Starborne (14 page)

“
Not highly probable, though,”
says Heinz. “
The odds favor us, you say.”

“
Not highly probable, no, but possible, distinctly possible, and what is possible is worth a little thought when that possibi
lity can be fatal to our endeavor. You are an engineer, Heinz: you deal in tangible things, in absolute concepts of what works and what does not. I am a mathemat
i
cian. We are more poetic than you, do you understand me? I deal in a
x
ioms and certainties; but
I also know that beneath the axioms lie only assumptions, and beneath the assumptions lies
—
chaos!”

“
Rely on faith, then, if you can
’
t trust your own equations,”
says the year-captain. “
We all took a leap into the dark when we signed on. If you didn
’
t thin
k the drive would work properly, you should have stayed home.”

“
I say only that there is a finite chance that it will not.”

“
And therefore
—
?”

“
And therefore, as I have just said, the more jumps we make, the greater the likelihood that one of them will be a
bad one. And so I argue that we ought not to make any shunt that is not absolutely necessary. By which I mean that we should not attempt a realspace re-entry without complete assurance that the world we have picked is likely to be a place where we
’
ll wan
t
to settle, because the risk of moving from one reality state to another is so great that we will want to attempt it only when there is a high order of probability that the risk is worth taking.”

Paco says, in what is for him an uncharacteristically subdue
d and thoughtful tone, “
You know, there
’
s something to that. The odds that any given Earth-sized planet has anything like Earth-like living cond
i
tions are
—
what? A hundred to one against? So we may find ourselves having to make a hundred jumps, five hundred
, a thousand, if we don
’
t get lucky right away. Which multiplies the shunt risks enormously, if I follow Sieglinde correctly. If there
’
s any real likelihood that the drive might fail, we ought to be damned sure ahead of time that whatever place we
’
re jump
i
ng to is
—”

Julia, who has the actual responsibility for operating the nospace drive, says irritably, “
This is a stupid conversation, and we
’
re not su
p
posed to be stupid people. Why are we even discussing this? There
’
s been a vote and we
’
re going to take a
look at Planet A, because we have good reason to believe that it
’
s the sort of place that we came out here to find, as far as we can tell without actually getting up close to it and ta
k
ing a good look, and that
’
s all there is to it. Heinz is right. Sieglin
de is pulling demons out of nowhere. When we make our next shunt, the stardrive will behave exactly as we want it to behave, and you all know it. And even if there
’
s some slight mathematical risk hanging on each jump, we
’
ve already reached agreement that
P
lanet A is a place worth taking risks to find. Our job is to find the way to Planet A, not to debate hypothetical nightmare scenarios.”

“
Yes, we are not stupid,”
says Heinz. “
But we are rest
less. We live in a confined place and we think too much. And if we think long enough, eventually we begin to think stupidly. Enough of this, Sieglinde. We will never find any place to live at all, if we are too terrified of these probability problems to u
n
dertake even a single survey mission. You knew all this when we set out. Why did you wait until now to say an
y
thing? If somebody else had raised this string of last-minute objections while you were trying to get on with the work at hand, you
’
d be trying to
cut off his head by now.”
He turns to the year-captain. “
Rule her out of order, will you? And then let
’
s adjourn.”

“
What do you say, Sieglinde?”
the year-captain asks. “
Can we drop this, please?”

The big woman shrugs. The manic force has gone out of her a
s su
d
denly as it came. She has made her little bit of trouble and is ready to relent. She looks tired and defeated and to the year-captain
’
s relief she seems as ready to be done with this as the rest of them. The point she has raised is a troublesome one,
but, as Heinz has observed, this is not the moment to be discussing it. And in an almost toneless voice Sie
g
linde says, “
Whatever you want, captain. Whatever you want.”

***

Until now the starship, in the absence of any specific destination, has been follow
ing an essentially undirected path through the nospace tube, simply traveling away from Earth rather than toward some particular star. Its course, such as it is, has been chosen to carry it into one of the more densely populated areas of the immediate sec
t
or of the celestial sphere in which Earth
’
s sun is located; but the intent of the planners of the voyage was that the voyagers would at some point redirect the ship toward a star they would choose themselves on the basis of planetary data collected in the
course of the journey.

Now that time has arrived. The
Wotan
must swing its course through nospace toward the star that is the primary of Zed Hesper
’
s Planet A; and, when it has reached the vicinity of that star, it must break itself out of the nospace tube
in which it has been traveling and return to the Ei
n
steinian continuum, so that surveillance of Planet A may be carried out by ordinary spacefaring methods, an orbital circuit in a probe ship, d
i
rect visual inspection, and then perhaps an actual landing if the survey of surface conditions from nearby is in any way encouraging.

Nospace travel is a fundamentally non-linear phenomenon. If you propose to make a surface journey between two cities on Ea
rth that are three thousand kilometers apart
—
Los Angeles and Montreal, let us say
—
you will expect to cover a distance of three thousand kilometers during the course of the trip, no more, no less, and the elapsed time of the journey will be a function of t
h
e average time it takes to cover
one
kilometer, multiplied by three thousand. There are no short-cuts; there are no exceptions to the rule that one must travel a distance of three thousand kilometers in order to make a journey of three thousand kil
o
meters.
Not so in nospace. Linear measurements applicable in the cla
s
sical continuum have no meaning there. Spatial relationships between points in the universe that have been determined by conventional means are irrelevant in nospace. Nospace is all short-cuts,
nothing
but
short-cuts. In that special space, flattened and curved and doubled and redoubled upon itself as it is, the logic of linear travel is useless and paradoxes abound. Dimensions are collapsed and transformed; the inf
i
nite universe is infinitely ad
jacent to itself; all normal understanding of such concepts as “
near”
and “
far,”
“
here”
and “
there,”
“
toward”
and “
away from”
must be discarded. In nospace it may be quicker to travel between two stars five hundred light-years apart than between two that
a
re close neighbors. There may
—
there is at least theoretical basis for the notion
—
be no clear and consistently calculable relationship between realworld distance between two points and nospace transit time between those points at all.

There are, however, pr
oxies and equivalents. With the aid of appr
o
priate computational power one can plot a set of transformations that will carry one through nospace along quasi-geodetic lines corresponding to actual realspace vectors and allow one actually to reach a pre-sele
cted destination. At least, so the governing equations of nospace travel demonstrate, and in the brief experimental flights of the
Columbus
and then the
Ultima Thule
those equations were found to hold true.

The
Columbus
, after making a journey of not quite
one light-year from Earth in a period of eleven Earth-days, was able successfully to re-enter Einsteinian space, accurately measure its distance from its starting point, and, returning to nospace without difficulty, carry out its homeward voyage in the s
a
me span of time. The
Ultima Thule
, going in a different direction, found itself a little more than a light-year from home after just nine days: it too was able to move out of nospace and back into it and to aim itself satisfactorily toward Earth. Despite S
ie
g
linde
’
s sudden willful skepticism, the year-captain prefers to think that there is every reason to believe that the
Wotan
would have just as little difficulty redirecting itself in nospace in order to head itself toward the Einsteinian location of the s
tar it meant to visit, and then in leaving n
o
space to execute a survey of the habitability of that star
’
s planet. He u
n
derstands her point that there is some risk with every shunt and that the more shunts they make, the greater is the number of times they
place themselves in jeopardy. But they must find a world where they can live; and for that, the taking of certain risks is unavoidable. She is simply overwrought. He has no regrets about quashing her objection to the su
r
vey shunt.

The year-captain,
ex offi
cio
, is the head of the team that will calculate and achieve this maneuver. But he is no expert on such things; the real work of the group will be done by five other crew-members. Roy and Sieglinde will handle the mathematical aspects. Paco is the master n
av
i
gator. Julia programs and operates the star drive. Heinz, the ship
’
s d
e
signer, is the prime generalist who comprehends all of the specialties of the other members of the team; he will be the interface, the grand co
m
municator, the true captain of the ent
erprise.

This first meeting of the group has been only a preliminary one. Hesper was there for the beginning of it. He has shown the others where, in normal-space reckoning, the star of Planet A is located, according to the set of correlatives that he has
worked out. After Hesper goes, there is much consulting of star-maps and the ship
’
s navigation circuitry. There will be need for much more, before the actual jump is attempted. Ult
i
mately the drive intelligence itself is going to do the real work of gettin
g them there; but the intelligence, clever though it is, is as finite as the minds of its makers. It has only limited ability to compensate for bu
n
gled instructions. They must figure out precisely what it is they want to do before they authorize the drive
intelligence to do it. Or as precisely as they are able to manage. And then pray. But to whom? And with what hope that their prayers will be heard?

***

Sieglinde
’
s outburst convinces the year-captain that the meeting has gone on long enough. He keeps them
together only a few minutes more, so that he can summarize this day
’
s work and get a consensus vote for the log. Then he adjourns.

Sieglinde is the first to leave, a fraction of a second later, striding from the room without a word, the implacable stride o
f a Valkyrie. She was poorly named, the year-captain thinks: Brü
nnhilde should have been her name, not Sieglinde. Paco and Roy go out together, arm in arm, bound for the lounge and their millionth game of
Go
. Julia trails after them.