Space for Evolution Read online

  Space for Evolution

  Zurab Andguladze

  Copyright © 2021 Zurab Andguladze

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  E-book formatting by Maya Avdeeva in Warsaw.

  Contents

  Space for Evolution

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  The great moment had come. Here, in near-earth orbit, the spacecraft had begun its centuries-long journey to an extrasolar planet.

  Two astronauts were seeing it off, sitting in their jet-powered chairs. One of them, Iason Azgo, had earned the honor, as the only man who had worked on the ship from the first bolt to the last strut. Larri Meinor was there only due to the good fortune of being Iason’s current shift-mate.

  Iason, in his wonder, felt a strong surge of emotions, although until this moment he’d had no doubt that this procedure would pass without any excitement. Nevertheless, unexpectedly, when the flight director Dr. Francoise Proset, announced the start, Iason felt as if the temperature in his EVA suit had risen abruptly. This agitation appeared to be really sudden, after those ten years during which he had worked at assembling this craft.

  Fifteen years before, when he’d been accepted into the project after following his youthful dreams, he hadn’t even dared think that he might find himself one day in outer space, much less at such a crucial time, in such a decisive position. Later, when he’d managed to climb the staircase of qualifications and had gotten here a decade ago, he’d thought that his farewell to this apparatus would be the most moving event in his life.

  But his values were changing.

  After ten long years of very difficult and dangerous work, his emotions had faded away toward the end. And six months previously, when he’d met Veana, this great project had gained a serious rival in her person.

  Now Iason soared in an orbit higher relative to the craft, two hundred meters above its “wing”—actually a fuel tank one and a half kilometers long. His workmate watched at another wing, but from the opposite side, from a lower orbit, and they easily escorted the ship because they still had an orbital velocity equal to its own. Although plasma had already started to fire from the rocket’s nozzle, it would happen only after one revolution around the Earth, when the craft would break away from the astronauts.

  Attentively observing his part of the gigantic, unmanned apparatus, Iason caught a spark from the corner of his eye, to his right. But there should be no spark anywhere. Even the flow of protons left the thermoplasmic engine without generating visible light. Moreover, he couldn’t see the rocket from his position. It hid between the wings, together with the lander docked to it, and the satellite attached to the latter. These three vessels were incomparably smaller than the fuel repository, and because of this disproportion, the entire construction resembled a hummingbird equipped with the wings of an intercontinental airliner.

  Iason turned his chair to look for the spark, but saw nothing at first. Although after he had narrowly peered toward the spot, the cosmic rigger discerned some kind of thin threadlike structure, glittering in the rays of the searchlight flowing from the International Space Station. He was about to report this oddity to Mission Control, but they got there ahead of him: “Condor One and Condor Two, we have some sort of vibration inside the fuel repository, and decreasing pressure in one of its sections. Do you see anything?”

  “Mission Control, Condor One. I see some sort of spark on the first sphere of the first layer of the left wing, on its upper side. It looks like a very thin thread flickering there. I’ll go and find out what it is,” Iason informed them.

  He referred to the fact that the left wing stretched toward Earth’s North Pole, and the right one to the South. These wings consisted of spherical reservoirs fastened to a common axis in a series of four, much like fan blades on their spindle. These sets of four constituted layers, numbered from the rocket out. The first in the layer was the sphere farthest from Earth.

  “Copy, Condor One. Go and check,” Iason heard through his earphones.

  Chapter 2

  Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter fly the millions of rocks comprising the asteroid belt. Each of these stones, all of different sizes—from jagged pebbles to spherical planetoids—has an individual path, stable and mostly unchanged over the past billion years or so. The era when they collided regularly passed by long ago. Now they would continue their monotonous journeys unscathed for the next several millions of millennia.

  Much further from Earth, well beyond lonely Pluto and Eris, is another orbiting cluster of celestial bodies called the Oort Cloud. It also consists of asteroids, although they are peculiar ones, circling the Sun along a very elongated ellipsis. Their strangeness begins to unfold as they near our luminary on their long orbits. The heat causes the ice in these bodies to start evaporating, and this steam, mixed with gasses and dust, follows such as
teroids like the tail follows the period forming a comma. That is why these asteroids are called “comets.”

  One of these comets was now approaching the Sun. It consisted of five large chunks measuring several kilometers each, and countless smaller ones, some of the latter glued to the main body of the comet by water ice.

  Five million years ago, the fastening of one of the stones, the size of a rugby ball, became weakened. The reason for this was the previous visit of the comet to the vicinity of our star, when part of its ice melted, turned into water, and evaporated.

  During the current visit, this connection had completely thawed out, and this rugby ball had finally separated from the main body of the comet. The latter, constantly spinning, pushed this small piece out of their common trajectory, easily overcoming their insignificant mutual attraction.

  Gradually, this newly formed celestial body approached the asteroid belt. Upon arriving, it ran into a rock the size of a golf ball. As a result, the smaller asteroid changed its eternal course and headed toward Earth’s orbit at the enormous speed of twenty-five kilometers per second.

  At the moment when Iason and Larri were going about their task, this rock was preparing to burn down into the atmosphere, like many of its comrades, which together constitute a total of several tons of extraterrestrial matter per year. At the moment when it was about to become a meteor, this “golf ball” collided with a fragment of an old communications satellite.

  After this high-energy impact, the piece of duralumin was flattened to almost the thickness of a sheet of paper, and, naturally, changed its orbital course. After two minutes or so, it collided with the interstellar probe’s fuel storage repository; specifically, it hit one of its spherical reservoirs, which contained five thousand tons of deuterium. Although it was a very light piece, thanks to its enormous speed and sharp edges, it managed to cause significant damage. From the strong multilayer hull of the container, it chopped off a fragment about ten centimeters wide.

  Chapter 3

  Having received permission to check the anomaly, Iason directed his chair to this strange beam. He’d passed almost half the way there when he heard the tense voice of Françoise Proset: “Condor One, the engine has increased fuel consumption. In fact, the process has already gone out of control. You need to hurry up.”

  “Copy,” Iason replied, pushing the joystick on the right hand side of his chair, maximizing jet thrust and, of course, fuel consumption.

  When he approached the place after about three minutes, he could hardly believe his eyes. A stream of liquid deuterium with a radius of at least ten centimeters was pouring out of the tank!

  At first, the shock numbed Iason, but the next moment the experienced space-rigger overpowered his bewilderment. He estimated the flow of fuel—a perfectly straight shot in zero gravity, and then reported: “Flight control, this is Condor One. Something has cut a hole with a radius of about ten centimeters in the hull of this tank. The stream flowing out of it is falling directly onto the feeding compartment.”

  The jet-stellarator, the plasma-generating device, constituted the core of the interstellar rocket. A nozzle and two feeders located in two light-gray boxes comprised its interfaces. These four components bore the pipe and cable connections to each other, to the fuel storage, and to the general-purpose computer situated inside the lander.

  “Condor One, the energy output has approached a critical limit. The fall in temperature inside the second feeder has caused it.” Dr. Proset informed him, as tensely as before.

  The more fuel that flowed into the plasma-generator, the stronger the magnetic field that held the plasma, and the more energy that would accumulate inside the plasma. This rule operated within certain limits, and then the plasma density approached a dangerous value that could trigger an uncontrolled fusion of nuclei—a thermonuclear explosion. The feeders should have regulated this inflow, but as mission control informed him, one was out of order.

  “Copy that. You can see that the deuterium is spilling right onto the second feeder.”Iason confirmed.

  As he spoke, he showed them with his helmet-camera what was happening in front of him.

  “But…” the flight director began, though he stopped at once.

  On the screen, mounted on a flexible stem protruding from the left armrest of his chair, the astronaut could see for himself all of the instrument readings. The situation was getting worse every second.

  “Well, maybe we should wait until this section empties?” The flight director resumed, with clear doubt in her voice.

  The internal space of the spheres, which contained five thousand tons of fuel altogether, was divided into one hundred sections, each of which could be separated from the remaining sections of the reservoir. This had been done precisely for such cases as this, although the need had occurred earlier than anyone expected. Overall, ten percent of these one and a half million tons of fuel was simply a reserve. After the expedition reached its final speed in eight years, this deuterium would remain somewhere in interstellar space if it wasn’t used.

  “At this pace… it seems maybe fifty liters per second… it will take at least twelve minutes,” Iason suggested. “Do we have that much time?”

  “I’m afraid we don’t,” the chief answered.

  The more Iason thought, the clearer he saw it: if they waited until all fifty tons of liquid ran out, it was highly likely the amount of energy inside the plasma generator would exceed the permissible limit.

  Here he involuntarily recalled the sad case of the shuttle Columbia, which had perished at the beginning of the century. Then they had immediately suspended that program.

  What would happen now if a thermonuclear explosion occurs? He wondered. The ISS and all its personnel would be destroyed—the orbital pier, communication satellites, a thermoplasmic rocket and a descent vehicle would turn into cosmic dust… And what would happen to the Project? Was there any certainty that it would survive such a huge disaster? And, which was no less significant than anything else—he would surely die.

  To avoid the impending catastrophe, he needed to warm up only one gadget. For proper operation, these gadgets weren’t supposed to go below a certain temperature. Later, en route, the energy of the radio-isotopic thermo generator would warm the equipment, but not now. For a human being, low-earth orbit is a deadly place, but for the equipment it was the right temperature.

  And now this had happened—something had chopped out a piece of the tank’s multilayer, ultrastrong hull, and as a result a fluid stream with a temperature of only sixty degrees Kelvin had hit this device.

  At first glance, the task looked simple, but in reality it was not so trouble-free—far from it.

  “Can we increase the heat flux?” Iason said.

  “Already done,” replied Dr. Proset. “The limit of the channel has been reached, and it is insufficient. We just need to stop this flow for a few seconds, and heat the injector’s control system. Do you have any ideas?”

  Floating over the fountain of liquid deuterium, all Iason could come up with was to direct his chair right into it. He felt that the chief wanted him to do exactly this, but didn’t dare to ask, obviously because of the amount of fuel required.

  Only seventeen percent of the juice remained in his transport, after he and Larri had inspected the structure, and after his quick flight to the damaged spot. But what if that wasn’t enough? When his chair ran out of fuel, the stream from the sphere would throw him into space, where no one could find him in the surrounding darkness.

  Wait a minute! After his thrusters died, inertia would push him directly to the rocket! Iason could grab one of those boxes and prevent himself from being thrown into space. With intensified palpitations he understood that he’d almost found a suitable solution. Only one problem hindered the realization of his plan; the chair was quite massive, and hard to maneuver—But no! During that fly to the rocket he could leave his transport and not have to worry about its momentum…

  “I’ll block this
stream with my chair,” Iason told mission control.

  “This is unacceptably dangerous. You’re almost empty,” an instant response came, indicating that they had indeed already examined this option.

  “How long before the explosion?” Iason asked, as if he hadn’t heard the previous information.

  “At this pace, theoretically about fifteen seconds, but nobody really knows if it will happen at all,” the answer came immediately.

  This time, Iason also answered instantly, “If my juice doesn’t last long enough, I’ll get rid of the chair and cling to the feeder. Next, I’ll move away from the stream so as not to freeze.”

  “Wait, it’s still dangerous,” Francoise began, but Iason interrupted her:

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Condor Two, move there.” The next order came from Earth.

  “Copy that,” Iason heard Larri’s voice, and after that, a complete hush reigned in the ether.

  Chapter 4

  Iason turned on the gas and headed for the stream of heavy hydrogen pouring from the container. He planned to build up momentum and then stand in the way of the flow.

  Entering it first, he felt it blowing, and then managed to adjust his position so that the head of the liquid hit the back of his chair, on its center of mass.

  Immediately his transport began to fly toward the rocket. Iason increased his thrust to counter the pressure. That didn’t help, and he immediately shifted the power adjustment joystick farther—to the edge position—and as a result almost ceased to move. But when the rigger glanced at the readouts, he saw with concern that the fuel was flowing as fast as water from an upturned bucket.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the clock at the top of his tablet. The first second passed, the next, third, fourth, fifth ... tenth, fifteenth...

  “What’s going on?” Iason asked the ether sharply.

  “It’s still growing, your fuel is almost finished, move out of there!” A nervous voice answered.

  “What now?” Iason didn’t pay attention to this warning, and was still slowly nearing the rocket.

  “Wait a minute… It seems the temperature has stabilized… wait, wait… it’s started to rise,” Francoise said in a suddenly hoarsened voice. “Condor One, get out of the stream. That is an order. We’ve stopped the feed; it’s done!”