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- The 'Not a Dry Eye in the House' Version - It is the year 2028. More than thirty years have passed since the historic launch of the Jupiter 2, and its brave crew has settled down into an isolated life on a planet many light years distant from Earth. Following their final crash landing some fourteen years earlier, the Robinson family, Don West, and Dr. Smith have lived a contented, if isolated, life on a planet with pleasant forests and blue lakes. Their vehicles and equipment are aging but still serviceable, thanks to stored repair parts, specialized maintenance schedules, and Will's genius for improvisation. They have no idea where they are in space -- nor can they even begin to guess where Earth is. Seven years past, John Robinson had died in an accident which also injured Smith. That day, three parties (consisting of Don and his son, Joshua; Will and the Robot, and John and Smith) had headed to distant, triangulated locations in order to set up an improvised radio telescope system in hopes of detecting some signal from space. The results of the terrible accident were not discovered until days afterward, when a worried Don and Will finally located the body of John and the near-death form of Smith. Following his long recovery, Smith underwent a severe personality change. He quickly became like a grandfather to the Robinson children and grandchildren, and even Don finally succumbed and began to like the new, improved, reliable, honest Smith. His transformation was genuine -- the former saboteur was a new man. One day, the Robinsons' lives change once more. A piercing signal is detected by the radio telescope system, a signal which repeats at regular intervals and is carried on a specific frequency used by Alpha Control back on Earth. It continues, weak but stable, for hours. Days. Weeks. It is a navigation beacon, proudly singing out its location for all the universe to hear. Its location -- and that of Earth. Will remembers, as does Don, that there was to have been a 'Project Lighthouse' constructed near Earth as soon as interstellar traffic warranted. Don estimates that the beacon might have been built some ten years after their departure, based upon the plans of the time. If true, that means that, since the beacon's signal has been travelling at the speed of light, it has taken two decades to reach them. They are within twenty light years of home. The Robinsons suddenly find a hope they had long since given up. Home is beckoning to them. Their energies renewed, they once more dedicate themselves to the repair of their only ride home, the Jupiter 2. For eighteen months, Don and Will create new ways of making the ship space worthy. Fuel is mined. Utilizing the Robot's electrical discharge as an arc welder, the hull is patched and reinforced. An abandoned, wrecked alien spaceship is salvaged for engine parts, and its components actually give them a propulsive system that allows them to travel much faster than the Jupiter could when first launched. Everyone pitches in, especially Smith, and launch day slowly but steadily grows closer. For perhaps the tenth time, the Jupiter 2 leaves a planet surface. Its fusion drive roars with a determined power the Robinsons never thought they would hear again. As the ship's hull creaks with the strain of stressed metal, the ship reaches higher, higher, into the upper atmosphere and finally into orbit. After Will gets a solid fix on the beacon, the Jupiter heads out across the cold blackness of deep space, toward home. The signal slowly grows stronger. For months the ship travels faster than light speed, driven as much by hope as by its deutronium fuel. Smith is the first to realize that the star patterns outside the view ports are beginning to coalesce into the constellations with which they are all familiar. Penny spots Orion's Belt. Judy recognizes Taurus. Their hope and excitement grows. Finally, fourteen months after their trip began, a single yellow star grows larger and larger in the forward view port. Soon, it dominates space ahead, and Will's spectral analysis shows it to be the Sun. The beacon's signal is loud and strong. As they happily watch, Saturn with her magnificent rings passes by, as eventually does Mars. And then they see it -- a tiny blue speck, accompanied by a smaller white one. They grow closer. The planet's surface comes into view. It is Earth. They are home. "If only dear Professor Robinson could have seen this moment," Smith quietly says, a tear welling up in his eye. "He loved the Lord," Maureen states, comforting him. "I'm sure he's with us now. He knows his family's safe at last." Don can raise no one on the radio. All, except for the beacon, is quiet. They pray that they have not once again found, via time warp, an Earth belonging to another time period. Will gets a fix on the Kennedy Space Center, home of Alpha Control, and they prepare for landing. As they break the clouds, they see that the space center is indeed there, plus the additional construction that one would expect to have occurred during the time they were away. There is no sign of movement, no sign of life. Puzzled, they begin their final approach. After hovering over the launch complex for a moment, Don chooses an ironic landing spot -- the same launch cradle from which they had begun their adventure some thirty years earlier. The engines shut down. The vessel goes quiet. Smith begins to crack the hatch, but Will stops him, insisting upon testing the atmosphere first. Don concurs, mentioning the absence of anyone outside and the possibility that some form of nuclear exchange may have occurred. The test concluded, Will finds the air clean and breathable. Smith triumphantly opens the hatch, and the sweet air of Earth fills their lungs for the first time in three decades. Maureen feels the warmth of the sun on her face and misses her husband. Exploring the abandoned facility, Will, Don, Smith and Maureen discover the mummified bodies of a few of the launch technicians that had once worked there. A thick layer of dust covers everything, but there are no cobwebs. Judy discovers a handbook, dated 2015, that outlines the recent history of the space program. The colonization program that had begun with the Jupiter 2 mission came to a screeching halt following the apparent failure of the Robinsons' craft. That, combined with the previous failure of the Jupiter 1 mission, had led to Senate hearings and public apathy toward Alpha Control. The United States' space budget was subsequently cut to the bone, allowing only a handful of manned missions to take place in the following years. The Jupiter 3 mission had successfully reached Alpha Centauri in the year 2007. That triumph allowed Alpha Control to renew its colonization program, although at a much slower rate than that envisioned at the time of the Jupiter 2's launch. Project Lighthouse was launched in 2010, and over the next five years twelve more colonization ships, the Victory series, began a two-way shuttle route between Earth and Alpha Centauri. As of the time of the Jupiter 2's arrival on Earth, it appears that more than a thousand people of all nationalities live at the distant colony. Finding a hand-scrawled diary of the last two days of a now-dead technician's life, they learn that the entire planet had been wiped out some thirteen years before, following the landing of an ancient, alien weapon of incredible destructive power. The mindless mechanical terror had perhaps been created to wipe out an enemy in a war millennia before, perhaps even in another galaxy. Apparently, it had also been designed to ignore stellar energy sources, such as the sun, while wiping out those that were artificially or biologically produced -- such as the energies created by war machines and alien enemies. After drifting aimlessly in space for untold centuries, the thing had homed in on the same navigation beacon the Jupiter 2 had, finding a helpless Earth. Its automated programming had once more kicked in. The weapon's function was -- and possibly still is -- the absorption of all energy, thereby paralysing and destroying any enemy it was used against. After destroying Alpha Control's moon base on the way in, it had come upon Earth hungry, and as it quickly roamed over the planet it had wiped out all life in a matter of days. The records show that the ships that had attempted to evacuate the planet had seen their propulsive energies drained off as fast as they were produced, sending both the vessels and the helpless victims inside them crashing back to Earth. The entire planet was left sterile. Will speculates that the alien machine went dormant once it had soaked up all of the Earth's energy, to awaken once a new energy source made itself known. And, most likely, the Jupiter 2 had declared its presence as it had landed. They fear the thing is still on the planet somewhere, making Earth no place to be. They know they must leave once again, while they can. Outside, thinking himself alone, Smith looks up into the sky and quietly begins to speak. Will overhears him 'apologizing' to John for failing to come to his aid just before he died. John's death was directly due to Smith's cowardice, and that is a burden that the doctor has been carrying since. The pain of that self-realization had resulted in his reformation. Will explodes in anger at the man. He had loved his father deeply, and feels that Smith's new, improved personality falls far short of making up for the 'murder' of his father. Loving Will like a true grandson, Smith can only stand and take the harsh but understandable verbal assault the young man unleashes upon him. Will's words cut like knives into Smith. Their relationship has been destroyed. Will storms off, telling Smith he doesn't care if the man lives or dies. Back at the ship, Don finds his fears realized -- the Jupiter 2 no longer has enough fuel to go anywhere. They quickly find that all of the deutronium stores at Kennedy were neutralized by the alien machine. Smith knows of a source of nuclear fuel -- while stationed at an ICBM launch site in Iowa, he had once overseen the deep underground storage of nuclear fuel modules, which were placed there in order to be protected in case of nuclear attack. The miles-deep facility, along with its intensely dense shielding, might still contain deutronium stores that could be used by the Jupiter 2. Since he knows the facility, Smith volunteers to retrieve the fuel using the space pod, hoping that its small engines will not be detected by the alien. He takes the Robot with him, needing his code-breaking talents in order to break into the underground complex. The Robinsons wait anxiously. Will silently builds up more hatred for Smith, not yet telling the others what he knows. As he passes low through the Midwest, Smith is stunned and saddened by the sight of thousands of acres of dead trees and crops where once there had been lush farmland. The pod soon approaches the ICBM site, and Smith guides the craft in for a soft landing. He and the Robot have little trouble breaking into the complex, and soon find that the fuel stored there is indeed still usable. The Jupiter's sensors detect something approaching from the north, somewhere over the Great Lakes. They radio Smith, telling him to get back quickly, for the thing had indeed noticed their landing energies and is homing in. Smith, knowing that the pod will only barely make it back ahead of the alien machine, devises a plan. He heads into the complex's launch centre, and, with the Robot's help, arms one of the missiles. A short time later, Maureen is making launch preparations downstairs. Hearing his mother speak fondly of his father, Will begins to tell her how John had really died. But before he gets the words out, Don calls out from upstairs. The pod has returned. Inside the pod are many canisters of deutronium fuel, but the craft had been set on auto-pilot and Smith and the Robot are not aboard. Knowing they have only minutes, Don and Will quickly load the deutronium into the Jupiter's fusion core. The alien machine is only a hundred miles away. The situation looks hopeless. The thing will be upon the Jupiter in minutes, before it can lift off, dooming the Robinsons to certain death. Suddenly, a signal comes in from Smith. It is snowy and gets worse as the alien approaches, but the Robinsons can hear and understand him. Smith knew that the Jupiter would not get away in time. In order to save the others, he has planned a diversion, one that will draw the alien machine away from the Jupiter and toward a more desirable target. His original hope had been to launch one of the missiles at a distant target, giving the alien machine a nuclear fireball to chew on while they all made a clean getaway. However, the firing codes had proven too complex and the Robot had estimated that it would take three days to break them. They, of course, do not have three days. But there is one option left -- the only one. Smith plans to manually detonate one of the missiles while it is still in its silo. The resulting blast of one hundred megatons should prove more than sufficient to draw the alien away from the Jupiter, allowing the Robinsons to escape and live. Smith has come to genuinely love the Robinsons as true family, and he knows he must atone for all that he has done to them. "I'm doing this for you, Will -- for you and for your father. I watched him die, and I will not allow his son and family to die as well. I owe him this." Maureen and the others are fighting tears, overwhelmed by the depth of Smith's sacrifice. Will frantically tells Dr. Smith not to do it, but knows he cannot change the man's mind. Smith further tells him not to worry about the Robot, saying that Will has a surprise waiting in the pod's computer banks. Smith bids farewell to the Robinsons, telling them of his love and appreciation for all they've done for him. The screen goes blank. His hand on his activation key, Dr. Smith looks at the Robot, who is manning the key station across the room. They say their good-byes. On Smith's signal, they both turn their keys simultaneously. A panel opens. Smith accesses a computer system, initiating the manual command. He smiles at the Robot, 'insults' him fondly one final time, and presses the last button. The alien is almost over Kennedy. The Jupiter's energy levels drop nearly to zero as their power is drawn off as fast as it is generated. They can no longer lift-off, and all pray for a miracle. The warhead detonates. The alien device instantly peels away, headed at top speed for the nuclear fireball in Iowa. The Jupiter's power once more reaches its full potential, and Don hits the lift-off button. As it did in 1997, the Jupiter 2 rises from its launch cradle and rapidly climbs through the atmosphere. In minutes, they are once again in space. They have nowhere to go, but as Earth falls safely away from them Don suggests that their best hope of finding Earth's survivors lies in -- -- Alpha Centauri. After all, he points out, there were many flights there, and those who happened to have been in space when the alien first landed on Earth would have had to have gone somewhere. And Alpha Centauri is the closest habitable planet. Will discovers the surprise Dr. Smith had left for him in the pod. There in its navigation computer are complete tape-dump copies of the Robot's memory banks. After flipping a few switches, Will listens as his mechanical friend speaks to him over the pod's radio speakers, imploring the young man to build a new body for him once they reach their new world. They head toward Alpha Centauri, fully fuelled and locked on target. To reduce the stresses on their ship, they travel at reduced speed. After a final meal, at which Don and the Robinsons lovingly remember their fallen family and friends -- including the brave Zachary Smith -- Maureen, Don, his wife, Judy, their son, Joshua, Penny, and finally Will once again enter their freezing tubes and dream of home. The
Jupiter 2 silently and safely sails across the cold, milky sea, toward
the long-promised planet six years away. *
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