Chapter Ten

"The endless trip frayed our nerves. The tight quarters didn't allow for privacy, we thought that our Spartan living habits would make it easy to adjust to a place with no walls. Everybody took for granted the simple happiness of our old stone building and more than anything, our magical suspended garden. We missed the birds and the cloudless sky, the rolling hills fading into the sea, the changing of the seasons, the breeze. So much of our happiness is ineffable even defining its absence eludes us."

"A lot of our innovations were born out of mistakes we made during this time of inescapable boredom. It made us wonder how many great discoveries were overshadowed by the human failure to accept challenging perspectives. To paraphrase the great Sherlock Holmes, if you eliminate the concept of impossibility whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

 

About half way through the trip everybody started getting antsy. There wasn't a certain event or attitude that one could pinpoint, more of a generalized restlessness, a vague unspoken sense of discomfort that saturated the already cramped quarters and put everyone on edge. After a while everyone realized that they had way more time on their hands than they anticipated. There was just so much to do around the shuttle, plants take care of themselves if they have food, light and water.

Everyone took this opportunity to get a renewed interest in their hobbies and while this was supposed to be a non-eventful endeavor it yielded one of the most important discoveries of their journey.

It happened one afternoon when sister Roberta, bless her heart, was playing with the wavelength tuner to harmonize the lasers and accidentally bonded the spectrometer to the table. Subsequent molecular scans of the bond revealed that the two materials had combined into a very stable and completely new substance, crystalline in nature and extremely hard. Sister Roberta crossed herself and spent the remainder of the afternoon in prayer to thank the Almighty that it was the spectrometer and not her hand that was irreversibly bonded with the table while the other sisters quietly assessed the risk of electronically stimulated amplified light putting a hole through the hull.

A ban on all hobbies was imposed immediately, including reading, cooking and plant hybridization, so that electromagnetism enthusiasts and light wave modulation hobbyists wouldn't feel unfairly targeted. Sister Roberta spent the next few weeks in sheepishly humble self deprecation and bore patiently the dirty looks of the others. Soon the mind numbing boredom of actually being forbidden any activity outweighed the risks of hull breach and everyone gave in to the burning curiosity of how exactly the fusion of materials happened. Of course precious time and energy had been lost in blaming and self righteous outrage so the poor sister couldn't remember the exact frequency that resulted into changing the structure of matter. The silver lining of this event was that everybody got so immersed in the scientific query that all existential angst flew out the window. The drawback was that no matter how many mnemonic techniques, relaxation exercises or reenactment of events, it was absolutely impossible for the sister to replicate the experiment.

"So what are we going to do now?" asked sister Mary-Francis.

"I don't know, do you want to volunteer to become the first human/table hybrid?"

"No, do you?" The spirits rose again after the near miss and the tempers came right back with them.

"Look on the bright side, we may be the ones to restore alchemy to its rightful place in science."

"Yea, we may use this opportunity to turn you into a dishwasher, that pile of dishes kept following me around for hours."

"Hey!"

"Please, can we talk reasonably?"

"She sure can't!"

"Seth, what do you think?" The commotion finally subsided.

"If we manage to find out how to duplicate the experiment we might find a use for it, I'm not exactly thrilled to live the rest of my life in a tuna can". She was lovingly referring to the modular dwelling units that were going to become their first home on Terra Two.

"Sister Roberta, since you found it in your heart to revolutionize science in such close quarters please take a break from your daily chores and spend the next three weeks to research what happened and share with us the modeling equations for an experiment that would SAFELY recreate the result".

Sister Roberta set diligently to work and indeed produced what was expected of her, since being focused and dutiful were her best attributes, but it would take guts of steel to test the validity of her theories, all things considered.

 

***

 

"Stand back, please", said sister Roberta, with a reassuring smile.

"Oh, that's surely going to help us if we get exposed to space", mumbled sister Jesse, morosely.

"Shut up, jinx!" hissed sister Joseph. "So help me, if anything goes wrong I'll blame you!"

"Please be quiet", said Seth, with a firm but calm voice that didn't reveal her inner tension. "Go ahead, sister!"

If sister Roberta had any misgivings about the experiment going wrong only she and her Maker were privy to that secret because she executed it flawlessly according to the new theoretical model and the results were exactly as predicted. After a while they fine tuned the technique using various blends of potentially compatible materials and found a very interesting combination of metal and ceramic that was not only extremely strong, but the combination was reversible at a specific laser wavelength, so the materials could be used and reused endlessly.

"So much for recycling", sister Joseph mumbled, unenthused, for as every one in the group knew there was nothing short of rapture that would ever impress her.