A Hole In Space, page 9
"As for the interstellar drop ship concept, it works. This has been the first real test, and it went without a hitch. Probably the next use of drop ships will not be a colony expedition at all, but an attempt to rescue the crew of Lazarus. The ship was sending its distress signal. There is good reason to think that the crew is still alive.
"Doctor Karin Sagan has pointed out that any rescue attempt will take decades. This is reasonable, in that the distances to be covered are to be measured in light-years. But today's ships are considerably better than Lazarus could ever have been."
"You idiot," said Robin Whyte, PhD. He twisted a knob with angry force, and the teevee screen went blank. A few minutes later he made two phone calls.
Karin was sightseeing on Earth.
The UN Space Authority had had a new credit card waiting for her, a courtesy she appreciated. Otherwise she would have had to carry a sackful of chocolate dollars for the slots. Her hands quickly fell into the old routine: insert the card, dial, pull it out, and the displacement booth would send her somewhere else.
It was characteristic of Karin that she had not been calling old friends. The impulse was there, and the worn black phone book with its string of nine-year-old names and numbers. But the people she had known must have changed. She was reluctant to face them.
There had been a vindictive impulse to drop in on her ex-husband. Here I am at thirty-six, and you-Stupid. Ron knew where she had been for nine years, so why bug the man?
She had cocktails at Mr. A's in San Diego, lunch at Scandia in Los Angeles, and dessert and coffee at Ondine in Sausalito. The sight of the Golden Gate Bridge sparked her to flick in at various booths for various views of all the bridges in the Bay area. For Karin, as for most of humanity, Earth was represented by a small section of the planet.
There had been changes. She got too close to the Bay Bridge and was horrified at the rust. It had never occurred to her that the San Francisco citizenry might let the bridges decay. Something could be done with them: line them with shops a la London Bridge, or landscape them over for a park, or run drag races... They would make horribly obtrusive corpses. They would ruin the scenery. Still, that had happened before...
Some things had not changed. She walked for an hour in King's Free Park, the landscaped section of what had been the San Diego Freeway. The trees had grown a little taller, but the crowds were the same, always different yet always the same. The shops and crowds in the Santa Monica Mall hadn't changed ... except that the city had filled in the space between the curbs, where people had had to step down into the empty streets.
She did some shopping in the Mall. To a saleslady in Magnin's West she said, "Dress me." That turned out to be a considerable project, and it cost. When she left, her new clothes felt odd on her, but they seemed to blend better with the crowds around her.
She did a lot of flicking around without ever leaving the booth-the ubiquitous booth that seemed to be one instead of millions, that seemed to move with her as she explored. It took her longer to find the right numbers than it did to dial.
But she flicked clown the length of Wilshire Boulevard in jumps of four blocks, from the coast to central Los Angeles, by simply dialing four digits higher each time.
She stopped off at the Country Art Museum in Fresno and was intrigued by giant sculptures in plastic foam. She was wandering through these shapes, just feeling them, not yet trying to decide whether she liked them, when her wrist phone rang.
She could have taken the call then and there, but she went to a wall phone in the lobby. Karin preferred to see who she was talking to.
She recognized him at once.
Robin Whyte was a round old man, his face pink and soft and cherubic, his scalp bare but for a fringe of white hair over his ears and a single tuft at the top of his head. Karin was surprised to see him now. He was the last living member of the team that had first demonstrated teleportation in 1992. He had been president of JumpShift, Inc., for several decades, but he had retired just after the launching of Lazarus II.
"Karin Sagan?" His frown gave him an almost petulant look. "My congratulations on your safe return."
"Thank you." Karin's smile was sunny. An impulse made her add, "Congratulations to you, too."
He did not respond in kind. "I need to see you. Urgently.
Can you come immediately?"
"Concerning what?"
"Concerning the interview you gave this morning."
But the interview had gone so well. What could be bothering the man? She said, "All tight."
The number he gave her had a New York prefix.
It was evening in New York City. Whyte's apartment was the penthouse floor of a half-empty building. The city itself had lost half its population during the past forty years, and it showed in the walls of dark windows visible through Whyte's picture windows.
"The thing I want to emphasize," said Whyte, "is that I didn't call you here as a representative of JumpShift. I'm retired. But I've got a problem, and pretty quick I'm going to have to take it up with someone in JumpShift. I still own enough JumpShift stock to want to protect it."
His guests made no comment on his disclaimer. They watched as he finished making their drinks and served them. Karin Sagan was curious and a bit truculent at being summoned so abruptly. Jerryberry Jansen had known Whyte too long for that. He was only curious.
"You've put JumpShift in a sticky situation," said Whyte. "Both of you, and the rest of the news media too. Karin, Jerryberry, how do you feel about the space program?"
"I'm for it. You know that," said Jerryberry.
"I'm in it," said Karin. "I feel no strong urge to quit and get an honest job. Is this a preliminary to firing me?"
"No. I do want to know why you went into so much detail on Lazarus."
"They asked me. If someone had asked me to keep my mouth shut on the subject I might have. Might not."
"We can't rescue Lazarus," said Whyte.
There was an uncomfortable silence. Perhaps it was in both their minds, but it was Jerryberry who said it. "Can't or won't?"
"How long have you known me?"
Jerryberry stopped to count. "Fourteen years, on and off. Look, I'm not saying you'd leave a six-man crew in the lurch if it were feasible to rescue them. But is it economically infeasible? Is that it?"
"No. It's impossible." Whyte glared at Karin, who glared back. "You should have figured it out, even if he didn't." He transferred the glare to Jansen. "About that rescue mission you proposed on nationwide teevee. Did you have any details worked out?"
Jerryberry sipped at his Screwdriver. "I'd think it would be obvious. Send a rescue ship. Our ships are infinitely better than anything they had in 2004." "They're moving at a seventh of lightspeed. What kind of ship could get up the velocity to catch Lazarus and still get back?"
"A drop ship, of course! A drop ship burns all its fuel getting up to speed. Lazarus II is doing a third of lightspeed, and it cost about a quarter of what Lazarus cost-it's so much simpler. You send a drop ship. When it passes Lazarus you drop a rescue ship through."
"Uh huh. And how fast is the rescue ship moving?"
"...Oh." Lazarus would flash past the rescue ship at a seventh of lightspeed.
"We've got better ships than the best they could do in 2004. Sure we do. But, censored dammit, they don't travel the same way!"
"Well, yes, but there's got to be-"
"You're cheating a little," Karin said. "A rescue ship of the Lazarus type could get up to speed and still have the fuel to get home. Meanwhile you send a drop ship to intercept Lazarus. The rescue ship drops through the receiver cage, picks them up-hmm."
"It would have to be self-teleporting, wouldn't it? Like Phoenix."
"Yah. Hmmm."
"If you put a transmitter hull around something the size of Lazarus, fuel tanks included, you'd pretty near double the weight. It couldn't get up to speed and then decelerate afterward. You'd need more fuel, more weight, a bigger hull. Maybe it couldn't be done at all, but sure as hell we're talking about something a lot bigger than Lazarus."
There had never been another ship as big as Lazarus.
Karin said, "Yah. You'd ditch a lot of fuel tanks getting up to speed, but still-hmmm. Fuel to get home. Dammit, Whyte, I left Earth nine years ago. You've had nine years to improve your space industry! What have you done?"
"We've got lots better drop ships," Whyte said quietly. Then, "Don't you understand? We're improving our ships, but not in the direction of a bigger and better Lazarus."
Silence.
"Then there's the drop ship itself. We've never built a receiver cage big enough to take another Lazarus. Phoenix isn't big; it doesn't have to go anywhere. I won't swear it's impossible to build a drop ship that size, but I wouldn't doubt it either. It doesn't matter. We can't build the rescue ship. We don't even have the technology to build Lazarus again! It's gone, junked when we started building drop ships!"
"Like those damn big bridges in San Francisco Bay," whispered Karin. "Sorry, gentlemen. I hadn't thought it out."
Jerryberry said, "You've still got the Corliss accelerator. And we still use reaction drives."
"Sure. For interplanetary speeds. And drop ships."
Jerryberry drained his Screwdriver in three swallows. With his mind's eye he saw six coffins, deathly still, and six human beings frozen inside. Three men, three women. Someone must have thought that a scout crew might just decide to colonize the Centunrus system without waiting. Fat chance of that now. Three men, three women, frozen, falling through interplanetary space forever. They couldn't possibly have been expecting rescue. Could they?
"So we don't get them back," he said. "What are we holding, a wake?"
"They knew the risks they were taking," said Whyte. "They knew, and they fought for the chance. We had over a thousand volunteers at the start of training, and that was after the preliminary weeding-out. Jerryberry, I asked you before about how you felt about the space program."
"I told you. In fact-" He stopped. "Publicity."
"Right."
"I thought I was doing you some good. Public support for the space program isn't heavy right now, and frankly, Doctor Sagan, your report didn't help much."
She flared up. "What were we supposed to do, build a planet?"
"Failure of the first expedition. No planets. A whole colony fleet on its way home without ever having so much as seen Alpha Centaurus! I know, it's safer for them, and better not to waste the time, but dammit!" Jerryberry was on his feet and pacing. There was an odd glow in his eyes, an intensity that could communicate even through a teevee screen. "I tried to emphasize the good points. Now-I damn near promised the world a rescue mission, didn't I?"
"Just about. You weren't the only one."
He paced. "I'm pretty good at explaining. I have to be. I'll just have to tell them-no, let's do it right. Robin, will you go on teevee?"
Whyte looked startled.
"Tell you what," said Jerryberry. "Don't just tell them why we can't rescue Lazarus. Show them. Set up a cost breakdown, in dollars and years. We all know-"
"I tell you it isn't cost. It-"
'We both know that it could be done, If we gave up the rest of the space industry and concentrated solely on rescuing Lazarus for enough years. R and D, rebuilding old hardware-"
"Censored dammit! The research alone on a drop ship that size-" Whyte cocked his head as if listening to an inner voice. "That is one way to put it. It would cost us everything we've built up in the past thirty years. Jerryberry, is this really the way to get it across?"
"I don't know. It's one way. Set up a cost estimate you can defend. It won't end with just one broadcast. You'll be challenged, whatever you say. Can you be ready in two days?"
Karin gave a short, barking laugh.
Whyte smiled indulgently. "Are' you out of your mind? A valid cost estimate would take months, assuming I can get anyone interested in doing a cost estimate of something nobody really wants built."
Jerryberry paced. "Suppose we do a cost estimate. CBA, I mean. Then you wouldn't have anything to defend. It wouldn't be very accurate, but I'm sure we could get within a factor of two."
"Better give yourselves a week. I'll give you the names of some people at JumpShift; you can go to them for details. Meanwhile I'll have them issue a press release saying we're not planning a rescue mission for Lazarus at this time."
JumpShift Experimental Laboratory, Building One, was a tremendous pressurized Quonset hut. On most of his previous visits Jerryberry had found it nearly empty; too many of JumpShift's projects are secret. Once he had come here with a camera team, and on that occasion the polished, smoothly curved hull of Phoenix had nearly filled the building.
He had never known exactly where the laboratory was. Its summers and winters matched the Northern Hemisphere, and the sun beyond the windows now stood near noon, which put it on Rocky Mountain time.
Gemini Jones was JumpShift's senior research physicist, an improbably tall and slender black woman made even taller by a head of hair like a great white dandelion. "We get this free," she said, rapping the schematic diagrams spread across the table. "The Corliss accelerator. Robin wants to build another of these. We don't have the money yet. Anyway, we can use it for the initial boost."
On a flattish disk of asteroidal rock a mile across, engineers of the past generation had raised a tower of metal rings. The electromagnetic cannon had been firing ships from Earth orbit since A.D. 2004. Today it was used more than ever, to accelerate the self-transmitting ships partway toward the orbital velocities of Mars, Jupiter, Mercury.
Jerryberry studied the tower of rings, wider than any ship ever built. "Is it wide enough for what we've got in mind?"
"I think so. We'd fire the rescue ship in sections, then put it together in space. But we'd still have to put a transmitter hull around it."
"Okay, we've got the accelerator, and we'd use standard tanks. Beyond that-"
"Now hold up," said Gem. "There's an easier way to do this. I thought of it this morning. If we do it my way we won't need any research at all."
"Oh? You interest me strangely."
"See, we've still got this problem of building a ship big enough to make the rescue and then decelerate, and a drop cage big enough to take it. But we already know we can build self-transmitting hulls the size of Phoenix. What we can do is put the deceleration fuel in Phoenix hulls. We wouldn't need an unreasonably big drop cage that way."
Jerryberry whistled. He knew what Phoenix had cost. Putting a rescue ship together would be like building a fleet of Phoenixes. And yet- "Robin was wrong. We could do that. We've got the hardware."
"That's exactly right I figure maybe twenty Phoenix hulls full of slurried hydrogen, plus a Phoenix-type ship for the rescue, plus a couple more hulls to hold the drive and the rigging to string it all together. You'd have to assemble it after launch and accelerate it to a seventh of lightspeed, using a couple hundred standard tanks. Then take it apart, stow the rigging, and send everything through a Lazarus II drop ship one hull at a time."
"We could do it. Does Robin know about this?"
"Who's had time to call him? I only just thought of this an hour ago. I've been working out the math."
'We could do it," Jerryberry said, his eyes afire. "We could' bring 'em back. All it would take would be time and money."
She smiled indulgently down at him; at least she always seemed to, though her eyes were level with his own. "Don't get too involved. Who's going to pay for all this? You might talk your bemused public into it if you were extending man's dominion across the stars. But to rescue six failures?"
"You don't really think of them that way."
"Nope. But somebody's going to say it."
"I don't know. Maybe we should go for it. Those self-trammitting hulls could be turned into ships afterward."
"No. You'd drop them on the way back."
Jerryberry ran a hand through his hair. "I guess you're right. Thanks, Gem. You've done a lot of work for something that isn't ever going to get built."
"Good practice. Keeps my brain in shape," said Gem.
He was at home, doggedly working out a time-and-costs schedule for the rescue of Lazarus, when Karin Sagan called. She said, "I've been wondering if you need me for the broadcast."
"Good idea," said Jerryberry, "if you're willing. We could tape an interview any time you're ready. I'll ask you to describe the circumstances under which you found Lazarus, and use that to introduce the topic."
"Good."
Jerryberry was tired and depressed. It took him a moment to see that Karin was too. "What's wrong?"
"Oh...a lot of things. We aren't just going to forget about those six astronauts, are we?"
His laugh was brittle. "I think it unlikely. They aren't decently dead. They're in limbo, falling across our sky forever."
"That's what I mean. We could wake them any time in the next thousand years, if we could get to them."
"That's my problem. We can."
"What?"
"But it'd cost the Moon, so to speak. Come on over, Doctor. I'll show you."
Lazarus cost N$ 2,000,000,000
Lazarus II cost N$ 500,000,000
Phoenix cost N$ 110,000,000
Colony (six ships adequately equipped) cost N$ 660,000,000
Support systems in solar system N$ 250,000,000
TOTAL COLONY PACKAGE, IN CLUDING COLONY AND
PHOENIX AND SUPPORT SYSTEMS IN SOLAR SYSTEM: N$ 1,520,000,000
Twenty-two self-transmitting hulls cost N$ 1,540,000,000
(One self-transmitting hull costs N$70,000,000)
Interstellar drop ship costs N$ 900,000,000
Phoenix-type rescue ship costs N$ 110,000,000
R & D costs nothing
Support systems in solar system N$ 250,000,000
TOTAL COST OF RESCUE N$ 2,000,000,000
"...which is just comfortably more than it cost to build Lazarus in the first place, and a lot more than it cost us to not colonize Alpha Centaurus. It wouldn't be impossible to go get them. Just inconvenient and expensive."
