Beyond Pluto by James Moran

Beyond Pluto by James Moran

When Beyond Pluto returned to Cape Canaveral one hundred years after its launch, the only surviving organisms onboard were a large lizard and an even larger catfish. All that remained of the 36 astronauts were scoured bones.A congressional committee was immediately established to lead an investigation.

Over ensuing months unanswered questions became chasms into which many professionals in investigatory fields plummeted helplessly. Of these professionals only two emerged with their theories intact. The first was an evolutionary psychologist and the second a forensic anthropologist. Both were called to present their findings to the committee panel in room 366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Before the panel the evolutionary psychologist suggested that the astronauts had split into two factions both led by males. Each group led raids against the rival group in attempts to steal females. Many males were killed in this process and probably females too, and traitorous females were most definitely killed. One of the groups fed the dead to the giant catfish, probably in order to demonstrate their ferocity and frighten the other group. This explained the numerous bones littering the bottom of the catfish tank. And a group, possibly the same one, loosed the lizard, which ate the meat off the bones of the many bodies not dumped in the fish tank. Eventually one group defeated the other. But within the victorious group infighting claimed the lives of the remaining survivors. The evolutionary psychologist concluded his presentation by confidently thanking the panel and taking his seat.

The panel invited the forensic anthropologist to present his findings. The forensic anthropologist assured the panel that, though the total lack of tissue remnants on the bones presented a grand obstacle, he was able, through persistence and ingenuity, to retrace the events that had transpired onboard. In great length he described his approach to studying the bones and the tests he subjected them to. He explained to the panel how he was able to judge rate of decay using original air samples and thus create a timeline of events. The bones of all thirteen of the bodies found in the fish tank exhibited the exact same cause of death. Notches in the ribs over the heart suggested a stab wound with a metal blade. Rates of decay throughout the ship pointed to the captain, Dr. Samuel Becker, as the most probable last to die. The bones of the bodies near Captain Becker showed evidence of a weakened cell structure common to cases of starvation. When the forensic anthropologist discovered, while studying what he could obtain of the crew’s original files, that the lizard and catfish were under the ownership of the eccentric Dr. Becker, everything tied together. The astronauts had not split into two factions, he argued. Actually the astronauts all belonged to one tightly knit group that centered on Captain Becker. Why else would thirteen of them have allowed themselves to be sacrificed to the catfish (obviously a very meaningful pet to the captain) without, in every case, significant signs of struggle? And why had those near Captain Becker died of starvation while he had not, and he died later than them? Why also would the lizard and catfish be alive today? The astronauts offered up their rations to Captain Becker and his pets. They worshiped the captain. There was no other explanation.

Before the committee Chair could dismiss the forensic anthropologist, he soberly thanked the panel and took his seat.

The Chair thanked the specialists in kind and the committee adjourned. Upon retiring to their respective offices all thirteen committee members met a similar description related to them by their respective secretaries. A self-proclaimed clairvoyant in her late-twenties had dropped by their office and left a note. Would they care to see the note? Independently, each committee member attributed the note to a “crazy” attracted by the strange circumstances surrounding the return of Beyond Pluto. No, they would not care to see the note.

That night the President, who in recent years had developed a fascination with the occult, dreamt that a clairvoyant knew the truth about what had caused the demise of the astronauts. In his dream, though, no matter how hard the President strived to meet the clairvoyant and hear her explanation, he was thwarted by an irrelevant excuse offered by one of the thirteen committee members.

The President awoke so disturbed he called an emergency meeting with the committee. At the meeting he did not return any of the early morning greetings offered by the committee members. He demanded to know who was hiding information from him regarding a clairvoyant who might have knowledge about Beyond Pluto.

At first the committee members were baffled. Vehemently they denied the accusation. Then, one by one, they silently recalled their secretary’s account from the previous day. When one member expressed ambiguity on the subject others began to follow suit. The President ordered them to contact the clairvoyant immediately.

The committee members scattered, ransacked their offices, reconvened, and compared the notes left by the clairvoyant. They were all blank save for the same identical phone number. Together the committee members made the call. Over speakerphone the clairvoyant agreed to testify in front of the panel under one condition: the venue must be moved to a courtroom and the lizard and catfish must be present. The committee reported this to the President who agreed to the stipulations without hesitation.

The following noon, however, in the old supreme court chamber, with the committee Chair presiding and the panel in the jury seats, the President became skeptical when the clairvoyant entered the chamber and took her seat at the front of the room. She wore her hair in a crisp ponytail. She wore glasses and a dress so simple she looked as if she were merely dropping by the courthouse on her way to attend college courses. She was well kempt and flaunted none of the clunky trappings the President expected of a clairvoyant. From his seat in the gallery he stood and pointed at the clairvoyant and told her she was in big trouble.

She pointed right back at him and told him to bring in the accused and stop wasting her time.

The President looked at the bailiffs, and nodded his assent. The bailiffs wheeled in a large sloshing tank and a wide cage with thick steel bars. The lizard was as wide as a man and longer than a couch. Flattened under his own weight upon the cage’s steel floor, he shifted his head grumpily and wagged his tongue to get his bearings. The catfish was larger than anyone expected. As long as the lizard and weighing several times more, it hovered in its tank with round mouth rhythmically gasping.

From the stand the clairvoyant announced to all present that the astronauts had ceased to age once they passed beyond Pluto. The first to notice this was the captain, Dr. Becker. Because of his advanced age, the aging process was conspicuous to him day by day. He used this knowledge to weave a very elaborate lie. He informed the crew that up until this moment the actual purpose behind their voyage into deep space had remained a secret known only by him. The reasons he had brought a Komodo Dragon and Wels Catfish aboard were not arbitrary. Those two animals were representatives of the gods who could grant the crew enjoyment of the benefits deep space had to offer. So many humans back on Earth had spent their lives searching for the fountain of youth. What they did not know was that the fountain of youth was not a fountain but a sea and that sea was called deep space. Now the crew swam in that sea and if they appeased the gods they could enjoy a place beside them as immortals. The crew rallied impressively behind Captain Becker’s campaign to please the gods. The captain had planned to sacrifice any dissenters, but since there were no dissenters he was forced to sacrifice one assenter a year. This maintained a harmonious atmosphere onboard for thirteen years. What the captain did not know, however, was that he had brought the lizard and catfish aboard for reasons that really weren’t arbitrary. “What is the one question,” the clairvoyant inquired of her audience, “that everyone has neglected to ask? How have a lizard and catfish remained at their peak age after a hundred-year voyage beyond Pluto and back? I argue,” said the clairvoyant, “that Dr. Becker was unknowingly professing the truth. The lizard and catfish were representatives of the gods. The lizard’s whispering tongue and the catfish’s gasping mouth subconsciously apprised the captain of this and directed his actions. For this reason I have summoned them here today to try them for the death of the crew and the failure of the mission, and to understand the purpose behind their manipulations. I call to the stand to testify: the catfish.”

With considerable effort, a team of bailiffs wheeled the tank near the witness stand. The clairvoyant began interrogating the witness. “Were you aboard Beyond Pluto?” The catfish merely pumped its mouth open and closed. “Do you decline to answer?” A settling sloshing prevailed as the only sound originating from the tank. “Do you invoke your right to avoid self-incrimination?” The catfish looked at the clairvoyant and helplessly swallowed great gulps of murky water. The clairvoyant cleared her throat and turned to the court. “The fish cannot hear me,” she said. “I am going to have to enter the tank.” From the fish’s current caretaker she gestured for not one breathing apparatus, but two. Upon the gasps rising from the audience in the gallery she added, “I will need someone along with me as a witness. Who will volunteer?”

The President stood and proclaimed, “We will interrogate this beast together!”

He strode to the witness stand, shed his suit coat, and heartily followed the clairvoyant up the ladder that ascended to the lip of the tank. The clairvoyant, leading the way, could see that the ladder’s end appeared at a much greater height than she had originally judged. In fact, the ladder seemed to disappear into a distance exactly proportionate to the amount she climbed, as if she were climbing over a curved surface whose horizon proved perpetually unattainable. The threat of falling hung on her elbows and knees. “It’s a ways yet,” she attempted to call down to the President, who was keeping pace behind her, but the ambient air current had been transformed into a wind that drowned out her voice. She began to fear she would have to rest her bent knees on the President’s shoulders as he climbed beneath her. In this wind she did not have the voice to obtain his permission. She halted and readied, at the risk of both of their lives, to ease her weight onto his shoulders without his knowledge of her intention. She paused and focused her eyes. Opposite the ladder and her clenching fists, was the rim of the tank.

The President awaited her lead.

She threw one arm then the other over the lip and hauled herself into water that buoyed her quaking joints and eased the bite of the wind. She fitted the breathing apparatus around her face and, to make room for the President, paddled farther out into water that from her vantage seemed to expand toward a distant horizon. The President donned his breathing apparatus from the rim and attempted unsuccessfully to maintain his composure while splashing into the water.

The clairvoyant could not bring herself to face the President so she dropped below the surface and swam for the depths. For the President’s unspoken presence behind her she felt safer, but still she chastised herself for bringing along another on a mission that, on further examination, she should have executed on her own.

The water began to feel funny, as if it were thinning to an ether-like consistency. She saw something suspended in the darkness and she strived to close in on the shape, but she had lost command over the medium through which she moved. The shape increased in size and definition. Though she did not move at a rate that pleased her, at least she progressed in her intended direction. A read of the shape’s full outline confirmed that it was the catfish. It hung eerily still in a field of blackness that was interrupted only by distant pricks of light like steady stars. She scanned for the President and found him beside her but upside down in relation to her. The distant points of light increased in number until their collective glow illuminated the contours of the catfish’s marbled gray skin. The resolution of the fish’s skin against the depth yet between her and the fish forced the clairvoyant to accept the monumentally enormous size of the catfish.

“Tell us what happened aboard Beyond Pluto,” the President called into the silence, drifting perpendicularly to the clairvoyant’s left. Or was she drifting overhead perpendicular to him?

The catfish’s mouth contorted slowly and epically in the darkness, without producing a sound. The silence magnified the clairvoyant’s sharp rapid breathing. In an effort to spin around she flailed her limbs and struck the President accidentally. She kicked her legs and flapped her arms now trying to rejoin him in hope of cutting them both obliquely free from the current that was ushering them along. The lack of movement registering on her body had deceived her. They were plunging toward the catfish’s gasping mouth at a rate that suddenly unleashed the mouth’s true proportions. Above and below catfish lips engulfed her full range of sight. They passed beyond the threshold of the mouth. Ridges greater than any mountain she had ever seen, and whisker-like hairs dozens of miles long ranged along the slick interior surface of a beast that was proving more cavernous the deeper they penetrated. At the center of their trajectory a clammy esophagus blossomed open, providing the first pulse of sound beyond the clairvoyant’s own halting breath. The esophagus remained open for a beat before collapsing shut, where it rested for a beat before, with an unsticking sound, it threw itself back open. With each beat of the esophagus an accompanying rushing sound altered its pitch like a wheeze, one that was quickly becoming deafening. This wheeze must have been the catfish’s voice and its answer to the questions posed by the President, who was now ahead of the clairvoyant, falling surprisingly passively.

She beat her legs and swung her arms so that at least the President would not be swallowed first. On all sides the esophagus protracted, dissipating her sense of movement and belittling her efforts. Now it spanned wider than the catfish’s lips had spanned. Now it seemed as expansive as the inside of a hollowed-out Earth. At the threshold of the esophagus they shrank at the same rate that they rushed forward. The gargantuan esophagus closed on top of them yet did not crush them. The clairvoyant remained centered in a vast, dark space devoid of any sensory input beyond a slight yet increasing pressure on the soles of her feet.

A faint light followed suit, gathering in the bellies of droplets speckled across the clairvoyant’s mask until almost blinding. She clawed her mask off and drank the open air of the midday courtroom. Her ponytail spat as she swung about. Beside her dripped the President. They locked expressions, then looked at the catfish hovering in its tank, then locked expressions again. The President grabbed her hand. She interlaced her wet fingers with his. He squeezed her hand hard.

Then he released her hand.

“We’re moving on,” the President announced to the court with arms raised in a gesture part reassurance and part plea. “Call the next witness.” He trod up the aisle as if perfectly dry and took his seat.

The clairvoyant aimed a flustered nod at the bailiffs. Cautiously they wheeled the steel cage to the witness stand and opened the gate. The lizard dragged himself from the cage and slunk up the few stairs. Before his tail could disappear up the stairs his arrow-shaped head appeared beside the microphone and his clawed fingers scrabbled over the wood of the witness stand’s topmost ledge. He craned his neck forward and scanned the entire range of spectators, pausing along the way to slip his tongue out as if tasting something about them. To contain her shivers the clairvoyant clenched her fists and bent her knees and elbows. “Were you aboard Beyond Pluto?” she asked.

The lizard looked at her and flapped his tongue. “Yes, I was,” he answered.

“Can you—” she paused. Quickly she asked, “Can you recount to the jury what happened onboard?”

“Yes, I can,” the lizard replied. He faced the audience. “That is very easy, considering that you have already told half of the story. The crew did stop aging. They did worship the catfish and myself according to Captain Becker’s urgings. But the story does not end there. One question you have neglected to ask holds the truth. Why did Beyond Pluto return to Earth after one hundred years? There are forces in deep space. Those forces sought incarnation in the bodies of the catfish and myself. Once incarnated those forces manipulated Dr. Becker and the crew and devoured them. Then those forces turned the ship around so that those forces could come to Earth and do the same.”

The courtroom was silent. No one shuffled. The President stood, his chest heaving.

“But,” the lizard said, “I have a secret. And that secret will save you. Would you like to know what that secret is?”

“Talk to us straight and stop playing games,” demanded the President.

“The secret is that everything I just told you is a lie. The crew was dead before they even passed the last of Saturn’s moons. They had broken into two factions led by males and killed each other off while leading raids to steal each other’s females. How then, you ask, could the catfish and I have remained alive for so long? The answer is simple: we are not the same lizard and catfish that left Earth. Dr. Becker used the lizards and catfish he brought with him to breed lizards and catfish for the crew to eat. You have discovered no bones of the other lizards and catfish because the crew pulverized them and combined them with the soil onboard. The catfish and I were babies when the crew died, and given our lifespan, it makes sense that we are alive at the journey’s return. And why, after all, did Beyond Pluto return home after one hundred years? Because that was the plan all along. The controls were programmed to automatically steer Beyond Pluto back to the site of its launch.” The lizard paused. “But,” he said abruptly, “I have a secret.”

The spectators glanced about. The President pointed and charged, “your story is a lie!”

“Yes,” said the lizard. “My story is a lie. But that is not my secret. The crew members of Beyond Pluto know my secret. What happened to them is my secret. Only the crew know what happened to the crew. If you care to know my secret the same will happen to you. Do not think that you are different from them. You are the same as them. Now, who here is willing to accept that what happened to the crew was not due to some defect unique to them?”

“You are not here to make demands of the court,” the President protested. “You are here on trial and you have incriminated yourself enough. Now the panel will deliberate on your sentence. Contain this reptile!”

“That is all well and fine,” said the lizard calmly. “But before I return to captivity I have one more question to pose to the audience: would anyone present like to know my secret?”

The President rushed the stand and tore at his sodden clothing, sending buttons from his shirt flying. “Nobody wants to hear your secret,” he screamed. “You will not speak anymore or I will strangle you with my own hands!”

The clairvoyant wedged between the President and the lizard.

“I will hear your secret,” declared the clairvoyant.

Behind her she felt the President’s wild hurt and disbelief. She could not bear to look at him. Tears clouded her vision. There would be no other opportunity. She wanted to communicate this, but there was no time.

The president stormed away.

She leaned toward the lizard. The lizard’s wet tongue tickled her ear.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright James Moran 2024