Unforgettable journey to other planets

David stopped and took out a small notebook and a pencil and began to write:

“When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was express myself and feel the world. Where is that now? There was no + and -. There was balance. Maybe unhappiness is just the force of that balance. It just wants to tell us, ‘Stop taking, it’s time to give’.”

David looked at the tape and remembered how he had decided to sell everything and leave. It all seemed far in the past now. How had he had the guts to do such a thing? He didn’t quite understand it either. Had he chosen it, or was he just reacting to the circumstances? Maybe it was the monotonous work, the long hours that forced him to do it. Forced him to quit the job, to move out of his apartment, to leave London. How did he end up on the other side of the world? Amazingly, the trip seemed like complete madness to him when he was at his father’s house. But now it all – what’s around and what’s inside – seems so logical and so singularly true.

There was a buzzing sound from the bag and a little later the music of his phone. David froze in place, unsure of what was happening. He looked behind him and listened. The sound was intensifying.

“What the hell?” he dropped his bag from his shoulders.

He fumbled for his phone, surprised that he had forgotten to turn it off. All it said on the screen was ‘Incoming Call’. No phone number, no name from the address book. “How is there even network service here?” He swiped the screen to accept the call and held it to his ear. A loud ring and rattle came from the speaker. David abruptly pulled the phone away from his ear and clutched at the pain. He tried to drop the call, but there was no way he could do it. The phone was unresponsive. He turned it off with a button and stomped his foot in pain.

“Shit,” David sat down on the ground, “what was this all about?”

He rubbed his temple and massaged his ear, wondering what it was. He thought maybe it was some kind of magnetic field from the iron ore or something. He looked at his hand and saw that there was blood on the fingers. His thoughts stopped dramatically. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, tore part of it off, put it in his ear, and walked onward until a fright found him among those mountains. His head was buzzing, but he didn’t want to lose the spirit that had come to him that morning. The steps became less smooth, and the philosophical thoughts faded away.

“Balance, you say?” he thought. “Will see.”

David quickened his stride, kicking rocks in frustration.

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.