Adventures in Human Space: Across Time and Beyond, Vol. 3

By Sandy Sandfort

In Adventures in Human Space: Across Time and Beyond, Vol. 3, you will voyage to the very beginnings of Adventures in Human Space and discover who got cloned multiple times and why. You will learn about a top secret government project to clone a long dead 'cousins' of Man, the Neanderthal. You will witness a crazy conspiracy to go to Mars in a stolen craft. And, you will see penguins fly. All that and much, much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sandy Sandfort
• Release date: Mar 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311060532

Sandy Sandfort

I was conceived in Liberty... really, Liberty, Missouri, that is. For better or worse, I spent my formative years in that sleepy suburb of Kansas City. My parents were iconoclasts and took pride in being different from the common herd, an attitude I adopted and maintain to this day. My father's inquisitive and thoughtful nature were enormously influential in my life.Early on, I loved my TV western heroes--Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Cisco and Poncho. Then I discovered Tom Corbett--Space Cadet, Space Patrol, Rocky Jones--Space Ranger, et alia. And at age 7, I was radicalized by Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. So, I turned in my six-guns, strapped on a blaster and cavorted around the neighborhood with my brother in the spacesuits that my mother and father had crafted for us. During my teenage years, I survived on books by such authors as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson and especially Robert A. Heinlein who was also reared in the Kansas City area. It has been science fiction ever since.Went to school, got a BA, then returned to school and got my JD. I worked as a lawyer, discovered I really did not care for the law and went to California to work on a magazine called, FREEDOM TODAY. That is where I did my first serious non-fiction writing. Later that was followed by writing for such publications as MONDO 2000, WIRED, REASON, SOLDIER OF FORTUNE, MALAYSIA TATLER and the LA TIMES.In 2007, I attended the ROBERT A. HEINLEIN CENTENNIAL in Kansas City, where my short story "World Ceres" was one of the winners in the Centennial short story contest. Later, Big Head Press (http://www.bigheadpress.com/) ran a highly rated webcomic adapted from a series of short stories I wrote that were derived from "Ceres." That series of short stories, ADVENTURES IN HUMAN SPACE are available right here on Smashwords. See below. More stories in this series are in the works, as are other fiction and non-fiction stories and books. To get on my email notification list, please send an email to [e-mail] with "List" in the subject line.Sandy Sandfort

Book preview

Adventures In Human Space

Across Time and Beyond

Vol. 3

Sandy Sandfort

Copyright Sandy Sandfort 2014

This entire work is copyright and released under a Creative Commons U.S. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Please do not resell or give away copies. If you have friends whom you think would enjoy this book, please suggest they download a free preview before they buy. Thank You!

Foreword

You may be reading this book because you are a fan of Escape From Terra, (EFT) my very popular webcomic featured on the Big Head Press website. If you are not familiar with Big Head, check it out.

EFT was adapted from the stories in the Adventures in Human Space (AHS) series. Instead, others of you may have read Adventures in Human Space: The Belt and Beyond Vol. 1 or Adventures in Human Space: The Grand Tour and Beyond Vol. 2 (AHS-2).

Each medium—prose and graphic—has its own special ability to tell a story. If you like the stories in this volume, I suggest you see how they look as a graphic interpretation.

The history of AHS/EFT goes back to the summer of 2007, when I attended the Robert A. Heinlein Centennial celebration. One of the events was a short story writing contest. I didn't win or place, but I did show with my short story, World Ceres. The second story in AHS-I was a slightly different version of that original short story. Big Head Press liked World Ceres and asked me if I could make it into a series. I did and the rest is history. Enjoy!

Sandy Sandfort

Contents

Foreword

Neanne

Gone Missing

When Penguins Fly...

Vesta, Massachusetts

The Plume of the Eagle

FloraFauna

Whirligig

The Resurrections of Robert A. Heinlein: Genesis

Afterword

About the Author

Other Books by Sandy Sandfort

Neanne

Call from Sv. Robert Guzmán, Tobi heard through his ock implant. "Shall I put him through?

Yes, Claude, please connect him. Of course, all he really had to say was 'yes.' 'Dr. Claude Shannon' was an A.I., artificial intelligence. He didn't require repetition nor politeness, but Tobi preferred to maintain his standards for human interactions; even with machines.

Tobi here, he subvocalized, What may I do you for Bert?

Bert chuckled. How would you like to mount an insane rescue mission?

"Again, Tobi was in a silly mood. Like for real? I hope it is a beautiful damsel in distress."

"Actually, it is a damsel in distress. Though beautiful would depend on your taste. She's a Neanderthal, Tobi."

That silenced Tobi until Bert finally asked, "You there, Tobi?

"Yeah, yeah, I just wasn't prepared for that. What's the scoop? There's been talk about resurrecting a Neanderthal ever since they brought back the first mammoths, Tasmanian tigers and moas, but a Neanderthal? You know it was never a question of could we do it, just a matter of should we do it."

"Yeah, all that fussy ethical stuff," Bert joked.

So what's the story here and why the rescue?

Bert organized his thoughts for a couple of beats. "We're not sure what the big idea was, but the UW was doing it. About twenty Terran years ago, they set up a lab at the fringe of Conservation Park in the Western Australian desert—I guess for privacy. Apparently, they paid an aboriginal woman a lot of money to carry the Neanderthal fetus to term, then rear her as part of the family. They, and three other Aboriginal families, moved into the compound with the researchers and their families. That was done to create a sort of 'community' for Neanne as she grew up."

Neanne?

"Yup, 'knee-ANN,' short for 'Neanderthal,' real funny, huh? Anyway, nobody is quite sure why the UW cloned this girl, but there are some theories. One is that they just wanted to conduct some basic genetic research on the QT, so anti-cloning protesters—or worse, Teddies—couldn't screw up the research. A more paranoid theory was that the project was set up to create stronger, dumber and more compliant sub-human workers or soldiers. You know, a kind of Planet of the Apes sort of thing. No one really knows, but like all government projects, it took on a life of its own.

"By the way, the word is that Neanne is stronger than the average human and is highly intelligent and not compliant at all. She sounds like a typical sixteen-year old. Sounds like Ba... Libby."

Rescue? Tobi prompted.

Oh yeah, the population in the area was growing, so the UW moved everything—lock, stock and barrel—to Groom Lake in Nevada.

Tobi smiled, Ah yes, Area 51.

Kind of funny, I guess, opined Bert, "but here is where it gets not funny. Given the impending melt-down of the Continental and general crash of the economy, the UW is actually doing some house cleaning; it's too little, too late, but they are shutting down some programs. This includes the Groom Lake facility, which they are going to mothball. So the Neanderthal project is being terminated as well. The catch is, they don't know what to do with Neanne. They don't want the secret researched exposed, so they don't want to let her go, but they don't want to keep supporting her either, so... "

Those sons of bitches! exclaimed Tobi, They plan to terminate her too!

Yeah, but there's a lot of resistance from the researchers. However, the pro-death" faction already has legalistic rationalizations in place. You see, eliminating Neanne isn't murder, because it's not the unlawful killing of a human being without justification or excuse. If she's not a human being, no harm no foul, right? And get this, they have two justifications for saying that she isn't human..."

Tobi jumped in, Let me guess: one has to be that Neanderthals are not the same species as we are, so not human. Which, of course, is bullshit, from the DNA evidence. I'm at a loss for the other excuse though.

"She's 'synthetic,' Bert explained. She was cloned from DNA recovered from several different individuals. So she's way beyond, Heather has Two Mommies. She's got seven mommies and daddies. So she was just synthesized like Frankenstein's monster. Of course, that's bullshit too, but there's nobody to challenge these specious arguments. After she's dead and buried, they can say, 'Oh it was a terrible mistake, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.' Makes me want to puke. 'Course they can also say, 'What Neanderthal? We had no Neanderthal.'"

Something occurred to Tobi, So how do we know all this?

"The good news is, the Aboriginal families weren't prisoners. They were free to come and go, though they mostly stayed around the Australian compound. By the time the operation was moved to Groom Lake, Neanne's surrogate mother had died. Everybody stayed in Australia, except one family they got to go to Nevada. The son, Nowra and Neanne were sweet on each other so he probably got his family to go. In the meantime, the stay-at-homes talked, even though warned not to. Frankly, the UW people weren't too worried if they did. After all, who's going to believe a bunch of primitive 'Abos,' right?" Bert had intentionally used the offensive Australian word.

"The aboriginals never bought the cover story that the child was mixed, Polynesian and Caucasian—her skin was white and she was more-or-less red-headed. They told some human rights workers in Australia the story. The rights workers were dubious, but then they revealed their evidence. They had secretly taken photos of Neanne. Gee, they didn't know those backward Abos were smart enough to operate a camera. But here's the kicker, they also provided hair samples."

Tobi smiled and offered, Hey, maybe that was just yeti hair.

"Ha ha. So the human rights workers checked out the site of the compound, but it had been razed to the ground and the soil saturated with bleach. Mount Carmel all over again."

Tobi had another question, So how do you come into this?

My mom and Reggie King, learned about it on their, uh, honeymoon. He heard Tobi snort, but continued, They were talking to Frank Martin, a newspaper editor on Mercury.

"The Tattler," know it well, but I don't read it for the news, just the gossip. As a public figure, I get invited to lots of social events. When I greet people, it's always useful to know who's shtupping whom."

"I'll keep that in mind, Tobi. Anyway, one of Martin's investigative reporters got the story from the human rights workers. Martin spiked the story, though. He feared that it would just get Neanne erased. When he recognized Reggie and Mom—they were incognito—he figured that they might be able to do something creative, like putting nukes in their pants and walking into Groom Lake. They talked to Ernie and me and I'm talking to you."

Next to last question, Tobi began, How do we know about the plan to put Neanne down?

"We have a man on the inside. Actually, it's Nowra, Neanne's boyfriend. He 'accidentally' overheard some of the lab people arguing about it.

"Well, he and his family were allowed to communicate with friends and family, back in Australia. Their calls were monitored and they were told to speak in English, but Nowra got permission to speak to his grandmother in Bunuba, because that was supposedly the only language she spoke. Not true, but the government bought it. Their project linguist had very little knowledge of the language—there are only a hundred or so speakers left. Plus, Nowra and granny salted their calls with so many idioms, slang terms and family language, the listener were totally lost. Not wanting to admit failure to her superiors, the linguist mostly pretended to listen after the first few calls.

During the calls, Nowra asked his family to send him an unlocked black market comm in a 'Care Package' from home. They sent the comm insert into a durian fruit. Durians are from Southeast Asia, but readily found in Australian Chinese markets. They picked a durian, because it's large and...

... smells like shit, literally, Tobi finished. Know it, hate it, but I'm sure it would be great for smuggling black market comms. Anyone who examined it would be repelled by the smell.

Bert continued, So we have a man inside, secure communications and we know the layout of the place. All we need is...

"... me. Okay, I'm in. Last question, what do you need from me?"

Money, guns and lawyers? Bert suggested. Tobi smiled. Then they got down to business.

* * *

Tobi and Bert called a meeting to bring others into the Pleistocene Plot, as they were already calling it. They would have liked to have met on Luna, for its proximity to Terra, but that was too risky. So they chose the next best place, SkyLand Theme Park.

Arana Awatere lived in a large apartment on the third floor of the dark and ominous, Forbidden Castle, which sat on an island in Hollow Earth's inner, equatorial lake. It really was forbidden. Park guests were kept off the island by the A.I.s in their rental watercraft. If someone tried to swim there, a huge mechanical sea serpent would swallow them, return them to lake's shore, regurgitate them, and warning them not to try that again, or 'else.' Of course, 'or else' was just 'rinse and repeat,' but for all the guests knew, there might be no regurgitation the next time. The only access to the castle was via the Underground Railroad as Tobi insisted the three, pole-to-pole tunnels be called. They were used to access environment equipment, deliver supplies and let Park Troupers to get from one area of Hollow Earth to another, rapidly and without being seen by Park guests.

Tobi also had a suite on the same floor, where he stayed when he was visiting SkyLand. The castle's fourth floor was the highest point in the castle. It contained guest rooms for VIPs and a large conference room, but the conspirators decided to meet in Tobi's suite. The living room was more than large enough to seat everyone comfortably. The conspirators were Tobi, Bert, Ernie, Tobi's personal bodyguards, Nisa and Mac, Commander Drenkowski, Arana Awatere and Tobi's incorporeal, but ubiquitous, A.I. virtual assistant, Claude Shannon. The furnishings were Spartan except for the art on the room's walls. They were decorated with dozens of fantasy paintings.

Okay, said Ernie, I see you are a big Frazetta fan... and is that a Boris Vallejo piece?

You have a good eye, Tobi replied. Most are ultra-res prints, but the one you are looking at is an original. Cost me an arm and a leg.

Yeah, but you've got more arms and legs than anyone, Ernie observed.

Without warning, a high pitched curse blasted from Mac, "Son of a bitch! She turned a red, angry face toward Tobi. Is this supposed to be me and Nisa, as naked Boris bimbos, doing... well, I'm not sure what. Anyway, where did you get this and what's the big idea?"

Tobi was sheepish, Well, uh, did you know that Arana also paints? I sort of asked him to paint me something in the style of Frazetta... he... he's the one who suggested making it of you two... Totally his idea. Out of the corner of his eye, Tobi could see Arana glowering at him.

Nisa jumped in. Bullshit! Tobi, you are a perv. Maybe we should invoke the Public Exploder failsafe!"

That actually made Tobi giggle for several seconds. Everyone else, though, exhibited a complete lack of comprehension.

Public Exploder? asked Ernie and Bert simultaneously. That amused everyone and even Nisa and Mac could not help smiling.

Oh it's a little safety feature I set up. I have a gram of plastique implanted in my brain. Seven people—including Mac and Nisa—have detonators. If any four of the seven push their buttons, a signal will be sent by tanglenet and my head will explode.

The announcement was met with utter silence and mouth-agape stares.

Finally, Ernie broke the silence, And you did this... why?

Tobi smiled and explained, "One of my favorite writers, Voltaire, said, 'An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.' I tend to agree, but here's my problem. I have a lot of financial power; maybe too much power. My home is a whole world. Yes, a small world, but The Little Prince still has thousands of inhabitants living there. One way or another, they all work for me. That is a lot of power; I don't want to be tempted to abuse it.