The E Utopia Project (23 page)

“You’re right, Bolton,” Cruz
said, trying to calm down. “We mustn’t get carried away. We’ve to go and see E
Utopia for ourselves. The question is... how do we get there?”

“Simple,” Bolton said. “We
just put a jump drive on a spaceship and jump to the vicinity of the planet.”

“Before we jump we have to
jump an unmanned prototype of the ship carrying cargo with weight equal to our
combined weight and the supplies that we intend to take with us on the voyage,”
Hitchcook said.

“Let’s get to the ground and
work,” Cruz said with half-suppressed euphoria. And like an overjoyed expectant
father, he added, “The ship shall be called Transgalactic.”

It took the scientists only five
months to make the unmanned prototype of the Transgalactic. The unmanned
prototype successfully made the jump and returned with jaw-dropping footage of
E Utopia. The images of the E Utopia were bigger and clearer, suggesting that
the unmanned Transgalactic had gotten closer to the planet than the drone. One
of the cameras captured images of a star.

“Is this the Sun?” Cruz
asked.

“It’s hard to tell from this
image,” Doctor Rudolf said. “It’s not clear whether the star is a red, orange,
yellow, giant or dwarf star.”

“Even if we could tell from
the image that the star is a yellow dwarf like the Sun, we would still be
unsure whether it is the Sun,” Bolton said. “There are millions of stars in the
Universe.”

“Mr. Cruz, I think it’ll be a
good idea to have a space station,” Hitchcook said when they were travelling
back to Earth.

“You’re right, Hitchcook,”
Cruz said. “I want you to design the space station when we come from our first
jump to the neighborhood of E Utopia.”

“Piece of cake,” Hitchcook
said.

They made a dozen more trial
jumps with the prototype in a month before they decided to make the ship that
they would use in mankind’s first ever space jump.

The three scientists
enthusiastically set about their task, knowing they were making history. Hitchcook
was probably the happiest man on Earth. Like all scientists, he dreamt of inventing
or discovering something. He had invented something totally new to mankind,
something that appeared to defy laws of physics. He was contented even though
he knew that his discovery wasn’t going to be published in science journals any
time soon.

It took them seven months to
finish the ship under Cruz’s impatient eye. Cruz couldn’t wait to make the jump
but the three men told him to wait. This wasn’t an unmanned spacecraft. This
was a ship that would carry them into the unknown and they wanted to make sure
that it was in perfect condition.

Cruz regarded their first
jump as the highlight of his life. Their hearts thumped with fear as they
watched Hitchcook activating the jump drive. Each one of them asked himself if
this wasn’t a fatal mistake. Cruz even thought about aborting the expedition. The
only reason why he didn’t cancel the jump was because he didn’t want the
scientists to label him a coward.

“I’m activating the jump,”
Hitchcook whispered.

“Get it over and done with,
will you?” Cruz snapped.

“Okay, sir.”

Hitchcook activated the jump
drive. Suddenly, the stars that they had been seeing through the viewport
disappeared. None of them uttered a word during the jump. Their fear turned
into joy when they found themselves in normal space some four hundred thousand
kilometers from E Utopia. Hitchcook only had a split second’s glimpse of E
Utopia before he turned his eyes from the viewport to the bridge. He steered
the ship into a U-turn and activated the jump drive when the axis of the ship
was parallel to the needle of the ship’s gyrocompass. He wanted to see more of
E Utopia but he couldn’t risk running out of fuel.

They all held their breaths
when they came out of hyperspace.

“Fantastic!” Hitchcook said,
looking at the navigational console. “We only strayed from the initial jump
spot by less than a thousand kilometers.”

The four men shouted, shook
hands and hugged.

“Now we need to go to E
Utopia and set foot on the planet,” Cruz said, drunk with joy.

“We’ll have to go with fuel
tankers to provide us with fuel for the return journey,” Bolton said.

“So that means we’re back to
square one,” Cruz mused. “We’ve to come up with an unmanned prototype of the
fuel tanker and do several test jumps?”

“Yes,” Rudolf replied. “And
we also have to modify our Transgalactic to enable it to launch without the
need of a runway.”

“I think we should build that
space station first,” Hitchcook suggested.

“Yes, the space station should
come first,” Rudolf concurred. “We need it to help us coordinate the project.”

“Alright,” Cruz said “Let’s
build the space station. The station will be just an outpost and the cost of building
it should not exceed seven billion dollars.”

The three scientists, in
consultation with Eureka Space Company’s engineers and technicians, drew the
design of the space station and construction began immediately at Columbus
Spaceport. The station, which Cruz called Eureka Research Space Station, was
less than a tenth of the size of the International Space Station. They
assembled the station on the ground and tested all its systems before they
dismantled it and launched it into orbit piece-by-piece. They transported most
of the space station’s parts to Bolivia and Congo, where they had lax licenses
that didn’t limit the number of shuttles that they could launch into space. It
took them nine months and sixteen missions to put the station into space.

Eureka Research Space Station
was designed to accommodate four permanent residents and a small number of
visitors for a short time.

They modified the Transgalactic
to enable it to launch vertically without a runway. This involved installing two
starter engines whose thrust was perpendicular to the main engines and hence to
the axis of the ship. These starter engines provided the initial lift from the
ground before the main engines took over. After making four jumps with the modified
Transgalactic,
they decided to make three more Transgalactics.

The tanker took almost a year
to build. They named it the Astrocarrier. When it passed the jump tests they built
eleven more tankers. The tankers could travel unmanned or manned. After that,
they made reconnaissance robots and jumped two of them to E Utopia in drones
that were programmed to follow the planet’s gravity and to seek dry land. A day
later, they jumped a drone to download data and videos from the robots. The
drone only stayed in the Luz Cruz system for ten seconds before it jumped back.
They refueled it and returned it to continue the download. That day, they
jumped the drone eleven times.

The video clips showed the
robots walking on bare sandy ground that looked so much like a portion of the
Earth’s surface that it was hard to imagine that these robots were billions of
miles away. They returned the drone with instructions to download measurements
of gravity, temperature and air content from the surveillance robots.

The results were amazing. The
gravity of the planet was 1.13g, average air temperature was twenty-one degrees
Celsius and the surface temperature was fifteen degrees Celsius. The atmosphere
contained 97.6 percent nitrogen by volume, 1.1 percent argon, 0.124 percent
carbon dioxide and trace amounts of oxygen, nitrogen dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane,
ammonia, iodine, helium and neon.

“E Utopia can sustain life!”
Cruz exclaimed. “We’ve found a place where we can live away from Earth’s
polluters.”

“From the planet’s gravity,
we can safely say that it is slightly bigger than Earth,” Rudolf concluded.

“We must land on E Utopia
ASAP,” Cruz declared.

“Let’s wait for a week or two
and then send the drone to download the latest videos,” Bolton suggested.

Cruz looked at Bolton with
rage and disbelief. “Why should we wait? I spent my fortune on this project and
I want to see E Utopia right now.”

“We’ve to make sure that
there are no hostile aliens,” Bolton explained. “If the drone is still moving
freely after two weeks, we can assume that there are no hostile aliens on the
planet.”

Hitchcook snorted. “Point of
correction, Bolton. We’re the aliens in this scenario.”

“I never imagined myself
being an alien,” Rudolf said. “Whenever I hear the word alien, the thought that
comes to my mind is a green ugly being with legs that look like those of an
insect.”

Cruz sighed. “Fine. I get it.
I can wait two weeks.”

“Mr. Cruz,” Hitchcook said
with a well-measure voice. “I don’t think you should be going with us to E
Utopia.”

“What?” Cruz exclaimed
vehemently. “Can you say that again?”

“Mr. Cruz, don’t get me
wrong,” Hitchcook stuttered. “We need to establish a coordinate system of some
sort to help us locate the jump zone where we will make the return jump from
the other side.”

“What does that have to do
with me not going to E Utopia?” Cruz scoffed.

“Mr. Cruz, sir, we will need
plenty of satellites to help us navigate. It will take us months or even years
to set up an effective coordinate system to help us locate the jump zone. And
if you are with us on E Utopia, who will send us food and supplies?”

“Hitchcook, are you trying to
tell me that it will take you months to put satellites into E Utopia orbit?”

“Satellites orbiting E Utopia
can help us navigate around E Utopia but they won’t help us navigate space and
locate the jump zone. To navigate the space around the planet and locate the
jump zone for the return jump, we’ll have to use the star in that system as a
reference point. We’ll have to locate quasars to use as markers. We’ll also
have to locate Lagrangian points between E Utopia and the star. We’ll need to put
satellites on the Lagrangian points because—”

“Alright, Hitchcook,” Cruz
interrupted. Although he didn’t understand everything that Hitchcook was saying,
he knew the scientist was making sense. “I’ll stay behind.”

“Thanks for understanding,
sir. We’ll try to set up a coordinate system as quickly as possible.”

They waited for two weeks and
sent a drone to download real-time pictures from the robots. They were
disappointed at first when the robot downloaded dark videos but they were
relieved when they noted that the robots were walking at night at the time they
shot the videos. They jumped the drone thirty-six hours later and were relieved
to get clear pictures from the robots. The temperature and atmospheric
conditions hadn’t changed much.

“Now what?” Cruz asked his
team of experts.

“Now we go to E Utopia,”
Hitchcook said. “First we send the tankers to E Utopia. We must program them to
follow the beacon from the robots or from the two drones on the ground.”

They launched the twelve
tankers into space two-per-day and jumped them to E Utopia. Eight of the
tankers carried fuel and four carried supplies, drones, small satellites and other
equipment.

Cruz wistfully bade the
scientists farewell when they departed for E Utopia. They went with five
technicians aboard two Transgalactics.

Every two weeks, Cruz jumped
a messenger drone to the other side to upload and download messages to and from
the E Utopia pioneers. To his delight, after only two months the pioneers sent
him a text message telling him that they had managed to put satellites on two Lagrangian
points between E Utopia and the star. The Lagrangian points, together with several
quasars that
they had found in the system,
provided a sufficient reference frame to help them locate the jump zone. They said
they had also put three satellites in medium E Utopia orbit to help them
navigate the planet, and four satellites in low orbit to observe the planet.

All they had to do to locate
the jump zone was ask Cruz to send a message drone programmed to revolve in a
small circle upon emerging from hyperspace. When the message drone came they
launched a ship into space to intercept it in its circular path. The ship followed
the drone along its circular path, recording coordinates of points along the
path. This circle would serve as the jump zone. What was left was to find the
direction of the jump. The only way to find the direction of the jump was by
trial and error.

The drone was programmed to
jump back after emerging from hyperspace. If it jumped to an area within reach
of Eureka Space Station, the station’s computers would instantaneously override
the drone’s bounce-back command and bring it to the station, where it would be
refueled and sent back to the other side with a congratulatory message.

They used quasars and the
direction of the drone’s gyrocompass needle as the main reference points to measure
the jump direction. In the first seven attempts, the drone returned to the star
system after sixty-two minutes. Their hearts palpitated with excitement when the
drone failed to return from the ninth jump in the usual time. If the drone
hadn’t met any obstacles, it had jumped to the vicinity of Eureka Space Station
and had been taken to the station.