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 66)

I scooped up a front loader bucket of silage and took it out to the pasture most of Sally’s herd occupied.  The portable milkers had grown and no longer milked their mothers but they still followed their mothers around.  The cattle saw my little gravity drive tractor coming and grouped around the feed trough at a corner of their pasture.  Their hooves left prints in the frost covered, close chopped field.  As yet, I was not their only source of nutrition but it wouldn’t be long before a good freeze put an end to any new growth in their pasture.  A few days more and Sally would decide to bring them all into the pasture nearest our home and barn.  They crowded around the trough so completely I had to hover above them in order to dump my load.  Some of them took the time to look up and give me a moo, most of them just started chomping.  Most of my field work was done, at least until early spring but I took the long way back to the barn and looked over the empty fields anyway.  I thought about my early years back on Earth; watering eyes, itchy skin, living inside sealed spaces surrounded by thousands of miles of useless, contaminated, ground.  I smiled at the site of the home Sally and I had built, drove past the house and parked the little grav tractor in the barn.  I walked to the house in the chill of a winter morning pulling my jacket around me.   

“Sally, I fed your beasts!” I shouted as the door swished to a close behind me.  There wasn’t an answer.  She sometimes took a walk before starting her day so I sat down on the sofa to wait.  I was thinking we could go to a new coffee shop that had just opened up on our side of the planet.

The door swished open.

Sally stood in the open doorway letting all my nice warm air go out into the winter morning.  Something in the way she stared at me let me know that I should holler at her to shut the door.  I waited for her to speak.

“They’ve managed to start another one,” she said so softly I could just hear her.  She held the communications pad she was carrying up to where she could see the screen and began reading, “at 4:36 Greenwich Mean Time Earth declared conditions of war exist with the Oaxiom race and their network of planets.  Earth’s defensive shields have been raised in response to our early warning missile detection system identifying a barrage of Oaxiom ships on a collision course with Earth.   Retaliatory missiles have been launched and the space force in fully alert and ready to engage this invasion force.”  Sally walked into the room letting the door swish to a close behind her.  She let her communication pad drop to the floor.  I walked to her and put my arms around her trembling body.  “That was received twenty minutes ago and it was the last communication Jasper’s has received from the Earth,” Sally whispered.  We stood there in the middle of our living room just holding each other until my communication pad dinged with an incoming message.

“Our shields are up but as far as we can tell nothing has been aimed at us,”  Sarah’s small holo image stood on my pad.  “From what we can see, there has been no communication from Earth as yet, but from what we can see Earth’s missiles have been able to eliminate from eighty to ninety percent of the invasion force and a sizable array of Earth’s long range missiles appear to have engaged the Oaxiom home planets.  All of the living components of Oaxiom’s attack appear to have been eliminated, judging from size and speed of the attack vehicles, so, no foreseeable invasion at this point.  Much of the Earth has been hit hard by the missiles that were able to get through her shields.” Sally paused to get her breath.

“So…the war may have ended already?”

“Earth has a much better detection system, or at least Earth had a better detection system.  But from our limited view the counter attack looks to have been effective.”

My Life (part 48)

We walked for a good mile along a space between a row of knee high corn plants and an alfalfa field.  I let Sally walk ahead of me in the thirty inch wide strip of unplanted earth because the best part of a walk is watching Sally walk.  The plants on each side of us looked just as healthy as any plants growing on Jasper’s.  The air was not quite as sweet but that might just be a personal preference.  I felt no soreness in my throat or burning in my eyes. The air was clean.

“Our GR units have helped a great deal in keeping Earth’s air clean already.  Bakersfield has cut the use of their air scrubbers by twenty percent due to the increasing band of plant life around the town,” I said while watching Sally navigate the few dirt clods that occasionally littered the smooth flat strip of expose land.

“I’ve noticed something,” Sally said turning her head a little to one side in order to be heard.  The turn wasn’t necessary in the almost complete quiet of the fields.  “This is a space between two fields but it isn’t a pathway.”

I looked around to see what she meant and then noticed that the only footprints in the dirt ahead of me were Sally’s, “On Jasper’s a space between two fields like this would be trampled hard with the use it would get.  The people of Earth never get their feet dirty.”

Sally stopped in our path, stooped down for a second and picked up one of the hand sized clots of dirt, she crumpled it in her fingers, watching the dirt return to the ground and then she put both hands near her nose and breathed in, “Is it weird if I just like dirt?”

“On Earth we’re both weird.  On Jasper’s we’re normal.”  We walked another couple miles before we turned back and walked on our own footprints back to the Systems Access Deck.

“Should we let Matthew know he can turn the sprinklers on?  Our short walk probably cost two hours of reprograming.”  I looked up and saw Matthew looking down on us.  “Better not to get the carpets dirty,” we both waved and walked back to our ground car.  

For the rest of our time on Earth we did things that could not be done on Jaspers.  We shopped in LA in the largest mall in the Galaxy and purchased things for our friends on Jaspers.  Sally showed me the place her parents had lived before coming to Jasper’s World, Sally had never lived there, she had been one of the first babies born on Jasper’s.  We toured a yeast factory that still produced a good percentage of the food Earthers ate, the Earthers had developed a taste for it.  The producers figured  they would still have an Earth market long after the need for food could be met without their products.  

The main factory doing the final assembly of the GR units was in Houston, Texas (The components were being produced all over the Earth).  The assembly factory had been key in providing the vehicles used in the war and shifting over to farming had been a natural evolution for them.  The mile wide dome had reinforcements to protect it from enemy fire  as a shield against Earth’s contaminated atmosphere.  Two of the football field sized Ground Rehabilitate units were in the final stages of assembly and two more were about half put together.  Small ground to air gravity drive vehicles darted here and there within the dome carrying people and material to places they were needed.  Machines were stamping, welding, painting and bolting everywhere we looked.  The noise required ear muffs to protect our hearing but the ear muffs supplied radio connections to anyone we wanted to speak to so communication was not a problem.  Our guide walked us into the giant maw of the earth eater, a place that made me very uncomfortable as I had no desire to be turned into good, productive, earth.

“You’ll never see one of these monsters on Jasper’s World,” our guide said as we continued the walk to the first chompers in a long line of treatments the earth eaten by the machine received.”  Sally actually reached out and touched the teeth of the beast.  I preferred to just look quickly and move on.  Our guide seemed to notice.

“We have a product that just went into full production.  I think you’ll be interested Trenton,” our guide said as we left the interior of the GR.  He said something into his mouth piece and in just a few seconds one of the driverless ground to air vehicles stopped at our feet.

“This is the latest in gravity drive tractors.  The working title is TUG.  It’ll pull anything you need pulled, tote twenty thousand tons enveloped in it’s gravity field and never harm a blade of grass.”  He was right, I fell in love.  I climbed all over the thing.  The Earth technicians, with sales to Jasper’s in mind, had provided a fully functional operator’s cab so that it could be manually run instead of being completely computer driven like the Earth only model.  I sat in the driver’s black leather chair pretending to drive it like a kid with a new toy.

Sally climbed the ladder to the cab, opened the door and poked her pretty head inside the cab, “I’m getting jealous.  Tell her goodbye.  We have things to do.”  I did as told but I sent several pictures and the sticker price to Henry Jasper on Jasper’s before we left the assembly plant.

My Life (part 46)

The observation dome had become an entrance way and the lobby of the systems access deck.  The same elevator we had used in our first visit took us up to the top of the clear plastic structure but what had been the observation dome two years ago now had a floor covered with thick green carpet with soft colorful chairs and sofas arranged into conversation pits.  Matthew, our friend from Jasper’s University, came across a short clear walkway from the new addition to the dome which was another dome ten times as large.  Matthew looked like someone out of a fashion magazine wearing the latest business wear.  Every hair on Matthew’s head seemed to be controlled perfectly, every strand exactly where it belonged but what impressed me the most were his shoes, they had an almost unnatural gloss black shine without a speck of dust anywhere.  

“Welcome to my farm,” Matthew said as he gave Sally a hug and me a firm hand shake. “And congratulations you two.  It’s no surprise at all.  You two have alway belonged together. Come across the plank.  Let me show you the brain of this operation.”

Matthew did not take us to a human but to a computer screen that formed a twenty foot wide circle around the center of the larger dome.  People sat or stood around the circle of screen feeding in information, checking on weather reports, arranging needed maintenance and repairs, processing all the necessary information needed to keep the crops below us growing.  People paused just long enough to be polite and greet us before they returned to the circle of computer screen that demanded their full attention.   Matthew took us on the complete trip around the computer explaining every function of each station without ever taking us to the clear plastic walls that looked out over a spectacular view of one hundred twenty eight thousand acres of crops of different types growing in laser straight rows.

My Life (part 39)

The GR looked like a flat gray rock sitting in the middle of gray waste land.  As far as we could see to the east the gray useless, toxic land stretched to the foothills and on until it was turned white by snow capped mountains.  Fifty feet behind us the city of Bakersfield, California, Earth started on the other side of a ten foot tall block and brick wall.  From our perch atop the tower we could see most of Bakersfield.  I pointed out the complex where I had lived.  The downtown mall’s dome looked like it always had but people walked outside on sidewalks without masks.  That was something I had never seen.

“The honor is yours, Mr. Jennings,” Ted pulled me out of my daydream by handing me the small pad sized control that would operate the GR.  A holo camera recorded my movements as I pushed the icon labeled start and began the rest of the start up program I had rehearsed many times back on Jasper’s.  The GR crawled into the ground until only its dome was visible and then it began to crawl looking like a turtle with no legs creeping slowly eating the dirt in front of it and spitting it out behind.  I kept her in her slowest mode until the system checked itself for any anomalies and then I bumped it up a bit.  A strip of perfect farmland one hundred feet wide showed clearly behind the GR, a strip of clean, brown, plowed dirt contrasted the gray moon like surface in front and beside the GR.  I bumped up the speed once more as I watched several technicians, one of which was Matthew my friend from school, spread out into the newly cleaned soil taking all sorts of tests at several different depths.  The technicians were in full spacesuits even though the air scrubbers inside Bakersfield cleaned this area, we needed to take every precaution until we knew for sure the GR was doing it’s job.  The GR plowed along at half speed until we got the signal from technicians that the soil met standards.  I got the okay and bumped the GR up to full speed.  The giant turtle monster started eating the gray dirt like it had a hunger that would never be filled.  I waited for the machine to settle in at the new speed and checked our progress.

“We’re cleaning just under twenty acres per hour,” I told the group around me.

Ted pulled out his calculator and started tapping the screen, “Figuring for overlap, turns and maintenance down time, this time next year Earth will have increased her productive farm land by one hundred twenty-eight thousand acres.”  Everyone in the room clapped and then got to work gathering and analyzing data.  The GR moved forward on auto pilot eating sick soil and pooping out clean. In ten days, after the second pass a team of farmers, eight from Jasper’s and eight from Earth would begin tilling the new soil.  By the time the GR finished cleaning this ten mile by twenty mile field a crop would be ready for harvest in this strip nearest Bakersfield.  The people of Bakersfield would be the first on Earth to be able to see plant life, on a large scale, growing next to their homes.  More GR’s were set to be manufactured as soon as this one proved itself.  Earth had a very good chance of not only being restored but a good chance of being restored to a level of health it had not had for a hundred years.  It would take time but we had just helped prove it could be done.  

My Life (part 37)

The ship set gently down in a clearly marked space in the largest space dock in existence just outside of Los Angeles, Californian, Earth.  Before our engines had completely shut down a shuttle attached itself to our exit port and established a lock.  All two hundred and forty three passengers moved from their gravity seats to the bus type seats on the shuttle.  The shuttle made the short hop to the terminal’s clear plastic dome buildings and we all filed out into the filtered air of LAX.

Just inside the door stands a very pretty girl with short black hair, old style plastic rimmed glasses wearing a short dark blue pleated skirt and a plaid vest over a red knit top.  She holds a hand painted sign with Jasper’s World Welcome! written on it. Sally was fine with my reading the sign but when my eyes drop lower in order to form an opinion of the lady’s dark knit leggings Sally punches me in the ribs.  Sally has become much more possessive lately.

“We welcome you to Earth.  I hope your fight from Jasper’s World was comfortable.” We smiled and say things like, “very nice thank you,” stuff like that.

“Please follow me.  Your shuttle awaits you,”  I must have been following her a little to much ‘cause Sally hit me in the ribs again.  It’s not much of a deterrent because I enjoy it when Sally hits me in the ribs and this Earth girl was just a little bit beyond cute.  The place was crowded but the little girl had a way of carving a path and after just a short walk we were entering another shuttle not much different than the one we had just walked out of.  Our guide says good bye and I watched her walking away long enough to get another jab in the ribs.  The shuttle was just like the one I used to take from the mall in Bakersfield, California, Earth; just a little smaller, so I showed all the guys how to use the safety straps and we settled in for the twenty minute ride to our hotel near the test site for the full sized GR Earth’s factories had produced.

“Feels weird going back to Bakersfield, I said to Jasper who sat beside me in the aisle seat Sally and I saved for him.

“There ended up being four sites that met our needs for the test.  Bakersfield was centered among the factories that produced most of the components and they had an assembly plant large enough so being your home town factored in but did not need to carry much weight.”

“A strip of land ten miles wide and twenty miles long, an island of green on a brown world,” Matthew, a fellow student, said from behind our seat on the shuttle.

“It’s going to be glorious,” Jasper said, turning in his seat and giving Matthew a grin.

My Life (part 36)

“There is something I want to see,” I say to Sally as she folds up her holo platform and slips it into her jacket pocket.

“And I know what it is,” we leave our seats and wander around the medium sized commercial vessel.  “You’ve never been on a passenger ship right?”

“Never, I’ve only been on the one flight, the cargo ship from Earth to Jasper’s.”  She leads me into the dinning area where a few passengers are already sitting at tables sampling what the galley has to offer.  Most of the passengers on board were already on board before the ship stopped on Jasper’s World. There is a gym, an entertainment room and a room sectioned off with personal boxes.  Each section with just enough room for one person to change clothes and there is a bed for sleeping in each box.  Two deck hands come out of a room with engine room written on the door in white block letters.

“Excuse me,” Sally says to the deck hands.  The man and woman dressed in dark blue jump suits stop and wait.   “Can we look inside there?”

“It’s generally off limits to passengers,” the lady, about the same age as Sally and myself answers with a smile.

“This is Trenton Jennings and…” Sally starts.

“The Trenton Jennings,” The male deck hand reaches out his hand to shake Trenton’s.  “The one who stowed away in a fuel cell container?  You’re famous man.”  He looks at his fellow companion for approval and she nods, grinning.  “Sure you can look around.  I thought after what you did you might never want to see an engine room again.”  The lady opens the door and motions us in.

“I never really saw much of the engine room, just the inside of the container.”

“How did you take care of things man.  That was at least seven years ago right?  That run used to take six or seven days.”

“It wasn’t pleasant,” I look around the engine room and realize at once that these are not memories I want to dredge up.  I look around quickly, thank the deck hands and reach for the door.

As soon as the deck hands leave Sally says, “So…no more engine room visits right?”

“Let’s go check out that entertainment room.  This is a much better way to travel.”

Passenger flights have always been faster than cargo vessels but the vessel that takes us to Earth is a newer model and the entire flight only takes three days.  There is much more to do on board ship than there ever was to do on Jasper’s.  Sally and I keep busy and are almost disappointed when it is announced we need to strap into our gravity seats for a landing on Earth. 

My Life (part 35)

  Just as soon as the stay in your seats light goes out Sally who is sitting on my other side, says, “Look!” Sally has a plate sized holo platform sitting on her lap.  The personal holo platform is the latest thing to come out of earth’s technologies. Now that Earth is not spending all her resources on the war effort they have turned to moving war time inventions into the public.  Half the kids at the school purchased the personal sized holo pads.  I give the pad a casual glance and then sit up straight an give it my full attention.  A six inch tall figure of my sister Sarah is standing behind a podium on what has to be the stage at the front of the college auditorium.  Sally changes the sound from ear bud to speaker and I can hear my sister’s voice.

“…and for these reasons we honor this first graduation class of Jasper’s World Agricultural College,” Sarah picks up her note pad and the crowd in the auditorium cheers.

“You can re-run it if you want.  She mentions us and spends half her speech on what a great thing we are going to do on Earth.”

“What’s my sister doing speaking at our graduation?”

“She’s the president of the senior class at the high school and she’s very political.  I thought you knew.”

“I hardly ever see her.  I’d almost completely forgotten about graduation.  This trip seemed much more important.”

From my other side Henry nudged me, “I really tried to postpone this a day so you kids could attend your own graduations but everything just clicked into place and today was the day.”

“No problem, Jasper, I hadn’t even thought about it until Sally pointed it out.  I’ve been way too excited about this trip to Earth to think about anything else.”

“I’m going to get a snack.  You can get up and roam about you know.  You don’t have to stay in your seat.  It’s not like traveling in a cargo container,” Jasper winks at me and heads for the snack room.

My Life (part 33) changes

Last two words removed (on Earth).

My Life (part 33)

The wall in the front of our engineering classroom became a screen and on the screen a direct feed from Earth.  The video showed a section of a city on Earth the first city on Earth to be completely emancipated from the harmful chemicals and radiations left behind after the attack by the Oaxioms.  The film panned streets filled with people walking without suits or respirators, people cheered as they passed the camera and kids ran by giggling at having been set free.   The camera panned to a huge tower, one of several that sucked in bad air and breathed out good air.  The commentators mentioned several other cities that would soon be free of domes and respirators.  As the video faded Henry Jasper himself walked through the side door of our third year college class.  He waited for everyone to quiet down before he spoke.

“This is a great day for Earth,” we all clapped and cheered until Jasper raised his hand to stop us.

“Jasper’s World has always been a friend to Earth.  I am a proud Earther and will always be no matter how great a place Jasper’s World has become my home will always be Earth.” Cheers came again, this time a bit louder from the residence of the off world dorms but the rest of us cheered too, we have never been in competition with Earth.

“I would like to end my days as a resident of Earth.  I long to see the blue skies and tall mountains, the oceans and mighty cities of my home.” Complete silence filled the room.  All eyes watched Jasper.  All ears waited for his next words.  No one wanted Jasper to leave us.  He has always been like a father to us.

“But there is work yet to be done and I want us to be a part of that work,” people started breathing again, Jasper wasn’t leaving just yet.  “Just like we have all kept the Earth fed for all these years I would like for us to be a part in Earth’s recovery.  The film you have just watched displays a level of technology far beyond any methods that have been used in the past to reclaim Earth’s atmosphere but  Earth has forgotten the farms and forests and grasslands of its past.  All of their efforts have gone into restoring cities and industry.  The task I put to you is to restore Earth’s soil.  In doing so we will not only restore Earth’s plant life but we will bring the Earth to a place where nature will clean the air making this new and remarkable technology completely unnecessary.  Today components, specifications and every bit of research available relating to this reclamation method has been transported from Earth to Jasper’s World.  The new building you have watched being built on the edge of our campus is designed to provide a state of the art facility with one goal, to develop a practical method of returning Earth’s soil to a productive state.  We will not be alone in this research.  There are universities on Earth that have programs of this type and we will share information back and forth with them but they are people of cities.  They do not have the attachment to the land that each of you have.  Will you help?”

Every hand in the room went up but I was the first to stand.  We never returned to whatever it was we were being taught that day.  We formed small groups and brain stormed.  Everyone had ideas, tests we needed to run, drawings of equipment were sketched on white boards.  With Jasper in front like the Pied Piper we walked as a single organism to the site of the new research facility.  Without being assigned tasks people found their places and we began filling our minds with every bit of information already stored there.  We worked until well after the last scheduled class on the day.  I think we believed we could solve the problem by night fall but it wasn’t quite that easy.  It was six months before we had a prototype ready for a test.