Vyyda Book 1: The Haver Problem Read Free Page B

workforce. 
                  Millar Jefferson, even after Dorsey had departed the room, made faces of sour frustration punctuating each sifting move he executed to separate crust from edible grain.  Why wasn't rearing his son as simple as pulling away the undesirable elements and tossing them aside? 
                  Dorsey continued to pick up more shards of information throughout the day.  Most importantly, he learned that the four men set to attempt a trip to Earth were a group of accomplished pobbers .  Plenty of stories about pobbers operating throughout U-Space had reached Hylandites before.  The vast majority telling of violent deaths.  Pobbers lived and breathed to build better and more advanced ketts – the commonspeak term for small vessels. 
                  Large companies and settlements in U-Space had their oversized molkas, constructed by manufacturers who guarded design secrets.  Pobbers were going to revolutionize the ability of average men and women to make their way around U-Space of their own accord.  These devoted innovators were necessarily dreamers, tinkerers and experimenters, married to their passion and unafraid of dying.
                  Underpowered displacement drives could be easily produced, but pobbers were intent on matching the big molkas for sheer power and reach, whatever it took.  It was one of the reasons many of them didn't tend to live all that long.
                  "A sweet goodbye to haska!" had become the traditional “war cry” transmission to confederates, typically followed by the declaration, "It's quite alright to die!", signaling that the pobber at the controls was about to engage a new displacement prototype.  These words were usually delivered with over-the-top conviction, tightening the guts and lifting resolve necessary to follow through.
                  Most prototypes failed.  And failure meant certain death.  In some instances, no one could say exactly what happened to a pobber when they made their jump.  They simply disappeared.  Residue of their ketts could occasionally be found somewhere between where they started and where they intended to go, nothing more.
                  But the new story making its way through Hyland wasn’t the typical pobber test gone bad.  These pobbers, as Dorsey heard told, had built something that was not only safe and consistent, but had the muscle to get them to Earth.
                  And therein was the most tantalizing part of the story.  The people of U-Space understood one thing for certain about Earth:  it was off-limits.  Attempts at communication with the home planet – or any element of C-Space – were always ignored.  There would be no relations between the two segments of man.  When U-Spacers didn’t bother with communication or requests, but merely approached the boundary, there was hell to pay.
                  Earth’s Home Sector Protection Bureau (HSPB) kept a remarkably tight seal on the line of demarcation.  They were tasked with keeping the U-Spacers out at all costs.  Perhaps most telling was that the HSPB worked to hammer into the minds of their agents that U-Spacers were not human.  At least, they weren’t real humans.  Not any longer.
     
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                  The quartet of pobbers with the plan to travel to Earth named itself The Nohbuer Four (inspired by the name of their haska, or home planet).  They were variously characterized as daring, suicidal, pioneering and insane.  Dorsey couldn't say for himself which description was most apt, he just wanted to see what would happen.  The Nohbuer Four would never sift syntho-grains, never clear away discarded crusts for disposal.  The Nohbuer Four were doing something.  Even if that something was rushing toward death.
    Not surprisingly,