Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  Tisix gestured agreement. “I think Proyerin is right. He looked at the motion picture of the end of Egalitarian Republic and he says he thinks the disperser was already burnt off—you know nothing on that ship was ever intended to be in the atmosphere, and a thin structure like that would have burned right off it, just like all the little struts and pods and antennae did. So when the zero-point energy laser kicked in, it probably sent a collated beam, not a dispersed one, at full power. It would have punched right through the sea instantly and made the rock on the seabed vaporize; the explosion was even worse than Krurix thought it would be.” He clutched himself tightly and added, “Anyway, there we were in orbit, getting any kind of a look at all about every fourteenth of a day, with practically no propellant. Proyerin was going insane—that was pretty rough treatment for an engine that was only about half-worked-on—and he was crawling all over it, swearing and complaining, even before he found out there was another lander he’d have to fly by telemetry, and that the orbit it had been kicked out into was high and elliptical and practically at right angles to ours. And Beremahm … Beremahm …”

  “Was sitting and crying,” Itenn finished for him. “It’s not her fault,” she added defensively. “You knew that she and the captain were lovers?” she asked me.

  “I was the captain’s assistant. I had to know where to find him, all the time,” I said. “Yes. And it had happened very suddenly … and that sudden feeling of weightlessness—she must have felt helpless—”

  Tisix gestured agreement. “I managed to think of something to do and I still felt helpless. I thought I was going to get blown up any instant, actually. And then for a while we thought we didn’t have propellant enough to make a successful reentry—we thought we were stuck up there for good, or that we might have to rendezvous and dock with the other lander to get back down, since it had somewhat more fuel. Fortunately we came up with two good ideas that just barely got us here—have you ever heard of ‘aerobraking’?”

  “Bouncing off the atmosphere to lose velocity? I studied it in officer training,” I said. “It’s how they did reentries in the early days of space exploration, centuries ago. And theoretically you can use it to conserve propellant. You mean you did that? And you just learned it from the library in the lander’s computer?”

  “Well, I spent half a day flying it in simulation,” Tisix said. “I wasn’t about to try to get it right the first time without some kind of practice. Proyerin sort of remembered that there was such a thing, and we looked it up in the computer, and there it was. But it wouldn’t have done any good if he hadn’t had a brilliant thought. He realized that the lander’s drinking water, and the water in the recycler, could be processed through the propellant generator to make hydrogen, same way we’re using the water down here to refill the tanks. And to get down to a workable velocity we only needed the hydrogen from nineteen units of water, and we had fourteen.”

  “You mean you had fourteen in the tank already, so you only needed to use five units of drinking water?”

  Tisix grinned, and Itenn did as well. “We really should let you find out from Proyerin,” Itenn said. “If we ever get back to Nisu, he’ll be bragging about this one to his engineer buddies for the rest of his life.”

  “We had fourteen units of water,” Tisix said. “Eight from the drinking water—it hadn’t been refilled. One from a unit I’d been using to clean up a mess at the time that the accident happened. Five from the wastewater system. We needed five more. And then it occurred to Proyerin that the processor could separate out the water and other hydrogen compounds from any fluid. So—” He held his arm up proudly, showing me the bandage; Itenn showed me hers as well.

  “Not bad flying, if I do say so myself,” he said. “A procedure I’d never done before, in a ship that was only supposed to aerobrake in an emergency … and I’d just lost more than a unit of blood. I’m just glad that the lander we were operating as a robot didn’t need my blood, too; it had more fuel to start with and a full wastewater tank, and we were able to direct a patch-through from where we were to get that processed.”

  I realized my mouth was hanging open and managed to stammer out that it was very good indeed. Before I had to think of anything else to say, Bepemm came into the little chamber where we had been talking. “Beremahm is suffering from exhaustion,” she said, “and plain old grief, which is going to be hitting all of us soon. The immediate cause of her symptoms, though, is a concussion from when she was thrown against the wall as the lander was ejected. From the look of her brain scan, she was hit hard enough to leave her severely disoriented and dazed for at least a short time, and then while she was still in the earliest phase of the concussion she took five gravities of acceleration. That would disorient and disable anyone. But I think the worst of it is shame. She’s had a perfect record and gone through a thousand emergencies before; she didn’t think she was a person who would have a breakdown at a critical moment.”

  “None of us thought so either,” Tisix said. “And none of us would have done any different from what she did, if we’d been hit in the head that hard.”

  “I’ve given her a sedative, and an IV to bring her blood sugar up. We’ll start her on antidepressants in about a halfday, but I want to keep her under for at least a full day, until we can be sure that she’s not going to go into a deep depression that we don’t have the equipment to deal with here. But I think if I do that—according to what the medical advisor program in the lander’s computer says—she has a pretty good chance for a full recovery.”

  Proyerin and Krurix had leaned in to hear the diagnosis as well, and Proyerin said, “Well, as ranking officer at the moment, I would love to be able to hand the job back to her. Let’s do exactly what you just said. Meanwhile I guess we try to get an inventory of people and resources, and get every gadget that we can working.”

  “Spoken like an engineer,” Krurix said, smiling.

  “Absolutely,” Proyerin agreed. “Making stuff work is something I understand, and I’d rather do what I understand.”

  Since we had the lander’s radio available, we could be fairly sure that the signals we were sending were getting through to Nisu, and that they at least knew we were here and what had happened to us—or rather they would know, in a bit over four years. That wasn’t any great consolation—it would be still more years before we got even a simple acknowledgment—but it was ever so slightly better than feeling that we were stranded forever.

  During the two days while we got things together and hoped Beremahm would recover, Proyerin was awake almost the whole time, digging things out of the palace and seeing if he could get them to work. Krurix shared in that work most of the time. As much as anyone could be under the circumstances, those two were happy, with so much to find, test, and fix. Several of the younger native Nisuans were enlisted as a search team to pick through the rubble and find anything salvageable that might have washed out of the palace and ended up in the mud of the city, or been carried off and dropped by Seteposians. There were plenty of small objects of all kinds, and because they had all been designed as field equipment, a surprising number of them still worked.

  The mucking out of the stone houses, and reroofing two of them, had consumed the energies of a large part of the Nisuans as well, under Tisix’s supervision. He confessed to me that since they had a much better idea than he did of how to use a wooden spade and a stone ax, whenever our few power tools weren’t called for his real function was to “stand around and make people feel like they should keep working.” Hunting parties found that their job was easy: a great deal of foliage had been destroyed, and animals coming down to the river to drink had little or no cover, so that we had almost unlimited food, as long as you didn’t mind eating nothing but roasted meat for every meal.

  Itenn took over sanitation and cleanup; as she said, she was supervising the only work that required fewer brains than the work Tisix was supervising. The parts of Real People Town that we didn’t salvage for our own us
e, or burn for fuel, went into great heaps that we set fire to with hand masers, in order to destroy all the dead animals and Seteposian corpses. Wild dogs were coming out of the hills to eat the abundant carrion in the valleys, and we wanted them to stay away from our camp.

  In the middle of all this, Bepemm and I, with Diehrenn and Weruz as assistants, ran around frantically counting, enumerating, and calculating, taking breaks only for Bepemm to look in on Beremahm, whose progress was rapid and encouraging. We wanted to at least have all the answers she could reasonably ask for; it was strange how the effort of getting those answers together, in such a short time, seemed to help us hold off the perception of just how dismal those answers really were.

  Beremahm was fine when Bepemm brought her out from under sedation two days later; like all of us she was extremely unhappy at being marooned for at least the next decade, and she woke up terribly hungry, but after three days of Bepemm’s putting her through every conceivable medical check, while she had nothing to do but read through the lander’s technical library, she finally said, “Enough of this. Absolutely enough of this. I may not be well, but if I am not, you aren’t going to find the cause, and the last three things you’ve checked me for, Bepemm, have been things that you couldn’t treat me for anyway. Let’s get to business.”

  We walked into the middle of what was left of Real People Town—not much, because so much had been burned or reused—past the heaps of stones that marked where the wall had been, and into one of the better stone huts. We had agreed that the Nisuans born on Setepos should elect four representatives, since it was clearly impossible for all of them to be part of the decision, so Diehrenn, Prirox, Osepok, and Zahmekoses were there waiting for us. “They had to elect representatives who spoke Nisuan,” Osepok explained, an amused grin playing across her face. “Weruz is too shy, and Otuz had only recently recovered consciousness. And besides, who else here has any understanding of what you’re going to talk about?”

  “And by pure accident,” Beremahm said, returning the grin, “it happened that exactly the ones I’d have appointed, if I were dictator, ended up as your representatives. Now that we have everyone together, let’s get started and figure out what’s what.”

  We spent a while going over the total resources available. The lander was actually in pretty good shape and had been fully refueled and provisioned; it could haul up to sixty of us at a time to anywhere on Setepos, so one possibility was to go to one of the areas that Seteposians had not yet reached. “If we go to the big island off the Hook, or better still to the ones that are south and east of Southland, it’s unlikely that either place will be reached for millennia, not until the Seteposians come up with ways of doing long-ocean voyaging. And there are a lot of smaller islands, some of which have wonderful climates. None of those places is likely to have any big predators or venomous animals, either,” I summarized. “We could get everyone there in four lander trips, with one additional trip to get all our stuff from here to there. With the micro-smelters on the landers, we could also make a certain amount of iron or other metals as needed.”

  “I think we can modify it to make glass as well,” Krurix said, “and we have chemical equipment to make some plastics. We’ve got an industrial plant for at least a while.”

  “How long?” Beremahm asked.

  “Well, that’s another problem,” Krurix said. “Each lander still has an almost full charge of antimatter—it uses almost none coming down or going up—and we can use them to give us electricity at max output for about five years. For that matter we could make more antimatter—the lander is set up to do it—but the process is horribly inefficient and you need the kind of power input that we used to have on Egalitarian Republic to do it in a timely way.”

  “Well,” I pointed out, “we can use the solar panels we found intact to give us enough electricity for our little colony, if we don’t insist on using electricity for everything. Why don’t we use power from them to make more antimatter?”

  “Because every bit they’ve got isn’t enough for the minimum energy to make antimatter,” Krurix said, “but anyway, there might be a solution to this. I just wanted to make sure the problem was on the table: we need a really large power source. Something on the order of a fusion reactor or a major hydropower project, if we want the lander to last until the rescue effort gets here.”

  “All right,” I said, “a big energy source is nearly a necessity. If we don’t have that, we won’t have a modern industrial capability after a couple of years, and should we be stranded for longer than we anticipate—or should we have an emergency while waiting—that could be a very serious problem. Bepemm, I think you have the biggest problem to discuss. Can you talk about that?”

  She sighed. “I really wish Dr. Lerimarsix were here. But I guess we’ll have to go with what I can determine. It looks to me like the terrible protein reaction disease that struck several of the Nisuans who were here for a long time is not at all far off for many of the Nisuans born here. Weruz was extremely close—she already had a few early undiagnosed symptoms—and Prirox and Diehrenn were so close to it that I doubt they’d have lasted out the year. Now, all of you are safe for the moment, because you’ve had the dialysis and you’re good for another twenty or thirty years, local. But if we assume the forty-fourth local year, give or take one, is about when it will strike, then we’re going to lose more than thirty Nisuans to the disease in the minimum time it takes for a rescue vessel to get here. That’s the number of undialyzed people more than thirty-four years old. But it’s clear that second-generation natives, probably due to exposure in the womb, form the toxins much faster—and so you can’t expect them to last as long. Even if they do, their birth cohorts are much bigger. So if the rescue is delayed even a few years, we could lose fifty, a hundred … who knows how many. The thirty or so oldest are merely the ones certain to die; there could easily be three times as many deaths.”

  “Out of less than two hundred and fifty,” Beremahm said. “All of us from Egalitarian Republic would live, of course—for another forty-four years, barring accidents—but what you’re saying is that if we end up as a permanently stranded colony here, the maximum lifespan will always be about forty-four of Setepos’s years. Or just about forty of ours. Our females will die with less than a third of their reproductive years available … this isn’t going to work well.”

  “Especially not because the toxins also produce fairly early sterility,” Bepemm said. “Even the Nim noticed that; ten years after puberty most of the Nisuans were sterile. We’d have to breed the way the Nim forced people to do: baby after baby as soon as puberty hits. Not a good way to live.”

  Beremahm sighed. “You spoke of some way out, Krurix?” she asked.

  I answered quickly, “Well, it was really Zahmekoses who made the suggestion,” and gestured for him to speak. Here, if anywhere, was where Beremahm might decide that we were all crazy.

  “We do have a source of Nisuan food,” he said. “At least there’s a good chance that we do. And remember the problem is caused by ingesting Seteposian proteins, even in minute quantities. So since we can’t do dialysis, the only way for us to all survive is to eat nothing but Nisuan food. So what I suggest is …” he drew a deep breath, his old voice cracking “… that we go up to Wahkopem Zomos, which is still in orbit—”

  “The ship’s farm!” Beremahm said. “That solves it, doesn’t it?”

  “Not quite,” Zahmekoses said. “Nisuan plants, animals, and tissue cultures are undoubtedly susceptible to the same kind of slow poisoning-by-immune-reaction as we are. Furthermore, if we raise them down here they’ll take up Seteposian proteins, too. So it would slow but not stop the disease, and there’s no guarantee that we can raise Nisuan food at all here on a long-term basis. We need a sterile environment in which we can build a much bigger sealed farm.”

  Beremahm groaned. “This gets worse and worse.”

  “Or better,” Krurix said. “Here’s the other part of it. Remember I said we n
eeded a big energy source, like a fusion reactor? Well, Proyerin and I were fiddling around, and we think we can make one, a fairly crude job. It won’t run on regular deuterium, unfortunately, that we could get here—but it will run on helium-3.”

  “And there’s a source of that on Setepos?”

  “Not right on Setepos,” Proyerin said, grinning.

  Beremahm looked around at the strange smiles in the room and said, “Well, now I know why Captain Baegess said the commanding officer is always the only person who doesn’t know what’s going on. All right, you’ve all come up with a way to solve this problem, and you were all afraid I would think it was too crazy, or perhaps too dangerous. Now if I admit that I’m desperate for a solution, would you please tell me what in the Creator’s name you’ve got in mind?”

  “Well,” I said, “we need a sterile environment with a lot of helium-3 around. And we suddenly realized that there’s a perfect place; something I remembered from the nuclear magnetic resonance map that our low-altitude scanning satellite made of the moon. Plenty of helium-3 because it’s been accumulating out of the solar wind since the moon cooled from magma. Right there on the surface waiting to be picked up. The solar panels would easily give you enough power to run an extractor and isotope separator, and then the fusion reactor would supply enough power to keep the lander recharged indefinitely. And with surplus power from all that …” I permitted myself to grin. “Well, the soil of the moon is a very low-grade aluminum ore, and there’s enough silica around that we can make glass as well, and most importantly, there’s a lot of water, ammonia, and carbon dioxide, deposited as ice in deep craters at the south pole. We can build a farm on the moon—and live there as well.”