Tempus Fugit – Part 3

“When we returned from Pluto we began the planning for the first interstellar trip.  We had about fifty stellar systems that had earthlike planets in what we measured to be the Goldilocks Zones around their stars.  We selected a red dwarf about fifty light years from earth; LHS 1140 whose second planet was believed to be a super-earth well within the habitable zone of its star.  We intended to take a lot of measurements of the planet and its neighborhood and then head straight home.

The crew would be me, McKenzie and a six-man science team that would take the measurements of the exoplanet and the surrounding system.  I also insisted that Bertram train one of his colleagues on his star drive in case any accident incapacitated him before the return.  He started laughing when I told him this, “Afraid I’ll jump ship and go native?”  I told him this was a dangerous mission and we had to have some redundancy for something as important as the astrogation.  He laughed again but he put together a manual for running his equipment and trained one of his “bosses” for the upcoming flight.

McKenzie set up the program for LHS1140 and the ship was equipped for a one-month voyage; oxygen, water, food, medicine.  I even brought some firearms, only because I realized where we were going there was no law in effect other than force.  I kept the locker those were in under lock with me the only one with a key or even knowledge of their existence.  I guess that was a little paranoid but you never know.

Came the morning of the trip everything had been inspected three times and the dashboard was all green lights.  We launched into the upper atmosphere and McKenzie set the program and a display counted down from sixty seconds.  When it reached zero, we felt the strange sensations of the drive for a few moments and then we felt normal again.  When we uncovered the viewing port there was a strange world far below us and the light of a red star was illuminating it.  The whole crew burst into spontaneous cheers.  You never saw seven nerds happier than these boys.  I thought they would never stop slapping each other on the back and jabbering about who had been most right about the planet’s appearance.  I have to admit I was pretty excited too.  That world was a mostly ocean planet with white clouds and what looked like island chains sprinkled across the equator.  There were even what looked like ice caps at the poles.  It was an amazing sight.

The boys spent the next week photographing and taking spectrograms of everything they could see.  I made a decision that for this first trip we would not enter the atmosphere of the planet.  Probably out of an exaggerated sense of caution I wanted to make sure that no microbes from this alien world found their way back to Earth.  The boys were bitterly disappointed but shrugged their shoulders and took it in stride.  After all, even a week flew by shockingly fast because of how busy all the observations and tests kept them.

Finally, I set the return hour for the morning of the eighth day.  McKenzie recalibrated his instruments by stellar observation and as the final minutes ticked off, we took our places and strapped in for the ritual.  Once again, the skin numbness and mental unease hit me but a few moments later it ceased and we cleared the viewing port to see Earth below us.  The rotation of the Earth had us facing the Eastern Hemisphere and so we could see Africa and Asia.  But something was screwed up.  India was floating off shore.  There was ocean between it and the Asian continent.  And when you looked at the whole world all of the land masses were “off.”

One of the scientists explained it to me, “That’s what Earth looked like 55 million years in the past.”  I looked at McKenzie and said, “I hope you brought your tools because we’re a long way from home.””