The fifth day brought a first look at the Genizee themselves. By that time they had soothed us so well that most people’s reaction when they saw a picture of a Genizee was sympathy that any rational being had to live with being so ugly.
The sympathy faded a little when the Genizee told us that they lived, on average, for twenty-seven thousand Earth years. When asked if they would make the longevity formula available to humans, they replied, with an apologetic quiver, that there was no formula. The Genizee had always been so long-lived. Almost everyone except Marcus believed them. He was already full of dark surmise.
The bombshell dropped by the Genizee near the end of the second and final week confirmed his suspicions. Asked during a TV broadcast (the world had lived glued to TV sets since the arrival) about their journey to the solar system, they offered an implausible reply. They had not used an FTL drive at all, they said, but an efficient sub-lightspeed drive that allowed them to reach over half the speed of light. They had been on the way from Tau Ceti for twenty-five years. All their journeys between the stars were made at a fraction of lightspeed.
The blue ribbon panel of elderly scientists who had been assembled to interact with the aliens were, if you can believe it, pleased by that reply. It confirmed, they said, their own conviction, that faster-than-light travel was a physical impossibility. Nothing could ever move from one point to another, faster than light would cover the distance.
Well, said the Genizee, quaking apologetically, that’s not exactly the case. In fact, the reason why we embarked on this long journey to Earth in person, rather than sending messages that you might not believe, or might think to ignore, was just this: Certain of your scientists have been conducting FTL experiments….
No one had looked to Marcus Aurelius Jackson or me for help and advice when the Genizee arrived. Why should they? We were young and junior, without reputation or known accomplishments, and Marcus had already been branded as a crank. Even if we had offered our services, no one would have taken them, or listened to what we might have to say.
That changed in ten minutes—the ten minutes when the Genizee explained that faster-than-light travel was not impossible; that it offered enormous danger and possible total destruction to any species that attempted it, for reasons that they would be happy to explain to us; that such attempts were being conducted on Earth at this very moment; and that the Genizee had come here with two main goals: to pinpoint the location of those experiments, and to warn the inhabitants of Earth, telling them to cease and desist.
My own immediate reaction was total disbelief, with good reason. If the Genizee had been on the way for twenty-five years, they must have left twenty years before we had even the theory for an FTL drive. So they couldn’t have started out for Sol just because they’d picked up evidence of what Marcus and I were doing.
It was Marcus himself, no fan of the Genizee, who quickly put me straight on that one. He had long known that any FTL drive would give rise to both advanced and retarded potentials, similar to those of conventional electromagnetic theory. Both potentials propagated through spacetime, and died out in magnitude—but the advanced potential moved backwards in time. The experiments that we had thought to be so secret might be detectable by the Genizee, before we had performed them.
They confirmed his comment later in the same broadcast. They could detect the signal from afar, they said, even as far away as Tau Ceti. But only when they came very close to Earth could their equipment pinpoint an exact location. They had done that now. They would be happy to provide that location to Earth authorities.
They did so, and added a few more minutes of stern warning on FTL drives. Half a dozen uses, they said, were often enough to cause “major repercussions” in the region of space.
Having said that, to everyone’s amazement they started their ship drives and headed away from Earth.
It was bad for an emerging civilization, explained their departing message as the three ships lumbered off towards Saturn, to suffer major exposure to an older and more advanced one. Now that their warning had been delivered, the only responsible thing for them to do was to leave, and let us humans make our own way. Goodbye and good luck, people of Earth.
I gather that our scientists and politicians went into shock—they had been hoping for free technology from the Genizee, and had received nothing but talk. Marcus and I didn’t take much notice at the time, because we had our own worries. Within hours of the last Genizee broadcast, our lab had been closed and was guarded by enough military men to fight a major war. Marcus and I were arrested. We were charged with theft of government equipment, misuse of grant funds, and travel without suitable permits.
Those crimes should not have been enough to hold us in confinement. They were. After what the Genizee had said, no one was willing to let us go free, not because of what they thought we would do, but because of what the aliens told them we could do.
Relax, said Marcus and I to each other. We can’t really be kept in jail like this for more than a day. Can we?
What innocents! We sure could. For the first time in my life, I learned what was meant by a witch hunt. I doubt if one person in a million understood the explanation that the Genizee had offered of the dangers of a faster-than-light drive, but they didn’t care. The Genizee themselves had fingered us, so we were guilty. We’d be kept under close guard, without a trial, unless the Genizee returned and said we were to be released.
I myself didn’t understand what the Genizee warning was all about when I heard it, but my cell-mate was Marcus Aurelius Jackson. He knew what they were telling the whole world—and he didn’t believe a word of it.
Marcus didn’t just explain his views to me. He told the guards, our family members, and finally, after two months of work from me, the three members of the press who could be persuaded to come out to our maximum-security prison in the Nevada desert to interview us.
“A faster-than-light drive needs a tremendous amount of energy,” he said to the three reporters. We were all sitting in one room, without bars between us, because I had been working hard on our guards, and finally had them to the point where they thought we might be crazy, but we were surely harmless. The room even had a tiny barred window, with only four guards posted inside, and another two just beyond the door.
“A huge amount of energy,” went on Marcus. “The only practical—or even theoretical—way to get that much energy is from the vacuum itself. You have to tap into it.”
“You mean, you get energy from nothing?” said the most junior of the press. He had an open, gullible face. The other two, one man and one woman, didn’t look even vaguely interested, and I guessed that they thought of the whole trip as a chore they hadn’t been able to wriggle out of.
“Not from nothing. From the vacuum!” That was one of Marcus’s problems, because although it was clear from their facial expressions that this subtle distinction was far beyond all the reporters, he swept right on: “Now, the energy available from the vacuum is so big, you tend to think of it as unlimited. But the Genizee insist that tapping the zero point energy sets up a local stress in space, which ultimately must be relieved. If you remove local energy past a certain critical point, they say, there will be a jump to a lower-energy ground state. The only more stable state is a black hole. The whole region pinches off from the rest of the universe.”
“In other words,” I said. “The rest of universe will get rid of the stressed region by making it vanish.” I saw the open mouths, and wondered if I was being as obscure as Marcus. But he had been over this with me again and again, until I had something that made sense to me inside my head. My picture might be over-simple, but the reporters ought to find it easier going.
“Imagine that there are a whole lot of elastic bands,” I went on, “all over the universe. Somebody starts to stretch one, in one place. That’s what we were doing, when we tested the drive. You can stretch it a fair bit, and nothing
happens. All the other bands give a tiny bit, and everything settles down again. But if you go on stretching, there finally comes a point where something has to give. The band breaks. When it does, everything can’t go back the way it was. You’ve got snapped elastic, and you’re catapulted right out of this universe.”
“And that’s what the Genizee are warning us about?” said the young reporter.
“They were. But it’s not true,” said Marcus hotly. “When I heard what they were saying, I went back and did all the calculations over from scratch. There’s no backlash effect. Spacetime makes a small and quiet adjustment—maybe the local curvature decreases by one part in ten to the twentieth. An FTL drive is quite safe.”
“But that means the Genizee were lying to us,” said the woman reporter, in an annoyed tone. “Are you suggesting that they didn’t come all this way on those ships? Or that they didn’t take a quarter of a century to get here?”
“Both!” said Marcus loudly. The guards stirred, and made sure their weapons were at hand. “They were lying about both. They didn’t come all the way in those ships, and they didn’t take a quarter of a century to get here. They came from Tau Ceti—if that’s really their home, and they’re not lying about that, too—in a big, fast ship, with a faster-than-light drive. They parked the mother ship out beyond Saturn, where we couldn’t see it. Then they switched to their slow little ships, and came crawling in the rest of the way to Earth.”
Marcus was losing any shred of credibility he might have had, because the youngest of the reporters at once asked the obvious question: “But why would they lie to us? What good would it do them?”
“They don’t want us to use the FTL drive. They want to bottle us up, here in the solar system. They don’t want humans out among the stars. I think they’re scared of us, because we’re smarter than they are.”
It sounded paranoid, even to me. He was wasting his breath anyway. Even if the reporters believed him, and it was clear to me that they didn’t, they would never find an editor willing to run the story. The Genizee, initially repulsive in appearance, had not stayed long enough for humans to learn their possible defects. Their slow and bumbling speech patterns and apparent confusion, which Marcus considered evidence of human superiority of thought, were to most people part of their appeal. The Genizee had become everyone’s favorite alien, and you couldn’t get away with a bad word about them. The stores were packed with cute little mop-topped black jelly cylinders—although for aesthetic reasons the toys didn’t have the disgusting layer of slime that allowed the amphibian Genizee to function out of water.
When it was Marcus Aurelius Jackson against the Genizee, MAJ didn’t have a chance. After all, hadn’t the altruistic Genizee taken many years of their own lives, just to come to Earth and deliver a warning? And weren’t they, even now, creeping back across the light-years in their cramped, uncomfortable little ships, with twenty-five years still to go? How many Earth people would do something like that, even to save their own closest relatives? Especially to save their closest relatives.
So, although Marcus went on talking, I knew he was wasting his time. He wouldn’t get one inch of column space or a second of air time for his unpopular views.
As it turned out, I was wrong. “MAD DOG SCIENTISTS UNREPENTANT!” shouted the only headline. And underneath: “Death Penalty Favored for Insane Inventors.”
Marcus is an interesting case for the psychologists. When his idea of a faster-than-light drive was ridiculed, he redoubled his efforts. And when his just-as-heretical views of the Genizee were pooh-poohed, he at once turned all his efforts from conjecture to possible methods of proof.
“There has to be a way to show that I’m right,” he said. “Wilmer, let me try something out on you.”
I said nothing. When you are living together in one locked room, it is hard to avoid a discussion.
“Point one,” went on Marcus. “According to me, the advanced potential from our test must damp out rapidly as it goes backwards in time. The Genizee say they picked it up a quarter of a century ago, but I say it fades to background level and becomes undetectable in a year or less. If I’m right—and I am—they can’t have picked up evidence of our test more than a year before they got here.
“Point two. They say they came from Tau Ceti, and their departure trajectory supports that idea. Even if they didn’t, though, they certainly came from outside the solar system. The nearest star is over four light-years away. Four light-years or more in one year or less means they had to have come using a faster-than-light ship.
“Point three. They left two weeks ago. If they really intend to fly all the way back to Tau Ceti, or any other interstellar destination, in those sub-light ships, they are still in the early acceleration phase of the trip. Even with the most efficient propulsion system I can imagine, it will take them nearly a year to work their way up to half the speed of light.”
He stared at me. “Do you see what that means?”
“It means they’re still a hell of a long way from home. They’re as altruistic as everyone believes.”
“No.” If the press could have seen Marcus now, they would have felt that their MAD DOG SCIENTISTS UNREPENTANT headline was thoroughly justified. “Wilmer, it means that if they were telling the truth about how they came here, and how they are going back, and where they are going back to, then anyone with an FTL ship could fly out and catch up with them. If they aren’t where they should be, then they are lying, either about coming from Tau Ceti or about the drive. One lie is enough to discredit everything they said to us. If you ask me, they’re already back home, wherever they came from—and I’ll bet money it’s not Tau Ceti—having a good laugh at the credible people of Earth.”
I looked at him, then let my eyes roam around the featureless beige walls of the room. “Let me try something out on you, Marcus. Point one. There is just one FTL drive in the solar system, and it is impounded, up in orbit and protected by maximum security guards, because everyone on or off Earth is terrified of it. If they weren’t afraid to touch the thing, they’d have destroyed it long ago.
“Point two. There are just two human beings who know how to fly that ship. No one else will go near the Godspeed.
“Point three. Those two humans are locked away in an underground room in a building in the middle of the Nevada desert. They have no tools, no friends, no money, and no way of getting to space, still less of reaching the Godspeed. Forget it, Marcus, you could never do it, not in a thousand years.”
“I know I couldn’t,” he said. He was still staring at me. I felt a quivery feeling in my stomach, as though my recent breakfast had suddenly been converted to live worms.
“I know I couldn’t,” he said again. “That’s not my line. But you, Wilmer, if you—.”
“It’s impossible.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“Totally impossible.”
“Yeah.” He stood up and went over to lie on his bed without another word.
After a few seconds I went across to my own bed, lay down on it, and closed my eyes. I decided that I hadn’t been totally honest when I was speaking to Marcus. I still had friends outside, and I still had some equity with them for past favors. I had cultivated our guards, too, drawing a little on Marcus’s wealth, to the point where they normally left us to ourselves, but would do the odd paid favor for me provided it was obviously no threat to them or to anyone else. So far as the security around the Godspeed was concerned, I had probably exaggerated that. No one would be too worried, as long as it was known that Marcus and I were locked up here.
I shivered, and stopped my thinking right there. What was Marcus trying to make me do? Help him to destroy the pair of us, and the whole of the human race as well? But he had touched that dark, hidden spot where the true ego dwells.
Now the live worms in my stomach had crawled up my throat into my brain, and set it on fire.
&n
bsp; If we escaped from prison, the alarm would go off at once. The search for us would begin. The two of us would never make it far outside the prison walls, let alone into space, and the guards around the Godspeed itself would be tripled in numbers and placed on maximum alert.
But it took only one person to fly the Godspeed. And there would be real juggling to be done here, inside the prison, to hide the fact of that one person’s escape.
Marcus, then, to pilot the ship and to design the programs that would allow the sort of freeze-frame sequence of hops that the unmanned payload had taken to Mars, searching at each transition for the Genizee ships. I, to stay here, and to arrange matters—how, for God’s sake? I had no idea—so that no one knew that Marcus was missing, until he was on his way in the Godspeed.
I opened my eyes. Marcus was sitting up on his bed, gazing at me expectantly.
“Any good?” he asked.
“Go to hell.” I closed my eyes again. What did he take me for? I had been lying there for maybe three minutes. Extraordinary things can sometimes be done in real time. Miracles take a little longer.
A “little longer” in this case turned out to be six weeks. Everything had to be choreographed tighter than a five-ship orbital rendezvous. I broke the problem down into discrete pieces, each one requiring a solution if the whole effort were to succeed. Marcus had to escape from here unnoticed. Then I had to conceal the evidence of his disappearance for at least five days. Marcus would need that much time to travel from Nevada, all the way out to the Godspeed. Then he had to have credentials that would allow him to board the ship, and he had to remain there undisturbed. After that he would be on his own.
Dancing With Myself Page 34