Warp speed

CHAPTER 22

It was going to take a while to figure out the tricks of interstellar navigation. We decided to start small and take baby steps out of the solar system. We warped to Mars in about two and a half minutes. We had christened our little warpship the U.S.S. Einstein. Tabitha and Margie were at the controls. Jim and I were in charge of celestial navigation. Rebecca and Sara were watching the power plant and warp core. Al and Anne Marie were in charge of general mission logistics. We entered into an orbit around Mars and started looking for interesting things. We landed in Cydonia. There were no pyramids to be found anywhere. We found no face either. I was always hoping there would be something.

We traversed several canals and headed to the Martian North Pole. Near where the ice caps met the desert, we took a few core samples. I never noticed any living creatures crawling around. It's possible that there might be some microbes in the core samples. When we had completed checkout of our exploration capabilities, we would come back to Mars and hang out a while. This time was more of a shakedown flight. We did hit the list of experiments and observations that a lot of planetary scientists had been writing about for decades.

We started near the equator then flew southwest to Ophir Chasma and back around east to Juventae Chasma. We saw all sorts of slope and bedrock material, cratered plateaus, and degraded craters. Then we turned northward toward the northern plains, Kasei Vallis, and the Viking I landing site. We finally sat down on the peak of Olympus Mons.

We hadn't developed individual warp fields yet. In fact, we were several years from that if at all, so we had to steal about ten new SAFER EMUs from NASA. We had our Earthside black bag connection take care of the paper work. NASA never knew that they had the spacesuits to begin with. We sat up a group in the Research and Development Dome back on Moon Base 1 to reverse-engineer the EMUs, redesign them, and make them more mobile and useful. That would take a year or so also.

At any rate, we suited up, cycled through the airlock with a lights-off lights-on maneuver, and descended the loading ramp of the Einstein. Once we had set foot on the Martian surface, Tabitha and Margie set up an American flag. The view from Olympus Mons was incredible. Sara scratched into a rock with a screwdriver "Sara Tibbs was here." Then she passed it around and we each took turns. Jim signed it last and dated it.

This wasn't a science mission. This was a technology demonstration mission. We had proven we could fly about four times the speed of light and navigate to a specific point. We had proven we could determine where we were once we dropped out of warp. We then demonstrated that we could locate and land on a planet and conduct EVAs. It was time to head back home. Tabitha corralled us back into the Einstein and we began the liftoff checklists.

"Ramp up?" Tabitha asked.

"Check." Margie replied.

"Everybody on board?"

"Check."

"Okay, liftoff."

"Check."

Not much of a checklist. The warpships made spacetravel almost as easy as a Sunday drive, as long as there were no technical difficulties. This time we stressed the ECCs up to three percent and shaved another minute and thirty-seven seconds off the trip. It took about twenty-three seconds in warp to travel back to the Moon. The average speed was about twenty-four times the speed of light.

Tabitha brought us into the spaceport's waiting zone, which was just outside the spaceport warp field. The spaceport's field is always set to oscillate on and off at a kilohertz or so. She simply flew Einstein through it when it was in the off position—of course, that was done in fractions of a second via a flight control computer and was transparent to her. We debarked and transferred the samples and EVA suits to a quarantined lab for analysis and cleanup, respectively.

Analysis of Einstein showed that it was in tip-top condition. The space travel at twenty-four times the speed of light had had no ill effect on it. It was a good ship. We prepared it for our next flight. This time we planned to visit every planet in the outer solar system and a few Kuiper Belt objects to boot.

Our flight trajectory was designed as multiple warps. The first warp would be straight to Jupiter space. We clocked out at about thirty times the speed of light. I'm here to tell you that Jupiter is beautiful! We did a very fast orbit around it so we could look at the giant red spot. Absolutely amazing. A few times, we actually turned off the warp field so we could see it with our own eyes for a few seconds. Then we clicked the field back on and looked through the viewscreen. We wanted closer looks at the moons, and the radiation from Jupiter was a bit more than we wanted to deal with. After all, both Tabitha and 'Becca were about five weeks or so pregnant. Oh, I guess I forgot to mention that. It would appear that they are having a race to see who can have the first baby in space. We wanted to attempt our first interstellar jump before they got too uncomfortable and big for space travel. The EMUs aren't designed to accommodate a woman in her third trimester. And both Tabitha and 'Becca said that we're not setting foot on an alien world without them.

We mostly wanted to see Europa. It supposedly had a very deep ice coating along with a water ocean underneath the ice. We pushed Einstein through the thick layer of ice on Europa's surface. The ECCs operated at only two percent to do this. At about ninety-four kilometers, the stresses on the warp field stopped and we could tell that we had broken through to a water ocean. The hole that we had just made through the ice immediately froze shut above us. We slowly panned around and illuminated the dark ocean with the outside lights, which were set to oscillate opposite the outer warp field. Near what seemed to be the bottom of the Europan ocean we found a lava flow. There was a lot of particle debris floating and drifting in the water but we couldn't tell if it was alive or not. A larger piece of the floating material seemed to alter its path and then it darted toward a smaller chunk. The smaller chunk took off like a bat out of hell. We focused the cameras in on the region a little tighter and realized that the debris floating in the water were actually schools of some type of fish.

"I want one of those!" Al said.

"Not sure how we could catch it, Al," Margie responded. "We can come back and get one some other time."

We sat still for a while and watched the fish swim and eat each other. These weren't ordinary fish. Upon closer inspection, we could see that they had no eyes. I also wasn't sure if I saw any gills or not. We would have to catch some of these things and have the right folks study them. Some other time. We'd watched the fish for about twenty minutes when Tabitha decided we should continue with our mission. Again, we were on a technology demonstration mission, not a science exhibition.

We tunneled back up through the ice and out to a very high orbit around the Jupiter system. Jim and I did a little celestial navigation and then on to Saturn.

Okay maybe I'm an old softy when it comes to the beauty of our solar system, but Saturn is an incredible sight. It is hard to say which I like better, Jupiter or Saturn. The big ticket item at the Saturn system was Titan. Ever since I read The Puppet Masters I wanted to know if there really were Titans. Titan's dense atmosphere has kept its surface a secret from astronomers. We learned its secrets. In fact, the planetary scientist had hit it pretty damn close. At about a hundred and eighty kilometers from the surface we hit a layer of nitrogen that was at one Earth atmospheric pressure. At about twenty kilometers from the surface, we hit a cloud of methane vapor. Just below the clouds it was raining methane and the stresses on the warp field suggested atmospheric pressures on the order of a thousand or more times greater than that of Earth. Visibility was very poor and we couldn't see well enough to navigate. Infrared didn't help, because there was none. The cloudy moon was cold. We had to switch to radar navigation and if we came back, we would bring a sonar system or something also. We did feel our way around with the radar for a while until we found a lake. The lake was at about minus one hundred seventy-seven degrees Celsius. The lake was liquid methane.

There were no Titans. I wasn't disappointed. In fact, I expected not to find anything. But childhood aspirations and fantasies should be entertained every now and then.

We oohed and ahhed as we stopped at Uranus and then Nep-tune. They weren't necessarily close to each other, but with warpdrive at thirty times the speed of light, no place in the solar system was that far away. Even the Pluto-Charon system, which is about thirty astronomical units from Earth, is pretty close at those speeds. The total trip to the three outer planets including the ooh and ah time of about thirty minutes was only an hour or so. It was obvious that things were going to be a lot different for the human race, at least for those "with the need to know."

We spent some time at the Pluto-Charon system looking around. We actually landed but didn't get out. There wasn't much to see. Pluto is an ice ball. The humorous part of the trip was the fact that we had beaten the NASA Pluto-Kuiper mission by several years. I thought about trying to track down the approaching spacecraft to just take a look at it. Maybe some other time. Our mission was to develop warp capabilities that would enable interstellar travel. We had to continue with learning how to navigate over large distances. So far, we had only been as far out as about thirty times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The distance to the nearest star is about hundred thousand times that. We still had quite a ways to go. At thirty times the speed of light, the trip to the nearest star would take about two months.

We wandered around in the Kuiper-Belt a bit and then decided to travel through the Oort Cloud and then the Heliopause. The Heliopause where the solar system meets the rest of the galaxy is considered the edge of the solar system at about a hundred astronomical units. There were some really neat plasma light shows there. Our spectrum analyzer systems picked up radio noise centered around the two to three kilohertz range and at awesome power levels. We pushed through the Heliopause out to about three hundred AUs. I checked our navigation and suggested to Tabitha that we bounce back to the Moon just to make sure. The nonstop trip took about an hour and a half. We docked at the moon for a few hours and had lunch at home.

By three o'clock that afternoon, we were ready to try for the solar gravitational focus. According to General Relativity any large massive body like the sun actually bends spacetime enough in its near vicinity that the paths of light rays traveling near that massive body are bent. In other words, the big object acts like a very large lens. This fact has been verified experimentally in many different ways since 1919. However, nobody has yet travelled to the focus of the large solar lens.

I had more reasons than just curiosity for traveling to the solar focus. Lets digress for a second.

The largest telescope built by mankind so far is on the order of about a hundred meters. It is a multiple mirror interferometer in Hawaii. The idea of making large telescopes is to increase the resolution. This means that the better the resolution the smaller the objects you can see, farther away. The way to determine the smallest object seeable by a telescope is to use the Rayleigh Criteria equation. The formula states that the minimum resolvable object diameter is found as 2.44 times the wavelength of the light (assume 550 nanometers for yellowish green light) times the distance to the object (five light years or 4.55 x 10¹⁶ meters) divided by the diameter of the telescope's primary optic. Assuming that you want to image an Earth-like planet that has a diameter of about 12,000 kilometers, Rayleigh's Criteria says that we need a telescope at least two kilometers or more in diameter! The Hubble Space Telescope is 2.4 meters in diameter and the James Webb Space Telescope is only a few times bigger than that. So we're a long way from imaging planets even around the nearest star even if you consider the ground-based interferometer in Hawaii.

Now consider the solar focus. The diameter of the Sun is on the order of a million kilometers. Using that as the diameter of the telescope primary in the Rayleigh formula shows that we could see a hair up an ant's ass on planets around stars out to a few tens of light years away. We could image planets much much further out than that. Talk about the ultimate telescope. I had what is known in amateur telescope making circles as "Big Aperture Fever" or BAF. Even worse, my case was acute, chronic, and was a special strain called BMFAF. You can guess what the MF stands for.

According to General Relativity, the solar focus should be somewhere between five hundred and eight hundred AUs depending on the wavelength you wish to view. The lensing effect works for all electromagnetic radiation not just visible light. Anyway, imagine a telescope that large. All that would be needed to use old Sol as the primary optic would be to place a detector at the focus. I planned to add other optics to do some image correction and cleaning up but the complete system is simple commercial adaptive optics and software. The hard part is getting to the solar focus. The other hard part is lining the star you wish to view up with the Sun and with the detector. The three objects must form a straight line: the star, then the Sun, then the detector. Assuming the solar focus is six hundred AUs from the Moon Base, then that means a trip time of about three hours to view one star. Of course there would be multiple stars in the field of view of the telescope depending on which eyepiece you use, but we were most immediately interested in stars close to Earth. Now we're talking about maybe fifty stars sparsely spaced whose light paths were rays passing through the surface of a sphere six hundred AUs in radius. It would take some time hopping around the solar focus to get images of all of these star systems. Three hours one way, there then a day or so of observation, then three hours back. Let's assume two days per star system. That means that it would take about a hundred days to look at each of our local stellar neighbors. I decided to start with the closest and move outward. That is once we got the telescope system working properly.

So, we zipped out to the solar focus in line with Alpha Centauri, which is the closest star to Earth. Tabitha popped open the hatch that enclosed our telescope secondary system. It took Jim and me another five or six hours before we had the system functioning the way we wanted it to perform.

There were several planets in the Alpha Centauri system but there was no hint of any planets that could support life as we know it. Using a visible spectrometer, we could analyze exactly what elements were in the atmospheres of these planets. None supported our kind of life. No water, chlorophyll, or oxygen.

Slightly disappointed, we warped back to the Moon. This time we decided to tax the ECC's to ninety-nine percent. Using most of the energy we had available enabled us to deepen the Alcubierre warp. We only shaved off about half of the trip time. In other words, it took about thirty-three times more power to increase our warp speed by a factor of two. Obviously there was some nonlinear function involved here that I hadn't counted on. My solutions to the Einstein equations were only accurate at low warp speeds. Between twenty and fifty times the speed of light, something else was going on. I'm still thinking about that. Jim suggested that spacetime might be quantized like the excitation levels of an atom and that there is some Moor's potential well that we have to overcome. Interesting idea. Like I have said before, Jim deserves a Nobel Prize.

We had proven that there was no life around Alpha Centauri. The next step was to look at Barnard's Star, which is only slightly further out. Barnard's Star is about six light years from Earth and is a faint red giant or M class star on the Hertzsprung--Russel diagram.

Using the solar focus telescope system, Jim brought the star system into view at low magnification and stopped out the bright spot caused by Sol, and by Barnard's Star. An array of planets came into view. Two were fairly large gas giants, one of which was twice the size of Jupiter, and three were planets in the realm of Earth-like in size. The spectrometer computer dinged at us and said that oxygen and chlorophyll had been detected. The light from Barnard's Star had illuminated the planet's atmosphere and the wavelength bands that get absorbed by oxygen and chlorophyll had been absorbed and not reflected off one of the planets—the spectrometer instrument enabled us to measure which bands of light were received by the telescope and which ones weren't. But which planet?

We zoomed in on the inner three planets one at a time. The first planet was a barren rock much like Mercury. The second planet closest to Banard's Star was blue and green and looked like a Mars-sized Earth. We spent hours zooming in on the planet. There were oceans, mountains, trees, and even grass. We saw no artificial structures of any sort. There was life there, but most likely not intelligent life.

The third planet was mostly like Venus.

We bounced back to Moon Base 1 and began discussing who was going to visit Barnard's Star. We decided that we were all going. We were too valuable to America to risk getting lost in space, but we didn't care. Was that selfish? We knew we could get back.

We had one problem. At fifty times the speed of light, the trip would take at least fifty days there and fifty days back. That's a little more than three months. Tabitha and 'Becca were pushing two months pregnant. The Einstein was very comfortable for few hours, just like a minivan is comfortable for a ten-hour drive to the beach. But you can't live in a minivan for three months. We had to build a real starship. We would just have to be patient.

The crew split up into three groups. Tabitha and Sara and I made up one group, Annie, Al, and Margie made up the second, and Jim and 'Becca made the third group. We took turns. One week you got to bounce out to the solar focus and continue planet hunting. One week you got to work the starship construction project. The third week you watched over the military research and development aspects of our Moon Base 1 operations. Each team alternated through the three jobs. There were over a hundred and fifty personnel on the Moon Base now but we were the original brain trust. We felt an obligation to making sure it functioned and continued all of its missions, not just the really fun ones.

Tabitha, Sara, and I took the first watch designing the starship. We took blueprints from the International Space Station habitat modules and began redesigning them. Our idea was to build three habitat size modules, just a little larger, and connect them side by side, then lay two on top of those three, and then one on top of the two. So we would have a pyramid of six cylinder-shaped modules. We would then attach the U.S.S. Einstein to the middle cylinder module in the bottom line of three. Remember that the Einstein doesn't have rocket engines in the back of it where the Shuttle does. In fact, this is where the loading ramp is located. We could retrofit Einstein fairly easily to the new configuration. There were two side doors also so loading and unloading wouldn't be a problem.

Tabitha and Sara went about setting up the contracts Earthside to get construction of the modules under way. It would take about a year to complete the modules. We contracted the same aerospace firm that built Einstein. We decided to have them go ahead and build the retrofit faring that would connect the little warpship to the habitat cylinders.

A few days later, Annie had the idea to put a retrofit faring on both ends of the cylinders so that we could dock one of the other warpships to the other side. This way, we could land and then split up into two teams to cover more ground more quickly. She had the contracts modified to allow the new designs.

Occasionally, Jim and I would compare notes on the warp field and energy anomalies. We still hadn't quite put our finger on a solution to the nonlinear energy requirements for fast warp speeds. But we were new to warp theory. We had only been doing it for a year or so. We also compared notes on pregnancy. Tabitha hadn't had a lot of trouble with morning sickness. 'Becca on the other hand was miserable. I told Jim that Tabitha had been an astronaut for so long that probably nothing made her sick anymore.

A couple of months later we compared notes on the so-called "honeymoon trimester." We both decided that it would be a lot more fun without having to deal with a three to six month pregnant woman. Both of them exercised every day but their mobility was beginning to suffer. So, Jim and I had a clever idea. We redesigned the curvature in the flat space portion of the protective warp bubble of the habitat dome. The area around our respective bedrooms we designed a curvature that would be modifiable to zero gee and would be centered about the bedroom. The low gravity field would slowly taper back to one gee at the edge of the room. We each rigged us a transmitter to trigger the new software via the push of a button. We could also modify the amount of gravity in our bedrooms from zero to one gee. That gave me another idea about a high gee training facility, but that is another story. In fact, I remember seeing that idea on a cartoon I used to watch years ago.

I told Tabitha that I had a surprise for her. "I have remodeled the bedroom," I told her.

"What did you do?" she said nervously.

I led her into the room and said, "Tada!"

"I don't see any difference," she remarked.

"Look here." I pointed to the slidebar switch by the headboard of the bed. The switch had a zero at the bottom and a one at the top. "Stand here by the bed and lower the switch slowly," I said.

She reached up and slid the bar downward about halfway. My stomach lurched and tickled. I'm sure hers did. The baby kicked also. "Whoa!" she grabbed the headboard and steadied herself.

I leaned over and picked up the bed with one hand. "See, I rigged it so we could modify the gravity in here. You can probably get more comfortable to sleep at lower gee."

Tabitha slid the panel to zero and did a slow spin backwards above the bed.

"You don't think this will hurt the baby do you? The baby is suspended in water anyway. If anything, it might get motion sick with no gravity, right? Perhaps we shouldn't go all the way down to zero?" I asked.

"Oh, phooey. We and the Russians did long-term studies on pregnant mammals in both ISS and on Mir. We tested pregnant rats, rabbits, and a few others and never observed any differences between the spaceborn animals and Earthborn ones." She balanced herself and slid the bar upward to about one tenth gee. "We will have to be careful at this gravity not to get up too fast or you will get a bump on the head from the ceiling or the doorframe or whatever." She did another back flip.

"Yeah, okay, just be careful. Also, the gravity is only modified in this room and the bathroom—there's another slidebar in there. I thought the low gee bathroom might make it easier on you for getting up and down. Although, I'd leave some gravity on when I used the toilet or took a shower." I smiled at her.

"This is great Anson. 'Becca has got to have one of these!" she said.

"She does. Jim and I worked this out together. He is showing her theirs about now also."

Tabitha smiled and replied, "Good. Would you like for me to show you mine?" She laughed as she undid her maternity top. Praise the Lord for the honeymoon trimester and low gravity bedrooms!

The effort to maintain military superiority Earthside was continuing as planned. No further skirmishes had popped up anyway. The Earth was battered and tired. World War III had done a lot of damage. It takes a while to mourn millions of deaths. It takes even longer to clean up. We kept an eye on the news and our favorite television broadcasts and the Internet. Nothing dangerous was going on. We continued at a steady and careful pace. No need to take undue risk during peacetime.

The status of the individual warp system or Supersuit wasn't great. A closed bubble that small with a hundred Watt heater (a person) inside it will need a good deal of air conditioning.

Also, the warp core and the ECCs required would take up a certain amount of volume. That couldn't be helped; things take up space. I pushed the group of engineers and scientists working the Supersuit to lead toward an armored suit, sort of like that suggested in Starship Troopers. The warp core and ECCs could be distributed throughout the suit. This would be the simplest and most likely first doable Supersuit design. We continued to work on it. And I began to create some new friendships in that group. Of course, we had handpicked everybody on the base and they were all our friends. However, none of them were really in our immediate family. Time changes that. We were becoming a lunar community.

Over the next three months we continued popping out to the solar focus and cataloged many other star systems. We looked closely at a red planet very similar to Mars around Wolf 359. Luyten 726-8 A and B supported a myriad of planets and asteroids, a few gas giants and one planet about twice the size of Earth that had liquid water and green vegetation.

Lalande 21185 had a set of twin medium sized gas giants similar to Uranus and Neptune. Sirius A and B had two different planets that could support life. One was more of a desert planet with very small oceans, while the other was in an ice age. Most of it was covered with ice except for the equatorial regions. There was liquid water there.

We continued looking and found planets around nearly every star we tried. Ross 154, 248, and 128. 61 Cygni and Luyten 789-6. Epsilon Eridani had a world that looked just like Earth but with two moons. I couldn't wait to get out there and look at these places. I was hoping that we would've found a civilization by this time though. We had looked at about twenty planets closely. I decided that we should take a couple of days per star system. Wouldn't want to miss anything. Out of all the planets we studied thus far, no intelligent life. The odds were at least worse than one in twenty for intelligent life. Although, it had been about one in three for plant life. The universe is a damn big place. We just had to keep looking.

A month or so later, Jim and I had plenty to do other than warp technology. I was constantly getting up in the middle of the night to change little Ariel Eridani Clemons. And I'm sure Jim was having a time with the twins, Mindy Sue and Michael Ash Daniels. Of course, we had no shortage of people volunteering to baby sit. Oh, who was the first baby born on the Moon you want to know? It was Mindy Sue, then Michael Ash was born a few minutes later. Ariel was born a week later. Fortunately, Ariel looks just like her mom and her older sister.

Tabitha and Annie had little Ariel in the bedroom in zero gee before she was two months old. She never seemed to get sick from the microgravity. Tabitha must have some super inner-ear gene that Ariel and Anne Marie inherited.

In our spare time, Jim and I dug out a small fifteen-meter diameter dome and put a gravity modification switch in it. We designed the gravity meter to enable gravity from zero to fifteen gee. We then padded the floor and walls and ceiling and started using that room to exercise in. I could do all sorts of flips and multiple spin kicks at a quarter gee. I could even stand and balance on one hand. We all spent time in the "gravity room" as it came to be known. After balance work, we would then do strength training. I was hoping to slowly work up to withstanding fifteen gee, but that is damned heavy. I was at least hoping to build my strength until I could do multiple flips and very high aerial kicks in standard one gee. I also spent time with Ariel and Tabitha in the room at low gee trying to get Ariel to walk early.

Life on the moon was swell. A few times we visited my and Tabitha's parents and let them play with the baby. How many kids do you know that got to fly back and forth between the Earth and the Moon on a regular basis? Our little Ariel was an astronaut at one month if you don't count being born on the Moon. Over the period of Ariel's first year she grew about twenty percent taller than the average, according to the Internet. Tabitha and I wondered if it was due to the low gee we often had her in. We soon decided that anytime we exposed her to low gee, we would then slowly expose her to higher gee. Say two and a half gee for a few minutes. However, more than ninety-five percent of her time was in normal gee.

Ariel, Mindy, and Mike became a handful. They were crawling all over the place and in the low gee rooms were walking. They were also beginning to jabber something fierce.

Finally, on Mindy and Mike's second birthday the starship was complete and parked on the surface of the Moon just outside Moon Base 1. We boarded Einstein and flew up to the surface and out of the warp barrier of the Moon base. Anne Marie docked us to the main section of the starship and we were ready for liftoff. The crew consisted of Tabitha, Margie, Anne Marie, Rebecca, Jim, Al, Sara, and myself. Our mission was to fly to the second planet from Barnard's Star, look around for a couple of days, and safely return to the Moon. We planned to bring the ECCs of both the Einstein, which was docked in front, and the Starbuck, which was docked, in the rear. The two ECCs would enable us to use much more energy and perhaps push our warp velocity even further than the fifty times that of light we had maxed out at previously. Jim and I calculated that we should be able to reach seventy times the speed of light. That meant a month out and a month back.

We had shaken hands with most of the lunar community in a prelaunch ceremony we had the previous day. We had said our goodbyes and left the base in the charge of a new colonel Tabitha was grooming, Lieutenant Colonel James Duvall. He was a good man as far as I could tell. Besides, he had the aid of the head NCO on base, Sergeant Major Calvin Perry. He would be fine.

We had also dropped all of the kids off with my parents. The Clemons and the Ames grandparents had adopted Mindy and Mike as their own grandchildren. So, we left all three of them. They would stay with my parents for the first month and then my folks were going to take them down to Gulf Shores where Tabitha's parents had moved to after the Secret War. We would pick them up on our way back. We all cried when we left them. The kids didn't seem to care that much. My dad said they started crying that night when they realized we weren't coming back for a while. Why didn't we take them? I just couldn't see taking toddlers into such a dangerous situation. What if something went wrong? Our kids should still get to grow up and have full lives. Besides, we didn't need toddlers bumping into spacecraft controls and warping us into a black hole or something. That sounds like stuff out of a bad science fiction novel.

So, we left the Sol system like a scalded dog headed for the creek. At warp speed seventy as we were beginning to call it, we just had a month to kill.

We talked several times about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and why we hadn't found it yet. Using three of the little warpships, we had hopped out to the solar focus and observed most of the stars out to ninety light years. We had yet to find any signs of E.T.s. None of us were about to give up though. They were out there somewhere. Statistics just ensures that. It was just a matter of time before we found them. The problem was that everyday the trip to visit the E.T. kept getting longer and longer. At a minimum, E.T. lived somewhere out past ninety light years. At warp seventy that had to be at least a two and a half year round trip. We needed much bigger ECCs or a much bigger ship, or both. The problem is that Jim and I had found a curve to fit the power requirements to the warp speed. We were approaching an asymptote and we didn't know if the thing went up to infinity or if it was just a potential well that we had to jump over. Either way it was going to take a buttload of energy to overtake even warp speed ninety. The ECC factory back on the Moon was pumping out flubell ECCs as fast as they could make them, but it would be another five or more years before they had enough of them to create the type of energy that I feared we would require for journeys any further out than a hundred and twenty light years away. We would get there eventually though. I just had to be patient. That's hard to do when you are pushing fifty.

A month went by rather like a turtle crossing the street in the midst of rush hour. I missed the kids terribly. So did everybody else. We popped out of warp about a thousand astronomical units from Barnard's Star, then made a couple of short warps into the interior of the star's system of planets. We approached the second blue green planet and entered into a LEO type orbit. Well it wasn't Low Earth Orbit, but what were we supposed to call it?

"Why don't we call it 'Anson'?" 'Becca asked.

"Yeah, Low Anson Orbit! Ha, that's great." Al laughed.

"What do you think, Anson?" Tabitha asked me.

"Okay. But I get to name the next one." I smirked.

Tabitha took the controls and led us around the planet multiple times. We spotted a location that looked like a lush tropical area and decided to give it a try. She brought us down in a field of something that looked like sea oats that grow along the beaches in the Gulf of Mexico. A few hundred meters to our south was a beautiful white sandy beach and an ocean frothing against it. The red sunlight gave the planet a dim appearance. There was plenty of light but nothing seemed very bright. Not like on Earth the way you have to squint your eyes or wear sunglasses at the beach.

We spent a few minutes checking the air for anything that would be harmful to us. We could see no microbes or deadly gasses. It was a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, argon, and other gasses. The oxygen was a little richer than on Earth, but that was no problem. We sat still in the ship and waited a while and watched for signs of indigenous lifeforms that could be harmful: snakes, bees, bugs, crocodiles, and three headed humanoid-eating E.T.s. Nothing other than an occasional alien sea oat reared its head.

An hour passed. We had made every measurement we could think of. Jim finally said, "To hell with this, let's go outside."

Tabitha reminded him that the protocol that he helped write required two hours of tests, analyses, and observation before running out into an alien world to be eaten by monsters or alien bacteria. So, we waited a little while longer.

The air was fine. I never even saw an insect. Perhaps they just didn't evolve here. We took a lot of vegetation samples. None of us could figure out how they pollinated without bugs. The ecosystem was completely different here. I guess the wind was good enough.

A couple of days later we split up. Tabitha, 'Becca, Jim, and I flew Einstein further inland while Margie, Anne Marie, Sara, and Al hopped continents in the Starbuck. We were to meet back on the beach in two days where we would leave the habitat cylinders.

We finally found insects and 'Becca swore that she saw a rodent of some sort. It would take years and teams of scientists to catalog all of the species of life there. We were physicists and engineers, not botanists, entomologists, and exobiologists. We would have to bring some next time. Two days passed quickly, and no creatures tried to eat us, not even the insects, if there were any insects.

Margie and Annie were docking the ships back to the habitat cylinders. Tabitha and I stood on the beach with the crystal clear water frothing at our feet. Even our treks to the bottom of the oceans of this world didn't reveal any underwater cities, although we had seen some big fish.

I was watching the alien red sunset. Tabitha, of course, was watching the docking procedures and muttering to herself about "teaching Annie how to fly better than that." I laughed at her and nudged her.

"Hey General, you got time to look at this really cool alien sunset?"

Tabitha turned away from the spacecraft and looked out over the ocean. "Yeah. It is pretty. You seem sort of solemn tonight. What's bothering you?"

"Nothing really. I just wanted to find more, you know?" I held my hands out as if to encompass the planet. Then I shrugged my shoulders.

"Yeah, I know. You wanted to find aliens. You did, just not the kind you can talk to."

"Maybe someday we . . ." I shook my head. "There are just so many stars out there. And it appears the potential alien homeworlds are farther away than we might have imagined. I keep telling myself that it is statistics. They are out there and we're bound to find somebody somewhere someday. One of the things that burns me up is that the people of Earth will never know we have been here. They'll never know what we, the human race, have accomplished."

"We will find aliens, one day, Anson. And some people on Earth know what you did. You saved the world from itself and have ushered in a new era of technology."

"Yeah a technology that they will never know exists. And I had a lot of help, Tabitha. And the world isn't out of the woods yet. Eternal vigilance and all."

"I know you had help, sweetheart. But you did it nonetheless. You, did it. And I have come to know you enough that I think you'll continue to do it. As long as it takes."

"I guess," I said.

"We will find intelligent aliens out there and we will get to tell the Earth, some day. But in the meantime, I miss my little girl and I'm sure she misses her mommy and daddy. What do you say we go home?" Tabitha held my hand and pulled me to her.

"Sounds great to me." I kissed her. "You know this is what I always dreamed of. I've always fantasized about inventing the warp drive and flying off to new and alien worlds with my beautiful wife and having wonderful adventures and saving the world. It's a childhood dream come true; I guess I can't think of anything that could make me happier."

She held me a little while longer and looked into my eyes. "I'm pregnant again," she said.

"Well, except for that." I laughed.

We went home.