"You bet! But we've got plenty of time. He's not going anywhere, or getting any older. So, you never went to Infinity City before five years ago?"
"No, I'm sure we didn't. My father told me about all the worlds we stopped at while I was still too little to remember.
But, you know, I remember the two of them talking about Infinity City once. They were talking about somebody from there. And it made them angry, and they started fighting..." Suddenly, he closed his eyes tightly, grimacing, and shaking his head. "No!
I don't want to think about that!"
Jason took hold of him, "Hey, take it easy, Dalton. All that's behind, and gone, now. Come on, let's get back to work."
He decided to change the subject. "How are we going to help these colonists?"
Dalton relaxed. "Yeah, we've got to rescue them..."
Jason quickly removed the article from the screen. "If we could figure out some way to get that ship out of the current, and out here where there's no surging, we'd have it solved."
They began pouring over all the complex gravitonic theory stored in the ship's atomic memory.
It was horribly intricate. The mathematics displayed on the screen before Jason were mind boggling to comprehend. Dalton had plugged the computers virtual-reality helmet in, put it one, and was using its visual representation capabilities to study the relationships between gravitons, other sub-atomic particles, their wave characteristics, and the other fundamental forces: electro-magnetism, nuclear weak, and nuclear strong. It was all so amazingly symmetrical when represented by the V-R generated various geometrical shapes with alternating sizes and colors, even sounds, representing the functional relationships. He could manipulate the virtual objects by just reaching out with his hands, as if his hands reached right into the virtual-reality.
He could even see his hands there in the V-R, colored a bright glossy white. Actually, the ship's computer simply monitored the movement of his hands and displayed their counterpart in the virtual-reality.
Jason watched Dalton sitting there, with the sophisticated V-R helmet tightly covering his head. A breathing apparatus ventilating the helmet, providing fresh air. This particular model sealed off the mouth so that the wearer could not be heard speaking, or even shouting. The dull white helmet with nothing resembling the human features of eyes, ears, or mouth made Dalton look like some kind of alien. Jason's lip curled involuntarily.
He was revolted by V-R, the use of which gave him unbearable feelings of anxiety.
Dalton was moving his hands around, grabbing invisible things, moving and pushing them here and there, completely at home in virtual-reality. His feet also would periodically swing in different directions. Dalton had told Jason that was how you told the computer to move you around in the virtual-reality.
This all gave Jason an eerie feeling. What if it bent the mind? What if it permanently affected perception of REAL
reality. REAL REALITY?! He said aloud, "Hey, Dalton, is that thing helping? Dalton??..." The helmet completely sealed Dalton off from outside sight and sound.
"Computer, can you pipe my voice into Dalton's V-R?"
"Both your voice and image can be displayed inside his virtual-reality."
"Well, beam me in there, would you..."
There was a pause, then the computer reported, "Your image and voice are now being duplicated within his virtual-reality."
"Hey, Dalton," Jason spoke.
Dalton jerked the helmet around and faced Jason, so surprised at suddenly seeing Jason in the virtual-reality amid the floating sub-atomic particle representations, that he almost fell off his chair.
Jason started chuckling at the surprised ALIEN. "Hey, is that virtual-reality helping any. I think it's kind of dangerous."
Dalton sat facing him for a few moments, and began shaking in a funny way. The computer reported, "Dalton has requested transmission of his voice into the pilot room."
"Go ahead!", replied Jason.
Suddenly he heard Dalton laughing, the sound coming out of the computer's speaker. "Hi, Jason! What are YOU doing here?"
"What?"
"Hey, watch out for that graviton, Jason! Oh, no! Wow, it went right through you... This is great! You gotta try it!
And, I think I know what we can do to get the colony ship out of the current. Put on the other helmet and I'll show you..."
Normally, that would have been the last thing Jason wanted to do. But, he did not want Dalton to think he was scared. And, he could not easily excuse himself with his usual remark: "I DON'T CARE FOR V-R GAMES." With a sigh, he pulled the other helmet out the cabinet below one of the control panels. The virtual-reality helmets were there primarily for sailship technicians to check out the sailship at the Infinity City space port for preventive maintenance purposes.
Jason told the computer to toss him into the same virtual-reality as Dalton, then, with a groan, he donned the helmet.
Instantly, he could tell that the last wearer had been a smoker.
Hey, that had been him! He'd smoked his last cigar after he'd last landed in Infinity City (where smoking was banned) just before a technician made him use the virtual-reality helmet to look at some small problem in an impossible-to-reach component of the gravitonic system.
He pulled the helmet down tightly, wiggling it around until he felt his eyes, ears, and mouth snugly covered by internal rubber cups. Then he lifted a hand up under his chin to slide a mechanical lever to the side moving the rubber cups inward sealing him in. All was black and silent. This part he liked.
It was relaxing. "Okay, computer, I'm ready." Slowly, light grew around him, and he saw all the bouncing, floating gravitonic theories. Vertigo began to grow within him, but he breathed deeply and regularly, bringing it under control.
Suddenly, there was a high-pitched growling roar from right beside him! He whirled to find himself face to face with a gigantic Kodiak bear!
"It's just me, Jason," the bear said. "Computer, show me as Dalton again." And, instantly the bear disappeared to be replaced by Dalton. The computer was transmitting Jason's three-dimensional image into the virtual-reality, and Dalton could see the enraged expression on Jason's face. "Hey, now don't get mad, Jason. I was just playing!"
"Playing, huh?! Let's see how YOU like it! Computer, turn me into a lion!"
"That is not possible," informed the computer.
"The key phrase is 'SHOW ME AS.'", Dalton instructed.
"Okay. Computer, SHOW ME AS a lion!"
"Command not specific enough," the computer complained.
"Specify North American cougar, extinct African lion, or extinct European lion."
"Oh, never mind. Dalton," and Jason looked around at all the multi-colored floating spheres, boxes, pyramids, and lines.
"What are all these things? And, computer, decrease the visual intensity 30%, the brightness is bothering my eyes. And stop transmitting Dalton's breathing sounds, it's like he's right in my ear..." Dalton explained what they were looking at, amid Jason's frequent complaints about other aspects of virtual-reality.
Dalton then set up a model showing the gravitonic current as a flowing blue stream, the colony ship (colored gray) inside, and their own sailship floating just on the outside, with the gravitonic sails, a billowing shimmering white, and the sailship a bright yellow, which Dalton preferred over the ship's actual iron gray color that Jason had chosen for its distinction.
Then, Dalton explained, using the geometric shapes, a theory of macroscopic graviton behavior. He said, "Now watch the model over here, Jason. Computer, run simulation program MOVE-IT." A white arrow appeared out of nowhere pointing at the sailship which began moving toward the nearby gravitonic current. Just before the little sailship entered the current, its billowing sails all tightened up, and tilted at radical angles, diagonal to the direction of the current. As the sails edged into the gravitonic current, part of the blue flowing gravitons within the current were deflected off the sails at right angles to the main current, spraying the colo
ny ship which began slowly moving sideways out of the gravitonic current!
Jason asked breathlessly, "Computer, is the plan MOVE-IT
feasible in normal reality?"
"Yes," replied the computer.
"MOVE-IT IS the feasibility plan, Jason," Dalton explained excitedly. "I put it together with the computer's help."
"YOU put this plan together?!" Jason asked incredulously, his envy of Dalton's skill quickly replaced by pride in his young friend.
"Yeah! It's easy with V-R! You should get into this stuff." He grinned at Jason inside the V-R, and teased, "What's the matter? Getting too old?? Been forgetting to take the PILL??"
"All right, all right. I just prefer real reality, that's all... Listen, this plan of yours gives me an idea for solving one other big problem."
"What other problem?"
"Even after we nudge them out of the gravitonic current, they'll still be flying along at near light speed. We can't dock with a ship moving that fast with that much momentum, because WE
have NO momentum. The moment we shut down the gravitonic generator to dock, we'll come to a dead stop while the colony ship flies away -- from near light speed to no speed at all, with no deceleration because we have no momentum. The sails do that trick of field-probability that lets a sailship get from point
'A' to point 'B' without any change in momentum.
Jason continued thinking out loud. "And, we can't dock with the sails energized. Who knows what would happen then? The colony ship is all distorted and slowed down and more massive because of its relativistic speed..." ( When an object accelerates up very close to the speed of light, it attains what are called RELATIVISTIC SPEEDS. At these speeds, the relations between the speeding object and the objects at rest, that it left behind, become somewhat strained. Consider a spaceship leaving a sleepy little planet, taking a big bite out of its moon to be used as fuel, and then accelerating up to say 99.99% the speed of light. Relative to an observer back on the home planet, pleasantly at rest, the wayward spaceship would be squished down along the axis of its direction of travel. That is, if the spaceship was shaped like a sphere when it took off, it would now be shaped like a bulging pancake, with the flat side in the direction of travel. However, relative to the folks on-board, everything would look nice and normal. One more difference.
Time on-board would slow down compared to time back home. The classic example involves two twins about 24-years-old, one onboard and one left at home. The one on board is all slowed down.
When the ship finally comes home, the twin at home is 80-years-old. The twin who was slowed down while the ship was near light speed, is only 25-year-old, and can now whip his brother at tennis again and again. ) Back on Earth, at the Riyad space port, Jason had once been told that these theories were first propounded long ago in the ancient times by the Arab genius Einstein al-Bert.
He continued: "To us they'd barely be moving, and would weigh a million kilograms. To them, we'd be just a blur.
"The whirlpool gave the colony ship far more momentum than their ion-engines can counteract. And, in the wrong direction, too. It would probably take several life-times for them to slow down, if they even have enough fuel!
"We have to slow that ship down, and I think if we pull the same maneuver on the other side of the current, after drifting out, we can slow them down..."
He went into further details, and Dalton agreed they made sense. Then they began working on a second feasibility model, called SLOW-IT. When they ran this model in the virtual-reality, Jason reluctantly again wearing the V-R helmet, they saw the image of the colony ship now outside of the current, though still within the weak side winds. Their sailship backed out of the current, from where it had been blowing at the colony ship, cruised all the way around to the other side of the tubular-shaped current near the colony ship, then edged over to the gravitonic current as before. This time, however, only a few of its sails, twisted around at a reversed angle, were dipped into the current. Gravitons deflected by the sails now blew out of the current, and over to the colony ship. These gravitons were colored green, because the sails deflecting them had been charged in a unique way to give the deflected gravitons a very special property turning them into "breeder-gravitons". When these special breeder-gravitons hit the colony ship, sucking up its kinetic energy, they split into multiple blue-colored regular gravitons spraying off in all directions. With its kinetic energy rapidly sucked away, the V-R image of the colony ship began to slow. The SLOW-IT program automatically also began to slow Jason's sailship. In this way, Jason and Dalton could slow the colony ship down to a stop, then dock with safety!
They began setting up the programs in the computer to initiate the maneuvers to first blow the colony ship out of the gravitonic current by deflecting gravitons with their ship's sails, and then slow it down to a stop by spraying it with the paralyzing breeder-gravitons.
After several days of preparation and especially rigorous testing of the MOVE-IT and SLOW-IT programs, they initiated the procedure. The sailship edged over to the gravitonic current, and dipped in about halfway with the gravitonic sails tightened and tilted at the required angle. The computer reported the sails responding as predicted. They watched the gravitonic radar screen intently. Slowly, as predicted, the colony ship began to move away from them, toward the opposite side of the mighty gravitonic current!
The computer calculated that at the colony ship's rate of sideways movement, it would be safely free of the current in about 20 hours. Dalton and Jason took turns monitoring the operation from the pilot room. Jason now fully trusted Dalton's competence. How had he ever done without a partner before?
The next day, late in the morning, the operation was complete. The colony ship was out of the current! They pulled their sailship back out of the current, then sailed around the outer edge, tacking through the side winds, until they were on the other side, fixing their position between the colony ship, as tracked by the radar, and the main current. Then they initiated the tricky maneuver to generate breeder-gravitons. Their ship edged over, and dipped only a few sails into the huge flow of the main gravitonic current. The view screens monitoring the activity of the maneuvering sails went wild with streams of data scrolling rapidly past as the computer rapidly made hundreds of course corrections per second to accomplish three simultaneous purposes: One, keep the sails generating the breeder-gravitons at just the right angle. Two, accurately keep the spray aimed at the colony ship. Three, slow the sailship down as the colony ship slowed. And, it slowed rapidly!
Each single breeder-graviton sucked up enough kinetic energy to split into millions of regular gravitons. Fortunately, this miniature storm of gravitons all shot forward in the direction the colony ship was moving, not affecting Jason's sailship at all.
But, as rapidly as the colony ship was slowing, the computer forecasted it would take several days before it would come to a stop. And so they again took turns manning the pilot room, monitoring the progress of their rescue operation.
On the fifth day both Dalton and Jason were weary from the tense operation. Jason had a scraggly beard from not shaving, and Dalton's eyes seemed to be stuck in a permanent screen-watching stare. But, late in the afternoon, Dalton noticed the speed indicator of the colony ship changing faster. It finally dropped below 90% the speed of light, and seemed to be changing faster. Dalton excitedly called Jason down in the living quarter. Jason woke up, and scrambled out of bed already fully dressed. He had fallen into bed early, too tired to disrobe. He scrambled up the ladder into the pilot room. Dalton pointed to the speed indicator. They watched intently. Jason ordered one of the robots to bring coffee. They sipped their coffee and watched. After about 15 minutes the speed was down to 80%. This was amazing! Most of an objects momentum traveling close to light speed in only the top few percentage points. All of that had been bled off over that last few days. In even less time the speed had dropped to 70%! Only four minutes later it was down to 60%. The gravitonic generator was now noticeabl
y winding down as the computer automatically matched speeds with the slowing colony ship.
A couple minutes later 50%. One minute later 40%. Jason and Dalton grinned at each other. Jason wagged his eyebrows up and down, and Dalton laughed. 30%! Fifteen seconds later 20%!
And just a few seconds later 10%, and then rapidly 9%, 8%, 7%, then just a blur, and finally a blinking 0%. They had brought the colony ship to a stop!
The computer reported "Procedure SLOW-IT successfully completed."
9. ENCOUNTER
Jason and Dalton were out of their seats jumping up and down, hugging each other, and shouting with joy. They had rescued the colony ship from the gravitonic current, and purged it of its runaway momentum! They were ecstatic. This intense feeling of triumph was the reason Jason was obsessed with rescue.
It was so difficult and challenging, but felt incredible when achieved. For Dalton, this was the most significant achievement of his life so far. He felt so important, so alive! How wonderful the universe was! Jason was just about to go down to the cargo hold in search of a bottle of sparkling wine to celebrate, when the computer interrupted them with a surprising report.
"A distress message is now being received from the colony ship. See view-screen-three for contents."
They whirled around and went over to look at view-screen.
It read:
MESSAGE FROM COLONY SHIP:
THIS IS THE INTERSTELLAR SPACESHIP HEAVEN, FROM
CONOVER, RIGEL.
MAYDAY! MAYDAY! DIRE CONTROL SYSTEM MALFUNCTION.
REQUEST EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION OR ASSISTANCE.
PLEASE RELAY MESSAGE TO CONOVER, RIGEL.
CURRENT COORDINATES ARE...
And the message continued on, detailing the location of the colony ship and its home world.
Dalton looked at Jason, grabbing his arm, "Hey, Conover is the world I'm from! That's where my father signed on with Katz when I was just a baby!"
Jason looked at him in amazement. "Are you sure?"
Dalton assured him, stressing each word, "I know that's the name of the world where I'm from!"
Douglas Kendall Page 10
