Emprise (18 page)

A follow-up broadcast was made, with more “footage” of the Senders and answers to the most common questions or misconceptions catalogued by Moraji’s operatives. But still no one came to Rashuri, and some went out of their way to avoid him.

Then as the days wore on, some true rumors began to surface. In Mexico City, five thousand applied for one hundred new Consortium jobs. That might not have been odd, except that more than ninety percent of the applicants were already employed elsewhere, many at higher wages. In Paris, petitions bearing nearly twenty thousand signatures were delivered to the President, calling on him to bring France into the Consortium. But still no one came to Rashuri.

The Chairman remained placid and serene, both outwardly and inwardly. He knew, as well as anyone could, the limits of one man’s influence. On what was destined to be known by the misnomer Discovery Day, he had unleashed a force he could not direct or, in all likelihood, measurably deflect. If it was poised to carry them forward, it did not matter if it took months to gauge its impact. If it were poised to crush them, then perhaps it was better not to know until the last moment.

Over the first six months of 2017, Rashuri was to receive more than two score reports on how the news of the Senders and their ship had affected cultures around the globe. But well before the last of those was filed, he had come to his own judgment, based on a word, a telephone call, and a drawstring bag.

He first heard the word in the corridors of his own office area and took it at first for an error in pronunciation by a staffer less skilled in English. Then he heard it again, and questioned his own hearing: “—man—man.” He could not decide what the first syllable was, except that it seemed not to be “hu—”

It was not, but it took seeing it in print the first time for Rashuri to realize it. That was in one of the independent Australian newspapers. Above an interview with Eddington ran the headline, “MuMan Expert Reveals Alien Sex Secrets.” Rashuri called in Weddell.

“Did we do this?” he demanded, pointing at the headline.

“Oh, God, that. I’m embarrassed by it, too, but we did agree we had to cut Eddington loose,” Weddell said apologetically. “As long as we want him speaking for himself—”

“I don’t mean that. I mean this word, MuMan. Did we plant that? Did that come from us?”

“Oh—no. That’s street slang, just seemed to spring up. The fact is, I have a proposal waiting action on my desk that we start using it ourselves. The field checkers are saying it’s much more widely used than ‘Sender’ or, God forbid, ‘Mu Cassiopeian,’ which a few of the science lads insist on. Unless you object, I was inclined to approve it. Ifs a garish word, I know, but people seem to prefer it.”

“I find it pleasing. Make the change.”

The radiophone call came from the President of Dixie, which was in itself an interesting surprise. None of the three American republics—Dixie, the United North, and Calalaska—had shown any interest in joining the Consortium. But only Dixie had completely and consistently rejected all contact, even trade.

“Chairman, can we take off our shoes and be friendly for a moment?” asked President Aubrey Scott.

“Of course, Mr. President.”

“Chairman—I’m gonna call you that because to be honest I can’t pronounce your damned name—Chairman, I’m embarrassed to tell you that I’ve been served poorly when it comes to this Consortium y’all have put together. They tell me now that you’ve put out the hand to us more than once, but one of my boys took it on himself to slap at it and send you packing. I want you to know that wasn’t my doing, and the fella that did it has been invited to move on, if you follow me.”

“I do, Mr. President,” said Rashuri, leaning back and enjoying the blarney. “If you want something done right—”

“You goddamn have to do it yourself, and that’s a sure bet,” the president finished for him. “What I’m getting at is that we should have been a part of this from the beginning, and it’s been damn tough explaining to my people why we weren’t without looking like a damn fool.”

“I can understand,” said Rashuri, now smiling broadly.

“What I’m thinking is that maybe we can make it up to you, if it isn’t too late. Let me put another fella on and explain what I mean.”

There was a rising hiss as an automatic level control somewhere in the electronic tie-line did its job, and then a new voice, deeper and with the barest of accents, came on.

“Chairman Rashuri. My name is Gil Henderson. Can you hear me all right?”

“Yes, Gil.”

“At the President’s request, I’ve made a survey of our resources to see what contribution we might be able to make to the Consortium. I’m very pleased to be able to tell you that four of the Shuttle II orbiters survived the ugliness of the past decades in operational or reparable condition. You’ll recall the Shuttle II was the heavy-lift cargo version with which they constructed SPS One?”

“Yes, Gil,” Rashuri said pleasantly, though he remembered the varieties of Shuttle hardware indifferently at best.

“We would like to place them at the disposal of the Consortium. A new Shuttle transporter plane has just been recertified, and as soon as you tell us where you want the spacecraft, we’re ready to ferry them to you. We also have two freighter loads of related equipment which are ready to be shipped as well. If that suits you, of course,” he added quickly.

“I’ll have to review your offer with my staff, of course,” said Rashuri, though he knew it would suit them very well indeed. But after five years of negotiating from weakness, he could not resist prolonging his first opportunity to negotiate from strength.

The drawstring bag was dragged into his office one spring day by a young woman wearing a Trade Division name badge. He had no glimmer what it might contain, since the bag was canvas and the woman a stranger.

“Chairman, may I use your desk a moment? There’s something I’d like to show you.”

He nodded, somewhat nonplussed.

“I felt like I should have a Saint Nick costume, bringing this thing down here,” she said, bending over to undo the knot holding the bag closed, thus favoring him with a glimpse of white bosom. “We’ve been collecting these for a while down in Trade and thought it might give you a chuckle to see them.”

With a smooth motion, she hoisted the bag over Rashuri’s desk, inverted it, and let the contents spill out. A writing set went skittering off the desk as a casualty, but Rashuri neither noticed nor would have minded. He had dropped back into his seat and was laughing, one hand over his eyes, about what had come tumbling onto his desk.

“Well—how do you like them?”

Rashuri looked up, shaking his head in mock disbelief. A multicolored mound of dolls and figurines had taken over his desk top and part of the surrounding floor. He reached out and picked up one to examine it, stroked the twin feathers which had been used for MuMan antennae, examined the three-fingered MuMan hands, admired the deep-set MuMan eyes.

“How many are there?”

“This isn’t all of them. We’ve collected more than three hundred varieties, and that’s not counting the patterns that show up in more than one area.”

“I see there’s no agreement about fur color.” She laughed. “No, sir. Without a pronouncement by Eddington, I guess there’s room for speculation.” It was at that point that Weddell walked in for his regularly scheduled weekly conference.

“What the devil are those?” he exclaimed, stopping short.

Rashuri held one high, facing it toward Weddell. “MuMans, every one.”

“Oh, good God, no one told me this was happening,” Weddell moaned. “We’re going to have to put a stop to that. We can’t have the Senders arriving and finding these little icons all over the place. What would they think?”

“Let it go. Any contact is years away,” said Rashuri. “The dolls are harmless. Are you forgetting we created this to give the people a focus?”

“But not this kind—”

“Let it go,” Rashuri said firmly. To the woman from Trade, he said, “I am very glad you thought to show me. May I keep this one?”

“Certainly, Chairman. I hope Charan likes it.”

Rashuri raised an eyebrow. “Charan is too old and too busy for such things.” He noted her bafflement and added, “I wish it for myself.”

He did not concern himself with whether she understood why.

Several months later, Driscoll also received a visitor with an unexpected package. In this case the visitor was not a stranger, it was Dr. James Avidsen, at thirty-two the youngest of the “old guard” from the Star Rise module D team. Having once made much over being born in 1985, the year calculated for the Sender departure, Avidsen now bore good-naturedly the nickname Starchild, even to wearing it on his badge.

“What do you have for me?” asked Driscoll, taking the envelope Avidsen proffered and tearing it open. Inside were a dozen sheets of paper bound together at one corner.

“I’d rather you drew your own conclusions,” said Avidsen, settling in a chair as though he expected to be there for a while. Driscoll rubbed his eyes. “I take it you wouldn’t be here if this wasn’t of some importance?”

“I’d rather you drew your own conclusions,” Avidsen repeated. “But the fact is, I’m not sure anyone else can properly evaluate that argument.”

Drawing a pair of reading glasses from a leather pouch, Driscoll took up the papers, which were written in a fine hand. The second sheet bore little but mathematical symbols, and Driscoll spent several minutes perusing it before continuing. When he reached the final page some thirty minutes after he had begun, he turned back to the second page, and looked over the rim of his glasses at Avidsen.

“These are my equations,” said Driscoll. “Some of the expressions are expanded, but this is my theorem, my unified field theorem.”

“I know. But, applied in novel fashion.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You never considered them in that context?”

“No,” said Driscoll, setting the papers down. “Never. But then, I didn’t anticipate the fission blanket, either, even though it proceeds directly from the theorem.”

“And it proved to work.”

“Yes. But we still don’t understand why it does what it does except in terms of symbolic analogues. The cascade effect, the energy multiplier—”

“But that hasn’t stopped us from using it. Is this author right? Can we do for gravity what we did with the weak force—alter its strength selectively?”

“The effects of the blanket were permanent, not selective.”

Avidsen nodded. “The blanket operated on matter. The gravity gradient drive would operate on spacetime.”

“So you’ve named it already.”

“You haven’t answered my question. Does the argument pass muster?”

Driscoll slowly moved the top sheet in a small circle with a touch of his forefinger. “He uses my equations for a special case solution to relativity theory. Intuitively the solution is false. No ship can drag itself forward. Parity is not conserved. Mass-energy is not conserved.”

“Reality has been counterintuitive before.”

“I know,” said Driscoll, and coughed. “Then tell me how you see the implications.”

Avidsen leaned forward. “Much as the author does. To accelerate, the gravity projector would create a massless gravitational field ahead of the ship, close enough to have an effect but far enough away to avoid any serious tidal forces. The ship would ‘fall’ into the artificial gravitational well—except that the well will be moving at exactly the same velocity, since it’s a projection from the ship, and not a real phenomenon. The stronger the field, the steeper the slope of the gravity well and the faster the ship will move.”

“Like a man picking himself up by his bootstraps.”

“A fair analogy.”

“And equally impossible.”

Avidsen shook his head slowly. “Don’t mistake me. I have difficulties with it myself. But I was unable to find the error in the argument. If your theorem holds, then it would seem—that’s why I wanted your input. I thought perhaps those expanded expressions, some error there—”

“None strikes me,” said Driscoll, and paused. “If none exists, then this is our drive. I want it moved to the top of the list. Let’s find out as fast as we can.”

Avidsen stood. “I’ll call the department heads together and brief them, and get work started on a prototype.” Driscoll nodded absently, taking the papers up again to study them. “
You’re
the author, aren’t you.”

Avidsen, already in motion, stopped at the door. “No. I claim only the discovery of the discoverer. The author is Dayton Tindal Lopez.”

“Who does he work for? The name isn’t familiar.”

Avidsen smiled. “Hziu-Tyu Tech. Only he’s not a teacher. He’s a student. And if he’s right, he’ll have made everything we spent on the institutes worthwhile.”

Even with the fission blanket projector as a model to work from, it took many months to reach the stage of attempting to engineer a prototype of the “bootstrap drive” or “pushmi-pullyu.” During that time, Rashuri pressed Driscoll again and again to fix a launch date or explain his failure to do so. With Rashuri reacting to what he saw as incompetence and Driscoll responding to what he saw as ignorance and impatience, the relationship between the two men acquired a distinctly frosty character.

Tai Chen was also displeased, since the second platform for Gauntlet had been delayed again by the focus on the drive prototype. Her leverage was limited by the secrecy which still surrounded the project, and she was wise enough in reading the temper of the times not to consider making any change in that status. But she harangued Driscoll at every opportunity, all the same.

Pressure came too from the Pangaean Assembly, on behalf of their sometimes vocal constituents and also on behalf of their own desire to acquire reflected glory from Star Rise. Two assembly committees insisted on tours of the Star Rise project center and periodic appearances by top Science Service administrators including, what it could not be avoided, Driscoll himself.

Though a nuisance, the interest was not so surprising. There were few within the Consortium’s sphere who did not immediately associate the year 2027 with the arrival of the MuMans, and it had become much easier to look ahead to that event now dud it lay less than a decade away. It was not uncommon for calendars to include a countdown to the “Galactic Era.”