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I leaned back once more, driven by a faint spark of curiosity, to get a glimpse of it, unobstructed by the steam. It looked even more fascinating. But it's all academic, I reasoned. The work with the bearings was finished. Besides, I was proud of the Zirconium/Platinum combination that I had invented, an alloy in which the platinum is suspended within a tight ceramic-aluminum lattice where it may act like so many ball bearings embedded in a sea of grease. It was the result of great genius, so I kept convincing myself. And boy, did it feel good to be so proud of oneself. The bearings would last a thousand years, I was sure of it.
My thoughts, however, were interrupted. I noticed Natalia coming from the changing rooms.
"Hey, what made you volunteer for this suicide mission," I asked her with the straightest face I could muster.
She stepped down into the steaming water. Her face showed some pain. "Oh it's hot," she uttered. Still, she looked perplexed when she made herself comfortable. She smiled. "Remember, you did that! Don't you recall how you twisted my arm to get me to join up?" Her smile turned into a grin.
Of course it wasn't like that at all. She would never have allowed herself to be twisted, not by anyone. Opinions and appearances carried as little weight with her, as the supposed glory of positions and titles, or the sting of gossip. What mattered to her, were results, the bottom line profit that enlarged her experience. Neither could she stand anything connected with bureaucracy, idleness, closed mind bickering. She was my kind of girl, a whirlwind in person. Whatever she came into contact with exploded into movement. I was glad she had chosen to come along. I hadn't twisted her arm at all. The mission itself had done that, the call of frontiers...
Her smile faded when I told her of our struggles in the belly of the ship. But could she judge the depth of those struggles? No, her face didn't reveal that. We had fought endless seeming hours in total weightlessness, in an atmosphere of chaos, the air filled with sweat, steam, and the noise of air driven tools, chains, winches, all interspersed by commands bellowed out by the foreman who conducted the disassembly of the still incredibly hot turbine generators. They were too hot to be touched with bare hands.
She responded by telling me that she wasn't at all surprised, only that it happened so soon. We had hardly gone a year, a mere three trillion kilometers, a pittance! It shouldn't have happened so soon that we faced these near impossible obstacles, not while our destination was still over four light-years away. "If this is the beginning, what in heavens will we yet have to face?" I heard myself asking, over and over, while the work was going on.
Our mission was to explore one of the two solar systems that are closest to Earth. If it had humanoid life on one of its planets, and these humanoid life forms were intelligent, and the civilizations they formed happened to be more advanced than ours, we stood to gain important knowledge that could be crucial for saving the lives of the human race itself. This was the reason for which the ship was build, to explore the Alpha Centauri system, a solar system which combined three suns locked together into a single gravitational structure of great complexity, which could theoretically have several planets with features similar to our Earth.
"A suicide mission," Natalia repeated. She shook her head. "No! That's not what this is. It's the opposite!" she said.
Her insistence reminded me of the enthusiasm I once had myself, for this mission. Mankind's greatest opportunity, I had called it. No, she shouldn't have needed to remind me of the fact that this wasn't just a mere game of exploration. It had evolved out of a most desperate effort to find answers to the challenging questions of how to maintain human existence on earth in the face of nuclear weapons, economic chaos, and an exploding pandemic of species-threatening diseases.
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Stories about
Love
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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