Pandora's Ark

By Glen Brumby

When an insignificant meteor strikes the earth it poses unprecedented scientific challenges for an unprepared world. An idealistic young academic faces losing much more than the life he has aspired to. With his only two friends in tow, a feminist and a scientist, he goes on an adventure he could never have imagined and he ends up exploring the depths of his resilience with surprising results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glen Brumby
• Release date: Aug 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310319457

Glen Brumby

I am married to Aija and we usually live at the Gold Coast in Australia although we are currently travelling around. Our children are Elise and Aleks. Aija and I have lived in the UK and in Germany. I studied arts and law at the University of Adelaide. I have had a number of interesting careers, including being a professional squash player, a fire-fighter, a teacher at Uni, a prosecutor and a senior public servant. I've also worked in a medium sized law firm for a while. I've also worked for a long time in building policy for the Queensland Government and I was proud to serve on the Australian Building Codes Board. Now I am writing and trying to keep fit. I have an ambition to write a novel that people say they can't put down.

Book preview

Prologue

Eons ago mundane galactic events initiated a series of cosmic collisions. An ordinary collection of rocks began a long journey. One boulder continued in uninterrupted motion until it contacted the Kracht comet just as it had been destined to do from the beginning. Then, as regular as clockwork, in July, celestial debris from the comet group rained down towards earth.

Inside the planet’s protective atmosphere there is little to fear from meteors. As small as grains of sand, most aren’t large enough to reach the surface. Rarely, some are larger. Following the fateful collision, debris from the Kracht comet became a meteor shower with an array of large rocks. Some were capable of reaching the earth and a few did.

With a velocity, relative to the earth, exceeding two hundred thousand kilometres per hour, the cosmic material posed a small but grave risk of cascading collisions with the many thousands of satellites high enough in the sky to remain in continuous orbits. Over six thousand man made satellites and more space junk than can be tracked orbit the earth.

Steadily, thirty seven thousand kilometres above the planet’s surface, a decommissioned satellite cruised silently in a geo-stationary orbit as it had done for over forty years. The inevitably violently collision with a sporadic meteor created a debris shower which radiated towards crowded lower orbits. In a domino effect known as Kessler’s Syndrome other satellites were transformed into even more dangerous space junk.

At first, the routine astronomic event didn’t endanger earth’s oblivious inhabitants. Mostly the debris burnt, broke up or evaporated as it travelled though the thermosphere and then the mesosphere. By the time it reached the thicker stratosphere, fifty kilometres above the earth, the layer of gases clinging to the globe had done most of its thanklessly protective work. At an elevation of eleven kilometres, the considerably denser troposphere only left a few of the largest pieces of debris intact to strike the land’s surface and they could be deadly. However, given the size of the planet, with its vast tracts of sparsely occupied territory, the odds of anyone being hit were low.

A struggling American farmer in New Mexico was fortunate enough to witness a meteor striking the ground. It’s a lucky man indeed who is able to bear close witness to such a rare spectacle while avoiding being hit by debris. Certainly, a small change in the meteor’s trajectory could have made things a lot worse. Even so, it wasn’t his luckiest of days.

Part one – Discovery

Chapter one

As far as the eye could see, on a flat vista not far off South Roosevelt Road 5, hot air hazed and shimmered across the land in every direction. Exasperated by the heat, Jimmy Baker dropped his spade and looked to a cloudless sky for inspiration. Salty sweat drained into his eyes and a damp cotton shirt stuck to his shoulders.

The dry dirt was being baked dryer still by a relentless sun. It was being blown every which way away in hot July breezes. Jimmy feared all his land would soon be gone, blown away.

Farming in New Mexico wasn’t turning out like Jimmy thought it would. Cheap land didn’t come close to making up for a dear dollar. And now the damn dollar was getting dearer by the day making everything so much harder for honest working men like Jimmy. He just wanted to feed a family from his toil like his ancestors had for generations.

He wondered, maybe he should plant pinto beans? Well there was just no margin in anything anymore. Everything kept getting cheaper except the things Jimmy needed to buy which always seemed more expensive than before. He looked up again and it came to him. A white flash of light streaked across the sky and as he closed his eyes he saw red from the illuminated blood in his eyelids. Chilli peppers. In his mind’s eye he saw red hot chilli peppers. Chilli was the newest new age food he could think of. Spice was in fashion. He could surely add some value to the peppers and sell them to rich Californians in fancy glass jars.

Besides, the meteor was a sign and maybe even a portent? Jimmy didn’t need to wonder. He watched a stream of fire herald the arrival of a celestial rock which landed smack in the middle of his as yet unplanted chilli field.

Yes sir, Jimmy knew what he knew. Most of all he knew he was no idiot. He knew a message from a higher power when he saw one. This was surely an omen. How many men could say they’d seen a damn big stone land in their field from space? The shockwave had knocked Jimmy down. At that moment he was mightily glad it was no bigger than a football. Just as well. If it were any bigger it would have been a curse instead of an omen. He understood it would’ve killed him stone dead.

With a wooden handled spade in hand Jimmy set off to investigate. In the excitement of the moment the heat no longer bothered him. The sweat in his eyes didn’t sting. After walking one hundred and fifty yards he came to the edge of a newly formed crater. He estimated it to be a perfect circle, five yards across and maybe two and half yards deep. Quite an impact, it’d formed an up-side down cone shaped dent in the arid dirt.

Jimmy could see there was little or nothing left of the meteor rock yet there was something partially buried at the bottom of the pit. He climbed in and slid down the side. Using his spade he uncovered a sphere of rock like material the size of a large orange or maybe a grapefruit. It was surely too hot to touch. On closer examination he could see the sphere was too perfect to be just a rock. Plus it had a seam around its circumference. He took it with him outside the crater by balancing it in the blade of his spade and laid it on the flat crusty earth.

It was still very hot. After wondering what to do with it for a minute, Jimmy hit it with the back of his spade to see if there was anything of value inside. The sphere responded with the dull sound you get when you hit something metal which is very solid indeed. But it didn’t open along the seam as he’d intended. He let the hot breeze cool his sweat drenched back for a moment before he tried again, this time hitting the unworldly object harder.

The sphere split open along its seam and a small amount of ultra-fine grey powder spilled out. Shit. It looked like gunpowder. What a let-down. Jimmy was too hot and bothered to notice the dark metallic powder glitter and sparkle in the bright sunlight. In his disappointment he left the sphere and the spilled contents where they lay and went home to tell his wife Ellen about his near death experience and his new plans to grow and market high-end chilli products. He thought no more of omens or portents and he decided he didn’t really want to think of himself as a superstitious person.

Jimmy was past halfway home when he figured out just how badly he’d screwed up. This was a big deal. Maybe even the biggest deal ever. What was he thinking? A manufactured rock from outer space was like the great American dream, the holiest of holy grails. It was proof we weren’t alone and it could be worth a fortune. New Mexico was about to have something much more substantial than Nevada’s Area 51 and it would be on his land. People would come from all over in their fancy recreational vehicles and he would become very rich.

Chapter two

On the other side of the earth, in a beachside suburb in the Australian city of Adelaide, Oscar Bain surveyed his neat kitchen. He was a young man who liked to watch cooking shows. The assembly and presentation of the ingredients resonated powerfully in his orderly mind. He’d always felt great comfort in being well prepared and with sensible and practical things like routines and neatness. But it wasn’t just the predictable forethought and preparation. He keenly anticipated the great artistry of combination. Blending well chosen elements to create something unique was a wonderful thing to do and for Oscar it was almost spiritual. Not that he believed in supernatural things or even that there was anything mystical about spiritual thoughts. No, it was a matter of emphasising that some activities should be venerated as being extra-ordinary.

With the chosen ingredients assembled on a pristine kitchen bench Oscar set about measuring each component of his recipe as exactly as he could manage. Using practiced care would ensure the result would be reliably within a small tolerance of variation. He liked to compare his work to baking a cake. Each time the ingredients will vary in purity, the mixture will have slightly different concentrations of each ingredient and every one of them will be distributed differently within the mixture. The cooking temperature will be different as will the duration of cooking. At the end of the process the cake will be unique. But hopefully his result wouldn’t be too unique. What he did required more precision than baking a cake.

He pursued his efforts with the single minded zeal of someone who loved his work and felt assured it was important. He preferred to think of himself as an adventurer. He was a person who wasn’t afraid to take risks with a bold new recipe. As a sensitive and impressionable young boy Oscar was deeply influenced by the stories of courage of the great seafaring explorers like Christopher Columbus and James Cook. He read about the adventurers, absorbing the tales of men who took great risks and devoted their lives to going to dangerous and exotic places. From an early age he knew that when he grew up he too would be an explorer.

It wasn’t that adventurers, explorers and pioneers were heroes. They could be egotistical, cold hearted and exploitative. Oscar was attracted to their idealism and he understood their restless desires to find and understand something new.

It took Oscar some considerable time to find his ideal new frontier. Although he wouldn’t ever admit it, in some ways he approached his life in a constant reaction to the influences of his parents, particularly his father. His father was a driven man who didn’t need to express his disappointment for it to be keenly felt. A young Oscar told his dad he’d be happy to be an average person. He wanted to be just like his friends. His father’s alternative view stamped itself on Oscar’s life forever. Average meant mediocre. A mediocre life was a wasted one. Mr Bain senior saw only one goal in life and two types of men. Men sought excellence in everything they did and men could win or they could lose.

Sadly, despite all their striving things didn’t turn out so well for Oscar’s parents. Senior Bain found himself seriously overleveraged when an unforeseen financial crisis hit. Of course crises were regular but they were also always entirely unexpected. Margin loans were called in when the stock market became a sea of red ink. His cherished dreams drowned and losing his entire fortune coincided with an overdose of his medications. He was drunk and didn’t leave a note. He died utterly broke, a man who was unable to live without his money.

For longer than she could remember, Oscar’s mother had depended on her husband for her material security and status. He watched her sink very quickly into a lonely depression. When the family home was re-possessed by the bank, in her humiliation she couldn’t face her affluent friends or the world. An overdose of anti-depressants stopped her heart instantly. The doctors said she died painlessly and her short note just said she was sorry for leaving him.

The events pushed a teenage Oscar out of his home and dictated he should find his own path in life, one which didn’t depend on success or wealth. His parents taught him there was great pain in wanting too much. It hurts if you attach yourself to things, firstly because of the worry you might lose them and then more especially when you do.

He wondered why he wasn’t enough to keep them alive and doubted his value as their only child. It made him want to be different to his parents and he settled on the idea of seeking out intellectual adventures in an academic life. Entirely new frontiers were continuously opening up for important study. Obvious ones like biology, space and the deep oceans were interesting but he never found anything specific he felt passionate about.

To Oscar, people were the most interesting objects of study and the greatest challenge of all was to understand how minds worked. Consciousness was his new frontier and he wanted to study everything that went with it. Oscar’s goal in life was to understand and stretch the human mind as far as it could go. Everyone had beliefs but no-one spent any time working out how they really got them or whether the process could be improved. Thinking was hard and working out what to believe was even harder. That’s what he wanted to do most, systematically build better beliefs.

And to do that, at the moment, he was focusing on the art of cooking. He’d produced a fine white paste after painstakingly blending the carefully assorted ingredients for a long time. It was important to ensure each component was uniformly distributed.

The white mixture needed to be heated just so and for a precise time. Oscar used a Bunsen burner and a digital timer. When he was done he left the glass crucible to rest and cool. Lastly, before the paste could harden, using a state of the art pill press he pressed out fifty small white pills. Admiring his work for a moment he reflected on how great it was to have these simple pleasures of interesting work and a well ordered life. He left his pills to dry on a large aluminium tray in carefully spaced and straight rows.

Chapter three

After discussing the ins and outs of their windfall over dinner and a blend of cheap Californian wine, the next morning Jimmy led his wife Ellen to inspect the crater site to size up their plans. On the strength of Ellen’s advice Jimmy called her cousin Earl again while they walked.

Earl had almost finished half his diploma in legal studies and was full of business ideas. He agreed to become their agent and now they were in constant contact developing strategies and working through the details. Jimmy was a farmer. He was smart enough to know he had no idea how to market and sell the story of the alien artefact.

One thing they agreed on immediately was that it was important to act quickly but not too quickly. They should examine all the angles and Earl certainly seemed to think there were quite a few opportunities.

Selling the news was the first. It had to be done just right to create a global sensation. Earl had explained the best way would be to string out the affair. Retain and build attention he’d said. You can’t do that by telling the whole story right up front. Earl was going to develop a narrative. First though he was contacting the major news networks. Jimmy was to scour the site as soon as possible, take a complete inventory and take some photos. A lot of photos.

Ellen was excited as well. It was a chance to be something better than subsistence farmers. They’d be able to have a family and raise some educated kids. Hell, even a little capital to knock down their loans would be great.

A little intoxicated with hope they approached the lucky field. Ellen didn’t bother remarking about how insignificant the crater looked. It may just be a hole in their barren dirt, in a flat field on a flatter plain, but if it was holding an alien artefact, well that would make it special enough.

Jimmy was impressed with how quickly Ellen thought through the issues presented by their luck. It was great she was so shrewd. As far as wives went, she was a good one that was for damn sure. The first thing she’d asked Earl was how they could be sure they owned the artefact. A great question. One Jimmy would never have thought to ask. For Jimmy, this was America. If it came from nature and was on his land he considered he surely owned it. Earl said he didn’t think you’d own a plane if it crashed on your land. Another good point thought Jimmy but he owned the rain didn’t he? And the sunshine shining on his land?

Ellen and Earl remained firm. This was a different situation, something more like a plane crash than the rain or sunshine. And it wasn’t as though they were going to be able to deny the thing came from the sky because that was the whole point. So maybe they should get a real lawyer first up. That was agreed. Nobody wanted some government squarehead turning up to spoil the party by taking their property.

Trouble was, that success sparked Ellen to think some more. There could be international laws. They could be a problem so she said Earl should get a damn good lawyer firm and Jimmy conveyed the message, Earl, we’ve been thinking, the lawyer should be with a firm which can check out the international laws too.

Earl joked, Hell there might be an alien law too. One that said you couldn’t own alien stuff under our earthling law.

This didn’t impress Jimmy, This is no joke Earl.

But now Ellen butted in