Starborne (13 page)

Will people be willing to settle for a planet like that on the first or second or even tenth try? Or will they vote again and again to reject
what we find and look elsewhere for something a little better? We can waste our entire lives looking for the perfect world, or even the almost perfect one.

An autocratic year-captain could force them to settle for the first plausible-looking planet we fin
d, simply by decree. But the year-captain isn
’
t supposed to be that kind of an autocrat. And in any case I
’
m not going to be year-captain, am I, by the time we reach Planet A. My year will be up. They could re-elect me, I suppose, if I agreed, and then I
c
ould do whatever was within my powers to influence our decision about where we found our colony. But if I want to be part of the landing team, somebody else has to be elected captain. And I do want to be part of the landing team. I can
’
t have it both ways.

Who will succeed me? Heinz? Roy? Sieglinde? I don
’
t immediately see an ideal candidate. That makes me uncomfortable. And anything at all can happen, once this collection of prima donnas starts to vote, which makes me feel even more troubled about the whol
e idea of han
d
ing the job over to someone else.

One other thing to consider. Are we really going to be able to jump in and out of nospace with the greatest of ease? This is experimental equipment we
’
re flying here. We aren
’
t entirely sure about its stress
to
l
erance. It may have plenty of surprises waiting for us. Apparently there
’
s a mathematical angle too, which has only now begun to surface in something I heard Sieglinde and Roy discussing. The stardrive, it seems, is governed by probabilistic phenomena t
hat aren
’
t fully unde
r
stood, that in fact are scarcely understood at all. Whenever we make a jump in or out of nospace there
’
s a small but distinct possibility that the ship will do something completely unexpected. It might just happen on any given shunt t
hat something critical will have gone awry that is b
e
yond our capacity to correct, and we won
’
t be able to make the equi
p
ment work any more, so that we wind up stuck wherever we happen to be, whether that
’
s in nospace or out of it. Come to think of it, we
might find that the first time we try to get back into normal space we simply can
’
t do it.

That
’
s quite a screed of worries, for one little journal entry. But it
’
s of some therapeutic value, I suppose, to set all this stuff down. In actua
l
ity I
’
ll deal wit
h all of these problems the way I deal with everything, tackling them one at a time in the appropriate order. No need to worry about our rejecting a nearly suitable world until we
’
ve found one. No need to worry about whether the shunt mechanism will fail
u
ntil it does. As for choosing the next year-captain, I ought to trust to the common sense and good judgment of my companions, instead of fretting about my own supposed indispensability and the likelihood that they will r
e
place me with some clown.

What matt
ers right now is simply to locate Planet A in some kind of Einsteinian-universe coordinates, get ourselves as close as we can to it before we leave nospace, and shunt back into the real continuum within easy exploring range of Planet A
’
s star
’
s solar syst
e
m.

We
’
re supposed to know how to do that. If we can
’
t manage it, none of the other problems are going to be very important.

And so we get started on the grand quest. I don
’
t seriously believe we
’
re going to find our New Earth on the very first try. Still,
nothing ventured, nothing gained. And there
’
s a chance
—
small, but real
—
that we
’
ll find what we need right away. Both of these two planets look as though they just may be the real thing, insofar as we can tell very much about that at these distances and wi
t
h the scanning equipment at our disposal. What we have to do now is go out and take a close look.

***

The morning transmission. Noelle, sitting with her back to the year-captain, listens to what he reads her and sends it coursing over a gap that now spans
more than twenty light-years. “
Wait,”
she says. “
Yvonne is calling for a repeat. From
‘
metabolic
.
’
 
”

He pauses, goes back, reads again:

“
Metabolic balances remain normal, although, as earlier reported, some of the older members of the expedition have begun
to show trace deficiencies of manganese and potassium. We are, of course, taking a
p
propriate corrective steps, and
—”

Noelle halts him with a brusque gesture. The year-captain waits. She bends forward, forehead against the table, hands pressed tightly to h
er temples.

“
Static again,”
she says. “
It
’
s worse than ever today.”

“
Are you getting through at all?”

“
I
’
m getting through, yes. But I have to push, to push, push. And still Yvonne asks me for repeats.”
She lifts her head and stares at him, her eyes lockin
g on his in that weird intuitive way of hers. Her face is taut with tension. Her forehead is furrowed, and it glistens with a bright film of sweat. The year-captain wants to reach out to her, to hold her, to comfort her. She says huskily, “
I don
’
t know wh
a
t
’
s happening, year-captain.”

“
The distance
—”

“
No!”

“
Better than twenty light-years.”

“
No,”
she says again, a little less explosively this time. “
We
’
ve a
l
ready demonstrated that distance effects aren
’
t a factor. If there
’
s no falling-off of signal after a million kilometers, after one light-year, after ten light-years
—
no measurable drop in clarity and accuracy whate
v
er
—
then there shouldn
’
t be any qualitative diminution suddenly at any greater distance. Don
’
t you think I
’
ve
thought about this?”

“
Of course you have, Noelle.”

“
It
’
s not as if we
’
re getting out of ear-shot of each other. We were in perfect contact at ten light-years, perfect at fifteen. Those are already immense distances. If we could manage that, we ought to be
able to manage at any distance at all.”

“
But still, Noelle
—”

“
Attenuation of signal is one thing, and interference is another. An attenuation curve is a gradual slope. Remember, Yvonne and I have had complete and undistorted mental access from the moment
we left Earth until just a short while ago. And now
—
no, year-captain, it can
’
t be a
t
tenuation. This has to be some sort of interference. A purely local effect that we
’
re encountering in this region of the galaxy.”

“
Yes, like sunspots, I know. Perhaps when
we head out for Planet A, things will clear up.”

“
Perhaps,”
Noelle says crisply. “
Let
’
s start again, shall we, year-captain? Yvonne
’
s calling for signal. Go on from
‘
manganese and potassium
.
’
 
”

“—
manganese and potassium. We are taking appropriate correctiv
e steps
—”

***

The year-captain visualizes the contact between the two sisters as an arrow whistling from star to star, as fire speeding through a shining tube, as a river of pure force coursing down a celestial wave guide. He sees the joining of those two
minds as a stream of pure light binding the moving ship to the far-off mother world. Sometimes he dreams of them both, Yvonne and Noelle, Noelle and Yvonne, standing facing each ot
h
er across the cosmos with their hands upraised and light streaming from the
ir fingertips, and the glowing bond that stretches across the galaxy between the two sisters gives off so brilliant a radiance that he stirs and moans and presses his forehead into the pillow.

***

“
I have a funny idea,”
Sieglinde says, and everyone looks u
p, for Sieglinde is not noted for funny ideas. Nor is there anything at all comic in the unusually thin, high, strained tone in which she is speaking now. But something has been building up in her for the past half hour and now it comes erupting forth. “
W
h
at if we throw the switch and the ship doesn
’
t want to come out of nospace?”
she asks. “
What if we find that we simply can
’
t reach this Planet A, or any other realspace destination? What do we do then? Do we have a fall-back plan?”

This is the first brains
torming session for the group that is planning the change of course. They are meeting in the control cabin. Intelligence readouts embedded in the curved wall glow all around them, soft em
a
nations of pulsing light, amethyst and amber and jade. Sieglinde and
Roy and Heinz and Paco and Julia and the year-captain have been tal
k
ing for two hours straight and they are all getting tired and a little silly, now.

“
If that happens, then we find a nice nospace planet somewhere and we settle down there instead,”
Paco a
nswers. “
That
’
s our fall-back plan.”

Roy gives him a glowering stare. “
What you say is absurd and irre
l
evant. There aren
’
t any nospace planets. Such a thing is a logical impo
s
sibil
—”

Heinz, smiling as always but displaying an edge of controlled a
n
noyance,
says to Sieglinde, “
Why do you even ask these things? This is a meeting to discuss a survey mission into realspace. You
’
re conjuring up imaginary demons for us. The stardrive wasn
’
t designed to fail. It will not fail.”

“
And if it does?”
Sieglinde asks.

“
He
inz is right,”
says the year-captain wearily. “
It won
’
t fail. It simply won
’
t. You can count on that.”

“
I count on nothing,”
Sieglinde says, speaking in a throaty mock-dramatic way. Maybe she
is
trying to be funny. But her eyes are strangely bright. She se
ems possessed by some powerful contrary ene
r
gy that will not relent. “
Anything may happen. We are dealing with tr
e
mendous physical forces and we still have relatively little experience with this equipment. And we work with stochastic processes here. Do you
understand what I am saying? Each jump we make is in effect a gamble. The odds are in our favor each time, of course. But with each jump there is always the possibility of the random event, whenever the stardrive is changed from one state to another. It
i
s here in the equations: the random factor, the fatal probability. The more often we jump, the more often we expose ourselves to that small but real probability. And on one of our jumps we may leap from one nospace to another instead of returning to reals
p
ace, or experience something even worse. It is poss
i
ble.”