by T I WADE
“VIN, how did everybody get all these belongings in? These flight suits and your Force Recon medals weren’t with you when you arrived at the airfield.”
“Pretty easy,” smiled VIN, the cat now out of the bag. “Once you explained to us that we could all be coming back one day, we got together while you were so busy. We did a deal with Lieutenant Walls, then the air force guy, my Sergeant friend who helped us at Creech. We all got packages of personal things that we wanted to take delivered to the airfield during the last few weeks.”
“What did Walls have to do with it?” Ryan asked enjoying the view from space for the first time from his ship’s Bridge. Besides a bright Earth and the moon away to the right of the large window, there wasn’t much else to look at, except millions of bright stars in the Milky Way around them.
“Lieutenant Walls took his job seriously. He agreed that we could get a few personal parcels sent in, as long as he and the guards could go through them and check every item delivered by the USPS. He was quite shocked when he saw my uniform and ribbons. He didn’t know that I had two Stars and three Purple Hearts, and actually saluted me out of respect, even though we used to be the same rank.”
“Sounds secure to me. How did you get everything up here?”
“Over the last several launches,” continued VIN. “By the time the dozen of us had accumulated everything we wanted or had ordered the weight was a little over 300 pounds; so we divided it by ten flights and the shuttles didn’t notice the 30-odd pounds of extra weight here and there.”
Ryan looked at VIN smiling. “I’m lucky you guys thought out these things. I never had time. Why did your items weigh so much?”
“Jonesy’s two cases of vodka, and I slipped in a case of Jack; they alone were 30 pounds apiece,” VIN replied smiling.
‘I should have known,” replied the boss. Ryan was happy just to have the stress of the launches over, and VIN thought his boss seemed far more relaxed than he had seen him for a long time.
“Time to visit the rest of your crew, I will stay here while the captain shows you the weirdest journey of all, and takes you up,” VIN added. Captain Pete, leading the way off the Bridge, was smiling at what Ryan was about to master.
Captain Pete entered the elevator first, then a second crew member. Ryan was told to walk into the elevator. The elevator was completely square, an equal seven feet in all directions, with three thick magnetic strips going around the four walls. Captain Pete and the second man took hold of Ryan’s upper arms and continued walking. They each placed one foot onto the wall, showed Ryan how, and walked up the wall until they were literally standing upside down inside of the elevator on the ceiling. Then Captain Pete pushed the button for the upper level.
Going up to the upper level in the elevator was the weirdest sensation of all. The reason was that everybody in the mid and upper levels walked upside down on metal carpets on the ceiling of the cylinders. In the middle of the craft they walked the normal way, right side up on the floor. Magnetic shoes had to be worn or one would float around. There was still no gravity since the rotations hadn’t started.
“Oh my God!” stammered Ryan looking out of the elevator at others standing around outside—upside down like he was—and smiling, knowing full well what he was going through. They had all learned the routine.
Ryan looked around him. Once the doors shut out the people outside the elevator who were standing upside down at the bottom level, his brain began to feel better. He remembered the team that designed the elevators decided to install two panels of buttons: one set at the “bottom” right side up and the other at the “top” upside down.
His brain was still in turmoil as he was helped out of the elevator, and he mentally retraced his steps to get some form of clarity. He had actually “descended” to the upper level; his brain made him feel that he was actually standing upright and when the doors opened at that level, everybody was standing upside down like he was, and looked the right way up. He smiled; that was sure the most interesting ride in his life. It had been far easier floating around in the empty cubes before they had put down the metallic strips.
The rest of the crew had set up a welcoming party in the upside-down magnetic and gravity-filled cafeteria cylinder. They stood on the ceiling above the outer wall and applauded their boss as he was ushered in. The cylinder now resembled an old-fashioned small-town milkshake parlor with a bar and ten red topped bar stools along one side, and ten four-seat tables along the other. It accommodated 50 people and even had the same old-fashioned coke ads on the wall, taken from the restaurant on the airfield. Ryan was surprised to see several portholes along the sides of the cylinder walls, making the cafeteria look more like the inside of an old aircraft.
“I thought we designed this cylinder without windows. I remember all of you scientists said that it wouldn’t be fun to eat while watching oneself rotate?”
“Unfortunately,” replied Suzi, “the original cafeteria was struck by the third meteor hit; luckily this equipment hadn’t been installed yet. We have had to make do with another accommodation cylinder with windows, but some of the guys are designing window covers down in the machine room on the mid-level.”
Ryan noticed that there was even chocolate cake and coffee especially made for the occasion, and he thanked all his crew for his welcome. Over a large slice of the first space-made extremely light—it wanted to literally float off his plate—slice of chocolate cake, (which tasted as good as it did on Earth), he commended his crew on a job well done, and told them about his three-week stay in Cuba. Then he had to ask why Suzi and Mr. Rose had made him travel into space with midges.
“Well,” started Mr. Rose, “we decided that it wouldn’t be a big problem to add a few extra trees, and the midges are needed to pollinate these cocoa trees. It was a sort of last minute decision on my part,” he added playing with his glasses, something he always did when speaking. “I did an Internet search before it went down, and realized that all I needed was a section of mosquito netting in one small corner of our tropical cube to be able to add cocoa and coffee, and the midges, to our space menus.
“I found a company in Malawi, Africa that could supply the young coffee and cocoa plants, as well as the midges. It cost me to get the order airlifted from that area of Africa into London and then a special cargo company flew the order into Plesetsk. Igor found out that the Russians could increase the capsule’s inner cockpit temperature to topical temperatures for the time needed to get up here and, because you were wearing a full suit, you wouldn’t notice the 20 degree temperature rise.”
“It was a great idea. And don’t ask what it cost Mr. Rose to get the plants into Plesetsk,” added Suzi. “I can tell you that within a few weeks of our coffee and chocolate stocks being kaput, we will have our new supplies, and these plants can last 50 to 70 years before they die.”
The party continued. Suzi took VIN his slice of cake while Ryan found out that since Mr. Rose wasn’t expecting to return to Earth for quite a while, he was happy to invest much of his own savings into luxuries he especially enjoyed. Most agreed that fresh coffee and chocolate would become real luxuries sometime in the future.
Fritz added that he had found a design for an infra-red five-pound coffee roaster on the Internet, and was now using broken metals floating around in space to build a one-of-a-kind, infra-red space coffee roaster.
Ryan was shocked by how well his crew were already adapting to their future lives in space. Looking around at them, he noticed that some of the ladies were beginning to show baby bumps, and Doctor Rogers immediately said that he would bring the boss up to date on the health of the crew, right after he followed him to his place of business for a checkup, one level down. This time Ryan didn’t need to walk around the elevator.
The doctor thoroughly examined him. Feeling Ryan’s ribs, he told him that it would still take a couple of weeks for the pain to go away, and that exercise would be limited to walking on the treadmill in the exercise cylinder until the
ribs had healed.
With an up-to-date report on his crew’s health, and a report on his own health, Ryan headed back to the Bridge alone, navigating the walls and ceiling, which, as the doors opened onto the lowest level, was the floor.
With his brain still getting used to this new phenomenon, he was at a loss at what to do next and needed to think. Ryan had spent so much time, energy, and thought on how to complete his project and outwit the government, that he had thought little about actually being in space. So he decided to have a meeting with all the department heads in the Bridge to figure out what life in space was all about. He gave Igor orders to collect Fritz, Captain Pete, Suzi, Boris, Martha Von Zimmer, Jonesy and VIN to meet him on the Bridge in half an hour.
Captain Pete and VIN were already there when the round door to the Bridge swished open. Much like Captain Kirk had done in the first season of Star Trek when Ryan was a kid; he walked onto his own Bridge and suddenly felt like he was in a television drama.
“Wow, that ‘swish’ brought back memories,” he stated as he stopped and looked around.
“Star Trek, 1970s, Kirk, Solo, and that guy with the pointy ears, Spock?” suggested Captain Pete. “I got the same feeling when I arrived up here. It took days for me to get used to the swish of the automatic door.”
“Exactly!” replied Ryan.
“I’m sure I’m too young for this reminiscing,” VIN interjected. Both men looked at the much younger man and smiled. He was, after all, just a kid!
“I’m at a total loss how to lead this next part of our lives,” Ryan began when everybody was on the Bridge. “I know that we have ideas and plans in place for our travels, but to be honest, I haven’t thought past this point for a couple of years now. Boris, Igor, bring me up to date on our next move.”
“Boris, Suzi and I have updated our programs throughout the time we have been up here,” Igor replied. “Remember our meetings years ago on which planets to visit?” Ryan nodded. “Well, since we have designed more modern hydrogen pulse engines, larger ion drives, and we have the extra five pounds of 238—which we didn’t know would actually arrive until it got here—we now have the entire Solar System at our disposal. Suzi and I have had three meetings with Martha, and we have selected several places we can travel to over the next couple of decades to search for a new home. Our first ideas, once we are ready to leave Earth’s orbit, is to try the closest planet, our own moon, and then set a course to Mars to check out the ice caps there, and see if we can find water.”
“My next suggestion, after Mars,” continued Martha Von Zimmer, “is to visit four of the moons around Jupiter: Io, Callisto, Europa and Ganymede. Finally, Titan and Enceladus, orbiting Saturn, could replenish our water stocks and be the furthest distance we need to travel on our twenty-year journey. Scientists on Earth already know that we will find all the gases we need to refuel our tanks, and there are other interesting places to visit around Saturn if we get bored.”
“Mars, Saturn, I really like those names,” said Suzi to nobody in particular.
“What about our ideas about trying to establish an underground livable cavern on Mars? It is, after all, our closest, and probably the most ideal planet to explore living possibilities,” continued Ryan looking at Suzi with a questioning look.
“We all agree on that,” said Boris. “Our latest meetings were about the possibility of a shorter journey than twenty or thirty years. It will take America One less than a week to ten days to reach the moon. My bet is that on the moon we find nothing other than diamonds all over the place. Let’s say we get there, find the rest of the diamonds from DX2014, collect them, search on the surface for any signs of under-surface gases, and come up empty handed. To change the subject slightly, and to bring you up-to-date on our laser digging machines for Mars, it seems that placing new lenses, cut and polished from the pure flawless space diamonds, into the barrel of the lasers, we can increase our range, accuracy and power of these mining units to dig deeper, faster, and with less reactor drainage than previously thought. We did not bring one of those diamonds with us, so that is a good reason to go and see if we can find any on the surface of the moon first.”
“How did you get to that reasoning?” Ryan asked.
“Do you remember Professor Ivan Brezhnev? You met him a decade or so ago when you and I attended a lecture of his at MIT. He gave a lecture on ‘Future Laser Accuracy and Development’.” Ryan nodded. “We used his ideas to partly design our own lasers.” Ryan nodded again. “Just before the Internet went down, he had released a paper on pure space diamonds and their potential. It seems that he managed to get his hands on one of our diamonds, from Europe, cut it into a couple of lenses, and performed some preliminary tests with it. The information was vague, but it suggested that the dozen laser lenses could be replaced by one perfectly cut three-inch diamond lens.”
“Those German Zeiss lenses were some of the most expensive parts of our lasers,” Ryan responded.
“Well, to anybody else, the diamonds are far more expensive than the lenses, but to us, they are free,” Boris suggested.
“I get where you are going, and also since the Internet is defunct, then Professor Brezhnev and we could be the only people privy to this new information for some time to come?” Boris nodded.
For the next several minutes, each planet or moon suggested by Martha was discussed.
“Our next problem is the ISS,” stated Captain Pete as fresh coffee was ordered. Ryan mulled over Mr. Rose’s investment of coffee trees, and mentally thanked him for the idea. “VIN and Suzi took them life-saving supplies two weeks ago. It seems that NASA will not be able to get supplies up to them.”
“Nor will the Russians, or the Europeans,” added Igor. “We have used up all their freight capsules, although I did hear that the Europeans might have one more eight-ton freighter, or freight capsule as they call it, the one they stopped manufacture on a year ago, but would continue if somebody paid them. Unfortunately the ISS crew would have been dead a month or two by the time they could launch it. They have a rocket ready, but the freighter will take two months to complete, plus the Europeans just lost their space navigation satellite and have only two communications satellites remaining.”
“So, if we don’t supply them, the astronauts aboard the ISS are as good as dead?” Ryan asked. “Have the Chinese launched any more of their space station?”
“Da, Ryan,” replied Igor. “Three launches took place from Base 10, the Jiuquan Launch Facility at Dongfeng Aerospace City while you were in prison. All of these latest space station launches have taken place at Jiuquan. I got word from a friend who helped develop parts for their new station; he was part of a team of mostly ex-Russian scientists at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. I didn’t tell my friend where I was, except to say that I was not working for NASA, or he wouldn’t have given me any gossip. I believe he thinks I’m still in Nevada, or maybe in Europe. But, it seems that these parts, their most important designs, were to do with laser development.”
“What sort of laser development? As modern as ours?” asked Ryan.
“No, I don’t believe that their mastery of lasers is anything like what Boris, Fritz and I worked on. Much of our development was interlinked with the latest German technology. They wouldn’t have had that added benefit, and why would the Chinese go for Russian assistance if they had better designs themselves? No, Baikonur’s latest laser designs, I believe were the ones copied from Boeing in Seattle, and maybe modified to be little more accurate and powerful. They wouldn’t have had the opportunities for plutonium-powered technology. I don’t believe there was enough Russian plutonium available at the time. You yourself had all the inside reaches in Russia as to what could be purchased.”
“At worst?” asked Ryan of Igor.
“At worst, I think they might have a pound, maybe more of Chinese plutonium. The Russians knew that they would get a better price from you. If they have two pounds of plutonium-238, they could increase their laser range to a
bout 500 miles.”
“Couldn’t the Chinese have more plutonium?” Ryan asked.
“No, they were not known for plutonium production. Like you, they purchased everything they have from Moscow,” Igor replied.
“It is all to do with our top secret research and our focus over the last decade to finally get a laser that uses plutonium as fuel,” Boris added. “Sure, many other Russian and American scientists have tried to design plutonium-powered lasers, but only we finally mastered it, and only very recently; and, none of us have had any communications with others outside the airfield. So, if we had a traitor in our midst, which would be any of the dozen scientists who worked on the project, they have had only a month to send the information on. There was no way any of the laser team could have ever spoken to anybody from inside the sealed plastic design and manufacture area. Also, nobody in the team typically knew what anyone else was working on. Each was assigned his own little piece of the puzzle to work on. Only Igor and I were out of there, and we kept our ears open around the hangar. In addition, hours after the lasers were completely tested, they ended up here in space. Only Igor, Fritz and I know every single part of the complicated 20,000-page laser design; nobody else does.”
“At worst?” asked Ryan again.
“At worst, I believe that the Chinese space station currently orbiting Earth has the same laser system that is in the American C-130; twenty, maybe fifty miles with limited accuracy. They also don’t have our accurate aiming devices. I would bet that their devices are also American, or even Russian.”
