Last One Out of Eden

Captain Jeffery Hawke had been a science-fiction lover from a young age. He attributed the start of his obsession to the day he discovered his grandfather's collection of old Tom Swift novels in a box in his parent's attic. The elegant but straightforward storytelling from that bygone era had been his gateway drug, and from there he had progressed to such legends as Heinlein and Asimov. While his friends whiled away their hours playing video games young Jeffery spent his time lost in the worlds of H.G. Wells, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, and Larry Niven. The classic movies of science fiction's golden age were also of particular interest, and he found his imagination fired by movies like Forbidden Planet, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, The Thing from Another World, and Them! Given his exposure to so many staples of the genre, Jeffery had seen more than his fair share of end of the world scenarios played out on the silver screen. The last thing he had ever imagined was that being caught in a calamity like that could ever leave a man bored, and yet that was precisely what he was feeling.

He was currently sitting in front of a vast and complex array of instruments with his focus on a single knob that he swiveled carefully back and forth.

"Harvey? This is station 5MLT calling. Are you receiving me, Harvey? Harvey? Please respond."

The board in front of him said he was getting plenty of power, and sending out a strong signal, but all he heard in his earphones was static. He had been trying for the better part of an hour, and now he sat back with a sigh flicking off the transmitter with a desultory gesture of one hand.

"I guess I really am alone now..." he said to the empty room.

Harvey, he had never known the gentleman's last name, was a ham radio operator in Sheffield, England, and as far as Jeffery knew the only other living soul on the planet. Their conversations over the last few weeks had been his only real distraction in a world that grew bleaker with each passing day.

It was probably a stretch to say that he was alone there might well be others still clinging to life out there, but if they existed, they had shown no inclination to respond to his signals. Harvey had been the only one to bother. Jeffery had gotten the impression that Harvey was something of a survivalist, and was likely the kind of mildly nutty person he would have given a wide berth to before the present crisis, but beggars can't be choosers and given his isolated location he wasn't exactly awash in visitors.

He stood up from the control panel listening to the joints in his back pop like distant firecrackers. Outside the window, he could see the sun was sinking toward the horizon, and his stomach growled, reminding him it was near dinner time. The reflection of his face in the glass revealed the features of a man in his late twenties with high cheekbones and a square jaw. It also showed how long his hair was getting. The straight dark brown wave falling well past his collar now would have gotten him into trouble back in boot camp, but there was no one here to enforce that particular rule.

The hot desert air lashed at his face as the door opened his hazel eyes glinting in the last light of day. He began to walk across the gravel and sand ground his footsteps raising small clouds of dust. A glance around revealed the empty buildings slapped up in haste and until a few months ago teeming with soldiers and civilian scientists all continually moving in a mad scramble to create a miracle. It was indeed a testament to human ingenuity and stubbornness that they had succeeded in spite of the odds stacked against them. Jeffery couldn't help but feel a swell of pride at that even if bad luck had prevented him from tasting the fruits of that labor. To his right, the empty gantry's where once ten massive rockets had stood were bent and melted monuments to the last gasp of humanity. A flash of light caught his eye, and he stopped briefly to look at the one rocket that remained standing on its pad, TPRT-11 or test prototype eleven, a miniature version of the ships that would make the greatest journey in human history.

"I'm sorry there won't be any museum viewings for you girl," he mumbled before moving on.

He had shut off power to most of the buildings to save the generators, only the dormitory, communication shack, and one of the science labs still had electricity. He would have liked to have cut off the lab as well, but it was on the same circuit as the dormitory. The air conditioning was a sweet balm after even a short walk outside, and he made his way to the cafeteria. One of the advantages to being alone, he didn't have to wait in line, and he strode to the refrigerators in back to pick out his dinner for the day. After a brief survey of the dwindling, but for a single man still substantial contents he chose to make a roast beef sandwich and added a generous helping of potato salad from a storage container big enough to feed twenty men. Once done, he sat at a long white table, took a bite, and tried like mad not to look at the glowing sign attached to the far wall.

As usual, he couldn't fight the temptation.

The sign was simple; just a bunch of numbers that showed days, hours, minutes, and seconds. The last was counting steadily backward and would drag the others along with it soon enough. Jeffery shook his head, trying to appear indifferent but making a note of how long he had left.

"Seventeen Days, 9 hours, 26 minutes, and 10 seconds till the big show," he said aloud with a mirthless chuckle at the end.

The Big Show, in a way it was the only thing left he had to look forward to, and he had started to think of it in those terms like he had tickets for the event of a lifetime. It would be a date with destiny or in this case a hunk of wandering interstellar rock nearly half the size of our moon that someone had poetically named Nomad.

Nomad had first been picked up by orbiting NASA telescopes some twenty-six months earlier. Given its size, you might have thought it would have been caught far sooner, but budget cuts in the agency had put the identification of space debris on the back burner, and few people had a proper conception as to just how big the solar system was and thus how challenging to monitor. The discovery had kicked off a firestorm in scientific circles once it had been determined that Nomad had better than a fifty-percent chance of striking, or at the very least coming perilously close to the Earth. The urgency of the situation cut through the usual bureaucratic red tape that seemed to hamper mankind's attempts at tackling global problems, and for once everyone seemed to be on the same page. As Nomad grew closer, and its chance of hitting grew ominously larger, scientists from around the world pulled together in an unprecedented effort to stave off the annihilation of the human race.

Since Nomad was far too large to destroy or divert the only avenue open seemed to be an impossible one, evacuation. The lack of habitable alternatives in the neighborhood made the idea seem preposterous on the surface, and it grew even more so when some scientists began to suggest that our only hope was to venture further than any person ever had all the way to another star. This idea raised mountainous hurdles that were daunting to anyone involved in those early days. The nearest identified star with potentially habitable planets was more than four light-years from the Earth, and given our current level of technology would take close to 76,000 years to reach. It seemed a pipe dream too far fetched to even hope for, but in his darkest hour, man refused to go down without a fight.

In the end, two breakthroughs lobbed a tender lifeline to the struggling people of Earth. One, fusion-powered rockets, an experimental way to propel a ship still in its infancy and seen as decades away from implementation succumb to the combined might and not inconsiderable budget of every government on Earth. To construct ships large enough the escape vessels, dubbed obviously enough, "Arks," would have to be built in orbit requiring a tremendous global effort to procure the raw materials and expertise necessary. Even with these high-powered ships though the journey would still take hundreds of years far greater than the lifespan of any human being. The idea of using them as so-called "Generation Ships" was floated these would have been vessels designed to be self-sustaining and crewed by people who would raise their children in the dark depths of space passing on the knowledge to run the ships to future generations until one day they finally reached their destination. It was a wonderful idea on paper, but the problems inherent in supporting a large population for that long were too complex to overcome in the time available. It appeared that this first breakthrough would ultimately be useless, but then came the second, and that belonged to the brilliance of one man, a young German scientist named Hans Von Rodinger. He was actually both a chemist, and an avid zoologist who studied the hibernation habits of various animals, and this led him to develop a special gas that had a chemical name longer than anyone other than Von Rodinger wanted to remember, but was quickly renamed "preservation gas" by the rest of the scientific community.

The plan was simple enough, put a group of people on board with supplies and equipment to build a colony, suspend them in a long sleep for the hundreds of years that the journey would take, and have an automated system awaken them when they reached their new home.

It was brilliant.

The downside was that in spite of an all-out effort, the best that could hope to be achieved by the time Nomad arrived was to build enough ships to house approximately ten-thousand souls. Clearly, this would not go over well with the close to 7 billion that were about to be left behind. This secret was kept extremely quiet, as was much of the operation. As a matter of fact, it was deemed in a special meeting behind closed doors at the United Nations that letting the world in on the existence of Nomad would cause a panic that no one could hope to contain, so secrecy was paramount. The governments of the world worked together to keep the secret for as long as possible while scrambling to get the ships built.

The launch facilities to reach the ships in orbit were scattered around the globe and designated evacuation bases. The one currently occupied by Captain Jeffery Hawke was in the Sonora desert of the southwestern United States and listed as EB-19.

Jeffery finished his sandwich and the last few bites of his potato salad washing it all down with a bottle of water. He then emptied it all into the trash can by the door noting that the receptacle was getting full and he would have to walk the bag over to the nearest bin. It was probably a bit absurd to worry about sanitation when the world was about to end, but Jeffery had spent most of his adult life in the military, and such mundane details as maintaining a clean barracks were too ingrained in him to be ignored. After he finished, he went over to the lab next door to check on the only other indigenous personnel still occupying EB-19 besides himself.

The noise of one very pissed off Rhesus monkey assaulted his ears as soon as Jeffery cleared the doorway into the first of the two big testing areas. Jeffery had taken to calling him Chuck after a bully who had made his life miserable in the third grade. Chuck had a poor temper and even worse personal habits finding it uproariously funny to lob his feces at Jeffery whenever he appeared. The idea of letting the little bastard starve had crossed his mind more than once, but in the end, he couldn't bring himself to torture another creature even one as vile as Chuck. The rest of the animals in the quarantine area were far friendlier and included several rabbits, a quartet of Guinea pigs, and one rather rotund lab rat. Jeffery fed them one by one and stood by to watch them eat their meals, envying them the ignorance of their ultimate fate. On the far side of the room, a set of double doors led to the second testing area. This room was far quieter than the first, and the reason for that was readily apparent. All the animals inside were sleeping each in its own little glass cocoon surrounded by what appeared to be a swirling yellow vapor.

Jeffery stepped closer to one glass case where a solitary Guinea pig breathed slowly in and out.

"Must be nice...end of the world and you'll sleep through the whole damn thing," said Jeffery tapping briefly on the glass, but not getting so much as a twitch out of the animal inside.

Finishing his rounds, Jeffery returned to the dormitory making his way up three flights of stairs to the roof access. Darkness had fallen outside, and he sat down in the cushioned chair he had carried out there some days earlier to stare up at the sky. Nomad was painfully obvious, the brightest object in the sky next to the Moon itself and it would only get brighter. As he watched the approaching obliteration of his home, he fished a small vial from his pants pocket holding it up to the light and shaking it from side to side as the single white pill inside clinked against the glass.

Once the secret of Nomad began to leak thanks to amateur astronomers and the power of the Internet governments around the world had been forced to acknowledge the magnitude of the coming tragedy. They did offer the slim comfort that some might survive to perpetuate our civilization anew. At first, people seemed to take the news with almost shocking equanimity, prayer vigils were held, there was a rapid rise in church attendance, but by and large many seem content to continue going about their lives as if nothing unusual was going on. Sadly, this brief interlude didn't last long. As Nomad drew closer and the news story's painting the picture of just what the end of the world would look like grew more grim society started to come apart at the seams. It wasn't long before the military had to be called out to keep order in almost every major city, and essential goods and services began to suffer and become hard to acquire commodities.

The only act of compassion those in power could think to offer was to mass-produce so-called, "suicide pills" issuing them to anyone who desired to go out on their own terms and not as the planet crumbled around them. Jeffery couldn't imagine facing that avenue. Strangely, it seemed too much like quitting, and he had never been one to quit. His father had been career military, and after his mother's untimely death from cancer when Jeffery was only five had raised him the only way he knew how on a steady diet of discipline and duty. The pill he currently held he had found in a storage locker in the medical wing of the dormitory, and though his first inclination had been to toss it, he had ended up carrying it in his pocket ever since. He wondered if the temptation to use it would become stronger as the days passed and at what point would he give in.

The sad truth was he shouldn't have been contemplating the vial at all. If things had gone according to plan, he would have been asleep right now onboard an Ark bound for a new home and dreaming of having a hand in rebuilding society.

"When does anything ever go according to plan?" mused Jeffery as he continued tipping the vial back and forth.

His mind drifted back to launch day several weeks earlier. The biggest problem they had begun to face was the growing threat of debris in orbit, bits and pieces of material knocked about by Nomads passage through the inner asteroid belt, or squeezed off the moon itself by Earths gravitational field were creating hazards that would only get worse. Already, satellite communication was becoming far less reliable as many of them were getting damaged by space debris with no hope of taking the time to repair them. The Arks had been moved out to a Lagrange point to keep them safe, but one still had to make it out of Earths orbit to get there. The launches had been carefully calculated to avoid the worst of it, but each rocket had to hit its window exactly with no deviation.

Jeffery had been designated the last to board for his ship. As an experienced engineer, his expertise had been deemed necessary enough to warrant a berth on one of the Arks, but they also needed him as a military officer to keep the civilians organized and moving. He and the other soldiers had gotten everyone on board the last rocket for takeoff when a fragment of rock no bigger than a man's fist came down from the sky and ended Jeffery's trip before it had even begun. As the last to board, he had doubled back to make one final sweep of the dormitory when the accident occurred. The meteor had hit the ship squarely punching right through one of the liquid propellant tanks and igniting the volatile fuel inside. The resultant explosion had killed everyone on board and stranded Jeffery with no hope of retrieval. He had missed his window and was now stuck on Earth waiting for the end like everyone else.

The pill made one last clink as he slipped it back into his pocket. He wasn't ready yet to give in even if there seemed no good reason to prolong things. There had been a time when he had considered leaving the base and returning to die with the rest of humanity, but the images he had seen of the breakdown of order in the world had put paid to that idea. The sight of cities aflame, and people fighting and looting in the streets had quickly soured him on the notion of going anywhere else. Once communication had broken down with the destruction of the orbiting satellites he had been left with only radio links and other than Harvey, no one had responded to his attempts at reaching out.

"I suppose the bright side is when I go out it will at least be quiet," he figured.

Jeffery yawned and shook his head standing up to return to the dormitory rooms below and get some sleep. The long line of beds was an eerie sight with no one occupying them, and recently he had taken to bunking in the colonels quarters where he had a bedroom with much nicer accommodations.

He had just started down the corridor when the banging began.

"What the fuck!" he snapped, pulling his sidearm from its holster without evening thinking about it.

The noise was particularly loud in the narrow hallway and seemed to be coming from the main door. Jeffery ran back toward it but stopped well short. This base was secret, not on any map, and far from the nearest town. It seemed unlikely that someone would have stumbled on it, yet the persistent knocking continued. Gritting his teeth, he grabbed the door handle with his free hand and yanked it open prepared to confront whatever desert animal or unsuspecting looter was breaking the silence of his base.

He froze, finger caressing the trigger as a girl barely as tall as his chest with blond hair bleached by the sun and reddened skin stood shaking and scared in front of him.

"Help me...please..." she whispered and promptly passed out at his feet.

"Holy shit...," breathed Jeffery.

WELCOME HOME -

Jeffery Hawke was no doctor, but he had been trained to deal with emergencies on their new world as had everyone else, so he had at least a rudimentary idea of how to handle someone suffering from exposure. The medical wing of the dormitory was intact, and he got his surprise guest inside easily enough. She hadn't been much of a load to carry, barely a hundred pounds dripping wet he figured, and not much more than five-foot tall in stocking feet. He guessed her age to be somewhere in her early to mid-twenties though it was hard to tell with her skin so burnt.

The first thing was to get her temperature down, and he retrieved some ice from the freezer in the cafeteria, putting it into plastic bags and wrapping them in towels before placing them strategically around her body. This tactic had required him to remove her clothes which were dirty and ripped anyway, but it still made him feel more than a little uncomfortable disrobing this poor woman that he hadn't even been introduced to properly yet. He tried to do it quickly and clinically, but once he had reduced her to her bra and panties, it was hard not to notice that for such a petite girl she had some very substantial breasts in her lacy green bra. Swallowing, and doing his best to avert his eyes, Jeffery placed ice packs in her groin area and under her arms before running an I.V. of fluids to replace what she had lost. He then slathered her from head to toe in aloe-based burn cream and covered her with a thin sheet. There was nothing else he could do for her for the moment, so he retrieved a flashlight and went to check if she was alone or if this was some trick.