The training of the first true astronauts took them throughout the solar system to learn about the disparate portions of the solar-system-wide machine that would toss them to the stars on a beam of light. First they dropped inward to the orbit of Mercury to see the "engine room" of their star-spanning spacecraft, for the lasers that propelled their starcraft would stay in the solar system where they could be maintained, repaired, and replaced by the sun-lubbers that remained behind.
They approached Mercury from shadowside, heading for the thin bright manmade halo behind the planet that could be seen in telescopes over interplanetary distances. This was the sunhook, a ring-shaped structure of gossamer that hovered halfway down Mercury's shadow cone. The intense light from the Sun bouncing off the reflective surface was enough to keep the sunhook levitated against the pull of the planet below. As Mercury rotated about the Sun, the play of the solar photons on the ring kept it centered about the shadow cone. Hanging below the sunhook, at the point of a cone of tethers, was MERLAP-4C, the Mercury Laser Propulsion Construction, Command, and Control Center, safely suspended in the deep shadow of the planet. As they came closer to Mercury Center, they could see a steady stream of robot vehicles hauling material out from the Center toward the sun-edged rim of the planet.
As they docked, they could see through the portholes the bright dress uniforms of the small contingent of the Space Marines at Mercury Center waiting to welcome their General Jinjur. The interconnection hatch opened, and there was a piercing whistle.
"Air leak!" shouted Shirley as she jumped for the hatch controls.
Fortunately Jinjur was in her path and deflected Shirley's flying body before someone's fingers were caught in an emergency closing of the hatch. Shirley turned with bewilderment at Jinjur's interference. Then she heard the piercing whistle change pitch while a voice gave some commands. There was a slap of hands on stungun butts.
"They're just piping me aboard," said Jinjur, "But you're right, that bosun's whistle does sound like an air leak."
Jinjur lead the way through the airlock. There were portholes in the short metal docking tube, and they could look up through them to see the brilliantly glowing ring hanging above them in the sky. Portions of the sail were tilting, turning from a dull grey to brilliant white as the ring control computer added sail to compensate for the weight of the docked transport craft.
They were greeted by Linda Regan, a short, bouncy young woman with long bouncy brown curls and sparkly green eyes. Shirley looked down in envy at the naturally curly hair, then her expression changed to that of puzzlement.
"Haven't I seen you somewhere before?" she asked.
"I wondered if you would remember me," said Linda. "I was a sophomore cheerleader at USC when you were a second-string forward on the men's basketball team."
Linda led them to a large central room used as a combination dining room and meeting hall. As they made their way through the corridors, Red felt uncomfortable. There was something wrong and she couldn't quite figure it out. She frowned and swam after the rest of the group.
In the meeting room they were met by the Chief Administrator of the Center.
"I want to welcome our distinguished group of true astronauts to the Mercury Laser Propulsion Construction, Command, and Control Center," he said. "It is here that we will generate the propulsion energy to send you off to Barnard. When the mission starts next year, we want you to know that we will be behind you, pushing all the way."
There were a few chuckles. He smiled and continued. "There is one very important fact you must always remember while you are here on Mercury Center; especially when you're off looking around on your own after the planned tours." He paused and continued, "You're NOT in free fall."
With those words he pulled himself over to a table fixed in the center of the dining hall. Using it for purchase, he crouched, and jumped expertly upward to the center of the domed ceiling, where he held onto a light fixture. He damped out his motion and hung there some ten meters overhead.
"Mercury Center is not in orbit about Mercury, but is floating at a point some eighty thousand kilometers above the surface of the planet. The pull of Mercury is counteracted by the large ring-sail that you all saw as you arrived. The ring-sail stays outside the shadow cone of the planet, while we are hanging in the comparative coolness of the shadow. This arrangement is not completely stable, so it is necessary to have active control of the sail area to keep us at constant altitude and in the center of the shadow cone as Mercury orbits about the Sun.
"The gravity pull from Mercury at this distance is weak, only one part in three thousand of Earth's gravity, but it's enough to kill you." He paused to let the last words echo off the walls of the large room. His voice took on a stern tone as he continued. "And the more free-fall time you've had, the more likely you are to forget, so I want you space veterans to pay close attention.
"Suppose you're outside being shown something, and you let go of your handhold for a second," he said. He let go of the light fixture for a few seconds. As far as the group could tell, he just hung there as if he were in free fall. He regained his hold on the light fixture and said, "For the first few seconds, you will only fall a few millimeters, and you can easily regain a handhold. However, let yourself get distracted for ten or twenty seconds..." He released his handhold and started counting. After ten seconds he had dropped noticeably. When he reached the count of twenty he desperately attempted to regain his handhold on the light fixture, but he had dropped over half a meter and it was out of reach. He stopped trying, then turned to look down at them.
"You will continue to accelerate," he said very solemnly as he slowly fell toward them. "If we don't see you within two or three minutes and launch a rescue vehicle—you are dead." His feet punctuated the last words as they hit the table-top with a dull thud.
"That's what's wrong!" Red said out loud. The others looked at her. "When I was coming through the corridors, something bothered me. Now I know was it was. The air was too clean and the floors were too dirty. In free fall you're always bothered by specks of dust and pieces of loose equipment. Here everything collects on the floor after a minute or so."
"You're right," said the Administrator. "Please keep it in mind all the time you are here. Now, let me turn you over to my Chief Engineer, who will explain the things you will be seeing during your visit here."
Their first tour took them out to one of the laser generator stations. There were a thousand of them, spaced in a sun-synchronous orbit about Mercury—a sparkling diadem for the innermost planet. Each consisted of a large light reflector thirty kilometers across, that collected the sunlight and concentrated it on a light-pumped laser at its focus. The astronauts visited the sites in groups of five in small flitters. They did all their observing from behind the heavily tinted portholes of the flitter for it was too hot outside for ordinary space-suits.
Red, who had gazed down at many a planetoid from orbit, suddenly broke her contemplative silence.
"How come the terminator is curved?" she asked. "I thought the lasers were supposed to be in a sun-facing orbit. In that case, we should be right over the terminator and Mercury should be cut in half by its shadow."
"For the same reason that the lasers and their collectors are here flying around Mercury instead of in their own orbits about the Sun," said the engineer conducting the tour. "Light pressure may not be much, but the solar photons would blow those light-weight collectors away if they were not anchored by gravity to the mass of the planet. In fact, the light pressure is so strong that the sail and laser are not even orbiting the center of Mercury. The light pressure actually pushes the orbit a few hundred kilometers toward the dark side. That pressure also keeps the orbit precessing so that it stays facing the Sun."
"Things have sure progressed since the early laser space-fort days," said George as he gazed at the huge expanse of light collector that seemed to go on and on to some distant horizon like the surface of a small sea. He paused, then queried in a perplexed voice, "The collector has a funny color to it."
"That's the special reflective coatings on the plastic," said the engineer. "The solar flux here at the orbit of Mercury is almost ten kilowatts per square meter, but not all of it can be used by the laser. The coating on the collector only reflects those portions of the sunlight that are at the right frequency to be converted into laser power."
"Prometheus needs thirteen hundred terawatts of power for propulsion, and there are one thousand lasers, so each one has to produce thirteen hundred gigawatts," said George, "That's a lot of power. What's the efficiency?"
"The overall efficiency of solar power to laser power is only twenty percent, but the important thing is to get rid of the eighty percent that you don't use," said the engineer. "The total solar flux incident on the thirty kilometer diameter collector is sixty five hundred gigawatts, but only about fifteen hundred gigawatts is reflected to the laser itself; the rest just passes on into space."
"So, since the laser puts out thirteen hundred gigawatts the efficiency of the laser itself is quite high," said George. "Still, even two hundred gigawatts is a lot of heat to get rid of."
"Not if you have a high enough temperature and a big enough surface area," said the engineer. The flitter moved closer to the laser itself. "They're about to do a test," he said.
Control jets flashed on the side of a one hundred meter diameter mirror. The mirror turned and deflected the focused sunlight from the collector sail into the end of a block-long, office-building-sized laser with four jet-black wings spread out into the blackness of space. After a few minutes the central portion of the laser started to glow a deep red, it then turned yellow as the base of the radiating fins took up the deep red color.
"Is the laser on?" asked George. "You can't tell, I guess, nothing to scatter light from the beam."
"The laser radiation is in the short infrared, so you couldn't see it anyhow," said the engineer. "But you can tell it's on by looking at the color of the beam-deflector mirror."
They looked at the deflector mirror at the output end of the laser and saw a deep red glow near the center, where the fraction of a percent of the thirteen hundred gigawatt laser beam had been absorbed by the material in the mirror instead of being deflected off to the distant laser beam combiner.
"The tests are coming along fine," said the engineer. "All the lasers should be operational long before launch time. Let's go look at the beam combiner."
A few hours later the small group had moved from the orbiting ring of lasers to the combiner at the Lagrange point L-2 that was close to Mercury on the side away from the Sun, just beyond the tip of Mercury's shadow cone.
As they approached the site of the laser beam combiner, they saw a lot of robot transporter traffic.
"It looks only half-finished!" Alan exclaimed with a perturbed note in his voice.
"Actually, it is only about one-third complete," said the engineer, but we'll have it done in another three or four years."
George, noticing the concerned look on Alan's face, chided him. "You're going to have to get used to thinking in interstellar terms, Alan. For the first few years of our trip, we're going to be so close to the solar system that the laser beam combiner won't be needed. In fact, if it were used, it would burn a hole in our sail. We need the power of all the lasers but each one of them can easily send a beam to the sail by itself. Since the combiner won't be needed until long after launch, they saved its construction until last."
The collector lens of the beam-combiner system looked like a fine lace doily sprinkled with dew. It was sitting in space a number of kilometers away from a long cylinder that was the main portion of the combiner. The lens was an open net structure that faced Mercury and its sparkling crown of laser generators. In the openings were transparent sheets of plastic a hundred meters across. They flashed the colors of the rainbow as the flitter moved across it.
"Those are hologram lenses impressed in thin plastic," the engineer explained. "When the collector is complete, there will be one thousand of them in a close-packed array some three-and-a-half kilometers in diameter. The light from each orbiting laser is captured by one of these lenses, which concentrate the beam and send it on to the smaller lenses in the combining cylinder. There, the one thousand separate beams are combined into a single coherent beam of thirteen hundred terawatts of power, and sent on to the final transmitter lens.
"Since the orbital plane of the lasers is almost exactly at right angles to the collector at all times, there is very little shift in laser frequency due to the doppler effect," said the engineer. "The little frequency shift there is, is easily predicted and compensated for at the laser. The main adjustment of the phases, however, is taken care of by sampling each of the one thousand beams as it enters the combiner cylinder and then adjusting the internal lens positions to correct any phase errors."
They flew behind the cylinder and stared back at the Gatling gun appearance of the output of the beam combiner. They could see right through.
"It seems to be empty," remarked Tony. "Are you sure you'll get all the lenses in on time?"
The engineer laughed, "Actually, all the internal lenses are already installed in the combiner. The reason that you can't see them is that they are made of ultrapure plastic so they don't absorb the laser light. Also, note that the output mirror is tilted slightly compared to the input mirror. That's because the combiner not only combines the various laser beams into one beam, but also transfers from solar system coordinates to Barnard coordinates. Barnard is four degrees above the ecliptic, so the top mirror has to be tilted slightly. Also, as Mercury orbits around the Sun, the output mirror rotates to keep the beam pointed at Barnard."
It was a long journey out to the transmitter lens. This was the other major portion of their spacecraft that would remain in the solar system while the rest of the ship made the journey to Barnard. The transmitter lens was situated half-way between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus where the Sun was weak and space seemed cold. The lens was under construction and was already a few kilometers in diameter. The gossamer structure of threads and plastic sheet was invisible until they went around to the far side and looked back at the Sun. The light scattering from the threads lit up the spiderweb structure and they could see the evidence of the alternating rings of plastic and emptiness. The construction was progressing slowly, since only a small crew of robots were assigned to the repetitive task of adding threads and thin sheeting. There was plenty of time to work on the lens, however, for the first one hundred kilometers would suffice for initial test and for propulsion of the interstellar craft for the first five years of thrust. More diameter would be added, as needed, during the forty year duration of the mission, until it reached its maximum diameter of one thousand kilometers.
The best parts of the training program were the practice sessions on Firefly—a one-third scale model of the payload section of Prometheus, the interstellar spacecraft. Firefly had a sail diameter of one hundred kilometers, and carried a single lander-airplane combination. Here the crew learned to work with James, the spacecraft computer program. James was gaining experience on Firefly that it would use to modify its pre-programmed procedures before it was transferred to the Prometheus computer. It was on Firefly that they were first introduced to the computer motiles that James used to communicate with each crew member and carry out necessary repairs and maintenance.
The first four aboard Firefly were David Greystoke, General Jones, Colonel Gudunov, and Shirley Everett. They were crowded together in the airlock waiting for the pressure cycle to finish. David was expounding on the characteristics of the super-computer that he had helped design and program for the mission.
"The computer on Firefly is as nearly complete as we can make it and still fit it into this scaled-down version of Prometheus," he said. "The central processing unit is the same size as the one on Prometheus, so that the computer and its program will be as 'intelligent' as it will be on Prometheus, but it does have some limitations in input and output circuitry. It can't handle as many sensors at one time as it will be able to do on Prometheus, and it can't control as many devices, but other than that it'll be a good simulation." The air lock cycled through and the inner door opened. David climbed out, followed by the others, and they helped each other remove their suits. Shirley looked around, found the suit locker, and after fussing over each suit, hung them neatly in their racks.
George noticed a fuzzy-looking metallic object in the corner. It was about forty centimeters tall and looked like a six-armed chimney-sweep brush. From the tips one of each of the fibers in the brush there flickered bursts of pure-color laser light. George noticed that the blue beams scanned over the bodies of the crew as they moved around, while the red and yellow beams monitored the rest of the room. The green beams, however, seemed to be for illuminating various portions of the brush itself, giving the brightly reflecting metallic surface of the multi-branched structure a deep green internal glow.
"That must be the 'Christmas Bush,' " said George to David, pointing to the small green cluster of twigs with its multi-colored blinking lights.
"Not quite," said David. "James doesn't have enough brain power here on Firefly to control a bush-sized motile. This is only a small branch, a 'Christmas Branch' if you will. The Christmas Bush James will have on Prometheus will be as big as we are and can do anything a human can do. The Christmas Branch here is pretty capable, however, just not as big." David was still holding his suit helmet. He tossed it at the Christmas Branch in the corner. "Put this away for me, James," he said.
The helmet sailed at the Christmas Branch in a nearly straight trajectory in the low gravity. Crouching like a miniature stick figure with three "legs", the Christmas Branch jumped into the air. The smaller twigs on the bottom side of the trifurcated structure whirled in the air, propelling the Christmas Branch through the air. The top portion of the Christmas Branch opened up into three furry paws that grasped the helmet gently with fuzzy fingers. The Christmas Branch shifted position, swam over to the suit locker, and put the helmet in its proper place in David Greystoke's suit rack. As it performed it uttered a series of happy barks and came bounding back to pause in mid-air in front of David, one of its rear twigs wagging in the air and the tiny cilia near its front portion emitting a series of breathy pants.
Jinjur listened in amazement, then broke into laughter at the performance. "Maybe 'Fido' would be a better name than James," she said, still laughing.
David smiled. "No, that's not its normal response pattern. I deliberately programmed that 'eager dog' response into James's repertoire as a method of chiding a crew member whenever they got lazy and misused one of James's motiles. That's one of the reasons that the program has the name James."
"It sounds like an English butler," said George.
"Exactly. James is here to serve us just as a good butler would, but the computer will also be responsible for running the ship and taking care of the legitimate needs of twenty crew members. Note that James did what I asked it to do, but at the same time it gently reminded me that I should have taken care of that particular job myself. Now, let me show you some of its other tricks." He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pressurized ball-point pen. He then unbuttoned his shirt front and used the pen to push out a bit of lint from behind a button-hole. He kicked over to a nearby wall and deliberately made an ink mark on the wall. As he kicked back, he let loose the bit of lint into the air. As he came to a halt back with the group, they watched as two tiny segments of the Christmas Branch detached from one of the arms. The smaller one, a minuscule cluster of cilia not much bigger than the bit of lint, flew rapidly through the air with a humming sound like that of a mosquito, captured the floating ball, and flew out the door to another part of the ship, zig-zagging as it went.
"It's picking up other bits of dust on its way to the dust-bin," explained David. "They're too small for us to see, but its little laser radars picked them up from their backscatter."
The larger sub-motile jumped from the Christmas Branch to the wall, and like a spider, used its fine cilia to cling to the wall and walk over to the ink smudge. The cilia scraped the ink out of the wall pores and formed it into a drying ball. The wall now clean, a sub-section of the spider detached and swam off through the low gravity, while the remainder of the spider jumped back to the Christmas Branch where it resumed its normal place.
"The Christmas Branch here on Firefly, and the larger Christmas Bush on Prometheus will normally stay in their assembled shape," said David. "They're easier for James to control that way, since each portion has a significant amount of computer power built into them. Each segment, down to the tiniest hexad of cilia, is practically identical in shape. There is a hexagonal central body that is the point of attachment to the next larger level of the structure. From six 'shoulder joints' on the central body radiate six 'arms', each with an 'elbow' joint. The next smaller hexad is attached to the ends of the arms. Its central body acts as the 'wrist' and its six 'fingers's form a 'hand'. But unlike a human hand, each 'finger' has a smaller 'hand' and so forth for ten levels. The smallest 'fingers's are cilia only twenty microns long. Each subset has its own tiny rechargeable permabattery in the central section, 'muscle' portions near the ends, and logic and control circuitry. Each also has diodes that can both receive and emit laser light at many different frequencies. The various levels of structure are only connected mechanically, not electrically. The logic and power connections are through the laser diodes."
"Because it's laser light, the efficiency of power transfer is nearly ninety-five percent," said Shirley. "James feeds power from lasers in the corners of the room to the main trunk of the Christmas Branch to keep that battery charged, and the Christmas Branch trickles the energy down to the various sticks, twigs, and cilia with the green lasers that you see. The power beams are modulated to send information back and forth between the logic circuits in each twig until you have a fairly sophisticated computer. All James has to do is tell the Christmas Branch where to go, and the Christmas Branch generates all of the subcommands needed to trifurcate its 'feet' and walk or swim there. If a smaller portion is detached, however, then James has to use some of its own brain-power to run it, so that's why the motiles are usually kept in clumps. Yet housekeeping is a continual chore, so don't be surprised if you see a mosquito flying through the air or a spider walking across the ceiling. They will just be collecting all the dirt and dust you've made that day."
"I'm not so sure I'm going to like living with mosquitoes and spiders," said Jinjur. "That's one of the things I really liked least about being a ground-pounder."
"Once you've gotten used to your imp, Jinjur," said David. "I'm sure you'll get used to James's other mini-motiles."
"Hummm. The 'imps'. I guess they're necessary, but when Shirley was talking about them in the briefings, I really didn't look forward to the experience."
"They're not so bad once you get used to them," said David. "And there's no time like now."
He turned to face the Christmas Branch. "Could I please have two personal imps, James? One for me and one for Jinjur?" He held out his hand and two portions of the Christmas Branch detached and flew through the air to David's finger, where they perched like two skinny sparrows.
"These personal imps are to stay nearby at all times so James has a way of communicating with you. It doesn't really matter much where you keep them, but I like to have mine riding my shoulder." David put one of the imps on his shoulder. It scrambled for a second and soon was perched on his collar, looking like a tarantula with six hairy legs. Jinjur noticed that one leg was resting gently on the side of David's neck.
"They not only serve as a means of communication," said David. "They also allow James to keep track of the state of each crew-member's health." He turned his head slightly and talked to the imp out of the side of his mouth.
"How'm I feeling today, James?" he asked.
The cilia on the legs of the tarantula vibrated into a blur. "Pulse 75, Temperature 37 C, blood pressure 140/80, blood constituents all fine except your triglycerides are a little high. Probably need to get that weight down. Calcium levels are slightly up and bone density is down, but that is normal for free fall."
David continued his briefing, "The personal imps have special illuminators and sensors that can monitor the small blood vessels in the skin and practically carry out a complete blood analysis. James doesn't know my weight yet, but after a few days of monitoring the frequency response of the various portions of my body as I push myself around the ship, it'll be able to tell from the changes in frequency whether I've gained or lost weight, and even which portion of the body contains the new fat."
"Pretty nosey," said Jinjur. "But I guess it's better than being wired with thermocouples and pressure sensors. I don't particularly care to have a spider sitting on my shoulder. Can I put it somewhere else, like in my pocket?"
"You could," said Shirley. "But James would sound kind of muffled unless you left your pocket unbuttoned. Here, let me show you how I wear mine." She turned to look at the Christmas Branch. "James?"
Another imp-sized motile detached from the Christmas Branch and flew over to Shirley where it landed in her hair. The imp flattened into a crescent moon on the side of her head. Shirley turned her head to show them the shiny barrette in her hair with its twinkling multicolored lights. "Pretty, isn't it?"
Jinjur grudgingly admitted that it was, and reached to take the other imp from David's finger. She held it in her hand, looking at it closely. She jumped when it spoke.
"Hello, General Jones," said the imp. "May I be of service?"
Jinjur scowled, a little annoyed with herself for being startled, then forced a determined grin.
"Well, to start with," she said. "You can cut the General Jones business and call me Jinjur like everyone else. I may be boss of this outfit, but it's not a military mission and titles often get in the way."
"Certainly, Jinjur," replied the imp. "Have you decided where you would like to have me?" Jinjur looked at the imp, bemused at herself for talking seriously to such a tiny, fragile bundle of fibers and twigs.
"Do you know what a hair comb looks like?" she asked. Quickly the six-legged star reconfigured itself into a six-pronged comb with most of its mass and lights clustered into an ornate comb-back. Tiny cilia clutching gently at her skin kept the comb balanced in the light gravity.
"Like this?" the comb-imp asked.
"Yes," said Jinjur, her face expanding into a pleased smile at the sight of the bejeweled comb. "I used to wear them when I was a teenager in high school, so I guess I could get used to you in that form."
She picked up the comb in her other hand and started to place it into her mop of thick black curly hair. She hesitated, then brought the comb down to talk to it.
"You look pretty fragile, are you strong enough for me to use you as a comb?"
"My motiles are quite strong. They are made of the hardest durasteel. You will find them as hard to bend or break as a needle." There was a pause, then James continued as Jinjur lifted the comb to her head and stuck it in. "You must also learn to realize that the imps are only sensors and transducers. You must not think of them as individuals. You might someday be tempted to try to save them in an emergency situation."
Jinjur wasn't really listening. She had turned to face the glass port that looked into the darkened air-lock. She noticed a flat space where her short afro had been squashed by the helmet in her space suit. She reached for the imp-comb to fluff it out.
"Allow me," said the imp in James's most butlerish voice. Jinjur's hand hesitated, and the imp splayed out into its normal star shape, moved rapidly through Jinjur's hairdo, and within one second every hair on her head was in its proper place. Jinjur's eyes widened. Then, as the star reconfigured into a comb shape and resettled into its place behind Jinjur's ear, Shirley laughed.
"Isn't it nice having your own personal hair-dresser at your beck and call?" she said.
"I thought we weren't supposed to have James do personal things for us," said Jinjur.
"The personal imps are with you all the time. Their job is keeping you healthy, happy, and informed. You can have them help you in any way that they can," said David. "Misusing the main motile is discouraged, however, since it is essential to the proper operation of the entire spacecraft."
"Let's see the rest of the ship," said Shirley. "Lead the way, James." She followed the Christmas Branch out the door with David, Jinjur, and George following. George noticed that the Christmas Branch had left a motile behind. It buzzed up to hover in front of him.
"Colonel Gudunov?" it queried.
"Hop aboard, James," he said. "And please call me George."
"Certainly, George," said the imp as it settled on his shoulder. Within five minutes George's peripheral vision had stopped seeing the softly blinking cluster of lights that flickered in the lower right hand corner of his eye. The imp and its lights would be there for the rest of his life.
Using the light pressure from the Sun and an occasional long distance laser assist from Mercury Center, the rookie crew and computer flew Firefly to a rendezvous with Titan. The crew made one of the runs without James's help under simulated emergency conditions. Thomas and Red each got to take the surface lander down onto the one moon in the solar system that was the nearest match to the moons in the Barnard system.
The lander was an ungainly, purely functional machine for getting them down to the surface of a planet and off again. The GNASA engineers called it the Surface Lander and Ascent Module, which resulted in an acronym that did not conjure up visions of safety. Except for its height and the amount of cargo it carried, the SLAM was not much different than the Lunar Excursion Module used in the first landing on the Earth's Moon. Its main body was a cylinder eight meters in diameter and forty meters high with a long groove down one side. Nestled in the groove was the fuselage of the aerospace plane, its chopped off wing stubs with their capped VTOL fans sticking out to the sides. The tall tail of the aerospace plane fit neatly into a slot in the lower body of the lander that ran between the four rocket engines in the base. The lander had three landing pads, with the struts for one of the pads doubling as the lowering rail for the body of the aerospace plane. The upper third of the lander contained the three crew decks and the ascent engine needed to take them back off the planet. The computer in the lander was a copy of James, but it had the name Jack and was given a different voice to aid in communication.
Landing the SLAM on Titan was valuable experience, but it didn't seem like the real thing to Red, since she was used to landing on the unprepared surface of an asteroid, while these landings were made on the flat landing pads at Titan base. After the second landing, the aerospace plane was lowered from the side of the lander using a winch attached to the nose of the plane. After the plane had traveled down the lowering rail and had been rotated to a horizontal orientation, the winch was used to remove the nested sections of wing from inside the lander. The wing sections were attached to the wing stubs to turn the aerospace plane from a stubby-winged missile into a graceful glider.
The main body of the aerospace plane was built more like a submarine than an airplane. The atmospheres on the planets and moons they would be visiting would either be non-existent or dangerous, so the hull had to be airtight. Entry and exit was made through an airlock under the left wing. On both sides of the plane, right behind the cockpit windows, were hemispherical blister windows that allowed the science scan instruments almost a 180 degree field of view horizontally and vertically. The bubble windows looked like insect eyes, which led the crew to name the aerospace plane Dragonfly. The name was more imaginative than its official designation of "Surface Excursion Module" or "SEM".
The main power supply for the Dragonfly was a nuclear reactor with a thermoelectric blanket. The reactor always ran at low level to provide the heat and electricity needed to keep the humans alive and operate the plane. The electricity was also used to power the electrically-driven VTOL fans in the wings that allowed the Dragonfly to hover and move in all directions, just like its namesake. For high speed travel, the fans were used to get Dragonfly up to speed, then the reactor power was increased and used to heat air that was scooped from the atmosphere and blown out a jet in the tail. In front of the reactor shield were tanks of monopropellant that was used for reaction mass and attitude control when the plane was rocketing through vacuum.
At the back of the crew section was the work area for the Christmas Branch. The "work wall" was crammed from floor to ceiling with hundreds of tiny synthesizing and analytical instruments ranging from miniature chemical laboratories to microscopes to x-ray machines, all scaled for operation by the tiny detachable hands of the motile, although they could also be operated and viewed from the science console up front. In front of the work wall was the air conditioning and renewal system, the laundry, the air lock and suit storage lockers, then a toilet and shower, and finally the crew quarters and work area, all as far from the reactor as possible.
The radiation level in the forward part of the aerospace plane was significantly higher than would have been allowed back on Earth, but since the crew would be having no children and would be experiencing the radiation quite late in their lives, the radiation levels were of no real concern. Since the aerospace plane would be under gravity most of the time, the crew had horizontal bunks with Sound-Bar doors that lowered and latched, for exploration was a twenty-four-hour-a-day shift operation. The galley was tiny, since only one or two would be eating at any one time. Between the galley and the science scan section was the operational center of the Dragonfly. One side of the aisle held the ship's computer, with a console for the computer operator, while the other side had two consoles for control of the science and engineering activities. The computer program for the aerospace plane was a miniature version of the computer program on Firefly or Prometheus. To keep confusion down during communications with James back on Firefly and Jack in the lander, this computer was given a female voice and christened, "Jill".
Arielle, George, and Jill took the plane through its paces and Arielle tried it a few times as a pure glider. It was a little heavier than the powerless planes Arielle had flown as a child but because of its enormous wingspan it performed well despite the weight of its heavy nuclear power plant.
The final test of the aerospace plane was a high speed leap into space. Arielle and George practiced gaining speed with a shallow dive, then heading for altitude until the controls got mushy and had to be replaced with attitude control jets. Their last jump took them half-way around Titan. At the peak of the forty-five minute hop, they rendezvoused with Firefly as it sailed by in a closely-timed maneuver, and an alternate means of getting off a distant world was verified and stored in James's memory.
The training drew to a close. From all over the solar system the crew came in small groups to board their interstellar spacecraft, hanging below a silvery sail as big as a small moon. Prometheus was a cylinder some sixty-six meters long and twenty meters in diameter, an insignificant seed hanging by shrouds from a one thousand kilometer diameter lightsail. They flew in from the backside of the sail where they could see the hexagonal truss work that held the large ultrathin triangular sheets of perforated aluminum sail and docked at the airlock coming out of the top deck. The top two decks would take the brunt of the cosmic radiation during their long journey, so they contained the storage areas and the work area for the Christmas Bush.
Running completely through the length of Prometheus was the lift shaft. It was four meters in diameter and ran from the starside science dome on the back side of the sail to the earthside science dome in the center of the bottom control deck. A lift elevator was available for heavy cargo, but the crew mostly ottered their way up and down the shaft using the handholds built into the walls.
After the top two decks, the next forty-four meters were taken up by four Surface Lander and Ascent Modules arranged in a circle around the lift shaft. They were upside down, with their landing rockets pointing upwards and their docking ports attached to four access ports in the hydroponics deck. Below the hydroponics deck, which supplied another layer of protection from cosmic rays, came the two crew decks. Each crew member had a luxurious hotel suite with a private bathroom, sitting area, work area, and a separate bedroom. The wall that separated the bedroom from the sitting area was a floor-to-ceiling view-wall that could be seen from either side. In addition, there was another view screen in the ceiling above the bed.
Below the crew decks was the Living Area deck, with a dining area, lounge, exercise room, and two small video theaters. Separating the lounge from the dining area was a large sofa facing a three by four meter oval view window that was the focal point of social life on the ship.
The Control deck at the bottom of the checker-stack was all business. Here was another air lock, all the electronics, and the consoles to operate the sail and the science instruments in the two science domes. In the center of the Control deck was the earthside science dome—a three meter diameter hemisphere in the floor surrounded by a thick circular waist-high wall containing racks of scientific instruments that took turns looking out the dome or directly into the vacuum through holes in the deck.
Prometheus was already on its way out of the solar system, flying slowly on the rapidly diminishing photons from the Sun. It was skippered by a busy GNASA checkout crew, and an updated and trained James copied from the memory of the Firefly computer. As each load of astronauts boarded, their ship was taken back by some members of the checkout team, until one day the twenty crew members were all gathered on the ship that would be their home together for the rest of their lives. They then started the shakedown phase that tested out the crew, computer, ship, and distant lasers as they moved around the solar system driven by a combination of solar light and laser light.
The shakedown had been going well for three months. Jinjur had just run them through an emergency drill where one of the hydroponics tanks on the upper deck was hypothetically punctured by a large meteor. There were supposedly tons of water loose on the upper deck, compounded by a rapid loss of air pressure. The crew, James, and the Christmas Bush had gotten the simulated emergency under control. Jinjur now had them all in the lounge for a critique, most of it supplied by James's perfect memory.
George, feeling his age after the strenuous activity, had stopped by the galley to grab an energy stick. He sank slowly into a chair, nibbling bites as he fell. The room was silent except for heavy breathing coming from a tired crew. George took a deep breath himself and started to cough. He struggled, coughed some more, grew a little red in the face, and just as Dr. Wang was coming over to pound him on the back he finally coughed up the little crumb that was the cause of the commotion.
"Excuse me," he said.
"Say!" said Sam, his eager intellect again picking something unusual out of what everyone else took for granted. "That is the first cough, or sneeze, or wheezle I've heard in nearly a month!"
It was quickly realized that not one of the entire crew of twenty had the slightest cold. They asked James about it.
"This phenomena often occurs when small groups are isolated for long periods from the rest of the world. The scientific teams in Antarctica that stay over the winter often are free from colds until the first supply plane comes in with its new strains of virus."
The crew, feeling better than they had for most of their lives on the bug-infested habitats of human space, turned their attention to Jinjur as she started the critique of their emergency drill.
A general doesn't stay on the Joint Chiefs of Staff forever, and for General Winthrop there was a good reason to leave. One of the two Senatorial seats in South Carolina was up for grabs. The present incumbent was an upstart Republican who had used his photogenic face and a highly successful career as a video actor to win the seat six years ago on the strength of his name alone. He had proved incompetent in the job and had begun to wonder whether the glamor of being a Senator made up for all the money he was losing.
General Winthrop announced he was retiring from the Air Force and running for the Senate at the same press conference. A lifelong Democrat, with roots in the South Carolina aristocracy that went back before the Civil War, and carrying the impressive name of Beauregard Darlington Winthrop III, he had no trouble wresting the Senate seat from an apathetic Rip Thorn.
Once elected, Senator Winthrop had no intention of allowing his "junior member" status in the Senate to moderate his actions. He had been in Washington long enough to know that the acres of empty space in newspapers and video screens had to be refilled each day with print, pictures, and words. He who supplies that voracious appetite gets attention, and through that—action. He had always thought that the whole interstellar exploration business was a great waste of time, especially since it was that goddamned Gudunov who had started it by sending out the first probes. He would get this goddamned nonsense stopped and send that goddamned Gudunov back to oblivion in Texas.
The interstellar mission was a popular project, however, and had developed a terrific amount of momentum. It would be hard to stop, but Winthrop would give it his best try. He first tried financial arguments, but the economic health of a Greater United States, still realizing the potential of the great northern wastes of Canada it had acquired, was so great that the country could not only have guns and butter, but art and exploration too.
He tried national security arguments, but the recent passage of the latest disarmament treaty and the amazing event of a Sino-Soviet Peace Treaty that seemed to be more than just a piece of paper made that approach untenable too.
He finally hit upon the key. It made no logical sense, but it appealed to the emotions of the public in such a way that there was an instinctive gut reaction that this mission was wrong and ought to be stopped. The Senator harped on the subject every chance he got.
"Ah have nothing but respect for the people in GNASA who are planning this mission," he said on a Meet-the-Press interview. "And Ah have even greater respect for the brave crew of boys and girls who have volunteered to throw away their lives in a grand spectacle that we will not even hear about for almost half a century. But Ah think there is a moral issue here.
"Are we not sinning against our God by allowing this ship to leave? The sinners are not the crew—they are the ones who are sinned against. The sinners are not the planners at GNASA—they are just doing their duty as we have instructed them." He looked directly into the camera, the thick Senatorial mane of white hair that had replaced his Air Force crew-cut gave an almost Sistine-Chapel aura to his image.
"You are the sinners," he said, pointing his finger straight at the camera. "You are murderers—for sending your children to certain death!"
He dropped his eyes, and the video camera pulled back to show him bowed in prayer, his hands reverently clasped in front of him. The reporters were quiet as he murmured—almost too low to hear.
"Forgive these poor sinners, Lord. For they know not what they do."
For the next month, Senator Winthrop harped on the suicide-mission aspect of the flight. He never relented in his insistence that if the public allowed the expedition to proceed, that each and every one of them was a murderer. One after another, church officials joined in the clamor. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit against GNASA, asking for an injunction to prevent the lasers from being turned on because the GNASA officials were violating the civil rights of the crew. The protests of the crew that they did not want to be associated with the suit only lead to accusations of brainwashing.
The planned launch date was only two months away and Jinjur was getting worried. Senator Winthrop had used his considerable influence to persuade the Senate Majority Leader to schedule a week-long debate on the subject, with full media coverage allowed. GNASA staffers began a headcount. There were a lot of previous supporters for the program that were now undecided. It was going to be close.
"We need to do something to turn this around," said the GNASA Administrator. "How about you or the crew giving a press conference?"
"That's the last thing in the world I want to do," said Jinjur. "But I guess I'll have to. It would be a complete flop if we tried to do it at long distance. Waiting a half-hour between the reporter's question and my answer is ridiculous on the face of it. I'll just have to come in on one of the ion ships that have been monitoring us. See you in about a week."
Soon Jinjur was under one gee again as the laser-beam-powered ion rocket accelerated to cover the millions of kilometers back to the Earth. Having gotten used to the low-gee environment of Prometheus, Jinjur spent most of her time in a soft chair, and was in nasty humor when she reached the Space Marine Orbital Base. The original plan was to have her come back down to Earth and give her press conference in the lion's den—Washington, D.C.— with the President and the GNASA Administrator backing her up. She vetoed that.
"I've been in space so long that I can't stand Earth—either its gravity or its crowds or its smells," she said. "Let me fall once on camera or lose my temper at some reporter, and the mission is dead. I'm a creature of space, and I'll hold the press conference in space. Let the Press come to Mohammed."
Most of the major reporters had been in space before as privileged guests of the GNASA establishment. This was to be the first major press conference held in space, however, and every little paper that could get a reporter to either Vandenburg or Kennedy was welcome. It took three crowded shuttle launches with bays full of double-decker passenger capsules to get everyone to Jinjur's press conference. Jinjur had wanted the conference to be at the Space Marine Orbital Base, but as the Press list grew, the number of reporters soon exceeded the capacity of any of the rooms on the station. The press conference was shifted to the Sheraton-Polar. Although still under construction, the wing of the hotel containing the large low-gee ballroom had been completed. Placed in a sun-synchronous nearly-polar orbit around Earth, the Sheraton-Polar would have perpetual sunlight and a permanent view of a half-crescent Earth turning below, the cities blinking their lights on and off as they slipped into and out of the darkness.
Jinjur walked into the ballroom. It had a quarter-gee gravity supplied by the slow rotation of the partially completed torus. She bounced a little as she walked. The quarter-gee would be just right for dancing. Enough to give you traction on the floor, but weak enough to make the leadest-footed dancers light on their feet. The ballroom was big enough so that she could see some curvature to the floor. That took a little getting used to, but cover the floor with a crowd and social dancing could have a new renaissance.
Jinjur had decided against wearing her uniform. A soldier, especially a Marine, is expected to risk her life for her country. She came here as a civilian, a human, a woman—who was about to be denied one of the greatest things that could ever happen to her—a chance to have her name immortalized in history as one of the first of the human race to leave the warm womb of the solar system and become one with the cold crystal stars.
The press conference went well. Jinjur fielded the questions adroitly, whether they were meaningful or stupid. She made it clear that the crew was under no compulsion. A question about them being bribed was easily proved to be nonsense when Jinjur patiently reminded them that one of the crew had left behind a sixty billion dollar fortune. The press conference was drawing to an end when a reporter from the Charleston Gazette rose and repeated Senator Winthrop's charge against the mission.
"I read from your resume that you are a member of the Abyssinian Baptist church, General," he said. "I presume you are a religious woman."
Jinjur stared at him levelly. "Since they face the threat of death daily, most soldiers are more religious than most civilians," she said.
"Then since you are a religious woman," he persisted, "Don't you agree that the people of this country are murderers if they allow this mission to send you and your brave crew to certain death?"
There was a silence as the reporter sat down with a smug smile. Jinjur spoke. Her low tenor voice was quiet, but the fervor that rang through it carried her words to the farthest reaches of the ballroom.
"The good Lord has nothing against death, for death is just a rebirth of the spirit from a tired, worn-out body. The people of this country are not murderers, and I resent anyone, reporter or Senator, trying to lay nonexistent guilt on them. This expedition to Barnard is a one-way mission. We will not return alive. But...it is not a suicide mission.
"Think about it. every one of us has been launched by God onto a one-way mission through life. We are born, grow up, work at a job, retire, and die. If you are one of the lucky ones, you find a job that is interesting and fun. So much fun that you don't want to retire. You find these lucky people staying in the harness until they drop in their tracks, doing what they enjoy and getting paid for it.
"We—I and the rest of the crew—are like those lucky people. We were born, raised, and for most of our lives have yearned to travel to the planets and the stars. We finally have been given the chance. It will take the rest of our lives to make the long journey to Barnard, and thoroughly study the star and the many planets and moons in the system. There is enough work there to keep us busy and happy until we too die in our harnesses—of OLD AGE. And when we die, we'll have a tomb floating between the worlds that is larger and more splendid than any Pharaoh's."
Her voice rose to parade-ground level, "You're not sending us to our deaths... you're sending us to GLORY!"
Her triumphant words echoed through the silent ballroom. There were no more questions. Jinjur turned her back on the awed group of reporters and walked out of the room.
Senator Winthrop still insisted on having his debate. Jinjur watched the proceedings on video as the ion ship carried her back out to Prometheus. Winthrop talked, pleaded, prayed, and talked some more. But in the end it was an overwhelming eighty-nine to thirty, with the senior Senator from Manitoba abstaining. The mission was on!
Winthrop didn't give up, however. He immediately started hatching a scheme that would strike one last smashing blow at "that goddamned Gudunov" before he got too far away.
Jinjur, despite her elation, didn't feel well as she neared the end of her journey back to the outer solar system. She thought it was due to the one-gee thrust of the ion ship. She was glad she would never in her life feel that again. She didn't know how the ground-pounders survived the constant drag on their bodies. While she was getting out of her suit back on Prometheus she broke into a sweat.
"Must be getting out of condition," she said to the small welcoming-home committee. A victory dinner had been planned, with veal from "Ferdinand", one of Nels Larson's famous tissue cultures, and strawberries from the hydroponics tank. They didn't have meals like that very often and it was a welcome break from the various strains of algae mush. The party had already started and Jinjur was welcomed warmly as she entered the lounge.
In the center of the lounge was a porcupine of fresh strawberries. For a second Jinjur didn't recognize the fixture, then realized it was a small section of the Christmas Bush, holding each strawberry tenderly until human fingers removed it from the grasp of a robot twig. She took one and popped it in her mouth, then grimaced in pain, tears coming to her eyes as she swallowed. Dr. Wang looked across the room at her, tucked a finger-slice of veal back into his food tray, and came over.
"I knew we should've never let you out of our sight," he said. "I bet you've picked up a bug from those disease-laden reporters."
"It's just a sore throat, Bill," she protested.
"Open up!" he commanded, pulling a tiny permalite from his pocket.
He took a quick look down her throat, then reached out to touch her neck. One side gave no response, the other side brought a gasp of protest from Jinjur.
"And what a bug!" said Dr. Wang. "You couldn't be satisfied with bringing back some cold bugs or flu bugs, could you? You get into your room and stay there, General. You have the mumps and are quarantined until you get over them. We boys may all have our shots and are fixed to boot, but if we catch those mumps from you in the wrong place, it could louse up our hormone balance for the rest of our lives, if we are lucky enough to survive."
"Flazz-bazz," she replied tiredly, and turned to George.
"Take command of the ship," she said. "I'm tired and I think I'll go to sleep for a week or so." She tumbled up the lift shaft and headed for bed.
"Is it really that serious?" asked George, concerned.
"The probability is low," said Dr. Wang. "But just because you had mumps as a child, doesn't mean you can't catch them again if your antibody level is down. And if they get into your other glands as well as the lymph nodes in the neck, they can kill you or damage you severely."
"Hmm," said George. "I'm not sure, but I don't think I've ever had mumps."
"Your medical records show no mention of it," said the imp in his ear. He noticed that Dr. Wang's imp was also whispering to him.
"George, Shirley, Alan, and Katrina are all prospects," said Dr. Wang. "The rest of us are pretty safe. I want each one of you to report to me the minute you feel ill or have a sore throat."
Shirley picked a strawberry from the holder and ate it.
"Feeling fine so far," she said, then took another strawberry, and another, eating them with obvious relish.
"Just a minute," said Richard, his huge bulk flying across the room. "I saw that one first!" There was a tussle as the two behemoths wrestled in mid-air over the bruised morsel of fresh fruit.
George took the strawberries off into a corner and stayed to make sure nobody interrupted them.