The Strivers: Adventure in Science, and Significance Forging a Fueled Future for Mankind

By Phil Wallace Payne

Civilization is in an energy crisis. Human beings have wasted away the majority of their natural resources, but without energy, the world will die. Who will come to the rescue? In secret, a technical team of geniuses has developed a way to harvest usable and never ending energy from polar seas. In concept, their mission is simple; in delivery, it proves to be difficult and possibly tragic. The Strivers tells a story of life, love, and the labors undertaken by a brave few who believe in the energy of the ocean. From diverse backgrounds, the team is brought together by a shared mission; they change each other, and relationships evolve that never would have flourished without the worlds energy crisis. They are inventors, but they are also human beings, looking for connection in an inhospitable place. With luck, the team will find a way to convert ocean energy into the next great fuel for mankind. If they fail, they will not only lose their own lives, but they will cause the extinction of planet Earth. Human life is in the hands of the strivers, who must harness the fury of the sea to save the world. Will they succeed, or will the weakness of their humanity make them fail?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781477162712

Phil Wallace Payne

As a rocket scientist, Phil Wallace Payne directed 105 space launches, where he gleaned an extensive knowledge of different fuels. He has been a trans-oceanic navigator, sailor, and sea diver for many years. He currently lives on the coast of California.

Book preview

The Strivers:

Adventure in Science, and Significance

Forging a Fueled Future For Mankind

cover.tif

By:

Phil Wallace Payne

Copyright © 2011 by Phil Wallace Payne. 98408-PAYN

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011914053

ISBN: Softcover 978-1-4653-4870-8

Hardcover 978-1-4653-4871-5

Ebook 978-1-4771-6271-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Xlibris Corporation

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www.Xlibris.com

Contents

Book I

The Cause

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

Book II

Consequences

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

Book III

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

Book IV

The Great Tour

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

The moving finger Writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

–– Rubayat of Omar Kayyam

as translated by Edward Fitzgerald

Preface

This is the present. You touch these pages, and you are reading. Things happened in the past, and you cannot change them.

In this narrative, the past which precedes your present will arrive to your eyes dustily through these words and pictures. It will come in that tense as you turn the pages.

That past is soiled in that only your mind can live in it. You, yourself, cannot … nor change it.

In veneration of human struggle, it will come like a weathered Ute or Dakota Indian, wrinkled, weakened, wise, but bearing vivid memory, to tell you how the present of these pages got here. What we see, what we apprehend, what takes place, always results from what transpired before –– despite Michelson & Morley, the Red Shift, the Big Bang Theory, and your narrator’s former colleagues in sending missions out to voyage in airless space.

Reflection on the pool of Memory is the Road to Reason. That is a lesson irrefutably logical, but widely unappreciated.

All that happens arises out of Origins. Some of these are tracks of forces we take for granted. Some are hills and valleys, substantialities so formed. Yet they, too, move.

Great mountains grow in pressures of time, and then subside. Some entities, seeming less substantial, are only thoughts, realizations by humans grasping insights, aching in their perceptions of events, understandings of decays, of dire drifts, and of thriving and disasters therefrom. Many improvements and most decays occur so slowly that common humankind does not notice. This story is one of those. It is significant in times and futures.

Not grasping the threads of change is a pattern typically antecedent of humanity’s worst disasters. Slow forces and movements they cause, are often unappreciated except to an observant and contemplative few. So here. Together we shall compress and illuminate.

It is hardly convention for a tale of humans tied to technology (as are we all today) to begin with narrative of place and time, as if they were players in a picture of passions. But this story is serious for the future of mankind, and so sets out, as struggle for creation of new perceptions, rich possibilities, to benefit the many.

Stories, are creatures of our telling. They have beginnings and ends, artifacts of our narration. Reality has neither. It has events in continuum. Each happening has prevenient cause, often beyond comprehension by the puzzling minds of humankind, lacking as we are in omniscience. Events have causes and results. The latter trigger new events. These have consequence. Existence is continuum.

Always we arrive in the middle, never at start. Therefore events surprise us; often they overwhelm us. Sources are perversely mysterious, and meanings are lost in the moil of events unknown. Causes and routes traveled are obscure, mysterious. Since we hardly know what youth or which historian is looking on, full fallout of events far reach is quickly beyond our ken. Real happenings have causes back in primordial time. Occurrences have consequence long after and far beyond origins, locale, and lives at hand.

So here. Good telling of happenings –– fact or fiction –– has talents in the tale. Beginning and End must strive to armature these.

Let your mind fly to, ENERGY, that nexus of so much striving in our once and future times. It is that measure of force times distance –– that quality which moves all matter, does all work for or against our purposes.

Energy is elixir of our age. In the twentieth century we learned to use more in a month than all preceding history of man. Work was done. Wars were fought. Despite Death and Deprivation, populations of our swarming lands welled rich and plentiful as never earlier. We had new riches of travel, access, and science with which to conquer disease, technology to mine metals, and industry to make earth-transforming molehills out of mountains, such as pierced the isthmus of Panama, long the impediment to ocean traffic between east and west.

This argosy is a little of the author’s direct experience, much of what he’s learned from travel on the seas, and sending rockets on errands into Space, then also from forethought and deep friendships, more from the accidents of acquaintanceship where knowledge of a fragment of a tale sharpens, earns, and ferrets-out folds in the mind, the gray matter that burgeons new blossoms, stemming from unlikely sources.

It is a novel about the sea, based on facts. Your narrator has had much to do with the sea. A major experience unfolded when Captain Irving Johnson, the famous world voyager of the 20th century, at helm of his last Yankee, a ketch, hailed author and beloved wife, Helga, on the Saône River side of Lyon in France and asked to tie abreast our twin-mast yacht, Peregrine. It was pouring rain; he then spent next days of August gloom aboard our ketch exchanging oceanic experience. He narrated how, in youth, as a common seaman aboard the German bark Peking, last of the large square-rigged trading vessels, he climbed to the yardarm 106 feet higher than waterline and filmed oncoming seas with a small windup cinema camera while rounding Cape Horn. For navies worldwide he proved for first time that there are ocean waves in trains over one hundred feet high.

Drawing only half the draft of the author’s yacht, captain Johnson’s Yankee departed Lyon to join the Rhône River below town and head down that torrent for the Mediterranean Sea. The Paynes, perforce, waited almost a month longer for rains in the Alps to raise the Rhône for safe descent of their two meter draft.

This is a work of adventure in technology, grasping a venue that can supply vast power for mankind’s destiny, without carbon emissions and consuming no valuable earth resource. It uses renewing energy coming daily from the sun. It offers striving technologically to peer ahead, invent, and finally to achieve a triumph, a way to solve humanity’s energy needs without exhaustion, a way that uses what has gone neglected. The inventive means are revealed clothed in lives, loves, fears, and passions –– human pulses which make it a novel, a play in largest of our tangible arenas, Imagination.

It yields perceptive thoughts, great recognition of opportunity, and … aspirations. It is a tensing tale of doing the almost impossible, but real in nature of winds, works, and human lives, for all of us facing boldly the next great threat to human dignity across our round, blue world: fossil fuels exhaustion.

It celebrates our singular species, the only one on this orb capable to invent complex devices, to choose work, ponder futures, and condense experience into art and science. Ours is the sole species to cause and capture civility over enmity, though only among our wisest. Ours is a time when we have understandings, learned technologies, that enable greatness; talented mind-works which we call Science.

This is the narrative, sad, of a struggle sterling in thought of better futures. It is the rise and tragic fall of a small, new continent, riding a concept as honorable as that novelty of the Continental Congress two centuries earlier. That invention berthed the American Independence Declaration. Like that, it is a plan of insights pursued –– imperfect, but a step forward in individual freedom to work, to think, and to develop.

Like the Constitution, it sprang from perception of ailments in mankind’s orientation that would bring penury and disaster, unless remedied. Sought to birth a brighter era than forward prospects without its contribution can promise, this concept is product of seeking and of study. It produced a giant craft, the Calcutta, nicknamed ‘C-Ring’. It did not foresee all foibles. Therefore it failed. But, wiser, bearing learned learning, it was reborn. That succeeded.

This book, narrating human events in both hemispheres of our earth, begs you to remember, if you are old enough to do so, the Apollo moon rocket, its launching from Florida in the northern hemisphere, in the summer of 1969. From it, two American astronauts landed on the moon, first humans ever to walk on another planet. The third man piloting the loitering return-vehicle, orbited the lunar body in the ‘capsule’, and waited for the two men walking the moon to launch from moonscape and rocket to rendezvous with him, their loyal, careful friend, Collins, orbiting, controlling the capsule, offering prospect of return to home, loved ones, and salvation. His partners left lunar sterility to return to their only hope of coming back to civil life and loves, the capsule orbiting low above the airless lunar landscape, still loaded with fuels, waiting to fire rockets and take these heroes the quarter million miles of vacuum space in return to earth, to its gravity, its pull to their planet of origin, and to home, our blue, water planet … our birthplace, our nativity. Every element had been designed to serve its segment for this accomplishment well. All of these designs, thanks to Wernher Von Braun’s team, worked as wanted.

Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin came safely back to earth, its placid ocean, then to Terra Firma near Houston, Texas, alive and uninjured.

Human adventures into space, the technology that enabled them, thus definitive in triumph, went on to conceive and use talented machines to gaze robotically afar through galaxies, to shower down on earth and seas the favors of our seeing, sensing, and surviving … through new technologies. They were only new at that time, the frontier time of robot spacecraft, launched and voyaging space, sending back in sound and pictures, knowledge to humanity.

Instruments of many descendant sorts developed rapidly thereafter, but in May 1980 through August, the depth of winter in south latitudes –– the time of this tale’s first, striving events –– many of the instruments and technical faculties that now populate and connect earth’s cultures, the internet, prolific computers, satellites that look down and see every detail, sea-scans that can tell wave heights and oceanic ferocity from the silent vantage of space, all these did not then exist. From such foregone conclusions that fed the lunar magic, these origins and their enrichment, the facilities of our twenty-first century, thus planted and fertilized, rapidly developed.

Earth population, in purity of new hygiene and persuasion of easy travel –– has sucked resources from the earth to promise future poverty … unless salvation, in science and seeking, sets in.

The story of C-Ring, Calcutta, is the wrenching trial of technology striving to do service more significant for humanity than adventuring into space. Yet … it is planet-bound, as are we all.

Conceived in view of rapid mutation of modern life, this rears a giant attempt to provide remedy for all the confined multitude who, like residents in a burning house, must find remedy in some urgency, to continue centuries of fine life. We are the human horde, sole mankind, homo sapiens, creatures of thought, inhabiting a blue planet, but burning –– burning engines of its enterprise, its fossil fuels.

C-Ring, a remedy, was product of thought –– guided by and sifted for harmony of design.

Realization of danger is infectious. Danger to humanity calls for mobilizing a carefully chosen technology. Danger is a part of life; it looms and dooms. In Africa the eland stamps its foot. In Kansas the crow calls out a single note. With humans, warning of danger is more complex.

Max Ernst had a talent for design, for insights, as well as communication. Many brains concentrating under his leadership, conceived and concatenated links of a logic chain. The problem addressed, potential solutions in hand, C-Ring was slowly, cautiously reared in the cerebral realm, thought, there studied and resolved with remedies to problem potentials, again and again. Finally, a colossus, it was created clandestinely, then launched to tame a salty reality.

To do so required avoidance of negativity, a resolute intensity, and sorties into realms of industrial, even international, security, perhaps exceeding all such achievements before it.

That was successful. C-Ring was built without attracting notice of nations, noses of news hounds, nor debilitating nuisances of inquiry ad infinitum. It navigated to its ocean station without alarm or jealousy.

There it set about experimental work. Its history is a testament of teamwork and dedication. Yet the first article fell victim of subterfuge. It failed. Swallowed, it was a leviathan lost. Participants perished.

But let that emerge with events. Here the need is only to define the burning fuse that, at first, fired devotion. Then set it alight in magnum minds, in fine devisings. Finally it tooled and hammered these into a system significant –– an oceanic infrastructure. The moments that led to disaster will emerge as foibles avoidable, as the great experiment, undertaken again, succeeds.

Details will unfold in right timing.

This telling portrays human beings in joys and sorrows, in loves and logic, the highest acts of living and in depths of despair that honesty … is not universal; it paints them also, as in other wars, in appetites and lusts as well as starvation and loneliness. It shows years of trust, honor, esteem –– all elements that accrete the comfortable and conceiving situation we have come to call civilization. As well, it shows moments of mendacity of mankind in gross ignominy, death, maiming, in throes of native inhumanity –– the pre-human degradation forces that require constant driving out from the camp of culture. It presents the flowering and fruiting of the human garden but nourishes its diseases, leading ultimately to its weeding. It depicts acts that are grim, however later to be hallowed. It delineates potentials and products of life as well as torments of death, draws the image of death not as caricature of fear, rather as significance for those who live on. More than cessation of one or many lives, death is a discontinuity of drives, efforts, purposes which headed somewhere, may, for loss, never afterward be realized.

This argosy is some of the author’s direct experience, much of what he’s learned from travel on the seas, sending rockets on errands into Space, and from forethought and deep friendships, then more from the accidents of acquaintanceship where knowledge of some fragment of a tale sharpens, earns, and ferrets-out folds in the mind, the gray matter that burgeons new blossoms, stemming from unlikely sources.

Where the tale ends may be the author’s choice, for he will cease the telling. Yet you, who will live later and perhaps longer, will know other chapters of human destiny beyond this, his time. Neither you nor he will know all.

Existence of this remarkable animal we call man of thought, Homo sapiens, shall leave yet many more tracks on sands of time. Man, too, like all we know, or have known, will pass into … past, as will our earth and our essence. We will not then be here to witness that passing. Yet we may leave trace that we have been –– and that we have thought.

Amen.

Book I

The Cause

CHAPTER I

It may be the tickle of a tale of people, places and awing events, to begin as if they all were players in a cinematic impression of passions and potentials. Here the texture of our times –– when we all are bound to life-support in technology –– makes it necessary.

Stories, in that they are creatures of our telling, have beginnings and ends. But these are only artifacts of narration. Reality has neither. It has man perceiving and pursuing facts of passage … happenings. They may be only thoughts, minutiae, or great, physical movements, an army on the march, or witnessed explosion of a star, with awe and worry that it could happen here. The substance may be only stirrings of remembrance, the redolence of something vague, familiar, or perhaps overlooked, small as irritation of a hang nail –– or as vast and solemn as death itself, a monumental movement, the founding of an empire, or demise of a civilization.

For the telling, events must be arranged in a sequence to fit conventions of communication. So invested, happenings only then take form as narrative.

In the world of our reality, each event has prevenient cause, often beyond comprehension by the puzzling human brain, lacking as it is in omniscience. But arranging events and qualities in ordered speculation is the genius of clear thought. It ripens comprehension.

Recognize at outset that time, happenings, entities and proclivities precede our witnessing and understanding. Our mothers needed to exist before we could be born and suckled. Events are a flowing stream of which we drink the intoxication of adventure, the joys and sorrows of our lives. Always we arrive in the middle, never at start. Ergo, events surprise us; overwhelm us. Their sources are perversely mysterious, and, at first, their meanings unknown, obscure, embedded in the moil of figments we know not, therefore … ineffable.

Since we witnessers of, or weavers in, the cloth of happenings hardly know what youth or which historian is looking on, the full fallout of their farthest reach is quickly beyond our ken. Real happenings have cause sequestered back in primordial time. Occurrences have consequence long after and far beyond origin locale, and lives at hand.

The good telling –– fact or fiction –– has a talent in the tale. The beginning and the end must strive to armature these.

So it is here:

Reader, think of fossil fuels, of coal and oil and natural gas. These are what we burn to drive our engines and generate electricity, the invisible liquid luxury that heats our houses and cools our refrigerators. All are the energies we use most today and that become ever more scarce and costly. They are energy, that nexus of so much striving in our once and future times, the puissance of aspiration and performance.

Burning wood or coal releases energy.

After eons of paleolithic existence, down to the dawn of machinery, energy was used –– only the finger-snap of two centuries ago –– to make steam of that abundant universal solvent, water.

Steam became the shibboleth, the new recognition, the key. It was what James Watt, toiling with pumps and problems, turned on. It did works. Railroads and steamships followed. Pistons and cylinders, newly understood, led Nikolas Otto, Karl Benz, and Gottfried Daimler to introduce internal combustion engines to world transport as automobiles. A man named Henry conceived his mass-production line and sent vast armies of flivvers out across the lands, burning petroleum products to set mankind a-building roads, and traveling them to and through cities of then, now, and futures. They transformed the world.

Work is that quality of force times distance which gets things done. It is that divergent entity that moves all matter, does all impelling for or against our purposes. Energy is its elixir.

In perspective, seeking energy, finding it, and using it has transformed mankind from Mousterian flint-knappers into mountain movers. As never before, in the twentieth century, we learned to use more energy –– power –– per month than in all preceding human history.

With energy release, work was done. Wars were fought. And the populations of our swarming lands, far from crippled, welled rich and plentiful as never had they earlier, for we had new wealth of opportunity and access, power and science with which to conquer disease, stave starvation, and foment travel, that ark of erudition. Man had new machines massively to mine metals, make earth-transforming molehills out of mountains in such grandiose acts as piercing the Panamanian isthmus, so long impediment to ocean traffic ‘tween occident and orient.

In the words and images of this narrative, people stretch all human capacity to build a future out of fatal destiny. Begin here with trigger of thoughts and times fomenting:

After momentary human ventures into arid vacuum of space, the Lunar Lander Eagle, in July, 1969, let two brave men walk upon the moon, first humans to stand on other soil and look back at their native home, this orb, blue with predominance of oceans. It was and is our earth, our only home. Ever it basks in sunlight, rolling eastward to reel its roundness once every twenty-four hours through exposure to the streaming light and warming heat of its benevolent star, our Sun. But reality calls. We do not possess the sun. It possesses us. We are caught and curling in its gravity. It is impersonal, but we are here!

c1_b1.tif

In space-suits, breathing air brought with them, Armstrong and Aldrin landed in lightened gravity, and walked about on the sterile Lunar surface, observing neither friendliness nor life. Then, timing every motion carefully, conserving fuel, electricity and slender resources, they scooped up rocks and rocketed aloft to rendezvous again with Collins and the capsule, then, in a creation of clever thought, by Von Braun’s team, and others, the return envelope of a dream machine, the Apollo capsule and its service module, voyaged successfully back to earth. On this return, for the voyagers, the men, three humans, all charm of atmosphere, solid footing, friends and domestic life –– enveloped them again. They were home.

After this singularity, many brains newly grasped our solitude in cosmic space. Telescope astronomers had already cataloged astronomic bodies in great dimension. These now were more widely brought to mind. Many thinkers, male and female, newly knew the loneliness of our sole planet in its Milky Way home, our speeding spiral galaxy, itself spinning in relative solitude. Our sun circles its center at half a million miles per hour, its gravity dragging earth and all its planets with it.

Still, to complete one circuit of that center, takes 200 million years. Some few sentient people, found themselves aware that we are but a speck of solitude, spinning solo in great distances.

Our moon, 240,000 miles away, is near. Apollo took only three days and four hours to traverse that separation. Our sun, our sole star, only remote from us 388 times the distance of our moon, provides our energy. It has given us all our coal and oil. It is a fusion factory, consuming hydrogen in enormous appetite, converting it to helium and other elements. It is highly reliable, has so burned for four and a half billion years and has enough fuel to burn another five, making earth’s destiny twice this long.

Mars, poor red planet, unlikely habitable, is cold, 141 times moon-distance from us –– when nearest –– and 1030 times moon distance when farthest. Other planets we now explore with rocketry are either plumbed with poisoned atmosphere or barren in temperatures too severe for life and limb.

We live in isolation.

We know our life, and the life on this earth we love; we think it good. In late riches of power, we pullulate on its firmer part … land.

Seventy percent of earth surface is seas. Six billion human souls live on less than thirty percent of this round and rolling orb, its solid planet surface. They inhabit rock and soil and sand. Essentially none domicile the brimming waters. Bore-holes drilled deep within its solid crust suck up the serum of our quondam salvation –– oil. Gases and coal are found and mined. Man of modern methods consumes. Quietly, blamelessly, and persistently –– he also, with release of carbon-dioxide, … contaminates.

But mankind’s work-source wealth … wastes away. Contemplation of our phenomenon pleads depletion, loss, wars, hardships, and progeny’s future as a spectacle macabre. We view in some alarm, not wishing humanity to leave its luxuries of present, daily life today. Some sober few speculate: Is there no tomorrow?

Humanity has capacity to form societies of a few among the many. Some of these, born of sincerity, not given to insouciance, have sprung from contemplating destiny and braved scorn of a greater populace. Most have strived for betterment, some in generosity of character, some in avarice, some also in malevolence. Religions –– people possessed of like beliefs –– are examples. Some have been docile. Others, such as Knights Templars and Saracens, more truculent, went to wars, clashed in crusades. Countless have been the cabals within countries under discontent, suffering unruly rulers, thus fomenting anger, yen for yesterdays, resulting in wars of revolution.

Such societies tend to gravitate to secrecy. Since they are immersed in common existence of others not bathed in whatever insights they treasure –– or even foment. When so, their insights tend to be uncommon. These are seen as strange departures. Some become pernicious, though most or many determinate only action needing isolation to develop, not desiring exposure to vaster unbelievers, whose numbers can scoff and squelch. Galileo’s experience was ‘lesson to the learned’. His punishments for discovery, for probing to draw the blood of facts, supplanting earlier beliefs, dogma, pronouncements, and priestly spouted ‘truths’ –– these punishments were cruel. Witnessed, they stifled many men of science.

Secrecy has had many valid adoptees. They need not be castigated for this proclivity. Modern business, stung with too early disclosure of new invention, or wishing advantage to advent better methods, has caused concealment of many worthy efforts until fruition. Thomas Edison, Einstein, Koch, Pasteur and other discoverers of fame, managed disclosure to suit their own readiness. Savants of some secrecy have more than seldom shown prematurity to be a forge of error. The serbian immigrant, Nikolai Tesla, told Edison, then a great and powerful man, his quondam employer, that he was wrong to promulgate uses of electricity in DC, direct current. This quiet Yugoslav had invented the transformer, humanity’s most efficient machine, an effector only in an AC world. He explored all manner of moving electric power to and thru modern life. Easier to generate and easier to transport was AC. The same man was only recognized after death to have been the true inventor of Radio, despite decades of public belief that Enrico Marconi was its source. But Edison discovered, with some pain of being lessoned by a younger man, that AC was indeed the way electricity would be used across the world.

This narrative tells of purposes pledged to the future welfare of wide humanity –– everywhere, and for centuries to come. The well from which it springs is a small and secret collection of wealthy men, elderly and seasoned, their fortunes made in quiet, good works. In common, before knowing one another, they shared a general tendency to shun publicity. This was not only because they were modest, needing little clamor of publication, but also from ill experience with men and women of the news who, absent technical understandings, shallow in insights, spread fable, worry, and wild inaccuracy at times, among wide audiences.

For your introduction to the persons of this portrayal, in some appreciation of their diversity, you and I adopt an aphorism of Astronauts, they who look down on earth from space and can see the orb at a glance, remarking what they have come to call the Terminator.

Dark of night and the light of dawn meet in a demarcation line as the earth rolls measured time Westward, as it rolls ineluctably Eastward. It is a line they call The Terminator. At dawn, The Terminator ends obscurity, terminates the night and heralds light in strength to reveal features of our earth by day.

Seeds of this narration, only some origins, will at first be revealed –– for time and detail, told too far ahead, may tire. Those near-to happenings, advent of what you have already read, must suffice. Time ticks on, counts down its cadence of cause and consequence. ALL is but a figment of infinity. We can know next to nothing of the great ALL. But next to it is naught if not something. Every story is but a fraction of all foundation events.

You have not yet heard of The Ephasian Society, its founding people, nor those who built the floating ring, a reef containing a research laboratory they called Calcutta, or C-Ring, for short, nor why.

The ‘Rest of the Story’ herewith ensues.

Astronomers and other scientists think today of The Big Bang, and reckon all the universe in an instant therewith began. Of course they are wrong … unless we realize there are many universes, a prostitution of that word’s original meaning of ALL.

There were no firsts and are no lasts. We have no experience of any existence without cause. Space appears to be endless. All events in our experience arise from former ones, whether they be interaction of substances, gravity, radiation, impacts, all of these or other. Nothing in our experience comes from nothing. The concept of infinity has yet to grasp the consciousness of humans at large.

Change is the process we can observe in all entities. This concept, as only partially revealed, also soon will change. Our scientific nabobs, our conceivers, do not conceive of a Continuum, but endlessness is probable. They swim in partial thought. They still think there are beginnings and ends. As humans, they have been conditioned to consider birth as a beginning, and death as end. But beginnings have beginnings, and death has consequences. Ergo there are no beginnings save those chosen by the human brain, nor ends but where we cease to look. There are only ‘transitions’.

All observations, all experiences, all events are consequences, –– happenings resulting from former happenings. Of these here, in this narration, you have yet to read. They rise from the people of these pages. Who they were, where they were before they came together –– at least the early ones, as they lived their lives alone, unattached to the great task and tantalus that would sweep them up and form itself into a team - a team where formerly they had perceived only partial thoughts, and lived alone.

Alone they pursued their personal perceptions, ideas of problems poorly grasped. These widened in consort and were impetus just and only then, of their departure from pasts before the future that unfolds alone from bygones, but did not comprehend depletions. Change is the nature of existence, and humans are not correct to rely on continuations without contemplating eventualities, exhaustions enforcing change.

Events unfolded here are: how disaster at sea came to be, and wounded primarily the people of this panorama, then how they perceived and then pursued impending problems and sought solutions. These were tried and tested. Keys of consequence unlocked ideas in search of their solutions, and that was real.

The real story of these lives and events is not the former, but what follows. The people in this tangle of talents and lives came together in actions of adventure, study, contemplation and research, through which they found each other.

Their proclivity to invent, then next, to refine and perfect in concept and then to devolve, finally, to building out and testing in, is the process here described in bold.

The experiments they forged were products first of thought, perceiving problems and conceiving arrays of solutions. The talents they brought, and the wonders they wrought came from workings of their brains, from accumulations of experience, and from unique pasts inviting interchange, then, ringing in rich potentialities.

Begin with the turning of our home, our earth, the sphere of our familiarity, our predominantly blue planet: follow dalliance of its day. It roasts in the sunlight, but rotates. It gallops around the sun in an orbit of 186 million miles breadth. It turns in these two distinct dimensions: rotation of its cheek to dawn, then to inch around its sidereal circuit of the year.

CHAPTER II

Our People & Places

This Day Of Destinies

March 21st, 1973, Friday, the Vernal Equinox! What world events set and beset this scene?

This decade in America was one of infamy, beginning with assassination of John Kennedy, continuing through the dark presidency of Lyndon Johnson, revealing unsavory facts of his past, then assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, and other assaults on honesty in the great American nation. Days after a California grocery boy, turned Lawyer, Senator, VP, then President, on the doorstep of his own disgrace for lies and thievery, ineptly declared defeat at hands of Viet Cong Heads who –– in pummeled Hanoi –– themselves were convinced Americans had won, and were silently preparing to surrender. They were astonished, as only of late has time and reportage revealed. Finding Americans withdrawing, they grasped victory in Viet Nam. Patience and Persistence are elements of victory.

Time seemed tense and trickling slowly in those days of the Watergate Scandal when lying at highest American level was daily shown and the only American Attorney General to be convicted of malfeasance in office, John Mitchell, was declared ‘overall boss’ of the criminal Watergate operation.

This day, the twenty-third, two days before the watergate burglar, James McCord Jr. singled out Mitchell as leader of the evil entity, was a dark time in America. While Mitchell was far from innocent, Nixon and advisors, Ehrlichman and Haldeman were initiators of the illegal deeds.

Yet this day, the twenty-first of March, vernal equinox, had farther reaching significance. Watergate would fade. Nixon would resign, ignobly, choosing his own successor on secret extraction of promise of a presidential pardon (another illegality), and Mitchell would remand to prison. Viet Nam would lose its worrisome presence in succeeding decades. But a conspiracy of honesty and honor was elsewhere in formulation, dedicated to saving for humanity more of human virtue than criminality destroys.

Your knowledge of persons and participants in this creation, raises recognitions in this day. It is a day of equal light, North and South –– Equinox. This day, the terminator, as always, moves west with dawn and touches all latitudes north and south with the same time and torch of light to terminate the night. Its length in Nome, Alaska was the same as that in Puerto Montt of Chile. This equinox began as midnight, the nadir hour, progressing on its global journey like the hand of a celestial clock that swept past midnight and the International Date Line while dawn, the Terminator, a demarcation of solar light from dark of space and night, inched westward, and enflamed illumination. Early it left Alaska, said good morning to islands of the Pacific, enwrapped Australia, Saigon, the tip of Fujiyama, Japan’s sacred mountain, and the loins of Greater China. It then encroached Rangoon, Tibet, and western China. After cracking dawn in its westward march, the Terminator, that angel of illumination, drawing back night curtain off dawning day, swept ever westward to light the morn in its march to what we humans call the ‘Middle East’. Relentlessly it crept toward the continents of Africa and Europe, launching then upon the Atlantic Ocean. Following Night with Dawn, this Terminator brought first faint light of day evenly to places of like longitude, North and South on the surface of our rolling planet.

As dawn encroached on Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russian town on the 60th parallel aside the Bering Sea, the light was also growing south of it on Attu, American territory, westernmost of the Aleutian Chain. It was the same moment there as in Russia, but a day earlier. Such are the vagaries of geography and human convention.

The girl-child, Alexa Feodorovna Bratislava, was born around four in the morning to the blonde Russian woman of Scandinavian genes, Sventana Androvna Bratislava. The baby was mewling as Feodor Androvski Bratislava tendered both females after bloody moments of that birth.

He wept at the wonder and the agony of parturition. Not only was he husband and father; but, in a departure from our conventions –– not so wide in this asiatic domain –– he was also brother and uncle. Sventana, whom he loved better than any woman, was his wife and the sister he had known since she was born three years after him, a social arrangement sometimes accepted there. He wept for her pain and he wept for exultation that she and baby were alive and fine, though bloody. He wept at the wonder of it. Birth, result of their body-joining in pleasure, was a sobering new image of responsibility, care, tenderness –– loving. He was learning. He would build onto their humble house –– or a boat –– for her.

Feodor was a man of mature experiences, for he had been a hunter, a miner, a fisherman and a soldier. And he was a man of large brain, capable of great memory and reasoning, close to the prototype Cro-Magnon man whose acumen led to civility atop savage capability. He was a practical man who used his hands with tools and thought … all to make a great variety of material things. Therefore, as master of the harbor of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy at his early age of thirty-two, he had deciphered the art of dealing with his near and distant Soviet powers. Over his everyday life, early he learned how to be humorous, cordial, entertaining, and at once intelligently secretive in his relations, thus deriving benefits of their confidence sufficient to live a peaceful life and pursue his own inclinations. Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s …

On Attu, south about the same time in the same morning, as light was first penetrating the constant cloud, Na-leida-a, only a little more than a child herself, gave birth to a son.

Ahl-ay-men-aht, was a son bearing genes not only of this slip of Aleut girl, but of a father bringing blonde biological traits of the Vikings. Mixed with those of Na-leida-a were the genes of Theodore Mortensen, the tall, bearded American meteorologist from Minnesota. He had taken refuge from loneliness in her proffered and personal hospitality through the nights of his first summer on Attu, when his hut would otherwise have been cheerless. He indulged in her most intimate giving without promise or benefit of matrimony. He was gentle. She had experienced crushing, shaking climaxes, for which she loved and adored him, without language to tell him. He was ignorant and of little experience, but gentle and patient he was. She, in this unspoken habituation, settled in, doing other services for him with neither wondering nor question, only natural confidence, a buoyant, feminine presence. She learned his English speech. And from easy, ordinary and friendly acts that shelter souls from perpetual cold, she had brought forth a new promise for humanity.

These two children, the girl-child, herself a potential mother, a few minutes older, but by calendar, a day younger than the latent little man of Attu, would one day not only make connection in a language neither spoke as children, but they would marry.

But that is later in starting this history by two decades.

On Attu, Theodore Mortensen left the hut where two other women showed him the sobering result of pleasures with Na-leida-a, pleasures that seemed so simple. This reality introduced him gently to the maturer visage of responsibility. Alone, but not so alone as before, not so alone as was his customary feeling, he climbed to take the measures of the morning atmosphere at his mountainside observatory. The air was gentler now, with a lessened wind and some promise of melting and of Spring. Far below, the sea waves cascading onto shore … thundered, turning a wisp of their awesome power into explosions in the air.

These seas were, he thought, far larger than any he yet had seen. They were, he knew, the result of the terrifying wind the island had endured for half a dozen days now. He observed that waves are created by persistent pressure of winds. His mind went through his weatherman’s perception of ocean interchange of energy. In that moment, as before, he saw small winds riffle surface. Upon the riffles, it pushes, he thought. Riffles grow, expanding the face of water surface for wind to press upon. This happens quickly, transferring energy from moving air to the water surface. The more transferred, the larger and the faster grow the waves, he thought. He had contemplated this for months, using the Physics studies of his university experience. This moment, and its events, gave him a sensation of awe at the movement of the planet in its orbit, at life, endowed by water on the only known wet planet, and awe at he himself, now a father.

But this feeling for the origins of waves and the power in them, wasting itself on the rock of his island, he had already had his public say: a book he wrote in this isolation, Power from Ocean Waves, his book of the ability of ocean waves to be tapped of their energy to do work elsewhere. It had been published, professing a giant, vagrant power, but lacked concept of any machine able to take up that energy and turn it into work. Now the sea was at its most savage since his arrival. He knew it was all because of the winter monsoons over Siberia. He had the happy thought that somewhere, someone, was reading his book. He observed the fury of the sea some moments longer, then retraced his steps down to new life and domesticity.

He choked back a sob as he descended. It was as much a sob of Na-leida-a’s pain, but joy of birth, as of wonder, certainly none of regret. He peered ahead into the mists that shrouded the lee, where wave energy had been robbed crashing on the island, and he wondered what lay before his new family, Na-leida-a, the hours-old boy Ahl-ay-men-aht, and himself. One step at a time he descended, as he knew his life ahead would unfold one day at a time. In his breast he felt a presentiment of unknown but palpable joy.

Six thousand miles south and a little west, in the not-so-little house of concrete near the boatyard alongside Wellington harbor, on the larger North Island of the country of New Zealand, light was loose on the countryside. Terrill Sudbury slipped out of the bed that sheltered him and his Muriel through the long silences of each night. Her breathing was steady, sonorous, somnolent. Taking care to be quiet, he caught up his clothes and departed the room, closing the door silently and securely behind him, as was his custom. He habitually slept less than Muriel. When he awoke, he was always rested and eager to continue affairs of his intense interest with each new day. Designs preempted his mind, as usual. If he lay there longer, he would wake her.

When he had made a cup of tea and taken it with him outside into the damp air of early, gray and Autumn morning, he looked about at the skyline of masts and motor vessels he had built, speculated the towering Kauri trees, then surveyed the gray form of his boatyard building, looming three stories above the low harbor jetty. It was Autumn, and there was a freshness in the air. Summer was past. He listened to birds awake and calling to one another in the swarming green presence of beeches whose color he could not yet see. He breathed in sweet-smelling air, laden with late summer blossom scents soon to disappear, and with the tangy marine essence, redolence of ocean wave and memories of distant travels in his youth, now past. This was a pleasant, habitual moment.

He walked down the concrete walkway, entered the huge metal building, peered at the unfinished shape of a ferrocement tuna clipper standing moveless in its gloom, then climbed the three flights of stairs to his design loft, flicked on the light switch, noted the red light’s response on the electric samovar, then settled down to his drawing table and began to look at the sketch of a new idea taking shape before him. In a moment the ideas he had left the night before of a fast, far-hurling substance gun for fabrication, started up in his brain. He liked this silent hour. Thought works well without distraction.

Daylight came on.

Farther south, in the tail of New Zealand’s South Island, another boat designer, Lawrence Becker, drove from his high hill house down to harbor-side, the site of his office, and sat at a drafting table with a new idea. Across the harbor of Littleton, a virgin girl of fourteen lay awake, dreaming of where her life would take her. Her name was Loretta Sewell, destined one day to become a Becker, and after tragedy, it would become Loretta Gibbs.

In a short while, far north of Tokyo, Yokiko Arimazu heard her father stirring about as he left. She knew he was headed for the fields and animals. She had not slept well. Shortly, she was dressing for her Interview. The ride south to Tokyo always intimidated her. During the early years of her study she had made the trip six days a week. The sojourn in California after completing university, provided an enlightenment to the possibilities of more charm and grace –– and leisure –– more time in life than here at home, always hurrying among her own race. She went in to help her mother who was steaming fish and paring vegetables for the morning meal. Rice was hot and ready, and the water for tea would await the father. She pulled a kimono on over her street clothes to keep them clean.

Ari and Ko? she asked after her two younger brothers.

In the field with your father, naturally.

They’ve grown so much while I was away. Now they go to the fields with father as early as him.

The fish and animals must be fed. It is almost daylight

In America they would not wait for dawn.

They would see with electric lights, then, Yoki?

Yes. Lots of them, mother.

Her mother was deft and quick with her paring knife. And at the cost of lots of energy … oil. They are a wasteful People.

I suppose.

Here. Take these out to the chickens. They must be out of the coop by now, and hungry.

Yokiko took the wooden bowl of parings. The rooster was crowing. She called. The hens came a-running toward the house in the early light. She dumped the scraps on the bare ground, still grass-less after the freezing of Winter. When she returned, she said, The sky is so beautiful in the east. There are sea clouds. Perhaps it will rain today.

More likely it will only blow again. Still, it is nearing Spring. When will you go off to England, if you get this position?

I don’t know. Maybe in a month or so. But maybe in just days.

You can help with the planting, then."

Yes, I think so, if I am still here.

The father came in, followed by her two brothers. He was rubbing his hands. He gave her a hug and touched her on the cheek, added his habitual witticism. Shortly, they sat cross-legged to drink hot tea and eat fish with vegetables and rice..

By the time the dawn had progressed westward to Manchuria and the margin of the Kerulen River she was already far down the great island of Honshu and in the middle of Tokyo, waiting for the English-speaking gentleman at the Trade Centrum.

On the prairie below Ulan Bator, capital city of the country of Mongolia, a wind was blowing over the frozen earth. In this region, north of the Gobi Desert, Khtaki, a young man, once a coal miner was afoot along the earthen road toward the adit, the mine entrance, the underground chambers where he had hewn out black, burnable rock for years, far below the surface for a few tissues of money per day.

His thoughts were not on the cold, for his felt boots with up-tipped points kept his feet comfortable on the frozen earth. His thoughts were not on the difficulty of his past labors, for he had not minded them, in spite of the general Mongolian dislike for monotonous toil, he had carried on through years. He had considered them his key to a world of discovery, for he had read by oil lamp in his parents’ yurt at night, and in the day, while he walked and while his limbs labored, his mind was occupied with the images of learning. The money he had been earning, he’d secretly piled until it financed his travel to a western university.

Now as he trudged along the indefinite roadway, he was joined by two others, acquaintances of his time of labors, as long before. After brief greeting, they knew to leave him in silence, a condition not difficult for the thoughtful Mongolian character. When others joined, he gave a nod of his kepi in the half-gloom without removing his mind from the review of English words he was reciting silently like a catechism. ‘Learning,’ he thought, ‘is a process slightly painful until one has acquired the discipline needed. Once discipline is there, it becomes a habit. It becomes a pastime of little effort. Habit is the key to any desired achievement.’ His return to this scene and to his parents was to reminisce; later this day, he would fly west to Europe.

Beyond this scene of rising steppes taking shape out of the dregs of the night –– a few trees along the river, the clots of yaks huddling, moving imperceptibly in herds in the lower hills –– beyond all this was the vision of the world afar, of lands such as Africa, Brazil, and Canada, and of the sea, an unimaginable unknown, fabled and foreign. And for the moment, as light defined the features of the land and the faces of the others all turned northward toward the crouched and malevolent buildings and the great black cones hulking like nemeses at the mine beside the railroad disappearing into far, hungering Russia, these images in hope and anticipation, came back to him. Remembering them sustained him.

In the darkness, he tried the muscles of his arms once more. Now he was unused to the labour. Hours later, with the others, they ceased the ‘mucking’ and took respite for talk, now far below the surface of the land, absented from the natural light and energy of the sun. Huddled in a niche in the carbon layers which ancient sunlight had reared as mesozoic plants, they all huddled under a single electric light bulb for eating, as of old … and the anodyne of talk, rare to the mongolian mind. At this time, his fellows had only remembrance and imagination to enlighten their futures, as he had done. He wondered if in ten years and he returned, would they still be at such labors.

In Mongolia it was already noon when the light of day had progressed far across the Altai, those mountains of unimaginably rocky passes and endless grasslands. The domains of Nepal, Tibet, India, and Afghanistan were lighted by dawn as now. Per a gracious American, he flew where before, in poverty, he had travelled by circuitous trains through the Urals and on to Holland, thence to England by ferry from Rotterdam. It was earlier a world unknown to him, for, as an uneducated coal miner on his way, then, to learn chemistry at Cambridge. Now, a man of achievements in carbon, he was this hour flying to München. As he passed over the delta of the Volga, sunlight was overreaching still expanses of the shrinking Caspian, and the berried hill-lands of the Caucasus. When light of early day had come to the western end of the Black Sea, the Bosphorus he was eating lunch. Therefore he had not seen the Bosphorus where dawn now crept westward.

The Bosphorus, that strait by Istanbul, connecting the Black Sea with with the Sea of Marmara is a sort of twin in history to the Dardanelles, the longer and wider strait linking the latter to the Agean Sea. It was there, at the debouchment through the Hellespont, swum by Achilles, this last strait by Illium, where the ancient city of Troy stood and fell time and again.

On the northern extremity of the Sea of Marmara, western terminus of the Bosphorus, the dawn created color behind the dome and minarets of St. Sophia’s at Istanbul, gleaming splendidly in its light. Raoule Penachette climbed to the port wing on the bridge of the Tanker Essoquile. This was a point of high vantage now.

They had off-loaded to the refinery the night before and risen thirty feet. Raoul paused at this location to absorb the colors and the scene. The wind was soft but persistent. It had come from the residual winter cold brooding over a vast Asian continent, the settling winter monsoon. It had turned the ship to face the east. For all its gentleness, it had easily swung this colossal carrier of 300,000 tons to face the morning. Above the ship, fluttering, the Tricolor showed to all, the ship’s nationality.

As one has much time to read at sea, and as he had read widely of the world and its wars and wonders, Raoul’s eyes took pleasure in putting things read into real scenes of history such as this.

He saw the image of ‘Suleman the Magnificent’ through veils of time. Thoughts of saracens meeting boatloads of Vikings that had ridden down the Volga, molded into the scene his eyes brought in and flushed him with excitement. Just then his Captain came through the companionway from his quarters.

B’jour Raoule, he said in their native tongue.

B’jour, Capitaine. Raoule glanced about at the scene. Et magnifique, eh?

Oui, his captain nodded, told him softly that he, Raoule, would take the watch, get the Essoquile underway back down toward the Agean and the Mediterranean, headed for Nigeria, their usual lading location. Raoule knew the dark, vibrant, and latent look of the coast of Nigeria afar. Then the captain disappeared for l’petite dejeuner –– breakfast.

Raoule was thirty-two. He felt that it would not be long before he, too, would become a captain and command his own ship. It was a heady, lucky, optimistic feeling. It energized him. His mind savored the wonder of this world of seas and of nations, of commerce and of people. And he contemplated the way they all seemed to him to be ever more tightly interrelated. Is it that they really are changing relationship? Or am I merely becoming aware, seeing more, understanding enough to excite me? he asked himself. He had no answer.

He stepped inside. At the comfone he called for a few persons to begin operations. In five minutes the two great engines started and sent their low vibration through the ship. Plumes of black smoke chuffed up from the shrouded stack. In another two minutes, the forward capstan began retrieving chain. Three seamen attended it, washing the mud with high pressure nozzles. The capstan was a beautiful machine to watch. The giant links came clanking inboard.

The pilot boarded just as the great hook left the bottom. The anchor was aweigh. The sun was rising beyond the towers, spires, and buildings of Istanbul, old and new. With a forward nudge of the port screw and a starboard rudder, the Essoquille began her turn under control of the pilot just aboard. Soon, they were voyaging down the Sea of Marmara, the sun at their back, the land with its long shadows of the first light, falling away.

Raoule Penachette said goodbye to the black-hatted pilot in the English language common to maritime commerce worldwide, shook his hand and watched him descend to his tethered vessel towed alongside. For a moment Raoule thought beyond his present duty conducting tons of petroleum from point to point on the curving planet. He wondered, in all the great, modern adventures of the world, what way he would further participate in the smiling conclusion of the twentieth century during months and years to come. It did appear to smile. Yet there were opportunities for early death. Death, in any case, would come at some time. In every life, it always did, he thought.

At this specific moment, in pleasant, somewhat excited preoccupation with command of a giant ship, he had no thought of woman nor of women. Not thinking about the momentary course of his mind, he did not realize that this concentration of great movement under his own control was a relief from the persistent tantalus of that other gender. There was a richness of destiny here for him who, not many years before, had been merely a scab-kneed French schoolboy with cold nose, ruddy cheeks and welcome bruises of the playing field.

Yet in the same moment, there was another, a woman often of his thoughts. She lay awake in her bed and thinking of Raoule in the quiet hours, farther west before the dawn.

Chelene Bessoret lay in a perceptible loneliness. It was quiet, yet there were the sounds of diesel engines conveying goods on the river, sounds supervening over her adopted city, Strasbourg, out-leant in the darkness along the busiest water highway of Europe, the Rhine. She saw the figure of Raoul in her mind, having heard nothing from him nor of him through a long and dreary winter. It would do no good to inquire of his mother. That would surely be reported to him and quench rather than arouse interest. For him she would have to be something desired, then refreshing, something rich and puzzling. That was, she knew, the way he was and the way the world of men is. She wondered where he was, what other woman or women touched him, drew him, compelled him. Compulsively she arose in the darkness, went to the open window, looked out into the streets from her atelier-like room, observed below the street lights, saw that rain had fallen, and that there was a succeeding wind. She pulled the wetted curtains inside and closed the window. then lay down again and drew the quilted cover about her. She felt a longing, an emptiness.

She would arise as usual, she thought, dress habitually, take one or two croissants with coffee at the shop across le pont from the firm, then stream in with the other employees of Bouchard et Frêres. She was a statistician. Relative to the other females there, she was highly paid. Telephone and typewriter, spread sheets, files, and inquiries would fill the day. There was some satisfaction in that, but