Over the last dozen years, Lola worked with Lucius and Sydney to try to develop a foolproof means of recruiting additional African Americans from Earth to join their community. They were investigating a long-term recruitment solution, looking to double their number to provide a wider range of genetic diversity. However, as far as the colony’s planning went, the only people off Earth were only going to be African American for the near future.
The matter of recruitment presented two challenges. The first was that there was no way to communicate without a very inconvenient communications lag as the signal traveled between the colony and Earth. At their closest, the lag was still inconvenient, stretching out any conversation over twice that of talking face to face. Waiting between three minutes at the colony’s closest passage, to over twenty minutes at its farthest distance, for someone’s reply to a question made for an untenable conversation. The second challenge was the matter of vetting possible recruits. Genesis could perform a thorough background check on anyone in the United States. Even those with manufactured profiles and identities couldn’t fool the colony’s A.I. There was an absolute need to be able to meet each recruit in person. When Lucius began the task of finding others to share in Christopher’s dream, he relied on a thorough background check, several one-on-one interviews, and even going so far as to interview friends and family members. His goal was to ensure that not only would the potential recruit be a productive member of Christopher’s growing community, but that the recruit would not reveal anything about their impending disappearance to family, friends, or the authorities.
Unfortunately, once the colony reached its current location adjacent to the asteroid belt, Lucius and Sydney realized there was no way possible to safely recruit new members, handicapped as they were by not being able to interview candidates face-to-face. No one from the colony could safely work on the ground in the United States without serious risk. And now that the existence of the colony was known, the task of weeding out possible saboteurs, government spies, or anyone else who could put the entire colony at risk was close to impossible.
Over time, the colonists whose initial posture was to repudiate all things on Earth, especially America’s goods and values, moderated their feelings. They still demanded that their community be completely without white Americans and having their colony beyond the orbit of Mars ensured that. But most of the colonists, if asked, were realistic in their acknowledgment of the need for some measure of support from Earth from time to time. But what they all believed, some even militantly, was that they were entitled to come and go at will. That, as former citizens in good standing, they were entitled to return to the United States and shop for anything the colony, or they as individuals needed, or wanted. They believed that they should be afforded the same courtesy as any other shopper, which Lucius and Julius found out otherwise with their capture by the Chicago Police Department and subsequent transfer into FBI custody.
Obviously, everyone on Earth wanted the technology, especially in space travel and defensive shields. But the council was not about to allow a situation where any such technology could be stolen and used against them. And, as a defacto state of war existed between Earth and the colony, the chance of visiting the planet without serious risk was nonexistent.
Yet, every now and then, the colony needed that which only the Earth could provide. The colony needed “new blood,” recruits genetically different from the current residents. The colony already had a growing second generation that would inevitably find partners in their own age group, but given the colonist’s much slower rate of aging, it was going to be interesting to see how that might influence the formation of bonded couples.
Since there was little immediate need for new members of the community, everyone was convinced that the opportunity would present itself somewhere down the line.
* * *
The colony’s planetary exploration science team nearly completed the planning of a mission to Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede. During both missions, the crews would be studying the ice-covered surfaces, hoping to locate liquid water to sample. Their hopes weren’t very high for the Ganymede mission, given that the frozen crust of the moon was estimated to be at least one hundred miles thick. Europa’s surface ice was calculated to be slightly less thick, maybe sixty miles, but was also covering an ocean of water.
The surface of Europa is in the -160 to -220ºC range, but the water under the crust was in liquid form and presented the best environment for life other than on Earth. Jupiter’s tidal influences were thought responsible for a warm-centered Europa, giving scientists throughout the solar system hope for finding non-terrestrial life. The current problem was how to penetrate the icy crusts of each moon to obtain samples of the water, then return them to the colony’s laboratories.
The secondary task was to investigate the feasibility of constructing habitats on either moon for extended scientific exploration, maybe even semi-permanent colonies. Their technological acumen was more than enough to construct durable structures, but the idea of relocating away from their original home wasn’t an idea that had gained much traction.
“One thing we can’t do is dig through the icy crusts using the compression effect of Chris’ G-waves. Water doesn’t compress too well,” Angela, the assigned mission commander pointed out. “That would be a hundred miles on Ganymede, that’s one deep-ass hole!”
“One of our advantages is that our spacecraft doesn’t have the limitations of conventionally-fueled ships. We can survey the entire moon, both of them in fact, to see if we find a fissure that goes deep enough so we can get to the water down below and never run short of fuel,” Wallace Usher observed.
Wallace had been a decade-long climatologist when he was initially contacted by Lucius Walker, presenting himself as a corporate recruiter for a new think tank. Lucius met with him a half a dozen times to discuss the prospect of leaving the continually embattled United States Environmental Protection Agency. Over the previous several generations, conservatives in the U.S. government constantly worked against the findings and work the EPA did on behalf of the American people. When Lucius was convinced of Usher’s genuine frustration with his efforts being undermined because of his position and race, he made the offer of employment at a new startup but was cagey about the details.
Usher was cautious about fully expressing his frustration and anger, but it wasn’t that difficult for Lucius to discern. It only took a couple of months for Lucius to convince Usher to take advantage of the new startup’s offer.
With Genesis as a mentor, anyone in the colony could study anything that interested them to a degree that no institute of higher learning on Earth could duplicate. Many residents wore several hats. Usher was fascinated with the colony’s recycling systems, then he took a turn in the hydroponics department. He then trained as a pilot, followed by additional training as an engineer. He wasn’t much different from most other residents. When the recruits realized that normal social and employment conventions didn’t exist in the colony, they had to undergo a complete change in perspective about their future. There were simply no barriers to changing jobs. There were no jobs in the normal sense of the word, given that there was no money changing hands. Whatever anyone needed was provided, and the accumulation of wealth wasn’t a priority for anyone who lived there, Lucius and Sydney’s comprehensive screening processes ensured that.
Though Angela was going to command the mission, Wallace Usher was second in command as Mission Specialist.
“I’m afraid that if we try to compress the ice on either moon, enough so we could tunnel through the crust, forcing the hydrogen atoms together that much might initiate a fusion reaction. Which begs the question, why hasn’t anyone here messed around with fusion using Chris’ G-waves?” Wallace asked.
“Because no one has been that interested in working out the complexities of the containment vessel,” replied Chuck, sitting in on the planning session. “There’s probably some laziness behind our
being able to create unlimited electricity using the G-wave generators. Someone’s going to eventually tackle fusion, most likely someone in Peanut’s group.”
“So what about the other idea? Drilling down by laser? Like Chuck said, we have the power for it,” Angela noted.
“It’s possible, but that’s going to take a crapload of power. The beam’s going to have to continuously vaporize the water to keep the shaft open so dropping something into it to collect samples is going to be a bitch. And, there’s no guarantee that the water will rise to the surface on its own. A hundred miles is damn deep,” Wallace shook his head.
“Any other ideas?” Angela asked the rest of the team.
“How long do you figure the hole would stay open?” asked Sheila, the mission’s organic chemist.
“Without constantly pumping energy into it, I would think it would seal almost immediately, and I have to believe that the heat alone would screw up any sampling we did as the hole gets deeper” Wallace replied.
“Let’s face it, unless you all get lucky there may be no way to grab samples of the underground ocean,” Chuck said.
“Kind of kills the primary reason for going if we can’t figure it out,” Sheila sighed. “Although, there may be a chance of getting a good read on liquid water composition breaking through twenty or more feet deep into the crust. There may even be some organic compounds frozen in the crust. I would still go, even if we didn’t have a concrete plan for getting down to the ocean.”
“I’m going to talk to Peanut about mounting a laser or two on whatever ship you decide to take, Angela. Maybe Peanut’s team can test highly compressing water to see what happens,” Chuck suggested.
Wallace nodded enthusiastically, “That sounds like a plan. Realistically, we don’t have to do everything we’d like the first time out. It’s not like we can’t go back as many times as we want.”
“I’m up for whatever. But I must admit, I’m liking the laser thing. If I can find a deep enough crevasse, we can excavate laterally to get you some good samples,” Angela said to Sheila.
“Anything we find will be outstanding,” Sheila agreed. “The lab is going to have a field day with anything we bring back. And if Peanut’s department can figure out how we can get a ship down into the water, I can’t even guess what we’ll find! Remember, Chuck, it was you who made a jumper, the very first one mind you, into a submersible.”
Chuck laughed. “Very true. We just have to put our heads together to try to figure out a way to get one down there. I envy you who are going, it’s going to be a grand adventure. By the way, anyone run the mission plan by Chris yet? We don’t want him to be blindsided.”
“I got this. I’m sure I can sell him on the mission and the fact that Wallace and I are committed to making sure we all come back in as good shape as we left,” Angela said, smiling.
“Good enough. Keep me posted,” Chuck got up from the table. “I’ve got to take a tour of the new hab today and I want to check in with Peanut before I head over. Catch you all later,” he said and gave a wave of his hand as he left.
“Well, one of the things we can’t do is somehow batter our way down to the ocean. Even protected by the shields, we still can’t count on being able to do something like that,” Angela said.
“You’d definitely know,” said Sheila. “You’re the one who sat above the White House and let them shoot everything they had at your jumper.”
“Yeah, but with Chris aboard, he didn’t give me much choice. Watching him put the President of the United States over his knee and hand out that spanking was something I wouldn’t have missed for the world! Protecting the jumper from weapons fire with the shields is something altogether different from trying to batter our way through solid ice for a hundred miles.”
“Let’s table this for now and check with the other science and engineering departments. Someone may come up with an idea we haven’t thought of,” Wallace suggested.
“No doubt,” Sheila agreed.
The rest of the conversation revolved around which one of their class of ships would be the primary mission spacecraft. They even discussed a dual-ship mission so that they could maximize their coverage of both moons. Their meeting went well into the night before they finally knocked off.
When Chuck left, he asked Genesis to locate Peanut, then took off for Peanut’s lab. When he arrived, Peanut was working on a piece of equipment with two of his engineers. When one of them saw Chuck, he nudged Peanut and pointed toward the door.
“What up, man?” said Peanut, greeting Chuck with a hug.
“Same shit, different day.”
“Really? So what brings you down here?”
“Hadn’t seen you for a bit, just thought I’d drop in. What the hell is that?” Chuck asked, pointing to the contraption Peanut and the others were working on.
“That, my man, is the I-D unit that’s going to be installed in a jumper to see what happens when it rotates out of our space, then hopefully comes back. It’s also the sensor package and fully functioning astrophysics lab. We know that the electronics, housed inside a shield holding a sort of bubble of our space/time around the spacecraft, work in the other space, the probes all came back. But neither Chris nor I think we’re anywhere near ready to rotate someone into the dimension the probes have been visiting.”
Chuck scratched his head. “But I thought you already confirmed that the cosmological constants in the interdimensional space were compatible with life?”
“It definitely is inside the shields. But time does not run at the same rate in the interdimensional space as it does in our universe. And our best biologists and doctors have no idea how those conditions will affect a person, especially their brain. So, what I’ve been working on for the last year and a half is ensuring the shields can encapsulate a bubble of our space/time so that we wouldn’t feel different once we rotated out of our universe,” Peanut explained. “The problem is that there’s no easy way to do that. We would almost have to send two probes at the same time, one shielded and one exposed to the ID-space cosmological constants, then make detailed comparisons. I’d say screw it and send some animals and see what happens to them, but even that’s not a sure thing either. Mice, even monkeys, can’t tell us if their brains wig out while they’re on the other side.”
“Right, and Chris would lose his mind if you proposed sending someone as a crash test dummy before you make damn sure it’s safe. But I’m still set on being the first one to get to another star!”
“We’ll just have to see about that! Rotating into ID-space is just the beginning. I have no idea if we’ll be able to navigate through that dimension using the G-wave principles. The latest probe’s optical sensors don’t show anything useful, even the ones pointed toward where I thought the sun would be. This is a whole new ballgame, we may have to invent a whole new sensory paradigm to just see details in that dimension, let alone navigate and travel,” said Peanut.
“Man, that would suck, big time! Not being able to see where we’re going, or worse yet, not being able to get back home.”
Peanut laughed, “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Hey, what have you been working on?”
“The mission to Jupiter’s moons and supervising the construction crew for the new hab. Angela is mission commander and Wallace is the mission specialist. We’re trying to figure out how to get samples of the underground ocean on Ganymede a hundred miles under a crust of ice,” Chuck explained. “I’m sure someone’s going to hit you guys up for advice on how to accomplish that. I thought I’d give you a heads up, and see how things are going. Family all right?”
“Bernice and Jeff are both fine. Hey, how are Chris and Pat doing with Ben gone?”
Chuck shrugged, “I guess okay. Haven’t seen him for a few days. We should get together for lunch and catch up.”
“No doubt. You want to look at the unit? Maybe you’ll think of something we might have overlooked.”
“Sure t
hing,” Chuck replied, as they joined the team members calibrating the unit’s sensors. Chuck worked alongside Peanut’s team well into the night. For him, it was very much like in the beginning when they started out in the garage in Chicago. In the intervening decades much had changed with the remaining three of the original four. The loss of Riley had taken something out of the survivors, especially Christopher. The exuberance of youth, the wonder of traveling into space to the moon, and the realization that nothing was beyond them had evolved into a sober consideration of the realities of life in an uncertain future. He, Chuck and Peanut didn’t get together nearly as often as in decades past, but their love and affection had not diminished in the least. They had conquered space, they were the first to the moon, and their community was living out beyond the orbit of Mars. Now the colony was turning its sights toward extrasolar travel. With Peanut every bit the theoretical scientist as Christopher, it was only a matter of time before the problems of faster than light travel were conquered, spreading black men and women throughout the galaxy. It was an unbelievable saga; there was hatred, envy, anger, disgust, pride, disbelief, wonder and more permeating the consciousness of Americans when anyone considered what those black colonists had accomplished. No one was without opinion, without feeling about what American blacks managed to do, and right under their collective noses.
The colonists were living on the moon well before Neil Armstrong planted his footprints. As a matter of fact, a large hauler spacecraft was ghosting the fateful Apollo 13 mission when an explosion in the command module almost froze the three astronauts to death. As the mission limped back to Earth, a rescue crew from the colony was prepared to save the astronauts should their ship suffer a complete mechanical breakdown.
So much about the colonists was unknown on Earth other than their names. Both Lucius and Sydney were so careful in their screening that it wasn’t until around two thousand African Americans had immigrated to the moon that the FBI even had a hint the missing weren’t dead. And the authorities hadn’t noticed so many black citizens were missing until some civilian pointed out on a radio talk show that the FBI’s own crime statistics contained the raw data. But the missing blacks went under the radar for the FBI, and no one was the wiser until four decades after the disappearances began. The colony’s creator, after watching his father die as a young child because of the Veteran’s Administration neglect of wounds he suffered as a mechanic for the 332nd Fighter Group, the Tuskegee Airmen, realized that there was no real opportunity for change in America’s attitudes toward the Negro anywhere on the horizon. His school experiences and the disbelief he received when he aced his college board exams convinced him that the only way a black man could realize anything close to the American dream was without whites and their historically racist influence. But in all the colonists’ wildest imaginings prior to being let in on the secret, no one would have believed that a young black man would discover a counter intuitive principle in astrophysics that would lead to the control of gravitational force and the colony. His stubbornness and paranoia ensured that he kept control of his own work. Particularly, no white man was allowed to coopt his discovery, claiming it for his own, or to profit off of it via America’s embedded white privilege. As much as the colony appeared to be a paradise to those on Earth, it existed, thrived, and survived through its residents doing everything possible to secure their home, ensuring each successive generation would be better off than the last. One would have to look long and hard for any place on Earth where the same could be said.
Quarantine Page 7