So, we left the Sol system like a scalded dog headed for the creek. At warp speed seventy as we were beginning to call it, we just had a month to kill.
We talked several times about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and why we hadn't found it yet. Using three of the little warpships, we had hopped out to the solar focus and observed most of the stars out to ninety light years. We had yet to find any signs of E.T.s. None of us were about to give up though. They were out there somewhere. Statistics just ensures that. It was just a matter of time before we found them. The problem was that everyday the trip to visit the E.T. kept getting longer and longer. At a minimum, E.T. lived somewhere out past ninety light years. At warp seventy that had to be at least a two and a half year round trip. We needed much bigger ECCs or a much bigger ship, or both. The problem is that Jim and I had found a curve to fit the power requirements to the warp speed. We were approaching an asymptote and we didn't know if the thing went up to infinity or if it was just a potential well that we had to jump over. Either way it was going to take a buttload of energy to overtake even warp speed ninety. The ECC factory back on the Moon was pumping out flubell ECCs as fast as they could make them, but it would be another five or more years before they had enough of them to create the type of energy that I feared we would require for journeys any further out than a hundred and twenty light years away. We would get there eventually though. I just had to be patient. That's hard to do when you are pushing fifty.
A month went by rather like a turtle crossing the street in the midst of rush hour. I missed the kids terribly. So did everybody else. We popped out of warp about a thousand astronomical units from Barnard's Star, then made a couple of short warps into the interior of the star's system of planets. We approached the second blue green planet and entered into a LEO type orbit. Well it wasn't Low Earth Orbit, but what were we supposed to call it?
"Why don't we call it 'Anson'?" 'Becca asked.
"Yeah, Low Anson Orbit! Ha, that's great." Al laughed.
"What do you think, Anson?" Tabitha asked me.
"Okay. But I get to name the next one." I smirked.
Tabitha took the controls and led us around the planet multiple times. We spotted a location that looked like a lush tropical area and decided to give it a try. She brought us down in a field of something that looked like sea oats that grow along the beaches in the Gulf of Mexico. A few hundred meters to our south was a beautiful white sandy beach and an ocean frothing against it. The red sunlight gave the planet a dim appearance. There was plenty of light but nothing seemed very bright. Not like on Earth the way you have to squint your eyes or wear sunglasses at the beach.
We spent a few minutes checking the air for anything that would be harmful to us. We could see no microbes or deadly gasses. It was a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, argon, and other gasses. The oxygen was a little richer than on Earth, but that was no problem. We sat still in the ship and waited a while and watched for signs of indigenous lifeforms that could be harmfuclass="underline" snakes, bees, bugs, crocodiles, and three headed humanoid-eating E.T.s. Nothing other than an occasional alien sea oat reared its head.
An hour passed. We had made every measurement we could think of. Jim finally said, "To hell with this, let's go outside."
Tabitha reminded him that the protocol that he helped write required two hours of tests, analyses, and observation before running out into an alien world to be eaten by monsters or alien bacteria. So, we waited a little while longer.
The air was fine. I never even saw an insect. Perhaps they just didn't evolve here. We took a lot of vegetation samples. None of us could figure out how they pollinated without bugs. The ecosystem was completely different here. I guess the wind was good enough.
A couple of days later we split up. Tabitha, 'Becca, Jim, and I flew Einstein further inland while Margie, Anne Marie, Sara, and Al hopped continents in the Starbuck. We were to meet back on the beach in two days where we would leave the habitat cylinders.
We finally found insects and 'Becca swore that she saw a rodent of some sort. It would take years and teams of scientists to catalog all of the species of life there. We were physicists and engineers, not botanists, entomologists, and exobiologists. We would have to bring some next time. Two days passed quickly, and no creatures tried to eat us, not even the insects, if there were any insects.
Margie and Annie were docking the ships back to the habitat cylinders. Tabitha and I stood on the beach with the crystal clear water frothing at our feet. Even our treks to the bottom of the oceans of this world didn't reveal any underwater cities, although we had seen some big fish.
I was watching the alien red sunset. Tabitha, of course, was watching the docking procedures and muttering to herself about "teaching Annie how to fly better than that." I laughed at her and nudged her.
"Hey General, you got time to look at this really cool alien sunset?"
Tabitha turned away from the spacecraft and looked out over the ocean. "Yeah. It is pretty. You seem sort of solemn tonight. What's bothering you?"
"Nothing really. I just wanted to find more, you know?" I held my hands out as if to encompass the planet. Then I shrugged my shoulders.
"Yeah, I know. You wanted to find aliens. You did, just not the kind you can talk to."
"Maybe someday we . . ." I shook my head. "There are just so many stars out there. And it appears the potential alien homeworlds are farther away than we might have imagined. I keep telling myself that it is statistics. They are out there and we're bound to find somebody somewhere someday. One of the things that burns me up is that the people of Earth will never know we have been here. They'll never know what we, the human race, have accomplished."
"We will find aliens, one day, Anson. And some people on Earth know what you did. You saved the world from itself and have ushered in a new era of technology."
"Yeah a technology that they will never know exists. And I had a lot of help, Tabitha. And the world isn't out of the woods yet. Eternal vigilance and all."
"I know you had help, sweetheart. But you did it nonetheless. You, did it. And I have come to know you enough that I think you'll continue to do it. As long as it takes."
"I guess," I said.
"We will find intelligent aliens out there and we will get to tell the Earth, some day. But in the meantime, I miss my little girl and I'm sure she misses her mommy and daddy. What do you say we go home?" Tabitha held my hand and pulled me to her.
"Sounds great to me." I kissed her. "You know this is what I always dreamed of. I've always fantasized about inventing the warp drive and flying off to new and alien worlds with my beautiful wife and having wonderful adventures and saving the world. It's a childhood dream come true; I guess I can't think of anything that could make me happier."
She held me a little while longer and looked into my eyes. "I'm pregnant again," she said.
"Well, except for that." I laughed.
We went home.
APPENDIX
The Current Status of Warp Drive
In 1994 a scientific paper was written by Miguel Alcubierre entitled "The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity." It was a short "Letter to the Editor" and was published in the scientific journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. In that paper Alcubierre showed that within the confines of the currently understood theory of General Relativity that:
. . . without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting distortion is reminiscent of the "warp drive" of science fiction.