Chapter 42: Bill – April 2162 – Epsilon Eridani
The update from Riker and Homer had been interesting on so many levels. The Svalbard seed vault was a pleasant surprise, and could be a real boon for terraforming Ragnarök. There were a couple of varieties of plants and moss that conceivably could be made to grow on the as-yet bare soil. And if they took hold, they could accelerate the oxygenation of the atmosphere by millennia. Riker had promised to put a clone together to ferry some seeds out to me.
But the most exciting item was a variant of a SURGE drive that could be used on large bodies. Like asteroids. Or Kuiper objects. Epsilon Eridani 2 needed about five or six hundred cubic kilometers of ice dropped on it, in order to connect the seas into oceans. I’d been mulling over how to get those Kuiper objects into the inner system. Hohmann orbits would take decades to centuries. That wasn’t necessarily a problem for me, but for humans needing a place to live, a little more alacrity might be in order.
Anyway, the planetary body SURGE drive wasn’t complicated, though it did require a lot of construction material. It occurred to me that I could use it to accelerate a chunk of ice into an orbit heading for Ragnarök, then remove the drive and fly it to another chunk. Rinse, repeat. As long as I had the drive available when flying icebergs started showing up at the tail end, I’d be golden.
I discussed the idea with Garfield. He looked skeptical.
“I understand the mechanics, Bill, but you’d better make sure that nothing goes wrong. You’re leaving yourself no wiggle room for adjustments.”
I shrugged. “Well, if I fail to catch one of the chunks on the back end, it’ll just sail past Ragnarök and probably end up in the sun.”
“If you fail to catch one, you’ll probably be failing to catch a lot of them. Why don’t you do a couple of simulations?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary, Garfield. Why are you going on about this, anyway?”
“Look, Bill, you really have to stop treating me like Igor. I can do the math, too. Maybe you should take the time.”