For two months after Czernak’s confinement everything else was sunshine. The highly motivated crews had grown used to sitting on their thumbs for the years required to arrive. And in those “days of wonder” at least there was something fascinating to watch, record, and analyze.
But greed does not breed patience. Osmore wanted to keep the three-ship fleet where it was and watch for another six months, at least. But the first-wave crews, all three hundred of them, got restless.
The hotheads wanted to cherry-pick something and head back. They figured, rightly, that anything, anything! they brought back would be worth its weight in diamonds. They’d all be personally rich and the Solar System would have plenty to justify sending more ships. The majority moderates merely wanted to move in closer.
At one planning session, when the cherry-pickers first proposed to go in, mug somebody, and hightail it back to earth, Osmore retorted, “Look at those ships out there! Which one is the ‘old granny’ ship you think we can snatch the purse from? The slowest ones we see maneuver at 4G!”
He had a good point, a real good point. So while the on-duty crews studied patterns and performance parameters, the off-duty crews studied what our own ships could grab and run away with.
As they watched, the problem started looking even tougher. These aliens knew each other. We couldn’t detect them talking to each other, but they knew how to stay out of each others’ way. Fights were few, and when they happened, they were over in an eye blink. One xenobiologist mashed together recordings of the ships’ movements with parallel behaviors of Earthly elk and big-horned sheep.
After a month, the muttering that the fleet needed to move closer could no longer be ignored. But there was counter-muttering that if it moved too close, one of those high-performance ships would take an interest, and the fleet would die. The three-captain council chose a compromise distance and watched some more from there.
Then the ugly got serious: Czernak’s original idea of talking to one of the aliens came back into favor, and with it, the idea of putting him back in as captain of the Burroughs! The doctor’s diagnosis and Czernak’s resulting removal and confinement had never been reviewed in a proper sanity hearing; it hadn’t seemed necessary at the time.
The tension was thick, but life is full of surprises. It was Jonas who broke ranks, not Czernak! Jonas headed in! He wanted loot! And here the legendary Luck of Jonas came to his rescue. Early on in his rush to get to the HX, the Lucky Jonas V was intercepted by the aliens we now call the Dolox. They’re those super-pressurized methane-breathers whose individuals range from about a meter long to seven meters. Even today, Dolox thinking—hell, everything about them!—is opaque to us. They’ve been known to help humans big time, hurt humans big time, or ignore us completely, and nobody can see a pattern.
In their recollections of the Jonas’ mad dash, no one ever says much about that contact. It’s all about the bobbing and weaving, getting close to this and that, landing, splitting up into two parties, shooting things up, and scampering back with a little more bobbing and weaving. And how when the dust settled on that first sortie into the HX realm, they had that truly marvelous treasure, even by HX standards, that we call the HX Battery.
We call it a battery because it generates electricity … a whole bunch of electricity, out of seemingly nothing! It’s the size of a wastebasket and we’re now using it to power much of the Greenland grid. One wastebasket and those Greenland cities have become the most desired real estate on Earth! Just like Elias Jonas’ gold asteroid, this is why we want more HX, and why Sol System is now spending a big chunk of its budget on more ships.
But there’s a fact that doesn’t get talked about. Soon after my arrival, I heard that the great find had been stowed in the Jonas cargo hold before they even launched away from that alien Dolox ship. Over the months that followed I personally talked to dozens of people who were in the Jonas’s two HX raiding parties. At that time they freely admitted they didn’t find that battery. And I talked to three who told me they saw it go into their hold and one who helped pack it. After the official story turned into a legend that everyone was invested in, they all stopped saying that. But if you go hunting the indexes, you’ll discover very few stories of finding the battery that aren’t from Jonas himself. Everybody else says it must have been the other party that found it.
So it’s clear that Jonas got the battery as a gift from the Dolox.
Anyway, after Jonas’ success, Mandalay and his crew decided to take the Zheng He in for a try at a close-to-HX raid. The Belt ship went in … and simply vanished. To this day we don’t know exactly how Jonas’s crew got lucky and Mandalay’s didn’t. Jonas said he headed for an “empty spot”. But if you look carefully at the record, and at what we know now about the Sphere’s environs, you see that the luck of Jonas was the Dolox choosing not to blast his ship into the Death Dimension. And that during their encounter, everybody else was scattering away from that top tiger in the food chain.
Presumably the Zheng He ran into one of the hundred different kinds of ships and traps that we now know throng around the Altair Sphere, a lot of which leave no trace of their victims. Likely Mandalay picked a spot as empty looking as Jonas’s, but something that saw them as food wasn’t scared off by some bigger, meaner ship nearby.
The Zheng He’s disappearance sobered the first wave. Osmore’s watching approach once again looked good, and the impulse to put Czernak back in command withered away. When we in the second wave came up, Jonas and Osmore weren’t planning any more sorties.
See you tomorrow, Jerzy!