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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
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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?
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"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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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