Venera Harrison
Unforgettable journey to other planets

Part 2 – Chapter 16

“Let’s get to the point,” said Jean-Jacques Dordain, as organizer, and he looked expectantly at Charles Bolden. “Charley, tell us, what’s going on?” changing his tone to a friendly one, the head of the European agency asked. “Why NASA gives no response to our inquiries?”

Charles Bolden, the head of NASA, looked at him with a tired smile. He looked around the large room, where about a hundred people from all over the world were sitting. There were representatives of the European Union, several top officials from the United States, China, and Russia. Charles Bolden turned on his microphone and cleared his throat.

“Well, folks,” he began, “here’s the deal. I can’t explain everything, but I’ll try to tell you what we’ve been able to recover. We launched two Voyagers in ’77. Both are still in service and our stations are still getting their signals. The crafts are performing better than we could have even imagined. They completed their mission years ago and are now moving away from the solar system by inertia, as we call it. The project was not without difficulties. On the approach to Uranus, Voyager 2 had an emergency situation. The signal was lost, and we thought we’d lost it. But then the signal came back.”

“No signal? Can you explain?” someone at the table asked.

“I have many versions of this incident, and the official NASA position is one of the memory clusters was damaged. That’s right, the device was damaged, but how it happened we can’t explain. The fact is that according to the data we were able to reconstruct, it turns out that the device was not moving in space for about 36 minutes.”

“Charley, didn’t move in space?” Jean-Jacques Dordain clarified.

“Yes,” Charles Bolden swiped his face, “it stopped.”

People in the hall began to look at each other and murmured.

“Have I got that right?” looking around the hall, Mr. Dordain said. “Voyager 2 stopped for 36 minutes on approach to Uranus? You mean… stopped at all?”

“We have the trajectory reports, the mission correction due to the 36 minute gap, and the program to exclude the damaged cluster from the transmission,” Charles Bolden pulled the documents out of a folder.

“But Voyager 2 has continued on its way, right? It’s in communication.” asked a representative of the Chinese agency.

“Yes,” Mr. Bolden turned around, “that’s right. The spacecraft has got back up to speed without any action on our part. Until this week, NASA believed that the discrepancy was tentative due to the desynchronization of the spacecraft with the control center.”

There was a pause in the room. Then the hubbub and commotion began to grow. Jean-Jacques Dordain collapsed in his seat. One of the American generals turned on his microphone:

“This information is raw, Mr. Bolden just wanted to say…” his voice drowned in the noise of the crowd.

After a moment, everyone’s confusion turned into a thirst for information.

“All right,” Mr. Dordain turned on his microphone, “all right, you have spatial telemetry. According to this data, Voyager hasn’t moved for 36 minutes, and you have a damaged memory sector on your device. Don’t you think that’s a transmission error.”

“That’s exactly what we told everyone,” Charles Bolden replied. “Corrected the course and continued the mission.”

“And now we have a recording from this device broadcasted somewhere in the Himalayas?” said the Indian general.

“Gentlemen,” the Russian general interrupted them, “in a couple of hours the Nepalese army together with our scientists will survey the square. Let’s not go crazy. It is not a fact that these things are related.”

Charles Bolden turned to his colleague from the European Space Agency and held his hands apart. Jean-Jacques Dordain silently said, “Wow!” and looked around the room, where a hundred adults were fiercely arguing with each other and trying to prove something. Some people tried to call the head of NASA or someone in his entourage to account, but Charles Bolden only shook his head in frustration as a sign that he had said enough.

Part 2 – Chapter 17

Yulia and Dr Capri starred in different directions, looking at the mountains that surrounded their helicopter on all sides. They were tense and quiet. The two pilots sat in the front, and the radio technician sat across from the doctor and Yulia. Yulia kept adjusting the huge headphones, which were supposed to muffle the whistle of the propeller, but only irritated her.

“How much longer is the flight?” Yulia asked the doctor in English.

Tulu-Manchi turned to the officer of communications and pointed to his watch.

“Thirty minutes to the point,” the officer said in Nepali.

He was holding a device that looked like a notebook computer and a sonar at the same time, and he tried to stare at it steadily.

“Half an hour,” the doctor repeated in English to Yulia.

She looked at the mountains overhanging to the left of the helicopter. These ridges had no edge. Only the haze blurred their disordered rows into the horizon. Those that were closer seemed like black ruins, and behind them stuck out snow-covered peaks.

The communications officer knocked on the device.

“What happened?” Dr Capri turned to him again.

“The unit is malfunctioning,” the officer replied.

“What’s going on?” the second pilot asked over the intercom.

“The electronics are going crazy,” said the captain. “We have to shut down all our systems. Contact the base.”

The aide began to press some switches and speak loudly into the radio. Yulia looked at the movements going on around her and wondered why she had agreed to this adventure, and why she hadn’t refused to her boss when he asked to go with the military. “Yulia, we have agreed with the Nepalese government that you can fly with the squad, we need to understand what’s going on there,” the boss’s words came to mind. She shifted her gaze from the frowning communications officer to the co-pilot. He jogged his hand over all the toggle switches on the panel and deactivated them. The helicopter stopped rocking from side to side. Yulia exhaled. “That’s enough. Enough!” she repeated.

Dr Capri listened intently to the crew’s conversations. He was trying to figure out if the chatter was related to the signal or if it was just a helicopter malfunction. The pilots were talking to the base.

“We have some kind of electronics malfunction,” the co-pilot said the last phrase.

The captain joined in the conversation:

“Do we continue to fly to the designated target?” he waited tensely for an answer.

“Yes, continue flight, subject to crew safety,” the base reported.

“Understood,” the captain replied and turned on the intercom. “Is the equipment operational?” he turned to the communication officer.

“Captain, the equipment is out of order,” the officer replied with a show of hands.

“Get a map of the area and mark the last position on it,” the captain said with determination to carry out the order.

“Yes,” the co-pilot responded.

Yulia tugged at Dr Capri’s sleeve and looked at him with an expression of bewilderment. Dr Capri began to explain the military’s conversation:

“The electronics are out of order. But we’re going to try to find the source on the regular map. We seem to have been close by.”

Yulia shook her head and, pressing her lips together, turned to the window. She felt fear creeping up and imagined she was talking to her mother on the phone and describing her condition, “Mom, everything burns inside. It’s like a mixture of despair, misunderstanding, resentment, and fear.” The cocktail was clearly not to Yulia’s taste. She looked at the mountains around her and thought that this would never happen to her in Moscow. “And I don’t really need it!”

Dr Capri fatherly put his hand on her shoulder.

“Yulia,” he began to say in his usual calm and judicious voice, “please don’t despair.”

He, also, looked at the mountains and nodded a little understandingly.

“Soon it will be over. I’m sure we’ll find someone’s portable player lying on a hiking trail and go back,” he smiled, following Yulia. “And then I’ll show you Pashupatinath. It’s an amazing place. The biggest Shiva temple in the world. I’ll take you to the lake called Rani Pokhari. You will like it.”

Yulia wiped her tears and patted Tulu-Manchi’s hand to show that she agreed. He smiled and pointed to the mountain ahead. It was Kanchenjunga. Yulia flicked her nose and with a sense of the universality of this mountain exhaled loudly and long with a ‘Ho’ sound.

“The point from where the signal is supposedly coming from is over there, under that peak,” the co-pilot pointed into the distance.

“We’ll make three tapering circles and if we don’t find anything, we’ll head back to base,” the captain said.

He did a small maneuver, the helicopter shook violently.

“Engine power is dropping!” he shouted. “Something is wrong with the machine!”

The helicopter began to descend against the actions of the pilots. The rotor blades began to slow down and the sound density decreased.

“Select a landing spot!” commanded the captain. “Everyone, grab hold of the handrails!”

The helicopter was approaching the ground. Tulu-Manchi held Yulia’s hand tightly. But she looked tiredly at the actions of the military and the doctor and did absolutely not feel the fall. Yulia stopped understanding what was happening. She turned as pale as the snow on the mountain tops around her. Her eyes rolled back, and she fell from this mountain madness into the quiet surf of her subconscious. The captain yanked the lever and the helicopter hovered just in front of the ground for a moment and landed gently, as gently as it could on the hillside. Everything went quiet.

“Are you all right?” looking at Yulia with fright, the doctor asked.

“No,” replied Yulia calmly, coming to her senses, “I’m not alright.”

The assistant captain opened the helicopter doors from the outside and helped Yulia out. The helicopter was sliding down the mountain. The pilots began throwing rocks under the wheels. The helicopter slid down a few more centimeters and froze.

Yulia, Dr Capri, the communications officer, and the two pilots stood in the middle of the mountain and looked at the bizarre giant steel dragonfly, which looked absurd in this landscape. Around the military and scientists towered mountains and an immense silence that contrasted strongly with the noise and anxiety that had ended a moment before.

The military put a few more large rocks under the wheels of the helicopter for reassurance. They took a few steps back, assessing the situation, trying to comprehend what had happened.

“Hey! Are you okay?” an English speech rang out behind them.

The assistant captain drew his gun and pointed it in the direction of the approaching figure.

“Stop and raise your hands!” shouted the soldier in Nepali.

The man stopped and put his hands in the air.

“I don’t understand you,” came the English speech, “I think you want me to do this.”

Tulu-Manchi asked the pilot to lower his weapon and said in English:

“Excuse us, are you a tourist?”

“Yes, I’m…” the man with the raised hands hesitated, “I’m an English tourist. I saw your helicopter falling and ran here.”

Dr Capri began to walk up the slope toward the sunlit figure behind him.

“My name is Dr Tulu-Manchi Capri,” the doctor said as he approached the young man.

“Hello,” the young man shook the doctor’s hand, “my name is David Conel.”

“Sorry about the gun,” the doctor said embarrassedly as he accompanied David to the helicopter. “We are doing scientific research here with the military. This is Yulia. And these,” he circled the group of military men, “are our escort.”

The doctor invited David to come up to Yulia, and went to the captain to explain that there is no threat and this is an ordinary tourist from England.

“Hello,” the young man said, filling the pause. “My name is David Conel.”

“Yulia Danilina,” Yulia answered, looking at the man incredulously.

“It can’t be possible that the helicopter broke down because of him,” she thought, looking at the puny long-haired guy with a tourist backpack behind his back, “and the signal is obviously not his doing.”

David looked confused and looked at the helicopter with childlike delight.

“It was a good landing, but obviously not planned,” David said, smiling.

“Certainly,” Yulia said with a little cheerfulness, “our electronics failed,” she blurted out in a simple voice.

“Oh!” David was surprised and looked at the helicopter.

Yulia couldn’t recognize the emotion David had just expressed and hesitated even more.

“Oh?” Yulia repeated, trying to keep the intonation and at the same time change it to a questioning one.

“Yesterday my phone went crazy and rang just like that, and when I picked it up, it made some kind of hissing and whistling sound,” David said, reasoning, and then pointed to his ear and the cloth in it.

Tulu-Manchi heard David’s last phrase and looked tensely at Yulia.

“David,” said the doctor, smiling, “will you please tell me again what happened to you and when? And more particularly.”

Part 2 – Chapter 18

A morning meeting began in Paris. A large number of people were already gathered in the hall. Everyone was discussing and arguing loudly. Igor Komarov, the head of Roscosmos, was excitedly discussing news with a Nepalese military general. Jean-Jacques Dordain knocked on the microphone to get the attention of his colleagues, and showed his hand to Igor Komarov that he could start talking.

“Gentlemen,” Igor Komarov began, “this morning we lost contact with the helicopter which was sent to the source of the signal. There were two scientists and three military men in it.”

“Connection with the helicopter was lost at 12:14 local time,” said the representative of Nepal. “The interference in this quadrant is very strong now. We can’t contact the crew. In addition to that, a major cyclone has started to form in the area.”

“Do we have any more information?” the head of NASA asked.

“At 12:04 we had the last radio contact with them,” continued the Nepalese general. “They reported that some of the electronics on board are out of order, but the machine is under control. We gave permission for the operation to continue if there was no threat.”

“That’s it?”

“Communication was cut off, 10 minutes later they disappeared from radar a couple of kilometers from the point of alleged source.”

“What can we do under these circumstances?” the Russian general asked.

“We sent a rescue team on foot to the point,” the Indian general interjected. “There is a risk that the weather conditions will worsen and the detachment will not be able to get close to the point.”

“How much time do you need to get people there?” The Russian clarified.

“About eighteen hours.”

“Eighteen?” the Roscosmos chief became indignant. “Are you joking? It is very long.”

“We can’t send a helicopter there now,” said the Indian, “it’s dangerous.”

“How did we let this happen?” Jean-Jacques Dordain said in a half-whisper without a microphone.

The Russian general approached the Indian and called the Nepali. Together they began to discuss something.

“Well,” said the head of ESA looking at the discussion of the military, “let’s wait for the news from the rescue squad.”

Charles Bolden stood up from his seat and said loudly without a microphone:

“Guys, what’s going on here?”

Everyone in the audience froze and turned to him. He put his hands in the air.

“I’m the only one who doesn’t understand how the ’86 Voyager crash, the signal, and our people going missing today are related?”

“What do you suggest, Charley?” Jean-Jacques Dordain asked.

“I’m suggesting we think a minute about it. We have a situation and all we do is react, offer nothing.”

“Charles, we are waiting for offers from you too,” said Monsieur Dordain.

At that moment, everyone in the room had their phones buzzing at the same time. People began to turn around and look at each other.

Part 2 – Chapter 19

Jean-Pierre opened his eyes. His sleepy state was not completely gone, and he looked half-asleep at the rows of seats in front of him. He saw the "fasten your seat belts" signal blink. The thought blinked, “landing?”

The plane bounced. Jean-Pierre sat quietly in his seat, assuming it was a hard landing. But the people in the cabin shrieked. The Japanese man next to him perked up. Jean-Pierre looked out the window and realized the plane was in the air. “An air hole?”

“Dear ladies and gentlemen, we have hit turbulence. Please fasten your seat belts,” the pilot said quickly and coldly.

The plane jumped once more heavily, as if the clouds outside had hardened and hit the hull of the plane. The lights in the cabin flickered. A scream was heard from the tail section.

Jean-Pierre tried to look down the aisle, but immediately realized what had happened. There was no Debby in place. Jean-Pierre unbuckled his seatbelt and, holding tightly to the back of the seat, moved toward the tailgate. There was a steward standing by the lavatory, knocking on the door.

“Please open the door,” the steward said again.

“Just open that door,” Jean-Pierre said sharply in French. “I heard a scream, there’s an American girl, she’s obviously been hit.”

“Monsieur,” the steward replied nonchalantly, “take your seat.”

He looked reproachfully at Jean-Pierre and pointed to his seat. A girl appeared behind the steward.

“Etienne,” she tugged at the steward’s arm, “please open the door, in case it’s something serious.”

The steward reluctantly lifted the toilet sign and pulled the handle that was hidden underneath it. The lock on the door moved from ‘occupied’ to ‘vacant’. Jean-Pierre was the first who saw Debby lying in an unnatural position. She had clearly hit her head on something hard. The steward rushed to her, but Jean-Pierre pushed him away:

“Get the first aid kit, she has a head wound.”

The plane began to shake again: it jerked sharply and began to turn over. Jean-Pierre wanted to hold Debby in place, but he felt his body become noticeably lighter and rest against the wall of the lavatory. Jean-Pierre grabbed Debby in an armful with his right hand and rested his legs and left arm on the wall. The door slammed shut again. Jean-Pierre tensed with his whole body, but through the chattering he heard Debby come to her senses and moan something like, “Where am I? Help!”

“Hold on,” Jean-Pierre shouted in English, “as hard as you can.”

Debby obeyed the request and clung to him as tightly as she could. Jean-Pierre knew by the sound that it was total chaos outside the lavatory. The sound of alarms and the noise of objects flying around the cabin filled the plane with a terrifying cacophony. The screams of women and men mingled with the roar of the engines.

“What is it? What is it?” Debby repeated.

Jean-Pierre tried to figure out what was going on. It seemed as if the plane was spinning around its axis and coming down sharply. Suddenly the plane stopped falling and Jean-Pierre and Debby were hit by inertia on the floor.

Jean-Pierre banged his hip and ribs hard, but held on with tenacity. He stood up again and took up a position with his legs and arms.

“Hold on,” Jean-Pierre commanded again.

Debby’s body went soft and her arms dangled.

The impact of incredible force threw them up to the ceiling and then threw them to the floor. Jean-Pierre hit his head and lost consciousness. He did not hear the iron screeching of the plane’s hull being torn apart. Everything around them went into total darkness and silence. Their bodies were tossed from side to side, and the door slammed shut and something propped it up on the other side. Debby and Jean-Pierre flew like wet clothes in a washing machine in the small space of a toilet cubicle at several thousand feet.

The plane stopped responding to the pilots as soon as Jean-Pierre felt the first air holes. The airliner was being pulled into the storm zone. All electronics abruptly shut down, and the plane went into a spin. The pilots tried to do something, but it was impossible to control the falling airplane. The first pilot commanded to restart the system, but when he saw the huge mountains in front of him, he realized that the plane was far away from its intended course, and the devices had been fooling them for a long time. In a final attempt to stop the plane from falling, he lifted the nose of the craft up, but caught the rock with his wing. The plane jumped up like a little boy on a sled. The impact was so powerful that the fuselage began to crack, and the wing fragments hit the tail section and cut through it like a sharp knife through paper. The tail, together with Jean-Pierre and Debby, fell off the plane and began to fall straight into the mountain range. The plane itself was without one wing and with a gaping hole behind it, descending between the peaks of the mountains.

The smoke left a dark, long cloud in the sky. Looking up from the ground, it felt like a huge meteorite falling to pieces. After a few seconds, the howl of the falling plane stopped abruptly, and it disappeared right in the middle of the sky. Only the tail section was slowly falling down, as if it weighed nothing. It whirled around like a light feather.