Infinite Dreams (27 page)

Well, the post office struck again; after several weeks, the painting hadn’t arrived. I started the story without it, working from notes I’d scribbled during the telephone conversation. It’s a good thing I didn’t try to finish without it.

The picture arrived and, lo, the spaceship had a hole in it. Repair crews were crawling around on it. Have to write that into the story. But wait. A spaceship going from star to star is going too
fast
to hit anything. Even a Ping-Pong
ball demolish it.
^*
So the damage has to be done either at the beginning or end of the journey.

Now, how long is that journey? Easy to find out, I can find out how far away the North American Nebula is, and how big it looks from Earth, then measure the apparent angular size of it in the picture. Do a little trigonometric tap dance and … we got problems. They’ve gone three thousand light years.

The starship on the cover painting is of the Daedelus design: it propels itself by the crude expedient of tossing H-bombs out behind and letting the blask kick it along. It just can’t go that far, not in any reasonable time. (I hasten to point out that none of this is Sternbach’s fault. He was well within the limits of artistic license, and the picture is breathtakingly accurate on its own terms—which is Sternbach’s norm.)

Well, I pushed the damned story through hoops, but finally fixed everything. Unfortunately, the art director of the magazine thought the painting looked better upside down, and printed it that way, which made the North American Nebula unrecognizable. So I went through all that work for the one reader in ten thousand who learned how to read by standing in front of Granny while she recited from the Bible, and so always holds his magazines upside down.

Was it worth it? Yes, emphatically; it always is. Not
because of the letters I get when I make a mistake—and I get some angry ones—but for two powerful and subtle reasons that have nothing to do with scientific accuracy. We’ll talk about them in the afterword.

^*
You want to know what a science fiction writer goes through? That line cost me ten minutes of tracking down formulae and conversion factors. It goes like this: a reasonable approximation for the kinetic energy of an object moving close to the speed of light is K = ½
mv
²
+ 3
mv
⁴
/8
c
²
. Say a Ping-Pong ball weighs 5 grams (about 1/5 ounce, just guessing). Say the ship is going at nine-tenths the speed of light. Plug those numbers in—thank God for Texas Instruments—and you get 2.93 x 10
¹⁴
joules, which is equivalent to some 73,000 tons of TNT. Put
that
in your starship and smoke it!

December 1975

Scientists pointed out that the Sun could be part of a double star system. For its companion to have gone undetected, of course, it would have to be small and dim, and thousands of astronomical units distant.

They would find it eventually; “it” would turn out to be “them”; they would come in handy.

January 2075

The office was opulent even by the extravagant standards of 21st century Washington. Senator Connors had a passion for antiques. One wall was lined with leatherbound books; a large brass telescope symbolized his role as Liaison to the Science Guild. An intricately woven Navajo rug from his home state covered most of the parquet floor. A grandfather clock. Paintings, old maps.

The computer terminal was discreetly hidden in the top drawer of his heavy teak desk. On the desk: a blotter, a precisely centered fountain pen set, and a century-old sound-only black Bell telephone. It chimed.

His secretary said that Dr. Leventhal was waiting to see him. “Keep answering me for thirty seconds,” the Senator said. “Then hang it and send him right in.”

He cradled the phone and went to a wall mirror. Straightened his tie and cape; then with a fingernail evened out the bottom line of his lip pomade. Ran a hand through long, thinning white hair and returned to stand by the desk, one hand on the phone.

The heavy door whispered open. A short thin man bowed slightly. “Sire.”

The Senator crossed to him with both hands out. “Oh, blow that, Charlie. Give ten.” The man took both his hands, only for an instant. “When was I ever ‘Sire’ to you, heyfool?”

“Since last week,” Leventhal said. “Guild members have been calling you worse names than ‘Sire.’”

The Senator bobbed his head twice. “True, and true. And I sympathize. Will of the people, though.”

“Sure.” Leventhal pronounced it as one word: “Willathapeeble.”

Connors went to the bookcase and opened a chased panel. “Drink?”

“Yeah, Bo.” Charlie sighed and lowered himself into a deep sofa. “Hit me. Sherry or something.”

The Senator brought the drinks and sat down beside Charlie. “You shoulda listened to me. Shoulda got the Ad Guild to write your proposal.”

“We have good writers.”

“Begging to differ. Less than two percent of the electorate bothered to vote; most of them for the administration advocate. Now you take the Engineering Guild—”

“You take the engineers. And—”

“They used the Ad Guild,” Connors shrugged. “They got their budget.”

“It’s easy to sell bridges and power plants and shuttles. Hard to sell pure science.”

“The more reason for you to—”

“Yeah, sure. Ask for double and give half to the Ad boys. Maybe next year. That’s not what I came to talk about.”

“That radio stuff?”

“Right. Did you read the report?”

Connors looked into his glass. “Charlie, you know I don’t have time to—”

“Somebody read it, though.”

“Oh, righty-o. Good astronomy boy on my staff; he gave me a boil-down. Mighty interesting, that.”

“There’s an intelligent civilization eleven light-years away—that’s ‘mighty interesting’?”

“Sure. Real breakthrough.” Uncomfortable silence. “Uh, what are you going to do about it?”

“Two things. First, we’re trying to figure out what they’re saying. That’s hard. Second, we want to send a message back. That’s easy. And that’s where you come in.”

The Senator nodded and looked somewhat wary.

“Let me explain. We’ve sent messages to this star, 61 Cygni, before. It’s a double star, actually, with a dark companion.”

“Like us.”

“Sort of. Anyhow, they never answered. They aren’t listening, evidently; they aren’t sending.”

“But we got—”

“What we’re picking up is about what you’d pick up eleven light-years from Earth. A confused jumble of broadcasts, eleven years old. Very faint. But obviously not generated by any sort of natural source.”

“Then we’re already sending a message back. The same kind they’re sending us.”

“That’s right, but—”

“So what does all this have to do with me?”

“Bo, we don’t want to whisper at them-we want to
shout!
Get their attention.” Leventhal sipped his wine and leaned back. “For that we’ll need one hell of a lot of power.”

“Uh, righty-o. Charlie, power’s money. How much are you talking about?”

“The whole show. I want to shut down Death Valley for twelve hours.”

The Senator’s mouth made a silent O. “Charlie, you’ve been working too hard. Another Blackout? On purpose?”

“There won’t be any Blackout. Death Valley has emergency storage for fourteen hours.”

“At half capacity.” He drained his glass and walked back to the bar, shaking his head. “First you say you want power. Then you say you want to turn off the power.” He came back with the burlap-covered bottle. “You aren’t making sense, boy.”

“Not turn it off, really. Turn it around.”

“Is that a riddle?”

“No, look. You know the power doesn’t really come from the Death Valley grid; it’s just a way station and accumulator. Power comes from the orbital—”

“I know all that, Charlie. I’ve got a Science Certificate.”

“Sure. So what we’ve got is a big microwave laser in orbit, that shoots down a tight beam of power. Enough to keep North America running. Enough—”

“That’s what I mean. You can’t just—”

“So we turn it around and shoot it at a power grid on the Moon. Relay the power around to the big radio dish at Farside. Turn it into radio waves and point it at 61 Cygni. Give ’em a blast that’ll fry their fillings.”

“Doesn’t sound neighborly.”

“It wouldn’t actually be that powerful—but it would be a hell of a lot more powerful than any natural 21-centimeter source.”

“I don’t know, boy.” He rubbed his eyes and grimaced. “I could maybe do it on the sly, only tell a few people what’s on. But that’d only work for a few minutes … what do you need twelve hours for, anyway?”

“Well, the thing won’t aim itself at the Moon automatically, the way it does at Death Valley. Figure as much as an hour to get the thing turned around and aimed.

“Then, we don’t want to just send a blast of radio waves at them. We’ve got a five-hour program, that first builds up a mutual language, then tells them about us, and finally asks them some questions. We want to send it twice.”

Connors refilled both glasses. “How old were you in ’47, Charlie?”

“I was born in ’45.”

“You don’t remember the Blackout. Ten thousand people died … and you want me to suggest—”

“Come on, Bo, it’s not the same thing. We know the accumulators work now—besides, the ones who died, most of them had faulty fail-safes on their cars. If we warn them the power’s going to drop, they’ll check their fail-safes or damn well stay out of the air.”

“And the media? They’d have to take turns broadcasting. Are you going to tell the People what they can watch?”

“Fuzz the media. They’ll be getting the biggest story since the Crucifixion.”

“Maybe.” Connors took a cigarette and pushed the box toward Charlie. “You don’t remember what happened to the Senators from California in ’47, do you?”

“Nothing good, I suppose.”

“No, indeed. They were impeached. Lucky they weren’t lynched. Even though the real trouble was ’way up in orbit.

“Like you say; people pay a grid tax to California. They think the power comes from California. If something fuzzes up, they get pissed at California. I’m the Lib Senator from California, Charlie; ask me for the Moon, maybe I can do something. Don’t ask me to fuzz around with Death Valley.”

“All right, all right. It’s not like I was asking you to wire it for me, Bo. Just get it on the ballot. We’ll do everything we can to educate—”

“Won’t work. You barely got the Scylla probe voted in—and that was no skin off nobody, not with L-5 picking up the tab.”

“Just get it on the ballot.”

“We’ll see. I’ve got a quota, you know that. And the Tricentennial coming up, hell, everybody wants on the ballot.”

“Please, Bo. This is bigger than that. This is bigger than anything. Get it on the ballot.”

“Maybe as a rider. No promises.”

March 1992

From
Fax & Pix
, 12 March 1992:

ANTIQUE SPACEPROBE

ZAPPED BY NEW STARS

1. Pioneer 10 sent first Jupiter pix Earthward in 1973 (see pix upleft, upright).

2. Left solar system 1987. First man-made thing to leave solar system.

3. Yesterday, reports NSA, Pioneer 10 begins AM to
pick up heavy radiation. Gets more and more to max about 3 PM. Then goes back down. Radiation has to come from outside solar system.

4. NSA and Hawaii scientists say Pioneer 10 went through disk of synchrotron (sin-kro-tron) radiation that comes from two stars we didn’t know about before.

1. The stars are small “black dwarfs.”
   

2. They are going round each other once very 40 seconds, and take 350,000 years to go around the Sun.
   

3. One of the stars is made of
   antimatter
   . This is stuff that blows up if it touches real matter. What the Hawaii scientists saw was a dim circle of invisible (infrared) light, that blinks on and off every twenty seconds. This light comes from where the atmospheres of the two stars touch (see pic downleft).
   

4. The stars have a big magnetic field. Radiation comes from stuff spinning off the stars and trying to get through the field.
   

5. The stars are about 5000 times as far away from the Sun as we are. They sit at the wrong angle, compared to the rest of the solar system (see pic down-right).
   

5. NSA says we aren’t in any danger from the stars. They’re too far away, and besides, nothing in the solar system ever goes through the radiation.

6. The woman who discovered the stars wants to call them Scylla (skill-a) and Charybdis (ku-rib-dus).

7. Scientists say they don’t know where the hell those two stars came from. Everything else in the solar system makes sense.

February 2075

When the docking phase started, Charlie thought, that was when it was easy to tell the scientists from the baggage. The scientists were the ones who looked nervous.

Superficially, it seemed very tranquil—nothing like the bonehurting skinstretching acceleration when the shuttle lifted off. The glittering transparent cylinder of L-5 simply grew larger, slowly, then wheeled around to point at them.

The problem was that a space colony big enough to hold 4000 people has more inertia than God. If the shuttle hit the mating dimple too fast, it would fold up like an accordian. A space ship is made to take stress in the
other
direction.

Charlie hadn’t paid first class, but they let him up into the observation dome anyhow; professional courtesy. There were only two other people there, standing on the Velcro rug, strapped to one bar and hanging on to another.

They were a young man and woman, probably new colonists. The man was talking excitedly. The woman stared straight ahead, not listening. Her knuckles were white on the bar and her teeth were clenched. Charlie wanted to say something in sympathy, but it’s hard to talk while you’re holding your breath.

The last few meters are the worst. You can’t see over the curve of the ship’s hull, and the steering jets make a constant stutter of little bumps: left, right, forward, back. If the shuttle folded, would the dome shatter? Or just pop off.