Galaxy 101: A Science Fiction Novel

By Mike Gertken

Galaxy 101 Galaxy 101 is the story of the events that take place at the end of the twenty-first century, when an inexperienced Earth is dabbling in interplanetary travel for the first time with a newly discovered thermonuclear power source in a spaceship called Friend. Stumbling upon the truth that some of the other planets were bullies bent on galactic dominance, the unschooled Earthlings befriend their only ally, a young and brazen Martian pilot of half-earthen descent named Rodius Gladdenhammer. With Rodius as their guide, they strive to garner an interplanetary alliance to ward off the aggressors in what culminates in a great galactic battle as the beginning of the twenty-second century is ushered in. Can Earth defend herself against such interplanetary thugs and survive in a hostile universe? Find the answer to that question and more in a light, creative, and informative trip around the stars as Earthlings go back to school and study Galaxy 101.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645447689

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Galaxy 101

A Science Fiction Novel

Mike Gertken

Copyright © 2020 Mike Gertken

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-64544-767-2 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-64544-768-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

For Ryan

Acknowledgments and Credits

This story is dedicated to my son, Ryan. The idea for Galaxy 101 was hatched in 1994, before Ryan was with us, and it had gathered dust for many years. One year ago, Ryan was about to turn twelve years of age and I got the story out and dusted it off. I had only a hard copy of the original version, all marked up with corrections, and had to retype and modernize it.

I conjured up R. M. King as a personal character for Ryan so he would have a place within the story.

I became aware of laser fusion while doing research for the original version of Galaxy 101 back in 1994. It is a real thing, I learned, but at the time, the technology had not come very far, largely due to the size and cost of the equipment needed. I’m sure that it has progressed by now and actually could be more widely available, especially by the time this story takes place.

Thanks are due to two specific individuals. I owe my understanding of laser fusion to Jeff Hecht and Dick Teresi from their book entitled Laser: Light of a Million Uses, copyright 1982, published by Dover Publications Inc. of Mineola, New York, ISBN 0-486-40193-6.

Chapter 10, Zapping Energy for the Twenty-First Century, gives an excellent description of laser-fusion technology and provides a dissertation that is not unlike the experiment conducted by Bridget O’Malley in the prologue of this story, though there are no direct quotes from their book in this work.

The biggest change that occurred in our society while this story lay dormant was the advent of the internet. I relied on the World Wide Web heavily while writing this updated version of the original work. Websites such as NASA.com and Space.com were used extensively in gathering data about the space program and characteristics of the individual planets. Yahooligans! Science provided information about Jupiter’s many moons.

I would like to thank Charles Q. Choi, a Space.com contributor for the reference article he authored entitled Planet Mercury: Facts about the Planet Closest to the Sun. The article helped me through a challenging chapter and kept me going.

Special thanks to Chris Jones, owner of SpaceFacts.com, for his excellent website, which provides information both interesting and informative. The website was paramount to my research. I want to mention that I first saw information pertaining to air-conditioning on foreign planets on the SpaceFacts.com site in August 2016, but my idea for use of air-conditioning on Venus and Mercury did not originate on SpaceFacts.com. I’d been planning on using air-conditioning for some time and had discussed it with my son at the beginning of summer 2016.

Wikipedia.com also deserves mention and appreciation as their website may have been the most referenced during the writing of this book. Wikipedia’s wide information base provided expert input for everything from a better understanding of the work that millers do, to data related to dust mites, the date of publishing for Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and dates of history as we know them for earthen appearances of Halley’s comet.

Newsweek magazine featured a concept on the cover of their July 25, 1994, issue called To Walk on Mars, which contained an article entitled Next Stop Mars written by Sharon Begley. Another feature called Mission to Mars appeared on the cover of their September 23, 1996, issue and contained an article entitled Mission to Mars, again written by Sharon Begley. Both of these articles are the copyrighted property of Newsweek Inc., 251 West Fifty-Seventh Street, New York, New York, 10019-1894.

These two articles were used with appreciation for background material and descriptions of Martian surface features, though no direct quotes are included herein. Together, these two articles inspired my inclusion of a Martian colony of Earthlings, which was established in this story prior to the arrival of the Friend spaceship.

Introduction

It was 2099 AD. Earth had finally united as a planet under a single government. People of the world had slowly learned patience, respect for one another, understanding, and trust. Uniting had been hard work, but it had been worth it. The world economy was so good under the Union that money had all but vanished. Everyone humbly and gladly shared everything in peace on Earth.

The Union had discovered a new thermonuclear fusion technique for power generation. They harnessed the power and built a spaceship called Friend. It was equipped with defensive weaponry and the most up-to-date communications equipment as could be contrived. Its mission was to explore the unknown reaches of the galaxy and find galactic neighbors.

Once near Mars, however, to their dismay, the other planets realized that Earth had finally found the secret. Some had wanted to harness Earth’s energy and beauty in slavery and have it as their own garden. All were now going to war with one another in lust of the Earth.

Earth wanted nothing of their fight, wishing only for peace and harmony, but now must defend herself against all odds and all planets. Earth could trust none of them, being so young in interplanetary affairs and the target of their lust and greed.

Earth had been slow in getting here but, through all its trials and tribulations, had grown wiser. The Union of Earthlings quickly bent all collective resources to raise a small fleet for world defense.

Young and inexperienced Earth was at the heart of a galactic war. It was kill or forever be put to slavery, fight or be destroyed, winner take all.

Welcome to Galaxy 101, he added grimly and not with a little sarcasm but mostly out of angst at the turn of events that had befallen them. Earthlings were really nothing more than students of the universe, little schooled in the subject of their neighboring planets, he thought. We’ve got a lot to learn.

Prologue

Jeepers! she exclaimed excitedly to no one in particular as she ducked away from flying debris. It was very late, and she was alone, working overtime. Around her were the smoking remains of the scientific experiment that she was working on and had just blown up!

Bridget O’Malley had been using the crosshairs in the lens of her microscope from across the room to aim a compact but high-powered laser. Her target was a platinum-plated nano-balloon containing a mixture of deuterium and tritium gases. It was the job of the laser to split a ray of light into several separate beams and amplify them a thousandfold just as they converged simultaneously on the salt-grain-sized balloon.

But the Irish physicist was not getting the results she wanted. She had tried it several times before taking matters into her own hands and modifying the laser equipment that she was using. She’d tried the equipment modification not so much out of desperation but for the fact that something in the back of her mind had said, You’ve got to try something different.

Reaching deeply into her experienced technical past, Bridget found the gumption and fortitude in the middle of the night to install and manually calibrate a fiber-optic multiplexer that would split the light source into innumerable additional beams of light.

Lasting only a fraction of a second, the reaction caused by the amplified beams from the laser as they converged on the gases of the hydrogen isotopes in the balloon built such immense pressure that the nuclei of the deuterium and tritium atoms were suddenly fused into a larger nucleus with the experimentally gauged pressure of nearly a trillion times Earth’s atmosphere—in an incredible blinding surge of energy, which momentarily blasted and then thoroughly toasted Bridget’s delicate experiment.

Earth had not yet developed the technique for generating the power necessary for regular interplanetary travel, but the Union’s control of nuclear power had proliferated for some number of years. Splitting or compressing the atom had become old news. Finding the power was inevitable. But there were many schools of thought on whether it would be fusion or fission that would ultimately win out on the question of which was the more plausible nuclear option.

Later, it was Bridget’s unconventional mathematical-frequency-distribution theory that tamed the launching and exodus of the earthen ship Friend into the galaxy and explained the wherewithal of interplanetary travel using her fusion model.

1

Adam Noble had been sleeping restlessly when he woke with a start, somehow feeling that he was late. But when he looked at the clock on his bedside table, it was only 4:00 a.m. He’d hardly been to sleep for six hours. He shook the sleep from his mind, his short blond hair comically sticking up on one side of his head.

He hadn’t rested well due to nervousness over the coming events of the day. They were going to choose the captain of the new galactic spaceship Friend. He’d been thinking of nothing but this day for weeks. It was hard to believe, but before summer was over, a crew would be headed for the outer reaches of the Milky Way.

He’d been waiting a long time. He flopped back on his bed and thought.

Adam had first wanted to fly when he was back in school. He had seen an air show of the Union’s new global fleet in September of his sophomore year at Oxford. He was born and grew up in Liverpool, England, just before the Union had been formed. September 1 was Union Day, the anniversary of the Union, the new global Independence Day—which was no longer just an American holiday.

Assembled after nations had finally achieved worldwide acceptance of the international global-peace accord and all countries bound together to form a global system of government, the fleet was really something to behold.

It boasted a combination of Japanese, American, German, Chinese, French, English, and Swiss technology and engineering never before witnessed on Earth. Built mainly for commercial use—although some police, fire, and rescue models had also been manufactured—the new aircrafts were much like the old space shuttles but used for intercontinental travel.

Adam had gone on to one of the feeder academies, changed his college major to aeronautics and minored in chemistry. After graduation he had joined the Union’s space program, earned his MBA in nuclear engineering wanting to be a rocket scientist, and had then set his sights on the cockpit of one of the new vessels. That seemed like a lifetime ago, Adam thought.

Since then the Union had been successful at their initial attempts to combine the world’s collective technologies into a single technology and harness the new power that resulted from their efforts. They’d been able to develop a space program that now had three manned space stations and several spaceships coming and going regularly.

They’d finally learned many of the secrets of extended life in inner space. But aside from conventional theories, they had been unable to develop the sustained and controlled regenerative power required for real, everyday interplanetary travel to outer space.

And they thought they saw some strange things moving around out there. Generations of knowledge and technological advancements in optics for the space telescopes were providing more and more highly advanced filming techniques and showed greater detail through the lens.

However, much of this development was still left to the imagination because all attempts to communicate with other forms of life in the galaxy, if indeed there were any, had failed.

It didn’t seem that long ago when Adam was first assigned to his own ship as captain, he recounted. He had certainly settled down since then and now managed his career more carefully, working harder at his goals. He was an achiever and knew that he wanted to continue to fly the big ships.

He had been to and from and between the space stations many times. But most of that time was before the O’Malley theory. Now they had the power and the ship to explore the galaxy. It was still hard to believe. All they needed were the captain and the crew.

And Adam thought he had a pretty good chance—his confidence told him As good as anybody’s, with his record and background.

As he got up, he stopped by the window and stood, breathing deeply the crisp mountain air. His quarters had a commanding view of Mount Comrade, the Union’s space-launch facility, and the surrounding complex. The base was nestled into the Cordillera Occidental mountains of Ecuador, near Mount Chimborazo, outside Guayaquil on the Pacific coast.

The site was chosen because it was on the equator and was believed to be as near as possible to the center of the planet, where the stabilizing effect of gravity would allow the new power to safely ignite in the thin atmosphere at some 5,000 feet (1,524 meters) above sea level.

The facility had been named Comrade because the base had been created and staffed to launch Earth’s newfound hope of finding interplanetary friends.

There was something special about Mount Comrade not only in the plush surroundings, which were indeed beautiful, with the mountains and the ocean both tucked away in the tropics, but there was energy about the place too. The spirit shown by members of the Friend’s development and command groups was synergistic and contagious. It was an incredibly cooperative team effort that had so far kept the project right on schedule.

Not only did they all work together; they all seemed to be friends with one another.

It wasn’t a large installation; it was in fact rather small when compared to other bases because their endeavor was so specialized.

Parts for the ship were manufactured elsewhere and shipped there for construction. There were training and engineering facilities on the base and at the command center, but besides minimal construction facilities, there was little else.

The base was located about halfway up the full height of the surrounding mountains, where there had been a large flat plain carved into the mountain peaks. So it was cooler than the area by the beaches at the foot of the mountains but warmer than the control center, nearer the crests of mountaintops.

The living quarters overlooked the rest of the base and faced west to the ocean, over the roof of the training and engineering building, which was across the parking lot, lower, and faced back to the east. One could see the long takeoff and landing runway in the distance. Adam worked in the building across the long winding parking lot.

The work in progress that was the Friend sat at the end of the runway. Due south was the small town that supported the base, the officers’ club, and the gymnasium. The base was well planned, well-built, and managed expertly even though it had been constructed hastily.

Adam left the window and pulled on a sweat suit, quickly wetting his hair and plastering it down as best he could. He brushed his teeth and left his living quarters. He had time for an extended workout before breakfast and his meeting at the base, and he wanted to think.

He was remembering the time that he and Dallas had teamed up to share the Top Gun award in their final maneuver at the academy. They were a good team. They did have a good chance; he again tried to convince himself.

He mulled it over as he jogged to the gym, winding slowly through the streets of the base, getting his rhythm, breathing deeply. It helped clear his head, running. He did it every morning.

This morning he thought he even felt a hint of spring, at least that which could be felt at such an altitude and in the tropics. He found it invigorating. When he reached the gym, he saw that Dallas was already there before him.

Dallas Sharpe was his lieutenant and longtime friend. They had met at flight school, where they had once been great competitors, but had, through their adversity for one another, become close and had been close friends ever since through many tough scraps together.

They met there to work out each morning when they weren’t on a mission, before going on to their jobs at the base. But Adam hadn’t expected to see Dallas for at least another hour.

On entering the weight room, Adam heard Dallas say, Hey. You’re a little early, aren’t you?

The early bird gets the worm, huh? Adam joked. What gets you up so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed? He was breathing heavily. Dallas laughed from under his curly dark hair.

Couldn’t sleep, I guess.

Yeah, me too, Adam said. Big day today, he answered lightly, not giving on to his nervousness. It won’t be long now until we finally know the answer.

I know, I know, moaned Dallas. I haven’t been able to think of anything else. He, of course, wanted the new commission on the spaceship Friend as badly as Adam and wasn’t afraid to say so. They really wanted to go as a team. Anticipation of being named to the crew that would command the new vessel was driving them crazy.

I would hate to see Sellers and Wright get it, Dallas added. I thought we gave a better showing.

They or Regret and Courier, the French team, said Adam. But all those guys have good records too. It’s going to be a tough choice for the admiral.

I know that too, said Dallas. I guess we’ll know soon enough, but the waiting is killing me.

Dallas Sharpe was born and grew up in the United States of America, in the state of California. He’d lived in San Francisco, a beautiful place even then. After Union Day, he took his chance young and moved to the Union’s capital in Marseille, to go to school and be somebody, as he had jokingly referred to the reason for the move when he left his hometown to seek his fortune in the world.

He had come to Mount Comrade several years later after graduating from the academy. Although his college degree from the university was in genetics, he had grown to love flying through his association with the space program and with Adam. He was happy-go-lucky, proud, and daring. Dallas was also an outdoorsman and enjoyed hunting and fishing in his spare time.

Adam and Dallas now both dug into their workout, their taut muscles going through a series of weight lifting exercises recommended by the coach, an old drill sergeant now retired who hung around at the gym. The coach was well respected for his toughness and sense of humor. The guys admired, trusted, and looked up to him.

They began with fervor to burn off some of the anxiety they were feeling. Slowly at first then developing a rhythm and finally in unison,