no problem in sifting aside those who were not to immediately saved, although all the people in the village now knew exactly what was being planned, for, of course, the slaves had been programed into automatic obedience.
Trojan's report went on:
One of the surviving Components later interrogated said that Anderson told them: "There are few guards and so it is unlikely that any serious attempt will be made to prevent us leaving this Base or, indeed, this planet. "However, those of you chosen for repatriation must remember that, in these circumstances, it is better to kill than be captured. The lives and freedom of many people depend on us getting back to Earth and so you must be prepared to kill anyone who tries to stop you. that is an order."
In fact, six of Alternative 3's resident personnel were soon killed. They were trampled down and kicked to death by the slaves, near or in the Terminal, when they tried to stop the party reaching the craft. They were left broken and bleeding on the ground and the slaves, with no show of emotion, walked over them and climbed on board. Then the engines fired into life and Gowers, seeing the opening-lights winking around the airlock on the left, eased them upwards.
The craft hovered briefly in the still air, thirty or forty feet above the tarmac, and then the inner lip of the airlock rolled aside like a transparent stage curtain. their path was now clear and Gowers depressed a switch to start the forward thrust. the horror, at that moment, was just seven seconds away...
Trojan's report picks up the story:
A senior technician at Archimedes Central Control, one of the permanent staff who did survive, has made a statement in which he describes how he was alerted by shouting and screaming from the direction of the Terminal. the angle of his view prevented him from observing what was happening there but then he did notice the unexpected opening of the airlock door. He knew that if the outer door were also to open, possibly because of some malfunction in the equipment,the Base would be subjected immediately to acute decompression.
He saw no traffic and no traffic was scheduled for departure. So, assuming there was a serious fault and that the shouts were probably ones of warning, he pressed a master-control button. This was on a board designed to activate a fail-safe system, over-riding all other, and his action resulted in the airlock door snapping instantly back into position.
An experienced pilot could have coped with the problem by taking avoiding action and returning his craft to the Terminal but Gowers was not an experienced pilot...
Gowers, in fact, was almost at the door when it closed. Suddenly, straight ahead of him and all around him, there was a transparent domed wall. He felt trapped like a fly under an upturned tumbler, and he panicked. He swerved the craft violently upwards to the left and then, in desperation, he over-compensated and jerked it into a fast and erratic zig-zag course. the craft, now bucking viciously, surged towards the roof. Gowers, hopelessly out of control, snatched wildly at the control stick, sending the craft into a lethal whiplash dive. It exploded into one of the walls of the dome, spewing fire and wreckage and blazing bodies, and it smashed a devastating hole in the transparent surface.
The entire base, where the air was artificially maintained at Earth pressure, immediately decompressed. It was as if some mammoth and malignant vacuum-cleaner was greedily sucking everything into its mouth. Litter-cans and small vehicles and the six men who'd been trampled to death. And the savagery of the maelstrom shattered heavy objects against the dome, rattling them and bouncing them until they too punched their way through and were swirled out into the outer blackness. And the new holes brought new snatching whirlwinds. And the buildings groaned and surrendered and shot up, disintegrating, in that monstrous cannonade of havoc. That day brought death to every Designated Mover at Archimedes Base. There were twenty-nine of them -scientists, technicians and medical specialists -mainly from America and Russia. And not one survived. They were brilliant men. Carefully selected men. Today they are mere particles of dust. Drifting through the uncharted wastes of eternity.
However, as we have indicated, there were survivors. Two of the people known as components lived through the holocaust and so did five of the resident staff. If they had perished the events of that terrible day at Archimedes would probably have remained a mystery for ever. There would possibly have been reports from observatories of a strange and momentary flare of activity on the moon - activity which might have been presumed to be the result of some unknown natural phenomena. And that would have been all. But because of these seven survivors, because of the information they gave to Department Seven and which Trojan has passed to us, the truth can be recognized.
These seven lived because at the time of the devastation they happened to be insulated in rooms where the atmosphere was independently maintained - and they escaped to the obsolete base at Cassini.
Cassini Base, we understand, is now being redeveloped. It will once again become the principal transit camp on the moon. The Alternative 3 operation suffered a serious set-back at Archimedes but it has certainly not been abandoned. No voyages are being made from Earth at the moment for there is much work to be done at Cassini but people are still being watched and assessed as potential Designated Movers. And, according to Trojan, plans are being made for the imminent round-up of more Components.
Maybe there are men and women in your town, possibly on your street, who will disappear, suddenly and inexplicably, in the near future...men and women already ear-marked for an astonishingly different existence on that far-distant plan-t.
They would already have gone, those people, if it had not been for the obstinacy of The German. And for the concerned compassion of The Instigator. They would already have joined those who, if biologist Stephen Manderson is right, are now on a planet where no squirrel will ever scamper. And where no nightingale will ever sing.
There is just one final point for us to make. On the back cover of this book you will note one word which you may consider puzzling: "speculation".
Why "Speculation"? That is a valid question ...especially in view of the fact that so much of our evidence, particularly that quoted from newspapers, was already a matter of public record. Well ... we did mention that politicians tried to suppress this book, that two in Britain sought injunctions to prevent its publication. And we did explain that we were forced into a "reluctant compromise".
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