Analog SFF, October 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  He inhaled sharply, as if startled, and then sighed. “No, that was never the plan, was it? You put El Dorado here for us, but it was up to us to take the final step. That's it, isn't it? You lousy son of a bitch!"

  Victor thought some more, then picked up the core sample disk and placed it in a sample transporter. “Computer, jettison this. Maybe somebody will find it and make a memorial out of it."

  "Command one accepted,” the ‘bot panel replied. “Command two not understood."

  "Computer, disregard command two. Prepare for departure. Disregard my metaphysical ramblings. The problem is not that I can't tell the difference between coincidence and fate, the problem is that I can't tell the difference between destiny and fate."

  * * * *

  Wiener: VICTOR GENDEG CHECKING IN. SORRY GUYS, I'VE BEEN SANDBAGGING. I'M IN PRIME POSITION, WELL TO THE WEST OF WHERE YOU EXPECTED ME. I HAVE A FULL LOAD OF ABOUT 90 PERCENT DEUTERIUM, 10 PERCENT HELIUM-3. I AM TRANSMITTING MY STATE VECTOR AND MY LOGS. IN MY LOGS, YOU WILL FIND THE STATE VECTOR, ASSAY, AND CLAIM APPLICATION FOR THE BODY I WAS REALLY EXPLORING. IT WILL PROBABLY SURVIVE WHATEVER IS COMING, AND YOU'LL WANT TO GET OVER HERE AND CHECK IT OUT. PLEASE GIVE IT TO EVERYONE I FAILED TO APPRECIATE WHEN IT WOULD HAVE MATTERED. I THINK THAT WOULD INCLUDE THE WHOLE HUMAN RACE. ANYWAY, REVIEW THE LOGS, AND YOU'LL KNOW THAT I'M NO DAMNED HERO. FATE JUST PICKED ME FOR THIS.

  * * * *

  "Computer, commence live broadcast of voice and data."

  Victor scanned the operations manual on computer display. “To whoever is listening, I'm trying to dump my deuterium tanks, but they got cold a few seconds after I opened the valves, and now nothing is coming out. The tank heaters aren't adequate for this much flow. Shit, every space ship in the movies has a self-destruct. How come there's no way to blow this sucker up? The damned engineers made it foolproof. If only I had a nuke! All I have are some little mining charges."

  He looked at the telescope display. Every minute, the glowing disk with the fiery speck in the center grew larger. “Hell of a lot of hard gammas. I wonder if Violet was wrong? Maybe the gammas will ionize the gas, if I can get it expelled in time.” He closed the vent valves, brought up a stern view of the ship, and touched points on the aft ends of the storage tanks. “Aretoo, plant a five kilogram mining charge on each of the following points. Emergency safety protocol override."

  "This instruction violates your lease and insurance provisions,” the computer warned.

  "I accept the liability, and my deductible is on deposit,” Victor growled at the machine. “I'm the freaking money-grubbing MBA around here. You are just a rental. I don't really give a shit what you think. I'm not in a particularly good mood right now."

  "Emergency safety protocol override accepted. Unintelligible commands ignored.” The robot panel display showed the maintenance robot racing to its final mission.

  He looked back at the telescope display. “Looks like we're still about dead center. I think Ice is probably right ... it makes more sense to try to concentrate the blast a little off to one side. If we stick with the assumption the thing will aim for dead center of the Sun, the error cone is pretty small this close in. Computer, display Earth's location relative to the Sun, with celestial axes. Show object's trajectory.” He nodded. “Computer, show target with celestial axes.” He held up one hand with fingers projected to visualize the relative orientations. “Now, time for a wild guess. Computer, adjust interception point to ten kilometers southeast of the trajectory error cone center."

  Victor shook his head as he felt the thrusters kick in. “I'm fooling myself thinking that thing is that accurate. If only there were more time! Dammit, I don't know how long it would take for the gammas to ionize this much gas at this density. This is basically going to be a liquid hydrogen dump. It will probably be a fog of droplets for a while. Hell, I don't even know the density. Just gotta dump it and hope.

  "Damn, how fast would the field fall off with distance? I figured ten million teslas near the center, but a magnetic field will fall off as the cube of distance. Near the center, it ought to be a steep funnel, and the energy stored in the field itself will be incredible. A few hundred kilometers out, it will be too weak to handle a big mass of ions. The electric field won't fall off as fast, but the Debye lengths in a dense cloud will mean most of the ions won't even see the field. The release has to be almost right down its throat. If anybody is listening, you need to get as close as you can."

  A few minutes later, the maintenance robot indicated the task was complete, there was a trace of pressure in the tanks again, and the ship was braking to the new position. Victor swung Iceman's leased ship around and pointed the stern at the rapidly approaching disk of hellish radiation, then typed a command on his console. The ship shuddered and lurched forward. He checked the display. A dense mass of frigid liquid and gas boiled behind the ship, the globs subdividing more with each second, obscuring his view of the approaching ramjet.

  "I gotta get some heat into that stuff to vaporize it, and ionize what I can. Maybe the ionization doesn't need to be complete. The density is certainly high enough for a few minutes that collisions will make a cascade ionization, especially when it gets slammed by that scoop and sucked in. Computer, reactors to full emergency power. Set reaction mass flow to maximize output of ions at one hundred electron volts. We're going to light that cloud up."

  "Command accepted. Reactors at twenty gigawatts. Full thrust in two seconds, one, fire. Unintelligible command ignored.” An alarm sounded a second later. “External gamma radiation is exceeding shielding limits. Cabin radiation dangerously high."

  Victor strained against the acceleration as the ship blasted away from the cloud of boiling fusion fuel. “All I can say is that this damned well better work. How far ahead would that thing be able to detect this release? A fraction of a second in ship-time, I'll bet. Could it switch off the ramscoop in time? What am I babbling about? Of course this is going to work. Why else would I be here? I can't possibly miss. God, if you're listening, if you let me into Heaven, there better be a thousand virgins waiting for me. And if you send me to Hell, Satan's going to wish he never got whoever launched this thing to worship him. ‘Tis a far, far better thing I do...."

  * * * *

  The recording ended. “That's when we lost his transmission in the radio noise.” Iceman pressed a button on the bar's holographic projector. “Here's what happened a few seconds later. How long did we calculate the ramscoop would be? Yet relativity has foreshortened it to almost a flat disk. Looks kinda like a cosmic flyswatter, doesn't it? It was probably quick. Most of his pain he had already gotten through.

  "Keep watching. You can see I had to switch telescopes in quick succession, since the emissions changed to redshift as it passed. As near as I can tell, he missed the hull by all of about two kilometers. Absolutely a miraculous job of targeting. You can see that the core flared up, but it isn't really obvious that anything useful happened. I'll speed it up. Now, you see the ramscoop field is disintegrating and the core is starting to break up. Looks like there are about three main pieces, six smaller ones, and a cloud of little stuff. The yield was a lot higher than we thought, probably because the big magnets he detected were storing a few gigatons of energy themselves, and they ruptured on the same side as the deuterium blast. The trajectory changed just about a thousandth of a degree, just enough that those big pieces will clear Sol."

  Frosty swirled his glass and sniffed Ice's best cognac. “Any idea how the inner system is going to fare? They've still got one hell of a lot of debris heading their way at nearly the speed of light. I imagine a pea-sized piece would hit like a nuke."

  Ice nodded. “That's for sure. But very little of it will hit the Sun, and he managed to scatter most of it away from Earth. They could still catch hell, no doubt, but most of them will live. We'll start finding out in less than a week."

  Crusty ran his fingers through his long, white hair, then stood up from his barstool to speak. “Now that you good fo
lk have seen and heard his logs, I'd like a little agreement. I say we edit out everything but a few choice quotes, and just release the good stuff to the press. Those recordings just have too much private information. Pretty obvious that the guy was reluctant. Well, I don't mind telling you I felt some guilty relief when Searcher told me I was too far out to take a shot at that thing. Being fearless is just stupid. Don't confuse that with being brave. And nobody says you have to like a choice like that. I'll bet the reason Pete is still out there is he feels guilty he couldn't help."

  Rock shook his head. “Man, I'd hate to have had a camera on me. I would have been too ashamed of how I felt to ever admit to a recording if I made one. I guess Victor felt so ashamed of how he felt, he had to tell us. I think that says something about his character.

  "I threw the switch to dump my tanks, cursing my bad luck and shaking like a leaf, and had the same problem Victor did. As soon as the liquid deuterium started boiling, the temperature dropped and the pressure went away. The tanks are just not designed for a fast dump. I got preoccupied trying to figure out a solution, when I realized too late I wasn't on the path. And then I just started crying like a baby, half because I had failed, half because I was relieved. What they say about the stink of fear, I tell you, that's real! I had to toss that jumpsuit."

  "You guys were all hauling deuterium.” Searcher swirled his snifter glumly. “All I had was inert reaction mass for the electric propulsion system. I could have gotten in position, but it probably wouldn't have done any good. But all those guys in the inner system were doing it. Why didn't I? I sure was willing enough to talk all of you into doing it."

  "I'll tell you why I didn't,” Violet confessed. “I told myself it was because I couldn't reach the intercept point in time, but the truth is, I could have. I couldn't have stopped there, and my targeting wouldn't have been precise, but I could have tried to release my payload in time. But I hesitated too long because, in the back of my head, I knew I had the excuse that I might be the only woman left if we failed. Me and my shriveled-up eggs. I'm a great-grandmother, with another generation on the way. I've got two kids, five grandkids about Victor's age, and they've got nine kids between them. I should have been thinking about protecting them."

  "You would have had the same problem ... you couldn't have dumped your payload fast enough,” Rock pointed out.

  "I should have died trying,” Violet declared, staring at her glass.

  Frosty shook his head. “You guys don't get it, do you? Search, let's say you managed to get right in front of that ship and it ripped through you? What would you accomplish?"

  Searcher started to open his mouth, and Frosty held up his hand. “Shut up and hear the truth. You would probably have knocked off some little dingus that was a critical part of the ramscoop generating equipment, and it never would have picked up Victor's load of deuterium. It would still have hit the Sun, but nobody would be able to see it coming any more, so all later attempts at defense would fail. And Violet, you probably would have given it a burp of gas, just enough to trigger it to shut down. Same result."

  Rock protested, “But I had a decent chance..."

  "Shush, fool,” Frosty snarled. “You were on the wrong side of it, with only half a load of deuterium, not a clue how to deploy it, and I'll bet with a half-assed repair to your telescope. You would probably have been so far off-center the slug of dense gas would have locally overloaded the ramscoop and not been collected. No telling what kind of trouble you would have caused. No, sir, none of you were supposed to stop that thing. It wasn't in the plan."

  Violet raised an eyebrow. “Damn, Frosty, did you just get religion?"

  Frosty sighed. “Good question. Ever since Searcher proposed that deuterium release, I've been looking at the whole problem of taking in that much gas at once. It just doesn't make any sense. Yeah, Victor shoved it right down its throat, right where the ramscoop field would be strongest. But it was a hundred tons in maybe a microsecond, not a kilogram in a second like it was designed for. I don't understand why it didn't just blast right thru the field. I've looked at what the field intensity should have been, how much energy it would store, relativistic effects, and it just don't add up. It's like the ramscoop was made of diamond fiber or something. Like maybe there was something else holding it together.

  "One thing is for sure, right there at the end, Victor sure did seem convinced that what he was doing was bound to work. How many of the rest of you could say you would have gone out with a feeling like that?"

  Frosty surveyed the room. “Thought so. Me neither. We're all sitting here kicking ourselves because we thought we might have had a chance, but we failed. Just think of all those poor heroes pissing themselves in the inner system, knowing they were doing too little, too late. Imagine being sure you were going to fail. Victor was blessed, my friends. Blessed."

  Ice raised his glass. “I can't tell you how many years I hoped to stumble on that damned asteroid core. And don't any of you deny it ... you did too. He actually had his hands on the prize. Fate stuck a knife in him and gave it a sharp twist. So what if he bitched and fumed all the way? He didn't have to be dragged kicking and screaming. He did what needed to be done, on his own. He did it brilliantly, in fact, no pun intended. All anyone else really needs to know is that he gave up more than most people ever dream of for the good of the entire human race. Regardless of whether he would approve or not, I raise a toast to a true hero."

  * * * *

  The author wishes to thank the following people for their contributions to this story:

  Dr. Robert W. Bussard of Energy/ Matter Conversion Corporation, for his original interstellar ramjet concept that has become a fixture in science fiction, for letting me in on this frightening potential application for it, and for his fundamental designs for the prospecting ships and electrodynamic fusion reactors.

  H. Paul Shuch, Ph.D., Executive Director Emeritus of The SETI League, Inc, and the present Dr. SETI ®, for allowing me to use the name of his organization, and for his many suggestions that enriched the details.

  Jeff Kooistra, freelance physicist, Analog M.A.F.I.A. enforcer, and good friend, for his valuable critique. I owe you one, fella!

  Copyright (c) 2007 Tom Ligon

  * * * *

  You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.—G. K. Chesterton

  It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.—Ursula K. LeGuin

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  THE HANGINGSTONE RAT by BARRY B. LONGYEAR

  * * * *

  Illustration by John Allemand

  * * * *

  The line between “who” and “what” is likely to get less and less distinct....

  Early on a late summer morning Artificial Beings Crimes took a call from Okehampton Station reporting a dead bio in North Dartmoor at a place called Hangingstone Hill. The location was seven kilometers south-southeast of the army camp, deceased was a dead male rodent amdroid reported by a hiker: no apparent signs of violence, scene marked, hiker's statement received, constable standing by. Rodent bios aren't terribly long lived, and it was likely the fellow simply happened to be on the moor when he pegged it. Likely the death was natural and the owner of the engrams had another meat suit in stasis. Nonetheless, it had to be investigated, and it was a welcome opportunity to get out of the city. At home in Exeter, as I waited for Shad to pick me up with the cruiser, I used Val's computer and looked up Hangingstone Hill: a minor legend, unremarkable history, third highest elevation on the moor.

  "Guy's here,” Val called from the hallway. She padded into the lounge and hopped up on the desk. I gave her ears a perfunctory scratch. My wife was a Golden Tonkinese.

  "Have a good day, dear,” I said as I went to get my coat.

  She looked at the computer screen. “You have a call out on the moor?"

  I pulled on my coat and sealed it. “Yes. Shouldn't
be much of anything, dear. Dead rat bio reported by a hiker."

  "Well, take care, Harry. I have a premonition."

  I smiled. “Remember your last premonition, dear? Wasn't it a furball?"

  "Even so, Harry, take care. I don't like rats."

  "I understand rats feel the same way about cats. Good-bye, dear."

  * * * *

  "We're coming up on the moor,” Shad quacked. He was a mallard duck bio and flew the cruiser remotely by means of his wireless interface. He had once been a quite famous telly star doing adverts for an insurance firm “in whiteface,” as he put it. We talked old movies for a while then fell silent as we watched the rugged greenness of Dartmoor spread before us.

  "Pick up the Vader prang beacon yet?” I asked him.

  "We're right on the wire."

  I looked over the vast expanses of hilly heather, broken only by granite-topped hills, boulder fields, ponds, peat bogs, and stream-carved cleaves. Among them the shadows of clouds seemed fixed in place. I could see for miles. What I failed to see was the constabulary cruiser that was supposed to be waiting for us. “I don't see the cop supposed to meet us, Shad."

  He glanced at me. “You're the one who pointed out to me the low esteem in which ABCD is held among the constabulary."

  "This juvenile anchor dragging grows tedious, nevertheless."

  "Hangingstone Hill up ahead,” announced Shad. “Ought to be a movie title,” he concluded whimsically.

  I smiled. "Hangingstone Hill, a western tale of murder and vengeance, torn from the pages of history, directed by John Ford—"

  "—Starring Susan Hayward and Gary Cooper,” completed Shad.

  "I always loved Susan Hayward. Wasn't there a Gary Cooper film called The Hanging Tree?" I asked.

  "Nineteen fifty-six,” said Shad, flaunting his vast cinematic knowledge. The theater was never far from the former insurance duck's thoughts. “Gary Cooper and Maria Schell,” he continued. “You know, The Hanging Tree was George C. Scott's movie debut."