The Great Escape Chapter 1 Part 2 of 3

The Great Escape
Chapter 1 Part 2 of 3

The girl occupied a stool at the bar, nursing a drink of an ugly green color with a foolish-looking umbrella. Assuming she was an Entertainer, Ezra took a place at the bar next to her and ordered himself a beer.

"Well, this is my last night on Capella," he said. "Any idea what people do for fun around here?"
The girl smiled at him. If she recognized his words as a standard pickup line in that establishment, she did not show it but answered politely.

"Besides the bars and the casino, there's a low-gravity exercise hall and a public park with a small zoo. Of course, if you have money" - she used a word that Ezra thought was significant - "there are plenty of shops. I don't know much else. I'm new here myself."

Ezra could not make out the girl. The mention of money seemed to hint that she was an Entertainer, but why mention shopping? Another Entertainer would have added: "Show me your credit stick, and I'll take you somewhere fun."

The girl sounded educated and refined, speaking English with barely an accent. This meant something in a place like Capella Space Station if she held out for a high price and a more attractive customer. Even so, she was interested in him.

"My name's Ezra," he said.

"I'm Yumi."

"What brings you to Capella, Yumi?"

"I'm on holiday," she answered. "How about you?"

No one came to Capella on holiday, but Ezra was still unclear whether Yumi was an Entertainer or an innocent customer who misunderstood her appearance. She seemed a little anxious: her gaze flitted to the door occasionally.

"Just stopping here for the night," he said. "I'm off prospecting tomorrow."

Yumi knew a Planetary Prospector's life to be exciting, full of danger and thrills, and there was a woman in every spaceport, but she showed only a polite interest.

However, there was no one else to talk to, so they continued to speak, though they both glanced at the door many times.

Ezra was failing to secure the services of an Entertainer, yet nothing else was happening in the pub. When they talked about where they came from on Earth, the lazy barman, pretending not to listen while idly rubbing a glass with a dirty towel, gave up eavesdropping and went away to avoid work elsewhere.

They took their drinks to a table in the window to be more comfortable. While he kept a surreptitious eye on the door, Ezra became genuinely interested in Yumi, who had gained an engineering degree and had recently started working for a big Japanese engineering firm specializing in hyperspace drives. He still did not believe her story of a solo holiday on Capella. He thought she was waiting for someone, so obviously, she scanned the pub's entrance every time she sipped her drink.

People gradually drifted in, and the bar was noisy and full when Hestia, the gorgeous entertainer Ezra had been seeking, arrived in the boisterous company of about twenty men and women. The men were in military uniform.

The women wore short skirts and tight tops, which are preferred by Entertainers and, apparently, Japanese hyper-drive engineers on holiday.

Hestia was of average height, with dark-red hair, large dark-green eyes, an oval face of heart-stopping beauty, and a straight nose and a delicate chin.

Her figure was slender but curvy. She was perfectly made up. Her dress was long and tight with a bodice and a low neckline. It suited a woman a few years older than her. She looked about eighteen.

Excusing himself for a moment, Ezra got up to speak to Hestia, but as he approached, he saw she already had a customer, an officer in naval whites.

Hestia saw Ezra and whispered to her escort. While the officer obediently made his way to the bar, she signaled Ezra to approach.

He pushed his way through the crowd to her table.

"Hello, Hestia," he said. "I was hoping to meet you. It's my last night on Capella for a while."

"What bad luck, Sweetie!" she replied. "If only you'd sent me a message. A cruiser arrived this afternoon, and we all went down to the Military Dock to meet it. ... I love watching a big stately vessel come into a tight berth," she added with a salacious grin. "It barely fitted."

Ezra was too preoccupied, thinking that the arrival of a rare military spaceship explained why it was so quiet in the pub when he arrived, to notice the opening Hestia gave him for a dirty joke.

"It was just my luck," he said.

She nonchalantly shrugged away her failure at initiating sexual banter.

"I'm sorry I can't recommend a friend to you," Hestia said. "Everyone I know has an escort."

There were gorgeous Entertainers all around. Some were sitting on the sailors' laps; others got up to dance with their customers in a voluptuous but energy-saving style. Disappointed, Ezra glanced back at Yumi, and
Hestia followed his eyes. Even before he spoke, she had given him kind advice.

"Not a chance," she said gently. "Unless it's her first night, she's not that kind of girl."

"Oh, well. At least I can be a gentleman. I'll take Yumi on a station tour and show her a good time."

"Well, aren't you just the sweetest man imaginable," Hestia cooed, stroking his cheek. "What a pity that horrid old Commodore grabbed me first."

Just then, the horrid old Commodore marched back carrying their drinks, keen to know why Hestia was talking to another man.

"Well, goodbye, Ezra," she said, gently pushing him away and fixing an engaging smile to turn on the Commodore. "Duty calls. Have a safe trip!"

Putting his brave face on, Ezra returned to Yumi, who had spent the last five minutes looking hopefully at the door.

"Yumi, it's noisy in here," he said. "Would you like to go somewhere else?"

Yumi checked the time, decided she had waited long enough, and smiled sweetly at Ezra.

"Yes, I'd like that."

As they passed through the crowd to the exit, Yumi resigned herself to whatever fate her disappointed vigil had ensured. Outside the bar, she made up her mind to be happy.

Becoming bright and chatty, she demanded where Ezra planned to take her. Improvising, he suggested the low-gravity exercise hall.

"Oh, good!" she said. "Can we walk to the lift?"

The lifts went up through the roof of the causeway into a spoke of the great wheel and through the central spindle to the other causeways. This was a quick route six miles across the diameter of the wheel rather than the slower route around the circumference of the moving walkway. Some passengers got off the lift in the middle of the spindle to take elevators to the docks, the hydroponics farms, the low-gravity exercise hall, or the Star View Promenade and Restaurant at the very top of the space station.

The nearest lift was the one Ezra arrived on, twelve blocks anticlockwise, at the junction of the East Causeway and the North Causeway, but Yumi wanted to walk the other way so that she could ogle in the window of a clothes shop.

It was always a pleasant temperature on the space station at night when the white roof lights were dimmed, and the yellow streetlights came on, giving even the shadowy pawnshops and rowdy bars a romantic feel. Yumi skipped along happily. Though she dawdled a little at the clothes shop, they were soon at the lift. She made a graceful hop into the cubicle, taking Ezra's arm in anticipation of the reduced gravitation and Coriolis effect that would try to knock them off balance.

At the exercise deck in the central spindle, they changed into brightly colored jumpsuits to float, gyrate, and bounce off the trampoline walls of the rubber-padded hall. Serious athletes used bungee ropes attached to harnesses around their waists to provide strong resistance to their leaps, getting a proper workout, but Yumi was content to bounce from wall to wall, gliding and spinning for fun as she went.

She laughed when an ambitious somersault caused a soft collision with another gymnast, leaving her stranded too far from the wall to push off again. She called for Ezra's help. He made a good bounce and glided to her rescue, holding her to stop her spinning. They got entangled, which made Yumi laugh more, but his momentum brought them safely to the opposite side. He turned her the right way up.

She blamed the restrictive top half of her capacious jumpsuit, which she undid, tying its arms around her waist.

She pushed off again.

Yumi spun gymnastically in only trousers and a bra in such apparent ignorance of its teasing effect on Ezra that he scolded himself for ever thinking that such an innocent girl could have been an Entertainer.

Hot and sweaty after a good workout, they enjoyed invigorating steam showers and met outside the sports hall, flushed and radiant.

If Yumi loved the low-gravity deck, she adored the Star View Promenade: a walkway under a plastic glass dome at the very top of the space station, pointing away from Capella, giving a clear view of deep space. They wore magstripe harnesses and shoes to parade under a velvety heaven glistening with a billion diamond pinpricks of liquid fire. The romantic possibilities of a man, a woman, and a canopy of stars were not lost on Ezra, but his night role required gentlemanly restraint, as he enjoyed Yumi's company for her own sake.

Entranced by their immersion in immensity, Yumi and Ezra proceeded slowly and silently to the Star View Restaurant. They ate a surprisingly good dinner for 40 Galactic cents on Ezra's credit stick. Re-charged by her meal and charmed by Ezra's attention, Yumi completed her transformation into a lively and knowledgeable companion, interested to know how Ezra's hyperdrive engine had performed in its recent tests.

Ezra was proud of his ship. His description of its virtues was a pleasant coda to an evening when two random strangers were thrown together light-years from their mutual home. It was now time for him to return to his ship and get some sleep before his big day tomorrow.

"Come on, Yumi," he said as they left the restaurant. "I'll see you back to your hotel."

"Is the night over, then?"

"It is for me, and I leave in ten hours."

"But you haven't shown me your ship yet."

"It's not that impressive."

"Ezra, I'd like to see your ship very much."

"All right. We'll go for a nightcap. Then I'll take you to your hotel."

They were at the passenger docks in ten minutes and began the tour with a view of the outside of his ship.

It was a robust yellow and silver tube with a bulbous front containing the piloting bridge, a plastic glass viewing dome below, and an entry hatch above. The airlock docking system was on the blunt nose. Beyond the bridge were two more hatches with explosive release bolts covering the emergency escape pods.

The living quarters were between the escape pods and the hold, which bulged out to give the ship a fat belly.

Four maneuvering rockets, fore and aft, could be turned in any direction. The hull had radio antennas and receiving dishes. The craft was designed to stay in space, not to land on a planet with a strong gravitational field or a thick atmosphere, so it need not be aerodynamic, though it had power enough to take off from a small planet, such as Earth, in an emergency.

The hyperdrive unit was a model that Yumi knew well. The engine took up one-third of the ship's length and was in two parts. A cone-shaped ion drive, covered in red pipes and valves, provided forward thrust. Extending beyond the ion drive was the expanding concentric silver rings of the hyperdrive motor that pushed the spaceship into hyperspace.

Inside the spaceship, Ezra led Yumi through the bridge, past the two escape pods, and into the living quarters.

The galley, shower and head, storage drawers, and collapsible furniture were there. Beyond them was the hold, full of well-used prospecting equipment: a digger, bulldozer, jet copter, and rocket-powered robot drones to send down to a planet's surface. There were tools, emergency supplies of food, rations, and water, and even a second head. Rope ties and magnetic lugs held everything down to be doubly secure.

They finished the tour in fifteen minutes and sat comfortably in the restricted cabin with zero gravity. Ezra made tea for Yumi and poured whisky for himself. They drank from sealed beakers with non-spill attachments.

"Will you tell me about your trip?" Yumi asked. "You never said where you're going."

Ezra had not wanted to talk about his mission in public, but the night before he left, back at his ship, there was no further need for secrecy.

"Have you heard of Samatha?" he asked.

"It's the lost planet. The 'other Earth' is on the far side of the galaxy. No one who goes there ever comes back."

"Well, that's the myth. Samothea isn't on the galaxy's far side of the galaxy, but no one has returned from there for more than a century. It's the 'other Earth' in that, had Samothea been successfully colonized, it would have rivaled Earth as the most life-friendly planet in the galaxy."

"Where is it?"

"1,850 light-years from Earth, on the outer edge of our spiral arm toward the galaxy's center. We can't see its solar system from any inhabited world or space station because they are all on the inside edge of the Orion-

Cygnus Arm and there are dust clouds in the middle of the arm."

"What's Samothea like?"

"When first prospected 150 years ago, it was described as a young and lifeless world, recently volcanic but now primarily stable. It's the same size as Earth, with identical gravitation, a similar temperature, and a slightly slower rotation speed. It is about 90 million miles from its sun, a mid-range yellow star similar to Earth's sun.

Samothea seemed to be the ideal planet to colonize.

"Terraforming began shortly after discovery. In the first stage, probes were sent loaded with molecular nanotechnology robots. The nanobots were designed to replicate almost without limit, taking power from the sun to oxygenate the atmosphere. In the second terraforming stage, probes were loaded with bacteria, seeds, and spores to spread life to the oceans and land."

"The third stage was the arrival of 300 engineers with machinery, a stock of plants, animals, and a cloning laboratory to complete the terraforming process. The engineers landed about 125 years ago on the smallest continent, a vast kidney-shaped island in the planet's tropical zone.

This was the first part of the planet to be made fully habitable. They stocked the ocean with fish, planted forests, and released insects, frogs, small reptiles, birds, and mammals onto the land. They cloned domestic animals and built houses to make a settlement, fabricating building materials from volcanic rock and sand.

"There was prospecting for ores and minerals. All the reports were good, and five years later, the first transport of 3,000 settlers was sent. They were farmers, foresters, builders, and mechanics. They took their families and domestic animals. Unfortunately, no acknowledgment of their arrival was ever received. For the last 120 years, nothing had been heard of either engineers or settlers."

"What happened?" Yumi asked.

"No one knows for sure."

"Did no one try to contact Samothea?"

"Plenty of times. Communication probes were sent, but they have yet to return. Even some prospectors tried jumping to Samothea, but they seemed to disappear. Whatever happened there disrupted communications and probably killed spaceships, maybe even a whole planet."

"And you're just going to jump there?"

"Well, it's a calculated risk. It has been 50 years since anyone has tried. Whatever caused the problem has died down now and gone away. I'll be careful. I'll make a dozen gradually shorter jumps so that, unless what hit

Samothea disrupted hyperspace pathways, so my final jump should land a good distance from the planet. This should give me enough time to take stock and prepare for danger."

"I hope so," Yumi said sincerely. "What do you expect to find there?"

"An empty world. It's unlikely any people will survive, neither engineers nor settlers, but their terraforming technology might have done its job. If not, we'll have to start over. The worst-case scenario is there's no planet because some catastrophe eradicated it."

Yumi shuddered at the prospect, showing genuine concern for a man she had grown to like in the last few hours.

"You're fearless, leaping to a place where hundreds of people might have been killed. I wouldn't do that."

"Yet you came to Capella on your own."

"That's different," Yumi assured him. "I had to come."

"You had to?"

"I mean, I wanted to. I wanted to do something different, just for once."

"Capella is certainly different, but I think you've taken as much risk as I have."


To be continued