Outward Borne by R. J. Weinkam

brought on
board, they too would need to be maintained. Feeding, housing, and
sustaining unknown alien life forms would be challenging as well as
unpredictable. It was not something a robot could figure out. The
ship must be ‘manned’. The Voyager would be huge, but the cost must
be borne.
    The ObLaDa’s envisioned a mission
that would seek out intelligent alien life wherever it may be
found. How they might deal with these societies was not always so
clear. Should they avoid highly advanced civilizations, should they
ever encounter one? They might be dangerous. It was undecided, but
promising beings could be captured and studied even if they did not
yet have a technologically advanced civilization. The ObLaDas would
try selective breeding, education, and training to prod their alien
beings to establish a society, master the sciences, or become more
technologically adept. If that were so, and they expected that it
was, there remained the question, the puzzle, of why so few
advanced societies existed. They hoped to find out.
    Only a large craft could support a
crew for the indefinite length of time envisioned. Indeed, the
Outward Voyager would never return to ObLa. It would traverse the
galaxy for however many millennia it could survive.
    The ObLaDas did not possess the
capacity to construct the Voyager. Interstellar space travel was a
hard game to play and ObLa found that it even lacked the capacity
required to invent and develop all of the specialized technologies,
machines, and engines that would be required. In the end, the
Outward Voyager was successfully completed only because their
planetary partners contributed greatly to the program. The
Primaforms did more than anyone. They designed and built four
hydrogen fusion propulsion systems and the robotic crafts that
delivered these units to the vicinity of ObLa. That alone was a
three hundred year operation.
    Technical challenges were one
thing; raw expense was another. No matter how much help it would
receive, one planet must bear the majority of the cost of
fabricating components, lifting them into orbit, and assembling the
craft in space. That planet must possess a tremendous supply of
surplus energy, material resources, and wealth. Only the richest
planet could attempt such a feat. ObLa possessed these resources
only because its vast mineral capacity had never tapped by its
frugal population. Even so, the proposed project would consume the
entire economic productivity of the planet for an equivalent of
fifty years. A terrific cost! Should they do it? (The simple task
of lifting the Outward Voyager components and assembly facilities
into orbit would cost as much as 1,000 trillion dollars if they
matched the Earth’s current best estimated cost of
$9,000/kg.)
    It is not a quest that would
appeal to the people of Earth, but then we do not view aliens as
members of our extended family, or even as our friends. The ObLaDas
were very different. Their biologically driven emotions sustained a
desire to make some connection with those beings that they believed
must exist. To date, ObLa remains the only planet in our galaxy
that is known to have successfully conducted a ‘manned’
interstellar space flight.
    And so was born the Outward
Voyager. It was a gangly, unattractive collection of ill-matched
components, vast, empty connecting spaces, and fragile critical
structures, all held together by a maze of cables and struts. No
interstellar vessel could be stocked with all the food, air, water,
and supplies that its crew would ever need. Too heavy, too costly,
manifestly impractical. When launched, the Outward was an almost
empty shell, albeit a very large one. The ship must be equipped
with the capacity to collect space-borne matter during flight and
to convert those basic elements into all the food, fuel, and
material that its crew would need to survive. The collected
material must be sufficient for the construction of new facilities,
and to meet the needs of any alien beings