10.DANGER SIGNAL
It is time to pull all this together. We have looked at a number of ways that the world can end, or at least become a very unpleasant place for human habitation.
Those disasters do not form a complete list. There are many other ways for the human species to become extinct, some of which would leave the rest of the world intact (some would say, improved). Disease is one excellent candidate. We can imagine, for example, a mutation of AIDS. Suppose that a form of the AIDS virus were to appear that could be transmitted, like the common cold, through a sneeze.
But that is a very different article. The key question for each event considered in the earlier sections is not, can it happen, but rather, what is the chance that it will happen?
Some events serve as triggers, to produce final effects beyond the obvious ones. Nuclear war, meteor and comet impact, and volcanic eruptions all serve to charge the upper atmosphere with dust, that cuts down sunlight and may produce results far more unpleasant than the original explosion. Similarly, a torrent of hard radiation and high-energy particles from a supernova may kill far more people in the long-term, from cancer, than die at once from burns.
Recognizing this, it is still instructive to compare the direct effects of each type of disaster. Table 3 shows the probable frequency of events equal in energy production to a full-scale nuclear war, derived from the discussion given earlier in this article.
It is very clear that nothing in Nature presents such a danger to the human race as our own actions. We know we can survive a volcanic eruption of the size of Thira; for one thing, it is localized in effect; for another, we have already survived such eruptions, essentially unscathed. We are not at all sure how much of our civilization would survive a nuclear war.
The message: our future lies in our own hands.
Anyone who is at all reassured by this conclusion is my candidate for the Pollyanna award. To quote Pogo once again, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”
Table 3: Frequency of Disaster of “Nuclear War” Dimensions
Disaster
Estimated Mean Time
Between Occurrences
Nuclear war
Volcanic eruption
Meteorite/comet impact
Supernova
Solar instability
One hundred years*
One thousand years
Two million Years
Two and a half billion years
At least three billion years
*Based on the assumption that there is a one percent chance of full-scale nuclear war in any particular year. Am I unduly optimistic in thinking that this probability has actually gone down a great deal in the past five years? And not before time.
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story: godspeed
The Genizee came.
Two weeks later, the Genizee went.
The aliens are the most self-sacrificing and noble saviors of humanity that anyone could imagine; or else they are the sneakiest and most evil species in the galaxy, following a diabolical agenda that no human is able to fathom.
Which?
Marcus Aurelius Jackson, a millionaire, a madman, a genius, and my long-time partner in science and short-time partner in crime, says the Genizee are villains. Everyone else on Earth says that they are heroes. Me, I just don’t know.
Not yet. But thanks to Marcus, I will know. Soon. In the worst case, it may be for just a fraction of a second, before the end.
It sounds crazy to say it, but although I think of myself as sane and rational while Marcus is a lunatic who may cause my death and the death of everyone on Earth, I’m as bad in some ways as he is—because I can hardly wait to learn the answer. That question—Which?—has been sitting in my mind for four months going on forever, like an internal and eternal itch that can’t be scratched.
I sit here, waiting for the reappearance of the television cameras or the end of the world, and I want to know.
In my case it is more than a theoretical issue. I was in the middle of the problem long before the arrival of the Genizee—before their existence was even suspected. More than that, according to the aliens, I and Marcus Aurelius Jackson are the reason that they came to the solar system—came, just in time to kill the dream.
In my case, it was a dream. In Marcus’s case, it was an obsession. I argue that there is an important difference between the two, though perhaps no else would agree.
Let me go back to the period BG—Before Genizee.
Before the aliens popped out of nowhere, most people thought that the world’s space programs were going well. The United States had the Farside lunar base close to self-supporting, with a ninety-nine percent closed recycling of food, water, and supplies. Only the most complicated equipment was fabricated and shipped up from Earth. The Russians had their permanent Mars colony, at last, after three abortive tries and the loss of one hundred and forty-seven people. The C-J consortium had a mixed Chinese and Japanese expedition wandering the asteroid belt, and another approaching the Jovian moons. ESA had their own explorer—unmanned, this one—heading out for a second Grand Tour with smart probes of the outer planet atmospheres.
This is truly the Golden Age of space exploration, said the media.
Big deal.
Don’t be surprised when I tell you that although space funding paid my salary, not one of the developments that I mentioned occupied my working attention for more than one minute a week. Marcus and I fumed at the self-congratulatory speeches from the politicians of all countries, and wept when the “great accomplishments” in space were touted by the world’s media.
Couldn’t they see—couldn’t everyone see, as we saw so clearly—that even when the Moon and all the planets were explored and colonized, we would still be playing in our own backyard?
If humans were serious about exploring space, the solar system wouldn’t do. We had to go to the stars, and we had to find a way to get there in a reasonable time. The fastest ship in existence, the Caltech/NASA Rocket Propulsion Lab’s Continuous Electric Propulsion Planetary Probe (Starseed for short) was now heading for the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, but it would not arrive there for another ten years. That, measured in terms of my own life span, was surely not a reasonable time. And when it got there, three thousand astronomical units from the Sun, it would still be traveling at only one percent of lightspeed, and be only one hundredth of the way to the nearest star. Tau Ceti, our best bet for a close star with useful planets, would be a millennial journey for the RPL probe. Despite its name, the Starseed and its relatives were not and would never be the answer. They could not bring the stars within reach of humanity.
A faster-than-light drive: that was the way to go. The only way. Unfortunately, you couldn’t even mention FTL to the Science Foundations who funded us. Marcus had tried it, and been ridiculed for his pains. Their committee of advisers was quite adamant. Nothing could go faster than light, the theory of relativity “proved” that, so not one cent should be wasted in trying. Instead we should spend the Foundations money on something useful, like plodding ion drives or bone-jarring pulsed fission.
“Dummies!” said Marcus, when he got back to the lab. “Stupid jerks.” He had said much the same thing to the committee, and it hadn’t helped his case.
“I know,” I commiserated. “They’re a bunch of idiots. Curse ’em all.”
I did a lot of cursing in those days, and without Marcus, that would have been all that I could do. With him, though, I had as my partner a top-drawer physicist who had studied the absolute basics of quantum theory and relativity, instead of taking them as gospel. He had done so with one goal in m
ind: looking for the loopholes.
They were there, of course. Everyone from Einstein onwards had pointed out that the two fields were inconsistent with each other. And even within the framework of those inconsistencies, the structure of spacetime at a subnuclear level had to be a sea of singularities, continuously forming and dissolving. The very notion of “travel” through such a discontinuous medium in its constant flux was meaningless, said Marcus. It was the learned advisers to our funding sources, sitting in their smug certainty, who needed to go back and do “something useful.”
I knew he was smarter than me, and anyone else I’d ever met. When he said that he saw a ray of hope, I believed him. His failure with the committee, and their ridicule, didn’t shake my faith in him one bit.
“We have to keep trying,” I said. “Show them they’re wrong.”
He shook his head gloomily, but soon he was working harder than ever. Rejection merely drove him to greater efforts. In the next few months he developed the theory further, and it looked good (to him, I mean—I admit that I couldn’t follow it).
The next steps had to be mine, though. I was the fix-it member of the team, because Marcus was terrible at practical details, and the diverse techniques for lubrication of egos that these days are lumped together as “human relationships” were quite beyond him.
So I “fixed it.” With, if I say it myself, my usual efficiency. (I sometimes think that the only thing in life that I find truly irresistible is the challenge to finagle something that everyone else says can’t be done.)
Money wasn’t the issue. Marcus had inherited bundles of that, and had found little use for it, but the equipment that we needed couldn’t be bought. It was available only through government programs. So the prototype construction, and the first small-scale tests, had to be worked secretly using materials bootlegged from approved conventional projects. If that sounds easy, remember that all the construction had to be done in space. Without assistance from Inventory Control, who owed me quite a few favors, it could not have been done at all. Even then, it was not totally invisible. Someday an enthusiastic auditor would discover that the equipment orders and use did not match, and the game would be over. Long before that I expected to have gone to Hell or Alpha Centauri.
It took five and a half years from the day of Marcus’s key theoretical insight to the first space test. On that day the two of us, crowded into a small cargo capsule never intended for anything but free-fall storage, paused and looked at the little payload, then at each other.
“Well?” he said.
I nodded. He drew a long breath, shrugged, and toggled the switch.
The payload vanished without a sound.
The test transition—Marcus insisted that it shouldn’t be called a test flight, since the payload would not be “traveling” through normal space—had been designed to carry an array of sensors eighty million kilometers to the vicinity of Mars, take a handful of pictures there, and return to the cargo capsule. It was supposed to be gone for just twenty minutes, almost all of it spent out near Mars.
Twenty minutes? I have known shorter months.
When the tiny payload popped back into existence, we both gasped. And when we examined the data it had collected, I at least got a lot more than I had bargained for.
The payload had not made the journey to Mars in a single hop. Instead, Marcus had programmed it to drop back periodically into normal space, make an instant navigation fix, and use that to direct the next transition. The resulting set of images was mind-blowing. The fixes had been taken every hundredth of a second, two hundred thousand kilometers apart. Seen in real time, they provided the series of frames that would have been obtained by a ship traveling at twenty million kilometers a second—nearly seventy times the speed of light. Godspeed.
I watched those movies about a hundred times in the next twenty-four hours, drunk with euphoria and the conviction that Marcus and I would ourselves be remembered as gods. We were the New Prometheans, the men who gave humanity the universe. (Like most people who play with fire, I had forgotten what happened to Prometheus.) I wanted to go public with our results, right away. As I told Marcus, we had more than enough evidence to justify funding for a complete series of operational tests.
At that point, he dug in and couldn’t be budged. The establishment hadn’t just said a polite “No thanks” to his theory, or pleaded poverty to explore it. They had mocked his ideas, suggesting that he was a crank or worse. Now he wanted to make a manned flight, go out in person farther than anything had ever been, and take hand-held pictures. Then he would come home, go to the skeptics who had told him he was a charlatan, show them our results, and invite them to stick it in their ear. Before that, he wanted complete secrecy.
Fame and fortune weren’t enough, you see. He wanted revenge.
I should have refused to go along with him, but he always burned a lot brighter than me. We argued for hours, until at last I gave in. He told me what he wanted for the Big Test: out a thousand astronomical units, so Marcus could get a shot of the Starseed, against a backdrop of the shrunken Sun and scarcely visible planets.
If finding the resources for the small test had been difficult, the new one—manned ship, life-support, full navigation and control systems—had me tearing out what was left of my hair. To be honest I also had a wonderful time, juggling three dozen people and organizations at once, but it was still another six months before I could go into his office and say, “Well, you asked for it, Marcus, and you got it. We’re in business. All-up manned test for Project Godspeed is set for one week today.”
“You actually got the flight permits, Wilmer?”—that’s me—“How’d you fix it? I’d have bet it was impossible.”
This had been one of our main worries. Stealing equipment had become fairly routine, and we had even managed to divert attention from our true activities by describing the Godspeed itself during the ship’s construction as a “pulsed fission-fusion pre-experimental post-design model,” which was enough to put off anyone. The earlier test had been on a scale small enough to hide. But the new one could not be concealed, since although the FTL transition should produce no detectable signal, according to Marcus the macroscopic quantum events leading up to it would make the Godspeed’s whole exterior sparkle and glitter like a cut gemstone catching the noonday sun.
“It was impossible,” I said. “I had to use all my chips on this one. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get caught.”
“Who cares?” he said. “When we get back from this trip—”
And at that precise moment, when the day of glory was within reach, Sally Brown from Ground Operations came running into my office without knocking, switched on the little TV set that perched on the corner of my desk, and said breathlessly: “Messages and pictures. Coming in from space. All over the world, hundreds of different wavelengths. Not from Earth. From the stars.”
I don’t know what Sally Brown’s words did to Marcus, but they created in me such a conflict of emotions that I wanted to throw up. On the one hand, the arrival of aliens and their superior technology would make all our work for the past few years as obsolete as the horse and carriage; on the other hand, I would have what I had wanted for so long: access to the stars.
We froze in front of the TV screen, waiting for our first look at the Genizee.
What we got instead was a look at their ships, inside and out, and at their technical equipment. No pictures of aliens, not then. We learned later that they weren’t sure Earth people were ready for three-foot-long cylinders of quaking black jelly, topped by a writhing mass of yellow spaghetti. Instead, we got pictures of technology.
Oddly enough, it was the sight of the ships that Marcus and I, alone of all the people on Earth, found hardest to take. The video signals had been beamed to Earth a few hours earlier, from just beyond the orbit of Saturn, along with a series of radio messages—in seven major Earth languages—proclaimi
ng peaceful intentions and giving a projected arrival time at Earth equatorial orbit in less than a week. The radio messages we could take. But the ships….
Marcus caught on first. “Where is it?” he said, almost under his breath. “Wilmer, where’s the drive?”
No one else would have been able to understand his question. But I did.
The form of certain technologies are dictated completely by the laws of chemistry and physics. That includes all propulsion technology. For instance, a rocket is a rocket, no matter whether the propellant is hot neutral gas, ionized particles, or radiation; and it makes little difference if the energy comes from chemical or nuclear processes. Similarly, a laser is a laser, regardless of wavelength or energy level. And the FTL drive that Marcus had conceived, and that we had both been working on so hard, had its own characteristic physics and signature.
The Genizee ships showed no sign of that signature. Either they had traveled across the interstellar void using a method which was so advanced that we could not recognize it; or—far more likely, in Marcus’s paranoid view—they were deliberately withholding all information on their FTL drive.
Neither Marcus nor I could imagine a third possibility.
When the third option was proposed, Marcus did not believe it. He has never believed it, to this day.
In retrospect, the aliens broke it to us slowly and carefully.
First, they brought their three ships into orbit around the Earth, five hundred miles up, and sat there quietly for a week and a half, doing nothing except chatting over the radio and making sure that their mastery of Earth languages was complete. They told us a lot about themselves during that period, and asked for nothing in return but our idiomatic phrases. On the first day we learned that they came from the Tau Ceti system. (Marcus and I had been right on target, though we received little satisfaction from the thought.) Day Two they gave us a description of their civilization, with its five populated planets and moons and its links to other, more distant intelligences; all, according to the Genizee, were as peaceful, well-meaning and sympathetic as they were.
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