"I don't mind your looking at it," Morbius said. "Just so you discuss something irrelevant first. Anything. But it must be...irrelevant!" Barbara, Charles, and Morbius left the room.
"Holoconferences," Gustaphson said. "Another bit of fad electronics. And, like all fads, something to which people are remarkably attached, those young people who like fads."
"Irrelevant?" the puzzled intern asked.
"It's a religious reference. 'That which signifies least is the most important to know.' I suppose Morbius does not dwell on his being a Gowist. In any event, the instruction was that we must talk about something that has nothing to do with your duties before we can get back to your data. So, ask!" Gustaphson ordered.
A slight smile came to Grant's lips. Sometimes obeying orders could be very helpful. "It's a dumb historical question. But--when I was younger I used day's spare time on the net searching, and never found a clue--It must have been so obvious no one ever wrote it down." Gustafson nodded. "Before genegineering, it said in your book on The Boss Himself, girls were much shorter than guys. So I'm 5'9", meaning that a tall girl might have been 5'6", not Sandra's 5'11", and not Sandra's strength, either."
"Precisely correct," answered Gustafson. "And I watched your group playing basketball, Miss Miller slamdunking over your head. In the mid-1970s -- there was one woman I saw drop something through the basket, once, and she was the best player of her generation, by a lot. She was your height, though, not quite Miss Miller's height, though. And the question?"
"How did guys ever find anyone to take out on a date?" Grant stammered.
"Same methods as now, I think," answered Gustafson, "though Feynmann's method -- read his book -- then worked only for him."
"Well, ummh, what I meant is: If all the girls are real real short, four inches shorter than guys or more -- and people back then were a lot more different in how tall they were, so some people were a foot and a half taller than others -- how would a guy like me or someone taller ever find a girl my height?...to take out on a date?" Grant asked.
Gustafson looked thoughtful, then held up his hand for silence. "When I read young people's magazines, the ideal girl is your own height." Grant nodded. "When I was a young man, the ideal height difference was four or six inches. The fellow was supposed to be taller. I think. If I remember correctly. It’s been a while. But the generation before mine was shocked at the idea of a woman dating a shorter man. Or was it taller? Shorter, I think. Curiously--I occasionally asked--I never found anyone who ever heard a reason why. That's just the way most people were brought up." Grant looked baffled. "It's a social custom. It's not hardwired. Download the last two centuries of Playboy centerfolds. Look at what someone thought female beauty was. It's wandered a lot. Even if you skip the 20's -- that's the 2020s -- and the lard barrel look, and the late 80s -- 1980s, sorry, and the," Gustafson stretched his memory, "the wet cat look."
"Wet cat look?" Grant asked.
"Imagine a cat that has just been dropped unexpectedly into warm water. It is displeased. Now morph that into a person. You'll know it, young man, if you ever have the misfortune to see it. As a general rule, a MinuteGirl with that look on her face is optimistically contemplating the pleasures of mayhem." Gustafson continued. "In any event, it's not written down. It's just that customs change a lot with time. And I've seen more time than almost anyone else. The stricture--so you can tell Morbius you learned something when he asks--is that the people who perpetually rant 'when I was a young man' adjust very poorly to immortality. So some of them emigrate to Harmony or Chastity or Robert James. They were the smart ones. The dumb ones--future shock kills, and some dumb people are very shocked by very little."
"I see, sir," Grant said. Rather, he thought to himself, I suppose I will see. Morphing an annoyed cat sounded truly strange.
"And now we can look at your data," Gustaphson announced. "Because know I can honestly say we discussed something that has absolutely no relationship to anything you do while in Morbius's service, you not getting the time to remember that there is an opposite sex, let alone do anything about the situation."
Chapter 16
"Matthew Amigone, you are not under arrest. You have been detained as an illegal combatant against the Constitution. There will be an examination of your guilt...No, as an illegal combatant against the Constitution, you are not entitled to an attorney, trial, or jury,...you most certainly may present evidence that someone else is also guilty of Treason...Yes, Treason. The Supreme Court is the United States. You used a military base for that detention. You used a military agency to arrest Gilbert. That's levying war...Authority? I have a gun. You don't. And I just happen to have a unanimous Supreme Court decision…Interesting you should ask. Yes, Justice Gilbert is the one surviving Justice at this point...You should have thought of that before you started throwing American citizens into Military Base Gulags, for hideous crimes like maintaining web sites, without any intent of trying them...As a matter of fact, you will be sharing a somewhat large cell with that Base's former Commanding Officer and those of his officers and men who incarcerated your 'illegal combatants'...you'll all be sharing the same gallows, too...I will not close sentencing by insulting She Who Is the Fivefold Creator by asking mercy for your soul..."
Remarks of Kapitan Mors, Presiding Officer, during the Trial and Execution of Matthew Amigone, Attorney General of the United States, November 2043.
CUTTER FLASHMAN
HARDING/VERSAILLES LOW ORBIT
October 14, 2174, 11:15 AM FNT
Sandra leaned back in her acceleration couch, listening to occasional updates from the Cutter's serviles as they stowed her luggage. Her combat gear was servot-packed, the supervising servile using rigidly standardized algorithms. Some mistakes were harmless. Failing to tell the cargo-hold servile how much explosive you were carrying was potentially serious. Some tasks were best handled by serviles that might be maltaught but were never inattentive or absentminded.
Outside her porthole, the banded dull-orange disk of the supraJovian planet Harding was rising above Versailles' horizon. When fully risen, Harding's 110,000 mile diameter would entirely fill the cutter's window. Before then the cutter would be well on its way out from Harding to the Clarksburg warp point, there to rendezvous with Ter-Minassian's flagship, the SLPSDF Large Warship Bellerophon.
Dry ice clouds obscured the ground below. Versailles was the densest though not the largest of Harding's moons, with a thick atmosphere largely of argon and carbon dioxide. Sandra recalled from her one planetography course the footnote that Versailles was enriched in transferrous elements. To judge from the Pontefract Tube traffic she'd seen, those elements were being vigorously mined. She remembered much more clearly being fascinated by the period locks of the Centauri planets, orbital periods all fractional multiples of the Centauri B period, arranged so that when Centauri B was at its minimum distance from Centauri A the Centauri A planets as often as not were arrayed on the line linking A and B.
She gave some time to reviewing the Bellerophon's Guide Manual. Bellerophon was an oblate ellipsoid, nearly 12000 feet in diameter along its two semimajor axes, and approaching 1000 feet thick in its central reaches. Most of the Bellerophon's billion tons was consumed by its vast engineering spaces. The modest space in its 50 decks that was regularly used by its human crew was still larger than Sandra could consider memorizing. The book had included an insert from Bellerophon's Chief of Quarters, assigning her an 1800-square-foot suite of cabins, with the humble apology that more appropriate spaces were still mothballed. What was the apology about? She decided to allow that sailors typically had not passed through two-week exercises sleeping on the ground, not in power armor, with a cold shower something that might happen before the exercise's end.
Bellerophon had originally been an interstellar vessel carrying a crew of several thousand for up to several decades. Her design purpose had been stretching a Pontefract tube from its 500 foot length as generated on Mercury to the multi-lightyear length that l
inked planets orbiting different suns. For that purpose she was now obsolete. Rather than totally gutting and rebuilding her interior, she had been sold to the States of Lincoln Planetary Self Defense Fleet. A warship conversion program had shrunk the crew, mothballed a few amenities like the seventh and eighth Olympic-plus size swimming pools, and replaced Pontefract stabilization generators with xrasers, missile batteries, soliton projectors and deflector screens. Weapons installed to date filled only a modest part of the available space. More were added whenever there was a production overrun. Bank after bank of chaos gates and fusactors incorporated in the original design and upgrades supplied more power than any plausible set of weapons installations would consume.
Sketchier information was provided on the other ships in Ter-Minassian's fleet. Photographs taken in airdock revealed flat-black many-faceted objects of various shapes ranging from the dumbbells of light cruisers to the conch-shell forms of Wyoming Class battlecruisers.
Old-Republic Class reconnaissance cruisers (CR) had recently passed through refit, entirely replacing fusactors with chaos gates. Someone was justly proud of the new gates, which ran only four times the mass and fifty times the volume of the fusactors they replaced. However, chaos gates did not emit neutrinos and did not require bunkerage, allowing a reconnaissance cruiser to spend years on patrol. Reconnaissance cruisers were not supposed to fight; they carried a single spinal-mount xraser and two clusters of soliton torpedo projectors. They were instead routinely expected to operate with screens down, greatly reducing their detectability.
The Hellenic-Class reconnaissance cruiser was a larger rhombohedron, massing nearly 40,000 tons. The original design had included a large void space 'to accommodate the reliable warp matrices soon expected to be available'. That expectation was a half-century old. At some point, Lincoln had concluded that matrices that would allow American ships to pass through warp points without blowing up were not going to be available in the foreseeable future. The void spaces had been filled with torpedo launchers and magazine.
Monitors (MN) were another old design, from a time when the public feared the EU was about to start a new war. Their design also reflected American experience through six Battles of Charon. European ships were faster, harder to hit, and had more effective screens. Brute mass in the form of multiple layers of screen, ablative and cermet armor, and redundant power plants ensured that Monitors might take hits but were challenging to destroy. Eliminating bells and whistles -- Sandra remembered Copperwright telling her the origins of that ancient phrasing -- meant that the wedge-shaped vessels had been unusually fast, and inexpensive to produce. A Lake Pontchartrain MN with representative mass of 200,000 tons was larger than almost all EU ship classes. Heavy screens and armor meant limited space for offensive weapons. The representative MN described here carried a few very heavy xrasers and xraser point defenses. Soliton torpedo generators had been tagged on during modernization.
The core of the fleet remained its armoured cruisers. The Ancestral-Victory-Class -- named by people whose ancestors had defeated Europeans on six continents -- CA massed 1.5 million tons and carried crews as large as 53 in a 2400-foot-long 250-foot-diameter spindle-shape hull. The weapons design philosophy appeared to have been 'include some of everything'. Wyoming-Class battlecruisers were more of the same, except a BC weighed in at 5 million tons, and resembled less a spindle than a giant conch shell. The horns of the shell mounted rapidity projectors, while masses of xraser batteries peered out from the shell's opening. The BC design philosophy was closer to 'room for lots of them'.
She rubbed her eyes. Morbius expected his interns to know everything, and to learn everything they did not know. A few years in his home and a supporting letter was a ticket for entry to almost anywhere in American society. Intuition said that the Holy Legion of Gow would be even more helpful. They also set higher standards.
There were two specialized classes of warship. Electronic warfare cruisers (CE) were purely defensive vessels, specialized in blinding and spoofing enemy lidar and radar. Given EU superiority in electronics, their effectuality was open to some question. Ship names, for reasons not explained in the data immediately available, were based on early 21st century concert orchestras. She hoped as much time had been spent on the design as the names; Gamma-Ra had as ship's logo a Horus-headed winged flying turtle waving an electric violin.
The torpedo barges -- George Washington Parke Custis was not a familiar name, but the LTM class was named after him -- were a Lincoln innovation. They waited a substantial distance from the battlefield, accelerated toward the field, and on closing volley-fired large numbers of torpedoes. The important advantage was the roll-up in speed into the combat zone. The barge could pull a remarkable number of gees, for an American ship, so that when it released its torpedoes they were traveling much faster, relative to the enemy, than would otherwise be possible. Torpedoes had the best 17-space reaction drives in the fleet, but ran out of power after a few minutes, so they never got up to great speeds by themselves. These torpedoes would close an order of magnitude faster than the EU had expected, and on closing would still have their full maneuvering power reserves.
There followed details on various weapons classes. The fine details went back into her notes. X-Ray laser -- xraser -- batteries had the same limits on Lincoln as anywhere else. Xrasers were diffraction limited, meaning the beamspread was insignificant at any meaningful distance. Active tracking was just as accurate. However, in battle any sensible enemy maneuvered randomly. If he was more than a few light-seconds away, depending on his size and variation-in-acceleration ('jerk') limits, his actual location would differ from the predicted one by more than the dimensions of his ship. At that point, hits became stochastic. You targeted a certain number of points within the aiming circle, points he might or might not occupy. If you were lucky, you hit him. If not, you missed. It was somewhat like the ancient game 'Battleship', as played with mobile ships, yet another game Arthur had taught her.
Missiles were the knife-fighting-range weapon. They pulled a hundred gees or more for a few minutes, and then ran out of steam. Missile hits were deadly, but required an opponent who was willing to close. There were two-stage missiles, but during coast phase missiles were somewhat visible and very vulnerable.
Soliton torpedos were the dominant anti-missile weapon of the American forces. A puff of gas became the plasma logic circuits. Various tricks with the eleven forces gave energy configurations that were stable over moderate distances, travelled at tenth-c speeds, and had extensions of tens of kilometers. When part of the torpedo hit a solid body of adequate mass -- whencefor the plasma logic control circuits -- the remainder of the torpedo coalesced into the object. The energy dump from a soliton torpedo would not strain a serious set of screens, though she would not want to be in a cutter being targeted by them. Unshielded missiles were fused.
The Bellerophon, to her great surprise, mounted an ether screen. The expense was staggering. She'd always thought of them as planetary defense weapons. Ether screens were the trump card against dumb sub-c rocks. They set a spherical shell around a fixed massive point, such as an asteroid or planet. A rapidly-moving object suddenly encountered nonlinear fluid-like friction with 17-space, friction that heated the object beyond incandescence and incidentally brought it to a dead stop before dispersing its component atoms over the nearest several Astronomical units. . Kinetic kill weapons and large dumb rocks of pre-incursion sci-fi were rendered useless. Someone had footnoted the holodrama -- make that "television show" -- that first used planetary ether screens. Early 50s. 'Commando Cody' did not ring a bell. She'd have to ask Arthur, who would doubtless refer to it as 'recently' and be prepared with a mock-serious tactical analysis of the plot.
Lincoln also had locked an ether screen to Alpha Centauri, with a radius pushing 150 million miles. They seemed to have really stretched the screen's diameter toward the theoretical limit. The first EU fleet trying to enter the inner Lincoln system would get a highly educational but
very expensive surprise.
The ting of a warning bell was followed shortly by a very slight shift in her balance. The cutter was underway, moving out from Harding past Tyler and Buchanan to her appointment at the Clarksburg warp point.
LARGE WARSHIP BELLEROPHON
ADMIRAL'S BRIEFING ROOMS
CLARKSBURG WARP POINT
October 16, 2174, 11:15 AM FNT
By custom Kalinin arrived first at the Briefing Rooms, confident that his officers' queue would exhaust itself at the appointed moment. His personal office was sparely furnished: a dozen chairs, a 6x10' scrupulously-polished desk of finest greenhouse-grown teak, a somewhat faded carpet that still bore the seal of the Federal corporation that funded, built, and launched the Bellerophon and her early sister ships, and a life-plus scale painting of the Board of Directors of American Interstellar Merchants, Factors, and Traders, the people who had -- most of a century ago -- built the Bellerophon. That was the original carpeting, he remembered; it ought to be framed and preserved.
There came the gentle ting of the annunciator. The head of Lieutenant Clarissa Montague, his regular aide and secretary, appeared on the screen. "Captain Wolverson to see you, sir," she announced. He nodded at the door. This was the routine. He'd have a few moments with each of them, enough for them to answer his key questions, and enough time for them all to talk with each other before he appeared.
Hector Ulysses Wolverson was a tall, rounded man with black hair and solid beard. He rolled as he walked, Ter-Minassian noted, exactly as would a sailor of old. Did he cultivate the gait? There were stranger peculiarities among naval officers at isolated posts.
"Good morning, Grand Commodore," came Wolverson's clipped, gruff voice.
"Good morning, Number One," Kalinin answered. Kalinin's flag was now on Bellerophon, making Wolverson his flag captain, first among equals if squadron and flotilla officers perished. Bellerophon was large enough that it was marginally possible for him to die and Wolverson to live. His other subordinates were highly likely to die with their ships.
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