Warp Speed (36 page)

But don't worry. Humans are quite resourceful. We will survive this and in fact thrive again in no time. I feel bad about all the damage and especially about the lost lives. However, and I'm not just trying to justify myself here, the Earth is becoming a better place now. China finally had to really open its borders to Western business or it was going to starve to death. The destruction of most of the Russian government destroyed a lot of their organized crime problem since most of the crime bosses were government officials. The Russian people asked us for help. So we moved in and helped them prop themselves up and clean up their act a little. Europe joined in to help since they were least affected. Although there was no longer a Germany, the rest of Europe was trying to help. Interestingly enough, no governments tried to take advantage of the situation. Also, the stock exchange was unfrozen a few weeks ago. World trade is back to normal or much better. Again there was some initial concern about global climate changes causing mass crop failures and global starvation. And once again this was mostly junk scientists making noise to get themselves on television. All of that original Carl Sagan nuclear winter nonsense continued to rear its ugly head--idiots. I wanted to strangle some of the fools I saw on TV bitching about the coming ice age and the end of the world. Tabitha eventually convinced me that I just had to let it go.

One thing that really bites me in the butt is that not long after the Secret War a damned group of Islamic Jihad fools car-bombed the American Embassy in Kuwait. Then they claimed that the meteors were due to us being the infidel and some other nonsense. About fifteen Americans were killed and a few from other countries. And we didn't do a damned thing! For now the world still depended on oil so we had to let those fools act as they had for thousands of years. Like fools.

I vowed that day that I was going to design a less efficient and less explosive energy collection dumbbell that we could leak into mainstream technology. If these weaker dumbbells generated only a millionth of the energy that the flubells do, the Middle East would be out of business in no time. Then we wouldn't have to put up with the bastards. I put Sara to work on the new dumbbell design. Jim was more than happy to volunteer to help her. Tabitha and I went to work on a plan to leak the technology.

The American way of life barely made it through the Secret War. We got lucky in a lot of respects. Tabitha and I talk about it every now and then. We both agree that neither of us would have thought of another way to defend against the final Chinese/Russian assault in time. If 'Becca hadn't been infected by that damn flubell virus, the outcome could have been a lot different. We might could have escaped with the partial Clemons Dumbbell ECC we had but who knows? I don't like thinking about how lucky we really were. Tabitha tells me that I think about "what-ifs?" way too much. I think she is right. We survived, America prevailed, the human race will continue.

CHAPTER 22

It was going to take a while to figure out the tricks of interstellar navigation. We decided to start small and take baby steps out of the solar system. We warped to Mars in about two and a half minutes. We had christened our little warpship the
U.S.S. Einstein
. Tabitha and Margie were at the controls. Jim and I were in charge of celestial navigation. Rebecca and Sara were watching the power plant and warp core. Al and Anne Marie were in charge of general mission logistics. We entered into an orbit around Mars and started looking for interesting things. We landed in Cydonia. There were no pyramids to be found anywhere. We found no face either. I was always hoping there would be something.

We traversed several canals and headed to the Martian North Pole. Near where the ice caps met the desert, we took a few core samples. I never noticed any living creatures crawling around. It's possible that there might be some microbes in the core samples. When we had completed checkout of our exploration capabilities, we would come back to Mars and hang out a while. This time was more of a shakedown flight. We did hit the list of experiments and observations that a lot of planetary scientists had been writing about for decades.

We started near the equator then flew southwest to Ophir Chasma and back around east to Juventae Chasma. We saw all sorts of slope and bedrock material, cratered plateaus, and degraded craters. Then we turned northward toward the northern plains, Kasei Vallis, and the Viking I landing site. We finally sat down on the peak of Olympus Mons.

We hadn't developed individual warp fields yet. In fact, we were several years from that if at all, so we had to steal about ten new SAFER EMUs from NASA. We had our Earthside black bag connection take care of the paper work. NASA never knew that they had the spacesuits to begin with. We sat up a group in the Research and Development Dome back on Moon Base 1 to reverse-engineer the EMUs, redesign them, and make them more mobile and useful. That would take a year or so also.

At any rate, we suited up, cycled through the airlock with a lights-off lights-on maneuver, and descended the loading ramp of the
Einstein
. Once we had set foot on the Martian surface, Tabitha and Margie set up an American flag. The view from Olympus Mons was incredible. Sara scratched into a rock with a screwdriver "Sara Tibbs was here." Then she passed it around and we each took turns. Jim signed it last and dated it.

This wasn't a science mission. This was a technology demonstration mission. We had proven we could fly about four times the speed of light and navigate to a specific point. We had proven we could determine where we were once we dropped out of warp. We then demonstrated that we could locate and land on a planet and conduct EVAs. It was time to head back home. Tabitha corralled us back into the
Einstein
and we began the liftoff checklists.

"Ramp up?" Tabitha asked.

"Check." Margie replied.

"Everybody on board?"

"Check."

"Okay, liftoff."

"Check."

Not much of a checklist. The warpships made spacetravel almost as easy as a Sunday drive, as long as there were no technical difficulties. This time we stressed the ECCs up to three percent and shaved another minute and thirty-seven seconds off the trip. It took about twenty-three seconds in warp to travel back to the Moon. The average speed was about twenty-four times the speed of light.

Tabitha brought us into the spaceport's waiting zone, which was just outside the spaceport warp field. The spaceport's field is always set to oscillate on and off at a kilohertz or so. She simply flew
Einstein
through it when it was in the off position--of course, that was done in fractions of a second via a flight control computer and was transparent to her. We debarked and transferred the samples and EVA suits to a quarantined lab for analysis and cleanup, respectively.

Analysis of
Einstein
showed that it was in tip-top condition. The space travel at twenty-four times the speed of light had had no ill effect on it. It was a good ship. We prepared it for our next flight. This time we planned to visit every planet in the outer solar system and a few Kuiper Belt objects to boot.

Our flight trajectory was designed as multiple warps. The first warp would be straight to Jupiter space. We clocked out at about thirty times the speed of light. I'm here to tell you that Jupiter is beautiful! We did a very fast orbit around it so we could look at the giant red spot. Absolutely amazing. A few times, we actually turned off the warp field so we could see it with our own eyes for a few seconds. Then we clicked the field back on and looked through the viewscreen. We wanted closer looks at the moons, and the radiation from Jupiter was a bit more than we wanted to deal with. After all, both Tabitha and 'Becca were about five weeks or so pregnant. Oh, I guess I forgot to mention that. It would appear that they are having a race to see who can have the first baby in space. We wanted to attempt our first interstellar jump before they got too uncomfortable and big for space travel. The EMUs aren't designed to accommodate a woman in her third trimester. And both Tabitha and 'Becca said that we're not setting foot on an alien world without them.

We mostly wanted to see Europa. It supposedly had a very deep ice coating along with a water ocean underneath the ice. We pushed
Einstein
through the thick layer of ice on Europa's surface. The ECCs operated at only two percent to do this. At about ninety-four kilometers, the stresses on the warp field stopped and we could tell that we had broken through to a water ocean. The hole that we had just made through the ice immediately froze shut above us. We slowly panned around and illuminated the dark ocean with the outside lights, which were set to oscillate opposite the outer warp field. Near what seemed to be the bottom of the Europan ocean we found a lava flow. There was a lot of particle debris floating and drifting in the water but we couldn't tell if it was alive or not. A larger piece of the floating material seemed to alter its path and then it darted toward a smaller chunk. The smaller chunk took off like a bat out of hell. We focused the cameras in on the region a little tighter and realized that the debris floating in the water were actually schools of some type of fish.

"I want one of those!" Al said.

"Not sure how we could catch it, Al," Margie responded. "We can come back and get one some other time."

We sat still for a while and watched the fish swim and eat each other. These weren't ordinary fish. Upon closer inspection, we could see that they had no eyes. I also wasn't sure if I saw any gills or not. We would have to catch some of these things and have the right folks study them. Some other time. We'd watched the fish for about twenty minutes when Tabitha decided we should continue with our mission. Again, we were on a technology demonstration mission, not a science exhibition.

We tunneled back up through the ice and out to a very high orbit around the Jupiter system. Jim and I did a little celestial navigation and then on to Saturn.

Okay maybe I'm an old softy when it comes to the beauty of our solar system, but Saturn is an incredible sight. It is hard to say which I like better, Jupiter or Saturn. The big ticket item at the Saturn system was Titan. Ever since I read
The Puppet Masters
I wanted to know if there really were Titans. Titan's dense atmosphere has kept its surface a secret from astronomers. We learned its secrets. In fact, the planetary scientist had hit it pretty damn close. At about a hundred and eighty kilometers from the surface we hit a layer of nitrogen that was at one Earth atmospheric pressure. At about twenty kilometers from the surface, we hit a cloud of methane vapor. Just below the clouds it was raining methane and the stresses on the warp field suggested atmospheric pressures on the order of a thousand or more times greater than that of Earth. Visibility was very poor and we couldn't see well enough to navigate. Infrared didn't help, because there was none. The cloudy moon was cold. We had to switch to radar navigation and if we came back, we would bring a sonar system or something also. We did feel our way around with the radar for a while until we found a lake. The lake was at about minus one hundred seventy-seven degrees Celsius. The lake was liquid methane.

There were no Titans. I wasn't disappointed. In fact, I expected not to find anything. But childhood aspirations and fantasies should be entertained every now and then.

We oohed and ahhed as we stopped at Uranus and then Nep-tune. They weren't necessarily close to each other, but with warpdrive at thirty times the speed of light, no place in the solar system was that far away. Even the Pluto-Charon system, which is about thirty astronomical units from Earth, is pretty close at those speeds. The total trip to the three outer planets including the ooh and ah time of about thirty minutes was only an hour or so. It was obvious that things were going to be a lot different for the human race, at least for those "with the need to know."

We spent some time at the Pluto-Charon system looking around. We actually landed but didn't get out. There wasn't much to see. Pluto is an ice ball. The humorous part of the trip was the fact that we had beaten the NASA Pluto-Kuiper mission by several years. I thought about trying to track down the approaching spacecraft to just take a look at it. Maybe some other time. Our mission was to develop warp capabilities that would enable interstellar travel. We had to continue with learning how to navigate over large distances. So far, we had only been as far out as about thirty times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The distance to the nearest star is about a hundred thousand times that. We still had quite a ways to go. At thirty times the speed of light, the trip to the nearest star would take about two months.

We wandered around in the Kuiper-Belt a bit and then decided to travel through the Oort Cloud and then the Heliopause. The Heliopause where the solar system meets the rest of the galaxy is considered the edge of the solar system at about a hundred astronomical units. There were some really neat plasma light shows there. Our spectrum analyzer systems picked up radio noise centered around the two to three kilohertz range and at awesome power levels. We pushed through the Heliopause out to about three hundred AUs. I checked our navigation and suggested to Tabitha that we bounce back to the Moon just to make sure. The nonstop trip took about an hour and a half. We docked at the moon for a few hours and had lunch at home.

By three o'clock that afternoon, we were ready to try for the solar gravitational focus. According to General Relativity any large massive body like the sun actually bends spacetime enough in its near vicinity that the paths of light rays traveling near that massive body are bent. In other words, the big object acts like a very large lens. This fact has been verified experimentally in many different ways since 1919. However, nobody has yet travelled to the focus of the large solar lens.

I had more reasons than just curiosity for traveling to the solar focus. Lets digress for a second.

The largest telescope built by mankind so far is on the order of about a hundred meters. It is a multiple mirror interferometer in Hawaii. The idea of making large telescopes is to increase the resolution. This means that the better the resolution the smaller the objects you can see, farther away. The way to determine the smallest object seeable by a telescope is to use the Rayleigh Criteria equation. The formula states that the minimum resolvable object diameter is found as 2.44 times the wavelength of the light (assume 550 nanometers for yellowish green light) times the distance to the object (five light years or 4.55 x 10
meters) divided by the diameter of the telescope's primary optic. Assuming that you want to image an Earth-like planet that has a diameter of about 12,000 kilometers, Rayleigh's Criteria says that we need a telescope at least two kilometers or more in diameter! The Hubble Space Telescope is 2.4 meters in diameter and the James Webb Space Telescope is only a few times bigger than that. So we're a long way from imaging planets even around the nearest star even if you consider the ground-based interferometer in Hawaii.