Complete Short Fiction, page 235
“That’s what it looked like to me,” agreed her husband. “I suggested to Jeff that he just collect measures for a while, hoping that the bulk of material would convince him there must be something to it, but I don’t know whether it’ll work.”
Sarjuk pondered for a minute or two. “I can’t think of anything better, myself,” she admitted finally, “except that you’d better do everything you can to keep up their confidence in the equipment—even if it takes more than its fair share of your time. If necessary, I’ll juggle watch assignments even further.”
“Hmph. I hope it won’t be. I like my work, but enough is as good as too much. That telescope is working; there are bursts of neutrinos coming from somewhere near that whirligig pair, whether Jeff and his friends want to believe it or not.”
“I’m willing to take your word for it—so far.” He looked at her sharply as she made the qualification. She smiled. “I just hope you don’t have to do their work as well, and come up with a theory to satisfy them. But forget all that for a few hours—no one can work all the time.”
Sarjuk did not actually have to reassign watches, but Garabed spent a great deal of time on the neutrino telescope during the next ten days. By that time, every one of its component modules had been replaced at least once, and the decreasing distance had improved image resolution to the point where it began to look as though at least some of the bursts were centered on, if not actually originating in, the neutron star.
By that time, also, the Manzara had made two minor—very minor—orbit corrections. The fusers had been used, and Feroxtant had seen for himself that his assistant had not been hallucinating. He did not stop his casts, however; there seemed no point in debating the matter until more data could be secured. Therefore, the Longline continued to emit its own neutrino bursts as it left the neutron star and when it made its reversal some three hundred thousand kilometers away.
To the surprise of Garabed and the relief of the captain, the physicists were beginning to accept the reality of their data, and were eagerly awaiting the completion of the capture maneuvers. The plan was to place the Manzara at the mass center of the white dwarf-neutron star pair, holding the umbrella toward the dwarf; in effect, this would place the ship’s instruments at the origin of a system-centered coordinate set, and the observers’ relative motion should be zero. This would avoid a lot of variables . . .
The capture maneuver was artistic, though hard for nonspecialists to appreciate. Sforza cut as closely as he could first to one of the bodies and then the other, choosing his vectors so that the inevitable gain in kinetic energy as he approached each would be more than offset by the loss as he withdrew, and combining this with an initial approach direction which caused each nearparabolic deflection to carry the Manzara from one body toward the other. It would have been elegant, as Sforza admitted, to do the whole job with a single application of steering power to get them into the proper initial approach curve; unfortunately, it was impossible. The period of the system remained just below thirteen minutes—which cut things tight enough as it was—while that of the ship was constantly decreasing as it surrendered energy to the little stars.
The job was finally finished, with the umbrella warding off the radiation flood from the hot star some twenty thousand miles off the bow and the vessel’s stern pointing toward the invisible mystery a little more than twice as far away. The data continued to flood in.
Feroxtant had also received a flood of data. It was not easy to interpret; one fact common to both his and the human universe is that the number of independent equations must equal or exceed the number of unknowns before any certainty is possible. The actual power drain on the Manzara’s fusers had been varying in complex fashion; so had the ship’s distance from the neutron star. Hence, the neutrino flux recorded by the Longlines sensing equipment had varied widely and erratically during the many minutes of Sforza’s maneuvering. Feroxtant felt subjectively that the variation was not random, but could find no pattern in it. He had stopped casting very quickly, and called Wattimlan back aboard. The youngster was equally mystified, though happy that his commander had also seen the strange readings.
“No star ever acted like that.” Feroxtant was firm. “I don’t know what we’ve found—well, what you’ve found, to be honest—but it’s new.”
“But—stars aren’t the only things that give off neutrinos,” Wattimlan pointed out rather timidly. “Ship’s accelerators—food factories—”
“I thought of that. Of course artificial processes emit neutrinos, too; but what imaginable process would produce them in a pattern which varies like this?”
Wattimlan had no answer.
Oddly enough, Garabed’s work load eased off; the physicists were accepting the information and had turned back into scientists. Sarjuk felt that the earlier problem must have been mere inertia—their minds had been running free, except for the planning of possible experiments, for nearly a year and a half; they had simply slipped clutches briefly at the first contact with reality in so many months.
She might have been right. Garabed wasn’t sure, but didn’t argue; he enjoyed the respite, and listened with interest to the questions flying about. Why should a neutron star emit neutrinos at all? Why in separate bursts? Why, if the Sirius system had started as a single unit, had its least massive member reached the neutron star stage first? Why were the white dwarf and its companion so close together—so close that when both were main sequence stars their radii would have overlapped? Why, if its magnetic field meant anything, was the neutron star in locked rotation facing the dwarf rather than spinning several times a second like all the others known?
Answers were not forthcoming. Physical data—size, mass, detailed motion, even temperature and conductivity—were flowing in nicely; but any question beginning with “why” remained wide open.
The white dwarf was being very cooperative, though it was not much to look at through a filter—no sunspots, no corona, no prominences or faculae; simply a featureless disc. Nevertheless, information about its internal structure was coming in very well, and none of it was very surprising. It was now clear that the neutrino bursts were not coming from this body; as far as nuclear activity was concerned, it was dead.
The neutrino telescope had been shut down during the capture maneuvers, and the pause when Feroxtant had stopped casting for a time had been missed.
It was equally clear that not all of the bursts were coming from the neutron star, either. Just half of them were—or at least, from a region within about eight hundred kilometers of it, that being the resolution limit of the telescope at this distance. The other half appeared to originate randomly at any point within about a light-second of the same center. They still came in pairs, one of each pair at the center and one away from it, with pauses of a few seconds every ten to twenty minutes—not completely random, but not orderly enough for anyone to have worked out a system yet.
“You have the betting look on your face again. I thought you were going to stop until the work let up.” Garabed looked at the captain, trying to decide how serious she might be.
“It has been easier lately. This isn’t to take care of boredom, though. It’s just one of those sure things. Would you care to allow any odds that the astrophysics crowd won’t be begging, within the next twenty-four hours, that we go into a parking orbit around the neutron star at tidal limit distance?”
Sarjuk gave a snort of disbelief. “They must know better. A few thousand more kilograms of hydrogen and we’ll have to get fuel from one of the planets to get home.”
“Well, we probably can. The big one seems to have water.”
“With enough deuterium already? Or do we build a separator?”
“We could. We expected to be here for as much as three years anyway, and personally I wouldn’t mind settling down into a less hectic life than this for a while.”
“The idea was, and remains, to make a preliminary survey and get the results home. The three-year plan was contingent on either unforeseen complication—just a safety margin—or on the making of some really fundamental discovery important enough to demand immediate work, rather than wait for the next expedition.”
“And how important would that have to be?” asked her husband.
“That will have to be settled when—and if—it happens. Until something of the sort comes up, we plan to return as soon as the planned operation—”
“Was the neutron star part of anyone’s plan?”
“No, but you know as well as I that it can really be handled only by a group set up specifically for it. No one even dreamed that such a thing would be here. I can’t see staying on and trying to do that job ourselves, even though we could live in the Manzara indefinitely. And, as I still think they know too well to ask, I will not sanction the fuel expense of getting into a parking orbit as far down in a gravity well like this as they’d need. And I won’t do any betting on the matter, dear husband.”
“I didn’t really think you would. I’ll cook up something even more certain.”
He refused to be more specific, and the captain knew him well enough by now not to try very hard.
The Manzara’s station between the two ex-stars was of course unstable, so Sforza and his colleagues would permit no interruption in their constant watch of the ballistics computer and its display. There were other, equally versatile units on board, however, and Garabed had no trouble getting time on one of these; he had an idea to check. He would have been as reluctant as any physicist to describe it to anyone; he would have admitted at the time, as was charged later by amateur psychologists, that it stemmed purely from wishful thinking. He made a point of setting it up in private, and looked for a long time at the display when the computer had done its work. Then he cleared the setup, and spent some time trying to decide whether to break it first to his wife or to Par dales.
The decision brought a smile to his face.
“Jeff,” he remarked to the physicist a few minutes later, “I don’t see why you fellows have had so much trouble with those pairs of neutrino bursts. I was just running your records through to check out one of the computer cores, and it seems perfectly straightforward to me.”
“Straightforward? How do you mean?”
“Well, the pattern is so simple. One of each pair is at the neutron star, as you’ve been admitting, and the other is always on the surface of a hemisphere just over a light-second in radius, centered on the neutron star and with its axis pointing—”
“Show me!” the physicist was satisfyingly jolted.
Garabed led him back to the station where he had tried his idea, and set up the material again. It showed as he had said; he had arranged the plot on a coordinate system which rotated with the Sirius B doublet, so the two main bodies showed no motion. The hundreds of luminous points which represented the records of the neutrino bursts were indeed arranged in a nearly perfect hemisphere for the one part, and concentrated around the neutron star for the other.
“Our plot was all over the place—nothing like that regular!” exclaimed Pardales. “What did you plug in there? You must have put in some extra data—”
“Not exactly,” replied Garabed. “There’s my program. Actually, I left something out. Look it over.” There was silence for a minute or two.
“You took for granted, as we did, that there was a causal relation between the members of each pair. You allowed for travel time from point of origin of each flash to the ship; you allowed for travel time from one of each pair to the other—wait a minute! No, you didn’t! You assumed they were really simultaneous!”
“Right,” grinned Garabed. “No travel time. Think it over, friend; I have to talk to the captain.” Pardales did not notice his departure. It is all very well to admit that coincidence can account for only so much; but when nothing else believable can account for it either . . .
“Captain!” called the instrument technician. Sarjuk was on the bridge, and there were others present, so he automatically avoided familiarity. “I think you’ll be having another request from Physics very shortly. I think I can forestall a suggestion of moving the ship, if you’ll let me take a tender out for a while.”
Sarjuk frowned. “That will take fuel, and are you a good enough pilot to play around in a gravity well this deep?”
“I don’t insist on driving it myself. Look, they are going to have another spell of doubting the neutrino telescope—I’ll bet on that. I want to take out the tender so they can check the scope against its engine emissions, and kill that argument before it gets started. Isn’t that worth a kilogram or two of hydrogen?”
Garabed’s words were very straightforward, but his wife thought she could detect something under them. She looked at him sharply. “Is that the whole thing?” she asked.
He knew better than to lie to her. “Not entirely,” he admitted, “but isn’t it enough?” Their eyes locked for several seconds; the others on the bridge carefully concentrated on their own jobs for the moment. Then she nodded.
“All right. Plan to stay inside one kilogram. Sforza will drive you.”
Minutes later the tender was hurtling away from the dying stars. Garabed would have climbed straight out along their orbital axis, with little regard for energy expenditure; Sforza, as a matter of habit and policy, cut out in the plane of their common orbits, slipped behind the neutron star at minimum safe distance, and let it sling them outward. Once he could see that they were safely away, Garabed made his key request.
“Will you let me have it for a few minutes? I want to change thrust patterns so Jeff and his friends can check their gear. There’s no damage I can do, I take it.”
“None that I can guess at,” replied the ballistician. “If there’s anything here to run into, I don’t know about it either. Go ahead.”
Garabed fingered the thrust potentiometer and began changing it in a careful pattern—alternately high and low, once, once again; twice, then four times; thrice, then nine times. Again and again he went through the cycle, while Sforza watched in amusement.
“It’s lucky this is a warp drive. You’d have broken our straps with straight reaction. If I were a mystery fan, I’d say you were playing spy sending code.”
“It does suggest that a little, doesn’t it?” acknowledged Garabed.
It was not the code which first caught Feroxtant’s attention; the drive units of the Manzara had bothered him enough, and the addition of the tender’s power plant gave him at least as much of a shock as Garabed had just given Pardales. The notion that anything could travel less rapidly than neutrinos was as hard for him to swallow as the demon hypothesis. Since neither his senses nor his imagination could provide data on the direction of the human machines, he could not be sure of their slow motion; but his attention, and Wattimlan’s, were firmly focused on them while the two explorers continued their casting for the white dwarf—or rather, for its slowly developing neutronium core, still so small that their thousands of random shots had not struck it.
Garabed’s code—the squares of the first three numbers—started the two on an argument which, by human standards, would have gone on for hours. Eventually, more to prove Wattimlan wrong than because he expected any results, Feroxtant performed a multiple reversal in open space which produced neutrino bursts closer to the neutron star; and he deliberately produced a set of four, followed by sixteen. He then brought the Longline back to her mooring in the neutron star’s surface film, and sent a frantic report to his home star. By the time Garabed’s five-twenty-five reply was spreading into space, the word had come that scientists were on the way. Not even the most conservative of beings could doubt that a series of numbers followed by their squares could originate in anything but a living mind—perhaps acting indirectly, but still a mind. It might have been some sort of recording—but it had responded when Feroxtant extended the number series. It responded with neutrinos, which had reached Feroxtant’s ship very quickly, in spite of the fact that they traveled with the ultimate slowness, so the mind—or minds—must be close to the newly discovered star. The discovery of an unknown intelligent race was worth a major research project—even if no one believed that they could travel slower than neutrinos.
“Just a minute.” Jeb Garabed was not a member of Policy, but he had the common right to speak up to the group. “We don’t dare go back to the Solar system at this stage, and you know it. We are sure now that these faster-than-light things have a different time rate than we do; if we disappeared from here for twenty years, without any more attempt to talk with them, they might be extinct—or at least, their culture might be, and they could have forgotten us. I know it takes fuel to talk to them, and we’re running low—though we could certainly build smaller fusion generators if all that’s needed is neutrino output. The only sensible thing to do is get over to planet Four, which we’re sure has water, set up a deuterium plant so we have no power problems, and just settle down to do research—which is what we’re here for anyway. We can stay right here, and keep sensibly and happily busy, and live very good lives for nineteen years until the next expedition gets here.”
“If they come,” interjected his wife.
“You know they’ll come.” Garabed spoke directly to her, but did not forget the others. “They can’t do anything else. The whole argument against interstellar flight has been the time it would take, as long as we thought the speed of light was a limit. Now we know it isn’t, and however short-sighted human beings may be, they don’t live happily with the certainty that someone can do something they can’t. Remember your history! What made it impossible to keep the nuclear bomb a secret? Leaky spy shielding? Balloon juice! The only important piece of information was given away free by the original builders—the fact that it could be done! There’ll be shiploads of people here from the Solar system as soon as they can make it. They’ll start so fast after our waves get there that we’ll probably have to rescue the first few—they’ll have set out without proper preparation. Sirius A-IV may not be really habitable, but there’ll be a human colony here in twenty years—or sooner, if my old idea is right. That radio message of ours may be all that’s needed, after all. Anyone want to bet whether it’s ten years or twenty before they get here?”
