Wheels in the Sky

Chapter 1 – Harmony Base

In the very near future…

Deep beneath the Earth, there was a thrum. Philip Bradford lay back on the bunk in his cabin and listened. He liked to think it was the sound of the planet itself, its molten core moving and rumbling, beneath the brittle skin of rock upon which all life lived. Or almost all life, for in three or four distant, far-flung places around the globe, tiny teams of researchers burrowed deep beneath the ground in the name of science.

In one of these ‘deep research’ stations, Bradford lived. He was not a scientist, not even a part of a research team. Instead, he had elected, for his own reasons, to live a mile beneath the ground, and had petitioned the Government of the United States to be allowed to do so.

So, Bradford lay back and listened to the thrum… and then it changed, barely perceptibly, to a different tone. Only someone who had been concentrating on it would have noticed; and it broke the illusion: the thrum had never been the Earth, which, that deep within the rock, was as silent as the tomb. It had been the generators and equipment of the scientists with whom Bradford shared his subterranean space – it was only a personal fantasy that the sound had been the groaning of the planet far within.

Years before, when he had been a young boy growing up in California, Bradford had been standing at the kitchen door of his family home, looking out at the Sacramento evening, when the sky had appeared to change its shade of blue. He’d been a sensitive boy, aware of objects and their fields; and that night, standing by the open door, seeing the sky change colour, he quite calmly wondered whether he had lost his mind?

Only over time did he think that all sorts of things could have altered his perception of the brightness of the sky: a light going on in a neighbour’s garden, a moment of light-headedness in himself, even blinking. Perception was a funny thing, and natural objects could be seen entirely differently for all kinds of reasons. But still, he had not forgotten that night: it acted as a totem of his fallibility, a reminder that our perception of nature could not be relied upon, and that his mind’s coherence was far from certain – he could lose it as easily as a million others had lost theirs.

And Bradford remembered that boyhood sensation now, now that the thrum had changed.

He had already been distracted from his writing that morning, hence why he had gone for a lie down. Now he hadn't typed a word for two hours, and had made it through to lunch time. Lunch was good, because it was a justifiable break – no writer could be criticised for needing to eat. Though Bradford knew it was a ruse, that he was looking for any reason not to write, and that ‘deep down’ (he chuckled at his own internal joke) he was verging on a crisis.

He remembered so clearly the first time he had come down to the base. He had seen it featured on the television news – scientists beavering away a mile below – and it had struck him as something entirely new to his experience. It made him sit up in excitement; and as a man in his fifties who had travelled and seen the world, there was not much left that could do that.

Between his novels, he also wrote occasional pieces for a certain broadsheet paper, The Herald, and he reported his discovery to his Editor eagerly,

‘They’re building an underground science base,’ he had declaimed over the telephone. ‘It’s the only place on Earth – or under the Earth – that they can find a certain type of particle, one that can pass through any matter. All the normal particles are blocked by the wall of rock around them, you see. It only leaves the one particle they’re interested in; and once they find it, then there could be all sorts of scientific breakthroughs.

‘The Government is spending billions on it, and I bet the public hardly even know it’s there! And it’s not just that – it’s the thing itself, the fact of it, of what it must be like to work and live so far beneath the ground. You have to get me down there.’

The Editor had agreed; and true to his word, a pass with Bradford’s name on it was soon waiting at the newspaper offices. Bradford couldn’t wait.

Like a boy running eagerly towards a funfair ride, it was left to those around him to call him back and worry for his safety,

‘A mile beneath the ground, you say?’ ‘What if the lift breaks?’ ‘What if you get crushed?’

But he waved these fears away, even goaded his friends with sarcastic responses,

‘Well, I could be crushed to death in someone’s cellar tomorrow if the building fell on top of me, you can’t be any more crushed the further down you go.’

He didn’t care if they were worried, he laughed it off – he was as high as a kite with excitement for his visit.

He travelled there alone. His flight from Los Angeles brought him into Lincoln, Nebraska. From there, a much smaller plane arrived at a distant rural airport; and then he was driven for five hours in the base’s supply truck,

‘You a scientist then?’ asked the driver.

‘No, I’m a writer. I’m covering the base for The Herald.’

‘You ever been underground before?’

‘No, you?’ Bradford’s own question to the driver had struck him as stupid the moment it left his lips – after all, here was a man who attended the base daily. But his answer caught Bradford off guard,

‘Me, underground? Nah, you wouldn’t catch me down there. I leave my goods at the door, and get off out of there,’ he laughed. ‘I’m not risking my life in some cage lift. I’ve got a wife and kids to get home for. You got any yourself?’

‘No,’ answered Bradford, and turned his gaze to the white-blown landscape they were passing through in the huge Ford truck. The air had been chill that day, as though the sky were emptying and blowing grey dust over the sparse grass and fenceposts.

‘How long till we get there?’ he asked.

It would be several more hours.

Chapter 2 – The Rock

Once arriving at the base, there was a sense of apparent anti-climax. The upmost part of world’s most advanced science centre was barely distinguishable from any local farm warehouse: oblong, featureless, blown by that same grey dust.

Bradford was greeted, not by a welcoming committee, but by the regular technician meeting the supply truck.

After greeting Bradford, he noticed his guest’s non-plussed expression,

‘It’s not much to look at, is it?’ he laughed at the visitor’s face. ‘And it’s not very much more glamorous downstairs,’ as Bradford would get used to people terming the base itself.

Bradford struggled for his words,

‘But that isn’t the point, is it? It’s not what the base looks like. It’s the fact of it, the geography, the distance below.’

The technician smiled, which Bradford took to show a shared understanding.

Other men appeared by the truck to take the supplies in, and the driver left as swiftly as intended. Bradford, ever the sentimentalist, even waved him goodbye.

‘Don’t worry,’ laughed the chipper technician. ‘He’ll be driving you back home tomorrow.’

Once inside the warehouse, Bradford was issued with a hard hat with attached ear protectors, and some basic instructions, which he laughed off,

‘Keep your hands inside the car, I know!’

The lift itself was a cube cage some three yards square. Squeezing in beside the cling-wrapped pallets and crates, the men began their descent.

It was in that ‘cage lift’ that Bradford felt his first fear. It wasn’t the weight of the rocks they were passing through that fazed him, their ‘instant crushability’, as he would write it in his subsequent article. It was that, as the open platform descended through the unsheathed chasm, for minute after slow minute, Bradford saw the eons and millennia of human existence… forget that, of the Earth’s existence, rolling past him in reverse.

He wondered: before the shaft had been cut for the long-exhausted silver mine, whose space the base now occupied, when had been the last time that any creature’s eyes had laid sight upon the ground they were, at each second, intersecting?

The technician must have mistaken Bradford’s awe for apprehension, and sought to break the monotony,

‘So, you’ll be writing on the research?’

Bradford paused, before answering,

‘I’m not so scientific, more creative.’

The guide laughed again, ‘You’re a creative one all right.’

Bradford was reminded that, to many people, that word was not always a compliment. The descent went on for many minutes, and didn’t speed up throughout.

‘Is it as quick coming back up?’ he asked sarcastically.

‘Just about. If someone has a panic attack down there, then the endless ascent can make it worse – we have to knock them out. Sedate them, you know? I don’t mean literally!’

‘That’s reassuring,’ uttered Bradford, as he thought of seeing dinosaur skulls leering out at him from the passing strata.

Thankfully, once they found the floor of the shaft, he didn’t instantly require to see the open air again. Instead, they calmly opened the gates and stepped out into the strangest environment.

Bradford’s first words were, ‘There is no sky.’

The technician laughed, ‘The main chamber can seem like that, can’t it. The arc lights point down, not up, so you can’t see the ceiling.’

‘And what is the ceiling?’

‘Unfinished rock. This was a working space – anything the miners didn’t need to smooth off, they didn’t.’

What the huge lamps did show seemed like an outdoor scene on a rocky outcrop at night; and also like some weird illuminated crime scene in an industrial complex: self-assembled oblong cabins, in singles and multiples, piled up on top of each other, in some places three high; buzzing generators surrounded by reams of heavy cables; and other ‘rooms’ that resembled the Apollo landing craft, metallic in construction, fitted with riveted portholes of thick clear plastic, and clad in golden foil.

‘You don’t want to go near those,’ he was instructed.

‘Top secret, eh?’ asked Bradford.

‘No, you’re just as likely to get an electric shock as to freeze your hand solid in liquid nitrogen.’

‘So, they are your famous experiments?’

‘Some of them, though not the big dogs. They’re buried even further away along the old mine shafts.’

‘That makes sense,’ mused Bradford, ‘if the purpose is to have the least disturbance possible.’

‘You really get this, don’t you?’ marvelled the technician.

‘And others don’t?’

‘Between you and me, we’ve had politicians down here, checking up on where their funding’s being spent, who haven’t known one end of a Bunsen burner from the other.’

He concluded, ‘But you seem to understand the need for isolation.’

The technician didn’t mean the words in the way that Bradford took them, but he was not to forget them.

Chapter 3 – The Decision

The rest of the underground visit passed by in a mood of beguiled excitement and a blur of explanations and introductions. Bradford even had one of his books presented to him to be signed. He ate with the staff, and slept alone in a visitors’ dormitory, placed spookily away from the main hall along a barely lit shaft.

Along that narrow tunnel the ceiling was lower than in the main area, only just above his head, for he was quite tall. And Bradford found he wasn’t scared – lying in his bed, he knew that just outside the dimensions of his small white man-made chamber, the rock was there, surrounding him, cosseting him.

Before sleep, alone in the tunnel, with the station almost silent, he stepped out through the door to stand on the ancient strata in his bare feet. He touched the natural wall beside him, and looked up those few inches to the tapered roof. He found that, even closed in like that, he felt no fear of the rock falling, or of him being crushed or, perhaps worse, being trapped down there alive – why should he fear? The old miners had known what they were doing. If the roof was going to fall, it would have done so many years ago.

In the Earth’s crust all around him he saw not something heavy and about to break, but instead the oldest thing that he had ever known. The plates hadn’t moved for millennia, and he had a total certainty that they weren’t about to do so now.

He went back inside his flimsy plastic chamber and lay down, and it was the best night’s sleep he could remember.

The next morning, eating breakfast in the largest cabin, with everyone sitting along two trestle tables, he had made up his mind. The previous day he had been mostly talking with the younger staff, recording their enthusiasm. The chiefs had been meeting in one of the offices for most of the afternoon. Though it was one of those to whom he would need to speak now.

He looked around for his guide from the previous day, then went over and asked,

‘Morning, so I’m off soon but I haven’t spoken to any of your senior scientists yet.’

‘Well, our Director’s not here this week – she spends half her time up-top. But you can speak to our Research Lead. That’s him there.’

The conversation took two minutes at the breakfast table, as the heavy-set man munched through a tomato and egg toasted sandwich. After mouth-full introductions, Bradford made his pitch, perhaps the last brave thing he would do for a while,

‘Sir, you’ve clearly got the space down here, and the quiet is a Godsend for a writer. I won’t be cut off from the world – you have cables running up to ground, you have the Internet, you have food brought down each day. And, if I could keep that room along the tunnel, then I can’t imagine the books I could write.’

By now, the listener had finished his mouthful, and asked,

‘But, wouldn’t it be lonely if you’re not used to it?’

‘I’d have food, a roof, my laptop. Some would say a writer doesn’t, indeed shouldn’t, need anything else.’

‘Well,’ pondered the Research Lead, before resuming his sandwich, ‘I’ll have to check with the Director.’

Bradford’s Herald article was a huge success, though friends were worried at his follow-up plan, asking,

‘But how long for?’

‘Three months; six.’

‘All that time underground?’

‘But I can’t tell you how restful it is. And after these past couple of years…’

‘I know, with Martha and little Jack.’

‘I’ve hardly written a thing. This could get me back on track.’

‘But,’ the friend implored, ‘aren’t you going to miss people? Aren’t they going to miss you?’

Bradford pondered, before finding the words to say what he hadn’t yet said out loud to himself,

‘Maybe if I still had a wife… though that was nearly three years ago now; and as for Jack, well, I expect I’ll see as little of him living underground as I do in LA.’

‘I get it.’

‘And I’ll be on email, and you can call. And you can always come and visit!’

The friend did not appreciate this last remark, but at least it broke the mood before they hugged and parted.

And so it was done. A week later, Bradford was back on the plane to Nebraska; back on the supplies delivery truck, back on the endless elevator, and back to sleeping soundly for the first time in years.

Chapter 4 – News of the Ten-Thousand

Eight months on, and Bradford sat down for lunch.

‘How’s The Mole?’ asked one of the others at the canteen table.

‘Distracted,’ he answered.

After so many months, they were getting well used to each other.

‘Well, this will get your attention.’

Although there was a Wi-Fi hotspot within the underground base, the print-sheet daily papers that came down with their supplies were a physical reminder of ‘life upstairs’. Bradford read its headline, as he did most days, but rarely with such electric enthusiasm:

AGREEMENT MADE FOR SPACE STATION PLAN

‘What is this?’ he asked his lunch companion, a scientist at the base.

‘Haven’t you been following the story?’

‘Maybe the bunny hasn’t been taking the papers down the rabbit hole to him?’ joked someone, referring to Bradford’s quiet nook off the main chamber.

‘What he means,’ interrupted a friendlier voice, giving the previous speaker a stern look, ‘is that perhaps the story hadn’t reached far beyond the scientific journals before this week.’

The friendly voice was Edward Ferrarin PhD, astrophysicist and researcher into the gravitational echoes of the early universe. Several of the gold-clad machines were expressly his. He also played a mean hand of Texas hold ‘em, though didn’t possess the granite visage to really push his advantage home around the card table. This was what Bradford liked best about his new-found friend: that, for all his talents, he was still too soft for the competitive world – he had to find other ways to get on.

The conversation, though, was passing Bradford by.

‘Another station?’ he asked rhetorically. In a sudden mix of emotions, he pushed the story away without hardly reading it. ‘I’m sorry, Ted. This might turn on you techies in your line of work, but I think the rest of us know what we’re getting out of space by now: weird ant experiments, a few TV satellites getting fixed, astronauts cartwheeling in Zero G listening to Bob Marley. I wasn’t part of the Apollo generation, I’ve never been excited by space.’

Ted just looked at Bradford in comedy contempt, but answered in a laughing voice,

‘You haven’t read the story at all, have you. This isn’t just any station, it’s The Station. The Big One.’

‘How big?’

‘Ten thousand people, big.’

Bradford was the boy again, staring out into space through the mile of rock above him. Only now it wasn’t changing shades of deep