The Earthlings of Moon Base 1 by Michael Dack

Author:Michael Dack [Dack, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

It was written with the same marker the eccentric genius favored to cover his many whiteboards in numbers and symbols.

Ari opened the case and found four pristine communication headsets, thin as wire, with a silvery earpiece and a tiny arced pipe acting as a microphone.

“Hey guys?” he said, recognizing immediately that he had stumbled upon something quite monumental. “Want your very own state-of-the-art Eddington-designed comm device? ‘Cuz I know where you can get one.”

“What?” Naveen said, looking over at him.

“There!” Jenya said, pointing to the screen. The left numbers under the screen image of the CCC had remained consistent, tallying the accumulating minutes and seconds as they had been doing the entire time. But all the numbers on the screen-right images had jumped backward a full two minutes.

“Base,” Jay Smith said, “we’re having some signal interference, probably due to our proximity to some ice in the north but we’ll be out of range of it soon. Though we’re [crackle]—ing toward even bigger outcroppings so I don’t know about a lot of improvement.”

“We got most of that last part, Bug One.” Captain Smith said. “Exercise caution on your approach. Be careful and keep us posted, son.”

Naveen said, “Now, it sounds like they’re talking, right? But the signal from the excursion crew came in two minutes ago and the CCC is just receiving it right there. Captain Smith answers, but they can’t hear him. In fact, I’m betting they’ll never actually be able to hear each other from here on out.”

“I don’t really understand,” Tom said.

There was a few minutes where there was nothing spoken from the excursion crew or the Command & Control Center. The two time-codes on the bottom of the screens continued to spin ahead, but remaining a consistent two minutes apart from one another.

Naveen said, “I’m guessing someone’s about to edit the incoming signal and they’ve given themselves a two-minute window to cut out the fragments they don’t want you to see.”

Ari came over with the black case which he re-opened with a flourish. It displayed the pristine new headsets set into protective foam. Tom and Jenya each lifted out a comm unit and regarded them with the appropriate awe.

“One for each of us,” Ari said. “Almost as if he planned it.”

“At this point, I wouldn’t put anything past him,” Jenya breathed.

They were coming up at the point where Naveen expected the time-code on the excursion side would begin jumping around as if heavily edited. “At least, that’s what Eddington was implying with his secret message,” he posited. “This must be of vital importance if he used his last free statement to send that clue — the last moment of him being in his right mind…if he was in his right mind.”

As the video images continued uneventfully, they had a few minutes to look over the forbidden comm devices Eddington had left behind. But Tom was not certain of their safety even here in the doctor’s private lair.

“Naveen, how sure are you of the secrecy of this place? Someone else has to know about it.

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