Chapter Forty-Six
NOAH
1
Thebe became pregnant to Slater on Christmas Day, 2012. Kane was born in Noosa hospital on a bright spring morning on Monday, September 23, 2013. Everyone was amazed at how calmly Thebe gave birth without any medication. Kane came into the world with his eyes open and smiling. He was a fully-telepathic child, learning communication in the mind plane from his mother since his conception.
Slater had been diligently practising his meditation for a couple of years by that time. His concentration had become unwavering and required little effort. He could now sit silently and be easily centred in the mind plane. This prepared him well for his telepathic communication with his son, Rama style.
Lucy’s journey through the Fish meant that her mind had been opened in a completely unique way.
‘It has exposed the inner layers of the onion for you,’ Thebe explained. ‘You will be able to traverse mind space that only Fish initiates may traverse. It is truly amazing. Everything is beyond anything you have ever imagined.’
Lucy had to still herself into lengthy, Fish-like, meditative trances to access places like that. She would come out of them uttering phrases like,
‘The whole universe is emanating from one point, from one singularity … me.’
With Kane’s arrival, everyone in the house tended more towards telepathic communication as that was the only real way that he could communicate. He said his first words at four weeks. They were ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’.
Their lives settled into a blissfully-retired, free and easy tempo. Nobody had a job and they all had plenty of money. They bicycled every day and took turns at looking after Kane. They rode out to Noosa Civic, which was the new mall on the edge of town, and bought their large fruit and vegetable juices there. They rode with their backpacks and did all of their shopping and banking that way. Slater needed to re-charge the Kombi’s battery every month as it was hardly ever being used. Some of Slater’s time was taken up by the garden, which required periodic attention, and some with Thebe, surfing Granite.
Most of the rest of the time was spent playing with Kane.
Lucy’s injuries completely healed. She became more youthful as her body accumulated the Mana. Her lifespan, as well as Slater’s, had already been extended beyond 200 years and their bodies voltaged with a constant yearning for adventure.
Adrian returned occasionally on another one of his missions to chip some bird species or other. On one of the trips he brought Slater’s ‘second skin’, and on another trip he brought a ‘skin’ for Lucy. They were gifts from Max and Ada. Together they gradually learned how to hover in the amazing flying suits by just using their minds. Their flying together and progressing at roughly the same level became a cherished time between the grandson and his grandmother. It was Thebe’s responsibility to teach them both how to fly the skins and use the camouflage function.
Adrian mentioned that a man called Noah, a time master, would be paying a visit. He told them, ‘Noah is a friend of Albion and Ambriel, the Sailsmiths, and they told him about you and your wonderful house.’
‘We’d be glad to have him,’ said Lucy.
‘Wow, a time master!’ exclaimed Slater in heightened anticipation.
The household lived by the days and generally remained disconnected from the frenzy of the outside world. They had a TV and radios, but they rarely used them. Most of their entertainment came from the music stored on their iPods. Much of that was sourced from Adam, which in turn was sourced from his old friend Nancy, the girl who was so much fun to be with that it felt like being at a party.
2
Noah arrived six weeks later, on the evening of Sunday, September 21, 2014. He cruised into Noosa in a compact, single-seater ship, which had a diameter of just thirty feet. It easily fitted inside the L-shaped jetty behind the house and was almost invisible in camouflage mode.
As he stepped out of his machine, they were immediately struck by his self-assured demeanour. He didn’t look like the sort of guy who ever took too many orders. He was tall, about 6’2”, and broad across the shoulders. His skin was either dark or deeply tanned and he wore his sun-bleached, brown hair shoulder length. He wore a comfortable, olivegreen, surfer-style T-shirt and a pair of lightweight, undyed-cotton trousers. He skipped barefoot from the ship’s ramp onto the terrace. His eyes burned an intense, iridescent, opal blue. They shook hands with him and greeted him warmly. Slater noticed that there was still sand between his toes.
‘You look like you live on the beach,’ he said, joking.
‘Shut up, Slatey,’ cautioned Lucy, ‘you don’t want to start off on the wrong foot, do you?’
Noah laughed, ‘It’s true, I live on the beach … a lot of beaches actually.’
‘Welcome, Noah,’ said Thebe as she came forward and hugged him warmly.
‘Thank you. You are most gracious to allow me to invade you like this.’
‘Stop it,’ said Lucy.
‘Yes, stop it,’ repeated Thebe. ‘You don’t know how excited we are to have a bonafide time master amongst us. We are going to pick your brain for stories.’
‘Come up into the house and make yourself comfortable,’ gestured Lucy. ‘Thank you. I feel at home already.’
3
After Noah settled into his quarters, and they had dinner, they all sat around the big table in the central courtyard. Slater unscrewed a few Pure Blondes while Lucy brought out a mix and rolled up a big fat ‘jayjay’. Thebe loaded everyone a pipe of Mana, after which Noah very graciously answered all their questions in as much detail as he could muster.
‘So, is it true, Noah, that all the time masters are surfers?’
‘Yes, that is true, but there is one master who is a surfer of a particular ilk. He is a nomad who likes to surf the desert coastline. He lives and surfs alone. His passion is to surf perfect breaks in total isolation. He knows some of the desert people. They really tend to keep to themselves and it is hard just to find them, much less make friends with them. I think that he might have picked up a few secrets from them.’
Noah looked about 28 years old. His actual age was 367. He learnt the art of time shifting from Iapetus, the ‘time god’. It was while spending time with Iapetus that he befriended Ben, Ambriel’s son.
Iapetus was an enigma and a legend within the constantly-drifting, hard-core, surfing subculture. This was chiefly due to his feats in time, although his surfing was something to behold as well, except that no one ever knew where he was. Noah explained,
‘When the time-chip technology emerged, no one wanted to use it because it was a one-way trip. It ended up that the mysterious nomads that wandered around in the wilderness, looking for surf, were the first to properly explore the power of the time chip.’ ‘Is it dangerous?’
‘There is a lot in it. You can easily lose yourself in some unwanted future. It takes a lot of concentration to set the chip.’
‘And it’s all done with the mind,’ added Thebe.
‘That is correct,’ said Noah. ‘They kept losing their test dummies, nobody knows how far into the future. But that was in the early days. Iapetus finally tuned into the chip the right way and made the first tiny hops into the future.’ ‘How tiny?’ asked Slater.
‘One day. That was the easiest.’
‘One rotation of Rama?’
‘That is correct. On Earth here, all the time chips are tuned to two celestial bodies, the Earth and the Sun. We could have used the Moon as well, but it was not necessary.’
‘Do you mean that you made time chips just for Earth?’
‘That is correct. Earth chips wouldn’t work anywhere else other than on Earth. They are all pre-set to skip 36,525 rotations of Earth around its axis.’
From under his T-shirt, Noah pulled out a small, gold medallion, which was hanging around his neck on a thin loop of leather. He held it up showing an inlaid, hexagonallyshaped, bright-blue, crystalline jewel measuring exactly 5.24 millimetres across.
‘This is the master chip. This is the one that sets off all the rest.’
‘Ahh, there is a master chip,’ said Slater. ‘I was wondering how you set them all off at precisely the right time.’
Lucy made everyone a cup of tea and biscuits, and everyone, except for Slater, had some of her mix.
‘The day after tomorrow is exactly nine years before the event,’ said Noah. ‘I’m here to scout out the impact site, right on the 23rd.’
‘Wow,’ said Slater, ‘can we come?’
‘Sure, but only one of you can come in my ship. You’ll have to sit on a duffel bag behind me.’
‘You go with Thebe, Slatey,’ said Lucy, ‘and I’ll stay back and look after Kane.’
‘There is no rush to decide,’ said Noah, ‘we still have all day tomorrow to go over our plans.’
4
Monday the 22nd dawned lazy. There was not a breath of wind and no one seemed to be in a hurry to get out of bed except for Thebe and Kane who were up early. Everyone else managed to drag themselves to the coffee plunger by 9.00am. After breakfast, they all ended up lounging around the pool sunning themselves. Lucy decided that the pool had warmed up just enough for swimming and that she was going to christen it for the season. Before long, they were all in it. Thebe brought out some drinks and fruit and they all relaxed in the sun and listened to Noah describe the exploits of Iapetus.
‘… The three of them sat in a circle on the edge of a towering sea cliff that projected out of the desert over the ocean. They all looked at their watches. At exactly midday, Iapetus looked at a silver bracelet around his left wrist and disappeared. His two companions rose to their feet and walked back to their camp. They returned to the same clifftop the next day. They sat in the same place and looked at their watches. It was 11.55. They sat and waited and at exactly midday, Iapetus reappeared out of thin air, still sitting on his spot on the ground. To Iapetus, the scene changed in a moment, in no time at all.
‘The longest jump he’s done is sixty days. People came back to the spot sixty days later and watched him emerge out of thin air. As you can imagine, everyone was pretty blown out by his achievement. To him the sixty-day time shift took exactly zero time. It was instant. Because of his achievement, they were able to design the second-generation chip, which was capable of much longer shifts. The Earth chips are really simplified versions because they are all set for just one shift through 36,525 axial rotations.
‘It was Iapetus who discovered connectivity, which was that things connected to one another can pull each other through time. Only the chip does the shift. Everything that is loosely connected to it gets pulled through with it. So, you can have a chip in a bracelet or under your skin. It works both ways. You just have to be telepathic and know how to manipulate it, even when it is in someone else’s body. I think Thebe is quite handy with that sort of thing.’
‘Oh … who … me? Oh no, I wouldn’t pretend …’
‘She did a nice number on me, Noah, in the surf,’ said Slater.
‘You must have got your one-hour pre-set.’
‘Yeah, it freaked me out because none of the bloody clocks matched.’
‘The one-hour pre-set is actually fairly advanced technology,’ commented Noah.
‘It’s like a test run of the chip, like a one-hour skip into the future test run, isn’t it, Noah?’
‘That is correct, Slater. There are two pre-sets in the Earth chip, the one-hour and the hundred years. The one-hour is the test run and can be activated by a telepathic person anytime. The hundred-year pre-set can only be set off by the master chip that is hanging around my neck. The timing of that must be absolutely precise.’ ‘How do you control it?’ asked Slater extremely interested.
Thebe thought she’d give Noah a break and explained,
‘An icon appears in our vision every time we are in the vicinity of a time chip. By focussing on it we can activate it. All our devices render telepathically-transmitted, visual and feeling images of themselves in our mind. Some of them, like our ships, feel like an extension of our bodies, like your flying suit, Slater.’
Noah continued,
‘Iapetus was the first person to use time shifting in a functional manner. He was the first to incorporate it into his lifestyle. Now, there are a number of us that use it. I’ll give you a typical example of how he uses it. He flies to a surf break somewhere and works out that it will come good in three days, say. He parks his ship, steps out with his board and time shifts three days into the future. Instantly, the surf changes to perfection and he goes surfing. Sometimes, he told me, when he can’t work out the weather, he just jumps forward one day at a time until he gets to a good day. It has completely blown the concept of waiting for the surf to get good.’
‘I’d love to get into that,’ said Slater.
‘You will, darling, you will, and more,’ assured Thebe.
5
After lunch, they discussed the destructive power of the comet. Noah had memorized all the statistics.
‘It was named Wormwood when it was first discovered some six-thousand years ago. It is made up of a conglomerate of ice and rock. It is thirty miles end to end. Some of the rocky chunks embedded in the ice are as much as a couple of miles across. About twenty percent of it is solid core.’
Everyone was transfixed. Noah continued,
‘It’s going to come in from the west, around the back of the sun. The first anyone on Earth will know anything about it will be when they see it rising up out of the western horizon, just after sunset, aiming towards Venus, which will be a little higher in the western sky. The astronomers will go crazy calculating the trajectory and will probably estimate that the comet will do a close pass of Venus, and harmlessly fly out into space, giving everyone on Earth the best celestial lightshow there has ever been in the whole of human history. However, we have calculated that there will be a near-physical contact with Venus. That comet is going to bury itself very deep into the Venusian atmosphere. It won’t actually make solid contact with the planet, but it will burn its way down to about 100,000 feet above terra firma. There will be a huge burn. We estimate that the comet will lose a sixth of its diameter. The ice will vaporise and many of the huge boulders will be freed from their entrapment. From the Earth it will look like half of Venus had exploded. Then they will see a wild fireball coming out of it, surrounded by about twodozen burning satellites trailing fiery tails behind them. And it will all, all of a sudden, be heading directly their way.
‘We have calculated that the comet will be slowed from twenty-five miles per second to about twelve-and-a-half miles per second through aero-braking in the soupy Venusian atmosphere. It will also be sucked into a twenty-three-degree change of direction and aimed directly into Earth’s path.
‘From that point on, Earth’s fate will be sealed and will be delivered in 166,666 minutes. The distance between the Earth and Venus will be two-hundred-million kilometres. The comet will be travelling at 20 kilometres per second. That works out at 10 million seconds, which equals 166,666 minutes, which equals 2,777.7 hours, which equals 115.74 days … and it will all be over.’
‘Jees, that’s not much time,’ said Slater.
‘It will be less than four months between when it glances Venus and when it hits Earth. Initially, I imagine, everyone will be completely captivated by it. Towards the end, most normal activity will probably come to a near standstill as everyone glues themselves to their television sets. The majority of people will be completely paralysed by the approaching trajectile and will not be able to process what is actually happening, until right at the end.’
‘Jesus.’
‘It will impact, square on, in the middle of Wyoming, right on top of a small town called Green River. Interestingly, it happens to be exactly 223 kilometres east of Salt Lake City. At 20 kilometres per second, it’ll come in so fast it’ll be through the atmosphere in five seconds. It will bury itself into Green River with the power of 240 quadrillion tons of TNT. The primary projectile will drill itself forty miles into the Earth, blasting out a transient crater 120 miles wide. The final crater will be over 220 miles across.
‘The ensuing fireball will reach its maximum radiation about 21.6 seconds after impact. Salt Lake City will be instantly vaporized by radiant heat 17,000 times hotter than the sun. All the oxygen will get consumed in the fire. There will be 1000-foot land tsunamis. Everything will go plastic and there will be earthquakes everywhere that will bring down most of the cities. And whatever the quakes miss, the air blast will finish. The air blast will hit New York City approximately 1.68 hours after impact, with winds reaching 900 miles per hour. Nothing will be left standing. But before New York gets taken out, it gets bombarded with ejecta that will hurtle in about 12.7 minutes after the impact.
‘21,500 cubic miles of earth will be vaporized or melted, half of which will be hurled into the atmosphere. All life globally will perish. In the long term, the plants will survive and pockets of the oceans will sustain life.
‘The Earth will not be strongly disturbed by the impact. There will not be a noticeable change in the tilt of the Earth’s axis, less than five-hundredths of a degree, and its orbit will not shift noticeably.
‘To New Yorkers, the fireball out to the west will appear 13.7 times larger than the sun. It will blaze with a heat 36.1 times more intense than the sun. Most of them will perish in that.
‘Huge tidal waves will rage across all the oceans and deep into the continents as the satellite projectiles slam into all parts of the Earth. Noosa here will be completely levelled by tidal surges, but when everything settles down, we think that Noosa will be one of the first places to recover back to its original, pristine beauty. I believe Noosa will be your settlement. Am I correct in saying that?’
‘We haven’t spoken much about that,’ said Thebe.
‘No,’ said Slater. ‘It still all seems so far off and it still doesn’t feel real.’
As evening approached, they decided to go out to dinner. Because they were too lazy to change, they chose to go to Elvis’s, down by the river, for some of their legendary hamburgers.
6
They had to be above Green River at 2.23pm on September 23, 2014, Wyoming time. That equated to 7.23am of the 24th, Noosa time. They wore their skins just in case they wanted to fly outside the ships. They launched at 6.50am, Noosa time, and slipped into the dawn. They crossed the Pacific in ten minutes, flying just under the Van Allen radiation belt. Noah led and Thebe and Slater followed in her ship.
They all communicated telepathically. It was like they were all on an open phone line.
‘There’s the coast of California,’ said Noah as he slowed down.
‘The whole West Coast will be toast. Nothing will be left standing.’
They cruised at 350 miles above the Earth’s surface on an east-north-east heading.
‘We head for the Great Salt Lake Desert up ahead. It’s that big white patch.’
Green River was already showing on Noah’s screen as a lime-green cross. They flew over the Sierra Nevada Mountains and across the wasteland of Nevada. They flew above the white expanse of the Great Salt Lake Desert and the Great Salt Lake, and over Salt Lake City, heading east-north-east to Green River.
They came to a hover 350 miles above Green River.
‘There’s nothing there but desert,’ said Slater.
‘Oh, Green River’s there all right, we’re just too high to see it. See Denver down there on the right? That will vaporise inside the fireball.’
‘Wow.’
‘The crater will go nearly all the way out to Salt Lake City.’
‘That’s huge. That’s like a whole state,’ exclaimed Slater.
‘In the end there will be a mile-deep lava ocean for as far as the eye can see.’ ‘Inconceivable,’ said Thebe.
‘Let’s take a closer look at Green River,’ said Noah.
They descended down to about 35 miles altitude and noticed how the town straddled a meandering stream. It was nestled in a tiny green oasis in the middle of the vast wasteland.
‘Let’s take an even closer look,’ said Noah.
Thebe followed him down to four kilometres altitude and came to a hover next to him.
‘What do you think about landing on top of that butte over the river there?’
‘You lead and we’ll follow, Noah,’ replied Thebe.
The two silver ships descended quickly. Thebe asked,
‘Should we go camo, Noah?’
‘Naah, I don’t mind if anyone sees us out here.’
‘OK.’
They parked their craft, hovering one foot above the parched, rocky ground, on top of a thousand-foot butte, about three kilometres to the east of Green River. They stepped out into a dry, ninety-five-degree baking oven and faced west into a gusty breeze.
‘God, it’s oppressive heat out here. What a vista, though.’
The town lay beneath them, snuggled in a green river valley. It stretched north to south. West of the town was an endless expanse of dry, hilly terrain. To the south, the river snaked spectacularly through a desert gorge. To the east was mesa country. As they stood there feasting on the view, Noah looked at his watch. ‘Ten past two. Thirteen minutes to go.’ ‘Can you hear that?’ said Slater.
‘Yes,’ said Noah, ‘it sounds like a motor and prop.’ They focussed in the direction of the sound.
‘It’s a trike,’ said Slater, ‘a hang glider with an engine. I recognise it because we get plenty of them flying around Noosa. I still can’t make it out.’
‘Don’t worry about him. You know, I’m coming here every September until the
event.’
‘Every year?’ asked Thebe.
‘Yes.’
‘There he is, there’s the trike,’ exclaimed Slater. ‘He’s just flying over the river now and I think he’s coming this way.’
‘The town has been booming lately because the oil men have come into it,’ said Noah.
‘You don’t say?’ said Thebe.
‘Should we make the trike guy go away?’ Slater asked.
‘Naaah! Let him see us. I detect that he has a time chip in him.’ Noah paused, concentrating on the trike pilot, then revealed, ‘Ah yes, I recognise him.’
‘I detect the chip as well, Noah,’ said Thebe. ‘And his one–hour test-shift has been carried out as well.’
‘Yes, he is set to go.’
Slater and Thebe both looked at each other and smiled. They both felt a great deal of faith in Noah’s judgement. The trike climbed up the west face of the butte, executing a few 360s in the process, until it reached their altitude. It flew in slow circles out in front, while the pilot surveyed the scene, then flew directly towards them and over their heads. Noah laughed. The trike banked hard and came back from the opposite direction. They could see the excited pilot taking pictures with, what looked like, his iPhone. They waved as he passed over them. The trike finally settled into flying low circles above them.
‘He must have taken a hundred photos,’ said Thebe.
‘Lucky our faces are covered.’
Noah looked at his watch and said,
‘Nine years from right now … kaboom!’
The trike kept circling and taking photos.
Noah asked Thebe if she minded giving the pilot some instructions. She agreed and he advised her what to say.
‘I should give him a show as well,’ she said playfully. She made her suit fluoresce in a multitude of bright colours, launched and flew up to the trike. Flying alongside, she posed for more photos and even a video. Following that, she flew right up to the pilot and gave him Noah’s instructions. She then flew back down to the boys. ‘That will have livened up his life somewhat, I think,’ she said.
The trike pilot was stunned, but he managed to keep it together enough to continue to shoot video of the aliens as they re-entered their ships, launched into the sky and disappeared off into the distance in a south-westerly direction.
…….