***
The news was met with joy, enthusiasm, and—surprise, surprise—loud complaints. I guess I should have expected it, and if I hadn’t been personally so giddy with the news, I would have seen it coming. No one wanted to share a planet. From the biggest city to the smallest enclave, they all wanted one to themselves.
Colonel Butterworth and I looked at each other, and I could tell that he’d expected this.
I let it go on for a while longer, then I asked for the floor. “Okay, okay. Look, here’s the thing. Right now, we have two planets available. That’s it, sorry. We can’t delay emigration until we get more, because the Earth is becoming uninhabitable. So here’s how it’s going to go. When we’re ready to ship a group, if there’s nothing else available, they’ll go to Vulcan or Romulus. If and when a new planet comes available, groups will get right of first refusal in the order in which they emigrated.”
“And meanwhile, they’ll have settled in,” Valter yelled into his camera.
“Yeah, and given the warm welcoming feeling you’re projecting, I’ve no doubt they’ll want to stay put.” I held a moment of silence for effect. “Look, this isn’t ideal, but this is a survival situation. We’re abandoning a sinking ship, and we’re spending too much time arguing about who is going to end up in what lifeboat with whom. Let’s think about surviving, first, okay?”
“As if it matters to you. You have no skin in this game. Or at all.” That was Ambassador Gerrold, the delegate from New Zealand, a former Aussie. For whatever reason, he had never liked dealing with me. I was mystified by his animosity, as there didn’t seem to be any reason for an attitude, pro or con.
This time, I simply smiled at him. “I can leave any time. Just put it to a vote and vote me gone. I’ll respect the decision, pick up my football, and go home.” I looked around the videos. “No? Then let’s get back to realistic discussions.”
Without so much as a heartbeat of hesitation, the argument re-erupted.
Bill – April 2162 – Epsilon Eridani
The update from Riker and Homer had been interesting on so many levels. The Svalbard seed vault was a pleasant surprise, and could be a real boon for terraforming Ragnar?k. There were a couple of varieties of plants and moss that conceivably could be made to grow on the as-yet bare soil. And if they took hold, they could accelerate the oxygenation of the atmosphere by millennia. Riker had promised to put a clone together to ferry some seeds out to me.
But the most exciting item was a variant of a SURGE drive that could be used on large bodies. Like asteroids. Or Kuiper objects. Epsilon Eridani 2 needed about five or six hundred cubic kilometers of ice dropped on it, in order to connect the seas into oceans. I’d been mulling over how to get those Kuiper objects into the inner system. Hohmann orbits would take decades to centuries. That wasn’t necessarily a problem for me, but for humans needing a place to live, a little more alacrity might be in order.
Anyway, the planetary body SURGE drive wasn’t complicated, though it did require a lot of construction material. It occurred to me that I could use it to accelerate a chunk of ice into an orbit heading for Ragnar?k, then remove the drive and fly it to another chunk. Rinse, repeat. As long as I had the drive available when flying icebergs started showing up at the tail end, I’d be golden.
I discussed the idea with Garfield. He looked skeptical.
“I understand the mechanics, Bill, but you’d better make sure that nothing goes wrong. You’re leaving yourself no wiggle room for adjustments.”
I shrugged. “Well, if I fail to catch one of the chunks on the back end, it’ll just sail past Ragnar?k and probably end up in the sun.”
“If you fail to catch one, you’ll probably be failing to catch a lot of them. Why don’t you do a couple of simulations?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary, Garfield. Why are you going on about this, anyway?”
“Look, Bill, you really have to stop treating me like Igor. I can do the math, too. Maybe you should take the time.”
Igor? I looked at Garfield in shock. Had I been patronizing him? I understood the reference, and the emotional undertone behind it. Something was definitely up.
“What’s going on, Igor, I mean Garfield?” I grinned at him to show I was kidding.
He returned a brief smile, acknowledging the joke. “I know Bob-1 made that rule about the senior Bob being in charge, but I’m getting tired of being a sidekick. We get a lot of stuff done here, and I’d hate to have to leave, but I think our working relationship needs some adjustment.”
I nodded, thoughtful. “I know you’ve been pestering me about some projects that you wanted added to our backlog. Is that what this is about?”
“Partly. Also, more input on the stuff we are working on. Original Bob was a bit of a lone wolf, and you tend to work the same way, expecting me to tag along. That’s not working so well for me.”
I prodded my psyche. No surprise, I was offended. But I definitely didn’t want Garfield to leave. We worked well together, and accomplished a lot more than each of us could individually. Time to suck it up.
“Okay, Gar, point taken. But don’t expect a raise.”
He laughed and waved a hand at the schematic, which had been hanging in the air, forgotten. “Good. Now, have a look at the plan, and do the math. Take the time, and consider the downside if you’re wrong.”
I nodded in thought. One of the important details of the project was that the ice chunks couldn’t be allowed to slam into Ragnar?k at interplanetary speeds. They’d have to be inserted into an orbit around the planet and broken up. The ice would come down as increased rainfall for a few weeks.
I did the simulations as Garfield suggested. Turned out that having two of the drives would allow me to get all the ice to Ragnar?k within twenty-five years. Now there was a plan I could get behind.
***
Garfield caught the softball—barely—and after due consideration, more or less whiffed it back to me. I cringed a little, watching him. Original Bob had never been much for sports, and even in VR we hadn’t improved on the basic model.
“You know what you throw like?” I said with a smile.
“Yeah, like you. Tell me again why we’re doing this?”
“First, it’s a good test scenario for fine-tuning the VR. Homer commented at one point that some of the physics is still a little off.” I bobbed the ball in my hand a few times. “Second, and more importantly, I think we have to do more than just sit in libraries and parks and command decks if we want to really retain our feeling of being human. I don’t want to be reduced to some Doctor Evil cliché.” I tossed the ball. “This isn’t exercise in the physical sense, but it does remind our brains what it’s like to do things.”
The return toss went way over my head and landed in the lake with a splash.