As he gathered their few belongings together, she added, “Let me remind you that my ship is unarmed. There are no tactics for fighting with it except to run. I will teach you as much as I can about its capabilities, but that is all I can do.”
“Does it have a shield?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Well, that’s a bit of good news. See? Our luck is changing!”
Airborne at 7:30, he was established on course and leveled off in cruise ten minutes later. For the first time in days, they had a high cloud cover, the leading edge of the weather Jim had told them to expect. The ceiling would continue lowering during the day, but it did not appear to be a hindrance to their short flight.
The ground below changed rapidly from the wheat fields of the day before to much more precipitous terrain. Rolling hills became substantial foothills, their tops as high as four thousand feet to both sides of the plane. The lake to which they were headed was located well into the foothills in a sparsely inhabited forest region. From what he could tell looking ahead toward the horizon, Arlynn had chosen a good area for hiding her ship.
“Okay, start talking,” he announced.
“I’m ready,” she replied. “Greg, the ship is propelled by forces you do not understand. Can you accept that as sufficient explanation?”
“I guess I can if I have to, but can’t you give me any clues? I’m not totally ignorant of physics, you know.”
“I did not mean to infer that you were, but no one on your planet would understand our drive principles. You are at least a century away from discovering the necessary physics. Some of your most brilliant scientists are working on what they refer to as the Unified Field Theory. Once they have it, they’ll have the key, but even then, they will only have an inkling of its possibilities. It will take many years before their knowledge leads to useful theories, then many more years of experimentation and testing before they construct a functioning drive system. But until they have the Unified Field Theory, nothing can happen.”
“How much gas do I have?”
Arlynn’s eyes took on a faraway look as if she was thinking hard, then Greg literally saw her eyes come back into focus as something connected in her memory. “Surely you know that my ship does not use gas. How it gets its energy and how it uses that energy is unimportant. There is plenty, Greg. This ship can traverse the galaxy without additional fuel. You may assume that we have an unlimited supply of energy.”
“Wow!” If the reality of taking a spaceship aloft was not so imminent, Greg would have felt like the proverbial kid in a candy store. As it was, he both savored and feared the tightness in his stomach. “Okay, I’ll take your word for it. I have an inexhaustible supply of fuel and the ship will take me to your baseship as fast or as slow as I want to go. Will we orbit Earth to pick up speed like our rockets do?”
“No. The power of these ships is sufficient for you to disregard that. Since we’re keeping this simple, you can just assume you’ll go direct. We have computers to do the aiming. I’ll teach you how to tell them where you want to go, and they’ll take you there.”
“That’s great! Maybe this won’t be so hard after all! Can I go faster than the speed of light?”
“It gets harder, trust me,” she said dryly. “Nothing in the universe can go faster than the speed of light but, yes, you can go slow or fast.”
"Then how did you get here if you can’t go faster than the speed of light?”
“We’ll discuss that later.”
“Yes, ma’am. Can I change speed and direction instantly like the UFO did?”
“My encounter with the Harbok was the only one I am aware of that occurred within atmosphere. We seemed evenly matched. In space, to the best of my knowledge, our maneuvering capabilities are similar, though I am told they have a slight speed advantage.”
“How does this instantaneous acceleration system work? How do you keep from getting squashed?”
“It is a welcome byproduct of our drive. The drive creates a field around and through the ship which is very powerful, but instead of just pushing the ship around like engines do here on your world, the drive acts on every atom within its field equally. It pulls everything along with it, including the crew. We do not feel turns or speed changes or any other accelerations. We simply move along with the field in whichever direction we’ve instructed the field to move us. For example, if I tell the ship to go up, it does not simply lift the ship up as if it was an elevator, making me feel heavy. Instead, it pulls all the molecules of my body up at the same time it’s pulling the ship. For our purposes, I think you can get by with the fact that it works by pushing the right buttons. Will you accept that explanation?”
“Sure! In fact, I like it. Do your regular pilots have it this easy?”
“Please appreciate that this is not easy. I’m a good teacher. You’re lucky to have me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Our shields are more complicated, and they have a wide range of settings. To start with, imagine the shield on maximum intensity. No detectable energy gets through. How then do you see out?”
“Ah . . .”
“Exactly. You don’t. At this point you can do one of two things. You can reduce the strength of the shield, which allows a portion of the energy spectrum through, or you simply turn the shield off.”
“But . . .”
“Wait. I’ll explain. Remember when I told you that luck was a big factor in fighting ship-to-ship with the Harbok?”
“Yes, I . . .”
“The reason is that during a battle our shield is often at its maximum level, but we instruct the ship’s computers to turn the shield on and off at a relatively high rate.” He started to object, but she ignored him. “Remember, the energies we’re discussing travel at the speed of light, so we can just say they travel instantaneously. That means the shield can go up and down many times a second, and every time it’s off, or reduced, our sensors record all the energies coming in to refresh our screens, or our windows if you would prefer to call them that.”
“No, I . . .”
“We don’t need our screens refreshed very often. Our eyes don’t notice changes that occur faster than sixty times per second, so if we refresh the screens a little faster than that, it will appear as if there is no shield. That’s only a tiny portion of each second to our computers and to our shield, but to the crew it appears visually as if our shield was not even in existence. If we had a weapon to fire—which we do not—the computer would fire it during the short time the shield is down. On the other hand, if the other ship fires during the tiny interval when your shield is down, you are hit. Are you still with me?”
“Yes, my shield is flickering on and off all the time. What else?”
“We control the rate of flickering, and we also control the strength of the shield. In adjusting the strength of the shield, we solve several problems. We can keep out harmful radiation and cosmic rays by leaving the shield on all the time at a low level. With a slightly higher level, we reduce the glare of the sun, or conversely, a very weak shield might be used for navigation purposes to locate dim stars. Do you see?”
“Sure, but it seems like a hassle to be worrying about that all the time.”
“It is, and you don’t have to. It’s all automatically controlled by computers unless you override them. I’m telling you this in order to lead into something else. Am I going too fast?”
“No, it’s a good rate for me. I’m not having any problems with this so far. Are we keeping to your schedule?”
“Are you lost yet?” she asked innocently, smiling her crooked smile.
“Well I’ll be!” he said, startled. “You have a sense of humor!”
“You’ll see more of that when I’m better—if we live that long. Did you notice all the crew stations on Jarl’s ship?”
“Yes.”
“The purpose of the other crew members is to assist the pilot in interfacing with the various computers. Controlling the shield is just on
e of the interface tasks. When fighting, the shield is usually stronger than normal, but someone needs to tell the computer when to do this and how much. If you are taking many hits, you select maximum shielding and little or no flicker, but then you can’t see outside. You might choose to slowly reduce the strength and/or flicker rate to see better. It depends on how badly you’re getting shot versus how much you want to look outside so that you may shoot back, or to run away as is the case with my ship.
“Remember, most hits are not fatal. These ships are designed to handle a certain amount of energy. The danger lies more in having a vital component hit, or if you are unlucky enough to have more than one ship firing at you at the same time, and they both get through your shield at the same moment, you are instantly gone.”
“Can more than one ship shooting at once overload your shield?”
“Yes, but it takes time. You would want to move your ship quickly in that case. It’s now time to move on to another subject. Are you still with me so far?”
“I guess so, but putting it all together while flying sounds pretty complicated.”
“I will not mislead you, Greg. It is difficult, especially when there is only one person to do everything, but we have no choice.” With a determined set to her jaw, she said, “You’ll learn. Now, what do you suppose happens if you have a shield at maximum power, and by that, I mean absolutely no energy gets through?”
“I guess no energy would be going out either, in which case you might cook inside your shield. Other than that, I don’t know.”
“Very good, but also very wrong as we found out when we tried it. With total shielding, we discovered that the ship operates independently of our natural laws. It may even be operating in a different universe. We’re not sure.”
“You lost me this time. Try that explanation again, will you please?”
“I can’t explain it further. I don’t understand it myself, nor do our scientists. We have many theories concerning other dimensions, energies we can only theorize about, and so on. For myself, and for our purposes today, it’s just something that happens. Why it happens is not important.”
“Okay, tell me again what happens.”
“With absolute shielding, nothing gets through. Something happens at the field boundary that we do not understand. Perhaps the energies of our drive combined with the energies of our shield form something new at the boundary, but whatever is happening, the forces in our universe do not like it.”
“Okay, I guess I can live with that, but what happens to the ship?”
“That’s a little harder to explain. Remember, I can only tell you what happens to us, not why it happens. Try to imagine the ship as being inside a ping pong ball. The surface of the ball is your shield boundary. Do you follow?”
“Go ahead. I’m trying.”
“Imagine taking that ping pong ball under water, then letting go of it. What happens?”
“It shoots to the surface.”
“That’s what seems to happen to our ship as well. It’s as if the universe is trying to expel us.”
“Which way do we go?”
“To keep it simple, we go very, very quickly in the direction we were last going when the shield reached maximum power. But complications set in. Strong gravity wells such as planetary systems, stars, and singularities, black holes as they are sometimes referred to on Earth, tend to bend our course just as they would if we were on a trajectory in normal space. The extent of this bending is not predictable, at least not yet. We just don’t understand the physics well enough. We’ve learned to measure the effects through trial and error, and we can navigate with some degree of accuracy, but we make frequent stops along the way even on well-traveled routes to survey our progress. We cannot use the system at all when we’re near strong gravity wells. We call it the StarDrive.”
She paused, then added, “Greg, I want to emphasize something: because of the effects of strong gravity wells, we never, ever operate the StarDrive within a planetary system. The variables are too numerous to calculate, even with our most advanced computers.”
“Don’t use it within the solar system. Okay, I get it. Just how fast do you go?”
“We’re not able to measure our speed, or anything else for that matter since we can’t see through the boundary of our ping pong ball. We are completely blind when the StarDrive is active. We know from trial and error experiments, however, that our rate of travel increases with time. We’ve discovered no maximum value to this rate, although that may be the result of not traveling long periods of time under the drive. From a practical standpoint, we’re quite satisfied with the transit times we now experience.”
He concentrated on navigating the plane for a while, letting his mind sort through what she had said. It didn’t add up. There had to be more. “Can you give me some ball park idea as to how fast I would be going in, say, five minutes, or thirty minutes, or even a week for that matter?”
“From a theoretical standpoint, speed is not something you experience in this bubble. It is only something we estimate prior to engagement. After the StarDrive is turned off, we determine our precise location, then we begin the computational process for the next jump.”
“Come on. You must use something to guesstimate your speed before you start.”
“We do, and those values have been quite accurately determined for the routes we normally follow. Roughly, you will have gone approximately half a light-year after fifteen minutes, one light-year in 30 minutes, and about five light-years in one hour. That’s about as far as we’re willing to go in one jump.”
He shut his mouth with a snap and stared ahead with glazed eyes. How was he going to fly something that went that fast?
“Greg . . . Greg, look at me please,” she demanded. He came back to the present but stared at her dumbly. “Greg, you will not use the StarDrive. It cannot be used within your star system, and we are not going that far. I only mention it so that you do not use it. You would become hopelessly lost or even killed in no time at all, in which case I would be dead too. Do you understand you are not to use this drive?”
“Jeez . . . yes! What if I get max shielding by accident?”
“You will not. Maximum shielding at the pilot station is not true maximum shielding. A separate station is used for StarDrive operations. It requires very delicate control of the shield, so it is always computer controlled.”
“Since I won’t be using the system, I guess I don’t really need to know, but how do you slow down?”
“The computer carefully reduces field strength. I’m talking here about almost immeasurable reductions. You could not do it manually. It appears that a tiny reduction in field strength acts like a brake. Whether normal outside forces acting on our bubble provide this braking or not, we don’t know.”
“What if you just shut the field off in the middle of a jump?”
“The computer will not permit that.”
“What if it happened anyway?”
“Our ships are extremely reliable. On the other hand, a few ships have departed that were never heard from again. It’s possible that a catastrophic failure of that nature occurred, but there are also many other possibilities as to their fates. Space travel is not without its dangers. Now, we’re almost there, are we not?”
“Soon. I think this is a good time for you to tell me where we’re going,” he said.
She considered his request but shook her head. “Not yet. There is too much at stake in revealing the location of my baseship. Doing so puts many other lives at risk.”
“Okay, but just out of curiosity, why don’t you just call them on the radio to come and get you? And don’t get me wrong,” he added hurriedly. “I want to go. I’m just curious.”
“Ships coming to rescue me would face the same problem of detection we will have when we leave Earth, but by then the Harbok will be in a better position to respond. I think our best chance is to go now, before the Harbok have repaired their ships. We’ll use a low-energy tra
jectory that will make it hard for them to detect us. A high-energy trajectory would reduce our travel time by two thirds, but the resulting energy reflections would act like a beacon to anyone looking for us. Even so, if they’re watching in precisely the correct location, we’ll be discovered. I think we have a reasonable chance since such a search would require a maximum effort by them. To search the entire solar system is an immense undertaking, and I don’t think they’re equipped for it.”
“That might be true, Arlynn, but searching just around Earth to catch us as we depart surely narrows down the search area.”
“You are overly perceptive,” she said sternly. Their gazes locked, and her tone softened. “I think you understand more than I’ve given you credit for, including the unspoken realities of our situation.”
“Just basic tactics, Arlynn. I’m trying to see things from the other guy’s point of view. Have you given any thought to just holing up in your ship here for a few weeks until this whole thing blows over? Maybe we could go hide out under the polar ice cap or something. We might have a better chance of sneaking out then.”
She gave him a questioning look. “I admit to being a little selfish here, Greg.”
He stared at her without comprehension for a few heartbeats, then he heard a tick . . . tick . . . tick in his head.
She saw from his expression that he understood. “Remember, Greg—Jarl and I damaged the Harbok ships quite extensively. There’s a good possibility they are not yet operational.”
“If there were no other ships on the planet, you mean. Who knows, maybe one was spying on Afghanistan while you were in their base.”
“You don’t have to come with me.”
“That’s not the point,” he replied indignantly. “You’re assuming the Harbok can’t mount a response following your attack on their base, but you really have no facts to back up that assumption. Whatever else we do, we should agree here and now that there will be no secrets between us. I need to know everything, or at least as much as you can pack into my thick head during the next few hours. Our situation is desperate. Teach me well, because you’ve used up a large share of your luck on this mission.”
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