Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “Ach, I wanted to make sure the aliens have some idea of their options, reassure them we’re not all arrogant exploiters. I come as a person, not as an ambassador of the human race.”

  “ ‘Greetings, fellow sapient beings, I come in peace!’ That approach?”

  “Right, that approach.”

  “Very nice, but can you really side-step your species of origin?”

  “Yes, I damn well can. I’m no puppet of official policy. If we meet any little green fellows, I’ll introduce them to Stron McKie, not to my species.”

  “Hopefully they’ll get the distinction.”

  “Why wouldn’t they? I can be a charmer, you know.”

  “Er . . . yes.”

  As we shuffled and bumped our way along Concourse A in the direction of the auditorium, which was in the forward part of the ship, Stron nattered a steady stream of quips. But I could tell he was nervous by the way he kept yanking tufts of white hair out of his ears.

  Approaching the wide entrance doors, we realized there would be a good crowd in attendance since a fair volume of conversational buzz came from within, and more people were converging from both directions of the main concourse, as well as its cross-avenues.

  “Well, Neil, here we are. Get ready for battle.”

  “I wish we’d painted ourselves lurid colors, Stron, and brought our claymores.”

  He grimaced and pulled out a few last strands of hair. “Nay, nay, the wrong approach entirely. Tonight we are going to be dignity incarnate.”

  He slipped past me and entered the auditorium alone, lest we be identified with each other and a conspiracy suspected too early in the game. I stood outside for a few minutes, shaking hands with people, making chat and observing Stron from the corner of my eye as he took his seat in the front row, beside three of the five Nobel men. Pagnol and Teal were also in the row, along with a few other scientific luminaries.

  The auditorium seats six hundred. Large as it is, it’s a room without echoes, due to the acoustic-friendly walls and carpet. The rows slope gently down to an orchestra pit (empty now, though it is sometimes used by musicians for pick-up concerts). The seats are maroon fabric over soft padding, as comfortable as an armchair. And tonight, it looked like a majority of them were filled. I estimated that two-thirds of the passengers and crew were present. This surprised me greatly, since my talk as advertised would be on the topic of “Psychological Physics”.

  During the planning stage, I had taken the precaution of throwing a handful of stardust into the eyes of dear Dr. Larson, explaining to him that I would begin the talk with the astrophysics of our journey, then tie it into my own early work that had made the ship possible, and then bring the presentation to a climax by using a simile—the comparison of the mutual gravitational pull of bodies in a solar system to the mutual influence that members of a community have on each other. The celestial titans, I would assert, maintain each other in a delicate equilibrium, much as we sustain each other onboard the Kosmos. The talk would end with a ringing call to a renewed sense of responsibility for each other’s well-being. In a word, Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft kinesiology.

  He loved it. He ate it up. He unleashed all his powers of promotion and advertisement. And now the splendid night had arrived.

  One of the event’s organizers, Dr. Skinner, the director of DSI, walked me down the center aisle toward the elevated stage. In passing, I noticed Dwayne in the back row, hunched over a book. Pia waved shyly from mid-audience; Maria smiled maternally at me; a few isolated individuals began to clap. A smattering of applause accompanied me up the three short steps to the stage. My heart pounded.

  The podium was a nostalgia item, a historic work of art, a platinum and polyplast sculpture representing a soaring rocket ship penetrating outer space. The rocket’s exhaust trail formed the podium’s trunk, the rocket itself was the support of the reading platform, which was a tilted transparent disk, representing our home solar system, with an illuminated sun the size of a grapefruit designed to throw light on a speaker’s papers. The planets orbited it in slow motion as smaller, colored spheres.

  Skinner took the podium and began his introduction. Blah-blah-blah—my awards, prizes, honors, achievements, books—blah-blah-blah. Why does that sort of thing make my flesh crawl? Maybe because it’s too much like the hawker’s prattle of an auctioneer? Does it threaten my humble persona? Or does it unmask my secret pride? Anyway, throughout the preamble, I stood to the side, smiling inanely like an old crackpot, with my fingers fidgeting nervously behind my back. Thunderous applause followed. I shook hands with Skinner and stepped forward to the podium.

  For a few seconds, I paused, and in my mind’s eye, I saw a boy dancing in a desert, singing and shaking his bells. I pushed away the thought and began.

  Let me say in summation, and with only a modicum of pride, that I shone. I was articulate in a way that flowed naturally, balancing scholar and showman so subtly that none in the audience (save for my co-conspirators) suspected a vaudeville act. I was witty. I was Nobelish. I was twangless. I gripped them and moved them. Step by step, I led the audience through the outline I had given to Elf.

  When I had reached the point in the talk where I was to compare solar systemic equilibrium to the equilibrium desirable in human communities, I paused for dramatic effect. During this brief hiatus, I looked around the hall significantly. You could have heard a gyroscope topple over. There in front of me sat a scattering of peers, gazing up with fond interest. There in the back row sat Dwayne, who (to my irritation) was still hunched over, reading a book. There in the middle sat Pia, beside a flight officer whom I took to be her “special friend”. The breast logo on his uniform sparkled with its three little stars. Beside him were two other sparkling officers, and there were more like them throughout the audience. To my extreme left, in the front row, sat Elf and the director of DSI, side by side, leaning forward slightly, smiling their encouragement at me because they knew that the big juicy plum of the evening would now be presented. The famous scientist would deliver their agenda in an irresistible package.

  “As we have seen,” I began, “the mutual gravitational pull of bodies in a solar system is a magnificently balanced symphony of physical forces. Our home system is most impressive to us in this regard, because we know it best; it is ours. The Alpha Centauri system presents an even greater complexity. These two systems are involved in a choreography of celestial titans, with their planets revolving on their own axes even as they circle their respective stars, which are in kinetic balance within the larger body of our local star cluster, within the massive spiraling of our galaxy, which is locked in the mutual gravitational pull of members of our own local galaxy cluster, which in turn dances with super-clusters, onward and outward with the expanding universe, and all of it splendid and beautiful. All of it is the courtship and marriage of unimaginable forces maintaining each other in a delicate equilibrium.”

  I paused and caught my breath.

  “It has sometimes been said that these colossal forces are similar to the mutual influence that members of a human community have on each other. Insofar as we do affect each other, this is true. Yet the simile is weak, and threatens to become superficial, for not a single human being onboard the Kosmos can be reduced to an unthinking force. We can harness the atom, but we cannot attempt to absolutely control men’s wills, nor their capacity for rational thought, nor their hunger for freedom, without grave risk to man himself. To condition him, to determine him according to arbitrary theories of his nature—his perpetually elusive and mysterious nature—is to deform him.”

  A sweeping glance informed me that Elf and his buddy were beginning to look a little concerned. Both were listening intently, both leaning forward, both with fists under their chins and forefingers laid along their cheeks as if they were deep in thought.

  “Has not our entire history until now proved this truth conclusively? We continue to make the same mistake, age after age. We confuse imposed governance for legitimate
authority. What, then, is legitimate authority? Is it not a mutual contract between free beings who agree to apportion their fields of responsibility and levels of decision-making, according to their gifts, while maintaining accountability, and placing above all other social considerations the necessity of mutual respect? If this is so, we must conclude that rare indeed has been its exercise in the history of mankind.”

  Again, I paused. Now Elf and Skinner were no longer smiling. Their brows were furrowed unpleasantly, their heads tilted at an angle of inquisitive worry.

  “That is why I am grieved this evening”, I continued. “I am grieved most of all that we have learned so little from our past. For this reason, I must now refer to a disequilibrium in the conduct of onboard life. The electronic surveillance of all of us has continued unabated since our departure from Earth. Each of our personal computers in our private rooms is monitored. Nothing typed or spoken into them goes unexamined. Someone, somewhere on this ship, has total access to your most deeply private conversations and thoughts. They are read or listened to by unseen people to whom you gave no permission to do so.”

  At this point, heads were turning in the audience, people murmuring or whispering to each other. Elf and Skinner were on their feet and striding toward the stage, Elf waving his hand as if to brush aside everything I had just said, or to send me a cease-and-desist order. Regardless, I pressed on.

  “No one asked me if they could listen to my voice journals, read my mail, listen to my mail, or track where I surf in the great sea of knowledge.”

  Now the audience broke out in rumbling conversation. A few people rose to their feet, shaking their heads, while others sat in frozen concentration, not so much perplexed as alarmed and unable to decide how to respond.

  Now Elf and Skinner reached the steps and tripped hastily up to the stage.

  The head of DSI approached me with courteous body language, but he gripped one of my biceps painfully. Elf, eyes scowling but mouth smiling broadly, put his hand over the sun (apparently doubling as a microphone) and said, “What the hell are you doing? Say good night and get off this stage.”

  His voice boomed throughout the auditorium, the sound doubly amplified. Startled, Elf glanced at the sun and banged it with his fist. While he was thus distracted, a number of people moved in.

  Stron McKie pushed himself between me and Skinner and disengaged the latter’s meaty paw. Xue, Pagnol, and Teal, stepped up beside me, facing the audience.

  “What Dr. Hoyos has told you is true”, Pagnol said, his voice booming. “I am Dr. Etienne Pagnol. For those who do not know me, I am assistant director of the biology department.”

  One by one, the others identified themselves and confirmed the truth of the message. Five more men and women joined them—doctors all, figures in various sciences, as well as the two other Nobel laureates who had been sitting in the front row.

  By now, Skinner and Elf were livid, but trying unsuccessfully to give the impression that they had things well under control, that the accusation was groundless.

  Elf tapped something on his lapel and growled soto voce: “Turn off the damned sound system.” His words echoed loudly.

  By then, all the people in the audience were on their feet and about two-thirds of them were making their way toward the stage. Some called out questions.

  “How do you know this? Can you prove it? Why would they do such a thing?”

  “Consider this”, I shouted, though there was no need to shout. “Consider that the public talks we’ve enjoyed since the beginning of the voyage are always accessible, live in real-time, through your max. Doesn’t that tell us something? If they can broadcast into your max, why wouldn’t the flow go outward too? They designed the ship’s communications systems, and it would be no great effort for them to implant code that walks right through your individual firewalls.”

  Elf whispered into his lapel, “What do you mean it doesn’t work? Use the override. Cut the feed to the rooms. And cut the power to the hall. Do it now!”

  His whisper boomed, and at that point, he realized he was showing his cards to the audience. He shut up and stood aside, letting me continue, but with every bit of his nonverbal mountain of flesh proclaiming his adamant rejection of what I was saying. I was as perplexed as he was, wondering why the sound system was behaving the way it was, and why something was preventing the power cut to the auditorium.

  “Consider also,” I went on, “that pre-flight briefings informed us, and the Manual itself states, that our rooms are our personal spaces—so they called it—and that we can do whatever we wish in them. The Manual further states that each of our maxes is an autonomous sealed unit, intended exclusively for our private use. Read the Manual, page 1013. It’s all there.”

  Now a few dissident voices were shouting objections, while the majority of people were calling out for more evidence.

  And that was the rub. I had no hard evidence. None at all. This cold fact momentarily disabled me, and I began to falter.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Stron, stepping in, “I’m Dr. McKie, head of the on-planet astronomy team. And I tell you that what Dr. Hoyos has told you tonight is the truth. You ask us for evidence. This is not a court of law. This is not a police forensic lab. But I will ask you this: If you were lying on your bed after a shower, undraped shall we say, and you spotted an eyeball at the keyhole of your door, and then you donned your coverlets as fast as you could and raced out into the hallway to catch the culprit, and failed, would you then say to yourself, ‘Naw, I was dreaming’? After all, you don’t have the Peeping Tom by the scruff of his neck, not even his eyeball in your tight little fist. But you know you saw that eye looking in on you. What any sensible person would do at that point is to try to track the culprit.”

  “That’s just suspicion, that’s no evidence!” someone shouted.

  “The smell of a skunk is no evidence that a skunk has walked past. You can’t see it, can you? Can’t pick it up. Can’t photo it. Should you then say, ‘Naw, there’s no skunk here!’?”

  “Maybe there is no skunk here. Maybe it’s a figment of your imagination.”

  “Try stepping on the figment in the dark, laddie.”

  Which made a few people chuckle, and others look thoughtful.

  Even so, we were on the verge of losing the audience, when Xue stepped in and raised a hand, calling for silence. He was known by all, and was generally so well respected that people stopped talking and listened. Here was an instance of the strategic superiority of self-mastered dignity over the more unstable manners of the idiosyncratic (by which I mean people like myself and Stron).

  Calmly, quietly, Xue said: “I am in total concurrence with the position of Dr. Hoyos and Dr. McKie, as well as the others you see before you. Our agreement on the truth of these troubling assertions is not, as you have correctly said, hard evidence. However, at the very least they should be examined objectively. I therefore propose that an investigative committee be formed, composed of representatives from the science teams, the flight crew, and if they wish to be part of it, the Department of Social Infrastructure. In this way, it may be possible to find a conclusion satisfactory to all.”

  The audience, for the most part, erupted with applause.

  Elf stepped forward and said, “Of course, the Department will be part of any investigation, if it should be decided that one is necessary, which I am fully convinced it is not. I can assure you that there are no grounds—absolutely no grounds—to these allegations. They began as a suspicion in the mind of Dr. Strachan McKie, and then it began to spread as speculative gossip. It was then gradually inflated into a so-called fact in the minds of a handful of people associated with him. Now, through this ridiculous piece of theater, we must contend with disruption and the potential for division, which could negatively affect the outcome of our mission. We are a team, we are a community, and the role of DSI was precisely formulated by global authority to assist in that communal sense, as well as to offer remedial efforts whe
never it is threatened by the irrational elements in. . .”

  The first half of this declaration went over somewhat limply. He sounded too much like a team leader trying to revive the spirits of a crowd of rain-soaked, mosquito-bitten campers. The second half of the declaration went largely unheard, because the sound system quit suddenly midway, to the relief of all except, perhaps, Elf himself.

  Then the lights in the auditorium went off, leaving only the tiny glowing dots along the aisles, showing us the way out.

  As I made my way past the row closest to the exit, I noticed Dwayne in the gloom, still hunched over, reading his book by the light of its pale green glow. More than a hundred people had congregated outside the doors, and they pressed close around me and our small band of accusatory scientists. Elf was among us too, and it quickly became a one-on-one exchange, with the others listening. Elf had regained his composure and his public style.

  “Dr. Hoyos,” he began, in a quiet, courteous and saddened tone, “I am really at a loss for anything to say. I feel strongly the need to convince you—”

  “I’m sure you do, Dr. Larson.”

  “I feel strongly the need to convince you that these allegations are without any basis in reality.”

  “Dr. Larson, I’m curious to know how you came to the conclusion that these allegations originated with Dr. McKie.”

  “People have mentioned his suspicions”, he shrugged innocently.

  “No, Dr. Larson, you overheard Dr. McKie and myself speaking about our suspicions. You overheard it by surveillance of our voice communications through our maxes.”

  “That’s absurd”, he protested.

  “My sentiments exactly. Eavesdropping is an absurd activity, a symptom of something lacking in a person—or, on the other hand, an excess of unhealthy curiosity.”

  “You don’t need to get personal in your accusations.”

  “What is more personal than what you’ve been doing to us, and to everyone on board? Everyone, that is, except yourself. You don’t eavesdrop on yourself, do you?”