Moonliner: No Stone Unturned (28 page)

For such a nice morning, oddly, there aren’t many people around.  The scene is serene.  The wind seems to sway the distant trees, but really can’t be felt.  The temperature is already bordering on hot.

High above a spacecraft enters the atmosphere with a sudden red glow, then morphs into a long, white streak across the clear blue sky.  Seconds later it is heard roaring across the sky at a very high elevation.

Cedric gets up and walks to the tip of the lake and down the trail he now knows so well, to the large stump.  Behind the stump sits the stone, right where he’d left it, seemingly untouched.  A smile comes across his face as he takes a really long look at it, now feeling its potential again.  Something feels right about this whether anything is under that rock or not.

He kneels beside it and brushes dirt off the top of it with his hand. 

              “Well I’m back,” he says to the stone, then laughs.  His smile suddenly drops off his face.  The moment has arrived.

Cedric gets his fingers under the stone for leverage and gently lifts it from its form fitted impression in the soil.  Looking down, he notices a distinct indentation where the coin had been discovered days earlier.  He sets the stone aside and begins running his fingers through the soil where the coin had laid.  It’s tight and well compacted.  He picks up a thick stick and uses it to dig a bit deeper.

Within seconds the stick hits something hard beneath the soil’s surface.  A shot of adrenalin goes straight down his spine.  Almost afraid to even look, he digs further around the object, which is now revealing itself.  It’s a box, a black PVC box of some kind, square in shape.  Cedric digs deeper, faster.  He then manages to get the stick under it and pry it upward, out of the ground.  It’s not very large.

With some resistance, he gets the lid of the box to pop open.  There’s a rubber ring sealing the rim.  Inside Cedric finds a plate made of brushed metal. It’s thin, just a few millimeters thick at best, and laser-engraved on one side in a small font.  He stays on his knees, now shaking too hard to get up.  With each passing moment, reality sets in.  What does he hold in his hand?

He takes his sunglasses out of his pocket and puts them on.  He then holds the plate in front of them and rotates it.

              “Can you scan this?” he asks Phaedra, with somewhat shaky hands.

Within seconds he has a 3D holographic image of the plate rotating in front of his eyes.

              “Can you enlarge and project the message?” he asks.  A large, flat, laser-generated image appears in front of Cedric’s eyes.  He reads it.

Cedric takes the plate back to his bench, where he sits throughout the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon examining it, the box, and rereading the message over and over again.  He doesn’t see the sun as it cuts across the blue sky, or hear the birds.  He’s too deep in thought.  He sits with his sunglasses on, watching images of the plate and its message orbit him.  He doesn’t say anything, but just sits there staring in a state of shock.

A late afternoon gust of wind catches his attention.  It’s the first thing he’s noticed outside of his sunglasses all afternoon.  Exhausted from hours on end of heavy brainstorming, Cedric makes his way back home, dispensing with his plan to get the photon tubes from school.  He now has more important things on his mind.

Moonliner
5:05

Lennox looks out the window of his shuttle as it burns across the darkening sky.  He has already re-entered the earth’s atmosphere and is minutes from touching down.  Tonight, unlike any other, his shuttle is descending over the city just as fireworks from the annual Festival of Light light-up the entire valley.  His flight has to circle tonight to avoid them, giving passengers the most optimal seat in the city.

              “Ladies and gentleman this is the captain,” a voice is heard coming over the intercom.  “Passengers on the left side of the craft can see fireworks from the Festival of Light.  We’ve had to take a small diversion to fly around them but we’ll be on the ground in seventeen minutes.  Enjoy the show.”

Meanwhile, Cedric sits on his balcony, holding both the coin and the plate.  Distant booms can be heard from the fireworks.  He smiles, as if they were planned to celebrate his discovery.  This all still seems like a dream to him.  He occasionally has doubts, which trigger more forensic examinations of the events.  They only lead him again down the same logical path, and to the same logical conclusion; the best explanation for the engravings remains that the coin and the plate are what they claim to be, both messages from the past.

He laughs.  Then he laughs even louder, to the point of tears forming in his eyes.  If only Nikki could be here sharing this moment.  He grasps the objects tightly and stares off into the distance as fireworks light up the horizon.  A million thoughts race through his mind. 

A few stars appear as the night gets even darker.  The moon is up and almost full, just starting to wane a little.  It’s a magical summer night.  Some neighbor is playing that DP song again, somewhere.  It’s still really warm out.

Cedric steps back into his apartment where Phaedra can hear him.

              “Can you take a message for Lennox?” he asks her. 

              “Yes, go ahead with your message,” she responds.

              “Let’s meet at the clubhouse at ten tomorrow morning.  You’re gonna wanna hear what I’ve unearthed,” he says.  “End message.  Send,” he adds.

              “Message sent,” she tells him.

Just as Lennox’s spacecraft banks a turn and perfectly aligns with its designated runway on final approach, his blue-beam alerts him of an incoming message from Cedric.  Lennox takes a close look at the message and smiles, nodding his head in agreement.  He sits back and stares out his window as his craft glides across the landscape, then softly touches down on the tarmac.

Moonliner
5:06

It’s mid-morning and Lennox is taking some practice swings just outside the clubhouse with his seven iron.  The day couldn’t be more picture perfect and Lennox is glad to be back on the planet. 

Cedric approaches with a golf bag slung over his shoulder, walking pretty swiftly.  He takes a seat on a bench by the clubhouse and kicks into a conversation with Lennox.

              “So how was your trip?” Cedric asks.

              “Pleasant actually.  It seemed to go by pretty fast,” Lennox answers.  “So what was beneath the rock,” he asks Cedric, not wanting to beat around the bush. 

Cedric takes his sunglasses off and hands them to Lennox.

              “Take a look for yourself.  I scanned it.”

Lennox sits down on the bench beside Cedric, takes the sunglasses and rolls his eyes, not looking too thrilled to wear them.  He puts them on nevertheless.  Once on, he immediately sees the orbiting images of the scanned metal plate, rotating as they orbit.  He reads the plate’s inscription.  After a few minutes, he takes the sunglasses off and stares blankly down the first fairway. 

              “Is this some kind of trick?” Lennox asks Cedric.

              “If it is, then it isn’t coming from me,” Cedric responds.  “Frankly, I don’t think it is,” he adds.

              “What if it’s just someone here and now, receiving your messages and setting you up?”  Lennox asks.

              “I don’t think so,” Cedric answers.  “Doesn’t that metal seem aged to you?” he asks Lennox; “and the duration between messages is exactly the same in 2014 as it is between the two Moondock transmissions.”

“That doesn’t discard the possibility that it’s someone in the present receiving your messages and toying with you,” Lennox adds.

“To the point of engraving a metal plate?” Cedric asks.

“An extreme reaction to a seemingly extreme request,” Lennox replies.

“Plus, I’m sure I could still see an indentation in the soil where the coin was.  The plate was directly under it, a little deeper down, encased in a plastic box.  Whoever this person is, he or she would have had to have gone to extreme lengths to make that box appear to be buried before the coin was discovered.”

              “This is insane.  I’m still having a hard time really believing it.  You’re saying that the message I sent from Moondock went back in time and was received by this guy over half a century ago.  Then he left this plate under a stone in the park for you to find,” Lennox recaps to get the story straight. 

              “Yes,” Cedric responds.  “That seems to best explain what happened.  Look, I had my receivers on and the messages were directed right at them, only accelerated.  I didn’t receive them, either of them and I should have, easily.  They went somewhere.”

              “So,” Lennox interjects; “you mean to tell me that you’ve established communication with some guy in another time.  You’re sending messages back and forth through time.  That can’t be real.”

              “You’re in on it too,” Cedric reminds him.  “You sent the second one.”

A seagull lands at the base of the clubhouse flagpole, looking for a bite. Lennox and Cedric lean back on the bench and stare off into nowhere, trying to come to grips with the facts and the artifacts in front of them.  The sun climbs a little higher but neither of them seem to notice.  They’re both enjoying the endlessly fascinating free-play of speculative imagination, and the vast potential therein.  There’s a look of raw joy on both of their faces, stemming from a new booster shot of confidence they’d both received with the metal plate, and both needed.

After a few minutes of silence, the two look at each other and start to laugh, hard.  It goes on for a solid minute, bringing tears to Lennox’s eyes, then it fades.  It was a refreshing laugh, like the kind they used to bust as college freshmen, like they’d just pulled something off. 

The profound reality of their circumstance is quite sobering, however.  Like with any true discovery, more questions are raised than answered, and questions are hitting Lennox and Cedric left and right.