Life in the Universe

Dale E. McClenning

Here’s how it went.

“Wake up everyone, system-side coming up fast. Navs, you there?” I asked through the intercom as we came out of FTL.

“Yeah, I’m here,” a woman said in a voice that sounded like someone who had just turned off their alarm. “Coffee, must have coffee.”

You can hardly blame Kwila for sacking out. Space had been a huge disappointment. With all the stories, television shows, and movies that had been written, the expectations for space had been pretty high when we were finally able to travel between the stars in hours instead of decades. Huge ships, manned by crew, scientists, ambassadors, and the military of course, were commissioned for space exploration. Mankind was going to find amazing planets, new life forms, and other intelligent beings to share the cosmos with in friendship.

“The military?”

Don’t worry, they got bored the quickest and stayed home. Who’s asking that, anyway? I don’t remember the voice. Oh well, the name must have slipped my mind.

“Okay, brain-juice ingested, I’m fine now,” Kwila said after a minute. “Give me a couple to check things out.”

So what did we find ‘out there’? Nothing!

Since we were so far out, the information for the third system on our survey schedule was still general. The sun was yellow, a good first step, and there were six planets in orbit. Not that I expected to find anything of real interest. Once the ship displayed two rocks, two gas giants, and two ice balls, any hope that showed its head quickly disappeared back into the black hole it called home. The outer-most planet was busy traipsing around the other side of the system, but the other ice ball was close enough to be our first stop. The computer plotted the order for exploration without my even asking—5, 4, 2, 1, 3, 6.

“Nothing?”

That has to be a member of the crew, but I can’t place who, which is strange, seeing how small the crew is. Was I speaking out loud and don’t know it?

Of course, when I said ‘nothing’ I don’t mean it in the ‘absolutely nothing’ sense, but in the sense of nothing that we couldn’t find in our own solar system. Except another Earth, that is. Planets like the ones in this system, whose name I hadn’t bothered to look up, were in abundance. What we didn’t find after more than four hundred systems was anything that you could call life. Nothing from intelligent being down to bacteria had been found. No primordial ooze bubbling away with life-making building blocks, no exotic algae, nothing. It felt like the first person to walk into the desert had come back and told us that, yes, there was only sand out there.

I punched up the time schedule for the planets and was reviewing what the computer promised would allow the fastest information from the instrumentation when Kwila came over the comms again. “Hey, want to hear something unusual?”

“Yes! Tell me, please!” I’m sure I sounded desperate, but who cares, something of interest was a real treat.

“The fifth planet, the ice ball we will be going to first, and the fourth planet’s orbit are in sync for about a quarter of their orbits. The fifth planet has an elliptical orbit exactly twice as long as the fourth planet so that during both of the semi-minor axes, the planets travel together, or mostly together, that is. It’s almost like someone planned it that way.”

“Wait!” I said, sitting straight up in my chair. “You’re not saying someone changed one planet’s orbit to coincide with another’s?” My mind reeled. A race who could do that could do just about anything.

“No, of course not,” Kwila said with a high-pitched emphasis. “Just saying it’s really unusual, that’s all. Guess you see enough systems, you see just about everything.”

“Guess so.” I deflated. The amount of disappointment I felt surprised me. Then another thought came to mind. If Kwila was messing with me just to get a rise out of me, I would make her pay big time. “Send me the orbital projections.”

The holographics confirmed what Kwila had reported. I increased the speed of the orbits to watch the planets spin around the sun. A few of the larger moons were included by now. I ordered the computer to include the calculated flight plan through the system and then made a decision.

“Ship, include some extra orbits around the fifth planet. I think we might want some extra time studying that one.”

“As you wish,” a voice replied. The ship had a friendly voice, but knowing that there wasn’t a real person behind it canceled any comfort it might have given me.

“Kwila, I’m going to give you some extra time at our first stop.”

“Do they grow coffee there?”

“Highly doubtful,” I replied with a small laugh.

“Then I will make our stop as fast as possible. Why waste one’s time where there’s no coffee?” Kwila was a real character at times.

The ironic thing about space travel is that the trip into the system takes as long or longer than the trip between stars. Unlike those old movies where people ‘warp’ right next to the planet, we make sure we are well outside of the system. I think whoever wrote those stories forgot that everything in a system moves. Besides having very little to no idea what is in a new system, do you know how much computing power it would take to keep track of the location of every planet, comet, asteroid, moon, satellite, etc. in every known system at any given time? It’s much safer to stop outside the system and take your time getting in-system. If the system is well regulated and busy like Sol, you could get a lot closer, but those were the exception. Thus we waited again as we flew our way into the system.

Several hours later, Kwila’s voice came over the comms again. “Here’s another strange one for you. Check your models.”

The number of ‘strange’ things were only up to two, but they were starting to worry me. This job was normally so routine that more than one strange thing could make me nervous, much less two of them. Strangeness got people hurt, dull and boring got you home in one piece. I came out here to get away from something, or more precisely someone, not run into more trouble.

“From who?” that voice asked again.

Let’s worry about that later.

Looking at the model, I had the ship zoom in on the fifth planet. It had no moons, which wasn’t unknown, but it did have a ring. A ring wasn’t unusual either, but no moons and a ring was. The ring also looked different from others I had seen.

“What am I looking at?” I said into the comms.

“If I had to guess,” Kwila started, “which I don’t, I would say that the planet originally had two moons and both now make up the ring we are looking at. See the two concentrations about sixty degrees from each other?”

“The planet tore up both moons?” That was Lucjan, our geologist. “Isn’t that pretty rare?”

“As far out as the ring is, it’s, like, unheard of.” Trust Kwila to be dramatic.

“So,” I joined in, “are you saying someone blew up the moons?”

“Well, I doubt someone blew them up. Then the remains wouldn’t be in a ring, they’d be all over.”

“They wouldn’t have to blow it up,” Lucjan added. “They would only have to crack it enough for the planet to do the rest. It would take time, of course, but you would eventually get a ring just like that. That assumes that the moons were solid to begin with.”

“Crack a moon?” I said, emphasizing the last word. “How would you do that?”

“Precisely placed atomics is the only way I can think of. Some of the pieces would end up radioactive, but most would be safe.” He said it so matter-of-factly, you could almost forget he was talking about blowing up moons.

“Wait a minute,” I said, placing my head in my hands with my elbows on the armrests of the chair. “Are you seriously saying someone broke apart two moons? Why would you do that?”

“To make it easier to get to the minerals inside would be the most obvious reason,” Lucjan replied.

That was too much for my brain. A survey ship, with nothing better to do, can be a place of wild speculation, but we had been talking about someone changing the orbit of a planet and cracking moons. In other words, we were talking about a civilization that could customize a solar system. The thought staggered my mind. Was that really possible? Humans were barely traveling traveling the galaxy.

“People!” I think I was shouting. “Are we really talking about someone cracking moons to mine them?”

Conversation came to a halt for a few moments. Maybe I scared them. Either that or they were laughing with their comms off. When Lucjan came back on, he sounded calm.

“No, I’m just saying that the data would be consistent with that scenario.”

I took a breath and slowly let it out. “Fine, let’s just keep the wild speculation to a minimum, okay?”

It was too early in the mission for me to be so stressed. Not having worked with any of the crew previously, I began to wonder if they were always like this. Had being in such a hurry to leave the station been a good idea? Bad things tend to happen when you rush. Thanks, Rogers, something else you screwed up for me.