The Cavern Dweller Extrication Project

    While the humex were struggling to reach Nexra, an equally important movement, or lack thereof, was taking place on Xra. For the most part, the Xrans still in orbit had been attending to the problem of the asteroid’s Great Cavern dwellers – they wouldn’t budge, which meant they were not preparing themselves for the next descent to Earth. The cavern dwellers belonged to a cult of religious fanatics, who, for various reasons, did not accept the premise that there was a safe route to Earth. They believed that the first descent group had died. They also believed that Xra was not in danger of eventually vaporizing in Earth’s atmosphere.

The surface dwellers tried to convince the cavern dwellers of the error of their ways by sending priests down to convince the cavern dwellers that the end was near – but to no appreciable avail. There the circle of half-hearted attempts persisted for nearly fifty generations.  

Picking up on a school project concerning the cavern dweller problem, Ahlu had continued to think ever more seriously about this problem. He had discussed the problem with humex leadership, Xran leadership and had written several papers regarding possible solutions. None of the proposed solutions seemed to hit the mark of a realistic answer. For awhile Ahlu gave up his quest for becoming the white-knight until scientists started pinpointing the next departure date of the next moon to be swallowed up by the Earth’s atmosphere - with a fleet of Xran life-boats following it in.

Ahlu finally enlisted Airam, the love of his life and a brilliant anthropologist, to assist him in finding the answers to this important problem. Together they prepared a plan and then supervised its execution. The project resulted in saving nearly all of the cavern dwellers, therefore saving them for the all-important human assimilation project slated for the end of the first century. The act of saving the cavern dwellers from a sure death as Xra eventually plunged into Earth’s atmosphere was a very important benchmark. The rescue would supply the humex with additional pure-humex leaders through the selfless Xran assimilation with the humans allowing this biological combination to expand the human's poor native intelligence thus promoting them to humex status. The increased numbers were crucially necessary to efficiently direct the growing humex civilization toward continued social fairness and evenly distributed prosperity.