Starfarers

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TO
JIM FUNARO
WHO WAS LED MANY A CONTACT MISSION

Captain:
Ricardo Iriarte Nansen Aguilar

Mate and first pilot:
Lajos Ruszek

Second pilot:
Jean Kilbirnie

Engineer:
Yu Wenji

Second engineer:
Aivin Brent

Physicist:
Hanny Dayan

Planetologist:
Timothy Cleland

Biologist and physician:
Mamphela Mokoena

Biochemist:
Selim ibn Ali Zeyd

Linguist and Semantician:
Ajit Nathu Sundaram

“Look yonder.”
The man pointed northeast and aloft. “That very bright star in the Milky Way. Do you know it?”

“Yes,” answered his son. “Alpha Centauri. The nearest to us. It’s two, really, and a third that is dim.”

Don Lucas Nansen Ochoa nodded, pleased. Juan was barely past his seventh birthday. “Now look up from it, a little to your right. That other brilliant one is Beta Centauri.”

“Is it close, too?”

“No, it’s far off. Almost seventy times as far, I have read. But it shines thousands of times as bright as our sun. Most of those we see are giants. Else our eyes could not find them across their distances.”

Man and boy sat their horses for a while in silence. They had drawn rein after leaving well behind them the house and its outbuildings, walled off by a cedar grove. The autumn air rested cool, still, and altogether clear. They had light enough without a moon, stars crowding heaven, galactic belt gleaming frosty. The Paraguayan plain rolled away through this dusk toward darkness, grassland broken by stands of trees and big, stump-shaped anthills. No cattle were in view, but now and then a lowing went mournfully through the early night.

“Where are
they?
” whispered the boy at last. Awe shivered in his words.

Don Lucas’s hand traced an arc along the constellation. “Look on upward from Beta, to your left. Epsilon—do you see it?—and, past it, Zeta. The name Zeta means it’s the sixth brightest in the Centaur. That’s where the signs are.”

“At Zeta?”

“No, as nearly as I can find out from the news, that star
just happens to be in our line of sight to the things. They are actually far beyond it.”

“Are they … are they coming here?”

“Nobody knows. But none of them are headed straight toward us. And we don’t know what they are, natural or artificial or what. All the astronomers can say is that there are those fiery points of X rays moving very fast, very far away. The news programs yammer about an alien civilization, but really, it’s too soon for anybody to tell.” Don Lucas laughed a bit. “Least of all an old
estanciero
like me. I’m sorry, you asked me to explain what’s been on the television, and I cannot say much more than that you must be patient.”

Juan pounced. “Are you?”

“Um-m,
I hope they’ll corral the truth while I’m still above ground. But you should surely live to hear it.”

“What do
you
think?”

Don Lucas straightened in the saddle. Juan saw his face shadowed by the wide-brimmed hat like a pair of wings against the sky. “I may be wrong, of course,” he said. “Yet I dare hope someone is faring from star to star, and someday men will.”

Suddenly overwhelmed, cold lightnings aflicker in him, the boy stared past his father, outward and outward. It was as if he felt the planet whirling beneath him, about to cast him off into endlessness; and his spirit rejoiced.

He became the grandfather of Ricardo Nansen Aguilar.

With never
a sight of beautiful, changeable Earth, Farside gained a night which stars made into no more than a setting for their brilliance. And the Lunar bulk shielded it from the radio noise of the mother world; and the stable mass underfoot and the near-vacuum overhead were likewise ideal for many kinds of science. It was no wonder that some of the most gifted people alive were gathered here, in spite of monastic quarters and minimal amenities. Besides, Muramoto thought, those should improve. Already the desolation of stone and dust was redeemed by an
austere elegance of domes, detectors, dishes, taut and silvery power lines.

As his car neared observatory headquarters, he glanced through its bubbletop and found the red beacon light that was Mars.
People there too, nowadays
. An old thrill tingled.
Yes, man does not live by bread alone, nor by economics and politics. It was the vision of ships flying through heaven that got us back into space in earnest. Damn it, this time we’ll stay, and keep going!

He reached the topside turret, linked airlocks, crossed over, and descended. The corridor below felt doubly drab by contrast. However, he could move fast along it, enjoying the long, low-gravity lope. Ordinarily an officer of the United States Aerospace Force was expected to be more formal.

He had called ahead. The director awaited him in her office. She greeted him a little warily, offered him a chair, told the outer door to close, and sat down again behind her desk. For a few minutes they exchanged ritual courtesies—how were things going here, how were things back home, how had his flight from Earth been and his drive from Port Apollo?

Then Helen Lewis leaned forward and said, “Well, I’m sure your time is as valuable as mine, Colonel. Shall we get directly to business? Why have you requested this meeting, and why did you want it to be confidential?”

He knew she shared the distaste for the military that had been common among intellectuals at least since the Siberian Action. His best approach was straightforwardness. “You seemed to prefer it that way, Dr. Lewis. May I be frank? You’ve entered a request for a large expansion of your facilities. The wide-orbit interferometric system, especially, would count as high priced even in free and easy times, and you know how tight budgets are at present. I’m afraid a wish list of research projects won’t open any purses soon. After all, you’re still discovering marvelous things with the equipment on hand. “What do you really want to search for?”

Her gaze challenged his. “Why do you, why does your service, want to know?”

“Because we’ve gotten hints that this may be something
we’d go for, too.” Muramoto lifted his palm. “No, please, not with any idea of warlike application. If our guess is right, it is an area that concerns us strongly, but ‘we’ are not just a few men and women in uniform. We include civilians, scientists, and certain members of the President’s Advisory Council.”

She flushed beneath the gray hair. A fist clenched. “My God, does that clique decide everything these days?”

Muramoto had his own wistfulness about the republic that Jefferson helped found, but it wasn’t relevant today. “Myself, I hope your request will be approved. Yes, and I’d like it to be an international undertaking, as you’ve proposed. So would my superiors, partly to save American money, partly on principle. We aren’t blind chauvinists.”

Taken aback, she sat quiet for a while before she murmured, “I … presume … not.”

“But you haven’t given us reasons to fight for what you want,” he said. “If you’ll tell me what you have in mind and why it shouldn’t be publicized”—he smiled—“you’ll find we military are pretty good at keeping our mouths shut.”

Lewis reached a decision. She actually returned his smile. “The truth is nothing desperate. It’s bound to come out in due course, and certainly should. But the potential for sensationalism—” She drew breath. “You see, our latest observations lie at the limits of sensitivity available to us at present. They could be in error. An announcement, followed by a retraction, would do worse than wreck several careers. It would harm this whole institution.”

“I see. I thought so,” he replied. Intently: “You think you have found more starship trails, don’t you?”

She nodded. Although he was not surprised, his mind whirled back through time, twenty-seven years, and again he was a boy, watching the news, listening to the discussions, feeling the dream explode into reality.

Pointlike sources of hard X rays with radio tails, crisscrossing a region in the Centaur. Some have come suddenly into being as we watched, others have blanked out. Parallax measurements taken across interplanetary spans show they
are five thousand light-years distant. Therefore maximum transverse motion joins with Doppler effect to show they are traveling at virtually the speed of light.