Analog SFF, November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I feel the need to die with some emblem of humanity—music perhaps. What is appropriate for the death of the universe? Beethoven's Ninth? Schubert's Unfinished Symphony? Well, if it's not finished now, it never will be. I think I'll go with the Ninth.

  * * * *

  Entry 100

  Explorer Clock: ERROR

  Capsule Clock: 08 July 2048—10:00

  I've just had breakfast—my last meal.

  With Beethoven playing in the background, I'm writing this—probably my last entry—probably the last entry (100 is a nice round number for the end of time).

  All that's left for me is to throw the switch. Then, I can use my telescope and watch the Milky Way die. As for the other galaxies, they'll grow so distant that they'll be beyond the resolving power of my scope. In my mind, I see the stars turning blue from the gravitation field—a lovely, rich shade of blue becoming deeper and fading to invisible ultraviolet.

  But then, perhaps Einstein-Rosen bridges do exist and as I go through the black hole, I'll pass through a wormhole and travel back in time. I could come out in physical space, filled with stars and galaxies and warm living souls. And since all NASA spacecraft are fitted with SETI-kits, including this one, I might even be able to communicate with those souls.

  This is absurd; I'm kidding myself. The certain outcome is death. Let it be quick.

  My family, my friends—they lived their natural lives. It makes no sense for me to grieve for them. I can only grieve for myself—and I refuse to do that any longer.

  My hand is on the switch. I'll miss the sound of the engines.

  * * * *

  "So, that's it,” signaled the Keeper.

  "That's it."

  "Too bad.” The Keeper started for the portal. “It would have been exceptionally helpful if we'd had the body."

  The Librarian signaled agreement.

  "But how is it I wonder, that we have the craft?"

  "I have a theory,” flashed the Librarian, displaying extreme modesty.

  "Do you?” The Keeper gestured that the Librarian draw closer. “Come. Join me in my studio for sustenance.

  "I'm honored. Thank you."

  "Afterward, tell me your theory.” The Keeper radiated a deep-thought aura. “And since you are the principal authority on the alien, perhaps you and I together can find something in the document that would prove the creature's existence."

  * * * *

  "No!” Conrad moved his hand away from the switch. “This is not the way for humanity to die.” He made a fist and let it fall to the console. “Last one leaving the universe, turn off the lights.” He shook his head. “No."

  Snapping to his feet, he backed away from the pilot's console. He wasn't sure what changed his mind; maybe his instinct for self-preservation, maybe his longing for home. Earth was no more, of course, but he still could end his days in his own solar system—if he could break free.

  He opened the connecting hatch to the left-side escape pod. Feeling pleasure at the thought of leaving the Capsule, he grabbed his journal and started through the hatchway. Then, almost out of a sense of whimsy, he pivoted around, pulled free the diverter board from its wiring harness, and took it with him into the pod. Assembling that board had been the work of eons.

  After strapping himself in at the pod's pilot's console, he powered up the electronics and turned his attention to the navigation cluster. He paused. There was no Earth to navigate to. But he could auto-locate Saturn. He let out a bark of a chuckle. Titan, in fact, had been the last solar system body he'd set foot on. It was as much home as anywhere. He set in the A.I. navigation parameters for Titan.

  Before starting the engines, he ran through a mental checklist. His NASA flight training had taken hold; he had a mission again. Logic suggested that since he had two escape pods, he could set this one on remote-launch and watch from the Capsule to see if it worked.

  Quickly, he released his harness, and dashed back to the Capsule. He whistled. The physical activity had made him feel human again.

  In the Time Capsule, he took remote control of the pod. Hearing the clank as the pod separated from the Capsule, he eased the pod to a position directly over his top viewport. It didn't take much thrust as the pod was well within the Capsule's Richardson field. Gritting his teeth, wondering if the viewport would stand up to the blast from the pod, Conrad threw the pod control to auto-navigate. He held his breath as he pushed the launch button.

  The pod moved slowly at first, then rapidly gathered speed. Conrad whistled in astonishment at how fast the pod accelerated. Then he realized that it was a gravity effect; the pod's clock was speeding up as it escaped the black hole. The pod would reach Titan many months before he could possibly arrive in the other escape vehicle. But the point was—it worked. He had a ticket home. He smiled. Odd, thinking of Titan as home.

  Conrad stretched, then scrambled into the remaining pod. He reprised his actions on the first pod, then hit the control separating the vehicle from the Capsule. His craft, buffeted by the turbulence from the Capsule's engines, shook like a bicycle on a railroad track. He maneuvered the pod to sit over the Capsule and the vibrations ceased. Conrad took a deep breath, slowly blew it out, and then levered the thrust control to full. The engine roared, the craft trembled, and the acceleration forced Conrad deep into his seat. It took a long hour, but the pod broke free of the black hole. Conrad moved his hand to pull back on the thrust control, but then changed his mind. Having no reason for caution, he ran full-speed toward Saturn. This time, relativity would work for him. With the Richardson engines, he could travel at near light speed and reach Titan in almost no time at all.

  He slapped a hand against the control panel. Damn it. I left the journal in the other pod. He shook his head. As if it matters.

  Three hours later, as measured by the pod's elapsed time meter, he reached the Oort cloud, the nominal boundary of the Solar System. He slowed his engines, and then slowed them further as he came into Saturn's neighborhood. Through the forward viewport, the Sun loomed large and Saturn gleamed with magnificent intensity under the red-orange light. Although the Sun was now a low-luminosity star, it was huge and, relatively speaking, close. As he watched, the auto-navigation system directed the pod toward Titan.

  Shifting his attention from the viewport to the computer screen, he pulled up a manual navigation display and eased the pod into a close orbit around the great satellite. After a moment of relaxation, reveling in the sensation of weightlessness, he switched the monitor to the pod's forward camera.

  He jerked forward against his harness, staring open-mouthed at the monitor. Unlatching his constraints, he push-floated to the viewport and gazed out. He had trouble believing what he saw; Titan looked like Earth—oceans, green continents, fluffy cloud cover. But the spectrum was shifted toward the red—Earth through rose-colored glasses. This is impossible!

  Then he remembered reading a paper theorizing that in eight or so billion years, the Sun in its red-giant phase would heat Titan to the point where the temperatures would be in the habitable zone. Conrad smiled. It was great seeing a validation of theory.

  In a fit of scientific curiosity tinged with hope, he pushed back to his console and made some measurements.

  He ran a spectrographic analysis of the atmosphere and surface, and then ran them again before allowing himself to believe the results; the air was actually breathable, the atmospheric pressure like Earth's at sea level, and the oceans composed of water—a far cry from when he'd been here last: 95 percent nitrogen atmosphere at sixty times Earth's pressure, surface temperature of—175 C.

  He returned to the viewport, this time merely to drink in the beauty of nature. Saturn's disk subtended an angle of about five degrees—about ten times that of the moon as seen from Earth. And the Sun, at about fifteen degrees of arc, appeared thirty times larger. But with its lower luminosity, Conrad could gaze on it without hurting his eyes. Simply beautiful!

  Conrad returned to his seat and fastened his harness.
His destiny, brief though it might be, lay on Titan. In preparation for landing, he switched the monitor to the down-looking camera and cranked up the magnification. He needed flat terrain to set down safely.

  "What?” Conrad felt as if he'd been struck. Straining forward in the harness, he peered at the monitor, trying to see deep but being limited by pixels. There was no doubt; structures, artificial structures, were slowly drifting across the screen. The regularity and complexity of the view suggested a medium-sized Earth city. Conrad let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. There was life on Titan, intelligent life. He shook his head in wonderment.

  When the shock had subsided and the “city” had drifted out of view, Conrad tried to think it through. The obvious answer was that people of Earth had migrated to Titan before the Sun went red giant. But as he considered it further, that seemed astronomically improbable; at that point, Titan would still have been a dark, frozen, uninhabitable world. And anyway, he'd been monitoring Earth and had seen it go dead.

  As for colonists from another star system, that too seemed a stretch; he would have likely seen the traffic and the voyagers would surely have explored his black hole.

  Conrad shrugged. Life must have just evolved naturally on Titan. He narrowed his eyes, realizing that evolution was an even less likely solution than were his other ideas. The Sun's red-giant stage could not possibly have lasted for more than about seven hundred million years. There was not enough time for a high order of life to evolve—not from a cold start at any rate. And his expedition had found no trace of life whatsoever on Titan, not even any complex organic molecules.

  Thinking about his Titan expedition, it suddenly hit him. Evolution spends most of its time in the microphase—the development of microbes and single-cell organisms. If Titan had been seeded with those microorganisms, then there would have been time for intelligent life to evolve.

  Conrad laughed, a sound grown unfamiliar to his ears. It had to be the waste canisters from the expedition. When the satellite warmed up after those billions of years, the canisters decayed, spilling microbe-rich human waste onto the surface.

  Humming softly, Conrad seized the controls and began his descent to the surface. He smiled. He could drink the water, at least after boiling it. And since Titan's life was derivative of Earth's, if his luck held, he might even find food; his destiny might not be as brief as he'd expected. And it would certainly not be boring.

  In his eagerness to go forth and meet his descendants, Conrad had to force himself not to rush the landing. He could scarcely bear to waste even a minute.

  Copyright © 2006 Carl Frederick

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  IN TIMES TO COME

  Our November issue leads off with “Imperfect Gods,” a new novelette in C. Sanford Lowe and G. David Nordley's series about a research project so big that it won't fit in one story—or even one solar system, or one century. “Kremer's Limit,” in our July/August issue, was set relatively close to home; “Imperfect Gods” takes place in a colony around Groombridge 34A (almost twelve light-years away), on a planet called New Antarctica—at story time the most Earthlike extrasolar planet but, as the name suggests, still quite different. And if you think cooperation over such times and distances is easy...

  We'll also have a very different novelette by Grey Rollins, and a potpourri of stories by such writers as Wil McCarthy, Jerry Oltion, and Catherine H. Shaffer, including a little something for the season. “Floatworlds,” the science fact article by Stephen L. Gillett, Ph.D., looks at a type of world familiar in science fiction, and where such places might actually exist and what they might be like.

  And, of course, we'll have Part III of Robert J. Sawyer's four-part novel Rollback.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THANKSGIVING MUSINGS Jeffery D. Kooistra

  It's Thanksgiving time here in the States, and one thing I'm thankful for is, as one might expect, my children. Haley, Ashley, and Joshua are all good kids. What I often find most interesting about them, despite how self-absorbed this sounds, are those parts of me that I see residing within them.

  Haley definitely favors Dorothy in looks and stature, my half-Japanese wife being on the short side. Though remarkably precocious intellectually as a baby, Haley seems destined to be a jock. There's nothing wrong with that, but sometimes I think the only thing she inherited from me is poor penmanship. Ashley favors my side of the family in looks, and was taller than her mom by age nine. If I were to pick one of my kids who is most likely to pursue a literary career, she's the one. She also shares my interest in science and nature, and is the most likely of the three to bury herself in a book and get cranky when interrupted. She wanted both a microscope and a telescope for Christmas and she got them. She invents robotic alligators out of Tinkertoys and dreams of one day finding Narnia for real.

  My son Joshua is the youngest, and has personality traits in common with both of his sisters. Though my girls were tomboys, when Joshua came along, Dorothy and I saw the difference between little girls who act like little boys, and an actual boy. Though the girls played with their share of toy cars, Joshua was our first child to take a picture of a car from a magazine and make motor noises as he raced it along the wall. His sisters share his interest in making things, but they are not at all as fond of breaking them. Only my son exhibits, as did I, that typical behavior of the mechanically inclined child—deliberately taking or breaking things apart just to see what's inside or how they work. More than that, he's the only one that likes to exhibit a thing with springs and gears, or chunks of circuit boards with stray wires and colorful capacitors, as an objet d'art.

  With age comes maturity, or at least the requirement to keep up the appearance, so I, of course, no longer tear things apart just to scope out their insides. Okay, that's a lie. Actually, I don't hesitate to help Joshua take things apart if he can't quite manage it on his own. And I still do it for myself, only now I claim that I'm “harvesting parts.” Sometimes I even keep those parts, if for no other reason than that they are pleasing to the technological eye.

  However, taking things apart to see how they work just isn't as fun as it used to be. I don't think it's because I'm older—the problem is that technology isn't as transparent as it used to be. Sure, you can still disassemble a simple wind-up watch and figure out what the gears do and how the spring mechanism drives the gizmo. But you can't learn a whole heck of a lot when you open up an electronic watch unless you already know quite a bit about them to begin with.

  The same goes for a TV or even a simple AM radio. Take the back off the radio and at best you only see a few wires. Most everything is on a circuit board, and some of the components are literally black boxes looking more like a Cubist's idea of a spider than anything having to do with electricity!

  I miss those days when technology was transparent to the mechanically inclined boy or girl. I only caught the extreme tail end of that period, and only benefited from it as much as I did because my father (about whom you can read in my June 2006 Alternate View, “My Mysterious Father") knew how to do everything and I could watch him.

  Perhaps that's also why Golden Age science fiction sings to me with such a sweeter voice than most of the more recent stuff. I don't think it is just because I was reading Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke when I was 12 and thus connect those stories to my own youth. I think it's because those writers grew up in an era when most technology was accessible to the educated layman in a way that most of it now is only accessible to those with a technical education.

  There is a good description of that era in the author's preface to Electrostatics by A. D. Moore (1), which is essentially a how-to book on build-it-yourself electrostatic machines. Born in 1895, Moore grew up in Pennsylvania, and had this to say about his formative years on page 15:

  "I was raised on a farm, where there are many problems to be solved and many handy things to be learned. And when painters or roofers or carpenters or plumbers or threshers would
come, endless questions could be asked—and I surely asked them ... But when loose from farm chores, I spent lots of time in the plumbing shop, the hardware store, the blacksmith shop, the foundry, the machine shop, the brickyard, the lumber mill and the glass plant. There were the coal mines to visit, and the coke ovens. There was a power plant, where the engineer was my friend. There was the streetcar line, where the motorman was my friend. There was the telephone man, who came to put new dry cells in our telephone, and he would give me the old ones to use in my experiments. It was a very rich environment for a kid who wanted to be an electrical engineer...."

  Moore's experiences were hardly unique for engineers who came of age in the early decades of the twentieth century. But he then contrasts his era with ours:

  "Coming back to you: today, safety rules prevail, and you, to my great regret, cannot wander at will in a glass plant or other factory. ‘KEEP OUT’ is a familiar sign. This denial of free access to American industry is a great loss to a full childhood, and believe me, a great loss to science and engineering."

  And I can only agree. Clarke's observation about sufficiently advanced technologies being indistinguishable from magic has applied in our own era at least since the advent of VCRs unprogrammable by most owners. True, we know we aren't really dealing with magic, but the practical result is often that we might just as well be. Going to the shaman or going to the IT guru, both do tricks that look like magic.

  What's a body to do?

  Even though the thirst remains to take things apart with my hands, I've found a substitute to slake that thirst, and that brings me to something else I'm thankful for, Lindsay's Technical Books (2). I found out about Lindsay when reading the little three-line classified ads in the back of a Popular Mechanics in the barbershop maybe 15 years ago. Lindsay offers exactly the kinds of books a guy like Moore would like to see in every library, often reprinting books from a long lost era. For instance, one of my recent purchases was a reprint of the 1935 Shortwave Radio Manual, edited by Hugo Gernsback and H. Winfield Secor. Gernsback is none other than the man after whom the Hugo award is named.