Culpepper watched out the window as Guerrero brought the vehicle to a hover over a large clearing. The sun was just beginning to peek over the treetops to the east. In the dim light of dawn, she could see orange and green fruits covering the trees beyond the clearing.
I hope today’s results are better than yesterday’s.
They had visited four locations in the last six days. Two of those had yielded nothing useful. Perhaps a month earlier or a month later, things might have been different, but nothing that was ripe now and suitable for human consumption. They’d found good options at the other two stops, and in each case had stayed an extra day to harvest what they could. But there were still critical nutrients they had to find if they were going to survive the winter. So they kept moving.
A survey drone hovered a hundred feet to their north over another patch of the same clearing. That would mark where Swenson wanted the transponder set for the portal. They had been through the same drill yesterday and the day before: touch down at sunrise; collect as many different samples of fruit and vegetation as they could before Mabel passed overhead and the communication window opened; set the transponder and pack their produce tightly around it; say the word and watch it disappear, leaving a divot ten feet in diameter and two feet deep in the turf.
Swenson, the team’s civilian engineer, would lock onto the transponder as a location reference and use the portal at the base camp to transport the cargo—which included the transponder itself. The rest of the team would then unload the portal as quickly as they could and Swenson would send the transponder, and the divot, back. Using the portal this way was risky, but it was the only practical way to move a significant volume of produce six thousand miles.
The chief problem was that they had no reliable location reference for the reverse transport. It wasn’t as simple as just sending it back where it came from. The spatial relationship between the two endpoints hadn’t changed much, but in the time that had elapsed the planet had rotated around its axis and its sun, and both moons had rotated around the planet. These celestial motions resulted in distortions of the gravity field in the region between the two endpoints. The impact on the portal technology was not insignificant.
The transit portal leveraged a novel understanding of physics that translated a spherical volume, in zero time, from one place to another. The amount of power required was proportional to the volume of the transfer and the square of the distance between the endpoints. They had a portal, but only a small fraction of the power that would be necessary to send themselves back across fifty-seven light-years to Earth. The portal there, with its much larger power source, would have to initiate that transaction. But moving things around on the planet wasn’t so much a problem of power as of precision.
It is a common misconception that no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. This is not so much a law of physics as it is a natural consequence of other principles. Reality is that whether you look at how atoms fit together to make molecules, or how subatomic particles fit together to make atoms, or how quarks fit together to make subatomic particles, the empty spaces are many orders of magnitude larger than the constituent objects. You really could interleave the particles of one rock into the space occupied by another.
In the next instant, however, mayhem would ensue. The original rock had achieved a delicate balance between the four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. The sudden introduction of a large number of new particles within the same space would dramatically upend that balance, with unpredictable consequences.
The portal’s solution to this dilemma was to preamble the transfer with a rapidly expanding void that would push out whatever matter currently occupied the destination. This still has significant consequences for anything currently occupying that space, but if mostly air, the implications are trivial.
In the two iterations they had executed the day before, the first return transport had been off by nearly three inches and the second by more than two in the opposite direction. This left an arc-shaped gap on one side of the divot, and packed and mounded soil on the other side where the portal had pushed away whatever was in the space to make room for the incoming sphere.
Swenson and Sakhr seemed to think this would be okay so long as they were working in soft soils, but they couldn’t be sure what would happen if they got into hard rock where pushing it away had potentially seismic consequences. That was why Swenson had sent the drone ahead and marked the spot where he wanted the transponder.
Guerrero set the four-wheeler down. Grass covered the floor of the clearing. As Culpepper saw it up close she realized animals had grazed here, and fairly recently. Memories of growing up on the farm and racing through the cow pasture crept up unbidden from somewhere in her mind. She quickly shoved them back into their closet and barred the door.
“Watch your step. There are landmines everywhere.”
Guerrero had been about to step out of the vehicle, but jerked back and spun around to look at her.
She smiled and pointed through the windshield at the ground in front of the vehicle where the grazers had left behind the byproducts of their craft.
Guerrero shook his head, then climbed out. He grabbed the transponder from the back of the four-wheeler and walked toward the drone. She watched him go for a few steps before he stopped and turned around.
“Are you coming?” he asked.
“Do I have a choice?”
“No. We’ve been through this. We don’t need to do it again.”
We’re wasting time, She thought. You don’t need my help to set up the transponder, and I don’t need your help to start assessing vegetation. But she said, “Right behind you.” She got out of the vehicle, grabbed her pack, and followed after Guerrero.
The transponder sat atop a tripod. Guerrero set it up directly below the hovering drone and adjusted the height to position it five feet off the ground.
He looked at his watch. “We have an hour and twenty minutes until the communication window opens. Where to?”
Culpepper hitched up her pack and started walking toward the treeline. Guerrero followed, and the drone drifted up above the treetops and shadowed them. Swenson had programmed it to track them and monitor their perimeter for potential threats.
The drone didn’t bother her. She knew the threat of aggressive wildlife was real, and having advance warning of potential predators made her feel a lot more comfortable. That was part of why she didn’t feel the need to put up with Guerrero and all his paranoid rules.
For the next hour, they collected samples of everything they could find that might have nutritional value. Culpepper tagged and cataloged them so if anything proved promising they could find more of it. Finally, Guerrero said, “We’d better get what we have back to the staging area. They’ll make radio contact in about five minutes. We need to be ready to transport.”
Culpepper piled the last of what she was looking at onto the sled that Guerrero had fashioned from an animal skin and tree branches. He started dragging it back toward the clearing.
She followed but began lagging further and further behind. When Guerrero got far enough ahead that she didn’t think he could hear her footfalls, she slowed to a stop. When he kept going, she turned and headed off in another direction.
Now we stop wasting time. Meathead can deal with the transport. I’ll get started surveying the next quadrant around the clearing.
Photo by Deglee Degi on Unsplash
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