Catalysts

A select, international crew expected to land, years later, on an uninhabited planet orbiting the red sun of Alpha Centauri, using their 'ship Canterbury as a base.

Wrong. They arrived earlier than scheduled. It didn’t take long to discover that Melthyra was inhabited, but by then they had already lost Canterbury. And the majority of the natives, although in many ways totally human-like, were not friendly.

They had a skipper whose qualifications as an astronaut were unequalled. One of them, Helen, was a fully fledged psychotech, trained to handle any of the problems that might arise from the long journey, isolated from any other human contact. Two of them were Christians. All eight of them had been chosen for their stability and the probability that they could start to colonize the planet as a strong, cohesive, civilized core of like-minded people.

Wrong. The tensions and conflicts overwhelmed us, and they found themselves in a situation that they thought they had left behind on planet Earth for good; not just at war with each other, but inflicting the threat of nuclear war on a planet that had not seen explosions for thousands of years.

And they thought that they would set up their colony, that their children would inherit the fruits of their efforts, and that they would eventually die as creators of a brave, new, peaceful world for the future of the human race.

Wrong.

Oh, they would die alright. But not, absolutely not, in a way they might ever had expected.

On the other hand, how could they possibly have foreseen that they would be able to chronicle these strange events for the education of those left on earth and eventually hope and pray that the hard, hard lessons could be applied.