Gibraltar Earth

by Michael McCollum

  The other members of the crew had been recruited for various aspects of the project. Two – Fairfax the astrogator, and Klein, the sensor operator – were merchant spacers, while Laura Dresser continued to pamper her beloved generators. Her obsession with the operation of the stardrive was one of which Landon approved. After 7000 light-years, the stardrive was still running as smoothly as the day they had gone superlight.

  “Two minutes, Captain!” Astrogator Fairfax announced.

  Landon acknowledged the report by repeating the information. He could see the countdown chronometer as well as Fairfax could, but there are certain traditions in the space services. One was that the astrogator kept the captain apprised of the countdown whether he needed to or not. On at least two occasions in the historical past, that custom had averted impending disasters.

  In this case, the maneuver the Ruptured Whale was performing was closer to a reentry than a launch. Having vaulted over the mountain that is light speed, they were now sliding down the far slope, preparing to reenter the real universe.

  “One minute, Captain,” the astrogator announced.

  “One minute, aye. Mr. Pendergast, make your announcement!”

  “Attention, All Hands. Breakout in one minute. I repeat. Prepare for breakout. One minute warning, and counting.”

  The numbers on the countdown chronometer continued rolling downward. After an indeterminate time, the numbers on the screen read 30. Then some time later, they read 20. Finally, they began to count backwards at a variable rate, with each second taking approximately twice as long as the one that preceded it.

  “Ten … ” came the voice of the communicator. Some of the high pitched overtones had crept back into Pendergast’s tone, reminding Landon of those moments after the gravity wave had rattled the ship at New Eden. Still, the boy recovered in time to pick up the count at five.

  “Five … four … three…”

  Dan Landon found his fingers hovering over the “kill” switch of their own accord. He was ready to intervene if anything went wrong with the flight system. Finally, it was time.

  “Two … One … Breakout!”

  Chapter Thirty One

  The bridge viewscreen had been black for nearly the entire 9,000-hour journey from Earth. No longer. One moment it was a stygian pool, the next it cleared to reveal … more blackness. Except, this blackness was punctuated by a scattering of diamond-like points, a typical deep-space star field. Arrayed before them were the stars of that section of the galaxy’s spiral known as the Perseus Arm. Despite its yearlong voyage, the Ruptured Whale had traversed considerably less than one-tenth the diameter of the Milky Way. That was the problem. They were still in Earth’s backyard and so, potentially, were the Broa.

  The few stars visible began to move in unison as the ship’s computer found its bearings and began to execute a preprogrammed command. Slowly, so as not to disorient viewers, the star field flowed off the upper-right corner of the screen, to be replaced by new stars at the lower left. For a few seconds it seemed as though nothing else had changed as the dimensionless points marched one after another. Then something did change. At the corner of the screen, a foggy line appeared, followed by a translucent wraith through which the background stars remained clearly visible. The dimly glowing cloud brightened as more of it climbed up the screen, then took on the illusion of depth as the observers’ brains worked to make sense out of the swirling patterns of light and dark. After long seconds made longer by racing hearts, the ghost climbed fully onto the screen.

  Dan Landon let out the lungful of air he had been holding, attempting not to sigh audibly as he did so. Whether the Broa lived around here or not was something to be determined. However, one thing was certain. They were close to their planned breakout point. They had definitely arrived!

  #

  About the time humanity was learning to farm the Po River Valley of China, a star ten times more massive than Sol finally came to the end of its life. After billions of years spent transmuting hydrogen into helium, then helium into carbon, and finally, carbon into iron, the star had used up all of the available fuel at its heart. Had it been of average size, a dwarf star like Sol, it would have slowly dimmed over time, becoming redder and redder, until eventually, it would extinguish itself completely.

  This was not to be. The size of the star prevented it from leaving the scene in such an inconspicuous manner. With the last carbon atoms transformed into iron, the star’s nuclear fires went out and the ever-present pull of gravity took control of its fate. With no new energy being produced, the core of the star fell inward, and the energy of position stored in gigatons of star stuff was instantly converted to heat. In a matter of seconds, the temperature within the “cold” star had risen to the point where iron nuclei began to stick to one another.

  Iron is unique in the universe. It is at the top of what scientists call “the curve of binding energy.” Fusing lighter elements into heavier ones (or splitting heavy elements into lighter) results in energy being released, a process that human beings first harnessed in the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Iron, being at the top of the curve, is a dead-end in terms of energy production. Iron has nowhere to go but down. Fusing iron consumes more energy than it produces.

  The iron-iron fusion reaction in the core robbed the star of what little energy remained to fight the implacable pull of gravity. Far from halting the collapse, the fusing of iron nuclei accelerated it and again, in-falling matter heated the center of the star. Suddenly, the interior was hotter than anything seen since the first moments of the Big Bang, and within the boiling cauldron, neutrinos began to condense from pure energy. The “neutrino storm” phase of the star’s death throes had begun.

  In the menagerie of subatomic particles, the neutrino is the most slippery of them all. Where photons, protons, and electrons might spend millions of years bouncing around inside the star as they worked their way to the surface, neutrinos were not so constrained. A neutrino can pierce the body of a massive star as easily as it can fly through hard vacuum, and that is precisely what the new-formed neutrinos did. In the moment of their creation, they leapt skyward as though the intervening layers of dense plasma did not exist – which, to the neutrinos, they did not. This powerful, invisible stream of energy robbed the star of as much energy per second as it had produced in its entire life.

  Of all the reactions taking place simultaneously, the neutrino storm predominated. All other effects were relatively minor byproducts of the exploding neutrino population. However, “minor” is a relative term, especially on the scale at which the universe operates. What happened next was spectacular, even when the aftermath was viewed ten thousand years after the event.

  To say that the star had lost all of its fuel is not correct. It lost the fuel down where the nuclear fires had always burned. Out in the gaseous envelope surrounding the core, however, there remained plenty of nuclear fuel in the form of hydrogen and helium. With an interior temperature measured in the billions of degrees, it was suddenly hot enough to fuse hydrogen even in the outermost layers of the star. Suddenly, the entire star was aflame with nuclear reactions. Gravity, which had been on the verge of winning its ages-old battle with the star, was suddenly inadequate to the task of holding the gas mass together.

  The star exploded!

  Three hundred generations of farmers tilled the Po River Valley before light from that explosion reached them. On July 4, 1054, the star that had previously been invisible to the naked eye was invisible no longer. In fact, it was difficult to miss, (although everyone in Europe seems to have managed the feat). In China, astronomers noted with alarm the sudden appearance of a “guest star” in the sky, as did the native people of the North American continent. The new star swelled until it rivaled Venus in brightness. In fact, it was so bright that it was seen in daylight for three long weeks. After that, the star slowly sank back into obscurity.

  The star was discovered again soon after the invention of the telescope. In place of the dead star
was now a misty cloud of material thrown out by the explosion. In the 18th Century, Charles Messier made a list of things in the sky that appeared to be comets, but were not. The remains of the dead star were so prominent that Messier gave the supernova remnant the preeminent place on his list. He labeled it M-1.

  Later astronomers gave the cloud a name. They called it the Crab Nebula.

  #

  The apparition on the screen resembled nothing so much as the puff of smoke from an exploding artillery shell – which, in a way, was precisely what it was. At the center was a furiously radiating star that appeared dull, almost black, against the whiteness surrounding it. In reality, it was anything but dull. The star, though dead, radiated furiously in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum and would burn out any unprotected human eye that observed it. The ship’s sensors were even more sensitive than human vision, and the hull telescope’s overload circuits automatically protected the pixels onto which the star’s image fell by reducing their sensitivity, making the image little more than a representation of the star’s true image.

  Surrounding the star was a large expanse of electric-white gas and dust, a region that glowed with the pure light of a fluorescent lamp. Beyond this central glow, the cloud darkened and became translucent, showing the stars and the blackness of space beyond before transitioning to an opaque reddish-purple band at the periphery. The whole central region was striated with tendrils of glowing gas and darker dust that appeared as though they had been whipped together by some giant hand. The contrasting strands were tangled into a complex Gordian knot that had been frozen in time.

  The cloud was all that remained of those outermost layers of the pre-nova star. Unable to dissipate the 400 million-fold increase in energy resulting from the furious fusion reaction in its outer layers, the star exploded. That explosion ripped away the star’s atmosphere and much of its mass, ejecting fully 70% of its substance out into space. The explosion had done more than merely blast the outer layers of the star skyward, however. The pressure on the core forced the electrons of the individual atoms out of their orbits and down into the nuclei with the protons. The collapse of the electrons was accompanied by the collapse of the star’s core. Before the explosion, the star had been a glowing ball of gas as large as the orbit of Mercury. After the explosion, it was a madly spinning sphere with a mass more than three times that of Sol, yet a diameter of only 20 kilometers.

  Out of the fires of the supernova had been born a neutron star.

  “Gawd!” someone muttered as the image of the dead star floated at the center of the screen. Even though it was ten light-years distant, the computer had the hull camera set to maximum field of view, and the gas cloud still overflowed the edges of the screen.

  Tearing his gaze away from the apparition on the screen, Dan Landon pressed the control that would put him on the command circuit. “All stations, report!”

  The reports quickly flowed in from all over the ship as departments announced their successful return to normal space. When it came time for the communicator to report, he said, “Strong interference across all of the radio bands, Captain. It is all 30-cycle hum, just as predicted. Looks like we’ll be transmitting via laser for the duration.”

  Even with the atomic nuclei jammed together, the star retained both its original angular momentum and magnetic flux. The neutron star rotated on its axis more than 30 times each second, sweeping surrounding space with a magnetic field that was a billion times stronger than the one it had formerly possessed. The spinning magnetic field whipped the surrounding gas and dust into a frenzy and broadcast an intense beam of light and cosmic rays to the heavens like a lighthouse on some unknown shore.

  “Understood, Kelly,” Landon replied. “Dr. Bendagar.”

  “The background radiation is high, Captain; but well within the capability of our shielding. We have nothing to fear as long as we stay inside the hull. Work parties are another story. I wouldn’t want to be out in that stuff for any longer than necessary.”

  Landon touched another control. “Sar-Say!”

  “Yes, Captain?” came the pseudo-simian’s voice.

  “Is that ‘Sky Flower?’”?

  “Yes, Captain. It is just as I remember it, although much larger and more complex.”

  “But it is the nebula you saw in the skies of the Zzumer world?”

  “No doubt about it, Captain. It is the Sky Flower Nebula.”

  For the second time in as many minutes, Dan Landon let out a silent sigh of relief. They were near one of the worlds of the Broan Sovereignty. That meant this whole expedition had not been a wild goose chase, the result of misidentification of the nebula.

  “Very well. Astrogator, find us our target star!”

  “I have it on the alternate screen, Captain.”

  “Switch to main viewscreen.”

  At the front of the bridge, the screen changed to show a yellow-white star silhouetted against the blackness of space. Hideout was where it was supposed to be, too. So far, so good.

  “Take her in, Mr. Fairfax. Mr. Klein, I want continuous circumambient sweeps on sensors. Let me know if there is even a twitch that indicates the presence of a ship other than our own. Also, keep a full watch on the Broan communications bands.”

  Landon waited for acknowledgement of his orders, and then grinned widely for the first time in a month. “All right, people, let’s go find the rest of our fleet. Twist her tail, Chief Engineer!”

  Laura Dresser’s words echoed instantly in his ears. “Consider it twisted, Captain.”

  Thrust followed a moment later.

  #

  “Is it truly Sky Flower?” Lisa Arden asked Sar-Say after the captain signed off and the thrust-gravity had caused the two of them to settle into their acceleration couches.

  “Yes, Leesa, it is really the nebula of the Zzumer sun. My memory for such things is quite good.”

  Lisa nodded. The alien had subtly mispronounced her name for the first time in months, making the long “e” too long. That was as good an indication as any of the excitement that Sar-Say felt. She could not blame him. She was excited herself.

  “How does it feel to be nearly home?” she asked.

  “It feels very good,” Sar-Say replied. “But there is still much work to be done. We must find your fleet before we can begin looking for the Zzumer world, no?”

  “We must find our fleet, yes! Space is a big place, as you well know.”

  Sar-Say “nodded.” As he often remarked to himself, living with humans was hugely educational, if not always pleasant. Frankly, the thought that stars were arrayed in the universe much as cities are arrayed across the surface of a planet was a new one for Sar-Say. He had no use for astronomy before coming to live among these strange people.

  He had a use for it now.

  Travel via stargate meant that you did not have to concern yourself with the space between the stars. Rather, you moved from stargate to stargate. It was the topology of the gates themselves that was important, not the positions of stars around which the gates orbited. Lisa had related an apt analogy to explain the situation in human terms early in their language lessons. She had likened Sar-Say to a traveler on one of the terrestrial subway systems.

  As she had explained, the average rider of the London Underground cared not what buildings he or she was passing beneath at any given moment, nor even the subway car’s location with respect to the Thames River, which the cars crossed without hindrance or notice. What was important to a rider of the Underground was that South Kensington came before Victoria Station, which in turn came before Westminster. Because of this independence from actual geography, the map that subway passengers used was a stylized representation of the Underground rather than a true map of London. For example, the scale of the map was larger in the central region of London where the stations were close together and smaller in the outlying districts where they were farther apart. The map had been designed to give riders maximum information about that which was importan
t to them, namely the arrangement of the stations along the rail line; and suppressed irrelevant information about the lay of the land overhead. In other words, the map showed the topology of the system without too great a correlation to its geography.

  That was precisely the situation in Civilization with regard to interstellar travel via stargate. When he traveled, Sar-Say had not been concerned with the “lay of the interstellar land,” only with the sequence of stargates that would get him where he was going. On his fateful final voyage, for instance, he had been en route from Vith to Persilin. The normal stargate sequence was Vith, Armador, Nala, Colsta, and Persilin. Where each of those stars was located with respect to one another, Sar-Say had no idea. They might well be in a straight line, or on different sides of Civilization. With a stargate at one’s disposal, it really did not matter.

  The human method of star travel was completely different. He remembered the shock he had felt when he had realized this awful truth. The human ships traversed the space between the stars, rather than jumping over that same space. As the interminable journey they had just completed had demonstrated, where the stars were located with respect to one another was the most important thing to a human starship captain.

  The disadvantage of not being able instantaneously to jump from star to star was compensated for by the fact that human ships were not constrained in their choice of destinations. Astrogation involved pointing the nose of one’s ship at any star one chose, and then going there. This freedom of movement would not sit well with Those Who Ruled once they heard of it. Moreover, until they learned the location of the human home world, there was little they could do about it.

  That made knowledge of where the human sun was located potentially valuable, and therefore, Sar-Say had quickly decided to see if he could determine its location for himself. As part of his education, the humans had provided him access to their planetary database system, and he had called up various educational files relating to astronomy.