The Best of Bova: Volume 1 (30 page)
Read The Best of Bova: Volume 1 Online
Authors: Ben Bova
“The timing must be exact,” she pointed out, not for the first time.
The director-general of Rising Sun, a former engineer, allowed a faint smile to break through his polite impassivity. “The timing will be precise, down to the nanosecond,” he assured her.
Delia was practically quivering with excitement as the time ticked down to midnight. It was going to happen! She would get all the power she needed, generate the antiprotons the ship required, and be ready to lift off for Alpha Centauri.
In less than half an hour.
If everything went the way it should.
If her calculations were right.
Twenty-eight minutes to go. What if my calculations are off? A sudden flare of panic surged through her. Check them again, she told herself. But there isn’t time.
Then a new fear struck her. What if my calculations are right? I’ll be leaving the Moon, leaving the only home I’ve ever known, leaving the solar system. Why? To bring Daddy to Alpha Centauri. To fulfill his dream.
But it’s not my dream, she realized.
All these years, ever since she had been old enough to remember, she had worked with monomaniacal energy to bring her father’s dream to fruition. She had never had time to think about her own dream.
She thought about it now. What is my own dream? Delia asked herself. What do I want for myself?
She did not know. All her life had been spent in the relentless pursuit of her father’s goal; she had never taken the time to dream for herself.
But she knew one thing. She did not want to fly off to Alpha Centauri. She did not want to leave the solar system behind her, leave the entire human race behind.
Yet she had to go. The ship could not function by itself for the ten years it would take to reach Alpha Centaui. The ship needed a human pilot, and she had always assumed that she would be that person.
But she did not want to go.
Twenty-two minutes.
Delia sat at the control console, watching the digital clock clicking down to midnight. Her vision blurred, and she realized that her eyes were filled with tears. This austere laboratory complex, this remote habitat set as far away from other human beings as possible, where she and her father had lived and worked alone for all these years—this was home.
“Delia!”
Marty’s voice shocked her. She spun in her chair to see him standing in the doorway to the control room. Wiping her eyes with the back of a hand, she saw that he looked puzzled, worried. And there was a small faintly bluish knot on his forehead, between his eyes.
“The security system at your main airlock must be off-line. I just opened the hatch and walked in.”
Delia tried to smile. “There isn’t any security system. We never have any visitors.”
“We?” Marty frowned.
“Me, I,” she stuttered.
He strode across the smooth concrete floor toward her. “Alpha One monitored your comm transmissions to the power companies,” Marty said, looking grim. “I’m here to shut down your experiment.”
She almost felt relieved.
“You’ll have to call the power companies and tell them you’re cancelling your orders,” he went on. “And that includes Rising Sun, too.”
Delia said nothing.
“Buying power from Mercury. I’ve got to hand it to you, I wouldn’t have thought you’d go that far.” Marty shook his head, half-admiringly.
“You can’t stop me,” Delia said, so softly she barely heard it herself.
But Marty heard her. Standing over her, scowling at the display screens set into the console, he said, “It’s over, Delia. I can’t let you endanger all our lives. Alpha One agrees with me.”
“I don’t care,” Delia said, one eye on the digital clock. “I’m not endangering anyone’s life. You can have Alpha One check my calculations. There’s no danger at all, as long as no one interferes with the power flow once—”
“I can’t let you do it, Delia! It’s too dangerous!”
His face was an agony of conflicting emotions. But all Delia saw was unbending obstinacy, inflexible determination to stop her, to shatter her father’s dream.
Wildly, she began mentally searching for a weapon. She wished she had kept a gun in the laboratory, or that her father had built a security system into the airlocks.
Then her romance videos sprang up in her frenzied memory. She did have a weapon, the oldest weapon of all. The realization almost took her breath away.
She lowered her eyes, turned slightly away from Marty.
“Maybe you’re right,” Delia said softly. “Maybe it would be best to forget the whole thing.” Nineteen minutes before midnight.
There was no other chair in the control room, so Marty dropped to one knee beside her and looked earnestly into her eyes.
“It will be for the best, Delia. I promise you.”
Slowly, hesitantly, she reached out a hand and brushed his handsome cheek with her fingertips.
The tingle she felt along the length of her arm surprised her.
“I can’t fight against you anymore,” Delia whispered.
“There’s no reason for us to fight,” he said, his voice as husky as hers.
“It’s just . . .” Eighteen minutes.
“I don’t want you to go,” Marty admitted. “I don’t want you to fly off to the stars and leave me.”
Delia blinked. “What?”
“I don’t want to lose you, Delia. Ever since I met you, I’ve been fighting your father for your attention. And then your father’s ghost. You’ve never really looked at me. Not as a person. Not as a man who loves you.”
“But Marty,” she gasped, barely able to speak, “I love you!”
He pulled her up from her chair and they kissed and Delia felt as if the Moon had indeed lurched out of its orbit. Marty held her tightly and she clutched at him, at the warm tender strength of him.
Then she saw the digital clock. Fifteen minutes to go.
And she realized that more than anything in the universe she wanted to be with Marty. But then her eye caught the display screen that showed the diamond starship sitting out on the crater floor, with her father in it, waiting, waiting.
Fourteen minutes, forty seconds.
“I’m sorry, Marty,” she whispered into his ear. “I can’t let you stop us.” And she reached for the console switch that would automate the entire power sequence.
“What are you doing?” Marty asked.
Delia clicked the switch home. “Everything’s on automatic now. There’s nothing you can do to stop the process. In fourteen minutes or so the power will start flowing—”
“Alpha One can stop the power companies from transmitting the energy to you,” Marty said. “And he will.”
Delia felt her whole body slump with defeat. “If he does, it means the end of everything for me.”
“No,” Marty said, smiling at her. “It’ll be the beginning of everything—for us.”
Delia thought of life together with Marty. And the shadow of her father’s ghost between them.
She felt something like an electric shock jolt through her. “Marty!” she blurted. “Would you go to Alpha Centauri with me?”
His eyes went round. “Go—with you? Just the two of us?”
“Ten years one way. Ten years back. A lifetime together.”
“Just the two of us?”
“And Daddy.”
His face darkened.
“Would you do it?” she asked again, feeling all the eagerness of youth and love and adventure.
He shook his head like a stubborn mule. “Alpha One won’t allow you to have the power.”
“Alfie’s only got one vote. We’ve got two, between us.”
“But he can override us on the safety issue.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But will you at least try to help me outvote him?”
“So we can go off to Alpha Centauri together? That’s crazy!”
“Don’t you want to be crazy with me?”
For an endless moment Delia’s whole life hung in the balance. She watched Marty’s blue eyes, trying to see through them, trying to understand what was going on behind them.
Then he grinned, and said, “Yes, I do.”
Delia whooped and kissed him even more soundly than before. He’s either lying or kidding himself or so certain that Alfie will stop us that he doesn’t think it makes any difference, Delia told herself. But I don’t care. He’s going to try, and that’s all that matters.
Twelve minutes.
Together they ran down the barren corridor from the control room to Delia’s quarters and phoned Alpha One. The display screen simply glowed a pale orange, of course, but they solemnly called for a meeting of the Council. Then Delia moved that the Council make no effort to stop her experiment and Marty seconded the motion.
“Such a motion may be voted upon and carried,” Alpha One’s flat expressionless voice warned them, “but if the risk assessment determines that this experiment endangers human lives other than those willingly engaged in the experiment itself, I will instruct the various power companies not to send the electrical power to your rectennas.”
Delia took a deep breath and, with one eye on Marty’s face, solemn in the glow from the display screen, she worked up the courage to say, “Agreed.”
Nine minutes.
“Alpha One won’t let the power through,” Marty said as they trudged back to the control room.
Delia knew he was right. But she said, “We’ll see. If Alfie’s checking my calculations we’ll be all right.”
“He’s undoubtedly making his own calculations,” said Marty gloomily. “Doing the risk assessment.”
Delia smiled at him. One way or the other we’re going to share our lives, either here or on the way to the stars.
Two minutes.
Delia watched the display screens while Marty paced the concrete floor. I’ve done my best, Daddy, she said silently. Whatever happens now, I’ve done the very best I could. You’ve got to let me go, Daddy. I’ve got to live my own life from now on.
Midnight.
Power from six dozen sunsats, plus the relay satellites in orbit around Mercury, poured silently, invisibly into the rectennas ringing Newton’s peaks. Energy from the sun was transformed back into electricity and then converted into more antimatter than the human race had ever seen before. Thirty tons of antiprotons, a million megatons of energy, ran silently in the endless racetrack of super-conducting magnets and diamond sheathing along the floor of the crater.
The laboratory seemed to hum with their energy. The very air felt vibrant, crackling.
Delia could hardly believe it. “Alfie let us have the power!”
“What happens now?” Marty asked, his voice hollow with awe.
She spun her little chair around and jumped to her feet. Hugging him tightly, she said, “Now, my dearest darling, we store the antiprotons in the ship’s crystal lattice, get aboard and take off for Alpha Centauri!”
He gulped. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.” Delia held her hand out to him and Marty took it in his. Like a pair of children they ran out of the control room, to head for the stars.
The vast network of computer components that was known as Alpha One was incapable of smiling, of course. But if it could congratulate itself, it would have.
Alpha One had been built to consider not merely the immediate consequences of any problem, but its long-term implications. Over the half century of its existence, it had learned to look farther and farther into the future. A pebble disturbed at one moment could cause a landslide a hundred years later.
Alpha One had done all the necessary risk assessments connected with headstrong Delia’s experiment, and then looked deep into the future for a risk assessment that spanned all the generations to come of humanity and its computer symbiotes.
Spaceflight had given the human race a new survival capability. By developing self-sufficient habitats off-Earth, the humans had disconnected their fate from the fate of the Earth. Nuclear holocaust, ecological collapse, even meteor strikes such as those that caused the Time of Great Dying sixty million years earlier—none of these could destroy the human race once it had established self-sufficient societies off-Earth.
Yet the Sun controlled all life in the solar system, and the Sun would not last forever.
Looking deep into future time, Alpha One had come to the conclusion that star flight was necessary if the humans and their computers were to disconnect their fate from the eventual demise of their Sun. And now they had star flight in their grasp.
As the diamond starship left the crater Newton on a hot glow of intense gamma radiation, Alpha One perceived that Delia and Marty were only the first star travelers. Others would certainly follow. The future of humanity was assured. Alpha One could erase its deepest concern for the safety of the human race and its computer symbiotes. Had it been anywhere near human, it would have sat back with a satisfied smile to wait with folded hands for the return of the first star travelers. And their children.
MEN OF GOOD WILL
As Rudyard Kipling once pointed out:
“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays.
And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right!”
—
In the Neolithic Age
Some science fiction stories begin with the dream of a wonderful invention, or the nightmare of a dreadful discovery. Some start with a vision of a particular person, a magnificent hero such as Muad’Dib or an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary events such as Montag, the Fireman. Other stories begin with the bare bones of a situation, an idea, even a joke.
Or the present offering.
* * *
“I had no idea,”
said the UN representative as they stepped through the airlock hatch, “that the United States lunar base was so big, and so thoroughly well equipped.”
“It’s a big operation, all right,” Colonel Patton answered, grinning slightly. His professional satisfaction showed even behind the faceplate of his pressure suit.
The pressure in the airlock equilibrated, and they squirmed out of their aluminized protective suits. Patton was big, scraping the maximum limit for space-vehicle passengers; Torgeson, the UN man, was slight, thin-haired, bespectacled and somehow bland-looking.
They stepped out of the airlock, into the corridor that ran the length of the huge plastic dome that housed Headquarters, U.S. Moonbase.
“What’s behind all the doors?’ Torgeson asked. His English had a slight Scandinavian twang to it. Patton found it a little irritating.
“On the right,” the colonel answered, businesslike, “are officers’ quarters, galley, officers’ mess, various laboratories and the headquarters staff offices. On the left are the computers.”
Torgeson blinked. “You mean that half this building is taken up by computers? But why in the world . . . that is, why do you need so many? Isn’t it frightfully expensive to boost them up here? I know it cost thousands of dollars for my own flight to the moon. The computers must be—”
“
‘Frightfully expensive,
’
” Patton agreed, with feeling. “But we need them. Believe me, we need them.”
They walked the rest of the way down the long corridor in silence. Patton’s office was at the very end of it. The colonel opened the door and ushered in the UN representative.
“A sizeable office,” Torgeson said. “And a window!”
“One of the privileges of rank,” Patton answered, smiling tightly. “That white antenna-mast off on the horizon belongs to the Russian base.”
“Ah, yes. Of course. I shall be visiting them tomorrow.”
Colonel Patton nodded and gestured Torgeson to a chair as he walked behind his metal desk and sat down.
“Now then,” said the colonel. “You are the first man allowed to set foot in this moonbase who is not a security cleared, triple-checked, native-born, government-employed American. God knows how you got the Pentagon to okay your trip. But—now that you’re here, what do you want?”
Torgeson took off his rimless glasses and fiddled with them. “I suppose the simplest answer would be the best. The United Nations must—absolutely must—find out how and why you and the Russians have been able to live peacefully here on the moon.”
Patton’s mouth opened, but no words came out. He closed it with a click.
“Americans and Russians,” the UN man went on, “have fired at each other from orbiting satellite vehicles. They have exchanged shots at both the North and South Poles. Career diplomats have scuffled like prizefighters in the halls of the United Nations building—”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yes. We have kept it quiet, of course. But the tensions are becoming unbearable. Everywhere on Earth the two sides are armed to the teeth and on the verge of disaster. Even in space they fight. And yet, here on the moon, you and the Russians live side by side in peace. We must know how you do it!”
Patton grinned. “You came on a very appropriate day, in that case. Well, let’s see now . . . how to present the picture. You know that the environment here is extremely hostile: airless, low gravity . . . “
“The environment here on the moon,” Torgeson objected, “is no more hostile than that of orbiting satellites. In fact, you have some gravity, solid ground, large buildings—many advantages that artificial satellites lack. Yet there has been fighting aboard the satellites—and not on the moon. Please don’t waste my time with platitudes. This trip is costing the UN too much money. Tell me the truth.”
Patton nodded. “I was going to. I’ve checked the information sent up by Earthbase: you’ve been cleared by the White House, the AEC, NASA and even the Pentagon.”
“So?”
“Okay. The plain truth of the matter is . . .” A soft chime from a small clock on Patton’s desk interrupted him. “Oh. Excuse me.”
Torgeson sat back and watched as Patton carefully began clearing off all the articles on his desk: the clock, calendar, phone, IN/OUT baskets, tobacco can and pipe rack, assorted papers and reports—all neatly and quickly placed in the desk drawers. Patton then stood up, walked to the filing cabinet, and closed the metal drawers firmly. He stood in the middle of the room, scanned the scene with apparent satisfaction, and then glanced at his wristwatch.
“Okay,” he said to Torgeson. “Get down on your stomach.”
“What?”
“Like this,” the colonel said, and prostrated himself on the rubberized floor.
Torgeson stared at him.
“Come on! There’s only a few seconds.”
Patton reached up and grasped the UN man by the wrist. Unbelievingly, Torgeson got out of the chair, dropped to his hands and knees and finally flattened himself on the floor, next to the colonel.
For a second or two they stared at each other, saying nothing.
“Colonel, this is embar—”
The room exploded into a shattering volley of sounds.
Something—many somethings—ripped through the walls. The air hissed and whined above the heads of the two prostrate men. The metal desk and file cabinet rang eerily.
Torgeson squeezed his eyes shut and tried to worm into the floor. It was just like being shot at!
Abruptly, it was over.
The room was quiet once again, except for a faint hissing sound. Torgeson opened his eyes and saw the colonel getting up. The door was flung open. Three sergeants rushed in, armed with patching disks and tubes of cement. They dashed around the office sealing up the several hundred holes in the walls.
Only gradually, as the sergeants carried on their fevered, wordless task, did Torgeson realize that the walls were actually a quiltwork of patches. The room must have been riddled repeatedly!
He climbed slowly to his feet. “Meteors?” he asked, with a slight squeak in his voice.
Colonel Patton grunted negatively and resumed his seat behind the desk. It was pockmarked, Torgeson noticed now. So was the file cabinet.
“The window, in case you’re wondering, is bulletproof.”
Torgeson nodded and sat down.
“You see,” the colonel said, “life is not as peaceful here as you think. Oh, we get along fine with the Russians—now. We’ve learned to live in peace. We had to.”
“What were those . . . things?”
“Bullets.”
“Bullets? But how . . . “
The sergeants finished their frenzied work, lined up at the door and saluted. Colonel Patton returned the salute and they turned as one man and left the office, closing the door quietly behind them.
“Colonel, I’m frankly bewildered.”
“It’s simple enough to understand. But don’t feel too badly about being surprised. Only the top level of the Pentagon knows about this. And the president. of course. They had to let him in on it.”
“What happened?”
Colonel Patton took his pipe rack and tobacco can out of a desk drawer and began filling one of the pipes. “You see,” he began, “the Russians and us, we weren’t always so peaceful here on the moon. We’ve had our incidents and scuffles, just as you have on Earth”
“Go on.”
“Well . . .” he struck a match and puffed the pipe alight “. . . shortly after we set up this dome for moonbase HQ, and the Reds set up theirs, we got into some real arguments.” He waved the match out and tossed it into the open drawer.
“We’re situated on the
Oceanus Procellarum,
you know. Exactly on the lunar equator. One of the biggest open spaces on this hunk of airless rock. Well, the Russians claimed they owned the whole damned
Oceanus,
since they were here first. We maintained that the legal ownership was not established, since according to the UN Charter and the subsequent covenants—”
“Spare the legal details! Please, what happened?”
Patton looked slightly hurt. “Well . . . we started shooting at each other. One of their guards fired at one of our guards. They claim it was the other way around, of course. Anyway, within twenty minutes we were fighting a regular pitched battle, right out there between our base and theirs.” He gestured toward the window.
“Can you fire guns in airless space?”
“Oh, sure. No problem at all. However, something unexpected came up.”
“Unexpected? What?”
“Only a few men got hit in the battle, none of them seriously. As in all battles, most of the rounds fired were clean misses.”
“So?”
Patton smiled grimly. “So one of our civilian mathematicians started doodling. We had several thousand very-high-velocity bullets fired off. In airless space. No friction, you see. And under low-gravity conditions. They went right along past their targets—”
Recognition dawned on Torgeson’s face. “Oh, no!”
“That’s right. They whizzed right along, skimmed over the mountain tops, thanks to the curvature of this damned short lunar horizon, and established themselves in rather eccentric satellite orbits. Every hour or so they return to perigee . . . or, rather, periluna. And every twenty-seven days, periluna is right here, where the bullets originated. The moon rotates on its axis every twenty-seven days, you see. At any rate, when they come back this way, they shoot the living hell out of our base—and the Russian base, too, of course.”
“But can’t you . . . ?”
“Do what? Can’t move the base. Authorization is tied up in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and they can’t agree on where to move it to. Can’t bring up any special shielding material, because that’s not authorized, either. The best thing we can do is to requisition all the computers we can and try to keep track of all the bullets. Their orbits keep changing, you know, every time they go through the bases. Air friction, puncturing walls, ricochets off the furniture—all that keeps changing their orbits enough to keep our computers busy full time.”
“My God!”
“In the meantime, we don’t dare fire off any more rounds. It would overburden the computers and we’d lose track of all of ’em. Then we’d have to spend every twenty-seventh day flat on our faces for hours.”
Torgeson sat in numbed silence.
“But don’t worry,” Patton concluded with an optimistic, professional grin. “I’ve got a small detail of men secretly at work on the far side of the base—where the Reds can’t see—building a stone wall. That’ll stop the bullets. Then we’ll fix those warmongers once and for all!”
Torgeson’s face went slack. The chime sounded, muffled, from inside Patton’s desk.
“Better get set to flatten out again. Here comes the second volley.”
