Hidden Variables (34 page)

If he was trying to make me feel better, McAndrew was going about it in quite the wrong way.

* * *

Back in the twenties, the resources of the Solar System must have seemed inexhaustible. No one had been able to
catalog
the planetoids, still less analyze their composition and probable value. Now we know everything out to Neptune that's bigger than a hundred meters across, and the navigation groups want that down to fifty meters in the next twenty years. The idea of grabbing an asteroid a couple of kilometers across and using it how you choose sounds like major theft. But it hadn't merely been permitted—it had been encouraged.

The first space colonies had been conceived as utopias, planned by Earth idealists who wouldn't learn from history. New frontiers may attract visionaries, but more than that they attract oddities. Anyone who is more than three sigma away from the norm, in any direction, seems to finish out there on the frontier. No surprise in that. If a person can't fit, for whatever reason, he'll move away from the main group of humanity. They'll push him, and he'll want to go. How do I know? Look, you don't pilot to Titan without learning a lot about your own personality. Before we found the right way to use people like me, I would probably have been on one of the Arks.

The United Space Federation had assisted in the launch of seventeen of them, between ninety and forty years ago. Each of them was self-supporting, a converted asteroid that would hold between three and ten thousand people at departure time. The idea was that there would be enough raw materials and space to let the Ark grow as the population grew. A two-kilometer asteroid holds five to twenty billion tons of material, total life-support system for one human needs less than ten tons of that.

The Arks had left long before the discovery of the McAndrew balanced drive, before the discovery of even the Mattin Drive. They were multi-generation ships, bumbling along into the interstellar void with speeds that were only a few percent of light speed.

And who was on-board them when they left? Any fairly homogeneous group of strange people, who shared enough of a common philosophy or delusion to prefer the uncertainties of star travel to the known problems within the Solar System. It took courage to set out like that, to sever all your ties with home except occasional laser and radio communication. Courage, or an overpowering conviction that you were part of a unique and chosen group.

To put that another way, McAndrew was proposing to take us out to meet a community about which we knew little, except that by the usual standards they were descended from madmen.

"Mac, I don't remember which one was the Ark of Massingham. How long ago did it leave?"

Even mad people can have sane children. Four of the Arks, as I recalled, had turned around and were on their way back to the System.

"About seventy-five years ago. It's one of the earlier ones, with a final speed a bit less than three percent of light speed."

"Is it one of the Arks that has turned back?"

He shook his head. "No. They're still on their way. Target star is Tau Ceti. They won't get there for another three hundred years."

"Well, why pick them out? What's so special about the Ark of Massingham?" I had a sudden thought. "Are they having some problem that we could help with?"

We had saved two of the Arks in the past twenty years. For one of them we had been able to diagnose a recessive genetic element that was appearing in the children, and pass the test information and sperm filter technique over the communications link. The other had needed the use of an unmanned high-acceleration probe, to carry a couple of tons of cadmium out to them. They had been unlucky enough to choose a freak asteroid, one that apparently lacked the element even in the tiniest traces.

"They don't report any problem," said Mac. "We've never had a response to any messages we've sent to them, so far as the records on Triton Station are concerned. But we know that they are doing all right, because every three or four years a message has come in from them. Never anything about the Ark itself, it has always been . . . scientific information."

McAndrew had hesitated as he said that last phrase. That was the lure, no doubt about it.

"What kind of information?" I said. "Surely we know everything that they know. We have hundreds of thousands of scientists in the System, they can't have more than a few hundred of them."

"I'm sure you're right on the numbers." Professor Limperis spoke when McAndrew showed no inclination to do so. "I'm not sure it's relevant. How many scientists does it require to produce the work of one Einstein, or one McAndrew? You can't just sit down and count numbers, as though you were dealing with—with bars of soap, or poker chips. You have to deal with individuals."

"There's a genius on the Ark of Massingham," said McAndrew suddenly. His eyes were gleaming. "A man or woman who has been cut off from most of physics for a whole lifetime, working alone. It's worse than Ramanujan."

"How do you know that?" I had seldom seen McAndrew so filled with feeling. "Maybe they've been getting messages from somebody in the System here."

McAndrew laughed, a humorless bark. "I'll tell you why, Jeanie. You flew the
Merganser
. Tell me how the drive worked."

"Well, the mass plate at the front balanced the acceleration, so we didn't get any sensation of fifty gee." I shrugged. "I didn't work out the math for myself, but I'm sure I could have if I felt like it."

I could have, too. I was a bit rusty, but you never lose the basics once you have them planted deep enough in your head.

"I don't mean the balancing mechanism, that was just common sense." He shook his head. "I mean the
drive
. Didn't it occur to you that we were accelerating a mass of trillions of tons at fifty gee? If you work out the mass conversion rate you will need, you find that even with an ideal photon drive you'll consume the whole mass in a few days. The
Merganser
got its drive by accelerating charged particles up to within millimeters a second of light speed. That was the reaction mass. But how did it get the energy to do it?"

I felt like telling him that when I had been on
Merganser
there had been other details—such as survival—on my mind. I thought for a few moments, then shook my head.

"You can't get more energy out of matter than the rest mass energy, I know that. But you're telling me that the drives on
Merganser
and
Hoatzin
do it. That Einstein was wrong."

"No!" McAndrew looked horrified at the thought that he might have been criticizing one of his senior idols. "All I've done is build on what Einstein did. Look, you've done a fair amount of quantum mechanics. You know that when you calculate the energy for the vacuum state of a system you don't get zero. You get a positive value."

I had a hazy recollection of a formula swimming back across the years. What was it? h
w
/2, said a distant voice.

"But you can set that to zero!" I was proud at remembering so much. "The zero point of energy is arbitrary."

"In quantum theory it is. But not in general relativity." McAndrew was beating back my mental defenses. As usual when I spoke with him on theoretical subjects, I began to feel I would know less at the end of the conversation than I did at the beginning.

"In general relativity," he went on, "energy implies space-time curvature. If the zero-point energy is not zero, the vacuum self-energy is real. It can be tapped, if you know what you are doing. That's where
Hoatzin
draws its energy. The reaction mass it needs is very small. You can get that by scooping up matter as you go along, or if you prefer it you can use a fraction—a very small fraction—of the mass plate."

"All right." I knew McAndrew. If I let him get going he would talk all day about physical principles. "But I don't see how that has anything to do with the Ark of Massingham. It has an old-fashioned drive, surely. You said it was launched seventy-five years ago."

"It was." This was Limperis again, gently insistent. "But you see, Captain Roker, nobody outside the Penrose Institute knows how Professor McAndrew has been able to tap the vacuum self-energy. We have been very careful not to broadcast that information until we were ready. The potential for destructive use is enormous. It destroys the old idea that you cannot create more energy at a point than the rest mass of the matter residing there. There was nothing known in the rest of the System about this use until two weeks ago."

"And then you released the information?" I was beginning to feel dizzy.

"No. The basic equations for accessing the vacuum self-energy were received by laser communication. They were sent, with no other message, from the Ark of Massingham."

Suddenly it made sense. It wasn't just McAndrew who was itching to get in and find out what there was on the Ark—it was everyone at the Penrose Institute. I could sense the excitement in Limperis, and he was the most guarded and politically astute of all the Members. If some physicist, working out there alone two light-years from Sol, had managed to parallel McAndrew's development, that was a momentous event. It implied a level of genius that was difficult to imagine.

I knew
Hoatzin
would be on the way in a few days, whether I wanted to go or stay. But there was one more key question.

"I can't believe that the Ark of Massingham was started by a bunch of physicists. What was the original composition of the group that colonized it?"

"Not physicists." Limperis had suddenly sobered. "By no means physicists. That is why I am glad you will be accompanying Professor McAndrew. The leader of the original group was Jules Massingham. In the past few days I have taken the time to obtain all the System records on him. He was a man of great personal drive and convictions. His ambition was to apply the old principles of eugenics to a whole society. Two themes run through all his writings: the creation of the superior human, and the idea of that superior being as an integrated part of a whole society. He was ruthless in his pursuit of those ends."

He looked at me, black face impassive. "From the evidence available, Captain, one might suggest that he succeeded in his aims."

* * *

Hoatzin
was a step up from
Merganser
and
Dotterel
. Maximum acceleration was a hundred and ten gees, and the living-capsule was a four-meter sphere. I had cursed the staff of the Institute, publicly and privately, but I had got nowhere. They were obsessed with the idea of the lonely genius out there in the void, and no one would consider any other first trip for
Hoatzin
. So at least I would check out every aspect of the system before we went, while McAndrew was looking at the rendezvous problem and making a final flight plan. We sent a message to the Ark, telling them of our trip and estimated arrival time. It would take two years to get there, Earth-time, but we would take even longer. They would be able to prepare for our arrival however they chose, with garlands or gallows.

On the trip out, McAndrew tried again to explain to me his methods for tapping the vacuum self-energy. The available energies made up a quasi-continuous "spectrum," corresponding to a large number of very high frequencies of vibration and associated wavelengths. Tuned resonators in the
Hoatzin
drive units selected certain wavelengths which were excited by the corresponding components in the vacuum self energy. These "colors," as McAndrew thought of them, could feed vacuum energy to the drive system. The results that had come from the Ark of Massingham suggested that McAndrew's system for energy extraction could be generalized, so that all the "colors" of the vacuum self-energy should become available.

If that were true, the potential acceleration produced by the drive could go up by a couple of orders of magnitude. He was still working out what the consequences of that would be. At speeds that approached within a nanometer per second of light speed, a single proton would mass enough to weigh its impact on a sensitive balance.

I let him babble on to his heart's content. My own attention was mostly on the history of the Ark of Massingham. It was an oddity among oddities. Six of the Arks had disappeared without trace. They didn't respond to signals from Earth, and they didn't send signals of their own. Most people assumed that they had wiped themselves out, with accidents, wars, strange sexual practices, or all three. Four of the Arks had swung back towards normalcy and were heading in again for the System. Six were still heading out, but two of them were in deep trouble if the messages that came back to Triton Station were any guide. One was full of messianic ranting, a crusade of human folly propagating itself out to the stars (let's hope they never met anyone out there whose good opinion we would later desire). Another was quietly and peacefully insane, sending messages that spoke only of new rules for the interpretation of dreams. They were convinced that they would find the world of the Norse legends when they finally arrived at Eta Cassiopeia, complete with Jotunheim, Niflheim, and all the assembly of gods and heroes. It would be six hundred years before they arrived there, time enough for moves to rationality or to extinction.

Among this set, the Ark of Massingham provided a bright mixture of sanity and strangeness. They had sent messages back since first they left, messages that assumed the Ark was the carrier of human hopes and a superior civilization. Nothing that we sent—questions, comments, information, or acknowledgements—ever stimulated a reply. And nothing that they sent ever discussed life aboard the Ark. We had no idea if they lived in poverty or plenty, if they were increasing or decreasing in numbers, if they were receiving our transmissions, if they had material problems of any kind. Everything that came back to the solar system was science, delivered in a smug and self-satisfied tone. From all that science, the recent transmission on physics was the only one to excite more than a mild curiosity from our own scientists. Usually the Ark sent "discoveries" that had been made here long ago.

Once the drive of the
Hoatzin
was up to full thrust there was no way that we could see anything or communicate with anyone. The drive was fixed to the mass plate on the front of the ship, and the particles that streamed past us and out to the rear were visible only when they were in collision with the rare atoms of hydrogen drifting in free space. We had actually settled for less than a maximum drive and were using a slightly dispersed exhaust. A tightly focused and collimated beam wouldn't harm us any, but we didn't want to generate a death ray behind us that would disintegrate anything in its path for a few light-years.