Starborne Read online

  What matters right now is simply to locate Planet A in some kind of Einsteinian-universe coordinates, get ourselves as close as we can to it before we leave nospace, and shunt back into the real continuum within easy exploring range of Planet A’s star’s solar system.

  We’re supposed to know how to do that. If we can’t manage it, none of the other problems are going to be very important.

  And so we get started on the grand quest. I don’t seriously believe we’re going to find our New Earth on the very first try. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And there’d a chance — small, but real — that we’ll find what we need right away. Both of these two planets look as though they just may be the real thing, insofar as we can tell very much about that at these distances and with the scanning equipment at our disposal. What we have to do now is go out and take a close look.

  The morning transmission. Noelle, sitting with her back to the year-captain, listens to what he reads her and sends it coursing over a gap that now spans more than twenty light-years. “Wait,” she says. “Yvonne is calling for a repeat. From ‘metabolic.’”

  He pauses, goes back, reads again:

  “Metabolic balances remain normal, although, as earlier reported, some of the older members of the expedition have begun to show trace deficiencies of manganese and potassium. We are, of course, taking appropriate corrective steps, and—”

  Noelle halts him with a brusque gesture. The year-captain waits. She bends forward, forehead against the table, hands pressed tightly to her temples.

  “Static again,” she says. “It’s worse than ever today.”

  “Are you getting through at all?”

  “I’m getting through, yes. But I have to push, to push, push. And still Yvonne asks me for repeats.” She lifts her head and stares at him, her eyes locking on his in that weird intuitive way of hers. Her face is taut with tension. Her forehead is furrowed, and it glistens with a bright film of sweat. The year-captain wants to reach out to her, to hold her, to comfort her. She says huskily, “I don’t know what’s happening, year-captain.”

  “The distance—”

  “No!”

  “Better than twenty light-years.”

  “No,” she says again, a little less explosively this time. “We’ve already demonstrated that distance effects aren’t a factor. If there’s no falling off of signal after a million kilometers, after one light-year, after ten light-years — no measurable drop in clarity and accuracy whatever — then there shouldn’t be any qualitative diminution suddenly at any greater distance. Don’t you think I’ve thought about this?”

  “Of course you have, Noelle.”

  “It’s not as if we’re getting out of earshot of each other. We were in perfect contact at ten light-years, perfect at fifteen. Those are already immense distances. If we could manage that, we ought to be able to manage at any distance at all.”

  “But still, Noelle—”

  “Attenuation of signal is one thing, and interference is another. An attenuation curve is a gradual slope. Remember, Yvonne and I have had complete and undistorted mental access from the moment we left Earth until just a short while ago. And now — no, year-captain, it can’t be attenuation. This has to be some sort of interference. A purely local effect that we’re encountering in this region of the galaxy.”

  “Yes, like sunspots, I know. Perhaps when we head out for Planet A, things will clear up.”

  “Perhaps,” Noelle says crisply. “Let’s start again, shall we, year-captain? Yvonne’s calling for signal. Go on from’manganese and potassium.’ ”

  ” — manganese and potassium. We are taking appropriate corrective steps—”

  The year-captain visualizes the contact between the two sisters as an arrow whistling from star to star, as fire speeding through a shining tube, as a river of pure force coursing down a celestial wave guide. He sees the joining of those two minds as a stream of pure light binding the moving ship to the far-off mother world. Sometimes he dreams of them both, Yvonne and Noelle, Noelle and Yvonne, standing facing each other across the cosmos with their hands upraised and light streaming from their fingertips, and the glowing bond that stretches across the galaxy between the two sisters gives off so brilliant a radiance that he stirs and moans and presses his forehead into the pillow.

  I have a funny idea,” Sieglinde says, and everyone looks up, for Sieglinde is not noted for fanny ideas. Nor is there anything at all comic in the unusually thin, high, strained tone in which she is speaking now. But something has been building up in her for the past half hour, and now it comes erupting forth. “What if we throw the switch and the ship doesn’t want to come out of nospace?” she asks. “What if we find that we simply can’t reach this Planet A, or any other realspace destination? What do we do then? Do we have a fallback plan?”

  This is the first brainstorming session for the group that is planning the change of course. They are meeting in the control cabin. Intelligence readouts embedded in the curved wall glow all around them, soft emanations of pulsing light, amethyst and amber and jade. Sieglinde and Roy and Heinz and Paco and Julia and the year-captain have been talking for two hours straight and they are all getting tired and a little silly now.

  “If that happens, then we find a nice nospace planet somewhere and we settle down there instead,” Paco answers. “That’s our fallback plan.”

  Roy gives him a glowering stare. “What you say is absurd and irrelevant. There aren’t any nospace planets. Such a thing is a logical impossibil—”

  Heinz, smiling as always but displaying an edge of controlled annoyance, says to Sieglinde, “Why do you even ask these things? This is a meeting to discuss a survey mission into realspace. You’re conjuring up imaginary demons for us. The stardrive wasn’t designed to fail. It will not fail.”

  “And if it does?” Sieglinde asks.

  “Heinz is right,” says the year-captain wearily. “It won’t fail. It simply won’t. You can count on that.”

  “I count on nothing,” Sieglinde says, speaking in a throaty mock-dramatic way. Maybe sheis trying to be funny. But her eyes are strangely bright. She seems possessed by some powerful contrary energy that will not relent. “Anything may happen. We are dealing with tremendous physical forces and we still have relatively little experience with this equipment. And we work with stochastic processes here. Do you understand what I am saying? Each jump we make is in effect a gamble. The odds are in our favor each time, of course. But with each jump there is always the possibility of the random event, whenever the stardrive is changed from one state to another. It is here in the equations: the random factor, the fatal probability. The more often we jump, the more often we expose ourselves to that small but real probability. And on one of our jumps we may leap from one nospace to another instead of returning to realspace, or experience something even worse. It is possible.”

  “Not highly probable, though,” says Heinz. “The odds favor us, you say.”

  “Not highly probable, no, but possible, distinctly possible, and what is possible is worth a little thought when that possibility can be fatal to our endeavor. You are an engineer, Heinz; you deal in tangible things, in absolute concepts of what works and what does not I am a mathematician. We are more poetic than you, do you understand me? I deal in axioms and certainties; but I also know that beneath the axioms lie only assumptions, and beneath the assumptions lies — chaos!”

  “Rely on faith, then, if you can’t trust your own equations,” says the year-captain. “We all took a leap into the dark when we signed on. If you didn’t think the drive would work property, you should have stayed home.”

  “I say only that there is a finite chance that it will not.”

  “And therefore — ?”

  “And therefore, as I have just said, the more jumps we make, the greater the likelihood that one of them will be a bad one. And so I argue that we ought not to make any shunt that is not absolutely necessary. By which I mean that we should not attempt a realspa
ce reentry without complete assurance that the world we have picked is likely to be a place where we’ll want to settle, because the risk of moving from one reality state to another is so great that we will want to attempt it only when there is a high order of probability that the risk is worth taking.”

  Paco says, in what is for him an uncharacteristically subdued and thoughtful tone, “You know, there’s something to that. The odds that any given Earth-size planet has anything like Earthlike living conditions are — what? A hundred to one against? So we may find ourselves having to make a hundred jumps, five hundred, a thousand, if we don’t get lucky right away. Which multiplies the shunt risks enormously, if I follow Sieglinde correctly. If there’s any real likelihood that the drive might fail, we ought to be damned sure ahead of time that whatever place we’re jumping to is—”

  Julia, who has the actual responsibility for operating the nospace drive, says irritably, “This is a stupid conversation, and we’re not supposed to be stupid people. Why are we even discussing this? There’s been a vote and we’re going to take a look at Planet A, because we have good reason to believe that it’s the sort of place that we came out here to find, as far as we can tell without actually getting up close to it and taking a good look, and that’s all there is to it. Heinz is right. Sieglinde is pulling demons out of nowhere. When we make our next shunt, the stardrive will behave exactly as we want it to behave, and you all know it. And even if there’s some slight mathematical risk hanging on each jump, we’ve already reached agreement that Planet A is a place worth taking risks to find. Our job is to find the way to Planet A, not to debate hypothetical nightmare scenarios.”

  “Yes, we are not stupid,” says Heinz. “But we are restless. We live in a confined place and we think too much. And if we think long enough, eventually we begin to think stupidly. Enough of this, Sieglinde. We will never find any place to live at all, if we are too terrified of these probability problems to undertake even a single survey mission. You knew all this when we set out. Why did you wait until now to say anything? If somebody else had raised this string of last-minute objections while you were trying to get on with the work at hand, you’d be trying to cut off his head by now.” He turns to the year-captain. “Rule her out of order, will you? And then let’s adjourn.”

  “What do you say, Sieglinde?” the year-captain asks. “Can we drop this, please?”

  The big woman shrugs. The manic force has gone out of her as suddenly as it came. She has made her little bit of trouble and is ready to relent. She looks tired and defeated, and to the year-captain’s relief she seems as ready to be done with this as the rest of them. The point she has raised is a troublesome one, but, as Heinz has observed, this is not the moment to be discussing it. And in an almost toneless voice Sieglinde says, “Whatever you want, captain. Whatever you want.”

  Until now the starship, in the absence of any specific destination, has been following an essentially undirected path through the nospace tube, simply traveling away from Earth rather than toward some particular star. Its course, such as it is, has been chosen to carry it into one of the more densely populated areas of the immediate sector of the celestial sphere in which Earth’s sun is located; but the intent of the planners of the voyage was that the voyagers would at some point redirect the ship toward a star they would choose themselves on the basis of planetary data collected in the course of the journey.

  Now that time has arrived. The Wotan must swing its course through nospace toward the star that is the primary of Zed Hesper’s Planet A; and when it has reached the vicinity of that star, it must break itself out of the nospace tube in which it has been traveling and return to the Einsteinian continuum, so that surveillance of Planet A may be carried out by ordinary spacefaring methods, an orbital circuit in a probe ship, direct visual inspection, and then perhaps an actual landing if the survey of surface conditions from nearby is in any way encouraging.

  Nospace travel is a fundamentally nonlinear phenomenon. If you propose to make a surface journey between two cities on Earth that are three thousand kilometers apart — Los Angeles and Montreal, let us say — you will expect to cover a distance of three thousand kilometers during the course of the trip, no more, no less, and the elapsed time of the journey will be a function of the average time it takes to coverone kilometer, multiplied by three thousand. There are no shortcuts; there are no exceptions to the rule that one must travel a distance of three thousand kilometers in order to make a journey of three thousand kilometers. Not so in nospace. Linear measurements applicable in the classical continuum have no meaning there. Spatial relationships between points in the universe that have been determined by conventional means are irrelevant in nospace. Nospace is all shortcuts, nothingbut shortcuts. In that special space, flattened and curved and doubled and redoubled upon itself as it is, the logic of linear travel is useless and paradoxes abound. Dimensions are collapsed and transformed; the infinite universe is infinitely adjacent to itself; all normal understanding of such concepts as “near” and “far,” “here” and “there,” “toward” and “away from” must be discarded. In nospace it may be quicker to travel between two stars five hundred light-years apart than between two that are close neighbors. There may — there is at least theoretical basis for the notion — be no clear and consistently calculable relationship between realworld distance between two points and nospace transit time between those points at all.

  There are, however, proxies and equivalents. With the aid of appropriate computational power one can plot a set of transformations that will carry one through nospace along quasi-geodetic lines corresponding to actual realspace vectors and allow one actually to reach a preselected destination. At least, so the governing equations of nospace travel demonstrate, and in the brief experimental flights of theColumbus and then theUltima Thule those equations were found to hold true.

  TheColumbus, after making a journey of not quite one light-year from Earth in a period of eleven Earth-days, was able successfully to reenter Einsteinian space, accurately measure its distance from its starting point, and, returning to nospace without difficulty, carry out its homeward voyage in the same span of time. TheUltima Thule, going in a different direction, found itself a little more than a light-year from home after just nine days: it, too, was able to move out of nospace and back into it and to aim itself satisfactorily toward Earth. Despite Sieglinde’s sudden willful skepticism, the year-captain prefers to think that there is every reason to believe that the Wotan would have just as little difficulty redirecting itself in nospace in order to head itself toward the Einsteinian location of the star it meant to visit, and then in leaving nospace to execute a survey of the habitability of that star’s planet. He understands her point that there is some risk with every shunt and that the more shunts they make, the greater is the number of times they place themselves in jeopardy. But they must find a world where they can live; and for that, the taking of certain risks is unavoidable. She is simply overwrought. He has no regrets about quashing her objection to the survey shunt.

  The year-captain,ex officio, is the head of the team that will calculate and achieve this maneuver. But he is no expert on such things; the real work of the group will be done by five other crew members. Roy and Sieglinde will handle the mathematical aspects. Paco is the master navigator. Julia programs and operates the star drive. Heinz, the ship’s designer, is the prime generalist who comprehends all of the specialties of the other members of the team; he will be the interface, the grand communicator, the true captain of the enterprise.

  This first meeting of the group has been only a preliminary one. Hesper was there for the beginning of it. He has shown the others where, in normal-space reckoning, the star of Planet A is located, according to the set of correlatives that he has worked out. After Hesper goes, there is much consulting of star-maps and the ship’s navigation circuitry. There will be need for much more, before the actual jump is attempted. Ultimately the drive intelligence itself is going to do the
real work of getting them there; but the intelligence, clever though it is, is as finite as the minds of its makers. It has only limited ability to compensate for bungled instructions. They must figure out precisely what it is they want to do before they authorize the drive intelligence to do it. Or as precisely as they are able to manage. And then pray. But to whom? And with what hope that their prayers will be heard?

  Sieglinde’s outburst convinces the year-captain that the meeting has gone on long enough. He keeps them together only a few minutes more, so that he can summarize this day’s work and get a consensus vote for the log. Then he adjourns.

  Sieglinde is the first to leave, a fraction of a second later, striding from the room without a word, the implacable stride of a Valkyrie. She was poorly named, the year-captain thinks: Brünnhilde should have been her name, not Sieglinde. Paco and Roy go out together, arm in arm, bound for the lounge and their millionth game of Go. Julia trails after them.

  Heinz alone remains with the year-captain. He stands before him, rocking lightly back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Are you worried?” he asks, after a moment.

  The year-captain looks up. “About what?”

  “Sieglinde’s hypothesis. Drive malfunction.”

  “No. Not in the slightest. Should I be?”

  Heinz smiles oddly, as though he is smiling within his smile. “That drive will take us from one end of the galaxy to another, a thousand times in and out of nospace and no problem. I promise you that.”