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My Life (part 80)

Turned out the intelligent life on both Oaxion and Freedom were just as tired of getting bombed almost out of existence as the people of Earth were.  They messaged back and forth a few times, shared a bunch of technology and before the year was out the Oaxions and the Earth were on their way to becoming great friends.  I’m calling them Oaxions because the name they have for themselves is a pleasant smell and cannot be written in this fashion.  They do, of course, have a written language but it does require a great sense of smell to read.  By the end of two years trade existed between the worlds.  Earth had found a use for her great stores of oil.  Oaxion produced manufactured goods at a price the Earth could not compete with.  We produced food for Earth and had little to do with Oaxion or Freedom.  The beings from Oaxion never visited Jasper’s planet and very seldom visited the Earth.

It took all of those two years for Sally and I to get our farm/ranch back to running like we wanted it to. We added a small dorm building so we could take part in a work study program with the university.  We allowed four students at a time to learn how farming and ranching could be done without all the mechanized support in turn for the students doing a lot of our hard labor.  Time passes quickly when things are going well and time passed very quickly for Sally and myself.  We attended every wheat harvest in the area around the university every year until, as we grew older, it became obvious that we were of little help.  The last two harvests we came late and took part only in the celebration dinner.  We were required to sit and tell stories about our lives on Jasper’s World.  The young people listened closely to the stories about the time we had spent with Henry Jasper but I was never able to leave without first telling the story about how I had stowed away on a transport ship in an empty fuel cell container.  Now-a-days we sit on the wide porch in front of our home and watch the students from the university learn how to operate an ancient, out of date, gravity drive tractor.  I can hear some student hollering at the cattle, Sally looks a little concerned, the students may be trusted to till my fields but she’s not sure they should be trusted with her black, furry babies.

That’s about it, that’s my life.  I plan to breath the clean air of Jasper’s World and call myself a farmer until my last day.  

My Life (part 79)

The people of Earth started outfitting a short range freighter for the trip to Freedom.  This time the earth would provide most of the cargo.  Five items from the first shipment to Freedom had been identified as food.  PVC, judging from the strength of the smell attached to the sample, was place at second only to one food source, crude oil.  If the beings on Freedom had considered PVC to be an enticement crude oil was like ice cream with hot fudge!  As least that was the conclusion boat loads of speculation came to.  Earth built Butyl rubber bladders and filled them with crude oil.  Funny thing, Butyl rubber was also considered a food to the alien beings, it was number four on the list of five if strength of smell had a bearing on preference.  All things considered were still all guesses, but the people building the bladders came to think of them as thin candy shells.

Earth also took over producing the message that would be attached to the cargo shipment.  Earth had the specialists in linguistics and in olfactics.  Jasper’s planet was kept in the loop because we had been the ones to get this ball rolling but the people of Jasper’s were pleased with the reaction of Earth and more than content to get back to farming.  Sally and I stayed in our home near the university where we could keep abreast of the activity until the refurbished cargo ship left for Freedom.  There would be no cloaking shields to protect the ship; instead, a visual representation of the ingredients in crude oil was being sent from on board the fully automated pilotless barge.  No one, as yet, had discovered how the Oaxions managed to send their language based on smells from place to place or ship to ship.  Our message was a holo image of the molecular structure of crude oil.  The holo image had substance, it could be felt and it produced a smell.  There was no way to know if the beings on Freedom would see it as a friendly message or not.  On the day the shipment left Earth’s orbit the classroom devoted to the mission of peace with Oaxion was crowded with people.  Every eye watched screens situated around the room.  Some screens showed the progress of the barge.  Some screens watched the planets Oaxion and Freedom, watching for missiles being sent to destroy the shipment from Earth.  No one left the room for a full hour.  No missiles were fired in that first hour but it would take a full week for the freighter to reach Freedom and it was an easier target  the closer it came to its destination.  Sally and I left the room full of optimistic people after just an hour and a half.

“We should reclaim our farm land,” Sally said as soon as we heard the door to the classroom swish to a close behind us.

“We’ll have to clean up whatever that was on the kitchen table.”

“What we?  It was growing out of your cereal bowl!”

There was little farming to do and Sally’s cattle needed to remain with Ned Barns’ herd until the crop of wheat that started two feet from our home had been harvested but it was good to be home and there was plenty of work that needed done in order to prepare for re-establishing our farm/ranch.  We lost ourselves in manual tasks.  A week later news came that the barge from Earth had landed on Freedom without mishap.

“These beings on Freedom and Oaxion may be a bit more trusting than humans,” Sally pointed out on a walk down a path we had established through the heavily headed wheat.

“Let’s hope they are,” I pulled the top off a wheat plant and rubbed the chaff off before tossing the hard kernels into my mouth. 

My Life (part 78)

“Understand that there is a whole lot of guessing going one.  I’d like to think it’s intelligent guessing based on a good deal of knowledge but, at lot of this is based on how humans think, we still know almost nothing about how the intelligent life of Oaxion thinks.”

“Understood.”

“The first smell has been interpreted, humans.  We did send them a few smells in the original packet, things that we could not send as a whole, like a human.  We sent pictures, hair, skin cells, even a little blood to represent a human.  They applied a different smell to each sample but they also seemed to understand that as a group the samples were meant to help them understand our make up and they labeled the group with a single smell.  We in turn have labeled that single smell as human.  I tell you this so you can get an idea as to how much of this we have to speculate.”

“We do understand, please read your interpretation of the message on the plastic stick.”

He clears his throat and begins, “Humans, death and putrefaction.  Humans Freedom polyvinyl chloride food web fire death.  Oaxion birds smell, smell, smell humans.  Human birds Oaxion death.  Oaxion birds Earth death.  Humans smell Oaxion?  Oaxion smell, smell, humans.  Grow Oaxion Earth?  Four thousand smells?  Eight thousand smells, smells” he stopped reading and waited for a reaction.  The room was quiet.  “I can tell you what we think it means but understand..,”

“Right, a lot of guessing.  Please continue.”

“Humans the bringers of death and putrefaction.  Humans who brought a gift of polyvinyl chloride food in order to trap us and burn us with fire.  Oaxion sent ships to Earth in order to communicate.  Oaxion ships were shot down by humans.  Oaxion retaliated by sending war ships to fight.  Do humans want to communicate now?  Do humans want to grow together with Oaxion?  You sent four thousands samples, send twice as many samples and include more smells.”  He set his tablet down and turned to a member of his team.

“We think, and like Tim, I want you to understand we are far from being sure of anything in this message, but we think polyvinyl chloride is an edible food for the beings on Oaxion and Freedom.  The suggestion is not only is it edible but it’s a food they enjoy.  When Earth’s settlers on Freedom unloaded pallets of PVC pipe the intelligent life on Freedom thought is was a gift for them to eat.  The settlers from Earth may have thought they were being invaded or they may have simply thought the Oaxion life forms were unintelligent and damaging their much needed pipe.  We think the settlers may have used fire to get rid of the life form eating their PVC pipe.  The Oaxion beings sent a fleet of ships to try to communicate with Earth.  These ships were fired upon by the Earth and Oaxion retaliated.  The package we sent to Freedom has been seen as an attempt to communicate and Freedom’s response to it is a request for more information.”  The room erupted with questions.

My Life (part 77)

Understanding the task before them the group started working day and night.  Sally and I had little to do during this time but I found a way to keep myself from innocence anyway.  Sally and I arranged a meeting, through my sister Sarah, with several government leaders.  Six of us met in Sarah’s apartment on the university campus.  The weather had started its turn toward spring.  Sarah had all the windows and doors open.  We sat in comfortable chairs looking out her front window at the neighborhood around her home.

“If we don’t do it they are liable to shoot missiles at Oaxion before we can begin to figure out what the message is.”

“We would have to tell them everything, even the part about our helping get technology to Freedom and, most likely, to Oaxion, that gives them the ability to cloak incoming ships.”

“That’s done anyway.”

“Do we share cloaking technology with Earth?”

“I’d rather not but we should right?”

“Aside from that, we need their help.  We don’t have the cutting edge scientists when it comes to smells.  Earth could solve most of the problems we’re having.  I could give you the names of three people right now who have taken the science forward, we’re using their research…”

“We need them?”

“Our scientist are a bunch of farmers Trenton, I’m not saying they are not good; it’s just that this is a little out of their field.”

We talked until the sun went down and then we talked into the night.  I think even before we started talking we all knew that Earth would need to be brought up to speed on what we had done and what we hoped to accomplish.  When we finally broke up our meeting we were all in agreement the politicians still had a lot of work to do but it was just a matter of time before Earth would be a part of our project to communicate with the beings of Oaxion.  

Ted Johnson came into my office unannounced, I had never kept a secretary in the outer office and the only way to see me was to be unannounced.  I’m afraid I had taken the “open door policy” to an extreme.  Ted stood in my doorway looking tired but relaxed.  His smile told me he had good news.

“We’ve identified over two thousand smells, or words. The only thing stopping us now is reading that plastic stick,” Ted wasn’t much for small talk; it was kind of special that he came to visit me at all, most of the time I took my questions to him.

“Come in sit,” I waved to a chair as I came around my desk and shook his hand.  I keep some soft cushioned chairs in a, I guess you’d call it a conversion pit, circle that takes up most of the office space.  I took the chair opposite the one he chose.  “Two thousand words, that should be enough to say something.”

“They are mostly things.  We could say something like: Spice flower clay green light spin.  But to say: The spice flower grows in the green light is a bit beyond us.  We could learn a lot from that information stick the aliens sent.”

“What’s holding up reading the stick?”

“Well, the samples we sent all came back with one word on each sample, one smell.  Like if you put a big label on each container, just one word like seed or water.  That stick of theirs is only a foot long and a quarter of an inch wide and it could contain a hundred words.  We need a reader that can separator each individual smell and give us our interpretation of that smell.

Simon Abernathy on Earth says he can get us a scanner that can do it.  The technology is all there it’s just that there never was a need.”

Might have been nice if the beings on Freedom had spaced out their words a little, you know, like speaking slowly and loudly.”

“Well, one of Earth’s top language experts, Martha Spouts, says the more words the better.  She says we can get a feel for their syntax and grammar and maybe a few more smells to fill in the blanks between spice, flower, clay, if you see what I mean.  She’s hoping the way they think is not totally alien to ours, that it’s just they use smells instead of sounds.”

“Cup of coffee?” I was late in asking but I’d never seen Ted stay still this long.

“Sounds good, Trenton, americano?”

“My personal favorite,” I shouted the order of two americano across the room to my drink replicator, “got to say Ted I’ve never seen you more relaxed.”

“I am, relaxed that is, I feel like my part is done.  The people of Earth seems to have really stepped up, couldn’t have got this far this fast without them.”

“They just never thought of it.”

“It?”

“Making peace with the Oaxions.  I guess when a group almost destroys your whole planet twice you automatically put them into the category of enemy.”

“But they are all in now.”

My Life (part 76)

The un-packaging of our returned present took time.  Everything was carefully inspected and categorized, scans made, notes taken.  Within a few days everything had been broken down into small packets and moved indoors.  Studies continued on desks, tables, nothing harmful had been found.

“So far so good as far as the Oaxions on Freedom having cloaking technology,” I said to Ted Johnson.

“Figures,” he said without looking up from the row of small packets he was studying on his desk top.  “If they had planned to use the technology to sneak bombs onto Jasper’s World or Earth they would not have returned this,” he replied waving at the items in front of him.

“So what did they send us?”

Well, Trenton, it looks like they sent us back everything we sent them, plus this,” he held up a thin stick of black plastic about a foot long, “everything else has been looked at, touched, and put back into the place it was in when we sent it.”

“Nothing gone?”

“Nothing.”

“This is new?” I started to reach for the thin, black, plastic strip.

“That stinks, by the way.”

I pulled back my hand and then reconsidered and picked up the  plastic strip.  I sniffed it, “Not so bad.”

“Try the other end.”

I sniffed the other end of the strip.  My eyes watered, “smells like something rotten.”  I sniffed the end I had smelled the first time, “this end, still not so bad.”

“That is all we have found that is not exactly what we sent them.”

“Weird.”

“Yes,” Ted turned his attention back to his work and I walked around the room looking at each person’s endeavors.  A lot of computer clicking, a lot of “Humms” and “Ahs” being said but I’m a farmer not a scientist so I was pretty much out of place in the room.  I smiled and nodded at the people who looked up at my passing but added little to their research.  I stopped at a long table covered with thousands of samples of  living and non-living items found on Earth and Jasper’s World.  No one was working at this table so I started poking around.  Bits of flowers of every kind, samples of vegetables like peas and corn and even common rocks and gem stones all still contained in the glass vials they were sent in.  I picked up a vial that was labeled “uncut diamond,” It looked like a glob of melted glass to me but it felt good to hold it.  Something about it drew me to it and I had never been one to be impressed by precious stones.  I set it down and the feeling passed.  I picked up a vial labeled rose petals and caught a whiff of the smell of flowers.  I brought the vial close to my nose and smelled it.  A definite flower smell but not the smell of a rose.  The smell was non-specific but definitely the smell of a flower.  I picked up a vial labeled “dandelion flower” and sniffed the container.  It had the same general flower smell.  I started smelling each vial with some sort of flower in it, they all smelled the same.  I picked up a vial labeled “wheat grass”.  I knew what wheat grass smelled like; I had worked in and around it most of my life.  The glass vial smelled in a general way like a grass but not like wheat grass.  I started sniffing vials and rearranging them according to smell.  I must has gone a little crazy with my sniffing because a group started to form around the long table covered with vials.

I pointed to a group of fifteen vials I had arranged, “this smell means flower,” I told the group.  I pointed to another group of about fifteen vials I had arranged, “this smell means grass.”  People started picking up vials and sniffing them.  The smell did not decrease or become less specific after being handled by several people.  Others around the table started to arrange vials. 

First vails were arranged in general groups like rocks and dirt but then people in the group with more sensitive noses found subtile difference and added sub groups for metamorphic, igneous and sedimentary and sub groups of clays, sands, silts and peats.  Before we stopped our frenzied  search we had discovered over two hundred words of the Oaxion language.  They spoke with smells.  They had labeled each item we had sent them with a smell.  The foot long thin black plastic stick was a message and we  needed to identify every item they had labeled for us in order to read that message.

My Life (part 75)

Our transport device sat in the middle of the grass covered quad.  Students and scientists who had worked on the project to send the device to Freedom crowded around the object.  As of yet it was still unopened as various tests were being conducted.

“When did you bring it in?” I asked the first person I came in contact with that might have an answer.

“It landed, right here, on its own,” was the quick answer and he went back to checking his personal communications pad and discussing data with those around him.

“It just landed here?” I questioned a student who looked like she might have a bit more time for me.

“Came down completely shielded.  We saw nothing coming from Freedom.  In fact we saw nothing at all until it showed up here.  I was part of the group scanning for it.  We didn’t even get a blimp or anything even when it entered our atmosphere.”  

Ted Johnson, one of the team leaders, saw Sally and me and broke away from the crowd around the returned space craft and walked toward us.

“Looks just like what we sent,” Ted said as he gave us both a quick hand shaking. “But it’s not,” he added.  “We may have made a pretty stupid mistake.”

“How so?” Sally asked.

“Well, we needed shielding in order to get this thing to Freedom without it being shot down by Earth or Oaxion.”

“Sure, anything without some sort of cloaking device wouldn’t have made it half way to Freedom.  Both sides would have fired upon it.”  I said.

“Well, we were pretty proud of ourselves when we came up with the answer, and it obviously worked but it came back better then we made it.  We should have been able to, at the very least, detect it breaking into our atmosphere and we saw absolutely nothing until it shut off its cloak and by that time it was sitting here.  It could have sat here for days with the cloak activated; the only way we would have found it was if someone had walked into it.”

“And our cloak wasn’t that good?” Sally asked.

“No, the beings on Freedom must have first reverse engineered our shielding and then improved upon it.”

My Life (part 74)

With things running themselves at the university Sally and I took the ground car to look over what remained of our ranch/farm.  From the air we saw what we expected to see.  The barn and house were still intact.

“They plowed to within two feet of the buildings!” Sally said rolling down her window and leaning out of the car while we landed.  “Flowers, rock garden, chicken coop,” she continued listing things that had been plowed under while I found a place to park.  I planned on parking inside the barn but found it full to the doors with bailed wheat stocks,  I parked on a patch of unplowed soil between the house and barn.  Looking around our old home would not take long, the only place to look was inside the small house.  Inside nothing had been touched.  Sally picked up a sock I had somehow left on the living room floor.  She held the sock with two fingers as far from her body as she could and then tossed it into a basket in the laundry room.  She walked through the kitchen and came back into the living room with her fingers pinching her nose.

“Don’t go in there, we may have left a few things out on the table that should have been put away.  There’s a purple mound of something growing out of your cereal bowl.”

We had left in a hurry and turned everything over to others.  It had seemed to be the right thing to do at the time, and probably was, but this place had become home and it seemed we had done it an injustice.  We went back outside to the strip of grass that survived between the house and the barn.  Colorful Bantam Chickens hunted bugs and seeds in the tall grass.  As we approached the chickens took flight and perched on the ridge of the barn.  They sat on the top edge of the barn waiting for us to leave the area that had become their sole domain.  We sat on the porch swing and watched the birds watching us for a good hour.  And then without discussion we walked to the ground car and headed back to the university.  To this day, in my minds eye, I can still see the purple mound of furry food sitting on our kitchen table.

On the day our package left for the planet Freedom the Earth announced plans to annihilate Oaxion once and for all.  The official protest from the people of Jasper’s World said nothing of our plans to contact the intelligent life we called the Oaxions.   Our effort at communications lifted into space and began its flight to Freedom without being spotted by Earth’s detection array and began its six day journey to the settler planet.  In the room at the university we watched our small space craft make its way as we watched both the Earth and Oaxion for missiles that could end our experiment.  No missiles came.  Our shielding had worked.  Our package of information soft landed on Freedom in exactly the spot we had programed.  Now all we could do was watch and wait.  We had no idea how long the wait would be.  Most of our work force returned to the task of providing food for ourselves and the people of Earth.

Sally and I were jogging alongside a field of tall corn the day the message came.  I was jogging slightly behind her, letting her set the pace and the direction.  At least that was my stated reason.  Sally and I were getting older but she still looked good in her short shorts and tank top.  She may have been watching the pathway but I was just watching her. She slowed the pace and waited for me to catch up.

“I remember doing this while you were still living with us in my father’s old house.  A scrawny, dirty, Earth boy, living in my nice clean home.  Can you imagine?”

“The first thing I did was take a shower.”

“I could just feel the contaminates from Earth coming out of your pores.  One of the reasons for taking you jogging was to get you to clean out your pores but I was still afraid you would damage our nice clean air.”

“Well, I’m glad you got over it.”

“Mostly,” she took off running and I did my best to catch up.  I could hear the signal from her communications pad just before I heard the signal from my own pad.  We both stopped running to look at our screens.

On both our screens a text message scrolled, “a package from Freedom has arrived.”

My Life (part 73)

The room went quiet as every image on every computer showed the same scene.  On the screens a missile left the Earth’s moon.  The missile moved into space and continued at light speed until it impacted a small vehicle from Oaxion on its way through space.  The bright light that followed produced a cheer from the watchers on Earth.  No such cheer went up in the room on Jasper’s World, a room filled with scientists working diligently on a vehicle that would be sent to Oaxion.

“They don’t even know what it was!”  A young student worker said breaking the silence that followed the destruction of the vehicle.

A quieter voice said, “we need to remember they were just bombed back to the stone age.”

Another voice said, “we need to find a way for this not to happen to our package,” with this the room went silent and the group went back to work.

“This will preform two very important tasks.  One of the main concerns has been that in this process we will reveal human life exists on Jasper’s World and then, of course, our vehicle needs to make it into orbit around Oaxion, or possibly even land on Oaxion without being destroyed.  This shielding will protect our delivery system from being detected based on what we know about tracking systems found on downed Oaxion fighter planes.  The shielding will protect from the time of leaving our orbit to the time our package reaches Oaxion,”  Ted Masson, the man delivering the news to the group on Jasper’s started to sit down and then decided to add one more thing, “this is top secret, no one shares this with anyone.  All our work has been done without any outside access.  I believe the technology is safe but it’s up to you that even a hint of the existence of this shielding does not make it outside this building.  All you have to do is think for a second about how this shielding could be used in the transport of missiles of mass destruction to see the need for secrecy.”

The package was almost complete and the problem of getting the package opened by the beings on Oaxion had still not been solved.  The shielding would get our vehicle into orbit around Oaxion but even with shielding the package would most certainly be noticed entering the atmosphere of Oaxion.  On top of that, we needed the package to be noticed.  Oaxion had to notice our vehicle in order to capture it and open it.  As the day we would be prepared to launch approached every mind turned to getting our project to land and opening it.  The answer came from Earth.

“Alien life has been found on Freedom.”  It had been assumed that Freedom, the settler planet that had been the source of war with Oaxion, had been completely destroyed.  On a whim an astronomer on Earth had turned a high powered telescope toward Freedom and found a population of Oaxionite’s building  a small settlement not far from the original site the settlers from Earth had chosen.   Earth prepared missiles.  What helped us the most was the fact that the Earth was not prepared to build missiles and it would be some time before an attack on Freedom could take place.  

We, on Jasper’s, had our chance.  We would land our package of information on Freedom near the Oaxionite’s small settlement.  Freedom did not appear to have any of the early warning systems that existed on their home world.  As we did more research we started to form a kindred spirit with the beings on Freedom.  They, like the humans on Jasper’s, seemed interested in forming a non violent place to live and had not set up any noticeable defense systems.

My Life (part 72)

“Come with me.  I want to show you something,” Sally pulled on her long black winter coat, slid her personal communication pad into one of its oversized front pockets and pulled my hand away from the keyboard I had been typing on.  I managed to complete a sentence using only my right hand before I had to stand or be pulled onto the floor.  When I  stood Sally allowed me the use of my hands and I reached for my own jacket.  With the jacket zipped I pulled my cap out of the pocket of my jacket and put it on my head at which point Sally once more latched onto my hand and pulled me out of the room filled with busy people.  The door of the university room swished open and the chill of winter rushed in.  We exited swiftly and the door swished closed behind us.

“What’s up Goober?” I said, using my most tender pet name.

“Nothing Goober Head,” she never really liked that pet name, “time to take a walk.”  I allowed her to lead me past the main building of the university across the grounds and to the old high school both of us had attended.  She didn’t stop at any of the classrooms but walked around them on the concrete walkways until we came to the greenhouse that sat just behind the main school.  The greenhouse covered more ground than the entire school site and housed acres of climate controlled space.  Doors swished open to allow us to enter an airlock.  Those doors closed, a moment passed while the proper temperature and humidity were restored and then the doors to the inside of the greenhouse opened.  The air inside the greenhouse was warm and moist like an early spring morning.  Students worked diligently on their projects, projects that not only taught them the basics of farming but projects that would be transplanted into fields at the proper times and produce food.  We walked past sections growing tomatoes, sections growing peppers and vegetables of every other kind; each with its own micro environment.  As we walked I could feel slight changes in both temperature, humidity and even smells.  Some of the changes were abrupt and completely obvious.  Some of the differences were so subtile only a farm boy like myself would be likely to notice.  It had been a while since I felt like a farmer.

“Thank you Sally, I needed this,”  I pulled her close and gave her a big kiss.  Several of the students watched us and giggled and whispered to each other.

“Over this way,” she pulled out of my embrace and led me by my hand to a pile of black plastic seeding trays.  “One of these,” she said while digging a round seed out of a bag, “into one of these,” she placed the seed into the center of the first space in a seeding tray, “this deep,” she pushed the round seed down into the potting mix about a quarter of an inch and smished the dirt down around it.”

I started doing my job but asked, “kind of old fashioned isn’t it?  Don’t we have machines that could do about a thousand of these a second?”

“We do, but here we are teaching an attachment to the soil.  We want our future farmers to care for their plants and respect their occupation.”  She watched my fingers push a seed, “pay attention!  That’s too deep.”  We must have worked for hours.  A new crop of students came in and stared at us for a few seconds.  It wasn’t usual to see Trenton and Sally Jennings planting seeds.  On the walk back to the exit of the greenhouse I noticed the changes from crop to crop once more.  I noticed the different smells most of all.

Standing in the airlock I said, “we need to include smells and not just major differences, we need to include the smell of a rose and a tulip but also every smell in there,” I nodded toward the greenhouse.  Somehow I knew it would be important but at that timeI had no idea how important it would be.