Timemaster

by Robert L. Forward

  The video image switched to a chestpack camera showing what looked like a nest of thousands of fine silver threads. The threads sprouted from a tiny spherical region at the center and spread out many meters in all directions. As the space-suited figure with the name "Jim Meriweather" on the back approached the object, the threads suddenly became alive and started to grow longer.

  "Jim Meriweather and Bob Pilcher found the 'Silverhair' feeding on an asteroid. When Jim got too close, the threads started to reach for him. He tried to get away by using his suit jets, but that was a mistake. He ran into one of the threads and it nearly cut his arm off. The automatic tourniquet mode of the electrolastic in his tightsuit activated, and kept him under pressure and prevented excessive loss of blood. Fortunately, Bob was right there and got him back to the medic in a hurry. He'll be all right once the cut heals. The cut, however, went all the way through one bone in his left forearm. Bob reports, however, that the Silverhair's thread suffered worse than Jim's arm."

  The video picture switched to a close-up of a single silvery thread rotating slowly in space.

  "The thread that touched Jim was severed by the contact, as if a section of it had evaporated," continued Philippe. "What is most strange is, when the engineers later took a close look at Jim's tightsuit, they found the material had not been cut. The weave in the fabric didn't match up, indicating there was a thin section missing, as if it had evaporated. Our first guess was that the creature was made of antimatter, and the thread had annihilated its way through Jim's arm, but that would have released a lot of energy and hard radiation. Both Jim and Bob saw nothing, and the radiation monitors on their suits show nothing unusual happening at that time."

  The video picture switched back to Philippe's face.

  "That's all I have for now, but I have a crew on the way out to learn more," he said. The screen went blank.

  Randy had a million questions to ask, but the one-hour communications time delay made two-way conversation impossible.

  "I'VE GOT to get out there in a hurry," said Randy, extremely agitated. He glared at the three faces his cuff-comp had brought together in a conference call.

  In the center of his screen was the image of Anthony Guiliano, manager of the Cable Transportation Group. Tony was looking his usual dapper self, his Paul Revere held in a subdued ribbon in red-and-grey silk plaid, a matching throat choker, and engineering school 'rings glittering in each ear—MIT on the left, Cal Tech on the right, and a Tau Beta Pi tucked discreetly away under the upper-left earshell.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Hunter," Tony said nervously to the annoyed image of his youthful boss. "The best our asteroid cable-catapult transportation system can do is eighty-five days. Hygiea is in the outer part of the asteroid belt, and on the opposite side of the Sun to boot."

  "Eighty-five days!" exploded Randy. "That's almost three months!"

  Flanking Tony's image on the right was "Bull" Richardson, manager of the Cable Catapult Division in Tony's group. Bull was seven feet tall and built like a bull. He had a permanent case of severe psoriasis that resisted all attempts to treat it. Bull had stuck with the now unfashionable skinhead look of a few decades ago. The red patches on his shaven skull looked bad, but not as bad as a Paul Revere full of huge flakes of dandruff.

  Bull's image replied. "I can cut a little off the time by cutting the payload in the capsule and increasing the acceleration of the cable catapult to five gees," he said, nervously scratching the back of his neck. The red patches on his head were reacting to the stress he was under.

  "How much time?" demanded Randy.

  "I can get you there in sixty days," said Bull.

  Randy snorted impatiently. "Not good enough! This could be the most important discovery of the century—maybe even the millennium. I want to be there and get things under my control before the word leaks out and every Tom, Dick, and Oscar is demanding I turn it over 'for the common good of all mankind'. Don't we have a longer cable?"

  To the left of Tony was the image of Mary Lewis, manager of Tony's Rotovator Division, and Bull's wife. Mary's greying hair, instead of being in a proper, feminine short bob, was long and pulled back in a mannish Paul Revere. She even had school 'rings in her ears, just like a man. Her only concession to femininity was the flowery pattern on her hair ribbon and throat cloth. Randy noticed that the pink flowers and green leaves were in the Reinhold company colors.

  "Sorry, sir," said Mary, the perky nose on her image twitching under her large glasses as she thought. "I'd be glad to turn over all the cable we've been making for the Mars rotovator, but by the time Bull's division could turn it into a cable catapult, you'd be there using the existing system."

  "Can we push the gee limit higher?" asked Randy.

  "Well ... yes ..." admitted Bull. "We have small express pods we use to send emergency cargo. We can accelerate those at ten times the normal three-gee launch acceleration and get them up to three hundred kilometers a second."

  "How soon would that get me there?" asked Randy.

  Bull, his fingers too large to operate a cuff-comp, pulled an hp pseudocray out of his shirt pocket, and did a short calculation. "Three weeks," he said. "But those capsules accelerate at thirty gees! You'd be squashed flat!"

  Randy paused for a while as he thought. "I've read about deep-sea divers who survived at high pressures by breathing an oxygen-carrying liquid," he said. "If I floated in a tank of that, I could handle thirty gees easily."

  Tony, Mary, and Bull each thought for a while; then all three nodded, although reluctantly.

  "If I were you, I'd check with some medical and diving experts first," said Tony. "It could be hard on your lungs."

  "You do that for me," said Randy. "Meanwhile, Bull can fix up an express capsule with an acceleration tank in it." He started to turn off his cuff-comp, then looked at them in the screen again.

  "Oh! Bull?" he said.

  "Sir?" replied Bull, turning back to the screen. "Make sure the zero-gee toilet is the latest design." Randy paused. "And put in two of them."

  "Yessir!" said Bull.

  THAT NIGHT, Randy had a visitor at his mansion in the Princeton Enclave. Alan Davidson found Randy out in the observatory that Randy had inherited from his father. Alan slipped through the observatory door into pitch-black darkness. As his eyes adjusted, he finally could make out the diminutive figure of Randy looking through the eyepiece of the custom-made telescope.

  Randy was looking at the Boötes Void—a gigantic bubble of emptiness outlined by glowing clusters of galaxies.

  Megalight-years of nothing ... Randy thought to himself as he gazed at the dark portion of the sky. For some reason, there was nothing there in that region of the universe ... and no one knew why.

  Randy shifted the telescope slightly and a dense cluster of galaxies swam into view. He stepped down from the makeshift wooden platform on top of the steps, laboriously moved it over, and stepped up again in order to look into the eyepiece more comfortably.

  He found a moderately bright guide star, centered it in the cross hairs, and pushed the button that started the automatic tracking and supernova detection routine on the computer. A mirror responded by tilting in front of the eyepiece, blocking his view. The light from the telescope was now going to an imaging array many times more sensitive than photographic film or the human eye. The digital data streaming from the electronic camera would be compared with a digital map of the heavens stored in the memory of the computer. With luck, Randy would detect another extragalactic supernova—or perhaps a comet. He already had one each to his credit, and he was only twenty-four. But then, he didn't sleep much ... bad dreams, practically every night, since both his parents had died in the crash of his mother's corporate jet. He kept himself from dreaming by coming out to use his dad's telescope whenever there was a chance the sky would be clear.

  Randy finally turned to speak to the tall, dark figure waiting patiently against the dark wall of the observatory dome.

  "It's all set," he said. "You
wanted to see me?"

  "I come here both as a friend and as the Sequence Bank trust officer for the Reinhold Trust," said Alan. "I have something serious to discuss with you, and I hope you will listen to me."

  "I always do," said Randy. "You're one of the few people can always rely on. That was why I insisted that you be the trust officer when I took over the company. You were a good friend of Mom and Dad's, and all my life you never treated me as a kid, no matter what age I was. Even now, when most people look at this tiny body I'm stuck with, they immediately assume I'm immature. They don't actually start spouting baby talk at me, but they might as well, from the way they treat me."

  "You have always earned my respect, Randolph," said Alan seriously. "Starting with your first lemonade stand at six. You bought your own lemons and sugar at the store instead of getting them from the cook, and you adjusted the selling price of your lemonade to maximize your profits from your market niche."

  "I had a corner on the rich bastards going to Enclave school," said Randy with a chuckle. "Soaked them for five dollars a glass." He paused, and an unseen smile spread over his face. "It never occurred to me at the time that I ought to have paid Mom for the use of the car and chauffeur to go get my supplies at the Enclave grocery store."

  "Your parents and I were amused by that," said Alan. "But your mother was very understanding. Rich children take a lot of things for granted, like chauffeur-driven cars, but you did less than most. What really impressed us all was that you saved most of your profits. I had to bend the rules a bit at Sequence Bank to get you a combined savings and checking account at your age. But you did well with it."

  "Sure did," said Randy. "Started my own mail-order software business at thirteen. I didn't realize it at the time, but I got a lot of help from Mom and Dad. When they upgraded their own personal computers, their hand-me-downs were always just what I needed for the next phase of my business. At the time I thought I was just lucky."

  "I couldn't comment on that," said Alan diffidently.

  "You don't have to, Mr. Davidson," said Randy, smiling sadly to himself in the darkness. He continued. "Because of their help, my software business brought almost fifty thousand when I sold it after Reinhold Astroengineering Company was dumped on me at eighteen."

  "That demonstration of business ability was one of the reasons the courts decided to let you have control of the company at eighteen, instead of making you wait until you were twenty-one," said Alan. "The last person to do that was Howard Hughes, and he was given control of his father's business when he was nineteen."

  "I know," Randy replied. "I've read his biography a number of times. Most people only remember Hughes as an eccentric, secretive billionaire who died without a will. They don't remember that in his younger years he was the greatest aviator in the world, who almost single-handedly demonstrated that worldwide intercontinental air travel was not only safe, but profitable. I want to do the same for the solar system."

  The dome was silent as they both looked up through the chill air at the dark starry skies.

  "It should be coming over soon," said Randy. "I'll have to blank out the 'scope, or the detector array will be overloaded." He flipped aside the deflecting mirror inside the telescope and waited, looking up out of the slit in the dome.

  Alan Davidson looked thoughtfully at the small, dark outline of the young man bathed in starlight. Randy's tiny body was not that of a midget or dwarf, but more like that of a jockey—a perfect four-foot-eleven-inch replica of a normal man's body. Randy had inherited his build from his mother, Golda Reinhold, former president and CEO of Reinhold Astroengineering Company and sole trustee of Reinhold Trust, which owned the company. At board and trust meetings she had used a special chair that elevated her to table level after she had sat down.

  Unlike his mother, who was of perfect proportions, Randy had a chunky muscularity to his chest and shoulders, for he religiously lifted weights and practiced karate exercises every morning. No one dared insult Harold Randolph Hunter. The rumors of what had happened to those snobs who did while he was attending the Princeton Enclave High School were enough deterrent now that he was a man.

  "Goddamn industrial light polluter—I'll have to write a letter to the owner of the company and complain he's lousing up my supernova searches," muttered Randy.

  An object brighter than the moon drifted past the edge of the slit in the dome. The glare almost hurt Alan's dark-adapted eyes.

  "There it is! Mom's tenth asteroid hauler coming back from the belt!" said Randy proudly. "A thirty-kilometer circle of heavy-duty next-to-nothing bringing back a billion-dollar cargo.

  "I'd better have a talk with the engineers," he continued thoughtfully as he critically watched the large lightsail pass overhead. "If the sail were a perfect mirror, then none of the sunlight would be deflected our way. We ought to work harder on surface finish and wrinkle control for the next models."

  He paused and chuckled. "That way I'll get fewer crank letters about light pollution from that pesky amateur astronomer in the Princeton Enclave." His mood changed back to that of a concerned engineer-entrepreneur. "Besides, it's bound to improve the propulsion efficiency too. The faster we can make the round trip, the greater the profits."

  There was a formal-sounding knock at the door to the dome. Randy flipped back the deflector mirror on the telescope and climbed down the steps.

  "You can come in, James!" called Randy to the door. "Just don't turn on the lights. I've got the telescope open."

  The door to the dome opened, showing the rolling hills of the Princeton Enclave, covered with snow and sparkling faintly in the starlight. In the doorway was a dark, rotund shape. Randy could have afforded a robotic butler, but James had been with the family since long before he was born.

  "Good evening, Mr. Hunter and Mr. Davidson," said James. "Dinner is ready."

  James led the way back up the long pathway to the distant mansion set on one of the large lots in the Princeton Enclave. Princeton Enclave was a walled-off city for the extremely rich. Like a number of other places built at the same time, it was constructed on farmland that had suddenly come on the market when a combination of plant genetic research, cheap power from solar-power satellites, and strict environmental laws had forced the farming industry off open land and into multilevel farmfactory buildings. Princeton Enclave even had its own private shopping center and an exclusive private school that took care of the Enclave's spoiled offspring, from toddlers to teenagers.

  At dinner, Alan brought up Randy's proposed trip to the asteroid belt.

  "I suppose it was Tony who warned you about my plan," said Randy.

  "Not only Tony, but Bull and Mary too," said Alan. "They are all very concerned about your safety."

  "Oh ..."

  "What you are proposing to do is very dangerous," said Alan. "There is no need for you to do it. You have competent engineers and scientists already out there in the asteroid belt who can do all the investigations that are needed and report the results back to you here on Earth."

  "But I want to be there," said Randy firmly.

  "But the company needs you here," said Alan. "The only reason banks are willing to give Reinhold Astroengineering Company the huge construction loans we have for the Lunavators and Terravator is that you, like your mother, seem to be able to pull off astroengineering miracles that pay off in the end. If something happens to you, nobody could replace you. The company would lose financial credibility, flounder, and die. The company needs you here to manage it."

  "I don't want to manage the company, I want to lead it," said Randy. "Just like Howard Hughes led his company. He not only was the lead designer for nearly every project, he was the test pilot for the first flight of every new airplane his company built."

  "And he nearly got killed when one of his airplanes crashed on its first flight," reminded Alan sternly.

  "Actually, he crashed at least three airplanes," said Randy. "But he didn't die." His face took on a determined look. "I'm going
."

  "As the Sequence Bank trust officer for the Reinhold Trust, and good friend of you and your parents, I can't let you do it," said Alan firmly.

  Randy's face grew even more determined. "For six years I have obediently taken your advice, Alan," he said. "And I appreciate your present concerns, for both me and my Company. But I'm no longer a kid learning the business. I'm twenty-four years old and I know what I'm doing."

  "But—" started Alan, but Randy interrupted him.

  "I would like to remind you that I am the sole trustee of the Reinhold Trust that owns the Reinhold Astroengineering Company," Randy stated in a challenging tone. "You are merely the bank trust officer, whom I appointed. I am the boss of the trust and the company ... and I say I'm going."

  There was a long silence. Then Alan sighed. "Very well. I and the rest of the managers will do what we can to keep the company running while you are gone."

  "I'll be just an electrofax away," replied Randy, trying to lighten things up with a big grin.

  IT WAS only a few days later that Randy found himself in space, riding one of the silvery threads that he and Rose had observed not long ago. He was on the cable catapult that supplied transportation out to the asteroid belt. The cable was 170,000 kilometers long—thirteen times the diameter of Earth. Randy's capsule was at one end of the long cable, inside the linear motor that would catapult the capsule and him toward the asteroid belt. The power station was near the other end of the cable. Beyond the power station was a shorter section of cable used to decelerate the linear motor to a halt so it would be ready to capture an incoming payload.

  The cable itself consisted of six cables in a hexagonal pattern five meters in diameter. Every forty meters there was an external brace structure that supported the six cables from the outside. The linear motor ran along the inside of the hexagonal track on six magnetically levitated rails that magnetically coupled to the superconducting film that covered each cable. The film also acted as a low-loss power line. The six superconducting wires formed a hexagonal transmission line that channeled the rf power that was generated at the main power station and pumped down the transmission line. The power was then absorbed and used by the linear motor, which was designed to be a perfect load for the impedance of the transmission line.