Trojan: Hollow Moon of Jupiter

Cover

The cover is created upon a photograph (STScI 2008-42) obtained using the Hubble Telescope. Permission has been granted as follows:

Material credited to STScI on this site was created, authored, and/or prepared for NASA under Contract NAS5-26555. Unless otherwise specifically stated, no claim to copyright is being asserted by STScI and it may be freely used as in the public domain in accordance with NASA's contract. However, it is requested that in any subsequent use of this work NASA and STScI be given appropriate acknowledgement.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona)

The author is appreciative of this permission. The Hubblesite (available at hubblesite.org which the author hopes you will explore), the North American Space Administration, the European Space Administration and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) provide a wide variety of educational material, including this photograph of Ganymede setting behind Jupiter used on the cover. A copy of this book will be provided to STScI as requested.

The moon depicted is not Trojan; Trojan, which is actually larger than Ganymede and tidally linked in the same orbit, is fictional, and as such, even the Hubble Telescope cannot see it.

Dedication

To the memory of John Cleves Symmes, Jr., who entered the U.S Army as an Ensign, and whose uncle, Colonel John Cleves Symmes, great-grand father of President Benjamin Harrison, served in the Revolutionary War.

Symmes Jr. posited that all planets, including Earth, were hollow, and proposed an expedition to the North Pole to find the ‘North Pole Shaft’. He was supported in this activity by President John Quincy Adams, demonstrating that politicians then were just as nutty as they are today.

Both of these Symmes are distant relatives of the author.

CHAPTER ONE

The First Victim

A sultry female computer voice heralded Jimmy’s presence and identified him to some nameless officer in TPD Headquarters. Trojan Police Department computers spoke to whomever was bothering to listen, as a bank of monitors focused on some new scene of potential mayhem.

"First Street past E Street, heading right hand rotation, east, at approximately 3.8 km/hour, unsteady gait, likely inebriated. Jimmy Madison aka Numero 4, Jimmy Borden (mother’s maiden name), Jimmy B, Jimmy the Bat. Vagrancy, theft, panhandling, minor trafficking, drunk and disorderly. One aggravated assault. Two rape accusations NSF. Suspected homicides times 3. Gang connections. Caution Egrit use. Probable detox, then booking. Attention P. Bowers, SW. BOLO and S&P."

Rounding the corner from E Street to First Street was Jimmy, an unstable (physically and mentally), unkempt, disheveled and mildly inebriated street person, whose progress was hampered by leather-soled shoes. These old shoes were torn, with holes in the right sole, and with unraveling of the stitching at the toe of the left. They slipped on the damp metal sidewalk. The sidewalk cross-hatching was absent at the corners, at intersections, where the metal of the sidewalk bevelled down to meet the gutter of the road. Yet from a safety concern, that was probably the most important place to have the cross-hatching. The guardrails also stopped at the corners to allow pedestrians access to the intersection to either cross the road or continue along the sidewalk—or to slide into the intersection inadvertently, like Jimmy often did. The smooth metal guardrails curved down and burrowed into the edge of the sidewalk at the border with the lower lying gutter, for all the world like one big single piece of carved metal, leaving openness and empty space through which the pedestrian could pass—or fall, like Jimmy often did.

Jimmy turned unsteadily off E Street, Easy Street as the visitors to this section of town sardonically call it. Feeling the reduced traction and subtle slippage under his feet he raised his arms and slightly bent his knees, like a tightrope walker, as he negotiated the turn. A caterwauling cry with wild gyrations almost signaled a painful collapse, but Jimmy, nearly magically regained if not retained his balance and continued gingerly down the damp walkway of First Street. For a time he seemed to bounce from side to side as he progressed forward, with near misses with the guardrail to his right and the wall of some industrial cinder block structure to his left. His feet slipped from under him once more before stability, such as it was, was restored. Gradually his body recovered its original height, his muscles relaxed into an easy if stuttering forward progression, and his arms returned to his sides. His gait lengthened and its cadence sped up into a steady comfortable walk. He breathed in relief, relaxed further, and even initiated a jaunty whistle. But it was only a defense. His footfalls echoed off the walls of shuttered industrial buildings on either side of the metal street, and a slight squelching sound emanated from the leather-soled shoes on wet metal. There was no one else on the street and his feet echoed alone.

Jimmy shifted his slicker with its hanging hoodie up on his shoulders and opened the front, allowing the trailing sides to billow out, shaking free in small damp drops the accumulation of mist that had condensed on this plastic covering. It was torn from use and abuse as were his two shirts beneath, torn and soiled, yellow and off yellow, respectively. The outer plastic slicker was a translucent yellow too, almost phosphorescent in the dim light of Trojan perpetual twilight. His pants were a coarse dark cotton, loosely fitting, and baggy, stained with who knows what. Empty belt loops were stretched out of position at the front where he constantly used them to hitch up his pants. The fly was undone, in absent mindedness, or perhaps the zipper stuck with crust dust, and one small tail of his second pale yellow shirt escaped out the opening, which some casual glance might have mistaken for a flaccid male appendage...although it was doubtful Jimmy’s would be that clean.

His hoodie flipped off his head revealing his identity to the ever-present security surveillance cameras. The receding hairline, unshaven visage, bulbous rhynophymal nose and pock marked skin of a triangular, almost fetal-alcohol face, where it extended outside the skimpy beard, marked him—marked him cold.

Trojan Police computers with their facial recognition software immediately confirmed his identity.

A stinging sensation near the front hair line caused Jimmy to suddenly shake his head, to slap away an imaginary gnat or other insect, a tribute to Jimmy’s memory of Earthside before his emigration. Trojan had its fair share of the creepy crawlies, but flying insects had yet to invade. Flying insects, oddly, in some kind of blessing, did not survive the low fidelity grav tran used to pipe in atmosphere from Earthside to Trojan. Although Jimmy trod on, without breaking step, another sting a half second later caused him to yelp, and the third made him stop and stare in front of him. His eyes were vacant though, or more vacant than usual, and did not reflect in what mind was left that stinging cut to the tip of his nose made by the fourth insult, the fourth gnat.

Jimmy’s feet had already abruptly stopped their forward motion seemingly pinned to the metal crosshatched sidewalk. There was no slippage now. His body, suddenly with a ramrod stiff spine, was briefly suspended in time as it slowly tipped forward, rotating on the fulcrum of his toes. His eyes did not blink when, half way through his fall, the blood spatter from his nose hit his cornea. The blink reflex was gone. Jimmy’s vision had already turned white and did not register the sizzling cloud of molten metal 53 centimeters in front of his feet, nor the second molten metal cloud on a straight line 106 centimeters from his toes, a mere half a second later. Jimmy’s unseeing eyes and face were directed forward and upward, as his head took that long slow arc toward the metal sidewalk, toward the last metallic cloud, 159 centimeters from his feet. Jimmy did not raise his arms nor did he turn away. He was in no condition to protect himself, nor to be protected. With arms at his side, with his head arched back on his neck, in those last few degrees of the body’s extended rotation downward, Jimmy, unknowingly, was leading with his chin through the final haze of tellurium-osmium-iridium vapor.

CHAPTER TWO

The Hollow Moon of Jupiter

The Hollow Moon of Jupiter: A Trojan Horse?

Interview with Commander Donald Garth, Medical Director of the Ortho Burn Unit, Trojan. Interplanetary Times, New York and Los Alamos. January 6th, 2066. Excerpted and reprinted. Interviewed by Janice Milton of SKTV.

[Milton] We are joined today by Commander Donald Garth, son of the late Colonel James Garth, the astronaut who explored Trojan in 2025 and subsequently became the First Governor of Trojan. Doctor Garth will be returning to Trojan to his work as Director of the world famous Ortho Burn Unit, after spending a two year sabbatical here on Earth.

Ortho Burn, as it is referred to locally, annually treats over three hundred burn and fracture trauma patients from all over Earth, and indeed, some patients now come from Nefra as well. The unit has been hailed for its attention to medical issues of the severely burned patients, often as a result of explosions that lead as well to multiple serious fractures and internal injuries. The unique aspects of the unit are its use of weightlessness, of laboratory skin regeneration and its attention to the social and psychological issues which fall on the heals of such disfiguring and debilitating injuries. It is the brainchild of Doctor Garth, and it stands as one of Trojan’s major uniting contributions to the welfare of both Earthside and Nefra.

Welcome Commander Garth.

[Garth] Please, call me Donald. Or, if you feel constrained by journalistic formalism on the air, Dr. Garth, but frankly, Donald is preferable.

{Joint laughter}

[Milton] My producer whispers in my ear—Dr. Garth it is. Tell us, Dr. Garth, what is Trojan?

[Garth] Well, it’s hard to imagine any listener who doesn’t know, but let me summarize. Trojan is an artificial satellite of Jupiter, a moon really, quite large, created by the Nefra. It abruptly appeared in 2025. Its unusual characteristics—actually, the whole thing is unusual, obviously—is that it is hollow, and made of an alloy that is dense, metallic, and of amazing tensile strength.

It was put into orbit around Jupiter in order to provide a safe volume of space, shielded from gravitational waves, that would then serve as a landing pad—area, or volume I guess—for humans arriving in this solar system via gravitational transportation.

[Milton] I’m told that amateur astronomers can view Trojan from Earth?

[Garth] Yes, in fact, a good pair of binoculars will pick it up. The surface has high albedo—albedo, not libido {laughter}—and is quite bright when it is in the sun, not in the shadow of Jupiter.

[Milton] How big is Trojan?

[Garth] Its radius on the outside is about 5,000 kilometers, about 4,000 on the inside.

[Milton] So, it is quite a bit bigger than the moon?

[Garth] Oh, yes. You could easily fit the moon inside Trojan. It is only about a thousand kilometers smaller—in outer radius—than the Earth, and almost the same mass, by the way.

[Milton] But that is immense! Why would the Nefra create this moon and put it in orbit around Jupiter?

[Garth] To come back.

[Milton] To come back?

[Garth] One way or another. The opinions are mixed: as conquerors, as refugees, as ambassadors for trade, as prodigal sons. We really didn’t know which during the ensuing 40 years, and indeed, there is evidence that the motives have changed over that time. But back in 2025, the worry, the conspiracy theory, was that the Nefra were going to invade Earth. Our response was to populate Trojan with humans—kind of like putting a guard at the gate. Or guards. Or maybe squatters in the house, I don’t know.

We’ve learned at lot more since the second wave in 2063, and there are now many more Nefra in Trojan than there ever were over the previous 40 years.

[Milton] The Nefra have tremendous expertise in gravitation science, do they not? That has something to do with the structure of Trojan?

[Garth] Yes. They managed to unify quantum mechanics and gravitation many years ago. Something Einstein could only dream of. They discovered gravity waves and learned how to manipulate space-time. They have applied that technology to large-scale space travel, and more recently to small-scale high efficiency engines that drive the ArfenCorp G-Car. The technology also allows for artificial gravity, which is really helpful in my clinical field.

Trojan is analogous to an airport, providing a flat level surface, so to speak, for instantaneous gravitational transportation, or grav tran. Going very large distances, light-years, in virtually no time—instantaneous.

[Milton] But—doesn’t that mean faster-than-light travel? Didn’t Einstein say that was impossible?

[Garth] As I said, Einstein could only dream of it—but in fact, and I don’t pretend to understand it—it doesn’t move that quickly, it twists space back on itself so that the distance between A and B is zero. So it doesn’t really contradict Einstein. You don’t go faster than light. It’s cheating, I suppose, or maybe Einstein would think so. They twist the spatial dimensions back on themselves.

[Milton] Does that mean they also might be able to twist the time dimension back too?

[Garth] Oh, somebody always speculates on that but, so far, I have not heard anything about time travel coming out of gravitation technology.

Apparently, the hollow metallic sphere, Trojan, shields against gravity waves—much like a grounded sphere or Faraday cage can shield against electromagnetic waves—and gravity waves are something Earthsider science doesn’t detect at all, but these waves can have considerable effect on living biological entities that undergo grav tran. Studying the effects of grav tran on humans was my area of research during this sabbatical that I have taken from my clinical work over the last two years.

[Milton] And now you are returning to Trojan to put it into practice?

{Silence}

[Milton] Ah, my producer whispers to me again. Let’s move on. Are there many people up in Trojan now?

[Garth] Probably half a million people split among the two cities and the Farming Projects. They are all in the narrow equatorial strip of atmosphere on the inside, held in place by the rotation of the sphere. Another 10,000 or so are on the Carousel in the center, a three kilometer diameter spherical structure that floats right in the geometrical center, rotating with Trojan. That is where the Ortho Burn Infirmary is, and also, over on the other side, ArfenCorp.

[Milton] So there is breathable air in that habitable area of Trojan. What about up on the Carousel?

[Garth] The air along the equatorial strip is piped in by grav tran from Earthside, then used to replenish the Carousel, again piped up from the Trojan equator. Of course, if the Carousel leaks, within a very short time those molecules are down in the equatorial strip. Around the Carousel, though, the space is almost totally empty vacuum, just like 4,000 km above the Earth.

[Milton] The Ortho Burn Infirmary is famous. Why is it so important?

[Garth] Weightlessness is a huge advantage for the treatment of patients with multiple unstable fractures, or total body burns, as you can probably imagine. The Ortho Burn unit is one of a kind. A large weightless environment, hospital really—with artificially controlled gravity, in fact—protected from meteor strikes and sun flares, a problem for any space stations in orbit around any of the planets.

People from all over the world who suffer extensive fractures and burns, which would normally be fatal, often can be successfully treated there in a variable gravity environment. We can suspend them in mid air as long as is necessary to allow skin grafting to take place, or fractures to knit, often both, in a large sterile facility. Then, during rehabilitation, we can slowly increase the ambient gravitational forces as tolerated. We have developed artificial skin and in vitro skin culture techniques; our success rate is very high, in terms of overall survival, limb and organ function, and aesthetic result.

Of course, many patients involved in explosions have both extensive burns and extensive fractures, so all in all, having them in a weightless environment is critical to the success.

This is a truly global humanitarian effort, utilizing Nefra technology, UNSA coordination and Earthsider financing to treat any and every person who meets the admission criteria.

One of the important aspects of this endeavor is the use of instantaneous gravitational transportation to get patients from A to B, B being the Ortho Burn unit. Because of the high fatality rate of extensive body surface burns, we take the risk and allow human grav tran directly from Earthside to the Carousel in Trojan. Healthy people—non-emergency—need to launch grav tran from a Lagrange point, or some other place of minimal gravitational wave production, just to be safe. But that can take several hours to get to—

[Milton] —We’ve all heard of Moon Lagrange One, and some perhaps of the Jupiter Lagrange Four. Could you just briefly explain—

[Garth] Lagrange points in astronomy are places of balanced gravitational fields. Between two bodies, it’s easy to understand, like between Earth and the moon—Earth’s moon—there is a point between them where the gravitational pull from both planet and moon are balanced. No net gravity. Obviously that point in space changes as the moon goes around the Earth, and more subtly as the Earth goes around the sun. But it is far more complicated when three bodies are considered, like Earth, moon and sun. And there are actually several points along the orbit of the Earth, and of Jupiter, where these relative low gravity field points occur. In most simple planetary systems, there are three to five points, but it can get much more complicated, when you consider that Jupiter has over sixty moons.

[Milton] Oh dear. Perhaps I should not have asked.

[Garth] {Laughter} There’s a good picture in Wikipedia. It’s all a bit counter-intuitive. Just remember that gravitational fields are at a minimum at Lagrange points. Anyway—

[Milton] I’ll look. Promise.

[Garth] Basically, these burn patients will die if they don’t get to Ortho Burn in a hurry, so taking the unknown risks of grav tran out of an area of intense gravitational field, like the Earthside surface for example, is a reasonable trade-off, or equipoise.

This allows for ethical research into the effects of grav tran on humans, and that is what I have been involved in, Earthside. So far, we have not been able to identify any long term adverse effects; there are some temporary epi-genetic changes that resolve over several hours, but clinically significant long term problems just have not occurred.

[Milton] That’s very interesting. Does that mean regular people like you and me might one day take an instantaneous trip from Earthside to Trojan directly, without going to our moon, or to one of the Lagrange points around Jupiter?

[Garth] Exactly. But we still need a lot more observational research. With the frequency of trauma we still see Earthside, seems that will be, unfortunately, all too easy to acquire.

[Milton] I notice you have referred to this place we are now as Earthside, and us all as Earthsiders. Is that—what—Trojan jargon?

[Garth] {Laughter} I suppose. I guess anticipating my imminent return has prompted me to revert to my roots.

[Milton] You grew up on Trojan?

[Garth] Yes, we came up with the first emigration, when my dad was Governor.

[Milton] Oh, of course. My apologies. Your dad was the famous astronaut, and first Governor—and later CEO of ArfenCorp, shortly before he died, was he not?

[Garth] Yes. He was quite a guy. I miss him. I used to get that, ‘Your dad was that astronaut,’ all the time. Dad got it too, of course. But then one day—sorry, this is something of a conceit—because dad was very proud of this, one day he met someone who said, ‘You’re the father of that doctor at Ortho Burn, aren’t you?’ I was very close to my father.

[Milton] I can imagine he was very proud. Well, Dr. Garth, you’re quickly approaching your father’s eminence. Thank you for this, spending time with us today. Good luck on your return to Trojan. On behalf of our listeners, thank you.

[Garth] My pleasure Ms. Milton.

ArfenCorp, Trojan, Grav Tran and the Nefra: A Journalistic Series Announcement.

Thomas van Nostrand, Editor in Chief, Interplanetary Times, New York and Los Alamos. February 20th, 2066. Excerpted.

ArfenCorp, a manufacturing company based in Trojan, one of the first Trojan initiated industries, has long been known to have connections to the Nefra, and their prime technology, the application of new theories of gravitation. The company has enjoyed steady growth over the last forty years since first contact, and in particular since the second wave and immigration of many Nefra engineers and scientists.

The recent introduction of grav tran ground cars to Earthside has been welcomed broadly, and seems destined for the success which was anticipated but not realized with the early marketing of ArfenCorp’s tranpod almost two decades ago. While the tranpod had considerable success in Trojan, the problem of spontaneous implosion in its initial line of vehicles prompted a total recall from the Earthside market. Ironically, tranpod sales continued well within Trojan, where the inhabitants were not nearly as suspicious of alien technology, even though all three implosions occurred in that moon of Jupiter.

It seems we are a more cynical group on Earth, or Earthside as the Trojans like to call it. We viewed the reports from Trojan as possible examples of Nefra terrorist actions in support of their invasion that never came to pass.

To understand the recent rise in ArfenCorp stock, and the acceptance of the new ground cars here on Earth, one has to go back to the beginnings of Trojan history: the first contact, the Nefra immigration and their acceptance in the Trojan community, the involvement of Nefra in governance and military organizations. One has to understand our stuttering progress toward treaty definition, trade negotiation, and border security. Parallel in development is the growth of UNSA, the United Nations Space Administration, as a global governance structure intent upon reuniting these two cultures into a productive, law abiding and peaceful congregation—as presumably they once were—and also the development of UNSA’s dark shadow, that half sister, UNSAGS, its Global Security or secret service.

With this in mind, the Interplanetary Times has sent Phillip Crinshaw, a seasoned and well-respected journalist from our Science Desk—and the son of one of the original astronauts—off to Trojan on a two month investigation of the Nefra, ArfenCorp, Trojan and the impact that the second Nefra immigration wave will have for us Earthsiders. Over the next three months we shall publish his accountings of those inquiries in the hopes of dispelling some of the fears and misinformation about our first interplanetary allies, and with the view of providing in-depth technical and fundamental analysis of ArfenCorp as one of the fastest growing international— indeed—interplanetary companies we have yet seen.

Gravitation Transportation: Alien Technology from a Human Source.

Phillip Crinshaw, Science Desk, Interplanetary Times, New York and Los Alamos. March 1st, 2066. Excerpted.

Just getting to Trojan, if you don’t want to spend months in transit, requires alien technology, and alien technology is—well—alien.

Except it isn’t, it is actually human.

But before we get into that, we must explain the basic concepts of Instantaneous Gravitation Transportation: iGravTran, or just grav tran.

If there is one area of science that the aliens, the Nefra—although they call us the aliens, and if they want to be derisive, they call us the ‘un-tailed’—understand better than we do, it is gravity. Many people know that Sir Isaac Newton developed the Theory of Gravitation over four centuries ago, and that this theory was extended and improved by Albert Einstein when he explained his General Theory of Relativity. Newton’s theory used forces between material bodies, while Einstein’s theory used space-time curvature induced by massive bodies. Einstein’s General Theory contains Newton’s Theory of Gravitation as a reduction, and or a simplification, and draws an equivalence between the curvature of space-time and the force of gravity. Space-time is curved by the presence of massive bodies, and that curvature nicely explains the relationship of space to time, which we all feel as acceleration, or distance (space) per second per second (time squared). Acceleration, when multiplied by mass, becomes the force of gravity. Don’t worry. You understood this OK in grade ten. This Newtonian part, anyway.

Nefra Technology has learned to manipulate space-time, folding the spatial dimensions over on themselves while keeping steady the time dimension. This has, amazingly, enabled the transport of material objects, including biologicals and people, over large distances instantaneously. Hence the title Instantaneous Gravitation Transportation, or grav tran. The safe handling of living beings, however, requires a transportation depot at either end which is almost totally devoid of space-time curvature.

Einstein would call such an environment flat. Newton would call it weightless.

Humans now call it Trojan, or more accurately, Trojan’s Inner Sanctum.

Nefra: Humans, by Another Name.

Phillip Crinshaw, Science Desk, Interplanetary Times, New York and Los Alamos. March 21st, 2066. Excerpted.

They are not little green men. They are not large arthropodic blobs with eyes on stalks. They are not tall mechanical mastiffs.

In fact, they look just like us—because they are us. We have met the enemy, and he is us, Pogo Possum said, so many years ago.

They have been away for a long time, but now, they want to come back.

First Contact 2025.

First Wave 2026.

Second Wave 2063.

If you are a Trojan, you have probably met at least one, and probably you never knew. Same number of nice guys, same number of jerks, same number of psychopaths, just like Earthsiders.

If you are an Earthsider, you might have met one, but more likely you have just seen them on TV, and again, you never knew.

If you were one of the four astronauts who visited Trojan North Pole in 2025, as my father was, you saved two Nefra from imminent death, just as they saved one of yours, and then you brought them home with you to meet your family, because basically they are nice people, just like us.

ArfenCorp: A Silly Acronym.

Phillip Crinshaw, Science Desk, Interplanetary Times, New York and Los Alamos. March 28th, 2066. Excerpted.

ArfenCorp stock closed at $56.23 yesterday, NYSE, up 3% on the week and 11% on the year. Not bad for an offshore company that few know very much about.

Offshore.

Well, off-world would be more like it, because ArfenCorp, the first Trojan based multinational company, is located on the Carousel, the central structure inside the hollow moon of Jupiter. It is an appropriate place for ArfenCorp, given its primary technology is gravitation, and its primary product is the tranpod, largely unknown to us Earthsiders, but popular within the hollow moon.

But now, ArfenCorp is shipping its new G-Car to Earthside, where its environmentally friendly energy source is more abundant. After all, if they can make cars that run off solar power in Trojan, where ambient light is a fraction of Earthside, the sky is literally the limit on Earth.

In more ways than one.

The new ArfenCorp G-Car is designed for flight too, though on-board computers restrict it to being a ground car (hence the name G-Car) until Earthside legislation and air traffic control has adapted to the idea of any wacko taking off up in the air. Apparently, a small update in the operating system, planned for when Earthside gets its act together, will allow the G-Car to zoom off to Moon Lagrange One. UNSA is actively blocking this update until greater controls are in place...

ArfenCorp was started shortly after the mid wave Nefra immigration in 2035. While shrouded in secrecy at the time, the silly acronym of Nefra was not truly designed to hide its origins, at least, not for anything more than about twenty seconds. It seems, rather, the principals involved were rushed when registering the company, and had to come up with a name on the fly.

ArfenCorp specializes in the admittedly superior technology that the Nefra understand regarding the control of gravity. They produce generators for local gravity fields (industrial and domestic), and gravitation transportation, both small scale as used in their vehicle engines, and large scale used in interplanetary and inter-stellar transportation.

It is the large scale grav tran that needed the huge flat space-time depots like Trojan, and smaller units like Moon Lagrange One or Jupiter Lagrange Four. With the recent breakthrough in much smaller units, the company is extending its horizons into instantaneous communication, allowing for real-time communication between friends and family on Trojan and those Earthside, instead of the turn around time of forty to sixty minutes between question and answer. It is predicted this will even be attractive to news networks on Earthside, to finally rid them of their built-in four second delay between question and answer of foreign correspondents that so irritates spectators for the last fifty years.

Look to ArfenCorp stock to just keep rising.

ArfenCorp and Nefra: A Marriage Made in the Heavens.

Phillip Crinshaw, Science Desk, Interplanetary Times, New York and Los Alamos. April 4th, 2066. Excerpted.

Remember the old movie star, Brad Pitt, from ‘Legends of the Fall,’ about seventy years ago. If you want to know what the typical Nefra looks like, check out that movie some time. It’s a great movie in its own right, but the long blonde hair and penetrating blue eyes of its leading actor gives you a pretty good idea.

Of course, with eight billion Earthsiders, and climbing, lots of Earthsiders look Nefra too. But everyone knows their truly discerning physical difference is their tail. Problem is, they can easily retract the tail, and when they do, frankly, they look just like us.

After two months on—or in—Trojan, I really had not met any I knew for sure were Nefra until I started interviewing engineers at ArfenCorp. The connection with that company is significant, as its founding engineers were almost certainly expatriates from Nefra back with the first wave, engineers who had learned their trade on their home world before emigrating.

They don’t talk about it much, but some of them, those who don’t play poker, look a little strangely at you when you tell a lie…a sure sign. They call it ‘scenterrogation.’

There are a lot of Brad Pitts in ArfenCorp. Many of the engineers, especially in the G-Car section, have kept their hair long, tied back with a thick leather string. If you look carefully you may find the penetrating blue eyes, you may see their nostrils flare slightly, though mostly only as they talk with colleagues and friends. They tell me that ‘scenting’ is impolite unless they know the person well.

You may notice their discomfort in sitting, with occasional subtle squirming. But only once did I see a real tail, and that Nefra had black hair and brown eyes. He was in one of the high-g labs near an isolated part of the ArfenCorp unit on the Carousel. He was by himself, about to sit at his desk as I passed his door on a tour with the manager of the research and development unit. Just as this Nefra moved to sit down, his tail flipped out of his coveralls and twined around his right leg.

My ‘tour guide’ saw my startled look as we passed, and simply commented to me that sitting with the tail retracted for long periods of time was uncomfortable. Apparently, wrapping the tail around the right or left leg before sitting is more comfortable.

"He’s clearly very unusual though, for a Nefra. He’s left handed," my tour guide said, and we simply walked on. By the end of the tour, I still had not figured out whether my tour guide was Nefra, but close to twenty-five percent of personnel in ArfenCorp are.

Nefra and Earthsiders: A Marriage Made in Trojan.

Interview with Phil Crinshaw, Science Desk, Interplanetary Times, New York and Los Alamos. April 11th, 2066. Excerpted. Interviewed by Janice Milton of SKTV.

[Milton] What was your introduction to Trojan like? Can you describe it for our viewers?

[Crinshaw] I was still pretty shaken by the events of our voyage over to Trojan from Jupiter Lagrange Four, especially making that space walk to a Ranger Class Tranpod. The trip down the North Pole shaft was dark, but brief, as we went down under power...

[Milton]...instead of just dropping or falling down, you mean?

[Crinshaw] Yeah. That would have taken eight and a half minutes—it takes everything eight and a half minutes to go over a thousand kilometers down the North Pole shaft. In the Ranger we were there in about seventy seconds—quite amazing—but you have to remember that without any atmosphere, well, it seems like nothing.

[Milton] Now, I know what you mean by the North Pole shaft, but again, our viewers have never been out of this atmosphere, so could you explain?

[Crinshaw] Oh yeah, I should. Look. Trojan is a hollow moon of Jupiter. About 10,000 kilometers in diameter, about thirty percent smaller than Earth, its crust is only about one megameter, one thousand kilometers, and the rest is hollow. At both poles, North and South, there is a shaft through to the inner section, dubbed the Inner Sanctum that starts about twenty-five meters across and increases to five kilometers when it opens into the inner portion.

[Milton] So you went down into Trojan through the North Pole shaft?

[Crinshaw] Yes, the South Pole is restricted to military operations.

Anyway, the opening into the Inner Sanctum is breath taking. Falling under gravity, everything enters at over 13,000 kilometers per hour, and that pinpoint of light that represents the opening into the Inner Sanctum expands rapidly over the last few seconds. Suddenly, appearing out of nothing you enter into this twilight space that is 8,000 kilometers across. The shiny, steely black surface on the inside almost glows with the dim sunshine. You can quite easily see the blue grey strip of atmosphere at the equator, on the inside of Trojan.

[Milton] Do the lights come from the cities in Trojan? You said sunshine, I think?

[Crinshaw] You can’t see the lights of the cities until you get quite a bit closer, nor of the Carousel, but the glow of the sun’s transmitted rays produces a dull, warm, yellow-orange bulge of light along the equator, spreading out to about a third of the inner surface before it fades into the metalscape. It was a surprise to everybody, and confusing, when first discovered.

Quartz fibers imbedded in the crust, tiny, almost microscopic wave-guides, channel the light from an outer surface area to the inner. This is basically at a ratio of 25 to 16—radius of 5,000 km on the outside, 4,000 km on the inside, you see—raising the ambient photon level by 56%. So it looks like more light inside Trojan than outside, and the Nefra certainly planned it that way when they built this thing.

Now, the whole thing is dim, but you accommodate, you know. It’s all like twilight, really. There is a beauty to it all.

The Inner Sanctum is huge, but deceptive. With nothing to compare to, nothing to provide a measuring stick, visually it flips back and forth from being infinitely far away to close enough to touch—the other side, I mean. I didn’t space walk out there until later after my arrival, but of course, the total silence is almost like sensory deprivation.

[Milton] When did you first meet the Nefra?

[Crinshaw] I’m not really sure.

[Milton] I’m sorry?

[Crinshaw] For the first half of my trip I was in the Cities, Fidelity and Charity, and briefly I toured the layout of the new town, Hope. I also went to the Farming Projects at the shore of the Great Ocean. I didn’t get out to the Carousel, and then ArfenCorp, until later.

[Milton] Were there not any Nefra in the cities?

[Crinshaw] Oh, probably, but you really can’t tell, or at least, I couldn’t. Not then, anyway. They look, talk, act, just like us. And there are probably very few down in the cities, certainly compared to ArfenCorp. Mostly, they are in the military or the TPD, because of their lie detection ability.

[Milton] TPD?

[Crinshaw] Trojan Police Department.

[Milton] Oh, because of their scenting abilities?

[Crinshaw] That’s right. Obviously very helpful in questioning people, suspects etc. But it is not admissible in court, because the pheromone production, I am told, can be ambiguous unless it is detected in very specific circumstances, you know, so there can be no confusion about which pheromone is being produced to which question.

And they have there own rules—etiquette. The police, those who are Nefra, can be pretty free with it, but in general public, they tend to ‘shut down,’ as they call it, you know, voluntarily close their ability to scent. Apparently, the scenting they do is really only acceptable between intimate couples, or very briefly in certain social circumstances—where they are trying to figure out if they said something wrong, or offensive. Or so I understand.

[Milton] Did you meet them out on the Carousel?

[Crinshaw] Yes. In ArfenCorp. About a quarter of the staff there are Nefra, because of the gravitation technology they work on. I got the impression that some of them even go back and forth occasionally, you know, back to Nefra.

[Milton] Now, I think many of our viewers have seen pictures of the Carousel. We can put a video clip of it up in the screen. That’s where ArfenCorp is?

[Crinshaw] Yes. It is a bit like a large Ferris wheel. Three miles wide, though. It is fixed in line with the under surface of Trojan, in that it rotates with Trojan, so always faces the same direction with respect to Trojan, at least while I was there—they can change it occasionally. So you’re always seeing the same surface area when you look out.

ArfenCorp has a large area of units at the south side toward the Great Ocean, the huge cistern of water. The Great Dark Spot, the Trojans call it, because it blocks out the sun every 67 minutes. Many of the employees live on the Carousel, although some commute up from the towns. That trip is over two hours, unless you take the instantaneous grav tran. People don’t really know how safe local iGravTran is for humans though, so that transport is largely reserved for emergencies. Even the commuters live up on the Carousel for two weeks, then two weeks down in the Towns. Like the hospital and government workers do.

[Milton] So let’s get down to it. You met a number of Nefra in ArfenCorp?

[Crinshaw] Yes, I think so. I mean, you don’t ask, you know? Even journalists. It’s sort of an open secret, like gender preference or religion. Nevertheless, I saw enough to know. Common physical characteristics are the blonde hair blue eyes, but that is only about a third of them. Occasional flaring nostrils from casual scenting, or an unusual gyration, when they sit, as they internally readjust the retraction of their tails, I think.

The real trick, which I think works, when you speak to a younger one who is not as self-restrictive about the etiquette—it varies, mostly with age, it seems—is to tell them a lie.

With some you get an obvious startled look. I really don’t think the Nefra are used to lying, you know. Dissembling is probably a better word, because you don’t really have to lie overtly to get a rise out of them. Apparently we produce the pheromones they smell without us saying anything.

But you have to be careful.

[Milton] What do you mean?

[Crinshaw] Well—I’ll give you an example. I got to know one of the engineers up there. He was pretty clearly Nefra, I thought, but I didn’t ask. Instead, in the midst of a conversation we were having about Earthside upcoming elections, I commented that I thought the Republicans—who are running this xenophobic campaign about them, about the Nefra—I mean, they really are, you know—well, I said I thought it was a non-issue because the Republicans were not going to win.

The engineer just looked at me, his nostrils flared, and then he smiled.

Then he said, Yes, I am Nefra...and yes, you’re right, the Republicans are probably going to win.

I didn’t try that trick again...

[Milton] Some of our listeners have expressed the concern that Trojan is really like the ‘wild west’ now, that street crime is ubiquitous, and that the influx of Nefra since the second wave began has resulted in some—well, domestic instability. Are crime rates worse on—I guess I should say, in—Trojan than here on Earth—Earthside, as they would say?

[Crinshaw] Really, I don’t think so. There seems to be a similar socioeconomic distribution in Trojan as on Earth, but, of course, there is far greater military, and paramilitary force in Trojan, simply because of its origins, and subsequent structural make-up: Trojan Police Department or TPD, TPD Central on the Carousel, which has a greater political flavor I guess, UNSA which is an outgrowth of United Nations, and is the primary or overt military presence in Trojan—sometimes I think every second person up there is UNSA...it includes the medical sector, you know. Of course, the elephant in the room is UNSAGS, the shadow of the military, very ‘big brother-ish’, which is hidden just barely under the surface of everything. United Nations Space Administration Global Security.

Maybe all this heat keeps the hoods at bay, I don’t know. Or maybe the heavy presence of Nefra with their ‘scenterrogation.’ Maybe it’s the universal facial recognition and security cameras on every corner, allowing TPD to track everybody. Maybe it’s just selection, I don’t know.

Anyway, there is virtually no crime in Trojan.

CHAPTER THREE

Jimmy's Death Scene

First Street of Charity is metallic in structure, in appearance, in its echoes, in its gritty residua from scrapings and grindings that created the street in the first place; it is metallic also in metaphorical terms, unforgiving, cold, brittle, shiny and easily scarred, but indestructible. ‘First’, as the initial designs originally laid out by town planners with UNSA designated—UNSA being the United Nations Space Administration. The name ‘First’ was an arbitrary choice. ‘First’ did not mean best.

There is no topology in Trojan with only the Great Dark Spot and the polar shafts to attract any attention for their heterogeneity. Even the equatorial strip is homogenous from a distance, but for the two cities. The rest of the inner surface of Trojan is just metal. From a distance, like 4 to 5 mega-meters, thousands of kilometers, out at the Carousel, say, it is shiny and pure, except for the inhabited bits. From the Carousel, it is all a shiny, steely color throughout the entire inner spherical surface, except for that relatively small strip of a smudge around the inner equator, a strip which is about twice as wide as the angular diameter of the moon, Earth’s moon, or the sun, for that matter, though it is much dimmer.

At the inner equator of Trojan, the equatorial atmosphere, held in place by centripetal forces, confers a dull blue-grey, like a rainy smog sky on Earth. Out in the ‘metalscape’, especially away from the equator, away from where the crust dust has settled, away from any interfering atmosphere, up above the 35th parallel, the inner surface is shiny and clean. It is the opposite of the outer surface, on the outside of Trojan where it meets the cold vacuum of space, where the equatorial regions are shiny and clean, and the poles are filthy with crust dust. So it is that the two fictitious forces, centripetal and centrifugal, have such opposite effects.

Trojan’s hourly rotation gives the inner surface gravity. Set spinning at its inception, Trojan completes a rotation once every 67 minutes, the Trojan hour. Actually 67 minutes and 23 seconds. The early settlers, the UNSA astronauts, called it a Trojan, in tradition with the endless ambiguities of early Trojan jargon. ‘See you in a Trojan’, ‘back in half a Trojan’, ‘been at it for Trojans.’ The expression was losing popularity, in part from early ads for the most popular condom: ‘A Trojan for a Trojan for a Trojan.’ Here the word stood for, in its original intent and sequence, the condom, the time and the man. A real man’s ‘best laid goals’, the ad went on, pun intended. When far too few men achieved the goal proposed in this phrase, and far too few women wanted such a goal, the designation as a unit of time slowly slipped away.

The word ‘hour’ seemed better, eventually, although ‘day’ was astronomically more appropriate, really. With a rotation once an hour, roughly, or once a Trojan hour, exactly, the outline of the sun, that hazy glow they call the solar bulge, the bulge in the equatorial smudge, seems to spin about the equator once an hour, once a Trojan, of course.

The sun shines through the crust, along billions of kilometers of quartz fibers extending through its thickness, and that familiar yellow hazy glow demarcates the center of the solar system, magnified as it is by the fibers like a spherical lens. The quartz fibers, which run through the crust of Trojan, don’t alter the frequencies much, so the color and tint of the sun are indeed familiar, to the human eye, or the Nefra eye, for that matter.

It is brighter inside Trojan than outside Trojan, but a glimmer that seems still like Earthside at one half hour post sundown, or that military strategic designation, ‘first light.’ Down here, right in town—and all towns in Trojan, present and future, are on the equator—here the metal surface is chewed up, dirty, black, almost coal-like greasy metal, into which are formed the roads and sidewalks, by some relief carving, with crowning and gutters and drains for water from rain which never falls. Charity’s town planning harshly confronts its inhabitants. The sidewalks even have tooled cross-hatching to promote traction for the ubiquitous rubber soled footwear. Guardrails protect non-existent pedestrians from running into the paths of non-existent g-cars. On First Street, pedestrians, when they do appear mostly stumble in an inebriated random walk, isolated, all alone. Such is First Street’s clientele.

The sky above First street is like the sky above everywhere within the equatorial strip. Re-radiated light, characteristic of the symmetrical diatomic molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, just as with Earth, produces a blue glow. The answer to that childhood question is not so different, here in Trojan.

Why is the sky blue, daddy?

Because the re-radiation by diatomic molecules (with only three degrees of freedom for photon absorption) of solar visible spectra from our highly nitrogenous atmosphere produces a lovely blue color, darling. Good old diatomic nitrogen, and oxygen, for that matter. Not at all like asymmetric triatomic sulphur dioxide, with that ugly dirty yellow. Smog is an Earthside phenomenon, dearest.

Oooh, I’m glad we don’t live on Earth, daddy.

Me too, he lies, proving that answers in Trojan are not distinguishable either from answers on Earth.

It is a colder blue, a duller blue than Earth’s, within the atmosphere at the inner equatorial surface. This atmosphere, at life sustaining pressures, extends barely a couple of hundred kilometers on either side of the inner equator, plastered to its surface by forces of perpetual circular movement.

Don a space suit, say an EVG-16, which is popular, one of the older UNSA suits, and wander up to the sixtieth parallel in an off road tranpod, and exit for a picnic—well, up there the sky is darker, forbidding, shining black, and Birdsong gun-metal color of the ubiquitous tellurium-osmium-iridium alloy crust. Up there the distances you see can reach out and touch you, at arm’s length it seems and yet seemingly infinitely far away, at the same time. Up there you can see the marker buoys of the Central structure if you squint, or some think they can. You can see the Carousel, the dead center of the Inner Sanctum, with all its lights. You can see the flush of the sister cities, towns really, of Charity and Fidelity, if you travel far enough off their longitude or latitude, far enough off the equator. Similarly, you can see the Great Ocean, the dull great blackness of a 2200-kilometer cistern of water, blackened by trace osmium from the inner surface crust. The ocean is mostly seen in silhouette, as it blackens out the traces of sunlight for a spell every 67 minutes. The 5-minute eclipse. Le petite mort, a risqué reference, is not to be confused with the three hour J’eclipse every week, as Trojan runs briefly behind Jupiter in its prograde orbit.

The picnic, north or south out of the atmospheric strip, is worth the trip, at least once, for the sights alone. To see across the crystal clear Inner Sanctum, to see across the 8,000 kilometers of empty vacuum to the opposite inner surface, to see that at Earthside twilight, causes supreme disorientation without drugs. Some people experience vertigo, others some spiritual revelation that mostly amounts to nonsense, as most spiritual revelations do; some think it like the moment before dying, and others that it is life changing. Psychiatrists and psychologists who study the human psyche consider it a projective test. Kind empathic people see glory; psychopaths see hell. Or is it the other way around?

Most appreciate the view as something totally foreign, something evil, something benevolent, something they could never have possibly imagined. Just seeing across the Inner Sanctum, to the other inner side of this habitable world, unimpeded by atmospheric distortion, is simply not an Earth-like experience in any way. It is not something that sentient people on the outer surface of an inhabited planet with a smoggy atmosphere have ever seen, or imagined, or ever expect to see.

A lot of young ladies would lose their virginity parking out on the metalscape of inner Trojan if those damn EVG-16s had been better designed.

There is a curious relative brightness in the classy neighborhoods of town. It is a sparkling. Colors are deeper, and richer,