The Vigilant Ones

By Alexis Latner and Alexis Glynn Latner

Organisms of very different kinds can live together as symbiotes to each other, yet an organism can have some of its own kind as enemies.

 

And that's just one of the surprises in the universe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Avendis Press
• Release date: Aug 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223185505

Book preview

ROBOT SEEKS ICE CUBE ON THE MOON, proclaimed the headline in the local section of the Houston Chronicle.

"Ice cube?!" Jan Kostryzinski exclaimed, incredulous. What the lunar rover had been designed to retrieve was more like a giant straw full of Moon-dirt Slurpee. Headline writers couldn’t resist an inaccurate but catchy turn of phrase. Jan took a savage bite of her burrito and checked her watch. She’d leave the house by 6:45 PM.; her office was only fifteen minutes away. The signal from the Moon would arrive at 7:13 PM. It would be a long evening.

Jan’s burrito had been in the freezer until she hastily microwaved it. Unpalatable cold spots lurked inside the wrapped tortilla. Twining around Jan’s ankles, Nutmeg meowed.

Cool it, Nutty, you’ll get your supper. That’s why I came home for mine. Bracing herself in case the story turned out to be as inaccurate as the headline, Jan read the article.

The Chron’s science writer had interviewed Jan yesterday in her office at the Planetary Science Institute. Evidently he’d taken good notes. Her name was spelled correctly, with y, i, and i in the right order. The article gave a simplified but adequate background for the project for which Jan was Principal Investigator. It continued, In the current frugal budgetary climate, NASA deems it more important to send humans to Mars to look for life than to the Moon to look for ice. Jan mentally added a footnote: frugal meant dirt cheap or no dice on the ice. The task of sampling ice on the Moon falls to a robotic rover named Cocytus.

The sidebar sketch made Cocytus look cute, like a bug on six wheels with a bristle extending from its rump. The bristle was its communications antenna. The rover’s name came from Dante’s Inferno where it meant the ninth and coldest circle of hell. That had turned out to be ironically appropriate, because the machine had made life hellish for controllers and scientists as it malfunctioned its way across the lunar surface after exiting the lander. The newspaper article translated the sorry situation into scientists and engineers have had to overcome a series of mechanical difficulties.

To Jan’s dismay, the article left out the best part of the project: how confirming ice on the Moon might catalyze the establishment of a lunar base. Jan deplored the priority given to a manned mission to Mars, which absorbed a vast fraction of space exploration money, leaving lunar concerns to dangle on a brittle shoestring of funding. Finding life on Mars or anywhere else in the Universe was a long shot. The surest and best ambition would be to go put life there.

With another meow, Nutmeg leaped into Jan’s lap just