THE FIRST INTERSTELLAR SPACESHIP

Maxwell London

Doomsayers had been predicting for years that the human race would annihilate
itself in a man made cataclysm. Atomic war, global warming, created diseases all
would be enough to do the job.

But we didn’t have to wait for man to do himself in.

Several decades ago the solar observatory at Harvard University announced that
our sun was entering an unstable phase. Solar radiation was increasing a
fraction of a percent a year. There appeared to be no stopping it. Folks currently
alive would survive although summers would be hotter and winter storms would
be stronger. Hurricanes and tornados would become more frequent. Our children
and grandchildren would have a much tougher time coping with the weather and
our great, great grandchildren would be toast. Even my children complained
about the summers getting hotter. But for them it simply meant more time at the
beach.

The information about Earth’s probable doom was suppressed. Since nothing
could be done about it, the authorities decided that all the news would do was
raise pubic anxiety during an era of international tension. Hydrogen bombs were
enough to worry about. Releasing the information that the sun might expand into
a Red Giant would drive people into an absolute panic. Besides we had years to
find a solution. In that time surely we would solve the problem.

Except that we didn’t.

Eventually the news of the sun's imminent expansion got out. Graduate students
and assistant professors just can’t be depended upon to keep secrets especially
when their careers depended on publishing or perishing. Newspapers splashed
the story across the front pages. It was heralded as a punishment for man's
iniquities and blamed on everything from gay marriage to failing to eat fish on
Friday. Congressional committees met to discuss possible solutions. And that
was only in the United States. Similar discussions were taking place in every
developed country in the world.
But the problem still hasn't been solved.

Scientific journals published strong evidence that the Sun would grow much
larger and hotter in several generations. The North Pole is now totally ice free.
The snow cover on Greenland and Antartica is gone. Last year was the warmest
on record. Summer temperatures averaged well over 100 F in Boston. Sea levels
have risen so much that most coastal cities hide behind dikes. Bangladesh is
now underwater. Soon much of Florida and the low countries of Western Europe
will be mere memories.

According to cosmological theory the Sun wasn't supposed to expand for another
two billion years but it was happening now. The laws of physics are immutable.
An expanding Sun will incinerate all the inner planets, including Earth, and
almost certainly make the moons of the outer ones, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and
Uranus, uninhabitable. The only way that humanity could survive would be to
leave the solar system entirely. Humanity would be forced to become an
interstellar species.

Astronomers had discovered several hundred Earth sized planets located within
100 light years. Several were in the Goldilocks zone of their stars with the
probability of liquid water on the surface. It was possible that a few could be
habitable by humans. The trick was getting there. They were all so far away.

One hundred light years doesn't sound like much. The phrase rolls off the tongue
so easily. But remember that a single light year is about six trillion miles. A
spaceship leaving Earth with the average velocity of the Apollo moon rocket
would take nearly 100,000 years to travel 100 light years. Despite TV’s Startrek
series and science fiction movies, the light speed barrier seems just as
unbreakable as when Einstein proposed it well over a century ago. In a
hypothetical interstellar space ship capable of traveling at 10% of light speed, we
would be looking at a 30 year voyage to reach the nearest potentially earth like
planet. More likely the ship wouldn't go that fast and the voyage might last much
longer.

Scientists proposed several solutions to the public. The first was to do nothing, or
almost nothing. Simply accept the fact that the Earth had a good long run, hold
hands, sing "Nearer My God to Thee.” Then wait until the sun exploded. A fall
back option was to collect and code all human knowledge, burn it into some
permanent medium like gold CDs or DVDs, and send multiple copies off in all
directions in tiny space capsules.
I recall that this is what was done on Voyager, the first NASA satellite to leave the
solar system. A gold plated record was attached to the satellite with the recording
of human voices plus instructions on how to build a phonograph. For the modern
version, packets of frozen human embryos could be placed in each capsule
along with the data discs if some benevolent aliens wanted to recreate the
species. A full DNA sequence of a variety of Earth life forms, including humans,
could be included in case the voyage took much longer than expected. Say a
million years or so.

Several other options for escape from Earth were proposed. I’ll describe as many
of those I remember but I must say that many were not practical in our time
frame. A favored option was to construct a fleet of generation starships capable
of supporting a large number of passengers and crew for a 300 to 400 year
voyage. That's ten generations. The original passengers would have long died
but their great, great, great. great, great, grandchildren might take their first steps
on a new planet. Or not. The new planet might not be suitable for human life after
all.

The generation ship idea seemed to catch the fancy of the general public. It
required no advance preparation. People would just troop aboard like the animals
on Noah’s ark and step off on a new home planet. It would be like taking a cruise
ship to the stars. Generation ships are a favorite of science fiction films but the
plots of these films tend to concentrate on the stories of people living within the
ship rather than the nature of the ships themselves.

Generation ships are not a fictional concept. The idea is over 100 years old. They
are huge spacecraft, assembled in orbit. The design is loosely based on the
pioneering work of Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky almost two centuries
ago. It is rather a conservative technology.

Tsiolkovsky recognized that many of the problems associated with spacecraft

were from the lack of gravity. Life evolved in Earth’s gravitational field. Many of
our organs require gravity to function properly. To provide an artificial gravity he
proposed that the passenger quarters of a spacecraft be constructed in the
shape of a huge ring which would rotate slowly on its axis. People would live on
the inside of the ring. Centrifugal force would be a good substitute for gravity.
This was quite an insight. The Wright brothers had barely invented aviation when
Tsiolkovsky wrote his papers.
Plans for planned generation ships were released to technical magazines like
Aviation Week to convince the public that something was actually being done.
The first one would be tentatively named the New Ark. According to the published
plans the generation ship would be the size of a small city. It would look like a
giant wagon wheel on a long axle, slowly spinning on it's axis as it made its way
through space. The wheel, a circular ring approximately 6 kilometers in diameter,
would be attached to the central axle by a dozen thick spokes. The ring was
designed to rotate slowly and create artificial gravity for about 3,000 people living
inside. That many people would not be needed to control and maintain the ship
for a three to four century trip but the planners wanted to have a sufficient
number to insure that the colony would be successful. The passengers would live
on the inner surface of the rim of the wheel where the gravity is greatest, nearly
Earth's gravity. The axle, the long central core of the ship, will be about half a
kilometer in diameter and would house the ship’s machinery and an ion drive for
course alteration near the destination.

The ring itself will be constructed like a large layer cake. The foremost layer,
nearly half a kilometer deep, would house supplies, water and raw materials. It
would also provide shielding against both radiation and micrometeorites which
might be swept up by the ship's passage. The four kilometer middle layer is the
habitable space. One clever innovation was a network of electrical cables around
the exterior of the habitable area. If an area of high interstellar radiation was
encountered the output of one of the ship's atomic generators was passed
through the electrical cables to produce a magnetic field sufficient to deflect most
of the radiation.

The aft most layer of the rim would contain the life support equipment necessary
to keep the ship functioning for an indeterminate time and provide additional
radiation shielding. Most of the ship's atomic power generating equipment was
contained in a compartment at the rear end of the axle, heavily shielded from the
living area. The proposed plan showed the axle expanding to a large cone about
1000 meters at the base. The cone would contain the propulsion system.

The ship will be assembled in low Earth orbit. Sub assembles would to be lifted
into orbit by the massive freight rockets that had been developed earlier in the
century to supply a Moon colony. The generation ship sounds big but in reality
the total mass was be no greater than that of a large cruise ship or a twentieth
century ocean liner. Aluminum and carbon fiber are much lighter than steel and
there is no need for 12 inch thick armor plate. Structural elements would be thin,
about like a conventional airplane. The acceleration forces on a trip to the stars
will be very low and the ship was not intended to land on a planet.

Heavy supplies like water and building materials that don't mind high acceleration
would be packed in containers and boosted into orbit by a railgun mass driver
constructed into the side of an eastward facing Peruvian mountain. Mass drivers
are simply large electrical cannon that accelerate streamlined containers fast
enough to escape Earth’s gravity. The Peruvian mountains are actually taller that
the Himalayas and the bulk of the atmosphere is beneath them. The railgun uses
a pair of parallel conductors, or rails, along which a sliding armature is
accelerated by the electromagnetic effects of a current that flows down one rail,
into the armature and then back along the other rail. For space launches from
Earth, relatively short acceleration distances (less than a few km) would require
very strong acceleration forces, higher than humans can tolerate. Because of the
strong acceleration, this system would be used to launch only sturdy materials,
such as food, water, and fuel. The railgun will get its power from a series of
generators along the track. Half of the operating magnetic field comes from the
rails, and the other half from supercooled augmenting magnets. The U.S. Navy
adopted railguns as a substitute for cannons in the 21st. century.

The articles published in technical journals mentioned that the ship was to be
made of individual wedge shaped compartments which formed sections of the
wheel rim. They didn’t look much like wedges when they were launched but
origami specialists devised clever folding options which enabled each section to
fit into the cargo bay of a supply rocket or an electonically boosted capsule and
then unfold into the proper shape once in space. Each section was put into
position and fastened in place. The walls between wedges helped support the
ship's structure against the forces of internal air pressure and the ship's rotational
"gravity." In addition, each wedge could be individually sealed. This would serve
as a safety feature against the perils of space. In the event that a rogue meteor
punctured one of the wedges, the openings between it and its neighbors could be
closed and people evacuated to the safe areas while the breach was being
repaired.

Strategically placed light fixtures on the inner surfaces of each wedge would
provide illumination designed to mimic Earth's sunlight. The climate in each
compartment could be individually adjusted. Those devoted to agriculture would
be kept warmer and more humid than the remainder of the ship. The lighting
would also brighter and the lights kept on constantly for a longer growing season.
Glass windowed observation rooms would be scattered along the rim of the living
area. These are not actually necessary but the designers felt that being able to
look at the heavens outside would make people realize that the universe was
bigger than the interior of the New Ark. It would stop crew members from
forgetting the purpose of their voyage. The "glass" of the observation rooms is
actually a multilayered glass/ plastic composite every bit as tough as the metal
walls of the ship. However it is not impervious to hard radiation and the
observation rooms would be evacuated during stellar flare ups. I anticipated that
people would spend a lot of time in the observation rooms looking out at the
stars.

Fastened to the outside of the starship would be a number of shuttle craft

designed to ferry people and supplies to the surface of the planet when the ship
reached its destination. I imagine that they could also be used as lifeboats in
case something catastrophic happened but since the ship will be traveling most
of its voyage in deep space, there would be nowhere to go.

At the very front of the spaceship would be a large combined laser and radar.
The radar detects solid objects in the ships path and the laser is used to either
disintegrate them or nudge them out of the way. One of the design engineers told
me that the idea was inspired by the Startrek TV shows of his youth.

The living area inside of the generation ship were intended to resemble a quiet
suburb or small town. Small apartment blocks, parks, farms and rivers would fill
the inner surface of the ring. The designers made full use of stagecraft tricks to
provide the illusion that the interior is much larger than its actual dimensions. But
there would be plenty of space for everybody.

Given the ring's diameter, the ship would provide about 75 square kilometers of
living area. When fully manned, the population density for most of the voyage
would be roughly that of the Hawaiian Islands, about the same as that of a rural
village. The internal environment would be similar to that of Hawaii as well. The
temperature and humidity would be maintained at a comfortable level without hot
summers or frigid winters. The engineers called it a shirt sleeve environment.

The passenger compliment would be selected to be a mix of all ethnic groups

and nationalities. This would provide enough genetic diversity to provide
resistance to disease and insure successful reproduction when the destination
planet is settled. Besides it was good politics since the expenses of the trip will
be greater than any single country could muster.
The crew would provide a mix of skills and capabilities suited for colonization.
Geologists, farmers, builders, scientists, medical personnel, artists, musicians,
teachers - in short everyone that the planners deemed necessary to run a well
ordered community. Given the length of the planned voyages, most passangers
would not live long enough to reach the destination planet but their descendants
might have a productive life on the new world. What was most important was that
all passengers had to be willing to go on a trip from which there was no return.
They would have to sever ties with friends, relatives, and careers on Earth and
face the challenge of the unknown.

Every effort would be made to emulate earth like conditions on board ship.. At the
start of the voyage time would still be measured in minutes, hours, days, and
weeks. The “days” would still be 24 hours to approximate the human circadian
rhythm. While the ship has to be maintained 24/7, the lighting was dimmed
periodically in each section to simulate a normal day. The length of the day would
be slowly altered enroute to match that of the new home world. Clothes,
appropriate for the ship's climate, would be selected from a catalog of available
garments. There would be no fashion show on board.

To prepare for colonization of a new planet a large stock of domestic animals

would be carried aboard. Not full sized cows, sheep, pigs, and horses but frozen
embryos which will be warmed and matured just before planetfall. The seeds of
useful plants would also be frozen. These will be planted after arrival.

The generation spaceship was intended to be propelled toward its destination by

the Orion drive. This wasn’t the massive Orion rocket that took man to Mars but a
far older concept that was proposed by scientist Freeman Dyson soon after the
start of the atomic era. Basically the Orion drive exploded tiny atomic pellets,
really small atom bombs, behind a heavy funnel shaped reaction plate at the tail
end of the spaceship. Although a bit of the surface of the reaction plate will wear
away with each explosion it should last more than long enough for the voyage.
The plate would block most radiation headed toward the inhabited area.

The explosions pushed the ship forward just like putting a firecracker under a tin
can. In actuality the drive is more complicated than it sounds. The "atomic
bombs" are little specially shaped capsules of tritium ejected out the rear of the
ship and detonated by an intense focused array of lasers. Experiments show that
properly shaped charges transfer more than 50% of their energy to the reaction
plate.
Each explosion adds about 10 meters per second to the ships velocity. It will take
many tiny explosions for the generation ship to reach it’s final speed. It was
estimated that the Orion drive would have to detonate about 8 million of these
hand grenade sized atomic bombs to reach 1.5% of the speed of light. A series of
shock absorbers in the plate mounting structure would attenuate the impact of
the individual explosions. The living area would feel a slight vibration when the
drive is used. The trip to Proxima Centauri, about 3.9 light years distant, would
take about 300 years if the ship’s average velocity was a bit more than one
percent of light speed. That sounds slow but the ship will be traveling at 2,700
miles per second. A speed fast enough to travel entirely around the Earth in 8.5
seconds.

The Orion drive was tested with regular explosives during the ‘60s and it worked
as expected. Although theoretically capable of taking a ship to the most distant
planets, the concept was never implemented because of nuclear nonproliferation
treaties. It released too much radiation to be used in Earth's atmosphere.
However since the generation spaceship is assembled and starts from Earth orbit
there is no atmosphere to pollute.

The top speed of the Orion drive, as originally conceived was about 5% of that of
light. Since the ship would have to slow down once it reached the halfway point
of the voyage the average speed of the trip would be about 2 or 2.5% of light
speed. Advances in the shape of the reactor plate allowed for faster speeds
however the ship velocity was purposefully limited because of the danger of
collisions with dust or gas particles. At very high speeds the energy of a collision
with a dust particle would melt a hole entirely through the ship’s skin.

Many ships would have to be sent to a variety of destinations to assure a

perpetuation of the species. The technologists were certain that the ships could
be built. It would take all of Earth's resources but the resources would be of no
value after the Sun exploded.

The basic problem was keeping the ship’s small population focused on an
objective that only their descendants would ever realize. This sociological
problem loomed as large as the technical one. The spaceship had to be
navigated precisely over a flight lasting many generations. In addition the ship's
population had to maintain good order and preserve a functioning society
capable of surviving in an unknown environment after planetfall.
Social scientists finally agreed that the most flexible governance structure for a
small community was modeled after the New England town meeting. Participants
got together periodically, proposed solutions to community problems, and voted
as a group. It worked for small towns and would probably work for a ship's
population of fewer than 3000. After arrival at the new planet the settlers could
choose whatever governance structure was most suitable for the new conditions.

History is full of stories of exploratory expeditions that failed because of social

problems, failure to adapt to environmental conditions, or leadership inadequacy.
In fact the success record of pioneering societies is shockingly low. Historians
estimate that a full 80% of travelers on Earth’s voyages of exploration during the
17th and 18th centuries died during their voyage. Even the Vikings who landed in
the Americas 500 years before Columbus lost 1/3 of their ships. The Vikings
never voyaged further than 150 miles from the nearest land, hopping from land
mass to land mass to complete their long voyages. Our space ship will have to
cross almost 20 trillion miles before it achieves planetfall.

One concept was to eliminate the social problem entirely by putting the
passengers in suspended animation for the duration of the voyage. Suspended
animation ships could be smaller and probably faster than the generation
starships. NASA research had shown that a crew that was asleep would only use
a fraction of the resources of a wide awake crew. More ships could be built and
sent to a wider variety of planets. Only a few crew members would need to be
awake at any time to tend to inevitable maintenance tasks in the course of the
voyage. The problem was that no one had figured out a way of inducing
suspended animation for a 300 year period. But that was simply regarded as a
technical detail.

The extreme case would be to freeze several hundred thousand sets of fetuses
or sperm and eggs and rely on a small number of very dedicated crew members
to defrost them a generation before arrival, nurture them, and educate them to be
the first generation of pioneers.

So how did I get involved in this planetary exodus?

My name is Maxwell London. I’m told that my great grandfather’s name was
some unpronounceable conglomeration of Russian consonants but I don’t know
anything about that. When my grandfather arrived in the United States in 1904.
His English wasn’t too good and he misunderstood the question “What is your
name?” as “Where did you sail from?” His reply “London” was entered into the
books as our family surname and it has been so ever since.

Thanks to my grandfather, a learned man who prospered as a midwest banker, I

received a good education. Our extended famiy lived on Grandpa’s farm along
the Mississippi River. My parents, both faculty members in the physics
department of the nearby small college, allegedly named me after James Clerk
Maxwell, a brilliant 19th century physicist, in the vain hope that I would also grow
up to be a scientist. I think that I disappointed my parents by becoming an
engineer instead. Most physicists feel that engineers are the carpenters of
science.

My older brother joked that they named me after Maxwell’s Demon because I
blew alternately hot and cold. That’s a scientist’s inside joke. If you don’t know
what it means, look it up.

Courtesy of the GI Bill I received further training in aeronautical engineering after

my Army service during the Korean war.

For the next dozen years I was a technological migrant worker flitting from
aerospace company to aerospace company as it gained or lost defense
contracts. By a weird throw of the dice my jobs were always at the cutting edge
of aerospace fantasy. My fingerprints were on the Atlas missile, the Mach 2
Canadian Avro CF105 fighter, the Polaris missile system, the Mach 3 North
American B70 bomber and the Dynasoar space glider, the precursor of the
Space Shuttle. Fortunately none of these craft were ever used in combat.

If you are reasonably familiar with the NASA lunar program, you probably know
who I am. I’m one of the few remainingy Old Guard who was involved in rocketry
before the Mercury program. Most of my colleagues and contemporaries are
either dead or in nursing homes.

I stayed in the aerospace business for a number of years, and then transferred to
NASA to participate in the Apollo program. I was a charter member of the
American Rocket Society. That makes me both a part time farmer and an old
time rocket scientist. To the disappointment of my parents I enjoyed the practical
side of the space program more that the theoretical side. As the program wound
down I accepted a professorship at a major university where I met my beloved
late wife. We spent 60 years together and had several wonderful children.
No matter what you see on TV science shows, the U.S. space program wasn't a
carefully planned NASA enterprise conceived and directed by forward looking
senior scientists. Rather it was a knee jerk political response to the Russian
success in putting a satellite in orbit. Sure, both countries had plans to capitalize
on their ICBM efforts by using rockets to loft scientific payloads into space but the
Russians succeeded while our Vanguard rockets blew up on the launch pad. The
Russians also mapped the back side of the moon and put a mobile vehicle on the
lunar surface while all we could do was launch a beeping radio transmitter on a
Redstone missile.

During the Kennedy era the politicians declared that we would leapfrog the
Russians and put a man on the moon. The Russian Yuri Gagarin had
circumnavigated the globe by the time we had barely put a man in a suborbital
flight.

The initial phases of the space program were left to untried, naive engineering
nerds like us. No senior NASA scientist wanted to have his reputation ruined if
the project was a failure although they were all ready to claim credit if it was a
success. We were the guys who conceived and tested the big rockets like the
Saturn 5 that lifted the Apollo spacecraft to the moon. In fact we designed the
Apollo and the Gemini as well. These were programs that the established
science community expected to fail. Manned spaceflight was a creature of cold
war politics. Both the USA and Russia had ambitions to be viewed as technical
superpowers. The real payoff for both science and industry was in much smaller
unmanned satellites and remote controlled exploratory vehicles.

Nerds is perhaps too pejorative a term. Most of us were in our 20’s or 30’s,
recent graduates from engineering schools. We were just like any other bunch of
horny guys who wanted desperately to drink beer with our friends on weekends,
drive fast cars, and get laid. The only difference was that most of us carried slide
rules and wore pocket protectors in our shirts.

After working all day on methods of killing Cold War enemies, we chilled out on
cold beer and hot girls.

The decade from 1950 to 1960 was a sexual paradise for young unmarrieds.
Free and open sex was the way of the 50's. Birth control pills removed the fear of
unwanted pregnancy. AIDS had yet to emerge as a sexually transmitted disease.
The Haight-Asbury "Summer of Love" was in flower, and women were asserting
their rights to enjoy casual sex. There were plenty of women, hot, nubile girls
anxious to use their college degrees on the job and their bodies in bed. It's hard
to believe that we were the guys responsible for the high tech weaponry that
formed the bulwark of America's defenses during the Cold War.

After the successful moon landing in 1969, a dozen trips were made and then
manned voyages into space largely stopped. We beat the Russians, secured our
political claim of technological superiority and returned a couple of hundred
pounds of moon rocks. But the public proved more interested in weather
prediction, TV satellites, and cheap GPS navigation for cars. And that's the
direction most aerospace research headed. There were few manned spacecraft
made after the 60s. The Space Shuttle was one of them. But the craft was never
the success that its supporters claimed and was ultimately retired.

About a month after the UN decided that humanity must leave the planet to
survive I received a personal call from NASA Assistant Director Roger Barton
asking if I would consult on the program. Rog Barton was a young engineer
assigned to my group during the early days of the Mercury program. When I first
met Rog he was slim and fairly athletic. He had been a fighter pilot and later an
engineering test pilot. In addition to his technical skills he had the talent for
finding the best restaurants in town. Many of our discussions took place over
very fattening five course meals. I particularly remember the sauerbraten at the
“Old German” in Ann Arbor. We sketched out the concept for the Gemini
spacecraft on a napkin at that meal.

The sedentary life of an engineer agreed with him and he added a few pounds
every year. By now, forty five years later, he was almost as wide as he was tall.
We had casually kept in touch over the years, mostly over drinks and snacks at
scientific conventions. After the last lunar mission Roger stayed with NASA while
I opted for academia.

NASA is like most governmental agencies where the top position, that of Director,
is filled by a politically reliable acolyte but the supporting position, the Assistant
Director, is a real expert who will stay despite many administrative changes.
Roger was one of those.

Soon after I started teaching my interests shifted from rocket design to the
influence of technology on modern life. How, for example, had the steel plow
changed civilization. One of my favorite questions on a final exam was to ask the
students what might have happened if the computer had been invented before
the steam engine. Still, my name remained on the roster of space scientists and,
on occasion I served on a National Science panel investigating spaceflight. So
when Roger asked me to consult on the NASA program, I reminded him that I
was well over 80 years old, approaching 90. Perhaps some younger people
would be more suitable.

"That's just the problem," he said. "Most of today's engineers have spent their
careers working on small, efficient boosters capable of lifting a few thousand
pounds into orbit. Payloads have been miniaturized. Your smart phone has more
computing power than all of our Apollo gear put together. In our day we would
have needed a room full of equipment to do the same job. These guys know
what they know and are very good at what they do but the generation ships we
intend to use to voyage to other star systems are orders of magnitude larger than
anything they have ever worked on. They are the size of a small city not the size
of an SUV."

"Modern engineers don't know much about large rockets. Some, in fact think the
Saturn 5 was a myth. So much knowledge has been lost. Sure we have the old
blueprints of the big rockets but few remember how things were actually put
together. No one knows the adjustments that needed to be made. Many of our
old computer tapes can't be read by modern equipment. The blueprints of the old
boosters can't be used by modern engineers because so much prior knowledge
is assumed."

"What we need is a few good people who have the experience to coordinate the
efforts of hundreds of contractors and make all parts of the spaceship play well
together. We need the memories of old timers who actually worked with these
things. NASA checked all our old personnel records. We asked the Russians to
do the same. There are very few of you old guys left, maybe a dozen who are not
senile. We need you. Earth needs you. Will you help us?"

So I volunteered. Or rather I was drafted into the Earth escape program. In due
time I was asked to attend a large organizational meeting at the headquarters of
the National Science Foundation in Washington. When I got there I was amazed
at the youth of most of the attendees. They could have been recruited from the
junior class of any of the surrounding colleges. I recognized some of the older
ones as former students of mine from college classes I taught years ago. I even
saw a couple of female colleagues that I had brief affairs with a half century back.
Frankly they had not aged well. I hope I don't look as wrinkled in their eyes as
they do in mine.
In the meetings there were a scattering of my peers, a few faces I had seen on
TV astronomy shows and a lot of people whose name tags had fancy titles. In
short, it was a collection of the top researchers in space science. What was I
doing here, I wondered. I had not been involved in such research for a number of
decades.

We had a few introductory lectures detailing the scope of the problem, an

assessment of the evidence supporting the inevitability of the Sun going nova,
and a survey of the escape methods proposed. I was asked to make a few
suggestions about the generation ship approach and I wrote a few reports that I
filed with NASA. My ideas certainly weren’t technical. Any farm boy could have
done as well.

Thinking about the Orion drive propelled starships is where I earned my keep.
Well hardly, since I wasn't being paid anything. When I was a boy I used to sit by
the banks of the Mississippi and watch the push boats muscle large strings of
barges up the river. As soon as the barges were delivered to their destination, the
push boat would release it's load and head down stream for the next delivery.
Why couldn't we do the same for spacecraft?

So I proposed that instead of building a highly expensive Orion drive for each
generation space ship, why not build just a few and use them as “push boats” to
launch numerous spacecraft to their destinations. It worked for barges, why not
for spacecraft? The “push boat” would accelerate the spaceship toward its target
at maximum speed. When the spaceship reached its desired velocity and was
headed in the right direction the module containing the Orion drive would be
detached. It would make a U turn, head back to Earth, and pick up another
spaceship to send to another destination. Each round trip might take a month or
two.

Each Orion propulsion module was expected to make a dozen or more round
trips. On the last trip the crew would leave their very heavily shielded control pod
and transfer to the boosted spaceship. There would be no shortage of fissile
material for the mini atomic bombs. All the nuclear nations agreed to strip their
store of atomic weapons for the project. There would certainly be no use for
these weapons after the Sun went nova.

Another one of my farm boy ideas was about the composition of the starship
crew. Any rancher knows that to get a bunch of cattle to the market you don’t
have to start out with a breeding herd equally composed of cows and bulls. A
single bull can impregnate many cows. If the herd were composed of mostly
cows and just a couple of bulls, a large number of calves would be born for
market at far less cost for feed and supplies.
Following this logic, even the basic generation space ship should have a crew
composed primarily of women with only sufficient male crew members to provide
genetic diversity. Any farmer could have had the idea but apparently not the
politicians. Many nations had a difficult time accepting a female dominated ship.
Most thought that the space craft should be run by males, replicating, as much as
possible, the social structure of the originating society.

Following the introductory meetings we ‘volunteers’ were assigned to work

groups suited to our areas of expertise. All except me. My name was absent from
the assignment list. I called Rog Barton to ask if the omission was intentional. I
sort of hoped it was so I could get back to the serious business of watching
summer baseball games on TV and leave the task of saving Earthlings to people
more qualified than me. Unfortunately he asked me to attend a private meeting
with some other NASA scientists.

My late wife had been a professor of neurophysiology of some renown. I knew

very little about the inner workings of the brain but I was pretty good at
mathematics and I materially contributed to the analytic parts of her research.
Out of love, and a bit of gratitude, she appended my name to her papers as co-
author. I was specifically asked to join the group because it was assumed that I
knew something about both rocket science and neurophysiology - a rare
combination indeed.

This misguided assumption of my broad knowledge was considered an asset. I

was reminded of the old joke about the difference between a scientist and a
philosopher. You know how it goes. “The scientist knows more and more about
less and less until he knows everything about nothing, while a philosopher knows
less and less about more and more until he is knows nothing about everything.”
I’m afraid I fell into the latter category.

It appeared that there were several more options for the survival of the human
race that were not being publicly disclosed because they were both radical and
irreligious.

Moving a human being through long distances of space is very expensive.

Moving just his mentality is a lot cheaper. The average human brain has about 86
billion cells. Most are used are used for handing basic body maintenance
functions, organizing perceptions, coordinating muscle movements and
processing incoming auditory and visual information. A substantial number serve
as the repository for memories and learning and mediate our self awareness and
personality. Neurons are the computing elements of the mind. They are
connected by billions of glial cells which serve as the internal wiring of the brain.

In essence the unique features of a given human mind consists of the information
handled by only 200,000,000 neurons. About $50 worth of hardware at today's
prices. The remainder of the mind is common to everybody. In theory, if the
individualistic contents of a human brain could be downloaded to a computer, the
entire population of a major city, say New York, could be contained in a device
less costly than a modern fighter plane. It could be made even cheaper by using
a variety of information compression techniques.

Research during the previous decade had made it possible to identify exactly
which groups of the brain's neurons were firing at any given time. A clever
scientist had the insight to see that if modern cryptoanalytic techniques were
applied to this information, the software, or better, the actual interconnections of
the neurons could be decoded. After all, if the NSA could collect and analyze
every bit of telecommunications in the country to draw a picture of terrorist
activity, the same computers could be used to develop a model of a specific
brain.

The second part of this option was almost purely biological. Human DNA had
been thoroughly mapped. Medical research had identified those areas which
could cause genetically mediated diseases. DNA sequences which caused
cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, feeble mindedness, and
other degenerative diseases could be systematically removed or altered using
techniques like ‘crispr’. The revised DNA was inserted into stem cell nuclei to
clone modified humans. Just like “Dolly”, the sheep.

Some labs in the US had tried to edit DNA but the Chinese had refined the
technique and actually implanted the gene edited embryos into surrogate
mothers. Everyone protested this usurpation of God’s perogative of course, but
that was like closing the gate after the horses had escaped. Now ‘designer’
children could be made, diseases eliminated, and organs and structures that
humans no longer needed could be removed.

It was all very simple in theory but complicated in practice. Over 200 attempts
were made to clone Dolly before one succeeded. With the improvements in
technology the success ratio with human DNA is now about 50%. After fetal
tissue is formed it is divided several times and each cluster of cells allowed to
grow into a fully developed baby. The babies are raised in an incubator which
supplies everything needed for maturation. One year of incubator time is
equivalent to several years of real time. After ten years of maturation, the ‘babies’
are ‘born.’ Each is now the physiological equivalent of a 20 year old human.
Because they had been matured in isolation in an incubator their ‘human’ brains
had no content or memories. The minds are tabula rasas on which anything
could be written.

After a lot of discussion we called them ‘androids’ primarily because it was easier
to say than ‘genetically modified humans’. But that was probably the wrong term
to use. Androids call up the image of pseudo mechanical beings like Data in the
old Startrek TV series. But our ‘androids’ were not the artificially created people
frequently used in science fiction. Rather they were normal people whose DNA
had been cleaned up. These would be humans designed to order, like GMO
processed food.

The term GMO had gained a bad reputation amongst the general populace.
Particularly “foodies.” Communities even passed laws banning GMO products. In
reality if we didn’t have GMO foodstuffs it would be difficult to feed the 9 billion
people on Earth.

Just a few models of androids, some male, some female, would do. They would
be sexual, of course, since biological reproduction would be the most convenient
way to grow the population. When the androids had babies they would be normal
children, albeit with slightly revised DNA. They would grow up, attend school, and
be regular kids. They would simply be real persons genetically modified for the
rigors of a trip through space. The major difference is that their android parents
would have been matured in an incubator. The portion of the android’s brain that
housed memory, experience, and personality would be left blank.

The final step in this option would be to download the knowledge and personality
of the saved brain models into the empty receptive brains of the androids. The
‘androids’ would have no childhood or teen aged experiences other than those
downloaded. Their education and mental skills would be the same as those of
the person scanned. This would be a simpler process than raising children to
maturity and training them in the skills necessary to survive. It was a short cut
way of creating a corps of individuals to colonize the new planets. The ‘androids’
were real people. Remember, human DNA was an essential part of the android
genome. Their children would be indistinguishable from normal children. We
were confident that humankind would be saved.

We didn’t really need androids. We could have done much the same thing with a
careful selection program plus an extensive training program for normal people.
We would select the best and the healthiest of all the candidates, making sure
that they had no trace of heritable disease. The candidates would all know ahead
of time that there was little probability of their seeing the new planet. They job
was simply to maintain the spaceship and produce a genereation of children who
would be trained in all the skills necessary to survive.

But it would be difficult to get people to agree to spending their entire lives in an
aluminum tube on the off chance that their descendents could populate a new
planet, Since technology could produce ‘androids’ it was fat easier to go with
them, at least until a faster transportation method was achieved,

Experts in neurology, cryptography, computer sciences and biological sciences

assured our group that, given enough resources, they could do what they
promised in a few years. It was up to us to design vehicles which could transport
the passengers to new worlds. Nothing was off limits. We could use any method
or technique, regardless of religious, ethical, or moral objections. And of course,
we had an unlimited budget. After the Sun went nova, money wouldn’t matter
anyway.

While the design of the spacecraft was determined largely by the US and
Russian space agencies, the actual details of the voyage were determined by a
group of ‘experts’ selected from the faculties of universities, industries, and
people who worked in the field. They determined the food and living
requirements, the social strucure and the governance of the ship. The meetings
were obviously noisy and contraversial. Everyone had his or her own idea of
what would be needed. Eventually the final plan was determined by a small
group selected from the ‘experts’. All had excluded themselves from going on the
voyage because of family, social, or health reasons and were cautioned about
letting political or religious jusgments clout their vision. I’ve got to say that the
‘planners’ were largely correct in their judgments. Perhaps it is true that the
lowest common denomenator is usualy the best.

Both the Kepler and the Webb space telescopes had identified thousands of
exoplanets including a few dozen habitable ones reachable from Earth. Several
nearby star systems had potentially habitable planets with liquid water. One
planet chosen as a possible destination was the one orbiting Proxima Centauri,
our closest stellar neighbor.

Our Sun is a G2-type star. It’s fairly well behaved and has been so for 4.6 billion
years. However, K-type dwarfs, which are smaller than the Sun burn their fuel
more slowly. They have theoretical lives longer than the age of the universe.
Heller and Armstrong argue that the longer a planet exists, the more habitable it
becomes. So an older planet revolving around an older sun may be a good home
for life. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf K1V-type star that fits the bill. It burns its
fuel much more slowly than our Sum and has an estimated age of between 4.85
and 8.9 billion years. It will probably live twice that long. It is known to have an
Earth-like planet called Proxima Centauri b. There were other nearby star
systems closer than 100 light years distant that had potentially habitable planets
but getting there would stretch even the theoretical limits of feasible
transportation systems.

Proxima Centauri b orbits about 7 million miles from it’s sun, with an 11.2 day
year. It is gravity locked to it's star, Proxima Centauri, just like the Moon is to
Earth. Proxima Centauri is much less intense than our sun but even so the side
of the planet that always faces the star is blazingly hot, the other is perpetually
cold and dark. Temperatures, at least in the planet’s terminator band, the strip
separating the light from the dark sides, are likely to be tolerable. The average
temperature of the Proxima b terminator strip is estimated to be within the range
where water could exist as liquid on its surface. The light of Proxima Centauri is
considerably redder than that of Earth’s sun but it was hoped that any residents
would adapt to the perpetual sunset conditions.

The planet itself is slightly larger than Earth, about 1.3 times Earth’s diameter but
it has a surface gravity less than that of our home planet. Astronomers tell us that
it most likely has a smaller iron core. It has a rotational period of 11.2 days. Slow,
but sufficient to give it a bit of a magnetic field to help repel some radiation.

Proxima Centauri b has some oxygen in its atmosphere. Planets with oxygen in
their atmospheres are rare in our galaxy. Obviously some sort of primitive
vegetation, sort of like the stromatolites on Earth, had developed a process
similar to photosynthesis that released oxygen as a by product. For those of you
who are not palentologists, stromatolites were the first widespread forms of life
on the Earth. They are rare now but once they blanketed most areas and
released enough oxygen to materially change the planet. Telescopic observation
of Proxima Centauri b has detected no evidence of animal life. Conditions might
be strange but, other than for radiation, no serious sources of toxicity were
apparent.

For all of the options mentioned, transportation to the stars is the major problem.
I assume that most of the readers of this article will not be space scientists so I'm
going to talk about each option in turn. I almost used the term "rocket scientist"
but I have been informed by my grandchildren that calling someone a rocket
scientist is a mild form of insult implying that the person is a fuzzy minded
goofball. It wasn't so in my day but then my day was half a century ago.

A starship's population at take off, even a generation ship, would be a fraction of

that needed to colonize the destination planet. The trip planners expected that
births during the final years of the voyage would increase the population to the
ship's capacity, and provide enough people to colonize a new world. The
‘planners’ were a group of experts selected from various universities. Most were
comparatively young but did not expect to go on the trip themselves. They did
give their best to creating a society which could survive for the tie necessary to
make the journey.

Extra supplies would be taken to support a start up colony until it is self sufficient.
To make things last, everything would be recycled. Water would be extracted
from refuse and condensed from the air, then purified and reused. Waste
products would be reconverted into their basic components and used as raw
materials or as fertilizer.

Open areas on the starships were designated as farm land. Soybeans would be
planted in parks and chickens roamed in the agricultural sectors. Agronomists
told us that chickens yielded more meat per kilo of feed than any other domestic
animal except grubs and insects. But the planners felt that the drying and
grinding equipment necessary to turn insects into edible foodstuffs largely
cancelled out the weight advantage. I personally felt that it was largely the “ugh”
factor that was involved. I’m told that fried grasshoppers are a favorite delicacy in
some African countries.

Chickens also laid eggs, a most convenient prepackaged foodstuff, that added to
their advantge. It was assumed that enough food could be grown in hydroponic
gardens to be sufficient for a 300+ year voyage to the nearest inhabitable planet.
In addition to augmenting the food supply, plants would release oxygen to
provide a breathable atmosphere.
The Orion drive was not the starship’s only propulsion method. It also had an ion
drive designed to enable it to alter it’s speed and direction as it neared it’s
destination.

The ion drive was another one of those techniques that was developed decades
ago. Basically an ion drive accelerates a stream of particles by an electron gun
and directs them out the rear of the spacecraft. It works just a large cathode ray
tube, the kind used on early televisions, but without the glass envelope. In
contrast to the Orion drive, it is quite efficient. It has minimal fuel consumption but
also very low thrust. Low radiation permits it to operate continuously. Ion drives
don’t have enough thrust to be a main propulsion unit but, if used long enough,
they could propel the craft to a high velocity. But not quickly. I was told that a full
sized ion drive would take a couple of days to accelerate a standard two ton
automobile to highway speed.

The ion drive permitted adjustment of the ship’s flight path. Without some means
of correcting the ship’s trajectory the aiming requirements would be almost
insurmountable. It would be like shooting a pool ball on a table the size of the
continental United States from Los Angeles to a pocket in New York. In addition
to making slight course adjustments, halfway through the voyage the ship would
be turned around and the ion drive used to slow it down enough to permit the
ship to enter planetary orbit.

The electrical power both for the ion drive and for all of the ship's systems would
be supplied by a bank of four thorium fueled nuclear breeder reactors. This was a
case where the designers did themselves proud. There should be plenty of
electric power. Each reactor was more than sufficient to supply the needs of the
entire starship and used sequentially they should last much more than long
enough.

Keeping the ship's society intact was a problem of a different order. Comparative
isolation from Earth meant that some social decisions could be made in a rational
manner rather than in accordance with cultural determinism. English was
selected for the ship's language, not because of it's linguistic superiority but
because most of the ship’s personnel spoke it as either a first or second
language. The majority of the technical books in the ship's large computer library
were written in English as well. It was simply an expedient choice. The colonists
could chose whatever language they wanted after arrival at the destination.
Measures of time would be maintained as days, weeks, and years although
some would be slightly modified to remove historical irregularities. Seconds,
minutes, and hours were reckoned as before. People were used to them. The
day was kept at 24 hours because it could be divided up easily into fractional
periods for shift work. Also our physiologists told us that humans were adapted to
a circadian rhythm of 24 to 25 hours.

One of the planners must have been a calendar rationalist. The year would be
kept at 365 days with 12 months of exactly 30 days each, grouped in three 4
month quarters of 90 days. At the end of each quarter was a one day holiday,
with an extra day added at the end of the year to celebrate the new year. At one
fell swoop all the irregularities of the conventional calendar were eliminated.
Goodbye Julius, Augustus, Pope Gregory, etc. The extra fraction of a day that
required leap years on Earth to correct was simply ignored. Modifications would
be made after arrival to suit the solar period of the new planet. When the ship
arrived at its destination the length of the year would be adjusted to suit.

The design of a generation spaceship could be either be based on the

philosophy that it should be constructed with sufficient reliability to function
properly until the end of the mission or that it should be constructed to be easily
and continually maintained by an onboard crew. Without advance knowledge of
how long the journey would take or the hazards to be encountered, the designers
chose the second approach. The side benefit was that continual maintenance
provided a social function for a trip of indeterminate length. People would have
something important to do and a high motivation to do it.

I’ve spent a lot of time describing the generation ships because most of the
planning effort went into their design. They were based on tried and true
techniques. The problem was little different from that faced by New World
colonizers of 400 to 1000 years ago. Some of those colonies were successful but
many more were failures. The secret lay in avoiding mistakes.

Another option, similar to the first, depended on finding a way to put the
colonizers in suspended animation for a number of years. Keeping astronauts
unconscious almost halves the supplies needed for any given trip. When a crew
is placed in an inactive state, many of the ship’s subsystems can be removed
and the space and equipment needed for humans reduced significantly. The
negative psychological and social aspects of prolonged space travel are
mitigated too.
I know that suspended animation is a favorite trick in sci-fi films but the way it is
done is glossed over. The spaceship crew simply goes to sleep and wakes up in
some far away galaxy. In nature some animals manage to hibernate over the
winter by lowering their vital functions to the absolute minimum. A few cold
blooded species can be frozen in the ice for extended periods. So far the
available techniques that have been used on humans work for only a few hours,
usually during surgery when it is necessary to stop the blood flow. Therapeutic
hypothermia reduces body temperature by about 10 degrees using methods
ranging from ice packs and cooling blankets to catheters injecting ice cold fluid
into body cavities.

Researchers used therapeutic hypothermia to put human beings into torpor, the
sleep like state that bears enter to endure long cold winters. Once in torpor, the
subjects could be transported through space. Currently, 14 days is the longest a
human being has been held in torpor at a single stretch. A crash program for
putting people in suspended animation was started and I was told that, with
proper monitoring, it was possible to keep people asleep tor several years. Body
temperature would be raised almost to normal every few weeks and then lowered
again. The practical limit for suspended animation was two years. Longer than
that and some vital functions would deteriorate.

A robot caretaker would monitor the unconscious travelers, making sure the
basic needs of their bodies were met. In addition to pumping in water and
nutrients, it would deliver sedatives to keep the bodies from shivering and also
administer mild electric shocks to ward off muscle atrophy. I'm not a medical
person so I was pretty much out of the loop on that one.

There is a revered engineering axiom that complex devices last longest with mild
use. Use them too much and they wear out. Use them too little and they rust out.
My cousin, a gun collector, inherited an SA-22 from his father. This was a John
Browning designed 22 semi-automatic rifle. Browning claimed that it was his
favorite design. Every several years my cousin took it to the shooting range and
fired off half a box of 22 cartridges, then he oiled and cleaned it and put it back in
his gun cabinet. It was over 200 years old but looked and functioned like new. I
guess that’s the way it is with people too.

The space ships intended to transport human settlers in suspended animation

would be like those of the generation ships except that they would be smaller and
possibly faster. Much of the machinery aboard would be devoted to maintaining
the suspended animation of the passengers with a reduced size living area
reserved for the needs of the flight crew.

I was mostly involved with the ‘android’ project. I would like to remind my readers
that these were not the robots of science fiction but rather genetically modified
human beings with a fully functional brain but no learning or memory other than
those uploaded from the persons scanned.

Feminists made the argument that it should make no difference if the scanned
mind was placed in a male or female body. But the planners decided that they
had enough problems without adding another. The mind would be loaded into a
genetically compatible android. Males to males, females to females. No one had
yet resolved the philosophical problem of whether an android human with all of a
person’s memories and experiences would really be that person or merely a
good facsimile. In my case the point would be moot. Now that I was in my late
80s I would welcome the chance to be in a young vital body even if it was
artificial.

The idea was conceptually simple. A space craft with a small maintenance crew
would be sent off to an earth like planetary destination. It would contain a
hundred or so passengers in suspended animation. A generation before reaching
its goal they would be awakened, programmed with strong family values and an
intense libido, and instructed to reproduce like bunnies to build the population to
the necessary levels. Child care and educational routines would be part of the
conditioning. The ship would be transformed into one huge nursery school, then
a secondary school and college. The passengers would be loaded with all the
memories and skills necessary for a new society. Would they be me or you? Who
knows? The trip would take many decades although, because of hibernation, the
passengers might feel that less time had elapsed.

My committee work was complete. I would be free to enjoy my remaining days,

imposing on my children, allegedly to visit my grandchildren. In a sense I
regretted not going on one of the starships but I realized that I would just be
taking the place of a younger person.

I had several more meetings with Roger Barton over the next year. The meetings
were a convenient facade for dining on unhealthy food and drinking too much.
Our meetings were in the finest Washington restaurants with NASA picking up
the tab. Roger knew all of the maitre de’s and they all knew him. I confided in him
my disappointment at not going on the voyage. I never expected to settle a new
planet but I simply wanted to see how things worked out. A search for closure is
the engineer's curse.

About a month after my last dinner with Roger I got a a phone call saying that a
place on an ‘android’ starship had opened up. One of the candidates who was
scheduled to have his brain scanned had been killed in a plane crash. Would I be
interested in having my intellect go along in his ‘android’ body instead? Sure I
would.

I made my appointment at the Bethesda hospital clinic to be scanned. After what

seemed an interminable wait while my credentials were evaluated, I was ushered
into a small room with a comfortable easy chair. A young technician clamped a
helmet on my head. The helmet looked like a football helmet on steroids. It had a
lot of wires coming out of it, all connected to a wall mounted computer. He flipped
a switch. I felt a little buzzing as the contents of my brain were fully downloaded
and stored in the computer’s memory. In an hour it was all over. The technician
showed me the handful of tiny thumb drives on which my engrams were loaded.
It is strange to think that a lifetime of work could be contained in such a small
volume. I had envisioned an oxcart full of my memories.

I was told that eventually my memories and knowledge would be loaded into the
blank mind of an ‘android’ body which, to all intents and purposes, would be me.
Of course, I, as an old man, would continue to live out my remaining days on
Earth but my ‘android’ alter ego would be on a trip to the stars.

There was a another option for a human exodus that I haven’t talked about. It
was proposed by people who were not included in the government program.
Scientists involved in artificial intelligence had predicted for years that computers
would eventually become self aware. Not human, just self aware.

Robotics engineers were adept at making special purpose robots for a variety of
tasks. It took just a moment of imagination to suggest that the robots be fitted
with self aware computers carrying humanities's memories. If, as has been
suggested, the next step in evolution is development of robotic analogs of man,
why not do it now? Robots don't need air or much space. Just a little electricity
and oil. Sending robots to the stars would almost be trivial. The robot ships could
contain records of all knowledge, the digitized contents of all earth's libraries,
music, and films. Robot voyagers could live on planets that were too hot, or too
cold, or had unsuitable atmospheres for human life.
There is no reason except human ego to make robots resemble people. It was
hard to convince the clerics and politicians though. Churchmen felt that since
people were created in God's image, our robot emissaries to the stars should
resemble department store clothes dummies but look like saints and
missionaries. Politicians wanted representatives to match the ethnic makeup of
their districts. Few agreed on the robot option. You can see why.

A few universities and agencies went ahead with the robotics project as a last
resort. Many scientists realized that they would not be among the few selected
for the exodus but wanted to see their work live after them. What was the fun in
making an automatic carpet sweeper when you could spend your time making an
interstellar robot that would fly your spaceship. They compromised by stating that
frozen embryos of real humans would be included to be thawed and nurtured if a
suitable planet was found. Frankly I don’t know how well this effort succeeded. I
was not involved in it at all.

OK, so that's it. There were four options discussed for coping with the expansion
of the sun. The first was to do nothing. Just wait until the end. A modification of
this passive approach was to collect all human knowledge and send it off into
space in hopes that some advanced civilization could make use of it. The second
option was to send settlers to habitable planets in various sized generation ships.
A third option was to send off ships with the crew in suspended animation. Finally
the last option was to create intelligent robots to populate the universe.

The one that attracted the most attention was the generation ship. It involved little
advance technology, just the ability to build a large craft and put it in orbit.
Essentially it was a cruise ship to space. People would just troop aboard and
settle down for a long, long journey. Few really appreciated how long it would
take.

Even with a massive generation ship construction effort the reality was that only
about 1% of the world's population could emigrate to new worlds. Most of the
people would be left behind even if their computer stored consciousness soared
into space. Governments, wisely fearing world unrest and descent into chaos,
kept this unpleasant truth from the general public by misdirection, subterfuge,
and all the tools that politicians have used for centuries to fool the general public.
Launch dates and places were kept secret. Dummy spaceships were built in
obvious places to keep protesters occupied. Hundreds of clinics were established
to record brain contents assuring the public that after the catastrophe they would
simply awaken on a new world with a new body. It was all a scam. Billions of
people simply couldn’t be transported to a new world. The recording of
neurological information was real but only a tiny fraction of the minds recorded
would ever be used, and those only if a specific skill was needed. Finally,
perhaps half of the Earth’s population, those living in third world countries, were
unaware of the sun’s imminent explosion. Life would go on as normal for them
until the end.

As for me, I returned to my Hudson Valley woodland home and watched baseball
games along with a few of my retired colleagues. We would gather on my porch,
drink beer and argue about the game that merged Abner Doubleday and Issac
Newton, each of us rooting for our favorite team. During the off season I visited
my children and grandchildren, and waited for the sun to explode. The summers
got hotter and hotter but after I was gone, who cared? Anyway the cataclysm
would not occur for a few more years. As the French say “Apres moi, le deluge.”

When the time came for the voyage I was asked to pack a cigar box sized
container of personal possessions to remind me of life on Earth. Most of the
travelers stuffed theirs with photos of friends and family. A few even packed their
cell phones disregarding the fact that there would be no one to call once the ship
left orbit. I packed a digital tablet and a few memory chips loaded with pictures of
my family and copies of all my technical papers plus the notes for the papers and
books that I planned to write. I also included the ancient 12 blade Swiss Army
knife that my wife had given me just after we were married. Then the box and the
inert android body that I would eventually inhabit were transported to the starship
circling in orbit.

I was asked to report to the same hospital in Bethesda where I had been
scanned only to be told that there was an unavoidable delay and to return home.
I would be called when everything was ready.

Staffing a starship to establish a human civilization on a new planet was a truly

formidable undertaking. In our world, at least in the developed countries, fewer
than ten percent of the people provide all the goods and services used by the
rest of us. That includes food, transportation, electricity, clothing, artifacts, -
everything. Most of us would starve to death if that ten percent disappeared. But
on a new planet everything would have to start from scratch. We would be like
the early settlers out west.

All our waste would have to be recycled too. If we re going to make journeys that
last hundreds of years our waste food, garbage, exhaled air, urine and feces will
have to be recycled into useable forms. No garbage heaps or frozen doggie bags
in space. We would have to turn the trash into drinkable water, breathable air,
vitamins, foodstuffs and raw materials for other uses. A decent sanitation system
would be easy to arrange. All modern cities have them. But real recycling of all
waste products is still in its infancy. An engineered yeast is probably the best
answer. One that is genetically modified to convert garbage into needed forms.
Fortunately the way the living quarters were arranged so toilets and sinks would
drain into a common sewer and from there go to a recycling facility. We just
needed a few good plumbers.

When I was a kid the bookstores were full of “how to do it” books giving
instructions for how to make almost everything from soap to gunpowder. My
father even had one which I read almost religiously. Most technically inclined high
school students knew how telephones worked. Real telephones. Not two cans
connected by a taut string. They could probably even build a basic telephone
from the pictures and diagrams in the books.

I even recall that the formula for making soap involved boiling cooking fat in lye
and skimming off the solids on top. The lye itself was made by trickling water
through wood ashes. I don’t recall how the gunpowder was made but the formula
was probably pretty simple. After all, Thomas Edison, as a schoolboy, made a
bottle of nitroglycerine. Or so the movie says. But now most of those “lost arts”
will have to be rediscovered. I’m not too sure that many of the passengers on our
ship will know how to make their own soap. I’ll try to remember what I can.

So how did I write this personal history?

If you are reading it in hard copy it is probably from a series of text files that were
sent back to Earth via a tight beam laser communications link. Contact with the
soon to be doomed Earth was maintained by a chain of communications
satellites deposited by each starship every lightyear or so. The satellites were
engineered for a long life, perhaps 1000 years or more. They consisted of of a
pair of receivers coupled to laser transmitters. The whole thing was powered by
the heat from a small atomic pile. Reasonably reliable communications could be
maintained with Earth over very long distances. Because of the transit time
everything sent back to Earth would be a couple of years out of date but most of
the material dealt with long term problems and a few years wouldn’t matter. But
the link was not much good for daily horse racing results. My history is based on
a collection of notes that I jotted down on an almost daily basis. Please excuse
the professorial pedantic style. It is hard to shake the idea that I’m not writing for
a professional journal.

I remember distinctly being awakened by a very attractive young woman in a

medical robe.

“It’s time to get up Professor London. Your duty shift starts tomorrow. Let me get
this IV tube out of your arm first. I suspect that you have to go to the bathroom.
It’s just through that door. When you finish I’ll meet you in the cafeteria at the end
of this corridor.”

Fifteen minutes later I was seated in the cafeteria eating a bowl of fairly tasty
vegetable stew when the young doctor joined me. She had changed from her
medical garb into a light blue coverall. There were about a dozen other people in
the cafeteria. All looked strangely alike.

“This isn’t the formal orientation lecture,” she said, “that will come tomorrow. But I
figure I should let you know what’s going on. You are a crew member on the
Exodus 7, a starship bound for Proxima Centauri b. Your body is new but your
mind is the same as it was when you were scanned.”

I looked at myself. There had been no mirror in the toilet. I had strong arms, no
belly fat, and my back didn’t hurt. I had the vague recollection of being asked to
return home but here I was.

“What’s happened to me?”

“To put it bluntly, you are an ‘android’. In fact everyone you see is an ‘android’.
Your mind has been downloaded into a ‘new’ android body and to all intents and
purposes you are the same person you used to be. The other “you,” the one that
was scanned, is living out its days at home. It thinks that there has been some
glitch in the planning and that the trip has been delayed. But in reality you are on
a starship bound for Proxima Centauri. You have an apparent age between 20
and 30 in human terms and, as far as we can tell, no genetic defects. Barring
accident, you have a life expectancy of about 200 earth years.”

“Now I know that’s not enough to reach Proxima Centauri b but you probably will
be one of the people who will set foot on the planet. The trip is expected to take a
bit more than 300 years but you will be in suspended animation for half the time.
Your present tour of duty is 2 years. When your tour ends you will be put into
hibernation for another 2 years then awakened for another tour of duty.”

“Are you an ‘android’ too?” I asked. “You don’t look like one.”

“Of course,” she said. “We all are. There are 160 of us as crew but only half are
awake at a time. We work overlapping shifts. I’m partway through mine.”

She went on, “Don’t let the term ‘android’ confuse you. We are real people. Our
genetic code has been re-engineered to eliminate the superfluous legacy of our
ancestry. We all have the same blood type and the same skin color and hair
texture. All of us are lactose tolerant. None of us has an appendix. Our eyes are
well corrected and their sensitivity to red light has been increased. Most genetic
diseases have been eliminated. We all have the same genetic mutation in our
DNA as do inhabitants of Himalayan villages that lets us tolerate low oxygen
levels. A protein derived from tardigrades has been added to our genome to
increase our resistance to x-ray, UV, and gamma radiation. In all other respects
we are normal humans.”

“One geneticist said that our bodies have experienced half a million years of
managed evolution from homo sapiens. Remember “Dolly” the sheep? We were
cloned just like her but matured in an incubator. All but our consciousness and
memories. They are those that you had when you were scanned. In time we will
accumulate enough random mutations to make us as distinct from each other as
most humans are today.”

“It may be indiscrete of me to mention it but we are quite honored to have you on
board. Many of your ideas were incorporated into the design of our starship. We
used the “pusher boat” technique to get us our initial velocity. We also have a sex
ratio much like the one that you suggested.”

“It was nothing.” I replied. “Any farm boy would have had the same idea.”

“But apparently none of the scientists.” she replied.

She continued. “Look around, most of the people you see are female. In fact of
the 160 crew members 144 are women. All told there are just 16 males in the
crew. We were assured that sixteen men would provide enough genetic diversity.
Our captain, Millicent Scotia, and most of the bridge crew are female. Captain
Scotia is a retired Navy cruiser captain who was more or less drafted to
command this vessel. Before we reach Proxima Centauri you men will be
required to service all of us. We intend to have a lot of babies who will grow up to
be the first inhabitants of the new planet.”

“The babies will be normal human children. We have the reproductive organs of
normal humans. So all of our offspring will be humans too. They will share our
DNA but they will be normal children. We simply don’t have the incubator facilities
that they had on Earth so the children will have a traditional childhood. Our small
incubators are only for animals.”

My companion, Riva, for that was the name emblazoned in the ID tag affixed to
her coverall, seemed quite unemotional when she talked about males “servicing”
females. I mean, we were talking about sex weren’t we? I had no idea of what
sex between ‘androids’ meant but based on a quick inspection of my equipment
when I used the toilet, I assumed that it was the traditional thing.

Obviously I didn’t appear to be convinced. In my previous experience sex was a

serious act. A bargaining chip that women held over men to convince them to
enter long term relationships. Who knew it would be different aboard a starship.

Riva pressed on. “Given the ratio between males and females, we can’t make too
much of any given pairing. It is likely that each woman will have sex many times
with different men before she achieves her quota of children. You men will be
kept quite busy.”

“I can see that you still have your doubts. Would you like to have sex with me?
We have plenty of time. My next work shift doesn’t start for a couple of hours and
you don’t meet with the captain for your formal orientation until tomorrow.”

I took a rain check on that offer. “Perhaps sometime later. I’m still a little
confused.”

Riva didn’t seem at all disturbed by my rejection. She showed me my quarters. A

nice room, by the way, and told me when meals were offered in the nearby
cafeteria. Then she vanished.

Frankly the room was better than I expected. I had envisioned it to be fitted with
pipe berths like on a submarine. But the living space was about the same size as
the bedroom in my old home. It was paneled in wood. At least the sound proofed
panels were painted to look like wood. The walls were decorated with several
brightly colored pictures. The room contained a comfortable bed, a desk and
armchair, and a private bathroom. On one side was a cabinet which offered a tiny
kitchen sink, a small refrigerator and a microwave oven. Most of the furniture was
either inflatable or collapsible like the things you would take to the beach on a hot
day. I guess it was to keep it light but comfortable. The only hard surfaces were
the built in structures and the desk. On the desk I recognized a computer with a
screen, keyboard, and a couple of strange accessories.

Each crew member had more than ample quarters. The current population of the
ship was small but as the population grew the rooms would have to
accommodate several people.

The computer binged and the screen showed that I had an appointment with
Captain Scotia at 10:00 a.m. the next day. Nothing to do until then. Under the
bed I found a drawer with clothes tailored to my new body dimensions and a
nightshirt for sleeping. Next to it was a locked drawer which I assumed belonged
to the person or persons who occupied my room when I was in hibernation. The
computer screen flashed what appeared to be a newsletter describing
happenings aboard the Exodus 7. It also offered a directory of items contained in
the large ship’s library. I figured that I might as well use my time productively so I
called up the blueprints and schematics of the Exodus 7 to gain some familiarity
with my new home.

The Exodus 7 was a test version of one of the much larger generation starships.
It was smaller than a real generation ship but had also been assembled in low
orbit. Previous ships in the Exodus series had been used to test concepts
intended for the larger generation ships. The Exodus 7, fully space capable, was
simply the first to be launched to a potentially habitable planet. The fact that we
were heading to the closest exoplanet was an accident. Originally it was intended
to send one of the larger generation ships on the trip but it would not be ready in
time. Staffing the Exodus 7 with an ‘android’ crew was the expedient thing to do.
Normally ‘androids’ would be reserved for much longer voyages.

The ship retained the general shape of the wheel on an axle form of a generation
starship but was only about a fifth of the size of the larger vessel. As an ex-
engineer I’m used to drawings and blueprints. Using only words to describe the
Exodus 7 is sort of like telling what a spiral staircase looks like without using your
hands. I’ll do my best but I must remember that this is a text message.
Imagine, if you will, a slowly spinning wheel on an axle floating through space.
The axle is a closed metal tube about 150 meters in diameter and about 800
meters long. The wheel is affixed to the forward end of the axle by six thick
spokes. It is about 1000 meters in diameter and 400 meters from front to back.
Both the front layer and the back layers of the ring contain supplies and life
support equipment. The 300 meter wide central potion of the outer rim serves as
the living area for the passengers. A rotation speed of about once every ten
seconds is enough to give the outer rim about eighty percent of Earth’s gravity,
just about sufficient to prevent muscle deteioration.

Down the center of the habitable ring, running all the way around the rim, is ‘Main
Street’, a 20 meter wide cleared section that serves as a passageway for all
manner of people and things. Extending off Main Street to the forward side are
short avenues, about 100 meters long. There were radiation sheltered rooms on
each avenue to protect the crew in case of an unexpected burst of activity from
the sun.

The avenues are ‘Mews’ according to the Brits. Each has several dozen rooms or
apartments which are our quarters. At the end of each corridor is a single large
space, usually one with a transparent window that is used as a conference room
or common area. The ‘pushboat’ system of initial propulsion led to some
problems with layout. The rotation of the wheel meant that ‘gravity’ was directed
outward, radially. The forward acceleration provided by ‘pushboat’ with its Orion
Drive had not been reduced for the Exodus 7. The resultant high force thrust
levels were accommodated by hinging the furniture. It would be hard to walk on a
tilt for the time required for the ‘pushboat’ to get us to our interstellar speed. The
‘pushboat’ provided a partial solution by only applying thrust for four hours a day.
During the interim periods were were expected to go about our normal business
but when thrust was applied we were all expected to sit in chairs or be in our
beds.

We learned to accommodate, after a fashion. Fortunately the ‘pushboat’ portion

of our acceleration didn't last too long. When cruising speed was achieved the
appliances, beds, and desks were firmly fastened in their new position for the
rest of the voyage.

The total living space was a fraction of that on a generation ship but the number
of passengers was also far less. The population density is about one person per
acre. That’s about a quarter of the average population density of the United
States, about the same as a rural community. The weather is benign. I’ve heard it
described as similar to a Caribbean island. There is plenty of elbow room for
everyone. Since the Exodus 7 is smaller and lighter than the proposed
generation ships but had the same ion drive, it was a bit faster too.

The Exodus 7 had been assembled in orbit so there was no need for
conventional aerodynamics. It was never intended to fly through an atmosphere.
Supplies were sent up in marine type shipping containers, about 12 meters long
and 2.5 meters wide, and were simply fastened to the back and sides of the ship.
The containers would be emptied as needed. Shipping containers were used
because they were readily available and could be easily transported by boat or
truck to the launch sites. The Exodus 7 looked nothing at all like the sleek
spacecraft shown in magazines. In reality it resembled a rotating cylindrical
porcupine with all sorts of things fastened to it’s surface. The bridge was a large
compartment in the rotating ring. It was equipped with the navigational and
control equipment necessary to guide the vessel.

Study of the mission profiles revealed that the faster ships like the Exodus 7 were
expected to make planetfall several decades before the generation ships. If
conditions were suitable, a message would be sent to the following spaceships
advising them that things were OK. If the conditions were marginal, the ‘androids’
with their enhanced physical capability would probably survive but the generation
ships would be warned away. If unsuitable conditions existed, a secondary
destination would be sought.

My meeting with the Captain the next day was a mere formality. After a leisurely
cafeteria breakfast of coffee, eggs and obviously synthetic bacon, I made my way
to Captain Scotia’s office. I only had to ask a few people where it was. It turned
out to be on the other side of the ring and consisted of a living area similar to
mine and an attached formal office. The office had a real desk and a couple of
chairs. Filing cabinets and some TV screens giving views of the ship adorned the
walls.

Captain Scotia welcomed me aboard. Even though she resembled the other
female crew members, she had a big, impressive persona. Almost too big for the
body containing it. I could easily picture her on the bridge of a battle cruiser
barking commands to the crew. She praised my contributions to the spaceship
program. I was a bit surprised but apparently she had read my file before our
meeting.
She told me that because I had been involved in the space program longer than
anyone else aboard my assignment would be different from that of the other crew
members. I was to be both the voyage historian and a senior advisor. I frankly
suspected that she felt a bit lonely and needed someone she could talk to. I had
been aboard for almost a year but she must have had other things to do than
attend to hibernating crew members. Because of my university experience and
my 10 years as a member of a local school board, I would be expected to head
up the ship’s educational efforts.

Captain Scotia intended to talk to me weekly and suggested that I keep a journal
of everything that occurred. It would be, she said, a living history. Most of the
other crew members, while technically adept, did not have much real world
experience. They were scanned when they were quite young. They had been
selected because of the skills they would bring for settlement of a new colony.

Daily life on board the Exodus 7 was largely a matter of performing those tasks
necessary to keep the ship functioning and to support a civilized society. Most
tasks were involved with food production, maintenance, education and research.
Basic research was similar to that conducted in Earth's universities. No one was
making soap though.

The ship interior was configured to resemble a small town environment. Grass
and flowers grew in most of the common areas. Chickens were allowed to roam
the streets. Even the signs marking various corridors resembled the street signs
that one would find in most communities. It was obvious that the designers had
taken great pains to disguise the fact that we would be spending most of our life
in an aluminum tube.

The majority of the ship's systems were run by capable computers. They could
handle just about any routine function, leaving only exceptional situations to be
addressed by crew members. The computers were just about as intelligent as a
human being, lacking only self awareness to be considered sentient. At the rate
that they were evolving it is likely that by the time we reached our destination
they would be running the ship.

We had no provision for making large structures but our well equipped
workshops and laboratories could construct replacement parts for just about
everything on board. Manufacturing technology was basically computer
controlled devices, three dimension printers and the like. Given adequate
instructions, they could make just about any artifact needed from hairpins to
semiconductor circuits. They could even repair and replicate themselves. But
computer scientists and programmers were still needed to provide the
instructions.

Each of us trained on a secondary function. In case there was a catastrophe we

might have to do each other’s jobs. In my case, considering my background, I
doubled as a systems engineer. You can interpret that as “general repairman”
since most of my duties involved fixing whatever went wrong. Despite it’s
technical sophistication, many of the Exodus 7’s components could be found in a
well stocked hardware store. We kept a supply of these things on hand and half
my repair time was simply spent in replacing failed items. Even very complex
things have simple parts.

My fellow passengers thought that I was very clever but I was doing just what
any handyman would do. It was tough to convince many of them since their
“hands on” expertise was usually limited to hitting the ON button on the TV
controller. The apartment superintendent was expected to do the rest.

One unusual task was to don a spacesuit and take a weekly stroll over Exodus
7’s exterior repairing tiny punctures made by micrometeorites that the radar and
laser had missed. My repairs usually consisted of applying a swatch of adhesive
backed aluminum tape to the hole. The adhesive hardened and the reinforced
aluminum tape was as strong as the underlying metal.

Both automation and the communal nature of shipboard life freed up a lot of time.
Food preparation was done in a large single kitchen, just like on a luxury cruise
liner. The ship's designers wisely reasoned that it would be much more efficient
to prepare 100 meals at one time in a single location than one meal at a time in
100 locations. Much of our food was prepared by machine. The ship’s kitchen
was stocked with blenders, automatic bread ovens, and even egg slicers. We
even had a “meat” making machine, basically a device which would compress
and flavor algae into a reasonable replica of a hamburger. With the proper salty
and smoky flavoring you could even imagine you were eating real bacon. All the
equipment was designed to reduce human involvement to a minimum.

Synthetic food, was hardly a new technology. Environmentalists had advocated

the use of man made meat for years realizing that it takes about 30 pounds of
feed to produce one pound of beef, a truly bad bargain since cattle are one of the
largest emitters of greenhouse gasses. In fact some environmentalists held that
one of Earth’s major sources of pollution was the raising of animals for human
consumption.

I had my first synthetic meal in Boston over half a century ago in preparation for
the first Mars mission. The cooks at one of the aerospace research firms
conjured up a meal of highly processed algae for NASA personnel to show us
what it would be like. To be honest it tasted to me like flavored cardboard. I was
happy to see that the technology had improved over the years. Though healthy
and nutritious, the meals were hardly gourmet food. Certainly not enough to
convince a real foodie. Perhaps that was the real reason that Roger Barton
declined to join us on the first interstellar voyage.

We would usually eat in small buffet restaurants scattered throughout the ship.
They were imaginatively decorated and provided the illusion of dining variety
though all choices were from the same menu. The standardization of our cuisine
was not universally accepted. Hindus had to be reassured that they were eating
algae and not cow. Crew members of Jewish or Muslim descent had to be
convinced that the synthetic bacon served at breakfast was not derived from a
pig. Those of Asian and South American heritage objected to the blandness of
the cuisine. Fortunately an ingenious dietitian solved the latter problem by
providing packets of regional and ethnic spices which could be added to any
dish. Even I developed a taste for chili flavored popcorn.

Varying work schedules required that most living quarters had rudimentary
kitchen facilities to prepare the occasional snack. The food preparation
appliances were usually restricted to a microwave oven and a tiny refrigerator.
Dishes and eating utensils were made of a plastic which was recycled. There
was little washing up. Water was a more precious resource than electrical power.

I ate most of my meals in the small restaurant close to my living quarters. I was
usually joined by Riva Cohen, the woman who was my first acquaintance on
board. At first it was by chance. Our cabins were simply close together and our
duty tours overlapped. But after a while we developed a liking for each other and
ate together by choice.

Although she looked young, Riva’s mental age nearly equaled my own. That was
fortunate. Most of the crew had been scanned when they were quite young and
they and I had few memories in common. Riva had been involved in the human
exodus project since its start. She was a pediatric physician who had opted to be
scanned when she retired. Like most Israeli doctors she had served a term with
the army. She took up pediatric medicine upon her discharge. I don’t know what
she was like beforehand but in her new body she was a compact bundle of
supercharged energy, extremely attractive. In fact she would be positively
beautiful if you could get her to sit still for a minute.

I just noticed that I referred to Riva as Dr. Cohen. Only we old farts used last
names, primarily because we had responded to them all our lives. Most of the
crew just called people by the first names embroidered on their coveralls. I
suspect the in time last names would be forgotten. The Welsh approach of simply
adding a number to the name like 23William, might be used.

Riva and I discussed our previous life over meals. She spoke perfect English with
only the slightest trace of an accent, but it wasn’t an Israeli accent. Her parents
were ardent Zionists from Milwaukee who emigrated to Palestine in the early
1930’s. Riva, herself, had attended medical school in Scotland. No doubt that
accounted for both her her mastery of English and her faint accent.. She had two
children, a grown daughter, who was now married and lived in Tel Aviv and a son,
now a college professor. I talked about my late wife, my children and my
grandchildren. Just two old folks, albeit in young bodies, reminiscing about the
past.

Riva was a movie buff. Off duty she spent a lot of her time watching older films in
her quarters. She was especially fond of musicals but confessed that she also
watched historical dramas like “Gone With the Wind” and “Gettysburg.” She
could hardly believe that such events took place in the United States a bit more
than two centuries ago. How could Scarlet be so stupid? To her the USA seemed
like such a bland and peaceful country. I told her that sometimes still water runs
deep. I admitted that I liked old films myself.

I neglected to mention that members of the starship crew were not exactly
identical. In an attempt to provide a greater measure of genetic diversity the
geneticists used several basic groups of humanity as the starting point.

Six groups were used to construct the DNA shared by the crew. The geneticists
merged the characteristics of North Americans, South Americans, Europeans,
Africans, Asians, and Indians. We all had the same skin color, a light beige
shade, sort of that like of a southern European. At one stroke the geneticists
solved the racial problem. All of us looked pretty much alike. We were truly a
amalgam of all humanity.
Our clothing was simple, usually just a one piece coverall. I don’t know what
everyone had on underneath. In my case it was just a T shirt and shorts. Clothing
was used until it got worn or dirty, then recycled and new clothes almost instantly
produced by special purpose machines. Everybody's physical measurements
were kept in a data file so garments were custom tailored for each person. The
designers had calculated that it was more efficient to provide new clothing when
needed than to launder and dry the dirty stuff. We put our dirty laundry in a bin at
the end of the day and received a packet of fresh clothes the next morning.

Riva and I had come of age during the “Flower Power” generation. Still we were
pretty conventional so both of us had a difficult time accepting the sexual mores
of Exodus 7. I guessed that she was still loyal to the memory of her late husband
just as I was loyal to the memory of my late wife. We both realized that a revised
relationship between the sexes would be necessary for the population growth
envisioned. In one of our lunches, Riva confessed to me that she had taken a
few lovers after her husband’s death but nothing permanent.

She had been celibate for several decades before being scanned. My rejection of
her in our initial meeting sort of took her aback. She told me that her offer to have
sex with me was, in part, a test of her new openness. I asked her what the other
part was.

She replied: “I guess I was getting pretty horny after all those years of
abstinence. I missed the physical aspects of a sexual embrace. Besides, you
appealed to me. It seemed like a good chance to try out that part of my new body
without any complications. It’s not as if it was really me. It would be like I was
pulling the strings of a marionette. Shall we give it a try now that we know each
other a little better? My new body seems up to it.“

My body seemed up to it too. We decided that our first tryst would be in my cabin.
Fortunately I had cleaned it up only that morning. Riva was sharing her quarters
with two other women, both were off duty and a couple of fornicating elders might
seem embarrassing.

Riva insisted that we stop at her clinic first for a drink. Alcohol was one of those
things that was forbidden on Exodus 7 so naturally there was a thriving
bootlegging industry. Most of the booze was made by fermenting fruit behind
closet doors and was pretty awful. She was much more resourceful. As a
physician she had access to a supply of 99% pure medical alcohol, and, with a
small cache of herbs managed to mix up a respectable gin substitute. She added
some fruit juice, produced a bit of ice from a freezer, and prepared mixed drinks
worthy of a fine bar. My tastes ran more to beer but the drinks were delicious. We
had several, then we adjourned to my cabin.

It was unlike any seduction I had ever experienced. After I shut the door she
simply took off her coveralls. I was astonished. I don’t know what I expected to
see. Perhaps a simple unclothed generic looking young woman. Instead she
looked like a Playboy centerfold. She was the embodiment of a teen fantasy,
beautiful face, tight torso, big breasts, firm butt and Broadway showgirl legs.

“Do you like what I look like?” she asked. “I’m told that it was a final joke of the
genetic engineers. They made all of us women resemble Playboy Bunnies. I
guess they figured that they would have to keep the male libido high to father all
our children.”

I undressed too. But I was no stud. The genetic engineers simply made the
males look like well built healthy men. I suppose it wasn’t fair to the women. The
men should have all looked like Tarzan but with Einstein’s brain. I suspect that
most of the genetic engineers were men and balked at that idea. They were the
ones who read Playboy.

Of course we weren’t in love. But as Tina Turner sang long ago “What’s love got
to do with it?” It helps make sex a more enjoyable experience but it isn't really
required. We lowered the lights.

Riva seemed to know what she was about. In the dark, she slid down beside me,
and nuzzled my neck. She fondled my rapidly growing erection. I was a bit
nervous but she knew how to get me excited. That was the main thing she cared
about. She let me caress her firm breasts for a few moments then pulled me over
on top of her. She gently guided my penis to her vulva, then eased the tip into her
vagina.

I hadn’t had sex for many years but apparently I performed adequately. It
certainly felt good. She was wet, warm, and soft. And very tight. I started moving
my hips back and forth driving into her. I didn't think. It was all instinctive. I heard
her softly moan with delight. She probably expected me to ejaculate quickly, but I
was solid. We moved together for minutes, my hands around her tight ass.

My partner was clearly pleased at my stamina. She obviously enjoyed what I was
doing to her. She wrapped her legs around my back, pulling me tighter even as I
pumped her. Her full calves pummeled my back with each stroke. We developed
a perfect rhythm. A sexual synchronization. Her hips moved to meet mine and
every motion drove me deeper into her body. She clutched me tightly. Her body
started squirming beneath mine. I could feel a deep vibration in her torso.

She shuddered through one orgasm, then another, as waves of pleasure washed
through our bodies. Her strong legs clutched me tightly as her vaginal muscles
contracted around my penis. She actually bit my shoulder, surprising me.
Between bites she shouted “YES, YES!”

I was thankful for the soundproofing of my cabin otherwise her shouts might have
shaken the entire spaceship.

"Oh, sorry--!" she said.

"That's all right," I said, finally pushing in deep. I climaxed, a really great one that
seemed to last and last. I held her body tightly, all the while ejaculating my sperm
into her. I kept on pushing until I was sure that I had squeezed out every last
drop. Even I was surprised at how hard I came. All the while I held her tightly in
my arms, and nibbled on her neck.

She held me close and whispered "That was very nice."

It was quite an introduction into the pleasures of ‘android’ intercourse. We were

both determined to repeat our sexual activity whenever we got the chance.

Lest you believe that this memo is becoming a love story, nothing could be
further from the truth. We enjoyed each other’s company and had much in
common. Not the least of it was being able to discuss events that had happened
in our youth. But we both carried too much baggage from our past lives. Neither
of us could deny our previous experiences and we were far too mentally old to
start over. We simply became best friends. “Friends with privileges” you might
say, using the jargon of my granddaughter’s college friends.

In a couple of months Captain Scotia surprised us all by announcing a party. She

saiid that a “Rite of Passage Celebration” was a traditional thing when ships
crossed a significant marker like the Equator or the International Date line. The
sensors showed us that we had just passed the heliopause, the limit of our sun’s
influence. We we're truly in interstellar space.
It had taken the Voyager satellites over 30 years to reach the same point but we
were going much faster.

Anyone who could play an instrument was recruited to play in our pickup band.
Riva surprised me by her skill on the piano. Her parents insisted that she take
piano lessons when she was a girl. She could even read music after a fashion. It
is a talent that I never dreamed that she possessed. I could play the harmonica
but in the late 21st. century the harmonica wasn’t thought of as a real instrument.
I guess they never listened to the National Barn Dance or had records of the
Harmonicats.

We danced, if you could consider my shuffling around the floor dancing. The
passengers, mostly women, danced together. Then we had a feast. The kitchen
had been alerted about the party ahead of time and had spent the last few days
confecting specialties. It was a meal we would long remember.

The timing was solved by scheduling it in the short interval between the end of
one hibrenation period and the beginning of the next. The Exodus 7 was crowded
for a few days but everyone got a chance to celebrate.

I hope that I haven’t given the impression that life aboard the Exodus 7 was one
of total peace and civility. Even though the largely female crew did not exhibit the
aggressiveness of an all male crew there was still plenty of trouble. Cliques,
clubs, and other passive aggressive organizations were the order of the day.
Remember middle school and high school. It was just like that. Large groups of
people, when faced with extreme boredom, manage to make their own
excitement. Captain Scotia did her best to diffuse the worst situations by rotating
work assignments, eating times, and living quarters. She tried to make sure that
no long lasting clusters of women formed. It is hard to ‘unfriend’ a person when
you or she is in torpor. Captain Scotia’s actions to ensure peace and tranquility
also served to break up potential groups of dissidents who might question her
authority. She wanted no female Fletcher Christians aboard.

Because of her background, she tended to run the ship like a naval vessel.
Democracy was OK, she felt, after we reached our destination but during the
voyage everyone obeyed orders. Thankfully she gave very few direct commands
but those had to be followed. There was a vice Captain, a second in command
named Susan Pritchard, who took over when Captain was indisposed but I never
met her.
Captain Scotia, as befits a naval commander, insisted on having a complement
of marines on board. Well not actually marines. They were former policewomen
who had elected to go on the voyage. I think we had six, perhaps eight, but half
were always in torpor. The women knew how to handle weapons but they were
unarmed. Just like the London Bobbies. Most of their efforts were used in dealing
with domestic disputes. Usually roommates who couldn’t get along or who had
fights over a mutual lover. Whatever weapons we had were locked in a secure
cabinet to be used only in the unlikely case of space invaders. In any event, if
deep space aliens were to attack us, I’m sure we would be no match for them.

Incidentally there were so few men and we were so widely separated that the
problem of male insurrection never occurred.

Maintenance of some sort of sexual relationship between men and women would
be essential for family life after arrival. Women didn't need to have intercourse to
have children. They could have had babies by artificial insemination. But the
planners thought that total abstinence from heterosexual intercourse would warp
society. So they established a rationale for baby making as sort of a lottery. They
didn't want to eliminate sex between men and women but wanted to give it a
reasonable justification. Everyone got a chance to do it once in a while.

On Exodus 7 women and men were allowed to get physical fulfillment as they
pleased. Sex was looked on as entertainment. It tended to release tensions that
otherwise might cause social unrest. Institutionalized sexual freedom was not
unusual in human history. After wars that decimated the male population,
acceptance of polygamy, harems, and concubines increased.

The disparity in male to female numbers put strains on a social system formerly
based on equal proportions of the sexes. Passive birth control was used to
control the population. Women had an implant which prevented pregnancy. A
simple injection would restore fertility for a few months so they could have a child
when they wanted. Nothing was left to chance.

Heterosexual intercourse was comparatively rare given the small number of

males aboard. The largely female crew got most of its satisfaction by
relationships with other women. Some women opted to group into female only
households similar to the nunneries or convents of the middle ages. Some gave
up on the concept of heterosexual satisfaction entirely and, as in other times,
devoted themselves to other means of gratification. Art, music, dance, poetry,
and education all served as a substitute for having physical relationships.
Prostitution in the usual sense did not flourish on board the Exodus 7. The term
“prostitution” was considered definitely anti-feminist. For centuries women had
resisted having their bodies considered "objects of desire" to be sold to the
highest bidder. Accepting the practice that one could buy sexual satisfaction,
even in the confines of the Exodus 7 was considered intolerable. Besides, in the
cash free society of the spaceship, there was no way to pay for the service. After
the novelty of unlimited access to sexual partners had worn off, most settled on a
few compatible crew members.

The sexual drive of the ship's inhabitants was only natural, the result of the
conjoint effect of several factors. Both men and women were undeniably
attractive and in the age range where their fertility and sexual desires were the
highest. The crew had been genetically configured to have a high libido. A new
planet would requite a high birth rate to provide a population mass sufficient to
ensure survival. Finally, there were few other sources of physical pleasure
available. The restrictions on the food supply made gourmet eating, the
traditional alternative to sex, impracticable.

The society that developed was a compromise between individual liberty and
shipboard discipline. The right of private property was limited to personal
possessions but private privileges were many. The motivation for achievement
lay chiefly in the winning of leadership positions and prerogatives, and, of course,
in the recognition of a job well done. There was only a very limited degree of
owning anything that could be classified as wealth. Resources of every
description belonged to the community at large as a matter of public interest. It
would have gladdened a Socialist's heart.

Free enterprise wasn’t totally abolished. Everyone received the same allowance
of clothing, for example, but all were free to decorate their garb in whatever
imaginative fashion they chose. A cottage industry of garment alteration arose to
provide fashionable wear. The same with just about every standard item aboard.
Payment was by trading job shifts or leisure time credits.

Selection for jobs and for eventual careers aboard ship was a function of choice
and availability. Jobs were posted and anyone could submit an application. If
there were more applicants than positions, a competitive exam was used for the
final selection. Most of us learned, or tried to learn, another skill. I suspect that it
was more out of an escape from boredom than necessity.
The crew was a pretty heterogeneous bunch. We had plenty of technical experts,
engineers, and scientists. We even had five geologists, three in my group, two in
the other. I always considered geology a pseudo-science, an excuse for walking
the countryside and making profound statements about pretty rocks. But I
suppose that’s my engineering bias coming out.

One of the geologists was even a geological engineer, a woman of nearly my

age, who was an expert on deep set mining. I understand that she had worked
for the Colorado Department of Mines. The other four had been faculty members
of various universities.

Captain Scotia, true to Annapolis tradition, had named the two torpor groups as
the Gold team and the Blue team. Mine, and Riva’s was the Gold team. The
captain tried to foster morale by introducing competition between the two teams
but her efforts were largely ignored. We were not naval academy cadets after all.

Our colony was hardly religious. The crew had been selected for their skills not
their religious beliefs. Most of the them felt that even if God did exist, his
influence would not extend beyond the reaches of the solar system. There were
hundreds of million stars in our own galaxy and hundreds of millions of other
galaxies, each with their own collection of planets. It was too much to ask of a
single God to attend to the fall of a sparrow in each of them. Besides, since many
of the crew had their own beliefs it was better to have an irreligious society than
to have one in which half the crew thought the other half were infidels.

Our small population encouraged us to go back to the apprenticeship system of

learning trades and professions. A crew mwmbwr who wanted to learn
mechanical engineering studied with an experienced mechanical engineer to
learn all the tricks of the trade. Of course it was more formal than that. There was
a lot of textbook type learning from video and computer sources but the hands on
practice was done under the supervision of a master just as it was in the middle
ages.

I even had several apprentices who wanted to learn the intricacies of spaceship
design. I’m wasn’t sure I could teach them anything. Spaceships had changed so
much from the days when I was active. Since there was little possibility that the
students would ever get to actually design a spaceship, most of my time was
spent in showing the students how to fix things. At least they learned something
which could be put to use.
The people aboard had been chosen for their knowledge of specific specialties.
The kitchen was overseen by a man, a former head chef at a Michelin starred
restaurant. There was no reason why a woman couldn’t have done the same job
but the man was available when the crew was configured. The designers clearly
didn’t skimp on anything. In the same sense I was selected because spaceship
design during the early days was a male dominated enterprise.

Medicine aboard ship was significantly different from that practiced on Earth
before we departed. Most infectious diseases on board had been exterminated.
Chronic illnesses were well controlled by drugs and therapy. Even our sleep cycle
was controlled by medication. We consumed a carefully compounded pill with our
evening meal which put us to sleep rapidly, kept us asleep for the required time
and left us as frisky as young bunnies in the ‘morning.’ Biological engineers had
eliminated as many genetic problems and structural disorders as they could by
new techniques of modifying DNA. In general, we were a pretty healthy bunch.
Since there were no children aboard Riva found that she had very little to do
except tend to minor injuries.

Surgical procedures were handled by automatic remotes with probes that

penetrated into the body through tiny incisions. Once in the patient's body, the
working head expanded into an array of surgical tools. The surgeon could watch
and direct the probe on a video screen. Riva told me that this type of surgery was
already quite advanced when the Exodus 7 left Earth. That was fortunate.
Training a competent surgeon to perform operations manually would take years.
Few people on board ever got sick enough to require operations so there would
be limited opportunity for a surgeon to gain hands on experience.

I had only a few chances to observe emergency surgery. In the most dramatic
case, a technician working with me outside the ship had the misfortune to have
her leg punctured by a meteor. Meteors were rare in interstellar space. At our
combined speeds, even a minuscule meteor would punch through the hull of the
ship like a bullet, damaging everything in its path. The meteor that hit the
technician was not detected by the large radar coupled with the military laser that
destroyed any small solid particles that would hit the ship. It must have come in
at an oblique angle and was missed by the forward looking radar.

The meteor punctured a neat hole in the technician’s space suit, passed through
her thigh, and came out the other side of the suit. The self sealing inner lining of
the suit prevented the loss of air and minimized bleeding. Riva’s medical clinic
was close to the emergency entrance and I assisted the wounded crewman
there. Riva immediately opened the suit, cut away the inner garment and
inspected the wound.

"It's just like a bullet hole," she said. "I haven't seen anything like this since I was
in the army."

She knew exactly what to do. She trimmed the damaged tissue, stanched the
bleeding and cauterized a few seeping blood vessels, then applied a healing
antiseptic and sutured the wound. Her quick action implied a lot of past
experience with similar injuries. I was very impressed.

We ate well during the journey. We had enough “farm” area for several times the
current crew compliment since we anticipated a major population increase before
planetfall. Our diet was largely based on fruits, vegetables, and whole grains,
foods that took the least energy to produce. Open areas had been turned into
high tech farms with hydroponic containers and controlled lighting. The growing
season was continuous. Poultry, eggs, and soy were the primary source of
protein. We grew algae in large tanks. The algae, when compressed and
flavored, provided a good substitute for meat products. Algae also served as a
source of oxygen to refresh the air. Cooks learned to prepare these staples in
imaginative ways. With this "health food" diet and the mandatory exercise
program illnesses related to obesity disappeared almost entirely.

Because of our diet and life style, people retained their vital functions well into old
age. All appreciated the lower gravity aboard ship. Body parts didn't sag as much
when they aged. But ultimately everyone's biological clocks ran down and they
would fade peacefully. Considering the comparative youth of the crew, that
wouldn’t happen for years.

The ship’s gravity would be adjusted to match that of the new planet when we
were within a generation of our destination. We planned to slowly change the
rotational speed of the living area a percent or so each year when we were near
Proxima Centauri b.

Our unmanned probes had returned the information that our destination was
marginally suitable for human life. Temperatures and gravity were similar to those
on old Earth, at least in the terminator area. Some plant life existed on the planet.
It had areas of primitive foliage but there were no land animals. There was a
partial oxygen atmosphere and some expanses of liquid water. We had a good
photographic map of several regions suitable for settlement. Our task on the
starship was to preserve the best aspects of human civilization and deliver a
population of competent pioneers to start a new world.

Riva and I dined together whenever our schedules permitted. We just got along
well, talked about this and that, and reminisced about various events. Of course
we exercised our “privileges” frequently, sleeping together whenever the
opportunity presented itself. It was almost like a real marriage - but not quite. We
had no worries about children. We didn’t have to plan for their education or
future. Our housing was taken care of. And we could never lose our jobs.

But all good things end. Riva was nearing the end of her duty cycle and she was
scheduled for hibernation. I know that when she awakened me she told me that
she was part way through her tour but I didn’t appreciate the consequences. Now
I do. It’s like a death in the family. We had a gala dinner. A few of her drinks. OK,
more than a few. And a long evening together. The next morning we kissed
goodby. I was alone again.

As I said, the crew members had been selected for the ability to make a new
planet work. They were agronomists, animal husbandry specialists, builders, etc.
But few knew the ins and outs of spaceship design and construction.

I was called on time and again to repair this, fix that, or even give a little advice
on how to use the ship’s resources most efficiently. The work schedule was
designed to keep everyone busy. Sort of like the swabbies holystoning the decks
on ocean going vessels of the 18th century. Still it kept our spaceship in tip top
shape and it kept me occupied. It’s a good thing I kept busy. Otherwise I might
have gone a bit stir crazy. It is tough to live your life in such a restricted
environment without a concrete objective. I began to sympathize with medieval
monks and prisoners in solitary confinement.

A real problem was finding things to do with my leisure time. This was the one
thing the planners forgot. They, themselves, were fully immersed in the details of
configuring a ship to last a two to three hundred year voyage. Boredom was the
last thing on their minds. The science fiction writers had it right. Simply ignore the
travel time by inventing a faster than light drive, putting the crew in suspended
animation, or teleporting them from one place to another. Then get on with the
story without all the inconvenient delays.

We had a sound ship and plenty to eat but we had little to do with our time. And
we had plenty of that. It wasn’t so hard for me. I had books to write and papers to
finish. Some of the crew, the kitchen staff, the medical personnel, and the control
room crew kept occupied with their ongoing tasks. But most of the rest of the
crew simply endured the monotony until we reached our destination.

I’m not a naturally friendly guy but I tried to be as sociable as I could. I joined
every group that would have me. But except for Riva and Captain Scotia there
were few others aboard with whom I shared a common background. I’m sure that
we would have much more in common to talk about in a few years. Most of the
crew had been selected for their knowledge of things that would be useful in
making a new society work, not for their gregariousness.

It was Earth’s toymakers that saved the day. People have been building playtime
analogs of life’s real experiences since the first apes learned to walk on two feet.
Chess and card games are substitutes for war. The Aztecs played a form of
soccer with the heads of defeated enemies. When I was a kid, stores had “shoot
‘em up” games to keep children occupied while their parents did real shopping. I
remember my grandchildren standing before a TV set waving their arms in a
mock game of handball. Game technology allowed you to perfect your golf swing,
ski a demanding downhill course, or play a perfect tennis game without leaving
the confines of your living room.

Sensors picked up your body motion and imaged your opponent, the golf course
or the ski slope on a TV screen or a virtual reality helmet. You could perfect your
skills at home. The results were quite good. I’m told that some Olympic athletes
never practiced on a real course until the actual games. Almost every nook and
cranny on the Exodus 7 sported a game console. These were used constantly. If
there was ever a spaceship Olympics I’m sure we would rank near the top.

When they were first released, virtual reality helmets encompassed the entire
head. They contained a stereoscopic screen, individual earphones, and motion
sensors which picked up the direction of the head and eyes. I recall that they
were developed to control weaponry in fighter aircraft but were soon abandoned
because too many pilots shot off pieces of their own vehicle. Game makers
adopted the idea as a wonderful way to transport players into the universe of
their game. Now the headsets consisted merely of a pair of video goggles, a pair
of earphones and a small package containing motion sensors. They were much
smaller than the full helmet but just as effective.

By the time the Exodus 7 was launched, every moviemaker and most toymakers
were marketing fully immersive versions of their products. All it required was a
game console and a virtual reality helmet. You could don your helmet, ride on a
stationary exercise bicycle, and take a simulated bike ride in the country on a
secluded trail amongst the flowers and trees. With interactive technology you
could take part in a triathlon or fly your own jet plane. You could actively
participate in movies or pirate adventures, taking any part you desired. You could
play rounds of golf with Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus and even beat them a
few times if you adjusted the controls correctly. It was not quite the “holodeck” of
science fiction but it came close.

When I was a teen ager I was addicted to baseball and I was pretty good. Good
enough to make the semi-pro team sponsored by the local dairy. I tried to relive
those days by calling up a baseball scenario on the virtual reality console. But I
guess I went too far. When I donned the helmet I found that I was playing first
base for the New York Yankees in the World Series. Boston, our opponent, was
at bat in the last inning of the deciding game, trailing by one run with the bases
loaded. Our pitcher wound up and released the ball. I heard the crack of the bat
and the ball came right at me. A line drive a bit higher than head high. My only
thought was “Oh God! I hope I don’t screw up.”

Fortunately long buried reflexes kicked in. I leaped, caught the ball on the fly and
flipped it to the second baseman in time to tag the runner coming from first base.
A double play and the game and the series was over. We had won. As we
headed to the locker room for our showers and the obligatory shaken bottle of
champagne, I heard the cheers of the crowd. Then I removed the helmet and the
dreams of glory vanished. Well, it was nice while it lasted.

In addition to whatever athletic pursuits or virtual reality experiences could be

performed in the confines of the ship, the we devoted much of our leisure time to
the arts and cultural amusements. We had dramatic plays, concerts and dances.
There was an acting troupe that put on an annual cycle of Shakespeare's plays.
In a reversal of Globe theater tradition, all of the male roles were played by
women.

A few brave souls even learned how to ‘fly’. Not really fly like birds but flit around
in near zero gravity conditions. Two of the six spokes that fastened the
passenger ring to the central core were fitted with freight elevators to transfer
heavy supplies from the core to the ring. As you climbed toward the core the
centrifugal force of ‘gravity’ declined, reaching zero in the core itself. There was a
large almost vacant chamber where the radial spokes joined the core. The
chamber had maintenance passageways which led to the atomic reactors and
the ion drive but was largely empty. It served as the staging area for organizing
and transferring supplies to the living area.

I don’t know who discovered that you could ‘fly’ in the central chamber. Because
of the almost zero gravity you could leap several dozen meters with very little
effort. By using your imagination and flapping your arms it was almost like flying. I
tried it a few times but flying, even if it was just jumping, made me sick. I recall
that in the early days of the manned space program they used to call a transport
plane which dove towards Earth, offering periods of weightlessness, the “Vomit
Comet.” Many of the passengers lost their lunch on the flights. But some could
tolerate the weightlessness without regurgitation. Those were our flyers.
Personally I needed a fixed structure to hang on to in zero gravity conditions.

One of the flyers was the first fatality of the trip. She had the misfortune to hit her
head on a sharp edge as she jumped and died instantly of a major concussion.
Her body was almost weightless but still had its full inertia. We lowered her to the
’ground’ level but despite our medical technology she couldn’t be revived. Rather
than put the body into the recycling apparatus to recover its fluids and minerals,
Captain Scotia decided that it would be better for morale if she was given a
proper burial according to military protocol. The woman had come from the UK.
The captain decided that she should be wrapped in a sailcloth shroud and
slipped out of an airlock while fifes and bagpipes played a funeral dirge. It was a
tradition of the British navy. Finding bagpipers amongst the crew was the real
problem. We finally ended up using a recording of bagpipes as the body was
eased out of an airlock.

Captain Scotia tried to forbid ‘flying’ but the sport proved so popular that she had
to relent. She compromised by insisting that all flyers wear helmets. Flying
became our version of solo rock climbing.

Every morning I ran a couple of times around the periphery of the ring. That, in
itself, was an odd experience. Because of the curvature of the living area it
looked as if I was always running uphill but with the centrifugal force of “gravity”
the physical sensation was always like running on level ground. Anyway it was
nearly a 4 mile run and doing it every morning kept me in good shape.

I learned to play a passible jazz piano on an electronic keyboard that I smuggled

to my cabin and even learned to read music. I had to keep up with Riva. If you
ignored the mistakes I could play a decent Scott Joplin rag. I saw every movie
that I wanted to see from our library, and played a fairly good game of poker with
other crew members for matchstick stakes.

The poker games were interesting. Most of the players were female and it took
me a long time to get over my habit of being “nice” to women players. But they
proved more bloodthirsty than any group of men I ever played with. They chortled
with glee when they swept the table free of matchsticks after displaying a winning
hand. I don’t even know where they got the matchsticks. There was no smoking
on board Exodus 7 so someone must have brought a box of matches in their
keepsake box.

Eventually we had a 3D printer cobble up a batch of real poker chips. Captain

Scotia turned a blind eye to this indulgence. When she sat in on the game she
became a tiger. I don’t know what they teach at Annapolis but it can’t be only
seamanship.

We liked Captain Scotia to play poker with us. It gave crew members a chance to
interact with her in a social setting. But she was far too good a player to be in our
games. During one of our weekly conferences I asked her how she learned to
play the game so well. She was much better than most of the sailors and soldiers
I had played with in Korea. She stalled a while then confessed that while waiting
for her appointment to the Naval Academy she had attended the University of
Nevada in Las Vegas. To earn her room and board she moonlighted as a
waitress in one of the casinos. She said she was a terrible waitress but a good
observer. While serving drinks she had a chance to study the real poker pros in
action. These were the guys who bet one million dollars on a single hand. In the
words of Kenny Roger’s old song, Captain Scotia learned from the masters
“when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. When to walk away and when to run.”

Unfortunately Riva treated poker as just a game, not as a metaphor for life. Too
bad. I would have liked to play with her.

Our communications link let me send my articles and books back to Earth. I knew
that the material would be a couple of years in transit. We also received out of
date news and old technical journals. I kept a file of those. The laser link served
as our sluggard interstellar internet. The material that I had sent back to Earth
was published and attracted a bit of a following. Few realized that the real author
was on a spaceship traveling to Proxima Centauri and not a retired professor.
I learned from reading old news obituaries that my Earthbound self lived on for
another few years, died peacefully, and was buried alongside my late wife.

I still ate my meals in the cafe near my quarters. I hated to eat alone and invited
some other solitary diners to join me. Soon we had a small group of 5 or 6
regulars that dined together. Considering the makeup of the crew, most were
attractive women. I had even played poker with some of them. Contrary to their
behavior at the poker table, they proved to be amiable dinner companions. It
would have been the fantasy of my life when I was a teen to regularly eat dinner
with four or five beautiful women but now I found it difficult to hold up my end of
the conversation. They talked of fashion, music, and children. Hardly the
important male topics of cars, sports, and careers. From time to time the ship’s
loud speaker system played a concert of “classical” music. Featured artists were
the Beatles and the Who. On the Exodus 7 these were regarded as classical
musicians. I really missed Riva. At least we shared common musical tastes. The
only time I could contribute my two cents worth was when we got on the subject
of politics. Everyone had an opinion on that.

I did build up a rapport with one of the ladies. Her name was Aisha. I had never
heard that name before so I asked her about it. She seemed happy to tell me. It
seems that a woman named Aisha had an important role in early Islamic history
during Muhammad's life and after his death. In Sunni tradition, Aisha was thought
to be scholarly and inquisitive. She contributed to the spread of Muhammad's
message and served the Muslim community for 44 years after his death.

On the Exodus 7 Aisha looked just like everyone else. In her previous life she
had been an agronomist from South Africa. Aisha said that she rather liked her
android appearance. In South Africa she would not have been considered a
beauty. Her previous body had been fat, had uneven teeth, and a bad
complexion. She despaired of finding a husband. In fact, to gain attention, she
confessed that she had been somewhat promiscuous. I interpreted that to mean
that she slept around. Aisha suspected that one of her lovers had given her
AIDS. She jumped at the opportunity to have her mind recorded. It would give
her a second chance to live her life while her earthly body wasted away. The
escape project needed agronomists and she was more than willing to offer her
services.

Because of my farm background we had something in common to talk about.

She had been involved in getting corn to grow in the Transvaal. When I
mentioned that my grandfather’s farm had 80 acres of corn, her eyes lit up. We
discussed, among other things, the types of fertilizer, yield per acre, different corn
varieties and other things only of interest to a farmer. Naturally we slept together
frequently. Two yers is a long time to wait. But, while our sex life was adequate, I
have to confess that she was no Riva.

Torpor at the end of my tour was uneventful. I was given a drink of sweet tasting
liquid, essentially a powerful laxative to empty my bowels and was then
connected to an IV tube. I lay down on the clinic cot and before I could count to
ten, I was fast asleep. Then I was transferred to a coffin like container where all
my needs would be attended to by the monitoring computer. It measured my
temperature, my nutritional needs, the oxygen level in my blood and made the
appropriate adjustments. I was a baby in the womb again and it was my momma.

In the midst of a pleasant dream which I can’t remember, I was shaken awake. It
was Riva attending to my needs. Just like the first time.

“Wake up, Professor London. We need your advice.”

This seemed to be a very formal tone from a woman with whom I had been
frequently intimate. But then I saw that she was not alone. The room seemed to
be crowded with a number of people from the management staff. I made my
ablutions, splashed a little water on my face, and prepared myself to listen to
their concerns. One woman. whom I recognized as a senior bridge officer,
stepped forward and said, “The radar has picked up a large unidentified object
almost in our flight path. It is at the extreme limit of the radar range and we can’t
make out what it is. All we know is that it is very big. Because we are still
accelerating, we are slowly catching up to it.”

“It is something we hadn’t expected.” said another. “Do we alter our course to
avoid it or do we pass it close enough to explore?”

My answer reflected my university orientation. I opted for a close flyby to gather

enough information to relay back to Earth. It might be essential for the next
mission. Who knows? Besides we had accelerated Exodus 7 long enough. It was
time to shut down the ion drive and coast before slowing down to go into orbit
around Proxima Centauri b. Captain Scotia agreed. We would pass the
unidentified object close enough to visually inspect it and take a few samples.

Every day I went to the bridge to view the new object on the radar display. It
gradually became bigger. After a while I could see that it had an irregular shape,
almost a fragment of an asteroid. When we finally came close to it, I could see
that our assumption was right. It was a big, tumbling hunk of rock several dozen
kilometers in size with glistening spots on its surface. It’s speed matched ours
closely. We decided that we would even have time to visit it before we drew
away.

A few crew members and I donned space suits to become an exploration team. It
was not like the old TV series where the Captain, Science Officer, and Doctor
always made up the away team. In this case I had the nagging feeling that the
members of the away team and I were the most expendable persons aboard.
Our away team was made up of a pilot, me, a geologist, a couple of construction
engineers and a few other people whose specialties I didn’t know. Probably they
were asteroid experts.

The shuttle craft made the short flight, about 15 minutes, to get to the asteroid.
The pilot fired a harpoon into the asteroid’s surface to serve as the anchor. The
exploration team wandered over the surface, stepping very carefully. Because of
the asteroid’s low gravity, a misstep might hurl the team member into space. We
chipped away a few interesting chunks of rock and confirmed that it was an
asteroid, perhaps even a hunk of a proto-planet from our solar system that had
collided with some bigger rock and was launched on its journey. It’s high velocity
was almost certainly the result of having been cast into space by the slingshot
effect of the gravitational field of some large planet, maybe even Jupiter.

Space must be littered with the remnants of planetary formation but this was the
first that we had found so far from the Solar system. Every rock sample was
cataloged and placed into a collection bag for later analysis. Captain Scotia felt
that it would give the crew something to do. The decks were getting worn out
from all that holystoning.

The geologist identified the glistening areas as frozen pools of water ice. That
was fortunate. The Exodus 7’s water supply was getting low and a few hundred
tons of ice would replenish it. But getting the ice from the tumbling asteroid to our
ship was the problem. Fortunately there was an answer for this one. Admittedly
low tech, but it was an answer.

I had learned that there was a boatyard up the Hudson River that manufactured
fishing boats even in the dead of winter. But the frozen river was a sheet of ice
and the market was in New York City, almost 100 miles down stream. The boats
were too big to send by truck or train. The yard solved the problem in an
ingenious way. As the ice broke up in the spring, large floes of ice would start
their journey to the sea. The yard would position each boat behind an ice floe
about the size of a city block, throw a tow rope onto the ice, and freeze it to the
surface by buckets of water. The ice floe would drift downstream, towing the
newly built boat and clear the way of all river debris. In a couple of weeks the
boats would reach their market. The crew would release the tow rope and the
boats would be sold. The boatyard claimed that they had been using this strategy
for almost a century and hadn’t lost a boat.

We used the same technique to get the ice to the Exodus 7. The construction
engineers planted explosive charges to blast a large chunk of ice away from the
asteroid. We froze a long towrope to the surface. A portable winch slowly tugged
the hunk of ice to our ship. In space the weight of the ice chunk didn’t matter. It
was just the inertia. We compensated for the additional drag on our speed by
running the ion drive a bit longer. The melted ice replenished our water supply.
We even had enough water for an occasional shower.

The asteroid wasn’t the only space wanderer. Through our telescope we saw
several rogue planets devoid of any moons or suns during our journey. It stands
to reason. There are several billion stars in our galaxy. Each one spawned a
dozen or more planets but few stars managed to hang on to more than a few.
The remainder were flung into outer space by their more massive neighbors. We
would have liked to explore some of them but we neither had the time or the
maneuvering capability. Perhaps some later space ship could do it but we
certainly couldn’t.

Riva and I celebrated replenishing our water supply with ice cold drinks. The next
morning I confessed to her that although I occasionally strayed, she was the only
woman I wanted to be intimate with on the Exodus 7. We kept each other more
than satisfied. Perhaps, I thought, we should make it permanent. I know that
marriage had fallen out of fashion on our starship. With a 9 to 1 sex ratio,
expecting fidelity would be impossible. But I proposed anyway. And she turned
me down.

“Max” she said, “things are very good the way they are. Let’s keep it that way. I
really like you but I suspect that it was the proposal of one old fogy to another.
When we start the reproductive phase of the mission I’ll have to have intercourse
with almost every man aboard. And you will have to sleep with dozens of women.
I know that it will be just our android bodies but I’m not sure how a long a
marriage would last under those circumstances, even if one of my children was
yours. You know that you are welcome in my arms any time you want. After we
land, if we feel the way we do now, we can talk about it again.”

So that was my attempt at a proper proposal. Well, I tried.

By now the Exodus 7 had been traveling through space for a number of Earth
years and the Sun was still there. It had not expanded. Every time I went to the
bridge I looked at it though our telescope. The Sun’s temperatures had even
fallen off slightly. Obviously the prediction of an imminent solar explosion was far
off. But how had so many scientists and astronomers been wrong?

I want back to my cache of news reports and technical papers and found that I
was not the only one that harbored doubts. At first a trickle of studies showed that
the variation in solar temperatures, although rare, was possible. Indeed it had
happened several times in Earth’s history. But other studies voiced more serious
doubts.

After World War Three the economy of Earth slipped into recession. The UN
mandate banning armament production cost millions of jobs. War is a great
accelerator of economies. Large quantities of material are built and then
destroyed. Economists have documented that it was only the entrance of the
USA into WW2 that pulled it out of depression. The movers and shakers of the
world’s economies had decided that society needed a moral equivalent of war to
continue its slow spiral of growth. What better way to foster industry than by
building large expensive projects and shooting them off into space. Whether they
ever accomplished their mission was unimportant. It was the building that
counted. It was a distortion of Keynesian economic theory. But, it just might work.

The idea of the Sun going nova met the criterion of a universal catastrophe that
all nations could get behind. I don’t know quite how the idea was hatched.
Perhaps it was formed at a meeting of the Bilderburg group or some like
conference of high level movers and shakers. Scientists had been predicting that
the future of the human race was dependent on its becoming a multiplanet
species. Why not harness that concept. Except that the planets of the solar
system are too close. Earthlings would be able to see success or failure.

Building very expensive spaceships and sending them off to the stars would
assure that humans in the future should become an interstellar species.
Factories would be kept busy. People would be employed. Scientific discoveries
made. Vast funds would be distributed to the world’s economies. It would be like
the early days of the space program. No one would know if the project is
successful but it is the attempt that counts. Yes, there would be loss of life. Still,
the fatality rate would be a tiny fraction of the losses in a real war. Losing a dozen
spaceships with an estimated crew of 1000 persons each is only half the losses
incurred in the defense of Stalingrad.

World leaders agreed. Leading astronomers were coopted and their data fudged
to make it look as if the Sun were about to go nova. Stories were planted in major
news media and scientific publications. The UN took it upon itself to push the
interstellar escape program. The US Congress was convinced. The aerospace
community leaped in with both feet. And, most important, all involved kept quiet
about the deception. So the interstellar program was launched.

Only now, over 60 years after the deception occurred did people appreciate that
it was a gigantic scam. The world and most of the scientific community had been
deceived. To make it more unsettling, one of the spaceflight technical journals
revealed that only about a dozen interstellar space ships were launched. All were
smaller test vehicles like the Exodus 7. None of the larger ships had taken flight.
In fact most were incomplete. Delays, parts shortages, design changes and even
labor unrest had taken their toll. The one Orion drive pusher ship built had used
up it’s supply of mini atomic bombs and was put into a parking orbit around
Earth.

Still the effort had accomplished its financial objective. Money was spent.
Research labs and factories flourished. Economies boomed. The moral
equivalent of war had been achieved. Earth’s financial future seemed secure, at
least until the next crisis. Keynesian economics had been proven correct yet
again. All at a cost of a few billion dollars and the risk of only a few thousand
lives. In retrospect it was merely the cost of a couple of WW2 naval battles.

To say that the news of the deception was disturbing to the crew of Exodus 7 is
an understatement. We were livid - but what could we do? We were coasting
toward an unknown future on Proxima Centauri b without a means of return. Our
only recourse was to continue on and make the best of it.

Captain Scotia was remarkable. A truly excellent leader. She discussed the
situation with the crew and laid out the options. We met in small groups and
talked about it as well. The crew was almost evenly divided into two factions, the
“Go Backers” and the “Go Oners.” It was the closest thing to a major conflict that
we had endured during our entire voyage.
The “Go Backers” realized that the ion drive had insufficient power to get us back
even in the extended lifespan of the current crew members. Turning the ship
around and using the ion drive to return to Earth would take hundreds of years. If,
indeed, our descendants went back to Earth they would be living antiquities. It
would be almost as if the crew of the Santa Maria were to set foot in modern
Spain to tell them that crossing the Atlantic was not a shortcut to the Indies.
Indeed, convincing the political establishment to admit the hoax would be difficult.
In some venues androids were not recognized as legal humans and had no
voting rights. Going back would be just a form of reproach that none of the living
crew members could enjoy. Still, it would be an unequivocal proof of the scam.

The opposite view was held by the “Go Oners.” Sure, it might have been a hoax
but they were given the wonderful opportunity to take a trip to the stars and
establish a new community. The arguments between the two almost evenly
matched sides were loud and vociferous. The conflict lasted for several months
of passionate speeches and community meetings. There were get togethers and
rallies. Everyone weighed in. If we had more crew I’m sure there would be
parades and soapboxes. Despite the nature of the outcome it was a good source
of entertainment.

I too was caught up in the conflict. I was furious at being deceived. So were
many of my fellow passengers. Many had signed up because there were firmly
convinced that the Earth would soon be uninhabitable and an interstellar voyage
was the best alternative. Eventually my rational side realized that there was no
practical alternative but going on. What to do?

Going on was the only realistic course. Eventually we put it to a vote and the
crew mostly came to the only conclusion. We had to go on. Captain Scotia
insisted that we all concur. A successful settlement of the new planet could
harbor no doubts.

Fortunately the voyage planners knew nothing about the scam and, so far, most
of their decisions had been correct. The ship was sound. We had ample supplies.
Our society was reasonably stable.

Riva and I maintained our quasi married status for the remainder of her shift. We
didn’t actually move in together but she spent more time in my quarters than she
did in her own. Every time we made love I mentally thanked the genetic
engineers who configured her body. They surely knew what would turn men on.
The women aboard might not have known how attractive they were but the
genetic engineers did. If they had been privy to the deception they certainly
sugarcoated the reproductive aspects of it.

Just before she entered torpor we had a long discussion about my proposal. She
confessed that she really wanted to marry me but was afraid that the relaxed
sexual attitudes required for population buildup might get in the way. She said
that she had seen something similar happen in Israel in the aftermath of the
second war with Iran. She suggested that while she was hibernating I have sex
with other women. If I still felt the same way about her after she awoke we might
reconsider my proposal.

I had an epiphany while I was talking about marriage. Obviously the genetic
engineers had figured out relationships like ours ahead of time. They realized
that the emotions of guilt, envy, jealousy and love all had major somatic
components buried in our genetic makeup. Evolution created those emotions to
foster pair bonding as an aid to species survival. Without them families would
rarely form and children would be pretty much left on their own to live or die. In
addition to endowing us with a heightened sex drive to foster a population
explosion prior to arrival, the genetic engineers had removed many of the genes
from our DNA responsible for the somatic consequences of envy, jealousy, and
guilt.

Riva must have known all about it but she never told me. I cherished my
relationship with her but I used my new insight to satisfy my lust with several
readily available women while she was in torpor. I even renewed my affair with
Aisha. Riva might have been doing the same thing when I was asleep. It was
something we never discussed. It’s best not to talk about some things.

I spent the next few weeks carefully considering the various options of
successfully colonizing our new planetary home. Proxima Centauri b was gravity
locked.

One side faced the sun continuously, the other side was dark. Even though the
sun was a red dwarf the temperatures on the side facing it would be extremely
hot. The dark side would be very cold. The tenuous atmosphere and the slight
rocking of the planet modified the temperature extremes a but but the only livable
zone was the terminator, the band encircling the planet between the hot and cold
sides. Proxima Centauri b had a circumference slightly greater than Earth’s,
about 25,000 miles. The planet terminator was about 200 miles wide, giving a
total possible living area of 5 million square miles.

Two of the geologists felt that the sun’s radiation would eventually sweep most of
the air and water from the planet. The other two felt that the dark side would keep
most of the air and water frozen as ice and shielded from the radiation of the sun.
Both sets of geologists concurred that the planet would be unlivable in a billion
years or so.

I reminded them that a billion years was a good long time. Earth’s inhabitants
had slithered out of the ocean, evolved into lizards, then into dinosaurs. The
dinosaurs had become extinct to be replaced by mammals and then by humans
all in less than a billion years. Humans, in fact, had inhabited the Earth for only
the tiniest fraction of that time. We could do with a billion years.

Naturally much of the land would be unsuitable for homesteading. There were
areas of water, mountains, and swamps. The terminator temperatures ranged
from near freezing next to the dark side and near boiling next to the sunny side. I
estimated that people could live on half the area, a region as big as the
continental United States. That was certainly enough land to colonize for the
population we expected to have. Assuming that the air was breathable, the water
was drinkable, and that our plants would grow, the colony might have a chance of
success.

Armed with my portfolio of information I set forth on my weekly discussion with

Captain Scotia. My conferences with Captain Scotia usually lasted a couple of
hours. One of the advantages of normal life on the Exodus 7 is that we had
plenty of time.

Our meeting started out in the usual way. We talked about the modifications we
would make to the life support systems to facilitate survival after planetfall. Both
of us knew that it was many years away but it never hurts to start planning early.
The next day the Captain gave her long awaited talk. It was carried on the large
computer display in the common room, on all the desktop computer screens and
on all the hand held devices that most of us carried. It was virtually impossible to
miss.

She started by saying that the reproductive cycle was about to start. It may seem
early but the babies would have to reach the age of 20 before landing. This was
what Riva had told me the night before. The males on board would be asked to
impregnate the available women. After the babies were born the woman would
be allowed to rest and heal for three months before going back into the
reproductive pool. Captain Scotia included herself as well. She went on to say
that the ship’s population would be primarily female at first but, with half the new
births being male, after several generations a normal sex ratio would be
achieved.

The details of the program were spelled out. Women became fertile about 13
times a year. When a woman became fertile she would be assigned to a specific
man to be impregnated. The men on board would be asked to have intercourse
117 times during the course of a year, about once every three days. There was
little discretion in the assignment. It was based on the computer’s calculation of
genetic diversity. After a woman became pregnant she would be relieved of her
duties for the last trimester until the baby was born.

Since the reproductive phase of the voyage would soon be on us. I spent much
of my time setting up the educational system of the ship. Because of work
responsibilities and torpor the new babies would be cared for in large nurseries
rather than by their biological parents. Theoretically no one should know who
parented each child. After they became toddlers the children would attend a play
school or kindergarten. They were raised by specially trained workers in a
supportive environment. Parents worked during the day and half the time they
would be in torpor. The children would not hibernate so they would develop the
normal way. Primary and secondary school would follow a traditional model of
classroom plus ‘hands on’ education.

We would start teaching math as early as kindergarten. By middle school most of

the students would be computer experts. That’s not much of a stretch. Most kids
know more about computers than their parents. Some of the adults had been
teachers in their former life and they would be recruited for the effort.

The relatively small number of students suggested that college should be built on
the English, or rather the European, model with small classes and personal
guidance by an experienced person in the field to be mastered. The detailed
educational plan was presented ito the governing council who approved it with
slight modification. But it would be several years before it could be put into force.
We had to have the babies first.

By the time the students were ready to graduate the Exodus 7 would have
reached Proxima Centauri b. Then the real work of colonizing the planet would
begin. I suspect that the first task would be to think of a better name to call our
new home than Proxima Centauri b.

Riva had pulled strings to get her shift and mine to coincide. Other members of
the crew began to think of us as a pair. We would have two years at a stretch
together and we were determined to make the most of our time.

A couple of weeks before the end of our shifts she said to me, “Max, we have to
talk about what comes next. Our reproductive phase is about to start. Building
the population is essential if we are to successfully colonize the planet. Every
woman will have to have at least two children. You and I will have to have babies
with other people. I don’t know how you feel about it but I don’t want it to make a
difference in our relationship. Our bodies may be freely used by others but our
minds are our own."

“So soon?” I answered. “I thought that it would be near the end of the mission.”
“You forget, the children will have to be about 20 years old before we get there.
They won’t be aged in an incubator like us. They’ll have to grow and mature the
normal way. Captain Scotia will give a briefing to the crew in a day or so.”
She went on, “Now I know that you have slept with a few other women while I
was in torpor. Did you enjoy it? Did you feel guilty afterward?”

I blushed. How had she found out? Then I admitted that I had had a few affairs
which I enjoyed and that I didn’t feel guilty afterwards. But I assured her that I
had been thoroughly faithful to her when we were both awake. Riva told me in a
very matter of fact way that when I was hibernating she also had sex with a
couple of the crew members, both male and female. At first she did it to try out
her new body but then said that she liked the sensations that her augmented
libido gave her. She also confessed that she had been intimate on several
occasions with Captain Scotia.

We both knew that our shift was ending and we didn’t know how much longer we
could maintain our ‘menage a duo’ life style. We were both aware that with the
reproduction phase starting there would be a considerable strain on our
relationship. I would be required to fornicate with many women the first cycle,
Riva with at least a dozen different men. Not that the experience would be
unpleasant. The younger members of the crew might enjoy it but we were
mentally old people whose views on fidelity were different.
As usual, Riva came up with a solution, or at least a partial solution, to the
problem.

“I checked the records,” she said, “and I seem to be the only person on Exodus 7
trained in pediatric medicine. In a few years we will have a lot of young children
aboard so they need me. Captain Scotia suggested that I have one child in the
first go around and then wait until the end to see if any more are required. I think
I’ll take her up on that offer.”

The idea was to get Riva pregnant before our torpor would start. In the meantime
we carried out our regular tasks. I met with Captain Scotia on a weekly basis.
The last time I visited her, I ran into Riva coming out of the Captain’s quarters.
She was breathing hard.

“Before you say anything, I have to confess that Captain Scotia and I just had
sex with each other. She consented to my having only one child and making love
to her was how she wanted to be thanked. I love you but you really should sleep
with her. She needs a man, not a woman. Promise me that you will - then tell me
all about it.”

We kissed and she left. Attitudes are much different on Exodus 7 than they were
in the world I was raised in.

At our meeting Captain Scotia said, “Riva is very sexy. Of course you know that
once in a while we sleep togther. We enjoy each other but she is very
aggressive. I don’t see how you can have sex with her every night and still
function. I think it is unfair that Riva has you all to herself."

“How do you know I sleep with her every night?”

“When I was a cruiser captain I had 800 sailors under my command and I knew
each one by name. Now I only have 160 and half of them are in hibernation.
There is very little that happens aboard Exodus 7 that I don’t know about.”

Riva and I entered torpor the next week, Riva a few days before me. Proxima
Centauri was still a speck on the view screen. We would have an estimated 22
years of travel before we would reach it. My last thoughts as I drifted off to sleep
was wondering how many of the crew would have signed up if they had known
that the trip would take so long.
Two things had happened while I was in torpor. First several of the probes that
we had launched had returned with detailed information on Proxima Centauri b.
All of the astronomical facts were correct. The planet was 1.3 times larger than
Earth but the density was a bit lower. The surface gravity was almost exactly the
same as Earth’s gravity. The planet was tidally locked to it’s sun just like the
moon was tidally locked to Earth. One side always faced the star. It orbited about
seven million miles from Proxima Centauri but since the star was much dimmer
than Earth’s sun the average temperature was tolerable. The side of the planet
facing the star had a temperature more than hot enough to boil water while the
back side was frozen in a perpetual ice age. Water could stay liquid in the 200
mile wide terminator.

There was a thin atmosphere, about half the density of that of Earth’s, which
moderated the temperature extremes. The thin atmosphere was breathable.
Sherpas on Earth breathed less dense air and climbed Mt. Everest to boot. It
might take several months to become fully acclimated but we could do it. The
surface was rugged with valleys and hills which indicted some internal planetary
activity. There was evidence of lava tubes and large underground caves. The
caves, hills and valleys would provide some shielding from the solar wind and
radiation streaming from the star. In short, it would prove a habitable, although
difficult place to live.

The returned probes were still in good condition. One of the crewmembers
suggested using them to partially terraform the planet. She suggested sending
them on a return trip loaded with the seeds of plants which could be useful. We
were obviously contaminating the planet but our objective was to have a place to
live, not a place to study. Despite my academic orientation, I agreed with her. The
probes were returned to the planet stuffed with fern seeds, grasses, algae
spores, and the seeds of softwood trees and rapidly growing self pollenating fruit
trees. The probes had instructions to deposit the seeds in suitable areas on the
terminator. The plants had 20 or more years to grow. We didn’t really anticipate
finding a jungle when we arrived but we hoped that some of the plants would
thrive.

The second event was unexpected. Riva, who had awakened before me, took
me by the hand and led me to the nursery. A flaxen haired boy, about 13 months
old, took a few awkward steps toward her and clutched her legs.

“Max,” she said, “meet your son. Apparently you got me pregnant the last night
before I entered torpor. As soon as the medical technicians discovered that I was
pregnant, they woke me up and allowed me to give birth normally. Fortunately
the genetic engineers made having a baby pretty easy. It was almost trivial
compared to giving birth to my son and daughter. After the baby was born I was
put back to sleep for the remainder of my session. The baby has no formal name.
It was considered best if the biological parents remained anonymous but I used
my medical password to get the DNA records. We will name all the children in a
gala ceremony but he is definitely our son. How about that? Centenarians
becoming parents.”

Now that our population growth period was starting, Riva and I had to reconsider
our living arrangements. All the men on board would be required to sleep with
two or three different women a week. Despite already having had a baby, Riva
would have intercourse with a different guy monthly. She was still on birth control
so she wouldn’t get pregnant. She told me that she didn’t want to be perceived
as different from the rest of the crew but I think she liked the sex.

Four rooms had been set aside for copulation. They were secluded from the
main traffic routes aboard ship. All were decorated nicely and had lights that
could be dimmed to provide complete darkness if the couple so decided. A nice
soft bed was standard equipment. Rather than give them imaginative names like
“Garden of Eden, Lover’s Lane, or Paradise” the rooms were simply labelled A,
B, C and D. No soul, it was strictly business.

Women were scheduled for “servicing” by the ship’s medical computer. A simple
fertility test was used. Female crew members were asked to blow into a tube.
Sensors detected hormones related to ovulation. When a woman was fertile she
was asked to report to room A, B, C or D, no questions, no exceptions. We 16
men were simply scheduled in rotation about two or three times a week. Again,
no questions asked. I was certainly not a virgin but most of my previous
seductions had involved wining and dining and a lot of romantic talk. Here we
were ushered into a darkened room, asked to disrobe and go about our
business. Thanks to the enhanced libido provided by the genetic engineers, we
did.

Every partner was different. Some ladies, even while bucking and thrashing in
the throes of intercourse, tried, usually unsuccessfully, to keep their composure
and not show their obvious pleasure at being romanced. Some simply enjoyed
sex. Some had already had several babies. I really couldn't tell much about the
women from the configuration of their bodies. Both genetic engineering and the
mandatory physical fitness program kept them in good condition.
Most women cooperated fully. They held me tight, kissed me, stroked me, and
wanted me to hold and squeeze their bodies. They usually had orgasms and a
few even told me when they were climaxing. I was being used, of course, but for
our mutual pleasure as well as conception. Prolonged abstinence builds up a
strong sex hunger. A few were so aggressive that I was totally exhausted by the
end of the session.

I can’t say that making love to so any women was the hardest task I ever had. I’m
sure Riva didn’t like the disparity in our romantic lives. Having intercourse with
three different Playboy Bunnies a week was hardly a chore. After every one of
my visits to a copulation chamber she reminded me what sex between lovers
was really like by seducing me.

Even though Riva assured me that the lively toddler in the nursery was mine and
said the DNA evidence proved it, I still harbored masculine doubts. She could
have slept with several of the men aboard after I was in torpor. I guess I’m just a
typical jealous man after all.

I had little time to worry. There were soon more babies than the birth mothers on
the ship could handle. Half of the babies were boys, the other half, girls. While
there were still more women than men aboard, the ratio was now closer to
equality. Nursery homes, essentially collective homes staffed by full-time
attendants, raised the babies through their first years.

All the newborns would be named in a gala ceremony. Up to now they were
simply called baby 1, baby 2, baby 3. etc. I suspect that the Captain wanted to
host another party and this was a good excuse. The ceremony was held in one of
our large common rooms. Paper slips with a random selection of names were
placed in a large bowl, pulled out one by one, and assigned to the next baby in
line. True to tradition boy’s names were on blue slips, girl’s names on pink slips.
The ceremony was punctuated by drinks and goodies brought out from the
galley. A good time was had by all.

It was refreshing to hear the laughter of children again. We had more or less
grown used to an adult society but now we had kids running around. Before
embarking we used to make jokes about children being rug rats but we sorely
missed them. Telling stories to a three year old is a wonderful experience. It frees
up the imagination.
A couple of other things. Two years before landing we gave up hibernation. Not
that it was a bad idea but we needed all hands for settlement of our new home.
All the equipment necessary for maintaining a person in torpor was carefully
stored. We also gradually changed the air pressure and the gravity aboard the
Exodus 7 to be more like that of our new home. This would give us a couple
years to accommodate to the Proxima Centauri b environment. Mount Everest
climbers had only a couple of weeks. We had two years to acclimate.

Now the ship seemed much more crowded. In addition to an effective doubling of
the adult population we had scores of children ranging from toddlers to teen
agers running around. I was requested to give up my large quarters and move to
a smaller room. It was not inconvenient since it was closer to the command
room. My new ‘office’ seemed quite cozy. It was only a fraction of the size of my
previous room but had space for a bed, closet, kitchenette, chair, table and
computer. Four people now lived in my old quarters.

Incidentally by this time we had stopped referring to our destination as Proxima

Centauri b. By informal consent most of the crew were calling it Terra Nova or
new Earth. It was simply easier to say.

As head of Education it was my responsibility to establish pre-schools,

kindergartens, grade schools, secondary schools, and eventually colleges. I had
served ten years on a local school board but I would be the first to admit that I
had little knowledge of the mechanics of running a nursery school or a grade
school. Fortunately I found a few crew members who had been grade school and
high school teachers who knew exactly what to do. My management instructions
were simply to say “Do it.” Post secondary education was on the European
model with seminars of half a dozen students absorbing the wisdom of trained
experts in their fields.

At one of our meetings we even contemplated starting a university. It was great

hubris on our part since we wouldn’t have enough students for a college for many
years. It would be the first extra terrestrial university, more that 1000 years newer
than Oxford, one of the first universities on Earth. We even coined a slogan for
the University of Terra Nova. It was Intellectus, Sapientia, Scientia. Intelligence,
wisdom, and science for those whose Latin is a bit rusty. During our discussion
one of the teachers of Italian heritage casually mentioned that the University of
Bolognia was several decades older than Oxford. It was embarrassing but we felt
uneasy about comparing our new hypothetical university to a college that
sounded like a delicatessen sandwich.
Given the regulated birth rate it was relatively easy to set up a classroom
schedule. After the first few years we would have about 25 or 30 new students
every semester. We could start with two kindergarten classes. The next year we
could add two first grade classes, and so on. Education was constant. We
weren’t tied to a farm economy where kids were expected to be free in the
summer to work in the fields. I recruited every crew member who had been a
teacher at some point in their lives and gave them a few lectures on pedagogy.
Actually many knew more than I did. You don’t have to pass an academic
certification exam to be a college teacher.

By cobbling together several rooms, books, and computers we managed to set

up a reasonably functional school system covering most facets of education from
kindergarten though junior college. We had no gym or swimming pool but neither
did the hypothetical little red schoolhouse that was our model.

Implementing a school system was easy because we anticipated only a total

enrollment of 500 spread over 20 years. I was proud of the way it worked though
most experienced educators would call it primitive. I suppose it was but it served
our needs. The children who had been born in the first copulation period were
now almost 20. We called them “pioneers.” By the time we were ready to land we
should have a large group of “pioneers” trained in the techniques necessary for
survival in unfamiliar terrain. We taught them everything we knew. Of course
what we didn’t know was the problem.

At last we arrived at Proxima Centauri. The star was indeed smaller and dimmer
than our Sun. Circling Proxima Centauri in a tight orbit was the planet Proxima
Centauri b, our new home. Riva and I sat together at one of the view ports
holding hands and wondered if the trip was worthwhile. Well, we were here so we
had to make the most of it. It would be a strange place to live. Slightly bigger than
Earth but with less gravity. A constant dim reddish light like a permanent twilight.
Plenty of rocks in the terminator zone. A barely breathable atmosphere. But it
would have to do. We couldn’t go back home.

The Exodus 7 couldn’t make a landing directly on the planet. The ship’s structure
was far too delicate to withstand Terra Nova’s gravity. It would be kept in orbit
and settlers would ferry themselves and supplies to the ground by shuttle craft.
Fortunately the ship had several air locks and shuttle bays.
I suppose I should talk a bit about the shuttle craft themselves. There were three
types. The first was essentially a sealed box with relatively low powered
thrusters. It was useful in outer space or in environments where there was little
gravity. We used these to investigate satellites and for in flight observation of our
ship. The range was about 100 kilometers.

The second type of shuttle was analogous to an ocean ship’s lighter. It was
designed for a one way trip in a high gravity environment. It was a sealed conical
container modeled after the Apollo capsule but much larger. The flat lower
surface of the shuttle had a heat resistant surface. A few thruster rocket engines
controlled attitude and a large parachute lowered it to the surface. It was
intended for ferrying people and supplies to a potentially habitable planet. Since
Proxima Centauri b had a gravity similar to that of Earth the shuttle could only fly
one way. There was no way it could carry enough fuel for a return trip. One way
only, like a WW2 landing craft. We had about 80 of these affixed to the surface of
Exodus 7. Thankfully there was no need for streamlined aerodynamics in space.

The third type of shuttle craft was more of a suborbital airplane than a ship’s
lighter. We had four aboard that could actually make round trips to and from the
planet. They were loosely modeled after the Virgin Galactic aircraft that flew into
orbit from Earth in the early 21st century. These were essentially high
performance airplanes with a rocket propelled thrust module. The airplane would
fly as high as it could and the rocket was ignited to propel the craft into orbit. On
return it would glide down to the starting point using its airplane wings. An
onboard computer would fly the shuttle to and from it’s destination. Each could
hold about six people and, on the down trip, about 1000 kilos of supplies.

The star Proxima Centauri had the habit of shooting out plumes of x-rays,
gamma rays, and other noxious radiation from time to time. The radiation level
was many times greater than that encountered on Earth. Ultra violet radiation
was 30 times more intense. But we hoped that much of the radiation would be
largely blocked by the planet. Not on the sun side, of course. The extremes of the
terminator were too hot or too cold to be comfortable but the area near the
center, shielded from much of the star’s radiation, would be pretty good. The
essentials for establishing a colony were water, food, shelter and some form of
escape from radiation.

If we could not find suitable caverns to live in, any houses we constructed had to provide both
thermal insulation and a radiation blocking shield. One of the crew members had been an
architect whose practice was devoted to small, off the grid houses. She suggested that water
could be used. No, not submerged houses but rather dwellings with a double wall on the side
that faced the sun. The cavity in the wall would be filled with water. Water is one of the best
radiation barriers. The exterior of the double wall would be painted white to reflect the heat for
those homes near the front of the terminator and darker colors for those dwellings near the
back of the terminator. The water would be circulated through radiators to moderate the
temperature inside. It seemed like a good idea for passive climate control. Whether it could
handle a temperature range of nearly 100 degrees C was yet to be seen. But it was a start.

Before we chose a settlement site we sent down an exploratory team of

“pioneers” to survey the livable portion of terminator. They were tasked with
identifying lakes, swamps, hills, and caves. Everything we could think of. The
pioneers were young crew members who had come of age during the 20 year
approach to the planet. I’m sure that they were eager to be free of the confines of
the ship.

My young son was one of the group. I gave him my cherished multitool Swiss
Army knife before he left in case he ran into something that the regular
equipment couldn’t handle. It was a symbolic gift from my late wife but it meant
something to me. The knife was one of the few items included in the package of
personal possessions that accompanied my ‘android’ body aboard the ship. I had
intended to give it to my son on Earth before we left but it had slipped my mind.

The pioneers, all six of them, explored several sections of the terminator, flitting
from one to another in one of our flying shuttle craft. They sent up pictures,
maps, temperature readings, and even estimates of soil suitability every time the
Exodus 7 was overhead. Lewis and Clark could have done no better.

We collected a portfolio of pictures and sent them back to Earth on our

interstellar internet. They would be the first closeup views of the planet. It was
good to know that the internet worked after two centuries. We had little idea of
who was in charge of Earth, the various national governments, or the advances
in technology. But our communication with Earth was still conducted in English,
not Chinese or Swahili. Apparently some things are still stable. I’m sure that a
few of the crew even thought that on arrival at Terra Nova we would be greeted
by a brass band and people asking “What took you so long to get here?”

After careful consideration of the data from the exploration crew we settled on a
reasonably flat stretch of terrain on the cooler portion of the terminator for our
first village. It was between a range of hills and a lake. The hills would provide
some shelter from solar plumes, the lake, water for drinking and crops. There
was an almost constant wind. The thin atmosphere was heated by the sunlight
on the hot side of the planet, rose and was replaced by colder air from the cool
side. The wind had the effect of moderating the climate of the terminator zone.
The average temperature of the chosen location was quite tolerable, not too cold,
not too hot. One of the Pioneers suggested that it was probably too cold to run
around naked but not cold enough to put on a sweater.

The area selected for our settlement, was in the shadow of the hills. That’s the
good part. The geologists who picked the location told me that the hills would
provide good shielding against the solar radiation. Because the planet was phase
locked to its sun the dim illumination was constant. There was no night, no
morning, no seasons. The climate was, and always would be the same.
Perpetual sunset.

I looked up the literature on how people coped with life in Alaska or above the
Arctic Circle where the sun never set in the summer. The answer seemed to be
to keep a regular hourly schedule. In other words live by the clock. Eat meals at
the same time and go to bed at the same time regardless of the position of the
sun. It just took some personal discipline. But I suppose it wasn’t a real problem
for those urbanites who were raised in “The City That Never Sleeps”.

On a personal note, Riva and I kept our relationship together. We slept together
less frequently but It was still just as enjoyable. We had far more demands on our
time now. She was the only pediatrician for several hundred children and I was
deeply involved in both setting up the new colony and managing our increasingly
complex educational system. To complicate matters, Captain Scotia died soon
after landing.

The demise of crew members was expected for new settlements. Half the
Pilgrims died during the first winter on Plymouth Rock. We never thought that one
of the first casualties would be the Captain. But even Captain Cook died before
the end of his circumnavigation.

Death for androids was uneventful, at least compared to normal humans. Most
diseases had been eliminated by modification of the genome so death was
usually the result of the biological clock running down. The person became
increasingly fatigued and sept longer hours. It was not uncommon for androids to
sleep 12 hours a day near the end. Eventually they did not wake up. Like the
“one horse shay” everything was simply worn out.

Riva checked the medical records and it turned out that Captain Scotia had never
hibernated during the voyage. The job of vice-Captain was largely fictitious. The
official title was listed on the crew manifest but the job was never actually filled.
Susan Pritchard, the woman I thought occupied that position was simply one of
the captain’s aides. Captain Scotia was totally dedicated to her work. Apparently
she had stayed on duty the entire time. No wonder she knew everything that
went on on Exodus 7. She had actually lived more that her expected life span.
The captain’s death was inconvenient. but, like a good captain, she had seen the
voyage to it’s successful end.

A few members of the bridge crew, Riva and I, held a quiet ceremony for Captain
Scotia’s funeral. She had been a friend and a competent captain throughout the
long voyage. One aide produced a very well aged bottle of single malt Scotch
that Captain Scotia had hidden for just such an occasion. We toasted her with
small glasses of the golden ambrosia.

Captain Scotia was the first person to be actually buried on Terra Nova. Rather
than committing her body to the recycling apparatus we dug a real grave and
erected a small cairn of stones with a plaque engraved “Millicent Scotia - a
Captain for the ages.” We expected that new cemetery would have more bodies
but hopefully none in the near future.

By now there were now about 400 prospective settlers on Terra Nova, half young
children. Most had landed on the planet itself but some were still aboard the
Exodus 7. On one of our “town meetings” we elected Amy Chen to be head of
state, mayor, boss or what have you. I must admit that it was a pretty
disorganized meeting. Captain Scotia had chaired all our “town meetings” for
many years and we were pretty much at a loss without her. Candidates got
nominated largely by acclaim. Even I was nominated but I had the good sense to
refuse. Eventually we settled on Amy. It was a wise choice.

Amy looked just like the rest of us but her credentials were impeccable. In her
prior life she had been deputy mayor of Hong Kong and had served very well in
that capacity. In fact the rumor was that she had actually run the city but the
Chinese government insisted that a politically loyal male figurehead should
occupy the top spot. Peking refused to acknowledge that a woman could serve in
that position. We had no such compunctions.

Another important topic discussed in the town meetings was a revision of our
calendar. Terra Nova orbited Proxima Centauri once every 11.2 Earth days. One
side was always illuminated, the other dark. The terminator was bathed in
constant twilight. Obviously an Earth year would not do. Neither would a week or
a month. We had to establish a new metric for the passage of time. The second,
the minute, and the hour were too familiar to give up but the year and the week
became synonymous.

Our week was now eleven days, the equivalent of five Earth days, then a half
holiday, then another five work days. We simply abandoned the idea of a month
and a year. The age of a person was simply stated as the number of weeks they
had lived. My age at embarking on the trip could be calculated as 4,472 weeks.
That makes me sound quite ancient. Of course by now it would be considerably
more.

We also gave our settlement a name, Terra Nova City. Of course the population
was that of a small town but the name sounds prestigious.

After a bumpy ride down in one of the cargo lighters, I took my first steps on the
grey, sandy soil of Terra Nova. I don’t know what I expected. It was certainly not
Kansas, nor was it like the sand dunes of New Mexico. My foot sank about two
inches into a gritty dark sandlike substance that covered the planet’s surface.
The light was dim, sort of like just before sunset on Earth. Rocks littered the
landscape. The temperature was fairly warm and there was a definite wind. Most
of the other settlers landed piecemeal, a few dozen on each shuttle.

The first order of business was to find shelter and potable water. We selected a
spot for our settlement that was shielded from the direct rays of the star by a
ridge of foothills. Our first act was to put radiation detectors on the hills to warn
us about solar plumes. The landscape was riddled with lava tube tunnels and
volcanic caves. Most would provide shelter from radiation storms and
temperature extremes. They could be adequate living areas.

Life had taken hold on Terra Nova but was not robust. There was a even a bit of
rudimentary foliage with green colored leaves. It wasn’t quite chlorophyll but it
accomplished the same effect. Driven by solar radiation, carbohydrates were
fixed and oxygen was generated by photosynthesis. It would take a long time
before the atmospheric oxygen content was the same as that on Earth but it was
a start. We could see adequately in the dim red light and our clothes would
protect us both from temperature extremes and the minor radiation episodes.
The terminator climate was fairly benign provided you shielded yourself from the
radiation.

Now for the details on our settlement. This is fairly prosaic stuff. I don’t ever
remember reading what the houses on Jamestown were like. All I remember was
John Smith and Pocahontas and most of that wasn’t even true. But we did build
places in which to live, cobbled together a power grid, provided an elementary
sanitation system, and grew food to eat.

Soon after landing we erected the prefabricated greenhouses. Amy Chen

designated a crew of twelve to do the job. It was one of her first executive orders.
The greenhouses were basically tents covered with transparent plastic sheeting.
Nothing novel. Similar structures had been used in Iceland for at least 200 years.
In Iceland they were kept warm by geothermal heat. Here we simply used the
water wall idea. Plants were grown in hydroponic tubs without dirt. Proxima
Centauri provided constant light in the red portion of the spectrum. With the
benefit of a continuous growing season we could harvest enough food to feed the
entire colony. The idea of using a water filled wall to provide radiation protection
and supplemental heat worked well enough to let the colony expand beyond the
shielding of the mountains.

Preparing meals for our growing population was another issue. Rather than
putting full kitchens in each dwelling we decided to have a communal dining
room, just like a cruise ship or an army base. The mess hall, which doubled as
the community meeting hall, was in one of the larger caves. We assembled there
to eat our main meals, all prepared by the same experienced chefs who had fed
us during our long voyage. When we were done eating we would simply move
the tables out of the way and have a large meeting hall.

Compared to startup colonies on Earth, Terra Nova had few natural resources.
There were a few scrub trees that were the result of our seeding attempt, little
soil, no wildlife. But we had the residue of our downloading effort. The large
parachutes of the shuttle craft would provide enough high quality fabric to clothe
an army. Parachute cord would provide miles of rope. The 80 boxlike containers
could serve as emergency shelters for our population until we could build some
more houses. Even the metal paneling of the packing cases could be put to use.

The first houses on Nova Terra were simply roofed over caves. Countless
numbers of lava tubes, some as many as 50 kilometers long, penetrated the
subsurface area. Many caves and lava tubes were near the site that we had
selected for our settlement. It rarely rained on Terra Nova and the climate, was
moderate, at least in the area where we were located. The caves looked like the
holes in a Swiss cheese. The walls were glassy and smooth. They were
attributed to some unexplained geological phenomenon, probably gas bubbles
when the planet was in a molten state. I’m sure we would learn more about it
later but right now they were a welcome convenience.

Essentially we adopted the middle ages European model for the community. All
the living quarters were close together. It made establishing electrical and water
connections much easier. We even had a central commons. It was the roof of the
large cave used as a communal dining room and meeting house. Eventually we
might get around to spreading over the landscape like towns in the USA and
modern Europe but we would have to establish an infrastructure of highways and
rail lines first.

We all worked together to build enough housing for our compliment of

settlers.We had very little lumber but plenty of material from the landing
containers. Basically the problem was to provide doors for the entrances of gas
bubbles. We simply sketched out the opening that we wanted to cover then cut a
section out of one of the shipping containers that would cover it. Not architecture,
just a lot of hard work.

One of the shipping containers was packed full of furniture, beds, chairs and the
like. Now that we had roofs over our heads we would need places to sit and to
sleep. Obviously the planners realized that everything had to collapse into the
minimum volume. At last the reason for the beach like appearance of the
furniture became clear.

Riva and I chose a bubble near the center of the complex. It was a short lava
tube about 30 meters long. about 10 meters wide. After the entrance the tube
bifurcated into two sections like the letter Y. We fitted out one section for living
quarters and Riva wanted to use the other portion for a medical clinic. It was
larger than necessary but It saved her walking to work. The door closing the
entrance was simply a section of a large landing crate. The benign weather
allowed us to dispense with insulation and water tightness. We illuminated the
interior with electronic candles. These were clusters of LEDs attached to a small,
high capacity battery and were one of the the few Earth like artifacts that had not
changed in over 200 years. It is one of the hallmarks of the human species that
we tend to keep things which work well. Wax candles and spoons are still being
used after 3000 years of history.

I’m sure that some homes nearest the hot and cold sides of the terminator were
not as comfy as ours but they would do. Using a hatchet and some scraps of
wood, I tried to make some Adirondack chairs. Years ago upstate New York
settlers made similar chairs. The chairs I made were reasonable comfortable to
sit in but, frankly, they looked terrible. Now I know where the term “hacker” comes
from.

A few daring souls built actual houses using rock walls and bigger panels
scavenged from the landing craft. While the cave dwellings were limited to the
size of the bubble, there was no limit to the size of a constructed house provided
you built a large enough water filled wall to afford radiation shielding. Both Riva
and my late wife preferred smaller homes to minimize house cleaning chores. I
sympathized.

Each time the Exodus 7 passed overhead it sent down a cargo shuttle craft,
packed with supplies. Food, machinery, construction raw materials, and tools
made up the bulk of the load. As many passengers as could fit were crammed on
board. Each of the shuttle lighters was guided to a receiving area by it’s own
autopilot. Fortunately we didn’t lose a one although there were some close calls.

We had planned on using conventional solar cells to provide electricity but the
two down loaded atomic reactors could provide power until the solar cells came
on line. Eventually the atomic reactors would wear out, or at least use up all their
fuel, and we had no means of refueling. One enterprising engineer suggested
that since the sun side of the terminator was more than hot enough to boil water
we should feed the steam into a turbine generator. A good idea but we won’t
have to do it for a few hundred years.

Just about everything that was not essential to the Exodus 7 was now on the
surface of the planet. Two complete atomic energy plants were pumping out all
the electricity that we could use. Our workshops could replicate almost any
device that we desired. Our repository of knowledge, our British Museum and
Library of Congress, had been copied and was transferred to the planet’s surface
where it could be accessed by laptops or the ubiquitous hand held tablets.

The lake that bordered the colony was about 15 kilometers long and 6 kilometers
wide, about the size of many of the smaller lakes in Scandinavia and in the US
midwest. Photographs taken by the Pioneers showed many similar lakes in the
planet’s habitable zone. There were no oceans to speak of but a series of lakes
marked the edge of temperate conditions in the terminator. Glaciers from the
frozen dark side lined the far shores. Melting icebergs replenished the lakes. The
fairly fresh water could be seeded with edible fish. Water for the plants in the
greenhouses and the few food plants that would grow in the soil could be
pumped directly from the lake. I suppose in time we would actually make boats to
sail the lakes but right now we had enough on our hands just living on the
shoreline.

The idea of sailing the lakes interested me. Sailing had been one of my favorite
hobbies. As an ex sailor I mentally planned boats that would be suitable. The
lake wasn’t very big so the boats could be of moderate size. The surface wind
only blew from the cold side of the terminator to the hot side so complex
maneuvering wouldn’t be required. It was pretty simple, really. I guess something
like a big outrigger canoe with sails would do fine.

The regolith soil was essentially pulverized rock. It would take several hundred
years for crops to live, die, and decompose to make humus similar to the dirt that
surfaces Earth. Now only moss and lichen would grow on it. All they need to
survive is moisture, sunlight, and carbon dioxide. While they couldn’t be easily
eaten they did provide oxygen for us to breath.

Riva was the sole pediatrician in the settlement which now had several hundred
children. The children had their usual share of scrapes, bruises, stomach aches
and dislocations. Some things never change. She was was fully occupied.
There were two other medical doctors in our small population, one a GP, the
other an emergency room specialist. We also had a veterinarian and a couple of
nurses. The vet had to treat human patients since, at first, we had no animals
other than chickens. Riva tried to convince everyone that a vet had to be smarter
than an MD since the patients the vet usually dealt with couldn’t tell you where it
hurt. The patients initially objected but soon realized that the vet was more
sympahetic that regular MD and provided excellent care.

The dwindling stock of our medical supplies was a problem. We had no

possibility of getting modern antibiotics or equipment replacements. Gradually
our medical care was retreating to the late 1800s level. Except, of course, for the
knowledge. It was fortunate that many basic medicines were derived from plants.
A section of our greenhouse was devoted to raising botanicals from which
medicine could be extracted. Our library had several books written two centuries
ago which showed how to use plants for medicine. One of the crew had been a
compounding pharmacist in her previous life and knew how to make drugs from
them. The modification of our DNA had removed the curse of genetic illnesses so
most medical treatment was for accidents or minor ailments. One advantage was
that we had good medical diagnostic equipment.
I kept busy solving basic living problems. I had been raised in a rural community
in the midwest so I was familiar with the problem of living in harmony with the
land. It was surprising to find that this was unusual knowledge. Most of the
settlers were city folk who knew enough to call the superintendent when things
didn’t work. I think some of them didn’t know which end of a hammer to hold. I
was constantly in demand to help build housing. That’s occupational regression
for you. From a rocket scientist to a rural carpenter in one lifetime.

Cattle became our main beasts of burden. These were miniature zebu cattle
descended from the cattle worshiped in India. The tough beasts had been bred to
be half sized but were almost as strong as full sized animals. They also ate less
than regular cattle but matured faster.

Cows are very useful animals. They serve man in many ways even through they
are outranked in humanity’s esteem by horses and dogs. Right after we landed
we thawed some of the cattle embryos, intending to raise and eat them. Many of
the crew from North America and Europe felt that we needed more beef in our
diet. They soon realized what remarkable creatures cattle were. Not only did they
provide beef, veal, milk, butter, cheese and leather, but mature cattle also
provided plenty of brute energy for plowing, hauling, and milling. Of course most
of the crew with Asian heritage realized this already. We found it far more useful
to let the cattle grow to the point where they could pull a wagon or carry heavy
burdens than to simply use them as a source of meat. They would be butchered
when they could no longer pull a cart.

This was half a millennia regression in agriculture. On our midwest farm we used
tractors to do all the heavy work. Maybe in a few years we could develop them
for Terra Nova but right now the cattle seemed our best option since there wasn’t
much plowing. We used electric motors and batteries for most tasks but it was
hard to rig them up to pull heavy loads. Fortunately the cows found the mosses
and lichen edible and they would eat and digest the husks and skins of our
greenhouse crops. They also provided fertilizer which was excellent for plant
growing when mixed with the regolith soil. We could subsist on chicken instead of
tough stringy beef for a while.

Our sanitary arrangements were right out of the 1800s. Cesspools and latrines
were located downwind of the living area. Fortunately for us the wind was
constant and always blew in one direction. We dumped our edible waste into the
latrines as well. In time we accumulated a sizable heap of compost that we mixed
with the regolith to make a pretty decent soil. Surprisingly, after a month of aging
it didn’t smell too bad. It takes plenty of compost to turn rock dust into a garden.
Plants grew well in it if they were properly watered. The vegetables were
delicious if you didn’t think too hard about where they came from. I suppose in
time we would have a community septic system and perhaps even decent
sewers but that was the future. I’m sure our primitive arrangements disturbed
many people who were used to modern toilets. It didn’t bother me too much. We
had little better on Grandpa’s farm.

Small internal combustion engines powered tools in remote locations. These

were not quite like the gasoline engines used in the past. Three dimensional
printers made very simple and small two cycle engines which ran on a mixture of
hydrogen and oxygen gas contained in pressure bottles. With plenty of electrical
power, decomposition of water into it’s elements provided fuel. The small engines
were used to run tools like chain saws and drills which were used far from
electrical connection points. Water was the only exhaust product. Hydrogen was
the universal fuel. We had sufficient electricity to make as much of it as we
needed.

Electric battery technology had improved quite a bit over the last two centuries.
When the Exodus 7 departed Earth it took about 20 kilograms of a conventional
storage battery to hold the energy of a tumbler full of gasoline. Now it took only
one kilogram of battery to hold the same amount of energy. This was still too
much for pocket tools but it was a start. The easiest way to distribute the energy
of our atomic plants was to run wire between the places where it would be
needed. Fortunately one of our supplies was spools of electrical wire. We had
plenty of it. We adopted the USA standard of 120 volt, 60 cycle AC because most
of our equipment would run on it. For remote power we simply charged up a
battery and then took it to the place where the power would be used. I called it
our wheelbarrow electrical grid.

It became an odd society, a 19th century economy based largely on agriculture

with 22nd century knowledge. Some felt that it was the best of both worlds. I liked
it myself. There was plenty of room to move around provided you used simple
precautions to avoid radiation. Riva compared it to the early days in Israel. It had
a lot in common with the freedom of the old West.

One problem was what to do with the Exodus 7 after people and supplies were
offloaded. At first we intended that the ship would stay in orbit with a small
maintenance crew. It would be like a beneficent shepherd ready to help out in
any emergency. But that was not to be. The Exodus 7, while the most reliable
spaceship ever constructed, wasn’t intended to tolerate the continuous radiation
that it would encounter if it stayed in orbit around the planet. Electronic
equipment would gradually fail and would eventually become unresponsive.
Besides, all the supplies and equipment that would be of use on Terra Nova had
already been landed.

We had four real choices. First, we could use the Exodus 7 to continue our
exploration of stars in the Alpha Centauri region to see if other planets could
support life. This would take many years and the chance of success was minimal.
Second, we could leave the ship in orbit as an ultimate resource knowing that it
would deteriorate and eventually crash to the planet’s surface. Third, we could
return the ship to Earth now that we knew that the Sun would probably not go
nova. Finally, we could put the ship in an orbit far enough away from Proxima
Centauri to escape most of the radiation, knowing the it would not be available
for immediate use. It could be used as an ultimate escape vehicle if the colony
went sour.

After a lot of discussion we voted to reject the last alternative. While we might
consider the ship in distant orbit as a “deus ex machina” ready to save us if
things went drastically wrong, using it would be admitting defeat. On a practical
basis it couldn’t support the colony for more than a few months, not enough time
to get anywhere.

We decided to send the Exodus 7 back to Earth loaded with observations and
samples from Terra Nova. Another group of settlers might be able to use much of
what we had learned. Two of the four atomic reactors had been transported to
the surface of Terra Nova as well as the bulk of the instruments but there was
enough power onboard to go back to Earth in reasonable safety. We could still
make some additional use of the Exodus 7. The cargo holds intended to hold the
supplies for the new colony were empty. The metals contained in their structure
represented a big chunk of resources for the settlers.

I reluctantly accepted a new assignment of spaceship undesign. I had to identify

the portions of the ship that were superfluous and direct a crew to cut them away.
We did this with torches, power saws, and a few chisels. I know that we left some
ragged edges. The habitable areas, the control center, and the ion drive bay
were still space worthy. The Exodus 7 no longer looked like an illustration in
Aerospace magazine. More like an escapee from some interplanetary junk yard.
The removed sections were jettisoned so that they would fall to Terra Nova within
a few miles of the settlement. They would make a valuable trove of aluminum,
steel, plastic and copper for the settlers to use until they could develop the
resources of the planet.

We lost our third crew member during the dismantling of the supplemental
sections of the Exodus 7. One of the sharp aluminum edges tore the fabric of her
space suit. The pressure loss propelled her up against an adjacent wall hard
enough to break her back. She died instantly. Such a loss was not unusual in
pioneering explorations. The only fatality free expedition that I can remember
was Shackleton’s exploration of the South Pole in the Endurance. Despite
trekking across the ice and a long sea voyage in open craft in the world’s
stormiest ocean, all the men survived. Unfortunately many of them died in WW1
in the following couple of years. Other explorers were not so fortunate. A fatality
rate of 30% seems to be the norm.

Ion drives had improved considerably in the 200 years that had elapsed on Earth
since our launch. We had made some of the advances ourselves and learned of
a few on our interstellar “internet.” With most of the crew and supplies gone the
Exodus 7 was quite a bit lighter than at takeoff. This reduced mass allowed the
trip back to Earth to be made in about a quarter of the time it took to get here. If
we kept the drive going long enough the increased thrust would let us achieve an
average of 10% of light speed.

A few people and a couple of the maintenance crew decided to guide the ship on
it’s return voyage. Most were considerably younger than me. There were two
other men, both in their 20s and 15 women. Our medical needs would be met by
a medical trainee, one of the students apprenticed to the emergency room
doctor. She should have learned enough by now. I guess there were 18 people in
all. Just about enough to handle the ship. Even the Mayflower was sent back to
England.

By a unanimous vote of the crew of the Exodus 7 I was elected captain for the
return trip to Earth. This seemed to me a polite way of saying that I was no longer
needed on Terra Nova. The new school system was well established and some
former teachers who actually knew how to manage a school were in charge.
Space ship design, my area of technical expertise, was now irrelevant. The
person who really regretted my departure was Riva. She couldn’t accompany me
because her skills and training were sorely needed on the planet. She took
consolation in the idea that I would eventually return with my mind inhabiting a
new android body. This concept of physical immortality became our substitute for
a real religion.

One of my assignments, when I started this trip, was to be the project historian
so I guess I better complete my history. At least to the present date.

My viewpoint has changed over the course of the voyage. Remember that history
is alway written through the filter of the historian. When I embarked on the trip I
was a dedicated technocrat assuming that every problem could be solved by the
proper application of scientific principles. Over the years my viewpoint changed.
Now I realize that most problems are people problems almost impervious to
technological solution. I have become a philosopher. Without a leader like
Captain Scotia the Exodus 7 would have never made it to Proxima Centauri.
Let’s hope that Amy Chen is the right choice. I know that I would not have been.

I sent my completed manuscript back to Earth via our interstellar internet. It

would arrive in about four years, long before I would come back in person. I was
sad to leave but I felt that more would be accomplished by returning samples and
information about Terra Nova than by staying. I certainly hoped that a faster way
of interstellar travel had been invented on Earth in the interim. I hoped to return
to Terra Novs to see how things had turned out and I didn’t want to travel for
another two centuries to get back.

When everything was ready to go, Riva and I had a bitter/sweet farewell party.
We hugged and kissed and drank more than a little bit of her home made
cocktails. Even if we never actually married, I felt just like I did when my wife
died.

Our aircraft like shuttle had to make three trips to the orbiting Exodus 7 to get
everyone aboard. As we boarded the shuttle on its final trip, a group of people
assembled. It wasn’t just me they were seeing off. Many had friends aboard the
ship and this was the last chance to say goodbye.

In short the inhabitants of Terra Nova were far better prepared for success as a
colony than the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. Students of ancient history tell me
that conditions were not much different from those of the first colonies in Australia
or the Americas.

In a vague way I felt a bit disappointed. Rather adapt ourselves to a new

environment we were making the environment adapt itself to us. We were
terraforming Terra Nova. Perhaps robots might have been a better choice.
Humanity has a lot of arrows in it’s quiver. If we fire enough, one might stick in
the target. I hope to return in a century or so to see how the colony fared. If all
goes well, humanity would be a true interstellar species.

EPILOG
This short story was written by Maxwell London, the oen name of Lawrence
Zeitlin, a former NASA Senior Scientist. Doctor Zeitlin was responsible for
significant portions of the lunar landing program. After the successful moon
landing he accepted a professorship at a large university where he participated in
NSF planning for interstellar voyages. Many of the aspects of the story are
modeled after actual experiences of his coworkers. The technical details of the
proposed voyage are based on current research. An interstellar spaceship would
be very much like the one described.