As Vaughn walked on, he saw a piece of his past come alive. The whirlpool of gray clouds withdrew from the road by degrees, eddies of energy spinning the matter beneath it into a different form. The effect reminded him of a transporter or a replicator, but not working all at once, instead rebuilding from the bottom up.
Even when it was only partially completed, Vaughn recognized the structure the clouds were creating. Tall—and he knew it would grow taller still—it spanned the roadway and well beyond. A complex steel framework sat perched atop a concrete base.
So this is what’s happening,he thought. And this is how it’s going to be.Harriman, Ventu, Prynn, and now this—not time travel, not holograms, not illusions or delusions. Not real, exactly, not authentic,but real enough, the energy clouds somehow reorganizing matter into people and places and events from his past—and probably re-creating the corresponding sensor readings on his tricorder. Someone or something was peering into his mind, into his memories.
But why?
Vaughn walked on, determined to reach the site of the pulse. By the time he reached the steel-and-concrete structure, its construction had been completed, the funnel of gray energy withdrawing back up into the cloud cover. The gantry towered above him. The tangled mass of metal gave the impression of architectural confusion, but Vaughn knew that every beam, every conduit, every joint, had been meticulously planned and constructed. The launchpad looked no different now from when he had visited here as a teen.
Vaughn strode through the flame trench, the channel between the two huge concrete slabs on which the tower complex sat. When humankind’s early spacecraft had lifted off from here, taken into orbit by massive, controlled explosions of fuel, the initial fires had been diverted here. Up ahead, the huge steel wall that had directed the flames reached from slab to slab. At the bottom of one side of the wall, daylight peered through an open doorway. Vaughn headed there at a steady gait, determined to put this slice of his past behind him as quickly as possible.
Vaughn had read about this place as a boy, captured as he had been by the promise and wonder of exploration. But he recalled now that the joy he had expected to feel when he had first visited this place had never materialized, supplanted by his knowledge of the tragedy that had begun here. As it had then, melancholy now swept over him.
The heels of his boots clicked along the concrete that had replaced the roadway, the sound reverberating hollowly between the walls of the slabs. Vaughn tried to concentrate on humanity’s first steps out into the cosmos, many of which had been taken from this very place. But he could not remain focused on such thoughts, his mind being pulled back again and again to his first trip to Cape Canaveral. And back to Prynn lying nearly dead on the bridge of Defiant.And to Ventu, killed in the collapse of the tower. And to Captain Harriman, back on that fateful day.
Vaughn kept his eyes on the open doorway in the steel wall at the end of the flame trench. The rectangle of light sat dwarfed by the black wall. Vaughn felt insignificant amid his massive surroundings, and a sense of the helplessness and fear that must have enveloped the people whose deaths had begun here closed in around him.
As he neared the doorway, Vaughn told himself that he should not stop beyond it. That he wouldnot stop beyond it. He knew what was there, had seen it all those years ago, and he did not need to see it right now. You have a mission,he thought again, and began repeating the phrase over and over in his mind.
It did not matter. He passed through the doorway, saw the roadway reappear beyond the launchpad, and then peered to his right, as though he had no control over his own body. The plaque hung there on the concrete slab, brass letters raised on a darker background. Vaughn stopped and read it.
LAUNCH COMPLEX 39, PAD B
TUESDAY, 28 JANUARY 1986
1139 HOURS
DEDICATED TO THE LIVING MEMORY OF THE CREW OF
SHUTTLE ORBITER CHALLENGER , OV- 99
COMMANDER FRANCIS R. “DICK” SCOBEE
COMMANDER MICHAEL J. SMITH, PILOT
RONALD E. MCNAIR, MISSION SPECIALIST
ELLISON ONIZUKA, MISSION SPECIALIST
JUDITH A. RESNIK, MISSION SPECIALIST
GREGORY B. JARVIS, PAYLOAD SPECIALIST
S. CHRISTA MCAULIFFE, PAYLOAD SPECIALIST
“THIS DAY”
SEVEN EXPLORERS
SAILED ON A FLAME OVER
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
The words struck Vaughn like a punch to the face. He felt dazed and sad and alone. His knees wavered beneath him, and he thought for a second that he would go down. He looked skyward, the gray launch tower pushing up toward the gray clouds above.
“Stop it,” Vaughn yelled, elongating the vowels. “Stop it.” Somehow, he kept his feet. He dropped his head back down, and said, “You have a mission. Stop feeling what you’re feeling.” He peered to his left, at the road as it headed away. “You have a mission,” Vaughn said. “You have a mission.”
He repeated it another fifty times before he was finally able to get himself moving again.
Vaughn walked on.
He walked through a section of battlefield on Beta VI, where he and his team had been unable to do anything but watch as more than eleven thousand men had beaten each other to death with rocks and sticks. Today, he saw only one member of his team, and perhaps only a dozen men attacking each other, their boots sloppy with the blood of the corpses lying at their feet.
He walked past the dark, stale cell—not much more than a box—in which the Breen had once kept him for seven weeks. He had survived only by licking at the damp stones of the walls, and by killing and eating the aurowaqqa—furry, ten-legged creatures, larger than his hand—that had occasionally found their way into his prison. He killed an aurowaqqatoday, beneath the heel of his boot, unable to stop himself, and then felt…diminished…for having done so.
He walked down the streets of Pentabo, on Verillia, amid throngs of emaciated children, orphaned by war and living in the wreckage of their world. The desperate, hungry faces he saw today reflected more sorrow and pain than should have been possible for young people to feel. The scene broke his heart anew.
He walked along the corridors of Kamal,the old Cardassian freighter lost in the Badlands. Bajorans, whose gaunt bodies betrayed their horrific lives under the Occupation, sprawled dead throughout the ship, their Cardassian oppressors dead beside them. He looked for the Orb, speculating about a connection to this haunted planet, but his experience did not extend to that portion of the freighter.
And finally, as the already pale sky faded toward the onset of night, Vaughn stood on the bridge of T’Plana-Hath,staring at the viewscreen, living again that terrible moment when he had first known for sure that Ruriko was gone. Part of him died with her. Again.
Vaughn walked on.
The light would be gone soon. Because of the amount of the energy interference, the tricorder could not tell Vaughn how far he had traveled today, but it did not matter. Either he would reach the pulse, or he would not. Less than a day remained now before the next destructive wave would launch into space.
Vaughn’s legs, very tired now but still strong, had held up remarkably well to this point, and he felt confident that he would not falter physically. On an emotional level, though, his strength had waned greatly. That the people and places he had seen on his journey had been re-creations and not precisely genuine was irrelevant, because his reactions to those people and places had been genuine—both whenever they had first occurred and again today.