REAP 23

by J J Perry

  Savanna hoped for some signs of survival longer than did Cyrus but was disappointed. She didn’t mind being alone; in fact, she was glad to have a minute to herself, a luxury in the close quarters of mission preparation. She followed a few minutes later, amused that she would, for the third time, soon eat green cheese.

  Maricia Paulson, the Danish medic, and her Spanish husband, Raul Trujillo, lay on their backs earlier that morning in a disheveled array of sheets in bliss.

  “I’ll have to keep the noise down after we take off,” she said, brushing her striking blond hair out of her pale blue eyes, her words lilting with Danish musicality. She had not ventured away from Denmark much in her life. During a break in her medical training, she met Raul on holiday on Mallorca, a resort island off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean. They found they could only communicate in English. He was a handsome meteorologist for broadcast news, who was more interested in communication than weather. She was the quiet one, at least in public conversation.

  “The louder, the better,” he replied. He was the flamboyant guy until they married. Then he turned his passion entirely to her, becoming the devoted, focused, attentive slave and servant. To him and her, it was a perfect match. He was five centimeters taller. She made more money. He was strong. She was bright. Their talk of starting a family ended them up on this mission.

  “Oh, there’s probably a limit somewhere, a point of diminishing returns,” she yawned and stretched then raised lazily up on an elbow, looking at her husband with sated lust. “It could get noisy on the ship at night.”

  “What else are people going to do up there for entertainment?” He put a bronzed arm across her waist, a stark contrast with her pale skin. His speech included a subtle frontal lisp, a carryover of his Castilian.

  “I’ll have a lot of work to do. You’ll have free time while I’m grinding away in the medical bay.”

  “Poor baby.” He rolled over to look at the clock. He groaned. “I think it’s almost time for the liftoff banquet, hon.”

  “We just did that.” She laughed and admired his long face and angular features. “Jamaica me crazy.”

  “There you go, making fun of my accent. Let’s get up. I want to put the sheets in the hamper so the cleaning crew won’t see the wet spot.”

  “Spots, Raul. Plural. Leave them on the bed. I want housekeeping to know we launched several times before we left.”

  1.4

  Leila looked forward to this meal, one she had eaten twice before with other departing crews since arriving at Schaefer Station, on the lunar South Pole about six months earlier. She was beaming. Suresh, sitting next to her, was manipulating a handheld computer, immersed and unaware of the crowd and of the many pairs of eyes that spent far too much time on the face and figure of his goddess, luxurious black hair tumbling in giant curls and waves well below the tops of her shoulders. About a hundred eyes lusted; an equal number envied. All of them admired. She kept looking at the entrance, waiting for her mother-in-law to arrive.

  Raul’s eyes and hands were occupied. He stroked shoulder-length blond hair while he studied Maricia’s features, placing her image, texture, and smell deeper into his brain in the faith it would survive centuries of sleep, in hope it would not be erased by death.

  Leila laughed, tossing her head, “Raul! You are not subtle. Your eyes are undressing her in front of everyone!”

  “I’m just burning her into my long-term memory.”

  “‘Long term’ is an understatement. It’ll need to last for millennia,” said Chen.

  “I’m working on it.”

  “That’s so sweet,” whispered Leila. “Don’t you think that’s sweet?”

  “Sappy is more accurate,” replied Chen. “Way sappy. Besides, we have holo-repos of each of us, including smell. Much more accurate and not degradable like human memory.”

  “Chen! Don’t be so uncaring,” scolded Lucinda.

  “Don’t worry, Luc, I’m not going to let your technophile husband ruin Raul’s hot Latino sentiment.” Maricia stroked his cheek in return.

  Most of the squad of REAP 23 laughed and visited with other astronauts until the expensive dinner was served. They enjoyed imported red wine and great cheeses from Europe, beef brisket from Argentina, and vegetables grown in the unique lunar biospheres. Bread baked in reduced gravity was deliciously light. More than the food, they fed on the spirit emanating from young adults from all over the world, full of hope and idealism. Their crew, like all others, comprised of four couples with requisite skills and vigorous genetic, psychological, and health screening, who had worked together for two years. They were the residua of eighteen people initially assigned to REAP 23. Most of the others had been eliminated from the program. Four had been assigned to other teams. Of those, two were aboard 22, and two were new to Schaefer on REAP 24.

  The crowd consisted of the next crew, the booster vehicle squad, and all support and administrative staff. Everyone here was part of the Repopulation, Expansion, and Annexation Project (REAP), a global program commenced in recognition that Earth was eventually doomed and that mankind would be extinguished if they did not find another place to live. While the certain time of destruction was more than a billion or more years in the future, when the sun would begin its death process, the time scale to expand to another planet with a younger sun was daunting. Twenty-two ships had been sent in various directions to solar systems that appeared to have habitable planets. There was funding for twenty-five missions. Mission 23 was aimed at the farthest system technically possible, five thousand light-years away, a mere 5 percent of the diameter of the galaxy.

  Dozens of raucous conversations echoed around the hall. “May I have your attention!” followed stentorian tapping on the microphone. Gen. Cecil McBain stood on a small dais and flicked obnoxiously again to confirm the mike was working. “Ladies, Gentlemen, and the rest of you.” There were a few polite chuckles from the sycophants in the audience. “I hope you are enjoying the meal. It certainly sounds like it.” Scattered laughter was repeated as the din of conversations receded. “As you know, every six months or so for the past eleven years, we have enjoyed this feast to honor the departing astronauts. Today we are here to send off REAP 23, who will launch in just a few hours. Twenty-Three, please stand up.” The bunch rose to their feet. Applause filled the hall, as did shouts, whistles, and hurrahs. They waved and pumped their fists in return. Three of the four couples had one arm around each other, the other raised. Suresh put his computer down and nodded with a polite half smile, while Leila Nguyen just looked delicious, her smile gathering the bulk of attention and gratuitous close-ups transmitted to Earth. This went on for almost one full minute.

  During the applause, a uniformed woman, plump and young, entered the hall and made her way to the table where Dr. Suresh Parambi stood. Leila watched as she approached, her smile fading almost imperceptibly.

  The audience sat as the general continued, looking into one of several cameras. “The few of us here and the millions on the planet who join us by conference all know pretty much what I am going to say.”

  “Dr. Parambi, sir,” the woman said in a low voice. Her hair was stretched back, accenting her red puffy cheeks.

  He looked at her without a verbal response.

  “Sir, I have some news. Bad news. There—”

  “You are interfering with this program, young lady,” he curtly interrupted.

  “It’s about your mother, sir.” He turned his attention back to McBain.

  “There are about one hundred million solar systems in our galaxy, most of which are in the inner portion, where radiation causes genetic instability. Less than 1 percent of the system is within our reach, not half a million stars. Among these, astronomers have identified twenty-five planets or moons among these stars that have characteristics of liquid water and an atmosphere containing oxygen and nitrogen.”

  “Sir, there h
as been an accident. Please come with me.”

  “Young woman, you are discourteous. Please leave, or I will summon security.”

  “I am security, sir.”

  “I am Mrs. Parambi, ma’am,” Leila interjected, placing a hand on the uniformed arm. “Let’s move away from the table.” Leila walked away to the edge of the room with the embarrassed girl, face growing redder with each heartbeat. “What’s wrong, Lieutenant?”

  “The rocket carrying Dr. Parambi’s mother crashed nearby an hour ago before landing. No one survived.”

  “Oh my god! Are you certain?”

  “Yes, ma’am. No survivors.” She lifted a small tablet and tapped it a few times. “Is this your mother-in-law?”

  It was a picture of an elderly Indian woman, smudges of soot across her cheeks and dark-red blood from her graying hair framing her face. “Oh, it is.” Leila put both hands over her nose and mouth and breathed deeply a few times.

  General McBain’s speech pattern was loud, short, clipped, and precise, characteristic of his demeanor. The volume made it necessary to raise their voices almost to the point of yelling. Leila bent in to the ear of the guard. “Can I have this?” She pointed at the image.

  “I can beam it to your device,” she hollered as she nodded to a black object hanging from her belt.

  “Of course, yes.” She flipped the handheld out and within seconds had the photograph on her screen. “I’ll tell Dr. Parambi. Thank you. Will you wait at the entrance for a few minutes?”

  “Yes, I’ll be happy to.”

  Leila returned to her seat. Savanna was looking over her notes, not paying full attention to the speech until McBain said, “At this point, we traditionally give the departing crew a chance to be heard.” The general with his familiar false smile, the look of anticipation mixed with concern over decorum, looked toward the crew. “What have you planned?”

  Savanna stood and walked to the podium, shook the general’s hand and then gave him a hug. She then noisily adjusted the microphone to her height. “The tradition has been to allow the departing souls wide latitude in saying farewell. In the past, we have seen skits, both profane and deeply moving.”

  “Suresh,” Leila whispered into his ear. He turned. She had the image of his dead mother on screen in her lap.

  “What?” he whispered back with irritation.

  “. . . raising money for REAP. Our team decided on a fertility ritual with loud drums and wild dancing, but the general turned us down. Why? He knew he could not follow a mating dance starring our very own Leila Nyguen.” She pointed to the well-known beauty. The boisterous whistles, cheers, and catcalls forced Leila to stand and bow, her emotional conflict appearing as embarrassment, increasing the thunderous din. “Besides, what could REAP 24 do to compete with that? General McBain didn’t want the previous crews to be upstaged. Not that they would ever know. It’s a legacy thing. So, in a selfless gesture, we decided to put on the worst program of all crews, a speech from a French Belgian farm girl with no talent whatsoever. I will use up less than my allotted fifteen minutes of undeserved fame.”

  Leila sat down. “Your mother’s transport crashed. That’s why she is not here.”

  “I did not want her to come anyway.”

  “She died in the crash, Suresh.” She held up the image where he could see it. He looked at it for a second.

  “She was near death anyway. At least it was quick.” He turned back to Savanna’s speech.

  “As general McBain said, our task as with each REAP mission is to copulate—I’m sorry, populate a so-called M class planet then send a signal of our fuccess or sailure.” Savanna paused appropriately to let the transpositions sink in then as laughter punctuated her dialogue. “However, I want to address the mital vission of you that remain, which is equally important.”

  “You are pathetic.” Leila sat for a moment then walked away, seething disgust never reaching her face. The other crew members looked at her with a mixture of curiosity and irritation as she left the hall with the young lieutenant.

  “Looking at your uncertain future, our little shocket rip will be a party in comparison. Eight of us up there yucking it up, having fun, sleeping in. We’ll get along without narcissists, murder, theft, or disputes, religious, social, or political, without other catastrophic dysfunctions that have plagued mankind since the teginning of bime. All we have to do is get knocked up and land the damn plane in paradise. It’s just that easy.” The crowd laughed, engaged by the monologue.

  Savanna kept her serious performance face as applause and cheers again filled the small hall and thousands of rooms over the planet below. Maricia looked at Lucinda and said, “She did good.” She looked at Raul and repeated it. Neither could hear her but understood what she said.

  “She did well,” Raul almost shouted in Maricia’s ear.

  “Thank you for correcting my English.”

  “What did you say?” Raul shouted.

  “What’s up with Leila?”

  2.0

  LAUNCH DAY

  Century-old Schaefer Station sprawled a pole of the moon to get sunlight on at least half of the arrays of solar panels throughout the monthlong day. The roof was about thirty meters below the surface. Four widely spaced giant terraria provided fruits and vegetables. Liquid circulated between them and through the domes to maintain stable interior temperature and protection from radiation. The reduced lunar gravity enabled such engineering.

  The launch site was twelve kilometers away from the living zone and below the surface. Four hours after dinner, the crew of eight left their quarters located on a giant turntable, which provided centrifugal force to simulate gravity close to that of home. The underground shuttle carried them to the launch site.

  “What’s the forecast?” meteorologist Raul asked with a smirk.

  “Solar flares with a slight chance of meteorites,” responded Savanna with a laugh.

  Chen looked at his handheld. “Looks like we’re wasting our time. The computer forgot to initiate launch prep.”

  “Yeah,” Lucinda said. “And the Exxon guy didn’t fill up the tank. Damn.”

  More gallows humor and inane chatter relieved tension as they navigated the last four hundred meters of the tunnel with multiple turns, ports, and blast doors that slowed progress.

  Entering Engineering with its color-coded gray motif on the first floor through a small door, they walked up two flights to the tan-colored quarter deck where they placed the suits in lockers and secured their last personal items. Pilot, copilot, and commander climbed to command and control on the seventh level as the other peeled off to their respective stations. They had a narrow window for launch, since they had to rendezvous with the rapidly moving Long Burn Stage.

  Ninety minutes later, precisely on schedule, the engine burn was started. Through the windows at Schaeffer Station, eyes and cameras viewed the tip of the rocket as it began to rise above the surface of the moon. The full ship emerged from the shaft. The light from the launch was also faintly visible to curious telescopists from almost half a million kilometers away. This was the last time any family members would ever see anything but recordings of their loved ones on REAP 23.

  Their seven-section crew module, with D-shaped floors, was attached to a rocket called a tugboat. It had a separate, small crew. For almost thirty minutes, they moved at three times gravitational acceleration, 3 g, before they achieved at a speed of forty kilometers per second and in perfect closing angle with the enormous Long Burn Stage. The engine was cut, and the crew was weightless for the next twenty-four hours.

  The next day as they coasted close to the rendezvous with the engine that would carry them out of the solar system, trio of distant but expected explosions and hard shudders was followed by “Separation successful,” Chen announced so all aboard the crew module and the tug could hear.

  “Look at the size of that ship!�
� Maricia spoke as six of the crew gathered in CAC looked at the screen that showed the tug and a part of the LBS in the same moving image.

  LBS rockets were all manufactured in weightless space in a process that took ten years. Maricia recalled her surprise on learning this. Her Danish medical education did not include astro-engineering. There was no other way to assemble vehicles of this size. Each was custom built for the length of the journey. On screen was the largest ever built. It had enough mass to propel REAP 23 for eight months of 1 g acceleration, eight months of deceleration, and six months of intermittent use to maintain a velocity of 0.7 c, the technical abbreviation for seven-tenths the speed of light.

  “It needs an enormous amount of matter to fire for almost two years.” McBain had explained on the day they arrived at Schaeffer months ago. “It’s about nine months to achieve 0.7 c and the same to slow down. It may need to fire up every so often for course corrections, loss of speed, and so on. The engine consists of particle accelerators, which shoot matter at near the speed of light from the exhaust port. The shell is dense, to protect against thousands of collisions with dust-sized specks. Subatomic alpha and beta particles that are most dense near the sun and become sparse deeper in space would provide little or no resistance until they approached the target speed. Striking an object as small as an orange traveling in the wrong direction would end the mission, folks. You need to be vigilant out there.”

  “The tug is a ladybug on an elephant,” Savanna said as they monitored its attachment to a secondary dock site toward the rear of the LBS to facilitate docking the two craft. The crew module at this point of the journey had no rockets for propulsion. There was an auxiliary rocket pack that would be used at the end of the mission that was stored in the Long Burn Stage. The REAP 23 stage docked two hundred meters from the tip of the torch, as it was called. This entire complex was coasting in a highly eccentric elliptical orbit. After required additional checks, both the LBS and the tug engines fired up to lift REAP 23 out of orbit. Twenty-two hours later, the tug disengaged. It would jettison its disposable booster, destined to spiral into the sun. The craft would then return to get new personnel, fuel, and supplies for REAP 24. REAP 1 to 23 were now speeding in different directions, each alone in the galaxy.