Chapter 4

12 meters doesn’t sound very big, but it got even bigger during construction. Each sphere ended up being a meter thick diamondillium, turned a bright and opaque orange by filling it with hydrogen atoms inside the carbon boxes of its structure. I kept the internal space to 6 meters wide, making the outer diameter of the inner sphere 8 meters. This made the exterior 16 meters. Five stories tall.

It took over a thousand tons of water to fill the radiation shielding. The door was a 2 meter wide 5 meter long cylinder, a fully threaded plug. I had designed a latch to lock the plug from turning on the inside. The exterior of the plug was perfectly flat. Because it was a solid piece of diamondillium, it became my pilot window.

Construction took place underground, because I could store the ship once complete, and conjure it in place once the sun went down. Val and Doris had calculated that I should head straight for the moon, as it would be directly overhead at about 8pm. Once I was at about 1000km up, but still able to detect surface features of the Earth, I would head east towards the sunrise. Just before I got there, I should be able to see Mars.

My phone’s navigation system used all three systems, the American GPS, the European Galileo, and the Russian GLONASS. They were all above 250k km altitude, plus the included magnetic compass would give me directions even at that height. Navigating to the correct side of Earth was not a problem. Finding Earth and returning from Mars worried me until Doris showed me a picture of Earth and the Moon taken on Mars by a rover. It was going to be very obvious in the sky, at martian twilight.

I was forging a comfortable chair just below the window, when Big T popped his head in. “Hey, boss. I’ve had a thought.”

I paused what I was doing, “Something brilliant?”

“Yeah. This door plug out here. Have you considered turning it into a giant telescope?”

“That is a brilliant idea,” I said, tossing him a conjured golden coin, that he immediately unwrapped and ate.

“I also have that camera you asked for. There was a shop in town that carried it. I was thinking you could mount it to the door, and use it’s wifi connection to view the image on your tablet. Using the zoom lenses I got, and the door as a telescope, you don’t have to sit right in front of a possible radiation source.”

I tossed him a second golden candy. “That is brilliant,” I said, dissolving the chair and platform, and reforging it as a new platform in the middle of the sphere.

Another Big T stuck his head over the side of the door above me. “I’m done with the emergency CO2 scrubber,” he said, “It’s battery powered, and I added a WiFi controlled switch, so if you lose consciousness for some reason, we can turn it on remotely. It has enough media for three weeks of operation, and battery power for four.”

“Toss it down,” I said.

He dropped the big box, and I absorbed it into a conjuring slot. “I’m placing one at the bottom of the craft as CO2 sinks. Is the G meter ready yet?”

“I’ve got it!” Val said, pushing the first Big T out of the way. She dropped it down, and I caught it with my power. I set the digital scale, with a 1kg weight glued to it on the deck. I conjured glue and stuck it to the floor, where I could see the number if I lifted my head. There was also a WiFi camera attached, pointed at the display.

Once the glue was set, I plugged it in. The power issue had been the first thing that Doris and Big T solved. She knew of a friend that had a Tesla power wall, and solar panels, that was out of town. I conjured her and Big T into the house, and once it was disconnected, stored and conjured a copy of it. When I conjured a copy back, they reinstalled it, and I stored them again.

Copying is not theft. Unless its copywrite.

The conjured solar panels ran in a ring around the exterior. They were encased in the diamondillium, with a diamondium covering to protect them, and keep them pressurized, as I was unsure how they would react to vacuum. The wires ran inside the support struts between the two sphere walls, and into a power room with ten power walls, two on each wall or ceiling, except the wall with the doorway.

There were power sockets in the floor to run equipment, and the big TV mounted just where my eyes now rested while trying out the zero gravity recliner attached to the middle of the deck. It mirrored a tablet mounted to my left, that displayed all the cameras attached to the craft. One camera was pointed at me, on the inside. Another was pointed at the digital scale that was my G sensor. There was a camera mounted underneath, so I could see behind me, plus others scattered around, for exterior views.

Doris had whipped up an app that also recorded and displayed power data, temperature data from the wireless pool thermometer floating in the water shield, and the data from a thermometer in the power room. Working together they had kludged a sophisticated set of sensors, displays, and a network that fed back thru my original wifi pearl, now embedded in the diamondillium floor where it broadcast wifi thru the entire craft.

I looked around, and realized the craft was much bigger than it needed to be. I was pondering starting over with a much smaller craft, now that we knew what equipment we felt was absolutely required. I looked up to see a worried Doris looking over the doorway lip.

“Boss, I don’t think Mars is a good idea right now.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“It’s 1.98 au away.”

“Ok, so almost twice the distance from the Earth to the Sun, what is that for flight time?”

“48.5 hours to the halfway point if you plan to accelerate and decelerate at 1 gravity.”

“Four days just to get there?” I asked, surprised. I was sure it would be faster than that.

“Plus four days to get back,” she said worriedly.

“If it works, I’ll just conjure myself back.”