The Blue People of Cloud Planet

by Brian Wolfenden

  ‘I cannot get any investigative print of the black mass; it is resisting infrared, X-ray and low frequency radiation. I can only see it, and it arrived at the treetops from the sea coast in less than half a minute!’

  ‘Gosh, the sea’s over 500 kilometres away,’ gasped Steve who paused as he worked out the maths, ‘that’s over 50,000 kilometres per hour! - how can it travel that fast!’

  ‘Also why was this attack so much more menacing and forceful than the previous one?’ Alison queried.

  AJ’s conclusion caused all the astronauts on LifeSeeker-1 deep concern, ‘The lander was trying to escape this time!’

  Then, as dawn approached and the cloud lightened, the black mass disappeared from below them as quickly as it had arrived. Communications were restored for just 1 hour before sunrise and the astronauts were relieved to hear that their colleagues were safe and well, but dismayed at the damage to ROL-1. Before contact was lost for the day, the lander astronauts said they would do a thorough examination of the damage to the rear engines and report back after sunset.

  Chapter 31

  Death in the Dwelling

  Zec-1 had adjusted the astronaut’s command seats so that they were horizontal. They had decided to wait for the dwelling to light up before attempting the extraction of the lander from the channel.

  The dwelling was its usual mess of huge leaves. The dome mimic then showed the scene behind and they jumped at the sight of one of the flying reptiles half in and half out of the large pool. It was a fearsome sight with its giant head and one huge scaly wing hanging down over the edge of the pool.

  ‘That wingspan must be nearly 4 metres,’ said Scott, ‘and look how thick the neck is, that creature must weigh a couple of tonnes – no wonder those last impacts swung the lander.’

  The camera at the rear of the lander then showed what had happened to the second reptile that had hit the lander forcefully just before touchdown. The creature was crushed down into the channel under the rear caterpillar track and hot water had backed up and flowed over its inert body.

  Meanwhile the blue females had emerged and gone about their business, seemingly oblivious as before to the carnage around them.

  Zec-1 then started the process of extracting the rear tracks from the channel. The first manoeuvre was to start rotating them under high power so the large ridged edges would cut into the clay. The right track turned easily but the left one had the grisly task of grinding through the body of the reptile. The water in the channel gushed red with a mixture of clay and blood.

  Once the two caterpillar tracks were sitting freely in the bottom of the channel, the legs front and rear were extended as far as possible lifting the lander so that the crushed engine cowls were now clear of the clay floor. Zec-1 now angled the rear tracks at 45 degrees and applied forward power to all four. The lander moved forward until the front edges of the rear tracks bit into the wall of the channel and started to grind an angled groove. The clay beneath the hard outer surface was quickly ground by the powerful rear tracks. Forward traction was now applied to the front, enabling the rear tracks to cut two 45 degree ramps in the clay. The lander slowly pulled itself out of the channel and Zec-1 levelled and turned it until it was, once again, facing the wreck of Pioneer 10 and in its original position.

  Olivia and Scott were relieved to be freed from the channel but concerned that the lander could be stranded in the dwelling. Meanwhile, outside, the blue females were busying themselves around the floor of the dwelling when Zec-1 interjected,

  ‘Warning! – reptile in large pool is starting to move!’

  The astronauts turned and gazed, open-mouthed, as the gigantic creature lifted its massive head and crawled to the edge of the pool. They could now see its huge body with powerful rear legs with extended claws. It used these to grab and tear a large leaf into ragged pieces and fed them piece by piece into its gaping mouth. The reptile was fully three and a half metres long and crawled from pool to pool. It gathered up further leaves and demolished them greedily on the way.

  ‘It must have been only stunned,’ Olivia observed, ‘and then the hot water revived it.’

  They had to crane their necks as the creature raised itself on all fours and jumped from pool to pool using the edge as a platform to launch itself into the air, while its huge wings flapped furiously. In the dome mimic display they watched as it touched ground momentarily behind the lander and then soared in an arc up over the platform and the first pool.

  It arced higher and higher, and then, like a moth trapped in a lightshade, started flying at the light sheath, turning at the last moment to avoid a collision. Now its flight was more erratic as it sought to escape from the blinding light. The creature panicked and careered back and forth across the dwelling, gradually losing height. During this drama the blue females carried large bundles of leaves underground, oblivious to the huge menace whizzing around them.

  ‘It’s trying to get out!’ shouted Scott, and then it disappeared low behind the lander and reappeared in front of the astronauts and headed for the space between the lift screw and the first pool.

  ‘On no!’ shrieked Olivia, as she realised that two of the blue females were coming up from below right in the path of the hurtling reptile.

  Time stood still for the two astronauts as, seemingly in slow motion, the reptile crashed into the two figures as it banked over the platform. One of the blue females took the full force of its right wing and it snapped her head back into an impossible angle. The other female was caught by the reptile’s left wing squarely in the midriff and her arms and legs shot out as she was carried, like a rag doll, into the air.

  ‘Oh my God!’ shrieked Olivia again, and she watched in horror as the flying reptile with its unwanted cargo flew straight at the light sheath. For a moment the creature and its hapless passenger seemed to merge with the wall of light bending it outwards. Then a blinding explosion of light occurred right in front of the astronauts’ position and then the light sheath closed and continued to shimmer as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Oh no,’ sobbed Olivia, ‘we brought those horrid things in here – it’s our fault those two females were killed!’

  ‘Olivia, that black menace above us caused this, we’re not responsible. Don’t blame yourself.’

  Whilst the astronauts were relieved that the lander had been extricated from the channel satisfactorily, they were both dejected that the sequence of events had directly resulted in the deaths of two of the inhabitants of Cloud Planet.

  They looked on sadly as the other blue females wrapped the broken and lifeless form on the platform and carried her to the channel where she floated past the damaged section and disappeared from view.

  ‘Olivia, did you notice that when they put her in the channel, the leaf seemed to shrink around her body?’

  But Olivia was too distraught to notice.

  Their misery was broken by Zec-1’s voice,

  ‘Command suit up for rear engine inspection!’

  ‘The cowls on the four main thruster engines of ROL 1 are 1 metre diameter at their narrowest section, 1 metre in length and of conical section. This spreads the exhaust gases for optimum control. Thirty, 5 centimetre bolts hold each cowl to the underside of the lander.’

  Scott directed his spacesuit cameras at the rear cowls – they were badly deformed from their impact with the clay ground and Zec-1’s conclusion was immediate,

  ‘Take off impossible with damage observed, cowls will need replacing.’

  ‘Well there’s spares and a special torque wrench on the starship 500 kilometres above us – but a fat lot of good that is!’ said Olivia dejectedly.

  ‘Nothing we can do until we talk to AJ later. Come on Olivia, let’s have another look underground.’

  They descended the lift screw and examined the huge pit that housed it.

  ‘There at the bottom you can see the shaft sticking out blocking the flow – it’s the same principle as the boat lift.’ Scott observed.

 
‘Look!’ Olivia pointed, ‘Behind the screw lift and under what looks like the inlet water channel are two narrower pits with shafts and overflows. What are they controlling?’

  ‘Zec-1 said something about the water flows being mixed to control temperature – must be something to do with that. The problem is we can’t get near enough to the inlet flows to see what’s happening.’

  They followed the ramps to the boat lift, where the craft was in its lower ‘arrival’ dock.

  ‘Look, it’s loaded with leaves and pods; they must be sending the food on to the next dwelling.’ Olivia commented.

  ‘Olivia, come here!’ Scott had moved to the upper dock and was directing his light into the mouth of the tunnel. ‘You said the water was white yesterday and you were right, but, let me see, yes it’s white because it’s full of tiny air bubbles. How odd!’

  He moved to the front of the platform and observed that water gushed into a large open channel. He imagined its source was at the front of the dwelling where it would have been fed from the upper canal. It turned through 90 degrees as it entered the wall of the pit below him and the channel became a closed box section.

  But Olivia was already kneeling over the edge of the platform and pointing downwards. Scott shouted for her to be careful.

  ‘Yes, look Scott,’ Olivia said excitedly, ‘there are thin channels cut into the top of the box section.’ She gingerly laid on her front and extended her arms over the edge of the platform which enabled her to reach the top of the box section. She put the palm of her spacesuit glove over the open slit. Surprisingly, she had to pull hard to release her hand!

  ‘Yes, yes, there’s suction there! This is the Venturi principle – remember from basic physics – you can create suction from high water flow in a tube passing an orifice leading to an open shaped tube in the T-section. The air is drawn into the water flow as bubbles. But why does the water need to be aerated?’ queried Olivia.

  ‘This tunnel travels 50 kilometres to the next dwelling and the water is being constantly aerated because the Blue People don’t just send their food in the boats – they must send themselves as well!’ Scott replied thoughtfully.

  Olivia looked aghast at the black mouth of the tunnel and shuddered, realising the implications,

  ‘No way!’

  ‘It stands to reason, they can’t travel above ground because it’s too cold and wet, so they travel at night while they sleep – how ingenious. And look at the mouth of the tunnel, Olivia, at the block of wood across the entrance. Remember, yesterday, when they pushed the boat into the upper lock, it moved forwards with the flow and stopped against it.’

  Olivia leaned precariously across the entrance and touched the black wood,

  ‘It’s floating, and you can push it down, why? - Oh, I’ve got it. They push it down from within the front of the boat and the flow takes the vessel over the block and into the tunnel. I can’t stop being amazed by the ingenuity and simplicity of these hydraulics.’

  But both astronauts were going to run out of superlatives before the end of the next day on Cloud Planet.

  Chapter 32

  Seren

  The video conference that evening was short because the black mass returned earlier giving them only a 30 minute window compared to 1 hour the previous day.

  AJ and the astronauts on LifeSeeker-1 had watched an edited version of the sad events leading to the deaths of the two blue females and were dismayed when they saw the damage to the rear cowls of the lander.

  ‘We need to review our options through the night,’ said AJ. ‘Meanwhile Zec-C had been analysing the light shafts in more detail. There is no ex...’

  Communications were lost at this point but there was plenty for Olivia and Scott to ponder on before they retired for the night.

  ‘I infer from Zec-C’s analysis that the size of the dwellings nearer the equator are larger than those currently visited. They are approximately 200 metres across, but at the equator they are 300 metres and there are four, so far, identified at a staggering 500 metres in size.

  ‘Furthermore, Zec-C has observed small shafts of light leaving and returning to the larger dwellings during the 2 hour period around this planet’s noon. There is, at this present moment, no explanation for this.’

  The following morning the black mass disappeared only 30 minutes before the dwelling was due to light up, giving precious little time for discussion. With takeoff definitely ruled out, they considered manoeuvring the lander out of the structure. ROL-1 was designed to drag itself up a 2 metre shelf but the height of the outer wall was beyond its capability. Alternatively they could get it up onto the screw lift platform and then over the wall but the gap between the outer wall and the upper canal was beyond the limit of the caterpillar tracks. At the second pool area the inner wall was less than 2 metres high but beyond the row of crystals the outer drop was impassable. They considered grinding their way out using the caterpillar tracks in a similar way as they had extracted themselves from the channel previously. This seemed a laborious and most risky approach because of the danger of the lander becoming trapped in the wall. The consequences if the dwelling lit up were too frightening to contemplate.

  AJ summarised and level-headedly concluded that time was on their side and they must all think more deeply. Then communications were again lost as the first diamonds ignited.

  Even though their plight seemed hopeless and the lander appeared trapped, Olivia and Scott sat back in their command seats and eagerly watched, for the fourth time, as the light lasers shot into the early morning cloud behind and around them until finally they were again completely enclosed in the laser sheath. The transition from the rain and dark of the night to the deep red shadows as the sun filled the dwelling, was, as ever, a thrilling event.

  Zec-1 had kept them informed about the departure of the boat the previous evening and an arrival earlier that morning. Whether this was the same craft could not be confirmed.

  The dwelling was its usual early day mess of leaves, stalks and pods, one of which had split in front of them and this contained a cluster of small seeds. They waited and saw the lift screw rise from the red clay followed by the appearance of the first of the remaining blue females.

  Except, this time, there were more than four.

  ‘Scott!’ cried Olivia, ‘Look there’s five, six, seven now eight in total. You’re right; the extra ones must have travelled overnight in the boat.’

  Suddenly Scott’s eyes were glued to the lift screw, ‘Olivia, Olivia, look!’ he almost choked, pointing towards the platform.

  The back of a head with shimmering curly golden blond hair was visible above the green leaf wrap. The form disappeared behind the screw and then appeared in silhouette as it stepped onto the platform.

  ‘Look at that golden hair! - The profile of the face – the texture of the skin is so smooth and it’s a lighter blue than the others.’ Olivia could not contain her excitement.

  The stunning new arrival took one step forward, stopped and then the head turned. The most piercing azure blue eyes looked directly, it seemed, into the lander. They could clearly see the creature in front of them, when Zec-1 enlarged the image of the beautiful face on the dome mimic.

  The eyes sparkled and seemed to penetrate Scott’s whole being and he let out an involuntary gasp.

  ‘She’s looking at us; she’s seen us. Look at those eyes.’

  Olivia sat, mouth agape, mesmerised by their depth and intensity.

  The new arrival looked forward and smoothly glided to the edge of the first pool and discarded the leaf wrap.

  ‘Oh my God!’, Scott stared at the lithe profile with smooth blue skin and firm breasts, ‘I’ve never seen anything quite like this on Earth let alone here.’

  The vision then stepped down into the first pool.

  ‘New arrival is 7,5 degrees, which is warmer than the other blue females at this point. The skin is perfectly smooth with no scales and the fingers and toes are not webbed. Eyes are blue with da
rk round pupils. Features and internal organs are humanoid and the brain is significantly larger than that of the blue females, but not quite as large as the average human. Apart from the reptilian characteristic of cold bloodedness, this lighter blue female appears human.’

  The other blue females went about their normal routines, but the astronauts’ eyes were focussed on the golden tresses that broke the surface of the first pool.

  As she stepped out of the pool she shook her head and water droplets flew from her hair, which now almost looked dry. Again she looked directly at them.

  ‘My! Whatever she treats her hair with would make a fortune back home!’ Olivia said enviously.