Chapter Ten:

The asteroid belt was nearly nine million miles thick. Even at a tenth of light speed, they’d have crossed it in under an hour.

Their odds of making it through at that speed without hitting something were incalculably small.

At 54,000 miles per hour, it would take them a week to pass through. To get to that speed, they had to decelerate for the entire two weeks since they had dropped out of faster-than-light. On the other hand, they had no fear of dragging any part of the asteroid belt to their new destination.

Belgar had been training at this speed for years. In reality, the game proved harder than what he experienced. In the game, the ship’s services didn’t kick in to protect him from some objects he might miss, he had a holographic back up and there were four other crewmen helping him.

When he needed to rest, Kharen would step in to replace him. She was nearly as good at the game, and had the same support. The both of them fretted about the tear down the ship’s side, but both were able to protect that part of the ship.

By the third day, they were more relaxed and through the densest part of the belt. They mapped dozens of asteroids with rare minerals which they might come back to pillage someday, attaching markers to them so that they would be easy to find.

When they emerged on the seventh day, they accelerated to seven times their speed and, by the time they achieved it two days later, were passing their original destination.

It was a sallow planet with tiny oceans and an atmosphere with comparable amounts of nitrogen, oxygen and similar gasses as Syriahs. Its population was a mix of mammals with lizard-like, semi-intelligent race which was just now building cities and monuments. They recorded rudimentary structures and evidence of farming, long-stretching canals along which plants grew.

In a few years, it would all be gone. Regnal read the images and the data on their civilization and felt sad.

It had never occurred to him that a reptile could be intelligent, but really why not? It made him wonder what his own race descended from.

Sariyans had built cities on top of cities for thousands of years. What existed of their ancestry was long-gone in the past. There were persons who were likely studying that even now, and some who would become more interested once news of this planet reached their home.

From there, they changed directions and headed for the orbit of the third planet, and turned into its path. As they skirted this new sun, they closed on their new home, with a month to wait until they reached their destination.

From here, finally, they could start to transmit data on a tight band back to Siryahs. That would take them months to complete, with all of the data they’d collected in to what to them was nearly four years.

It was on the way to their new home that they came up with a solution. This time it was just Regnal, Roo, Efrain and Hames in the captain’s cabin.

“We can use the ship itself to save us,” Efrain informed them.

Regnal couldn’t imagine that he was going to like this solution.

“We automate it, and we send it along the path by which we came here, as fast as it will go,” he said.

“I’m listening,” Roo said, skeptically.

“At the front of the wave, we simply change the direction of the debris following us,” he said. “As it moves farther along, it folds the wave in on itself.

“If it continues even for a light year,” he continued, “then no matter what is left to follow us, if it makes it through the wave where it folds on itself, then it will be light years behind us.”

“The most obvious problem with this,” Hames informed them, “is the matter of getting the ship up to speed. We don’t have the means to create another particle beam and to transmit it to where we want to go.”

Regnal agreed. There was also ample reason to believe that the stream that they’d come here on was obliterated by the wave of debris.

“At less-than-light speed,” Hames said, “Maglen’s own inertial mass increase will keep her from going fast enough to affect the mass.”

“Yes,” Reglan said, “but we don’t need it to actually achieve that speed, just to be that deep of a gravity well.”

The other men turned to him.

“We reverse the polarity of her deflectors once she senses the start of the debris field,” he said. “It will still change the direction of a large part of the debris field, and create the collisions that we want.”

“And crash on the first object the size of a melon that it finds in space,” Roo said.

Reglan shook his head. “We leave the front deflectors as-is. Yes, she will eventually crash, but not before she diverts a good part of the wave.”

Efrain smiled. Hames with him.

“We’ll take what we can from the ship,” Efrain said, “and Reglan and Ghegee can program a new course for her. We have a few years.”

Reglan nodded. He looked Roo in the eyes. “I think it’s the best option,” he said. “I’ve studied our path and the path of the wave through the galaxy – we don’t cross paths, we follow very similar ones, in fact. That’s why we had to wait three months to get to the other side of the wave in order to send a message home.”

“Maglen was designed in part to be the center of our new colony,” he said. “But we can cut stone, we can build our own edifice.”

They all nodded. “I’ll put together task groups,” Roo said.

“I’ll help,” Zane asserted. It wasn’t a question or even an offer. Once they landed on their new planet, Zane took command and he made the main decisions.

His hazel eyes looked out past the bulkheads of the captain’s cabin, into the future, into whatever plans he had been laying for nearly four years.

Reglan had to wonder what he saw there.

In the coming months, members of the crew and its passengers were informed of their new plans, of its consequences and of their new assignments. Roo delivered the initial orders, however more and more it was Efrain Zane who followed through on those orders, verified them and issued new ones.

The plan was to create a single edifice of stone, one that could house all of them. A team of rock cutters was assembled with instruments which would make building blocks out of the hardest deposits what they could find. Another would move the building blocks, another would assemble them. Programs were written for the tools they brought, which would help them make the blocks interlock, and then make it easier to assemble them.

As in Syriahs, they’d build from stone, rather than from other natural materials. Things built of stone were simply easier to maintain and lasted longer, and there was plenty of it. While wood and steel might be easier to work with, it didn’t last and was hard to maintain. Wood rotted, metal rusted. Stone was, simply, stone.

There were other groups which would immediately begin planting, and others which were already cultivating the embryos of the domestic animals that they’d brought, and others still which were studying the globe for the best place to cultivate the land. They’d move their hydroponics to the soil. While tractors could move more and carry more, domestic animals could suit their simple needs for now, and were actually easier to maintain. Their scans showed ample grasslands and water – farming wouldn’t be hard.

Builders, farmers, workers – these were the rudiments of their new society, beginning as agrarians, skipping over the hunter-gatherers, though there would be time for that as well. After they studied this new world and decided what they could take from it.

Finally, their new home appeared from around the corona of their new sun. Maglen began another series of breaking maneuvers, calculating an approach to the new world where their anti-grav could settle them down on its surface.

“Odd, so… odd,” Kharen informed Reglan, the two of them staring at a screen which gave a graphic representation of this new world.

They’d decided to call it ‘Ki,’ meaning the first. The sun they named ‘An,’ or center. All of this in their most ancient language, the one that they’d used before the unification of the continent and of the people of Syriahs.

It made sense somehow to use the ancient language, as if they’d gone back to ancient times. Because they were starting again.

“It is odd,” Reglan agreed.

Syriahs was a planet with one ocean and one continent, and a number of lakes and streams. In the beginning they were separate people who built city-states, and who fought for control of those assets. Eventually they’d been united, one city state had overwhelmed all others, formed the Government, and ruled over the people.

This world was one of many continents, riding on a system of tectonic plates which floated on a sea of molten lava. It formed several oceans, saw different and diverse climates, polar ice caps and hominid life forms as well as more animal species than they could categorize.

The hominids were tribal, hunter-gatherers, relatively benign. Intelligent life, it seemed, was not unique in the galaxy, and if there was a collection less advanced than the Sariyans, then maybe there could be collections that were more?

“We’ll settle where there aren’t many of them,” Regnal said, and he pointed to a continent that was almost split in two parts, connected by a land-bridge. In the lower part there was a plateau south of a mountain range, rich in the minerals they’d need and near a source of exceptionally hard rock called andesite, alongside sedimentary red stone which, though not as hard, was easier to carve and shape.

“Uranium, iron, bauxite, magnesium – it’s all there,” Regnal said. “It’s like a great sampling of the world’s wealth, and there’s plenty of it. More than we need.”

Kharen nodded. As a ‘person of name,’ Regnal was a city planner and would have a place on the ruling council which would work with Zane as the colony took shape.

She’d spoken to Roo and gotten herself assigned to assist him. She’d received a knowing look from the captain as he approved it. Zane did nothing to change her plans.

She’d selected her man – all that remained was to get him to recognize it.

That was proving to be hard work.

“We’ll be just a few miles from the site,” Regnal said, indicating their prospective quarry, “and just a few miles from where we’ll plant. Far enough where we’ll be able to build and to expand, close enough where we can guard our crops from whatever would eat it.”

“There’s plenty of that,” Kharen noted. On Syriahs, nearly all animals were domesticated, and the rest closely managed. Here, the species ran free, often in herds. Far to their north there was a meat-animal whose numbers were so great that herds of them covered miles. At first they’d worried that it was some gigantic mammal that roamed the land, and they’d wondered at how something so huge could be alive.

“This planet is clearly emerging from a period of exceptional cold,” Regnal noted. “The atmosphere is exceptionally humid and the oxygen rating quite high. The animals are larger than those on Syriahs ever were.”

“We should eat well,” Kharen commented.

“Or be eaten,” Regnal countered. “There’s a canine that we brought – I’m going to order an alteration of its DNA to make it larger and more vicious – not so much that it’s a danger to us, but enough where they can protect our crops and our other animals.”

Canines, Kharen thought. The least appreciated of the species, but one of the most important. In ancient times, the canine monitored crops and possessions and guarded against intruders and undomesticated predators, while its owner could sleep and rest. In return, the owner could accomplish more, think more deeply, grow and expand. Without the canine, Syriahs would still a collection of tribes, half of their numbers staying up all night and the other half all day, on guard for their possessions and their food stuffs and unable to plan past the next growing season.

Others argued that, without the canines, progress would have come more slowly, but still come. Eventually they would have had the numbers to guard their own possessions as a collective, and then progressed on.

Kharen didn’t agree – mostly because there was no evidence that it had ever happened. People had canines. They liked them. She liked them.

She missed the furry head that would lay on her lap some times.

“I’d like to go study that giant herd,” Kharen said. “Maybe bring some of them back to add to our own.”

“That’s up to Zane,” Reglan said, “and Zane isn’t eager to integrate what’s out there with us yet. There is almost no one living here, and most of them are on the coast – simple fishermen. We’re going to avoid them.”

Kharen had heard Zane’s opinion of the hominids. They were another resource to exploit, no different than the others. Once this colony was established, they would be studied and their fate decided. In fact, if they had nothing to order, it wasn’t inconceivable that they’d all be exterminated. A virus unique to them, which wouldn’t affect the colony, would be developed and they’d be infected with it. It was the most efficient way to eliminate an unwanted species, and it had been done before with certain predators and undesirable species on their home world.

Kharen wasn’t a fan of that, either. Species eliminated were gone forever. Clearly, they couldn’t all be kept, some would have to go, but those that were intelligent? Certainly some use could be found for them.

For now she’d say nothing. Don’t start a fight if you know you won’t win it. Do nothing to jeopardize her plans with Regnal Viniker.

Regnal stood up and pushed himself away from the console. He smacked his lips and said, “It’s the meal interval, isn’t it?”

Kharen smiled. “We worked through it again,” she said. They’d done that more often than they’d made it to meals. It worked in Kharen’s favor – no chance for him to meet someone ‘more suitable,’ as often happened when persons of name dallied with the common people. Families would decide on a better match, and the commons would be escorted to the door.

Here, there were almost no persons of name, and only a few of them women. Livven had her worried at one point, but she’d clearly set her sites on Zane. Unlike Regnal, Zane had picked up on it immediately and it was well known by the crew that they were cohabitating.

Viniker would want to continue his house, even if its properties were on another world. When that time came, there would be Kharen and no other. She’d ensure that.

She offered to bring him their meal and he agreed. She left his cabin and walked back to the galley, where she knew the meal would already be waiting.

Yes, she thought. He planned a whole city and the basis of a colony. Yet she had plans of her own.

They landed on Ki on a crystal-clear morning with the home star, An, shining through a pure blue sky. They’d picked a spot ten miles from a deep meteor crater which had become a lake, sandwiched between two mountain ranges, just east of the planet’s largest ocean.

The spot made sense in that the natives, even the animals, would have a hard time accessing it, yet there was ample space for crops and domestic herds. The altitude made a future space port a simple matter, being defensible as well.

Regnal had to wonder what there was to defend against, however such thoughts occupied the mind of their new leader, Efrain Zane. Not even an hour had passed before he had his feet on the dirt and was issuing directives to their teams.

One of several flivers which had to be assembled and put to use was unpacked from a ramp that extended from the underside of the craft, to be assembled by members of the ship’s crew. They were divided between a maintenance team which would repair the damage to Maglen’s hull, and others which would put together the machines they’d use to build their new home.

Regnal joined the group that surveyed the damage. It was much worse than they’d imagined – he wondered that the ship had actually held together for the years since this had happened. Whatever they had hit must have been solid iron, and the stress of the tearing had left micro-fractures in the inner hull that would take them weeks to repair.

“I wouldn’t want to take her up again,” Regnal commented to one of the workers. Now that they were a ground force rather than a space crew, they wore the same red uniforms, but now with blue sashes that matched the color of this sky.

A blue sky was something that would take getting used to. As humid as this planet was, and as prone to temperature change, the color made sense. There was also only one sun, so true, dark night would be a daily occurrence. On Syriahs, the sky was more of a light blue or green, depending on which sun was dominant at the time. Clouds hung in the air above them, much more common than he’d ever seen before. On Syriahs, they relied on water pumped from the ground, in from the ocean and filtered by bedrock. Here, while there was water in this lake, water would fall from the sky much more frequently, and then would be collected accordingly.

“She got us here, though,” Kharen said. She placed a hand on her hull. “The ol’ girl did what she was supposed to do.”

It seemed odd to Regnal that a ship named for a man was actually referred to in the feminine, but for as long as he could remember, or anyone else for that matter, ships were ‘she.’

“The ol’ girl,” Regnal commented, “is barely 10, fifteen if you include her construction time.”

Overhead an avian mammal flew in the sky and cried out its call. It was beautiful and graceful, carving lazy circles in the air. At the same time they heard the hum of the engine of the first fliver that had been assembled. Regnal was sure that it would be launching with Efrain Zane as quickly as he could man it. He’d want to get an overview of the terrain, start a mapping effort and verify a path to the quarry they would use to gather the building blocks of their new city.

Another fliver, much longer but less maneuverable, would be used to move those bricks. The anomaly of anti-grav was how much weight the flivers could be burdened with. The first of these had launched themselves into space as soon as they were turned on – they were an electro-magnetic opposite of the planet’s gravity, and so really they just pushed against that greater mass. A load of millions of tons of cargo, compared to that mass of the planet, made even the heaviest load almost insignificant.

“There goes Lord Zane,” Kharen said, mirroring his thoughts.

He regarded her. “Lord?” he asked.

“What people call him,” she said. “He never asks for anything; he tells you what to do and just assumes you’re going to do it. Like we all serve him.”

Strange, Regnal thought. In fact, they all did serve him. He was, after all, their leader right now.

“That – well, I didn’t think,” he began.

Kharen shook her head, her brown hair tossing back and forth around her shoulders. She didn’t wear it in a bun any more. In fact, a lot of the women who had just kept their hair up for the journey had let it down. During the journey, most of the men had grown beards and a few of them had let their hair grow, too. Disposing of hair, even getting time to get their hair cut, had been an unanticipated difficulty of space travel.

Kharen had maintained Reglan’s hair for him, both facial and on his head. He preferred a close-crop to his skull, or he tended to fiddle with it, and that was distracting, even though it was him doing it.

She was part of his ‘team,’ much as it was. They were other persons of name who would work with him as he needed something, however his primary use here was to get them through the asteroid belt, and now it was to deal with the ruinous wave of debris that had followed them here. With that, there were questions as to what Regnal would be doing here.

Work on the exterior continued through the day. As Ki turned on its axis and An sank to the west, the sky turned to amazing mix of reds and oranges, and the temperature dropped.

For years, they’d been on Maglen, where there wasn’t a single fluctuation in temperature for any reason. Before that, they’d been on Syriahs which, with two suns to warm her, never saw a day that was particularly cold.

Here, the temperature dropped no less than 20 degrees once the sun went down, a condition made worse by their high altitude. Most of the Sariyans fled back to the ship and its controlled environment as the world darkened, but others remained outside for a wonder none of them could have expected.

That night, they saw with their naked eyes a sky that none of them could have perceived from sun-drenched Syriahs – a cavalcade of stars, a display of other solar systems, awash with color, of stars, planets and comets in motion, even of the trail they had brought here with them, a sparkling red-and-white road back to where Syriahs once was.

“That’s – it’s,” Kharen said to Reglan, standing next to him in the open. As the sun went down they’d used the ship’s RF drive to light their compound, but they extinguished that as more people returned to the outside, to see what the rest were talking about.

Hundreds of eyes who’d never seen a night sky before turned up in wonder.

Kharen realized of-a-sudden that she was clutching Reglan’s upper arm. She realized moments later that he hadn’t commented on that or pushed her away.

“Even with our most powerful telescopes,” he informed her, “you don’t see that.”

“It’s so beautiful,” she managed finally.

Unnoticed, Livven and Efrain had stepped up behind them.

“We traveled through that,” she said out loud. “We’re here now, but that is where we’re from.”

“And we changed it,” Efrain continued. He pointed out the debris fields. “Such is our power, that we put our stamp on it.”

“But that will pass,” Reglan said. “We created it, we’ll destroy it. We’ll have to come up with a way not to do it again, too, or we’ll be a menace to this part of space.”

“We will,” Efrain said, confidently.

“Hopefully we already have,” Kharen said.

Eyes turned to her. Normally, commons didn’t speak among those ‘of name,’ but Kharen in her close proximity to Reglan was often an exception to that rule.

“They had to have watched us,” she said to the rest. “They had to have seen that this was happening. Why wouldn’t they? And they had no way to stop us, or this from happening, so they would want to change the drive somehow to make sure it didn’t happen again.”

“I can’t imagine how,” Efrain said.

“Nor I,” Reglan agreed. “There are laws of physics. You can’t break them. We didn’t – we just worked within them. We found a hole in the way things worked, but we still moved through a physical world, and we created a moving object of almost infinite mass, moving through space and time.”

They’d studied to death the effect that had caused this. Different people felt different ways about it.

“What would happen if they had sent a ship after us – maybe another Maglen, a few years later?” Kharen asked Reglan.

This had been hanging in the back of Reglan’s mind.

“There was no plan,” Efrain said, immediately.

“There was,” Reglan said. Others turned toward him, tearing their eyes away from the brilliant sky. “Thoughts of a stream of ships sent, one-after-the-other, and multiple colonies to ensure success here.”

“I knew nothing of this,” Efrain said, a touch of anger in his voice.

“There was no need, because there was no agreement on it,” Regnal said. “There was no guarantee that we’d find a habitable planet here, simply speculation. Even finding one, we didn’t know if it didn’t contain pathogens that would kill us, a superior species which would repel us, or thousands of other reasons why we couldn’t settle here.

“Why rush things, and send ship after ship to its death before we found out what we were doing?”

“So, there is no other ship,” Kharen said, sounding relieved.

Livven shook her head. “There was no agreement, but now 10 years have passed, and anything could have changed. By now, they’ve received our first transmissions reporting the debris field and our change of planets, as well as all of our tactical data on this solar system and its asteroid belt, but they’ve only just received it. For the first few years, the debris field might have looked like nothing more than a dust storm to them.”

Eyes returned to the sky. Other ships like Maglen might be crashing into their physical wake even now. Explosions from their crashes might be traveling as light with the rest of the field, to reach them in coming years, if they managed to be looking at the right time.

It detracted a little from the beauty they were seeing.

By day, Reglan was involved in how much material could actually come off of Maglen, and still allow her to perform her final mission.

First, of course, they’d be removing as much of its inner walls and compartments as they could. Some of this would be used to patch her exterior, the rest for building material. After that, there would come the electronics, which could be re-tasked. None of the external deflectors could be removed because all of it would be necessary to keep the ship travelling as far as possible, and to drive the mass of debris out of a collision course with this solar system. The RF drive, as well, couldn’t be sacrificed, or the anti-grav drive.

The latter was actually going to have to be strengthened or amplified, as the ship would be pushing itself off course as it did the same to the debris field.

All of this involved extreme calculations and kept Regnal’s mind occupied. As he did this, more flivers were constructed and more activities took place around the compound.

That compound was becoming better and better defined. A flight of building blocks of various sizes were swarming to it, as fast as flivers and anti-grav lifters could move them. At the quarry itself, less than 10 miles away, there was a backlog of stones to move, and soon those workers would come here for a ‘second cutting,’ where the blocks would be trimmed and fitted onsite. Built without mortar and fitted precisely as they were positioned, the edifice would house them all and their next generation, and still be standing in a thousand years.

They’d already begun to grow domestic herds, and to plant. The first planting, coming at the start of the summer here, would likely be meager, but really was only to see what grew best, as well as what it attracted. They’d be eating from their hydroponic plants for the upcoming years.

They’d sent a fliver to sample the bison far to the north – the largest congregation of meat animals from which they could draw and, for the first time in years, have a non-plant staple to their diet. They reported that there were none of the hominid life forms that were prevalent on the other side of the planet. Apparently life had come here in more recent years, speaking on a global scale, and had not found a way across either the vast oceans or the frigid north.

Bison meat turned out to be delicious when properly cooked. Of course, the animals were wild and were loaded with bacteria and other diseases which weren’t safe for them, but they learned quickly that cooking the meat killed all of these. On Syriahs, there were meat diseases which survived cooking, but these hadn’t seemed to arise here.

Kharen made a picnic dinner for Reglan and a few of his ‘of name’ associates, and they sat outdoors under the night sky to a meal of steak along with their vegetables.

There was a lot of sighing, chewing and eye-rolling for the people who’d lived on plain, warm plants for years.

“We’ll have a fully-functional residence in another week,” Efrain commented between bites. “We already have people living in it.”

Reglan had noticed that. There was a main residence, a work area, even an armory (at Efrain’s insistence). An upper level was reserved for persons of name and their future families. He wouldn’t have the luxuries he’d been accustomed to on Syriahs, but he wouldn’t be in the cell he’d lived in on Maglen, either.

He'd given a lot of thought to pairing with Kharen. She clearly wanted it – he’d noticed her advances starting once they’d come here. She took special opportunities to touch him, she rarely left his side. She seemed comfortable around others of name, and they seemed to accept her. When his peer group avoided commons, that was usually the reason why.

Things were different on Ki.

“We’ll have the ship as well-repaired as she can be by then,” Reglan said, “and stripped of everything that she doesn’t need. There’s the argument of batteries, of course.”

Solar technology was a poor source of power here, much to their surprise. The sun wasn’t visible at least half of the time, making it mostly useless without batteries. Batteries themselves, while easy to build on Syriahs, required technology that they were years from here. However while solar was an excellent alternative for the ship, she still needed her batteries for the first part of her journey.

“We’ve looked at putting her in orbit,” Livven said, “then going to her on a fliver and taking a big part of her batteries and sending her on her way.”

“I’d feel better if she went into near-space manned,” Reglan said, “but in fact, it’s proximity to a large body when she needs her batteries least. When she’s out in space, and she’s running entirely on RF, is when she’ll need them most.”

“That means we’ll have to get by on ½ of her banks,” Efrain said. “Those will get us through the night for now, but as our population grows, won’t be sufficient.”

“We’ll be back to rationing,” Roo said. “People have paired off since the ship left Syriahs, and we’re almost out of contraceptives. Women will start becoming pregnant soon, and there’s little we’ll be able to do about it.”

“Other power sources?” Reglan asked.

Hames Acuff swallowed a large bite of his steak and said, “This planet is rich in quartzite. It’s even in a kind of stone here. There’s the piezoelectric effect which we could study but not build on in Syriahs, but which could be viable here.”

“Power from the pillars?” Liven said, and laughed. That’s what some called the planetary motion experiment which was regarded largely as a fiasco on their home world. The transmission of power based on the conversion of energy from the actual spinning of the planet.

Put a load on the planet as it spun, and by the laws of physics the planet slowed, even it if it was by so little that you couldn’t measure it. The problem, though, was that the moment you labeled that energy as ‘free,’ its use would explode and you could never get the populace, always growing, to conserve it.

Eventually, you would be able to measure the load. Then you’d have a planet whose rotation would slow to a stop.

With a quartz transmission method, it was theorized, you could just vibrate giant pillars, which deferred the load from the planet to the pillars themselves. They bore the load and, if you used too much, they simply didn’t meet the requirement, like any other power source. You’d have to get by or make more.

Of course, quartz was practically impossible to find on Syriahs, and never in any form of rock or stone. A single quartz pillar would be prohibitively expensive and, if you overloaded it, would likely shatter.

“How long to test it?” Efrain asked.

“A few months,” Hames said. “We could have something working in a few years. Well before we exceeded our batteries.”

“Batteries don’t last forever,” Kharen said. “They require maintenance, and they break down over time. Already, our existing batteries are only 90% as efficient as when we installed them.”

Efrain’s eyes widened. “I didn’t know that,” he said

She nodded. “Eventually, they’d have to be replaced, regardless.”

Efrain nodded, and turned to Hames. “Outline what you need by noon tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll shuffle resources.”

As Kharen had said of ‘Lord Efrain,’ Reglan couldn’t help thinking.