"No. That's recorded fact. You see, the Einstein equations work—and at least five of those starships have made trips back, in what were short periods of time to them, but that represented centuries on Atalama."
The engineer refilled his pipe. "Okay," he said. "Your story includes, as all good science fiction should, the assumption that mass increases as it approaches the speed of light and tends to become infinite, while time tends to stand still. The inverse ratio of time and matter." He leaned back in his chair, applied a match to the bowl of the pipe, and puffed the tobacco alight.
"Yes," said the archaeologist quietly. "My story assumes that the Einstein equations are real statements of actual fact; the great Vahs, the interstellar ships that have returned, have proved the equation…"
The ship hung well out from the planet, a tiny snowball in space. The man working over the computation panel in the control room was a tiny entity in the vast snowball of the ship.
Rahn Minos, captain of the Vahsaba, the great starship that would take mankind's Vahnire twenty-two hundred light years from their home planet, hunched over the ship's computer, his spatulate fingers working the keys carefully; he was checking against pencilled notes the complexities from which he was drawing simplicities.
He threw down the pencil with a gesture of weariness and leaned back, running his fingers through heavy brown hair; he eased his huge shoulders back against muscles that had begun to ache with tension.
He shoved his chair back and walked over to the view-screen that dominated the bridge, the control room of the ship, nestled deep in the heart of its snowball.
Atalama centered the display, its single land mass uppermost, lapped gently at its furthest edges by the mother sea which covered two-thirds of the planet.
Centering the land mass, almost directly below him, Aetala—the planet's northern pole—seemed a glistening crown on the cloud-flecked greens and grays of the continent of Ura. Around her polar crown, Ura made a slightly lopsided circle, its edges indented with the mouths of rivers and harbors and bays; the lofty peaks of the Laya mountains looked from here like pebbles roughening the continent's smooth surface.
Rahn's eyes traced the outline of the Layas. It was there, high among those forbidding peaks, that the physicist Baron Sivos had his laboratories. It was there that he had first discovered the clue to the ionospheric tap. the solar power source, and had built the first of the great Siva generators that made the interstellar ships possible.
The ionospheric tap—the solar tap. So simple that the most backward technology could handle its construction and put it to use; so sophisticated that men had had to reach a technology capable of the laser and of atomic power before it could be discovered.
With the tap had come power—thousands of times more electrical energy than man had been able to manufacture with all his generating stations before its discovery. Power with which to feed the world, to drive machines. Power with which to throw into orbit the heavy blocks of equipment and insulation needed to create a starship and to build an interstellar drive where it could free itself from the gravitic field of the planet.
Power to create a technology beyond the dreams of the puny hydro-electric stations that had powered men's dreams before.
Yet with the power came its dangers. A malfunction at any of the coastal Sivas caused an avalanche of proportions that might not be disastrous, but that were both disruptive to the growing broadcast-power economy and disquieting to the people who used the power but still feared it. Such avalanches were not frequent, but they occurred.
An avalanche at the polar tap would be another story. The magnetic field of the planet in the coastal areas near the equator was at right angles to the magnetic field of the tap, and the interaction of the two extinguished an avalanche; but the lines of force of the magnetic field at the pole were nearly perpendicular to the planet—nearly parallel to the tap—and there would be no interaction. If an avalanche occurred there, it would continue to burn, and no one knew what the results might be.
Yet for this same reason, the power-surges were greater at the poles; the mighty blasts of power needed to throw into orbit the tons of mass needed for the ships were available there as nowhere else. There was the factor, too, that through the polar hole in the doughnut of the proton and electron belts trapped in the magnetic field, it was possible to send up men and animals without the heavy shielding that would be necessary at any other location.
And so the polar trap had been built with the most elaborate safeguards and a constant watch for solar flares that would augment the charge on the ionospheric capacitor and that might instigate an avalanche.
The arguments against the polar tap had been long and bitter. There were many knowledgeable men who still felt that the stars were not worth the gamble. There were more who simply felt an unreasoning fear of the power that all the taps represented, and the construction of the polar tap, now more than ten years in the past, had augmented that fear until it had become a growing, restless surge of feeling throughout the mass of the populace, led and fed upon by the increasing displacement of the technologically unable in a civilization that was giantizing technologically overnight; and led and fed upon, too, by those who profit from churning the fears of the uninformed.
That the public unrest centered on the Sivas as objects of hatred, Rahn knew; and insofar as that hatred centered on the polar tap it was, he also knew, possibly justified.
He could barely make out, on the planet below him, that huge polar Siva at Aetala, the most powerful of the great generators; potentially the most disastrous, and yet the one that made possible the starship on which he stood: a "snowball" of polar ice, raised in huge blocks from the polar cap, with the control systems, the crew's quarters, and the huge holds for the 2,000 colonists and their equipment, nestled and shielded in its center.
The Vahsaba; the seventh ship, its goal nearly 2,200 light years out. Nothing short of the tremendous power of the polar Siva generator could have raised the parts for this ship. Megalar by megalar, the great blocks of ice from the polar cap had been raised by the tremendous blasts of power into an orbit in space. Month after month the pre-formed blocks of ice had been welded and fitted to form the huge central mass of a stardrive ship; a central mass that must be moved far out into space before the dainty spiderweb of plastic could be rigged to her; the dainty web that, spread to nearly planetary size, could be woven to serve as the mass-trap that would power her.
The ice was for shielding, since near the speed of light running into so fragile a piece of energy as a radio-wave gives the impression of meeting a tremendously powerful X-ray. But the ship itself would be the dainty spiderweb, containing this central block of ice much in the manner of a very small spider at the center of a very big web. A spiderweb of air-rigid plastic-film fingers linking metallic conductors and supporting a structure of electrostatic deflection and electromagnetic focusing grids that would sweep a nearly planetary-size area of space, plucking the few molecules of hydrogen out of each area that it passed, and focusing them towards a central reaction area that was only cubits in size.
The magnetic traps would sweep space and focus in its debris—perhaps only one molecule of hydrogen per cubic centimeter; perhaps as many as five, distributed over the area of a whole cubit. But traveling near the speeds of light, that much mass becomes a density ahead; and that density would be magnetically trapped and forced, converged into a stream of mass; caused to interact in a hydrogen fusion reaction, and then thrown away again, in the manner of a jet airship collecting air at its nose, heating it and kicking it out at the tail.
Stardrive. A sweep of the tenuous gases of emptiness into a focus of hellfire and a sweep of that hellfire backwards into a deadly wash that would drive the ship forward, at first in tiny increments of motion—but those tiny increments compounded per second per second until, within six months, the ship would have reached nearly to the velocity of light itself. At that velocity, time is a relative matter; at that velocit
y a ship can cross a galaxy in a matter of weeks ship-time; while on each planet in the galaxy that same time-span is measured in centuries.
The calculations must be precise; for the ship must brake; must give up its tremendous energy of flight and slow itself at the far end of the course. And this was even more complicated, for the particles swept in by the nose must be converted to energy and re-directed out through that same nose, slowing the ship down to the relatively low velocities of suns and planets.
Six months to build to speed, while crossing measurable distances; weeks at point ninety-eight C to cross distances measurable only in terms of light years; and then, again, six months to build down, to the speeds of mere suns and planets.
And mass, thought Rahn, becomes near infinite; is compacted more and more into a smaller space until its density is such—to the rest of the galaxy—that it is almost invisible; its size is microscopic. Like velocity, mass has been shown to be relativistic. And the theories are exact. Yet what will the fact be like to a living thing, to a human being?
The preceding expeditions had, of course, not yet been heard from; even if any of the first five ships had turned around immediately on reaching its destination, they could not be heard from for Atalaman decades. The interstellar ships—the great Vahs—were not limited in range per hop, other than by considerations of real time. Once they reached their maximum speed, the elapsed ship-time computations were such that they might cross half the galaxy in a matter of months ship time, though such a voyage would mean an elapsed time on Atalama of megayears.
Rahn turned his attention to the viewscreen that showed the Vaheva, a tiny bubble reflecting the sun's rays like a crescent moon against the black of space. She's nearly ready to go, he thought. In a few days now, her atomic motors would take her to the trojan position, 60 degrees retrograde of Atalama, where she would spend two weeks opening up and fitting her plastic web, like a giant sailing ship unfurling its sails. Then she would tack slowly through the solar system on a path that will keep her from blasting planetary masses with her high intensity radiation. She would creep until she was four solar radii—twenty-two light hours—out of the solar system. And only then would the full power of the starship drive be unleashed, lest its vast backlash of directed radiation should upset the system—or the sun itself.
And then? he thought. By then the Vahsaba would be ready to go, and they in turn would unfurl their plastic sails… their electro-magnetic web … to capture the particles of the galactic winds, and to sail the seas of time and of galactic distances…
Rahn tore himself from his reverie. There was work to do before he caught the shuttle back to Atalama. He'd be tied down at Crêta for several days, supervising the last details of clearing personnel and equipment, before he could come back aboard.
That's quite a ship you've just described." The engineer leaned back with a quizzical look on his face. "Remarkably well thought-out, for a story-teller. It reminds me in some of its details of one that was recently written up in a scientific paper. Bussard, I think …"
"Yes," said the archaeologist. "R. W. Bussard's Ram-Jet Vehicle for Interstellar Flight. Published in 1960, wasn't it? It's the same research towards the same end—nearly 9,000 years later. The principles of the utilization of energy don't change much in 9,000 years."
The engineer laughed. "No, they don't change," he said. "If it had happened before, that's probably how it would have been done. But I gather there's more?"
"Yes. There's more." The archaeologist looked across at the engineer for a moment, then out at the dusky desert sky beyond the canopy. "Remember Scheherezade and the Thousand and One Arabian Nights?" he asked.
"Sure," the engineer answered. "It was one of my favorite kid-time stories. And I'll admit you've got a point there. It could be translated to mean familiarity by the story-teller with a lot of things we know now that couldn't have been known when the stories were first told, or even when they were written down, centuries later. Aircraft, flying carpets, mechanical horses. I think even a mechanical man. And there were the walls that killed when you touched them, and other references that could be translated to mean the use of electricity. I suppose you've got Scheherezade in your story? She'd be a darned good addition, even though I may consider her inclusion rather farfetched. It's a fascinating yarn."
"Yes," said the archaeologist. "Yes, it's a fascinating yarn. I'll grant you that." He stretched and lit another cigarette. "If you'll open me another can of beer, and if you'd like, I'll go on."
The engineer grinned and reached for another can from the small bottled-gas refrigerator at finger-tip distance from his seat.
"I reckon I quit believing in fairy tales or science fiction about the time I went out to get my first job. But I still read science fiction, and I've been known to read through my smallfry's books of fairy tales on occasion, just to see if they still hold the old magic. If you don't mind a certain amount of skepticism, I'd like to hear the rest. I'll try to keep an open mind, but…"
The archaeologist laughed. "Fair enough," he said. "And yes, Scheherezade is in my story. It's not her name. 'Shahara' meant 'of those who control the sun,' but I can't persuade myself to abandon the old title. So I've been calling her …"
When Zad Shara reached Dade's lab that night, she was dressed in green silk slacks that fitted at the waist, but hung loose to the ankles, where they were pulled in by slender bands of gold. On her feet were soft gold slippers; above the slacks she wore a loose gold vest over a white silk shirt. Her hair was tied back with a filmy green kerchief, just out of her eyes, hanging loose, its darkness contrasting with the white of her shirt.
Dade began shucking his lab smock as she opened the door, and looked ruefully at his own white silk shirt and plain gray slacks.
I'm not as fancy as your garb," he said. "Want I should go change?"
She laughed gaily. "You'll do as is, but there's a party waiting for us, if you don't mind. Rahn and Pacia Minos, and a gang are going to Club Five, and have asked us to join. You don't mind partying with your captain, do you? He says there's a new combo there that's building a reputation as fast as an avalanche—and he said it sounds nearly as dangerous."
I'd better change for something like that." Dade looked at her solemnly. "I rather enjoy Rahn and Pacia. Who else?"
"Well …" She hesitated. "David Lyon and his assistant, Memph Luce of Furra. And Captain and Mrs. Gavarel of my ship. That's all. Really, you're fine as is. They keep those places so dark that nobody will know what you're wearing."
It was hazy and dark and crowded as they entered Club Five—a cavernous night club. Its single light from atop a central pyramid was a model of Station Five, from which it took its name.
The two stood at the door a minute, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the gloom before making their way between the tables in search of their friends.
They finally found them with the aid of a waiter, ensconced near the stage in a booth designed, according to club standards, for eight, but allowing for the eight only by the utmost squeezing together.
"At least we'll be able to talk to one another," Pacia Minos told them, gesturing at the tiny space into which they were to jam themselves. "If we can hear ourselves talk at all. This show had better be good," she told her husband. "We're sacrificing an evening's get-together for it."
"It better be good because it's probably our last night on the town in Atalama for about 2200 years—and Atalama may have changed when we get back." Diane Gavarel smiled happily from beside her quiet, blond husband, the captain of the Vaheva.
"I haven't heard that it was good." Rahn told them all. "I've only heard that the songs and feelings that seem to be sweeping all Ura are to be heard here—and that the Vahnire would do well to hear what's going on."
Memph Luce gestured to rise when he was introduced but found it impossible in the space. David Lyon greeted Dade without animosity; the engineer was relieved. The man could have taken offense at this afternoon's set-to, but—well, c
helt! He wanted that beast!
The music started, a normal enough tune for a normal enough night club, even if it was exceptionally dark and cavernous, and he captured his date for the first dance. As they reached the floor and he swung her lithe body against his own heavy, almost ponderous form, he spoke into her ear. "You look as dangerous as that cat of yours."
"Maybe I am," she answered. "This place gives me the creeps."
"Want to leave?"
"Ye gods, no! I've got to find out what's going to happen. The crowd feels keyed up."
"Why, you've hardly been able to see the crowd—unless you mean our own gang?"
"No, I don't mean our own gang. I mean the people around us. You may not have seen them, but I'll bet you could describe the construction of this room and the system of lighting. Well, I can tell you about the people. It's not only my job, it's where my interest lies."
"Yes, I could tell you how the thing's designed and lighted with a ninety-five percent accuracy. You're right. That's where my job is and my interest lies. Tell me about the people. Or rather, tell me about you."
He only half-listened to her voice as he felt the smoothness of her muscles moving in perfect synchronization with his body. He was clumsy enough at dancing, he knew, but she made him feel as though he were a dancer.
"The crowd's waiting. I can feel it. They're dancing the new stay-apart, jump-up-and-downs on most of the floor and we're a bit away from the dancers, but can't you see it? They're not dancing for dancing; they're dancing for interim. And quite a proportion are just sitting, waiting. There must be something really good coming. Well, no; good is not the word. Something really vital! Something they're expecting that's got an internal twist. …"
He swung her in an arc away from him, and back into his arms, taking the moment to look at her closely. Her eyes as she followed the motion without effort, were on his, but intent, unseeing, almost as though she were listening to a distant sound.
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