felt more than simple curiosity. Maybe he was lonely without his kids around, or maybe he was suffering an alien version of divorce or a child custody dispute. He was downright stalkerish when Max came for a swim. Max couldn’t do more than a lap or two around the center islands before Rick glided in on his single leg. Rick struck him as a lonely man. Alien. Whatever. Max sometimes wondered if the children were imaginary. Maybe Rick wanted a friend and feared rejection. Even without compensation, Max would happily hang out with Rick. He was fond of Rick and his randomly scattered eyes and his love of any story with Darth Vader.
“Most ships make gravities similar,” Rick said. The translator still had a slight awkwardness to it, and some concepts led to entire failures of vocabulary, but overall, Max was quite proud of his work on the translation program. That had been downright understandable.
“Query. Why is that? Have all the different aliens gotten together and decided to use the same gravity?” Max considered that from a pilot’s perspective.
Logistically, that would’ve been safer than navigating wildly unpredictable gravity wells when approaching another ship or station. Having a standard would prevent pilots from having to calculate the forces that gravity would apply to the ship. Otherwise, somebody would do the equivalent of driving through a laundromat’s front window. When that happened in Wichita, it was an interesting item on the news. If someone's tentacled Uncle Bob drove his spaceship through a station window, Max was fairly certain that people would die.
“No. All creatures in ships like gravity that they like.”
Max righted himself and dog paddled next to Rick’s large tentacle. “Are you telling me that all of these different aliens have similar gravity on their home planets?” That didn’t make a lot of sense. But then again, Max was quickly discovering that the universe didn't care about his personal opinion of it.
“Yes.”
Sometimes those one word answers made Max want to tie Rick’s tentacles in a knot. “Clarify. Query. Why would everyone's planet have the same gravity?”
“Many planets are many gravity different.”
“Exactly. If everyone has a different gravity on their home planet, then why are all of the ships using similar gravity?”
Rick twirled until he considered Max out of a new cluster of eyes. “Different planets have many gravity different. However. Clarify. Most who travel space have gravity similar.”
“Why?”
Rick's tentacles twitched. Max grabbed the edge of one of the water filtration islands and pulled himself half out of the water. Thank God he had taken a job with a patient alien. Even if it caused him tentacle-twitching frustration, Rick would explain a dozen different times if Max asked him to. In his whole life, Max had never been able to talk to someone the way he could to Rick, and that said something sad about Max’s love life.
“Planets of large create more gravity.” A few details came through only as untranslated belches, but Max understood the bulk of the statement.
“Yes,” Max said.
“Big planets have many metals. Elements owning large electron numbers.”
As the translator struggled with technical terms, Max realized that he needed to do a little clarification of the periodic table. That said, he did understand what Rick was talking about. Large planets would have more heavy metals and radioactive materials, more nuclear fuel, and basically more raw materials for building a spaceship. If they were playing a world building game, Max would want to start his civilization on a big planet.
“Yes, and with more of those metals, they could reach space. And then they would be here with ships that used heavy gravity. Where are the ships with heavy gravity?” Max asked.
“No. Clarify.” Rick paused, and Max could almost see the thought bubbles over Rick’s head as he struggled to find a way to explain concepts that were obvious to him, and not-so-obvious to Max. “Big planets mean difficult lifting. Ships fall back to big planets. Those ships are not in space.”
“Oh.” Max grimaced. Gravity trapped some cultures. “Are there large planets with big civilizations that can't get off?”
“Yes. They trade in information or communication. They send up ships too small for a pilot. Sometimes traders drop materials into gravity well. They do not travel space.”
“Okay. That makes sense. That also sort of sucks. My people have wanted to visit the stars ever since we looked up.” Max doubted that Rick had understood much of that, so he added. “My ancestors who could not yet make ships and rode horseback wanted