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Larry Niven - All the Bridges Rusting Take a point in space. Take a specific
point near the star system Alpha Centaurus, on the line linking the center of
mass of that system with Sol. Follow it as it moves toward Sol system at
lightspeed. We presume a particle in this point. Men who deal in the physics
of teleportation would speak of it as a "transition particle." But think of it
Page 1
as a kind of super-neutrino. Clearly it must have a rest mass of zero, like a
neutrino. Like a neutrino, it must be fearfully difficult to find or stop.
Despite several decades in which teleportation has been in common use, nobody
has ever directly demonstrated the existence of a "transition particle." It
must be taken on faith. Its internal structure would be fearfully complex in
terms of energy states. Its relativistic mass would be twelve thousand two
hundred tons. One more property can be postulated. Its location in space is
uncertain: a probability density, thousands of miles across as it passes
Proxima Centauri, and spreading. The mass of the tiny red dwarf does not bend
its path significantly. As it approaches the solar system the particle may be
found anywhere within a vaguely bounded wave front several hundred thousand
miles across. This vagueness of position is part of what makes teleportation
work. One's aim need not be so accurate. Near Pluto the particle changes
state. Its relativistic mass converts to rest mass within the receiver cage
of a drop ship. Its structure is still fearfully complex for an elementary
particle: a twelve-thousand-two-hundred-ton spacecraft, loaded with
instruments, its hull windowless and very smoothly contoured. Its presence
here is the only evidence that a transition particle ever existed. Within the
control cabin, the pilot's finger is still on the TRANSMIT button. Karin
Sagan was short and stocky. Her hands were large; her feet were small and
prone to foot trouble. Her face was square and cheerful, her eyes were bright
and direct, and her voice was deep for a woman's. She bad been thirty-six
years old when Phoenix left the transmitter at Pluto. She was three months
older now, though nine years had passed on Earth. She had seen a trace of the
elapsed years as Phoenix left the Pluto drop ship. The shuttlecraft that had
come to meet them was of a new design, and its attitude tets showed the color
of fusion flame. She had wondered how they made fusion motors that small. She
saw more changes now, among the gathered newstapers. Some of the women wore
microskirts whose hems were cut at angles. A few of the men wore assymetrical
shirts-the left sleeve long, the right sleeve missing entirely. She asked to
see one man's left cuff, her attention caught by the glowing red design. Sure
enough, it was a functional wristwatch; but the material was soft as
cloth. "It's a Bulova Dali," the man said. He was letting his amusement show.
"New to you? Things change in nine years, Doctor." "I thought they would,"
she, said lightly. "That's part of the fun." But she remembered the shock of
relief when the heat struck. She had pushed the TRANSMIT button a light-month
out from Alpha Centaurus B. An instant later sweat was running from every pore
of her body. There had been no guarantee. The probability density that
physicists called a transition particle could have gone past the drop ship and
out into the universe at large, beyond rescue forever. Or ... a lot could
happen in nine years. The station might have been wrecked or abandoned. But
the heat meant that they had made it. Phoenix had lost potential energy
entering Sol's gravitational field and had gained it back in heat. The cabin
felt like a furnace, but it was their body temperature that had jumped from
98.6° to 102°, all in an instant. "How was the trip?" The young man
asked. Karin Sagan returned to the present. "Good, but it's good to be back.
Are we recording?" "No. When the press conference starts you'll know it.
That's the law. Shall we get it going?" "Fine." She smiled around the room.
It was good to see strange faces again. Three months with three other people
in a closed environment...it was enough. The young man led her to a dais.
Cameras swiveled to face her, and the conference started. Q: How was the
trip? "Good. Successful, I should say. We learned everything we wanted to
know about the Centaurus systems. In addition, we learned that our systems
work. The drop-ship method is feasible. We reached the nearest stars, and we
came back, with no ill effects." Q: What about the Centaurus planets? Are
they habitable? "No." It hurt to say that. She saw the disappointment around
her. Q: Neither of them checked out? "That's right. There are six known
planets circling Alpha Centaurus B. We may have missed a couple that were too
small or too far out. We had to do all our looking from a light-month away. We
had good hopes for B-2 and B-3-- remember, we knew they were there before we
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set out-but B-2 turns out to be a Venus-type with too much atmosphere, and
B-3's got a reducing atmosphere, something like Earth's atmosphere three
billion years ago." Q: The colonists aren't going to like that, are they? "I
don't expect they will. We messaged the drop ship Lazarus II to turn off its
JumpShift unit for a year. That means that the colony ships won't convert to
rest mass when they reach the receiver. They'll be reflected back to the solar
system. They should appear in the Pluto, drop ship about a month from
now." Q: Having lost nine years. "That's right. Just like me and the rest of
the crew of Phoenix. The colonists left the Pluto transmitter two months after
we did." Q: What are the chances of terraforming B-3 someday? Karin was glad
to drop the subject of the colony ships. Somehow she felt that she had failed
those first potential colonists of another star system. She said, 'Pretty
good, someday. I'm just talking off the top of my head, you understand. I
imagine it would take thousands of years, and would involve seeding the
atmosphere with tailored bacteria and waiting for them to turn methane and
ammonia and hydrocarbons into air. At the moment it'll pay us better to go on
looking for worlds around other stars. It's so bloody easy, with these
interstellar drop ships." Them was nodding among the newstapers. They knew
about drop ships, and they had been briefed. In principle there was no
difference between Lazarus II and the drop ships circling every planet and
most of the interesting moons and asteroids in the solar system. A drop ship
need not be moving at the same velocity as its cargo. The Phoenix, at rest
with respect to Sol and the Centaurus suns, had emerged from Lazarus II's
receiver cage at a third of lightspeed. "The point is that you can use a drop
ship more than once," Karin went on. "By now Lazarus II is one and a third
light-years past Centaurus. We burned most of its fuel to get the ship up to
speed, but there's still a maneuver reserve. Its next target is an
orange-yellow dwarf, Epsilon Indi. Lazarus II will be there in about twenty
eight years. Then maybe we'll send another colony group." Q: Doctor Sagan,
you were as far from Sol as anyone in history has ever gotten. What was it
like out there? Karen giggled. 'We were as far from any star as anyone's ever
gotten. It was a long night. Maybe it was getting to us. We had a bad moment
when we thought there was an alien ship coming up behind us." She sobered, for
that moment of relief had cost six people dearly. "It turned out to be
Lazarus. I'm afraid that's more bad news. Lazarus should have been
decelerating. It wasn't. We're afraid something's happened to their
drive." That caused some commotion. It developed that many of the newstapers
had never heard of the first Lazarus. Karin started to explain...and that
turned out to be a mistake. The first interstellar spacecraft had been
launched in 2004, thirty-one years ago. Lazarus had been ten years in the
building, but far more than ten years of labor had gone into her. Her
life-support systems ran in a clear line of development back to the first
capsules to orbit Earth. The first fusion-electric power plants had much in
common with her main drive, and her hydrogen fuel tanks were the result of
several decades of trial and error. Liquid hydrogen is tricky stuff. Centuries
of medicine had produced suspended-animation treatments that allowed Lazarus
to carry six crew members with life-support supplies sufficient for two. The
ship was lovely-at least, her re-entry system was lovely, a swing-wing
streamlined exploration vehicle as big as any hypersonic passenger plane.
Fully assembled, she looked like a haphazard collection of junk. But she was
loved. There had been displacement booths in 2004: the network of passenger
teleportation had already replaced other forms of transportation over most of
the world. The cargo ships that lifted Lazarus' components into orbit had been
fueled in flight by JumpShift units in the tanks. It was a pity that Lazarus
could not, take advantage of such a method. But conservation of momentum held.
Fuel droplets entering Lazarus's tanks at a seventh of lightspeed would tear
them apart. So Lazarus had left Earth at the end of the Corliss accelerator,
an improbably tall tower standing up from a flat asteroid a mile across. The
fuel tanks-most of Lazarus's mass-had been launched first. Then the ship
itself, with enough maneuvering reserve to run them down. Lazarus had left
Page 3
Earth like a string of toy balloons, and telescopes had watched as she
assembled herself in deep space. She had not been launched into the unknown.
The telescopes of Ceres Base had found planets orbiting Alpha Centaurus B. Two
of these might be habitable. Failing that, there might at least be seas from
which hydrogen could be extracted for a return voyage. "The first drop ship
was launched six years later," Karin told them. "We should have waited. I was
five when they launched Lazarus, but I've been told that everyone thought that
teleportation couldn't possibly be used for space exploration because of
velocity differences. If we'd waited we could have put a drop ship receiver
cage on Lazarus and taken out the life-support system. As it was, we didn't
launch Lazarus II until-" She stopped to add up dates. "Seventeen years ago.
2018." Q: Weren't you expecting Lazarus to pass you? "Not so soon. In fact,
we had this timed pretty well. If everything had gone right, the crew of
Lazarus I would have found a string of colony ships pouring out of Lazarus II
as it fell across the system. They could have joined up to explore the system,
and later joined the colony if that was feasible, or come home on the colony
return ship if it wasn't." Q: As it is, they're in deep shit. "I'm afraid
so. Can you really say that on teevee?" There were chuckles at her
naiveté. Q: What went wrong? Any idea? "They gave us a full report with
their distress signal. There was some trouble with the plasma pinch effect,
and no parts to do a full repair. They tried running it anyway-they didn't
have much choice, after all. The plasma stream went wrong and blew away part
of the stem. After that there wasn't anything they could do but set up their
distress signal and go back into suspended animation." Q What are your plans
for rescue? Karin made her second error. "I don't know. We just got back two
days ago, and we've spent that time traveling. It's easy enough to pump energy
into an incoming transition particle to compensate for a jump in potential
energy, but the only drop ship we've got that can absorb potential energy is
at Mercury. We couldn't just flick in from Pluto; we'd have been broiled. We
had to flick in to Earth orbit by way of Mercury, then go down in a
shuttlecraft." She closed her eyes to think. "It'll be difficult. By now
Lazarus must be half a light-year beyond Alpha Centaurus, and Lazarus II more
than twice that far. We probably can't use Lazarus II in a rescue
attempt." Q: Couldn't you drop a receiver cage from Lazarus II, then wait
until Lazarus has almost caught up with it? She smiled indulgently. At least
they were asking intelligent questions. "Won't work. Lazarus II must have
changed course already for Epsilon Indi. Whatever happens is likely to take a
long time." Teevee was mostly news these days. The entertainment programs had
been largely taken over by cassettes, which could be sold devoid of
advertisements, and which could be aimed at more selective audiences. And
newspapers had died out; but headlines had not. The announcers were saying
things like Centaurus planets devoid of life ... colony ships to return ...
failure of Lazarus scout ship engines... rescue attempts to begin ... details
in a moment, but first this word... Jerryberry Jansen of CBA smiled into the
cameras. The warmth he felt for his unseen audience was genuine: he regarded
himself as a combination of entertainer and teacher, and his approximately
twelve million students were the measure of his success. "The Centaurus
expedition was by no means a disaster," he told them. "For one thing, the
colony fleet which cost you, the taxpayer, about six hundred and sixty million
new dollars nine years ago-can be re-used as is, once the UN Space Authority
finds a habitable world. Probably the colonists themselves will not want to
wait that long. A new group may have to be retrained. "As for the
interstellar drop ship concept, it works. This has been the first real test,
and it went without a hitch. Probably the next use of drop ships will not be a
colony expedition at all, but an attempt to rescue the crew of Lazarus. The
ship was sending its distress signal. There is good reason to think that the
crew is still alive. "Doctor Karin Sagan has pointed out that any rescue
attempt will take decades. This is reasonable, in that the distances to be
covered are to be measured in light-years. But today's ships are considerably
better than Lazarus could ever have been." "You idiot," said Robin Whyte,
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PhD. He twisted a knob with angry force, and the teevee screen went blank. A
few minutes later he made two phone calls. Karin was sightseeing on
Earth. The UN Space Authority had had a new credit card waiting for her, a
courtesy she appreciated. Otherwise she would have had to carry a sackful of
chocolate dollars for the slots. Her hands quickly fell into the old routine:
insert the card, dial, pull it out, and the displacement booth would send her
somewhere else. It was characteristic of Karin that she had not been calling
old friends. The impulse was there, and the worn black phone book with its
string of nine-year-old names and numbers. But the people she had known must
have changed. She was reluctant to face them. There had been a vindictive
impulse to drop in on her ex-husband. Here I am at thirty-six, and you-Stupid.
Ron knew where she had been for nine years, so why bug the man? She had
cocktails at Mr. A's in San Diego, lunch at Scandia in Los Angeles, and
dessert and coffee at Ondine in Sausalito. The sight of the Golden Gate Bridge
sparked her to flick in at various booths for various views of all the bridges
in the Bay area. For Karin, as for most of humanity, Earth was represented by
a small section of the planet. There had been changes. She got too close to
the Bay Bridge and was horrified at the rust. It had never occurred to her
that the San Francisco citizenry might let the bridges decay. Something could
be done with them: line them with shops a la London Bridge, or landscape them
over for a park, or run drag races. . . They would make horribly obtrusive
corpses. They would ruin the scenery. Still, that had happened before... Some
things had not changed. She walked for an hour in King's Free Park, the
landscaped section of what had been the San Diego Freeway. The trees had grown
a little taller, but the crowds were the same, always different yet always the
same. The shops and crowds in the Santa Monica Mall hadn't changed ... except
that the city had filled in the space between the curbs, where people had had
to step down into the empty streets. She did some shopping in the Mall. To a
saleslady in Magnin's West she said, "Dress me." That turned out to be a
considerable project, and it cost. When she left, her new clothes felt odd on
her, but they seemed to blend better with the crowds around her. She did a
lot of flicking around without ever leaving the booth-the ubiquitous booth
that seemed to be one instead of millions, that seemed to move with her as she
explored. It took her longer to find the right numbers than it did to
dial. But she flicked clown the length of Wilshire Boulevard in jumps of four
blocks, from the coast to central Los Angeles, by simply dialing four digits
higher each time. She stopped off at the Country Art Museum in Fresno and was
intrigued by giant sculptures in plastic foam. She was wandering through these
shapes, just feeling them, not yet trying to decide whether she liked them,
when her wrist phone rang. She could have taken the call then and there, but
she went to a wall phone in the lobby. Karin preferred to see who she was
talking to. She recognized him at once. Robin Whyte was a round old man, his
face pink and soft and cherubic, his scalp bare but for a fringe of white hair
over his ears and a single tuft at the top of his head. Karin was surprised to
see him now. He was the last living member of the team that had first
demonstrated teleportation in 1992. He had been president of JumpShift, Inc.,
for several decades, but he had retired just after the launching of Lazarus
II. "Karin Sagan?" His frown gave him an almost petulant look. "My
congratulations on your safe return." "Thank you." Karin's smile was sunny.
An impulse made her add, "Congratulations to you, too." He did not respond in
kind. "I need to see you. Urgently. Can you come immediately?" "Concerning
what?" "Concerning the interview you gave this morning." But the interview
had gone so well. What could be bothering the man? She said, "All tight." The
number he gave her had a New York prefix. It was evening in New York City.
Whyte's apartment was the penthouse floor of a half-empty building. The city
itself had lost half its population during the past forty years, and it showed
in the walls of dark windows visible through Whyte's picture windows. "The
thing I want to emphasize," said Whyte, "is that I didn't call you here as a
representative of JumpShift. I'm retired. But I've got a problem, and pretty
quick I'm going to have to take it up with someone in JumpShift. I still own
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zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plhot-wife.htw.pl
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| Cytat |
Dobry przykład - połowa kazania. Adalberg
I ty, Brutusie, przeciwko mnie?! (Et tu, Brute, contra me?! ) Cezar (Caius Iulius Caesar, ok. 101 - 44 p. n. e)
Do polowania na pchły i męża nie trzeba mieć karty myśliwskiej. Zygmunt Fijas
W ciepłym klimacie najłatwiej wyrastają zimni dranie.
Gdybym tylko wiedział, powinienem był zostać zegarmistrzem. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) komentując swoją rolę w skonstruowaniu bomby atomowej
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