Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  “Sorry. It’s an old nursery thing. ‘The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see.’ ”

  “Oh. Well, we haven’t seen anything yet.”

  “‘The other side of the mountain, was all that he could see.’ But it’s the third verse that’s interesting. ‘He fell into a dark hole, and covered himself over with charcoal—’”

  “Warning, warning, take your posts for jumpoff.”

  Ramsey examined his screens. His chair was surrounded by them. “All right, Trevor, make your search.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Lieutenant Trevor would be busy for a while. He had been assigned the job of looking after Marie Ward, but for the moment Ramsey would have to be polite to her. “You haven’t told us much about what we’re going to see on the other side of that mountain. Why?”

  “Captain, if you knew everything I did, you wouldn’t need to take me along,” she said. “I wish they’d hurry up. I don’t like starjumps.”

  “It won’t be long now—” Just what do you say to a convict genius? The whole trip out she’d been in everybody’s hair, seldom talking about anything but physics. She’d asked the ship’s officers about the drive, astrogation, instruments, the guns, nearly everything. Sometimes she was humorous, but more often scathingly sarcastic. And she wouldn’t say a word about Black Holes, except to smile knowingly. More and more Ramsey wished he’d borrowed a KGB man from the Soviets . . .

  “WARNING, WARNING. Jumpoff in one minute,” the watch officer announced. Alarm bells sounded through the ship.

  “Lined up, Captain,” Trevor said. “For all I can tell, we’re going straight through to 81 Eridani. If there’s anything out there, I can’t see it.”

  “Humph,” Marie Ward snorted. “Why should you?”

  “Yes, but if the Alderson path’s intact, the Hole won’t have any effect on us,” Trevor protested. “And to the best we can measure, that path is there.”

  “No, no,” Marie insisted. “You don’t measure the Alderson path at all! You only measure the force, Lieutenant. Then your computer deduces the existence of the path from the stellar geometry. I’d have thought they’d teach you that much anyway. And that you could remember it.”

  “FINAL WARNING. Ten seconds to jump.” A series of chimes, descending in pitch. Marie grimaced. Her mannish hands clutched the chair arms as she braced herself. At the tenth tone, everything blurred for an instant that stretched to a million years.

  There is no way to record the time a jump takes. The best chronological instruments record nothing whatever. Ships vanish into the state of nonbeing conveniently called “hyperspace” and reappear somewhere else. Yet it always seems to take forever, and while it happens everything in the universe is wrong, wrong, WRONG . . .

  Ramsey shook his head. The screens around his command seat remained blurred. “Jump completed. Check ship,” he ordered.

  Crewmen moved fuzzily to obey despite the protests of tortured nerves. Electronic equipment, computers, nearly everything complex suffers from jump induced transients although there is no known permanent effect.

  “Captain, we’re nowhere near Meiji!” the astrogator exclaimed. “I don’t know where we are . . .”

  “Stand by to make orbit,” Ramsey ordered.

  “Around what?” Lieutenant Trevor asked. “There’s no star out there, Captain. There’s nothing!”

  “Then we’ll orbit nothing.” Ramsey turned to Marie Ward. “Well, we’ve found the damn thing. You got any suggestions about locating it? I’d as soon not fall into it.”

  “Why not?” she asked. Ramsey was about to smile politely when he realized she was speaking seriously. “According to some theories, a Black Hole is a time/space gate. You could go into it and come out—somewhere else. In another century. Or another universe.”

  “Is that why the hell you brought us out here? To kill yourself testing some theory about Black Holes and space/time?”

  “I am here because the CoDominium Marines put me aboard,” she said. Her voice was carefully controlled. “And I have no desire to test any theory. Yet.” She turned to Lieutenant Trevor. “Dave, is it really true? There’s no star out there at all?”

  “It’s true enough.”

  She smiled. A broad, face-cracking smile that, with the thousand-meter stare in her eyes, made her look strangely happy. Insanely happy, in fact. “My God, it worked! There really is a Black Hole . . .”

  “Which we haven’t found yet,” Trevor reminded her.

  “Oh. Yes. Let’s see—it should have started as about five stellar masses in size. That’s my favorite theory, anyway. When it began to collapse it would have radiated over eighty percent of its mass away. X-rays, mostly. Lots of them. And if it had planets, they might still be here . . . Anyway, it should be about as massive as Sol. There won’t be any radiation coming out. X-rays, light, nothing can climb out of that gravity well . . . just think of it, infinite red shift! It really happens!”

  “Infinite red shift,” Ramsey repeated carefully. “Yes, ma’am. Now, just how do we find this source of tired light?”

  “It isn’t tired light! That’s a very obsolete theory. Next I suppose you’ll tell me you think photons slow down when they lose energy.”

  “No, I—”

  “Because they don’t. They wouldn’t be photons if they could slow down. They just lose energy until they vanish.”

  “Fine, but how do we find it?”

  “It can’t reach out and grab you, Captain,” she said. The grin wasn’t as wide as before, but still she smiled softly to herself. It made her look much better, although the mocking tone didn’t help Ramsey’s appreciation. “It’s just a star, Captain. A very small star, very dense, as heavy as most other stars, but it doesn’t have any more gravity than Sol. You could get quite close and still pull away—”

  “If we knew which direction was away.”

  “Yes. Hm-m-m. It will bend light rays, but you’d have to be pretty close to see any effect at all from that . . .”

  “Astrogation!” Ramsey ordered crisply. “How do we find a star we can’t see?”

  “We’re about dead in space relative to whatever stopped us,” the astrogator told him. “We can wait until we accelerate toward it and get a vector from observation of other stars. That will take a while. Or we can see if it’s left any planets, but with nothing to illuminate them they’ll be hard to find—”

  “Yeah. Do the best you can, Mister.” Marie Ward was still looking happily at the screens. They showed absolutely nothing. Ramsey punched another button in the arm of his command chair. “Comm room, sir.”

  “Eyes, there are ships out there somewhere.” God, I hope there are. Or one ship. “Find them and get me communications.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. I’ll use the distress frequencies. They might be monitoring those.”

  “Right. And Eyes, see if your bright electronics and physics boys can think of a way to detect gravity. So far as I can make out that’s the only effect that Black Hole has on the real universe.”

  “On our real universe, Captain,” Marie Ward said.

  “Huh?”

  “On our real universe. Imagine a universe in which there are particles with non-zero rest masses able to move faster than light. Where you get rid of energy to go faster. Sentient beings in that universe would think of it as real. It might even be where our ships go when they make an Alderson jump. And the Black Holes could be gates to get you there.”

  “Yes, Miss Ward,” Ramsey said carefully. Two enlisted spacers on the other side of the bridge grinned knowingly at each other and waited for the explosion. They’d been waiting ever since Marie Ward came aboard, and it ought to be pretty interesting. But Ramsey’s voice became even softer and more controlled. “Meanwhile, have you any useful suggestions on what we should do now?”

  “Find the Hole, of course. Your astrogator seems quite competent. His approach is very reasonable
. Yes, quite competent. For a Navy man.”

  Carefully, his hands moving very slowly, Captain Bartholomew Ramsey unstrapped himself from his command chair and launched himself across the bridge to the exit port. “Take the con, Mr. Trevor,” he said. And left.

  For fifty hours, Daniel Webster searched for the other ships. Then, with no warning at all, Ramsey was caught in the grip of a giant vise.

  For long seconds, he felt as if titanic hands were squeezing him. They relaxed, ending the agony for a brief moment. And tried to pull him apart. The screens blurred, and he heard the sound of rending metal as the hands alternately crushed, then pulled.

  Somehow, the watch officer sounded General Quarters. Klaxons blared through the ship as she struggled with her invisible enemy. Ramsey screamed, as much in rage and frustration as pain, hardly knowing he had made a sound. He had to take control of his ship before she died, but there were no orders to give. This was no attack by an enemy, but what, what?

  The battle damage screen flared red. Ramsey was barely able to see as it showed a whole section of the ship’s outer corridors evacuated to space. How many men were in there? Most wouldn’t be in armor. My God! Daniel Webster too? My wife and now my ship?

  Slowly it faded away. Ramsey pulled himself erect. Around him on the bridge the watch crew slumped at their stations. The klaxons continued, adding their confusion, until Ramsey shut them off.

  “What—what was it?” Lieutenant Trevor gasped. His usually handsome features were contorted with remembered pain, and he looked afraid.

  “All stations report damage,” Ramsey ordered. “I don’t know what it was, Lieutenant.”

  “I do!” Marie Ward gasped excitedly. Her eyes darted about in wonder. “I know! Gravity waves from the Black Hole! A tensor field! And these were tensor, not scalar—”

  “Gravity waves?” Ramsey asked stupidly. “But gravity waves are weak things, only barely detectable.”

  Marie Ward snorted. “In your experience, Captain. And in mine. But according to one Twentieth-Century theory—they had lots of theories then, when intellectuals were free, Captain—according to one theory, if a Black Hole is rotating and a mass enters the Schwarzschild Limit, part of the mass will be converted to gravity waves. They can escape from the Hole and affect objects outside it. So can Alderson forces, I think. But they didn’t know about the Alderson force then . . .”

  “But—is that going to happen again?” Ramsey demanded. Battle damage reports appeared on his screens. “We can’t live through much of that.”

  “I really don’t know how often it will happen,” Marie answered. She chewed nervously on her right thumbnail. “I do know one thing. We have a chance to get home again.”

  “Home?” Ramsey took a deep breath. That depended on what had been done to Danny Boy. A runner brought him another report. Much of the ship’s internal communications were out, but the chief engineer was working with a damage-control party. Another screen came on, and Ramsey heard the bridge speaker squawk.

  “Repairable damage to normal space drive in main engine room,” the toneless voice said. “Alderson drive appears unaffected.”

  “Gunnery reports damage to laser lenses in number one battery. No estimate of time to repair.”

  Big rigid objects had broken. Ramsey later calculated the actual displacement at less than a millimeter/meter; not very much, but enough to damage the ship and kill half a dozen crewmen unable to get into battle armor. Explosive decompression wasn’t a pretty death, but it was quick.

  With all her damage, Daniel Webster was only hurt. She could sail, his ship wasn’t dead. Not yet. Ramsey gave orders to the damage control parties. When he was sure they were doing everything they could, he turned back to the dumpy girl in the assistant helmsman’s seat. “How do we get home?”

  She had been scribbling on a pad of paper, but her pencil got away from her when she tried to set it down without using the clips set into the arm of the seat. Now she stared absently at her notes, a thin smile on her lips. “I’m sorry, Captain. What did you say?”

  “I asked, how do we get home?”

  “Oh.” She tried to look serious but only succeeded in appearing sly. “I was hasty in saying that. I don’t know.”

  “Sure. Don’t you want to get home?”

  “Of course, Captain. I’d just love to get back on a colony ship. I understand Tanith has such a wonderful climate.”

  “Come off it. The Navy doesn’t forget people who’ve helped us. You aren’t going to Tanith.” He took a deep breath. “We have a rescue mission, Miss Ward. Some of those people have been out here for five years.” Five years of that? Nobody could live through five years of that. O God, where is she? Crushed, torn apart, again and again, her body drifting out there in black space without even a star? Rest eternal grant them, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them . . .

  “How do we get home?”

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  But you do. And come to think of it, so do I. “Miss Ward, you implied that if we knew when a mass would enter the Black Hole, we could use the resulting Alderson forces to get us out of here.”

  “I’ll be damned.” She looked at Ramsey as if seeing him for the first time. “The man can actually—yes, of course.” She smiled faintly. “I thought so before we left Ceres. Theory said that would work . . .”

  “But we’d have to know the timing rather precisely, wouldn’t we?”

  “Yes. Depending on the size of the mass. The larger it is, the longer the effect would last. I think. Maybe not, though.”

  Ramsey nodded to himself. There was only one possible mass whose entry into the Hole they could predict. “Trevor.”

  “Sir?”

  “One way you might amuse yourself is in thinking of ways to make a ship impact a solar mass not much more than two kilometers in diameter: a star you can’t see and whose location you can’t know precisely.”

  “Aye, aye, skipper.” Dave Trevor frowned. He didn’t often do that and it distorted his features. “Impact, Captain? But unless you were making corrections all the way in, you’d probably miss—as it is, the ship would pick up so much velocity that it’s more likely to whip right around—”

  “Exactly, Lieutenant. But it’s the only way home.”

  One hundred and eight hours after breakout, Chief Yeoman Karabian located the other ships. Daniel Webster’s call was answered by the first frigate sent out to find the Norton liner:

  DANIEL WEBSTER THIS IS HENRY HUDSON BREAK BREAK WE ARE IN ORBIT ELEVEN ASTRONOMICAL UNITS FROM WHATEVER THAT THING DOWN THERE IS STOP WE WILL SEND A CW SIGNAL TO GIVE YOU A BEARING STOP

  THE NORTON LINER LORELEI AND CDSN CONSTELLATION ARE WITH US STOP YOUR SIGNAL INDICATES THAT YOU ARE LESS THAN ONE AU FROM THE DARK STAR STOP YOU ARE IN EXTREME DANGER REPEAT EXTREME DANGER STOP ADVISE YOU MOVE AWAY FROM DARK STAR IMMEDIATELY STOP THERE ARE STRONG GRAVITY FLUXES NEAR THE DARK STAR STOP THEY CAN TEAR YOU APART STOP ONE SCOUTSHIP ALREADY DESTROYED BY GRAVITY WAVES STOP REPEAT ADVISE YOU MOVE AWAY FROM DARK STAR IMMEDIATELY AND HOME ON OUR CW SIGNAL STOP

  REQUEST FOLLOWING INFORMATION COLON WHO IS MASTER ABOARD DANIEL WEBSTER INTERROGATIVE BREAK BREAK MESSAGE ENDS

  Ramsey read the message on his central display screen, then punched the intercom buttons. “Chief, get this out:

  “HENRY HUDSON THIS IS DANIEL WEBSTER BREAK BREAK CAPTAIN BARTHOLOMEW RAMSEY COMMANDING STOP WE WILL HOME ON YOUR BEACON STOP HAVE EXPERIENCED GRAVITY STORM ALREADY STOP SHIP DAMAGED BUT SPACEWORTHY STOP

  “IS SENATOR MARTIN GRANT ABOARD CONSTELLATION INTERROGATIVE IS MRS RAMSEY THERE INTERROGATIVE BREAK MESSAGE ENDS.”

  The hundred-and-sixty-minute round trip for message and reply would be a lifetime.

  “Trevor, get us moving when you’ve got that beacon,” Ramsey ordered. “Pity he couldn’t tell us about the gravity waves before we found out the hard way.”

  “Yes, sir.” The acceleration alarm rang through the ship as Trevor prepared the new course. “We ca
n only make about a half-G, Captain. We’re lucky to get that. We took more damage from that gravity storm than Danny Boy’s ever got from an enemy.”

  “Yeah.” Pity indeed. But communications did all they could. Space is just too big for omni signals, and we had maser damage to boot. Had to send in narrow cones, lucky we made contact this soon even sweeping messages. And no ecliptic here either. Or none we know of.

  “Communications here,” Ramsey’s speaker announced.

  “Yes, Eyes.”

  “We’re getting that homing signal. Shouldn’t be any problem.”

  “Good.” Ramsey studied the figures that flowed across his screen. “Take the con, Mr. Trevor. And call me when there’s an answer from Henry Hudson. I’ll wait in my patrol cabin.” And a damn long wait that’s going to be. Barbara Jean, Barbara Jean, are you out there?

  The hundred and sixty minutes went past. Then another hour, and another. It was nearly six hours before there was a message from the derelicts; and it was in code the Navy used for the eyes of commanding officers only.

  Captain Ramsey sat in his bare room and stared at the message flimsy. In spite of the block letters from the coding printer, his eyes wouldn’t focus on the words.

  DANIEL WEBSTER THIS IS HENRY HUDSON BREAK THE FOLLOWING IS PERSONAL MESSAGE FOR CAPTAIN BARTHOLOMEW RAMSEY FROM GRAND SENATOR MARTIN GRANT BREAK BREAK PERSONAL MESSAGE BEGINS

  “BART WE ARE ALL HERE AND ALIVE STOP THE SCOUTSHIP WAS LOST TO GRAVITY WAVES STOP THE LINER LORELEI THE FRIGATE HENRY HUDSON AND THE FRIGATE CONSTELLATION ARE DAMAGED STOP LORELEI IN SPACEWORTHY CONDITION WITH MOST OF CREW SURVIVING DUE TO HEROIC EFFORTS OF MASTER OF HENRY HUDSON STOP