by Joe Haldeman
He looked around. “I don’t know exactly where to begin.” He tapped the podium nervously. “This all started with the astrophysics group. Some fellows from Bellcomm University came to them with a jump proposal. To Achernar.”
Somebody whistled. “That’s right, 115 light-years. Expensive proposition. Bellcomm offered to match funds, but we haggled and . . . they wound up paying ninety percent.
“Well, it seemed reasonable. No way we could colonize a planet that far away. Besides, it’s a B5 star, not likely to have anything interesting.
“The Bellcomm people, Drs. Wiley and Eisberg, had been mapping gravity waves. They caught a strong pulse from Achernar. Looking back over the records, they found similar pulses occurring for over twenty years, at irregular intervals.
“You’re all familiar with the normal mechanisms that produce gravity waves. There’s nothing about Achernar that suggests it could be a source. So they wanted to go take a look.
“We tapped Shirley O’Brien’s team for this, a thirty-minute jump. Outfitted them as we would a normal trailbreaker assignment, plus some gadgets the Bellcomm people gave them. This is what came back.”
The auditorium lights dimmed and the podium and Riley disappeared, replaced by an image of the LMT chamber. Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then half a GPEM suit appeared. It toppled over and spilled. Collective gasp of anguish.
The lights returned; Riley was wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “All right, it’s not very pretty. But it’s the chance we all take, every time we step on to that crystal.
“That’s what we thought it was, just a horrible slingshot accident. Evidently O’Brien had gotten separated from her team, and had the black box off-center when return time came up. How they could manage to get separated on a thirty-minute jump we didn’t know.
“Her personnel recorder was intact, though, and she was carrying an automatic holo camera for Bellcomm. So we could find out what happened.”
He paused and shook his head. “I won’t keep you in suspense,” he said quietly. “What they found was an anomalous Earthlike planet. An inhabited planet.
“Quiet, please. The people, the creatures, on this planet were evidently not indigenous. They seemed also to be an exploration team. And they found O’Brien, not vice versa.
“They landed on nightside and waited for their floater.” Riley nodded at the projectionist.
The Tamers were standing in a broad savannah in dim blue moonlight. There were dark mountains on the horizon, and large single trees every couple of hundred meters. They were talking excitedly. O’Brien had just relayed the information that the planet had a terrestrial atmosphere.
They were taking soil and plant samples when the floater came. They started to get on board; race to where Achernar was visible before their half hour ran out.
Then another floater landed.
It was a round platform enclosed by a railing, inside a semitransparent dome. The dome disappeared when it touched the ground.
There were four human beings on the platform; two very female and two very male, wearing nothing but dark tan skin and silver belts. They were beautiful.
They hopped lightly out of their floater and approached O’Brien’s team. The woman leading them raised her right hand in a gesture that seemed to mean “wait.” Or perhaps a sign of peaceful intent. Then the sky fell.
Between them and the mountains a huge black mass settled noiselessly. In the dim light, no details were visible, only a slender ellipsoid about three kilometers long by a half kilometer wide. A spaceship.
O’Brien had found her voice. “Don’t do anything that might seem aggressive. We must look pretty fearsome in the suits.”
A seam opened in the front of the ship and warm yellow light poured out. The woman beckoned them toward the light.
“Should we go with her?” one of the crew said.
“It-I don’t know,” O’Brien said. “Yes. But everybody stay close to me. We jump in twenty-one minutes.”
She led them to a ramp that had slid out of the opening in the ship. The Tamers waited while the aliens went up the ramp, which had no apparent moving part but acted like a conveyor belt, and then followed them up.
The ramp was at one end of a corridor that appeared to extend the full length of the ship. Its walls were a seamless, glassy substance that radiated a uniform, soft yellow light.
When the last of them stepped off the ramp, the floor closed behind him. Then there was a hollow “boom,” perhaps the ramp sliding back into place.
“Looks like we’ve been kidnapped,” someone said.
“Or collected,” O’Brien said. “No matter. The ceiling is high enough for us to pyramid. I don’t imagine they could stop us.”
The alien leader made half-fists of her hands and put them together over her sternum, then drew them apart slowly: a gesture probably inviting them to open their suits. She repeated it several times, then smoothed a hand over her naked body and smiled. She had too many canines.
“I’ll be glad to get out of my suit,” a male voice said, “if you promise not to open your mouth.”
“Shut up, Jerry. Let me answer.” Since the cameras were on her suit, it was impossible to see what O’Brien did. The alien shook her head and said something in a surprisingly low growl.
“That could mean either yes or no, even on Earth.”
One of the males rapped on the wall with his knuckles and a small rectangle opened. He reached in with both arms and came out with four objects that looked like old-fashioned microphones. A short length of silvery wire dangled from each.
He handed one to the leader and then to the other two. Each one plugged the wire into his silver belt.
“Couldn’t be a translator,” Jerry’s voice said. “A weapon?”
“Maybe it is a translator,” someone said. “We don’t know everything. . . .” The leader approached the nearest Tamer, pointed the microphone at him and smiled.
The sound from the holo cube screamed a split second before the audience did.
The beam from a ten-megawatt laser couldn’t penetrate that suit, but where she pointed the wand a round hole opened, then widened into a long gash that sprayed blood. Dying, the Tamer snatched her arm and pulled. She dropped the wand as the amplified grip broke her arm.
The other three aliens attacked simultaneously; it was over in a second. The holo picture tilted sideways, then dimmed red and turned two-dimensional as blood washed over two of the three lenses.
The aliens walked slowly down the corridor, the injured one showing no sign of pain, even though jagged gray bone protruded through the bloodslick on her useless arm. A couple of dozen paces down, the wall opened and they turned left.
The auditorium lights went on. “That’s all,” Riley said. “There’s another nineteen minutes of the same scene. The aliens never come back.”
He referred to his notes for the first time. “We-myself and representatives from Bio, Psych, and Senior Survey-we have some tentative remarks, observations about these aliens.
“The most striking thing, of course, is that they look so much like us. The compelling explanation is that we have common ancestors, either in prehistory or. . . well, any number of interesting scenarios. Another possibility is that they are able to change shape, and adapted this form to throw our Tamers off their guard.
“How they could know what a human being looks like is anybody’s guess. Perhaps they could read the Tamers’ minds.
“That they should conform to our current standards of beauty is a suspicious coincidence. As Dr. Sweeney pointed out, a culture will generally regard as beautiful such characteristics as have survival value, for the individual or for the race. A similar aesthetic about the body presupposes a similar environment. Of course, two highly developed technological societies will have similar environments, the most comfortable possible. Which brings us back to square one.”
He held up a piece of paper. “See whether any of you can add to this list. Dr. Jameson
made it up: anatomical differences between us and them.
“The teeth are obvious. But that could be cosmetic; various Earth cultures have filed or chipped teeth to make them look more ferocious.
“Did you notice that the men have no nipples? I didn’t. Jameson says they could have been excised in infancy, though, for cosmetic or ritual reasons, and not leave scars visible from our range.
“Their umbilici are all the same, a simple vertical groove. You would almost never find this in four humans chosen at random. The same with genital size in the men. But we have no reason to presuppose randomness; maybe only men with strange navels and large genitalia are recruited for the job.
“Also, the females . . . the genital slit extends about a centimeter higher than it normally does in humans, viewed frontally. And in a low dorsal presentation, the last view we have of the injured alien, the external genitalia aren’t visible. They would be in a human.”
He shook his head. “These are small details, but maybe one of them is a clue.
“None of the aliens had a mole, birthmark, or other visible skin deformity. Every one of them had brown eyes. The two women were the same height, 173 centimeters. The men were four and seven centimeters taller. Neither of the men ever opened their mouths.
All four had long, graceful fingers and the high foreheads that we unconsciously, erroneously, associate with intellectual ability.
“Their fingernails and toenails were closely trimmed, what would be painfully close for a human. Collarbones and shoulderblades less prominent than the average human.
“Dr. Jameson feels that the skeletal structure in the legs and pelvis is slightly different than in humans. But that awaits more precise measurement.
“Finally, the injury the female alien sustained. Most people would go into shock and pass out with that kind of a severe fracture. A human might ignore such an injury if he were in a berserker rage, or under deep hypnosis of anesthesia. She seemed to act the same, before and after.
Also, in my opinion, the damage should have been more severe. He grabbed her just above the elbow, in a dying spasm, and shook her twice. With the GPEM’s amplification circuits, that’s like being attacked by a bulldozer. Her arm should have come off.
“We’ll be running this cube continuously for several days, in Studio A next door. I want everybody to see it over and over, as often as you can stand it. There’s no specialty that applies to this problem; there’s none that doesn’t apply. Anything you come up with, send it on to me through Planning.
“Obviously we have to go back. Probably an automated probe; I won’t order anybody to undertake a suicide mission.
“Damned expensive, too. The energy we have to push through the crystal for a 115 light-year jump, just for a couple of hours, would pay for hundreds of routine resupply missions.”
He folded the papers together and gave them a sharp crease. “But once we show this cube around, I doubt we’ll have any trouble getting funded.”
34 - Numbers and Dollars
(From AED Employees’ Handbook, AED TFX, Colorado, 2053:)
It might seem inefficient for us to proceed with geoformy in a sequence of many short jumps, rather than fewer long ones. It is unavoidable, though, from the mathematics of the Levant-Meyer Translation.
To appreciate this, it’s not necessary to have a complete technical description of the LMT; indeed, not one in a thousand AED employees understands all of the subtleties of the process. But it’s instructive to compare the energy requirements of the crystal for jumps of different duration.
(Readers without first-year college mathematics may wish to skip to the last table.)
The basic equation describing the energy needed for a given jump is:
E=C (e^(t/k) cosh s^(1/2))/(l/t+1) , { t>=.01356, s>=9.4095
where C and k are constants, t is the duration of the jump, and s is the distance. Calculations are normally done in the MKS system, but for clarity we will consider t in units of days, and s in units of light-years.
The constraints braced to the right of the equation are due to an energy threshold phenomenon of the LMT crystal. Jumps cannot be made to destinations closer than 9.4095 light-years, nor may a jump be of less than about 191/2 minutes duration. The first constraint keeps us from exploiting the promising Alpha Centauri system.1 The second makes it impossible to explore planets more than about 100-light-years distant.
It’s a convenient fiction to consider this equation as continuous over the range of values allowed. The LMT, however, can’t translate an object to any desired point in space; it translates only from matter boundary to matter boundary. There has to be an object with a distinct and relatively cold surface-a planet or asteroid-“near” the point to which the LMT crystal is tuned (attempts to translate probes onto the surface of planetless stars have always failed). The margin of error allowed is described by a fourth-order differential equation involving distance, energy, and the angular displacement of charge application away from the lattice axis of the LMT crystal.2
This family of curves shows the relationship between energy requirement and jump duration for representative distances.
1 There are plans, however, for the Tau Ceti colony to build an LMT facility out of native materials, for jumps to Centauri.
2 As described in the monograph Mathematics of the Levant-Meyer Translation: State of the Art 2051, by Lewis Chandler, AED TFX, Colorado, 2051.
( See attached graph2.jpg )
Note that a tenfold increase in distance becomes a thousandfold increase in energy required.
Energy is money, of course, and the AED is the largest consumer of energy in the world. Like any other consumer, we pay a flat rate to Westinghouse Interplanetary for every kilowatt-hour, though our rate is reduced both because of volume and because of mutual-interest grants from WI research facilities.
It’s instructive to compare the cost of jumps to various planets for different durations (see included table1.jpg).
Careful study of this table will give one an appreciation for the complexity involved in scheduling jumps (coordinating them so the crystal is always clear when a return is due).
As an illustrative example, consider the course of a breeding mission to Cygnus A. A pregnant Tamer will spend about 150 days of her pregnancy offplanet. The energy cost of various combinations of jumps is as follows:
150 one-day jumps = $2,340,000
30 5-day jumps = 1,197,000
15 10-day jumps = 1,114,500
5 30-day jumps = 3,376,500.
So a sequence of short jumps may actually cost more than a smaller number of longer jumps. What happens in practice is that the least expensive combination is calculated, and then adjustments are made to the sequence in order to minimize crowding of the crystal’s schedule . . .
( see attached table1.jpg)
35 - Autobiography 2053
Box 5397
Oswego, NY 1312659
3 January 2053
Dear Carol,
It looks like I’ll be here for another week. Not looking forward to it, either.
My stepmother insisted on a viewing, open coffin. Barbaric. She said Dad would have wanted it that way. Maybe he changed a lot these last nine years.
The reason I have to stick around is that Dad willed his papers to Cornell, and their history of science department is anxious to have them. He left a trailerful, in no particular order; I’m filing and cataloging them with the help of half-brother Jerry.
Jerry’s all right. I never really got to talk with him before. He’s just finishing a master’s in holo arts. Dad was disappointed he didn’t go into physics. Still, he left him everything-all the money, that is. (The house and such went to Zara, my stepmother.) Neither my mother nor I was mentioned in the will.
I called Mother, but she didn’t want to come to the funeral. She confronted Zara once. She agreed that Dad wouldn’t have wanted all this morbid circus. The will didn’t say anything one way or another.
I saw in the
Times that they think the Achernar gravity waves were caused by interstellar space ships braking. So they’ve been on that planet for 140 years or more.
The article didn’t say, but I assume the gravity waves are generated by a sudden loss of mass as the ships come down from relativistic velocity. They must stop pretty suddenly. Has anybody figured out the gee-forces involved? Tough customers.
At least they don’t have the LMT, not yet. After seeing that cube (a hundred times) I’m just as happy we don’t have them in our back yard.
I called Noad (Planning) and he gave me a leave extension. They do need a scientist-type here for the sorting. Jerry’s smart but he doesn’t know a quark from a quasar.
I may come back to Colorado Springs by way of Kuala Lumpur, spend a day with my mother. She remarried three or four years ago, and I’ve never met the man.
They’ve been busy years, though.
This letter probably comes as a surprise (pleasant, I hope) since I have been calling every night. Guess I got in the habit of writing when I was in Australia and you were making babies for the greater glory of etc.
I do miss you so much. Take care.
Love,
Jacque
36 - Things That Go Bump in the Night
12 Jan 53
TO: All personnel involved in Project Bogeyman.
FROM: Psych Group (R. Sweeney, chmn).
RE: Psychological profile of the Achernar aliens.
I’m stuffing this in your mailboxes because we just don’t have enough to make it worth calling a general meeting.
Take the following list with a ton of salt. The essence of psychology, in the only sense that’s applicable here, is in figuring out consistent stimulus-response patterns in the population under scrutiny. We have only a small set of stimuli to consider, and responses that as often as not make no sense whatsoever.
Possible Characteristics
1. Courage or lack of concern over personal welfare.