Space Redux

Space Redux

Peter A. Hempel

Commander Lee shook hands with me and motioned me to a sofa away from his desk. He took a seat on the sofa facing mine. The secretary asked if I wanted anything, and I told her water would be fine. “Water for both of us,” the Commander added.

He looked at me for a moment, checking me out. Then he began. “I know what you’re wanting me to tell you. That stellar exploration is the fulfillment of man’s dreams. What we as a species were created for. All that sort of thing.”

He paused for a moment; then, in a distinctly more emphatic tone, he said: “The reality is that stellar exploration has been a bust. At least compared to our expectations.”

“But,” I began, “space is a huge industry. And it’s growing faster than ever.”

“Sure,” he replied, “if you want to talk profits, corporate growth, new industrial materials and uses.

“But frankly, that was never what it was about, at least for me. And for mankind and its hopes and its vision? Strictly a dud.

“Look,” he continued, “I’m not saying there’s nothing out there, or that it hasn’t meant anything. As you know, I was a cosmonaut on the crew on the first stellar expedition to make it back, a trip to the planetary system around the star Gliese 581. That was, and remains, the most powerful experience of my life. If you haven’t been out there, 20 light years from our own solar system, you can’t possibly grasp what it is like. It is mesmerizing, terrifying—and totally addictive. I am still haunted by it, in good ways and bad.

“When I returned…well, that’s part of what I have to explain to you. But let’s just say it took a huge act of will on my part to stay and not head right out again. And if I had done that, I would still be out there, a permanent space rat.”

Commander Lee stopped and looked at me. He was, as you might expect from his rank and reputation, distinguished-looking and old-school military in his bearing. But there was also something else that flashed across his face as he spoke—an uncertainty, an out-of-placeness.

I was a writer for Popular Planets. We covered just about every kind of topic, but space was one of the most popular subjects for our audience. A space celebrity? That was a home run.

* * *

Commander James Lee was a big deal. Very senior, lots of medals and awards. But my boss, Brian, who was managing editor, warned me about him as well. “Look,” Brian told me, “Lee is the real thing as far as it goes. But he’s also got a reputation for being a bit of a kook. He’s got a big, beautiful office, but no real staff to speak of. A secretary with lots of spare time on her hands. The top brass really don’t want him going around giving lectures to the public, so not much scheduling for her to take care of—hell, I had to call in some favors, you know, some paparazzi photos we didn’t publish, just to get you in to see him.

“As far as real work, he doesn’t have much day-to-day responsibility. They gave him a title of Senior Advisor on Space Planning, whatever the hell that means. Anyway, apparently he has some pretty strange ideas, so be careful not to go down any rabbit holes with him. Just try to get some space stories—space adventures, that sort of thing.”

* * *

I was definitely feeling a little nervous. I was 23, with less than a year on the job. This was my opportunity to show Brian I could deliver—that is, if I didn’t blow it completely. And so far, it wasn’t looking good.

I looked out at the view, which was spectacular. Space Central HQ was in Colorado, and the glass wall of the office was facing a tall mountain covered in trees. Even now, on a bright day in late spring, there was still a bit of snow at the top.

Commander Lee saw my gaze shift. “Wonderful, isn’t it?” he said. “Lots of people around here would love to get this office, and they’d love to see me retire—or drop dead—preferably sooner rather than later. Sometimes I think I should oblige them.

“I’m 120 you know.”

He looked to me like he was in his early 70’s or so, not young, but still energetic.

“I’ve been rejuvenated twice, which is why I’m not dead, but there’s a point of diminishing returns with what they can do today. Just as well, I suppose.”

I decided to steer things towards Brian’s suggestion. “Sir, can you tell me a bit about your space expedition? Why you did it and what it was like?”

The Commander straightened up in his seat. “Right, right,” he said. “When I was a boy, we were still busy exploring this solar system. It was exciting stuff, especially when they discovered evidence of prior microbial life of some sort on Mars, and then very primitive organic compounds on Europa. There was also a lot of debate about some of the chemical compounds found on Titan, about whether they represented a possible precursor to some sort of methane-based biochemistry.

“None of it was life to speak of, but it was exciting. It made us sure that life was everywhere, just waiting to be found. We had all studied the Drake Equation, which gave us a formula to determine the number of other advanced civilizations in the universe. The equation itself was a string of variables which depended on wild estimates and guesstimates, but even a stingy interpretation ended suggesting that new civilizations were pretty much all over the place, even though none of them had ever contacted us.

“To be sure, there were skeptics; some guy named Fermi developed what he called Fermi’s Paradox giving a long list of reasons why we would never find any other civilizations, but that was just negative nonsense. We paid no attention. We were believers.”

I had a digital notepad in my hand, and was pretending to take notes. I had put my recorder out on the table when we first sat down, of course, but that was for transcription. Taking notes would make it look as if I was preparing to ask follow-up questions.

Commander Lee paused, perhaps checking to see if I was still following him. I knew my readers’ eyes would glaze over at any equation beyond E = mc². In any case, he moved on to something more relatable.

“At the Academy,” he said, “I took a course in The Literature of Space. There were two things I remember especially. One was an ancient television series called Star Trek. The sets and situations were utterly laughable, of course, but all the cadets could recite the show’s opening line: ‘To boldly go where no man had gone before, to explore strange new worlds, and to seek out new life and new civilizations.’ That’s what we saw ahead of us.

“That show was from the very early days, even before the most rudimentary computer graphics. The alien species were all somehow bipedal and roughly human-sized—the major villains wore masks that made them look like some sort of racist stereotype of The Other. Soon, however, computer animation advanced and there were no real limitations on the kinds of aliens that could be created by filmmakers. But it didn’t move us into any really new kind of thinking, or, for that matter, towards any kind of actual realism. There was a scene from one of the early movies in the old Star War series with some kind of intergalactic bar with all sorts of weird-looking aliens, different sizes, different shapes, sitting around, each drinking its own kind of drinks. These days, of course, you’d have all these hologram aliens sitting there next to you, with all the appropriate smells and everything else. Who knows, a cute alien might start coming on to you.

“So on the one hand, we weren’t stuck with aliens as humans in Halloween costumes, but the message was still pretty much the same. Lots of oddball alien races out there who you could pretty much have a drink with. I mean I wanted to be able to go to that bar, wouldn’t you?”

He looked at me, and I nodded.

* * *

“I don’t know how much history you have studied,” he continued. “But back a long time ago, there were two very famous explorers who lived around the beginning of the European Renaissance. The first was Marco Polo. The other was Christopher Columbus.”

It seemed like every military person who retired—or, in the Commander’s case, was sidetracked out of any real responsibility—went on to become an amateur historian. They loved the idea of seeing themselves as part of some epic narrative, and they seemed to expect everyone else to be as fascinated and impressed as they were.

The Commander definitely had the historical vision bug, and there was no stopping him. “Marco Polo was a merchant and trader who went with his father and his uncle on a trip from Europe to Asia, ultimately becoming one of the first Europeans to visit China. On their journey, they had many adventures, traveling 24,000 kilometers on foot, boat and horseback, through strange lands and cultures, and ended up spending several years living in China. Marco Polo himself spoke four languages, and as an astute trader was the ideal kind of person to appreciate the many kinds of arts and exotic cultures he encountered. When he returned home to Italy 24 years later, he wrote up his adventures in a book titled The Travels of Marco Polo.

“Travels was wildly popular even before the invention of the printing press. With the introduction of mass printing, it became the second most popular book besides the Bible.

“In fact, Marco Polo’s book inspired another young explorer, Christopher Columbus, to dream of his own travel adventure.

“At the time of Marco Polo, the route to China through Asia had long been open, but now the Muslims had conquered Constantinople, a major port on the route, and closed it to non-Muslims, basically ending European trade with the Far East. Some Europeans tried to get around this problem by taking alternate sea routes, including going south around Africa to get to Asia. But none of these efforts proved practical or economically viable.

“Columbus decided to try an alternate route—due west across the Atlantic on a direct route to India and China. He knew nothing of America and in fact, his calculations about the distance to Asia and India were woefully far off. If he had really had to travel all the way to Asia, his food and water would have been gone well before he was halfway there. But he did find land, even though he still continued to think he had landed in India and that the natives were ‘Indians.’

“Unlike Marco Polo, however, Columbus had almost no interest in the new peoples and cultures he encountered. Basically, he was a thug. As soon as he happened to discover that the natives had gold, that became his obsession, and it became the obsession of all the seafaring countries in Europe. Within 50 years, almost all of South America that bordered the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had been conquered, and the natives either killed or sold into slavery to produce gold and silver for Europe.

“Between the two of them, it was a tale of two totally different paradigms.”

Okay, this was actually sort of interesting, I guess, but it was useless for my article. Brian’s mantra was that our readers wanted spaceships and aliens, and that was pretty much it. Also a little zero-gravity sex wouldn’t hurt.

Commander Lee paused, drank some water, and then continued. “When I was a cadet, I thought of space exploration as a kind of Marco Polo expedition, fueled by curiosity and the desire to explore and meet new beings and new cultures.

“Basically, that was pretty much what the Academy thought too. None of us were there hoping to become miners on dead rocks in space, no matter how much money we might make.

“Obviously a lot of our education was science and technology, practical stuff for the nuts and bolts of space travel. But we also studied a lot of other fields that were supposed to be useful when we met up with new civilizations. Meta-linguistics was a required course for every single cadet.”

“Meta-linguistics?” I asked.

“It’s the study of all human languages, and even animal languages, to try to understand how communication is constructed, from its most basic levels to its most sophisticated forms. This is what they thought would give us the best chance of communicating with other species when we encounter them.

“It sounds very logical, but of course it’s all based on earth life and earth forms—and on our earth environment, whether through air or water or vibrations on the ground. Who knows how another, completely alien species on a completely different planet might communicate? What if they communicated by some form of telepathy?

“We studied history, of course, and evolution, and animal and human societies, all of which was supposed to help us look for basic patterns and understand the ways that other kinds of societies worked.

“Needless to say, there was also lots of combat training, with a big emphasis on Asian martial arts, as well as knives, swords, and guns of all types. After all, some aliens might not be completely friendly, and we needed to be ready to fight them hand-to-hand as well as with laser weapons.”

He smiled somewhat wistfully at the memory. “At least it gave us lots of exercise, and helped keep us in good shape for the trip.

“So there we were, fists at the ready, poised for mankind’s greatest step, ready for adventure and new challenges—intellectual and cultural as well as physical. We were, we thought, ready for anything. Except what we actually found.”

“What was that?” I asked.

* * *

Commander Lee thought for a moment, then continued. “Look, I know you’re here for tales of space adventure, so I’ll tell you about my trip to Gliese 581. Although there was a lot of debate about which star system and which planets were the best potential candidates for life, and especially advanced life, the planet Gliese 581g was up there as one of the best possibilities. It was about 20 light years from earth, and slightly more than twice the size of earth.

“Now 20 light years is next-door neighbors in terms of the cosmos as a whole, but using the technology of the time I’d still be only be part-ways out on the outbound trip by now. Suspended animation could help me deal with living long enough to make the trip and come back, but on earth many centuries would have passed and for all we knew the human race would have blown itself up before our return. Being stuck with the speed of light was the barrier to space travel.

“Fortunately, a Dr. Marilyn Fenn, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton—that’s where Einstein had been a Fellow by the way—was exploring string theory and dimensions. She found the answer that had been eluding us. She was looking at the 8th dimension—sorry, I don’t really understand it myself—and she discovered it could work as a wormhole through space. It took years and years and teams of top researchers from universities, think tanks, and the military to begin to figure out how to make use of this. Even now it’s still in its infancy.

“It turns out you need to find an entry point—now referred to as Fenn points—to get started. They’re not easy to find. So far, we’ve found only three in our solar system—one slightly inside the orbit of Mercury, one out past Mars, close to Jupiter, and one just inside the orbit of Neptune. Of the three, the one near Mercury was too hot to be usable, so the second one, past Mars, was the most practical, especially since it let us use our Mars bases as a launch point.

“So what happens when you go through this 8th dimension?” I asked. My readers wanted the cool stuff, not a lot of technical details. And the 8^th dimension sounded very sci-fi.

I think the Commander got my point. “Well,” he explained, “no one is quite sure. Mostly it’s not fun. And it’s very hard on anything and anyone inside. Maybe the easiest way your readers can think about it is when big data files get compressed really small and then get opened again by a slightly clumsy system that is prone to making random and often unfortunate mistakes.

“Then we discovered that while the Fenn points got us in, that’s not where anything could come back out. We would send test ships with automatic controls in, and nothing would come out, but then a few weeks later there would be some kind of explosion somewhere else in the solar system. Finally, a Dr. Henry Dunn, a physics professor at Oxford, figured out that there were separate exit points—it wasn’t like a two-way highway, it was more like the old trade winds that would take Columbus on one route towards the Americas and a different route back. So, after a lot more study, we found two exit points—now known as Dunn points—one near our own moon, and the other just past the orbit of Neptune. Obviously you know that these days interstellar ships come in via the moon.

“Anyway, they finally managed to work out a lot of the kinks and start getting flights to go out from the Fenn point and to come back in via the Dunn point. The ships were kind of battered, but after a lot of tries most of the test animals we sent along in them survived. All of us cadets were anxious. If the Space Agency took too long to agree to a human flight, we might age out and never get a chance. We were all already veterans of travel within the solar system, but what we really wanted was to go interstellar.

“Finally, they began planning in earnest. I was selected for the crew of the second ship to go out. I was disappointed, of course, since everyone wanted the prestige of being on the first interstellar flight and being able to report back. I knew most of the cadets chosen for the first flight, and I was envious of them.

“But things didn’t go as planned. The ship returned, through the Dunn point near the moon, with everyone dead. They had been crushed in their suspended animation capsules. The humans had needed much larger capsules than the test animals we had sent out earlier, and the engineers realized they had grossly underestimated the pressure generated by Fenn travel.

“I lost a lot of classmates and friends in that accident, including a young woman I had dated for a while. It was a sobering reminder, but it was never a deterrent for any of us. We were as gung-ho as ever.

“It took over two years to build a new, much more heavily reinforced ship. And so we began, with a crew of 40 top cadets—20 men and 20 women.

“One of the things about Fenn travel is that it is peculiar in regards to time. Before Fenn we had been very preoccupied with the problems of relative time for crews travelling near the speed of light—that is, time would pass far more slowly for us than for people back on earth and we would return to find everyone we knew long dead and everything else changed in who knows what kinds of ways.

“With Fenn travel, our first assumption was since it was not constrained by the speed of light, it would be more or less instantaneous, like some kind of magical teleportation.

“It turns out, that’s not how it works. It does take time—it’s a short-cut of sorts, to be sure, but it’s also unpredictable. Gliese 581 was 20 light-years out, but of course no regular space ship could achieve anything near the speed of light. The trip would have taken an absolute minimum of an earth century with our fastest technology. With Fenn travel, it ended up taking eight years. I have no idea what it was like since all of us were sealed into our chambers. And it turns out we were still subject to at least some of the time distortion that Einstein had talked about.

“We emerged through an exit point that was out past the outer planet Gliese 581j, so we had a trip of several months to get to Gliese 581g. We needed the time anyway to recover from suspended animation and get our muscles back in shape. One member of the crew found his muscles had largely atrophied during the trip and was never able to recover for active duty. He ended up dying before the return trip.

“We finally set down on Gliese 581g1, the single moon orbiting Gliese 581g. Gliese, which is what I’ll call the planet to keep things simple, turned out to be roughly 2.3 times the mass of earth. Its moon is a third the size of the earth, so the gravity factor made the moon a much better place for our initial landing.

“Anyway, to move the story along, we got everything set up and then sent a manned probe ship to Gliese. Because of the high gravity on the planet we had to use anti-grav suits, which help but are clumsy as hell to walk around in.”

He smiled and added, “Good thing we didn’t have to put our martial-arts skills to the test.”

* * *

“I can tell you about our stay in the Gliese system, but I can't even begin to explain how it felt. When I looked up at the sky, there was no way for me to see Earth. Gliese was up in the sky, the way the earth would be when you're visiting the moon, but there was no life anywhere. It was just cold rocks and sheer emptiness.

“Yes, I had my fellow crew-members; mostly we stayed busy setting things up, doing assays, monitoring readings, or whatever other scientific tasks were on our to-do list. But even with all the time that I spent with them, that we all spent with each other, there was, somehow, no spirit of camaraderie. Rather than coming together, we seemed to be falling apart. Jokes seemed pointless, and our entire collection of earth entertainment seemed either irrelevant or a dangerous reminder of something much too far away. Even my sense of attraction to the female members of the crew—and some of them were quite attractive—seemed to wither away. We could all have been robots for all the difference it made.

“To be honest, this didn’t really all happen as soon as we landed. When we first arrived, I thought I was prepared for it. I was a highly trained space cadet, and ready to be awed by being in such a completely new part of space, and by the sheer scale of the universe as we now felt it. And it was all that. It was hypnotic. Our own solar system was the tiniest of dots in a horizon filled with stars and distant galaxies. I still have dreams about that utterly magnificent, and completely alien, cosmic view.

“But…in the end, that was all a romanticized cliché. I was part of a grand script for mankind’s uncharted journey into the universe. But the exhilaration didn’t last. We were well trained and used to a kind of military, mission-oriented mindset, so I wasn't expecting the setting to have a huge impact on me beyond that storyline. As a cadet, I had been to the moon many times, sometimes for tours that lasted the better part of the year, and Mars for space training, and even to some of the moons of Jupiter and all that. But you always knew that earth was there, that even though you were a very long ways from home, you were still cosmically speaking, in your hometown.

“You know how people talk about an ‘insensate, indifferent, unfeeling universe’? It's one thing to talk that way when you're on earth, where the sky is blue and the grass is green and you're surrounded by life, and even on the moon and other planets, Earth is still there and you feel it somehow. But here, all of that was gone. Sure, we can talk about a meaningless universe, and even joke about it, but deep down, our emotions can't handle it. At least, not for long.

“It was just this total emptiness and aloneness. I couldn't shake it. Even eating dinner with the rest of the crew, I just felt alone. What had looked like a great adventure on man’s road to his greater destiny was beginning to look like a reminder of how irrelevant man is, and how nothing we really are.

“If we had encountered a flotilla of alien monsters ready to destroy us, it would have given us a sense of purpose. But nothing? Nothing at all? This was the adventure we had all been waiting for all this time?

“It didn't make any sense. I had always been sociable, even gregarious. As a cadet, I had been disciplined more than once for being too fond of partying off-base. But now I found myself lapsing into silence. We had brought some alcohol with us, but with all the weight constraints imposed on what we could bring with us, it was supposed to be strictly rationed to make it last until we headed home. So on a Saturday night—days of the week being a rather arbitrary designation, but at least they were familiar—on a Saturday night we’d each get the equivalent of a shot of vodka to drink. Granted, when you don't drink the rest of the time, you feel it a bit more, but nobody was satisfied with that.

“I guess none of us were surprised when one night a group of crewmembers broke into the storeroom and got completely shit-faced drunk, using up at least six months of the alcohol ration for the rest of us in the process.

“We were furious. We couldn't afford to lock them up, or really punish them in any way—except perhaps by cutting them off from alcohol for the rest of the trip. And we weren't quite sure that that would be a good idea. We were all going crazy, so we understood. If it hadn't been them, it might've been any of us.

“We were stocked with other kinds of drugs to be sure. Aside from antibiotics and pain killers for injuries, we had a substantial supply of tranquilizers and antidepressants of all sorts. But they just kind of shut you down—they don't give you a chance to break loose in a way that, even though it may be painful afterwards, gives your mind a chance to scream.

“We even had a supply of different kinds of psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin and MDMA. They can be very useful for PTSD and some other kinds of conditions, but in our situation, it didn't seem like a good idea to just let your mind loose in that kind of way. We were one step away from madness as it was.

“And madness did set in.

“We spent two years checking out Gliese. What did we find? Basically nothing. No water, no life, so signs of organic matter of any sorts. We made a lot of trips to Gliese from our moon base, checking out every part of the planet. We mapped it down to the centimeter, we took samples of every kind of soil and rock, we took samples of the atmosphere. All very scientific. And probably scientifically interesting. But no life. Nothing at all.

“Six members of the crew died in accidents during this period, although it was sometimes hard to tell how many were really accidents. We couldn’t spare the time to investigate, and what could we have done about it? A seventh died when some bolts on his helmet somehow came loose. There was gossip that it was a case of suicide, brought on by a failed romance on the ship. The people stuff gets very tricky on a long space voyage.

“We spent another year and a half checking out the other planets in the Gliese system. It wasn’t that different from checking out the other planets from our own solar system. Some scientifically interesting things to check out, but no life, and nothing to suggest that there ever had been or would be.

“As time went on, tensions between some members of the crew got worse and we had to establish a rotating schedule to have people spend time in the suspended animation tanks so they wouldn’t end up killing each other. That was a very important lesson about space travel.

“I mentioned that the crew consisted of 40 people—20 men and 20 women. It sounded like a reasonable number at the time, and pretty much the maximum that our early spaceships could manage in terms of weight. But basically, that's about the number of people in a high school homeroom—definitely not enough people to be cooped up with in tight quarters for multiple years. As our technology improved, we upped the crew size to 100 members, which probably helped, but there’s still a limit to how long an isolated group of people can stand each other. Right now they’re working on a strategy of sending out mixed human and synth crews so the synths can reduce some of the tension.”

“Synths?” I asked.

“Next-generation androids—robots that look and act completely human. Synthetic humans so to speak. They’ve made huge advances on that score—nothing like the service robots you’re used to. Actually, my own wife is a synth. But I’ll get to that.

“When we were finished with our assignment, and before we could all finish killing each other, we headed back.

“How did we feel about leaving Gliese? It's true that we had all gotten on each other's nerves and were going crazy, but at the same time, returning to earth? The thought made me nervous. I think it made everyone nervous. What would it mean to be back? What would we have lost being away so long? I no longer had a sense of fitting in anywhere. On the other hand, our mission was done and it was time to go.

“I told you that the Fenn travel time is unpredictable. It took us eight years to travel out, but only five years to return. Of course, since we were in suspended animation, we weren’t aware of any of that. The trip wasn’t perfect. An additional two members of the crew were found dead in their tanks on arrival.”

 * * *

“When we got back, we were greeted as heroes, returning from the first interstellar expedition. Actually, as it turns out, two later interstellar expeditions had returned before us because of better and faster technology developed after us. But we were still the originals.

“In fact, while it seemed as if only 16 or 17 years had passed since we first took off, it had been a total of 43 earth years. Many of the people we had known were dead by now, and the rest had aged far more than we had. Essentially, because we had been in suspended animation during our Fenn travel, we had only aged a little over three earth years. Old girlfriends were now truly old girlfriends.

“Even though we were treated like heroes, we found ourselves totally out of touch with the society we found ourselves in. In my case, there were women, especially younger women, often very attractive, who were very excited about the idea of going out with a famous cosmonaut. But when we began to talk about everyday things, like books, hologramics, humor, politics, or practically anything else, we were from completely different worlds. It felt like different universes.

“Besides, I found myself grappling with everything I had seen and experienced. At times I would seem confused, or simply lose my focus on what people were saying or asking. HQ noticed, of course, and set me up with a psychotherapist. Word somehow leaked out to the press, and the brass decided to blame it on a malfunction during the re-entry process. Meanwhile, the therapist interpreted my condition as a form of PTSD from the trip.

“Some of the other members of the crew seemed a little iffy as well, and a couple of them ended up killing themselves within the first few years back.

“A few of the crew ended up heading out again on other ships as fast as they could. They couldn’t handle the idea of being back, so they became space rats instead. I almost did too. It might have been better for me if I had.

“I don’t know about the others—at first, those of us who could still stand each other would get together from time to time, but then we drifted apart—but I wouldn’t call what happened to me PTSD.”

“What was it, then?” I asked.

“I guess the best way to explain it is to say that I found out that God isn’t there.”

“God?” I said.

“I use the term metaphorically of course, but on that trip, I finally saw that we were really and truly alone. That has always been our true terror. Primitive man, when our minds grew big enough to become self-aware, created gods, other beings, who controlled the forces of nature in our lives and did things to or for us according to their rather complex whims. Later, some groups came up with a more efficient, consolidated God, which had an equally complex relationship with us—it loved us while constantly punishing us, it urged us to peace while it cheered us on to slaughter, it was everywhere all the time, giving us the freedom to choose and then punishing us for our choices. But at least we were not alone.

* * *

“Once, when I was a cadet, my class—the whole class—was enrolled in a course that exposed us to lots of different kinds of cultural and philosophical experiences, from history, from art, from literature. Again, they wanted to try to build up our cultural flexibility, to think outside of the technical and scientific confines of our normal curriculum. And one of the things they showed us was a performance of Waiting for Godot.

“It was an old play from the 20th century when they were very involved in existentialism—the meaning of life, what existence was all about, all that sort of thing. The play involved these two men—bums really—who are waiting for someone named Godot, who has promised to arrive but never does. Finally a little boy comes by and tells them that Godot won’t come today, but he will come tomorrow. So the two men resign themselves to waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Godot, of course, stood for God, who never was going to show up.

“The play had been very famous in its time, and very influential. But the cadets in my class?... They hated it. First, of course, they didn’t believe in God, so it was automatically a waste of time. But even more importantly, they couldn’t stand the idea of waiting around doing nothing. These cadets were primed for action. They weren’t going to wait for anything, they were going to go out and find it.

“It was a bleak play. But…well, it was true. Mind you, I’m not saying we’ll never find organic life on other planets. The odds say we will, and I more or less believe it. But beings we can hang out with and have a beer with? No. Beings that we can discuss philosophy and the meaning of life with, and join with in bold new intellectual and galactic adventures? No. Since we left, more than 100 other exploration missions have set out. I believe about 27 of them have returned, while some others have experienced…accidents. A few have come back with new kinds of elements and compounds that have revolutionized our technology. And like Columbus, we have launched new ships to bring back the booty.

“But in terms of what we all hoped for, what we all dreamed of, we’re still waiting.

“I don’t know. Maybe that is a kind of PTSD after all.”

* * *

“They probably told you before you came here that I don’t really have any staff anymore. I had a team of people for a while, and I put them to work doing cold, hard projections of the probability of encountering meaningful life out there—life that we could at least interact with on some sort of intellectual level. They were young and optimistic and they kept insisting that it would happen any time now—10 more trips, 100 more trips.

“I kept shooting their ideas down, and before long I saw that none of them wanted to be stuck working for me on this kind of funeral for their dreams. So about two years ago I relented and asked them to start coming up with ideas about the kinds of life we might encounter out there given various kinds of atmospheres, chemistries, gravities, and types of suns. They loved it. They developed all sort of projection presentations where you would just sit there and be surrounded by these new life forms and even new kinds of civilizations.

“These presentations quickly became wildly popular with cadets and with the top brass, and just as my team was getting to enjoy working for me, HQ stepped in and took them away to do road shows all around the solar system.

* * *

“I didn’t really mind as much as you might think. I didn’t believe in any of it anymore, but who was I to insist on bringing anyone else down?

“I know I should retire—hell, should have retired long ago. Spend time with my wife enjoying tropical beaches and touring the world.

“I mentioned to you that my wife was a synth. After my experience with regular women, and realizing I would be completely out of their time frame, I went to our tech department and asked about the idea of a custom-made synth. It was a wonderful opportunity for them to display their skills. Human women didn’t understand my time-frame. And they couldn’t understand anything about what I had seen and experienced. The tech team downloaded my synth—her name is Julia—with a complete database of music, literature, entertainment of all sorts from my younger days, as well as historical details, cultural fads, and a complex understanding of tastes and culture. She also has a full education in technology both from my day and from today, so she can help me understand things that are commonplace now but utterly alien to me. Most importantly, she is patient and interested in letting me talk and talk, long past the point where anyone else would be hopelessly bored.

“Julia is beautiful, at least to me, but I was just looking for a kind of everyday beauty you can live with and grow old with. She is totally devoted to me—she’s programmed that way. It gives her life a kind of purpose that I can never really match. I do love her, but I know all too well that in the end I am still all alone, and always will be.”

It was late afternoon and the sun was beginning to head down on the west side of the mountain. Commander Lee stood up.

“I’m afraid I may not have been as entertaining or as helpful as you hoped. I had told myself to be more upbeat, but I’ve been having a hard time with that.”

“Oh no, sir,” I said, grabbing my recorder and notes and getting up from the sofa. “This has been really fascinating, and I really appreciate your taking the time to meet with me.”

Commander Lee looked as if he was considering something else. “You know, you might check with my secretary about some of those alien life presentations my old team did. If your readers are anything like most of the people around here, they should go crazy over that stuff.”

“Oh. Really? Can I?” I hoped I didn’t look too relieved. “Thank you, sir. I really appreciate the suggestion.”

* * *

After the reporter left, Commander Lee sat down on the sofa facing the view of the mountain. He started to ask his computer to connect him with Julia, to discuss their evening plans. But he didn’t. He just sat there, staring out the window at the magnificent view, staring out there at nothing at all.

© Peter A. Hempel - 2020