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April, 2287
David
Dysinger stared at the information on his computer terminal and told
himself that this had to be a mistake. What he was looking at couldn’t
possibly be correct. He had been sitting in the Advanced Physics Lab of
the Johns Hopkins University campus on the asteroid Ceres, doing his
usual job: checking the results from this day’s observations with the
main gravitic sensor array and waiting for his shift to be over so he
could get down to the tavern where the other graduate assistants would
be having a good time, when a faint beeping jogged him out of his
pleasant daydream about one particular female GA. He’d paused the flow
of information on his screen and rolled his chair over to one of the
other terminals. A small light was flashing there; it was a data
transfer from the main radio-astronomy station. That was odd: the log
had not indicated any Requests-for-Information pending and it was not
an RFI from RadAst, either. Puzzled, but grateful for any distraction,
he had hit the ‘accept’ key.
A wave of incoming
data had filled the screen. The first part was just a header from
RadAst giving the Right Ascension and Declination of the data’s source:
somewhere out towards Sagittarius. But the rest of it was not in any
format that David recognized. He automatically routed it into a storage
area and then engaged a search routine to find a match for the
encryption format. A minute went by and then two. This was surprising.
Whatever it was must really be out of date…
An
instant later the match was found and the data was decoded. David
stared at it for a few moments and then his jaw dropped open. Impossible! That was lost years ago!
He checked and rechecked the data. It matched the archived records
exactly, but there was just no way this could be right. Someone over in
RadAst must be playing a practical joke. It wouldn’t be that hard to
arrange, either…
Well, he could prove it easily
enough. The MIT lab on Pallas was only thirty light-minutes away, easy
communication range, but far enough to get a good parallax reading on
the signal source. That would tell the tale. He typed in an RFI and
sent it off. Then he leaned back in his chair and tried to think up
ways of repaying whoever was behind this joke. The minutes ticked away
and he went and got another cup of coffee. Eventually he went back to
the gravitic readings this strange message had interrupted. It would
probably take a while for the MIT lab to respond, although it was an
easy enough request. He found it very hard to concentrate on the
gravitic data. What if this wasn’t a joke…?
His
shift was nearly up when the reply came. It was short, as he had
expected. But the numbers it contained were not what he had expected at
all. Even without running them through the computer, he could see that
the radio source was not close. Not close at all…
“Holy Shit!” he hissed. His heart started pounding when he
realized what the numbers were telling him. With his fingers stumbling
in haste he managed to copy all the data to a chip and make a quick
hardcopy of the critical facts and then he ran from the lab, unmindful
of the fact that his relief was not due for another ten minutes.
He was in the three-quarter gee section of the slowly rotating
asteroid, but he had spent his whole life in one space installation or
another and variable gravities were second nature. There were few
people around at this point in Ceres’ ‘day’ and he saw nobody before he
reached the lift shaft. On the long trip up through the kilometers of
rock to the one-third-gee level, he tried to compose what he was going
to say to the Doctor when he got there. He checked the time. It was
late, but Sweeney would probably still be up. He supposed he should
have called first, but he was far too wound up for any delay at all.
This was hot!
The lift slowed to a halt and the
door opened. Several people were waiting, but they paid him no mind. He
slid past them and then headed down the corridor in long, gliding
steps, fending himself off from the ceiling with his free hand. Corners
were tricky, but he used the grab bars to swing himself onto the new
trajectories without a lost second. He went through several open
pressure doors into one of the older sections of the station. Here, the
corridors were the bare rock of the asteroid.
Two
more turns and he reached his goal: a metal door set into the rock. A
small name tag read: “J.H.C.L. Sweeney, Ph.D.” He pushed the door
buzzer. There was a long pause and he was getting ready to push the
button again when there was an answer. “Yes? Who is it?”
“It’s David, Doctor. I’ve got something important here. Can I come in and show you, sir?”
“It’s a bit late, isn’t it? Why aren’t out drinking with your chums?”
“Doctor, please! This is very important!”
“Very well, come in.” The door slid open and David went through.
He had been in Doctor Sweeney’s apartment many times before, but he
always marveled at how little it looked like a college professor’s
home. There was no clutter, not even any books to be seen. The tasteful
furniture and decorations were dusted and polished. Had it not been for
the half-dozen cats lounging about, it would have looked like no one
lived here at all.
“I’m out on the balcony,” called the Doctor’s voice.
David followed it and went through the heavy glass doors that led
to the balcony overlooking The Canyon, several of the cats following in
his wake. The Canyon was a breathtaking sight that never paled. The
original explorers of Ceres had tunneled all through the huge space
rock, extracting minerals and making living space. They had found an
enormous open fracture deep inside that ran for kilometers. When the
asteroid was set spinning to provide artificial gravity, the fracture
became a ‘canyon’ fifty kilometers deep and a hundred long. It had been
filled with oxygen and inert gases and was now the asteroid’s air
storage tank—and its chief wonder. David could see hundreds of lights
from other balconies and windows along the opposite cliff face. There
were powerful lights mounted at many points, but these were dimmed for
the asteroid’s ‘night’ cycle. He could just barely make out the
wing-tip lights of someone out there ‘birding’ on artificial wings.
But the stunning view only distracted him for a moment. David’s
eyes were dragged back to the form of Doctor Sweeney, sitting easily in
one of the chairs. The Old Man was over ninety standard years, but the
low gravity made him look only seventy. His hair was thin, but still
had a few strands of its original black among the gray and silver that
predominated. He wore a full beard that had even more of the black in
it and hid many of the wrinkles. There were plenty of wrinkles around
his eyes, however. Those eyes sparkled like polished onyx as they
looked up at him.
“So? What brings you here in
such a rush?” Sweeney’s face was full of amusement. David thought he
always looked like that. Well, for once, he was going to put
astonishment on the Doctor’s face instead of amusement! He cleared his
throat.
“Doctor, we’ve just received the telemetry from
Hyper-One. I’ve had Pallas confirm the location and I’ve calculated the
distance: a little over twelve light years. It worked, sir! It really
worked!”
“Of course it worked,” said Sweeney calmly. “I never had a doubt. The signal is just about on time, too.”
David’s mouth dropped open. “You… you were expecting this?” he gasped.
“Yes. It has been twelve years, four months, two weeks and three
days since we launched the probe. I was expecting the signal about
now—plus or minus two months.”
“But… but…” stuttered David. This was not the reaction he had expected.
“Of course, I wasn’t expecting this at the time we launched it,”
continued Sweeney. He leaned back and his eyes strayed out the window.
“Stupid of me, really. I should have realized that the gravity well
would affect the jump distance.”
“Sir?”
“When we did the first jump test with the anti-matter—you would
have been about five then, I guess—the scaremongers made us run the
test out beyond the orbit of Pluto. Damn fools thought thirty whole
grams of anti-matter were going to blow up the entire solar system if
something went wrong! The sample went three light months before
reentering normal space and exploding. We saw the explosion and the
timing told us that the antimatter had indeed jumped through
hyperspace. But when we built Hyper-One we jumped it from just beyond
the Belt--far deeper in Sol’s gravity well.” The Doctor’s eyes came
back to David. “It’s like trying to push your fist trough a piece of
paper, you see. Out by Pluto, the paper’s like tissue, you can push
through with little effort and control where your fist goes easily.
Back here by the Belt, closer to Sol, the paper is much heavier. It
takes more force and you have less control after you break through.
Jumping back near Earth would be like punching through a plank—God only
knows where you’d end up.”
“But the probe went twelve light years, sir!”
“Indeed it did. I figured out the math for it a few years after
the jump, but I doubted anyone would have been interested in the
excuses of an old charlatan at that point, so I’ve been biding my time.
And, of course, there might have been some mechanical failure which
would have prevented any signal reaching us—I wasn’t about to start
making predictions again, not after the first fiasco.”
David stood and stared at his mentor. His casual statement did
not reveal the pain he had suffered over that costly and oh-so-public
“failure”. The initial test with the anti-matter has proved that
faster-than-light jumps were, indeed, possible. Sweeney’s fame had been
enormous. Six years and ten billion dollars later he had tried to prove
that a self-contained jump device could actually survive the jump. The
probe had jumped out—but was never heard from again.
Until now.
“You have the proof you need now, Doctor! We need to inform the
journals and the media. Then you can apply for funding to build more
probes and eventually a real ship. Just think of it, sir! The stars!
The stars are finally in reach!” Even as he said those last words,
David realized he was letting his excitement get the better of him. As
if he needed to remind Sweeney of what this all meant! The Doctor had
been working on this for over fifty years—of course he knew what it all
meant.
But Sweeney looked back out the window at the Canyon and slowly shook his head. His expression grew dark.
“No.”
“No? What do you mean, sir? Surely we have to tell people about this!”
“Oh, I didn’t mean the part about informing people. We need to do that,
naturally. No, I was responding to the rest of your statement, Dave.
I’ve had my fill of University budget hearings and trying to pry money
out of the government. It was so hard back when we were doing the first
tests. And a lot more people cared about things like this then than do
now. It will be ten times harder this time. I’m too old and tired for
another fight.”
“But, Doctor! This is incredibly
important!” cried David in amazement. “You can’t just ignore it.
Someone has to take up the fight and make this happen!” Even as he said
it, he knew he was making a mistake.
Sweeney’s eyebrows slowly rose and his look of amusement was back.
“Are you volunteering, Dave?”
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