Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 1

by Eric Flint

  " Frank?" Liz said. " They've agreed to accept a Fed—unarmed. He stays in the suit and in the lock. He doesn't climb the ladder to control, and he doesn't touch any hatches."

  " Will do. This is Sam, Liz. I'm going to be your courier." Sam cut the transmission and unfastened his harness. "Thompson will help me suit up. Let me know as soon as we're in position, Frank." The Port Agent pushed off from his chair, caught a grab bar, and swung onto the ladder down to the lock.

  "Montoya—if I find out you've left those keys with Thompson—" Frank left the threat hanging.

  "What goes up won't come down. I got it, Frank." Sam nodded, then disappeared.

  Frank shook his head at the ease with which Sam accepted the assignment. No arguing, no questioning, just an "Okay, I'll go." Frank wasn't sure whether it was fatalism or utter faith in his skill as a pilot. The trouble was, it wasn't his skill alone at issue. He could line the docking ports up, match velocity and trajectory. The pilot of the Mens Sano could still screw everything up in an instant with a twitch of his finger.

  Frank concentrated on giving the Port Authority just enough spin to point the docking port at the Mens Sano. He damped the motion with expert ease and wished the ships were closer together. If the Mens Sano's pilot didn't have a delicate touch for the collision-avoidance system, Sam could go spinning away before Frank could retrieve him. Or be burned to a crisp if the system decided he was debris. Frank noted the red light indicating Sam was in the lock and tuned into the ship's intercom system.

  " Ready to go, Sam-sam? Lab kit tethered? Helmet locked?"

  " Helmet and lab kit confirmed, Frank. How far am I going?"

  " A little over half a click. It's close as I could get."

  " Thanks. Out."

  Frank switched channels in the stream to reach Liz and the Mens Sano. " Liz, we're good to go at this end. Justice, leave any maneuvering to me. Concentrate on the c-a. Don't you dare let your ship mistake that lab kit for space debris."

  " Confirmed, Port Authority."

  Frank rolled his eyes, knowing Liz was rolling hers as well. But the other pilot's personality wasn't at issue here. His skill was.

  The control desk alarm chimed as the Port Authority's lock cycled open. Frank acknowledged the warning and leaned back to watch the observation screen. Sam's miniature figure shrank to a pinpoint of jet flares and Frank bumped up the magnification. This was the easy part. Until he got close enough for the Mens Sano's powered down collision-avoidance system to detect him, Sam only needed good aim. And the ability not to panic. God knew Sam had a lot of practice not panicking. Frank resisted the temptation to tune into the stream and ask how it was going. He could see it was going just fine.

  Sam jerked right with enough force that Frank could see the tether connecting him to the lab kit. His jets flared brighter. Sam plunged downward. The jets flared again. Frank raised his right hand and chewed on his knuckle. His left hand hovered over the attitude control panel. If he needed to intercept, it would be sudden and soon. Sam's rockets flared again, a longer burst. He seemed to hang there unmoving, a gray dot against the yellow blot of the Mens Sano. Frank tensed.

  Then it was over. Sam was holding onto a tether bar to one side of the Mens Sano's lock. The lock cycled open. Sam jetted inside with a final flare. The lab kit floated after him.

  * * *

  " Clear of lock hatch." Sam's voice emerged through the Mens Sano's intercom.

  "Daniel, go get that kit she wants so bad," the pilot said. "Comfort, you stay down there and keep an eye on that Fed. Flush him back out if he gives you any trouble."

  "He won't," Liz said. She tuned into the stream to send a private message. " Watch your step, Montoya. They're still pretty jumpy."

  " I don't suppose I can blame them. Good luck, Liz."

  They waited in silence for Daniel to return with the lab kit. Liz washed her hands as best she could in the zero-g wash bag Justice had provided. The captain's suffering made the Attestors uncomfortable. Liz's treatment of him—which so far consisted of trying to get him to drink and making Justice lower the temperature in the control cabin—didn't soothe them.

  Daniel's head appeared at the hatch. He looked down and after a few seconds, the lab kit floated into view. Liz aborted her instinctive grab for it, but not before she put herself in motion. She used the Fed's leg to stop. Daniel gave the kit a shove as soon as it rose above floor level. It shot across the cabin and Liz winced when it crashed into the wall. Not that space-safe packaging would be damaged by a bump like that. Whether by chance or design, the kit hit the wall at an angle that sent it dead-center toward Liz on the rebound. Now she had bruises on her breastbone to match the ones on her knees.

  Liz had a lot of experience drawing samples under adverse conditions. A semicomatose patient wasn't a challenge, even in zero g. The worst part was waiting for the reactions. It wasn't enough to test for Chirus and Parachirus. The symptoms were similar to half a dozen other hemorrhagic fevers. She tested for those, too. She even grabbed an air sample and tested it.

  " How's it going over there, girly-girl?" Frank asked.

  " Why didn't McCourtney send one of the new kits? These old ones take too much processing time."

  " The new ones are for Ebola. They won't tell you if it's Chirus."

  " This isn't telling me diddly at the moment. Wait. There it goes." Liz checked the readings twice. Relief made her giddy—although that could've been the dregs of the space sickness. " It's not Chirus," she said, broadcasting to both ships. " It's Parachirus."

  "What does that mean?" Justice asked. The crew members of the Mens Sano still in the cabin framed him like bodyguards in the employ of a merchant prince.

  "No one's going to die, for one thing. In ten percent of untreated cases, Parachirus causes blindness. About fifty percent of susceptible, exposed patients get sick. The air sample I took shows your filters either failed or are contaminated. You'll need to go downside and get them fixed."

  "If we go downside, the Feds'll shoot us." For the first time, Liz realized how young the pilot was.

  " We won't shoot you," Sam said through stream. " You'll have to stand trial for the three deaths—"

  " Three?" Frank asked.

  " Another ground crewman died while we've been . . . busy. Justice, you won't be shot. You'll stand trial, you'll lose your pilot's license, maybe spend some time in jail—it depends on the jury. And the government of the Corporo Sano."

  "The captain needs a hospital," Liz said. "He's not one of you. Would you condemn him to blindness because you're frightened?"

  " And what else can you do?" Frank asked. " You can't dock—you're going to have a hell of a time just landing. We could all stay up here, circling the planet until we run out of food and air, but what's the point? Take it downside, Justice."

  "You've got guns, why don't you make me?"

  " And kill Liz and the captain? After what we just went through? Not to mention you have Agents Montoya and Thornberg over there. You haven't picked my apples, junior, I got no quarrel with you."

  Liz noted Frank's failure to mention that the agent with authority to key the guns was on the Mens Sano. The pilot looked up over his shoulder at the crew members surrounding him. Liz was sure he was transmitting on some Attestor-only channel. He must have been all along. She wished she could tell whether he was planning an attack or counting votes.

  " Now would be a good time, Mens Sano. You've got a straight shot down to North Port ," Frank said.

  The pilot closed his eyes. His lips moved and his left hand traced a ritual pattern. Then he turned back to the control desk.

  "Hang on everybody," he said. "We're going down."

  * * *

  The landing was rough enough to renew Liz's space sickness on solid ground. She pushed the feeling aside. She had too much to do to be sick. Even before the lock tested for atmosphere and cycled open, she had the Fed and Daniel easing the captain down the ladder. Sam, still suited up but helmetless, waited at the
bottom.

  There was a stretcher in the middle of the troop of Feds waiting to make the arrest. Liz let Sam deal with them. She was too busy handing her patient off. An epidemic specialist was already talking to Comfort, giving advice—appropriately—on keeping the Parachirus victims comfortable. Liz interrupted to check that a quarantine area was ready. Every non-Attestor who'd had access to the Mens Sano had to be found and vaccinated. Those for whom vaccination was too late would join the Attestors in their quarantine. And the source of the contamination still had to be found. Liz trusted McCourtney was already working on that.

  Sword of Justice walked down the Mens Sano's ramp under his own power, surrounded by half a dozen Feds. He looked up. Liz followed his gaze. The Port Authority hung low in the sky. He saluted. Liz wasn't sure if the gesture was aimed at Frank or the ship itself.

  "Jeshosephat, that thing's huge," she said to Sam as Justice walked away.

  "He flies it as if it were a shooter."

  "He flies everything that way."

  They watched Frank bring the orbital in to a hardstand. He was the last one off, strolling down the ramp with his hands in his jacket pockets.

  " If I lose my job, Hutchinson , you owe me a new one," Sam broadcast to the two CECID agents.

  "Relax, Sam-sam. The Mens Sano is down, safe and sound and without holes. The CECID pulled off another miracle, and you've got your murderer in custody. What more could anyone ask?" Frank grinned.

  * * *

  FACT:

  Scandals:

  Being True To Our Own Imaginations

  Written by Gregory Benford

  Illustrated by Laura Givens

  Physics has been the forerunner of much of modern science, but perhaps we don't have enough verve, the true courage of our convictions.

  Take just one example from our grandest province where we merge with astronomy— cosmology. Half a century ago, we should have seen the big bang coming; indeed, we did see it. And ignored it.

  In the late 1940s George Gamow, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman worked out element formation and the entire scenario that led to the famous 3 K (3 degrees Kelvin) background radiation. Yet the Steady State model held sway, and their work faded from view by the mid-1950s.

  "We never quite thought through to the realization that the peak emission was observable in the microwave sky," Ralph Alpher said when I asked him about it after a colloquium at UC Irvine in the 1980s.

  "Why didn't you go to the radio astronomers and ask if they could see the emission?" I prodded.

  It turned out that they did. Radio astronomers at NRL and Johns Hopkins didn't think it could be done. Alpher took their word for it, he acknowledged ruefully

  But in a way, Joe Weber did. I turned to Joe, standing at the wine-and-cheese reception after Alpher's talk. He couldn't recall if he had then even heard of the Gamow-Alpher-Herman work, but around 1950 he knew of Gamow's reputation. He asked Gamow for a thesis problem. Joe had capability in radar, learned in the Navy, extending up toward the microwave region. Was there some cosmological use for observations in such a range? "Gamow couldn't think of anything relevant," Joe said, shaking his head. "So I looked at stimulated emission instead." This work built on Einstein's ideas about photons of light (of any frequency) distributed into quantized levels, and how to release them, so they could all at once cascade down in a pulse. In that work he provided some of the theory that led to the maser. Indeed, when Charles Townes and others won their Nobel for inventing the maser, the only reason Weber wasn't on the list was the prize rules, which allow no more than three people per prize."

  In the early 1960s, Steady State was in retreat and the group at Princeton including Dicke and Peebles began working on implications of an earlier, hot stage. They began building a radiometer, motivated by a desire to find a prior "big crunch" in a cyclic universe. They apparently did not recall the Gamow, Alpher and Herman work and replicated it. By startling coincidence, while they were still thinking through the details of how to detect the 3 K emission, it turned up nearby. The famous Bell Labs experiment, trying to see sources of noise in the sky, came upon the classic black-body signature, at just the right equivalent temperature, netting Penzias and Wilson a Nobel Prize.

  But could the 3 K background have been seen earlier?

  In 1976 I took a sabbatical from UCI to Cambridge's Institute for Astronomy. Martin Ryle and Tony Hewish had won the Nobel for pulsars, and I wanted to work on the plasma physics of rotating magnetized neutron stars. (A true, closed system solution to this problem remains elusive, decades later.) In discussing this with Ryle, I suddenly asked, "If someone had come to you suggesting that relic radiation around 3 K was detectable, say, around 1950, when could you have detected it?"

  He thought and said, "It would have been a challenge, getting the signal to noise ratio down, but . . . perhaps a few years."

  "Would you have put in that level of research investment?"

  He shrugged ruefully. "Probably not, without a big authority behind the idea."

  "An authority like Gamow?"

  He laughed. "I'm really not sure. I think Hoyle would've frowned at the idea."

  So I asked Fred Hoyle. Hoyle pointed out that there had been tantalizing detections much earlier, that nobody thought to relate to the Gamow-Alpher-Herman work. In 1941 Walter S. Adams found a puzzling excitation temperature of 2.3 K in interstellar CN absorption, and remarked on the lack of any obvious exciting source. This 2.64 mm measurement was near the blackbody peak, yet it escaped general notice for decades.

  By 1956 Hoyle had seen Andrew McKellar's report on interstellar molecules, in which he proposed that the temperature of space is about 3 K. Gamow visited Hoyle in La Jolla in 1956 and told him he thought space was filled with microwaves at a temperature of about 10 or 20 K. Hoyle said the temperature could not be so high because of McKellar's work. He thought it should be zero K, the Steady State view.

  Hoyle said that he would have encouraged such a test, but it had not occurred to him as plausible at the time. Ryle might have, but he was far from the particle-cosmological community in the USA, too. Hoyle was in a "scrimmage" with Ryle by then, and not likely to tell him of odd ideas from across the Atlantic. They were disputing the issue of radio source counts.

  Ryle's collaborators found that the slope of the number of radio sources versus distance did not fit the Steady State prediction. There were too many at great distances, implying some evolution of the sources over time.

  So instead of a direct test, we sat through the slow battles over source counts. Rather than testing the Gamow model, cosmologists spent over a decade falsifying Steady State's predictions. No one followed on the nucleosynthesis path, much less thought of observations. On the theoretical front, Hoyle and others tried to get the same element abundance that Gamow-Alpher-Herman had found by 1950. Not until 1964, just before the accidental discovery of the background radiation, did Hoyle and Tayler realize that Steady-State could not explain the helium formation.

  No one set out to directly prove the big bang. They instead showed where Steady State was wrong. This may have emerged partly from the philosophical bias of the time, which stressed falsification of theories.

  To outsiders, this might seem a scandal. Not in the gutter sense, of personal failure, but more seriously, a failing in our approach. We didn't treat both models fairly, and lost more than a decade before discovering the truth.

  If so, what were the scandal's roots? Can they tell us something about ourselves?

  Alpher and Herman, in their long 1988 Physics Today article,1 said that they suspected a cultural bias was at work: "It is possible, but regrettable, that Gamow's fun-loving and irrepressible approach to physics led some scientists not to take seriously his work, and perhaps our work too because of our close identification with him." Further, they note, Alpher and Herman worked far from the academic astrophysics community, mostly in industry— General Electric and General Motors. Stephen Brush2 says (p. 589) that one reason the Gamo
w-Alpher-Herman work was relatively neglected even after the Penzias and Wilson discovery "may be that it was not presented as a cosmology but as a hypothesis about the origin of the elements. As such it was not generally successful; nucleosynthesis in the big bang is needed to explain the cosmic abundance of helium, but nucleosynthesis in stars is needed to account for the formation of heavier elements."

  Gamow-Alpher-Herman committed a minor social sin; they weren't in the club. Neither were Penzias and Wilson, but they had a firm result in hand, not to be denied.

  Are there similar scandals in our own era? Say, in cosmology, the most philosophically striking arena we have? We now know that the universal expansion is accelerating, and that acceleration may be even rising— an effect known among cosmologists as, appropriately, the "jerk:"

  But shouldn't we be the ones feeling like jerks? Despite thirty years of drum-beating by the string theorists, these explorers never suspected that the dark energy could comprise the majority of the energy density of our universe. Of course, string theory is mind-numbing in its mathematical complexity. Predictions are very difficult.