Warp Speed

by Travis S. Taylor

  Tabitha and Sara went about setting up the contracts Earthside to get construction of the modules under way. It would take about a year to complete the modules. We contracted the same aerospace firm that built Einstein. We decided to have them go ahead and build the retrofit faring that would connect the little warpship to the habitat cylinders.

  A few days later, Annie had the idea to put a retrofit faring on both ends of the cylinders so that we could dock one of the other warpships to the other side. This way, we could land and then split up into two teams to cover more ground more quickly. She had the contracts modified to allow the new designs.

  Occasionally, Jim and I would compare notes on the warp field and energy anomalies. We still hadn't quite put our finger on a solution to the nonlinear energy requirements for fast warp speeds. But we were new to warp theory. We had only been doing it for a year or so. We also compared notes on pregnancy. Tabitha hadn't had a lot of trouble with morning sickness. 'Becca on the other hand was miserable. I told Jim that Tabitha had been an astronaut for so long that probably nothing made her sick anymore.

  A couple of months later we compared notes on the so-called "honeymoon trimester." We both decided that it would be a lot more fun without having to deal with a three to six month pregnant woman. Both of them exercised every day but their mobility was beginning to suffer. So, Jim and I had a clever idea. We redesigned the curvature in the flat space portion of the protective warp bubble of the habitat dome. The area around our respective bedrooms we designed a curvature that would be modifiable to zero gee and would be centered about the bedroom. The low gravity field would slowly taper back to one gee at the edge of the room. We each rigged us a transmitter to trigger the new software via the push of a button. We could also modify the amount of gravity in our bedrooms from zero to one gee. That gave me another idea about a high gee training facility, but that is another story. In fact, I remember seeing that idea on a cartoon I used to watch years ago.

  I told Tabitha that I had a surprise for her. "I have remodeled the bedroom," I told her.

  "What did you do?" she said nervously.

  I led her into the room and said, "Tada!"

  "I don't see any difference," she remarked.

  "Look here." I pointed to the slidebar switch by the headboard of the bed. The switch had a zero at the bottom and a one at the top. "Stand here by the bed and lower the switch slowly," I said.

  She reached up and slid the bar downward about halfway. My stomach lurched and tickled. I'm sure hers did. The baby kicked also. "Whoa!" she grabbed the headboard and steadied herself.

  I leaned over and picked up the bed with one hand. "See, I rigged it so we could modify the gravity in here. You can probably get more comfortable to sleep at lower gee."

  Tabitha slid the panel to zero and did a slow spin backwards above the bed.

  "You don't think this will hurt the baby do you? The baby is suspended in water anyway. If anything, it might get motion sick with no gravity, right? Perhaps we shouldn't go all the way down to zero?" I asked.

  "Oh, phooey. We and the Russians did long-term studies on pregnant mammals in both ISS and on Mir. We tested pregnant rats, rabbits, and a few others and never observed any differences between the spaceborn animals and Earthborn ones." She balanced herself and slid the bar upward to about one tenth gee. "We will have to be careful at this gravity not to get up too fast or you will get a bump on the head from the ceiling or the doorframe or whatever." She did another back flip.

  "Yeah, okay, just be careful. Also, the gravity is only modified in this room and the bathroom--there's another slidebar in there. I thought the low gee bathroom might make it easier on you for getting up and down. Although, I'd leave some gravity on when I used the toilet or took a shower." I smiled at her.

  "This is great Anson. 'Becca has got to have one of these!" she said.

  "She does. Jim and I worked this out together. He is showing her theirs about now also."

  Tabitha smiled and replied, "Good. Would you like for me to show you mine?" She laughed as she undid her maternity top. Praise the Lord for the honeymoon trimester and low gravity bedrooms!

  The effort to maintain military superiority Earthside was continuing as planned. No further skirmishes had popped up anyway. The Earth was battered and tired. World War III had done a lot of damage. It takes a while to mourn millions of deaths. It takes even longer to clean up. We kept an eye on the news and our favorite television broadcasts and the Internet. Nothing dangerous was going on. We continued at a steady and careful pace. No need to take undue risk during peacetime.

  The status of the individual warp system or Supersuit wasn't great. A closed bubble that small with a hundred Watt heater (a person) inside it will need a good deal of air conditioning.

  Also, the warp core and the ECCs required would take up a certain amount of volume. That couldn't be helped; things take up space. I pushed the group of engineers and scientists working the Supersuit to lead toward an armored suit, sort of like that suggested in Starship Troopers. The warp core and ECCs could be distributed throughout the suit. This would be the simplest and most likely first doable Supersuit design. We continued to work on it. And I began to create some new friendships in that group. Of course, we had handpicked everybody on the base and they were all our friends. However, none of them were really in our immediate family. Time changes that. We were becoming a lunar community.

  Over the next three months we continued popping out to the solar focus and cataloged many other star systems. We looked closely at a red planet very similar to Mars around Wolf 359. Luyten 726-8 A and B supported a myriad of planets and asteroids, a few gas giants and one planet about twice the size of Earth that had liquid water and green vegetation.

  Lalande 21185 had a set of twin medium sized gas giants similar to Uranus and Neptune. Sirius A and B had two different planets that could support life. One was more of a desert planet with very small oceans, while the other was in an ice age. Most of it was covered with ice except for the equatorial regions. There was liquid water there.

  We continued looking and found planets around nearly every star we tried. Ross 154, 248, and 128. 61 Cygni and Luyten 789-6. Epsilon Eridani had a world that looked just like Earth but with two moons. I couldn't wait to get out there and look at these places. I was hoping that we would've found a civilization by this time though. We had looked at about twenty planets closely. I decided that we should take a couple of days per star system. Wouldn't want to miss anything. Out of all the planets we studied thus far, no intelligent life. The odds were at least worse than one in twenty for intelligent life. Although, it had been about one in three for plant life. The universe is a damn big place. We just had to keep looking.

  A month or so later, Jim and I had plenty to do other than warp technology. I was constantly getting up in the middle of the night to change little Ariel Eridani Clemons. And I'm sure Jim was having a time with the twins, Mindy Sue and Michael Ash Daniels. Of course, we had no shortage of people volunteering to baby sit. Oh, who was the first baby born on the Moon you want to know? It was Mindy Sue, then Michael Ash was born a few minutes later. Ariel was born a week later. Fortunately, Ariel looks just like her mom and her older sister.

  Tabitha and Annie had little Ariel in the bedroom in zero gee before she was two months old. She never seemed to get sick from the microgravity. Tabitha must have some super inner-ear gene that Ariel and Anne Marie inherited.

  In our spare time, Jim and I dug out a small fifteen-meter diameter dome and put a gravity modification switch in it. We designed the gravity meter to enable gravity from zero to fifteen gee. We then padded the floor and walls and ceiling and started using that room to exercise in. I could do all sorts of flips and multiple spin kicks at a quarter gee. I could even stand and balance on one hand. We all spent time in the "gravity room" as it came to be known. After balance work, we would then do strength training. I was hoping to slowly work up to withstanding fifteen gee, but that is da
mned heavy. I was at least hoping to build my strength until I could do multiple flips and very high aerial kicks in standard one gee. I also spent time with Ariel and Tabitha in the room at low gee trying to get Ariel to walk early.

  Life on the moon was swell. A few times we visited my and Tabitha's parents and let them play with the baby. How many kids do you know that got to fly back and forth between the Earth and the Moon on a regular basis? Our little Ariel was an astronaut at one month if you don't count being born on the Moon. Over the period of Ariel's first year she grew about twenty percent taller than the average, according to the Internet. Tabitha and I wondered if it was due to the low gee we often had her in. We soon decided that anytime we exposed her to low gee, we would then slowly expose her to higher gee. Say two and a half gee for a few minutes. However, more than ninety-five percent of her time was in normal gee.

  Ariel, Mindy, and Mike became a handful. They were crawling all over the place and in the low gee rooms were walking. They were also beginning to jabber something fierce.

  Finally, on Mindy and Mike's second birthday the starship was complete and parked on the surface of the Moon just outside Moon Base 1. We boarded Einstein and flew up to the surface and out of the warp barrier of the Moon base. Anne Marie docked us to the main section of the starship and we were ready for liftoff. The crew consisted of Tabitha, Margie, Anne Marie, Rebecca, Jim, Al, Sara, and myself. Our mission was to fly to the second planet from Barnard's Star, look around for a couple of days, and safely return to the Moon. We planned to bring the ECCs of both the Einstein, which was docked in front, and the Starbuck, which was docked, in the rear. The two ECCs would enable us to use much more energy and perhaps push our warp velocity even further than the fifty times that of light we had maxed out at previously. Jim and I calculated that we should be able to reach seventy times the speed of light. That meant a month out and a month back.

  We had shaken hands with most of the lunar community in a prelaunch ceremony we had the previous day. We had said our goodbyes and left the base in the charge of a new colonel Tabitha was grooming, Lieutenant Colonel James Duvall. He was a good man as far as I could tell. Besides, he had the aid of the head NCO on base, Sergeant Major Calvin Perry. He would be fine.

  We had also dropped all of the kids off with my parents. The Clemons and the Ames grandparents had adopted Mindy and Mike as their own grandchildren. So, we left all three of them. They would stay with my parents for the first month and then my folks were going to take them down to Gulf Shores where Tabitha's parents had moved to after the Secret War. We would pick them up on our way back. We all cried when we left them. The kids didn't seem to care that much. My dad said they started crying that night when they realized we weren't coming back for a while. Why didn't we take them? I just couldn't see taking toddlers into such a dangerous situation. What if something went wrong? Our kids should still get to grow up and have full lives. Besides, we didn't need toddlers bumping into spacecraft controls and warping us into a black hole or something. That sounds like stuff out of a bad science fiction novel.

  So, we left the Sol system like a scalded dog headed for the creek. At warp speed seventy as we were beginning to call it, we just had a month to kill.

  We talked several times about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and why we hadn't found it yet. Using three of the little warpships, we had hopped out to the solar focus and observed most of the stars out to ninety light years. We had yet to find any signs of E.T.s. None of us were about to give up though. They were out there somewhere. Statistics just ensures that. It was just a matter of time before we found them. The problem was that everyday the trip to visit the E.T. kept getting longer and longer. At a minimum, E.T. lived somewhere out past ninety light years. At warp seventy that had to be at least a two and a half year round trip. We needed much bigger ECCs or a much bigger ship, or both. The problem is that Jim and I had found a curve to fit the power requirements to the warp speed. We were approaching an asymptote and we didn't know if the thing went up to infinity or if it was just a potential well that we had to jump over. Either way it was going to take a buttload of energy to overtake even warp speed ninety. The ECC factory back on the Moon was pumping out flubell ECCs as fast as they could make them, but it would be another five or more years before they had enough of them to create the type of energy that I feared we would require for journeys any further out than a hundred and twenty light years away. We would get there eventually though. I just had to be patient. That's hard to do when you are pushing fifty.

  A month went by rather like a turtle crossing the street in the midst of rush hour. I missed the kids terribly. So did everybody else. We popped out of warp about a thousand astronomical units from Barnard's Star, then made a couple of short warps into the interior of the star's system of planets. We approached the second blue green planet and entered into a LEO type orbit. Well it wasn't Low Earth Orbit, but what were we supposed to call it?

  "Why don't we call it 'Anson'?" 'Becca asked.

  "Yeah, Low Anson Orbit! Ha, that's great." Al laughed.

  "What do you think, Anson?" Tabitha asked me.

  "Okay. But I get to name the next one." I smirked.

  Tabitha took the controls and led us around the planet multiple times. We spotted a location that looked like a lush tropical area and decided to give it a try. She brought us down in a field of something that looked like sea oats that grow along the beaches in the Gulf of Mexico. A few hundred meters to our south was a beautiful white sandy beach and an ocean frothing against it. The red sunlight gave the planet a dim appearance. There was plenty of light but nothing seemed very bright. Not like on Earth the way you have to squint your eyes or wear sunglasses at the beach.

  We spent a few minutes checking the air for anything that would be harmful to us. We could see no microbes or deadly gasses. It was a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, argon, and other gasses. The oxygen was a little richer than on Earth, but that was no problem. We sat still in the ship and waited a while and watched for signs of indigenous lifeforms that could be harmful: snakes, bees, bugs, crocodiles, and three headed humanoid-eating E.T.s. Nothing other than an occasional alien sea oat reared its head.

  An hour passed. We had made every measurement we could think of. Jim finally said, "To hell with this, let's go outside."

  Tabitha reminded him that the protocol that he helped write required two hours of tests, analyses, and observation before running out into an alien world to be eaten by monsters or alien bacteria. So, we waited a little while longer.

  The air was fine. I never even saw an insect. Perhaps they just didn't evolve here. We took a lot of vegetation samples. None of us could figure out how they pollinated without bugs. The ecosystem was completely different here. I guess the wind was good enough.

  A couple of days later we split up. Tabitha, 'Becca, Jim, and I flew Einstein further inland while Margie, Anne Marie, Sara, and Al hopped continents in the Starbuck. We were to meet back on the beach in two days where we would leave the habitat cylinders.

  We finally found insects and 'Becca swore that she saw a rodent of some sort. It would take years and teams of scientists to catalog all of the species of life there. We were physicists and engineers, not botanists, entomologists, and exobiologists. We would have to bring some next time. Two days passed quickly, and no creatures tried to eat us, not even the insects.

  Margie and Annie were docking the ships back to the habitat cylinders. Tabitha and I stood on the beach with the crystal clear water frothing at our feet. Even our treks to the bottom of the oceans of this world didn't reveal any underwater cities, although we had seen some big fish.

  I was watching the alien red sunset. Tabitha, of course, was watching the docking procedures and muttering to herself about "teaching Annie how to fly better than that." I laughed at her and nudged her.

  "Hey General, you got time to look at this really cool alien sunset?"

  Tabitha turned away from the spacecraft and looked
out over the ocean. "Yeah. It is pretty. You seem sort of solemn tonight. What's bothering you?"

  "Nothing really. I just wanted to find more, you know?" I held my hands out as if to encompass the planet. Then I shrugged my shoulders.

  "Yeah, I know. You wanted to find aliens. You did, just not the kind you can talk to."

  "Maybe someday we . . ." I shook my head. "There are just so many stars out there. And it appears the potential alien homeworlds are farther away than we might have imagined. I keep telling myself that it is statistics. They are out there and we're bound to find somebody somewhere someday. One of the things that burns me up is that the people of Earth will never know we have been here. They'll never know what we, the human race, have accomplished."

  "We will find aliens, one day, Anson. And some people on Earth know what you did. You saved the world from itself and have ushered in a new era of technology."

  "Yeah a technology that they will never know exists. And I had a lot of help, Tabitha. And the world isn't out of the woods yet. Eternal vigilance and all."

  "I know you had help, sweetheart. But you did it nonetheless. You, did it. And I have come to know you enough that I think you'll continue to do it. As long as it takes."

  "I guess," I said.

  "We will find intelligent aliens out there and we will get to tell the Earth, some day. But in the meantime, I miss my little girl and I'm sure she misses her mommy and daddy. What do you say we go home?" Tabitha held my hand and pulled me to her.