Chapter 21: Merchantman

The timely arrival of the alien ship is considered a providential event by several of our colonialists. Just as we celebrate our third anniversary, the alien ship parks in orbit around our planet and hails us. Crashing the party?

No, these visitors are a no surprise except only to us humans. Oops replied when challenged, the aliens are here on schedule.

“Why would we keep secrets? All you needed to do was ask. How are we to know what you want to know, if you don’t ask?”

Apparently one of these ships appear on schedule roughly about every ten years in frequency. That gives rise to our speculation, the newcomer’s home world is perhaps about a four or five light years distant. Certainly not farther, but easily closer. Unless they discovered a FTL drive, a round trip to a farther star isn’t possible in a decade. For those who don’t regularly read SciFi, FTL is the abbreviation for Faster Than Light. Warp drive is a fictional story device to bend space-time, and only one imaginary means to accomplish FTL Warp exists only in fiction, though physicists think it’s hypothetically possible. Possible or not, nobody I’m acquainted with has ever developed, abbreviated RL, a real life FTL drive. FTL isn’t yet known to exist whether predicted in SciFi stories or not. Unless these aliens know how to accomplish it. Worth investigating.

Why are they here and why return every decade or similar?

According to Oops, for trade. The alien ship in orbit is a merchantman, a trader. What trade goods are exchanged?

Helium is exported by the Merfolk. What do the aliens need with helium, they would travel so far to acquire it? Back on earth, helium is used as a lifting gas in advertising blimps and party balloons, but the number one use of helium is as a cooling gas for magnetic resonance devices. Also it’s an inert gas for welding and inert atmosphere manufacturing, used for leak detection, and for pressurized breathing mixtures. The magnetic resonance cooling property sounds like a possible alien use. Unknown until investigated.

What do the Merfolk get in exchange? Drugs. Not medicines, but recreational drugs. Hallucinogens. Not unlike Britain trading Indian opium to China for it’s tea in the middle nineteenth century? Possibly a similar sort of trade.

Organic bladders filled with helium float to the surface of the sea, where they are towed ashore by swimmers, then collected by a landed shuttle ship from the alien’s mother ship above in orbit.

A ballast weight prevents the large helium filled bladders from floating up into the atmosphere. These ballast weights interest me. Once the bladder is emptied, the weight is flipped over and easily returned into the sea. The ballast weighs a lot or a little, depending which side is uppermost. A natural occurring antigravitic material?