Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (35 page)

“I rule out option one. I have never known Jubal to be wrong about something like this. I believe him completely. If we just keep going, we will all be dead, and soon. Just for my information, can I have a show of hands of anyone who also believes as I do?”

Just for his information, huh? A little clue that this was not going to be a consensus decision. This was going to be a captain’s decision. The final word aboard an ocean ship, an airplane, and a spaceship.

I was relieved to see most of the hands go up. At least a three-quarters majority. Not that it was going to change Travis’s decision; that much was obvious to anyone who knew him.

“Thanks,” he said. “I hate option three so much I can hardly express it. Starting something like this, spending so much time on it already, then turning around and going home . . . the whole idea of it makes me sick. Is there anyone here who thinks that’s what we should do? Don’t be shy, I won’t be mad at you.”

No one raised a hand.

“Thanks for that, too. I would be surprised if any of you had wanted to go back. None of you were selected because you are quitters.

“That would seem to leave some variation on option two. It’s not one I or any of you like, taking that long to get there, and I worry a bit about the ship. So far there have been no major technical problems, nothing unexpected except this ‘dark lightning’ flux that no one could have known about, I guess. But as the best of bad options, it’s what I had intended to do.”

He paused, then smiled.

“Until Jubal provided me with a fourth option.”

There was considerable murmuring about that. Polly and I looked at each other, and I’m sure my eyebrows were raised as high as hers were.

Travis walked to the gizmo in the middle of the round room. He gave it a little time for our curiosity to build up. For a moment I glanced up at the huge screen that simulated what we would see outside if we weren’t under a quarter mile of rock. The view forward. New Sun in the center, no brighter than any other star in the scrunched-up universe. If it hadn’t been in the exact center, it would have been impossible to pick it out from any of the others. Our destination, still many long years away, even at our present speed. My new home, someday.

“Jubal, I know you have trouble explaining things like this, but I’d like you to lay it out for them, just as you told it to me. I think they need to hear it from you.”

Papa looked intensely uncomfortable, but he started to speak, looking down at his folded hands the whole time.

“It be all about space-time,” he said. “It ain’t solid, like a piece of wood. It be stretchable, like a sheet of rubber. What we could do, we could stretch that stuff. Behind the ship, we stretch the space-time out. In the front, we scrunch it up, like a wadded-up piece of paper. With the space-time spread out behind us, or sort of piled up, like a wave . . . sorry, I ain’t good at this . . . we could ride that wave. There wouldn’t be no acceleration. You might even say we ain’t really movin’, not like we’re used to movin’. We just
go
, and when we get there, we just
stop
. People knowed about this for a long time, but there ain’t been nothing we could do about it.”

I looked at some of the other faces in the room. No one looked any more enlightened than I felt.

“Tell them why, Jubal,” Travis said, gently.

“Oh, yeah, because it take a lot of power. A
lot
of power. If you took the planet Jupiter and converted it to energy, about that much power.”

That got a rise. Even the power in any of the silver bubbles we carried for fuel and power wouldn’t give that much power. I guess, theoretically, Papa could squeeze the actual planet Jupiter down to the size of a Ping-Pong ball, but then what would happen to Jupiter’s moons, where plenty of people were living? And how would you apply all that power without blowing up the whole solar system? And what would you do when you wanted to do it again? Squeeze Saturn? You could use up a lot of solar systems that way.

“But you think you found a way, Jubal?” Travis prompted.

“A way? Oh, yeah. It be all that dark lightning.”

Travis could see that many of them were lost. I would have been, too, if Papa hadn’t talked about it some while we were away from the ship. So he explained about the dark matter and dark energy that makes up 95 percent of the stuff in the universe.

If it is actually
in
the universe, in the way we understand that. Because the way Travis put it, trying to clarify the things Papa said, Papa thought it wasn’t, exactly.

It all had to do with superstring theory. My knowledge of strings is limited to yo-yos and Mama’s guitars, and of superstrings I know nothing. It seems they are incredibly,
incredibly
tiny things. Compared to them, a proton would be as big as the Earth. Maybe bigger. They are folded through about eleven dimensions. Seriously, eleven, I’m not just picking a number out of the air! If you can unfold them a little, you can have access to a lot of power. Me, I got stuck trying to imagine five dimensions, and I wasn’t sure I really had the fourth one down pat.

Papa thought all that dark energy was hiding in one of those dimensions. He thought the way to get at it involved the same kind of things he had discovered when he invented the squeezer bubbles and the black bubbles. He thought he could unlock it, and we would have virtually unlimited energy at our disposal. All around us, in interstellar space, it was just hanging around out there, around a corner of space-time where we couldn’t see it and it didn’t affect us much. Except for exerting gravity on regular matter, which is how we discovered dark matter, and for speeding up the expansion of the universe, which is how we discovered dark energy.

Until we got up around 70 percent of the speed of light, and the rules changed. Tapping into all that energy would be enough to squeeze and stretch space-time in front of us and behind us without having to destroy Jupiter in order to do it.

That’s what he thought, anyway.

We could all see where this was going. All eyes turned to the gizmo sitting there like an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. This must be the space warper.

Somebody asked, “So you’re telling us that this thing can get us to New Sun faster, and without exceeding your speed limit?”

“That’s right,” Papa said, pleased to have been understood. “Real quick-like.”

“How quick?” someone else asked. Papa frowned.

“Very quick. A few hours? Even a few minutes? I’ll have to try it out first, see just how it works.”

“It might be even quicker than that, right Jubal?” Travis prompted him. “Isn’t that what you told me?”

“I don’t wanna say that, me. It’s one way it might work out.”

“This sounds crazy to me,” said a third person. There were some murmurs of agreement.

“It does, doesn’t it,” Travis agreed. “Jubal, turn the machine on.”

Papa got up and went to the machine. The murmurs got louder. There was a switch on the side, and Papa threw it.

Now that’s more like it! The thing began to glow here and there, and a screen came alive with complex geometrical shapes. I smelled ozone, and felt a low vibration in the floor. There was a sense of suppressed energy pulsing though the room. I think we all felt it.

“Now, my friends,” Travis said. “There’s really no other way to see if this thing works than by testing it right now. Jubal, what happens if you throw that other switch?”

“Either we get where we goin’ real quick, or nothin’ happens at all if I ain’t built it right.”

“No other possibility? It won’t blow us all up?”

“Cain’t,” he said with total assurance. “It ain’t built that way. It’ll either channel all that energy around us, or it won’t work at all. No.”

“Now wait,” one of the doubters said. (I’m not using anyone’s names here, to avoid embarrassment. Their concerns were real.) “Shouldn’t we discuss this? Maybe put it to a vote?”

“The people should hear about this,” someone agreed. “I think we should put it to a referendum.”

Travis sighed.

“In a lot of situations, I’m all for democracy. When we get there, we can have all the democracy you want. I’ll be pleasantly retired, and you folks can fight it all out among yourselves. But this is going to be an executive decision. As far as I’ll go is to ask for another show of hands. Those who trust Jubal’s judgment, let’s see them.”

There was a long, pregnant pause, and slowly the hands began to go up. Two, three, then five. A few more. It wasn’t as ringing an endorsement as the first vote had been, but it was a slim majority. I was surprised, frankly. I would have voted yes if I had a vote, but in some ways it seemed to be moving all too quickly.

“Throw the switch, Jubal,” Travis said. I found myself on my feet, alongside Polly, and we weren’t the only ones.

Without even a pause, Papa threw the switch.

And the lights went out on the overhead screen. All of them. All the stars, just gone.

It’s just a screen, I told myself. Maybe we’re in some sort of limbo, and after a few weeks or a few months we would come out of it. Meanwhile, life seemed to be going on as normal. I was breathing. We weren’t heating up or cooling down, at least not that we could sense.

All eyes were on the overhead screen. I think it was dark for around half a minute. Then it lit up again, with a simple message that stretched from one side to the other:

RECALCULATING

I guess that’s how long it took the ship’s navigating computer to assess all the new data and figure out where we were. That message was up there for maybe ten seconds, then all the stars came out again. Only right in the center of the screen was a blazing yellow star, brighter than any star I had ever seen, even Old Sun, looking back when I was young.

It was New Sun, and it was
close
.

But even that wasn’t the star of the show. Off to one side, big as a beach ball tossed in the air, was a half-moon shape, vividly striped on the side facing New Sun. There was a faint system of rings around it, and I could see some smaller half moons here and there. It looked like pictures of Jupiter.

Travis was communing with his navigation console. He looked up, grinning.

“That would be New Sun Zeta, the sixth planet from New Sun. We’ve known about it and a lot of the others for decades. It’s about 50 percent larger than Jupiter and has six moons that we know of . . .” He looked up, and smiled again. “And I can see a seventh, just from here.”

There was a lot of cheering, a lot of backslapping. It felt like an occasion for champagne, but no one had brought any.

But after a few minutes, Polly noticed something.

“Look, Cassie. It’s moving.”

And it sure was. In only a few minutes, we had passed behind it and were leaving it behind. And New Sun had moved visibly. Travis turned to Jubal with a frown.

“What’s happening, my friend?”

“What do you mean, Travis?”

“We seem to be moving right on through the system. What’s the deal?”

“Well, sure,” Papa said. “We be traveling at .78 of the speed of light. Sure, we gonna go through it right fast.”

“But . . .”

“You said get us to New Sun, Travis. I figgered you knew we gonna be goin’ through it real fast.”

Polly:

Even if we had been stuck with the situation, it wouldn’t have been as bad as the other choices we had faced. But it looked bad at first.

Our speed, our momentum, had been tunneled through space right along with our mass. There was no way for the warp drive to cancel out our speed, or our direction. We would have to do it the old-fashioned way.

Twenty years of deceleration, then a long time of accelerating to the halfway point, and the same amount decelerating until we arrived, more or less motionless to the New Sun system. But we would never be traveling at .78c again. We wouldn’t reach nearly that speed on the way back.

So there were a lot of upset people, and Travis had to calm them down. He huddled with Papa for a while, then he started laughing. Papa looked indignant.

“You just ast me to get us to New Sun. And that’s what I done.”

“It’s okay, Jubal. You did it, and no one else could have. Friends, listen up here. It turns out there’s a simple solution. It’s not a perfect one, but it’s better than what we have now, and I think you’ll all be happy with it. Remember, this warp drive got us out of hot water. We will never have to test out Jubal’s warning about going any faster.”

And he explained it to them, and soon we were all laughing in relief.

“I guess we would have seen it for ourselves, eventually,” Travis told us all later, at a gathering of much of the family back at our house. We were still working on fixing the damage that had happened when we were forced out, but it wasn’t extensive.

The solution really was simple, and obvious once you got your mind around the idea that we could now be anywhere, virtually instantaneously. I say virtually, because Papa’s still working out just how long it took us. It was less than a second, he knew that for sure. “I think it was no time, but clocks don’t figger real good when you get to messin’ with space-time,” was the best explanation I could get out of him.

So what we did was use the warp drive again, and move ourselves back to a point where twenty years of deceleration would bring us to rest in a comfortable orbit around New Sun, right near New Earth. And
bam
, there we were. Not even that dramatic, actually. Papa just threw the switch, and there we were.

We had to turn the ship, which was a messy project that took almost a week. The engines had to be shut down, which meant that everything was suddenly at a slight slant. We had to drain a lot of water from the lakes, shut down the rivers. And everything had to be tied down. We were given a week, but still, when the engines shut down, a lot of crockery spilled from cupboards, a lot of furniture slid slowly to a wall. Nothing catastrophic, but a lot of little messes.

So now we’re decelerating. We will be getting to New Sun in only twenty years. We shaved many years off the trip.

But as usual with Papa, there was a kicker I hadn’t even thought of.

One day not long ago Travis was sitting around with Cassie and me, talking about all the excitement, now that it was wrapped up and back to more or less normal. I mentioned what an impressive device the warp drive was. He laughed and looked me in the eye.