Pleas to the Pleiades

In Candor’s open hands magically there appeared a pearl and a drop of mercury. The pearl changed to gold, becoming blue gold. The drop of mercury changed to red mercury, still trembling liquid.

Jimmie and Candor were working in their new physics technology laboratory, while Khlilia was watching.

Jimmie said, “A reaction tube of this size. Maybe several.”

Candor answered, “Several. No problem. I suggest the special ceramic, like you said. We will have the first one tomorrow.”

“Then we need an electronic control system, to generate the required frequencies. Can you make it smaller than my schematic plan?”

“Also no problem. One small tuned crystal.”

“Super. I like you more and more, Candor.”

“The feeling is mutual, Jimmie.”

Soon, the new engine prototype was complete, a dark metallic ceramic cylinder, surrounded by gleaming metal tubes and wires. It was three metres long and a bit over a half metre in diameter. One end was rounded, and the other was open. Two units the size of small suitcases were attached near the rounded end. The entire apparatus was bolted into a thrust harness, which had analysis equipment wired into it. Opposite the open end of the rocket was an ablation pad, several metres away. Beyond that the open end pointed out into the Martian desert, through a large clear window array.

Jimmie said, “Let’s fire her up.”

“Her?” Candor questioned.

Khlilia, watching, sighed, “It’s a thing Earth human males like to say about their favorite machines.”

As before, Candor ignored their sentiments. “Here, you mammals better put on these protective masks for air. Just in case.”

Khlilia looked apprehensive as she and Jimmie put on the air masks. Candor pushed a button, and the machine started to hum. Then, a beam of ion plasma, alpha-helium particles and blue gold and platinum, fired out the open end and blew the ablation pad out through the window, shattering it into a thousand pieces. The thrust harness was destroyed, and the engine itself had propelled itself into the opposite wall. Everything was quiet and smoking. But then, Candor and Jimmie were jubilant, and dancing.

Candor said, “More than we calculated.”

Khlilia was unimpressed. “You guys are happy that you blew up the building? And I didn’t know that dragons danced.”

“Yeah! It’s a new era, Khlilia!” Jimmie rejoiced.

“Let’s talk over lunch,” Candor said calmly.

They were all three back in the dining hall, and the table was filled with extravagant dishes. Candor gestured toward the ample table.

“The exotic dishes of the planets we hope to visit, faster and farther than we have ever done before.”

Jimmie was still on the job. “What were the readouts?”

Candor replied, “Almost exactly according to our calculations.”

Jimmie was reading the computer printouts. “Just over a million metres a second! And that’s nowhere near full throttle! We could get to Earth in a few days.”

Khlilia thought about it all. “It takes a few months now. Coming here was the most uncomfortable and expensive experience of my life. I felt like I was in a cage, even more than I do now. I wonder why I did any of it. It was monotonous, and I never knew when Captain Quirk would start the spinning for exercise periods. I took sed-meds. Most of the trip.”

Candor looked at her and said, “Rather like the old Atlantic crossings in the sailboats of your history.”

Jimmie rejoindered, “Yeah, even if you weren’t a slave.”

Candor said, “Come on, Jimmie, aren’t you my slave now?”

“It’s a voluntary partnership.”

“Good answer. Let’s make several more engines. You mammals need a faster ship than we draco-sapent reptiles. We live for thousands of years or more … so, fast for us never meant much. We could sleep for several months or even years in rocket ships, so a few months to Earth from Mars never meant much, and a century or so from Thuban didn’t mean much either. You are getting me up to speed, Jimmie, my man.”

Jimmie, Candor, and Khlilia were watching, and making and testing several more engines. Then, a spacecraft was built, not very large – about twice as big as Jimmie’s truck. The Brave Brat. It loomed silvery on its launch pad, five exhausts apparent, ready to boom. It had two more engines mounted and pointed forward for braking, which could also be used as short-range defensive weapons or to blast apart meteors or comets that got in the way. It had short wings and two vertical stabilizers on the tail, with smaller engines on the tips of each, for maneuvering. The wings were big enough to give some gliding ability if the engines failed on planets with air, and the whole craft also had positive flotation, so it could also function as a boat. Under the fuselage were electrostatic lifters that doubled as a second propulsion system.

“Voila, the first Brave Brat. It can go almost anywhere in this solar system. Let’s go to Earth, my pets.”

Khlilia objected defiantly, “So you guys can hunt your enemies and eat them?”

“Yeah.” Jimmie nodded to Candor.

“Hey, Candor, do you have Internet here? We have it in Hesperia, but it’s expensive and very slow here on Mars.”

“Why, of course, Jimmie,” replied the Prince in his resonant dragon voice that reverberated in the air for many metres around. “It’s one of the ways I keep track of all my human pets whom I have released and returned to your planet. They are all under hypnosis to report on Facebook every day. Some of them I have farmed as friends, and I plan to eat them. You know how I like to eat people. Even more than squid and oysters and fish and crustaceans and deer and wild boars. I suppose you’d like to use it?”

“If I may,” answered Jimmie Memnon.

“Of course you may.”

Khlilia, the waif-musician, asked, piping in, “May I also use it? I’d like to ask about my family and friends.”

“Sounds normal to me, Khlilia,” answered the carnivorous Prince of Candor. “But, I must warn you, if any of your family cannot make music, I will eat them.”

Khlilia was aghast. Not all of her family made music.

The Prince of Candor, the gracious dragon-like feathered immense reptile, escorted the couple to his rather large computer room.

Lights were blinking everywhere.

Candor stuck his claws into two holes.

An earth-type keyboard slid out.

“Khlilia, you first,” said Jimmie.

She typed in her password for Facebook. She nervously smiled when she saw her Earth friends. She had one good musician relative. Through him, she communed with them for a while, waiting the several minutes that Earth-Mars communication required for each reply.

Jimmie then took over. He immediately checked in with his old musician friends from Chicksookhatchee.

“Look, Khlilia, and Candor, here are my old musician friends with whom I used to jam.”

“Those guys who wrote a song about a hotel?”

“Yeah. Chicksookhatchee. Look how young they look. They’ll meet us at my Grandma Osie’s place, not far from Chicksookhatchee in Florida. I suppose we’ll play some music together. Candor, I’m quite sure you won’t want to eat them. They are really good musicians.”

Candor replied, “Of course I know their music. It is quite good. That hotel song is one of the great rock classics.”

“Never much liked living in hotels. They give me heartbreaks.”

“Neither did I. Not nice to us reptiles. Not that Chatterquot was any better, eh, Jimmie?”

Jimmie grunted, and slid into the crescent array of controls in the fore of the cabin. Candor, and Khlilia got into the two seats behind his in the new spacecraft, with their own controls of life support and defense, and they buckled in. There were two more empty seats behind them, then a very small compartment with a vacuum-toilet and shower bags, and aft, a long narrow private sleeping chamber that could be used in turns. In the sides of the cabin were stored a variety of foods … all provided by the Chief Chef, the Prince of Candor. A table grill could open up in the middle of everything, and the forward three seats could all swivel around to form a circle of five. All five seats except the captain’s could level out flat for sleeping.

They took off without a hitch, leaving the red planet and all its swirling dust below. The spacecraft cruised toward Earth, a luminous blue-golden stream behind it.

Jimmie was exultant after takeoff, cruising as the new Captain, his forearms strapped into the triangular apparatus that served as steering system, his hands grasping handles with several triggers and push-buttons on them. “Okay, we’ll be in Earth orbit in ten or twelve days. Thanks for letting me be the pilot, Candor. This beast excretes platinum and gold!”

Khlilia remained skeptical. Her arms were crossed as only a woman can do. “Then, why don’t we just gather the gold and platinum? We could sell it on Earth.”

Candor tolerated her, bristling his coloured parrot-like feathers. “Don’t worry, Khlilia. Jimmie and I have developed a system for saving most of the gold and the platinum. We’ll be able to sell it for a few measly thousand dollars. This horse is far better than the one his ancestor Agamemnon developed. Jimmie, I understand that you mammals cannot withstand the gravitational force that I can. That’s the only reason you are the pilot. I protect my pets.”

Khlilia remained indignant. “Why can’t we make millions or billions of dollars worth of gold, or platinum? And help people, especially us, with it?”

Jimmie sighed, “Khlilia, this engine makes only a small amount of precious metal isotopes. Most of the exhaust is alpha particles – helium. Not precious. But the energy we generate is extremely precious.”

Candor added drily, “Moreover, what we can do on Earth to change all history is very, very precious.”

After a few days of their eating Candor’s delicious space-catering, and using the suck-bowls and the shower-bags, the spacecraft approached Earth and its Moon. It was beautiful to look upon, the turquoise and sandy cloud-frosted drop of water with a floating silvery pearl, the Moon, parked not far from it.

Jimmie asked Candor, “Where should we land?”

Khlilia said, “I’d like to land where I can properly bathe.”

“Khlilia, we’ll do that at my grandmother‘s place.”

Candor answered, “Let’s go to your Moon first, and get some titanium.”

Jimmie said, “Good, that’s more money.”

To Jimmie, Candor said, “Captain, approach the dark side bathed in light, then we’ll come around to the light side shadowed in darkness, and gather titanium.”

The spacecraft approached the dark side, and then landed on the light side of the Moon. Robots went out and cut chunks of titanium from the lunar maria – called the seas.

Then, the spacecraft headed toward Earth. However, a dozen smaller high-altitude aircraft were following it.

Captain Jimmie said, “We’ll enter through the North Pole. That will avoid re-entry friction. Plus, chase those followers off our tail. They look like the new F-22s. Fast, but not near as fast as we are.”

Candor said, “They are not F-22s. They are Draco fighters. Your Earth space programs never understood that about the poles. Very good, Captain. The vortex above each pole makes for much less re-entry friction.”