PLANET MAGAZINE

Photo-Illustration: “EyeAm” © 2005 by Andrew G. McCann

Sam talked while looking through the instrument. “Nothing to get excited about,” he said. “Just a mix of individual stars. That red one looks to be a lot closer than the others… but that’s because I’m assuming it’s a dwarf.” He pulled back from the eyepiece of the huge telescope and turned to look at Frank.

“That’s what I thought, and you’re right about the dwarf.” Frank said. “But come to my desk and let’s look at the monitor image: same field, same magnification. All we’re going to do is turn the point of view.”

Frank clamped the remote-feed camera body onto the telescope. They both moved away from the device. The mirror at the base was almost eight feet across and all by itself weighed 12 tons. It was very dark inside the observatory. And very quiet. Even with the curved overhead doors open, it seemed very quiet in the observatory. The observatory was located on a hill, and down below was a growing city and a thick ribbon of highway that curved along under their perch.

Looking up towards the ceiling, or out towards the walls, was a waste of time. The walls and ceiling were corrugated steel and looked silver in daylight, but now it was night. Now the whole building looked black. The walls could have been miles away, except for the slight echoes that whispered the sound of four shoes as the men worked their way along the steel walkways. There were four lights burning inside the domed observatory. Red lights placed strategically so the astronomers didn’t walk into nests of wires or walk off the edge where the stairs began.

The four lights were dim; 20 watts. And red; Persian red. Because red light didn’t affect the eye the same way white light affects the eye. So the only white light in the room was coming from the 32″ monitor on the desk. And as the camera was focused on stars, the screen was almost as dark as the night sky.

Frank sat at his desk and pulled an extra chair closer so Sam could sit. Frank pointed at the dots. “Same field.” He said.

“Taken today?” Sam asked.

“Just an hour ago.”

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These are seemingly dark days in the transoceanic trucking industry. The seas are as deep and gloomy as they’ve ever been. Lotsa truck cabs are unheated and unpressurized, and they typically crumple under the pressure of even one aquasphere. More important, the goods being transported get wet, and flatter, even if they were wet and flat to begin with. So it’s harder than normal to retain drivers, much less good ones, as they usually don’t last for much more than one leg of an underseas road trip.

So will the transoceanic trucking industry simply sink like a stone, or perhaps dry up?

Not so, retort aqua-trucking scientists, perhaps a bit too loudly. They recently have developed a retrofitting method that removes the tires and seals the undercarriages of these trucks and adds a propeller in back. As a result, the vehicles actually can “float” and move about on the surface of the water, rather than crawl along the rutted and barnacle-encrusted seabed highways, past the brooding and spell-cursed ruins of Atlantis and the sleeping tomb of Cthulu and his many wives. They call this new method the BOuyant Advanced Truck System, or “BOATS”.

Well, glad that’s settled.

So, what’s next on the agenda for these scientific saviors of wheeled transoceanic commerce? Quite simply, they’re taking on a much more complicated task: the transatlantic and transpacific railroad industry!

The obvious solution, they acknowledge, is to create larger BOATS, rather than waste time figuring out how to make the rails float. But they also think there may be a way to add birdlike “wings” to the BOATS and move the propellers to the front. This could allow the BOATS to actually lift up and move through the air — an approach they are thinking of calling JETS or maybe PLANES, but the big stumbling block has been figuring out what those acronyms stand for. A UN committee is currently working on it, and until that’s finalized some day in the far, far future, History herself shall have to wait.