“Yet here you are at at last.”
“Only because six of your zombies held fistguns on me.”
“These are dangerous times, Mr. Cochrane. It would not serve the Republic well if it was learned that a noted visitor such as yourself had come to harm here.”
Cochrane didn’t understand the game Thorsen was playing. Nor did he care to learn what it was. “So now that I’m safe, am I free to go?”
Thorsen opened his hands. “Of course you’re free to go. Any time.”
To test the theory, Cochrane stood.
Thorsen remained seated. “Of course, I would appreciate a few moments to talk with you, but …”
“But what?”
“Nothing. I have work to do, too, Mr. Cochrane. These are busy times for the Republic. For the whole planet for that matter. And you were just a passenger in the limousine.” Thorsen sighed, as if with the burden of his office—an office which he had taken, not been given. “Of course, at some point, Sir John and his … ’driver’ will have to be interrogated. And my troopers can sometimes get … carried away in their zealous pursuit of perfection.” Thorsen’s mask slipped again. “Shall I call for an escort so you can be on your way?”
Cochrane remained standing. “I want to leave with Sir John and his driver.”
Thorsen’s voice slowly colored with a terrible, restrained fury. “And I would like to talk with you, sir. As I have wanted to talk with you for the past seventeen years. You at least owe me that much common courtesy if you expect me to show the same toward your friends.”
Cochrane sat down.
Thorsen’s calm returned. “Better,” he said.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“’The time has come, the walrus said,’ hmm?” Thorsen replied playfully. His anger seemed to have vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “And what I want to talk about is … you and me. But I know we’re both busy men. In fact, I know a great deal about you.” Thorsen pursed his lips and stared down at his folded hands as if checking unseen notes. “To begin, you were born in what used to be the United States.”
“The last I heard it was still there,” Cochrane said with a slight edge to his own voice. This man was dangerous, but Cochrane had difficulty accepting that Earth now allowed such arrogance as Thorsen’s to so routinely threaten others’ well-being.
“Things change, Mr. Cochrane. Like your life. Raised in Hawaii, in London, India, Seoul—your parents were teachers, weren’t they, traveling the world? Then education at MIT.” Thorsen glanced up to give Cochrane a significant look. “Left after three years, no degree. Genius is seldom appreciated, as I well know. Then to Kashishowa Station on the moon, thanks to a grant from Brack Interplanetary. And finally swallowed up by useless, self-indulgent, private industry.”
Cochrane locked eyes with Thorsen. “I go where my work takes me.”
“Does that include Centauri B II?” Thorsen smiled horribly. Cochrane did not look away although he wanted to, desperately.
“Alpha Centauri is my home,” Cochrane stated with an inward shudder at the thought of this man’s beliefs ever invading his world. It had taken four years to establish a self-sufficient farming community there that could support a fully equipped continuumdistortion research facility, and now the small colony was thriving. Cochrane was perhaps the first human to have ever said that another world was his home, but it was true.
“I am so sorry to hear that, especially from you.” Thorsen frowned slightly in disapproval. “I’m sure you’re aware that the sentiment here on my home is that anyone who leaves Earth in these turbulent, troubled times is a coward, if not an outright traitor, for abandoning one’s birthplace at the time of her greatest need.”
Cochrane knew the argument all too well. Years ago, when he had finally decided to accept Micah Brack’s offer and establish a fully equipped facility on Alpha Centauri, he had taken part in the same debate a dozen times over, arguing from the other side, Thorsen’s side. In the end, Brack had convinced him otherwise. And for the right reasons. Modern technology had made Earth too small. For humanity to survive, it was imperative that it leave its cradle and establish itself on other worlds around other suns. That way, Brack had finally persuaded Cochrane, even the destruction of an entire planet, by nature or by folly, would not doom the species.
“It is tragically wrong to believe that the advancement of humanity must proceed at the pace of its slowest members,” Cochrane said forcefully, thinking how ironic Brack would find this moment.
Thorsen looked troubled. He cracked his knuckles and the sudden noise in the tense, silent room startled Cochrane. “Are you suggesting that because I care about my home, because I care about saving the planet instead of abandoning it, that I am somehow holding back the species?”
Cochrane was tiring of Thorsen’s game and the wretched restraint it required of him. “I am suggesting that your Optimum Movement has brought Earth to the brink of destruction and that because there are functioning, independent colonies on other planets, the species will survive despite your insanity.”
The corner of Thorsen’s mouth twitched. “Because of my deep and abiding respect for your work, sir, I will overlook such treasonous slander. But I do suggest you choose your next words more carefully. As a friend of Sir John’s, anything you say will be held against him. And his driver. With most unpleasant consequences.”
Cochrane resisted the impulse to strike the sneer from Thorsen’s handsome face. But this tyranny had to end. Someone had to take a stand.
“Just what is it you want from me?”
Thorsen stared intently at Cochrane, as if to bend the scientist to his will by the force of his obsession. “I want you to help your real home, Mr. Cochrane. I want you to contribute to Earth instead of sucking it dry and abandoning it.”
“I have helped Earth. There’s an interstellar community growing. New economic possibilities for mutual expansion. A whole new—”
Thorsen suddenly slammed his palm against the desktop, making Cochrane jump. “A whole new mentality that says because Earth is no longer unique, it is permissible for it to be destroyed!”
“It’s your Optimum Movement that’s doing that,” Cochrane snapped.
“On the contrary, sir—it is your greed and selfishness that is at fault.”
Cochrane gripped the arms of his chair in frustration and rage. This man was stupid as well as venal. “Then what do you want me to do?! Go out and ask everyone to give back their superimpellors? Tell the colonists there’s been a mistake and would they all like to come back to Earth now?”
“Don’t be infantile,” Thorsen said coldly. There was more open threat in his manner now than there ever had been.
Cochrane forced himself to calmly try again. There had to be something he could do to help Sir John and Monica, and everyone else this lunatic held hostage. “You say you want me to contribute … then tell me how.”
“I want, quite simply, the secret of the continuum-distortion generator.”
Cochrane stared at Thorsen, not understanding the request. “Complete information on the superimpellor is available in any library. Through the Cochrane Foundation, you can download plans for fifty different models at no charge. You can buy parts or fully assembled units or even complete spacecraft from a hundred different companies. Hell, man, if you’ve got fifty thousand Eurodollars for parts and two graduate students, you can build one for yourself in a week. Is that what all this is about?”
Thorsen’s reply was slow and measured. “You misunderstand me again, Mr. Cochrane. It’s becoming a bit of a habit with you, isn’t it?” Cochrane felt the hair on his arms bristle. He saw insanity in Thorsen’s empty blue eyes.
“I am not interested in escaping from Earth. Your fluctuating superimpellor holds no interest for me as a mode of transportation. But the continuum-distortion generator at the heart of it does.”
Cochrane knew he had to be extremely careful. For Sir John’s and Monica’s sake, he couldn�
�t risk raising his voice again, not the way Thorsen was looking at him now. “Again, sir—the plans for my generator are available from any library, or from my Foundation, free of charge.”
“I have been patient for seventeen years, Mr. Cochrane. Please, please, don’t make me lose patience with you now.”
Cochrane continued with as much composure as he could. It was obvious that Thorsen was about to reach some kind of decision point. “Then with respect, Colonel Thorsen, allow me to say that I do not understand your request. What exactly is it that you want?”
Thorsen stood up, leaned forward on his knuckles, his face completely hidden in shadow.
“I want the secret of the warp bomb, Mr, Cochrane. And if you expect yourself and your friends to live to see the dawn, you will give it to me now.”
Of all the emotions Cochrane felt at that moment, the most powerful was relief. He knew how precarious his position was, but at least he finally knew why Thorsen had pursued him with such obsession. And that obsession had been for nothing.
Cochrane looked at the madman with a steady gaze. “There is no such thing as a ’warp bomb,’” he said. “Listen to me carefully: That’s an old, senseless rumor without a particle of truth to it.”
But Adrik Thorsen shook his head. “On August 8, 2053, a pressurized dome one hundred kilometers from Kashishowa Station literally … disappeared from the face of the moon.”
Cochrane sighed. It seemed that old tale would haunt him forever. Shortly after that event, he had appeared at a hearing of the Lunar Safety Board. His testimony had lasted for three days. Weapons research was not allowed on the moon, which is how the rumors had presumably begun. His residency permit was threatened with suspension. But he had been able to convince the board that his work was not weapons-related. In fact, the explosion was proof that the continuum-distortion generator he was trying to perfect as a precursor to the superimpellor had no possible military application.
“I’ll say it again, Colonel Thorsen: The destruction of that test facility was the result of the failure of the lithium converter and the resulting uncontrolled mixing of matter and antimatter. The instability of lithium under these conditions is probably the single biggest problem we’ve still to overcome in regulating the intense energy flow we need.”
Thorsen stared fiercely, uncomprehendingly, at Cochrane, and the scientist could see that the soldier was not willing to let go of his dream so easily. “Yet your own testimony at the hearings confirmed the total absence of radiation traces. You are a scientist, sir: How is it that matter and antimatter can annihilate each other without the creation of prodigious amounts of ionizing radiation?”
Cochrane struggled to maintain control. Not just for himself but for Sir John and his granddaughter. “If you had reviewed all of my testimony before the board, you would know the answer to that. An engineering failure created a runaway continuum distortion that made everything within it vanish from normal spacetime—including the radiation.”
Cochrane leaned forward, drawing the outline of the asymmetrical distortion field with his hands, as if he were back in the lab talking to students. “It’s a simple concept,” he said frantically, trying to reduce physics only a handful of people truly understood to something Thorsen would grasp. “The radiation created by the matter-antimatter reaction traveled outward from the point of annihilation at the speed of light. However, the momentary surge in power to the continuum-distortion bubble, in the two femtoseconds the generator remained intact, propagated at one point six times the speed of light—faster than the radiation. When the bubble was pulled out of normal space-time by the proximity of the sun’s gravitational distortion, everything within it was pulled out of space-time, too. Including the generator, the explosion, and all radiation released by the explosion.”
Thorsen narrowed his eyes. “Leaving behind a perfect, hemispherical crater in the lunar surface with a diameter of eighteen meters, beyond which nothing was disturbed.” Thorsen rose slowly and walked around to the front of the desk again. “You do understand that you created the perfect weapon, don’t you?” Even the dim emergency lights were enough to reveal the cruelty in his eyes. “Complete destruction of the target, with no radiation fallout, no blast effects. The ultimate surgical strike guaranteed not to produce unwanted civilian casualties.”
“You’re not listening,” Cochrane pleaded. “It doesn’t matter how big a generator you build, or how powerful you make it, all you will ever get out of it is a bubble of displaced space-time eighteen meters in diameter. This close to the sun, that’s as large as the continuum-distortion bubble can grow before it no longer exists in space-time.”
Thorsen gazed steadily at Cochrane, as if willing him to change what he knew to be true. “I never thought you would be a fool who suffered from a lack of imagination, Mr. Cochrane. Your superimpellors regularly travel at what velocity now? Sixty-four times the speed of light? Earth to Alpha Centauri in a little less than a month? What kind of hole would you have left on the moon if your distortion bubble had propagated at that speed? I’ll tell you: half a kilometer. If you boost it by another of your time multiplier factors: three-quarters of a kilometer. And by another factor: almost a kilometer and a half of complete destruction. With no collateral damage!”
“What you are suggesting is impossible,” Cochrane stated firmly, though his heart sank as he realized why he had become so important to Thorsen’s demented vision of Earth’s future. “I haven’t been able to prove it yet, but I suspect it’s because the sun’s gravity creates wormholes when continuum-distortion fields are formed too close. Empirical experiments show that near Earth, the distortion field can only ever be eighteen meters in diameter no matter how fast it propagates. On Mercury, it would be no more than six meters across. Out by Neptune, perhaps one hundred meters. Any farther out, and you have continuumdistortion propulsion. The sun’s gravity is the limiting factor. Not technology.”
Thorsen loomed over Cochrane, casting his shadow across him. “I have read your research, sir! I know for a fact you are working to control the size of the field. I know for a fact you can control the size of the field!”
“To make it smaller,” Cochrane insisted. “So superimpellors can operate more closely to a star. So we can use it planet to planet instead of system to system. Someday we might even be able to launch from the surface of a planet with them.
“The whole trick is to shape the region of distortion around the spacecraft. I can increase the efficiency and the operational range of the superimpellor within a gravity well. All I need to do is create an alternating series of overlapping fields. Each field helps shape the other at finer resolutions. Look at the designs of most of the ships—two generators balanced like a tuning fork offset to either side of the center of transitional mass. I have nothing at all to do with that. My engineers have nothing to do with that. It’s the nature of the continuum.”
Thorsen stepped back to lean against his desk again. He regarded Cochrane thoughtfully. “As I have said, I have read your papers. I have studied your work and your life. I even admire your mind. I consider your accomplishments to be the hallmark of what the Optimum Movement is striving to become—what it must become if this world, if humanity, is to survive.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose as if he had gone too long without sleep. “But the Optimum has enemies, sir. Ignorant cowards who would have us huddling by fires in caves, afraid of what lies outside, and of each other.” He looked away, seemingly lost in remembrance of some secret regret. “Those enemies attack us even now. They rally against us across the globe. No matter how hard I try to bring enlightenment and a new order to the world, they want to stop me, throw away everything I have achieved.”
Thorsen looked at Cochrane as if inviting him to reply, to offer encouragement. But Cochrane restrained himself from saying anything. He knew who the Optimum’s enemies were: decent women and men who had the courage to stand up to fanatics, who believed that order could never come out of any group that governed by.
exclusion, prejudice, hatred, and genocide.
“A warp bomb could save us, Mr. Cochrane. With such a weapon, purely for self-defense, no one would dare attack us. War would at last become unthinkable.”
Cochrane stared at Thorsen with incredulity, hearing the man say exactly what Micah Brack had predicted would be said, though under different circumstances.
“Colonel Thorsen,” Cochrane said slowly, “even if a warp bomb were possible, if it were the only thing that would keep the Optimum Movement in power, I would rather die than build it for you.”
Thorsen reached into the breast pocket of his blood-red jumpsuit and withdrew a local net phone from his pocket—a slender, pen-shaped object with a tip that glowed green when he twisted it on. He glanced at Cochrane and his mouth flickered up into a ghastly approximation of a smile. “Even if you resist me, Mr. Cochrane, you are too valuable to die. For now. But, fortunately, there are many other nonoptimal people available to take your place.”
“This is Colonel Thorsen,” he said into his net phone, as if with great reluctance. “Mr. Cochrane and I appear to have reached a deadlock which must be broken. Bring in the old man. And his driver.”
EIGHT
U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 STANDARD ORBIT BABEL PLANETOID
Stardate 3850.7
Earth Standard: ≈ November 2267
As he entered the transporter room, Ambassador Sarek’s face was tinged with a greenish cast, the perfect picture of Vulcan health, completely recovered from McCoy’s surgery. At the ambassador’s side, Amanda, his human wife, walked with a placid smile. The other delegates given passage on the Enterprise had already beamed down or had been taken by shuttle to the Babel planetoid. Only Sarek and Amanda remained.
Kirk, uncomfortable in his dress uniform, had been looking forward to a final meeting with the ambassador. But the presence of Admiral Kabreigny had forced him to scale back his expectations. The admiral was impatient to get under way for the Gamma Canaris region and there would be little time for Kirk and Sarek to converse. The presence of the transporter technician behind the console would also constrain what could be said.
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