I am Leaving the earth

Dagmar Göschick

I am Leaving the earth

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Maybe that is why I’m leaving this beautiful planet we call Earth for a New Planet identical to Earth. Planet Earth2, or better known as El Mundo. They say it’s even more beautiful, and it is just the beginning for us, the new civilization. It’s nothing compared to the old days when they opened a boxed community on Mars. This here is pure life. There is no need for us to invent new technologies as we already have them all of them on board with us. Us as in our captain Mark and his wife Elly, our electronic freak Jason, and his lovely wife Molly, along with their 3 children Luke, Howey and little Sara, our Doctor of Medicine Virgil Hunt with his beautiful partner Minnie Dawson, thank God she is a dentist!!! Then we have our environmentalists Jimmy, Marion, Brian, Frank, Lucy and Sylvia, along with Svenja, Inger, Serge and Bill who are biologists. The construction crew who has joined us is comprised of Ben, Mike, Todd, Jay, Ron and Steve. Then there’s me Sally, I’m the only writer here on board the Spaceship. Of course, we aren’t the only ones who have boarded as there are plenty more people on board the Spaceship 1. We have people on board with their families who come who all have different educational backgrounds, and who work in different trades to ensure we can establish our new society as quickly as possible once we land. In total we are 1,500 people traveling with the use of the speed of light, which was discovered accidentally 10 years ago, otherwise this would be still a dream for all of us – travelling through the universe. Oh, I just forgot to mention the name of our spaceship: don’t laugh, we came up with Enterprise. The old pals from the movies, Spock and Co. are still with us.

The total length of our time on board the Enterprise is estimated at no longer than 1 year, currently we have been travelling for 3 months, just another 9 months to go. So far nothing serious has happened, but we all know that our journey ahead is a dangerous one.

“Everyone please stay in your rooms, we have a ring of rocks in front of us. It will be a bumpy ride. As soon as we are through, I will get back to all of you.” Captain Marks voice did not sound impressed.

I’m going to go and have a look at the commando stand to see what is going on as I’m not a writer who only writes poems, I’m also the one who is taking notes of everything that is happening here on board and I’m writing the daily reports for the crew. As I run to the elevator to make it to the commanding office as quickly as I possibly can, seconds begin to feel like hours however, I arrive at the office in under 5 minutes. As I enter the room, I can see the screen which is full of rocks as the ship is doing anything and everything possible in order to avoid as many bumps as possible. But they are all over the place.

“Where are they coming from? Didn’t you guys see them?” Everyone turns to face me with a look of despair that makes my skin crawl.

“We didn’t see any of these rocks at all until they surrounded us suddenly. Out of the blue.”

Our engineer is stunned and tries to explain the situation. But he can’t. I asked again.

“Didn’t you see these big rocks floating around at all?”. All of them shaking their heads. The captain looks at me and said: “We are doing all we can to get rid of them, but it seems as though they are sticking to us like shit. Every move we make is mirrored by them when we turn, they turn too.”

“So, what does that means for us?” I asked.

“Can we still fly with the speed of light? I asked further.

“Yes, we can, but we are unaware of what happens when we make a sudden stop.” Mark answered.

“Our physicists are working franticly to find an explanation for the situation we are finding ourselves in at the moment. He says.

“Maybe they are sticking to us like a big magnet”, Elly is saying. More to herself than to us.

As I look over at her and I begin to have the feeling that she could be right. No one has ever been so far away from earth. None of us have any experience with the universe at all. Everything is damn new to us. Why should she be wrong. maybe everything is much simpler than we can think of right now, I mean humans tend to be complicated by nature.

“A magnet, mmh, that sounds easy. What do you mean by this?” I asked her.

“Well, we all know, that a magnet has 2 poles: a positive one and a negative one, right?”, “so what if the ship has a negative or positive pole and the rocks around us have the opposite pole causing them to be attracted to us because the ship attracts them magnetically. Which would mean, we must find out what magnetic pole the ship is in order for us to neutralize the Enterprise.”.

“Neutralize the Enterprise? How shall we manage to do that”. Her husband looks at her with disbelief.

“In order for us to accomplish this we need to stop the ship, go outside and retrieve some samples from these massive rocks, and then we can find a way to ‘neutralize the Enterprise’”. “Every stop we make is a disaster for us as we only have enough fuel for 1 extra month for emergency situations, so how do you suppose we can manage the situation?”

We are all shocked by what he is saying. But we all know that we need to get out of this massive volume of rocks.

“In general, hitting a magnet with force from another object is an easy way to demagnetize it. It is also possible to demagnetize a magnet by hitting the ends of the magnet with a hammer, which changes the order of the magnet” Elly said. “But there is another and maybe even easier way for us to do so; in addition to vibration, an increase in temperature is also suitable for demagnetizing magnets. Every magnet has a physical temperature range in which it retains its effect. This maximum operating temperature is called the Curie temperature, named after the French physicist Pierre Curie.”

She turned around and looked into the eyes of our physics staff.

“What do you think? Is it possible to get a higher temperature for the spaceship? So that we can make it through these rocks? Leaving them behind? And how long would it take us to do so?”

Suddenly everyone begins talking about this, and I end up having to yell over top of them all to make sure they all understand what our next steps are. Jason, the electronic freak comes up with a brilliant idea.

“What, if we create a ring of fire around the rocks? This would lead to a higher temperature and the rocks will fall behind us!”

We have weapons on board with us for emergency situations, I think this counts as one, don’t you?

The crew begins preparing for our first shot into space for our safety.

Everyone is nervous, and I can feel my sweaty hands. My eyes are following the first bomb which just hit one of the rocks. Damn, nothing. The second bomb is on its way. Again, nothing. Are we wrong? Do we need to do it a different way? But how? We are all civilians, and this is the first time for all of us to fire a bomb. Of course, we have trained military experts on board for our protection in the new world. But this is something different. Our enemies are made of stone and metal. Mark gives out the order for a third bomb with 2 explosives. We all watch nervously as it shoots out of the Enterprise, damn, it hits a small rock. Oh, no. Couldn’t it hit that big beast right in front of us??

I turned my head in disbelief. The next thing I know is that I’m lying face down on the floor, like all crew members, with a bleeding nose and scratches all over my face, arms, and hands. My first glance is over to the window. The rocks are gone, I try to jump up, but my leg aches with every movement, I must have broken it when I fell. But the ship is free, we are free to continue on to our new home. I remember an old saying: Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.