Warp Point

by Darrell Bain

  “Any resentment from the Muslims?"

  “Very little, considering the executions. A few think you were unnecessarily harsh, but surprisingly, there's more of that in the Christian community than among the Muslims we have left. Either way, it's very subdued and mostly they've all put it behind them."

  “Good. Stacey said that's how it would turn out and I'm glad to see she was right.” He smiled in the direction of his wife, sitting on the bed and propped against the headboard with pillows. The meeting was being held in their stateroom.

  Dan brought up the subject of the ship probably monitoring everything aboard, up to and including the most intimate acts between couples. Only the inner circle had been told. “Has anyone else figured it out yet?"

  “If they have, they're not talking,” Stacey said. “We'd know because Melinda and George keep us pretty well informed. They're not deliberately spying on their crew mates, but they overhear a lot just in the nature of their jobs and they pass on anything they think we ought to know without naming names."

  “That's a good way to do it,” Hawkins said. He rubbed his chin. “All in all, I think the crew has shaken down remarkably well, considering most of them didn't know each other and weren't even sure what they'd be doing three months ago."

  Dan chuckled. “Just don't let on that we're not exactly sure of what we're doing, either.” He got up and added brandy to the glasses needing to be topped off, then remarked, “This is pretty good stuff considering Pioneer manufactured it from scratch."

  “It's damn good,” Hawkins amended. “We could print labels for it and sell it on Earth with no problem at all.” When he drank, brandy was his preferred liquor.

  “Matt, are you and Tara learning anything new? I don't get to see you as often as I'd like, what with you wearing more hats than you see in church on Sunday morning."

  “Not much since we reported about the warp point. We've refined that data enough to be pretty sure of our conclusions. Once we get to the other side, I think we'll be able to ferret out other warp points when and if we need to. Assuming they're there, that is. I've come to believe that not all systems will have them, and some will have more than one, but I'll need to check my math once we pass through this one. Berlin and Terrell are making slow progress in deducing how the fusion device that powers Pioneer's gravity drive works."

  “So they told me. The way they explained it, in very simple terms, the ship gathers hydrogen and other material with a magnetic scoop field as we travel. The hydrogen is separated out, then cold fusion takes place in a chamber made of a material that's foreign to us and not well understood yet. The fusion is done with a catalyst, a rather complicated molecule. We could probably reproduce the combination of elements in it but we think it's the folding orientation of the catalytic molecule that's the key. It produces deuterium, neutrinos and so forth, which are matched with corresponding anti-particles held in a separate chamber. From there, I don't understand it, nor does anyone else, but the result is controlled gravity, both for thrust and within the ship. None of the processes are quite like our theories predicted and we'll be a long time working out the mechanics of how it happens, but in the meantime we're using it all the time."

  “It powers our weaponry, too,” Hawkins said. “We can shoot concentrated plasma in a straight beam or anti-matter missiles. The lasers are very powerful, but they're the easiest to use, probably because of their familiarity. Ever since Star Wars, laser beams've been the weapon of choice for imaginary space battles. And the military actually does have them, but the power sources are very big and clumsy to use. These things on the ship are as easy to operate as water pistols."

  That got a laugh.

  “Let's hope we don't have to use them, but it's nice to know they're there, just in case. Keep your gunners practicing, Chet."

  “I shall.” He drained the last of the brandy from his glass, thought about a refill, then decided he'd had enough.

  Dan noted the gesture. “Is there anything else, folks?"

  “One more,” Hawkins said. I'd like one of you—” he motioned toward Dan and Stacey. “—to work with me on the weaponry just in case the ship decides to listen only to you."

  Dan caught Stacey's eye. She nodded. “Stacey's your man. She's more ruthless than me."

  Hawkins nodded as if he had known it all along.

  “Anything else? Anyone?"

  No one responded, which was a signal that the session was over. Once they had departed Dan put on a movie and he and Stacey relaxed. He thought it was a good idea. Once through the warp point he doubted they'd be able to have a relaxing evening again for a long while. There was no factual basis for the feeling; he was just uneasy at the lack of knowledge about what they were headed toward.

  As the warp point drew near, the time came when central control was fully manned, with everyone who was in the chain of command in uniform. Dan sat in the center of an arc of seats so he could see everyone without twisting about. To his left was Matt, Terrell Blanco and Susan Cadler. On his right sat Berlin Soundman and Bradley Starks. Dan wanted the scientists present in case he needed an immediate opinion on what they encountered after passing through the warp point.

  Hawkins was in another alcove designed for defensive and offensive operations with Stacey there to back him up. Dan had already released the defensive weaponry to him. He wanted no delay in case they were attacked immediately after passing through the warp point. It would take only a word to give him control of offensive armaments as well.

  “Ten minutes and counting,” Matt announced.

  It was surprising how long ten minutes took to pass, Dan thought. He glanced around the control center. The scientists were glued to the screens in front of them, as were Hawkins and Stacey to their screen. He could feel his own pulse speeding up as the minutes ticked off, so slowly that at one point he was certain the digits counting off time had frozen. Nevertheless, at last they blinked off a minute, then another one. Another and another, and then they were down to seconds. He tried to keep from holding his breath. He tried to appear calm and knew he was failing. It was like going into combat, knowing that the shooting would start any moment. He was entirely familiar with that sensation but that made it no easier to control.

  The last seconds ticked away. “...five, four, three, two..."

  * * * *

  Astronomers followed Pioneer's progress up until the last second, when it abruptly disappeared from view as it passed through the warp point. The great ship was never seen or heard from again.

  BOOK TWO

  Beyond the Warp Point

  * * *

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dan never knew if Matt called out the last second of the countdown or not. He felt a peculiar twisting sensation, as if all his nerve ends were tangling and untangling themselves in swift succession. His vision blurred. At the same time, his muscles were frozen. He couldn't move, and began to think something had gone dreadfully wrong. Then abruptly, he could see clearly again. He could move, and the first thing he did was tilt his head slightly to take in all the view offered by the screen in front of him. The starry vista had changed. He scanned it quickly but didn't recognize anything. He gave Matt a few moments to look as new digits and icons appeared, and was just about to ask him if he recognized any part of the firmament when the astronomer spoke.

  “The ship makes it easy. I could have figured out where we were eventually, but it would have taken quite a bit of study and spectrographic comparisons. As is...” he hesitated.

  “As is what?"

  “We're still in our galaxy. Our own spiral arm, in fact, but much farther in. And Pioneer is showing we also came out in a solar system, though not one like our own. It seems to have only one planet in near the sun, then two gas giants way, way out. So much for Bode's law, huh?"

  Dan had to think for a moment to remember what he was talking about, then it came to him. The planets of Earth's solar system were arranged at a mathematical distance from the sun, each suc
ceeding one a greater distance away by a factor which could be calculated. “Yeah. Of course it was a misnomer ever calling it a law to begin with. All we knew was our own system and there was never any reason for thinking it might apply to all G type stars."

  “Uh huh,” Matt replied, already distracted by the changing screen.

  Again the parameters blinked, displaying a graphic of the new solar system, with vectors pointing from their position to a planet inward toward the sun from where they were.

  “Are we still moving, Matt? Never mind, I can see we are. And it sure looks like Pioneer is pointing us to a destination. Chet, any hostile activity?"

  “Not so far. In fact, no activity at all.” He continued to scrutinize his screen, which was somewhat different than the one Dan was observing.

  “Let's stay on the present course for a while and see if anything else develops. I don't want to commit ourselves to the planet that vector is pointing toward just yet, but we've got plenty of time to change if we decide to go somewhere else. In the meantime, we'll see if we can pick up any signs of intelligent life."

  * * * *

  Pioneer hung in space, unmoving except as the velocity they had had before broaching the warp point continued. The ship was no longer accelerating, but strangely, it was moving inward rather than outward in the solar system they had entered, exactly opposite to the direction of movement before passing through the warp point. Immediately after arriving on the other side, Pioneer had released control of thrust it had held so tightly for the last three months. Dan noticed immediately that the ship was capable of a much greater velocity than it had used to take them on their journey so far.

  After several hours with nothing at all happening, he gave orders to accelerate at a moderate velocity toward the planet the vector on the main screen was pointing toward, where their previous velocity had been taking them anyway.

  “Accelerating. Counting.” Matt announced.

  The digits began displaying time until arrival. They read twenty days and some hours and minutes.

  “Is that until orbital insertion?” Dan asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said, observing military protocol while civilians were present.

  “Nice to be able to go a little faster than we could on the way to the warp point, huh?"

  “It is, but on the other hand, the three months did give us time for the crew to shake down. And the three months it took to get to Earth gave us a chance to think about the implications of an alien visitor. It's almost as if it were planned."

  Dan didn't comment. He had to think about that one for a while.

  * * * *

  As the days passed, efforts were focused on scanning the known spectra for any kind of signal from the planet, but so far nothing had been received. Nevertheless, the vector still pointed unerringly toward the second planet out from the star, a type in the G sequence similar to Earth's sun. Within a few days they learned from both telescopic and spectroscopic observation that the planet harbored life and that the atmosphere was similar to Earth's. Everyone agreed there must be something there of interest; otherwise the ship wouldn't have taken such pains to point it out. On the other hand, a counterargument came up. The ship could go anywhere they wished now; they weren't being forced toward the planet. So why were they heading there when no intelligent signals originated from it?

  “We've got plenty of time,” Dan said in answer to a comment along those lines. “And the ship obviously wants us to check out the planet, so why not?"

  “No reason,” Hawkins said. “I'm just uneasy, I guess. I keep looking for bogeymen and I'm not finding any. And I can't figure out why we're being directed toward that planet when there's nothing obviously intelligent there—or at least nothing that's capable of producing transmissions. And if they have telescopes, surely they've seen us by now."

  “All that doesn't necessarily hold, Chet,” Susan Cadler said. “The place may be inhabited by beings which communicate by an entirely different method than we do, and they may not be the least bit interested in the sky."

  “True. I guess I can hold out another day or two. By then we should be able to get some telescopic observations with enough definition to tell us whether there's a civilization there or not."

  “Which again might be entirely different from what we think of as civilization."

  Hawkins forced a grin. “You're right again, but I didn't get promoted to general because I was a dummy. Something's funny about this setup."

  “I have to agree with Chet,” Dan said. Unconsciously, he took Stacey's hand in his and intertwined their fingers. “I've felt a sense of foreboding for some time now. I haven't mentioned it because I couldn't find a reason for it."

  “That makes me feel a little bit better, but not much."

  The next day gave them a chance to observe the largest continent of the planet under a near-cloudless environment. Signs of habitation were visible, and became more so the next day. After that the clouds returned, but it wasn't hard to find clear patches. Soon it was evident that both of the large continents were heavily industrialized, though not in the same manner as Earth. The cities weren't nearly as concentrated and tended to occupy higher altitudes than those of Earth. The lowlands were heavily vegetated, but it was hard to determine whether it was by crops or unbridled growth.

  “Hey!” Matt exclaimed. “Look. We're getting a signal of some kind from the planet. It's weak ... uh oh, it's faded out. No, now it's back. Still weak ... okay. No, gone again. Damn!"

  Everyone waited tensely for the transmission to repeat, but it didn't, not that day. On the following morning, however, it was back, and stronger, and now they were only four days out, decelerating in preparation for orbiting the planet, as yet unnamed.

  The first transmissions had come in spurts of such low signal strength that even computer enhancement didn't help much. However, as they grew stronger and unbroken, an attempt was made to see whether it was directed at them or simply random broadcasts being picked up by chance.

  Matt summed it up. “If they're looking at us, and surely they must be by now, they'll be broadcasting something easy to interpret; something that'll get us started on learning their language. That's assuming their communication method is similar to ours, though."

  “I've always read that the first attempt at contact with an alien species would be in mathematical terms,” Dan said.

  “Well, if that's the case, we're in trouble because I'm not seeing anything that resembles a formula, not even one plus one equals two."

  Dan had a sudden thought. “Maybe the ship can translate. After all, it learned our language and some of us've been assuming Pioneer originated from the civilization we see on the planet.” He asked Pioneer if it could interpret the signal.

  Yes. Translation follows.

  Warning! Slow. Approach no closer than two planet widths. Do not orbit. Enemy will arrive from Oort Cloud and gas planets and attempt to capture. Instructions and historical data follow.

  There was a deadly silence in central control as a tale began to unfold.

  Thousands of years ago, this race of intelligent beings developed a civilization. Eventually it became dependent upon computerization to such an extent that artificial intelligence was developed, a mistake in retrospect. When the mechanical intelligence learned their creators intended to explore warp points, some possibly leading to other universes, they became afraid. Their artificial minds had been designed and built with one set of universal laws governing all physical properties. They were afraid that exploring warp points might change that, somehow, and possibly wreck the linear functioning of their intelligence. The machine intelligence, hereafter referred to as MI, took control of their planet and solar system. Fortunately, the core programming of the sapient computers could not be broken, changed or new modules constructed without incorporating that programming, which specifically forbade doing harm to any form of intelligent life.

  Unable to destroy, or even harm their creators, the developing
machine civilization instead confined their creators to their planet. It took time, but the machine culture was methodical. First it temporarily blocked known warp points the race was planning to explore, and then began rounding up all spaceships their monitoring devices found which had intelligent life aboard. Ships of the MI surrounded the ones manned by biological intelligence and tractor beams were used to force them down to their planet. The MI never returned fire from intelligent beings; they used a combination of an overwhelming number of ships with powerful tractor beams and defensive fields to subdue and force them down upon the planet. A second type of force field put in place by the MI extended far beyond the atmosphere of their world and prevented any ship bearing intelligence from leaving it. Even communication beyond a few astronomical units was not possible; the surrounding field muffled it.

  Various methods were tried to get around the prohibition on travel beyond their own world, all of which had failed. Eventually the MI left them and began using the moons of the far away gas giants of the solar system and its Oort cloud to build more MI constructs. However, a detection system and orbiting MI robots remained in place; any ship bearing intelligence not of MI origin would always be detected, and enough ships brought in to force the biological species to land.

  All this they had gleaned from years of study and observation before the bulk of MI left the environs of their planet many years ago. For the last century a huge effort had been put into constructing the ship they were on, a mighty fortress so well armed it was near invulnerable. Of necessity, it had been sent through the barrier around the planet and to the nearest warp point empty, and again of necessity, it was arranged so that nothing would be learned of the ship's origin until and unless it was brought back to the system by intelligent beings. They would have manned the ship themselves but for the fact that the monitor in their solar system would not only have detected their presence but activated the MI robots left behind for just such an occasion. They would have quickly forced the ship back to their planet, not giving it a chance to put its awesome weaponry into play, for that also was muffled when near the planet by the surrounding field. This was also the reason why they had been unable to break free of the confinement despite many attempts. They had even tried launching their own robots in an attempt to destroy the monitors but the MI had no qualms about fighting armed robot ships so long as they contained no living intelligence. They were quickly destroyed before they could get beyond the force field and bring their weapons to bear.