Back on Earth

Wearing a cap and tight, faded jeans, he arrived home. Bananas and apples were aesthetically placed in a basket bowl, in the middle of a glass table in the sitting room. The whole house was echoing with emptiness.
An old 50s TV, his favorite souvenir, was missing in the basement. Photos of his three children; a son and two daughters were missing, together with his wife. He couldn’t hear Tommie’s barking either. Something was not adding up. Doubts were clouding his mind.
“My sweetheart might have re-married and re-located…” he thought.
“You can be easily assumed dead if you are absent for a long time…”
Holding back his tears was harder than he thought. Flying a rocket against Earth’s gravitational pull wouldn’t be compared to what he was feeling.
For a year he spent his life in space. No communication, no photos, no knowledge about his whereabouts. The CIA and God were the only ones who knew of his whereabouts. Classified assignment, the CIA called it. God was silent throughout the mission.
The US government was well-versed with common human psychology, which blended in with such kind of research. They were very wary of the press. If any single shred of information leaked to the public, there would be mass hysteria around the world. Looting, demonstrations, and doomsday prophecies would plunge the world to chaos.
The astronaut was in a solo mission to prepare various plant DNAs code-named Flora MX47, for panspermia. The plan was to spread life on Mars. For the past two decades, the US government had secretly developed bases on Mars, to enrich and thicken Mars’ atmosphere with oxygen and ozone constituents. It was summer then.
Bases all over Mars were vacant of any single human. They had all returned back home, on Earth. All Paul did was to observe and record any behavioral changes of the samples in their incubator, as he waited for his chief’s orders.
He was to fire a capsule containing the DNAs on Mars, using hi-tech cannon from the comfort of his space station. After reaching within reach of three hundred miles from the Red Planet’s surface, the capsule would automatically blow up, releasing Earthly microscopic life-forms.
The goal was to make Mars green and habitable for man and any other life form in the next thirty to fifty years. Between those time frames, astro-biologists would observe and analyze the first life forms on Mars germinating. Some plants would then be harvested and sent back home on Earth, and fed to herbivores. The herbivores of course would be located in safely, enclosed cells, in case the plants turned them into something like the Greek Minotaur.
During the mid of fall, asteroids of nowhere bombarded his space station. Floating into a silvery egg-like space ship and waking up in a hospital was the last thing he could remember after the incident.
He felt weak and wasted, like a used cigarette.
“What happened to me?” he asked a doctor.
“You were found on a beach….”
“Did NASA recover any wreckage in the ocean?”
“No.”
“Where am I?”
“You are in safe hands.”
The doctor’s replies were fast and brief. This made him sound reluctant to go on talking. He knew it was just a matter of time before he disclosed to the patient that his DNA wasn’t recognized in the national population data. The name “Paul Higgins” could not be traced in any record. It was as though he didn’t exist at all.
Paul’s face turned in absolute shock when he saw a digital calendar on a wall close to where he slept. It read 20th July 2042! Horror streamed his soul as he screamed with fear. Strong men in white came and tied him up with thin leather belts on both frames of his bed.
An injection for inducing sleep was given. He fell asleep. The doctor, together with three others, was ready to do some tests on him. The patient had no idea what was happening above or inside his body.
“Wake up sleepy head!” he heard.
He was inside a truck. Roughness of the road made him experience migraines. The one holding the wheel had a birth mark on his chin, like that of his seven year-old son.
“Did you pick me from hospital?”
“No.”
“I found you by the road side, passed-out.”
Anxiety had now become a companion, like his shadow.
A few moments later, he sighed with relief when he saw a one stored farm house staring right at him. A scarecrow faced away from him in the maize field. He had reached home.
Little did he know that the truck driver was his son, and his experiences were consequences of time travel. A dozen times he would visit different universes in different time frames of his life, until he was able to reach a time with no asteroid bombardments, to be able to successfully plant the seeds of life on Mars.
Aliens from higher dimensions knew it was a matter of millennia, before a super volcano destroys Earth.