My Life (part 71)

Jasper’s World had been formed by a bunch of rebels who for one reason or another felt the need to leave the Earth.  These rebels formed a group of some of the freest people known to exist on any world, farmers.  These are not the kind of people who just accept a plan that exposes them to annihilation by an alien planet.  

The good thing about a secret meeting is that everyone on the planet knows what was said by the time the meeting breaks up; if the meeting were put out on national news a bunch of people would never hear about it.  

Half of Jasper’s was all for our idea to share information with Oaxion.  Half of Jasper’s rose up with signs and marched against it. Most of the university students were behind sharing information.  Two thirds of the students at the university were Earthers living on campus anyway.  Sally and I discussed it with each other and with every trusted friend that we were sure would be on board with our idea of sending a message in a satellite to Oaxion.  Before very long it became clear that we would need to keep our project private and not expect it to become a project of the government of Jasper’s World.  

Sally and I had never embraced the fact that we owned, outright, half a planet.  We had distanced ourselves from the responsibilities and the profits but that had in no way protected us from storing up assets.  We were, whether we wanted to admit it or not, two of the most powerful people in the known galaxy.  My sister Sarah worked quietly and nonstop with the congress of Jasper’s making sure the laws protecting personal rights stayed in place.  Because of the nature of Jasper’s, personal rights had, from the start, been strong and very well protected.  We moved ahead slowly and carefully with our plan to try communication with Oaxion.  We set aside space on the university’s campus as a lab and a central base.  For the first time ever some of the best, most creative human minds sought for ways to establish a non violent exchange with Oaxion.  No idea was considered too small or far fetched in our discussions. 

“They may not even have sight or hearing like we do.  They may just feel vibrations or maybe they feel bumps of waves in the air to understand color.”

“We need to include every spectrum even if it is far beyond what a human could discern.”

“We can forget about speech entirely.  Their frame of reference has to be totally different.”

“Math will always be the same and basic physics cannot change.”

“But their perception and the importance they place may be entirely different.”

“What about sending some life forms?  You know plants, maybe a rat?”

 At the same time a delivery system was being developed.  A space vehicle that could deliver our message.  And that vehicle must somehow suggest that the intelligent life forms on Oaxion should open our package rather than blow it out of space with their defensive weapons.

My Life (part 70)

The department of war on Earth had the most information.  Throughout the war constant effort had gone into learning the speech of the beings from Oaxion but even with the best in the fields of linguistics and the best of codebreakers working around the clock for years very little progress had been made.  There seemed to be very little in common between our species and theirs.  Toward the end of the first set of encounters with Oaxion two sounds were identified.  The sound that helped the Earth get the upper hand in the war in space was the sound the Oaxion pilots made just before firing missiles.  The spilt second between hearing the sound and the release of the missiles saved the lives and ships of many of Earth’s pilots.  The other sound identified was a high screech that would always be heard when a missile launched by a Oaxion pilot hit its target.

After a month of study all we knew about the life forms on Oaxion was:  they could breath the same air, they could not eat our food, they had a word for “fire” and they had a word that could be translated as something like “yeah!”

As the Earth recovered from the initial devastation attention was given to repairing the communications satellites that had been damaged.  The initial scans of the world called Oaxion  showed Earth’s missiles had been at least as successful as Oaxion’s.  Oaxion’s production of radio waves and its output of energy from the surface had been reduced to almost nothing.  But life still existed on Oaxion.  The Earth set about repairing its weapons of mass destruction with a fervor that was beyond her efforts to repair the damage caused to the Earth itself.

“They still have people living in spacesuits,” Sally said looking up from her personal communications pad, “Half the domes are improperly sealed and they’re building weapons.”

“They’re scared and for all we know they have reason to be.  How do we know the beings on Oaxion aren’t doing the exact same thing?  How can we know Oaxion isn’t intent on finishing off Earth once and for all?”  Sally had never lived on Earth and still had a bit of trouble thinking of herself as an Earther.  Now a days when she said Earther it sounded like a curse word.

“Earthers!”

“I’m an Earther.”

“You’re different Trenton.”

“We are all different Sally.  What’s more is we can all change.  What we need is more information.”

“The Earth is sending a probe to orbit Oaxion, to get a closeup scan.  That might help.”

“Makes me wonder.”

“How so?”

“Well, as much as we hate to admit it, with all our differences, we and the Oaxions seem to have a common interest in destroying each other.”

“And this makes you wonder?”

“Is Oaxion sending a probe to Earth? If they are we should capture it and study it right?”

“I’m sure they will.”

“We should send a probe to Oaxion Sally.”

“We are , I just told you.”

“No, we, Jasper’s World should send a probe to Oaxion.  We should include every bit of information the we can come up with that might help them to communicate with us.  They have obviously been studying us for as long as we have studied them.”  Sally brought me a fresh Americano to replace the empty cup sitting on my desk.  “But it’s all been about the war, just like our data.”  I took a sip of the coffee and smiled a thank you.  “We need to give them information that might establish common ground.”

“Like what?”

“Kids playing, plants growing, the abc’s, all kinds of things.  And it can’t be all vocal or sight it has to include smells and touch.  We have no idea as to how they receive stimuli.  They may have sensors that we do not possess.  We need to get through to them before we destroy each other completely.”

“They may not even know about Jasper’s World,” Sally said quietly.

“It’s a risk we need to take.”

“We need to talk to your sister.  This has to be an action taken by the government of Jasper’s.”

“Does it?”  I was thinking of how Henry Jasper had saved the Earth.  I was thinking about how unpopular he had been at first when he refused to support the war effort.

 

My Life (part 53)

I was walking in a slightly muddy field between rows of sprouting potatoes.  The morning air was cool but I wore shorts and a light shirt; it felt good the be out of the protection of a controlled indoor environment.  The mud built up sightly on my rubber soled canvas shoes, every few steps a layer of mud would delaminate itself and one leg would  be longer that the other for a few steps.  I had no reason to be in the field other than to be in the field.  My thought returned to the time Sally and I had spent on earth for our honeymoon trip.  I couldn’t put the image of a farm being nothing more than a factory out of my mind.  On Earth plants were nothing more than machines that needed adjustments and fuel to keep them producing according to a computer’s idea of what they should accomplish.  The plants were expected to reach goals on charts but no one cared about their beauty or the smell of their flowers.  I stopped and considered the first leaves that no one would eat coming out of the tilled ground.  If the Earth could produce a potato without this useless foliage it would.  But to me farming was about squeezing dirt in my hand to determine the proper moisture without ever needing to see a gauge or a computer screen.  The smell of rain from fifty miles away and the subtle changes in the winds that tell me if the rain is coming my way.  I stopped walking and assumed a military squatting position.  I sifted a handful of dirt from the pathway and let the ground dirt build a tiny ridge around a single potato plant.  “You’re a good fellow,” I told the life form that would some day produce a product good enough for McDonald’s.  And then I had the idea that would occupy many of the next years of my life.  It would fit into our program to attract tourists.  It would contribute to the health of Jasper’s World and it would let me keep my hands dirty.  

“Should we choose a place first or do we need to determine how much land we need first?”  I had found Sally walking through the almond orchard around our house.  She had been doing much the same thing I had been doing; trying to get back in the good graces of nature.

“General size first I’d think.”  The almond trees had just dropped their defective blossoms and the ground under the trees was covered with a carpet of pinkish white petals, the trees were still bouquets of flowers just starting to show their green leaves. 

“I was thinking fifty million acres?”

“That’s pretty worker intensive.”

“I’m including pasture for cattle, that doesn’t take much labor.”

“Until we have to round up the cattle.”  

The area would effect the man hours quite a bit;  somewhere where we would need a minimum of irrigation.

My Life (part 42)

And with that childhood, parental care, college, student farming all became things of the past.  With a lot of Jasper’s help and Sally at my side we started putting together our team as soon as the ship docked on Jasper’s world.  Nothing would change on Jasper’s for years to come.  Earth would not taste its first bit of food from the newly reclaimed ground for a year and that would just be a nibble.  Jasper’s would need to increase production for several years before it could begin to taper off production.  But when the shift came and Earth needed less instead of more the change would be dramatic and we needed to be prepared.  At first I plunged into it working day and night, planning to solve everything myself.  Jasper put a stop to that.  Henry Jasper himself forced me to spend every morning out in the fields taking care of practical matters.  I established a routine of getting into the fields as the sun rose and working at whatever task presented itself in that season.  Jasper demanded at least three hours of farming six days a week.  I’d work my three plus hours in rain, cold, sunshine, wind, I was never to be a token farmer.  After the farming a full breakfast, the largest and most important meal of the day.  I’ve never understood people who eat as soon as they get up.  After eating I’d check on our crew of thinkers and planners.  At first our plans went in every direction at once.  Plans for a satellite dock, beachside hotels, retirement towns, mountain parks on one hand and genetically produced patented mixes of bananas and strawberries or pink grapefruits without sections or seeds on the other hand.  Some of the ideas proved impossible almost immediately.  Some ideas became fields of study at Jasper’s University.  At the same time planting, harvesting, storing and shipping methods were improved.  In order to compete in the galaxy fifty years from now our operation needed to be not only more efficient but our product needed to be better than anyone else’s.  Our brand needed to be so established no world would ever think of doing without Jasper’s crops.  

The one wrench in the works was also the most important.  I always had the full backing of the owner of Jasper’s World and without Henry’s position it would have been hard to control the push to industrialize Jasper’s World.  For instance, a tractor that might take a factory on Earth three weeks to produce might take Earth an extra three months to produce in modules that could be shipped to Jasper’s and assembled on Jasper’s World with an additional three weeks labor.  But, if Jasper had his way and if I had any control at all, Jasper’s world would never have factories that belched out pollutants the way Earth’s industry always had.  

We used solar cells, wind machines and hydro generation and the argument constantly came up that we were polluting Earth by having Earth produce these thing for us.  Jasper never entered the debate.  Henry would just smile.  No matter how much we relied upon Earth for our industrial needs the balance of trade would remain in Jasper’s favor for at least the next twenty five years, according to the economist on our team.  Earth welcomed every order we made and we encouraged Earth, in our trade agreements, to keep her air clean and her waters pollution free.

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.

My Life (part 2)

People think twelve year olds are all talk, that we are just humans in the making.  Not true, I have a plan.  If you really want to get something done you make sure to tell no one.  Not telling may be about the hardest part of the whole thing.  Not having a bunch of friends helps but I’d really like to tell my mom.  I understand that I can’t.  Even a note left in a place where she would not find it for a few days would get me shipped back to earth.  I’ve been working on this since I was eleven, I know what I’m doing.  I’m working on my departure right now.  I stay away from home as much as possible.  Being here at the mall gets my mom and sister used to not seeing me around.  I’ve been taking trips to industrial sites, schools and under the false “visiting friends” just to get them used to my being gone.  Moving about the earth also teaches me the best ways to move from place to place without causing a lot of interest.  One of the most important things is to act like you belong.  Someone says, “hey kid, what are you doing here?”  the answer is, “hey, what are you doing here?”  They love that.  Of course, here on earth, I have all the proper papers and have every right to move from place to place but there are plenty of planets out there without much organization, where papers don’t mean much at all.  I have one all picked out.

I have my seat on a ship all picked out too.  I told you I’ve been thinking about this.  I hung out at a loading dock and watched the action for a full week before I figured it out.  I’m going to start out in a fuel cell container.   I weigh about the same as a container of fuel; not everybody knows that but I do.  I even have an empty container stored in the trash heap next to the port.  I wait for a change in shift.  When shifts change every one in the place meets in break rooms and talks for a good fifteen minutes, the whole loading dock is completely devoid of activity.  I sneak onto the dock dragging my container.  I place the container next to the other fuel cell containers and lock myself in.  It took me half a day to figure out how to put some latches inside the black plastic container, but they work great.  I spent a day inside the container at the dump just to see how it will be.  I’ve thought this through.  The only thing I can’t get ahold of is a current scan number for my old container.  I scuffed up the code stamps so that it will not respond at all.  They will load me up anyway.  I watched them do it with other containers with the same type of damage.  It’s too much work and takes too much time to follow the rules and get the fuel cell re-approved.  All I’m waiting for is a ship going where I want to go.

Space3 (part eighteen)

“First thing I know Randy is that we need to move the ship.”

“Are we in a no parking zone?”

“As far as I know we can park anywhere we want outside the dome but if we want to remain unseen we have about ten minutes before lights out in the dome and then we will be in plain sight.”

“I think we could get away with it Mac, I don’t thing anyone in the whole place comes out of their homes after lights out, but move us Mac.”  The little ship spun on it’s axis and clinging to the ground Mac had them hidden beyond the dome’s horizon well before ten minutes were up.

“While I was gathering data I found no evidence of any sensors or trackers of any kind for keeping tabs on anything outside the dome Randy, we should be fine here.”

“It’s like people in the country that don’t lock their doors, they’re just too far out in the middle of nowhere to worry about strangers poking around.  And from what I’ve been reading here coming to the dome at all is not something people do because they want to.”

“You’re right there Randy, only the poorest, most undertrained people make up the population of the dome.”

“But the intelligence level is high.  The people here just slipped through the cracks somehow.  A lot of them, a very high percentage, had problems with the law at a young age  and never completed their education.  Far more than average come from homes missing a father or mother.  And others just didn’t want to be a part of the group, a lot of individuals and rebels work and live here.”

“They came here and were trained for very specific jobs.  Most assignments here require thought and care but very few individuals have been trained to the point where they even understand what it is they do other than in a very general way.” 

Mac moved his holo image from above the ship’s console to the holo pad in the back of the ship.  He had the holo flat screen television appear on the wall, a recliner for his image and a recliner for Randy.  Randy was looking over entertainment suggestions Mac had made when Randy’s communications pad pinged with a message from inside the dome.  The face on the pad was the face of the Barista Randy had talked to while he had his morning coffee.

“Mr. Owens, I hope you remember me, my name is Saul Anderson, I don’t remember if I every introduced myself.”

“Mr. Anderson, call me Randy, I was hoping to hear from you.”

“I talked to some of my friends Randy, please call me Saul by the way, anyway my friends would very much like to meet with you.”

“And I would like to meet them and maybe get a little more information from you Saul.”  They set up a time and place on the next day; after work hours but with plenty of time before lights out and then broke contact.  

“I guess I passed their test.”

“Great Randy, so what are we watching?”

“How about this private investigator named Monk?”

“It’s in color.”

“I think I can handle color, I’m not sure why I think it but I think we’ve just had a good day Mac.”

Matter transfer from planet to planet is almost instant but requires a base with a stable gravity, a predictably constant location in the galaxy and a matter transfer platform.  The transportation of living matter once completely impossible has improved to a level where short trips, like from an orbiting space station to the planet below, are not healthy but possible.  Space ships travel by attaching to a gravity source in the direction travel is desired and by pushing away from gravity sources a ship would like to move away from.  Using this method Light speeds are achieved.  The bulk of time in space is spent speeding up and slowing down.  Communication in space is only slightly faster than space travel.  

A ship like Randy’s on Grander’s View is about two weeks away from Earth.  A message from Gander’s View to Earth takes about a week.  A package sent from the matter transfer platform on Gander’s View to a matter transfer platform on Earth takes almost a full minute.

The Place (part 15)

My plan had been to show Kathy the patch of inside ground where all the transportation bubbles gathered but we didn’t make it anywhere near that far.  Handing notes back and forth took more attention than talking.  We included drawings along side of words like “box” or “ball”.  Kathleen put the alphabet at the top of a page just to let our readers know what our limits were.  I have never been a artist but with little else to do and what seemed to be an unlimited supply of paper and pencils over the next days I took up drawing.  I drew landscapes of our dome almost exclusively at first.  Kathy labeled the objects in my drawings as squares, spires, tubes, transportation bubbles and any other words that seemed to apply.  I left one of the better of my completed drawings, along with Kathy’s labels on the red box before sleeping.  I had no intention of requesting anything from our watchers.  The red box served as a table and leaving the page there was just my failure to put my stuff away.  In the morning the page was gone.  My drawing returned the morning after that along with a white twelve inch by twelve inch page.  On the square of white paper appeared the same landscape I had drawn.  The intelligence’s copy was in full color along with blinking lights and moving transportation bubbles.  On the white paper our benefactors had labeled each object on the page with tiny lines of script.  I drew a cube as carefully as I could on a blank paperback paper page and tried to copy the dome people’s letters that appeared next to a cube in their drawing.  The letters, at least I assumed they were letters, there were hooks and circles that took time to figure out and I’m sure the colors also had meaning.  The one “word” I tried to copy had six different colors and a dot above one letter blinked.  Mine, of course, was all in gray but I did my best and placed my cube drawing on top of the red box.  My drawing was taken and returned with “cube” written in large black letters using the same font as the Hobbit book.  Sitting beside the drawing was a set of thin tubes of different colors.  It took me a few minutes to figure out how to use them, it requires a slight pressure to start the flow of color and a slight pressure to stop it.  But the set of drawing implements is very handy.  With practice they have a range from a hair’s thickness to a quarter of an inch or so and the original set has never run out of ink.  I use the colors for my drawings but I’m very careful to use only pencil gray when writing words.  Colors carry meaning here and I do not want to confuse the inhabitants with my ignorance.

The Parable of the Two Carpenters

       Back in the 1930`s in Northern California there lived two craftsmen, Gilbert and Paul.  Gilbert and Paul were carpenters, more specific, they were framers of stick frame houses.  Paul was the “cut off man” and Gilbert measured and hammered in the nails – “the framer”.  Gilbert would measure for the length of the boards he needed and shout the measurements to Paul. Paul would saw the lumber and toss it to Gilbert.  Gilbert would nail it into place.  In this fashion they framed hundreds of homes.  Over time the reputation of Gilbert and Paul grew.  They were known as tradesmen you could trust, as tradesmen who built strong, correct structures.  They never had to look for work.  Contractors sought them out and paid above scale. 

       Monday morning came and Gilbert and Paul prepared their pick-up for a long drive to yet another house site.  The foundation had been poured the week before, and very early that morning the lumber company had dropped off the two by fours, beams and miscellaneous lumber needed to frame the house.  The site was a couple of hours away but when they arrived the sun had just begun to provide enough light to work by.  Gilbert strapped on his nail belt and began laying out studs for the first wall as Paul set-up saw horses and unpacked his saw and square.  As Gilbert shouted out his first measurements for cuts he would need he realized he had forgotten his hammer.  With all their experience, with all the careful planning, with all the materials ready, with all the time and sunlight, Gilbert and Paul could not frame this house.