The E Utopia Project (22 page)

“If we dump the silicon in
space it could form asteroids which could someday collide with Earth.”

“We can dump the silicon on
the nearest planet.”

“We’ll need lots of fuel and
lots of oxygen to power the rockets that will transport the silicon waste to
space and the oxygen we use to do that could outweigh the oxygen produced during
the sand reduction that produced the silicon dumps.” Sara’s eyes widened. “When
spacecraft travel in the Earth’s atmosphere, they release carbon dioxide into
the atmosphere, which is not so bad because the carbon dioxide can be split
into carbon and oxygen by green plants or by UVL plants. But when rockets leave
the Earth’s atmosphere and enter interplanetary space, their engines continue
combining oxygen and fuel, releasing carbon dioxide into space. The oxygen
molecules in the carbon dioxide that they release in interplanetary space are
lost to the Earth forever.”

“I get it,” George said.
“It’s impractical to send silicon waste to space.”

“I think the world should
limit the number of space shuttles that leave the Earth because they release
carbon dioxide into interplanetary space, and the oxygen and carbon atoms in
this carbon dioxide are lost to the Earth.”

“The scientific talk is a
little stimulating.” He kissed her. “I’m feeling strong again.”

She purred when he parted her
legs. When he finished pounding her, she looked at him with amusement, knowing
he would soon be asleep. She lay on her back, her hands on the back of her
head, enjoying the high that she always felt after sex. A motherly feeling
surged in her heart when she heard him snoring like a little baby.

Her thoughts moved back to El
Monstruo.
Where is the oxygen going?
What will happen to the environment
if people continued to chemically break down sand?
There was a lot of sand on
Earth and no one seemed to be concerned about the possible consequences of
overexploitation of sand. Sara knew that although sand was abundant,
overexploiting it could tip the mineral balance of the Earth.

She fell asleep still
thinking about El Monstruo and the environment.

* * *

The arrival of Sam Cruz
changed the living arrangements in Sopoaga’s ship. Sopoaga had no choice but to
vacate his sleeping cell to the President and Commander-in-Chief. He and Commander
Jantunen had to share her sleeping cell. This didn’t pause much of a problem
since the rear admiral and his ship’s XO never retired to bed at the same time.
Sopoaga wished Lebia Nuate was still his ship’s XO. He felt a stir in his pants
when he imagined himself sharing a sleeping cell with Nuate.

Cruz sprawled on Sopoaga’s
bed, reliving how the E Utopia Project began. He had always been fascinated by
science and nature. Since he was a child, Cruz wanted to travel to space. When
the first space tourist travelled to the International Space Station in 2001,
Cruz asked his father for money to pay for a seat to space but the old man
refused.

When his father died, Cruz
shed crocodile tears. The old man only cared about making money and maintaining
his pole position on the world rich list. He had no interest in saving the
environment. He owned several companies that committed gross acts of
environmental degradation in Africa and South America. One of Cruz’s first acts
after inheriting his father’s estate was to sell companies which he thought had
a strong impact on the environment.

He travelled to the
International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz Spacecraft. He vividly
remembered his first journey into space. Viewed from space, the Earth looked so
beautiful and so perfect. It was even harder to imagine that there was war,
poverty and hunger on the surface of this gorgeous globe. It was hard to
imagine that some people were willing to destroy this beautiful planet for
personal gain. He vowed to do everything in his power to protect the globe.

He immediately formed the
International Green Movement. Through the International Green Movement, he
supported green parties around the world and printed millions of pamphlets to
educate the people of the world about the need to preserve the environment. At
the same time he founded his space company, Eureka, and hired a team of rocket
scientists and technicians to design and build spacecraft that was ideal for
recreational space travel. He believed that if people saw how beautiful the
Earth looked from space, they would appreciate the planet better.

It took three years for his
team of experts to build Eureka’s first spacecraft, the Ultravoyager. Eureka
Space Company used its Ultravoyager to take rich tourists into space. Sam Cruz
offered a number of people in positions of power free rides to space, hoping
that the beautiful space view of the Earth would make them cherish the
environment.

His efforts to preserve the
environment did not produce the results he desired. The politicians and
businesspeople he talked to only paid lip service to sustainable use of natural
resources. Dismayed, Cruz spent more and more time in space, away from polluted
Earth. Doctor Hitchcook, a member of Cruz’s team of scientists, asked for
funding to make what he called a “jump drive,” which he said he hoped could
make spacecraft travel at speeds faster than light.

Cruz seriously doubted the
feasibility of Doctor Hitchcook’s “jump drive,” and in jest, he contracted Hitchcook
to develop the jump drive. Two years later, Hitchcook told Cruz he was ready to
test his jump drive.

Cruz accompanied Hitchcook
and two scientists into space to test the jump drive on a space drone.

“If this works, we’ll conquer
the world,” Hitchcook said solemnly, looking at the base station that
controlled the drone. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll be the laughing stock of the
scientific community. I’m activating the jump drive.” As Hitchcook
remote-controlled the drone’s jump drive, everyone’s eyes were on the drone
that was travelling meters away from the spaceship.

What happened next was
nothing short of a miracle. One moment they were looking at the drone and the
next it was gone.

“I did it! I did it!”
Hitchcook shouted.

“What happened?” Cruz asked.
“Where did it go?”

“Maybe it exploded,” said
Professor Bolton, a friend of Hitchcook who had ridiculed the jump drive
project from the beginning. “Let’s play the video.”

Their mouths gaped when they
watched the video. It appeared as if the drone had gone into a hole.

“It’s like something quickly
sinking in water,” said Doctor Rudolf, the other scientist, who had equally
ridiculed Hitchcook’s project.

“We’ve lost its beacon,”
Hitchcook said. “It must be hundreds of light-seconds away.’’

“How does this jump drive of
yours work?” Cruz asked. “Did the drive make the drone teleport?”

“Sort of,” Hitchcook said.
“Think of the jump drive as a device that compresses the space in a ship’s
trajectory. The drive takes the ship into what I call hyperspace. The ship
moves with normal speed in the hyperspace but because the space in its
trajectory has been compressed, it moves at a much higher speed with respect to
normal space.”

“How fast with respect to normal
space?”

“Possibly faster than light.”

“I wonder what
Einstein
would say to this,” Rudolf said with a sardonic smile.

Hitchcook proposed to “jump”
another drone. This time he was going to program the drone to turn one hundred
and eighty degrees with respect to its gyroscope needle as soon as it finished the
jump, and then make a return jump. He wanted to program the drone to make the
U-turn in ten seconds to give the drone’s cameras time to record sizable
footage without taking the drone too far away from the point where it emerged
from hyperspace.

Cruz swore the three scientists
to secrecy and readily provided Hitchcook with funds. He didn’t patent the jump
drive because he didn’t want Earth’s polluters to know about the new invention.
If they knew about the jump drive, they could use it to pollute remote planets.

Hitchcook wasted no time
making another jump drive. He fitted the jump drive on a drone that was
identical to the first but this time he put three times more ultra-dense
deuterium fuel in the drive than was in the first drone to provide it with energy
for the return jump.

The results were astonishing.
The drone disappeared like the first and they lost its beacon. Bolton and
Rudolf, the co-skippers of the Ultravoyager, made the ship circle in one place,
waiting for the drone to return. They picked the drone’s beckon an hour later,
when they were beginning to lose hope.

“It returned,” Hitchcook said
with relief, pointing at the navigation display on the drone’s base station.

The unmanned spaceship was
only eight hundred kilometers away from the Ultravoyager.

“I’m bringing it back,”
Hitchcook said. “I hope it has enough fuel to get here.”

Like a kid playing a video
game, Hitchcook fingered the base station’s console and was delighted to see
the drone approaching the ship. “She’s coming!” he shouted. “She’s got fuel.”

It took the drone less than three
minutes to reach the ship. The ship automatically opened its hangar to let the
drone in. They excitedly rushed to the hangars airlock to inspect the drone.

“Let’s see what you’ve
brought for us, baby,” Hitchcook said, quivering with excitement.

Everyone excitedly watched the
footage from the drone’s first camera. The five second footage showed total
darkness. Hitchcook played footage from the second camera. Again, total
darkness. All of the drone’s six cameras had recorded clips of total darkness.

“It seems our bird was in a
dark place,” Professor Bolton remarked.

“It means the drone jumped to
a place with no objects to reflect light from the Sun, assuming of course that
it was in the Solar System,” Hitchcook said.

“And if it was outside the Solar
System?” Bolton asked.

“It means that either the
system has no stars or there were no objects or planets to reflect light from
the system’s star or stars.”

“So how do we go from here?”
Cruz asked, his euphoria waning.

“We need to jump the drone
from different locations and in different directions,” Hitchcook said. “I’m
sure one of the jumps will bring us pictures of a planet or a star.”

“It might bring us pictures
of unknown planets,” Professor Bolton said.

“We’ve to increase the camera
angles in order to increase the chances of picking light from a star,” Rudolf suggested.

“What are you waiting for?”
Cruz asked. “Let’s return to the ground and get back to work.”

They returned to Earth and
the three scientists worked on improving the drone, a feat which took them
three months. Cruz accompanied them to space to watch them jump the drone. The first
two jumps didn’t produce any desirable results. The drone returned from the
third jump with footage of distant stars. They recorded the location of the
jump zone and the direction of the jump spot using ICRS spherical coordinate
system and a gyrocompass.

They did six more jumps
before the drone returned with footage of the planet they now called E Utopia.
The footage was breathtaking. It showed and Earth-like planet with large bodies
of water on its surface. The water bodies were not like oceans but rather a network
of seas. The fact that the rocky planet was reflecting light and had liquid water
on its surface meant that it was in the circumstellar habitable zone of a star.

For fifteen seconds everyone
was speechless.

“There’s no known planet like
this in the Solar System,” Bolton said.

“If this planet is outside
the Solar System, how did the drone pass through the asteroid belt?” Doctor
Rudolf asked.

“The majority of asteroids
tend to orbit the Sun relatively close to the orbital plane of the Solar System’s
planets,” Hitchcook mused. “It could be that the drone’s trajectory was at a relatively
safe angle to the planetary orbital plane.”

“I hope there are no aliens
on that planet,” Cruz spoke at last.

“Mr. Cruz, if there are
sentient beings on the planet, then we would be the aliens if we go there,”
Hitchcook corrected.

“If there are no hostile creatures,
then mankind has found a new home,” Bolton said.

“Not all mankind,” Cruz said
fiercely. “This is our planet. We don’t want any polluters there. We shall rule
the planet under strict environmental law.”

“What shall we call the
planet?” Rudolf asked.

“We shall call it E Utopia,”
declared Cruz. “It’s short for Environmental Utopia.”

“Let’s not get carried away,”
Bolton said, looking at the screengrabs from the footage. “Maybe the liquid on
the planet’s surface isn’t water. Maybe it’s liquid ammonia or some other
liquid that doesn’t support life.”

“It’s a major breakthrough
regardless of the planet’s ability to support life,” Rudolf said. “We now know
that the jump drive can help us traverse the Universe and discover new planets.
If this newly discovered planet doesn’t support life, we can jump drones from
different locations and at different angles till we find a planet that can
support life.”