When Cruz got out of the Transgalactic’s airlock and stepped on E Utopian ground for the first time, he felt as if he had flown to heaven. He quickly took off his spacesuit, longing to feel the air of E Utopia on his body. He wasn’t disappointed. A cool breeze tingled his body. The scenic beauty of the landscape was enchanting to the eyes. In the distance he could see hills and mountains. The only thing missing from the view was vegetation. E Utopia looked like a clean-shaven version of Earth. The sky even had clouds.
He felt much heavier under E Utopia’s gravity than he felt in space when he was wearing a gravity belt. He was too delighted to mind the dizziness caused by the change in gravity.
Rudolf extended a breathing machine to Cruz. “Put on this, sir. We don’t want you to suffocate on your first day on E Utopia.”
Cruz put on the breathing machine and paced around. E Utopia’s gravity was slightly more than Earth’s gravity, but coming from the weightlessness of space, he felt many times heavier than he felt on Earth. He felt the need to sit down or lie down but he was too excited to do so. “There must be ways to increase oxygen in E Utopian atmosphere.”
“We thought about electrolyzing sea water to make oxygen and dump the hydrogen waste into space,” Rudolf said.
“But Hitchcook told me that unlike Earth, E Utopia has more land than sea?”
“Yes, Mr. Cruz.”
“Then I don’t think we should reduce the amount of the water that we’ve got on the planet,” Cruz said with finality. “We’ve got to get the oxygen from somewhere.”
“We will find a way, Mr. Cruz,” Hitchcook assured.
“The sun shines so bright yet the weather is cool,” Cruz remarked after he had finished greeting the other five pioneers.
“That star, Mr. Cruz, isn’t the Sun,” Rudolf said. “It is orange whereas the Sun is yellow and we suspect that it is slightly bigger than the Sun. Do you know what we call it?”
“What do you call it?”
“We used to refer to the star as the E Utopian Sun. I reckoned it was best to name the star Luz Cruz. I asked the other guys what they thought and they all agreed that Luz Cruz is a fitting name for our star.”
“Rudolf, I don’t know what to say,” Cruz said. He loved nature and to have a star named after him filled him with an overwhelming sense of accomplishment. This was not just any refulgent orb. It was the star around which E Utopia revolved.
“The star gives us light and warmth and your funds and your vision made it possible for us to see the star and bask in its rays,” Rudolf said. “So Luz Cruz is a fitting name to the star.”
“I don’t know what to say. Thank you for such an honor, guys.” Cruz looked at the sky. “How’s the rain like?”
“It’s just like on Earth but here there are more hail storms,” replied Rudolf.
“Did you have a chance to study the sea water?”
“Yes,” Bolton said. “We flew to the nearest sea by helicopter. The sea water contains a good amount of chloride but it has almost three times the amount of calcium and potassium found in Earth’s sea water. The magnesium is fifty percent higher than that of Earth’s sea water.”
“Will sea animals adapt to the high calcium levels?” Cruz asked.
“I’m sure they’ll adapt to the calcium level,” Hitchcook said. “Besides, the calcium level will decrease when sea animals assimilate calcium into their bones and sea plants incorporate calcium into their middle lamellas.”
“Yes,” Rudolf chipped in. “The same applies to nitrates. There are relatively high levels of nitrates in the sea water but they’ll decrease when sea algae and sea weeds grow.”
“Hey guys, look what I’ve just found!” shouted Tiago Alonso, the group’s structural and mechanical engineer.
“What have you got?” Rudolf asked.
He waved a tablet. “This.”
Cruz snorted. “Did your girlfriend send you a photo?”
“I was going through the pictures taken by the drone that we jumped three days ago,” Alonso chirped. “I don’t know how we missed this clip.”
“You jumped a drone three days ago?” Hitchcook rasped. “Rudolf, did I not tell you not to use fuel before more supplies come from Earth?”
“Calm down, Hitchcook, we just used a little fuel,” Rudolf said.
“What’s in the video clip?” Cruz asked.
“Images of a planet,” Alonso said.
They all huddled around Alonso for a look at the picture on his tablet.
“We managed to take the drone close to that planet!” exclaimed Akpobori, the group’s medical doctor and biologist. “Another planet ready for the taking. At this rate we’ll soon find a planet full of diamonds.”
“Did you know about the planet before you launched the drone?” Cruz asked.
“Yes,” Rudolf replied. “I discovered the planet through a telescope and we decided to attempt to jump a drone to the planet,” Rudolf said, glad his defiance of Hitchcook’s order had yielded good pictures of the newly discovered planet. Hitchcook had become very arrogant since his invention of the jump drive and the discovery of the planet in his absence had quashed the notion that the pioneer team was useless without him. “My decision to jump the drone wasn’t so bad after all, was it, Hitchcook?”
“It looks a lot like Jupiter,” Cruz said in a fit of excitement.
“You’re right, sir,” Bolton said. “It doesn’t look like a rocky planet. It must be a gas giant.”
“If you discovered it through a telescope, it means it must be in this star system,” Cruz said.
“Yes,” Rudolf said. “I reckon it is as far away from here as Neptune is from Earth.”
“But how did you jump the drone to the vicinity of the planet?” Hitchcook asked. “The jump drive jumps the drone over a much longer distance than that. The jump would have taken the drone past the planet or would have taken it right next to the planet’s atmosphere, but from the video clip, it’s obvious the drone was only a few hundreds of kilometers away.”
Rudolf cleared his throat. He had been waiting for Hitchcook to ask that question. “Simple. We modified the jump drive a little.”
“Modified it how?”
“You designed the jump drive to make a fixed length of jump and we modified it to allow for an adjustment of the length of the jump,” Rudolf said, glad to see Hitchcook not looking omniscient for once.
“How did you do it?” Cruz asked with effusive admiration.
“Hitchcook forgot to put a mechanism to control the ultra-dense deuterium fuel in the jump drive’s reaction chamber. The amount of UDD fuel in the reaction chamber determines the length of the jump, so we put a simple mechanism to control the amount of UDD fuel in the drive’s reaction chamber.”
“You mean we can now control the jump drive’s fuel like we control the fuel of a petrol car with a gas pedal?” Cruz asked.
Rudolf shook his head. “No. Once the jump drive is activated, there is no way to increase or decrease the fuel. You can only control the amount of the drive’s fuel before the jump.” Rudolf almost laughed when he looked at Hitchcook’s worried countenance. “We started with a small amount of fuel and programmed the drone to put the same amount of fuel in the chamber for the return jump. Then we jumped it in the direction of the planet. We gradually increased the fuel in a series of jumps, hoping to jump the drone close enough to take good pictures of the planet. We thought we had failed in our last attempt and we planned to jump the drone again today.”
Cruz patted Rudolf on the shoulder. “That was very clever of you, Rudolf. So you say it’s a gas giant?”
“It is no doubt a gas giant,” Rudolf said, looking at Hitchcook with the corner of his eyes. “If we’re lucky it might contain oxygen to bring here or heavy hydrogen to use as fuel.”
“How did we miss this clip?” Alonso asked, his eyes fixed on his tablet.
“The camera took only a passing glimpse of the planet,” Rudolf said. “I think it captured the picture of the pl
anet when the drone was making the U-turn.”
“Do we have the coordinates and direction of the jump that brought the drone within sight of the planet?” Cruz asked.
“Yes, sir,” said Jean-Pierre Jacquet, the group’s IT, communications and electronics expert. “We also have a record of the amount of fuel that jumped the drone to that location.”
“We must jump the drone as soon as possible to increase the chances of getting pictures of the planet using the same direction of the jump,” Rudolf said, more to annoy Hitchcook than to impress Cruz. “Although E Utopia and the gas giant orbit the Luz Cruz in the same direction, they have different orbital periods. Their orbits have different shapes and might not be in the same plane. The longer we take, the more the two planets move away from each other.” He looked at his chronometer. “We jumped the drone at this time of the day. Right now we’re on the same side of the Luz Cruz as we were when we jumped the drone. If we jump the drone now we stand a big chance of getting good pictures of the gas giant using the same jump direction.”
“I say let’s jump the drone and see if it will bring us pictures of the planet again,” Cruz said all his physical discomfort forgotten. “Hitchcook, what do you say?”
Hitchcook sighed into his breathing machine. He felt heavy and disoriented due to the change in gravity, and he was jealous of Rudolf’s moment in the lime light. All he wanted to do right now was to lie down and fall asleep. “Okay, sir,” he said. “Let’s jump the drone.”
They refueled the drone and remote-conned it to the spot where it made the jump that took it within sight of the new planet. They launched the drone into space and jumped it, and sure enough, it brought back pictures of the planet.
“We need to go there,” Cruz said. “Maybe this gas giant has oxygen.”
“You’re right, Mr. Cruz,” Daniel Foreman, the group’s geologist and metallurgist finally broke his silence. “We have to find out whether the gas giant doesn’t have resources we need here.”
After several test jumps with an unmanned Transgalactic, Rudolf, Hitchcook and Cruz jumped to the vicinity of the gas giant and sent a drone to collect samples of air from the planet’s atmosphere.
Cruz was disappointed when tests showed that the gas giant’s atmosphere had no oxygen. The air contained 92.5 percent hydrogen, 7.4 percent helium and trace amounts of ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, methane and water vapor. When they isolated the hydrogen, Hitchcook, Bolton and Rudolf were delighted to find out that it had a much higher percentage of heavy hydrogen than was found on Earth. While naturally occurring hydrogen on Earth contained less than one percent heavy hydrogen, the hydrogen from the gas giant contained forty-seven percent heavy hydrogen. Of the heavy hydrogen, twenty-nine percent was deuterium and eighteen percent was tritium.
“Mr. Cruz, we’ve found our fuel,” Hitchcook announced.
“How can we use hydrogen fuel if we’ve got no oxygen to burn it?” Cruz asked.
“This isn’t just plain hydrogen, Mr. Cruz,” Rudolf said, unwilling to let Hitchcook take all the glory. “It contains heavy hydrogen in very favorable proportions for us to use what we call the deuterium-tritium reaction.”
“Mr. Cruz, if we use the deuterium-tritium reaction we’ll need very small quantities of fuel,” Bolton entered, keen to showcase his knowledge. “The deuterium-tritium reaction is four million times more energetic than burning combustible fuels.”
“And one other thing,” Hitchcook said, desperate to show Cruz that he was the most knowledgeable of the E Utopian pioneers. “The hydrogen from the gas giant has more deuterium than tritium which means we’ll have plenty of deuterium to make ultra-dense deuterium that fuels the laser nuclear reactors which power the jump drives of our ships.”
“In short you’re saying that we have an abundant supply of fuel,” Cruz summed up.
“Yes,” Hitchcook said. “The gas giant has more fuel than we will ever need. I think we should call the planet Fuel Ball.”
“Fuel Ball it shall be,” Cruz said. “What kind of waste will our spaceships produce if they are powered by the deuterium-tritium reaction?”
“Helium and neutrons.”
“Are they safe for the environment and living organisms?”
“Helium is an inert gas,” Hitchcook beat Bolton and Rudolf to the answer. “It won’t have a negative impact on the environment.”
“And the neutrons?”
“Free neutrons can harm the environment,” Bolton jumped in. “They react with atoms to form isotopes which maybe radioactive. They’re harmful to living organisms because they can lead to the production of dangerous free radicals in the body. To avoid polluting our environment with free neutrons, we should only use deuterium-tritium fuel in space. Each one of our spaceships should have an additional pair of engines that operate on hydrogen fuel. The spaceships will use the hydrogen engines to travel from the ground to the fringes of the atmosphere. Then they’ll switch to deuterium-tritium engines.”
“My sentiments exactly,” Hitchcook said through gritted teeth, cursing himself for not thinking of the idea first.
“Where will we get the hydrogen?”
“From electrolysis of water?” Rudolf jumped in.
Cruz grimaced. “We can’t do that! It will reduce the amount of water on this planet.”
“It won’t, sir. The hydrogen will be oxidized back to water in the rocket engines.”
“That is a master plan.”
“Mr. Cruz, if we make spaceships that run on deuterium-tritium fuel, we’ll have enough fuel to go to the Solar System and take carbon dioxide from Venus,” Hitchcook said. “Then we’ll simply break the carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon.”
“We’re not going to take carbon dioxide from Venus,” Cruz declared. “We’re going to take oxygen from Earth.”
“Mr. Cruz,” Akpobori said with shock. “Did I hear you correctly?”
“Yes, you heard me correctly,” Cruz said with a poker face.
“Why do you want to take oxygen from Earth? It’ll asphyxiate people.”
“Listen, young man,” Cruz said tartly. “The people on Earth are killing themselves. They’re committing suicide by destroying the environment. If we let them, they’ll destroy everything.”
“But taking oxygen from Earth will destroy Earth’s environment beyond repair,” Jacquet scoffed. “Mr. Cruz, I thought you loved the natural environment.”
“It won’t destroy Earth’s environment beyond repair. We’ll bring animals, plant seeds and seedlings of as many species as we can. When Earth’s polluters suffocate, we take some of the animals and plants that we saved back to Earth and we’ll have two planets that we shall rule under strict environmental law.”
“Like Noah and the deluge?” Akpobori asked.
“Sort of,” Cruz replied matter-of-factly.
Akpobori sneered. “Mr. Cruz, I can see that you see yourself as some kind of Noah. But Noah didn’t create the deluge if you remember.”
“Mr. Cruz, what makes you think that the world powers will let you take oxygen from Earth’s atmosphere?” Rudolf asked.
“They won’t let us. We’ll steal it.”
“Suppose your plan succeeds,” Bolton said. “What will happen to our families and friends on Earth?”
“Each one of you, as an E Utopia pioneer, is entitled to bringing one hundred and fifty people of his choice to E Utopia. You just give us a list and we’ll evacuate your loved ones.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Alonso said with disgust. “This is just sick, man.”
“Mr. Cruz,” Foreman said. “I’m still waiting for the part where you will laugh and tell us that you were joking.”
“Joking?” Cruz roared. “You think it’s a joke that people are polluting the Earth? You think it’s a joke that I spent billions of my money in vain attempts to educate them to preserve the environment?” He poked Foreman’s chest. “Have you ever heard about a thing called global warming, Foreman? Have you ever heard abo
ut a thing called the ozone layer? Tell me, Foreman, how many species are now extinct? I know you are a geologist but I think you must forget about rocks for now and think about the plight of living organisms. Earth’s biota is being annihilated as we speak.”
Foreman parried Cruz’s hand away from his chest. “Go and have some rest. You’re not thinking straight.”
“Mr. Cruz, I know you are passionate about saving the environment but, seriously, you can’t contemplate wiping out the billions of people on Earth,” Jacquet said. “This is worse than Hitler or Daesh.”
“Mr. Cruz, that won’t help,” Rudolf said. “It won’t be a surgical operation to remove polluters from Earth. Such a measure will wipe out Earth’s flora and fauna. It will destroy Earth’s natural environment beyond repair.”
“Earth’s environment will recover when we bring animals and plants from here. Before we do that we’ll re-oxygenate the Earth’s atmosphere with oxygen that we shall extract from Venus’ carbon dioxide. If we let polluters and greedy people continue to live on Earth, most of Earth’s life species will become extinct, including humans themselves.”
“Mr. Cruz is right,” Hitchcook said. “We’ve got to save the Earth’s biota from humans.”
“Come on, gentlemen,” Bolton said. “We’ve got our own planet now. Why worry about Earth? We should just get oxygen from Venus’ carbon dioxide. We’ll have our own pollution-free paradise when we bring animals and plants from Earth. Besides, our ships can travel at superluminal speeds; we can still discover more planets. Who knows? We might even discover a rocky planet with oxygen.”
“Yes, we’ve got E Utopia now but Earth is our home,” Cruz said grimly. “We can’t just leave it to the polluters.”
“Mr. Cruz, I’m struggling to understand your obsession with Earth,” Akpobori said. “You’ve got a whole planet here. And it’s bigger than Earth. You even have a star named after you, for God’s sake.”
“We have found enough fuel to bring oxygen and flora and fauna to E Utopia,” Alonso said “Let’s stop obsessing about Earth and concentrate on bringing life to E Utopia.”
“Alright,” Cruz said. “Let’s vote. Those who support the idea of creating a two-planet, pollution-free empire stand this side. Those who say we should abandon the Earth and concentrate on E Utopia, stand that side.”
The E Utopia Project Page 19
