An Accidental Alliance (3 page)

     
The questions continued on for another hour but they were mostly variations on those already asked and after a few minutes, Park signaled to Iris they might as well leave the meeting. “We’ll be told when to report to the stasis room through our terminals.” he told her. “Most likely tonight if my guess is right. Why don’t we go dancing?”

     
“Do we have a dance room?” Iris asked, sounding surprise.

     
“Well there’s no one in the hall between our rooms right now,” Park laughed.

     
“You’re silly,” she laughed, “I like that.”

           
Nine hours later a gentle but persistent pinging sound filled Park’s room. He automatically reached to hit the snooze button but abruptly stopped when Iris laughed. “Silly, it’s your terminal,” she told him. She wrapped a sheet modestly around her as she sat up in bed and leaned over to read the screen.

     
“We’ve been summoned,” she told him. “According to this, everyone in our section is to have a last meal and report to the stasis chamber.”

     
“Now why should we need to eat before stasis?” Park wondered as he started getting dressed.

     
“We don’t need to,” Iris replied, picking her clothes up from a nearby chair, “but it’s nice to know we won’t come out of stasis ravenous for our next meal, isn’t it?” She stepped toward the door, still garbed only in Park’s sheet. “I’m just going to slip into my room and put on something fresh. I’ll meet you in a few minutes.”

     
Park grunted his acknowledgement and continued dressing. Once that was done he packed his computer pad into his small bag with his one change of clothing and left the room.

     
“Do we need to take our bags?” Iris asked as she met him in the hall. Others were already headed past them on their way to the cafeteria.

     
“That’s up to you,” Park shrugged. “I have a few things in here I’d like to keep, and they should keep just fine with me in stasis.” Iris nodded and retrieved her things as well.

     
After breakfast the nurse who helped their section into the stasis booths told him, “There’s really no need to hold those bags. They would have been fine for two weeks in your rooms.”

     
“Will they inhibit the stasis process in anyway?” Park asked pointedly.

     
“Well, no,” the nurse replied uncertainly. “I was told nothing can interfere with the process.”

     
“Then we’ll keep these with us, if you don’t mind,” Park replied with his usual smile.

     
“But you’ll be crowded in the tube with those bags,” she protested.

     
“We won’t be there long enough to notice,” Park laughed this time.

     
The nurse shrugged and helped Iris into the clear electro-plastic tube of her stasis chamber. Park blew Iris a kiss just as the lid swung down and Iris was frozen with the beginning of a smile on her lips.

     
Next Park stepped into the tube, remembered an old cartoon and as the lid closed down, he shouted, “To Infinity a…”

     
“…nd beyond!” Park finished as the lid of his tube swung gently open. “Hey! Who turned out the lights?”

     
There was no light in the room, but it was filled with the sounds of forty-nine other people coming out of stasis. Most of the sounds were of mild astonishment but a nearby voice asked, “What are you complaining about now, Park?”

     
Park recognized the voice of Peter Spechny. He and Iris had met him on the first night after their arrival at Van Winkle Base. He was a tall man with long light brown hair and a tendency to lean forward as you spoke to him. As Park recalled, Peter was a computer programmer from New Jersey and had been mildly interested in Park’s customized computer pad.

     
“You like it in the dark, Pete?” Park snapped back. “Why are the lights turned off?”

     
“Cost saving, I’ll bet,” Pete countered. “Why leave them on if we’re in stasis and can’t see them anyway?”

     
“They were supposed to come back on immediately on our release,” Park pointed out. “It was in the briefing packet, you know.”

     
“Park, is that you?” Iris asked from his other side. There were other worried voices in the room and Park understood he would have to say or do something reassuring.

     
“Who else?” he laughed confidently. “I think Congress must have cut our funding. Hey, folks! I’m going to get up and
 
make my way to the door. Stay in your units until I find the light switch, okay?”

     
Most of the others made sounds of agreement, but Pete demanded, “Why you, Park?”

     
“It was my idea,” Park told him, “so I get the honor of stubbing my toes if someone’s been in here moving the furniture since we went to sleep.”

     
Park made his way across the room and with only a bit of fumbling found the door and the light switch next to it. “Okay, everyone. Shield your eyes!” he paused a moment, then flipped the switch and nothing happened. “Now I know Congress cut our funding,” he remarked sourly.

     
“Try opening the door,” someone suggested.

     
Park tried the handle and reported, “It seems to be stuck. I could use a few hands. Maybe we can push it open.”

     
It took another ten minutes, but finally they got the heavy door open enough to slip through. “There are some lights on down the corridor,” Iris reported, having been the first to step out of the room. “The air is cold and smells a bit funny though. I think it’s a little stale.”

     
Park took a sniff. “It won’t kill us,” he decided. “Let’s go see if we can find out what’s going on. I’ll just go back for my bag.”

     
“I have it,” Iris assured him and handed him the small pack in the gloomy second-hand light of the hallway. “Why should that door have been stuck?” she went on to wonder. “It was aluminum bronze. Not all that susceptible to corrosion.”

     
“The hinges probably need oiling,” someone remarked as they started walking toward the lit section of hallway. Along the way they tried the doors to what had been their assigned rooms finding them all stuck to one degree or other. Some could be opened with difficulty, but others may have been welded shut for all their efforts could produce.

     
There was only one light to illuminate the end of the corridor and the door that blocked it, but the door did not seem to be stuck and, in fact opened quite easily to reveal a brightly lit hallway on the other side. Save for the lights and fresher smelling air, it was nearly identical to the one they had just left, with fifty small bedrooms and a somewhat larger one with stasis chambers inside.

     
“Should we let them out, do you think” one of the women, Tina Linea, asked Park. Tina was
 
tall with wavy blonde hair and blue eyes that made her look like a character from a beer bottle, but Park recalled from their earlier meeting that she was actually an accomplished Navy pilot.

     
“Everything seems to be working just fine in here,” Park decided. “Let’s let them sleep for now. Fifty of us are enough to figure out what happened. We can wake up the others once we have our bearings.” He expected an argument over that, but to his surprised everyone just nodded and followed him out of the room.

     
There was a stairway and an elevator at the end of this corridor and Park knew beyond that were another two sections of living quarters and stasis rooms. The elevator did not seem to be working. He was not surprised, so he led everyone up two flights of stairs to the cafeteria level. On arriving they found another fifty men and women sitting quietly at the tables nearest the kitchen while others were in the kitchen, apparently looking for something to eat.

     
Arn was standing on the floor between the tables talking in firm authoritative tones, but broke off when he saw Park and the people from his section entering the cavernous hall. “Ah, Parker!” Arn called out. “Good. Is anyone else up, do you know?”

     
“Not that we saw,” Park replied, “but we haven’t been exploring yet. At least some of the stasis chambers are still working. I was planning to check out Central Ops to see if I could figure out what’s going on. Speaking of going on, how long have your lot been awake? I still feel like I just ate, but you look like you’re getting ready to fix breakfast.”

     
Arn took Park aside from the others and Iris chose to follow them. “Had to make sure they had something to do. People panic when you don’t give them proper direction.”

     
“Really?” Park shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never really tried being a leader. Some folks follow me, some don’t, but no one from my sections seems to be in a panic just yet.”

     
Iris cut in before Arn could debate the point. “What about all the other sections?” she asked. “There are one hundred of them, you know. We seem to have gotten free because the power went out in ours, but we were nearly trapped behind a stuck door. What if there are others who really are stuck down there?”

   
  
“We still need to get to Central Ops,” Park insisted.

     
“You’re both right,” Arn decided. “Park, you and I will take a crew up to the center of operations and I’ll assign others to check out the rest of the storage sections.”

     
“Storage?” Iris asked archly.

     
“It’s as good a word as any,” Arn shrugged. “Do you want to organize that?”

     
“I’d rather have Iris with us in Ops,” Park told him. “Depending on what we find, we may need a top notch engineer on hand.”

     
“How do you know I’m top notch?” Iris countered.

     
“You’re here,” Park chuckled

     
Arn chose a woman by the name of Patricia Zinco to join them. The black-haired woman with almost white skin had been in his section and Park thought he remembered seeing her sitting near Arn during the briefing. Well, if Arn wanted to bring his partner of choice that did not bother Park in the least. Park had chosen Iris for her known abilities. That they had hit it off the night before stasis had nothing to do with his choice.

     
While others went off to check the stasis rooms, Arn led Park and the two women up three more levels toward the operations room, However at the top of the third landing they got the shock of their lives.

     
One wall was missing and the cold outside air was spilling into the stairwell. “Well that explains the cold air,” Park noted. The air may have been cold, but there was a clean scent of grass in it. It was still very dark outside and looking west they could see a just past full moon setting on the horizon. “Moon over Ohio – very picturesque.”

     
“That’s not right,” Iris told them.

     
“What do you mean,” Arn asked.

     
“Aren’t we supposed to be three thousand feet below ground level?” Iris asked pointedly. “How long would it take for erosion to cut us free like this?”

     
“Haven’t the slightest,” Park admitted, “but I suspect we’re going to find out eventually.”

     
“Better not tell the others about this, just yet,” Arn advised them.

     
“Do you think you can keep this a secret?” Iris asked. “We must be thousands of years out of our time.”

     
“Longer than that, I think,” Park told them. “Maybe even a few million, though it’s hard to believe the base would have remained even this intact for that long.”

     
“Our walls were under stasis too,” Arn admitted.

     
“Really?” Park asked. “Why?”

     
“To protect the base from the ravages of time, of course,” Arn told him. “That meteor strike might have hit us directly, but we would still have survived.”

     
“Then how are we even out of stasis now?” Park asked.

     
“It was modular and not perfect,” Arn explained. “Each section had its own stasis all controlled by the central computer. And then the entire installation had a stasis field around that. The outer one was programmed to fail for a micro-second every few minutes. I forget how many, it was a matter of harmonics, but that’s how the central computer could keep track of external time and conditions.”

     
“Why wasn’t that a part of the briefing?” Park demanded softly.

     
“That was strictly need-to-know,” Arn explained.

     
“Need-to-know?” Park
 
snapped. “Who the heck was anyone in there about to tell? What good would it have done them?”

     
“I had my orders,” Arn replied stiffly.

     
“Orders?” Park asked. “I thought you were supposed to be retired.” When Arn did not volunteer any further information, Park looked out though the large hole in the stairwell wall and continued, “Well, from the looks of things here, I think we can safely assume you’re off active duty.”

     
“As commander of this installation,” Arn countered, “one could argue that point.”

     
“Most of us are not military, Arn,” Park told him, schooling his voice to patience, “and this base is not supposed to be a military establishment.”