Chapter 3
At the end of the twenty-first century, Andrea Sardi, Earth’s most famous sociologist, published a scientific paper that was to become her magnum opus. Her theory was that no human political, economic, or religious institution survives longer than six generations, and that any evidence to the contrary is purely an illusion. In support of her thesis, Mrs. Sardi pointed out that the United States of 2195 was not that of 1776, nor was the Catholic church of 1850 that of 850 AD
It was hardly surprising then—three hundred years after Pathfinder I departed the solar system—that nearly everyone had given up the Procyon Expedition for dead. Of course, no one in the solar system was in any position to ask the colonists what they thought of such reasoning. Nor had the tenth generation of human beings to inhabit Alpha Canis Minoris VII (Alpha for short) studied the famous lady’s magnum opus.
Not knowing any better, the colonists had built a society whose prime motivation was the completion of the search that their forebears had begun. To an Alphan, the goal of faster-than-light travel was the Holiest of all Grails.
Thus, the crewmen of Starship Procyon’s Promise approached the solar system with a strong sense of destiny. Nowhere was the excitement more strongly felt than on the starship’s bridge. Captain Robert Braedon sat in his command chair and listened to his crew chatter like children as they approached the breakout point.
Braedon gazed upwards in thoughtful contemplation. The bridge was roofed over by a ten-meter diameter, free blown bubble of armored glass that had been lovingly polished to optical perfection. Beyond the glass was blackness—the fathomless, absolute black that accompanies flight at speeds faster-than-light.
When Pathfinder I entered the Procyon system, its crew found no trace of the far-flung ftl civilization they expected. What the colonists did find—on an island continent in the northern hemisphere of Procyon’s seventh planet—was a small exploration base. The starship’s wake detected by Life Probe 53935 had been that of a transient, an interloper climbing away from a minor outpost world, headed toward an unknown destination somewhere farther in toward the galactic core.
When the first human landing boats descended from orbit, they touched down at the spaceport in the midst of the deserted base. The creatures that had built the outpost were gone—fifty years gone to judge by the yellow-green vegetation that choked the streets of their city. The city was a disappointment to the colonists, merely a series of featureless foundations of vitrified rock that marked where dwellings had once stood. The spaceport proved more useful. A large building, that the colonists tentatively identified as a maintenance hangar, stood in the middle of the port; and near it, sat two globular starships.
Both hangar and starships proved to be little more than shells. The scars of cutting torches could be seen everywhere. Gaping holes let sunlight shine through the ships’ hulls where plates had been removed. Yet, despite their stripped condition, the two starships still contained a considerable quantity of alien machinery. Sometimes the reason why a particular mechanism had escaped salvage was obvious—one crystalline unit was half melted, another was buried deeply within a ship’s oversize ribs. More frequently, however, the colonists had no idea why the creatures that flew the starships left behind particular devices.
The colonists studied the hangar, the starships, and the few other clues the Star Travelers had left behind, hoping to learn something of their precursors on Alpha. For two decades after their initial landing, the colony’s scientists struggled to make sense of the equipment remnants remaining in the starships. For two decades, they failed utterly. Then, when it seemed that they would never make any progress, archeologists digging in the aliens’ garbage dump unearthed a small strip of bright-blue plastic that turned out to be the Star Traveler equivalent of a record cube. It was ten years before the Alphans could access the data encoded within the strip, and another twenty before they could read it. Eventually, however, they succeeded—the record strip turned out to be a maintenance manual for one of the abandoned starships. It was the breakthrough the Alphans had sought so long.
It took two hundred years to go from the initial explorations of the abandoned Star Traveler spaceport to a working ftl starship. In that time, the human population of Alpha climbed from fifty thousand to fifty million. The vast majority of Alphans were average people with the same everyday concerns as people anywhere/anywhen. Only a tiny minority could work at any given time on the puzzle presented by the starship hulks. Yet, in spite of Mrs. Sardi’s thesis, support for the ftl project continued high from generation to generation.
* * *
“Two minute warning! Prepare for breakout. T minus two minutes and counting.”
Robert Braedon took a deep breath and pulled his attention back from the utter blackness overhead. He was a tall man whose black hair was streaked with a greater quantity of gray than his 45 years should have warranted. Like most Alphan men, he kept his hair close-cropped and in a bowl-cut without sideburns. His weather-beaten skin showed the effects of having been exposed to sunlight with a higher percentage of ultraviolet in it than Sol’s. His dark tan, plus the muscular frame beneath his uniform, betrayed him as an outdoorsman. His most prominent facial feature was his nose, which had been broken in a training accident and not reset properly. His wife had always claimed that it gave him character.
Braedon stretched in the chair he had occupied nearly continuously for the last twelve hours, and leaned forward to study his readouts. Two dozen instruments told him that his ship was operating normally. He nodded in satisfaction. Things were going well.
“One minute to Breakout. Stand by.” The voice belonged to Promise’s computer, a direct descendant of the original SURROGATE. After a short pause, the computer spoke again. “Thirty seconds. Shields going up.”
A series of wedge shaped sections rose from out of the metal hull at the perimeter of the view dome and quickly converged at the apex to shut off the blackness overhead. All over the ship, similar shields were sliding into place.
Like any other vehicle, Procyon’s Promise displaced the medium through which it traveled. In Promise’s case, that meant a vacuum thin mixture of hydrogen, cosmic dust, and primitive organic molecules. Had the ship been moving at less than superluminal velocity, its progress through the void would have been marked only by an undetectably small warming of its hull plates as it pushed the detritus of stellar evolution aside.
However, once Promise cracked the light barrier, things changed markedly. At ftl velocities, each hydrogen atom became a significant obstruction. As the ship bored its narrow tunnel through space, the interstellar particles refused to be pushed. It was the classic case of the Irresistible Force meeting the Immovable Object. In a situation analogous to the supersonic flight of an atmospheric craft, the confrontation resulted in a shock wave of high energy Cherenkov radiation.
Nor was Promise’s wake the friendly upwelling that follows any watercraft. It was a ravening storm intense enough to fry an unprotected human within seconds. Yet, the very speed that created the phenomenon also protected the starship from harm. Since the radiation of its wake was limited to the mere crawl that is light speed, Promise left its deadly wake far behind in the instant of its creation.
There was a time, however, when Procyon’s Promise would lose its immunity to the titanic forces that its speed had unleashed. For, as soon as the ship slipped below light speed, the trailing wake would wash over it like a wave over a hapless surfer. In that instant, the starship would be engulfed in radiation equivalent to that encountered during a Class I solar flare.
“Everyone ready for breakout?” Braedon asked over the command circuit. Around him, a dozen crewmen were monitoring the ship’s subsystems against the day when they might have to fly home without the computer’s assistance.
“All ready, Captain,” Calver Martin, Braedon’s executive officer answered from his console on the starboard side of the bridge.
Braedon nodded. Several seconds later, the computer began the countdown. “Ten seconds ... five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... breakout!”
Braedon felt a tiny lurch. That was all. There was a moment of silence, followed by two hundred voices cheering over the ship’s intercom system.
“Breakout complete. Secure from breakout stations.
“All Department Heads report status and damage.” Braedon reached out and touched a control on his instrument panel. A green status light lit up immediately, and the voice that had so recently echoed from the annunciators spoke quietly in his ear.
“Yes, Robert?”
“We seem to have made it, PROM. What’s our status?”
The computer answered almost before he had finished the question. “We are green across the board. I am still calculating a precise breakout point. Initial observations place us approximately six billion kilometers from Sol. We will need twelve hours to achieve intrasystem velocity.”
“How fast are you applying the brakes?”
“I am holding deceleration at 7000 meters-per- second-squared. Do you wish to order a change?” Braedon hesitated momentarily. The figure cited was 650 times the force of gravity on Alpha. Should the internal compensators fail, two hundred crewmembers would be turned instantly to a thin red paste spread evenly over every interior surface facing Sol. Unfortunately, that was an unavoidable hazard. To back down from light-speed at one Alphan gravity would take most of a year.
“No change in programmed deceleration,” he said.
“Understood,” PROM answered.
“Is it safe to unshutter?” Braedon asked one of the technicians seated directly in front of him.
“The radiation storm peaked five seconds ago and is now declining as predicted, Captain,” the man said without taking his gaze off his instruments. Stand by...” There was a ten second period of silence, followed by: “It is now safe to unshutter.”
“Do so. Continue to monitor. Inform me of any deviations from nominal,” Braedon ordered.
“Order acknowledged and understood.
Braedon keyed for the comm circuit that connected him to his executive officer. “Set the watch, Mr. Martin.”
The Exec acknowledged the order. Seconds later, the metal covers slid silently back into their recesses, and the light of the universe flooded in for the first time in a week. It was a universe much changed from that which Captain Braedon was used to seeing in the night sky back home.
He smiled as he remembered the last time he and Cecily had packed his three-centimeter reflector to the top of Randall’s Ridge for a night of stargazing. Sol had been low on the horizon, an unblinking point of yellow light burning brightly in spite of the aurora that danced across the sky. They had taken turns staring through the eyepiece at the Mother-of-Men, watching it until it streamed below the horizon. A few minutes later, the swiftly moving point of light that was the partially constructed Procyon’s Promise had climbed into view in the east. They had watched that until it too was out of sight. Then they had zipped their sleeping bags together and made love in the cold mountain air.
Construction on Promise had been completed seven months later. And here he was twelve light-years away, staring at the same yellow point of light.
Except this time, it was no mere point and decidedly not yellow! The star of mankind’s youth was now an eye searing, actinic blue-white. It was as though old Sol had suddenly blown his top, surging out with supernova violence to steal the lives of his children. In fact, it was Promise’s breakneck speed that caused the sun’s rays to be blue shifted so violently. All the stars in the sky were shifted likewise and their positions distorted by the relativistic effects of the starship’s speed.
Braedon reached out and punched for his executive officer again.
“Yes, Captain?”
“What’s the tally on breakout?”
“No apparent damage, sir. We have spot-checked the radiation dosimeters. No problem there, either. The shielding appears adequate.”
“Very good, Mr. Martin. I am going off watch to get some sleep. You do the same as soon as you have the second officer briefed.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
Twelve hours later, Robert Braedon was back in his command couch, watching a much more normal Sol grow slowly larger overhead in the bridge view dome. A magnified view also decorated the viewscreen in front of him. In that view, Sol was a bright yellow ball with three tiny sunspots arrayed across its face. A small planet could be seen transiting across the face of the Sun as well.
“Which one is that?” Braedon asked, motioning toward the planet.
“That would be Mercury, I believe, Captain.
The speaker was a white haired man of sixty, whose face was set in a perpetual smile. Behind that idiot’s grin was one of the most perceptive brains Alpha had ever produced. Scholar Horace Emanuel Price had contributed more to the final assault on the Star Traveler’s secret than any man alive. When the time had come to build Promise, Price had been the only crewmember with a sure berth aboard the starship.
Braedon nodded. The only four planets in the solar system whose names he could remember were Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and what’s-its-name with the ring. Compared to the topography of Alpha Canis Minor, the Solar System was a relatively boring place. Of course, the home system did not have Procyon’s white dwarf companion to liven things up.
“Anything to report, Scholar?”
“We managed to find Earth without difficulty. It is the brightest radio star in the sky. PROM is monitoring. Their neutrino count is higher than we expected, indicating our estimates of their productive potential are conservative. No surprises yet, Captain.”
“At least they didn’t blow themselves up while we were away.”
“Thank The Promise for small favors.”
Braedon signed off with Scholar Price and keyed for the computer. “PROM!”
“Yes, Robert.”
“How long to rendezvous with the probe?”
“Six minutes, seventeen seconds.”
“Please tell the Chaplain to get ready then. I’ll give him twenty minutes for his ceremony, then everyone goes back to his duty station.”
“I have so informed him, Robert.”
“Let me know when we come in range.”
“Order acknowledged and understood.”
Four minutes later, PROM notified him that she had visual contact with the probe.
“Put it on the screen,” he said. The screen jumped and suddenly there was a very tiny something at its center, something that looked like two tiny marbles joined together with a toothpick.
“We are being scanned, Robert.”
“Scanned? By what?”
“A search beam of moderate power. I am also picking up a transmission.”
“Put it on speaker,” he said.
“WARNING. WARNING. YOU ARE APPROACHING THE RESTRICTED ZONE OF A PROTECTED HISTORIC MONUMENT. YOU ARE HEREBY ADVISED TO TURN BACK IMMEDIATELY. FAILURE TO COMPLY MAY LEAD TO CIVIL OR CRIMINAL PENALTIES BEING ASSESSED AGAINST YOU.”
“What is that?” Braedon asked.
“It would appear to be an automated satellite of some kind.”
“Put a lid on it before it squawks to Earth.”
The mechanical voice shut off in mid-cry and they continued their approach. Less than a minute later, the computer had some more distressing news.
“There is a ship beside the probe.
Braedon felt his mouth go dry. “A manned vessel?”
“By its design, yes. What should I do?”
“Nothing,” Braedon replied. “Continue the approach.”
The probe had grown large enough to fill the screen. Braedon ordered magnification reduced. Sure enough, there was a spacecraft hovering close by the probe’s control sphere. It was a tiny thing about the size of the scout boats that Procyon’s Promise carried. Its design was similar to that of ships in use when Pathfinder had departed the Solar System.
“What do you make of it, Scholar?” he asked.
“Obviously powered by a plasma reaction jet. Its engine is probably an I-mass initiated, hydrogen fusion reactor. Standard design. By its size, I would guess a runabout, two to four crewmen.”
“Sightseers?”
“Highly probable.”
“I have spotted a single figure on the surface of the probe, Robert,” PROM said. “She sees us and is calling the ship. I have blocked the signal from getting through.”
“She?”
“By the timbre of the voice, I estimate a ninety percent probability that the person inside that spacesuit is a woman.”
“What language does she speak?”
“English. There is a high probability that she recognizes that we are a starship.”
“Better slap a tractor on her then. We don’t want her getting away.”
PROM had put the space suited figure on the main screen. Braedon could imagine her state of emotions as she watched Procyon’s Promise approach the probe. Her mood would not be helped when they yanked her off the probe with a tractor beam. Braedon hated to do it. Still, he had to have information as to conditions on Earth. This opportunity seemed too good to pass up.
As he watched, the woman jumped for her ship.
“She has evaded my beam,” PROM reported. “and is accelerating too quickly. She will be injured when she contacts her ship.”
“Spear her in flight, then,” Braedon ordered. He gulped and watched the slow motion drama. It would be a bad omen if their first contact within the solar system ended in the Solarian being injured, especially if that Solarian were a woman. He held his breath until the figure suddenly changed course and came floating toward Promise.
Braedon keyed his communicator. “Chief Hanada!”
“Here, Captain.”
“Get two of your men into suits. Have them assist our visitor. Use the main airlock.”
“Yes, sir.”
Braedon swiveled to face his executive officer. “I’m going to greet her, Mr. Martin. You have the conn.”
“Very good, Captain.”