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Chapter 3: Discoveries And Dilemmas

    Jeff stepped down, still incredulous at what he saw, his mind racing. A hundred questions suddenly raced through his mind. What was it? where had it come from?, was it manned?, and biggest question of all.
    Was it of this Earth?
    Once his feet were on the surface, he slowly made his way towards the vehicle, his heart pounding. What would he find? only the next few minutes would tell.
    He passed the giant wing fin, and saw up ahead at the front of the craft that there was a light at the view port. He took another deep breath, and walked forward.
    He drew closer.
    The light seemed to get brighter.
    Eventually, after what felt like an eternity, he reached the window, and looked inside.
    It WAS manned.
    Two people were in there, a man, and a woman, both slumped at what looked like very futuristic controls.
    They both looked very elderly, and they were not moving.
    "I have to get inside", Jeff said to himself, "I've simply got to".
    He turned and made for what seemed like an airlock on the side of the fuselage. He expected it to be designed in some way that would render it impossible for him to open it up, but to his astonishment, he found it to be a standard airlock. Astonishment turned to confusion. It would appear this craft WAS built on Earth, but who the hell by.
    He pressed the control that he hoped would open the hatch, it did. Once inside and the hatch was closed, he hit a button marked "Pressurise". His suit monitor registered the increase to normal atmosphere. Jeff then took off his helmet, and turned to open the inner door of the airlock, and take his first step inside this strange craft.
    He found the lighting to be rather bright, this took him a little by surprise, but he ventured in, and saw what almost certainly was the dividing door between this compartment, and the front of this ship.
    As he came to it, it opened, by itself.
    Jeff looked inside, and saw the two people. Still slumped, motionless. They both had to be in their seventies, or even eighties, so old they were. He went to the woman first, tried for a pulse. Then he moved over to the man and did the same again.
    Nothing.
    They were both dead.
    He sighed. Sadness overcame him as he stood there, and also disappointment to a degree. He would never know who or what all this was about.
    Or would he.
    As he turned to walk back out of this cabin, he noticed a book, lying on the floor, and a pen not far from it. As though the book has been written in.
    Jeff picked up the book, opened it up at the first page, and began to read.

    "This is the final log entry of Colonel Steve Zodiac, commander of the World Space Patrol vessel Fireball XL5. We have been catapulted through what appeared to be a vortex cloud following our departure from Earth. This cloud has sent us crashing on to the moon. Yet when we sent out a distress call as we lost height over the Luna surface, no one responded. What was even more disconcerting, I noticed as we got closer and closer to the surface that the Luna cities and homesteads had all gone. There was no Armstrong City, Tycho City, Copernicus Village, Lovell Settlement, or the Scott complex at the Hadley Rille. Nothing. All that registered on the scanner was a tiny structure on the edge of crater Tycho.
    It’s as though we have travelled back in time, back a hundred years. This is not how I and my wife, Venus had planned to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. Everything had gone so wonderfully well. We have had the best possible present anyone could wish for. The gift of our old craft. Long since de-commissioned. Then after leaving Earth we detected this strange cloud formation ahead of us. We signalled the nearest WSP ship, as we were not in a position to make any kind of investigation. Yet we barely had time to open the radio channel, before our ship was dragged into this cloud.
    My wife and, I are losing blood all the time, unless someone locates us soon, well, that’s it.
    If anyone finds this journal, can they please pass this to my family. We have no children of our own, I'm afraid the life that we have both led has stopped us from doing that. The name I have taken is not my real family name. I took it from my father, the late Air general Steven Zodiac, who changed it by deed poll as a result of the occupation he had. An occupation that even on his death bed, he would not disclose, even to me.
    If anyone finds this journal, can they please pass it on to the Kalinski family; this is my family's real name. My grandfather was... "

    Jeff's eyes could not quite grasp what he was seeing. He had to read it again, but it still said the same name.
   
    ". . . . Edgar Kalinski".

    Edgar Kalinski!
    How?
    The very man he had spoken to less that 24 hours earlier was now being spoken of as in the past tense. All of a sudden this man who Jeff had the most deepest respect for was now, in the mind of the person who had written in this journal, who had channelled all his remaining hours of strength into writing this record so that someone could learn of what had happened and somehow preserve a little of the life’s that were now at an end, dead.
Was this supposed to be a ship from the future, a vessel commanded by his own grandson? It was simply too much to take in. Simply too wild a scenario. Simply out of this world. This was simply not happening.
According to what he had read, and seen, this giant vessel was from the future.
It was impossible, some sort of trick. Yet how could Jeff disprove what he had seen. Goodness knows it all made sense. This craft, the Fireball, XL5 looked like nothing he had seen before. Maybe this was a craft from the future.
Having read the journal, it all made perfect sense.
    Yet Jeff had his dilemma.
    Edgar Kalinski.
    He read on.

    "Edgar Kalinski was the former commissioners of the old Solar System Exploration Council, he supervised the exploration of the inner part of the solar system, and is a man I hold very dear. Even though I never met him.
    I would love to have told him about the day that changed mankind. The day that I will never forget, nor anyone who was alive that day will forget either. To anyone who reads this journal I will tell this story.
    It was my first mission as master of this vessel.
    In the latter part of the earth year 2072, a disabled spaceship from another world was found, adrift, off the orbit of Neptune. By the end of the 2060's, mankind could be found throughout our solar system, but that was as far as we thought we could go. Yet here we were. A ship from another world and a ship that could travel faster than the speed of light. This ship was a representative from an alliance of worlds. An alliance of over 50 solar systems.
    They knew of Earth, and they knew of our language, and they were actually thinking of sending a ship to make first contact. This ship was now in trouble, it had developed a fault that was causing its life support system to fail. The XL5 was diverted from its journey from Pluto to Saturn’s moons and located the craft. The result was a Stella alliance of worlds including the Earth. Our world was invited into the alliance, and Earth was made its headquarters. This was done because of the fact that in saving the crew of the ship we found, we had saved the life of the president of that federation. Had he died, there could have been a war within the stellar alliance. There was at that time, no federation headquarters. So Earth, as a thank you, became the centre of a massive space empire. Our craft had their engines converted to enable them to travel at speeds many times that of light, and a day greater than any day in history since the creation, had gone into the history books as the day mankind evolved into something new, and bold.    
He inherited the galaxy.
    I grow weak now, eight hours have passed since we crashed, I don't know how I've managed to write all this in such a short time, I will rest, having grieved for Venus, who will die with me in the next few hours if no help comes,  having channelled out much of this grief in writing this.
    I dedicate this to Edgar Kalinski.       
               Steve Christpher Zodiac
                            Lillian “Venus” Lumere
                                                                                June 18th 2113

On to Chapter 4.