Although this is chapter 3, I've toyed with starting my book here. Why?
It's the first modern-day chapter, plus more representative of the overall tone of my book. The first two chapters are set in 1975 and have a more serious tone than the rest of the book.
At a writing critique group, I just received the most Wisconsin feedback ever on this chapter:
My fellow writer says,
You know how when you go into Culvers and they have the custard flowing out of the machine and you want to have a spoon of it? That's what this chapter is, all smooth custard.
Thank you, Mark! That's quite the metaphor, and I took your suggestion about adding the hearing protectors.
I hope you are in the mood for smooth flowing custard. Enjoy.
Chapter Three
Stew Wafflequisp Jr
Thirty-eight years later
During next thirty-eight years, 1G-0 the generator learned the patterns of its new environment. Temperatures rose and fell. Solar particles rose and fell. 1G-0 quickly concluded that it was confined on the northern hemisphere of the third planet from the sun.
The generator had not been idle. It had been useful, making energy. Even with its own crude, machine version of intelligence, 1G-0 liked being useful.
However, 1G-0 also felt abandoned. Ever since the Bad Event, 1G-0 had not detected any signal from its creators.
1G-0 was confused. It did not understand what it was powering. Its new client was not like Ship. The new client demanded only a small fraction of 1G-0’s available load. The generator produced many queries but the new client stayed quiet.
1G-0 was not entirely alone. Right after the Bad Event, 1G-0 sensed four new humans. Two were large and two were small. After one solar orbit, one of the large humans stopped appearing. After four more solar orbits, the other large human also stopped appearing.
For all of the remaining solar orbits, only the two small humans remained. The two small humans grew as large as the two large humans that had stopped appearing.
1G-0 often sensed the two humans hovering near its interface. Unlike the generator’s first human pilot, they would not respond to any of the queries 1G-0 displayed for them on its communication panel. Unlike 1G-0’s first human pilot, they never used its communication panel to show gratitude for its work. But the generator had made power for many orbits and there had been no further Bad Events.
Until now.
***
Stew Wafflequisp Junior’s dairy farm gleamed under the summer sun. Throngs of happy sightseers wandered about, contributing to the festival atmosphere. Above the crowded parking lot, puffy white clouds billowed about the cheerful blue sky, demonstrating to the cramped circulation of cars below that large objects could, under better circumstances, move freely.
A gem of Door County, Wafflequisp's Ho-Made Country Dairy—the title an appeal to its humble roots—was now one of the most successful businesses in the entire county.
For the local bean counters, the farm’s sudden and unexpected transformation in the mid-seventies remained a riddle. A diminishing handful of old-timers scratched their heads and speculated. How could this extravagant tourist trap grow more and more extravagant and stay detached—apparently—from the energy grid? Was it solar? Biofuel? Geothermal?
Some recalled Stew’s father and how old Mr Wafflequisp had, after his wife’s death, become a strange, secretive tinkerer. When he died, leaving everything to his son, any secret to their farm’s success failed to emerge. While father and son had strikingly different personalities, they were alike in their secretiveness. In fact, the son proved even more tight-lipped than the father.
The Wafflequisp farm did have a secret. That secret had, for the first time ever, become unreliable. This was new. It was also extremely inconvenient and upsetting for Stew, who did not inherit any of his father’s fascination for things mechanical.
Chest puffed out, head held high, Stew surveyed the crowd. Hands on his hips, he assumed one of his favorite authoritative looks that he had spent time perfecting before his bathroom mirror. Studly-Stew in charge, here. The crowd’s cautious glances his way told him they were all impressed. Anyone would be.
Because look at this place. And look, here’s Studly-Stew who runs it all.
Today looked like any other profitable day in the long chain of profitable days that his farm had witnessed. Stew wanted to believe this. He didn’t. He wondered if he could ever believe it again.
He sucked in a breath. Below the soft folds of his well-cushioned belly, something had shifted in response to that painful thought. Whatever it was, it shifted in a way that increased pressure in all the wrong places. He had just come out of the dairy shop’s restroom. He couldn’t be seen going back in.
He offered a tight smile to a particularly attractive blonde.
“Cow!” cried a small, squeaky voice.
Stew looked down and was disappointed to see that a little girl had associated herself with the blonde’s lean legs. He preferred it when they didn’t have children. He had little experience with children and he wasn’t sure he wanted any. Arm extended, the child was pointing to Millie, looking awed.
Elevated on her platform in the middle of the parking lot, the massive cow statue beamed her blue-eyed, anthropomorphic smile above and beyond all the cars orbiting her below. The bold, country-western style font on her flank helpfully identified her to drivers by as Millie the CowTM.
Millie’s grinning trademarked head appeared everywhere. She grinned on the labels of cheese for sale in the dairy shop. She grinned on the packages of petting zoo food for sale. She grinned on the freshly painted signs posted around the parking lot querying visitors with thought-provoking dairy trivia.
Stew carefully appraised the figure of the blonde who was now bending to look at one of the questions. She read slowly to the little girl.
“‘What is Millie the Cow’s favorite kind of cheese?’” The woman frowned and, without lifting the sign’s wooden flap to see the answer, moved on to read the next sign. “‘How many burgers would Millie the Cow need to eat every day?’” Her frown intensified. “Who writes this stuff? Come on, Emily, let’s go see the goats.”
Stew couldn’t believe it. What a bimbo. He had designed those questions with agricultural education specifically in mind, and it had taken him forever to get Frogtown to word them the way he wanted. Frogtown claimed he couldn’t rig some way for people to pay to see the answers. Stew didn’t believe him. Frogtown was pigheaded. For a man who sponged off him getting a lifetime of free room and board on his farm, it seemed he ought to be grateful and do what he was asked.
Visitors drifted around, getting a glimpse at the new corn maze in progress, lifting the flaps to the dairy trivia signs to see the answers. They lined up at the dairy shop counter, the children’s play area, and the petting zoo.
The dairy shop lights flickered. Visitors startled, looked at each other, chuckled nervously.
Stew gritted his teeth. Not again. He braced. That godawful alarm would be next. He reached for his phone.
***
1G-0 the generator considered its dilemma. The first Bad Event had happened fast. This second Bad Event was unfolding so slowly that 1G-0 had many solar cycles to plan its emergency response protocols. The two humans needed to be warned. They were not listening.
1G-0 had recently received a bad message from its main reaction chamber. The generator had been expecting this. Since then, more bad messages began arriving from 1G-0’s secondary reaction chambers.
All of 1G-0’s requests for maintenance from the two humans went unanswered. Reaction chambers were never to be used without regular protocol maintenance. Reaction chambers now neared critical.
1G-0 quietly entered an Emergency Status Condition. This required 1G-0 to send a distress signal to its creators. It could not send this signal. The part that broadcast distress signals had been damaged by the first Bad Event.
However, the generator had planned for this moment. It had another way, a harder way, to send a distress signal. Thirty-three orbits ago, 1G-0 began diverting energy to harvest and store a fraction of its rarest particles. It now had enough. Given the rate of bad messages it was receiving from its reaction chambers, it would not have time to stockpile more. It could use these particles only once.
1G-0 decided. It would now use its cache of rare particles. It would try one last time to send another distress call to its creators.
And for those two humans that it sensed nearby, the generator decided that it would keep trying to warn them. It would use its display panel. It would use its amplifier. It would use higher amplitudes and more frequencies.
***
Pascal Fourier looked up. He swore quietly. The barn lights had dimmed for a moment.
Ramiro glanced up from his notes on the new seasonal feed changes. He shifted his gaze to the rafters as if he could find some answer there. “Again? What’s going on?”
Pascal let out a breath, unable to meet the young man’s eyes. “I’m sorry. I should go—”
“This keeps happening.” Ramiro sounded exasperated. “These outages. Then that horrible alarm starts up. You’ve got to keep that thing from going off. It’s terrible for the animals, you know.”
“Believe me, I know…” More than anything, Pascal wished he knew how to shut off the alarm, but that wasn’t something that he would be able to explain to Ramiro.
Ramiro shook his head, then met Pascal’s eyes. “I know some good electricians.”
Pascal tensed as Ramiro rattled off the names of some very dependable electricians who could, for a modest fee, check out the farm’s power system.
He liked Ramiro. Ramiro was one of his more serious employees. Ramiro had a family to feed and was taking classes part time with aspirations to go into law. Pascal hated hiding things, especially from people he liked. He hated that he had no choice.
“Well?” Ramiro was staring at him, his wide brown eyes expectant.
Hating himself, Pascal stammered out his usual excuse. “Stew…he, um, uh, you know, has some projects, …they are…”
Ramiro nodded, rolling his eyes. “I know. Confidential. Proprietary. We’re just going over that stuff in one of my classes.” He lowered his voice. “Look. I probably shouldn’t say this. But why do you let Stew treat you, you know…” Ramiro grimaced. “The way he treats you. And that name he calls you. Frogtown? Why do you even stay here?”
Despite his tension, Pascal felt a corner of his mouth pinch into a smile at the young man’s concern. Ramiro deserved an answer. He wished he could explain everything. He could, at least, say something of the truth.
“Stew and I grew up together, here on this farm. This is my childhood home.”
“I see.” Ramiro still looked uncertain.
“I will not allow my home to…” Pascal stalled as fumes from the neighboring factory farm penetrated his senses, “…to change. I must protect my cows.” He felt his smile broaden as he looked into Ramiro’s eyes. “I must protect my fellow workers. And Stew…” He waved a hand dismissively. “Stew still tries to hurt me.”
Ramiro just shook his head at that.
“Maybe, I am waiting for him to learn. No form of cruelty ever satisfies the cruel.” Pascal shrugged. “I’m sorry, it must be hard to watch.”
As a look of unqualified admiration spread across the young man’s face, Pascal immediately regretted voicing his thoughts. He’d overheard the workers giving him nicknames, too. The Sage. The Philosopher. Flattering, those names, but also fallacious. He didn’t want to encourage fallacies.
“It’s nothing.” Pascal swiped a hand through his hair. “I should go—” He squeezed his eyes shut as the generator’s impossibly loud siren started up.
Ramiro winced and raised his voice over the noise. “Look, I’ll just go over your notebook here and make a list of questions for when you get back from whatever you…”
Pascal nodded quickly, grateful. “Thanks.”
He dashed from the barn, across the long field, toward the distant building that held the secret. He cursed that the building needed to be so distant, in order to avoid the inspections that the barns legally required. The phone in his pocket was already buzzing. “Good Lord,” he said, extracting his phone as he bolted across the long stretch of grass. Without even looking at his phone, he managed to answer it.
“Stew,” he said, panting. “I’m on my way.”
***
Stew seethed. Just as he had dreaded, the alarm was sounding again, shattering the pleasant buzz of the visitors. This was killing his profits.
It wasn’t just that the screeching and wailing of his secret generator was loud. It was biologically impossible to ignore. It seemed custom-made to grab a person’s attention and to make them want to do something, anything, to stop it at once.
The family buying food for the petting zoo froze. Quarters halted on the way to one of his pellet dispensers. The family paused, looking around for the source of the clamor.
“Hey mom!” the red-haired boy shouted. “Is that a tornado siren?” He sounded hopeful. Two younger children cowered, shoving their heads into the mother’s legs. The mother wore a look on her face that said that she would rather be anywhere else.
The noise vibrated the ground under Stew’s feet. The vibration loosened some pressure deep inside his gut. The loosened thing, whatever it was, lurched. As with the generator’s misbehavior, his gut’s misbehavior was new, aggravating and mysterious. He grasped at his midsection, masking a wince. Not now.
His digestive parts had lurched and churned a lot lately. He’d kept quiet about it, hoping it would stop. But Frogtown had narrowed his eyes at him, witnessing his frequent dashes to the dairy shop men’s room.
Frogtown’s use of this personal information against him was deeply annoying. Frogtown kept insisting they stop using their well water. Frogtown, fastidious fussy pants that he was, now only used water that had passed through his homemade distiller, for cooking as well as drinking. Frogtown kept running back and forth from his boiler to the dairy shop, filling up carboys of purified water, carting them over for customers and employees. What a waste of time.
Frogtown, who had no idea what modern progress looked like, had gotten himself all worked up over the expansion next door. Stew envied the Kartsplinkers. They had the right idea. More milking units meant more money. Frogtown was obviously trying to spook him out of that notion with dire predictions, his French accent thickening the way it did when he got upset. Thousands of cows pooping next door, Stew. There will be the public health crisis, you will see.
Frogtown obviously had no idea how busy he was. He didn’t have time to visit Frogtown’s cute little distillery every time he needed a sip of water.
At first, Stew tried protesting the energy needed to run Frogtown’s distiller. Frogtown had simply given him a withering look. They both knew that, because of the secret, all the energy on the farm was free.
The secret was now howling.
The idea of crossing the span of grass that was more than a football field away to get to the generator, in his current state, made the unknown thing in his gut perform a summersault.
The screeching seemed to have reached a finale and was now descending to a growly bass that Stew felt under his feet. Millie the CowTM smiled stiffly into space and trembled.
One of the family’s toddlers started howling like a car alarm, triggering the second to go off as well. A baby in the arms of a man emerging from dairy shop screwed up its face, then joined in. Apparently crying was contagious among the young.
Stew massaged his forehead. New arrivals exiting their cars were conspicuously hesitating, holding their ears, consulting one another, shaking their heads.
“Sorry ’bout the construction!” Stew shouted. He waved his arms and faked a loud laugh. “Always building more amusements for you all!” he lied. “I’ll just have a word—”
Another gut spasm made him clench his teeth in a grin.
Clutching his belly, Stew speedwalked past the petting zoo, past the barns, across the long, long field, and at long last reached the door of the small building housing his dad’s secret generator. Plastered on all sides of the building, weathered hand-painted signs warned intruders against entry. The privacy tinted windows vibrated with every pulse of noise.
With one hand smashed over one ear, he raised his free hand and prepared to enter the electronic door code that kept the building sealed. 1-1-1-1. November eleventh, 1975. Stew hesitated, not wanting to go in, his mind racing back, back. That day after the big storm.
His dad’s luckiest day. Stew still didn’t understand what all had happened. His dad’s story kept changing. His dad had given him only the basics, probably for his own protection. His dad had risked everything, betting their farm to win this stolen top-secret Soviet device off his old war buddies. Winning this generator was a once-in-a-lifetime jackpot.
He punched in the code. Wrenching the door open, Stew gasped. On exposure to the source of the noise, his ears sang a duet of pain.
Frogtown was already inside, pacing back and forth. Big orange hearing-protectors covered his ears, but his eyes bulged and his hands pressed over the muffs covering his ears. He skidded to a stop and whirled to give Stew a look of anguish. He snatched a second pair of hearing protectors off the counter and threw them at Stew, bellowing over the noise. “Stew! I know! I KNOW!”
Almost dropping the earmuffs, Stew fumbled to put them on. They barely made any difference. He took a breath and marched inside, right up to the howling generator, allowing the door to swing shut on the two of them. He gaped at the tangled rat’s nest of wires connecting the hulking, silver generator to the electrical panel that powered everything.
“Make it STOP!” Stew shouted, mouthing his inaudible words, glaring at Frogtown. “NOW!”
Frogtown began scurrying around, pulling open cabinets and drawers and rattling around in them.
Stew paced back and forth with gorilla stomps, pressing his hands firmly against his throbbing ears. It wasn’t fair. He eyed his dad’s brilliant contraption with a new level of hostility. Elevated four feet off the ground on the same wooden platform that his dad had constructed decades ago, it lay, shining silver and sleek, flashing its mysterious colors, like a beached metal whale on some sort of emergency life support system.
The thing was betraying him.
He wheeled to a stop, pausing to wince at the snarl of wires that trailed from the generator up to the humming electrical panel that his dad had also constructed. Hundreds of connections. Each wire paired with an ancient, yellowed strip of paper, each labeled on the panel in his dad’s neat handwriting.
Dairy shop counter.
Main Barn Milk pump.
Hilltop barn milking pump.
Vat cool-side yard.
Vat cool-main shop.
Calf barn overhd light.
There had to be hundreds of labels. Everything looked like it was still in place. He resented being so dependent on something that he didn’t know how to control. He longed to yank out handfuls of wires.
“Aie!” Frogtown yelped. “Don’t touch anything!”
Stew clenched his teeth. Frogtown probably loved seeing him like this. Relished knowing that he had no idea how the thing worked or how to fix it.
Frogtown shifted from foot to foot, his hands jammed over his ears, his gaze leaping over the shelves and cabinets. He opened one after another. Pulling out one tool after another, rejecting the tool.
At last, Frogtown seemed to find something. He plunged his long arm into a drawer. His hand emerged wielding a caulk gun. He grabbed a boxcutter and with a single swift swipe, cut the plastic tip off the caulk tube. Aiming the caulk gun tip at a small hole next to the generator’s display panel, he pumped the gun. A thick, white blob of caulk splattered over the hole.
Stew’s ears were ringing so loudly in the silence that followed that it took him a moment to realize what happened. Frogtown’s trick worked. He gaped down at Frogtown’s plug of white caulk.
How could all that noise come out of that tiny hole?
Frogtown, his pale eyes huge, gave him a look that suggested he was wondering the same thing.
Slowly, they both lowered their hearing protectors to loop around their necks.
Frogtown shrugged and pumped the caulk gun again. Stew watched dumbly. More caulk splattered out to cover the first blob, emerging from the tube with the sound of a long, wet, mournful fart.
The generator was gagged, but still not completely silent. The thing had always made a noise. This wasn’t its old, perky little purr. This was a new, grating rasp. It sounded like a corpse trying to gargle.
Stew’s jaw unclenched. He released his hands from his ears. Maybe this was the solution to that godawful alarm. Relief stretched his face into a grin and some ghost from his childhood almost caused his lips to blurt out Frogtown’s real name. Pascal!
Stew pressed his lips together, alarmed at himself. It had to be the stress.
Instead, he said flatly, “Look’s like we’re staying open, today.”
Twice this month, the generator’s alarm and power failures had forced him to close the attractions.
It all started last spring. It was the first time he knew the thing could make any kind of sound other than its usual purring hum. It had sounded almost quizzical, with the first short, intermittent, ear-splitting chirps. Polite. Like it was asking questions. Uneasy, Stew had told himself these little blips would resolve. He had been wrong.
The chirps had grown sharper, louder, and more demanding. They grew into long intervals of ear-splitting cacophony. More disturbing, however, were the power outages that accompanied them. Noise, he could live with, but they needed power.
He couldn’t guess what was triggering these outages. Nothing like this had ever happened before.
Along with the alarms and power outages, the generator was also showing a smaller change. Stew had no idea what it meant. He had started keeping the display panel closed because he didn’t like looking at it. He slid it open, bracing himself.
He could never forget the first time he saw it. With great secrecy and fanfare, his dad had showed it to him. Mister Fourier had been there too, lurking behind his dad, watching Stew’s reaction, his face unreadable. The silver panel had slid smoothly slid back with a hiss. There, on a jet-black surface, had whirled two ever-changing, glowing kaleidoscopic wheels of color. It had been the most beautiful thing Stew had ever seen, like the rainbow eyes of some magical, fairy-tale creature. When he was still in high school, Stew would sneak into the generator building early, before his chores, just to stare at the color wheels.
The two color wheels now looked different. Rotating off-kilter, two lumpy shapes lurched in muted tones of mustard, beige, and something that was not quite pink. It was like watching two washing machines tossing around a bunch of vomit. He slid the panel shut.
The sound of a clearing throat made him look up.
Frogtown arced a pale eyebrow at him. “That was surely over one-hundred decibels. A violation of OSHA workplace safety standards.”
Not for the first time, Stew had the unsettling sense that Frogtown was making one of his odd little jokes. Ignoring the comment, he walked to the far side of the room and looked out the window.
Distance reduced his farm’s visitors to different-colored ants. Even so, he could see all the ants moving in the right direction again, continuing their trajectories toward the attractions. “Good,” he grunted.
He needed those visitors. He yanked the hearing protector off his neck and slammed it down on the counter. A sudden surge of spite for all the families that crawled over his farm’s attractions flooded through him. He was sick and tired of pandering to their demands. Was the extra income they offered really worth it?
It no longer paid to be small. The Kartsplinker farm was proving that. Karl and Nancy Kartsplinker seemed to be enjoying generous state subsidies for going big, concentrating thousands of cows on their lot. Kartsplinker didn’t bother with these stupid tourist attractions. Kartsplinker would probably have to pay folks to visit, what with how his place smelled now.
Whenever Stew brought up the idea of trying it themselves, Frogtown balked. Frogtown pointed out that if they also became a CAFO—twisting up his face and spitting out the words concentrated animal feeding operation—they would have inspectors to deal with instead of tourists.
He hated to admit it, but Frogtown had a point. The idea of inspectors crawling over his property slid needles of fear into his brain. He had heard, however, that inspections and regulations might be easy to get around. He hoped that was true. He’d have to keep prying eyes away from the generator, of course.
A forbidden thought followed. He’d had it a lot, lately. Each time he rolled it around in his brain, he felt a weird mash of fear and guilt and hope.
What if he could sell the generator?
“So.” Frogtown interrupted his thoughts. “I fixed it. Are you satisfied?”
Stew turned from the window to find Frogtown staring at him expectantly. Pale eyebrows raised, Frogtown stood with the caulk gun steadied on his hip like some sort of gunslinging plumber. As usual, his attire was pathetic. Under filthy brown overalls, Frogtown wore a ridiculously bright, red-and-white striped shirt. Rather than answer his question, Stew nodded down at Frogtown’s clothes.
“Nice shirt.” Stew sneered. “Got a date?”
Frogtown’s troubling lack of interest in women was a flaw that he liked to point out whenever he could.
Frogtown smiled back evenly. “Bastille Day.”
Stew hid his confusion, turning to pat the generator’s main silver tube. The generator felt hot. Too hot. Feverish. “Seems that caulk worked,” he admitted, rubbing his chin.
Frogtown shot him his j’accuse look. He pointed his caulk gun at the generator, rotating the tip in small circles. “And this alarm, do you have any idea, at all, what it means?” He lay down the caulk gun, and crossed his arms. His pinched face brimmed with skepticism.
“Don’t know.” Stew shrugged, defensive. “Don’t care.” He again stared out the window, not really seeing the tourists, feeling his thoughts spin off into that forbidden plan.
It was the generator’s fault. The plan started when generator started misbehaving. Now, like the vetch taking over his fields, the plan wouldn’t stop growing.
Stew stared at the generator and rubbed his chin. “What if I could sell it?”
Frogtown made a scoffing sound. “You would let people know? Do you even know what government wants this back?”
Frogtown had a point. His dad had warned them both more times than he could count, how they might all spend the rest of their lives in a frozen gulag if the wrong people heard about what they had. Another forbidden thought followed.
All the more reason to get rid of it.
He would just have to be careful about who to approach.
“I have connections,” Stew said airily, speaking more to himself than to Frogtown. He headed for the door, and paused, his hand on the handle. “About time I speak to some greedy acquaintances I know.”
Frogtown rolled his eyes, then stiffened as Stew’s words seemed to penetrate. “You can’t be serious. Your father,” he shook his head and seemed to catch his breath. “And my father. They both warned us.” Frogtown’s pale eyes flashed. “We can never tell, never. So we keep this secret for how many years and now, just like that, you are wanting to sell it?”
Stew stepped outside, back into the sunshine. He ignored the stabbing pains in his gut. He slammed the door behind him on the generator and Frogtown’s question.
Time to make some calls.
***
To Stew’s and Pascal’s substantial relief, a mere caulk plug almost entirely muffled the audible portion of the generator’s noise. But with all the Earth technology they had at hand, Stew and Pascal could never have stopped the cascade of subatomic events already set in motion years ago inside the 1G-0 power generator.
The creators of the generator were wise. They would never have depended on a single form of energy such as sound to convey a message that was so consequential.
That is why a second signal escaped the notice of Stew and Pascal entirely. The second signal was electromagnetic, invisible, and silent. Shortly following the muffling of the audible warning, the second signal effortlessly radiated out from Wafflequisp’s Ho-Made Country Dairy to enter the cold vacuum of space.
The wave traveled far and quickly. Traveling at the speed of light for over an hour, it was at last intercepted somewhere near Saturn’s orbital path by the Colony’s waiting receivers. There, the pattern of oscillating electric and magnetic fields were interpreted and displayed all over the Colony.
Anxiously anticipated by the Emissary for over thirty-eight years, 1G-0’s distress call triggered a burst of activity.
All around the Colony, display panels blossomed with pairs of spinning, glowing color wheels. The Council convened immediately. The next moves were carefully considered. Clearly, rapid action was imperative.
Though the meeting was essential, it was a formality. It was obvious to both human and nonhuman alike which plan should be implemented. It was obvious to all who should go. Koyper was a master pilot just as his father had been. Koyper wanted to go. Everyone understood why.
Koyper made hasty farewells, then scrambled through the preparations, all while practicing his training to stay calm and focused. A short time later, a green, spherical, triple-finned spacecraft detached from one of the Colony’s many docking bays. Koyper maneuvered his craft towards Earth as quickly as his calculations allowed.
It would take seven Earth days to get there. Three Earth days to search. Day one, the first day, his search would start remotely as soon as he approached Earth, confirming and narrowing down the location. The best estimate was that his father’s lost 1G-0 power generator was somewhere on a little strip of land jutting into Lake Michigan, but he needed to be sure of this before he landed. He would continuously recalibrate as he got closer. Then, two days on the surface to pinpoint the location.
His father had once departed like this, in a hurry, on the mission that had killed him. Alone on his ship, Koyper broke the silence. Speaking in his native Polish, he made a promise to the spirit of his father.
He needed to reach a place called Door County. Before it was too late.
© 2024 Holly Phaneuf Erskine. All Rights Reserved.
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