Star Traders

The next four days was a flurry of activity as small Gravity Wells were stored aboard the Earth Princess and the other three ships in the fleet. The next morning all four ships rose majestically and followed one another out of the atmosphere of Epsilon 4 at mach 3. Once in space, Jayne turned up the speed and quickly reached the second moon of Epsilon 4. They reconnoitered with the huge Expedition starship. They had at least 100 hours to safe departure in Hyperlink. They quickly left Epsilon 4 behind.

40 hours out Jayne punched up a call to Lars Pierson, whom she had placed aboard the Expedition ship as commander. Six other Earthmen crew had gone aboard with him for the voyage to E-6. They had decided to make the trip separately rather than hook the Earth Princess into the Expedition ship. If the drugs worked as they suspected they would, the fact of space sickness for 48 hours was not going to be a factor, so no one had to take care of the 40 people that would have been affected.

“Kind of reminds me of the privateer eras on earth!” Lars said excitedly. “We put a prize crew aboard and sail her home!”

“Are you about ready, do you think?” Jayne laughed, catching some of Lars excitement.

“As ready as I’ll ever be, Cap’n!” Lars chortled. “I still think you should have taken this prize in though. You sure deserve it.”

“Not an option, Jake,” Jayne answered one more time. “I have a lot of Larn to take care of here. Remember that they are my family now. And with the additional 200 Larn to take care of on the way home, I shouldn’t leave them alone without me here on the Earth Princess. And don’t you worry either. They will take care of me too! Can you think of any problems you might encounter?”

“I can’t think of a one captain,” Lars said a little more somberly. “We’ve thought of everything…I hope!”

“Don’t even say that, Lars!” Jayne said with an edge of panic. “I’m on edge here as it is! I don’t need you telling me that!”

“Just kidding, Cap’n. I don’t expect any trouble at all. Certainly not with Hyperlink. We have already tested it when we dropped into it a couple of weeks ago. We are all ready to head for E-6. The computers have been loaded with the programs and the controls are as good as we can make them. The only thing I’m going to miss is the Simscreens. We’ll be traveling blind here. But there’s a lot of ship here to explore during the voyage. I don’t think I will be bored!” Lars signed off.

“I guess they’re ready,” Jayne said worriedly. “I hope that drug works. It will be a mess over there if it doesn’t.”

“It won’t be that bad, Captain,” Jake said sitting with her for coffee. “The Dran aboard the Expedition ship can take care of them if it doesn’t. I have a feeling everything will be just fine though. There’s no real reason why the drugs won’t work with us as well as the Larn.”

“I know you say we are compatible enough to them for that, but I can’t help worrying about it,” Jayne said. “We don’t seem that close, really. They’re smaller and, for the most part, darker than and certainly not as intelligent as we are. I can’t help wondering why that is.”

“Eric the Elder has a theory about that.” Jake said, nodding.

“Why am I not surprised about that?” Jayne asked wryly. “He seems to have a theory about everything.”

“Well, anyway, here’s what he thinks, and it makes some sense: Eric says that the Larn world spawned life early in the existence of the universes. They evolved to the point at which we now see them. No doubt they were nothing more than cave dwellers and hunters and had no particularly good weapons to insure they would survive. At that time they had a lot of predators that might have actually wiped them out had it not been for a meteor or something that upset the Van Allen belts around the planet allowing the radiation to bombard the world, causing mutations all over the place. One of the mutations was the man Dran, of course.

“Eric claims there is a world of difference between mutations and evolution. Mutations occur at random intervals when radiation from space bombards genes. Evolution, on the other hand, is the survival of the fittest. Or the more successful. Evolution allows that the most successful of a species will pass on their genes to the future species, each generation improving to a small extent on the one before. Eventually the species will evolve into a very successful group of beings, whatever they are. There’s a species of monkey, for instance, that all have very long little fingers. That is for digging grubs and ants out of their lairs in rotting logs. They are very successful in what they do and evolved a method of surviving.

“In the case of the Larn, that evolution was short-circuited by the mutation that was Dran. Dran made their lives comfortable and safe for the Larn before the Larn had the chance to evolve into it. Their evolution was arrested at a point where they are now; a 12-year-old mind and body. Dran gave them the weapons to destroy their enemies and the hunting and farming skills they needed long before they were even aware as a species that they needed them. Therefore, they did not need to evolve any farther than they are now to be successful. Dran, in his interfering with the natural process, relegated the Larn to a standard far below what they would have achieved on their own.”

“And what would that have been, do you think?” Jayne asked thoughtfully.

Jake looked at her and smiled. “Just look in the mirror. We are what the Larn should have become. When the portals between the worlds closed in the Sol system and left behind a number of Larn and Dran on E-1, somehow they evolved. They evolved into the human race. We are the natural heirs of the Larn. Don’t ask how. Who knows? Conditions were just right. Maybe we are, as I have heard many archeologists and anthropologists claim; an accident in the night after all, and not by any design.

“For whatever the reason, we evolved to what we are today. We are obviously of the same stock as the Larn; else we would not be able to breed with them. That we are farther along the evolutional scale is inarguable. The relationship between the Dran and Larn is permanent. It will never change. And the relationship between the Larn and us will always be as it is today. The Dran may find a niche in our society, but even that is doubtful. We are all what we are.”

“I guess we can be thankful that they are not a warlike people, in spite of what we ran into out here. Epsilon 4 was protecting their people, and those in the Expedition ship were merely fighting a defensive battle,” Jayne observed.

“I think that was part of the short circuit. I think that maybe their development was arrested before the war with one another started to be the successful way to go. Not only that, their development was arrested before the God thing too,” Jake said.

“I was wondering about that!” Jayne commented, “I never saw a place of worship on E-6 or here on Epsilon 4.”

“Apparently religion never took with the Larn. Probably because it was never necessary with them. Or maybe Dran himself forbade it. Who knows? From the trouble we are having and have had with religion for centuries, it’s probably a good thing. They certainly seem to be getting along well without it,” Jake commented. “Maybe it’s because they don’t seem to need to be controlled or to control, but more likely it was one more thing that was arrested in the development of the Larn. The Larn just never had to go through the natural historic change we went through. Part of that development might have been the invention of God. The Larn just didn’t have to invent Him.”

“Do you think God is an invention of man?” Jayne asked Jake.

“Probably,” Jake said. “I’ve read extensively and I haven’t found any solid evidence He exists or existed. That is not to say He doesn’t exist. The fact that I have never seen evidence of it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. But, I’m somewhat of a skeptic. If God doesn’t want me to do something, I feel He would let me know directly. Like, blazing a message across the sky for me to see, Jake, you piss me off, or something.”

Jayne started to answer.

“I know! I know!” Jake held up his hand. “I’ve heard that argument too. That’s what he did in the bible, you were about to say. Well, OK. But which version? I will answer. It seems that religion is so fractionalized as to lend a skeptic like me a lot of ammunition. And the fact that they fight to the death of one or the other is so ludicrous, it’s no wonder guys like me say God doesn’t exist.”

“I can see your dilemma, Jake,” Jayne said. “I have the same problem. But I have solved it another way. I believe there is a God, just not the one the popular mass religions believe. I think things are going along just exactly as He has intended. I had a friend once; an old guy who had a severe heart attack. He claimed to have had his talk with God, and seemed to think that everyone who has had a near-death experience has the same talk, and that God will only talk to you when you are ready to listen to what he has to say.

“He claimed that, as he prayed on the table, promising to do whatever if he could only live awhile longer, he heard a chuckle. Don’t worry, the voice told him, you’ll be around for awhile. I’m not ready to take you yet. And when he asked God what He wanted him to do, God told him, Nothing. You are doing exactly as intended, as are all others. The continued conversation brought out that God told him organized religion was run by charlatans, to a man, who interpreted for their own ends what other men had written in good faith. The guy finally died, several years later. The odd thing was, he never feared death from that point on. He was not afraid of hell, for he was told there was no such place. That it was another invention by man to control other men. And the real clincher was God was chuckling all the while. It wasn’t a laughing AT type of chuckle; it was the chuckle one might use with a child he was trying to appease. It was sincere. Hey, I believed him.”

“Well, I not going to say nay, Jayne,” Jake said. “I don’t have the experience to deny he was right.”

“One wonders, though, about the veraciousness of some of the advocates of the Christian religion when you hear about a person selling a part of a cheeseburger they claim has a likeness of the Virgin Mary imbedded in it.” Jayne said.

“What?” Jake exclaimed.

“I heard about it a year or so ago. It seems that some woman saw the likeness of Mary in her cheeseburger after she had taken a bite of the thing. Then she put it in a freezer and kept it for 12 years. The last I heard she was offered $14,000 for it on E-Bay.” Jayne said with a shrug.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” Jake laughed.

“Nope. It’s a fact. I wonder how she knew it was a likeness of Mary rather than someone like Marilyn Monroe?

“It’s been an enlightening conversation, Jake,” Jayne said as she rose to go to her cabin. “We only have a couple of days before transition to Hyperlink. See if you can think of anything we might have missed. I’d hate to have missed something obvious!”