"ALTERNATIVE 3" LUNAR TRANSFER BASE DISASTER
"ALTERNATIVE 3" LUNAR TRANSFER BASE DISASTER
Copied below is most of the text of the final chapter of the
book "Alternative 3", by Leslie Watkins, David Ambrose, and
Christopher Miles, 1978, Sphere Books Limited, .
This is NOT fiction.
SECTION FOURTEEN
They call it Archimedes Base. And that's where the
trouble, the really big trouble, flared so violently.
Archimedes is a walled crater-plain on the western
border of the Mare Imbrium, the Moon's "
has a diameter of about 50 miles and, unlike the nearby
Aristillus crater, it has a relatively smooth ground surface.
That is why, according to information from Trojan, it was
developed as the principal transit camp on the Moon - the
place from where people were normally lifted for the final
leg of their journey to Mars.
Man cannot survive in the natural atmosphere of the
Moon. NASA said so years ago and NASA, in that instance, was
telling the truth. So most of Archemedes Base was
hermetically sealed under a transparent bubble inside which
air and temperature was controlled to the levels usual on
Earth. The construction had taken two years and had been a
fantastic triumph of space engineering.
Conditions under the bubble were similar to those
visualized by Dr. O'Neill for his artificial worlds of the
future. Men and women could live there comfortably for
indefinite periods - secure inside a domed and gigantic
greenhouse.
There were two huge airlocks in the southern section of
the bubble. Shuttle craft arriving from Earth and from Mars
entered through these locks before taxiing to the centrally-
sited Arrival Terminal. A series of roads ran from the
terminal to the stores and service areas and to the three
separate "living-quarter villages" - one for pilots and
resident personnel, one for "designated movers", and one for
"batch-consignment components". And over it all was a spread
of camouflage, reminiscent of that used during World War Two,
to ensure that Archimedes Base could never be seen by
unauthorized observers on Earth.
There was another transit camp, the original one on the
Moon, in the crater known as Cassini, but that was now
considered too small. Most of its equipment and furnishings
had been moved to Archimedes. For Archimedes was the
bustling center of activity...
Trojan's cryptic message about possible sabotage was
soon followed by this report:
Stringent security ensures the complete segregation
of Designated Movers from Batch-Consignment Components
until after disembarkation in the new territory.
They are transported in separate craft and, while
awaiting transportation, they are quartered in different
areas of Archimedes Base. This is as a result of an
order from the Policy Committee.
It is felt that among the Designated Movers there
may be those who initially harbor reservations about the
morality of the mental and physical processing
considered necessary for Components.
"Components"! Let us not be confused by the jargon
euphemisms. Trojan uses them. Trojan, like most others in
Alternative 3, has been brain-washed into accepting such
words as normal. He is revolted by what has been done, by
what is being done, but he has unwittingly absorbed the
obscene distortion of language. So, just for a moment,
forget "components". Trojan means people. He is writing
about slaves, about men and women who have been mutilated
mentally and physically, who have been programed to obey
orders. And who have been condemned to a life of sub-human
degradation.
His report continued:
These Designated Movers can have their doubts put
into "proper perspective", after they have become
acclimatized to life in the new territory, by
representatives of the Committee in Residence. They
can, according to official reasoning, be persuaded to
recognize that the ultimate survival of the human race
must take precedence over the fate of a limited number
of low-grade individuals.
Consider the appalling significance of that paragraph!
It means, if "official reasoning" is right, that Ann Clark
and Brian Pendelebury and others like them can be taught to
regard fellow humans as expendable beasts of burden. It
means, surely, that natural compassion must be systematically
eradicated, that the minds of "designated movers" are also
moulded to match the needs of Alternative 3. Orwell's vision
of 1984, it seems, has already come to fruition - millions of
miles from Earth.
Trojans report then went on to detail the curious
circumstances which resulted in Earthly efforts to undermine
Alternative 3. And which eventually culminated in carnage at
Archimedes Base ...
Bacteria are far more tenacious than humans when it
comes to clinging to life. They survive the seemingly
impossible. They can apparently retreat into a form of
hibernation for centuries. For millennia even. Then, when
conditions are right, they wake up, as it were, and they
flourish. That is apparently what happened on Mars.
The "dynamic changes" recorded in 1961 and described by
Gerstein provided the ideal conditions. And across the
silent wastes of the empty planet there was a great awakening
of the minute unicellular living organisms. They developed
and they spread. They were too small to be seen but they
were there, waiting, when Man first arrived...
These were alien strains of bacteria, pernicious and
voracious strains never before encountered by humans, but
they were not numerous enough noticeably to damage the
imported and carefully-cultivated crops. Not until late
1976. That, as we now know, was the time of the great
blight...
Attempts were made to fight them with bactericides and
even by bacteriophages which involved the introduction of
ultra-microscopic organisms normally parasitic to bacteria.
But the Committee in Residence realized it was a losing
battle. And that was when the super-powers decided they
needed The German.
The German, whose name we have agreed to withhold, is
possibly the most imaginatively successful bacteriologist in
the world. That is accepted by his contemporaries in the
East and the West. He has probably achieved more than any
other man in his sphere - not only in combating bacteria but
in harnessing them into the service of man. That was why he
was needed so urgently in the new territory...
But he refused to go. He was seen by the Alternative 3
regional officer and, eventually, by the West German Chief
Executive Officer. They argued with him, offered him every
possible inducement, but he remained adamant. Certainly he
would respect the confidences he had entrusted to him but he
had work to do, work on Earth, and he had absolutely no
inclination to become involved in Alternative 3.
They did recruit his principal assistant, an American in
his mid-thirties, who travelled as a designated mover in
February, 1977. He went willingly, enthusiastically even.
But he is another man whose identity it would be unfair to
reveal, for, if he is still alive, he is today being hunted.
He is being hunted by agents of the East and the West.
He will certainly have changed his name by now, and
probably his appearance as well, but he must know that for
him there can be no permanent hiding place. He is the man
chiefly responsible for founding the guerilla group known as
Anti-Alternative. He was also responsible for the eventual
disaster at Archimedes Base. We call his The Instigator.
It soon became apparent to the Committee in Residence
that The Instigator, although competent and experienced,
lacked the intuitive flair needed for the new-territory task.
they still needed The German. But The German was still
refusing...
Urgent meetings were convened in the Hall of the
Committee in Residence. There were consultations with the
Policy Committee on Earth, with key men in Department Seven.
And eventually a decision was reached. The German liked and
respected The Instigator. He had confidence in his
judgement. And if any man could persuade The German to
become a designated mover it was The Instigator. He should
go back to Earth, they decided. He should go back to talk to
The German. That, as it turned out, was their biggest and
most disastrous mistake...
They had made one serious miscalculation over The
Instigator. They had failed to realize that he still had not
got the plight of the Components into "proper perspective".
Maybe that would have changed if he had been allowed more
time, for there had been others, many others, who had needed
months to become completely accustomed to living with an
enslaved sub-species. All of them had eventually accepted
that this was part of the essential balance. But The
Instigator had not been allowed time, not enough time, and he
was tormented with secret guilt. What right, he wondered,
did he have to be one of the Chosen, one of the
Select? He was racked with disgust and with doubts, and he
knew then that, somehow, he had to shatter the component
system...
And then they told him they were returning him to Earth.
There was a stop-over at Archimedes Base on his return
journey and he was temporarily housed with a new group of
designated movers awaiting transportation to the new
territory. They knew nothing, these people, about the
components - quartered, as usual, in a different "village" -
who were being condemned to spend the rest of their lives as
slaves. He told them. He told them exactly what was
happening and exactly what to expect. He described the
kidnappings and the mutilations being carried out on Earth -
for their benefit and comfort. And they were not ready for
such horrendous information. They were normal people, highly
intelligent and sensitive, and they had not yet been exposed
to the skilled and persuasive arguments of the Committee in
Residence. They were uncertain about whether to believe him.
It all sounded so lunatically outrageous. Yet this man was
strangely convincing...
The truth. They decided surreptitiously to visit the
village he'd described. And that is what sparked the
holocaust at Archimedes Base...
The Instigator did not contact The German when he
returned to Earth. He fled into hiding. And then, with a
small group of trusted collaborators, he founded his action
group, Anti-Alternative. This group, unlike organizations
such as the IRA or the PLO, could make no public statements
for such statements could lead to them being rooted out and
destroyed. They dedicated themselves to disrupting, by
guerilla tactics, all work connected with the exploration and
exploitation of space. Their actions, they felt, might force
an eventual re-think on Alternative 3.
On October 1, 1977, the Daily Telegraph carried a story,
written by Ian Ball in
SATELLITE ROCKET No.2 BLOWS UP. It said:
A second communications satellite was reduced to
debris over the Atlantic yesterday after another
spectacular rocket failure at the Cape Canaveral space
center in
Within two and a half weeks, the failures have
destroyed communications satellite projects, one
European, the other American, worth a total of $91.4
million (about o54 million).
An Atlas Centaur rocket, carrying a $49.4 million
Intelsat 1V-A satellite built by Hughes Aircraft, was
destroyed minutes after its launching late on Thursday.
The failure was similar to the September 13 explosion of
a Delta rocket carrying a $42 million European Space
Agency orbital test satellite.
"We had indications of trouble in the engine area
within seconds after lift-off," said the Atlas Centaur
launch director, Mr. Andrew Stofan. "At 55 seconds the
Atlas lost control and broke up. It flipped, broke
apart, and then the Atlas blew up."
The remainder of the Centaur stage was destroyed by
an Air Force range safety officer, ending the mission
four miles high and four miles down the range. The
debris from rocket and satellite fell into the ocean.
The next Intelsat 1V - a launch scheduled for
November 10 - and other Atlas Centaur launches have been
postponed until an investigation into the latest failure
is completed.
Similar problems were being experienced by Russian
space-teams. On October 11, 1977, the Guardian carried this
Reuter report from
Two Soviet Cosmonauts failed yesterday to dock
their Soyuz-25 craft with the Salyut-6 orbiting
laboratory.
engineer Valery Ryumin, thought to be planning a long
stay aboard the new space station, were ordered back to
Earth after abandoning the link-up.
Tass, announcing the latest in a series of troubles
to affect the Salyut series, said there had been
"deviations from a planned docking regime" during the
approach while the Cosmonauts' Soyuz-25 capsule was 120
yards from the station. The Soyuz-25 failure has come
as a blow to Soviet space chiefs...
So that is what happened. Did it happen because of The
Instigator? That is a question we cannot answer. We simply
do not know. We do know, however, that the catastrophe at
Archimedes Base can be traced back directly to The
Instigator. And that was incomparably more devastating.
Disaster hit Archimedes Base on a cataclysmic scale.
The Arrival Terminal ... the service centres ... the
buildings of the three villages ... they were all ravaged and
wrenched from their foundations by the sudden and cyclopean
clash of uncountable tornados. They crumbled and
disintegrated, these buildings, as they juddered and
somersaulted high in the air. And people spilled from them.
The living and the dead - they all looked the same in that
great spasm of destruction. They were all flailing limbs and
buckled, distorted bodies. Many of them exploded far above
the ground and bits of them whirled around in the dust and
the debris before being sucked out into the eternal blackness
of space.
And all of it, we now know, had been sparked by a gentle
and compassionate marine biologist called Matt Anderson. He
had meant well. He had been inspired by the highest motives.
By consideration and humanity, by raw and spontaneous pity.
And he had unleashed a nightmare.
That is clear from documents analyzed by Trojan. Very
little else, however, is certain. There were few survivors
and their accounts were so disjointed and confused. The full
facts, now, will probably never be known.
Here, however, is what we have been able to piece
together:
Anderson, a thirty-three-year-old single man from
who listened to The Instigator. He was one of the small
group who secretly visited the segregated
He talked to the people there, heard enough to realize that
The Instigator had been telling the truth. It was grotesque
and barbaric but it was, unquestionably, the truth.
That whole party of designated movers was scheduled for
transportation to the new territory that night. And
everything would have been different if they had all gone.
There would have been no disaster.
They would certainly have posed a bigger "conscience
problem" to the Committee in Residence but, in time, the
Committee would have converted them into accepting the
necessary realities of Alternative 3.
But
stumbled on the return journey from the village of the
slaves. He stumbled and hurt his spine. And it was decided
that he was not fit to travel, that he should stay for a
while at Archimedes Base.
Ten days later he slipped unseen from his room and again
visited that village. It was not difficult for there were no
guards. There was no need for guards around the village.
The people temporarily there had been instructed to remain
in their quarters. And they had been programed to obey,
unquestioningly, every order they received.
them, to see if he could possibly help. And that was when he
got his great shock. By then there was a new Batch
Consignment in the village and in that Batch was a man he
knew, a man who, years earlier, had been a colleague at
school.
The man recognized him, could obviously think fluently
and intelligently, but all the vital personality had been
gouged out of him. His bearing and his attitude showed that
he knew and accepted his position. He was a slave. That was
when Anderson knew he had to take action...
Trojan's report says:
Two of the Components who did survive have revealed
under interrogation that they heard Anderson talking to
the man of two occasions, on that first day and later
when he returned with details of the plan for the
intended evacuation. This is principally how Department
Seven has been able to establish much of what did happen
before the disaster...
There was an aerospace technician in the latest group of
designated movers, a highly-qualified man who had been
trained by NASA, and
explained the whole situation. He told this man of the
atrocities to which they were all, unwittingly, a party.
He elaborated on how they had been lured towards a debased
and de-humanized future, on how they would be battening for
the rest of their lives on the misery of the mutilated
slaves. He convinced him it was their duty to rescue the
people from the village, to return them to their families on
Earth - and to ensure that this traffic in human life was
stopped for ever.
Trojan's report continues:
The main depot for craft on the Earth-run was south
of Archimedes Base on the far side of the mountain range
known as Spitzbergen. Most long range vehicles were
maintained and parked there and smaller craft were used
to convey passengers to and from Archimedes, rather in
the style of airport buses on Earth.
There were invariably a number of these smaller
craft on the tarmac at the Archimedes Arrival Terminal
and the plan was for Anderson and Gowers, the aerospace
technician, to steal one of these craft and use it to
evacuate as many of the Components as possible.
Another sympathetic designated mover, briefed on
the technicalities by Gowers, would operate one of the
airlocks in the southern section of the bubble to allow
them through. They would then travel to the main depot
where, by force if necessary, they would commandeer a
vessel in which to make the journey back to Earth.
So that, apparently, was what was meant to happen. But
it all went wrong. Horribly and hideously wrong. Gowers
found a suitable craft and he checked it, established that it
was fuelled and ready for flight. And
of discreetly marshalling the people in the village of
slaves, of supervising their march to the Terminal.
Everything went well at first. There were a hundred and
fifty-five slaves in the village at that time and the small
craft could accommodate only eighty-four of them, so
selected the youngest, including his former schoolmate, for
in his opinion they ought to have priority. When he returned
to Earth and publicly exposed this sick side of Alternative 3
there would be such an international outcry that the other
slaves would also be returned to their homes. Yes, and those
who had already been taken to the new territory. The vast
majority of human beings would never tolerate the obscenities
being committed in their name. That, according to the
evidence from Trojan, is what
There was no problem in sifting aside those who were not
to be immediately saved, although all the people in the village
now knew exactly what was being planned, for, of course, the
slaves had been programed into automatic obedience.
Trojan's report went on:
One of the surviving Components later interrogated
said that
so it is unlikely that any serious attempt will be made
to prevent us leaving this Base or, indeed, this planet.
"However, those of you chosen for repatriation must
remember that, in these circumstances, it is better to
kill than be captured. The lives and freedom of many
people depend on us getting back to Earth and so you
must be prepared to kill anyone who tries to stop you.
That is an order."
In fact, six of Alternative 3's resident personnel were
soon killed. They were trampled down and kicked to death by
the slaves, near or in the Terminal, when they tried to stop
the party reaching the craft. They were left broken and
bleeding on the ground, and the slaves, with no show of
emotion, walked over them and climbed on board. Then the
engines fired into life and Gowers, seeing the opening-lights
winking around the airlock on the left, eased them upwards.
The craft hovered briefly in the still air, thirty or
forty feet above the tarmac, and then the inner lip of the
airlock rolled aside like a transparent stage curtain.
their path was now clear and Gowers depressed a switch to
start the forward thrust. the horror, at that moment, was
just seven seconds away...
Trojan's report picks up the story:
A senior technician at Archimedes Central Control,
one of the permanent staff who did survive, has made a
statement in which he describes how he was alerted by
shouting and screaming from the direction of the
Terminal. The angle of his view prevented him from
observing what was happening there, but then he did
notice the unexpected opening of the airlock door. He
knew that if the outer door were also to open, possibly
because of some malfunction in the equipment, the Base
would be subjected immediately to acute decompression.
He saw no traffic, and no traffic was scheduled for
departure. So, assuming there was a serious fault and
that the shouts were probably ones of warning, he
pressed a master-control button. This was on a board
designed to activate a fail-safe system, over-riding all
other, and his action resulted in the airlock door
snapping instantly back into position.
An experienced pilot could have coped with the
problem by taking avoiding action and returning his
craft to the Terminal, but Gowers was not an experienced
pilot...
Gowers, in fact, was almost at the door when it closed.
Suddenly, straight ahead of him and all around him, there
was a transparent domed wall. He felt trapped like a fly
under an upturned tumbler, and he panicked. He swerved the
craft violently upwards to the left and then, in desperation,
he over-compensated and jerked it into a fast and erratic
zig-zag course. The craft, now bucking viciously, surged
towards the roof. Gowers, hopelessly out of control,
snatched wildly at the control stick, sending the craft into
a lethal whiplash dive. It exploded into one of the walls of
the dome, spewing fire and wreckage and blazing bodies, and
it smashed a devastating hole in the transparent surface.
The entire base, where the air was artificially
maintained at Earth pressure, immediately decompressed. It
was as if some mammoth and malignant vacuum-cleaner was
greedily sucking everything into its mouth. Litter-cans and
small vehicles and the six men who'd been trampled to death.
And the savagery of the maelstrom shattered heavy objects
against the dome, rattling them and bouncing them until they
too punched their way through and were swirled out into the
outer blackness. And the new holes brought new snatching
whirlwinds. And the buildings groaned and surrendered and
shot up, disintegrating, in that monstrous cannonade of
havoc. That day brought death to every Designated
Mover at Archimedes Base. There were twenty-nine of
them - scientists, technicians and medical specialists -
mainly from
They were brilliant men. Carefully selected men. Today
they are mere particles of dust. Drifting through the
uncharted wastes of eternity.
However, as we have indicated, there were survivors.
Two of the people known as components lived through the
holocaust and so did five of the resident staff. If they had
perished the events of that terrible day at Archimedes would
probably have remained a mystery for ever. There would
possibly have been reports from observatories of a strange
and momentary flare of activity on the moon - activity which
might have been presumed to be the result of some unknown
natural phenomena. And that would have been all. But
because of these seven survivors, because of the information
they gave to Department Seven and which Trojan has passed to
us, the truth can be recognized.
These seven lived because at the time of the devastation
they happened to be insulated in rooms where the atmosphere
was independently maintained - and they escaped to the
obsolete base at Cassini.
Cassini Base, we understand, is now being redeveloped.
It will once again become the principal transit camp on the
moon. The Alternative 3 operation suffered a serious set-
back at Archimedes, but it has certainly not been abandoned.
No voyages are being made from Earth at the moment, for
there is much work to be done at Cassini, but people are still
being watched and assessed as potential Designated Movers.
And, according to Trojan, plans are being made for the
imminent round-up of more Components.
Maybe there are men and women in your town, possibly on
your street, who will disappear, suddenly and inexplicably,
in the near future...men and women already ear-marked for an
astonishingly different existence on that far-distant planet.
They would already have gone, those people, if it had
not been for the obstinacy of The German. And for the
concerned compassion of The Instigator. They would already
have joined those who, if biologist Stephen Manderson is
right, are now on a planet where no squirrel will ever
scamper. And where no nightingale will ever sing.
There is just one final point for us to make. On the
back cover of this book you will note one word which you may
consider puzzling: "speculation".
Why "Speculation"? That is a valid question ...
especially in view of the fact that so much of our evidence,
particularly that quoted from newspapers, was already a
matter of public record. Well ... we did mention that
politicians tried to suppress this book, that two in
sought injunctions to prevent its publication. And we did
explain that we were forced into a "reluctant compromise".
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