Copernican Journey

By Len Robertson

Twenty-eight years after it’s first contact with other civilizations, Earth is divided between the Neo Darwinists who exploit the latest sciences and technologies as they seek to make the Cosmos their private goldmine, and the People-of-the-Book who fear armed interference by the vast empires beyond Earth.

Into this turmoil, step Dr. Jennifer Colbert, biologist, and Boone Dalton, a race driver surgically altered by scientists after a suspicious accident. Boone and Jennifer have an inadvertent blood exchange following an assassination attempt that proves to be key to their surviving android ambushes, and a terrible Martian pandemic. This mismatched pair must, learn to work together as they become the first humans robust enough to colonize the Cosmos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Len Robertson
• Release date: May 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311769107

Len Robertson

Len Robertson is the author of 6 science fiction and fantasy books, including his most recent release, Revelations, which won 3rd place in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Category at the 2010 Pacific Northwest Writers Conference.He is a regular contributor to the opinion pages of the Chicago Tribune and an avid follower of recent activities in astronomy, space travel and the search for life on other planets.He currently lives in St, Charles, Illinois with his wife and loves to travel to places like Italy, Turkey, and New Zealand.

Book preview

October 29 CE (old calendar date: 2046)

Ius Chasma, Mars

The wall screen in Jennifer Strand’s lab brightened as she entered the room. A message in large block letters spread across the screen. Jennifer, it read, I think you need to see this.

See what, Jennifer wondered? Ulysses, she commanded the Ius Chasma’s central server. Display any attachments.

Nothing. Ulysses, display attachments.

The screen remained blank.

Another message spread across the screen. Password. The scientist that’s your mother’s namesake.

What? Oh. Marie Curie.

The screen continued blank.

The message had to have come from Boone Dalton, Jennifer groused to herself. The man could be so old-fashioned at times. Ulysses. On-screen holographic keyboard, please.

The name of the famous early 20th Century scientist flowed from Jennifer’s fingertips onto the keyboard hovering before her. She had written Marie Curie’s name so many times in the past it felt as familiar as her own. A moment later, Jennifer found herself looking at the desk she used in high school, a time that seemed to her as remote as the Dark Ages.

Only something didn’t seem right. Ulysses, she commanded. Up close and personal

Instantly, a golem of herself appeared in a three-dimensional, holographic room with a desk and chairs. The desk and chairs was hers, but not the room. It seemed too large. She could only think of two rooms in her mother’s house that looked as large as the room she viewed: the living room and her mother’s home laboratory. She caught a glimpse of windows rimming the room. The windows fit her mother’s lab only the room looked nothing like a lab. Not with all the books lining shelves along the wall.

Realization hit Jennifer like a hammer. It was her long-dead father’s library. But how? Why?

It was then that she saw a man’s hand and an index finger pointing to a series of folders neatly stacked on her old desk. What are the folders, she wondered? And, who was the man? As she puzzled the identity of the man, a cursor appeared where the man’s hand had been moments earlier.

Jennifer golem opened the top folder titled Whom The Gods Would Destroy. To her amazement, the folder held documents that dated back to the 160’s BCE (1880’s old calendar). The man’s hand reappeared on the screen. This time, it held a pencil. The pencil scribbled a comment along the documents’ margin. She recognized the handwriting. It belonged to her father, as did the hand.

Her golem turned the folders beneath Gods. Below it were folders titled, Puppet Master, Puppet Master’s Circus, and Fallacies Of Light, Laugher, and ending with Revelations. There were fourteen folders in all, some of them were heavy with notes and documentation, others were nearly empty, and none of them were familiar. The last folder’s title gave her a clue. They had to be documents relating to Revelations, the unpublished sequel to her father’s controversial book Manifest Destiny, lost since his assassination twenty-one years earlier. Her mother believed the book and everything relating to it had been stolen by the ruthless Neo-Darwinist, CR, yet here the papers were.

Tomorrow, she would be making the biggest decision in her life and at the last minute someone hands her Revelations, the book that explained it all. In stunned disbelief, Jennifer closed the file. Considering how crazy her life has been since she met Boone, it made perfect sense.

Whom The Gods Would Destroy

Jennifer perused her father’s folder

Whom The Gods Would Destroy

Odd

He compiled hundreds of notes on William Gladstone

Britain’s great 19th Century Prime Minister

And the Suez crisis that led to Britain’s invasion

In the fall of 140 BCE (old calendar date: 1882)

How this obscure British conflict of the 2nd Century BCE (old calendar 19th Century)

Related to the First Century CE

(Old calendar 21st)

Eluded

Her

Thirteen Months Earlier

San Francisco

Jennifer recalled only a few details about her long-dead father, Oscar Strand, but she remembered him being fearless and strong, especially when it came to Mars and humanity’s future. He would talk endlessly about Martians to anyone who would listen, and she found his stories magical. But, as she learned years later, many of his colleagues hated Mars and the notion of human colonization across the solar system. They found her father tiresome. That a little book of his ideas called Manifest Destiny proved to be the most controversial and talked-about volume since Darwin’s Origin of the Species only made her father and Mars more impossible in the minds of his detractors. To avoid the notoriety of the Oscar Strand legacy, Jennifer used her mother’s last name, and for years, denied that her father was Strand. It was a matter of survival, really. Fighting to protect his good name once nearly got her killed.

The portion of the academic world that detested her father had hardly changed in the two decades since his death. Just about everyone at the Discovery Institute thought she had lost her mind to exchange her comfortable Across-the-Bay, Mill Valley lifestyle for that of rough, raw Mars, but she didn’t care. There had been persistent rumors about organic life in a cavern near a mining town called Ius Chasma City, and she meant to seek them out. She smiled. I am definitely Oscar Strand’s daughter to risk my career by applying for a grant to Mars.

Two formidable barriers stood between Jennifer and the on-site research, however. As a junior level scientist, she needed the sign-off from Remington Khu, Chairman of Discovery Institute, and the approval of the People-of-the-Book (better known as PoB) watchdogs. Khu, for his part, was so tight-fisted that he expected researchers like her to dine on sack lunches while traveling cross-country on packed subsonic, cattle-car flights or the faster 900 mile-per-hour Hyperloop tubes, but boarding the tubes took forever unless one had a firm reservation and paid full fare days in advance. Rarely were novice scientists allowed to accompany him aboard posh intercontinental suborbital flights. What he would say to a ticket to Mars would probably be censored in polite company. As to the likelihood of the grant request surviving PoB attack dogs; she guessed her chances were no better than a hundred to one. She saw one consolation: If her Mars proposal vanished into the system or was simply rejected, she could chalk her failure to experience. Next time she might be successful.

A chime from her cheap, off-brand smart watch drew Jennifer’s eye. She glanced its holograph to see a line of deep-water hovercraft racing across the Arctic Ocean. The Pole-to-Pole Classic had started. She hurried to her locker to change from her lab clothes to something more presentable. She planned celebrating completion of her Mars proposal at the local pub even if it meant suffering through the silly race. The pub played music and everyone danced and had fun once the race got underway.

Whom The Gods Would Destroy (continued)

Our first bite in Egypt by larceny or exception

Gladstone said in 145 BCE (old calendar: 1877)

"Will be the almost certain egg of a North African expansion

That will grow and grow

…Till we finally join hands across the equator…"¹

Jennifer studied her father’s scribble in the margin.

"Historians call Gladstone’s 140 BCE (old calendar: 1882) occupation of Egypt

‘A classic case of unintended consequences’.

I say nonsense

Someone intended for it to happen"

At a Racing Platform in the Arctic Ocean

Today marked Boone Dalton’s last high-speed Pole-to-Pole boat race; a fact he would rudely discover within seventeen hours. Boone blocked out the salty tang of the ocean air and the dull roar of the crowd as he made a critical final inspection of his racing boat, Pioneer Spirit.

A piercing voice broke his concentration. Boone! Over here.

Boone recognized June Williams, the attractive sports media face of Posterity Inc. Under the ruthless Neo-Darwinist hand of Calvin Ritsch, known from Mercury to Neptune as CR, Posterity had become the largest and most powerful corporation in the solar system. If humans acquired interstellar flight, as the jokes went, CR would lay claim to half of the galaxy. Evidently, June had been assigned as Prosperity’s color anchor for the Pole-To-Pole Classic.

Boone ignored the stylishly clad woman. An interruption in his pre-race routine counted as the last thing he needed in the minutes before the beginning of the Classic, the longest and richest hovercraft race in the world.

Anyway, on the one occasion he asked her for a date, she arrogantly reminded him that he just wasn’t in her class. For starters, she was a Rhodes scholar who had twice been nominated for a Pulitzer, while Boone had never even attended college. That she had been selected the best-dressed media anchor three years running only rubbed salt into his wounded ego.

Boone, June called again as she approached him. I need you. CR wants you to do an interview for your billions of fans. One that can be played repeatedly during the race.

Not now, June. Boone muttered several well-chosen words to himself before he continued. I haven’t completed my safety check.

She stepped closer, her perfume teasing his senses. Your fans demand it, she said in a low, sultry voice, CR demands it.

He fingered his helmet as he considered her request. What she asked was ridiculous. Any moment now, the siren would summon race drivers to their boats and there would be no time for anything, especially interviews. It would take all of thirty seconds for him to zip his insulated, orange survival suit, don his helmet and show his back to the woman.

Bad idea, he reminded himself. One didn’t snub a media icon like June or a trillionaire like CR and expect a career afterward.

Look, we’re already set up and the camera is cued. Won’t take more than a minute. Two at most.

The siren shrilled.

I gotta go, Boone yelled.

Before he could escape, she clung to his arm and positioned him so Pioneer Spirit appeared in the background. She remotely focused her hovering camera, flipped her hair, and unzipped her Artic parka to reveal cleavage. This is June Williams reporting for Posterity Inc. I have Boone Dalton, five-time winner of the Classic with me. Boone, how do you like your chances today?

Good. Boone felt trapped, but he forced a broad smile. "Spirit is as ready as she can ever be. I’m looking forward to the Winner’s Podium."

Jack Spinner qualified second to you in the last two Classic time trials and he finished second in the race both times. Now, qualifications are reversed. Does it mean we’ll have a new champ?

For some reason, the woman seemed determined to knock him off his stride. She evidently knew about the death of his parents in an air crash only weeks before his first victory at the Classic in ‘39, his later regretted decision to race rather than attend their funeral, and his many arrests for public intoxication in the years following that race. Boone maintained his composure. It’s a long race, and I have a great ride. I like our chances.

There you have it, people. Boone Dalton promises to bring it all home one more time. Better run, Boone. I heard the five-minute siren. June released his arm and turned to Boone’s billion fans while he sprinted for the staging area.

Sixty seconds before the one-minute siren, he scrambled aboard Spirit, already afloat in the water. He eased himself into the hovercraft’s tiny cockpit and waved to the crowd one last time as his pit crew struggled with Spirit’s balky engines. The lift turbine refused to start.

As he waited on the unruly engine to engage, he thought back to the interview. June’s timing nagged him. She knew that distractions before a major race were verboten. It didn’t seem likely that CR ordered the last-minute spot as she claimed. CR never interfered with his crews before a race. Still, the Classic was special and Boone had never qualified as low as third. Was it his way of warning Boone he was expendable in spite of his past victories?

He heard the howl of the one-minute siren in the distance. At the same moment, the lift turbine whined to life. Boone grinned. The Classic waited on no one, but he would be early to the starting line. With a little luck, he might just win back that those precious three minutes from Spinner.

Whom The Gods Would Destroy (continued)

Jennifer reread the rumpled document three times

William Gladstone

The great British Prime Minister

Opposed to schemes that meant colonizing Africa

Possessed Egyptian Suez bonds worth $2,000,000.

In 2nd Century BCE British Pound Sterling

($ 2,000, 000,000,000 in mid-1st Century CE worldcoin)

At the time of the Suez crisis.²

She strained her eyes to read her father’s brief comment in pencil

Unknown for 108 years. Excellent, but I need more.

Far South Pacific

Seventeen Hours into the Race

The first hint Boone had that he was in trouble came from a sudden diamond-bright light that strobed erratically on the horizon. He recognized it instantly as the reflection of icebergs—known to Deep Ocean hovercraft jockeys like himself, as growler packs. Yet, that couldn’t be possible. He had passed Macquarie Island not twenty minutes earlier, and satellite mapping on his racer’s screen plainly showed Antarctica’s growler packs still below Sturge Island of the Belleny group, which lay 560 kilometers from Cape Adare in Antarctica.

Boone’s fingers flew over the meter wide touch-screen console as the attitude klaxon squealed in protest. His short-range radar verified the icebergs three kilometers dead ahead. A whole field of growlers lay before him and he was almost on top of them.

As he struggled to control Spirit, Boone reminded himself how catastrophe prone deep ocean racers were. Racers like Spirit were little more than twelve-meter wide Frisbees with turbo power and skirts three meters long that dragged the water. Had to lift her skirts higher. Could trip and stumble if he didn’t. He had (he hoped) at least five seconds to react.

To stretch that fatal fifth second, he slowed his airspeed from Mach 0.8 to Mach 0.7, then increased power on the lift turbine and eased the stick to the left. The boat lurched to her maximum altitude of 9.7 meters. The screaming lift turbine drowned the attitude klaxon as it jammed additional metric tons of precious air beneath the skirt. Boone felt the boat shudder and he saw the stall light flash crimson as he banked the hovercraft steeply.

Suddenly, Spirit’s skirt snagged a wave. The collision siren’s shriek deafened Boone as he overrode the fly-by-wire computer controls and gave the machine hard, full rudder. The stall light winked out and the siren died away. Close call. The racer’s sleek design allowed its jockey thirty degrees off its plane. That last snag wrenched her at least twenty.

Moments earlier, the iceberg blocking his way had been little more than a rough, somewhat overly large petal amid a field of silvery lilies. Now, the iceberg’s frigid forward wall rose over him, and he imagined its jagged face flaying his hovercraft.

Once more, he banked Spirit sharply left. Again, her trailing skirt gouged the crest of a roller. The machine bucked violently and teetered on its fragile air cushion, alarms howling like an infernal symphony. Boone grinned as his fingers flew across the command console and steadied the trembling boat. His skill at the helm hadn’t been challenged this harshly since he raced Super-Ten hydroplanes on Wisconsin lakes as a kid.

Boone hoped he could congratulate himself for his clever stunt, but the outcome remained in doubt. He still traveled faster than Mach 0.5 and the iceberg loomed so close he swore he saw himself in its reflection. He guessed he stood about a second from extinction. A full power touchdown on the open sea seemed a 5-to-1 shot at best but it remained his only hope. He jammed the button to kill Spirit’s lift turbine while simultaneously deploying her speed brake. Keep her nose up, he warned himself. He needed a perfect Sully landing. If he let her drop more than thirty degrees at the bow, she would bite a swell and flip end-for-end.

As the lift turbine died, the hovercraft fishtailed unsteadily. He gave the twin power turbines steady full throttle as Spirit descended those last few meters. He imagined himself balancing a squirming flounder on the naked point of a sewing needle and found it easy compared to navigating his racer through this pack ice.

All wildly implausible, yet it worked. The boat’s speed dropped to a manageable 200K or so and her skirts skimmed the tops of the rolling ocean swells. Everything looked good. Even her sensors had ceased their screaming. Fifty meters of clear water and he and Spirit would fly free.

A slender ice-tooth surged in the swells dead ahead. The spike wasn’t massive or huge like its brothers and cousins to either side. It was a mere sliver carved from a growler but Boone remembered what he had been taught in high school science about ice suspended in salt water. Enough bulk lay beneath that sliver to kill his ride, and it bobbed less than 20 meters away.

The cockpit became deathly quiet. Only a single light flashed. The onboard computer had already sensed an unavoidable collision and had activated the boat’s ejection capsule. An instant later, Boone became a human bullet fired from an oversized gun.

In the brief interval between his abrupt departure from the cockpit and Spirit ramming the ice tooth, Boone imagined he would witness the boat somersaulting bow-stern, bow-stern across the swells as she strode to her doom, or transformed into a majestic crystal shattered into a gazillion shards by a giant fist. Or, at the very least, celebrated as a great champion by slipping gracefully beneath the waves for a well-deserved rest.

Unfortunately, the fanfare for Pioneer Spirit existed only in Boone’s mind. As he watched helplessly from his rising vantage point high overhead, the hovercraft simply slammed across the ice tooth with a loud thud and sank in a small pool of bubbles, her bowels ripped apart by the unforgiving spike.

Boone’s beautiful machine deserved a last goodbye, but his ejection seat demanded his immediate attention as it yawed unaccountably to the left. He scanned the capsule’s rump console with its four lights and tiny, holographic touch-screen for the source of the trouble. An amber light revealed the cause. One of the seat’s four attitude thrusters had malfunctioned. Instead of operating intermittently to stabilize the capsule in its free flight, the thruster fired continuously. If he didn’t shut down that errant thruster or compensate with the other three, the capsule’s para-wing couldn’t be successfully deployed and he’d die as ingloriously as his hovercraft.

He pressed, in turn, the manual firing mechanism for each of the thrusters, but nothing changed. He couldn’t ignite three of them and the unruly fourth wouldn’t die. Now, he detected the sharp odor of an electrical short circuit. This shouldn’t be happening.

Boone thought hard. His mechanics ran repeated diagnostics. He did a last minute diagnostic. Correction: he ran a general diagnostic only. He didn’t have the time for a fail-safe, manual check of his ejection seat due to June William’s ill-timed interruption. Boone had never experienced so many system failures.

No time for distractions, he warned himself, as the acrid smell of the electrical fire intensified. Focus. Remove the ejection seat’s override cover. Manually disable the thruster.

Boone tested the console’s fasteners with his fingers on the off chance they were loose. They weren’t. He tried again, savagely ripping his fingernails against the unyielding alloy fasteners. Then, again. And again. Just before his ejection seat slammed into the icy Pacific, a stark realization ran through his mind. Someone had sabotaged Spirit and June Williams played a part. Who got to her? Was it Spinner?

Puppet Master

A picture of a powerful man in Oxford tweed

Topped the second chapter of Revelations

Who? Cecil Rhodes? Ah, Mining and Railroads. De Beers diamonds

A quote by a peer "Men are ruled by their foibles

And Rhodes’ foible is size"³

In pencil Obviously.

October 28 CE (old calendar 2045)

San Francisco

On the inauspicious day that marked the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of Mars’ greatest advocate: her father, Jennifer regarded an email with suspicion. The return address indicated she had a response to her Mars proposal. It must be a request for more information, she thought. Or, she had not filled out all of the paperwork properly.

Biting her lip, Jennifer took a deep breath and began reading the document. The next moment, she sprawled into a chair hyperventilating. As she did, her mind turned to her dead parents, a habit that kept them alive in her mind.

Loki screwed up, she laughed. Loki might be the Scandinavian god dedicated to keeping Swedes like me miserable, but this time he screwed up royally, Dad; my grant came through. Come next September, I’m going to Mars.

As she leaned back to reread the email, Jennifer’s eyes fell upon an old picture of a small, dark- haired woman in a white lab jacket peering into an old binocular optical microscope.

Mom, you would have loved going to Mars, too. And you would have found those mysterious Martian organisms about a minute after you got there. But thanks to crazy Loki, they didn’t send you. Or, anyone like you. Soldiers went to Mars, instead. Well, maybe not soldiers, but miners and geologists, which are almost as bad.

Only the Norse trickster god, she realized, could fully appreciate this irony: the first organic life confirmed beyond Earth wasn’t found on the Red Planet, but on oddball Water World twenty light years from Earth. Even now, decades after astronomers confirmed Water World as the first living planet, it seemed strange. Water World was nearly eight times larger than Earth; but, with ice for a core instead of iron, its surface gravity remained about the same as that of Earth. Humans would feel right at home but for the fact there would be no place to stand.

Years earlier, her graduate exobiology professor put Water World into perspective.

Think through the looking glass, he insisted. Everything on Water World appears backwards. We live on a rocky planet that got its oceans from ice asteroids that crashed eons ago. We think the minerals on Water World came from iron asteroids. Minerals, in fact, may be the defining difference between the two planets; aside from the fact that we would need infrared glasses to see anything because the weak light from its tiny, red dwarf star, Gliese 581, would otherwise leave us blind.

Does that mean, Jen remembered the know-it-all next to her asking, that creatures on Water World are more like ancient Ediacaran⁴ fauna like Dickensonia or Cyclomedusa, than turtles or crabs?

The professor shrugged. That’s what we really don’t know. For some reason, we find a sharp difference between the atmospheres of Water World and the Aquarian planets surrounding it. Some say the water accounts for the difference, but many of us suspect a far more important reason. Anyone know what that might be?

Jennifer raised her hand, but the same source of annoyance seated next to her caught the professor’s eye. Sir, could a sentient species older than the Aquarian Empire live on Water World?

Hard to know for sure, but that’s what we presume, the professor replied. People, what rule should guide our thinking about this matter?

All the hands in the class shot up. Kaku’s rule.⁵

And that is?

Anything not proven to be impossible is mandatory.

"Close enough. He actually said ‘anything not impossible,’ leaving out the word ‘proven’. Oscar Strand, a controversial historian whose work, Manifest Destiny some of you may have read, added that later. Yet, Kaku’s intent is clear." It was obvious from the way the professor’s face twisted at the mention of Oscar Strand’s Destiny that he hated it. It was also plain that the professor had no inkling that she was Strand’s daughter.

Jennifer remembered that day with clarity for other reasons, also. For one, it happened not long after an ugly incident at the university forced her to adopt her mother’s maiden name. For another, she overslept, and got a traffic ticket rushing to class in her little electric runabout. She wasn’t about to be upstaged twice by the twit who already had his hand up a third time, especially since she had read one of the professor’s books on extraterrestrial life. She usually sat hunched forward, her fingers twisting her hair as she absorbed the day’s lesson, but now she sat up, waved her hand in front of the twerp, and asked Sir, what about Van Biesbroek 10 c?

The professor beamed. Very good, Ms. Colbert. I gather you read my books. Curious planet: ‘c’. It’s a solid planet six times as large as Earth with an oxygen atmosphere, yet it’s less dense than hydrogen. Is it an artificial construct: that question bothers everyone I know.

Well is it? everyone wanted to know.

Don’t know, the professor answered with a wolfish grin.

When will we know? everyone asked.

"When we can travel to other stars. That’s when. How long that will take, I don’t know and I can’t think of anyone who does. It’s a difficult problem that makes the 70-year quest for fusion power child’s play. But, if I had to guess, I think it will happen sometime in next twenty years.

"Even before the Moses Lake Affair, we knew that faster-than-light communication and travel existed thanks to the military’s concession in 2012 that UFO’s are real.⁶ After the unfortunate Moses Lake Affair that could have gone very badly for us, we learned that we were caught like the thirty planet, Alpha Centauri civilization, between the huge 30,000 world Betan civilization and the gigantic million world Aquarian civilization.

Squeezed as they say between Scylla and Charybdis, we had no choice but to embark on a quest for faster than light travel. When the Aquarians said that unless we bowed low to them we would never be given the gift of interstellar flight that they had so generously bestowed upon others, we elevated our world wide faster-than-light research to Manhattan Project priority. As I said, we should be star-bound soon.

The professor thought for a moment. "As for VB 10 c, call it just one more mystery like Water World and Methuselah d orbiting HD 140283, the star older than the Universe, to nag our idle minds and keep us awake until dawn. And, write scholarly tomes on VB 10, Water World and Methuselah that this young lady evidently reads, of course. By the way, Ms. Colbert, I’m working on my third. It points out how illogical for people to think that Methuselah alone seeds our galaxy, much less the entire Universe."

Jennifer recalled being so irked by the professor’s evident distaste for her father and his parting remark that day that she never touched another of his books. Still, he had been right about Water World, Methuselah d and VB 10 c. Those three planets plagued her for weeks afterward, and she mentioned them when she visited her mother, Marie Curie Colbert, at the Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.

Marie, who was recovering from a bout of stage four, breast cancer, seemed amused by her questions about life on Water World. Jennifer, the more we learn about life across the Cosmos, the more convergence we find. Martinus Beijerinck, the great Dutch microbiologist, spoke the truth when he said over a century ago, ‘everything is everywhere.’⁷

But that means we could find people like ourselves on Water World, she remembered herself arguing. How could that be?

Maybe not ourselves, Jennifer, but we might find organisms we recognize as we study a single drop from Water World. Remember Beijerinck’s Dutch colleague, Lourens Baas-Becking, who credited the game changing, biological premise ‘everything is everywhere’ to Beijerinck, while adding a crucial caution his own.

You mean ‘the environment selects?’⁸

Exactly. The environment selects. Every time I read about Mars, Europa, or Titan, I wish I were your age so I could explore them. As for Water World, studying the native life of another solar system would be a dream come true.

Methuselah d, her mother continued, "is a nightmare for everyone. The Pan Spermians come down with migraines when they think about their elegant design of life spreading across the Cosmos from some place long ago and far away and how loose cannon, Johnny Appleseed ‘d’ from beyond the beginning of time turns all that on its head.

As for the Creationists and the Darwinists, they get red faced at the mention of Methuselah d, mutter about ‘damned liberals’ and walk away.

Both of them, Mom?

Both of them. I don’t know which of them is more hidebound and stubborn.

Marie chuckled. The only ones who should be smug about Methuselah are the Intelligent Designer’s but they’ve caught so much flak from everyone else that they pretty much avoid biology conferences. I don’t know if I’ve talked to them in years.

What about VB 10 c, Mom?

"I haven’t given it much thought, Jenny. Frankly, it seems more like a lost artifact than a living thing. I’m much more interested in Mars. Life is there. We just haven’t asked the right questions."

As Jennifer listened to her mother describe the aggressive Martian research approach she would have taken, Jennifer saw the cancer pallor drain from her face. Marie’s dark eyes flashed with renewed vigor and, just for a moment, she became once