The Engines of Dawn (8 page)

The auditorium filled with snickers and somebody yelled "Blow job!" and now several professors down in front were actively scanning the auditorium for the scattered malcontents.

Porter said, "The Kuulo did say that the Enamorati will cooperate fully in all of our investigations, providing that our need for information doesn't violate the Enamorati Compact. I find no trouble with this."

For an anxious moment Julia thought that the president would next mention something about Jingle Bear, since her bear's death seemed to be part, in some vague way, of what had happened. But Porter either didn't know about it or hadn't thought it important enough to mention.

"Since the Enamorati Compact forbids us to interfere with Enamorati affairs, we have no choice but to let them conduct their own investigation of the Engine's failure. We will wait for their report. In the meantime, we will be conducting our own investigations and I urge everyone to give campus security your fullest cooperation, especially those of you who might happen to have been in the science wings when the weapon was set off. We're all in the same boat, after all."

The president's smile reappeared. "Once the cause of the Engine malfunction has been discovered and analyzed, the Enamorati will be jettisoning the old Engine and replacing it with a new one. Depending on the availability and location of the nearest Engine, we estimate that we can be back on our Alley circuit in three weeks."

A collective groan went up through the crowd, but this time no faculty member tried to quell it.

Somebody threw his other shoe at the screen.

"We aren't exactly helpless out here, however," the president said calmly. "Physics and Engineering, who were up all night working on the problem, have informed me that we do have a means of getting us to the nearest human-habitable planet. Astronomy tells me that we are just three light-days away from what appears to be a main-sequence M-type star that has at least one habitable planet. We were very lucky in this.

"As you know, our part of the Sagittarius Alley is very, very small. There are thousands of stars within a hundred light-years of the Earth and we've only explored a fraction of those. So this new star and its planets will be a wonderful opportunity for us all. Who knows? We might even make a little bit of history.

"Therefore, under the university charter, I am immediately directing our pilot, Captain Cleddman, to divert us to this nearby system. In the meantime, contrary to any rumors you may have heard-" Here, Porter gestured to the copy of
The Alley Citizen
on his desk. "-classes will continue as scheduled. So, enjoy your weekend. That is all."

Even before the 2D screen winked out, all sorts of debris was hurled at the fading vision of Nolan Porter, including a squash racquet.

The lights came on and the babbling began again. Julia looked around. She hadn't thought about the possibility of classes being canceled, but it was clear that several students had hoped they were going to be.

The boisterous crowd got up and started filing out into the adjoining hallways, ready to start their delayed weekend.

Behind Julia, in the crowd that had been sitting high in the rear, was Ben. He seemed to be walking gingerly and he looked a tad shorter than she remembered him being.

Unless, of course, he was walking barefoot.

And he seemed to be in a hurry.

She was about to call after him, but he and his friends had disappeared. Besides that, two professors were already heading in their direction, one of whom held a shoe in her hand. She was looking for the foot that fit it.

Julia decided to contact Ben later. They had, after all, three weeks on their hands.

10

Colin Hollingsdale, who lived in an earlier century, probably never imagined his discontinuity breeder reactor as a means of moving ships through the interstellar void. The Hollingsdale reactors were typically designed for instructive purposes and were found in schools such as Eos University, or on planets far from either Tau Ceti 4 or Earth. This was because the Hollingsdale reactors created very small black holes in free space, so students and scientists alike could study their effects.

Ben had some experience with Hollingsdale-breeder technology back when he was working on his master's degree at UC Fresno-by-the-Sea. The breeders created artificial black holes-discontinuities-by using a form of C-gravitaton compression at distant projection points, tapping into the same energies that powered the Onesci Engines. Depending on the relative motion of the breeder-the ship it was within or the moonlet it was on-a powerful black hole with the same angular momentum could be created-well away from the projection source to prevent the hole's intense gamma radiation from killing its users, of course. But the gravity effects of the discontinuity itself
could
be felt, and that was the whole point.

Ben hadn't known that Eos University had a Hollingsdale discontinuity breeder until Eve Silbarton had told him that this was going to be their means of limping to the nearby planet where they could reprovision themselves until the new Engine arrived.

So while the students celebrated their good fortune to have a habitable planet nearby and the means to get there, Captain Cleddman sent a bullet back to the H.C. Council, giving directions to the star Kiilmist, which the Enamorati had just named, and its target planet called, for the time being, Kiilmist 5. More detailed data bullets would be sent with more information, once they achieved a stable orbit around the planet. For now, they had a tricky maneuver to make and all of the rail guns were going to be shut down for the duration.

At 1400 hours the following Monday, Eve Silbarton and her handpicked crew activated the Hollingsdale breeder reactor. Ben was among those invited; so, too, was Tommy Rosales. Ben had convinced Eve that Rosales's experience with fusion-reactor technology might come in handy, even if Rosales had dropped out of Eos's nuclear engineering program.

Dr. Silbarton and several engineers had spent the weekend setting up communications links from the nuclear engineering alpha lab, where the Hollingsdale resided, to both ShipCom and the command deck. This last was done at the request of the Cloudman. If the ship was going to move, regardless of means, he wanted to be in control of the means by which they were going to do it.

Though some of the best engineers on Eos had been called to assist with the experiment, Ben hadn't anticipated that the Kuulo Kuumottoomaa, one of his Kaks-a navigator Ben had never seen before-and High Auditor Nethercott would be invited to observe. They were standing in the back of the room, staying as much out of the way as possible. But nothing escaped their scrutiny.

"What are
they
doing here?" Tommy Rosales whispered to Ben when the spectators arrived at the last moment.

"I don't know," Ben remarked. "Let's ask."

Ben walked up to a gathering of technicians going over the large Hollingsdale breeder-a reactor the size of a small house-and buttonholed Dr. Silbarton.

"Eve, what are those people doing here?" he asked.

The High Auditor had had his eye on Ben the moment he had walked into the lab. Apparently, Ben's little venture into the auditorium the other day had cost him anonymity among the Auditors. Nethercott glared at Ben. Ben glared back, and the High Auditor came over, having heard Ben's query. "I can assure you that we're here as advisors only, Mr. Bennett," the Auditor said cordially.

"Advisors?" Ben said. "You're going to
advise
these people? What qualifies you or … them"-Ben pointed at the Kuulo and the Kak standing mute in their enclosed environment suits-"to advise anybody on anything?"

"They're just going to observe, Ben," Eve said.

"They shouldn't be here," Ben insisted.

Nethercott's eyebrows rose somewhat, but he did not seem to mind Ben's effrontery. He said, "President Porter invited us to observe the ship's use of energies it will be taking from trans-space, the realm of Mazaru."

"Horseshit," Ben said.

Several engineers had heard this and looked up. Even Rosales seemed surprised.

"Ben!" Eve said.

Ben felt his blood start to boil, although he wasn't sure why.

"They have
no
reason to be here," Ben stated. "That's all."

The High Auditor said nothing, but did not take his eyes off him.

Eve Silbarton pulled Ben aside. "What did you do? Trade your brain in?" she whispered harshly. "If you did, get it back. This one's defective." She tapped him hard between the eyes with a forefinger.

"Ow!"

"Look, this is Porter's idea. Nobody's done this before and he thinks it will make history-if we can pull it off. And it might be good for us to have several highly placed witnesses."

It was the Kuulo Kuumottoomaa's turn to voice an opinion on the matter. The voice box at his collar said, "We traveled in space for thousands of years using sublight-speed technologies before we came across the Onesci Lorii's mathematics and could build her Engines. But this maneuver you are attempting is new to us, at least the way your engineers have described it, and we may be of some help if something goes wrong."

Several of the workers in the room had paused to witness the exchange between Ben and the Grays.

"Then why not share Onesci mathematics with us so we can manufacture our own Engines and get the hell out of here?"

The High Auditor took in a breath sharply. But the Kuulo didn't seem to be offended. "When you are ready for them, they will make themselves known to you. That is how Mazaru works."

"He helps those who help themselves," Ben said. "What kind of help is that from the Almighty?"

"I'm sorry," the Kuulo said. "I do not understand-"

Dr. Israel Harlin, the head of the physics department, broke up the philosophical fracas. Harlin was a tall, white-haired man with a heavy beard, and a way of walking stooped as if he feared ceilings. "Gentlemen, please. We need everybody at their stations for this. We can argue later."

The two aliens and the Auditor backed away as if conceding some sort of minor victory to Ben. But Eve kept looking at him strangely-as if he had just had a personality overhaul, one that came with less common sense than the one it replaced. Maybe she was right, Ben admitted to himself. But it didn't cool his resentment.

One of the techs announced, "I've got a parallax focus at one thousand miles, dead ahead."

"C-graviton expansion point?" Dr. Harlin asked.

"Eighty miles behind us," the tech said. "We're ready to poke a hole in space on your command, Dr. Harlin."

The tall department head nodded. "It's the pilot's call. On his mark."

"And you're sure we can use the beta-projection point as a brake?"
Captain Cleddman asked from the command deck.

"Yes," Eve Silbarton said, switching on her own com/pager. "The black hole ahead of us and the C-graviton expansion point behind us will give us enough pull and push to get us moving toward Kiilmist 5. We'll activate a second discontinuity to slow us down."

"Behind us,"
Cleddman said.

"That's right. If we can stay outside the Schwarzchild limit of the alpha collapse point in front of us," Silbarton said, "then the thing will pull us toward it and quadruple our speed. We'll do the same to slow us down."

Tommy Rosales whispered to Ben. "How long is the discontinuity going to stay out in front of us?"

"Just a few seconds," Ben said. "But that's all we'll need to get us up to relativistic speeds-that is, if we don't get sucked into it directly or near enough to it to catch its gamma radiation."

"Has anyone ever done this before?" Rosales asked nervously.

"Only on paper," Ben replied.

"Swell."

"It's worse than that," Eve Silbarton said, having heard the two. "Time's going to pass us by on the outside. We're going to lose both contact and time with the rest of the Alley. But it can't be avoided."

"How much time will we lose?" Ben asked. "Has anyone done the math on that yet?"

"I did," Dr. Harlin said. "Depending on our top velocity, we should arrive at Kiilmist 5 in about four days. On the outside, however, we'll be out of contact for about two months."

"Mom and Dad aren't going to like
that,"
Tommy Rosales said.

Dr. Harlin glanced back at their "advisors" standing at the rear of the room. "The good news is that it will give our Enamorati friends back at the Yards enough time to find us an available Engine or build us a new one."

"
If
this works," Ben said.

"That's right," the department chair said.

"Okay," Eve Silbarton announced, scanning her monitoring board. Lights became all green across it. "I think we're ready. Let's put Mr. Hollingsdale to work."

11

The Hollingsdale maneuver, as complicated and dangerous as it was, actually worked. The discontinuity, brought into existence and traveling well out ahead of them, stayed in place long enough to coax Eos up to the required velocity they needed to reach Kiilmist 5.

Perhaps more politically desirable was the outcome on the High Auditor and the two Enamorati witnesses. The two aliens had agreed that Mazaru had not been violated, concluding, in fact, that the success of the maneuver was an indication of how much Mazaru approved of it.

Which, Ben thought, was hogwash. This time, however, he kept his opinions to himself.

Ben left with Eve Silbarton soon after that, leaving it to the human engineers and Tommy Rosales-who decided to stay behind-to explain to a couple of nosy reporters from
The Alley Citizen
what they had just done and why every student on board should be proud. They were part of history now.

Ben and Eve Silbarton went straight to the gamma lab in the physics department. Ben was feeling buoyed by the experiment's success, but Eve was much less sanguine and kept silent.

Once they were in the gamma lab and the outer door closed- several undergraduate students were in the delta lab next door working on their own projects-Eve cornered Ben. "Look," she said sharply. "We're the focus of an intense investigation by campus security and God knows who else, and we don't need any more heat right now."