Contact across the Solar System

Los Angeles, City of Angels II

Early in 1995, Kalna and Ilmuth returned to the Los Angeles area. As before, they got a small apartment near Caltech. Also as before, they dressed in thrift-shop clothing, looking much like college students, though female college students at places like Caltech were much less of a novelty by then. And also as before, they became cashiers.

Once they settled in, they got to work. They got a computer for themselves, and they went online, getting Internet access and signing up for some online services. They soon had to get another computer, so that they could both be online at the same time.

Though some of the people that they met online were very helpful, some were not. Some "gentlemen" asked them things like "r u a girl", wanting such proof as pictures of their breasts. The two found it very odd and disconcerting at first, but they developed various comebacks, like Kalna saying that such demands prove that the demander is unworthy of such a glorious sight, and Ilmuth responding with such pedantry as "A girl? I always thought I was a woman." They sometimes got responses like how they are fat and ugly and "bitches" and "feminazis". But such "gentlemen" were no great loss for their researches. They seemed like an online version of men that they'd physically meet who would hit on them.

After a lot of online searching, they didn't find much that the SSC didn't already know about Earther spaceflight. They also discovered that the online services didn't offer very much that wasn't already on the Internet, so they cut their losses and went Internet-only. Some of the other residents stayed on those services until their ends a few years later, either getting shut down or becoming Internet sites.

So the two still had to go to the libraries of Caltech and UCLA and other such places. But those libraries now had electronic catalogs, something that made research much easier. The UCLA one even displayed what various other University of California branches have, so it was not necessary to go to Berkeley or Davis or wherever to see what they have.

What they found was not very flattering. Earther space-rocket technology had not advanced very much. Chemical rockets could be improved a little bit with superstrong materials, but they were already pretty much flying fuel tanks and their engines had to survive their operation. Electric rockets need less propellant material per velocity change, but their thrust is teeny tiny and they only work in a vacuum. More exotic systems have plenty of problems of their own. Systems like space ladders, linear-motor guns, solar sails, nuclear-bomb drives, pellet-implosion nuclear-fusion drives, and interstellar ramjets.

"Seems like it is indeed stagnant," said Kalna.

"But it's good to get it from the source. What they say to themselves," said Ilmuth.

She thought a bit.

"Even their exotic systems don't have anything like our technologies, and they've discussed a lot of them."

"Yeah, we're safe there."

"Another thing. About their rockets, they don't seem close to having a high-thrust, high-velocity system. They have high-thrust low-velocity ones, low-thrust, high-velocity ones, but no high-thrust, high-velocity ones."

"What might that mean?"

"They aren't going to go to other planets much faster than they do today, and they'll still need those huge rockets to get off of their homeworld into space."

They also did various other sorts of research for the people back home, like on geology and biology and paleontology and the like. It was awfully impressive how Earther scientists had mapped out their homeworld's history, though creationists were impressive in a much less pleasant way.

As they researched, Ilmuth once came across a book on meteorites, one with some detailed history. Like how the Earther scientists once refused to believe that there was such a thing as extraterrestrial rocks. A meteorite fall on a French town in 1803 convinced them otherwise, however. A scientist who visited the site discovered numerous fragments and numerous witnesses. The book also described a big explosion in Siberia in 1908, complete with the mystery of its lack of macroscopic fragments. That was very evidently the crash of the SSC ship Kinden Tarupa, a mystery that she had long been interested in. It was something like the sinking of the Earther sea ship Titanic, but that ship's accident was very well-understood, thanks to the Earthers' excellent researches.