by Geoff Palmer
‘Got it!’ said Tim. ‘A caravan.’
‘A caravan?’
‘Brilliant,’ mocked Coral. ‘And what do I put down for the address?’
‘Care of the Post Office, Rata Area General Store. I’ll clear it with Glad.’
‘And where’s this caravan going to come from?’
‘That is no problem,’ Alkemy said. ‘If you have picture, we can make.’
‘You’re going to make a caravan?’
Tim darted into the lounge and returned with an armful of old motoring magazines. ‘There’s bound to be some pictures in one of these.’
Coral shook her head. ‘Even if you do make something it’s going to have to go somewhere.’
‘What about the reserve down the road?’
A kilometre past the Townsend farm, over the bridge beyond the mouth of the meandering stream that marked the farm’s southern boundary, was a large stand of native bush and protected wetland. It had a broad grassy picnic area in front of it and Tim had occasionally glimpsed tourist camper vans parked there as Fitchett’s Flyer rumbled past.
‘That is good,’ Ludokrus said. ‘We are near there already.’
‘Caravans don’t just tow themselves,’ Coral said. ‘They need cars.’
‘Car is easy,’ Ludokrus shrugged. ‘We have already some.’
‘You mean “one”. You already have one.’
‘But we have several.’
‘Eh?’
By now Tim had found some pictures of caravans. He showed the others.
‘Ah yes! This too we have.’
‘What? Where?’
‘The resource pit.’
Coral blinked dully. She was losing the plot again.
‘Come, we show.’
* * *
‘It’s a tip!’ Coral exclaimed.
‘This means good?’ Ludokrus was puzzled. ‘We think good but your face speak no.’
They were standing on the brow of a hill overlooking the local rubbish dump. It was a perfectly ordinary rubbish dump filled with perfectly ordinary rubbish.
‘See,’ Ludokrus pointed to a collection of wrecked and rusted cars, ‘We have already. And there, look.’
Down the slope, half buried in junk, sat the battered remains of an old caravan. It lay on its side, a single wheel sticking up in the air, looking as if it had been dropped off a cliff.
‘Good, yes?’
‘Home sweet home,’ Coral muttered.
‘Come,’ he beckoned.
‘No way! If it stinks up here it’ll be even smellier down there.’
Ludokrus shrugged and he and the others made their way through the rubbish.
Coral was right, it was pretty smelly. You had to watch your footing and there was broken glass everywhere but Tim was determined not to miss a minute with his new friends. On reaching the caravan Alkemy took off her backpack, retrieved the magazine they’d borrowed, and something else that Tim recognised at once. The calculator. Only it was much bigger now: human-sized.
‘You know this already,’ she smiled.
‘What is it exactly?’
She thought for a moment then shook her head. ‘I have not the word. It is our Everything Machine. Most precious. You will see.’
Ludokrus, who had climbed up on to the side of the battered caravan, beckoned impatiently. Alkemy opened the magazine at the caravan pictures, flipped some switches, ran the calculator over them for a few seconds then handed it up to him. Ludokrus flipped some more switches and began pressing its side against various parts of the wrecked vehicle. From time to time he checked the display and nodded to himself.
With Tim’s help Alkemy tugged the caravan’s crumpled door free and they dragged it over the hill and down into the reserve. A minute later Ludokrus joined them, carrying an old gearbox and a bag of tin cans. He dropped them on the ground and headed back towards the tip.
Coral, relieved to get away from the smelly dump, came down to join them and stood with Tim, watching as Ludokrus piled up more and more rubbish while Alkemy carefully ran the calculator over each item.
‘What’s she doing?’ Coral whispered.
‘Looks like she’s scanning it,’ Tim said.
Ludokrus staggered past with a soggy carton containing broken plates, an old electric drill, half a dozen torch batteries, some wire coat hangers and a pile of tatty clothes. He grinned at them. ‘Much good resources, yes?’
Coral screwed up her nose.
‘Enough metal, more plastic,’ Alkemy called, consulting the calculator’s screen.
Ludokrus ducked behind a patch of scrub and emerged pushing the shiny red scooter. He added it to the pile. ‘Much plastic there,’ he said. ‘And you say we must not use again.’
Alkemy pressed some switches, the calculator made a faint whirring sound and a small flap opened on one side. She tapped a tiny drop of thick grey liquid on to the upturned edge of the old gearbox and stepped back, kicking a few empty drink bottles into the pile.
When they looked again the drop of grey goo had grown. It was now the size of a large coin and its edges shimmered as if it were quietly bubbling from within.
‘It’s getting bigger,’ Coral said.
Alkemy went over and joined them. ‘They are making more.’
‘Who are? More what?’
‘The machines are making more machines.’
‘Eh?’
‘Is the first stage. First they make enough machines, then they make our caravan.’
Coral frowned. ‘Machines?’
‘Nanomachines, yes. Very small. Many thousands to a millimetre. Your scientists already make, but they are just beginning. These, I think, are better.’
‘Machines. Of course,’ Coral muttered, staring at the blob which now had the diameter of a coffee cup and was expanding steadily. As it reached the edge of the old gearbox a thin trickle ran down one side.
‘My favourite part,’ Alkemy observed. ‘It start slow and finish quick. Each several seconds the machines’ numbers double. Exponential.’
‘Uh huh.’ Coral said dully.
Alkemy could see she didn’t understand so she explained. ‘Imagine I give you one dollar in January then every month make double.’
‘You mean like two dollars in February and four dollars in March and eight dollars in April?’
‘Exactly. How much have you in total by the Christmas month?’
Coral shrugged. ‘A couple of hundred?’
‘More than four thousand. In the Christmas month alone I must give you two thousand and forty-eight dollars.’
‘Really?’
‘Start small but soon get very big. This is what our machines do. First the calculator make just some hundreds. These use the resource,’ she pointed to the rubbish pile, ‘to make some thousands more. The thousands make some millions, the millions make the billions and soon it is done.’
‘But ... what’s to stop them from keeping going and eating up the world?’ Coral asked.
‘The calculator make control. Stop the calculator and all machines stop also. Is quite safe.’
In another minute the puddle covered the pile of rubbish and was rippling and shimmering as if it was alive. Ludokrus returned, his arms full of polystyrene packaging, and dropped the pieces in where they melted like butter in a hot pan.
‘What if you fell in?’ Coral said, imagining what the grey goo might do to a person.
Alkemy smiled. ‘Is OK. They do not harm living cells. But your shoes and clothes will be dissolved.’
Ludokrus knelt and dipped a grubby hand into the puddle. ‘Help, help! Is eating me up!’ he cried. A second later he took it out, shook off the grey dust that covered it and held it out to them. The portion he’d dipped in the goo was as clean and pink as if it had been thoroughly scrubbed. He patted his cheeks. ‘Also good for the complexion!’
Once all the rubbish had melted, little happened for several minutes.
‘First, the machines make more machines. Then they break down the resource. Now
they must move them to where they are needed. This take longest.’
‘Move what?’ Coral asked.
‘Molecules. Elements. What we are all made of.’
‘You mean like copper and carbon and oxygen and stuff?’
‘Exactly.’ She picked up an old tin can. ‘Here is iron coated with tin. The nanomachines separate these and then reuse.’
‘Wow! So you can make anything you like?’
‘We need only a plan and some resource. Here we have plan,’ she pointed to the magazine, ‘there is more detailed information,’ she pointed towards the wrecked caravan, ‘and all around, resource.’
‘It’s a roof!’ Coral exclaimed. ‘You can see the roof. The caravan’s growing from the top down!’
A gently curving roof had formed in the goo. The square in the centre became a skylight, complete with shiny fittings.
‘It will go quick now,’ Ludokrus remarked. ‘The sides are not thick.’
The caravan grew steadily, as if it was slowly rising up from underground.
‘It’s magic!’ Coral gasped.
‘No, is science.’
The caravan continued growing, perfectly formed, from the seething grey goo, it’s windows and door emerging as smoothly as its aluminium sides. It was even ready-painted.
‘You make it white,’ Ludokrus groaned. ‘Boring!’
‘Yeah, yeah, you would make orange with the purple stripe. I make like the photograph. Ordinary.’
Then, when it was almost done, progress seemed to stop.
‘The bottom will take more time. Is complicated. Chassis, axle, wheels,’ Ludokrus advised.
‘Well that’s perfect,’ Coral said, ‘because it gives you two time to tell us who you really are and what the heck this is all about.’
15 : Spare Time
The four of them sat on a patch of grass on top of the hill. Behind them, to the north and west, lay endless blue ocean while to the east, beyond the green belt of coastal land, the impossible peaks of the Southern Alps rose in the distance, capped here and there with cones of white. Below, to their right, the caravan continued slowly rising like a gigantic loaf of bread.
Tim and Coral weren’t in the least surprised to learn their new friends were aliens from a distant planet. Or that their civilisation was much older and more advanced than anything on Earth. Or that — in spite of being so advanced and clever — their fancy spaceship was broken and they needed dumb old humans to help them out.
‘We guessed all that,’ Coral said dismissively. ‘But who are you really? And what are you? I mean you look human, but last week you were mice.’
Alkemy laughed and tapped her chest. ‘This is us. Our real shape. And we are like you, sister and brother. We are from a planet called Eltheria. Is much like Earth.’
‘Except for sun,’ Ludokrus said.
‘We have two suns. One like yours, one small.’
‘And moon.’
‘Also three moons.’
‘And our sea is liquid chocolate.’
‘No!’ Alkemy exclaimed, giving him a slap. ‘Now you are silly!’
‘So ... what ... you go to school and stuff?’ Coral asked.
Alkemy nodded. ‘When we leave it was holiday, so we go to visit our parents. But we are lost.’
‘You mean your parents live on another planet?’ Tim said.
‘Something we have in common,’ Coral muttered.
‘They are scientist,’ Alkemy said. ‘Make study of other solar system. Very busy. So we go to visit.’
‘You get to go to other planets?’ Tim repeated, glancing at his sister. ‘We’ve only been to Australia.’
‘What happens when you finish school?’ Coral asked.
Alkemy shook her head. ‘Does not finish. Our schools are not like yours. Always there is more to learn.’
‘What did you say this place was called? Helltheria?’
Alkemy laughed. ‘With our Everything Machines,’ she gestured at the calculator, ‘there is no need to work. Everyone can make what they want.’
‘What do people do then?’
‘Whatever is their interest. Some like the power and make government. Some like to help sick and make doctor. Some like the animal and make farm. But always we can change. Go back to school, learn more, do new thing.’
‘Cool!’ Tim said. ‘Where is this place?’
‘Close by. Only fifty light years.’
‘Fifty light years!’ Coral was aghast.
‘What’s a light year?’ Tim asked.
‘The distance light travels in a year,’ Coral said.
‘How far’s that?’
‘Well, it travels at three hundred thousand kilometres a second, so that’s about a billion kilometres an hour. You work it out.’
‘Nine trillion, five hundred billion kilometres in one year,’ Ludokrus said. ‘About.’
‘And it’s fifty times that?’ Tim gasped.
‘See? We are neighbours,’ Alkemy smiled.
‘Neighbours ...!?’
‘Our galaxy — what you call Milky Way — is more than one hundred thousand light years across. And we are only fifty. This is like next door, no?’
Tim gave a hollow laugh. He was still trying to work out fifty times nine trillion.
‘Can you travel faster than the speed of light then?’ Coral asked.
‘No, is impossible,’ Ludokrus said.
‘Thought so. Then you ...’
‘How come you know all this stuff?’ Tim put in, surprised that his sister was suddenly talking about space travel like an expert.
‘I did a science project on Albert Einstein last year.’
‘Albert ...?’
‘Special Relativity, 1905. Look it up!’ she snapped and turned back to Ludokrus. ‘So if you can’t travel faster than light and you live fifty light years away, you must have been travelling for fifty years.’
He smiled and shook his head. ‘Good logic, but no. The trip take only three and one-half week.’
‘But how ...?’
‘Chronocells,’ he said. ‘You have batteries that store the electric?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So, we have batteries that store the time. We release this when we travel very fast and the problem with your Special Relativity is fix.’
‘How does that work?’
Ludokrus blew out his cheeks. ‘Is much mathematical. Hard. Make my head hurt to think. But your Mr Einstein say space and time are part of same equation, yes?’
Coral nodded.
‘So, we add spare time, it give us much more space.’
Coral frowned. ‘You’re saying you don’t actually travel faster than the speed of light, you just release time?’
‘The effect seem like the same — that we are travelling much faster — but no law is broke.’
‘O-K ...’
‘For this trip we store one hundred year. Fifty to come, fifty to go back. Simple.’
‘Except our chronocells have accident ...’ Alkemy said.
‘Accident!’ her brother scoffed.
‘... and now no time is left for going home. Of course we may still travel, but this trip will take us fifty proper years.’
‘Can’t you use your nano-thingies to make some more batteries?’ Coral asked.
‘Of course, and this we have done. But to charge require special machine called Temporal Accumulator, which we ourselves do not have. Nor any plans either. Our ship have plan, but in the accident the information is lost.’
‘So you’re stuck.’
‘We think so, yes. Then we detect signal coming from your planet which say you have this machine we need. Faint signals, occasional only. It take us much time to find the source.’
‘Which is ...?’
Tim’s mind raced ahead. ‘The microwave!’ he exclaimed. ‘Aunt Em’s microwave!’
‘Eh?’ Coral said.
‘Aunt Em’s microwave’s a Temporal Accumulator! I hit too many zeros when I was heating up the pie
s. There was still seven minutes on the clock when I stopped it. Spare time!’
‘Oh,’ Coral blinked.
‘And you guys were picking up the signals on your calculator thingy. That’s why you were dancing round when I first saw you. You’d just found the source.’
‘So your problem’s solved,’ Coral said.
Alkemy frowned. ‘Maybe our problems are just begin. We need to borrow her to make copy with our nanomachine, but then we start to worry. What is this machine doing here disguised as microwave?’
‘It’s not like it’s just faulty or something?’
‘No! This technology is much advanced. Humans cannot make this yet. It must come from somewhere else.’
‘But who? Where? Why?’
Alkemy shook her head. ‘These things we do not know. It make us think perhaps your microwave may be a trap.’
16 : The Galactic Creed
There was something odd about the caravan. It looked perfectly ordinary but it wasn’t quite right. It was of course brand new and — apart from a few pockets of spent grey dust — might have come from a showroom that afternoon. But it wasn’t that. It was still warm in places from the frantic activity of countless nanomachines, but it wasn’t that either. The first clue was the carpet. The stuff on the floor looked like carpet but it was hard to the touch and Tim’s shoes clacked on it when he walked. None of the drawers or cupboards opened. The mirror on the wardrobe wasn’t glass at all but a picture of what a mirror would have reflected. Coral picked up the electric kettle. It felt too light and the lid wouldn’t come off because, when examined, it was just a closed metal sphere with a plastic handle.
‘It’s like the instruments on your scooter,’ Tim said, knocking on the carpet. ‘It looks OK but it’s not right.’
‘Is the photographs,’ Alkemy sighed. ‘They have not enough detail. To make a perfect copy we must have original to make measure.’ She reached for her pink backpack, took out a pad and pen, and handed them to Tim. ‘Please, you will write down all is wrong? We must find samples to fix and make proper.’
Coral called out suggestions while Tim struggled to keep up. Kettle, carpet, mirror, cupboards, drawers ... ‘It should look a bit used too,’ she added. ‘A bit of mud on the outside, or maybe a dent or scratch. And you need lots of stuff inside. Cutlery, cups, maybe a TV, definitely a radio, blankets, pillows, clothes ... Oh, and a car. Caravans don’t tow themselves.’
