A Hole In Space, page 10
"In spades," said Karin. "You'd tie up the Corliss accelerator for a week solid. The whole trip would take about thirty four years starting from the launching of the drop ship."
"And if it could be done now it could always be done; we couldn't ever forget it until we'd done it. And it would get more difficult every year because Lazarus would be getting further away."
"It'll nag us the rest of our lives." Karin leaned back in Jerryberry's guest chair. His apartment was not big: three rooms, with doors knocked between them, in a complex that had been a motel on the Pacific Coast Highway thirty years ago. "There's another thing. What are we really doing if we do it Whyte's way? We're talking the public into not backing a space project. Suppose they got the habit? I don't know about you-"
"I just plain like rocket ships," said Jerryberry.
"Okay. Can you really talk the public into this?"
"No. Lazarus didn't even cost this much, and Lazarus almost didn't get built, they tell me. And Lazarus failed, and so did the colony project. So: no. But I'm not sure I can bring myself to talk them out of it."
"Jansen, just how bad is public support for the Space Authority?"
"Oh... it isn't even that, exactly. The public is getting unhappy about JumpShift itself."
"What? 'What for?"
"CBA runs a continuous string of public opinion polls. The displacement booths did genuinely bring some unique problems with them-"
"They solved some too. Maybe you don't remember."
Jerryberry smiled. "I'm not old enough. Neither are you. Slums, traffic jams, plane crashes-nobody's that old except Robin Whyte, and if you try to tell him the booths brought problems of their own, he thinks you're an ungrateful bastard.
But they did. You know they did."
"Like flash crowds?"
"Sure. Any time anything interesting happens anywhere, some newstaper is going to report it. Then people flick in to see it from all over the United States. If it gets big enough you get people flicking in just to see the crowd, plus pickpockets, looters, cops, more newstapers, anyone looking for publicity.
"Then there's the drug problem. There's no way to stop smuggling. You can pick a point in the South Pacific with the same longitude and opposite latitude as any given point in the USA and most of Canada, and teleport from there without worrying about the Earth's rotational velocity. All it takes is two booths. You can't stop the drugs from coming in. I remember one narcotics cop telling me to think of it as evolution in action."
"God."
"Oh, and the ecologists don't like the booths. They make wilderness areas too available. And the cops have their problems. A man used to be off the hook if he could prove he was somewhere else when a crime happened. These days you have to suspect anyone, anywhere. The real killer gets lost in the crowd.
"But the real beef is something else. There are people you have to get along with, right?"
"Not me," said Karin.
'Well, you're unusual. Everyone in the world lives next door to his boss, his mother-in-law, the girl he's trying to drop, the guy he's fighting for a promotion. You can't move away from anyone. It bugs people."
"What can they do? Give up the booths?"
"No. There aren't any more cars or planes or railroads. But they can give up space."
Karin thought about that. Presently she gave her considered opinion. "Idiots."
"'No. They're just like all of us: they want something for nothing. Have you ever solved a problem without finding another problem just behind it?"
"Sure. My husband... well, no, I was pretty lonely after we split up. But I didn't sit down and cry about it. When someone hands me a problem, I solve it. Jansen, we're going at this wrong. I feel it."
"Okay, so we're doing it wrong. What's the right way?"
"I don't know. We've got better ships than anyone dreamed of in 2004. That's fact."
"Define ship."
"Ship! Vehicle! Never mind, I see the point. Don't push it."
So he didn't ask her what a 747 circling the sinking Titanic could have done to help, or whether a Greyhound bus could have crossed the continent in 1849. He said, "We know how to rescue Lazarus. What's the big decision? We do or we don't."
"Well?"
"I don't know. We watch the opinion polls. I think ... I think we'll wind up neutral. Present the project as best we can finagle it up. Tell 'em the easiest way to do it, tell 'em what it'll cost, and leave it at that."
The opinion polls were a sophisticated way to read mass minds. Over the years sampling techniques had improved enormously, raising their accuracy and 1owering their cost. Public thinking generally came in blocks:
JumpShift's news release provoked no immediate waves. But one block of thinking began to surface. A significant segment of humanity was old enough to have watched teevee coverage of the launching of Lazarus. A smaller, still significant segment had helped to pay for it with their taxes.
It had been the most expensive space project of all time. Lazarus had been loved. Nothing but love could have pushed the taxpayer into paying such a price. Even those who had fought the program thirty-one years ago now remembered Lazarus with love.
The reaction came mainly from older men and women, but it was worldwide. Save Lazarus.
Likewise there were those dedicated to saving the ecology from the intrusion of Man. For them the battle was never-ending. True, industrial wastes were no longer dumped into the air and water the worst of these were flicked through a drop ship in close orbit around Venus, to disappear into the atmosphere of that otherwise useless world. But the ultimate garbage-maker was himself the most dangerous of threats. Hardly a wilderness was left on Earth that was not being settled by men with JumpShift booths.
They would have fought JumpShift on any level. JumpShift proposed to leave three men and three women falling across the sky forever. To hell with their profit margin: save Lazarus.
There were groups who would vote against anything done in space. The returns from space exploration had been great, admittedly, but they all derived from satellites in close orbit around Earth: observatories, weather satellites, teevee transmitters, solar power plants. These were dirt cheap these days, and their utility had surely been obvious to any moron since Neanderthal times.
But what use were the worlds of other stars? Even the worlds of the solar system had given no benefit to Man, except for Venus, which made an excellent garbage dump. Better to spend the money on Earth. Abandon Lazarus.
But most of the public voted a straight Insufficient Data. And of course they were right.
Robin Whyte was nervous. He was trying not to show it, but he paced too much and he smiled too much and he kept clasping his hands behind his back. "Sit down, for Christ's sake," said Jerryberry. "Relax. They can't throw tomatoes through their teevee screens."
Whyte laughed. "We're working on that in the research division. Are you almost ready?"
"An hour to broadcast. I've already done the interview with Doctor Sagan. It's on tape." "Let's see what you've got."
What CBA had for this broadcast was a fully detailed rescue project, complete with artist's conceptions. Jerryberry spread the paintings along a wall. "Using your artists, whom we hired for a week with JumpShift's kind permission. Aren't they beautiful? We also have a definite price tag. Two billion three hundred million new dollars."
Whyte's laugh was still shaky. "That's right on the borderline. Barely feasible." He was looking at an artist's conception of the launching of the rescue mission: a stream of spherical fuel tanks and larger, shark-shaped Phoenix hulls pouring up through the ringed tower of the Corliss accelerator. More components rested on flat rock at~ the launch end. "So Gem thought of it first. I must be getting old."
"You don't expect to think of everything, do you? You once told me that your secretary thought of the fresh-water tower gimmick during a drunken office party."
"True, too. I paid her salary for thirty years, hoping she'd do it again, but she never did ... Do you think they'll buy it?"
"No."
"I guess not." 'Whyte seemed to shake himself. "'Well, maybe we'll use it some other time. It's a useful technique, shipping fuel in Phoenix hulls. We'll probably need it to explore, say, Barnard's Star, which is moving pretty censored fast with respect to Sol."
"We don't have to tell them they can't do it. Just tell 'em the price tag and let them make up their own minds."
"Listen, I had a hand in launching Lazarus. The launching boosters were fueled by JumpShift units."
"I know."
Whyte, prowling restlessly, was back in front of the launching scene. "I always thought they should have drilled right through the asteroid. Leave the Corliss accelerator open at both ends."
Activity in the sound studio had diminished. Against a white wall men had placed a small table and two chairs, and a battery of teevee cameras and lights were aiming their muzzles into the scene.
Jerryberry touched Whyte's arm. "Let's go sit down over there." Whyte might freeze up if confronted by the cameras too suddenly. Give him a chance to get used to it.
Whyte didn't move. His head was cocked to one side, and his lips moved silently.
"What's the matter?"
Whyte made a shushing motion.
Jerryberry waited.
Presently Whyte looked up. "You'll have to scrap this. How much time have we got?"
"But- An hour. Less. What do you mean, scrap it?"
Whyte smiled. "I just thought of something. Get me to a telephone, will you? Has Gem still got the schematics of the Corliss accelerator?"
An hour to broadcast time, and Jerryberry began to shake.
"Robin, are we going to have a broadcast or not?"
Whyte patted him on the arm. "Count on it."
Gen Jones's big white-on-blue schematic had been thumbtacked to the white wall over the table and chairs. Below it, Jerryberry Jansen leaned back, seemingly relaxed, watching Whyte move about with a piece of chalk.
A thumbtacked blueprint and a piece of chalk. It was slipshod by professional standards. Robin Whyte had not appeared on teevee in a couple of decades. He made professional mistakes: he turned his back on the audience, he covered what he was drawing with the chalk. But he didn't look nervous. He grinned into the cameras as if he could see old friends out there.
"The heart of it is the Corliss accelerator," he said, and with the chalk he drew an arc underneath the tower's launch cradle, through the rock itself. "We excavate here, carve out a space to get the room. Then-" He drew it in.
A JumpShift drop ship receiver cage.
"The rescue ship is self-transmitting, of course. As it leaves the accelerator it transmits back to the launch end. What we have then is an electromagnetic cannon of infinite length. We spin it on its axis so it doesn't get out of alignment. We give the ship an acceleration of one gee for a bit less than two months to boost it to the velocity of Lazarus, then we flick it out to the drop ship.
"This turns out to be a relatively cheap operation," Whyte said. "We could put some extra couches in Phoenix and use that. We could even use the accelerator to boost the drop ship up to speed, but that would take four months, and we'd have to do it now. It would mean building another Corliss accelerator, but-", Whyte grinned into the cameras, "we should have done that anyway, years ago. There's enough traffic to justify it.
"Return voyage is just as simple. After they pick up the crew of Lazarus, they flick to the Pluto drop ship, which is big enough to catch them, then to the Mercury drop ship to lose their potential energy, then back to the Corliss accelerator drop cage. We use the accelerator for another two months to slow it down. The cost of an interstellar drop ship is half a billion new dollars. A new Corliss accelerator would cost us about the same, and we can use it commercially. Total price is half of what Lazarus cost." Whyte put down the chalk and sat.
Jerryberry said, "When can you go ahead with this, Doctor?"
"JumpShift will submit a time-and-costs schedule to the UN Space Authority. I expect it'll go to the world vote."
"Thank you, Doctor Whyte, for..." It was a formula. When the cameras were off Jerryberry sagged in his chair. "Now I can say it. Boy, are you out of practice."
"What do you mean? Didn't I get it across?"
"I think you did. I hope so. You smiled a lot too much. On camera that makes you look self-satisfied."
"I know, you told me before," said Whyte. "I couldn't help it. I just felt so good."
There Is a Tide
THEN, THE PLANET had no name. It circles a star which in 2830 lay beyond the fringe of known space, a distance of nearly forty light-years from Sol. The star is a G3, somewhat redder than Sol, somewhat smaller. The planet, swinging eighty million miles from its primary in a reasonably circular orbit, is a trifle cold for human tastes.
In the year 2830 one Louis Gridley Wu happened to be passing. The emphasis on accident is intended. In a universe the size of ours almost anything that can happen, will. Take the coincidence of his meeting-
But we'll get to that.
Louis Wu was one hundred and eighty years old. As a regular user of boosterspice, he didn't show his years. If he didn't get bored first, or broke, he might reach a thousand.
"But," he sometimes told himself, "not if I have to put up with any more cocktail parties, or Bandersnatch hunts, or painted flatlanders swarming through an anarchy park too small for them by a factor of ten. Not if I have to live through another one-night love affair or another twenty-year marriage or another twenty-minute wait for a transfer booth that blows its zap just as it's my turn. And people. Not if I have to live with people, day and night, all those endless centuries."
When he started to feel like that, he left. It had happened three times in his life, and now a fourth. Presumably, it would keep happening. In such a state of anomie, of acute anti-everything, he was no good to anyone, especially his friends, most especially himself. So he left. In a small but adequate spacecraft, his own, he left everything and everyone, heading outward for the fringe of known space. He would not return until he was desperate for the sight of a human face, the sound of a human voice.
On the second trip he had gritted his teeth and waited until he was desperate for the sight of a Kzinti face.
That was a long trip, he remembered. And, because he had only been three and a half months in space on this fourth trip, and because his teeth still snapped together at the mere memory of a certain human voice ... because of these things, he added, "I think this time I'll wait till I'm desperate to see a Kdatlyno. Female, of course."
Few of his friends guessed the wear and tear these trips saved him. And them. He spent the months reading, while his library played orchestrated music. By now he was well clear of known space. Now he turned the ship ninety degrees, beginning a wide circular arc with Sol at its center.
He approached a certain G3 star. He dropped out of hyperdrive well clear of the singularity in hyperspace which surrounds any large mass. He accelerated into the system on his main thruster, sweeping the space ahead of him with the deep-radar. He was not looking for habitable planets. He was looking for Slaver stasis boxes.
If the pulse returned no echo, we would accelerate until he could shift to hyperdrive. The velocity would stay with him and he could use it to coast through the next system he tried, and the next, and the next. It saved fuel.
He had never found a Slaver stasis box. It did not stop him from looking.
As he passed through the system, the deep-radar showed him planets like pale ghosts, light gray circles on the white screen. The G3 sun was a wide gray disk, darkening almost to black at the center. The near-black was degenerate matter, compressed past the point where electron orbits collapse entirely.
He was well past the sun, and still accelerating when the screen showed a tiny black fleck.
"No system is perfect, of course," he muttered as he turned off the drive. He talked to himself a good deal out here where nobody could interrupt him.
"It usually saves fuel," he told himself a week later. By then he was out of the singularity, in clear space. He took the ship into hyperdrive, circled halfway round the system, and began decelerating. The velocity he'd built up during those first two weeks gradually left him. Somewhere near where he'd found a black speck in the deep-radar projection, he slowed to a stop.
Though he had never realized it until now, his system for saving fuel was based on the assumption that he would never find a Slaver box. But the fleck was there again, a black dot on the gray ghost of a planet. Louis Wu moved in.
The world looked something like Earth. It was nearly the same size, very much the same shape, somewhat the same color. There was no moon.
Louis used his telescope on the planet and whistled appreciatively. Shredded white cloud over misty blue ... faint continental outlines ... a hurricane whorl near the equator. The ice caps looked big, but there would be warm climate near the equator. The air looked sweet and noncarcinogenic on the spectrograph. And nobody on it. Not a soul!
No next door neighbors. No voices. No faces.
"What the hell," he chortled.
"I've got my box. I'll just spend the rest of my vacation here. No men. No women. No children." He frowned and rubbed the fringe of hair along his jaw. "Am I being hasty? Maybe I should knock."
But he scanned the radio bands and got nothing. Any civilized planet radiates like a small star in the radio range. Moreover, here was no sign of civilization, even from a hundred miles up.
"Great! Okay, first I'll get that old stasis box... He was sure it was that. Nothing but stars and stasis boxes were dense enough to show black in the reflection of a hyperwave, pulse.
He followed the image around the bulge of the planet. It seemed the planet had a moon after all. The moon was twelve hundred miles up, and it was ten feet across.
"Now why," he wondered aloud, "would the Slavers have put it in orbit? It's too easy to find. They were in a war, for Finagle's sake! And why would it stay here?"
