World Without a Sun

World without a Sun

Discovery

If we could have hit pay dirt, it would have to have been here. Too bad it wasn't the pay dirt we wanted to hit. Instead of 30 miles of uninterrupted silver veins, we hit a big hole in the ground. Down deep in the ground, our exploration team was tunneling with a vengeance when Daggit began to yell. All the rock rats froze at the signal, machinery whined to dead silence and everyone turned to look at the man with the magic screen. The screen told us if we were about to die or not, so we generally paid attention.
With a curious nonchalance Daggit moved to the side of the tunnel we were in and knocked a fist on the wall. After a few moments he did it again.

“Dagnabit Daggit, are we in danger of being spit on or not?” I yelled. That is to say I asked him if the tunnel were ready to collapse.

“This thing must be goin nuts.” he growled. “It's telling me there's a hole on the other side of the wall.”

“A whole what?”, says Jimmy. Jimmy was the baby. I smacked him across the back of the head.

“Twenny and 'e don' unnerstand nuthin!” yelled rags. “H O L E you numbwit, not W H O L E!”

“What kind of a hole?” I asked, curious for the moment.

“A darn big one.” Daggit said with reverence.

I turned my cutter toward the wall. “Well, lets see what's in there!”

The machinery whined and cranked, then rumbled and roared. It ground its teeth into the wall and as soon as I felt space beyond, I yanked back and a large portion of the wall collapsed. We turned the powerful tunneling light into the hole and for a moment, no one moved. It was too awesome to contemplate. Jimmy leaned forward toward the hole, but daggit grabbed his collar and laid him flat on his back in the tunnel.

“Idjit! Do you think you can fly?”

Beyond the edge lay a drop of at least 400 feet. Above us lay a 100 foot wall to the roof of the huge cavern. This place was so immense, even the light couldn't get across it. We all wondered what could have made a space in the earth that big. What ever it was had to have been a power of nature we had a hard time even thinking about.

We took a few turns throwing flares and bagged explosives as hard as we could. We didn't reach the other side of the cavern.

“We should stake a claim and sell it.”

Jimmy always made sense when he talked business. We were lucky we staked that claim. Twenty days later we were stars. Twenty one days later we were millionaires, every last rock rat on the exploration team.  We learned why when we saw the entire the cavern eight months later, lit up bright as day. The length of it was easily a mile and a half long. At its deepest, the cavern was 700 feet from top to bottom. The walls were smooth as though a giant bubble had just popped right there in the middle of the earth. It had a slightly sandy bottom, like beach sand. It had tiers and slopes that could be climbed from tier to tier. At the very far end a lake fed from an underground river produced sweet fresh drinkable water.

Researchers swarmed over that cavern for four years straight. Funny that no one could produce a good  working theory as to how that cavern actually got there....

--

Vision

“And today ladies and gentlemen, the RockRat installation is the largest research facility in the world. If you'll come with me, we will enter the elevators which will take us down fourteen floors to the tunnels that were investigated so very long ago by the initial RockRat teams.”

To a child nothing could have been more fascinating than endless miles of tunnels dug into the earth. Kelly had seen it several times and she still liked to take the tour, running her hands along the long rock walls that had been chewed open by diesel generator rock cutters. Most of the tunnels had been lined and looked just like any hallway up on the surface. A few tunnels were cut off, behind doors that said “CAUTION: NO ENTRANCE” on signs that repeated them in spanish, german, french, latin, and for some reason, swahili. The tunnels ran to research rooms deep in the complex, floor upon floor of them.
Kelly stopped at one of the rooms, watching monkeys play in an endless series of tunnels, learning how to get treats from boxes by cooperating with each other or trying to 'cheat' the system and get all the treats for themselves. She loved their antics and their intelligence.
A old gentleman in a white lab coat stopped by the girl.
“I like them best when we let them out to go streaking around the hallways.” his accent was vaguely english.

Kelly turned shocked blue eyes on the old man. “Do you really??”

Smiling he looked down, “No, not really.”

Kelly smiled tentatively back, “I didn't think so.”

The white haired old man and the young girl with blue eyes stood together watching for a long moment.

“I've seen you come down here several times.”

Kelly nodded, “My mom works on the surface, I can come down any time I want. I want to be a researcher when I grow up.”

The old man smiled to himself, “There are other professions. Professions less, consuming.”

Kelly shook her head, “I want to see how things happen and find out why.”

Speculatively, the researcher looked down at the little girl and offered his hand, “My name is Joe.”

Kelly reached out to take the researcher's hand, “Kelly, Kelly Linstrum. It's nice to meet you Joe.”

Joe shook her hand gravely, “It's very nice to meet you too. Kelly, would you like to see something spectacular?”

Kelly smiled and nodded. Joe motioned down the hallway and Kelly walked along side him. They passed chemistry laboratories with giant fume hoods for dangerous chemicals, minature structural laboratories where any number of models stood, awaiting destruction from earth, fire, and flood. They came to a side hallway where one of the CAUTION doors lay. Joe unlocked it with a key taken from his pocket and as they stepped through, Kelly smelled the dark earthy smell of an old, unused rock tunnel. Here was an original tunnel unsullied by modern construction. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to envision the initial teams with their diesel rock cutters, stone chips and dust flying everywhere in the brilliance of the directed mining lamp light. She opened her eyes again and the vision faded away into the darkness. Joe took down several hand lights and together they began walking down the tunnel.

“I come down here after a long day of work when I feel particularly dispirited at my failures. It helps to remind me that not every thing on or IN this Earth, can be explained.”

Kelly looked confused,  “Here in the tunnels?”

Joe chuckled, “No my friend, up here.”

They had come to the end of the tunnel and Joe handed Kelly his handlamp. In front of them lay another door, a slightly larger than normal sized metal door. Joe punched in a code to the alarmed panel, then used his key to open the door. As they stepped out onto a small platform, Kelly could feel the darkness pressing in on her. Joe reached out next to him to a box with a lever and pushed it upwards. Kelly heard clicks coming from far away and then huge lights way above her began to hum. In an explosion of focused brilliance, the cavern yawned beneath her, vast and impressive. She sucked in a deep breath. She looked longingly down the stairs at the floor of the cavern but Joe shook his head.

“Not today my friend, but I promise, when we are prepared with food and safety gear, we will go down and I will let you walk around as long as you like, from end to end and up every step of every slope.”

“It's fantastic...” she breathed.

Kelly sat on the stairs and took in the awesome magnitude of the space inside the cavern. For a moment she could envision people. People going to and fro in the cavern, in and out of buildings made of rock set on the tiers, people coming and going from the lake, even animals in pens at one end of the cavern.

Joe sat beside her.

“Could people live in here?”, she asked.

Joe pursed his lips thoughtfully, “I don't know. What makes you ask?”

“It looks like it was made for people.”, she said.

Joe blinked. It was one possibility that none of the researchers who had ever explored the cave had ever considered. Was it 'made' ?

Joe looked at his watch and patted Kelly's shoulder.

“Well, what ever it was, will have to be a question for another day. I have work I will have to complete today and plans to make if you want to see the bottom of this cavern.”
As Kelly stood to leave, she took one more look around and thought carefully to herself,

'People could definitely live in here, all they need is a reason.'

–
Conception

A tall woman stood to the side of a staged platform as the MIT director introduced her to the crowd; detailing her education and accomplishments. Her straight brown hair fell past the shoulders of her immaculate blue business suit. Her blue eyes scanned the crowd, attempting to pick out those most receptive to her speech. She couldn't help but let her eyes rest on her mentor Joe Valentine. He nodded to her and she smiled, quelling the butterflies in her stomach.

“Ladies and Gentleman, the leader of the Earths Monument project, Doctor Kelly Linstrum.”

Kelly stepped up to the podium.

“Ladies and gentlemen. For many years we have attempted to do our best to go one step further, to make something even better than before, even go so far as to reinvent the wheel. We have done our best to convince ourselves that all our technological experiences have been for the benefit of mankind, all the stereos, the new communication equipment, all the video games and solar arrays. However what if we couldn't use it any more? What if for some reason the surface of the Earth became unlivable? We have already  lived through terrorism, earthquakes, wars all over the world, tsunamis, hurricanes, and various medical disasters that decimated entire nations. It is thinkable that it could happen again. We want to be ready. We want to survive.”

A few people got up and left at this point, but both Joe and the MIT director had warned her this was a possibility and not to let it phase her, so she went on after noting the defections peripherally. The director would tell her later who had left.

She waved to the audio visual booth and the presentation slides behind her came up.

“In 1974 a half dozen groups of subterranean miners named the RockRats were hired to create tunnels to explore mining possibilities next to a mountain in Arizona. They were not successful in finding the silver vein that was initially prospected, but they did create a vast tunnel complex that we know today as the RockRat research facility. What was not publically released was the discovery of a vast cavern right next to the research facility.”

Pictures, done by professional photographers came up on the screen and the audience suddenly began to murmur. Kelly turned for a moment to admire the way the photographers had made the lights seem more 'natural'.

“Beautiful isn't it? At its largest, the cavern is seven hundred feet high. It is one and a half miles long and a mile wide. The mountain itself stands another eighteen stories above it.”

The statistics made the crowd suddenly break into chatter. Kelly waited for them to calm down before recapturing their attention. Here again the directors advice had warned her what to expect so she didn't attempt to capture their attention before they were ready.

As it was Kelly had a time trying not to answer questions that were spoken out from the crowd before she had finished her presentation. She smoothly went on.

“Initial research done in the cave indicated an enormously strong structure. Subsequent research shows the underground river runs for miles and there is a possibility that more caverns could be discovered along its length with some judicious tunneling.”

“I am proposing Ladies and Gentlemen that in a several step system, we actually populate this cave. This experiment could give us enormous amounts of not only physical, but social information as well as geological, atmospheric, and even technological  information that in such a disaster that we could not longer live on the surface, nor leave the Earth entirely, we would be able to populate caverns like these.”

The final few impressive displays of the caverns clicked to an end and with her heart pounding in her chest, she awaited the questions that she knew were coming. Surprisingly the technical questions came first. She answered with geological and atmospheric data instantly summoned on her laptop which sat at her elbow ready to go. She briefly outlined the seven step system she had sketched, making sure to note that it was not written in 'stone' as it were. She got a few laughs. Then the questions she dreaded.

“Ms Linstrum, we have already proven that humans cannot live without our Sun. How do you think we could do it now?”

Kelly looked carefully at the questioner.

“I believe that our technology is good enough to use alternates that we have already provided to ourselves. There are many who have lived underground in facilities all their lives or part of their lives. It is true we cannot survive without our Sun being here as part of our solar system and our universe, but I am confident we could survive not seeing it.”

“Why?” came a question from somewhere in the back rows.

“I'm sorry … why what?” Kelly asked politely

“Why did you think of this when you saw that cave? Anyone else would see just another natural wonder. Why do you think of people living there?”

Very admirably, Kelly did not chew on her lip as she really wanted to. Why indeed. She wished she could tell him her private pet theories. All about those who had done this for a purpose, but she dared not. Not at this stage, not without backing and support. Perhaps in the future they would think her just an eccentric old lady, but for now, it did not matter what her thoughts really were, as long as it happened. She turned with a brilliant smile to the questioner.

“Why not?”

–