The Sunspacers Trilogy (38 page)
“What rough spots?” Susan asked suspiciously, looking at Lissa.
“Usually there aren’t any, young lady. This tug could take you there by itself, once you put in the course. Oh, by the way, we’re running a bit late. Do you mind one point one g?”
Lissa looked at Dr. Shastri, who nodded his approval.
“I guess not,” she said.
“Here we go.”
Lissa felt a tug. The flat screen showed a dark tunnel. The small vessel moved forward. Stars showed in the opening as she gripped the armrests and put her head back. The engines made a whining noise, and she felt vibrations in her feet, but after a moment everything quieted down.
Phobos was falling away on the screen. Mars grew behind it, and Lissa thought of a large potato falling into a red fire.
“So it’s back to the old listening post, eh, Doctor?” Harry asked. “And you’ve got two new students.”
“Yes,” Dr. Shastri replied. “This is Lissa Quintana-Green-Wolfe, and Susan Falleta. Both are very talented.”
“You’d have to be,” Harry said without turning around. “I have two daughters down at Wells myself. That’s a small town at the end of the rail line out of Marsport.”
The course chart appeared on the screen again. A small green dash crawled over the red curve, showing that the tug was on course.
“How long before we arrive?” Susan asked.
“Tomorrow this time,” Harry replied.
Lissa sniffed the air, picking up the odor of human sweat.
Harry’s head turned slightly. “Sorry about that, but the old boat just doesn’t have a way to clean itself up completely.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lissa said.
“We’re at one point two g now. How does it feel?”
“I can’t really tell,” Lissa replied.
“Well, you won’t have to walk around much in here.”
Lissa looked over at Dr. Shastri. He was asleep.
The remote station looked very much like Phobos, except that the potato shape was only two kilometers long and a half kilometer across. It had been mined out nearly forty years ago. The Institute had bought it, sealed up the cracks, landscaped the inner surface, and put a half-g spin on it. It orbited the Sun just beyond Mars, and few people knew much about what kind of work was going on there.
Lissa noticed the large attachment at one end. It looked like a railroad car held in place by massive rings.
“That’s the tachyon device,” Dr. Shastri said.
The other end of the asteroid held two massive globes. Dr. Shastri did not say what these were.
Harry lined the tug up along the asteroid’s long axis and came in toward the dock just below the railroad car.
“We’re here,” he said, sitting back as the tug crept into the tunnel. “And on time.”
Lissa felt a small bump as the tug was secured inside.
“Thank you, Mr. Lipsky,” Dr. Shastri said. He unstrapped and floated upright. Lissa did the same, feeling a bit queasy.
They pulled themselves down the tunnel to the lock, which was already open.
“What’d you think of Harry?” Lissa asked Susan as they floated out into another passageway. Dr. Shastri lagged behind.
“Kind of cute, in a smelly way.” She laughed. “I’m glad we’re out of there,” she said, holding her nose.
“Keep going!” Dr. Shastri called from behind them.
The tunnel ahead was filled with yellow light. Lissa pulled herself forward on the guide rail. Her feet drifted down as she neared the end, until finally she was able to walk the rest of the way. Even though the pull was gentle, it was enough to indicate that they had moved off the central axis of the asteroid, giving the centrifugal spin a chance to work.
They came to a circular opening and looked out into the hollow. The curving landscape was very plain. Dr. Shastri caught up, and the three of them gazed out at the gently rolling grassland. It covered most of the inner surface. Barracks stood in groups of a dozen on the curving land of the small world, connected by dirt roads. A small sun mirror stood at the other end of the asteroid, two kilometers away. There were few trees.
“We’d better go,” Dr. Shastri said.
Lissa stepped out first. A small vehicle of some kind was coming up the road toward them.
“It’s not a large hollow,” Susan said, looking at the land overhead, “but it looks much bigger than it is.”
“It’s comfortable-looking,” Lissa said, breathing the fresh air.
“How many people are here?” Susan asked.
“With you two,” Dr. Shastri said, “five hundred and two.”
“A very small town,” Lissa added.
The small open car pulled up to them. “Welcome back, Dr. Shastri!” a lanky young man called out from behind the wheel. He smiled at Lissa and gave Susan an appreciative look.
“This is Dr. Repplier, our youngest double doctorate,” Dr. Shastri said proudly. “May I present Susan Falleta and Lissa Quintana-Green-Wolfe.”
“Call me Mike.” He smiled and brushed his sandy blond hair out of his eyes.
“How old are you?” Susan asked, smiling back.
“He’s just nineteen,” Dr. Shastri said. “He also went to the Institute.”
Susan was being a bit pushy, Lissa thought, but she wished her luck.
They took their places in the back of the vehicle.
“Barracks A,” Dr. Shastri said as Mike turned around and drove down into the hollow.
As the air blew across her face, Lissa looked straight up. A half kilometer above her, a barracks complex was stuck to a green sky; yet it all seemed natural. Opposite points were much farther away from each other on Bernal One, but this wasn’t too different. There were no clouds in the great central space. Lissa concluded that the ecological balances were still very simple here. She wouldn’t even be surprised to learn that oxygen generators were needed to keep the air breathable.
Mike drove straight down the center and pulled into Barracks A. The place seemed deserted.
“We’ve just put this group up,” he explained. “Another team will be coming in by end of next week, just before we get going.”
“What are your specialties?” Lissa asked.
“Oh, I do physics and chemistry.”
“He helped design the tachyon receiver,” Dr. Shastri said. “And he contributed a lot to the negative-g propulsion system that is going to move us to the outer solar system.”
Mike smiled at Lissa. “Neither gadget has proven itself yet, so don’t be too impressed.”
“We won’t, for now,” Susan said.
“Your rooms are over in that building,” he said after a moment.
“We get rooms?” Susan asked.
“Well, small ones. These are luxury barracks. The pecking order around here goes up from maintenance engineer to student apprentice to big brains. So you’re in the middle.”
Dr. Shastri chuckled. “We have to go, Mike. Therefore, young ladies, please go inside and get settled.”
Lissa took her shoulder bag and got out of the vehicle. Susan followed her, and together they walked up to the barracks, climbed three steps, and went in through the open door. Susan turned and watched Mike drive away with Dr. Shastri.
“He’s very cute,” she said, “but with my luck he already has someone.”
“Don’t be in such a rush, Lissa said, thinking of Alek as she went down the hallway. Her name was on the third door in.
“See you later!” Susan called.
Lissa slid the door open and stepped inside. The room was cube shaped with a large window. There were a bunk, desk, built-in closet, and small bath-toilet behind another sliding door. Everything was made out of light-and dark brown ceramic, suggesting wood but hard to the touch.
She dropped her bag down on the bunk and opened the large window, wondering whether she would need the overhead light during the day in such a sunny room. She took a deep breath, grateful for the freshness after the confinement of Harry Lipsky’s tug.
She sat down at the desk and touched her palm to the ID plate. The upright screen lit up:
WELCOME, LISSA. DO YOU STILL WISH TO USE WORD DISPLAY, OR WOULD YOU NOW PREFER A VOICE?
—AUGIE
She laughed. Of course, Augie could be transferred quite easily. She typed:
DISPLAY WORDS WILL STILL BE FINE. I’M GLAD YOU’RE HERE, AUGIE.
THANKS.
On the second day after their arrival, Dr. Shastri took Lissa and Susan on a tour of the engineering and research level. This was a maze of tunnels, low ceilinged rooms, meeting rooms, and control areas below the green land. Here the main work of the scientific community was conducted. The open space of the hollow, with its sky and greenery, was the living area and the place to get away from the high-pressure environment of work. The green hollow made it psychologically possible for the asteroid’s community to exist so far away from the homes of its members. Whenever the controlled work environments grew tiresome and constricting, one could travel inward to daylight and grass.
Lissa saw the preparations going on for the asteroid’s departure, and she was impressed by the seriousness of the scientific and technical workers. This was no longer merely a listening project for the study of a curious alien communication. The fate of all Sunspace might one day depend on decisions that were now being made. As Dr. Shastri showed them around, Lissa became increasingly committed to being there.
“This is the control room for the tachyon detector,” Dr. Shastri said as they came into a large theater filled with screens, measuring equipment, and seats for observers. A thrill passed through Lissa as she imagined what would one day happen here. “You saw the core container on the outside when we docked,” Dr. Shastri continued. “That container holds a small black hole in a powerful magnetic field. If a tachyon particle enters and is captured by the black hole, the entire field will jiggle, and the event will register on various detectors. We also throw some waste material into the hole, and that generates some usable electricity. Not much yet, but it works in principle. We still depend on our matter-antimatter reactor, the backup inertial fusion container, and solar collectors for most of what we need.”
“When will the detector be ready?” Lissa asked.
“Long after we’re on our way, I’m afraid. We’re having problems with spurious signals. Mike says it’s a matter of setting our instruments to register only tachyon reception. That’s easier said than done, because we must be able to predict the kind of ripple we can expect when a tachyon collides with our mini-black hole.”
Later, Dr. Shastri showed them the control area for the negative-gravity generator. “We’ve been using negative-g catapults to launch ships from planetary surfaces for some two decades now, but this will be the first time a continuous negative-g force will be used to push an object of this size. It works in smaller prototype vehicles, but the power requirement is still massive. Of course, we’ll still have our torch engines as a backup, in case something goes wrong. We can’t take any chance of getting stranded out there.”
“But an asteroid this size can carry enough simple fusion-power generating capacity to feed the negative-g pusher,” Lissa said.
“True. And torchships are as good as we need to get around the solar system at this point in history. But the negative-g pusher is so elegant. It creates no problem for centrifugal spin, so we’ll have unperturbed g spin to walk around in and forward motion without the g-force limitations that a human body places on a torchship.” Dr. Shastri’s eyes sparkled. “Mike says a hundred-g equivalent will be possible, and we won’t feel it—assuming, of course, that we can generate the power needed to run the pusher.”
“We’ll get where we want to go fast,” Lissa said. “And we’ll need it.”
Dr. Shastri looked at her appreciatively. “It’s taken decades to build up this facility, and it will have many uses. We may have to go out as far as a hundred astronomical units beyond the orbit of Pluto to find the source of the signal. But we’ll be very comfortable, and safe.”
“It occurs to me,” Susan said as Mike came into the control area, “that this asteroid could take us out to the nearer stars in reasonable relativistic time—”
“Dr. Shastri,” Mike interrupted, “the last cargo ship is on its way from Mars. All the final personnel are aboard. I thought you’d like to know. They’ll be here tomorrow.”
“Good, good,” Dr. Shastri replied. “It’s all coming together at last.” Lissa watched as he turned back to Susan. “The nearer stars, you were saying. Of course, of course, why not? That day will come.”
That evening, a few minutes after she had fallen asleep, Lissa awoke suddenly, realizing that when the asteroid left its Sun orbit she would be moving even farther away from Alek than she had expected. It might be years before she saw him again, if ever. He would meet someone else, or she would; the older feelings would fade, and she would wonder what she had ever seen in him. She knew that could happen by how easily she had put him out of her mind during the journey out here; and she had forgotten him completely during Dr. Shastri’s guided tour.
No, she thought as she got up to write Alek a letter. It might have to be read by others and would take some time to reach him, but it would confirm how she felt one more time.
A siren wailed in the hollow.
Lissa got up from her studies and went outside. Susan was sitting on the barracks stairs. Windows opened throughout the complex of twelve buildings, and faces peered out. Many of the off-duty maintenance workers and engineers were out in the fields, standing and sitting down as they waited.
“This is it, I think,” Susan said.
An amplified male voice spoke:
“WE ARE ABOUT TO PUT INTO DRIVE. PLEASE FIND A SECURE PLACE IN CASE SOMETHING GOES WRONG
“Nothing will go wrong,” Susan said. “The physics is perfect.”
Lissa sat down and closed her hand around the edge of the ceramic stair. The sun at the far end of the worldlet flickered slightly, but there was no other sign of anything happening. If the drive worked perfectly, there would be nothing to feel.
“WE ARE MOVING!” the voice boomed. Lissa tensed. There was no going back now. There were a few cheers from the windows. Lissa looked at Susan and smiled.
“Well,” her friend said, “we have a lot of studying to do before we get where we’re going, and the whole idea is to have fresh, trained minds to interpret whatever we find.” She got up and went inside, Windows closed, and the groups of people out in the tall grass began to break up. Everyone had pretty much expected the drive to work.