Landings
Copyright© 2015 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 8: Winter is Coming and Then Came the Winter of the Soul
“I am in radio contact with Claire here when I go out. She goes outside and visually inspects the sky, checks the temperature, the wind speed and direction, and checks the barometer every hour,” Jim responded to my comment.
The head geologist grinned. “So that’s why she keeps interrupting my work for the latest readings. I was going to speak to General Mendoza about it the next time she asked.”
Claire held her chin up. “Maybe you shouldn’t have said that anyone could come and look at the readings anytime and didn’t need to ask you.”
General Mendoza laughed. “She’s got you there, Dr. Cochrane. I heard you say the same thing myself.” The general turned to Claire. “I am not an ogre, and I am a pilot. Why you would think I wouldn’t want to know the weather forecast eludes me.”
Claire looked General Mendoza in the eye. “Did you tell the President about our flight schedule? The Joint Chiefs? The Secretary of the Army? How high up the chain of command do you feel it incumbent to report daily operational details?”
“I report to Dr. Chou, and I suspect he reports down more than he reports up. For such a mild-appearing man, he positively loathes the bureaucracy and is frequently rude to authority figures. Did you know about this, Colonel Cross?”
“Yes, I did. And I supposed that hourly weather reports during a flight were routine. And I only knew about them because Claire and I room together. She never asked me, and I would have been surprised if she had.”
The general laughed. “Hoist by my own petard! I didn’t even know we had a weather office. I assumed there was nothing and that Jim was just eyeballing it. I was going to recommend someone start recording basic measurements. It has indeed been nippy the last few mornings.
“I was going to order some arctic gear just to be safe, and I was going to have Colonel Cross give some briefings on survival in cold weather. One of the things you are probably forgotten is that Colonel Cross was making a duty chopper flight when his bird went down in a snowstorm. He not only saved his pilot’s life with his knowledge of arctic survival, he saved Miss Story’s life as well.
“Officially, there is no data on how cold it was that night on Mt. Rainier; the automated weather stations only read to minus eighty — and they all broke. There are credible witnesses that carbon dioxide was freezing out of the air ... and that happens at about 110 below zero.
“It warmed up the next morning and was about minus fifty when the sheriff arrived — in spite of repeated warnings, there were two frostbite casualties in the first few minutes. I saw it myself; someone barfed at the crime scene, and the barf froze before it hit the ground. And that was when it was fifty or sixty degrees warmer than the night before. The sheriff left it there as a dramatic reminder to people not to get careless.
“Colonel Cross fought a gun battle with terrorists and came away with the checkering of his pistol grips as a permanent tattoo. Miss Story was not injured at all.”
She turned to me. “You won’t have to keep wearing gloves, Colonel.”
I had taken to wearing them full time to avoid answering questions.
“Now,” the general went on, “this meeting was supposed to be about re-prioritizing our exploration schedule. Let me hear your thoughts.”
The head geologist was adamant. “We need to explore east. That red hill and particularly that canyon — the Grand Canyon is a slice of geology from the Precambrian through today. What part of the geologic record that would reveal! I tingle from head to toe thinking about it!”
Sourdough had a zinger though — he was a clever, intelligent man, and a lot of people over the years underestimated him. “I understand that the discoverer of a geologic feature gets to name it,” Jim asked the question of the room.
General Mendoza laughed. “Well, with me able to veto anything I don’t like. I’m not going to let a name get by me like that fellow tried in the movie Armageddon.”
Sourdough grinned, “Then I expect Galt’s Gulch is out?”
There were pained expressions around the room. “I think you are right, Mr. Armstrong,” the general told him.
He came right back with, “How about Texas Canyon — so much larger than that puny ditch in Arizona?” I believe he wanted that from the beginning.
General Mendoza looked at me and surprised me by winking. “Well, this is New Earth. It’s not inappropriate.”
“And the Iron Hills?” Jim went on.
General Mendoza looked around and saw no objection. “That’s fine. Are you going to name everything you find?”
“Good heavens, no! Naming plains and savannahs would be boring!”
“We are still off-topic,” the general said, struggling to get the discussion back on track.
“We need to focus on the east,” the head geologist said, and the head biologist nodded. “We have a proposal to import a small ATV in parts ... actually, we think we can get something like a Range Rover through. We have built a dozen ten-thousand-gallon tanks, dotted over the low valley nearby. Those tanks are at ten percent capacity at the current time, and there is a priority for transferring the fuel to fill them.
“We built those tanks up from curved sections of the tanks that we nested together for transit, then welded when we installed them. Given time to think about it, we are coming up with some innovative ideas of getting things through the wormhole.”
The rest of the meeting was planning for an extended campaign to go east before the weather turned bad. We were going to create a new outpost halfway to Texas Canyon, but slightly north of a direct line. We had no idea how bad the winter would be, but we wanted to be ready for the spring.
We had a small dozer to clear a runway. We would pick a spot with good water and without a lot of trees — and there were places where the grass was barely ankle-high. We brought over a thresher that could be hooked up to our Range Rover. We built a wooden platform that would go on the Rover that we could lash to the top, using it as a pallet for cargo — but the cargo was mostly in plastic boxes and easy to load and unload.
The winch had two hundred meters of cable, and we figured that we could cross streams up to the size of a football field — if we were careful.
We also brought over some new ultras. One had the capacity to carry two passengers, and the second had extra fuel tanks for extended range. Operations slowed down as winter closed in. We installed simple shells for buildings at the new outpost and left the finishing until the weather improved.
We built a temperature-controlled shed for the machinery, with alarms if the temperature got too cold.
The first snow was almost exactly a year after Claire and I had arrived. We were two hundred, by then. I saw to it that we sang Christmas carols on Christmas Eve, had Christmas trees with decorations and all the trimmings. It turned out to be a good thing, as there was a hidden streak of homesickness amongst most of the people on New Earth.
We were evidently even with the latitude of places like Ohio and Pennsylvania. We got a total of about four feet of snow over six months, before the snow started to melt. We hadn’t seen any predators all winter long, and the biologists theorized that they were hibernating ... but no one wanted to go looking for their dens. Some of the predators hunted in packs and no one wanted to disturb a bunch of them.
The winter was, as it was for cultures around the Earth, a slow time. We stayed warm, the scientists did research and reported back home and the rest of us stayed close to home. The thermometer never dipped below zero Fahrenheit, in fact, it never got close.
The scientists were excited to get a handle on the length of the year — they estimated sixteen months which turned out to be accurate.
Finally, when it started to warm up, we were augmented with several hundred additional people, including two new pilots, and we sent another one of the new guys home, who had sat in his room and trembled.
We also got three new ultras, this time they had been designed by people not limited to Earthly rules. Two were capable of carrying two people for nearly two hundred miles.
At first, everything was going well. The new outpost was fitted out and moved into it without a hitch. We moved fuel supplies forward to support exploration of Texas Canyon.
General Mendoza wanted to ease the new pilots in slowly, so a mission was planned to the Iron Mountains, with one of the new pilots and a geologist. Claire was in contact with Richard Emerson as he prepared to land... when we lost contact with them.
We never heard or saw them again, even when the population radically expanded. Unsolved mysteries are always vexing, and this one was no different. Still, we soldiered on as best as we could.
The next flight was to cautiously approach Texas Canyon and land well short and walk closer to the edge.
The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. The pilot reported in about ten miles short of the edge, then, while Claire was talking to him, he managed to report that an updraft had torn the wings off, and he was going down.
The twin events traumatized the scientists. They no longer trusted the ultras and refused to fly them. Subsequent investigation gave no help. The ultra to Texas Canyon landed a mile inside the canyon even though the pilot said he was landing ten miles short. Very quickly, we learned that with the air currents over and near Texas Canyon, you needed all the luck you had to survive.
Claire had her seventeenth birthday. She was living in the single women’s dorm now and had many friends as well as teachers. She kept busy working on schoolwork and the ultras. The loss of two of them really affected her, even though she was definitely not responsible for one and no one could say for sure what happened to the other.
Life on New Earth was filled with every sort of challenge.
Claire quickly went from being thought of as a teenager to the go-to person when it came to ultra-lights. Sure, we had several, including spares, but they had sent only a single woman who was supposed to be both frame and engine qualified.
It turned out she was a woman who had the power certificates, but who had never worked on ultra-lights. When the pilots learned of that, they refused to fly on anything the woman worked on. Shortly, she was sent home, the second person to go back.
One nice thing about General Mendoza — after her initial hesitation, she wasn’t reluctant to send people home. The news got back to New Earth — Cat 5 bio-containment was less than no fun.
I had initially worried that everyone would treat Claire as a mascot, and the condescension that implied. They treated her instead as the genius mechanic that not only kept the ultra-lights flying, but fixed everything else in camp.
Then came Shien Shan, in China. A rural village that had the misfortune to have a badly designed wormhole research facility nearby. The Chinese had instruments and computers as good as we had — they just didn’t use them in Shien Shan. It took a second and a half for the radiation to destroy the wormhole.
The Chinese had remote monitoring and knew what had happened. Like the Japanese before them, the wormhole had opened about sixteen light hours from a Wolf-Rayet star. People will next be able to visit Shien Shan again in twelve thousand years — in radiation suits.
A hundred and ten thousand people were killed, a quarter million injured. No one wanted to come clean about what had happened; the new American president was a genius with PR and managed an introduction to wormholes by talking about how secret they were and how he couldn’t talk about them.
By that time, we had three hundred at the colony and had several births. No one ever got sick.
At first, the government was very reluctant to send people to New Earth. Everyone in the government was afraid of lawsuits — that obtained right up until the US Supreme Court refused standing to a plaintiff’s relatives in a suit when the plaintiff had been killed on New Earth.
If relatives of people on New Earth had no standing to sue if their loved ones came to harm — there was no worry about any suit from anyone on New Earth — and very, very few had ever come back.
The administration floated the idea of free emigration to New Earth — and decided that there were too many to easily handle. Their first cut was to charge a hundred thousand dollars for the cylinder for each person to go through the wormhole and food that had to be sent with them.
New Earth produced all the useful amino acids and food crops; the rest was generated, but the food supply had to be kept in balance. People had to be fed long enough to live to the first harvest. Winters at Landing were like New England winters. Not much could be done in the winter, except stay warm. Claire and I stayed plenty warm that first winter, although we no longer pretended not to be husband and wife.
However, what was happening back on Earth wasn’t pretty. Minorities were an underrepresented group among the people who could afford to come to New Earth. Worse, the elderly affluent were cashing in their life savings to send their kids and their families. For the better part of a year, there was a long line of people waiting to emigrate.
However, those of us on New Earth were consumed with dealing with the thousands of newcomers, most of whom were unsuited to frontier life. We had to laboriously bring farming equipment through the wormhole, then, in most cases, weld it back together.
There was little work outside of farming, and people complained — then a number wanted to return to Earth. There was a continual stream of newcomers, and General Mendoza put her foot down and refused to let people go back. Frantic messages were sent home, and the emigration slowed, but didn’t stop.
That’s when it hit the fan.
At the start of our third year, General Mendoza had come to me. “Have you been following the news from back home?” she asked.
I shrugged. “A little; it is altogether depressing.”
“The former President paid a heavy political price for the New Hampshire Project and lost the election. The new guy — he’s a waffler, a trimmer ... the worst sort. Among other things, he has opened up New Earth to immigration.”
“How many?” I asked. I was still naive, a little.
“Unlimited. Honestly, it won’t last. The price of a ticket is a hundred thou, to be spent on consumables. Can you imagine what that will mean back home? The folks with any gumption will get up and go ... leaving the non-productive underclass, for the most part, behind. A lot of people think it is a political ploy to attract people on the right to emigrate, leaving the left in charge.
“Taking the productive members of society away — shipping them to New Earth where everyone, just about, is a farmer or hunter. It is a prescription for disaster. The top one percent of taxpayers paid something like sixty plus percent of the taxes. If any significant fraction of that one percent emigrates — it’s curtains for the economy.
“The only bright spot, at least for you and Claire, is this guy is a devout atheist and dislikes religious people — and Muslims are the most religious people on the planet. Since wormholes became public, the terrorists have gotten desperate and bold. There have been several massacres in various places, and they have always been willing to kill each other. It isn’t a pretty picture.
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