Kemlo and the Space Lanes

Book 0: Kemlo

by E.C. Eliott

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

How Kemlo won his spurs in the first and last great Battle of Space. For, yes, even to Space, that final goal of all Man's earthly dreams, enmity and war eventually came. But in Space, as always in the end on Earth, good was to triumph over evil - though not until a hideous and terrifying danger had been averted.

Release date: June 29, 2016

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 109

Sample

‘KREEE … OWW!’ The slim flat space craft screamed across the blue void. The gravity pulse set up by the armour of holding rays rippled and bucked around its hull—man-made gravity in space which gave colossal speeds and equally terrific braking power to all craft, apart from acting as invincible armour against hurtling meteors, cosmic rays and solar penetration.

‘Shroo … uush!’ The craft flared as its pilot sent it banking into a spiral before levelling out and coming in fast side-slipping flats toward Kemlo’s space scooter.

When they were moored side by side and the holding rays adjusted to cover both craft, the pilot slid open the chute and walked across to the scooter. He wore the new light-weight space suit uniform of the Space Charter Corps; a shiny blue in colour and smart despite the trappings of wide magnetic belt, ray gun and the life-giving canisters of diathene, oxygen and waste converters. Around his figure as he moved there rippled the aura of the holding rays generated from various points of the suit so that the man was enveloped by them. Perhaps of all the fantastic inventions made by Man in this space era, the holding rays rank as most important of many vital inventions, for without them Man’s passage through, and life in, space would indeed be hazardous.

The pilot’s strongly featured face was shadowed behind the solar vizor of the space suit helmet, but Kemlo saw a flash of white teeth as the man adjusted his helmet speaker control and hailed the boy in the space scooter.

‘What do you think of it, Kemlo?’

‘Sounds fierce!’ Kemlo grinned as he climbed from his scooter.

‘Afraid of it?’

‘Of course not,’ Kemlo replied stoutly. ‘But I don’t see how you get so much power. It’s too flat to have a large expansion chamber in the power unit. What is its top speed, Cal?’

Calvin Lester shrugged casually.

‘Around ten thousand at full gravity power. She hits about fifteen thousand on a spiral slide. That power unit is going to revolutionise our charter work. It’s the smallest, most compact and powerful self-generating unit ever devised.’ His voice was eager with enthusiasm as he continued: ‘When we get the power for weight plus tensile strength of hull balanced properly in the big ships it will solve fuel problems for all time.’

‘I thought the pellets of urania we use for power in the scooters had solved it?’

‘Well, of course there’s no comparison with units powered by pellets of urania and the old type propellent fuels,’ Calvin admitted. ‘Man wouldn’t have built this new world in the sky if he’d had to continue to use thousands of tons of liquid fuel for every cargo ship sent up from Earth.’

‘Funny you should say that about the new world,’ said Kemlo.

‘Why?’

‘Because my friends and I never think of it like that. It’s our world and we were born into it. We don’t have to wear space suits, and although we live an ordinary life in the open sections of the Satellite Belt, we don’t know what it’s like to have streets and buildings surrounding us like you have on Earth. It’s not a new world to us—it’s our world. And when we leave our Satellite Belt and go for thousands of miles in our space scooters, and sometimes visit the smaller and lesser known planets …’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Calvin interrupted. ‘If I remember rightly, you’ve been to the Moon and to the moonlets of Mars.’

‘We certainly have.’ Kemlo grinned at the memory. ‘Kerowski, Kartin and Koram, in fact several of the boys from other Satellite Belts have been with us, but most of the times we went with space-suited men like yourself from Earth; but as we don’t have to wear space suits, there were many things we could do which they couldn’t. It’s only when we work with you in that way that we realise how different our life is. I suppose you people living down on Earth looking up at at the sky and seeing the tiny Belts spinning around a thousand miles above you, must always think of it as a new world.’

‘Yes, I suppose we must,’ Calvin admitted. ‘Of course, these Satellite Belts have been up here since I was a boy so I’ve got used to them and come to accept them, and so have my parents, but my grandparents remember them being built. They called it the conquest of space. And now we’ve got a generation of children born in space.’ He grinned at Kemlo in a friendly way. ‘And a fine-looking bunch you are, if I may say so,’ he added.

Kemlo gazed at the man seriously as he asked: ‘Are we very different from Earth-boys, Cal?’

‘Now I wonder what you want me to answer to that? Do you want me to say that you’re better or that you’re the same …’

‘Just the truth,’ Kemlo interrupted. ‘We have Earth-boys to visit us and although they always have to wear space suits we get along fine and they don’t seem any different from us. We play the same sort of games in our games-room, but outside the Satellite Belt I think we’re much more at home. Very often the vastness of space frightens Earth-boys, and they don’t get the same pleasure as we do out of skimming along in a space craft and perhaps waiting on the space lanes for a big ship to go past so that it rocks us and tosses us about on its spume-wake. Earth-boys live constantly in gravity, but except for our gravitational exercises each day to keep our muscles supple we can’t fall over and bounce around like they do. So being tossed about on spume-waves or having races in our space scooters doesn’t have the same appeal to them.’

‘But you’re happy?’

‘Of course we are,’ Kemlo declared confidently. ‘Although we know that in many ways we’re different. Earth-boys can come here wearing a space suit and visit us, but we can’t visit Earth—at least, not yet.’

‘You mean that scientists are still working on a suit which will enable you to live properly on Earth?’

‘Yes, but I don’t think they’ve succeeded very far yet. That’s what makes us feel different and why I asked you the question.’

‘I shouldn’t think too much of it, Kemlo,’ said Calvin Lester seriously, putting his arm around the boy’s broad shoulders. ‘You have plenty of history lessons at school, don’t you?’

‘We do,’ Kemlo chuckled. ‘Too many sometimes.’

‘Then you’ll know that centuries ago—probably dozens of centuries ago—people lived on Earth in very different conditions and circumstances to those in which we live now. The expectation of life now is about one hundred and twenty years, yet not so very many centuries ago men died when they were not much more than forty or fifty; at least, that was the common age for dying. Centuries before that men lived in even worse conditions—according to our ideas of life. And that’s where you have the problem which bothers you, I think, Kemlo.

‘You don’t want to be different from Earth-boys yet you know you must be. You were born into and belong to the space generation, just the same as a long time ago boys were born into what they called the Jet Age, when it was quite common for them to sit in a plane and go hurtling across the sky above the Earth faster than sound. But since those days we have developed this new world and it is your world. The scientists will find a way of making an Earth suit the same as they have found a way of making us a space suit, and then you will be able to visit Earth and see it all for yourselves. It’s a far more crowded, noisy and restless life than you have up here. But you’ll be greatly admired. Not many Earth-boys have the physique that you and your friends have.’

‘You mean our very broad shoulders and deep chests?’

‘A natural development of being born in space,’ Calvin Lester replied. ‘Centuries ago, scientists said that the existence of human life in space was not possible, but they were not able, even by the most modern instruments of their time, to record what would happen if a human was actually born in space. Old habits and beliefs die hard, Kemlo. Scientists always accepted that space was nothing and therefore Man could not live in it without the protection of Earth-made devices.’

‘But that’s true.’

‘Yes, it’s true as far as Earth-born people are concerned; but in this great Universe wherein the distant worlds are linked by the vastnesses of space there does exist something which gives you who are born to it a natural life, yet to an Earth-born person brings death.’

‘Oxygen, of course,’ said Kemlo. ‘We can’t take too much oxygen.’

‘Not only oxygen.’ Calvin Lester laughed softly as he added: ‘Let’s not start quoting all the long words and medical terms loved by the experts. There are some things we ordinary chaps have to accept, and the most obvious of these is that here you are—standing beside me in space, breathing naturally, looking strong and healthy and immune to solar penetration. But if I were to shut off my oxygen and diathene and remove my helmet I should die.’

‘And if I were to fly down to Earth right now I’d die, too,’ said Kemlo. Then he glanced at the man with a slightly embarrassed look as he asked: ‘Do you think I’m stuffy, Cal?’

‘Stuffy! Of course you’re not stuffy. What a silly question!’

‘Not so silly. We have to learn a lot more than Earth-boys do. We have to learn all about Earth and its history, and how life is lived every day, for you down there, and on top of that we have to learn many more technical details because of our life here. Sometimes when Earth-boys visit us they find us stuffy because, although we like lots of fun, we seem a lot more serious to them.’ He sighed gustily as he added: ‘I suppose it’s all part of our new world.’

‘You want to forget any ideas that you’re stuffy, young fella-me-lad. You’re bound to be a little different in the way you think and talk because you study more intensely up here and you deal in more technical things, but that’s part of your life. If you were stuffy you wouldn’t have been chosen to help us on the space lanes—you take that from me.’

‘You really think so?’ Kemlo asked anxiously.

‘The proof of it is that you’ve been chosen,’ was the reply. ‘And I suppose if an Earth-boy overheard us talking right now he’d think both of us were stuffy. But that’s because there’re so many fascinating things mixed up in your everyday life and mine which both of us want to know more about. And anybody who wants to laugh at us or call us stuffy can do it, but they’d be wrong and we know it.’ Calvin Lester changed the subject abruptly. ‘Who’s going to be your assistant on this job, Kemlo?’

‘Kerowski, I expect. He was mad that he couldn’t come now.’

‘Why?’

‘Kerowski doesn’t like to miss anything and he’s got lots of admiration for you charter pilots. So have I,’ Kemlo added quickly. ‘I think yours is the most dangerous job of all.’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Calvin protested, but obviously pleased at this compliment. ‘Charting the space lanes for the ordinary route ships is a trifle hazardous, but this sort of job is easy—I hope!’ He grinned at Kemlo.

‘There’s always the uncertainty, isn’t there?’ Kemlo said with a tone of understanding.

‘Have you ever seen a blueprint of space?’ Calvin asked.

‘I saw a copy of the prints you’ve been working from.’

‘Then you’ll know what I mean when I say it’s a crazy sort of business. Let’s go across to the charter craft and I’ll show you what I mean.’

When they reached the craft, Calvin Lester set the power-operating mechanism working by pressing an external switch and the sleek, flat cowling of the craft slid back in two sections. Each section folded into the side panels, leaving the wide low control section open. They climbed into the compartment and sat for a few moments while the pilot answered Kemlo’s questions about the seemingly complicated control-panel.

This panel which faced them contained more instruments, dials, levers and switches than Kemlo had seen in so small a craft. Above the panel were long screens now dark, but at the flick of a switch Calvin Lester flooded the cen. . .