First Star

About the Book

Everyone knows that one of our closest neighboring stars is Sirius. Traveling at the speed of light, it would take over five years to get there. Einstein said nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but nobody said anything about traveling just under the speed of light. His formula that says matter turns into energy at the speed of light SQUARED, not the speed of light. We know that our civilization will eventually get there. NASA has scheduled Hubble to study this star system. Sirius is a star that has conditions right for life. What if we sent a team of astronauts (like in Michael Collins book, Mission to Mars). He was one of the three astronauts that went to the moon first. He was the pilot. He worked for and wrote this nonfiction book to tell how we could get to to Mars with our current knowledge and technology. This is about the first team that was sent to Sirius. It was not supposed to be inhabited. An astrobiologist studied the mapping satellite's spectrograph and said so. However, that turned out to be not true, but this fact did not come out until the team was already on the way. The scouts that went out to search for edible plants and to take pictures of the geology discovered that some of the food in the habitat (it arrived shortly after their ship) was missing, stolen. They told the others following that the hab door was open. The team arrived in the middle of a war between inhabitants. The two astronauts befriended the people who were hiding in the caves (limestone, means water and sea creatures millions of years ago). Anyway, they did not want to leave, but Space Law says you can't land on an inhabited planet. It means the mission was over, that they would have to go back. The team decided not to tell mission control about the people. The people, who looked similar to humans, were helping them. Several team members decided to stay out of the war but help the cave dwellers. They and the translation robot got stuck in the caves and could not leave.

About the Author

Rosemarie Shumate Paulling was supposed to be born in Waynesboro, Vriginia, but apparently was in a hurry then and was born in Brooklyn instead. She graduated with a BA in Studio Art at the College of Charleston and a Master's in Education, also at the College of Charleston. She always worked in hospitals in medical transcription and for academic medicine as a secretary for several doctors. She has hand tremors because of medication, so is trying to change careers. One of the giants of science fiction advised young science fiction writers to write stories set in the next millennium, because he said you can't catch up with NASA. Over the past year or so, Asimov and Clarke's ghosts have been thumping me on the head. However. I felt strongly that the gap between the shuttles and the first star our civilization visits must be bridged by science fiction writers. So here we are.