Mindbridge (4 page)

“-eggshell.”

Like some improbable circus act, the Tamer team suddenly appeared less than a meter above the surface of Groombridge 1618’s second planet. They fell abruptly, and found that the planet did indeed have liquid water. More to the point, liquid mud.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Merdel” Jacque fell the farthest and so sank the deepest, up to his shoulders.

“Hold it,” Tania ordered. “Nobody move for a second. See whether we keep sinking, whether it’s like quicksand.”

“I don’t think it is,” Jacque said. “Think my feet are on solid ground.”

“Try to walk, then.”

“No problem.” Walking, Jacque made a gelatinous sucking sound, and the black mud swirled viscously behind him. “Uh, heading toward that bush. Or whatever it is.”

The planet, which they would simply call Groombridge, was within its star’s biosphere and obviously had a primitive form of plant life. Not green, though. Jacque was headed for an organism that did have a recognizable stalk and drooping fleshy plates that might be called leaves. But it was the color of a corpse.

Groombridge 1618 hung high in the sky, easily four times as big as the sun is from earth, but looking unwell. It was a dull orange color, mottled with black spots and etched with fine swirls of yellow faculae. Its brightness was tempered by the dense low fog, and one could look directly at it without squinting.

The pale yellow fog limited their visibility to some 70 meters; half again that far in the infrared. At the extreme limit they could barely make out what might have been the edge of a forest. Or at least a group of largish plants.

“It’s a . . . a good planet.” There was a trace of wonder in Tania’s voice. She wasn’t looking at the dreary landscape, but at the information that appeared projected in ghost images onto her viewplate:

Gravity
      
0.916
      
Methane
          
0.004

Temperature
  
27.67^
     
Xenon
            
0.003

Atmosphere:
  
Sulfur
    
Oxides
           
<10E-7

Pressure
     
0.894%
     
Carbon Monoxide
  
<10E-7

Nitrogen
     
0.357
      
Nitrogen Oxides
  
<10E-8

Argon
        
0.297
      
Hydrogen Sulfide
 
<10E-8

Oxygen
       
0.212
      
Ammonia
          
-

Water Vapor
  
0.051
      
Halogens
         
-

Carbon Dioxide
0.047

This didn’t mean they could open their helmets and start breathing. For one thing, there was too much water vapor and carbon dioxide: sitting still in a chair, you would start to pant in a few minutes. And there were things like bacteria, viruses, and nerve gases that a suit’s equipment couldn’t detect, but which could be fatal in concentrations of less than one part per million.

But Tamers had brought more formidable worlds under control. Groombridge might never be the garden spot of the universe, but if the AED thought it worth the trouble, men might walk unprotected on its surface in not too many years.

“Wish we’d brought a mouse,” Carol said.

“Next time. We’ll take some air back.”

(From Sermons from Science by Theodore Lasky, copyright © 2071, Broome Syndicate. Reprinted from The Washington Post-Times-Herald-Star-News, 16 September 2071:)

“To geoform” is a transitive verb, an inelegant neologism that means, rather obviously, “to change into [something having certain qualities of] earth.”

The first planet to be geoformed was earth itself.

Consider: men can’t destroy a planet’s ecology, not with hydrogen bombs, not with nonreturnable bottles (remember them?). All they can do is change it. Even a featureless radioactive billiard ball of a planet has an ecology, albeit not a complex one.

Men started to geoform the earth in the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, a lot of the early work was done by people who failed to see the earth as a closed set of mutually interrelated systems. Typically, they would drive around in petroleum-powered vehicles, picking up cans (which were trying their damnedest to rust and get back into the soil). Then they’d drive the cans to a recycling place that ultimately burned coal to melt down the cans to make more cans. In the process they were using up very finite supplies of fossil fuels-and incidentally gave New Jersey the most spectacular sunsets this side of the planet Jupiter.

More generally, the problem was that in order to fix something up, you have to apply energy to it. And taking energy from anywhere on the earth-be it coal, uranium, or a waterfall-will have an effect on the earth’s ecology. So you have to fix that up, too. And so on.

The obvious solution was to get energy from someplace else. The sun wastes 99.999% of its energy trying to warm empty space. So in the fullness of time, they tossed up a couple of satellites with huge mirrors that turned sunlight into electricity. The electricity powered big lasers, also in orbit, that pumped energy down to ground-based collectors. From that point on, things got complicated, but suffice it to say that there eventually was plenty of extremely cheap energy which could be had at no expense to the environment.

They made the deserts bloom. Unfortunately, nature is perverse in this regard, and making one desert bloom will turn some perfectly good piece of real estate somewhere else into a new desert. What the hell, send up another satellite. It took quite a few satellites, but eventually the whole world was covered with green grass and nodding grain and the sweetest air this side of the Garden of Eden.

That this organic, polyunsaturated paradise was precariously maintained by the several million megawatts of brute power that screamed down from the sky every second-this was only the concern of a handful of scientists and technicians who smoked too much and snapped at their spouses.

Eleven billion people lived fairly comfortable lives because of those megawatts. But theorists estimated that if the power failed, fewer than one in ten would live out the year. And it was unlikely that the survivors would be very civilized.

It looked as if geoformy might provide a kind of insurance against this rather probable disaster: make an alternate earth, an independent colony on another planet. Then humanity could go on even if earth were in a shambles.

To this end they did a limited kind of geoformy on the moon, roofing over the crater Aristarchus and filling it up with air, water, crops, and farm animals. But it was too expensive a project to maintain, and so was abandoned after a few years.

Mankind might have lived on forever-however long that turned out to be-in this state of artificially maintained grace, and never geoformed any planet but Earth. But forty years ago today our universe changed, because of a random lightning bolt that struck a research building in the suburbs of College Park, Maryland.

(From Science for Everyman by Russel Groenke, Hartmen TFX, Chicago, 2059. Copyright © Hartmen House, 2059. R28, C10:)

The Levant-Meyer Translation is named after two American scientists, the one who accidentally discovered the process and the one who refined it into a practical device for interstellar travel.

Many scientific discoveries have come about accidentally. For instance, one of the times the element phosphorus was discovered, it was because an alchemist’s cook had forgotten to take dinner off the fire (see R12, C39). And Galvani’s dinner of frog legs-that twitched when touched by two different kinds of metal—led to the invention of the storage battery (see R21, C53).

The accident that happened to Tobias J. Levant was not culinary in nature, but literally a bolt from the blue. In his own words:

I had set up an experiment with a large (about two centimeters across) crystal of calcium bromide. Calcium bromide is an “ionic conductor,” and so conducts electricity only at relatively high temperatures.

The purpose of the experiment was to record changes in the lattice structure of the crystal as it was heated, with a small electric current going from one face to the opposite. A special kind of electron microscope was trained on the crystal.

There was a violent thunderstorm that night, and the laboratory lights had flickered several times, but I decided to go ahead with the experiment. The only part of the setup that was on line current was the small heating coil that encircled the crystal, which was not critical. The laboratory had an emergency generator that would go on automatically if the power failed.

A freak discharge of lightning struck the wall of the laboratory (ignoring the lightning rod on the roof) and a brilliant blue arc enveloped the heating coil, simultaneously with the thunderclap. The lights went out and there was a strong smell of burning insulation. I felt a sharp pain in my finger but had obviously been neither burnt nor electrocuted.

The lights came back on in another part of the laboratory-the wiring had been vaporized on my side-and I went over there to call the fire department. Once in the light, I could see that the tip of my forefinger had been sheared off. So I called a doctor as well.

I was a little stupid from shock and got the idea that I ought to go back into the laboratory-before it burned down-and find the end of my finger, so it could be sewn back on. I found a lantern and made my way through the smoke, back to my bench.

The heating coil was just a charred mess, but oddly enough the crystal itself seemed unharmed, glittering like a lens where it had fallen on the tabletop.

When the lightning struck, I had been adjusting the controls of the electron microscope, so I looked for my fingertip there. I didn’t find it, but did see an amazing sight.

A hole had been bored straight through the machine, in line with the axis of the crystal and exactly the shape of the crystal’s cross-section. At first I thought the lightning bolt had burnt through, but there was no charring or melt. That part of the electron microscope had simply ceased to exist.

It reappeared seconds later, in midair, directly over where the crystal lay, and fell with a great clatter. Pieces of metal, electronic components, and my fingertip, all in a jumble over the table-top.

With my good hand I retrieved the fingertip. It was frozen solid; so cold that it stuck to my skin and left a burn. The metal objects had become rimned with frost and were smoking-a kind of cold I had never seen outside of a cryogenics experiment.

While the firemen were tearing down the wall to get to the smoldering insulation, I was calling every scientist and engineer whom I knew well enough to drag away from dinner. We met in lantern-light around the shambles of the electron microscope.

That very evening, Theo Meyer came up with what turned out to be the correct explanation. While the doctor was tending to my wound, he said, “Tobias, you’ve invented a matter transmitter. Your finger just went to Jupiter and back.

(-Time TFX, 16 Oct 2034, Copyright © Time Inc., 2034)

It had gone considerably farther than Jupiter, of course. As Meyer himself was to find out, the minimum distance an object can be transported by the LMT is on the order of 10^14 kilometers, or about three parsecs. We’ll never know exactly where Tobias Levant’s fingertip went, but it was deep space.

It took several minutes for Jacque to force his way onto solid ground, or at least relatively solid mud. The bush he had followed for a reference mark was the only vegetation around; there was nothing nearby resembling grass or moss or even algae. From his vantage point he could see that the “forest” yonder was simply a clump of bushes slightly larger than his own bush.

“Time for the floater,” Carol said. They had been on the planet seven minutes.

“Depends.” The floater had been launched a little over five minutes after the Tamer team. It was somewhere on the planet, probably in the same hemisphere. But it was impossible to say exactly where it had appeared.

The floater would home in on a signal from Tania’s suit, the same signal that would be the focus for the returning LMT field when their time was up. If Groom-bridge’s atmosphere had something like a Heaviside layer so that the signal could bounce over the horizon, then it would take only a few minutes for the floater to get to them. If not, the vehicle would have to lift into orbit and quarter the planet, searching for the signal.

A few minutes later, the floater did appear, with an impressive sonic boom. It sensed the positions of all five Tamers and landed a safe distance away-in deep mud, unfortunately.

So Jacque spent his first couple of hours on Groom-bridge helping the others drag the heavy machine out of the muck, then laboriously scraping it clean.