The Cerebral Catalyst

Across the cloudless bright blue skies, a spherical-shaped escape pod streaked through the unknown planet's atmosphere, leaving a vapor trail as it flew down to the planet's surface. The pod created sonic booms in its wake as it jettisoned the pentagon-shaped heat shields before deploying its automatic parachute to slow its rate of descent. The capsule jerked suddenly when the blue and red chutes opened up and swung the escape pod like a pendulum over a forest-covered part of a small central continent on the Earth-like planet. As the emergency escape pod floated gently down to the ground, three landing struts slid out from the bottom of the craft, preparing it for a hard landing. It crashed through a small stand of deciduous trees and landed in a thick blanket of tall weeds while the chutes were hung up on the broken limbs, high up on the eighty-foot-tall trees.

Suddenly, the pod's door opened and a man dressed in jeans, a red flannel shirt, and army combat boots stepped out of the capsule to survey where he landed at and to see if there were any more escape pods entering the planet's atmosphere. He found nothing but a bright flash of light like a star and several shooting stars streaking and burning up as they rifled through the mesosphere. The man's short, brown hair was wet from sweat and his face was covered in scratches and lacerations from his escape from the research ship that was damaged in a local meteor shower. He was sore when he decided to take stock of his emergency stores in the four-man pod, which he alone used to escape the mortally wounded Earth ship. He climbed back inside and walked behind the chairs facing towards the pod's flight counsel and main computer systems.

"Computer, what is the status of the other escape pods from UERS Togo?" the man inquired, opening up the locked storage chests behind the seats.

In a deep male voice, similar to that of the late 20th Century actor, James Earl Jones, the computer answered. "There were fifteen escape pods on the Togo, of which twelve were launched before the atomic core exploded. Only two managed to survive the event horizon, and this capsule only had one human occupant and the other was unmanned. It was launched by mistake minutes before the Togo exploded."

The man slumped down onto his knees, feeling quite alone knowing only he survived from the twenty-six-man mission to an unknown system, two hundred light years from Earth. He opened the lids and found enough food tablets and water to last him for months, while the other locker housed two laser rifles and side arms with chargers that the survivors needed to protect themselves until a rescue team arrived.

"Computer, how long will it take for a rescue mission to arrive here?"

"It will take ten months for the beacon signal to reach the military outpost Sigma Tao Omega II, and a ship from that area should be here one year after the signal is received and plotted."

"Almost two years," the man remarked quietly. "How long can your nuclear fuel last?"

The computer hummed for a minute before answering. "One year. But my energy can be extended with deployment of my solar panels and I can last for years until my systems wear out from age."

The man climbed back into the pilot's seat, studied the control panels and found the solar panel systems. He typed in the order and three small solar panels slid and folded out from the top of the escape capsule before angling themselves to receive the maximum solar energy they could absorb.

The computer shut down its reactor to conserve its fuel and powered up on the solar panels. "I suggest you inject a homing beacon into your arm and input your information in my data banks in case something should happen to you. The inoculation gun is in the arm of the pilot's seat."

The man opened the right armrest and pulled out the small inoculator, housing four small homing beacons in its clip that the computer could use to keep track of the survivors on the planet. He cocked the gun and shot one small two-millimeter computer chip in his thigh and placed the gun back in the armrest. The man wiped the sweat off his face with his shirt as he typed in his name, Roger Dickinson Cromwell, xenobiologist, and the computer downloaded his file from its database until it flashed up his files that were in the Togo's personnel files before it was destroyed.

"Roger Cromwell will be noted. I am fully functioning living quarters and work area if you need me while waiting for rescue."

"Noted. Can you change your voice?"

"I can."

"I would like you to switch your voice to a female voice, American Dialect."

The computer hummed and answered in a sweet-sounding, pleasant voice. "Does this sound better, Dr. Cromwell?"

"Yes, much better. Did you do a survey of this planet when we entered the atmosphere?"

"This planet is three times the size of Earth. Temperate climates, three oceans, twenty-nine fresh water seas, and ten continents. We have landed on the smallest continent, connected by a narrow land bridge to the largest landmass on the planet. From what I can tell, the planet is populated by life forms similar to all Class M planets known in my files. The region we landed in is like the Midwest in North America, and it has two small mountain ranges to the north and west of here with two expansive lakes and six rivers…" the computer answered, but Roger stopped it from completing its analysis.

"Thank you," Roger said, when the sound of thunder rang out overhead.

He climbed out of the capsule to see hundreds of pieces of debris from what was left of the Togo racing overhead, creating sonic booms as they burned up in the bright blue sky. Roger hung his head and went back inside the spacecraft to catalog everything he needed to survive on the planet.

Several weeks had passed when Roger explored the area around the pod, cataloging the fauna which was a mixture of North American types such as cats and wolf-like dogs hunting in the area, and four-armed monkeys and large, bipedal primates similar to chimpanzees, but taller than his six-foot-three frame. Those large primates were omnivorous and he gave them the name Yeti, after the mythological creatures on Earth. He took his rifle and side arm with him when he went out exploring, but the cats, the size of tigers, were night hunters and always stayed in the foot hills, hunting the vast herds of brown and white-striped, four-antlered deer-like herbivores grazing along the edge of the forest and lake areas.

Roger decided to explore an area twenty miles southeast of his camp, where he had noticed some unnatural formations within the forest when he studied the rock dog packs from a tall hill overlooking the mile wide river that snaked its way through the forests from the lake and down to the broad coastal plains. He wandered through the forest while the birds and spider-armed monkeys called out, as several kangaroo pigs (named for their elongated back legs and habit of hopping when chased) rooted contently in the dead leaves, searching for edible fungi. He scanned the area with his palm-sized lifeform detector, making sure the cats were not on the hunt in the area. It was clear as he hiked quietly for two hours, until he reached several tall mounds covered in tall broad-leafed trees that towered over one hundred and fifty feet even on the mounds. The mounds didn't look natural as he stared up at the twin mounds with a pass between them where no vegetation grew, but only a rock-strewn area that was fifteen meters wide.

"Computer, scan the area where I am at," he ordered the computer through his LFD.

The scanner he held in his rough-looking hands analyzed the mounds and something didn't look right. The computer showed that the mounds were not natural, but were created by sentient beings. All Roger could think was that it reminded him like some of the major Mayan towns swallowed up by the Yucatan jungles in Central America. The two mounds were only a hundred meters high and had a near square base of six hundred meters by seven hundred meter and had a jagged ribbon of rocks and brush as high as two meters stretching away. He stared at the forest and found it may had been thousands of years since the forest grew over the unnatural features.

"Computer, what do you make of these features?"

"It's not a feature natural to this area. Based on the tree growth and how the forest fluxes, it may take well over six thousand years for these features to be swallowed up by the forest."

Roger walked up to the features and noticed cut stones protruding out from the thick berry bushes and ground clutter. He decided to climb to the steep side to get a better view of the area behind the mounds. He used the sapling trees as handrails as he climbed up until he reached the top, to find a vast forest with hundreds of hills and mounds standing out like a serrated mountain range within Central America.

"My God," he thought. "Computer, how far does this area extend?"

"Ten miles by eight-point-two-five miles."

"I think we may have found a lost city."

The computer hummed for several seconds, analyzing every piece of information coming in on the palm-sized scanner. "It's a city, but my initial readings when we landed on this planet showed no sentient beings here. Maybe something cataclysmic wiped the race out."

"Or they were colonizers who abandoned the city."

"The stones were rough cut, Roger, not left by space faring people."

"How would you describe this place?"

"Ankara from Cambodia. Not the Mayan from Central America. The structures are relatively intact."

Roger glanced around, surveying the forest-covered city and trying to decide in which area to explore. "Record the readings for the rescue team. I want the archaeologists to see this."

"Noted, Roger."

The xenobiologist climbed down the mound and hiked to the southwest where six mounds were clustered around a much taller central mound, the tallest structure in the entire area. Its trees were the oldest and stretched upward for three hundred feet, and its branches reached out for hundreds of feet providing shade for the undergrowth and stunting or killing other trees that were common elsewhere in the forest outside of the city. But the tall, oak-like trees were the grandfathers and great grandfathers to those in the vast forest covered city. The fallen trees and broken limbs left large extensive clearings where small animals were feeding on the nuts and berries falling down on the grass and tall shoulder high weeds.

Massive flowers, in bright hues of blue, red, and yellows added color to the dark browns and greens that the forest had. He kept his eyes and ears peeled for the cats he had named Mane Cats. They were a problem for him because they were not like the night cats, and they were territorial and had seven-inch long canines like Earth's extinct Smilodons. They were perfectly camouflaged with light and dark brown coats and hunted in pairs, ambushing their prey, the four-antlered deer.

He unslung his laser rifle and set it for stun while he silently walked through the forest. Hundreds of cut stone blocks laid strewn over the ground, half buried in the rotting fallen trees and dirt. All were large blocks, hand-carved and now moss-covered and eroding from the centuries of rain, wind, and plants growing on their surface. He stared at the ruins, wondering who or what built this city and why they abandoned it. The sounds of monkeys and rodents, similar to squirrels but with two-foot-long prehensile tails and elongated toes to grip the thick bark and teeth to tear apart the rock hard nuts the trees produced in great quantities, chattered and screamed out overhead. The monkeys swung overhead and screeched in alarm at the foreign intruder walking through their territory.

He kept a close eye on the troop, because they were as tall as a four-year-old human and very aggressive when provoked. He spotted a troop who attacked one lone Mane Cat venturing down to the river by his camp one day, and they killed it with sticks and stones, finishing it off by beating it to death with their fists and biting it with their long, sharp canines. The big cats tended to stay away from the spider-armed troops.

As Roger approached the hills, he used his scanner to see the lay out of the seven mounds. It showed him that the hills were tree covered, but the ruins under their roots were well defined due to the lack of dirt covering the stone surface. But something was standing in the center of the mounds and the scanner couldn't make out the structure. It wasn't covered in vegetation.

"What do you make of this structure?"

"Can't say," the computer answered. "But you should find some cover. My sensors are picking up a storm brewing over the western mountains. It's packing winds in excess of forty mph, gusting to seventy mph."

"Now you tell me. Is this area prone to flash floods?"

"No."

"I'll be OK. Shut down the solar panels and lock down. I'll ride the storm out in the ruins."

"I suggest…"

"Shut down and that's an order."

"OK, shutting down now. You will be out of contact with me until the storm has passed."

"I know."

He knew he didn't have his eyes or ears to protect him from the storms, but if the solar panels were damaged or destroyed he would be in a world of hurt. He glanced up to see some black clouds rolling over the mountains, and winds were gusting through the thick canopy. This caused the monkeys to scurry for the safety of the lower trees that had weathered severe storms in the past, and had insulated the ruins from the severe weather for thousands of years.

"Maybe I should follow their lead," he thought aloud, walking for a collapsed building where a large cave-like structure was created by its debris.

As he approached the cave, he pulled out his flashlight and pointed his rifle into the pitch-black cavern. The flashlight pierced the darkness and found a stairway leading under the ruins. He climbed down fifty meters and found a large antechamber where hieroglyphic writings and some letterings looked as if they were etched later than the hieroglyphs. He brushed off the dirt and cobwebs, finding they were in a Roman lettering style. One word emerged from the years of accumulated dirt, "CRITI."

"CRITI? What the hell is CRITI?" He pondered the room, finding more words, and every seventh word, CRITI appeared. The xenobiologist took off his backpack and pulled out his notebook, quickly writing down all the words etched in the rocks along the top of the walls. After writing them down, he quickly sketched out several murals before he shoved the notebook back into his green canvas backpack. Roger didn't dare to venture deeper as the first raindrops broke through the canopy and struck the bone-dry ground. The gentle rattling of the rain striking the leaves turned into a wall of solid rain, drenching the ground, causing small streams to form and rolling through, sweeping the ground clutter away from the ruins and from ancient trees. He felt awave of humidity rushing into the anteroom. It was causing him discomfort and forcing him to scale the stairs in order to breath. The heavy rains came straight down, knocking down dead limbs from the sprawling canopy. Limbs as big around as his capsule crashed down, leveling all the brush under the broad-leafed trees.

"Damn."

Lightning streaked across the pitch-black skies and the crushing roar of thunder sent a sonic wave shaking everything in its wake. Somewhere out away from him, several trees with the diameter of Redwoods came crashing down, taking out some of the surviving stone buildings. Birds and monkeys screamed and scrambled for a safer place to roost. The winds, howling at gale force strength, pushed the ground clutter and rotting limbs past his shelter and collected against what he thought was a pyramid, similar to that of the Mayas. The steps and top platform were weathered away, leaving only the forest to create the outline of what it had looked like in the past.

The stinging rain whipped into his face and arms, causing the skin to turn red. It forced him back down into the anteroom where the river of rain water cascaded down the steps, through the room, and pushing the dirt and debris deeper into the caverns The smell from the rain storm was sweet, just like Autumn on Earth, and it brought back fond memories from his childhood. He relaxed by sitting on a chunk of rock that fell from the ceiling several centuries ago, and waited for the storm to blow over.

It was two and half hours later when Roger walked up the slippery stairs and found dozens of trees, some two hundred feet tall, laying on the ground in a tangled mess over the ruins; leaving gaping holes exposing the ruins to the light of day for the first time since they enveloped the city nine centuries ago. He was cold, wet, and tired, but the blue skies and gentle breeze reenergized him as he glanced around the ruins, finding large chunks of forest blown down and finding the ruins exactly like Ankara. Intricate stone statues of a human-like people with wide eyes and a snout-like face. Their bodies were that of hominids, but their hands had four digits and each digit had five joints.

"This is unreal."

He walked past the fifty-foot tall statues, finding the structure the scanner picked up on his initial sweep of the area.

"Computer, wake up."

For several long tense minutes there was just static coming over the scanner, until that familiar female voice rang out like a long lost love.

"What is it, Roger?"

"How are you?"

"The storm didn't damage any of my solar panels or sensors."

"Good. Scan the area where I am at and make a map of what you see."

"Noted."

The scanner beeped as the ship filmed everything the scanner had located since the ship went dormant. For ten minutes it scanned and filmed everything while Roger walked into the center of the seven mounds. The storm had ripped down the forest, exposing pyramids and temples and their amazing details. The forest protected the white and blue-hued rocks and, with the vegetation ripped off, the intricately carved artwork exposed them to the shipwrecked scientist. The same hieroglyphic writings stood out under each carving. The word CRITI appeared near the summit of the central temple. Roger was so mesmerized by the sophistication of this long forgotten people that he wondered why they died out.

"Are you recording this?"

"Yes."

"You know off hand what race built this city?"

"I cannot say, Roger. If they were here thousands of years ago, something global wiped them out."

Roger wandered up to the central pyramid and started climbing up its steep, broken, moss covered stone steps, studying the faces encircling each of the five terraces that made up the tallest temple in the city. He reached the summit after fifteen minutes of hard climbing and found a broken stone cross-like object standing in the center of the top terrace. CRITI was etched into the pieces that were left standing. He rubbed his hands over the reddish rock and felt the etchings from the stone mason's chisels.

"Could this be…? It can't be," Roger muttered aloud, thinking about how he was raised Roman Catholic and the Latin phrases he had to memorize by the nuns in the elementary school on the Titan colony.

"What is the matter, Roger? Is there an emergency? I cannot pick up any threat to you at this time."

"Don't be alarmed. I was just thinking, what if this culture had a Judeo-Christian religion similar to the one that Earth has," he replied, finding a hole on the right beam at the end of the word CRITI.

"From what my memory banks have on the twelve known alien races, only Earthians have that kind of monotheistic religion," the computer answered. "Besides, the Bellum-Davis Theory on parallel cultural evolution doesn't apply here."

"Yeah, you're right."

"You should leave the city in an hour if you want to make it back here before dusk."

Roger glanced around, taking in the abandoned city and making geo-position notes on his scanner for the pod's computers to store until a rescue team arrived and extracted him off the planet. He scaled back down to the muddy ground and hiked back to the pod to get something to eat and make some notes in the log about what he discovered while he was marooned on the planet.

It was eight months later when the area where the escape pod landed was cleared by Roger, who wanted the rescue team to see the landing zone more clearly from orbit than it would have if they were scanning the surface with their radar. He was keeping busy by doing what his ten years of college had prepared him to be, and that was a xenobiologist. For all his time when he went out hiking down to the great blue lake, forty percent larger than Lake Superior on Earth, he found countless numbers of birds, mammals, and invertebrates. All were unique, and were not afraid of him. The nine hundred species and one hundred subspecies he found were too much for him to handle, but it kept him busy, and it allowed him to keep his mind off of time itself.

But once in a while, he would travel down to the overgrown ghost city and explore its ruins, drawing detailed maps of the area he never explored in his original exploration. At times, he felt like the great archaeologists in search of the one great mythological city, and finding it more glorious than they ever dreamed it would be. But it was the fascination with the word CRITI that puzzled him. That one little word, C.R.I.T.I. It bothered him as he went over his notes, drawings, and scannings to see what it all meant.

"Christi…" he thought. "Latin for Christ. But how did they know that?"

For some time, Roger imagined that space faring people brought his Judeo-Christian religion from Earth to this planet by accident. The indigenous people incorporated it into their religion and in turn used the Roman alphabet to write a pidgin word for Christ. He made a notation in his log about what he thought and continued to study the wildlife around his capsule.

The long, hot days started turning cooler, forcing him to break out one of the jackets housed in the weather gear locker next to the engineering room. It was bright blue and thin, but quite warm as the weather was changing slightly from the eighty degrees down to the low fifties. Roger kept hoping that a rescue ship was on its way. As time passed, he tried to keep his moral up and decided to find the empty escape pod that survived the event horizon. According to the computer, it landed about thirty miles to the northwest of his position across the slow flowing, mile-wide river that fed water into the great blue lake.

For a couple of weeks, using his laser rifle and tools from the escape pod, he carved a large stable dugout canoe and paddle to cross the river for his expedition, and for use when he wanted to study other animals along the lake shore.

He took enough supplies to last five days, knowing he could scavenge more supplies off the other pod to survive the rest of his time on the planet. His canoe looked more like a Polynesian canoe than a Native American canoe, with its two stabilizing pontoons made out of thick tree branches. He hiked about five miles from his camp to his canoe and rowed his way across the river without incident. When he reached the other side, he beached the canoe on a fairly high sand bar and gathered his backpack, rifle, and scanner and proceeded to trek inland. The topography on this side of the river was quite different from that where he lived. There were rolling hills with small stands of trees, similar to evergreens, and more herds of animals wandering around and grazing on the tall green grass. He knew the Mane Cats lurked close by and weren't choosy about what they broughy down. He had two run-ins with the cats near the lake, but he learned not to make himself visible above the grass. The cats usually didn't attack anything as tall as the Yetis who had been on the prowl, searching for small animals and berry patches in full bloom with blue and orange berries.

Roger kept low while running through the tall green grass until he reached one of the many hills that sprawled out away from the mountains he called the Humpbacks. They were not very tall, but they controlled the weather patterns enough to keep severe weather out of the central part of the continent. The weather and the topography helped him to cover the twenty-five miles, until he discovered another abandoned city in a valley where the mountains fed water to the forest that was slowly reclaiming the eastern side of the city. And in the city, somewhere, the empty escape pod sat in the vast ruins now covered with grass and dirt, with some solitary trees.

Roger scanned the city and located the escape pod lying in the eastern section.

"We got another set of ruins."

"Does it appear to be similar to what you found to the south?"

"Yes, but covered in grass. The forest is just now engulfing the eastern walls and two towers."

He walked down from the hills and found himself following the walls that were perfectly smooth with two-ton square blocks placed with precision, one on top of another, without the use of mortar or cement. The wall was twenty feet high and crumbling, degrading from the wet weather. It took him some time to find a breach in the wall where a section buckled and collapsed into the city and proceeded to search the ruins for the other surviving escape pod.

The xenobiologist walked up a mound and scanned the area for the pod. The scanner could only spot the deployed chutes lying on the mound just outside the edge of the creeping forest, about six hundred meters northeast of his position. He was about to wander down off the mound, when the guttural grunts and yelps from the Yetis echoed out as they passed through the city searching for food, forcing Roger to stay in the shadows and trying to keep a good distance from the mammoth apes.

He walked up onto the collapsed section of the wall and silently raced along the top, just out of sight of the eight-foot tall creatures. They were using sticks and clubs, poking and striking the ruins to chase out small rodents, quickly killing them with one lethal blow. He spotted the silk chutes entangled in the rocks, shredding the silk until the fibers floated on the winds wrapping themselves in the brush and long branches in the tree canopy. The chute cords strung out on the ground and lead straight in the path of the Yetis. They wandered past the capsule, searching other parts of the ruins for a quick meal.

Roger scaled down the wall and snuck over to the escape pod, lying on its side. To his dismay, the escape pod was wrecked. Its autopilot computer systems malfunctioned and it crashed hard into the ruins. Wreckage was strewn everywhere but somehow its nuclear core wasn't damaged and the emergency lockers where the food tablets could keep him from hunting for another four months were exposed to the elements but still intact. He wasn't against hunting, but it would draw unwanted attention, with the large predators roaming the area at any given time. The weapons locker was damaged and the four power packs were drained dead.

He stared at the scattered remains and only thought it was a wasted trip away from his camp. But the only thing that survived was the computer's memory core, encased in a titanium shell. He went over to the memory core and found it in good condition. He opened the core's service panel and removed all ten wafer thin four-centimeter long banks and stuck them in his backpack.

The computer he was dependent on was out of range for him to report to it about the condition of its sister pod. "It wouldn't matter if anyone was in there. They would have been killed on impact."

He gathered his rifle and backpack before leaving the ruins.

He returned to the escape pod with what he could salvage, exhausted from the long journey. He was gone for a day and a half, but it seemed like a hundred years.

"What month is this?" He asked the computer.

"Twelfth month, sixteenth day."

"All I recovered were food tablets and the pod's memory banks."

"I feared that, from analyzing its trajectory, that it was in trouble."

"I'll slip the chips in later. Any signals that I should know about?"

"A faint signal, barely within my range." The computer reported while Roger sat down, laying the backpack on the metallic floor.

"How far away?"

"650,000 miles from the planet."

"Help?"

"It could be. It's on the same bandwidth used by the United Earth Forces."

"Try sending an auto distress signal on the high end of the bandwidth. Maybe it can reach the source of the signal."

Roger sat back in the co-pilot seat and stared at the monitors, listening to the very faint signal. The radio crackled as an undistinguishable voice repeated his message

Again the emergency pod sent out a distress signal and a voice broke though. "This…UES…Calling…Pod…Come….Please."

"They are within range for our signal."

Roger turned on his mike. "This is emergency pod #5 from the UERS Togo. We are located on a small central continent area Alpha thirty Foxtrot forty-nine ten miles due south of the largest freshwater lake in the four lake chain. Over."

The voice became clearer.

"We hear you and have picked up your distress signal. This is the UES G.H.W. Bush. We will be extracting you in about three hours. Are there any other survivors with you?"

"No."

"Any sentient beings for us to worry about?"

"They are extinct, from what I can tell."

"How is your health?"

"I lost twenty-five pounds, but still in good physical shape. I have been documenting and categorizing the fauna here in the LZ for the past year."

"That's good you kept busy while awaiting rescue. Just keep this channel open if you need an emergency pick up."

Roger didn't say anything for a moment, trying to remember everything he had done over the course of the year. "I have a wealth of information to bring back to Earth."

The voice on the UES Bush didn't respond while conferring with its chief science officers. "We could download your information right now."

"I am transmitting the information right now," Roger responded, typing in the command and hitting enter.

"You know, I could have done that without you doing it manually," the computer reminded him.

"I know."

The voice came back. "Just received the files and logs and, my, you have been busy. Too bad we cannot send a scientific team down there since the system is technically in the Neutral Zone between the Atlantisian and Earth zones. It took some quiet diplomacy just to bring a small destroyer to extract you from this solar system."

"I apologize for creating a problem. I'm just a scientist."

"No problem. Both empires were eager to resolve it peacefully."

"I'll sign off for now."

"We'll be there soon."

Roger could hear the first of the sonic booms cracking the silence, breaking the din of animal calls and screams. He knew that his time on the planet was well spent.

______________________________________
posted 12.05.05.

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