Phase Shift

Chapter I - ARRIVAL

They had been together more than thirty years when she died. She was younger than he was and he had always thought it would be him who would go first. For a long time afterwards he felt, without her, there was nothing left to live for and wished that he could join her. They had been like Yin and Yang, interconnected, one could not exist without the other. They had done everything together and now he felt completely lost without her. Not long before she died, they had left London and bought their retirement home in the Lake District - she had always loved it there. The move had taken them away from their friends and now he found it hard to pass the time alone. He searched, fruitlessly, for something to fill the gap and help him pass the lonely hours without her. In the summer he tried walking and spent hours at the Lakes. Now it was winter, he spent hours on his computer. It was a place where he could forget. He read the news but he especially loved browsing through the immense number of strange and interesting items on eBay. He loved seeing the old things that reminded him of his childhood.

Something he had bought had arrived that morning in a large cardboard box. He struggled into the dimly lit conservatory carrying it and placed it in the centre of the floor. As he stooped over it, he felt a pain in his back, a reminder that the Doctor had told him to stop lifting or bending so much. He sat down on the comfortable sofa beside it and used a sharp knife to slice the brown parcel tape before pulling back the two halves of the top. He lifted out the white polystyrene packing to reveal a gleaming black tube about two feet long and eight inches in diameter, mounted on a square base with a black plastic cap on the end. He placed it on the low table beside the PC in front of him and removed the plastic cap, revealing a glint of dark polished glass. It was a telescope, but no ordinary one. It was a state-of-the-art Meade self-orientating, computerised telescope. He read the instructions, following each step to connect it to the back of the computer. He moved it closer to the window, looking out over the desolate expanse of Cumbria and (as it said in the instructions) plugged the scope in, turning it on first, before booting the computer up. The Windows notification reported "New Hardware found - installing the software for your new hardware." and, less than a minute later, the scope was installed, ready for use and an icon for it was on his desktop. He double-clicked on the icon and the telescope started to perform a self-test, the motors clicking and whirring, as the telescope started to move, quite quickly, up and down, left and right, traversing the night sky. After a few minutes it stopped and a message appeared on the PC monitor – "Your Telescope is now orientated. Begin tour?" He moved the mouse pointer to 'Yes', clicked once and the screen changed from the familiar Windows desktop to a real-time picture of the night sky outside. At the bottom of the screen were the control buttons – big arrows for up, down, left, right, zoom in and zoom out. He started to play around with it, clicking on the icons and zooming in on some stars. As he did this, the software identified them, reported what their names were, and offered the chance to call up full data reports or to show him, inter alia, other stars and planets. When he zoomed in on Mars, the software gave a full history of its composition, atmosphere and so on. He was pleased with the new gadget. For many evenings afterwards he started it up and scanned the heavens. It was a way of whiling away the lonely hours without her. A way to forget.

It was a month later, on the evening of the 17th of October, when it happened. He had settled down to another evening viewing the sky and was looking around randomly when he noticed it. An object moving across the screen. Just a little white dot at first, but it wasn't a comet or a meteor - it didn't seem to have a tail. Yet it was moving. Could it be a spacecraft coming back to Earth? He knew that it wasn't the space-shuttle. NASA had shut down the shuttle programme, but there were now other craft servicing the International Space Station wasn't there? He had heard that some private companies had taken up the task. There were lots of people flying in space now, not just NASA. Elon Musk was sending up unmanned craft he'd heard. Could this be one of them? He tried to zoom in on it, but when the screen magnified, the dot was moving too fast to be followed. He zoomed out again to find it. When he did, it seemed to be changing course.

"Interesting – it can't be a comet." he thought.

It was coming closer and getting bigger. He could see it more clearly now. It was a craft of some sort. It did not look like anything from this world. It looked like some sort of disk, like the UFO's of classic 1950's science fiction movies. He followed it, as best he could, for a few seconds until, just as quickly as it had appeared, it disappeared.

"My word." he gasped to himself.

His first thought was to report it, but who to? Could he be mistaken? Yes, he thought he probably was.

"A UFO! What would anyone think of me if I reported that?"

It was certainly some sort of spacecraft of unconventional shape, but then that was unsurprising. He had heard about new shapes being tested by N.A.S.A. and the other private companies too. Yes, there was no need to get too excited. This was his first unusual sighting with the telescope. He expected there might be more. Many more.

"UFO?" he thought. "No such things!"