Contact across the Solar System

Back to Los Angeles

Kalna and Ilmuth continued to do research in Caltech's library, and they branched out to other LA universities' libraries, like the library of the University of California at Los Angeles. "A University of California? But only in LA?" thought Kalna when she learned of it, but she soon learned that it has branches across the state, like ones in San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Davis.

The two also did research by sitting in on various professors' talks and graduate students' journal clubs. That was very hit-and-miss, since it depended on what they wanted to talk about, but they did get a lot of interesting info that way. Graduate students were sometimes very approachable, and they could be as good as professors as info sources. Undergraduate students were more numerous, but they were usually not as knowledgeable.

The two also discovered in the LA area a lot of weird machines. They looked like seesaws continually rocking back and forth, with one end connected with bars to an engine or a motor and with the other end connected to some cables going into the ground. Not long after the two arrived, Ilmuth asked what they were, and she found out that those were oil pumps for pumping crude oil out of the ground. So LA was built on top of a big oil field.

Some months later, a geologist gave a talk about oil resources. Kalna remembered the LA oil field, and she sat in on it. The geologist talked about the prospects of finding new oil fields as old ones get pumped dry. He concluded that running out of extractable oil was something like a century or so in the future, but that if people start using it at a greater rate, it would be gone sooner. The easier oil will be go first, making it harder and harder to extract the remaining oil. Kalna asked about alternatives to oil, and he mentioned tar sands and oil shales and the like. To get the oil out of them, you grind them up and bake them. She asked what if one needs to burn more oil than the oil that one gets from it. The geologist conceded that that was a potentially serious problem with such resources, but that one could instead burn coal. She also asked him about mineral resources in general, and the geologist described how his fellow geologists look for convenient concentrations of what they seek. She asked why not use ordinary rock or garbage as a raw material, and he stated that it was usually more expensive, though some metals are very easy to recycle.

Kalna had to keep herself from mentioning that recycling and ordinary-rock mining were what was normal on the SSC worlds. Most of them do not have the sort of geological activity that the Earth does, and thus they do not have nice ore bodies and the like. Earthers often don't realize how good they have it, she thought to herself.

Los Angeles was the home of Hollywood, the capital of the US entertainment industry, but Kalna and Ilmuth had some difficulty researching it. They couldn't get movies and TV shows whenever they wanted to, so the best place to research those productions was back on a SSC ship. Some residents made copies of movies and TV shows as they were shown, taking them to ships, and gradually building up a huge library. As a result, some SSC people joked that the Earth looks like Los Angeles.

But the Los Angeles area newspapers were full of gossip about the entertainment industry, and in their ship-pilot days, the two would get a lot of it from LA-area residents. Residents like Firkon and Ramu in previous years. It sometimes made them dread becoming celebrities among the Earthers. It was yet another possible negative consequence of their revealing their true identities, alongside being considered kooks, being sent to mental hospitals as hopelessly deluded, or worse.