Transport 2_The Flood

by Phillip P. Peterson

  Christian Holbrook followed him into the sphere a few steps behind. “I still get goose bumps when I climb into this thing. Even after all these years.”

  “Well, we haven’t used the transporter for almost fifteen years.”

  “Yup, when we destroyed the sphere on Mars. And I keep asking myself if that was really such a good idea.”

  “We can’t change it now,” said Russell crossly.

  Russell could feel the familiar pressure in his head, not unlike a headache. At the time, the scientists had thought it was a simple side effect of the magnetic fields that passed through the transporter. Then Russell had found out that in fact it was the device’s artificial intelligence, trying to make contact by a kind of telepathy. After Russell had put himself into a meditative trance, he had succeeded in making initial contact, and gradually they had discovered the story behind the alien artifact. He hoped that the artificial intelligence would still talk to him.

  “I’ll start now,” he said to Christian.

  “Yes, okay.” The astronaut hopped uneasily from one leg to the other. “We should have brought along two folding chairs.”

  Russell shrugged and sat down on the curved floor. Then he closed his eyes and began to meditate. He suppressed all thoughts until his mind was empty and all he could feel was the pressure in his head. Then he tried to make contact. He whispered so that Holbrook could hear the conversation.

  “Can you hear me? Are you there?”

  The answer came right away.

  Yes, I can hear you.

  It wasn’t so much as if someone else had answered his question but rather as if he had had the thought himself. It felt almost schizophrenic. Like a mental disorder which caused him to wrestle with his own thoughts.

  He quietly conveyed the answer to Holbrook.

  “How are you, buddy?”

  The sphere did not answer his question.

  “I’m looking for another habitable planet.”

  Define habitable!

  I’m looking for a planet with a similar environment to Earth’s.”

  I don’t know a planet called Earth.

  Russell took a deep breath. How could he explain to the sphere what he was looking for?

  “I’m looking for a planet with similar environmental conditions to this planet.”

  A galaxy appeared in his mind’s eye. Billions of points of light blurred into a spiral-shaped cloud, until Russell could make out the Milky Way. Gradually the points faded, but ten thousand still remained. How was he supposed to select from all these?

  “I need a planet with plants that humans can eat.”

  The data for this selection are insufficient. There is no information about the compatibility of plants for specific species.

  “Damn! Show me the habitable planet closest to this one.”

  An image appeared in Russell’s mind. It was of a desert of golden sand, with barren, craggy mountains rising high into the sky. The sky was blue, but that was the only friendly part of the picture.

  “Show me another planet. I need one with plants and animals that eat only plants. Without beasts of prey that are a danger to humans. And no extreme seasons or weather conditions.”

  A new image appeared. Russell saw a black sphere lying in lush, green grass with a few trees and bushes. In the background he could see high mountains that rose up into a blue sky.

  This planet is a hundred and twenty light years away. Average temperature seventy-seven degrees, sixty-eight degrees at night. Duration of days twenty-two hours and eight minutes. Gravity zero-comma-nine-five G. Atmosphere eighty percent nitrogen, nineteen percent oxygen, one percent argon.

  Russell opened his eyes and passed on the data to Christian.

  “Doesn’t sound too bad,” said the astronaut.

  “Shall we try it?”

  “Why not?”

  Russell took the retractable ladder that they had brought with them from Eridu, and climbed up the steps to the inner sphere. The straps of the black backpack dug into his shoulders. He wheezed heavily and coughed.

  “That doesn’t sound good at all,” murmured Holbrook, who despite carrying his own kitbag, climbed the steps with ease.

  Russell was silent until he reached the little platform from where they could enter the sphere.

  “Perhaps somebody else should make the trip with me?” offered Christian.

  Russell grunted. “I’m fine.” He was well aware how unrealistic that sounded.

  “Didn’t you speak to Lindwall yesterday? What did he say?”

  “What’s he supposed to say?” asked Russell. “I’m finding it harder to breathe from one day to the next, and there are moments when I can only stay upright using stimulants. The damn cancer is spreading like a wildfire. In two weeks it’ll be hard for me to stand up at all, in four weeks I’ll need oxygen if I don’t want to suffocate. There’s a bottle under my bed, and last night I almost used it. In two months, you’ll all be standing around a pretty little grave and listening to Marlene making a speech in which she’ll tell everyone what a nice guy I was, while at least half of the colony will be thinking the opposite.”

  “I’m sorry,” replied Christian. He put his hand on Russell’s shoulder.

  “It’s okay. Sometimes I manage to forget that I’m sick until someone asks me about it again.”

  “I won’t ask anymore.”

  “Good.” Russell entered the inner sphere. He laid the ladder flat on the floor and took off his backpack. Holbrook closed the opening and went over to the transporter’s control column. He pointed at a black field on which a code was already visible. “Is that our destination?”

  Russell nodded. “Yes, I told the intelligence to pre-select the destination for us.”

  Holbrook shuddered. “Even knowing that the destination has a friendly environment, it’s still a horrible feeling to be transported. To be beamed across light years in the blink of an eye surpasses my powers of imagination. Particularly since we don’t know how this thing works.”

  “I used to be afraid of flying,” said Russell. “I especially hated taking off. And once we were up in the air, I would look out of the window and wonder how long it would take to fall back down to Earth. Eventually, I found a solution to my fear—it works here, too.”

  “And that is?”

  “I simply don’t think about it.” Without flinching, Russell pressed on the illuminated field below the code.

  There was a slight, hardly discernable jolt as the gravity changed. As if an elevator had started.

  “You see. There already.” Russell smiled. “And much faster than in an airplane.”

  His friend shrugged and opened the entrance to the inner sphere. “Can you pass me the ladder?”

  They climbed down and opened the outer wall of the sphere.

  The air was warm, dry and pleasant. He stepped outside and looked around, his right hand hovering over his holster. You could never be sure. . . .

  An orange sun stood high above them. The deep-blue sky was dotted with little white clouds that drifted slowly toward the horizon. A light wind ruffled Russell’s hair. The sphere was surrounded by grassy knolls and the occasional tree—just as the intelligence of the transporter had shown him. Fruit was hanging from some of the trees. To his left, a river meandered through a valley before disappearing into a forest.

  “Looks nice,” said Russell.

  “Yes,” agreed Christian Holbrook. “Reminds me of the orchards in New Hampshire or even more so in Europe. England, or northern France maybe. If it weren’t for the orange sun, you might think you were on Earth.”

  “The trees don’t look at all strange. That one over there with the red fruit looks like an apple tree. There are conifers in the forest over there. No mile-high giant redwoods or other exotic varieties.”

  “We should have taken Jenny with us.”

  “Yes, she would have had something to say about this. Even on New California she was surprised how the physiology of the plants and t
rees was so similar to on Earth.”

  “Apart from the fact that on Earth there aren’t any wotans or other acid-spitting beasts,” said Christian.

  “Wrong,” said Russell. “Ever heard of ants? What do they squirt?”

  “Ant acid.” The astronaut nodded. “One point for you. But they’re a tad smaller than wotans or greyhounds.”

  “That’s true. But it seems as if all Earth-like planets went through a similar development.”

  “Jenny said the same. At least, that similar environments inevitably lead to carbon-based life forms with a cytochemistry similar to on Earth. The differences are in the details. Shame that she can’t return to Earth. With the results of her research she would win the Nobel Prize in Exobiology!”

  Russell grinned. “We can offer an alternative prize. I think there are a few people in the colony who deserve one.”

  Christian nodded and chuckled. “Ernie would get the Golden Combat Boot for being the toughest soldier.”

  Russell chuckled. “And Doc Lindwall the Glass Ashtray for twenty years as an involuntary non-smoker.”

  “Dr. Cashmore told me that a while ago the doc asked him for some chemical—I can’t remember the name of it anymore. Some awful stuff that’s used for chemical weapons. When he asked him what he wanted it for, the doc beat abound the bush for a while and then admitted that he wanted to try and synthesize nicotine out of it.”

  “And?”

  “Cashmore chased him out of the lab and since then has been regularly double-locking his chemical supplies.”

  Russell laughed. “Luckily, the doc has his own drugstore. It wouldn’t surprise me if he created something stimulating out of it from time to time. That’s probably also why he’s so stingy about handing out medication.”

  “Or he’s just trying to make our supplies last as long as possible. We won’t be able to produce a lot of it once it’s used up. And we don’t even have some stuff that we urgently need.”

  “Chemotherapeutics for example,” said Russell bitterly. Then I might at least stand a chance and wouldn’t have to die a miserable death! Now he had come back round to the subject after all.

  Christian was silent.

  Russell tried to shake off his negative thoughts. “Let’s get our samples.” He opened his backpack, took out a specimen container and scooped in some earth. Together they checked out the area, took samples of plants, fruit, and water from the river, and measured the natural background radiation.

  They approached the conifer woodland, when Christian suddenly pricked up his ears. He turned around, and his eyes widened. Russell turned around, too.

  An animal was standing no more than ten feet behind them and staring in their direction. Russell reached for his pistol and released the safety catch.

  “It looks harmless,” whispered Holbrook. The creature resembled a horse. It was a little bigger than a pony, with brown fur, a slightly shorter head and smooth tail. It lowered its head and snorted.

  Obviously it was neither shy nor in any way aggressive. Its legs seemed powerful, but at the same time graceful. Its big ears were turned in their direction.

  “It’s standing between us and the transporter,” said Russell quietly.

  “I don’t think we need to worry,” said Holbrook, and walked slowly toward the animal.

  “Don’t!” whispered Russell. “Who knows what it’ll do.”

  The creature made no sign of running away or attacking as Holbrook approached it. Russell felt uneasy. He pointed his pistol at the creature, ready to react quickly if necessary.

  The astronaut slowly reached out a hand.

  “Christian! For God’s sake!” Russell hissed.

  The animal closed its eyes as Christian gently stroked its head. Only now did Russell notice that his friend was talking softly to the horse. It opened its eyes again and sniffed at Holbrook’s chest. Holbrook turned round to look at Russell triumphantly. After a while, Russell put the gun back in its holster and went over to the horse, but kept at a distance of over an arms length.

  “What a lovely boy!” said Christian.

  “Until it bites off your arm and has it for supper,” said Russell drily.

  “It’s completely tame. Like the horses on my uncle’s ranch. When I was young I used to spend my holidays there. In the afternoons, we often went out for a ride.” He turned away from the horse and gave Russell a serious glance. “It should be possible to domesticate them without any problem. Imagine—if we had horses, we could use them for transportation or working the fields. We wouldn’t be reliant on a couple of jeeps for everything.”

  “Seems to be paradise,” grumbled Russell. In his opinion, his friend was getting excited about this world too soon. After all, they’d only seen a tiny part of it. They couldn’t tell yet whether the soil was suitable for growing plant species from Earth, or whether the fruit on the trees was edible and the water drinkable.

  “I’m sure we’ll find more animals here. Maybe there are also animals similar to cows or pigs. Something we can eat. I would so love to eat a steak again.”

  Russell grinned. He had nothing against that idea, either. “Maybe this guy here would taste good barbecued.”

  Holbrook looked at him sharply, grinned, and carried on stroking the horse creature. “Good boy! We won’t be barbecuing you. You’re much too sweet for that.”

  As if the animal had understood that they were talking about him in relation to food, he turned round suddenly and trotted off. Or perhaps he had just grown bored of the encounter.

  “In any case, the animal wasn’t afraid of us. And that suggests that there isn’t much here that it has to be afraid of,” said Holbrook.

  “The artificial intelligence of the transporter seemed to suggest that there weren’t any beasts of prey here. At least none that could endanger humans.”

  “Only here in the immediate surroundings or on the entire planet? How could it even know that?”

  “No idea.”

  “I must say, I like it here. If the test results are positive, I’d say we’ve found a refuge.”

  Russell nodded. “At least until the flood is over. You don’t want to pack up everything and move here?”

  Holbrook looked at him and shrugged. “It would mean starting from scratch on a new planet and setting up a new colony.” He hesitated. “On the other hand . . .”

  “On the other hand what?”

  “Well, in a way this planet is only three miles away from Eridu. All we have to do is go to the transporter. An hour’s journey and you’re here. We could live on both planets at the same time.”

  Russell nodded. His friend was right. “Perhaps we made a big mistake.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After we moved to New California, we only used the transporter to destroy the other spheres in the galaxy. For fifteen years we forgot about it almost entirely.”

  “Suppressed it, I would say. I reckon we just didn’t want to see the thing anymore, after so many people died using it.”

  Russell nodded. “You’re right. We were constantly complaining that we didn’t have any livestock, that we didn’t have more choice of food. And all that time, all the other habitable planets in the galaxy were just a stone’s throw away. We didn’t even go to the transporter and communicate with it. But I think we just didn’t want to have any more to do with it.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Only now that the colony is in serious danger are we turning back to the alien technology. You can’t describe our behavior as particularly logical.”

  “What does it have to do with logic?” asked Holbrook.

  “We destroyed the spheres in the solar system so that the people of Earth don’t destroy themselves.”

  “Yeah, and? I don’t get it.”

  “But we left the transporter lying around for our own kids. At some point, they or their descendants will also start to play around with the thing, even if it takes a few generations. If we’d followed our idea throu
gh to the end, we would have destroyed the transporter on New California, too.”

  Holbrook remained silent as they traipsed back to the transporter with their backpacks full of specimens.

  “Well, for now, we can be glad. Escaping through the transporter might be our last chance.”

  Chapter 27

  “You wanted to speak with me?” asked Marlene, after she had pulled closed the door to the lab.

  The dismantled atomic bomb was still lying in the middle of the room. Ty had now taken it apart completely, and the two halves of the plutonium core lay in plastic bowls. The initiator lay in a little black container. Dr. Dressel stood beside them, red-faced.

  “Yes,” said Ty. “We have another suggestion for how we could close the pass.”

  Marlene listened attentively. Perhaps the men really had come up with a feasible idea. Then they wouldn’t have to evacuate. “Have you found a way of repairing the bomb?”

  Dr. Dressel shook his head. “No. They’re both dead. The explosive has decomposed. In principle—”

  Ty interrupted him: “But would it be possible to take the cores of both bombs and construct a new one out of them?” He grinned, as if awaiting applause.

  Marlene looked back and forth between the physicist and the weapons expert and raised her eyebrows. “Gentlemen, what am I to make of this? First you say the bombs don’t work anymore because important components no longer work, and now you’re saying you want to build a new bomb? I think you need to give me a little more information before I can respond.”

  Ty’s grin faded and after a moment he nodded. “Of course we can’t build a bomb that works in the usual way, in other words, one that’s detonated with an explosive, because we don’t have a suitable explosive. And even if we did, we wouldn’t be able to position it around the core with the necessary precision to produce a symmetrical shockwave for the detonation. So I thought that we could initiate the chain reaction the same way it’s done with uranium bombs, by fusing two subcritical masses into a critical one.” With a gloved hand, he took out one half of the bomb core and laid it on the other, so that they formed a silver egg. “The plutonium of the bomb is sub-critical in this form, until it’s turned into the right form by the detonation of the explosive mass.”