“You mean, we might get new music from you? Then by all means, go, and enjoy yourself. Visit Venus, tour Titan, meet Mars. Produce something to match this.” Par Leon began to rap on the desk in front of him the rhythm of the ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’ section of Gustav Hoist’s ‘The Planets.’ With their own work so close to its end, he was in high good humor.
“I’d like to go.” Drake had to be careful what he said next. “I was just wondering if I’d be able to afford it.”
The smile on Leon’s face was replaced by a puzzled frown. “Afford it?”
“The cost of the fares. Mars is a long way away.”
Par Leon frowned, as though he did not understand the relevance of the remark. “The cost? Who are you proposing to take with you?”
“No one. Just me.”
“Then cost does not enter into it. The ship will fly itself.”
“But who pays for the ship?”
“The question is meaningless. There are ships available, as many as you want. But they are manufactured automatically. Machines make them, and they also fly them. Machine use is free. There is no human cost to making and flying a ship. Cost becomes relevant only when you demand that human time be devoted to something. Like now.” Par Leon laughed, his good humor restored. “I could charge you for this advice, you know. But I won’t. Go on, Drake, take your holiday. You’ve certainly earned it.”
“I will. In a few more days.”
“But if you are crazy enough to go to space, don’t ask me to go with you!”
Drake laughed, too. He did not mention the subject again to Par Leon, but in the next week he quietly took accelerated courses in astronautics, astronomy, and space systems, subjects that previously had never interested him at all. He was astonished by what he found. Par Leon had understated the situation. Ships were available in abundance, with drives that could take them close to light speed. It made Drake reevaluate all his own plans. He had been thinking that he would have to return to a frozen state. Now there might be other options.
He did not even try to understand the technique of inertia shedding that bypassed what should have been a killing 4000g acceleration as the ship moved to and from the light-speed region. That understanding required a working knowledge of a Science language far beyond his capabilities. Instead, he thought of the changes in the world. If this capability had been around at the end of the twentieth century, it would have been used by millions. Now, few people seemed to care. Although the stars were within easy reach, humanity was not stretching out to enfold them. Civilization seemed stable, static, content to remain within the comfortable limits of the solar system. Was that progress, or was it regress?
After nine days Drake was ready. He had done all that he could. The night before he was scheduled to depart he invited Par Leon out for a ceremonial dinner. By this time it was assumed that they would eat and drink comfortably in each other’s presence. Leon had hinted once or twice at a more intimate relationship, but he had not been offended when Drake declined.
They went to Leon’s favorite eating place, ate his favorite foods, and drank his favorite wines. It was an unexpected bonus that by coincidence one of Drake’s own new compositions was playing in the background.
“There.” Par Leon jerked his head toward an invisible speaker. “That is real and deserved fame. Music good enough to eat to.”
“But not to listen to.” Drake shrugged off the compliment. “Table music is like table wine, usually nothing special. Telemann could compose it as fast as he could write it down.”
“True. But do not undervalue yourself, my friend. Mozart’s divertimenti are often both artful and memorable.”
The conversation was on satisfying and familiar ground. Drake felt the glow that comes with good, compatible company. He was going to miss that.
The urge to tell the full truth became very great.
Surely, if he confided in Par Leon his commitment and the depth of his feelings, the other man would become a willing accomplice.
“Leon.”
“Yes?”
“Oh, nothing. I’m just thinking about my trip.”
He stifled the idea before it could develop further. His new plans were shaping up, and they were nothing as simple as controlled freezing and a return to the cryowombs. They might lead to danger and destruction. He would not want Par Leon to bear any guilt by association.
He also would not — could not, dare not — do anything at all that might endanger his chances of success.
Chapter 9
Escape to Nowhere
Drake had decided to proceed with great caution. For at least the first part of his trip, he must look and sound like a genuine tourist. His resurrection helped. He could tell anyone he met that he had been recently thawed (he would not define recently). He would say he was still trying to get the hang of his new era. He would gape at anything he saw, like the original hick. He would be free to ask a million innocent questions.
Drake had delved into solar system geometry long before he left Earth. At first he had been worried. By an accident of timing, Pluto was almost exactly at aphelion, as far away from the Sun as it could get. But then he looked at the performance of the ships. They could accelerate so hard, and achieve huge speeds so quickly, that nowhere in the system was more than a few days away. Travel times became irrelevant.
Mars, first, then, just as he had told Par Leon upon his departure. Drake could imagine his friend and mentor checking the first phase of his travel, but he would lose interest once he was sure that Drake had arrived safely.
Mars was described in the Earthside databases as undergoing a “modest” terraforming effort; nothing, the sources said, compared with the major effort going on at Venus. The Mars project was designed only to increase the available surface water, and it did not interfere with life in the Martian interior.
Drake’s ship took him to Mars in a day and a half. He landed; and found hell.
The planet was under ceaseless bombardment. Every twenty minutes a cometary fragment, a couple of hundred meters across, hit the surface. It had been directed in from the Kuiper Belt, nine billion kilometers from the Sun, and it struck Mars tangentially, precisely at dawn on the day-night terminator. Each impact came within twenty degrees of the equator. The Mars atmosphere was too thin to carry sound, but land waves shook the surface around the point of arrival.
Drake donned a suit and stepped out of the ship. He was well away from the impact zone. Even so, he felt the compacted rubble of the regolith tremble and shake beneath his boots.
He looked up. The sky was a dirty gray, streaked and filmed with white haze. Most of the added dust and water vapor in the air came not from comet fragments, but from the ejecta of vaporized surface rocks and permafrost, blown high into the Martian stratosphere. That permafrost was the main source of atmospheric water. It returned to the ground as a thin drizzle of ice particles. For the first time in a billion years, snow was falling on Mars.
As Drake watched, another ball of fire flamed across the dull southern sky. It moved from west to east, and vanished. One minute later a flash of crimson light lit the southeastern horizon. It was hard to believe that a rough-edged chunk of water ice, dirtied with smears of ammonia ice, silicate rock, and metallic ore, and no more than two hundred meters in diameter, could produce such violence. But a few million tons of mass, moving at forty kilometers a second, carries formidable amounts of kinetic energy. The energy release for each impact was around a thousand megatons. Each arrival had the force of a big volcanic explosion back on Earth. The thin atmosphere of Mars did little to dissipate it.
Drake watched the tumult for a couple of hours. Finally he decided that the open face of the planet, battered by hailstones bigger than the Great Pyramid, was more likely to stimulate nightmares than musical creation.
He went inside the ship and considered his next move. He had told Par Leon that he would visit the Mars deep caverns. Natural formations, kilometers across, they had been inter
locked and fortified over the centuries by tunneling and construction moles. Now they stood second only to Earth as a center for human civilization.
Caution said he should visit the caves, as originally planned. After that, his original itinerary called for visits to Europa and Ganymede, the satellites of Jupiter, and to Neptune’s big moon, Triton. But a new knowledge was burning inside him. The trip to Mars had changed his perspective on interplanetary travel. He knew that he was, if he chose, only a few days away from Ana. From Mars to Pluto, even without invoking emergency status and maximum accelerations, was just a thirty-six-hour run.
The temptation was too much. He ordered a message sent to Par Leon, back on Earth, announcing his safe arrival on Mars. Then he gave his command.
The ship rose from the surface and arrowed out, directly away from the Sun’s warmth. It would bypass Jupiter and Saturn, bypass Uranus and Neptune. It would not stop until it reached Pluto, out at the frigid limit of the solar system; out where Sol was no more than a bright spark in the sky, and the cryocorpses slept their ancient, dreamless sleep beneath the silent stars.
A little knowledge could be almost too much. In six years of work on Earth, Drake had become used to the idea of robotic servants. They were of varying levels of intelligence, depending on their function, but they all had one thing in common: they accepted every command without question, provided that it was not dangerous and did not exceed their available resources of materials or knowledge.
He assumed that it would be equally true on Pluto, and it began that way. His ship landed without incident on the frozen surface. Machines attended his arrival. There were no humans, and he had expected none. The nearest people resided at the research station on Charon, seventeen thousand kilometers away. Pluto and Charon were more like a pair of little moons than a planet with a satellite — Pluto was smaller than Earth’s moon, while Charon was half the size of its primary. The pair were tidally locked, always showing the same face to each other. Drake, standing on the surface of Pluto and looking up, saw Charon hanging pendant in the sky above him, like a giant dull ruby. The research station was not visible. From this distance, there was no evidence to be seen on Charon of any human activities.
Even though Charon was so close, the machines on Pluto were designed to operate without advice or assistance from there or anywhere else. Drake’s command to be taken to the cryowombs was obeyed without question.
The surface of Pluto was one of the quietest places in the solar system. However, there would be occasional impacts from meteorites and cometary debris. The wombs, for additional safety, had been placed deep within the interior to protect against disturbance.
It had not occurred to Drake that he himself constituted such a disturbance, until he had been led at least a kilometer along a descending ramp. He and his attendant machine entered a large open chamber, where his suit was placed within another and larger one. The space between the suits was filled with liquid helium.
“Is this necessary?” He could imagine the second suit interfering with his mobility.
“It is necessary. There must be no energy release within the vaults to raise the ambient temperature. I myself cannot proceed beyond this point. I am too warm.” The machine raised a spidery articulated arm and pointed at a hovering blue pyramid, half a meter on a side. “This is now your guide.”
Ever since they left the surface it had become steadily darker. All light sources now disappeared as Drake followed the drifting blue pyramid out of the chamber and into the next level of the Pluto vault.
According to the first machine, the cryotanks were stored in regular rows within the main cryowomb. Drake strained his eyes into the darkness ahead. He could see nothing but the faint blue light in front of him. He was at the mercy of his robot guide, who must know the deep vault’s geometry and contents through programmed memory.
Encased within his double suit, Drake followed the blue glimmer, on and on. Finally it halted. Drake moved closer, and by its feeble illumination he saw the outline of a cryotank. It was like a great coffin, two meters long and a meter wide and deep. Although the cryowomb was kept at a controlled temperature, for double security each tank also contained its own temperature control and source of refrigeration.
“This is the one?” He crouched low, seeking the identification.
He was not sure that the blue pyramid could hear him, understand him, or talk to him, until he heard the sibilant whisper in his helmet. “It is the one.”
“I cannot see any identification. Are you sure it is the cryocorpse of Anastasia Werlich?”
“I am sure.”
“Then lift it carefully, and bring it with you. Lead us back to the surface and to my ship.”
He could see no way that the blue pyramid could exert force, but after a moment of hesitation the cryotank lifted in the low gravity. Two seconds more, and the blue gleam was moving again through the vault. It led the way steadily upward, to the first-level chamber where Drake’s outer suit was removed. Twenty minutes more, and he was supervising the careful placement of Ana’s cryotank in the aft storage compartment of his ship.
The machine attendants had gone and he was ready to tell the ship to lift from the surface of Pluto, when the communication panel lit with a busy constellation of red and yellow lights.
“The removal of a cryotank from the Pluto cryowomb, and its placement aboard this ship, is unauthorized,” said a quiet voice. “The cryotank must be returned at once.”
Drake cursed his own stupidity. The actions of the machines must be reported automatically to some central data bank. It was only his good luck that screening -for anomalies apparently took a few minutes to perform.
Rather than replying, he locked the outside ports and gave the order for instant departure from the surface.
“The removal of any cryotank from the Pluto vaults is forbidden without proper authorization,” repeated the voice. “You do not have such authorization. Do not attempt to leave Pluto. It will not be permitted. ”
Drake ignored the warning. He dropped into the pilot’s seat. Why hadn’t the ship taken off? When he left Earth and Mars, his commands had been executed immediately.
He could guess the answer: the ship’s automatic piloting system was being overridden from outside. If he wanted to leave, he would have to assume manual control. He knew how to fly the ship in theory, from his crash courses in astronautics and space systems. In practice, he had never tried anything like it.
He hit the switches to turn off the ship’s computer control, cursing the messages that came back to him:
“The requested action will remove the vessel from automated path guidance. Do you wish to proceed?”
“Yes.”
“The requested action will inhibit the use of all trajectory planning functions. Do you wish to proceed?”
“Yes.”
“The requested action will also disconnect this vessel from the solar system protective navigation system. Do you wish to proceed?”
“Yes, yes, yes!”
He was hitting the manual lift sequence, over and over, convinced that outside the ship more direct methods were being put in place to prevent takeoff.
Finally — at last — he saw that the ship was rising. Pluto’s surface of rock and ice receded below them.
He set a simple outward course, directly away from the Sun. He did not care where he went, provided it was away.
It should have been easy. The Pluto approach corridor had been completely deserted on his arrival. Now it was buzzing with ships. His control board showed scores of them in the space ahead. Where had they all come from? Was it like the automated service that had caught Melissa, a whole invisible safety net of ships that sprang into action exactly when it was needed?
No time to worry about what or why. The ships ahead were converging, moving to intersect the course that he had set for the solar system perimeter. Somehow they knew his flight plan. It must be transmitted automatically, even when he was flying manual.
“DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PROCEED.” The command was louder and more peremptory. “RETURN AT ONCE TO PLUTO.”
Drake set the ship to maximum acceleration and kept going, driving toward the heart of the converging cluster of ships.
“TURN OFF YOUR DRIVE. YOU ARE MOVING IN EXCESS OF FORTY KILOMETERS PER SECOND, AND
ACCELERATING. IMPACT AT SUCH SPEED CAN HAVE FATAL CONSEQUENCES.”
It was a great understatement. Impact with another ship at forty kilometers a second would leave random bits of melted metal and vaporized plastic.
“YOU ARE ON A COLLISION COURSE.”
A grating siren sounded in Drake’s ear. The ship’s own detection system was blaring its warning. Collision and destruction were no more than a split second away.
And then, at the last moment, the other ships sheered off. The center of the cluster became open. Drake flew on through.
He wondered what had saved him. Did the interceptors have their own prohibition against causing harm to a human? Or against permitting their own destruction?
He angled wide of another group of ships that had appeared far ahead. They moved toward him, but he was racing along too fast. He was soon past them. Still at maximum acceleration, he fled for the edge of the solar system.
As soon as the sky was clear ahead, he set a course for Canopus.
At last he was able to breathe. If he might have been judged a murderer in an earlier generation for what he and Tom Lambert had done to Ana, he was certainly considered a thief or worse in this one.
Who cared? He and Ana were together, that was all that mattered. Although pursuit was still possible, he could see no signs of it. And he would be hard to catch. The ship was still accelerating monstrously. Soon it would crowd light speed, moving just 125 meters per second slower than a traveling wave front. Even that was not the limit. If need be, he could reach within a meter a second of light speed.
But it should not be necessary. He examined the control board. Unless he saw signs of pursuit, their planned top speed would be just right. Relativistic time dilatation was going to be a powerful factor. Years would pass on Earth for every day of shipboard time. The trip out to Canopus and back would be a few months for him, but almost three hundred years back on Earth.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow Page 9