Starfarers Read online

  The animations ended. The galaxy came back.

  “Details we could not detect before, such as certain faint spectral lines, are now lending confirmation to my cosmodynamic model,” Olivares said. “And that model, in turn, suggests the energy source for such spacecraft. That’s all,” he ended diffidently.

  “I’d say that’s plenty, sir,” the journalist responded. “Could you tell us something about your ideas?”

  “It’s rather technical, I fear.”

  “Let’s be brave. Please say whatever you can without equations.”

  Olivares leaned back and drew breath. “Well, cosmologists have agreed for a long time that the universe originated as a quantum fluctuation in the seething sea of the vacuum, a random concentration of energy so great that it expanded explosively. Out of this condensed the first particles, and from them evolved atoms, stars, planets, and living creatures.”

  Excitement throbbed beneath the academic phrases. “At first the cosmologists took for granted that the beginning involved a fall to the ground state, somewhat like the transition of an electron in a high orbit to the lowest orbit it can occupy. But what if this is not the case? What if the fall is only partway? Then a reservoir of potential energy remains. For an electron, it’s a photon’s worth. For a universe, it is vast beyond comprehension.

  “I’ve shown that, if the cosmos is in fact in such a metastable condition, we can account for what the astronomers have observed, as well as several other things that were puzzling us. It’s possible to tap energy from the unexpended substrate—energy more than sufficient, for lengths of time counted not in Planck units but in minutes, even hours.”

  Fleury whistled. “How can we do this?”

  Olivares chuckled. “I’ll leave that to the laboratory physicists, and afterward the engineers. In principle, though, it must be by means of what I’ll call a quantum field gate. We can use a Bose-Einstein condensate to generate a certain laserlike effect and bring all the atoms in two parallel, superconducting plates into the same quantum state. The consequences are nonlinear and result in the creation of a singularity. Through this the energy of the substrate flows. Presumably it will distribute itself evenly through any connected matter, so that the acceleration is not felt.”

  “Hoo, you’re right, this is kind of technical.” A touch of practicality should liven it. “How does the, um, pilot get the ship headed the way he/she/it wants to go?”

  “A good question,” Olivares approved. “I’m glad you know the difference between a scalar and a vector. I think the velocity vector must increase or decrease linearly. In other words, when the ship acquires the new energy, she continues in the same straight-line direction as she was moving in. I’m still working on the problem of angular momentum.”

  “More technicalities,” Fleury said ruefully. “You mentioned having this energy for a period of maybe hours. Must it then go back?”

  Olivares nodded. “Yes, just as with the familiar vacuum, a loan from the substrate must be repaid. The product of energy borrowed and time for the loan is a constant. However, with the substrate the constant is immensely larger—a multiple of the Planck energy, which is itself enormous. The quantum field collapses, reclaiming the borrowed energy for the substrate.”

  “But the ship can take out another loan right away?”

  “Evidently. The instruments have, in fact, detected flickerings in the X-ray outputs that correspond quite nicely to this. From the inverse proportionality of energy and time, it follows that every jump is of the same length. My preliminary calculations suggest that this length is on the order of a hundred astronomical units. The exact value depends on the local metric—” Olivares laughed. “Never mind!”

  “Maybe we can talk a little about what a voyage would feel like, aboard a ship like that,” Fleury proposed.

  “Why not? It’ll take us back to less exotic territory.”

  “Could you review the basic facts? For some of us, our physics has gotten kind of rusty.”

  “It’s simple enough,” Olivares said, quite sincerely. “When you travel at relativistic speeds, you experience relativistic effects. I’ve mentioned the increase of mass. The shortening of length in the direction of motion is another. Of course, you yourself wouldn’t notice this. To you, the outside universe has shrunken and grown more massive. And your observations are as valid as anybody else’s.”

  “What about the effect on time? I should think that’d matter most to the crew.”

  “Ah, yes. Time dilation. Loosely speaking, if you’re traveling at close to c, for you time passes more slowly than it does for the friends you left behind you. One of those spacecraft may take several hundred years to cross the several hundred light-years between her home port and her destination. To those aboard, whoever or whatever they are, a few weeks will have passed.”

  Before she could head him off—but it could be edited out later if need be—Olivares continued: “The new theory modifies this a bit. If you travel by way of the quantum field gate, you never get the full time dilation you would if you accelerated to the same velocity by ordinary, impossible rocket means. However, at high energies the difference becomes too small to be worth thinking about. Contrastingly, the less energy you borrow from the substrate, the worse the ratio is. You could take an extremely long time by your clocks—theoretically forever—to transit the fixed distance of a jump at an ordinary speed. You’d do better to use a regular jet motor.

  “So the quantum field gate is not for travel between the planets. Nor do I expect it will serve any other mundane purpose.”

  “But it will take us to the stars,” Fleury breathed.

  She guided the conversation from that point, retracing much ground, expanding explanations, weaving in a few personal, human matters. It would be raw material for a program that should awaken eagerness in every thinking person who saw it, around Earth, on the Moon and Mars, faring to the ends of the Solar System.

  At last the two stood up. She shook his frail hand and said, “Thank you, thank you, Dr. Olivares, for this hour,” which had actually been almost three, “and thank you infinitely more for everything you have given the human race.” That would remain in the tapes.

  Immediacy closed in. Blasphemous though it felt, she could not help herself; she went to the television set in his office and tuned in a newscast.

  Terror leaped from the screen. Houghton’s junta had seized the Capitol and White House. He had declared a state of emergency and martial law. A number of military units, here and there across the country, had mobilized to resist, and battle had erupted at several locations. She saw combat in the air above Seattle, street fighting in Houston, a city block burning in Minneapolis.

  She turned and seized Olivares’s hand again. Through her own tears she saw his. “No, God damn it!” she cried. “We’ve got work to do, you and I!”

  —Conflict sputtered out in the next few days, as Houghton prevailed. After all, he and his cause were widely popular. He was now the permanent Chief Advisor to any and every President of the United States. The trial and execution of his predecessor assured the docility of Congress and the courts. His reign lasted until his death, nineteen years later.

  Olivares lived much longer in history.

  Once an aspect of nature is known, quantum computers and nanotechnic construction make for rapid progress. Barely ten years passed between the publication of his theory and the departure of the first spacecraft for Alpha Centauri.

  Surely billions of eyes watched on screens as it left Earth orbit. A few persons on Himalia were luckier. That little moon of Jupiter chanced to be near when the vessel passed by. For many hours before and after the moment, work ceased. Almost everyone crammed into the habitation domes from which it would be directly visible.

  Dmitri Sumarokov and Karl Vogel did not leave their station. They and their robots were prospecting the Stephanos Crater area. It might have been more exciting to watch with a group, but would certainly have been more uncomfortable.
The partners simply donned spacesuits, took what optical gear they had, and went out of their roundhut.

  Low above a topplingly near horizon, the giant planet loomed close to fullness. Larger in this sky than Luna in Earth’s, lion-tawny, banded with clouds and swirled with storms in subtle hues, a glimmer of rings offside, it flooded most stars out of vision. The radiance fell soft over ice, rocky upthrusts, scars, and pockmarks. Breath and pulsebeat sounded loud in the silence.

  Trouble with the air recycler had caused a delay. Repairs couldn’t wait; dead men can’t watch anything. With scant time to set up, they wasted none in speech, except for an occasional muttered curse. But when they had their telescope aimed and an image appeared in the display, Sumarokov whooped, “There! See, Karl, see!”

  A point of light swelled rapidly within the frame. It turned into a jumble of glints and shadows. It became a bright spheroid from which reached structures that seemed as fragile as spiderwebs. The telescope swung, tracking. Vogel peered along it. Pointing, he said, his tone not quite steady, “Selbst das Schiff.” In the English they shared: “Someday our children will envy us, Dmitri.”

  The naked eye saw a spark flit above a crag and across the night. It could have been any satellite, catching the rays of the sunken sun. Two Galilean moons outshone it. But Sumarokov and Vogel stood enthralled.

  It faded, dwindling away into distance. Their gaze went back to the display. Abruptly the magnified image vanished in a flare. They glimpsed the reality as a wink near the Jovian disc. “What was that?” Sumarokov exclaimed.

  “The jet fired,” Vogel answered. He had studied the subject more closely than the other man. “Approach maneuver.”

  “So soon?”

  “You would not want to operate a plasma jet in Jupiter’s radiation belt.”

  “No. … No, certainly not.” Again the shape was in telescopic view, coasting along on gravity and momentum, shrinking, shrinking. “The day will come,” Sumarokov said raptly, “when none of this will be necessary.”

  “Um, I don’t know,” Vogel replied. “They, those robots, they do have to be well away from the sun before they turn on the zero-zero drive. Something about space not being too warped.”

  Sumarokov blinked at him. “Zero-zero?”

  “That is what they are lately calling the quantum field gate drive. Have you not heard? A ship springs from the energy state normal in this universe, what they call the zero level, to the superhigh energy level it gets from below the universe, and then falls back down again to normal, over and over.”

  “I see.”

  “First they may as well save fuel by letting Jupiter pull them out of the ecliptic plane and aim them at the goal.” Vogel spoke absently, his attention on the image. Soon it would be invisibly small.

  “Yes, yes, I know that,” Sumarokov said. “Everybody does.” Enthusiasm thrust irritation aside. “I mean the technology will improve. Jets will be screened. Fuel will be less important. And it will be humans, not machines, who go to the stars.”

  “If machines do not become as intelligent as humans, or more so.”

  “That will never happen. I know some neuropsychology. Consciousness, creative thought, that is not merely a business of electrons in circuits. It is something the entire living human organism does.”

  “Well, maybe. But all of us here would be in a bad way without our robots.”

  Talk broke off. Both men were watching the starcraft too hungrily.

  When it was gone from them they went back inside, and presently back to work, as if awakened from a dream.

  Yet the work had its fascination, establishing a settlement in the Jovian System, coordinated with the outposts on the asteroids—steps in the industrialization of space, until the wealth of the planets flowed to Mother Earth and humans need no longer maim and defile her.

  Such was the hope of the far-seeing. The hope of most people concerned in the endeavor was to make a profit. And this was right and necessary. No civilization, whatever its social and economic arrangements, can continue forever throwing resources into a void. It must eventually start to reap some kind of material return.

  —Eight and a half years after the spacecraft left Sol, its first laserborne messages arrived from Alpha Centauri. What they revealed was wonderful. Three years later, transmissions ended. The unforeseeabilities of navigating among rock swarms between two suns had overwhelmed the computers. The vessel perished in a collision. Its wreckage became another small heavenly body.

  By then, however, the first ships designed to carry human crews were taking their first flights.

  1.

  “Man down.”

  Ricardo Nansen was floating weightless, looking out a viewscreen, when the alarm shrilled and the words followed. He never tired of this sight. As the ship orbited into morning and the sun rose red from a peacock band along the edge of the planet, blue-and-white marbled beauty drove night backward across the great globe. He could almost have been at Earth. But the sun was Epsilon Eridani, there was no moon, and here Sol shone only after dark, a second-magnitude star in Serpens Caput. That fact turned splendor into a miracle.

  The call snatched him from it. He took off, arrowing along a corridor. Captain Gascoyne’s voice rang from every intercom: “Pilot Nansen, prepare to scramble.”

  “On my way, sir,” he replied. “Who’s in trouble?”

  “Airman Shaughnessy. Wrecked. And that was the only flyer currently operating.”

  Mike Shaughnessy! shocked through Nansen. The man was his best friend in the crew.

  This shouldn’t have happened. Aircraft, like spaceboats, had been tested for reliability, over and over, under the harshest available stresses, before the expedition set forth. Thus far they had come handily through everything they met. And Shaughnessy had simply been on his way back to Main Base after delivering supplies to a team of biologists on an offshore island.

  At least he lived. Nearly eleven light-years from home, any human life became boundlessly precious.

  Second Engineer Dufour waited at the launch bay of Nansen’s craft to help him make ready. Ordinarily that wasn’t needful, but urgency ruled today. While she got him dressed and otherwise outfitted, he kept his attention on the intercom screen at the site. His briefing snapped out at him, verbal, pictorial, mathematical.

  Information was scant. Shaughnessy had radioed a report of sudden, total engine failure. He didn’t think he could glide to a landing and was going to bail out. Minisatellite relays carried his message to the ship. When she swung above his horizon, her optics found him at the wreckage. Evidently he’d guided his motorchute to chase the crashing flyer. His communications were dead, though, even the transceiver built into his backpack. He seemed unhurt, but who could tell? Certain it was that his tanked air would shortly give out.

  To make matters worse, a hurricane raged along the seacoast west of him. To wait in orbit till the window for an approach from the east opened would squander time. Besides, weather along that flight path had its own nasty spots. This atmosphere was not Earth’s. Steep axial tilt and rapid rotation increased the treacherousness. Meteorologist Hrodny was still struggling to develop adequate computer programs. Crewfolk argued about whether to recommend naming the planet Satan or Loki.

  “We have a course for you that should skirt the big storm,” Gascoyne said. “Do you accept it?”

  “Yes, of course,” Nansen answered.

  “Good luck,” Dufour whispered. “Bonne chance, mon bel ami.” She kissed him, quickly. He cycled through the airlocks.

  As he harnessed himself before the control panel, the boat told him, “All systems checked and operative. Launch at will.”

  Nansen grinned. “¡Ay, la sensatión del poderío absoluto!” Beneath tautness and concern, exhilaration thrilled. The mission wasn’t crazily reckless, but it challenged him. He touched the go pad.

  Acceleration pushed him back in his seat, gently at first, then hard. Aft, the ship receded from sight. Forward, the globe swelled unt
il it was not ahead, it was below, the circle of it bisecting his universe.

  The drive cut off. Slanting steeply downward, the boat pierced atmosphere. A thin wail grew into thunder, the view turned into fire, he lost contact with the ship. The force on him became brutal. He could have taken an easier route, but he was in a hurry.

  Slowing, the boat won free of radio blackout. Vision cleared, weight grew normal. Wings captured lift. His hands ordered the airjet to start. He flew.

  An ocean gleamed below. Broad patches of weed and scum mottled its azure. A darker wall rose over the rim, higher and higher, crowned with alabaster cloud.

  “Damn!” he muttered. “The hurricane. It’s not supposed to be dead ahead.”

  The ship had passed under his horizon and couldn’t help. His own instruments probed. Unpredictably, incredibly fast, the tempest had veered.

  “Advise returning to orbit,” said the boat.

  Nansen studied the map unrolling in a screen. We can’t simply fly around, he agreed. The boat was too awkward in the air for such a maneuver. Normally it dipped into the stratosphere and released a proper aircraft when all exploration party wanted one. The two made rendezvous at that height when the time came to return. Someday we’ll have boats that can perform as well in atmosphere as in space. But today—

  “No,” he decided. “We’ll push straight through.”

  “Is that wise?” The synthetic voice remained as calm as always. Once in a while you had to remind yourself that there was no awareness behind the panel, no true mind, only a lot of sophisticated hardware and software.