Long Time Ago

[aeon]

The meditech officer stared at the sample under the magnobeam enlarger. The image refused to focus even though the ident program was trying thousands of magnetic lens foci per second. What was it?

The packet had arrived from the mining office of one of the outer asteroid belts. The insert claimed it had been recovered after a disastrous explosion by one of the drill teams. They were using magnetic diffusion bombs to crack the outer surface of a promising planetoid.

The ill fated team had then landed and deployed a dis drill sealed in a force field rated factor five considered more than sufficient protection.

The technicon examination determined they had intercepted a gas pocket under unusually high pressure. The sample embedded itself deep in the tank's force barrier. The resulting kinetic shock wave killed the crew instantly.

His eyes lost focus as he drifted deep in thought. Every test said element unknown. It was quite heavy for its size. On a hunch he ran an integrant ratio scan to determine amount of exd to elemental Te.

His eyes widened at the reading on the screen. He ran it through three times before accepting it. The sample was pure elemental Te. There was no exd ash or any de contamination.

Now that he knew what he was dealing with additional avenues of investigation became readily apparent.

The Te was so tightly interlocked it resisted even the force of dis cannon fire. Exd ash was violently repelled from its surface. Now he knew what had killed the crew. The impact of the dis beam had caused a violent snap back flow.

Fifty years later the first star drive vessel lifted off for interstellar space. The engine core used a de thrust beam on the Te element. The reflexive snap back being millions of times greater than any other previously known fuel.

Using magnetic beams they assembled the Te atoms together until the growing molecule began to self accumulate. Elemental Te was attracted only to itself.

The greatest advance was the perfection of the Te lens. Capturing infalling gravity exd and Te atoms while reflecting all de particulates. This led to the creation of the first life growth generators.

The end.

Post by Ye Admin

Well, that explains a lot, but, is it the canonical explanation?


I do not think Shaver ever really pinned it down. Which is why I wrote the story. My best impression is that longevity in dark space was discovered by accident when the Titans first entered deep space. This was so far back in the mists of time these Titan records no longer exist. They don't even seem to know the origin of Mantong the language of the space traders.

This seems to have evolved after they met other races and began creating additional races by mutative rays and high exd infusions. These mutants became the Atlans although they mingled freely with Titans and other space races.

The best canonical texts I have found is probably this.

Formula From The Underworld

If we try to make a clean surface place so as to clean some surface life
of their influence, and bring back the study of the ancient science
through the study of the ancient machines, our efforts come to nothing
because we can never get enough of the old ray positions in our hands,
to protect ourselves fully. Our men become, in a short time, foolish or
insane from the needling of unreachable old rays.

It seems impossible that intelligent men could not overcome these
foolish Hoblocks. But when they turn on the old rays it gives them
immense awareness; they are super destructive. We have not succeeded in
freeing any surface life of them.

The Formula Live On: To prolong life indefinitely, even under deadly
suns, a super-dense metal is particularly useful. This is true for this
important reason, disintegrant energy cannot exist unless it have an
integrated particle to feed on, just as fire cannot exist without fuel.

A beneficial force flow is a ray which is rich in the ultimate end
product of disintegrance, energy ash. Take the most dense metal you can
obtain, and force an energy flow through it at high pressure, those bits
of matter that keep disintegrance alive, will be excluded by the
super-dense metal. Just as ashes fall through a grate and leave the
burning fire above.

A flow rich in energy ash causes an immediate increase in the mental
function to an amazing degree, as well as stimulates and causes a new
growth, a more powerful and intelligent being is created immediately by
subjection to such a flow. Such metals can be obtained floating free in
space, the product of gravitic space vortexes.

Immortality can be achieved by excluding all persistently disintegrant
particles from the whole intake of the animal. This is the path that our
race took to greatness, to the conquest of space, to life everlasting in
the darkness of space.

These metals form the heart of our most important mechanisms, the
growth-force generators.

The secret of immortality it lies in empty space. Now I, and you, have
the secret of the metal shield that can make us live forever and with
two ways to construct it: By scientific work on magnetic vortex flows
using ex-disintegrance to pack ordinary metal with energy ash, or by
sending men into space itself in space ships.

One of the better descriptions of propulsion.:

The driver flow is a kind of reverse gravity formed by the disintegration of a certain metalloy, during the expansion under the dis-current. Gas is formed exclusive of the integrative snapback flow of exd which is the frictional flow forming the drive.

The dissociating sub-atoms of the driver plates pass through a gaseous stage where they leave a trail that is detectable. This ionizing trail is an unavoidable product of this form of drive.

Drive plate instead of gas jet drive:

Both are rocket drives in principle, but different in detail. The drive is an alloy metal that decomposes into a repellent electric flow very much like gravity in reverse.

Things fall away from the plate when certain frequencies of dis-electric are applied to the plate. The resultant impulse is rendered useful by a reflecting material, opaque to the drive flow, on the side of the plate nearest the ship.

Hence all the repellent flow is directed backward; giving a drive like a rocket in principle but very different in detail. This is the drive generally used in the ancient ships, though there are several distinct types of drives and ships from widely separated civilizations lying about the caverns, still existent today, and in some cases still usable.