In fact, The Founder had a plan. He had realised long ago of the futility of space travel, due to the massive demand on resources that not even the Oodles conglomerate, with its almost total strangle-hold on the Earth, could afford. He had lost many of the best brains at his last attempt. Besides, it took too long to develop and assess, even approaching the speed of light, and there wasn’t any time left, now that climate change was out of control and nuclear war had broken out in the Middle-East, North and South Korea, and along the Russian borders.
Time was of the essence. The Founder, with all his personal wealth, had developed an alternative approach in parallel to the space programme. He had built a time-machine! He intended to start Civilisation again from scratch. To go back to the Rift Valley, with a few sturdy Londoners, armed with all the knowledge and technology of the past 70,000 years, and begin afresh, hoping to avoid most of the unpleasantness the Human Race had so far inflicted on itself.
He would be in charge, of course. He had already chosen his Disciples from those few left that had proved themselves independent, resilient, adaptable and innovative. They just needed a little guidance and technical help from himself. The New Order would be a vast improvement on anything that had gone before and maybe they could reverse the almost inevitable decline into chaos that every system so far devised had descended into.
He had already proven that his theories worked by sending back that titanium cylinder to the Olduvai Gorge and hiring Indigo Brown to retrieve it. It was a pity that such a resourceful man couldn’t join his disciples, but he was far too self-obsessed and sexually motivated; too much of a potential threat and rival.
For his experiment, The Founder had used a very small worm-hole that did actually exist on the top of Mount Lemakarot, but for this expedition he would have to use the larger one that he knew existed at one of the Lagrangian Points, the exact position where the gravity of the Earth, the other planets, and the Sun cancelled each other out; where Newtonian Laws ceased to operate. Which was why his time-machine was actually a space-ship, with a fairly short range, and capable of reaching its destination in a matter of months rather than decades. All he needed to do was to collect his crew and settle them down for the trip of a life-time. After the necessary injections and immunisations, of course.
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Oodles 