“If you’ve been in business as long as I have, you learn how to pick winners.”
Cochrane’s eyes narrowed. He wanted to ask exactly how long Brack had been in business, even though he knew from experience that that was another topic Brack didn’t like discussing. But there were other questions. “Why the hurry, Micah?”
Brack thought about his answer, pursed his lips, stared up at the dome, but focused on something only his eyes could see. “In 1838, a British steamer, the Great Western, crossed the Atlantic, Bristol to New York, in fifteen days.” He looked back at Cochrane. Cochrane shrugged. He didn’t see the point. “It was the first fully steam-powered vessel to make the crossing. Another ship arrived the same day, but it had taken nineteen days to cross from London. Now, the sailing clippers could make the crossing faster if the winds were right, but the Great Western moved independent of the winds and the weather. It was technology. Dependable. Repeatable. Fifteen days from London to New York. A trip that used to take months.”
Cochrane waited. “I sense an analogy building.”
Brack rubbed at his temple, as if he were caught up in a memory instead of reciting facts he had studied. “You know what the American newspapers—they were the data agencies of the time —you know what they said?”
“I’m at a loss.”
Brack quoted. “ ‘The commercial, moral, and political effects of this increased intercourse, to Europe and this country, must be immense.’ ”
“They were right, weren’t they?” Cochrane asked.
Brack’s eyes burned into him. “And, they said, because of the expansion of business, the rapid spreading of information, and the resulting reduction of prejudice, it would make ’war a thing almost impossible.’ ”
Cochrane shrugged. “Simpler times.”
“No,” Brack said emphatically. “There’s never been a simpler time. Never. In all of human history, everything has always been as complex as it is right now. The people change. The technology changes. But the … the forces at work, whatever it is that drives us to be human, that’s always the same.”
Brack looked back at the governor’s home. The quartet still played. Cochrane could hear faint laughter mingled with the music—a cocktail party on Titan. He wondered what the newspaper data agencies of 230 years ago would have thought about that.
“Eighteen thirty-eight,” Brack continued. “That same year, the Boers slaughter three thousand Zulus in Natal. British forces invade Afghanistan. Eighteen thirty-nine: Ottoman forces invade Syria. Britain and China start the Opium War. Eighteen forty: the Treaty of London unites Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia against Egypt. Steamships didn’t do a thing except get troops into battle more quickly. It’s never going to end, Zefram.”
Cochrane thought he saw where his friend was headed with his argument. “You’re worried about what’s going on back on Earth, aren’t you? Colonel Green. The Optimum Movement.”
But Brack went on as if he hadn’t heard Cochrane. “A century later, nineteen forty-four: World War Two.” He rolled his eyes in mock exasperation. “We actually started numbering them. And all eyes were on television. You know what the data agencies said about that?”
“You tell me.”
“Exactly what they said about steamships!” Brack held his hand to his eyes, recalling something he had read. Or heard. “ ‘Television offers the soundest basis for world peace that has yet been presented. International television will knit together the peoples of the world in bonds of mutual respect.’ ” Now Brack rubbed his hand over his eyes, as if overcome by a sudden wave of fatigue, not just weariness. “Television! And after Korea, and Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and Africa, and Khan, and Antarctica, war was still with us. And television …” Brack snorted disdainfully. “It’s been twenty years at least since anything’s been done with it on an international level. It’s dead. Steamships are curios for collectors. But people are still people.”
Across the domed field, the concert ended. Cochrane heard the polite applause. As Brack had said, the guest of honor would be missed soon.
“What’s your point, Micah?”
“They’re going to say the same thing about what you’ve done.”
“That the fluctuation superimpellor will bring an end to war?”
Brack’s wry smile didn’t do anything to warm his grim tone. “I promise you that that will be the lead editorial on a hundred services by the end of the week.”
“Well, why not?” Cochrane asked. “I mean, wars are fought over resources, and the superimpellor opens up the galaxy. There’s no end to resources now.”
Cochrane followed Brack’s gaze to the governor’s home. There were silhouettes in the windows. People looking out, trying to find the man of the hour. Of the century.
“Wars are fought because that is what people do,” Brack said. “Resources are an excuse, nothing more.”
Cochrane felt frustration rising in him. Usually, he was all for these philosophical talks with Brack. The industrialist could go on as if time had no meaning for him. But Cochrane was about to be pulled back into the governor’s reception. Who knew when he would have five minutes to himself again?
“Micah, the superimpellor has no military function, if that’s what you’re worried about. It can’t even be used out here by Saturn without getting twisted up with the sun’s gravity well. On Earth, it can’t function for more than a nanosecond without self-destructing. Remember Kashishowa?”
Brack’s expression hardened. “I know it has no military function—the little ’accident’ at Kashishowa Station notwithstanding. I would never have funded your work if I had thought otherwise. But no matter what the editorialists say over the months ahead, the superimpellor has no peaceful function, either. It’s technology, Zefram. Neutral. It’s only what humans make of it.”
At last Cochrane saw the question to be asked. “And what should we make of it?”
“An insurance policy.”
Cochrane didn’t understand.
“War won’t end, Zefram. The superimpellor won’t do it. Matter replication or teleportation won’t do it. Nothing on the thousand drawing boards I fund ever will. But what the superimpellor will do is make sure the next war won’t cause humanity’s extinction.”
“There won’t be a ’next’ war. The New United Nations—”
“Are a joke. There will always be a next war. And each next war brings cruder weapons. And the more cruel the weapons, then the more cruel the person who uses them.” Brack stepped closer to Cochrane. Someone was in the open door of the governor’s home, waving her arm as if calling Cochrane in. “We’re ten years from World War Three, Zefram. Twenty at most. The New United Nations is destined to collapse like its predecessors. And a third world war fought with twenty-first-century technology is going to be something from which Earth might never recover.”
Cochrane frowned as he finally understood what Brack meant. “But Centauri B II will be far enough away not to get involved.”
“Centauri B II and a half-dozen others within the decade. Perhaps twenty within the same number of years.”
Cochrane gave his friend a skeptical look. “Not even you can afford to spend twenty billion Eurodollars on twenty extrasolar colonies.”
“You’re right. But I can get four or five started. And when my competitors see me doing it, they’re going to think I see profit in it, so they’re going to try and beat me at my own game. They’ll form consortiums. Sell shares. Attach superimpellors to every probe sled and impulse freighter in the system to flood the nearby systems with a wave of exploration … and I intend to give them the patents to do it.”
Cochrane nearly choked. “Give them the patents? After what you spent to develop them?”
Brack patted Cochrane on the back. “You’ve made space travel quick, now leave it to me to make it inexpensive. Trust me, my friend, by the time I’m finished with giving your invention away, they’ll be naming planets after you. And by the time any of my competitors figure out
I’m just throwing my money away on colonies, with no hope for any kind of reasonable return, it will be too late. A whole industry based on interstellar exploration will have emerged.” Brack’s eyes narrowed as his most serious tone returned. “An industry that will be able to survive the collapse of Earth.”
“You’re telling me all of human history is a race, aren’t you?” Cochrane asked. “That we’ve always been running away from our own worst instincts, and that we always will be.”
Brack gave Cochrane a look the physicist knew too well. A surprise was coming, and it wouldn’t be pleasant. “Zefram, Colonel Adrik Thorsen left Earth two hours ago. He’s coming here. To see you.”
Cochrane felt a chill that had nothing to do with the chill air of Titan. Thorsen was one of Colonel Green’s cadre. He was rumored to have quelled a ration demonstration in Stockholm by deploying battlefield pulse emitters designed to be used against armored infantry. The civilians taking part in the demonstration had had no radiation armor. Hundreds had been killed. Thousands left impaired, their synaptic connections sundered at a molecular level.
Then Thorsen had joined with the Optimum Movement in the Pursuit of Perfection. Perfection was whatever Colonel Green and those of his countless analytical committees said it was. And if something, or someone, or some group of people wasn’t perfect, then that thing, or that person or group, didn’t deserve to exist.
Cochrane understood what Brack had said about history repeating itself. The coldly efficient bureaucracies of Green’s Analytical Committees, the stark design of the interlinked OM triangles, all were just new skins for an old and hideous ideology that should have been consigned to its ashes more than a century ago.
“I’ve had nothing to do with the Optimum,” Cochrane said. “Why does he want to see me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. He wants to see your ship.”
“Our ship.”
“The point is, he wants to make it his.”
The answer seemed obvious to Cochrane. “But we won’t let him.”
Brack sighed. “There have been a great many changes while you’ve been away, Zefram. The Optimum Movement has been expanding its influence. Rapidly. There are some nations on Earth that don’t like the way things are going. They’re the ones clinging to the illusion of order the Optimum offer, and ignoring the price they’ll have to pay.”
“Well,” Cochrane said, his mind working quickly, “if Thorsen left two hours ago, then we’ve still got a few days before he gets here. We can work out something tomorrow.”
“Colonel Thorsen will arrive on Titan in nine hours.”
Cochrane’s eyes widened. Whatever vehicle Thorsen was in, he was traveling at almost five percent the speed of light. Impulse drives could boost a space vehicle to that kind of velocity in less than an hour, but the rapid acceleration would crush any living thing on board into a thin organic paste against the aft bulkhead. True, there were specially constructed impulse ships designed to operate at multi-g accelerations with humans aboard, for military or emergency rescue missions, but those required the pilots to be suspended in liquid-filled command capsules, “breathing” an oxygen-rich saline solution to prevent their lungs from being crushed. Crewed ships could reach light-speed velocities without harming their living cargo only through gradual acceleration. But even at a constant, military-standard three-g acceleration, it would take almost five days to achieve the speed with which Thorsen was coming to Titan.
“What’s he sending? An artificial-intelligence surrogate?”
“He’s coming himself, Zefram.”
“Not in nine hours, he’s not. This time of year, we’re thirty-seven light-minutes from Earth. No human could survive that kind of impulse acceleration.”
A handful of people were walking across the bare soil to Cochrane and Brack. They only had a minute left to talk undisturbed.
“As I said,” Brack said emphatically, “there have been a great many changes since you left.”
Cochrane’s eyes widened as he realized what Brack was implying. “Inertial damping?”
Brack frowned. “I’ve spent a fortune trying to develop that over the past thirty years, too. And the breakthrough came out of the R-and-D section of a chain of simulator theaters, of all things.” He looked away to gauge the approach of the party guests, “But on the bright side, between your superimpellor and control of inertia, there’s not a place in the universe humans can’t travel.”
Cochrane felt as if he’d been kicked. Control of inertia put the full power of vectored-impulse space travel in the hands of human crews and passengers. The solar system could be crossed in hours. An Earth-moon flight would be little longer than a maglev train trip between San Francisco and New Los Angeles, with more time spent getting out of Earth’s atmosphere than traveling the next 380,000 kilometers in vacuum. And Adrik Thorsen, the Optimum, was already using that technology.
A part of Cochrane wished he could see the specs of an inertial damper. The device, if it were real, might help him overcome some of the superimpellor’s engineering shortcomings. But it was human shortcomings that concerned him now. “After all you’ve just told me about human nature, do we really want the Optimum to spread into the universe?”
Brack shook his head. “The Optimum aren’t interested in the universe. They’re interested in control. And how can they have control if the superimpellor can whisk their potential subjects light-years beyond their influence?” The reception guests were almost upon them. “I’m guessing Thorsen’s coming here to see if he can suppress your invention.”
Cochrane clenched his fists at his sides. Alone in space, it was easy to convince himself that science was as pure as the numbers glowing on a scanner screen. But being back among the madding crowd, he was once again reminded of how impossible that ideal was. As long as people remained blind to the clarity with which the universe was laid out, there would always be those who would seek to obscure and twist its truths for ugly political and philosophical goals. Cochrane could see Brack read that growing sense of resentment and anger within him.
“Don’t worry,” Brack said. “There’s no chance he’ll be able to suppress anything. I’m giving away the patents, remember? As soon as you download a systems assessment I can include as an engineering supplement, I’m going systemwide to transmit your design theories, your blueprints, and your manufacturing log. By the time Thorsen arrives, the information will already be on its way back to the inner planets. By the time the editorialists start pontificating on the end of war, millions of people will have access to your work. The genie, so to speak, is out of the bottle and will never go back in.”
Cochrane felt overwhelmed. After so much time alone, his emotions were too rarefied. Though he had never admitted it to anyone, indeed, had taken great pains to deny it, he had looked forward to a scientific triumph. He especially had wanted to hear the apologies from those who had scoffed at his work years ago. “I had hoped to publish in the normal way,” he said hesitantly. “Peer review. A data conference upon publication. That sort of thing. I … I don’t know what to say, Micah.”
“That’s why you’re with me, my friend. I do. And this is not the time for things to be done normally. I want humanity to explode out of this system as if a dam had burst.”
Cochrane wanted that, too. More than ever. More than anything. “So what do we do about Thorsen?”
Brack lowered his voice as the approaching partygoers came within earshot. “Leave Thorsen to me. In two hours, my yacht will be prepped for launch at Shuttlebay Four. She’ll take you back to the Bonaventure. I’ve got a tug up there now replenishing her.” Brack suddenly turned to the approaching guests and held up his hands. “Ladies, gentlemen: an indulgence, please. I’ll return him to you in just a moment.” Then he put his arm around Cochrane’s shoulder and guided him across the soil, away from the excited and slightly annoyed buzz of conversation that grew behind them.
Cochrane was annoyed, as well, as he pictured strangers’ hands on
his ship. “Micah, please. The antimatter field containers are still too sensitive. And I’ve got to do something about the lithium converter. It only runs at twenty-two percent of—” But Brack cut him off.
“There’s no time for that, Zefram. Put it in your engineering download. The point is, when the Bonaventure’s fueled and stocked, I want you to leave.”
Cochrane stopped dead. He could tell Brack didn’t just mean Titan or near-Saturn space. “As in, leave the system?”
Brack nodded. His expression was grim as he heard the partygoers swarming toward them again. “That’s right. Far enough out that you can use the superimpellor again.”
Cochrane grimaced. It would take him two weeks to get far enough away from the sun’s gravity well. Two more weeks of being alone in space.
“Not for long,” Brack added, obviously sensing Cochrane’s unspoken reaction. “Just enough that the military nets will lose track of you. Because when Thorsen arrives and finds you gone, they will be tracking you.”
“And then what?” Cochrane asked.
Brack quickly laid out his flight plan, telling Cochrane to reenter the solar system opposite Saturn’s present position, then come in like an Oort freighter on a long-fall passage, to rendezvous with asteroid RG-1522. “I’ve got a manufacturing setup there,” Brack explained. “You can get started on the second generation of the superimpellor. Get the fields up to the volume of a freighter.”
“And be safe from Thorsen?”
“I’ll be honest,” Brack said. “Thorsen’s just a puppet. I want you safe from the Optimum.”
“When will that be?”
“When they realize that anyone with a few hundred thousand Eurodollars can retrofit an existing space vehicle to make a faster-than-light vessel. And that anyone with a few hundred Eurodollars can book passage on one. When Colonel Green and his cohorts realize they can’t stop the spread of the superimpellor, they’ll lose interest before they’ll admit defeat.”
There were footsteps immediately behind them. Chiding voices told Brack he had monopolized Cochrane long enough.
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