Star Trek: The Original Series - 082 - Federation (3 page)

I[ took Thorsen three minutes to destro), the pla(form. Bodies
1oating everywhere, a cloud of death surrounding the distant Earth. as it always had. In two more minutes, he had used the particle cannon to neutralize his own troopers as well. History’ had too often shown that great men were brought down by’ those who dared to share the glory for others’ actions. Thorsen.felt no remorse because none was warranted.p>

At 02.‘11 GMT, Thorsen sent a coded signal to an Optimum listerling post on the moon. The listening post responded with a
li~17t plan that would guide the.fighter to Thorsen‘3’ meeting with de.sti~Tv. And Thorsen’s meeting with destiny would be humaniO”s
t
rt~ing point as well.p>

Because, as of March 19, 2061, the key to total victory over the Optimum’s opposition, and to the resulting emergence’ of a new Order and salvation for the world, lay in the hands of a young scientist named Zefiram Cochrane, who was poised on a threshoM from which he would forever change humaniO’%’ place in the universe.

Driven by the wings qf history and dreams of salvation for all who were
vorthy, and determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Adrik Thorsen fiew jbr Titan.

His plan was simple, efficient, optimal—whoever controlled the genius of Zqfram Cochrane would control the future of humanity.

And as o[‘March 19, 2061, the future of humaniO’ belonged to Adrik Thorsen.

CHRISTOPHER’S LANDING, TITAN Earth Standard: March 19, 2061

For just one moment, a fleeting instant of the time his life would span, Zefram Cochrane thought he heard the stars sing to him.

He could see them overhead, through the transparent slabs of aluminum that formed the dome over this part of the colony of Christopher’s Landing, Earth’s largest permanent outpost in near-Saturn space. Beyond the dome, the frozen nitrogen winds of Titan swept away thick orange streamers of crystallizing methane and hydrogen cyanide, as they chased the terminator to clear the dense atmosphere for only a few minutes between the clouds of day and the mists of night, allowing, briefly, dark bands to appear in the sky above. In that darkness, the stars flickered for Cochrane, creating a shimmering jeweled band around the dull yellow arc of Saturn that filled a quarter of the sky, so far from the sun that the light reflecting from it made the enormous planet almost imperceptible in Titan’s twilight. Its rings, head-on in the same orbital plane as the moon, Were invisible.

In that narrow window of time, between the beginning and end of a day unlike any other in human history, Cochrane stared at Stars he had known all his life, and they were unfamiliar to him.

Alone among all humans now alive, as far as he and most others knew, he had seen them as no one ever had. Blazing in deep space.

Orbiting a world belonging to another star.

Four and a third light-years from Earth.

Four months ago.

Cochrane closed his eyes to see the stars as he had seen them then, the constellations familiar to billions of his fellow beings shifted to new perspectives never seen before.

Four and a third light-years. A world so far away the fastest impulse-powered probes took more than two decades to reach it, and then took more than four years longer to transmit back the data they recorded.

And Zefram Cochrane had gone there and returned in two hundred and forty-three days.

Faster than any human had ever traveled before.

Faster than light.

Cochrane blinked open his eyes at the sudden feeling that the stars here were staring down at him with shock and approbation for daring to invade the sanctity of their domain. In response, he felt laughter rise up in him. He couldn’t help it. He stamped his foot into the engineered soil beneath his boots and unexpectedly bounced a few centimeters in the moon’s half-gravity.

The awkward moment as he waved his arms for balance broke the previous moment’s spell, and he finally realized that the pleasing harmonies he heard were not from the offended stars above, but from the string quartet that played in the assembly hall of the governor’s home adjoining the domed field. The faint melody, festive even over the perpetual background hum of the immense air circulators and muffled howl of the outside winds, sounded like something by Brahms, but he couldn’t place it.

Cochrane looked down at the bare soil beneath him, the crushed and sterilized decomposed rocks of an alien world in which Earth bacteria worked to change its composition, cleansing it of Titan’s octane rain and hydrocarbon sludge. Someday grass and trees would grow here, so that children would run in play and lovers would stroll and old people would sit in contentment on benches by a splashing fountain as they grew old together, gazing up at the stars and knowing that others like them looked back from different distant worlds.

Now the laughter that had been growing in him faded and he felt tears form in his eyes for no reason he understood. What books would he never read that were still to be written on those different distant worlds? What poetry would he never understand? What music? What paintings, what sculpture, what histories unimagined would play out without him now that the human stage had been expanded to… “Infinity.” Cochrane jumped at the word so aptly spoken, startled by the unexpected company. He recognized the voice, of course. His ship, the Bonaventure, had cost more than 300 million Eurodollars, and the precarious state of the world was such that government agencies were not inclined to turn over that level of funding to thirty-one-year-old physicists who had the audacity to question the most basic tenets of nature. But the voice belonged to the man who had paid for his ship—Micah Brack.

Brack owed allegiance to no government funding committee or board of directors. The debit slips the tycoon had authorized over the eight years of Cochrane’s single-minded pursuit to overturn the Einsteinian mind-set of the Brahmins of modern science had come from Brack’s own pocket. Considering that most data agencies placed him among the ten wealthiest individuals in the system, with holdings on every planet and moon humans had colonized, that pocket was virtually without limit. Most of Christopher’s Landing existed because of Brack’s foresight, and his impatience with those who merely looked up at the stars, unable to grasp the promise they held. In Micah Brack, Cochrane had found a champion, a backer, and most importantly, a friend.

‘%orry to startle you.” Brack put his hand on Cochrane’s shoulder, glancing up to see what Cochrane had seen, so far away.

He nodded to the sounds of the reception coming from the lit doorways and windows of the governor’s metal-walled home.

“But they’re about to notice the star of their party is missing.” Cochrane knew that as well. Since his return to the system, less than fifty hours ago, he had had no time to himself. He wasn’t Used to that kind of intrusion. He didn’t like it. Never had. And he had no intention of ever getting used to it, even though Brack had warned him about the publics probable reaction to news of his accomplishment almost three years ago. At the time of that conversation, they had been out past Neptune, with Sternbach and Okuda, literally bouncing off the walls of the John Cabal, an old lunar ice freighter Brack had refitted as Cochrane’s microgravity lab. The freighter had allowed Cochrane and his team to conduct their research light-hours from Earth’s military surveillance nets and the gravimetric disruptions of the sun’s gravity well.

Brack had been with them that day, on one of his infrequent trips from Earth—the day the team’s first, hundred-kilogram, fluctuation superimpellor test sled had literally warped itself into a smear of rainbow-colored light and streaked off into something other than normal space-time. Eight minutes later, Cochrane’s scanners had picked up the distinctive radiation signature of the miniature particle curtain he had rigged to self-destruct the sled one minute after launch. It had been a drastic measure, but at the time he had known of no other way to cause a continuum-distortion generator to reenter normal space at a precise moment, had no precise idea of how far the sled would travel, and had no way to predict in which directions it might drift while not in normal space.

When the signature had been confirmed, the vast, hollow drum of the John Cabal’s science bay had echoed with cheers. The sled had traveled eight light-minutes—more than 143 million kilometersrain sixty seconds.

The prototype superimpellor was massive in proportion compared to the initial test devices Cochrane had used in his twenties at MIT to accelerate electrons to twice the velocity of light. But its size had not lessened the effect of the distortion and it had transported the sled at a pseudovelocity eight times faster than light, corresponding to a relativistic time-warp multiplier factor of 2-‘!

That day they had toasted farewell to the EinsteinJan universe, drinking hundred-year-old cognac from squeeze tubes microgravity was no place for effervescent champagne. It wasn’t tha~ Einstein and Hawking and Cross and all the other giants of ph> sics had been proven wrong—the universe had simply opened another window onto its infinite, unpredictable nature for hu-man~, ‘,o peer through, and a whole new science had to be created to de. scribe phenomena that earlier scientists had never seen. and that same. like Einstein, had refused to imagine.

In th;tt refusal, at least, Einstein had been wrong. Because, as (‘ochral~e had predicted, and as he had finally given up trying to explain to nonscientists, whose eyes inexplicably yet inevitably dxxcd over whenever multidimensional equations entered the coxvc~:4ation. the effects of relativity were limited to normal space-time alone. Cochrane’s subsequent bench tests on rapidly decaying particles had shown that once the superimpellor had entered a fluctuating continuum distortion, the well-known time-dilation effects of very fast-speed travel no longer occurred.

Beca~use there was no way for information to be exchanged bct~cen the normal universe and the volume contained within the di~tortionIfor non,, his team continued to remind him— time could progress within the continuum distortion at the same rate
t had progressed when it was last in contact with normal space-time, without contradicting anything that had been established about light-speed being the fastest anything could travel.

OF course, Cochrane knew that eventually, given enough 11ucuation-superimpellor-driven ships visiting enough distant stellar % stems with their own rates of relativistic time, variations in tir:;ckeeping would mount up. He could see that eventually,
ivcn enough superimpellor-driven spacecraft visiting enough distan
planets, a whole new technique of timekeeping and date-recording would have to be developed to account for those local rate-of-time variations and relate them to each other in a mean;,ngful, if complex, way. But by slipping the bounds of [~inste]nian space-time, time dilation was no longer a limiting FactoF to the human exploration of space. More importantly, Brack had observed that day, neither was distance.

Hewever, Brack had gone on to warn, there was a price that
ould have to be paid. When Cochrane returned from the stars as the
r%t human to have traveled faster than light, his name would be uttered in the same breath as Armstrong, Yoshikawa, and

Daar. He would no longer be able to lead a normal, low-profile existence—he and his life would belong to the world. To the universe.

Judging from Cochrane’s reception in Christopher’s Landing, everything Brack had said had come true. Cochrane sometimes wondered about the insight or science behind his friend’s ability to predict the future. He did it so often and so well. But Brack himself denied having any special gifts. “The events of the future are reflected in the events of the past,” he often said. He claimed only to be an attentive student of history.

Cochrane looked back up at the dome, but the brief twilight clearing had passed. The mists of Titan’s night billowed beyond the transparent slabs, roiling in the external floodlights, as if the colony were a lone oceangoing vessel, plying Earth’s North Atlantic in the winter. Cochrane tried not to think about icebergs.

“What was that you said about infinity?” he asked his friend.

Brack grinned and the years dropped from his face. Cochrane guessed the billionaire was in his fifties, middle-aged for the citizens of Earth’s industrialized nations. His short hair was white—Brack paid no attention to fashion or fads—and worn in a style reminiscent of the Caesars. But his eyes sparkled like those of a much younger man, and the smile in his rugged face was always full of the promise of youth. Cochrane guessed having enough wealth to affect the course of human history might give a person reason enough to feel young and energetic, but he often thought there was more complexity within Brack than the man would ever reveal.

“I saw you looking at the stars,” Brack answered. “So wasn’t that what you were thinking? About the new limits to human growth? Or, should I say, that now there are no limits.” “But how did you know that u’as what I was thinking?” Brack glanced away, a smaller smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. Cochrane recognized the expression. Brack wasn’t going to answer the question. Instead he asked one of his own.

“What are the prospects for a colony?” “At Centauri B II?” Cochrane was surprised by Brack’s sudden change of subject. He was operating in his business mode now.

.-Those surveys were complete before I left,” Cochrane answered.

,’They were complete practically before I was born, weren’t they?”

The whole world knew the prospects for a colony at Alpha Centauri were good, and had for decades. Of the hundred or so known solar systems detected beyond Earth, the Centauri system xvas the most thoroughly mapped, primarily because it was also the closest solar system to Earth’s.

Seen with the unaided eye, Alpha Centauri was the third brightest star in the sky, though only visible south of latitude + 30o. Its brilliance was due to its closeness and to it being, in fact, a ternary system composed of three separate stars. Alpha Centauri A was a spectral-type G2 star, a close twin to Earth’s own sun, gravitationally locked to Alpha Centauri B, a slightly larger and brighter K0 star. Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B orbited each other about the same distance apart as the diameter of Earth’s solar system. The third stellar component of the system, Proxima Centauri, was a much smaller red dwarf star, in excess of 400 times more distant from A and B than they were from each other.