Chapter 5

It took us a year to get through all of the spaceships in the fleet, and we found only one more man and two more women. However, nine years later, we now have a thriving community of close to 1,000 souls, and some of our children are almost ready to turn out children of their own.

We had a big meeting and decided that it was no longer necessary to cycle every adult through sex with every other adult, since we now had 438 women of breeding age and 197 men who were fertile. That let us set up stable families of either two or three women to every man. The women were allowed to choose their men, and Susan, Geni, and Hester chose me. Erin, Janice, and Judy chose Ed. These were the women who had borne our children, so they figured that this was the appropriate way to divide themselves. Ed and I were very happy with what we got, so that ended the discussion as far as we were concerned.

At a different big meeting of the people, I was elected to be the chairman or president or whatever they wanted to call me. My title didn't make any difference, what did make the difference was that I was supposed to mediate all of the big disputes and act as chairman of this type of meeting. We were running a true democracy, and that got damned hectic at times. There were often five or six factions divided on a major question, but we eventually worked through them.

The catch was that I was supposed to be the decision maker when we did not have time for an appropriate meeting. That had never happened during the first 17 years of my "reign," but then the shit hit the fan! We met our first aliens, and the fact that they were hostile made the situation even more one for me to handle by myself.

The encounter started when one of our empty ships was blasted into small pieces without any warning. You can be sure that got my undivided attention. Computer reported that there were 12 unidentified spaceships facing us at about 15° above our plane and 17° to our left. Neither Computer nor I had any idea what they had used to destroy that empty ship, but it was bound to be more firepower than we had available.

Foolishly, we had left Earth without any major armament. It was a combination of tight budgets and the certainty that we were not going to meet any hostile aliens, if we met any at all. The people who set the budget were dominated by the "Earth is unique" faction, and were sure that we would not encounter any aliens of any sort; therefore, we did not need weapons. The Space Marines we had on board were there strictly to control the humans.

Anyway, Computer and I scratched our collective heads and came up with a possible defense, but we honestly did not know how much good it would do. Computer was able to program a large replicator to produce a crude Lithium Bomb. The idea was that we would transport this bomb into one of the alien vessels and set it off. We would have a little grace period if the aliens did not know which of our over 200 remaining spaceships had sent the bomb. That should give us time to replicate a few more of the bombs; at least, we hoped so.

We had to work our tails off to communicate with the aliens. We never did get a picture of them, so we had only a vague idea of what we were fighting. In a way, that was more frightening than knowing exactly what we were facing. Anyhow, Computer was finally able to get a radio link set up and the conversation went like this: an alien "voice" said, "You are encroaching on our space, and that is prohibited. You must leave immediately, or we will destroy you just as we did that spaceship we first detected."

Computer answered, "We cannot leave so quickly. We have lost propulsion power throughout the fleet, and we are drifting until we can fix the problem. We will ignore the regrettable loss of that one ship because of your ignorance of our intentions, but we are drifting at approximately 0.13 parsecs per year until we can repair our problem. Just ignore us and we will eventually go away."

"That is not acceptable! You must leave immediately or we will attack all of the ships in your fleet."

"You don't seem to understand! There is no way that we can comply with your request. It is just not physically possible. All that you need to do is to be patient for us to be gone from 'your' territory as quickly as we can manage."

"The situation is not negotiable! If you do not turn around and leave within the next two hours, we will attack. We will not talk to you any more."

Well, that set the parameters for us to act. Computer finished creating the 12 Lithium Bombs that we needed and computed as closely as possible the exact location of the center of each of the alien ships. We had to act before the aliens moved away from their current relative positions, so Computer transported the bombs as soon as it had calculated the proper coordinates.

There was an interval of 87 minutes while Computer did the calculations, and that was virtually forever in computer time. As soon as all of the coordinates had been calculated, the bombs were launched. They had a fusing device that set them off the instant they were in position. There was a spectacular light-show in space as the 12 bombs went off. Computer had done a better job of calculating the transporter coordinates that either it or I had expected. Each of the alien ships had a bomb detonate inside the spaceship, and the result was a cloud of slag and dust to mark the former location of the alien fleet.

Computer's success was a great relief to us all! On top of saving our lives, Computer had come up with a devastating weapon that we could use if we were ever again attacked. We all felt safer and maybe a little bit cocky, but we were no longer in fear of any aliens that we might encounter.