Aurona, page 18
He began tapping furiously. “Okay, everything’s set. These slabs each have codes. I punched in their four respective sets of transport code numbers, followed by the command ‘CLIMB/5FT.,’ then finally ‘RADIUS 20 FT./ LOCATE KRON.’”
He studied the crew’s puzzled faces intently. Obviously, nobody had a clue. “Follow me yet?” he said, grinning mischievously, picking up on Adam’s clowning. “Nothing happens until I tap the ‘Enter’ button on my programmer….”
The four thin, flat slabs seemed to be nearly featureless. Floating about six inches off the floor, they were simple, elegantly proportioned rectangles with rounded corners and some kind of a rubberized, nonslip finish.
“Here goes!” Shrugging, he pressed ‘Enter.’
Silently they rose to eye level and, almost on cue, turned and began to circle the perimeter of the room entirely on their own. As the astonished crew scooted toward the center to watch, he pressed out another series of codes. “I’m locking in their paths and setting their radar spacing distances,” he explained. “Okay now, give me some room.” As a path opened through the crowd, he got a running start and hopped up nimbly onto one of the floating transporters. His blonde hair flying, he stood there casually, confidently, his legs far apart and his hands on his hips. Astonished faces followed him as he flew around the room.
“You can do the same!” he shouted. “Almost anything that’s mobile on this ship—SpeedSleds, barges, and so on—have a code and frequency number assigned to them! These slabs may look plain, but they’re extremely sophisticated: they have radar, sonar, infrared, terrain mapping, and laser guidance systems along their lateral lines, just like the SpeedSleds! So dig, guys! You have exactly the same menus as me, with an almost infinite list of submenus. The codes are all there, right at your fingertips!”
Adam walked out to the center of the room. “I just thought of something important here. I’m going to throw a scenario at you. Imagine this: if Kron were injured somewhere, this slab could fly out to him all by itself, homing in on his PIL frequency. The slab has a ‘SEEK’ function, too! Right, Kron?”
“Yes. And it also has some manual controls as a backup, built into the front bumper.” Grinning, the taut, muscular man flicked a hidden panel open with his toe. As it unfolded and raised from the surface, it lit up brightly. The crew watched, enthralled. “And as if that weren’t enough, in emergencies it’s possible to run all this equipment remotely with voice commands or chin codes from your e-helmets! They repeat every function on your wrist programmers … everything’s connected!”
Joelle raised her voice as the sled breezed by, her short hair ruffling. “Why don’t the e-helmets just use voice commands, Kron? I don’t like the chin codes. Everything electronic has been using voice commands for decades! They’re so easy!”
He explained from the other side of the room. “If it’s really quiet, yes, but sometimes there’s too much background noise,” he shouted, smiling. “It might ‘hear’ the wrong thing and do something unexpected or dangerous. The human voice is, as best, an unreliable source for intricate commands and subcommands. A keystroke is always more exact than a sneeze or stutter when moving such sophisticated objects!”
Adam held up his hands. “Thanks, Kron!” he concluded. “Great job! There’s tons more to learn, guys, we can all be sure of that! But we’re done for the day. We’ll just leave all the rest of the equipment piled up right here and come back to it.”
As a disappointed moan went up, Adam held up his hands. “I’m sure a lot of you have reached your saturation point. You’ve just woken up and I’m sure you’d like some time to yourselves to work the kinks out. Really. We’ve just scratched the surface, here. We’ll have to form learning teams on this long, last leg of our journey to dig deeply and know all this stuff cold.”
Kron lowered the circling barges, slowed them to a stop, and nimbly hopped off. Suddenly, he caught Joelle’s admiring eye and turned away, reddening. A few others had caught the subtle exchange and elbowed each other with knowing looks.
Adam had caught it too and continued smoothly. “There’s a last important key to the success of this mission—in fact, the most important one. Although we don’t really know each other yet, I feel it’s starting to happen already…. Even though we’ve been, um, shall we say, sleeping together for seven hundred years.”
An explosion of laughter swept the room, along with a few reddening faces.
Adam held up a finger. “Thank you so much, Joelle. After our, ah, ‘adventure’ downstairs in the kitchen, I think we know the key I’m talking about: the forging of deep and lasting friendships!”
The crew jumped to their feet with a wave of applause, hugs, and laughter. It had indeed been a long, tiring, yet extremely enlightening first day. Gathering their belongings, they put away their cushions and filed out through the big bronze doors.
There was another enlightened face in the center of the room. Dexor stood up stiffly, stretching out his limbs, nodding and smiling at the crewmembers as they filed out of the room. He took his time, trailing along behind everyone. Safely down the hallway, he glanced furtively over his shoulder and slipped into a freight elevator.
Chapter 10: THE PODIUM
The days flew by and their bodies and minds strengthened rapidly. Some of the crew became almost addicted to the Galaxy Wall’s huge screen, reclining on piles of memory foam cushions and immersing themselves in the unforgettable panorama for hours at a time. As they pushed deep inside one of the spiraling arms and drew closer to Aurona’s solar system, the starship began a programmed sequence of deceleration maneuvers, streaking impossibly close to some large dying suns and using their massive gravities to slow down. Swirling, zigzagging, the schematic of their path looked like the track of a pinball machine.
Finally, as Aurona’s solar system centered itself on the big screen, a new display popped up along one side: some ornate numbers began to count off the days until they arrived. The info served its purpose, calming the crew and giving them a time frame to anticipate and plan until they reached their goal. As they entered the system, they found it to be immense, with great, gaseous giants and hundreds of rocky planets surrounded by clouds of tiny moons. The starship almost seemed to linger as it slipped past some watercolored Jupiter-like beauties, treating the crew to some spectacular close-ups.
Finally, one evening as Adam was standing by himself in front of the big screen, they slowly rounded a large planet. A long, straight stretch opened up toward a small, shining dot. He drew in his breath sharply.
Aurona! Even from millions of miles away, the planet was spectacular!
He sprang to action. As he sounded the tone for general assembly, they came on the run just as they were, midway in their prep for bed. Everyone had been anticipating this moment, and there was a loud buzz of excitement as they entered the room: this couldn’t be Aurona already—they weren’t expecting to see it for a few more days! They settled onto their floor cushions in nervous anticipation.
“It’s late, so I’m keeping this short and simple, guys: five minutes, tops.” He pointed at the display. “See that tiny, bright metallic blip in the center? It looks like a star, doesn’t it? Well, it fooled me too! Just like you, I thought we’d have to wait awhile, but we can actually see the planet from this tremendous distance!” He turned around to face a sea of uncomprehending stares.
“Why does it do that, sir?” Kron asked. “What makes it glow like that?”
He shrugged. “I don’t have a clue. It’s a complete mystery….” His voice dropped off as his wrist started to vibrate. “Wait a sec.” As he read a message on his programmer, his eyes widened. “Wow, speaking of mystery, it’s a mystery how anyone’s going to get to get any sleep tonight! According to this latest latest update, our starship just began to accelerate to close the gap! We should be establishing orbit by early tomorrow morning!
A collective gasp went up, the crew staring at him in disbelief.
“Okay, that’s it!” He shrugged. “I did say that I’d keep you here five minutes, didn’t I? Get back to bed, so you can get up early! We’ve got a planet to explore!”
They rose reluctantly, putting their pillows away and glancing repeatedly over their shoulders as they filed out of the room.
Adam lingered in front of the screen to study the dot in minutest detail. It looked totally different, more like a shimmering ball of gold foil than a planet. After a moment, he shrugged his shoulders, closed the screen, and turned off the lights.
He couldn’t sleep. Something wasn’t right; something just didn’t wash. Suddenly a train of disturbing thoughts started to rumble around a track inside his mind, along with a vision of flashing yellow warning lights. A short phrase lit up: ‘Anticipate your problems.’ He sat bolt upright: Grandpa! Always solution-oriented, he’d drilled the concept of red, yellow, and green lights into his head as a child. Mumbling to himself, he began to mull it over. “Hmm … so, if potential problems are yellow lights, loosely translated, that means I gotta know what I’m getting into!Friend or foe, I gotta figure out this mystery planet!”
He jumped out of bed and finished dressing on the run. Pacing inside his private speed elevator, his mind was filled with a blur of scenarios. “What if there’s dinosaurs or swamps or poisonous bacteria in the air? Is that why Grandpa looked so sick?” He gripped the railing. “Yow, I’m responsible for the lives of a lot of people here!”
As the Observatory’s big bronze doors opened, he flew across the room and opened the screen. Yes, there it was: the tiny ball had a distinctly warm, golden hue around its edges. Aurona looked foreign and out of place, almost as if it were suspended on a string in the middle of a cold, dark panorama. Shivering in the cool semidarkness, he fumbled through his pockets for his wrist programmer. “Oh, come on now,” he sputtered in frustration. “Give me a break! Don’t tell me I left it back in my room! Crud!” he scowled. “I really don’t want to go back to … wait!” He paused a moment, thinking. “Yes, there should be a set of manual controls hidden somewhere.” He explored a row of identical-looking panels, poking with his fingertips. One felt a bit spongier, as if it were on hidden springs. Shrugging, he pushed hard. A door flipped open.
“Aha!” In front of him, plainly marked, was the Observatory Room’s master programmer! A small button blinked expectantly: ‘PODIUM.’ Shrugging, he pressed it.
In the dead silence, he heard a faint, low hum coming from somewhere near the blue line of separation at the center of the stage. Cocking his head aside, he followed his ears to the source and knelt down, feeling with his palms. Yes, there was a definite vibration underneath the floor. He expelled a long breath, shaking his head in wonder. Just like the holocamera, there was far more than met the eye inside this starship!
Suddenly, an impossibly thin, masterfully fit, circular outline appeared under his fingertips! Shocked, he pulled away from it just in time: nearly catching him on the chin, an odd-looking, cylindrical form extruded itself rapidly out of the floor. He watched it warily. A finely ribbed, flat-topped tube nearly three feet in diameter was oozing up out of nowhere! He started to sputter. “Huh? What the…? I walked over this spot hundreds of times! I never dreamed this thing was here!”
Stopping about chest height, the podium began to transform, swelling slightly and splitting down its backside along a thin line. He watched it guardedly: the thing looked like a giant chrysalis splitting open and something was definitely emerging! With a whoosh and a thump, the top simply flipped over to reveal an impressive array of controls, lit brightly from within.
“That’s it?” He edged closer, amazed. “Well, I’ll be….”
A button was flashing. PIVOT, it read. Tentatively he reached out, touched it, and quickly jerked his hand back. With a hum, the podium simply swiveled around to face the screen. “Wow!” He walked around the cylinder, his hand on his chin. “Good night,” he gasped, “there must be fifty or sixty extra buttons on top of this thing! None of these are on my wrist programmer!”
One button stood out from the rest. MAGNIFY, it read, in a soft red glow.
“Magnify? I wonder if that could mean…?” His fist shot into the air. “Yes!” There was no hesitation this time. He punched the button emphatically. The screen jumped forward, with Aurona enlarging from a pinpoint to about the size of a quarter! With a racing heart, he proceeded to tap out a series of magnifications, his eyes widening as each one doubled the planet’s diameter! In moments, he stood there open-mouthed.
Aurona now filled the screen! Mountains and rivers, jungles and deserts, continents and oceans—they all stood out in breathtaking crystal clarity! But where was that golden hue they’d all seen from the distance? Could it be that pencil-thin, metallic shimmer around the edges? Odder still, there were thousands of densely packed vertical columns of light striating the narrow band of twilight along the day/night boundary! What could they be?
He blinked his eyes, squinting closely at the fantastic columns of light. His mind racing with possibilities, he turned to the controls and scanned them with renewed intensity. Another promising-looking button stood out from the rest. PHOTO, it read. He pressed it emphatically.
Somewhere in the darkness behind him, there was a muffled click, followed by a whir. Spinning on his heels, he spotted a tall, narrow panel swinging open near the bronze entrance doors. “What’s that?” he sputtered. “I-I thought that skinny panel was just a decorative filler next to the door! This-this is incredible!” He sprinted across the room. “I don’t remember seeing any of this stuff on the holo-disc’s demo. Could this starship be an enhanced version, maybe a-a newer model?”
As he reached the door, a machine slid out on rollers, spitting out a large, shimmering sheet of paper. It floated through the air and dropped into a wire basket. He hesitated a moment, then bent over to retrieve it. The plasticized material still felt wet, probably a little damp from processing. “Perfect! Now I have proof!” As he turned it over in excitement, he drew in a sharp breath. It was a photo, all right, but what a photo!
A hologram! Nearly three feet in diameter and circled by a thin shimmer of metallic gold, the bulging sphere of a planet looked as if it were literally floating off the paper! He held it out at arm’s length to stare at it, bug-eyed. How could this be? It was a hologram of crystal clarity and perfection, taken from millions of miles away! What kind of lenses could…. He turned around, his gut quaking. Why, the possibilities of this new equipment were incredible! He sprinted back to the controls, the big sheet of paper fluttering behind him.
Just as he suspected! Right under the PHOTO button were several smaller sub-buttons! INTERVAL, one read, then next to that, MAP. And what was this? An interesting one read SECTION. He hesitated, surmised wildly, then tapped it and held his breath.
An electric blue line sizzled down the center of the huge screen, bisecting the planet through its poles! He drew in a sharp breath. “Good grief!” he intoned. “That’s what I’d call a section, all right!” He studied it a moment, then bent back eagerly to the controls. There was a small trackball in the center. Hmm, could it be? Purely by intuition, he rolled it a bit with his thumb and watched the screen. Yes, the blue line warped to the right in a big arc, still connected to the poles on the ends! It was now running down a mountain range. He let go. It stayed there, locked in position.
“Whaddaya know!” he whispered. “Let’s see if this does what I think it’ll do….” He tapped the PHOTO button. As the now-familiar whir immediately sounded behind him, he trotted back to the basket. This time, a very different photo was spewing out of a thin slot near the top, not so much a photo but a four-foot ribbon of paper, about six inches wide.
“Huh? What in the world?” He held it up by the ends and squinted at it, studying it from different angles. Suddenly he looked up with a start, his mind boggling with the answer. There was no mistake about it: The photo-strip was a silhouette, a perfect cross-section of the planet’s crust, running along a thin blue line from pole to pole! Even the sea floor showed in minute detail below a dotted line representing the surface!
Rolling it up, he flew back to the podium, beside himself with excitement. The ergonomically placed controls seemed to be laid out by a sensitive, intuitive mind. It only took a few minutes of brainstorming to come up with a sizeable list of logical conclusions. Without delay, he pressed a small blue control marked AREA.
A flashing blue rectangle appeared in the center of the screen! Wow, maybe the trackball could…. He nudged it a little with his thumb. As he’d anticipated, the rectangle slid smoothly in response! Grinning from ear to ear, he moved it around the screen, playing with the feel of it. In a moment, he placed it decisively over a very interesting spot, a large lake in the southern hemisphere.
“Hmm. Should I try to MAGNIFY?” He shrugged and pressed the button. A true geek, he’d always been one to push the envelope and drive any given machine to its limit. Why fight it now? He waited in eager anticipation. After a short spasm of fluttering, the screen faded to black, then snapped back into focus.
“Wow!” He stood on his toes. An aerial shot appeared, as if the ship were hovering only a few miles above the surface! Transfixed, he edged around the podium and walked right up to close the screen to study the surface. “This is amazing! Truly amazing!” he babbled in excitement, and then spun back around on his heels. He was totally hooked. The envelope had only been nudged; no blue smoke was coming out of the podium yet. He wrung his hands in excitement.
“Maybe, just maybe I can zoom in closer?” He studied the controls, his eyebrows raised in lock position. “Sure, why not? What the heck, anything’s possible!” He jabbed the AREA button again and carefully rolled the blue rectangle to a spot on the shore of the lake. “Now, MAGNIFY!” As before the screen faded to black, but this time it seemed to take much longer to display the results.
