Redeeming Factors
James R. Lane
REDEEMING FACTORS
Copyright ©2000 James R. Lane
Lulu Press Edition ©August 2016
All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover and Interior Illustrations
Copyright © 2000 Eugene Arenhaus
[email protected]
Used by permission.
This book was printed in the United States of America.
Published by Lulu Press
http://www.lulu.com
Other books by James R. Lane:
Lifetimes
Last Dance of the Phoenix
Visit the Author's website
lane-books.com
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the late Jack D. Hunter; soldier, spy, journalist, novelist, artist, mentor, and above all – friend. Thanks to longtime journalist/critic/friend Glenn Bernhard, as well as to artist Eugene Arenhaus, and fellow writer Ted R. Blasingame. Special thanks to my late parents, Norma L. and James E. Lane. They cared, and they never gave up.
Chapter 1
*First Contract*
Jack Ross parked his silver classic 1962 Corvette convertible in a slot of the small paved lot at Patrons. It was a perfect springtime Northeast Florida morning, the air smelled good and the mockingbirds were raising a cheery-sounding ruckus. He left the top down, but since the intense sub-tropical sun would quickly warm the unprotected red leather upholstery Ross spread a light-colored blanket over the seats to keep them cool. A quick glance at his hands showed them to be rock steady. While Ross was excited about what would shortly take place, he was also pleased that his excitement didn’t show.
In the next few hours a great deal of work performed by a group of unusually dedicated people would be given its first crucial test, and Ross was justifiably proud to be playing a starring role in it. He also believed in enjoying the fruits of his labors, and what better way to celebrate his 50th birthday, he reasoned, than to give himself a present, especially one so uniquely suited to fit comfortably into his middle-class divorced lifestyle.
Jack Ross was acquiring a companion.
* * *
Ross’ low-key arrival at Patrons that fateful day had been preceded by a social upheaval of monumental proportions. The past decade had brought unprecedented change to Earth, with her societies and economies world-wide literally turned upside down mostly due to one deceptively simple discovery. After little more than a century of powered atmospheric flight in heavier-than-air vehicles, humankind had, in the span of two short years, achieved not only reliable, comfortable and rapid interplanetary flight—
Mankind had reached the stars.
And the way mankind had reached the stars turned out to be the main problem for both the fabric of world societies in general and their governments in particular. For ages we had dreamed of simple and economical space flight—“the everyman’s spaceship”—but the cold physical and economic realities of travel beyond the boundaries of our blue-green world meant that for the foreseeable future such adventures were apparently destined to remain science fiction dreams. Yet we desperately continued dreaming, writing countless books and making wondrous movies of exploration and contact with mysterious and often terrifying alien life forms. Many sociologists theorized that our fascination with the mysterious “out there” realm was nothing more than an attempt to forget the looming global economic and population crises that threatened to end our cosmically brief sovereignty on Earth. But as the post-millennium world grudgingly settled down to deal with the next thousand years something extraordinary happened.
The jumperdrive became a reality.
This engine, this incredible device that promised practical interstellar travel for the masses, had apparently been developed entirely by private enterprise, yet right after that unprecedented accomplishment the very technology that made it possible had been released into the international public domain.
Like the basic internal combustion gasoline engine, the jumperdrive engine module appeared to be both relatively easy and cheap to produce, and as an added bonus it cost literally nothing to operate. It was inevitable that, once word got out that such a device was readily available, countless millions of people the world over threatened immediate civil war with their governments—with all governments—should their access to this wondrous boon be denied. In a show of universal frustration and uncommon unity the United Nations, meeting in emergency session, declared the jumperdrive technology, and any use of it, to be “unrestricted” technology.
For humans, that is.
For the first time in its recorded history mankind would be truly free—free from governmental tyranny, free from environmental restrictions, free from social and religious constraints.
Free, too, in all too many cases, to ignore basic common sense.
Fully automated computer-controlled factories were quickly set up in every industrialized country to produce the jumperdrive engine modules in large quantities and to standardized specifications. The devices ranged in size from that of a small schoolchild’s backpack to the modest bulk of a household refrigerator; the smallest one handily powered a minivan-sized vehicle, while the largest one could easily motivate a vessel the size of an oceangoing luxury cruise liner. Need something to power a vessel the size of an oceangoing supertanker? No problem! Just install two or more of the largest modules into the behemoth and link their computerized controls together.
One popular joke theorized that a given number of jumperdrive modules—the exact number a matter of wide speculation—could, when wired together, make the Earth, itself, into a giant spaceship. The joke fell somewhat flat when it was pointed out that the Earth already was a giant, self-contained spaceship, moving proudly through space on a constant, never-ending journey.
The jumperdrive modules were rendered tamperproof at their factories where carefully guarded companion devices, apparently developed at the same time the jumperdrive technology was discovered, used a molecular phase-shift procedure to seal the main mechanisms against unauthorized opening. Other than the specialized—and heavily guarded—sealing machines found only at those factories, anything that could crack the housing on a jumperdrive engine module would also completely destroy the device inside. Should a jumperdrive fail in space, an event of almost immeasurable improbability, there was no way possible to repair it in flight.
Wise travelers simply carried a spare drive module; paranoid travelers carried two spares. After all, with prices starting at less than two hundred New Millennium UN dollars for the smallest ones, they were certainly cheap enough.
When operating, the jumperdrive was silent and created no pollution—no hot exhaust, no damaging radiation, no toxic emissions. A homeowner’s lawn mower was a far more environmentally obnoxious machine. In fact, no one, not even the scientists who claimed to have invented it, knew exactly what it was the jumperdrive “emitted”. They just knew that, when operating, its field radiated a distinctive radio frequency signal-–-in itself totally harmless-–-and that the device did exactly what it was supposed to do. This outraged the rabid environmentalists who wanted to blame it for everything from global warming to toenail fungus.
; The jumperdrive needed no exotic fuels. If you had a few grams of liquid or granulated matter, type not critical, you had enough motivational material to move a family of four, plus ample vacation luggage, to a destination a thousand light years away. Ready to return? Scoop up a handful of sand or a little cup of water before securing the hatch, dump it into the “fuel tank”, and you had all the “go-juice” you needed for the quick ride home.
Having your rugrat pee into the tank’s intake hopper would also work, but was considered to be uncouth.
When it came to measuring the duration of a given journey “quick” was definitely the operative word. On an average interstellar trip it took far longer to navigate the planetary atmosphere out on departure and in on arrival than the aforementioned thousand light year journey. Einstein’s and Hawking’s theories were still right most of the time—however, like many other icons of theoretical physics, the mathematical monuments of energy/mass/speed equations, time dilation and the conservation of matter and energy were summarily turned upside down when the jumperdrive performed its magic.
In use the jumperdrive produced a visually transparent field that encapsulated and protected the entire vehicular body in which it was mounted. Often this so-called “vehicle” was no more than an airtight horizontal or squat vertical cylinder equipped with a couple of windows, a few seats, basic controls, a canned air supply, one pressure-sealed door and something along the lines of stabilizing feet or skids to keep it from rolling like a can of beans when parked. Besides protection from friction and minor impact, the jumperdrive field also conveniently shielded everything within its influence from harmful interstellar radiation.
One thing the jumperdrive did not do, at least while operating in its inner-atmosphere secondary phase, was negate the influences of gravity, mass and momentum. At the secondary setting the jumperdrive could be used to “fly” the object that contained it through the air in a more-or-less controlled manner. During that mode of travel passengers still felt acceleration, bumps and jolts, and they could be squashed into strawberry jam if the ship made too sudden a maneuver. Also, under low to zero-gravity conditions passengers often became airsick to the point of blowing chunks all over the upholstery.
But once a jumperdrive-equipped ship was outside the bulk of a planet’s atmosphere its pilot was then free to switch the device over to its primary phase, and here is where the engine worked its real magic. All external physical effects—mass, inertia, gravity, even time—were suddenly negated, and the jumperdrive engine, along with the ship containing it, stepped outside normal four-dimensional physical space. In the blip of an immeasurable instant it moved from an interstellar here to an unimaginably distant there, with no discernible time interval. While it was true that it took a computer to calculate the mathematics of the jump itself and actually control what the jumperdrive engine did, a modest laptop/tablet-class machine was all that was required. Most people found it more difficult to program a digital video recorder than to set up a jump to another star. With the right software running in their ship’s computer even a technology-challenged granny found celestial navigation to be a snap.
Since the jumperdrive obviously did what all the physicists said could not be done, the main thing it did for them was to give them migraine headaches. It quickly came to be known as The Gee Whiz Machine. Disbelievers rolled their eyes in skepticism, saying (among less-polite things) “gee whiz”. Yet after a quick jaunt to a distant star and an equally quick jaunt back, the skeptics inevitably changed their tune to a GEE WHIZ of amazed belief.
Major automobile manufacturers had kicked the idea around of incorporating jumperdrive modules into Buicks, Toyotas and Volkswagens almost since the beginning, but for the present most people bought their own personal starships the way they bought RV motor homes, travel trailers and small pleasure boats. In fact, many of those same RV dealers devoted a sizable portion of their facilities to displaying and selling small to moderate-size jumperdrive powered ships. With such dealers in almost every good-sized town and city, along with hundreds of small companies in virtually every country on Earth throwing together basic vehicles for next to nothing, people found they could buy their very own “ultimate escape machine” for less than the price of a new cheap motorcycle.
Those who were skillful, wealthy or both often custom-built their own jumperdrive-powered starships, with many of those based on whimsical or fanciful designs straight out of fantasy and science fiction. Everything from outlandish, often-elaborate “flying saucers” to drastically scaled-down replicas of the original Star Trek ship Enterprise could be found zipping in and out of low-Earth orbit, happily on their way to and from distant alien worlds.
A giant articulated Pegasus had been under construction for some time, but the builder was rumored to be experiencing insurmountable technical difficulties getting the device’s wings to flap in sync with its galloping legs when it flew through the air.
One important thing the UN did manage to mandate was that each craft, private and commercial alike, be equipped with a simple 2-meter FM radio transceiver that would operate on a block of frequencies appropriated, under bitter protest, from the HAM radio spectrum. This at least gave them some semblance of local and international air traffic control.
For less than five thousand New Millennium UN dollars a person could have his very own basic spaceship, taxes and local license fees extra, space suits and common sense not included. And as far as regulatory taxes went, the newly emancipated citizens were receptive to buying RV-type registration tags for their fancy toys, and they grudgingly consented to UN-mandated basic driver’s license-type pilot training and licensing to keep the level of in-flight chaos down to a manageable level.
Even so, there still were spectacular crashes, mind-boggling accidents and tragic blunders in the operation of the private spaceships, but like anything humans decree must be available to “the masses”, those same masses declared the benefits to be well worth the cost.
And thus we come to the social/political implications of relatively unrestricted interstellar travel.
Exodus-time had arrived for all the world’s malcontents, zealots and starry-eyed Utopians. For the most part mankind no longer wasted time poking around our little solar system, either. Decades of time and an embarrassing amount of money had been frittered away on crude, unsatisfying planetary exploration relatively close to home, and now that we humans had the ability to travel far and wide, travel far and wide we did. The resulting first contact discoveries with distant alien worlds, alien creatures—and above all, alien sentients, with all the biological hazards and cultural shocks such events must entail—were quick to follow.
But there was one catastrophic exception. Most of the Middle Eastern Arabs and Jews didn’t want to leave Earth; they were far too intent on squabbling over possession of the same little patch of historical Paradise their ancestors had warred over for millennia. If anything, the advent of the jumperdrive made their struggles for the Ancestral Homeland all the more intense, ultimately bringing matters to a final, irreversible conclusion.
The Two-Hour War, the Middle East’s first and no doubt last all-out nuclear confrontation, obliterated Israel and most of the surrounding Arab/Muslim states.
At least Iraq, Iran, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria were no longer threats to humanity’s survival, since the hundreds of tons of nerve gas and biotoxins their military factions had stockpiled were vaporized in the first thirty minutes of the localized nuclear exchange. The tragic price for that increase in world security was the loss of millions of innocent civilian lives, along with the destruction of one of the most treasured regions on Earth.
Still, in the relatively brief year following the first successful round trip to a distant star, literally hundreds of splinter factions of dozens of religions, along with a multitude of both high- and low-brow social experimenters, made their grand exodus statements, hauling millions of the faithful to the interstellar promised lands in all manner of makeshift tin-can
colony ships. Most returned (if they were fortunate enough to be able to do so) with their figurative tails between their wobbly legs, telling horrifying stories of nightmarish monsters and unbearable hardships on the strange alien worlds they tried to claim as their own.
Those few who survived to return to Earth were thought to be the lucky ones, yet occasionally they brought back hidden pathological passengers that devastated additional millions of home-bound innocents before mankind’s medical science could devise biological and anti-viral counter-measures. Luckily for us, most alien germs didn’t really like our biochemistry; luckier for the inhabited worlds we visited our own Terran germs usually didn’t like their alien biochemistry any better.
And so we explored and fought and oftentimes ran like hell. After several years of mankind’s wildest roller coaster ride ever, things finally began settling down and sorting themselves out.
* * *
The H’kaah were just one of over two dozen more-or-less sociable non-human sentient species discovered in a loose cluster of stars a mere three hundred light years from Earth. Most of the discovered species appeared to be, for lack of any better theory or explanation, highly evolved cousins of Earth-native animals, a classic science-fiction theme immortalized in thousands of stories and numerous movies. Some, however, appeared to spring straight out of our wildest fantasies and myths. Many of these alien species also had varying levels of human-style, or anthropomorphic, physical and/or social characteristics. And while every sentient species had its own evolutionary or creationist theories, often complete with suitably-impressive religions, a popular theory among humans was even more shocking than the existence of the aliens themselves.
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