TWO EXPLORERS

PART - I

"Aargh!" said Samuel as he gazed out of his infinity elevator which seemed to be moving slower than a geriatric slug on a salted snowed-in street. He gave a weird look to his only companion telling that this invention might become useless if such things happen. The thick iron string that supported the entire weight of the elevator threatened to creak under the might of the elevator capsule. Tashan tried to console him saying that they are very close to their destination. Samuel in the other hand was not ready to listen to anything and he started staring out of the window of the lift at the black sky which was the only thing he had been seeing for several years together. "How much longer?" he cried. "I agree that this capsule lift has a lot of recreational stuff inside it. But we have been sitting here for the past ten years and all the things around here are driving me crazy." Saying this he started splashing water on himself and kicked all the items everywhere just to show his disgust. Tashan just sat quietly thinking that it's gonna be useless trying to convince him. Soon they started feeling sleepy and both went to sleep. No sooner than a few earth hours had passed that the explorers were awoken by an unimaginably bright flash of light that was millions of times brighter than the sun. They immediately fetched their Polaroid glasses turned each Polaroid at right angles to each other and went to observe the source of the light. To their horror they observed that the star to which the capsule was travelling to was expanding enormously and was about to engulf all what was in its proximity!! Tashan and Samuel immediately left the capsule lift and tried to pull the string away from the star and after hours of struggle they managed to divert the string miles away from the star. Now to string was suspended in free space clearly indicating hopelessness and wastage of ten long years of travel. Samuel was ready to burst in a fit of tremendous rage but Tashan looked at him at his eye and he calmed down. This struggle made them fall into a dreamless slumber. Now the end of the iron string that had no support started drifting off to a nearby celestial body under the influence of its gravity. The iron string started falling towards that planet and struck its surface. This caused a quake in the capsule and woke them up. They stared at each other thinking that they were not destined to sleep. They decided to explore the planet in which their string struck. As the capsule was entering the planet's atmosphere the sudden gravity made the lift to fall down at a tremendously high speed. Tashan immediately pressed the keys to decelerate the lift. Samuel peeped out of the window at regular intervals and calculated the rate of deceleration so as to land exactly on the planet's surface. Slowly the deceleration rates and the gravity of the planet helped them to set their first step on the planet that was 2.7 light years from our earth! They also observed that the planet was the only one that revolved around the star that they were planning to go before. The two explorers decided to explore the planet. "TAP TAP TAP", a sound came. "Whos that?" They asked........

.....There was no response. Samuel and Tashan went closer to observe the source of the sound. As they went closer and closer the sound became louder and louder. Finally they observed a deep hole and when they looked into it they got the strangest sight of their life. Inside the pit they saw a small volcano and instead of molten lava coming out of it they found dry ice crystals coming out in lots from inside of it. These ice crystals went deeper into a bigger hole causing the most familiar sound they had heard a few minutes ago. "What is this?" asked Samuel? "How am I supposed to know?" said Tashan "Even I have also come here with you for the first time. Let's find out." They decided to investigate this.

Slowly and steadily they started to descend through the hole and as they went down they felt a tremendous pressure which seemed to be a million times greater than the pressure experienced by deep sea divers. They felt as if they were being crushed by a load of rocks. To counter this they immediately increased the pressure of their spacesuit until it equalized the pressure of the surroundings. This counter effect cancelled the surrounding pressure and made them feel as light as before. Then they heaved a sigh of relief. After they opened their eyes they found the most brilliant sight of their life. There were diamonds here and there of various shapes and sizes. Tashan became totally shocked and got petrified for a while on seeing this while Samuel was on cloud nine and he began to wade in the diamonds and started flinging them here and there in complete excitement. "Stop it!" cried Tashan "You are distracting me." Samuel then came back to his senses. "Sorry I got too excited on seeing so many diamonds." He said. "Let's go up to the foot of the volcano again. I want to know how the dry ice formed." Said Tashan. Saying so both went up again and started digging the foot of the volcano. They dug and dug till they found some plant like organisms. According to their calculations argon was the most abundant gas in that planet's atmosphere. 96% was argon, 3% was chlorine and 1% were the remaining gases in trace amounts. They began looking deeper into the organisms to study the reaction in the plants. They found out that chlorine was converted into carbon-dioxide using transacetylase and chlorine as the enzyme-substrate complex. Tashan immediately understood the whole process behind this. She explained to Samuel that these plant like organisms evolved carbon-dioxide through a process similar to photosynthesis. This gaseous carbon dioxide immediately got converted to dry ice because the ambient temperature was -80°C which was below the freezing point of carbon dioxide. Argon and chlorine remained as gases because they had a much lower freezing point. After that just like lava these dry ice crystals used to erupt from the volcano when full. This point was clear in the minds of the two explorers but now the new question was "How did the dry ice become diamonds under the larger hole."

To be continued....