Ryan Taylor awakens from hibernation to a mystery that he, along with his crew, must solve in order to continue their mission. How they solve it and what they find is astounding.
We arrived back in Earth orbit a few days later. I decided to let the dome city people know what we had discovered in the Centauri system. The first thing we noticed was that the conifer seeds that we had given them had sprouted and grown quite a bit, a process that usually required several years.
The dome city woman looked a bit older, a sign that being in hyperspace had shoved us into the future again.
"We explored the Centauri system and discovered that Proxima-b is uninhabitable. It's tidally locked to its M-class red dwarf star."
"I'm not surprised," she replied, frowning.
"We did discover where the abducted humans had been taken. It's a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri-B at the inner edge of its habitable zone. The aliens that had abducted them became extinct because of an illness carried by the humans they had abducted."
"Is that planet capable of supporting a large human population?" she asked.
"Yes, but the main problem is that going there in hyperspace renders one infertile. The humans on that planet can't produce children, and neither can we."
"Why does being in this hyperspace cause infertility?"
"We believe it has something to do with being in a quantum dimensional shift that essentially stops aging. Because of this effect, females no longer menstruate."
She blinked several times before replying. "I don't understand how not aging could stop and prevent menstruation but everything else still seems normal.
"We're not sure. It has to be some sort of quantum effect that only affects living tissue. Maybe it's because once stopped, the atoms of living tissues are changed in a way that prevents reproduction. I'm not an expert on that subject."
She sighed. "Our population here in the city is very near the maximum safe size. Unless we find a way to live outside the city, we will need to employ euthanasia."
I swallowed hard. "We might be able to work out a method to reverse Earth's climate change. We have many tree seeds and are working on a method to remove carbon emissions from the atmosphere."
"We appreciate your efforts but changing the climate of a planet in runaway global warming is a daunting enterprise at best."
I nodded. "I agree, but we are going to give it a try."
"We await your effort," she said.
"By the way, what is your name?"
"Adal," she said.
"Well Adal, we will be in contact with you when we come up with a plan."
She nodded before the communication link was broken.
"I'm not surprised that they would be in a population crisis," I said. "They need to get out of the dome city and begin populating the countryside."
"The problem with that is that the atmosphere is screwed up," Sharon said. "It has too much carbon dioxide in it, making breathing difficult."
"How are we able to breath it?" Natale asked.
"We can survive in it for short times, but long term it would result in serious health problems."
"She's right about that," Bridget said. "If we're going to make Earth safe for human habitation, we have to remove a good deal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."
"We do have one advantage," I said. "At least humans are not polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases."
"Unfortunately, once greenhouse gases reach the critical point, they cause a runaway effect that rapidly increased global warming," Sharon said. "That's what's happening on Earth. If left alone, Earth will become like Venus. In fact, it will become worse than Venus."
I swallowed hard. "We are faced with a serious problem, but we will fix it not because it's easy, but because it's hard."
Everyone agreed with that.
It wasn't until the next day that Janet discovered something that gave us new hope. She told us when we joined her at the command station.
"Guess what I found in the ship's stores list!"
My right eyebrow shot up. "What?"
"We have a ton of iron sulphate."
I squinted at her. "Iron sulphate? Why the hell did they give us that?"
Sharon smiled. "Ha, ha! I know what that's for."
I turned to her. "Really?"
"It's for what they called iron fertilization. Iron salts act like a fertilizer for algae and phytoplankton. Since those plants employ photosynthesis, increasing their numbers is a way to remover carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."
"I get the feeling that they were counting on us to fix Earth's climate," I said. "But that suggests that they didn't think we would be all that successful in finding a habitable new Earth."
"It also assumed that we wouldn't return for at least forty years," Janet said. "And, that represented a last-ditch hope on their part."
"Maybe that's the reason they sent out two more ships," Sharon said.
"Unfortunately, they fell into the same trap that we did," I said. "In other words, NASA kept making the same mistake."
"What do we have to do to use the iron sulphate?" Janet asked.
"We'll have to stop the wheels and move the containers of that chemical up from engineering to the hanger deck and then load them in the shuttle's distribution units, but before we do that we have to decide where we're going to distribute it."
"I've done some scans of the various ocean and lake locations," Sharon said. "I found that there is some plankton and algae in the Gulf, Caribbean and in seas nearer to the equator, but algae is just about everywhere there's water."
"I'll leave that strategy up to you two. I'll work on the best way to get the containers up to the shuttle."
"We'll help you with that," Natale said. Bridget nodded her approval.
We made our way through the axel tube, down to the agricultural deck and then down to the engineering deck. After consulting the computer down there, we found four drums in a storage compartment. I tried to move one of them, but it was too heavy.
"We'll definitely have to move these in zero gravity."
"Why can't these robots do that?" Bridget asked.
"They're not designed to maneuver through the axel tube."
"That sucks!" Natale said.
I concurred, but we had a job to do and it was going to require muscle to complete it.
After having COMA stop the wheels, we were able to move the containers. However, just because we were in zero gravity didn't mean that we could easily move the drums. They still had considerable mass and that required force to move, according to Isaac Newton.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
After considerable effort, we managed to get all four of the drums up to the hanger deck and in the shuttle. After returning to the crew deck, we congregated at the command station to find out where we were going to distribute the chemical.
