New Frontiers (32 page)

“It's past midnight, Dad.”

Dad's frown melted slowly into a smile. “Yes, so it is. Well, happy birthday, son.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“I had a surprise party arranged for you,” Dad said, almost wistfully. “With a videophone call arranged from your mother and sister.”

Tom tried not to laugh. “I guess I surprised you, instead.”

“I guess you did.”

Dad spent almost half an hour studying Tom's discovery.

“Well, it's not like Earth is
now,”
he said at last, “but Earth had a lot of methane in its atmosphere a few billion years ago.”

“It did?” Tom brightened a little.

“Yes, back when life first began on our world.”

“So this world is like ours was, way back then?”

“Perhaps,” his father said. “You've made a real discovery, Thomas. This is the first world we've found that could become Earthlike, in a few billion years. By studying this world we might be able to learn a lot more about our own.”

“Really?”

Dad was grinning broadly now. “We'll have to write a paper for the journal about this.”

“We? You mean, us?”

“You made the discovery, didn't you? Daniels and Daniels, coauthors.”

“Wow!”

The two of them worked side by side for several more hours, using the telescope's sensors to measure as much as they could about this distant new world.

Finally, as the morning shift started coming into the center, Tom asked, “Have you ever made a big discovery, Dad?”

His father shook his head and smiled sorrowfully. “Can't say that I have, Tom. I've put my whole life into astronomy, but I've never made what you could call a big discovery.”

Tom nodded glumly.

“But here you are, fifteen years old, and you've already made a significant discovery. You're going to make a fine astronomer, my boy.”

“I don't know if I want to be an astronomer,” Tommy said.

His father looked shocked. “Why not?”

“I don't know,” said Tom. “I was lucky tonight, I guess. But is it really worth all the work? Night after night, day after day? I mean, you've spent your whole life being an astronomer, and it hasn't made you rich or famous, has it?”

“No, it hasn't,” his father admitted.

“And it keeps you away from Mom and us kids a lot of the time. Far away.”

“That's true enough.”

“So what good is it? What does astronomy do for us?”

Dad gave him a funny look. Getting up from the computer, he said, “Let's take a walk outside.”

“Outside?” That surprised Tom.

He followed his father down the bare concrete corridor and they struggled into their outdoor suits.

“Science is like a great building, Tom,” Dad said as he opened the inner hatch. “Like a cathedral that's still being built, one brick at a time. You added a new brick tonight.”

“One little brick,” Tom mumbled.

“That's the way it's built, son. One little brick adds to all the others.”

Dad swung the outer hatch open. “But there's always so much more to learn. The cathedral isn't finished yet. Perhaps it never will be.”

They stepped outside onto the barren dusty ground. Through the visor of his helmet Tom saw the spidery frameworks of the Lunar Farside Observatory's giant telescopes rising all around them. And beyond stretched the universe of stars, thousands, millions of stars glowing in the eternal night of deep space, looking down on the battered face of the Moon where they stood.

Tom felt a lump in his throat. “Maybe I'll stick with astronomy, after all,” he said to his father. And he thought it might be fun to add a few more bricks to the cathedral.

 

AFTERWORD TO

“A PALE BLUE DOT”

 

This story was inspired by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who in 1967 discovered the first pulsar while she was doing “grunge work” as a graduate student at Cambridge University. Pulsars are collapsed stars that emit powerful pulses of radio energy.

 

INTRODUCTION TO

“INSPIRATION”

 

In this story we again breach the frontier of time travel.

Traveling into the past or the future is not forbidden by the known laws of physics, and what is not forbidden might one day be accomplished by determined human minds and hands.

When H. G. Wells first published his novella
The Time Machine
, Albert Einstein was sixteen years old. William Thomson, newly made Lord Kelvin, was the grand old man of physics, and a stern guardian of the orthodoxy who proclaimed that physicists had discovered just about everything that there was to know. The frontier of knowledge was closing, according to him.

Wells's idea of time as a fourth dimension that we might be able to travel through would have been anathema to Kelvin, but it would have lit up young Albert's mind. Was Einstein inspired by Wells? Did a science fiction tale lead to Einstein's concept of relativity?

Hence this story of Wells, Kelvin, teenaged Einstein, and a time traveler.

And one other person, as well.

 

INSPIRATION

 

HE WAS AS
close to despair as only a lad of seventeen can be.

“But you heard what the professor said,” he moaned. “It is all finished. There is nothing left to do.”

The lad spoke in German, of course. I had to translate it for Mr. Wells.

Wells shook his head. “I fail to see why such splendid news should upset the boy so.”

I said to the youngster, “Our British friend says you should not lose hope. Perhaps the professor is mistaken.”

“Mistaken? How could that be? He is a famous man! A nobleman! A baron!”

I had to smile. The lad's stubborn disdain for authority figures would become world-famous one day. But it was not in evidence this summer afternoon in A.D. 1896.

We were sitting in a sidewalk café with a magnificent view of the Danube and the city of Linz. Delicious odors of cooking sausages and bakery pastries wafted from the kitchen inside. Despite the splendid warm sunshine, though, I felt chilled and weak, drained of what little strength I had remaining.

“Where is that blasted waitress?” Wells grumbled. “We've been here half an hour, at the least.”

“Why not just lean back and enjoy the afternoon, sir?” I suggested tiredly. “This is the best view in all the area.”

Herbert George Wells was not a patient man. He had just scored a minor success in Britain with his first novel and had decided to treat himself to a vacation in Austria. He came to that decision under my influence, of course, but he did not yet realize that. At age twenty-nine, he had a lean, hungry look to him that would mellow only gradually with the coming years of prestige and prosperity.

Albert was round-faced and plumpish; still had his baby fat on him, although he had started a moustache as most teenaged boys did in those days. It was a thin, scraggly black wisp, nowhere near the full white brush it would become. If all went well with my mission.

It had taken me an enormous amount of maneuvering to get Wells and this teenager to the same place at the same time. The effort had nearly exhausted all my energies. Young Albert had come to see Professor Thomson with his own eyes, of course. Wells had been more difficult; he had wanted to see Salzburg, the birthplace of Mozart. I had taken him instead to Linz, with a thousand assurances that he would find the trip worthwhile.

He complained endlessly about Linz, the city's lack of beauty, the sour smell of its narrow streets, the discomfort of our hotel, the dearth of restaurants where one could get decent food—by which he meant burnt mutton. Not even the city's justly famous linzer torte pleased him. “Not as good as a decent trifle,” he groused. “Not as good by half.”

I, of course, knew several versions of Linz that were even less pleasing, including one in which the city was nothing more than charred radioactive rubble and the Danube so contaminated that it glowed at night all the way down to the Black Sea. I shuddered at that vision and tried to concentrate on the task at hand.

It had almost required physical force to get Wells to take a walk across the Danube on the ancient stone bridge and up the Pöstlingberg to this little sidewalk café. He had huffed with anger when we had started out from our hotel at the city's central square, then soon was puffing with exertion as we toiled up the steep hill. I was breathless from the climb also. In later years a tram would make the ascent, but on this particular afternoon we had been obliged to walk.

He had been mildly surprised to see the teenager trudging up the precipitous street just a few steps ahead of us. Recognizing that unruly crop of dark hair from the audience at Thomson's lecture that morning, Wells had graciously invited Albert to join us for a drink.

“We deserve a beer or two after this blasted climb,” he said, eying me unhappily.

Panting from the climb, I translated to Albert, “Mr. Wells … invites you … to have a refreshment … with us.”

The youngster was pitifully grateful, although he would order nothing stronger than tea. It was obvious that Thomson's lecture had shattered him badly. So now we sat on uncomfortable cast-iron chairs and waited—they for the drinks they had ordered, me for the inevitable. I let the warm sunshine soak into me and hoped it would rebuild at least some of my strength.

The view was little short of breathtaking: the brooding castle across the river, the Danube itself streaming smoothly and actually blue as it glittered in the sunlight, the lakes beyond the city and the blue-white snow peaks of the Austrian Alps hovering in the distance like ghostly petals of some immense unworldly flower.

But Wells complained, “That has to be the ugliest castle I have ever seen.”

“What did the gentleman say?” Albert asked.

“He is stricken by the sight of the Emperor Friedrich's castle,” I answered sweetly.

“Ah. Yes, it has a certain grandeur to it, doesn't it?”

Wells had all the impatience of a frustrated journalist. “Where is that damnable waitress? Where is our beer?”

“I'll find the waitress,” I said, rising uncertainly from my iron-hard chair. As his ostensible tour guide, I had to remain in character for a while longer, no matter how tired I felt. But then I saw what I had been waiting for.

“Look!” I pointed down the steep street. “Here comes the professor himself!”

William Thomson, First Baron Kelvin of Largs, was striding up the pavement with much more bounce and energy than any of us had shown. He was seventy-one, his silver-gray hair thinner than his impressive gray beard, lean almost to the point of looking frail. Yet he climbed the ascent that had made my heart thunder in my ears as if he were strolling amiably across some campus quadrangle.

Wells shot to his feet and leaned across the iron rail of the café. “Good afternoon, your Lordship.” For a moment I thought he was going to tug at his forelock.

Kelvin squinted at him. “You were in my audience this morning, were you not?”

“Yes, m'lud. Permit me to introduce myself: I am H. G. Wells.”

“Ah. You're a physicist?”

“A writer, sir.”

“Journalist?”

“Formerly. Now I am a novelist.”

“Really? How keen.”

Young Albert and I had also risen to our feet. Wells introduced us properly and invited Kelvin to join us.

“Although I must say,” Wells murmured as Kelvin came round the railing and took the empty chair at our table, “that the service here leaves quite a bit to be desired.”

“Oh, you have to know how to deal with the Teutonic temperament,” said Kelvin jovially as we all sat down. He banged the flat of his hand on the table so hard it made us all jump. “Service!” he bellowed. “Service here!”

Miraculously, the waitress appeared from the doorway and trod stubbornly to our table. She looked very unhappy—sullen, in fact. Sallow pouting face with brooding brown eyes and downturned mouth. She pushed back a lock of hair that had strayed across her forehead.

“We've been waiting for our beer,” Wells said to her.

“And now this gentleman has joined us—”

“Permit me, sir,” I said. It
was
my job, after all. In German I asked her to bring us three beers and the tea that Albert had ordered and to do it quickly.

She looked the four of us over as if we were smugglers or criminals of some sort, her eyes lingering briefly on Albert, then turned without a word or even a nod and went back inside the café.

I stole a glance at Albert. His eyes were riveted on Kelvin, his lips parted as if he wanted to speak but could not work up the nerve. He ran a hand nervously through his thick mop of hair. Kelvin seemed perfectly at ease, smiling affably, his hands laced across his stomach just below his beard; he was the man of authority, acknowledged by the world as the leading scientific figure of his generation.

“Can it be really true?” Albert blurted at last. “Have we learned everything of physics that can be learned?”

He spoke in German, of course, the only language he knew. I immediately translated for him, exactly as he asked his question.

Once he understood what Albert was asking, Kelvin nodded his gray old head sagely. “Yes, yes. The young men in the laboratories today are putting the final dots over the
i
's, the final crossings of the
t
's. We've just about finished physics; we know at last all there is to be known.”

Albert looked crushed.

Kelvin did not need a translator to understand the youngster's emotion. “If you are thinking of a career in physics, young man, then I heartily advise you to think again. By the time you complete your education there will be nothing left for you to do.”

“Nothing?” Wells asked as I translated. “Nothing at all?”