Mindbridge (16 page)

“Obviously we have to go back. Probably an automated probe; I won’t order anybody to undertake a suicide mission.

“Damned expensive, too. The energy we have to push through the crystal for a 115 light-year jump, just for a couple of hours, would pay for hundreds of routine resupply missions.”

He folded the papers together and gave them a sharp crease. “But once we show this cube around, I doubt we’ll have any trouble getting funded.”

(From AED Employees’ Handbook, AED TFX, Colorado, 2053:)

It might seem inefficient for us to proceed with geoformy in a sequence of many short jumps, rather than fewer long ones. It is unavoidable, though, from the mathematics of the Levant-Meyer Translation.

To appreciate this, it’s not necessary to have a complete technical description of the LMT; indeed, not one in a thousand AED employees understands all of the subtleties of the process. But it’s instructive to compare the energy requirements of the crystal for jumps of different duration.

(Readers without first-year college mathematics may wish to skip to the last table.)

The basic equation describing the energy needed for a given jump is:

E=C (e^(t/k) cosh s^(1/2))/(l/t+1) ,
          
{
         
t>=.01356, s>=9.4095

where C and k are constants, t is the duration of the jump, and s is the distance. Calculations are normally done in the MKS system, but for clarity we will consider t in units of days, and s in units of light-years.

The constraints braced to the right of the equation are due to an energy threshold phenomenon of the LMT crystal. Jumps cannot be made to destinations closer than 9.4095 light-years, nor may a jump be of less than about 191/2 minutes duration. The first constraint keeps us from exploiting the promising Alpha Centauri system.1 The second makes it impossible to explore planets more than about 100-light-years distant.

It’s a convenient fiction to consider this equation as continuous over the range of values allowed. The LMT, however, can’t translate an object to any desired point in space; it translates only from matter boundary to matter boundary. There has to be an object with a distinct and relatively cold surface-a planet or asteroid-“near” the point to which the LMT crystal is tuned (attempts to translate probes onto the surface of planetless stars have always failed). The margin of error allowed is described by a fourth-order differential equation involving distance, energy, and the angular displacement of charge application away from the lattice axis of the LMT crystal.2

This family of curves shows the relationship between energy requirement and jump duration for representative distances.

1 There are plans, however, for the Tau Ceti colony to build an LMT facility out of native materials, for jumps to Centauri.

2 As described in the monograph Mathematics of the Levant-Meyer Translation: State of the Art 2051, by Lewis Chandler, AED TFX, Colorado, 2051.

( See attached graph2.jpg )

Note that a tenfold increase in distance becomes a thousandfold increase in energy required.

Energy is money, of course, and the AED is the largest consumer of energy in the world. Like any other consumer, we pay a flat rate to Westinghouse Interplanetary for every kilowatt-hour, though our rate is reduced both because of volume and because of mutual-interest grants from WI research facilities.

It’s instructive to compare the cost of jumps to various planets for different durations (see included table1.jpg).

Careful study of this table will give one an appreciation for the complexity involved in scheduling jumps (coordinating them so the crystal is always clear when a return is due).

As an illustrative example, consider the course of a breeding mission to Cygnus A. A pregnant Tamer will spend about 150 days of her pregnancy offplanet. The energy cost of various combinations of jumps is as follows:

    
150
     
one-day jumps
 
=
         
$2,340,000

    
30
       
5-day jumps
    
=
         
1,197,000

    
15
       
10-day jumps
  
=
         
1,114,500

    
5
         
30-day jumps
  
=
         
3,376,500.

So a sequence of short jumps may actually cost more than a smaller number of longer jumps. What happens in practice is that the least expensive combination is calculated, and then adjustments are made to the sequence in order to minimize crowding of the crystal’s schedule . . .

( see attached table1.jpg)

Box 5397

Oswego, NY 1312659

3 January 2053

Dear Carol,

It looks like I’ll be here for another week. Not looking forward to it, either.

My stepmother insisted on a viewing, open coffin. Barbaric. She said Dad would have wanted it that way. Maybe he changed a lot these last nine years.

The reason I have to stick around is that Dad willed his papers to Cornell, and their history of science department is anxious to have them. He left a trailerful, in no particular order; I’m filing and cataloging them with the help of half-brother Jerry.

Jerry’s all right. I never really got to talk with him before. He’s just finishing a master’s in holo arts. Dad was disappointed he didn’t go into physics. Still, he left him everything-all the money, that is. (The house and such went to Zara, my stepmother.) Neither my mother nor I was mentioned in the will.

I called Mother, but she didn’t want to come to the funeral. She confronted Zara once. She agreed that Dad wouldn’t have wanted all this morbid circus. The will didn’t say anything one way or another.

I saw in the Times that they think the Achernar gravity waves were caused by interstellar space ships braking. So they’ve been on that planet for 140 years or more.

The article didn’t say, but I assume the gravity waves are generated by a sudden loss of mass as the ships come down from relativistic velocity. They must stop pretty suddenly. Has anybody figured out the gee-forces involved? Tough customers.

At least they don’t have the LMT, not yet. After seeing that cube (a hundred times) I’m just as happy we don’t have them in our back yard.

I called Noad (Planning) and he gave me a leave extension. They do need a scientist-type here for the sorting. Jerry’s smart but he doesn’t know a quark from a quasar.

I may come back to Colorado Springs by way of Kuala Lumpur, spend a day with my mother. She remarried three or four years ago, and I’ve never met the man.

They’ve been busy years, though.

This letter probably comes as a surprise (pleasant, I hope) since I have been calling every night. Guess I got in the habit of writing when I was in Australia and you were making babies for the greater glory of etc.

I do miss you so much. Take care.

Love,

Jacque

12 Jan 53

TO:
          
All personnel involved in Project Bogeyman.

FROM:
    
Psych Group (R. Sweeney, chmn).

RE:
          
Psychological profile of the Achernar aliens.

I’m stuffing this in your mailboxes because we just don’t have enough to make it worth calling a general meeting.

Take the following list with a ton of salt. The essence of psychology, in the only sense that’s applicable here, is in figuring out consistent stimulus-response patterns in the population under scrutiny. We have only a small set of stimuli to consider, and responses that as often as not make no sense whatsoever.

Possible Characteristics

1. Courage or lack of concern over personal welfare.

As O’Brien remarked on the cube, a Tamer in a GPEM suit is a pretty dangerous organism, and looks it. The aliens didn’t bother with weapons when they first confronted the five Tamers. Either they didn’t realize that the suited Tamers could do them harm- an unlikely supposition in light of their technological sophistication-or they didn’t care what happened to them personally (this theory is buttressed by the passive reaction of the female leader to her grave injury).

Another explanation would be a kind of judgmental blindness, an egotism that wouldn’t allow them to consider another race as being a potential danger.

2. Confidence; lack of xenophobia.

The female leader was immediately in charge of the situation. She communicated very well in sign language and, again, showed no sign of fear.

3. Aggression.

It would have been interesting to see what the aliens would have done had the Tamers not gone along with them. As it is, all we have to go on is the explosion of violence at the end, and the sound the leader made before the slaughter, which resembled a growl. This could be the normal tone and timbre of their language, though.

4. Sensuality (?).

One gesture the female leader made would have been frankly sexual in human beings. It’s more likely, though, that she was simply indicating that the Tainers didn’t need their suits inside the ship. (Though it may be worthwhile to remember that human societies allowing casual, nonsexual nudity do have restrictions on the range of gestures allowed in public.)

5. Incuriosity.

The aliens seemed not at all interested in the Tamers once they were killed. It is possible that something in their philosophy or psychology prohibited them from investigating the dead. As a wild guess, one might posit a purification ritual that had to follow killing; there was no way for them to know that the corpses would soon disappear.

Other Points

1. Smiles.

Although two of the aliens smiled frequently, there is no reason to believe that they were trying to convey a feeling of friendliness, to put the Tamers off their guard. Even in human cultures the smile is often an ambiguous or even negative expression. In other primates, the baring of teeth is usually an aggressive challenge.

2. Tools or puppets.

Dr. Bondi suggests that the aliens O’Brien encountered might not have been the “true” aliens, the ones who built the starship. They may have been constructs, flesh-and-blood robots designed for dangerous work.

This is an ominous possibility, in view of their striking similarity to human beings. The aliens appeared less than five minutes after the Tamers translated onto the planet. If they were puppets constructed to mimic human form, then either their masters were able to divine an accurate picture of human anatomy and build four humans in minutes, or they were already familiar with the human form. It’s hard to say which explanation is more frightening. If the first is true, we are dealing with a race that has vast psychic and scientific powers (and apparently no respect for life). If the second, we are dealing with a race that has observed humanity, and presumably knows where Earth is.

3. The aliens as adversaries.

We assume that the aliens have not settled any planets closer than Achernar, since we haven’t recorded the peculiar gravity wave bursts in the neighborhood of any closer stars. This doesn’t mean they aren’t on their way.

In day-to-day work with the Levant-Meyer Translation, we tend to forget, or ignore, the fact that the LMT is a time machine. When we detect a gravity wave from Achemar, it is the record of an event that occurred 115 years ago. If we respond to that event with the LMT, it gathers information 115 years in that event’s future; then brings it back to the past for us to investigate.

So if the aliens learned the location of Earth from O’Brien’s team (of course, there’s no reason to assume that they did), and immediately mounted an expedition to our planet, we would have over a century to prepare for meeting them.

On the other hand, they could have left Achernar over a century ago, and be right on our doorstep at this moment.

From a statistical point of view, this fear might seem irrational: there are some twenty thousand stars within 115 light-years of Achernar, so why should they single us out?

The answer is that they might be able to detect our civilization. A powerful enough radio receiver in the region of Achernar would at this moment be picking up radio broadcasts that originated on Earth in 1938: undeniable proof of a technological civilization. It’s true that the signals would be weak-we have no radio telescopes, in fact, sensitive enough to detect such a signal. But neither have we mile-long spaceships that travel close to the speed of light.