Tomorrow

By M.M. Rumberg

From the national award-winning author of CodeName: Snake comes an extraordinarily realistic adventure in outer space. A huge asteroid is heading toward the earth, its magnetic signature causing tremendous vortexes of destruction even before it arrives. Scientists call its arrival the end of the earth. In an effort to preserve humanity, long-distance spacecrafts are launched to planets newly discovered to be in the Goldilocks range.

The US’s ship, Hope of Humanity arrived at its new planet, New Earth, a trip that took two years; and a new hope arose among the passengers. During their explorations, they discover that others from another solar system had arrived before them, and not everyone is thrilled with this discovery. In addition, some people no longer want to be on New Earth and wish to return home to earth, even though it appears that life on earth has been wiped out.

When they arrive back on earth, what awaits them is beyond their belief, and they discover the huge lies they were fed.

How far will people go to save themselves and humanity? This action thriller will sweep you along an unforgettable journey that tests modern science and old-fashioned ways. The surprise ending will leave you breathless, testing the ties of love and family and what exists out there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984524898

M.M. Rumberg

Mort is a retired U.S. Air Force Officer who served as a Rescue and Survival technician teaching escape and evasion and survival techniques to aircrew members. He survived a tour of duty in Vietnam and barely survived two tours in the Pentagon as a computer systems action officer. He was also an information technology consultant and a manager with a large international health care insurance company. He earned a Doctorate in Education and has been an adjunct professor of computer sciences for several universities and community colleges in the Washington, DC, area. Mort was a volunteer with the Alexandria, Virginia, Police Department and the Animal Welfare League of Alexandria. His novel, CodeName: Snake, The Evil We Kill, won a national award and several of his short stories have won national recognition. Now residing in California, he is busy working on several new novels and many short stories. Visit the author’s website: mmrumberg.com

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

The Near Future

The Deep Space Exploration Laboratory, DSEL, was being readied for launch—its first flight. The ship was filled with new technology, much of it untested. There simply was no time left for normal testing. While some said the end of the Earth was coming, so building the ship and testing it was pointless, the crew and volunteers who had signed on for the flight were assured that everything would work. Still, the thought in everyone’s mind was they had to get it right the first time—there were no second chances. This ship was to be the hope, the savior of humanity. The apocalypse was at hand.

Was it the end of the Earth? Humans had desecrated the planet through constant wars and over-population and had stripped the planet of its resources. Through the years, countless millions had been killed over issues like oil, religion, and land, with millions more displaced as refugees. Huge water shortages had greatly impacted agricultural production causing crop failure and empty and uncultivated land. Thousands upon thousands starved. Strip mining and the continual burning of fossil fuel accelerated rising CO2 levels and filled the air with pollutants. Unprecedented deforestation had altered weather patterns. Increasing acidic levels in the oceans led to extraordinary aquatic loss.

The ice caps had shrunk—and the remaining caps and glaciers were melting at an accelerating rate forcing large land areas along the shoreline underwater. An astonishing number of animal and plant species had already become extinct—a one or two degree rise in temperature destroyed them quickly—and there no longer was a reasonable way to stop future losses, let alone reverse them. And still, unbelievably, politicians still denied that global warming was occurring.

In spite of all the evidence, warnings, and lives lost, nations refused to take determined action and refused to cooperate, paying lip service to conservation efforts and treaties. No relief was in sight. The Earth’s population had grown to over eight billion people and had become rogue animals that soiled their own nests. Now they were beginning to pay for their transgressions.

As if to further emphasize Earth’s predicament, astronomers discovered that a huge asteroid, a massive one, almost a quarter the size of the moon, was heading Earth’s way. At first astronomers predicted that the asteroid would hit Earth, and if so, life on Earth would cease to exist—the doomsday prediction. Subsequent calculations said it wouldn’t directly impact the Earth but would be a near miss—a very near miss. It was hardly grounds for celebration. Because of its growing proximity, it was being called a Near Earth Object—NEO sounded much nicer than an asteroid about to smash into and devastate the planet—and it was beginning to cause damage to the planet. Its magnetic signature was off the charts.

Even at this distance it was having an effect on the Earth’s tides and gravity, and was causing what scientists termed vortexes. These were atmospheric shock waves producing massively destructive weather systems that could wipe out large geographical areas. And the closer the asteroid came, the more destruction it would cause. Some astronomers thought there was a high probability, whether it hit Earth or not, that Earth had run out of alternatives.

How can magnetic shock waves from the asteroid, with it so far away, cause these vortexes on Earth? asked one reporter.

A NASA spokesperson, Jerome Cook, tried to explain. They are very much like solar flares, he said. Usually a solar flare applies to a very broad spectrum of energy release from the sun. However, similar phenomena are occurring with this asteroid. We don’t know why.

But solar flares don’t usually cause trouble here on Earth, right?

Cook shook his head. They can, and sometimes, do. For example, the UV radiation and X-rays can disrupt radio communication, radars, and any device that uses those wavelengths. Luckily, most of the solar flares from the sun miss the Earth so we’re largely spared any consequences.

So, again, how does this asteroid affect the Earth? It’s not a…wayward sun, is it?

Cook smiled. No, it’s not. It’s not a sun. The problem is, we just don’t know how it’s…for lack of a better term…huge, massive magnetic flares are affecting us. We can measure the energy release, but the mechanism, the why and when it happens, is not known.

So, when is the next one, the next magnetic flare?

Cook sighed. I wish I knew. We simply are not able to predict them. The best we can do is provide a minute or two of advance notice when one is about to strike.

Later, the reporter realized he had been deluged with scientific answers that he simply could not understand. His resulting story was caustic.

Scientists apparently don’t have the answers. Are they hiding behind their ignorance they don’t want to admit? All they had to say was they were unsure of what and why this was happening, but clarifying that seems not to be on their agenda. No one will even speculate what will happen if the moon and earth’s gravitational pull conflict with the asteroid. This leaves us to wonder what NASA is doing, other than asking for more money and complaining that our satellites are being disrupted and knocked out of orbit. The only thing that is known for sure, is that this asteroid is huge, and even from its vast distance from the Earth, is already causing great damage here and it will only get worse.

Anticipating enormous devastation, NASA, in collaboration with DARPA, the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the European Space Agency initiated an emergency mission that might have a chance…a good one, they said…, to ensure humanity’s survival of the species.

They named it the Hope of Humanity. Everyone called it The Ark.

But if it failed….

CHAPTER 2

Five a.m. The barest sliver of light was beginning to creep along the horizon. Another hour would pass before the sun would start to poke above it. The gantry was lit up like high noon on a sunny, cloudless day. The metal scaffolding surrounding the massive, ungainly-looking ship held scurrying people carrying supplies. Even though most of the ship was below ground surface, the scaffolding protruded above it. The ship pointed toward the stars, or as some preferred, toward an uncertain future.

Right now, fueling had just finished and resource stocking was nearing completion. Animals had already been aboard for several days getting acclimated to their new home. The ship was really three ships, connected to each other. Each ship had a pair of horses, a cow and bull, two sheep, and two pigs. Together, the three individual ships, called the Deep Space Exploration Lab, was huge, a modern-day ark on a scale never before achieved.

Colonel Sebastian Rice, Chief of Mission Payload Directorate, in charge of stocking the ship, had been working around the clock like everyone else, racing to beat the unavoidable devastation scientists predicted. This interplanetary stuff is so new, he thought, and under these conditions…. He shook his head and looked up at the night sky barely able to see the last of the glimmering stars as the sky began to slowly lighten.

Every aspect of this mission had to be right. There simply was no other choice…there was no room for error.

The countdown had already started—a highly unusual procedure since it had started before they were fully ready. Rice sweated in the cool morning air of the New Mexico desert. One ear to his communicator, the other to a cell phone, he kept reminding crews that they were running out of time, imploring them to work faster.

We’re going to launch…and soon, people. Get it done, now, then head for the bunkers.

People rolled their eyes at him, having heard this many times before, but they understood the urgency and moved quickly. Everyone moved quickly.

Abbreviated systems testing and electronic switching and sequencing were being keyed and readied without commencing full testing protocols. Normally, for a launch, each component had to test at 100 percent before it was a go. Now, it no longer mattered…anything was okay. It either worked or it didn’t, and if it didn’t? Well… if a component didn’t work, it would have to be bypassed. The crew would take their chances. Luckily, so far, everything had met minimal acceptance levels, so final countdown was quickly started. Under regular scheduling, the launch sequence would take at least eight hours, but now, actual launch was less than an hour away at 0600.

Listen up people, said Rice into his communicator. We’re launching in 50 minutes. The ship is going into space whether it passes launch benchmarks or not. The crew is suiting up. This is not a case of ‘go or no go.’ It’s only ‘go.’

He knew his words were unnecessary. Everyone understood. Urgency was the keyword of the day and had been every day for the past two weeks.

The ship’s command consisted of a crew of six, two for each of the three individual rockets. Each crew was a mile away in the command center receiving their final briefing. The passengers, 81 couples, already on board, were closely reviewing their final launch checklists. They’d already been mission-briefed. Now it was time to depart.

The ungraceful-looking ark consisted of three separate ships attached to each other in a triangular configuration and umbiliqued together so each could share resources. The rockets were designed to work together, but if one failed, the other two could accommodate the failure, and the mission would survive. Also, in case of an emergency, the three ships could separate and land in different locations, so survival chances, at least for some of the passengers, were increased. That was the logic, and at the time it seemed to make sense.

Rice looked down at the ship from the upper gantry and shook his head. DESL was a strange-looking craft, unlike anything ever designed or launched before.

Several reporters had labeled it the devil’s toy, predicting the ugly ship would never fly. And even if it managed to get off the ground, they predicted, it’s so ungainly, it’ll settle back down and explode. We’d do better digging deep into the Earth and settling in bunkers until the asteroid passes. Maybe some of us would survive.

Rice grimaced and wondered if that judgment was true, and the media’s gloom about the mission followed him like a dark cloud. I can’t really blame them. The ship looks like something out of a nightmare…as if a committee of blind engineers had built an elephant. He tried to shake off the negative images as he started down the gantry.

Surrounding the three rockets like a huge, elongated donut, were the housing units and hydroponic labs. Although each rocket’s attached housing unit was designed to carry 27 couples and pairs of a handful of Earth’s animals, with careful rationing, each hydroponics lab could support all 162 people and the animals for several months, even if the other two housing units and labs failed. Each rocket also had a mission commander and co-commander, bringing the original complement of souls on board to 168. However, at the last minute, seven illnesses and five unanticipated dropouts reduced the number to 156.

NASA administrators mandated that all volunteer couples had to be married—a necessity to minimize relationship conflicts and help ensure continuation of the species. At least that was their logic. When not enough couples passed the evaluation tests, they allowed a few volunteers who were single, both male and female, to enter the program. NASA must have had fun pairing them.

The mission’s goal was that everything aboard was necessary to support the passengers, including the animals, until reliable food sources could be obtained locally. They speculated that there would be local food sources—although no one fully believed that, but everyone was optimistic.

Each housing unit, if stood on end, would be about three stories high and a block long. Surrounding the upright rockets, they were as streamlined for launch from Earth as such a huge structure could be, but even so, they made the DSEL look like it had an enormous bulbous growth around its middle.

Rice entered Ship Number One and headed to the flight deck nodding to several people along the way. He loved being here and several times he had sat in the commander’s seat, letting his fingers flit over the multitude of switches and gauges. He’d attended many classes about the ship’s operation, and learning about its mission gave him a tremendous sense of adventure even though he knew he wasn’t going on this ride. Now, arriving on the flight deck he was pleased to see that all of the flight deck’s stores had been loaded and secured and noted it on his checklist. Flight crew operations had done a good job.

When the rockets landed on some unknown but habitable exoplanet, theory went, the housing units would detach, slide down and away from the upright rocket. Then each unit would become four-legged, multiple-storied housing and labs. The volunteers knew it was a gamble at best…. Instead of being an ark taking them to safety, it might very well be their coffin.

Although the scientists claimed that the odds of survival were heavily in the passenger’s favor and that the ship would find an Earth-like planet that would easily sustain them, there was always an element of doubt. The closer to launch, the more that doubt increased.

CHAPTER 3

When the call for volunteers went out, Rice had actually volunteered himself and Marge, but both were turned down even though Marge was four years younger than him.

Too old, they had said. Both of you, although your skills for such an undertaking are very good…. Young blood was required as an overriding consideration, even though youth came with less experience. Like everything else, he thought, it was a trade-off.

I’m sorry, honey, said Marge. It would have been an extraordinary adventure.

Rice hugged her. Yeah, I’m sorry, too. He shrugged. It’s obviously a young person’s game.

His emotions felt slightly jumbled, but not for him, for Marge. She should be on this mission more than anyone. She was an emergency room nurse, someone who should be in high demand for selection for the Ark. He loved her for her adventurous spirit in being willing to leave Earth and go into the unknown void and felt bad that she wasn’t chosen because of age—most likely his.

Lieutenant Colonel Sebastian Rice had retired four years ago from the United States Air Force Space Command after twenty-six years of service and had begun his second career as Professor of Aerospace Sciences at the University of Maryland in the Washington, DC, area. He’d written two books on the possibility and probability of deep space travel—non-fiction—although some people debated that. Both books had been well-received by most of the scientific community.

His unique experiences and familiarity with the science of space travel led to NASA’s renewed interest in him. Rice wasn’t especially interested in again working for the government—enough was enough—but they were insistent. He had refused to voluntarily join them, even with the recommendation of a one-grade promotion to full Colonel, but against his wishes and with NASA’s influence in the DoD, he was recalled to active service and ordered to head NASA’s readiness team for the first manned interstellar survey, or as the NASA administrators officially called it, Deep Space Voyage.

Even though he disliked being recalled to active duty, Rice thought the mission had a nice ring to it and was challenging, and he was impressed with what was happening with such urgency. He talked himself into accepting it because he thought it was the right thing to do. What he didn’t know at the time of his reactivation was that there was a huge, legitimate need for the urgency, and once on the project he was briefed on the full expectation. Everything said at the briefing was classified, so the media hadn’t yet been able to spread the word, but everyone knew they would soon ferret out the details. Although at first, no one really gave full voice to it, Rice had the thought that the urgency might well be a race to save humanity.

The ever-present doubt was clear from the get-go when the call for volunteers went out even without providing a full explanation of why other than space exploration. However, NASA administrators need not have bothered. They were inundated with applications. Over two hundred thousand people submitted résumés. Selection was based on age, physical ability, health, and special skills. After an intensified screening process to eliminate those volunteering as a lark, to get away from a spouse, or those not qualified, they still had thousands to consider. Finally, the volunteer list was whittled down to eighty-one couples—twenty-seven per ship. One hundred additional couples were accepted as backup. Disappointing as it was to them, they were not on the secondary list and would probably not be included, even if volunteers dropped out.

Death mission or not, a one-way trip or not, expectations of a grand adventure, as well as anxiety about the trip, ran high. With so many volunteering, and because of the extreme vetting, no one in NASA anticipated that anyone would drop out because of a sudden onset of cold feet, although pregnancy was a disqualifier. The suspended animation gas was largely an unknown quantity. No one knew what might happen to a fetus after a year or so asleep.

Several unmanned experimental ships had already proven their worth—everything had worked. Now it was time for manned flight…but whom to believe? Certainly not the rocket design engineers.

None of them had volunteered.

CHAPTER 4

I hate to admit it, but space travel really is a young man’s game, thought Rice, patting his slightly rounding stomach. Although he jumped at the chance of volunteering, he had been told, You’re too old at 50, and your wife, Marge, is likewise too old at 46—past breeding age.

Rice smirked. In spite of the age restriction, several old-time astronauts from past missions who were close to Rice’s age, managed to make the list. Well, being put in charge of outfitting the Hope of Humanity is second best. It would’ve been nice to be selected, but, if I can’t fly, then at least I can help the others, help humanity survive. He snorted and shook his head. A noble thought, but I’m pissed at being turned down. I want Marge and Jason and myself to survive, even though my son refused to volunteer.

I’ll take my chances, he said aloud.

When the NASA launch complex was completed without a vortex yet hitting this location, although some mild ones had hit not too far away…the people and ship were brought together. Housing within thirty miles around the NASA complex was built, and several mini cities were created.

The rockets were clustered together, each over 400 feet tall, made of a newly developed space-age material. Each rocket was individually outfitted for a ride to another star system, hopefully a newly discovered Earth-like planet, probably hundreds or so light years away, but more likely much farther. Word soon leaked that the final destination might not be within the Milky Way, but this did not deter volunteers when the call went out.

The living quarters—the housing and hydroponics labs—were firmly anchored to the rockets. People laughed at the result and predicted it would never lift off. Was this the real thing or an experiment in sci-fi lunacy? No one, except the math wizards, knew if it would really work, and even they were iffy.

Instead of a launch site on the surface, the site was underground. It was a tight fit and deliberately so. In case a vortex hit, it was hoped, the ship would be spared since most of it was protected below ground level. The only parts sticking out were the noses of the three rockets, and they barely protruded, like three sleek antennae.

Rice was anxious and kept checking his watch. Trained to be mission-oriented, he knew that time was running out. The last of the supplies were finally aboard and his team just about finished, but the crew was not yet here—they had just had their final briefing in the assembly room and were suiting up when mission control scientists announced that an unexpected vortex was going to hit the site. It was starting to form, and nothing could stop it. It would shut the complex down and possibly destroy it.

The launch site had to hunker down and wait it out, hoping nothing would be wrecked. If the vortex was a bad one, it could easily take a year to redo everything with no guarantee that another vortex wouldn’t recur. And they didn’t have a year. Right now, because the asteroid was still so far away, the vortexes were relatively mild, but as it came closer, the vortexes would increase in number and intensity.

The passengers were aboard doing their final checks—refamiliarizing themselves with the ship’s systems and grasping the new science and mechanics of long-term, deep space sleep. Classes had been held, of course, but it was one thing to have theoretical classroom academics compared to on-the-job training. Those accelerated courses had only touched on the necessities, the high points. There wasn’t any time for flight simulation. Time was a luxury they no longer had.

Rice’s headset beeped. Sebastian, I’ve got some bad news, said Mission Control.

More bad news? What could be worse than the end of the world? What is it?

Two things: the President has declared martial law until the problem dealing with the vortexes is resolved and right now a vortex is forming right here and will reach peak force in just a couple of minutes.

Damn. How bad is it?

A very bad one—a super-vortex.

I’d better get everyone out of here and head for the bunkers.

No, Sebastian, they’ll never get underground in time. They’ll be caught in the open. You have to stay in the ship.

But….

No other choice. Lock it down. Now.

What about the crew?

No way they can make it to the ship. They’ve been pulled back to Mission Control. There’s no other choice. Close it down and wait it out. I don’t know how long we’ll have radio communication with you. Do it now.

Rice reached for the main intercom. Everyone, listen up. This is Colonel Rice. A vortex is coming, and it’s supposed to be a bad one. In ten seconds the hatches will close, locking us in. Take any nearby seat and strap in.

The monitors showed panic and fear on their faces as everyone rushed to their pods. A female technician glanced at Rice as she slipped into the seat next to him. This okay? she asked, strapping in. Her face was pale with fright.

Rice nodded.

Outside, three workers dropped the packages they were carrying, ran for and leaped into the ship, barely