Chapter 2 Chapter 1 Space Frontier

Port Burroughs is the only inhabited place on the planet Burroughs.It sits on top of a mountain surrounded by a thin layer of artificial air.This port town is gaudy and noisy, full of wandering adventurers, but it's the capital of all the far-flung asteroids of the High Space Trusteeship. One morning in March 2190, Rick Drake returned from Earth to Port Burroughs on the planetary spacecraft.Before that, he spent four full years studying for a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering at Sun City.Now he's back in trust, not only with a new degree, but with his big dream of building a CT chassis.

Rick waited a long time before it was his turn to step out of the spaceship.Standing at the entrance of the passage, he was tall and thin, with bright blue eyes and brown-red hair, making him look very young.Ahead of him was a long line of laborers pushing their way to customs and immigration officials.He couldn't help becoming a little impatient, and couldn't help but look around hopefully, trying to find someone he knew.His home is still twenty million kilometers away on an asteroid called Albania, where few spacecraft go.He hoped his father would come to fetch him home, or at least old Rob Mackey would come.

Many spaceships stood like silver spires around the hilltop, but there was no sign of Mackey's dilapidated ship called Goodbye Jane. "Look, Miss Karen Hood!" A crew member standing behind Rick suddenly pulled his arm and said, "Her uncle is one of the senior members of the trusteeship government committee. She can take the Twenty-seven pieces of luggage without worrying about being overweight. Really pretty, right? Her uncle picked her up, and that's a real car!" Karen had fiery red hair that was combed perfectly, and she was tall and straight and attractive.At this time, she was chatting and laughing with the men around her.Those people were either officers of the Space Guard or young managers of the Interstellar Corporation. They must have feasted, danced, and laughed with her in the first-class cabin on the spaceship.She was too beautiful to fit in the ugly narrow alleys of this cheap iron town. She should live in a tall white tower in Sun City.These asteroids can only provide the metals they contain, and someone has shipped these deposits back to Earth in exchange for riches for her and her pampered friends to squander.Rick really didn't understand why she came here, for her.It's all an adventure.Maybe it's because she's bored, maybe it's because she's tired of yachts, nightclubs, and beach houses.

Rick nodded, as if he understood the purpose of her trip.The four years of staying on the earth were too long for him. The gray space, closed horizon, and suffocating weight of the air made him miss his hometown asteroid deeply.He missed the cold brilliance of the stars and the endless darkness around him, the refreshing feeling of freedom, the hot sun, the silent peace and the boundless space. However, Karen is an earthling, born to be pampered. Rick felt a sudden pang of jealousy as he saw those Earthlings who were entitled to be around her swarming around her.For him, she is out of reach, no asteroid person can enter her world, just as no earth person can control CT.But Rick wasn't exactly asteroid, and Karen reminded him of that, and he felt helpless pain because of it.

Rick's father's family has lived on the planet Albania for three generations. While fighting against meteorite showers and CT meteor swarms, they mined and smelted metal ore to make a living.Rick's mother, however, is from Earth, and her family is as old, rich, and proud as Karen Hood's.But she ran away from her family in order to marry a "rock rat" named Jim Drake. Rick gritted his teeth angrily, trying not to recall those melancholy things.Karen didn't pay him any attention, and when she got into her uncle's long car, she turned her head and waved cheerfully goodbye to the men she had left behind.

Rick looked at the desolate scene with a smile in his blue eyes.The old world to which Karen Hood belonged and the power of the Interstellar Corporation had expanded here, and they used their atomic power to plunder the planets' uranium, radium, and other deposits, which were now on the verge of being depleted.Before Rick was even born, these unfortunate colonized planets had been engaged in a space war to defend precious energy resources.Now despite the Trusteeship's truce, they are still secretly fighting for these depleted resources.However, these ores, which can undergo atomic fission to generate energy, will eventually be exhausted, and Karen's world will die with it.

In Rick's eyes, those deserts made of bare rocks, the biting cold and the dead silence of no one seemed to exist anymore, because in his mind, all these had been produced by the huge CT reaction. energy changed.Space engineers, once in possession of this limitless source of energy, could endow all the barren places of the planet Burroughs with air, temperature, and transplanted organisms. People can use this CT energy to transform all asteroids that are not suitable for human habitation, and make them all become human homes.And that's the drive and dream Rick got from his father.He lived to build that glorious new world, and that world - if it existed - had to be built on the CT chassis.

The prudent Earthling always declares that such a CT chassis cannot be built, but he is not Earthling.These asteroids were his world, and now he's coming home again.While CT matter is still as untouchable as Karen Hood's gloriously flowing locks, there must be a way.Didn't uranium, which can undergo nuclear fission, seem uncontrollable at one time?Now that he's an aerospace engineer, his pride in it and his lean, strong body make him feel omnipotent. Rick finally made his way to the exit after the line of patient laborers, and worries began to eat away at his joy of returning home.His father was supposed to come get him, at least Baby Mackey.The inspector slowly checked his backpack and stamped his passport.Rick hurried into a phone booth at the Star Corporation air terminal and called Albania.

"Drake and Mackey's office, please," he told the operator. "Anyone is welcome." "Please put in ten dollars for a ten-minute call," the operator said. "Please don't hang up the phone." Rick asked to wait a full three minutes before receiving the signal back from the distant asteroid. "Sir, O'Banilla's on the phone. A Miss Ann O'Brien is calling you back, please." Ann O'Brien... Rick froze for a moment.She was actually an asteroid girl with brown eyes who used to play "astronauts and thieves" with him as a child in the abandoned mines on Albania.Ann also helped him learn aeronautics when he was in school.She also shed tears when he left for Earth because she had to stay and tend her father's house.Rick stood for a while wondering what she would become in these four years.

"Sir, please speak." "Ann, I'm coming home—to work." Rick held his breath, reminding himself not to mention CT, "I wrote and told Dad I wanted a job. I thought he or Mackey would pick me up, but The Jane ship isn't here. I want to know—I hope nothing happened." He waited another three minutes before hearing Ann's answer. "Hi, Rick. Glad you're back." Because of the distance, Ann's voice was as soft as a whisper, but still lovely, and it reminded Rick of her brown face and the boyish cut she'd had, and now her hair.Xu has been staying for four years, and she has grown up.

"You're surprised, aren't you?" she said. "I don't think you know I'm working for your father's company. I know your father doesn't write letters, but he got your letter. I came to pick you up together, but—but something happened." She paused, and Rick knew she was afraid of talking too much. "Don't you worry about Rick," Ann continued hurriedly, "they're both fine. They're just out on a new job. Your father knew you'd be calling and told me to tell you all about it. " But Rick knew she couldn't tell him everything.She couldn't tell the truth as long as CT was involved, and her worried tone convinced him that it had something to do with CI. CT is out of reach.The law of the hosting government stipulates that for known CT objects, an official research and development license must be held to enter within a range of 100 kilometers around it. Jim Drake's company once had such a license.He was working with Mackey to mark the dangerous CT meteorites with a sign he had invented.Those signs still flashed the warning, but Jim's research charter had been revoked because Trustee officials had assembled a CT patrol. The Asteroids did not get a seat on the Trusteeship Council, and Jim and Mackey were both Asteroids who were derisively called "Rock Rats".For all the CT meteors they've spotted and flagged, they're still friends of the asteroid-free Bruce O'Brien in the eyes of the authorities.Rick knew that those smart Earthlings, Martians, Venusians, etc. were still suspicious of the asteroid inhabitants under their rule and enslaved, and they were extremely afraid of CT. Ann was silent, as if she really couldn't tell a little bit about that job.Rick didn't ask any more questions, because there must be many spies eavesdropping, and the distance between them was too far, so it was impossible to ask clearly at the moment. "There is an asteroid four million kilometers above Albania," Ann said suddenly, and Rick felt the tension in her words, "an iron asteroid, it is you Father needed to build a - a metallurgical laboratory." She hesitated a moment, and Rick knew she meant a CT lab. "He's now trying to legally own it. Mackey finds out it's about to collide with a CT planet they marked years ago. They found an old law that says if someone finds an uninhabited asteroid He can claim possession of the asteroid if he is not in danger of colliding with CT material and successfully alters its orbit." In the dim phone booth, Rick nodded uneasily.He knew the law, and it was to prevent explosions below C that would flood the space lanes with doors and streams of non-CT metal that would be fatal to the ship.But how could his father and Mackey change the orbit of the asteroid? "Nice, isn't it?" Ann went on, "a new planet of our own, on which to build the shops and factories your father wanted to build. He asked me to name it, and we're going to call it 'Star of Liberty'." She didn't say why she took the name, but Rick understood.He had read Bryan's book and heard his father speak with great hope of a "fifth freedom" -- the use of giant transmitters to supply CT energy to planets that were starved of energy, and this inexhaustible energy would make These planets are coming back to life, and this energy supply is completely free. "Of course, they haven't been able to change its orbit yet," Ann said. "I don't even know how they will. The Liberty Star weighs billions of tons, and the little Jane ship won't be able to pull it. They don't even have the necessary tools right now, but they've issued a callout and are working on it." Rick shrugged uncomfortably in the cramped phone booth, knowing that his father and Mackey simply didn't have the money to buy the equipment they needed. "They're going there on the Jane ship," Ann's voice was high-pitched, full of anxiety. "I'm not sure if they have enough time. The two planets are very close to the collision. All the traffic over Albania has been diverted. But your father said they could do it, and Mackey doesn't seem worried at all." Settling down, Rick felt her concern again. "Anyway, we'll hear soon," she said, on the verge of ending herself, as if remembering how many people were listening. "Rick, I'm glad you're back, but now you're stuck in Burroughs." Find a place to live in Hong Kong, and wait for your father or Qiqi to pick you up." Ann hung up the phone abruptly, and Rick felt uneasy.He squeezed out of the phone booth and walked out of the air terminal with his bag on his back.On the street outside, he stopped and looked up at Wukong to the southwest.He frowned, thinking about how his father planned to change the orbit of a planet. All Rick could see was a deep blue sky, with the sun far away and small, but with a strong, blinding light.When he turned his head, several stars came into view.The two asteroids heading towards the collision site were too far away to be visible to the naked eye.Rick knew that his father and Mackey couldn't stop the explosion unless they planned to use CT. Rick shook his head disapprovingly, because neither of them had the qualifications to study CT.Roto Mackey was almost illiterate, though the diminutive asteroid possessed a mysterious intuition of space-time, matter, and motion.And Jim Drake has been out of school for many years.The delicate science of aerospace engineering has advanced considerably over the years.Also, Rick knew they simply didn't have the CT chassis to operate safely.