Read Online Earth Ship Protectress: Book Two in the Freddy Anderson Chronicles by John Ricks - Free Book Online Page A

now. I really did need to get it trimmed. I dried it using my telekinetic abilities and then braided it. I put on some new earrings I’d received from the town for Christmas. I liked these earrings. They dangled nicely and tickled my neck, and the girls had stopped laughing long ago.
    Almost everyone was outside around the two shuttles. The commander and one man were waiting for me. They were talking at the bottom of the stairs when I came out. The commander said. “Freddy, this is Dr. Michael Landers. He’s an aerospace scientist from NASA and MIT.”
    I put my hand out, asking, “Are you the same Dr. M. K. Landers who wrote Space and the Reasons Man Must Conquer It and Traveling Faster than L ight ?”
    He shook my hand. “Why, yes, I am. Have you read my books?”
    “Of course. They were required reading for my doctorate in spatial physics.”
    “Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Dr. Anderson.”
    “Please call me Freddy. We’re not much on titles here.”
    “And you can call me Mike.”
    “Thanks. Have you had lunch, Mike?”
    “Yes. We just ate an hour ago.”
    “I have not eaten for … ” I looked at the commander.
    “Three days.”
    “Thank you, Commander. Three days. I’m a little hungry at the moment. If you don’t mind, I have a few things to discuss with the commander, and then can we talk while I eat.”
    “Of course. Do I need to leave?”
    “No, sir. Commander, how’s the training going?”
    We talked through the meal, and she brought me up-to-date on what had happened in the last few weeks. She stopped long enough to explain to Dr. Landers that I paid little attention to my surroundings when I was working. He laughed and said that his wife often said the same thing about him.
    “In essence,” the commander said, “the training went well until the scenario of going past the moon and out to Mars. None of the girls has had the training needed to work out the math. Every time they tried, they missed Mars by hundreds of thousands of miles. I asked NASA for help. They sent two astronavigators to teach us, Lieutenant Cal Bergman and Lieutenant Yuan Nguyen. With their help, the girls are at scenario forty-eight.” Her eyebrows rose a little when she pointed out the fact that they had crashed or died in one way or another over a hundred times before getting through scenario twenty-six. She said, “That’s a ridiculous scenario. Nothing like that will ever happen because there’s no such thing as a UFO.”
    “Susan, did I give you the scanning equipment to watch the solar system yet?”
    She looked wide-eyed and startled, took a small step back, and said, “No.”
    “Remind me to give it to you. You’d be surprised the education it can provide.” I changed the subject. “Mike, you had some questions for me?”
    “Yes, well … ” He paused and then said, “You have just increased the questions I have by a factor of ten.”
    I smiled. “Then we’d better get to them before I go back to work.”
    “First, can your craft really do what the scenarios show? Can they really go that fast?”
    “You’re as bad as the commander here. The trainer is just a simple mock-up of the real thing. Please understand that I was in a hurry when I made the trainer, and I slowed it down to allow the trainees a chance to learn to control it. The two shuttles out there on the launch pads are much faster and have much more capability.”
    “The two shuttles look like they’re able to carry a lot of cargo.”
    “I built the shuttles so that they can connect to a number of different cargo or personnel carriers. I did not wish to limit myself to having a ship that could do only one thing. I thought about it for some time and decided to use our trucking system as a good way to move materials from one place to another. Our semitrucks can carry any type of cargo, pull a bus of people around, move frozen products through the desert, or pull a house across country. What you see out there are two semitrucks