Will Newman

Catalysts Will Newman

We knew without doubt, when the wheels came up on 'Canterbury', and the giant ship lifted silently off the tarmac and settled into its months of steady vertical acceleration, that the future was uncertain. We expected to land, years later, on an uninhabited planet orbiting the red sun of Alpha Centauri, using Canterbury as a base. Wrong. We arrived earlier than scheduled. It didn't take long to discover that Melthyra was inhabited, but by then we'd already lost Canterbury. And the majority of the natives, although in many ways totally human-like, were not friendly. We had a skipper whose qualifications as an astronaut were unequalled. One of us, Helen, was a fully fledged psychotech, trained to handle any of the problems that might arise from our long journey, isolated from any other human contact. Two of us were Christians. All eight of us had been chosen for our stability and the probability that we could start to colonize the planet as a strong, cohesive, civilized core of like-minded people. Wrong. Our tensions and conflicts overwhelmed us, and we found ourselves in a situation that we thought we had left behind on planet Earth for good; not just at war with each other, but inflicting the threat of nuclear war on a planet that had not seen explosions for thousands of years. And, of course, we thought that we would set up our colony, that our children would inherit the fruits of our efforts, and that we would die as creators of a brave, new, peaceful world for the future of the human race. Wrong. Oh, we would die alright. But not, absolutely not, in a way we might ever had expected. On the other hand, how could we possibly have foreseen that we would be able to chronicle these strange events for the education of those left on earth. I hope and pray that they will learn from our hard, hard lessons.