Runaway World

The Habitat

     They passed five more sets of wheel tracks over the next couple of days as they continued across the continent.

     The first tracks they passed were running roughly from South West to North East, but as they continued west they angled more and more to the north, converging roughly on the position of New Philadelphia if you took the avoidance of difficult terrain into account.

     "I think we can be pretty certain now that the city still has people living in it," said Lungelo over the three way video link. His daughter was sitting beside him on the long sofa, looking healthy despite her close call with death. The only visible sign of it now was the bulge under the leg of her coverall where bandages covered her glued up injury. On the other half of the monitor screen, in another window, Philip nodded his agreement with Lungelo's words.

     "I think you're right," Andrew agreed. "It changes nothing, though. We have a mission to perform. We can't be distracted from it."

     "They deserve to be told that there are other survivors of the human race in the world, and that we're planning to return to the inner solar system. We cannot, in all conscience, withhold these facts from them."

     "And what if they react badly to the news?" Andrew replied. "They may consider us to be intruders into their territory. They may consider everything on this continent to belong to them, including the dysprosium. What if they try to stop us?"

     "Maybe they have a right to stop us," Lungelo said. "We came here thinking we were the last humans on the planet, thinking that everything belongs to us. We now know that that's not the case. Are we thieves? Are we going to steal from these people so that we can return to the sun and leave them marooned on this dead, frozen planet?"

     "The twelve cities renounced the idea of national territory," said Izindaba, leaning away from her father so she could look sideways at him. "They agreed that the full resources of the planet would belong equally to all of them."

     "She's right," Susan said to Lungelo. "They knew that, with the future of the human race so precarious, so dependent on everything working perfectly, the one thing that could doom us all would be conflict between the cities. The dysprosium belongs just as much to us as to the people of New Philadelphia. Its location is irrelevant."

     "That was two hundred years ago," Philip pointed out. "The descendants of those people may not feel the same way. We should at least try to contact them. Get their thoughts on the matter."

     "That would be foolish and dangerous," Andrew told him. "At the moment they have no idea we exist. We can go to LaSalle, get the dysprosium and go home again without them ever knowing we were here. The Council can contact them once we're safely home again."

     "Once we've gotten away with our I'll gotten gains," said Philip, frowning.

     "They're not ill gotten," Andrew replied. "As Izzy said, the dysprosium belongs just as much to us as it does to them."

     "You're talking legal," Philip told him. "I'm talking moral. We don't have to tell them why we're here. We just tell them we exist and that we want to be friends. A simple radio message."

     "Without a satellite, we'd have to be almost within visual range for them to receive a radio message," Andrew reminded him.

     "New Philadelphia is only a few hundred kilometres from LaSalle," Philip countered. "Once the dig is well underway, a rover could go there to make contact. We leave a bug to act as a relay. The rover can then withdraw to a safe distance, up to twenty klicks away. At no point would we tell them where we were or what we're looking for."