Patreon or PayPal Me keeps this site and its author alive. Thank you. |
Stories from the Verse
In Version
Chapter 1: Slade 214
Table of Contents
No previous chapter
As Robert Elvis Slade walked across the campus to engineering, he thought about the current situation.
He and his wife Shella had arrived here probably two to three years ago, by his way of reckoning, although the years on this planet were roughly twice as long as those back on earth. They had found the Parakeet People, whose ancient ancestors had met him and built a mythology around him and Joe Kondor and Lauren Hastings etching images of them on the clay pots Lauren taught them to make, now entering their industrial age with steam engines, and he began “inventing” many of the devices he had used back home, with the help of a local university engineering department, in exchange for a share of the vast wealth this generated. They lived in a home built for them, with modern conveniences he had invented such as central heat, hot water, and a gas stove and oven. They were reasonably comfortable.
His propensity to expect combat had been slaked by a class of students wanting to learn to fight with primitive weapons, along with one very skilled professor who had been teaching them. Still, he always expected that there would be something more. That expectation grew as Joe Kondor and Zeke Smith arrived, expanding their knowledge into electricity and basic electronics, going beyond Slade’s telephone and telegraph into radio, and starting to move Slade’s basic improvements to their weapons into automatic rifles and pistols, and the introduction of interchangeable parts and assembly lines. Then Derek Brown and his wife Vashti arrived, in a borrowed but damaged spaceship, and started working on very basic computers plus some advanced math and physics concepts.
And in his experience, any time three versers came together in one world, there was war on the horizon.
The appearance a couple days ago of a flying saucer, an unidentified flying object, above the campus (and Joe himself saw it, so Slade expected it was a genuine object) confirmed those expectations. Joe and Derek weren’t persuaded; they wanted to explore peaceful explanations first. He supposed that was reasonable--although he was sure there was going to be a war, it would look better in history if the other side started it. He was certain they would; these overflights were, to his mind, obviously reconnaissance.
It had been confirmed over the past few days, using the shortwave radios that were now shared by nations around the globe, that there were multiple sightings. There had been some panic, some superstitious theories, some craziness; but the fact that the prestigious engineering department at Central University claimed not only to know what the objects were but to have one in a hangar on the campus had quelled a lot of that. The explanation had been sent to the national leaders that these were flying machines capable of space travel operated by intelligent creatures from another planet, probably another star system, and that at present their intentions were unknown. Efforts were being made to contact them.
That last was also true. Zeke was scanning radio frequencies looking for anomalies that might be their communication channels. Derek was working with his robot and the communications gear aboard his ship in the hope that he could contact the aliens and talk with them. So far nothing had happened, but it was early days yet.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #476: Versers Deduce. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
