THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY

by Peter Damon

  “Paul?” Frank asked quietly of the doctor, back on the ARC. “How are my novices doing?” he asked softly.

  “I’ve seen worse,” he responded from his seat on the ARC.

  “Joyce. Try a simple Mantra,” Samuel murmured from his position nearby.

  Joyce let her breath out with a sharp note and blushed as she realised how much her nervousness showed. She took a fresh breath as she prepared to pray in the Hindu manner, the word already in her mind after weeks of taking up the regular sessions with Samuel. Rick looked across to her and smiled. She returned the smile and focused her attention, a tiny corner of her mind surprised at how such a simple thing as prayer could calm her so much.

  “All strapped in?” Frank asked of his crew. “Sit back, hands away from anything important,” he murmured.

  He counted to five slowly in his mind. “Ricky,” he said.

  Ricky touched the app on the centre of his forward monitor.

  “Oh, yes!” Matt cried over the startled exclamations of the three not so used to such speeds. The moon swelled in front of them, the earth shrinking.

  “Speed?” Frankie asked, more to get the rest of the crew’s attention back where it belonged than in need of an answer. After all, he had exactly the same information as they on his monitors.

  “On the spot, ten million kilometres an hour,” Jerry confirmed.

  “The moon is coming up on our port side,” Ricky confirmed, breaking the lengthening silence that had grown as each crew member watched the moon visibly grow in front of them.

  “Are we going to hit anything, Joyce?” Frankie asked.

  “No. Course is holding steady. Perfect in fact,” she confirmed.

  “Course change in three, two, one,” Ricky intoned, watching his display.

  The Coach reached the moon and changed direction to begin ascending from the ecliptic plane. The minutes ticked slowly away.

  “Half a million kilometres, turning the slow laser on,” Matt advised.

  “The generator is doing fine,” Jerry murmured, watching over it as it generated the power necessary to move them at ten million kilometres an hour.

  “All green on my board,” Ricky agreed, conscious that the first of the telescope satellites was being released.

  “Should I be doing something?” Joyce asked.

  “Making the tea?” Frank suggested.

  “Sexist!” she stormed, nonetheless reaching for the thermos.

  “You’re the one with nothing to do,” Frank reminded her while his eyes scanned his monitors.

  “We have the laser communication channel open,” Matt confirmed.

  “So, are you going to talk or anything?” Frank asked after a few moments of silence.

  Matt shook his head and grinned. “We’re communicating. We’re each transmitting 10 terabytes of information per second, with each end monitoring the speed of each packet, and the retry and error rates,” he explained. “It’s just like broadband on earth, only a bit broader,” he chuckled.

  Quite a bit broader in fact, and quite a bit faster too. Leanne had found a method of slowing down light to a point where she could code digital traffic into it. When released to normal speed, the laser carried a huge amount of data encoded and compressed within it, far more than would have been possible if laser pulses alone had been used. She described the breakthrough as having the same proportional increase as Morse Code had over semaphore signalling. This test was to capture the error rate caused by ‘noise’ or interference from other light sources also hitting the receiving station. Even set at a particular wavelength of light, Leanne was worried that the error rate would make her application unusable.

  Matt smiled as he imagine Leanne watching from the other end, squealing with delight as she found her error handling more than capable of sustaining the speeds and volumes she had anticipated. The transfer rate far exceeded even her imaginings.

  October 9th.

  “Will you stop taking the cherry tomatoes off the plants,” Professor Julia Rogers complained. “My staff think we have a voracious bug in here, which in a way, we have,” she told Frank as he plucked yet another of the ripe tomatoes.

  Frankie grinned and popped one into his mouth. “Reminds me of when we were kids; scrambling under the hedges to pick the fruit and vegetables before the farmer came to harvest,” he chuckled.

  “I’ll tell Doctor Barber,” she threatened.

  He popped the last small tomato into his mouth and followed her through the farm. “We need to talk,” he told her, nervousness making him put fingers to his ear. The earrings and studs had long since been removed and he dropped his hand.

  “Really? What about?” she asked, an eyebrow raised.

  “You’re not making this easy,” he complained.

  The professor stopped her rounds of the tables and leant against one to cross her arms and glare up at the tall and fit spaceman, his physique, plainly revealed by his spacesuit, once more engaging her eyes and thoughts.

  “What?” she asked bluntly.

  “You know, if you were a Traveller you would already be living with me,” he told her.

  “Really,” she stated, her expression threatening.

  He sighed. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he told her lamely, and looked up to heaven as he sought help with the most awkward woman he had ever met.

  “You know what I mean,” he challenged.

  “Frank Hill. You are the most awkward, difficult, dense man I have ever met,” she told him.

  “I want to know what your plans are,” he told her.

  “Why?”

  “Because wherever you go, I want to be there too,” he told her plainly.

  “And Madeleine?” she asked pointedly.

  “Maddy?”

  “Sure, Maddy. You two have been pretty close recently,” she pointed out, refraining from pointing out that the girl was possibly young enough to be his daughter. In fact, she knew both their ages, and Frankie would have had to have been only 14 to conceive the girl, but even so, their age difference did gall the older woman.

  Frankie let his breath out and licked his lips. “Perhaps I should have explained,” he murmured.

  Juliet frowned, confused by the man’s sudden shyness.

  “Madeleine is mine. My daughter,” he explained. “She didn’t know until she told her mother she had made plans to come onto the ARC with me. Then her mother told her, hoping it would stop her from coming.”

  “So the mother’s not on board?” Juliet asked.

  “Christ, no!” Frankie cried. “She’s doing a five year stretch for fraud and embezzlement.”

  Juliet began to laugh.

  October 10th.

  “I don’t think you’ve met our Operations Manager, Samuel Jenkins,” Michael told Dr Cannon, Professor Lovell and Stanley Charway as they entered the main meeting room in the ARC Business Annex at the Cambridge Airport. A glass wall provided a clear view across the main runway towards the service road on the southern perimeter, the road all the ARC vehicles used for take-off and landing.

  “A pleasure to meet you,” Dr Cannon shook Samuel’s hand before offering him a drink from the refreshment area in the corner of the large meeting room.

  With Michael and Samuel was Paul Wright, their doctor, Heather for security issues, and Mickey who would cover any spacemen issues. Gary had yet to arrive, but Michael had caught sight of a SUV coming down onto the service road on the far side of the airport, so knew he’d be joining them shortly.

  “Oliver did a good piece on your scientific breakthrough,” Professor Lovell told him. “Not easy, making particle physics understood by the masses,” he agreed.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I had little trouble understanding it,” Michael disagreed with a fair amount of flexing of the truth.

  “We’re moved the tests on Lamor and Lorenz equations for time dilation forward. The ferry was scheduled to carry those out, but with the coach happening to be going up to those speeds for its own shakedown, we
used that instead. I understand they’re still going over the results, but will publish their initial findings in a few days,” Michael explained. “Needless to say, all the crew are happy to be roughly one second younger than everyone else.”

  “Can I ask you to publish the Press Release through our offices this time? Dr Cannon begged.

  “I’ll let Oliver and Robert know,” Michael nodded, doing it straight away from his tablet. “They’re going to need one or two more assistants to handle all the enquiries we’re getting,” he mentioned. “Perhaps a couple of graduates with English, Politics and heavy involvement in the Cambridge Tab, or any of the student rags that are out there now,” he suggested.

  “You get about a tenth of the volume of enquiries that are coming through our central office,” Dr Cannon pointed out with a sharp look towards him. “And that number has risen since the success of your last experiment,” she added as they all moved towards the table. “Frankly, just about every particle physicist not directly employed by CERN, and even some that are, have requested they be considered for any vacant posts coming up on the ARC,” she explained. “A couple of the more eminent physicists have gone so far as to suggest we just can’t make do without them.”

  “We’re that popular,” Michael observed dryly.

  “We have our doubts on half a dozen of them, so we’ve given them more details regarding the skills we need in order to develop our experiments further, to see who they go and tell,” Stan told them all with a grin. He really did enjoy playing his games, Michael observed, and grinned too, two conspirators sharing a moment of brotherhood.

  Gary arrived and did a round of shaking hands before getting himself a drink and settling down at the table. “Sorry I’m late. The traffic at 15,000 kilometres is terrible,” he joked.

  “Shall we start with the Rolle College?” Michael asked as they all settled down.

  “A good a place as any,” Dr Cannon agreed. “We have a couple of disgruntled students, which we are dealing with,” she told him, bringing the data up on her tablet. “But statistically, and given the nature of the college’s location, the numbers of problematic students and professors are extremely low,” she conceded.

  “Have you any statistics on the impact Hinduism has had on the college?” Paul Wright asked, a pet subject of his since he had first become aware of a low instance of stress related problems among the student population.

  “Not directly,” Dr Cannon told him. “However, we have noted a high instance of religious following within the ARC as measured by instances of prayer meetings and overcrowding in your small chapel.”

  Samuel nodded. “The Hindu faith not so much teaches tolerance, as teaches Karma, the principle that every act causes a reaction. Hence little things like how you greet someone will bring a reaction from those you greet,” he explained. “If you want such interaction to become more positive, look towards yourself and how you relate to those about you.”

  “And Purushartha,” Professor Lovell added, displaying some knowledge of the faith’s teachings.

  “Correct. The Hindu faith expounds three basic principles or goals for life; virtuous living, profit through success, and pleasure,” he explained to the room.

  “Certainly, the psychologists are noting a very close knit community, much of which they conclude has been brought on by the feeling of threat the students perceive from their external environments. However, the crew’s reaction to these threats appears to have been channelled into Hinduism, and that’s very positive,” Paul agreed.

  “You’ll also note very positive changes in the medical statistics Gail Barber has presented. She’s barely had two months to begin making changes to our nutrition and physical behaviour, and yet the statistics reveal a marked improvement for over 80% of our crew. Now the students are on board, they will fall under the same programs of fitness and diet. It should be extremely interesting to see those statistics at the end of a full year,” Paul vouched.

  “Well, on the educational front, all the professors are exceedingly pleased with the environment, the facilities, and the service they receive from the ARC. Of course, it’s very rare to have such high quality of students to work with, but nevertheless, they feel able to teach their subject with much greater precision. Therefore, if there is a problem, it will be when we have to decide what professors we use on the ARC next year,” she confided.

  “You must be looking forward to the holidays after the trials of the last month,” Professor Lovell suggested with a smile.

  Michael looked about the table in shock. “Holidays?” he cried. “What holidays? The Rolle College doesn’t have term holidays,” he told them.

  “Be serious Michael. You can’t have the student’s spend Christmas on board the ARC, with none of them even allowed to obtain presents from earth,” Heather told him.

  “Haven’t they heard of Amazon, Alibaba, et-al?” he asked with a bland face.

  “He’s joking,” Heather told the room. “Even if he doesn’t know it yet. Of course we’ll break for the Christmas vacation.”

  “So let’s talk about security,” Michael asked of her.

  “Well, from the ARC’s point of view it’s been very quiet. We released our one extremely dangerous prisoner a short while ago,” she said, referring to Michael’s short incarceration. “We had one incident of theft, which turned out to be a case of forgetfulness. Other than that, we’ve had no cases of drunkenness, or assault, rowdiness, jay-walking, or anything else for that matter,” she reported. Jake’s situation had been discussed confidentially before the meeting and it had been decided not to make any comment on it.

  Stan took up the subject. “From the earth’s point of view, we’re making some groups extremely irritated by our presence. Several people have been picked up or stopped soon after entering our outer security circle and politely but firmly turned away.

  “Some foreign interests have hired UK media companies to do documentaries on Cambridge and the Rolle College on their behalf, and that way they obtain video of this facility and the new radio shack. We know of these and allow it. There’s little they can do with the information they gain,” Stan shrugged.

  “In addition to the intelligence we’re receiving from applicants who we know have links with foreign interests, we’ve also been contacted by several ex-students who, having taken lucrative positions with certain foreign companies, are then asked to further their education, and apply for places at the Rolle College. Our investigation into their backgrounds would have highlighted the links anyway, but we are heartened by the number of ex-Cambridge students willing to come forward and give us this information themselves. We’ve recruited a couple to continue the charade of attending the college, just to find out what these companies would like to discover, other than the obvious one, of course,” Stan explained.

  “So we now have private industries working covertly to obtain information on the ARCs unique ability to move and sustain an orbit. The USA is still around, but one has the feeling that they’re no longer really that interested, just playing the game to be seen as being there. Russia, of course, is attacking the ARC on the legal front, as can be seen from their United Nation proposals. Meanwhile, China has been quiet on all fronts, nor can our people in China find out anything. That’s a big and worrying unknown for which we can only remain vigilant.”

  “I was hoping to see a reduction in attempts at espionage,” Michael said.

  “Had you just moved into space and not made any other achievements, then that might have been the case,” Stan agreed. “But the college has continued to make big leaps in technology and our understanding of the world around us, many with implications to our everyday life. As a result, I think you can expect to find incidents of espionage increasing. I think we’ll see suspects move into ground-based colleges in the hope that those positions will enable closer views of what the Rolle College is up to, or to be involved in secondary testing; items of test conducted here rather than up on the ARC,” he explaine
d.

  “Well, if that’s the world we’re going to be living in, then I guess we need to act accordingly,” Heather reflected.

  There was a momentary silence while those around the table reflected on the situation, before Michael asked for a report on the commercial aspects of the ARC.

  Gary glanced at his tablet before answering. “We have 25 satellites generating revenue circa 4 billion US Dollars annually. Additionally, we have a network of 10 analytical satellites on short term rentals, event driven predominately,” he reported.

  “Analytical?” Stan laughed. “You mean spy!”

  Gary smiled thinly, his mind full of Jake’s indiscretion. “Analytical,” he stressed. “They’re designed as metrological satellites, but yes, their facilities would allow close inspection of anything on earth, not just weather patterns.”

  “They’re in a very low earth orbit, Stan. Sally Locke, the lady who took over their design since Leanne moved across to the Ferry project, has done a wonderful job on them. So good, you can tell if a person is smiling or not from the detail on its photographs,” Michael explained.

  “Their revenue is small in comparison, just 45 million US Dollars to date, but of real value to the earth, so we provide them,” Gary explained.

  “Would you, or could you, make one available to me, parked over Cambridge?” Stan asked.

  “Of course we can! I’ll have it done right away,” Gary told him, and began typing on his tablet.

  “And what of the garbage collection?” Professor Lovell asked.

  “Well, let’s remember that we planned to do it for free. Revenue would come from selling the garbage, with the ARC taking a 50% tithe from the gypsy travellers for providing them with life-support and equipment.

  “What we had not anticipated was the amount of instances where the original party would want their equipment returned to them, or disposed of on their behalf. Many of them are paying very handsomely for those options.

  “So, although we’d never anticipated making any significant income from the collection of spent items in space, we’ve actually made close on 100 million US Dollars,” he reported. “That doesn’t include the fee for returning the two Mars rovers; Spirit and Opportunity.”