by Howard Marsh
“You can also cause the ship to tilt by tilting that handle. Tip it to one side, and the ship tips to that side. Tip it forward or backward, and the ship tilts its nose up or down. You can also pull up or push down on the handle. That will produce acceleration up or down. Remember that it’s acceleration that you’re controlling, so the ship’s motion will accelerate at a rate determined by how much force you put on the stick, and it will continue until you let it return to neutral. Give it a try. Rotate and tilt the handle to see how it feels. I haven’t powered up yet, so nothing will happen.”
Harry gripped the ball handle at the top of his joystick and found that it rotated and tipped forward, backward, and sideways with just enough resistance to make it feel right. He saw that there was a cleverly designed hinge and rotator sleeve that allowed those motions and still allowed the handle to be able to move the joystick itself in both front-to-back and side-to-side directions.
“Have you ever flown an airplane?” Milo asked.
“Only a couple of times, when I was with a friend that owned one. He let me fly when we were in the air, but I never took off or landed.”
“Good. That’s most of what you’ll need to know. As I said, the ship is controlled by acceleration. It’s a lot like an airplane, so you already have some experience controlling by acceleration vectors. You should get the hang of it very quickly. And don’t worry about takeoff or landing. This is a lot easier than with an airplane, since we can control our external gravitational forces and just stop in mid-air or hover and slowly settle down or climb. We don’t have a high speed approach or takeoff to worry about. OK, let’s power up and go for our quick trip to Mars.”
Milo pressed a large red button on the front panel. The ship came to life, and the view screens turned on and gave the impression of windows with almost unobstructed view in all directions. Milo then used his left hand to work the buttons on the front panel while his right hand controlled the joystick. The ship rose about half a meter off the floor and drifted through the large door that had opened. Harry had been through this before and knew that they were entering the air lock between the docking port and the ocean. The ship floated into the air lock, and the large door closed behind them. Then water filled the air lock, and the ship rose to where it could exit through the door to the ocean.
“Now we get to the only delicate part,” Milo said, as he worked with the front panel. “Here’s where we do some sound cancellation and tricky maneuvers to hide from the undersea sensors. Once we get to the surface, things are much easier. Fortunately, we have the tricky stuff programmed into the flight control computer, so I just have to set it on autopilot and let it do its thing. Even our exit just now was mostly preprogrammed.”
The ship broke the surface of the ocean and began to ascend nearly straight up. Harry could see in the sensor screens that they had tipped upward, more or less pointing in the direction of flight. If this were a normal airplane, he would feel gravity pulling him back into the seat, but he felt none of that. It was if he were just sitting in a room, not moving at all and not tipped at a crazy angle toward the sky.
“I’ve got the internal gravity field set on automatic,” Milo explained. “That’s also preprogrammed. You just have to turn it on with this button,” and he pointed to a green one on the panel. “We try to use colors and shapes that tell us about the function. Green is for the internal gravity field. It’s just on or off since there really isn’t any other setting that would make any sense. Once it’s on, we don’t feel any acceleration or change in orientation. We turn it off only if we need to do something that requires weightlessness. OK, we’ve left the atmosphere, so we can speed up a bit. I’ll wait until we’re beyond the geosynchronous satellite orbits, and then we can go to near light speed for a bit. Then you can have a try.”
Several seconds later, Milo hit another of the buttons on the front panel and pushed the joystick forward. The speedometer numbers went from black to green to blue, and the Earth and Moon, which could be seen through the rear-looking viewer, got smaller and smaller as the ship charged ahead. Then he did something with his left hand and the numbers changed to red as they accelerated to nearly the speed of light. After about thirty seconds, Milo pulled back on the joystick, and they slowed almost to a full stop. Harry was impressed by the way that he used both his hands to work the front panel and joystick.
“Your turn. These three buttons and the joystick are all that you’ll need to use for this trip.” He pointed to three buttons at the lower left hand corner of his panel and then at the same colored buttons at the lower right hand corner of Harry’s panel. “You’ll have to work the panel with your right hand and the joystick with your left hand. In the pilot’s seat, it’s the opposite, but it’s easy to get used to moving from seat to seat once you get the hang of it. OK, are you ready?”
“I guess so. What should I do?”
“We’ll start with a bit of low speed maneuver, so you can get the feel of the controls. Then we’ll graduate to relativistic speed. You’ll take us most of the way to Mars and vary the speed between 90% and 99% of the speed of light. You’ll see how easy it is. When we get near Mars, I’ll take over again, so don’t worry about crashing. This is just the first lesson. We’ll get to the delicate maneuvers later. OK?”
“OK,” Harry replied. He was a bit nervous, but Milo seemed to know what he was doing, so on with the lesson. He actually was also excited and eager to try to fly the ship.
They first went through some basic maneuvers, going straight up and down, tipping, and traveling more or less like an airplane would fly. Harry found it easy, as Milo had said, and he enjoyed the feel of freedom to make the ship do whatever he wanted. The controls were extremely intuitive. A bit of a push, and whoosh, off you went in the direction that you chose. More of a push and the acceleration increased, almost instantaneously, but none of the usual inertial reactions could be felt at all. It was like a video game. After about half an hour of basics, Milo decided that it was time to let Harry try his hand at relativistic travel.
“OK, now we’re going to get this buggy into high gear. That control button on the right hand side of your seat is the one that amplifies all the forward and backward accelerations. Do you see it?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t do anything else. All the tipping and rotating is still at normal rotational acceleration, so there’s no danger of getting into a relativistic spin when you change the attitude of the ship. The high speed setting returns to off automatically if you pull the joystick back all the way, and then the ship will stop. When you push the button in, you can accelerate to near light speed in just a few seconds. You can’t go at high speed in reverse, but you can decelerate at the high rate until you stop, either in an emergency stop like I explained or in a more gradual deceleration.”
“How can I be sure not to hit anything when we move so fast?”
“Good question. When you’re moving that fast, you have little ability for emergency maneuvers. You’re basically trying to guide a bullet, not flying an airplane. But the ship has two means of protection. It has a sensor and a computer-controlled autopilot that sees far enough ahead to avoid anything large enough to cause damage. Unfortunately, that works reliably only up to about 99% of the speed of light. Above that, there’s not enough time for the computer and gravitational drive to react since the sensor is like a radar, and the signal has to travel to the obstructing object and then back to the ship. The signal travels a bit faster, but the reaction time is still too small when we really get moving.
“The other protection that helps us at high speed is a short range gravitational repulsion field that’s part of the ship’s shield system. It protects us from cosmic rays and other things that might hit us. The shield can also fend off objects like asteroids up to several meters in diameter, even when the relative velocity is nearly the speed of light, so we only have to plot a course that avoids much larger objects. The shield is produced by the same gravitational field
generator that does everything else, but it’s a more complex form of gravity than what we use for propulsion and inertia control. It falls off as the inverse sixty-fourth power of range, and it’s enormously strong when you get near the ship. It’s turned on automatically only when we’re going at near light speed in open space so that it doesn’t interfere with our normal gravitational maneuvers near Earth or other objects. But we can turn it on manually if we want to use it at lower speeds, like for a shield against kinetic weapons, or even to diffuse the plasma and x-ray beams. It’s not a perfect defensive force field, but it does work against very long range plasma and x-ray attacks, and it’s very good against kinetic attacks.
“Look, the main thing is to plot a course that is as clear as possible before going to high speed and then to rely on the ship to defend itself. Once we’re traveling that fast, the relativistic time dilation doesn’t give us much time to react to anything, so being careless and hitting a large object is the main danger.”
“OK, I get it.”
“Let’s get started.”
“I assume that you’ll set the course for me.”
“We’ll go through that together, so you know how to do it next time.”
“And what if I do something wrong?”
Milo grinned. “Don’t worry. My controls override yours, and I’m not in any hurry to crash and burn. So, let’s go for the ride.”
Milo guided Harry through the steps to set the course toward Mars. The main thing was to pick a trajectory that avoided collisions with major bodies, most of which were clearly shown in a map that was presented on the large view screen in front, the one that would normally show the view in the direction that the ship pointed. The computer automatically plotted the course as if the ship were a beam of light, more or less a straight line with a bit of a curve due to the general relativistic distortion of space near heavy masses. It was almost impossible to get it wrong, since the computer did most of the work once the end point was identified.
Harry did most of the work to set the course, with Milo giving pointers. He seemed pleased with the speed at which Harry caught on. “Very good. Now push the speed button and let’s get moving.”
Harry pushed the button on the side of his seat and pushed the joystick forward. The ship immediately accelerated at an unbelievable rate, and the numbers went from black all the way to red in less than ten seconds.
“Now be careful with the joystick,” Milo warned. “We don’t want to go too fast. Bring the stick back a bit, and we’ll keep accelerating until we get to 85%. When we hit 85, you want to back off on the acceleration a bit more, and then gradually taper it back until we reach 90. Then you bring it back to neutral, and we coast at 90%.”
Harry tried, but he overshot. The red number indicated 92 before it settled down. “Oops. It got away from me.”
“Not bad for the first time,” Milo replied. “You’ll get used to it. OK, now back it down a bit and take us to the end point that you selected. Try to stop as close to it as you can.”
This time, Harry did much better. He pulled the stick back to decelerate and brought the ship to a stop only a few hundred kilometers from where he intended, about one hundred thousand kilometers from Mars.
“Very good. That’s the best that I’ve seen in a beginner. Maybe it’s just luck, but it was nearly perfect. The computer was already computing an intervention point to prevent a collision with Mars, but you had another tenth of a second before it did anything. By the way, when you’re traveling at nearly the speed of light, if you reach the speed that you want, you can push the high speed button again, and it will pop back out. Then the joystick will revert to normal acceleration, and you can use it to make small adjustments without altering the relativistic speed that you already reached. The other option is to go on autopilot by pushing this button on the panel.” He pointed to a round button with an “A” in the middle. “Or you can continue with manual control.”
“So what next?” Harry asked.
“Use normal acceleration, and take us to about three hundred kilometers from Mars. I’ll take over from there.”
Even at “slow” speed, the ship made the last leg in only a few minutes, and Harry returned control to Milo. He guided the ship down to the surface, and Harry could see a structure in one of the level areas near a jagged rise. The ship settled onto the ground about twenty meters from the structure, and a few robots were clearly visible through the side view screen nearest to Harry. The sentry was recognizable immediately. It looked exactly like the one at Ops, but the others were much larger than the robots that were demonstrated to Harry on his first day there. They also were totally enclosed in outer skins that looked like the composite material that enclosed the sentry’s inner workings. None of them were moving.
Brad finally started speaking. He’d been silent since takeoff, while Milo gave Harry his lessons. “OK Harry. Let’s introduce you to our friends here and show you around.”
Brad took Harry to the rear of the spacecraft, where several space suits were hung on racks. “This one is yours,” he said as he took another off the rack. “There’s an atmosphere on Mars, but the pressure and oxygen content are much less than on Earth, so we need these suits. You’ll find it reasonably comfortable, at least for the few hours that we usually need outside. I can help you with it.”
Once they were both suited up, Brad opened a pressure hatch near the rack where the suits were hanging, and both of them stepped into a very small enclosure that was obviously an airlock. Brad shut the inner door, and they waited as the interior pressure equalized with the outside atmosphere. The airlock was large enough for the two of them, but just barely, and Harry was very happy when the outer door opened and they stepped out.
“Welcome to Mars. What do you think of it?”
“Wow,” Harry replied. “If someone told me that I’d be standing on Mars someday, I’d have said they were crazy. It’s amazing. I’ve never seen anything this desolate.”
“OK, let’s walk around to the other side of the ship. That’s where the robots are and where the aliens built their base. Be careful walking. It’s a bit different than on Earth, and the terrain is pretty rough in places. Try not to fall down. We don’t want any problems with punctures, but don’t worry. If you do get a puncture, we can get you back in the ship before you run into any problem. The suit has a self patch feature that can seal a hole almost completely, as long as it’s small enough. Even if it doesn’t seal, the leakage isn’t as bad as it would be in space.”
Harry walked carefully, following in Brad’s footsteps, and by the time that they reached the alien encampment, he felt confident in his ability to function outside the ship.
Brad went to the large sentry robot and explained that it and the other three were turned off, but that they would turn them back on when everything was ready for the arrival of the alien invaders.
“There are ten pathogen containers in the ship that we need to load into that storage building that the robots built.” He pointed to the large structure that Harry had noticed. “This is where the aliens were storing the biological material to prepare for the attack. We removed their containers and are replacing them with our own, the ones filled with the viruses that won’t cause us any problems.
“Our containers are almost identical to the ones that they use. They’re made of the same composite that the aliens use. It’s similar to the composites that were developed on Earth for all sorts of commercial purposes. We made our containers to match theirs physically and chemically, with a few very subtle differences. The walls contain the chemical and biological material that Gladys, Mikio, and Nigel developed. It’s hidden within the chemistry of the composite structure, and it won’t get out until Gladys’ chemicals do their job and create the pores for the pathogens to leak out through. We brought the last of the containers with us, and you and I are going to load them into a cabinet in the storage building.”
The next two hours were spent showing Harry around. The
alien site was relatively simple. It contained the sentry and the other three robots, all of them eerily silent and still, and seeming to stare at Harry through their many sensors. The storage building was also very simple. It was like a self-storage unit of the type used on Earth, and inside were various types of racks and cabinets for tools and equipment that the aliens and robots used to build and maintain the base and its facilities. The biological warfare containers were stored in a cabinet on top of a large table near the front door. It appeared to be built precisely to accommodate the containers and had shelves that were just high enough and deep enough to hold them. It also had a mechanism to lock them in place so that the entire cabinet could be transported with the containers secured inside. The shelves were wide enough to store twelve containers. There were six shelves, so seventy two containers would fill the chamber. All but ten were now in place. Harry assumed that this was where they’d put the remaining ten.
“This is the transport container that the aliens had built for the pathogens that they were developing. The robots started fabricating it before the aliens crashed on Earth, and they just went on after that and completed it along with all the other tasks that they’d been given.”
“Is there any reason for the twelve container width and the six shelves?” Harry asked. “They seem to have a thing for the numbers six and twelve.”
“Like we have a thing for the number ten,” Brad replied. “Remember that they have six fingers on each hand. Their number system is base twelve, and twelve is to them what ten is to us.”
