Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  Torrin nodded and fussed with drinks from the snakewood cabinet. The ringing tone of a crystal glass was very loud in the quiet apartment. Ramsey was vaguely amused as he took a seat at the roseteak table in the center of the lush room. A rear admiral waiting on a captain, and no enlisted spacers to serve the Vice Admiral Commanding, who, after all, wasn’t really there in the first place . . . the whiskey was from Inverarry and was very good.

  “You have been in space nearly two years,” Lermontov said. “You have not seen your father-in-law in that time?”

  “More like three since Martin and I really talked about anything,” Ramsey said. “We—we remind each other too much of Barbara Jean and Harold.”

  The pain in Ramsey’s face was reflected as a pale shadow in Lermontov’s eyes. “But you knew he had become chairman of the appropriations committee.”

  “Yes.”

  “The Navy’s friend, Grand Senator Grant. Without him these last years would have been disaster for us all. For the Navy, and for Earth as well if those politicians could only see it.” Lermontov cut himself off with an angry snap. The big eyes matching his steel gray hair focused on Bart. “The new appropriations are worse,” the admiral growled. “While you have been away, everything has become worse. Millington, Harmon, Bertram, they all squeeze President Lipscomb’s Unity Party in your country, and Kaslov gains influence every day in mine. I think it will not be long before one or the other of the CoDominium sponsors withdraws from the treaties, Bart. And after that, war.”

  “War.” Ramsey said it slowly, not believing. After a hundred and fifty years of uneasy peace between the United States and the Soviets, war again, and with the weapons they had . . .

  “Any spark might set it off,” Lermontov was saying. “We must be ready to step in. The fleet must be strong, strong enough to cope with the national forces and do whatever we must do.”

  Ramsey felt as if the admiral had struck him. War? Fleet intervention? “What about the Commanding Admiral? The Grand Senate?”

  Lermontov shrugged. “You know who are the good men, who are not. But so long as the fleet is strong, something perhaps can be done to save Earth from the idiocy of the politicians. Not that the masses are better, screaming for a war they can never understand.” Lermontov drank quietly, obviously searching for words, before he turned back to Ramsey. “I have to tell you something painful, my friend. Your father-in-law is missing.”

  “Missing—where? I told Martin to be careful, that Millington’s Liberation Army people . . .”

  “No. Not on Earth. Outsystem. Senator Grant went to Meiji to visit relatives there . . .”

  “Yes.” Ramsey felt the memory like a knife in his vitals. “His nephew, Barbara Jean’s cousin, an officer in the Diplomatic Corps on Meiji. Grew up in the senator’s home. Barbara Jean was visiting him when . . .”

  “Yes.” Lermontov leaned closer to Ramsey so that he could touch his shoulder for a moment. Then he took his hand away. “I do not remind you of these things because I am cruel, my friend. I must know—would the senator have tried to find his daughter? After all these years?”

  Bart nodded. “She was his only child. As Harold was mine. If I thought there was any chance, I’d look myself. You think he tried it?”

  “We do.” Lermontov signaled Torrin to bring him another drink. “Senator Grant went to Meiji with the visit to his relatives as cover. With the Japanese representation question to come up soon, and the budget after that. Meiji is important. The Navy provided a frigate for transportation. It took the usual route through Colby and around, and was supposed to return the same way. But we have confirmed reports that Senator Grant’s ship went instead to the jump-off point for the direct route.”

  “What captain in his right mind would let him get away with that?”

  “His name was Commander John Grant, Jr. The senator’s nephew.”

  “Oh.” Bart nodded again, exaggerating the gesture as he realized the full situation. “Yeah. Johnny would do it if the old man asked. So you came all the way out here for my opinion, Sergei? I can give it quick. Senator Grant was looking for Barbara Jean. So you can write him off and whatever other plans you’ve got for the goddam Navy, you can write off, too. Learn to live without him, Sergei. The goddam jinx has another good ship and another good man. Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to get back to my ship and get drunk.”

  Captain Ramsey strode angrily toward the door. Before he reached it, the vice admiral’s voice crackled through the room. “Captain, you are not excused.”

  “Sir.” Ramsey whirled automatically. “Very well, sir. Your orders?”

  “My orders are for you to sit down and finish your drink, Captain.” There was a long silence as they faced each other. Finally, Ramsey sat at the expensive table.

  “Do you think so badly of me, Bart, that you believe I would come all the way out here, meet you secretly, for as little as this?”

  Bart looked up in surprise. Emotions welled up inside him, emotions he hadn’t felt in years, and he fought desperately to force them back. No, God, don’t let me hope again. Not that agony. Not hope . . . But Lermontov was still speaking.

  “I will let Professor Stirner explain it to you, since I am not sure any of us understand him. But he has a theory, Bart. He believes that the senator may be alive, and that there may be a chance to bring him home before the Senate knows he is missing. For years, the Navy has preserved the peace, now a strong fleet is needed more than ever. We have no choice, Bart. If there is any chance at all, we must take it.”

  Professor Hermann Stirner was a short Viennese with thinning red hair, improbable red freckles, and a neat round belly. Ramsey thought him about fifty, but the man’s age was indeterminate. It was unlikely that he was younger, but with regeneration therapy he could be half that again. Rap Torrin brought the professor in through a back entrance.

  “Dr. Stirner is an intelligence adviser to the fleet,” Lermontov said. “He is not a physicist.”

  “No, no physicist,” Stirner agreed quickly. “Who would want to live under the restrictions of a licensed physicist? CoDominium intelligence officers watching every move, suppressing most of your discoveries . . .” He spoke intently giving the impression of great emotion no matter what he said. “And most physicists I have met are not seeing beyond the end of their long noses. Me, I worry mostly about politics, Captain. But when the Navy loses ships, I want to know what happened to them. I have a theory about those ships, for years.”

  Ramsey gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles were white, but his voice was deadly calm. “Why didn’t you bring up your theory before now?”

  Stirner eyed him critically. Then he shrugged. “As I said, I am no physicist. Who would listen to me? But now, with the senator gone . . .”

  “We need your father-in-law badly,” Lermontov interrupted. “I do not really believe Professor Stirner’s theories, but the fleet needs Senator Grant so desperately we will try anything. Let Dr. Stirner explain.”

  “Ja. You are a bright young CoDominium Navy captain, I am going to tell you things you know already, maybe. But I do not myself understand everything I should know, so you let me explain my own way, ja?” Stirner paced briskly for a moment, then sat restlessly at the table. He gave no chance to answer his question. but spoke rapidly, so that he gave the impression of interrupting himself.

  “You got five forces in this universe we know about, ja? Only one of them maybe really isn’t in this universe, we do not quibble about that, let the cosmologists worry. Now we look at two of those forces, we can forget the atomics and electromagnetics. Gravity and the Alderson force, these we look at. Now you think about the universe as flat like this table, eh?” He swept a pudgy hand across the roseteak surface. “And wherever you got a star, you got a hill that rises slowly, gets all the time steeper until you get near the star when it’s so steep you got a cliff.” And you think of your ships like roller coasters. You get up on the hill, aim where you want to go, and pop on
the hyperspace drivers. Bang, you are in a universe where the Alderson effect acts like gravity. You are rolling downhill, across the table, and up the side of the next hill, not using up much potential energy, so you are ready to go again somewhere else if you can get lined up right. O.K.?”

  Ramsey frowned. “It’s not quite what we learned as middies—you’ve got ships repelled from a star rather than—”

  “Ja, ja, plenty of quibble we can make if we want to. Now, Captain, how is it you get out of hyperspace when you want to?”

  “We don’t,” Ramsey said. “When we get close enough to a gravity source, the ship comes out into normal space whether we want it to or not.”

  Stirner nodded. “Ja. And you use your photon drivers to run around in normal space where the stars is like wells, not hills, at least thinkin’ about gravities. Now, suppose you try to shoot past one star to another, all in one jump?”

  “It doesn’t work,” Ramsey said. “You’d get caught in the gravity field of the in-between star. Besides, the Alderson paths don’t cross each other. They’re generated by stellar nuclear activities, and you can only travel along lines of equal flux. In practice that means almost line of sight, with range limits, but they aren’t really straight lines . . .”

  “Ja. O.K. That’s what I think is happening to them. I think there is a star between A-7820 and 82 Eridani. which is the improbable name Meiji’s sun is stuck with.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Admiral Torrin protested. “There can’t be a star there, Professor. There’s no question of missing it, not with our observations. Man, do you think the Navy didn’t look for it? A liner and an explorer class frigate vanished on that route. We looked, first thing we thought of.”

  “Suppose there is a star there but you are not seeing it?”

  “How could that be?” Torrin asked.

  “A Black Hole, Admiral. Ja,” Stirner continued triumphantly, “I think Senator Grant fell into a Black Hole.”

  Ramsey looked puzzled. “I seem to remember hearing something about Black Holes, but I don’t remember what.”

  “Theoretical concept,” Stirner said. “Hundred, hundred and fifty years ago, before the CoDominium Treaty puts a stop to scientific research. Nobody ever finds any Black Holes, so no appropriations for licensed physicists to work on them. But way back then, a man named Schwarzschild, Viennese perhaps, thinks of them.” Stirner puffed with evident pride. “A Black Hole is like a neutron star that goes all the way. Collapsed down so far, down to maybe two, three kilometers, that nothing gets out of the gravity well. Infinite red shift of light. Some ways a Black Hole isn’t even theoretically inside the universe.”

  The others looked incredulous and Stirner laughed. “You think that is strange? There was even talk once about whole galaxies collapsed to less than a tenth AU in size. They wouldn’t be in the universe for real either.”

  “Then how would Black Holes interact with—oh,” Rap Torrin said, “gravity. It still has that.”

  Stirner’s round face bobbed in agreement. “Ja, ja, which is how we know is no black galaxy out there. Would be too much gravity, but there is plenty room for a star. Now one thing I do not understand though, why the survey ship gets through, others do not. Maybe gravity changes for one of those things, ja?”

  “No, look, the Alderson path really isn’t a line of sight, it can shift slightly—maybe just enough!” Torrin spoke rapidly. “If the geometry were just right, then sometimes the Hole wouldn’t be in the way . . .”

  “O.K.,” Stirner said. “I leave that up to you Navy boys. But you see what happens, the ship is taking sights or whatever you do when you are making a jump, the captain pushes the button, and maybe you come out in normal space near this Black Hole. Nothing to see anywhere around you. And no way to get back home.”

  “Of course.” Ramsey stood, twisted his fingers excitedly. “The Alderson effect is generated by nuclear reactions. And the dark holes—”

  “Either got none of those, or the Alderson force stuffs is caught inside the Black Hole like light and everything else. So you are coming home in normal space or you don’t come home at all.”

  “Which is light-years. You’d never make it.” Ramsey found himself near the bar. Absently, he poured a drink. “But in that case—the ships can sustain themselves a long time on their fuel!”

  “Yes.” Lermontov said it carefully. “It is at least possible that Senator Grant is alive. If his frigate dropped into normal space at a sufficient distance from the Black Hole so that it did not vanish down it.”

  “Not only Martin,” Bart Ramsey said wonderingly. His heart pounded. “Barbara Jean. And Harold. They were on a Norden Lines luxury cruiser, only half the passenger berths taken. There should have been enough supplies and hydrogen to keep them going five years, Sergei. More than enough!”

  Vice Admiral Lermontov nodded slowly. “That is why we thought you should go. But you realize that . . .”

  “I haven’t dared hope. I’ve wanted to die for five years, Sergei. Found that out about myself, had to be careful. Not fair to my crew to be so reckless. I’ll go after Martin and—I’ll go. But what does that do for us? If I do find them, I’ll be as trapped as they are.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Stirner snorted. “Why you think we came out here, just to shake up a captain and maybe lose the Navy a cruiser? What made me think about this Black Hole business, I am questioning a transportee. Sentence to the labor market on Tanith, the charge is unauthorized scientific research. I look into all those crazies, might be something the Navy can use, ja? This one was fooling around with gravity waves, theories about Black Holes. Hard to see how the Navy could use it. I was for letting them take this one to Tanith when I start to think, we are losing those ships coming from Meiji, and click! So I pulled the prisoner off the colony ship.”

  “And he says he can get us home from a dark hole in blank space?” Ramsey asked. He tried to suppress the wave of excitement that began in his bowels and crept upward until he could hardly speak. Not hope! Hope was an agony, something to be dreaded. It was much easier to live with resignation . . .

  “Ja. Only is not a him. Is a her. Not very attractive her. She says she can do this.” Stirner paused significantly.

  “Miss Ward hates the CoDominium, Bart,” Lermontov said carefully. “With what she thinks is good reason. She won’t tell us how she plans to get the ship home.”

  “By God, she’ll tell me!” Why can’t anything be simple? To know Barbara Jean is dead, or to know what mountain to climb to save her . . . “If I can’t think of something we can borrow a State Security man from the—”

  “No.” Lermontov’s voice was a flat refusal. “Leave aside the ethics of the situation, we need this girl’s creative energies. You can’t get that with brainscrubs.”

  “Maybe.” And maybe I’ll try it anyway if nothing else works. Barbara Jean, Barbara Jean . . . “Where is this uncooperative scientist?”

  “On Ceres.” Vice Admiral Lermontov stretched a long arm toward the bar and poured for everyone. Stirner swished his brandy appreciatively in a crystal snifter. “Understand something, Bart,” the Admiral said. “Miss Ward may not know a thing. She may hate us enough to destroy a CD ship even at the cost of her life. You’re gambling on a theory we don’t know exists and could be wrong even if she has one.”

  “So I’m gambling. My God, Sergei, do you know what I’ve been through these last years? It isn’t normal for a man to brood like I do. You think I don’t know that? That I don’t know you whisper about it when I’m not around? Now you say there’s a chance but it might cost my life. You’re gambling a cruiser you can’t spare, my ship is worth more to the Navy than I am.”

  Lermontov ignored Ramsey’s evaluation, and Bart wished it had been challenged. But it was probably true, although the old Bart Ramsey was something else again, a man headed for the job Sergei held now . . .

  “I am gambling a ship because if we do not get Martin Grant back in time for the appropriations hear
ings, I will lose more than a ship. We might lose half the fleet.”

  “Ja, ja,” Stirner sighed. He shook his round head sadly, slowly, a big gesture. “It is not usual that one man may be so important. I do not believe in the indispensable-man theory myself. Yet, without Senator Grant I do not see how we are getting the ships in time or even keeping what we have, and without those ships . . . but maybe it is too late anyway, maybe even with the senator we cannot get the ships, or with the ships we can still do nothing when a planet full of people are determined to kill themselves.”

  “That’s as it may be,” Lermontov said. “But for now we need Senator Grant. I’ll have the prisoner aboard Daniel Webster in four hours, Bart. You’ll want to fill the tanks. Trim the crew down to minimum also. We must try this, but I do not really give very good odds on your coming home.”

  “Stand by for jumpoff. Jump stations, man your jump stations.” The unemotional voice of the officer of the watch monotoned through steel corridors, showing no more excitement than he would have used to announce an off-watch solido show. It took years to train that voice into Navy officers, but it made them easier to understand in battle. “Man your jump stations.”

  Bart Ramsey looked up from his screens as First Lieutenant Trevor ushered Marie Ward onto the bridge. She was a round, dumpy woman, her skin a faint red color. Shoulder-length hair fell almost straight down to frame her face, but dark brown wisps poked out at improbable angles despite combings and hair ribbons. Her hands were big, as powerful as a man’s, and the nails, chewed to the quick, were colorless. When he met her, Ramsey had estimated her age in the mid-thirties and was surprised to learn she was only twenty-six.

  “You may take the assistant helmsman’s acceleration chair,” Ramsey told her. He forced a smile. “We’re about to make the jump to Meiji.” In his lonely ship. She’d been stripped down, empty stations all through her.

  “Thank you, Captain.” Marie sat and allowed Trevor to strap her in. The routine for jumpoff went on. As he listened to the reports, Ramsey realized Marie Ward was humming. “What is that?” he asked. “Catchy tune . . .”