Chapter 43
May 16th, 2047
Elpis
Jason woke up with the rising sun shining in his eyes. Sitting up, he looked around. David was stowing his sleeping roll in the trailer and rummaging through their rations for something appealing to eat. Jason started to stand up and suddenly realized his pants were still off. He quickly pulled them on and stood up and stretched. “I could use a real bed right about now,” he complained. “My back is never going to be the same.”
David looked over at him. “Maybe you can get someone to rub it for you,” he grinned. “From all that racket you guys made last night, I’m surprised you can even stand.”
“What racket?” Jason demanded.
“Just kidding, I didn’t hear anything or see anything. It must have been the river that was making all those sounds,” David mused.
Jason grinned, and rolled up his and Brianna’s sleeping bags.
“Where are the ladies?” Jason asked.
“They went down to the river to bathe. I’ve been directed to have breakfast ready when they come back up. Do you want powdered eggs with simulated ham protein cubes, or powdered eggs with simulated artificial bacon bits?”
Jason grimaced. “I think I’ll have the simulated bacon and some simulated coffee to wash it down.”
Brianna and Sarah reappeared from the river rubbing towels on their heads to dry their hair. Brianna looked radiant to Jason with her tousled and wet red hair. Sarah was also downright exotic looking with her rich brown skin and beautiful white teeth. Jason noticed that Sarah had a sparkle in her eyes and a spring to her step that she hadn’t had before. He looked at David and started to say something when Brianna came up, kissed him lightly, and pointed to the river.
“Your turn,” she said. I don’t want you stinking all day.
Jason took the towel from her and grabbed a tube of soap. He followed their wet foot prints down to the water’s edge. He had finished bathing and was going back up the bank when David appeared.
“Kristy is on the radio wanting to know why we aren’t on the trail yet. Brianna was talking to her,” he said in passing.
Jason hurried up to the transport. He heard Brianna talking on the radio.
“It’s my fault Kristy. I wanted to get some samples from the river to see if any terrestrial bacteria has made its way this far down river. We’re getting ready to move out in just a few minutes. Here’s Jason now.”
“Jason here,” he said as he stood in front of the communications set.
“You guys are getting a late start there Jason. We were a little worried when you didn’t report in at first light,” Kristy said over the radio.
“We’re moving out as soon as Brianna gets her samples loaded and I get the balloon down,” said Jason. “We should reach the sea in about three to four hours and we’ll call in when we get there. We have had to make a lot of detours due to all the erosion gullies.”
“You drive carefully. On second thought, I think maybe you should let David drive. I know how you pilot a ship,” Kristy laughed. While you guys are out there playing around, we’ll be planting the green houses today. All of Beatrice’s experimental seeds are coming up so we’re going ahead and planting ahead of schedule.”
“Ha-ha,” Jason quipped. “Have fun playing in the dirt. We’ll call from our seaside villa when we get there. Jason out.”
“Load up everyone. We’ll eat on the road,” he called out as he pulled the communications balloon back down.
As soon as David got back from the river they climbed into the transport. Brianna stood up on the back seat and yelled out again with a grin, “Yahhh mule, Wagons ho.” She sat back down laughing and opened her breakfast ration as they started rolling along beside the river.
Approximately an hour later, the river bent sharply to the south and they turned with it. They came over a small rise and a cloud of fog and mist rose in the air as the river rushed over the edge of a precipice. They stopped and walked down to the edge of the drop off. The river plunged about a hundred meters until it fell on a field of broken boulders and rushed into the sea. Before them, an expansive bay opened up. The water was a deep blue and they could see the other side of the bay about twenty kilometers to the southwest. There was a rainbow shimmering in the mist. They stood and gazed in awe at the scene of beauty.
David finally came to his senses. He ran and got the video imager from the transport and recorded the scene. He had the other three of them stand and wave at him with the river, mist and rainbow in the background. He had no idea at the time how famous their impromptu photo shoot would become on Earth, nor the events that it would set in motion. He finished his video by recording the foot of the water fall below them and the blue water of the bay.
After taking in the beauty of the vista before them, they started looking for a way down to the shore. They had to drive westward another kilometer until they found a slope gentle enough to take the transport down. Just before they went down, Jason put the communications balloon up and radioed in that they were at the sea and going to go down to the shore. He told Kristy that they would call in around dark after they came back up to the plateau. The balloon didn’t have enough cable to reach an altitude where he could talk to the base camp from the beach. He pulled the balloon down and they started down the slope to the beach. They stopped on a small rise about ten meters above the water and about one hundred meters from the gentle surf that was lapping on the rocky shore.
Jason and David had a good laugh at Sarah and Brianna. The two women had rushed down to the water’s edge, removed their shoes, and had waded right in. The women gave a squeal and promptly ran back to the shore.
“Damn, it’s cold as hell,” yelled Sarah.
David waved and yelled back. “Don’t forget that just six years ago this ocean was all but frozen solid.”
Jason shook his head. “What did they expect, a sandy beach and water like you would find in Jamaica?”
The women came back up to the transport.
“So much for swimming,” complained Brianna.
“Let’s get camp set up,” said Jason. He was eyeing some clouds to the west. We may get some rain later on. They pulled out a four person tent that they had packed. Shedding all pretenses, Jason looked at it and frowned. “If it’s not raining, Brianna and I will sleep beside the transport.”
“We’ll sleep on the other side,” agreed David. “I guess we’ll have to tough it out in the tent together if it starts raining.”
After they set up camp, Brianna went down to the shore and starting poking around the water’s edge. When Jason caught up with her ,she was turning over the rocks in a small pool and looking under them.
“What are you looking for?” Jason asked.
“Some type of life form. Any type of creature that evolved to live in the darkness under the ice when this ocean was frozen will not like the sunlight. They probably wouldn’t like the warmer water here in the shallows either, but you never know. They might crawl under a rock during the day and come out at night,” Brianna said. She finished turning over all the rocks in the pool. “Nothing,” she said.
“Were you expecting to find crabs or something?” Jason joked.
Brianna shrugged. “I really don’t know. Odysseus said that his creators were aware of primitive life forms living in the sea underneath the ice but hadn’t really investigated them. By the time they had the capability to reach this planet, the Brown Dwarf was bearing down on them and that sort of took precedence I guess.”
“I want to get some samples of the water and run some analysis. Why don’t the three of you walk the shore and see if you can find any of that purple slimy weed stuff that was seen by the first expedition?” she suggested.
“We can do that,” said Jason.
While Brianna set up her analysis equipment and microscope, the other three split up and walked the shore. Jason went one way and Sarah and David the other way. Brianna went and collected a set of water samples from th
e small waves breaking on the beach. She placed one set in the chemistry analyzer and then prepared a couple of slides for her microscope. Placing the slide in the microscope, she turned on its display and examined the water.
“Ahhh, what do we have here?” she said to herself excitedly. “The drop of water on her slide was not exactly teeming with microscopic life. None the less, it contained several different types of microscopic creatures in it. There were non-mobile single cell organisms as well as others that were moving around quickly using the same type of cilia that many terrestrial organisms did. None of them looked familiar to her, and Brianna was quite knowledgeable regarding microscopic terrestrial life forms.
Brianna diluted a drop of sea water with twenty milliliters of pure water and then took a small drop of dye and did a stain slide. She put that under the microscope and increased the magnification and started typing notes into her tablet. Although strange and slightly different, the microscopic creatures in her stain slide were remarkably like many of those she was familiar with back on Earth. They had a cell membrane, a nucleus, and many of the organelles were similar looking to those of microscopic Earth organisms. The microbiologists back on Earth were going to be busy for a long time, she grinned to herself. The interesting thing was that there were no algae type organisms present. Not surprising, really though, she thought. These small life forms were not used to sunlight, so none of them had ever evolved to utilize photosynthesis as an energy source. They probably used something like a sulfur metabolism, or something very similar, as an energy source while living in the deep cold black world that they had evolved in.
The chemistry analyzer beeped and indicated it had finished the initial tests she had run. Brianna transferred the results to her tablet and reviewed them. “Wow,” she mumbled. The potassium content of the water was about three times that of Earth’s sea water and the sodium chloride content was about a tenth that of Terran sea water. There was also a fair amount of sulfur present in the form of sulfates. That fit her theory of a sulfur based metabolism for some of the most basic life forms.
She went back to her stain slide. Looking it over, she started highlighting the different types of life that were most common. She then had the computer erase those from the display. That narrowed down the crowd of organisms. She kept doing this until she reached a manageable number of creatures on the slide. Shifting the display around, she passed over a larger one and backed up and zoomed the display in on the larger creature. She felt herself tingling with excitement. The small creature she was looking at was multicellular. It was some type of larvae or immature creature. It had a gastric opening and a vestige of a gastrointestinal tract. This was no simple single cell organism. This was an immature form of a larger creature. She zoomed the microscope display in further and started making notes. No doubt about it. There were going to be thousands of biologists on Earth full of envy that she was here examining these new life forms while they could only look at the information she sent them. She reckoned that this was payback for all the crap they had given her for studying to be a Xenobiologist.
Brianna was still making notes when Jason came walking up the beach. She looked up. “Find anything interesting?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Just more rocks and water. There isn’t even much in the way of sand.”
“It takes wave action and many years to make sand,” said Brianna. Look at what I found,” she said. She turned the display toward him. She pointed out the different parts of the multi-cellular organism that she had found in the seawater. Jason kept leaning over and trying to nibble her ear while she was pointing out things on the display. “Jason, stop it! This is serious, and very important. Look at how similar these life forms are to terrestrial aquatic life forms. This really gives credence to the theory of Panspermia. Just think. These life forms evolved in a star system that was probably hundreds of light years from Earth. The fact that they are so similar to those that exist on Earth is too great to be accidental. Somehow our own evolution was based upon some type of common microscopic origin.
“You’re losing me, Brianna. You’re saying that we are the result of some microscopic amoeba that was hitch hiking a comet from one star to another. I think that is sort of far-fetched,” kidded Jason.
“Jason, open your eyes. Look at this planet. It hitched a ride from one sun to another. It has brought all these life forms with it. If a meter hit here and ejected a large rock that then fell on another world like Earth and those life forms that survived then spread…..then you have Panspermia. Those life forms would be similar to those on this planet. We have the proof right here in front of us.”
Jason was getting ready to try and kiss her when they heard a yell from down the beach. They looked up to see Sarah carrying an armful of purple seaweed and David had what appeared to be part of a dead eel.
“We found all this stuck in some rocks further down the beach. The eel thing has been dead for a while and stinks horrible,” David said.
Brianna examined the thing that David had. “It’s very badly decomposed. I can’t even dissect it. Let’s get some pictures and a few tissue samples and then throw it back. Phew!!!” Brianna gagged.
After David got rid of the eel looking creature he came back and saw the other three examining the purple looking weed stuff. The plant was very fibrous, almost to the point of being leather like. Brianna took pictures and tissue samples from it.
“Look here,” she said. “This base looks like it could give the plant motility. It really doesn’t have what we would consider roots or a permanent anchoring system. It’s more like the bottom of a snail. I’m betting that it can move from one source of nutrients to another along the sea bottom.” She starting taking images and setting up additional microscope slides.
Sarah had enough medical training that she was a great assistant to Brianna. The two of them were soon deep in discussion over the samples they were looking at. Jason and David got bored and went to sit on the front of the transport.
“God, I would give anything for a cooler full of beer right about now,” sighed David.
“I second that,” said Jason.
They sat in silence and watched the small waves lap the shore as the women worked with the lab equipment.
…
It was nearly dark and Kristy was getting inpatient when Jason called in his status update to the basecamp. He told her about the life forms that they had found and had her stand by for a big data dump. It took nearly half an hour for the images and data to be transmitted and put on the camp server.
“Brianna is requesting that you transmit all that data to Alpha Control and NASA as soon as possible. She thinks the biologists on Earth are going to have a fit over what she’s found,” Jason told her over the radio. “How’s the farming going back there?”
“We’re going to finish planting the second greenhouse tomorrow. We should have all the hard work done by the time you guys finish vacationing at the beach,” she joked.
“Have we heard from Earth regarding our other issue?” Jason asked.
Kristy knew that he was referring to Odysseus. “Not yet,” she replied. “Supposedly the President is consulting all the mucky mucks in our allies’ governments. He doesn’t think he should make this decision alone.”
“That makes sense. Brianna is asking that you also send the data that she has collected to Odysseus. She would like him to have access to it and she wants to ask him some questions regarding life forms on his creator’s planet when she gets back,” Jason informed her.
“That would probably be all right,” Kristy agreed. “I’m betting that he’s listening to us right now anyway and has already snitched the data from the server.”
Jason was silent for a moment, and then Kristy heard Brianna’s voice came over the radio. “Odysseus, are you listening to our communications?”
“Odysseus is monitoring humans communicating,” Odysseus said to them on the radio channel.
Kristy ground her teeth. This w
as supposed to be an secure encrypted digital channel and that damn alien computer broke the code like it was nothing.
“Odysseus, this is Brianna. Do you remember me asking you not to change the programming on any human computers or equipment?”
“Yes, Brianna,” Odysseus replied.
“Have you Odysseus?”
“Odysseus will not change any programming on human computers,” he stated.
“Odysseus, I would like you to look at the data I have sent from the organisms that live in the sea of this planet. I would like you compare it to any data you have on life forms from your creator’s world. Could you see if it is similar and if it could have possibly evolved from a common source?”
“This will take Odysseus…..approximately one point seven of human’s hour time units.”
“Ok Odysseus, if you could do that, and inform me of the results in the morning. Why’s it going to take so long Odysseus?” Brianna asked.
“There is a…large collection of data from the creators world to review,” Odysseus said.
“Kristy, this is Jason. It looks like we may be getting a bad thunderstorm here so I’m going to sign off. We’ll check in at first light.”
“Roger that, Jason. I’ll relay this information to Earth,” Kristy said as she closed the channel with Jason.
“Kristy tapped her PA. Odysseus this is Kristy, do you have the data from Brianna or do I need to transmit it to you?”
Blue Planet Rising (Pebbles in the Sky Book 2) Page 28
