When I landed I saw Whistler in his office. He was in bad shape alright, hunched over his desk, coughing. He was lucky I got there in time. Once I got the oxygen tank on him he relaxed and started to talk.
“We gotta get off this planet. We gotta leave, let’s go.”
“You know I didn’t come all the way from the head ship to take you like this. They want answers, Whistler.”
“Oh God, this whole thing was a waste…”
“What happened here?”
“Ohh…” He grabbed his stomach.
“Where are the thousand employees, why are the mines abandoned? You know how much money they’re losing on this whole thing. Now you radioed the ship and said to send someone quick, the whole operation was done for.”
“They’re all done for, they’re done…leave them.”
“Where are they, Whistler?”
He was hungry and homesick but I told him we weren’t going anywhere until I got some answers. Jesus, he looked like he’d aged ten years in the six months since I saw him. This mine was supposed to be open by now, sending huge uranium and plutonium cargoes back to the ship.
We walked slowly down the hill towards the mines. He was limping like an old man.
“They found something…it’s like a network.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Are they alive?”
“Barely. No. Well, yes, I suppose.”
“Jesus, man! Answers!”
“Okay…I’ll show you…”
He started limping down towards the lower mine, where I’d parked my craft.
“You know what kind of shit I’ll be in if I go back there with nothing but a crazy old man?” He wasn’t listening but I went on anyway. “They lost millions developing this place and they’re pissed. Okay? And you’re raving about some goddamn network. What am I doing here? Why did I get this assignment? This is two weeks out of my schedule that I’ll have to make up for back on the ship. I’m following some lunatic around…”
When we got to the mine there was a glowing red light emanating from deep within.
“It must’ve been left here from whoever lived on this planet before,” he said, hobbling down the steep incline. “It’s not like anything I’ve seen before. Hold on.”
I held on to the railing as we descended on steps deeper into the crimson.
After a few flights of stairs, he stopped, panting, on a walkway.
“There. It’s down there.”
It was a sea of little pods, or vessels, of little wombs, almost. Thousands of them, on the ground floor. Inside of the greenish cells the miners were all entombed, moving slightly. Little electric flashes criss-crossed and zig-zagged between the countless cells, as if exchanging information.
“It’s some communication network,” he said. “But they’ve stopped eating, they’ve stopped working, they won’t come out. I took a few of them out but they were all glazed over. Brain-dead. I looked down in the other mine and there were the same things, but some other creatures were inside. They’re not alive. Whatever this network is, it killed the last species.”
“Or they killed themselves.”
“Yes. Let’s get out of here,” he said for the tenth time.
“How the hell am I supposed to explain this to the head ship?”
“Just tell them what it is.”
“But what is it? What are they communicating with?”
“Each other.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s a complex system of communication and information exchange,” he coughed. ”It’s highly addictive. That’s all I know.”
I stared at the cells and the electric charges zapping between them. What a waste. I got Whistler back to the ship right before he collapsed.
“The air is no good on this planet,” he said, coughing. “The environment is not good for life.”
“Who used to live here?”
“I don’t know, some of the guys thought it was Earth.”
“Earth? Come on. That’s where humans live. I can’t believe that. All the broadcasts from Earth show a planet with rivers and oceans and forests.”
“Those reports could be millions of years old. We don’t even know where Earth is.”
“But all the stories I heard about Earth growing up make it seem like a paradise.”
“Well, I don’t know, that’s just what some of the rumors were. You know how the guys like to talk.”
And then he passed out. I lifted off and soon we were rising through space, headed back to the home ship. They would not be happy about this.
