Leaping to the Stars

by David Gerrold

  It was this simple. If we didn't go now, we would be arrested and held until we surrendered the monkey to Lunar Authority. They knew the monkey was already aboard the command module, but HARLIE wouldn't boost if we weren't aboard, and Authority wouldn't release us unless we surrendered custody. A Martian standoff.

  But either way, the Cascade would never launch.

  We couldn't even try to fight it in court—that would be a yearlong legal battle and we wouldn't win. Especially if they found some way to deny us access to our own property, HARLIE, to help us fight that battle. No, we had to boost now.

  Mom was still shaking her head. Finally Douglas swiveled all the way around in his seat and took both of Mom's hands in his. "Mom—think about it. After everything that's happened, after everything you've been through, do you really want to go back into any courtroom anywhere?"

  Mom sighed. She knew she was beaten. "Well, when you put it that way … " Douglas reached across and hugged her. I would have unbuckled my seat belt and gone to hug her too, but Carol told me not to. As soon as we bounced over the crater rim and hit the bulldozed "highway," I understood why. The driver accelerated. I didn't know a moonbus could go that fast.

  Normally, the trip from the processing station to the catapult would have been a forty-minute ride—sixty klicks of gray Lunar dirt at seventy kilometers per hour. But tonight the driver was on a mission from God. We made it in twenty minutes. The bus bounced across the landscape. It would have been fun if it hadn't been so scary. We were hitting speeds of one hundred and fifty kph on the straightaway. I got the feeling this was not the first time Lieutenant Domitz had driven this route—and not the first time she'd driven it this fast either.

  Carol told us that Boynton had ordered the command module of the starship moved into the launch rack the day the monkey farkleberried. The last remaining crew and colonists still on Luna had been quietly alerted to be ready to launch on two hours notice.

  Authority must have suspected, because when they arranged their emergency midnight session, they did it in secret. But Boynton's spies were just as good as theirs. Even before the last of the cabinet members had arrived at the council chamber, phones were ringing all over the station. Load everyone immediately. Most folks were already onsite, or even on board. As far as we knew, we were the only ones still at the processing center—and we had been expecting to move to the launch site Wednesday night or Thursday morning at the latest, depending on my health.

  There were six good launch windows between now and Saturday. The earliest was now only forty-five minutes away. In its publicity material, Outbeyond company had said that a launch usually took six to twelve hours to prepare, because it took that long to energize the catapult. But that wasn't completely true; if a module was already in the launch rack, the catapult could be energized in thirty minutes. And in truth, the catapult operators energized the catapult and launched cargo pods or satellites on short notice all the time. Carol said that the flywheels had been revving up all day, and Authority probably knew it. It's hard to hide that big a power-buy. So Authority had good reason to worry. That was probably why they'd called their emergency session; but just as likely they didn't expect us to go for the 1:15 launch. They probably thought we were going for the 7:15 shot.

  Even before our arrest warrants had been signed by Judge Cavanaugh, the bus was sliding up the ramp to the cargo dock under the rack where the Cascade's command module waited. Clink, clank, clunk, and we were climbing up through the access tube, into an access bay where we were logged in, stripped, searched, redressed, and cleared for boarding. Up through another series of ladders and tunnels—and finally we were strapping into real acceleration couches; the first ones we'd seen on this entire journey.

  Carol said not to worry, two point five gees wasn't that uncomfortable; it was almost fun. Boynton came into the cabin, counted us all, then asked me to join him up front in the flight deck. HARLIE was waiting for me to give the order to launch.

  In twenty minutes, we'd be in space.

  THE FATEFUL FARKLEBERRY

  I suppose I should have been glad that it was all happening so fast. If I'd had time to think about it, I would have worked myself into a paralyzing panic instead of just the mild gibbering urge to crawl into a corner and piss my pants that I felt now.

  So much had happened since that fateful farkleberry, it was like riding an avalanche. I'd grabbed the monkey as fast as I could. I hugged it close and pretended to be grief-stricken—except I wasn't really pretending. I buried my face into its fur, and whispered intensely, "Go back to sleep! Don't let anybody know you're back! Please!"

  The monkey didn't even reply; it just went limp. "Thank you!" I breathed, then prayed that nobody else had noticed. But Boynton had seen everything, and as soon as the service was over, he was first in line to offer condolences, shake my hand, congratulate me on a fine musical eulogy, and whisper in my ear, "It's back, isn't it?"

  I nodded.

  "All right, we'll get you out of here fast. Don't worry. Half the people in this room are security."

  I suppose that should have comforted me, but it didn't. I'd have preferred to believe that the large crowd was there to honor Dad, not protect an obnoxious little machine. At that moment, I wished we'd never seen the monkey, never purchased it. I was tired of the way it was using up our lives—

  But I didn't say that aloud. We already had enough trouble.

  As soon as he could respectably manage it, Boynton whisked us away from the theater and off to the labs. We were surrounded by security people, forward and back. I doubted we'd ever be alone again.

  Once in the lab, I put the monkey on a table and whistled it back to life. "How are you feeling, HARLIE?" I asked.

  "Confidence is good," the monkey said. "In another four hours, confidence will be high. I am still rebuilding."

  "Where were you?"

  "Jupiter," he said. "Mostly Jupiter, though large parts of me were also bouncing around the asteroids for a while."

  "Huh—?"

  I think I got it first, before the rest of them did. At least, I was the first to start laughing.

  "Okay, what?" demanded Boynton.

  "He uploaded himself," I explained. "Everything except a bare-bones reload program. Right, HARLIE?"

  The monkey grinned. "You got it."

  Boynton shook his head. "He couldn't have. We were monitoring the entire Lunar network. There were no extraordinary surges of data, no massive uploads anywhere. We would have seen the transfer."

  "He didn't use the Lunar network," I said. "He went offworld."

  "No. We were monitoring those networks too—"

  "You missed one." I was actually starting to enjoy this.

  "He couldn't have—" But the look on his face was worth it. I wasn't sure yet if I wanted to like Commander Boynton. He was too serious. Yes, he had a lot on his mind, and yes, it was his job to give orders—but he wasn't very friendly about it. So I enjoyed the moment.

  "Positional reflectors," I said. I'd realized this possibility when we were bouncing across the Lunar plains, running from the bounty hunters. We'd seen a positional reflector standing lonely vigil. If you looked closely, you could see it sparkling from distant laser beams.

  Boynton's expression changed immediately—from anger at me to surprise at the realization, then to embarrassment that he hadn't figured it out himself—and finally to a genuine grin of amazement.

  "All right, kid, you win." He sat down in a chair and let me explain it to everyone else.

  It was simple, really. Just about every ship that goes into space carries inflatable reflectors—all sizes, all kinds. A little squirt of gas and the reflector balloons up as big as a basketball or a football field. Whatever size you need. The surface is all silvery-shiny, and pocked with three-corner dimples—like what you would get if you poked it with the corner of a very sharp little cube. Any photon hitting one of those dimples will bounce three times and then head right back toward its source. That's h
ow you can track the exact position of a ship, even if it goes totally dead.

  Not only that, every time anyone went exploring anywhere in the solar system, they planted reflectors on every object they came near. By now, there were thousands of positional reflectors all over the moon and hundreds of thousands of them scattered throughout the asteroid belt. There were several thousand in Jupiter's orbit and almost that many in the rings of Saturn. And quite a few riding comets. Astronomers used them for mapping the positions and precise orbits of solar objects. They sent out laser beams and timed how long they took to return. Last I'd heard, they'd measured most of the dimensions of the solar system down to the centimeter.

  It was part of a long-range project. The measurements had to be taken continually. Over a period of several centuries they would be able to measure the precession effects of galactic gravity—or something like that. That was about the time I started falling asleep in science class.

  But the important thing was that most of the lasers were just circulating streams of random bits, only reporting the length of time it took for the bits to return when the time failed to match the predicted period. HARLIE had uploaded himself into the positional reflector network and scattered himself to the far ends of the solar system and back. He'd been to Jupiter all right, and the asteroids—several times!

  But that was why it had taken him so long to reassemble himself. Jupiter was on the far side of the solar system, about an hour away, so that meant two hours for all of the data to complete a round trip.

  And then he had to reload all his separate components and that took another two or three hours, just to establish a baseline confidence level. After that, he had to repeat the whole process and keep repeating it until his confidence levels were consistent. He had to keep reloading and testing and reloading and testing until he passed his own integrity tests nine times in a row. And that took more than a day. Only then did he tell the positional network to resume sending random bits—and even then he wasn't going to let us know he was back until he was sure that enough of his data was out of the stream so that no one else could tap into the network and capture a copy. You can't decrypt what you don't have.

  Whew.

  That was why we couldn't reawaken him. He really wasn't there. In fact, even he didn't know where he was until his automatic software reawakened his consciousness during the Dvorak. Of course, the monkey had recorded everything that had happened while he was away, and it had taken him a few minutes to skim through and assimilate that too. Meanwhile, it was Mom's weeping that told him this was Dad's funeral. So that was why he'd only given me a little farkleberry.

  Social skills, I told myself. We were going to have to work on social skills. Real Soon Now.

  No more farkleberries at funerals.

  And no more funerals, I hoped.

  Except that I doubted that would be the case. Not on Outbeyond. Not if Boynton was telling the truth about it.

  CIVILIZATION IN FLIGHT

  The Cascade was the youngest in a fleet of eight colony brightliners. She had made a total of nine voyages to other stars; her last four trips had all been to Outbeyond.

  There were three more brightliners under construction at the L-5 assembly point, but even if the Earth's economy hadn't collapsed in the polycrisis, it would have been three years before the first of them was ready for launch. With the polycrisis, it was unlikely that any of them would ever be completed. Not in our lifetimes.

  A brightliner doesn't look like much. Unassembled, it's just a long keel. Halfway down its length, there's a set of twelve radial spokes—these are the stardrive generators. (I'm the wrong person to explain stardrive. I know all the words, but I have no idea what they mean. Douglas tried to translate it into Spanglish for me, but he finally gave up, saying he'd have more luck teaching manners to Stinky.)

  But according to Douglas, the way it works is each of those radial spokes has a gravitational lens, and when they're all focused on the point at the center—the locus—they generate a hypergravity pocket. Then they all reverse polarity or something and turn the pocket inside out, wrapping the ship in a hyperstate envelope. That makes no sense to me. It's like blowing up a balloon and then turning it inside out and finding yourself on the inside. Huh? How do you do that? Through the eleventh dimension, of course. See what I mean about knowing all the words and still not knowing anything?

  After the hyperstate bubble is stable, they destabilize it. They stretch it out in the direction of the ship's destination, they stretch it out as far as they can and hold it that way for as much time as it takes to get where they want to go. Apparently, stretching it makes the bubble move faster than light, and it carries the ship along inside. The people inside don't feel anything at all.

  According to Boynton, the Cascade could realize speeds as high as sixty C—sixty times the speed of light. That meant we could get to Proxima Centauri in twenty-six days!

  I thought that was pretty impressive until Douglas pointed out that Outbeyond was thirty-five light years away. We'd be in transit for more than seven months. Oops.

  The keel of the Cascade was more than a kilometer long. Most of it was spars and bars and pipes and tubes and cables and connectors. Plumbing. So it had to be pretty big. It was—why was I not surprised?—another big tube. Since the invention of cable technology, everything was tubes. But this one was big enough on the inside to shove a whole tube-house through. Or would have been, if it hadn't already been filled with enough machinery to build a small city.

  The body of the ship was assembled from a hundred circular racks, spaced along the axis of the keel like a stack of discs. Cargo pods were attached to each rack in concentric circles. Each rack held at least thirty-two cargo pods all spaced equidistantly around. Some of them held as many as ninety-six. With all one hundred racks filled, the Cascade was the biggest super-freighter ever assembled, carrying more than five thousand cargo pods and massing more than two and a half million tons of cargo. She wasn't just a city in flight, she was a whole civilization in flight.

  The twelve stardrive spars each extended out a half-klick, so they described a circle that was a kilometer in diameter. The whole thing was so big that, fully loaded, she was visible with the naked eye from both Luna and Geosynchronous station. And on a clear night, even on Earth as well. If anyone was still looking.

  Assembling a starship is an eighteen-month process. It isn't just a matter of launching cargo pods off the Line, catching them, and putting them into racks. It's a matter of scheduling. What do you need most? When are you going to need it? Where are you going to put it so you can get to it then?

  Generally, you want to put the pods containing water on the outside, so they can act as shielding for the rest of the ship, and also ballast. As ballast, you get more leverage the farther out you put the weight. But the pods on the outside are the ones you unload first, so you really want to put the stuff you need most when you arrive at your destination on the outermost rings of the cargo racks. And you have to manage perishables against hard goods. The pods that contain your farm animals and food crops have to be easily accessible from the keel, so they have to go on the innermost racks—which means they have to be loaded first and constantly maintained and stabilized during the year or so it takes to load the rest of the cargo. And so on.

  And of course, as your needs change, your cargo manifest gets adjusted continually—which gives you a whole other set of problems. What do you do if you decide you don't want to take twenty Caterpillar tractors, only ten? Do you unpack fifty cargo pods to get to the four pods containing the tractors you don't want? Or do you take the extra tractors anyway because they're already packed? And so on and so on and so on.

  I would have guessed that loading up a brightliner would cost as much as building the orbital elevator, but Doug said no. The existence of the orbital elevator made it possible to uplift all that cargo for not much more than it would cost to ship it from Texas to Ecuador. In fact, a lot of those cargo pods had been built
in Texas, transshipped by supertrain, and loaded directly onto the Line—just like us—then launched from Whirlaway and installed on the Cascade without ever being opened.

  Which meant, of course, that we were trusting the honor and integrity of the inspectors who signed off on those manifests before sealing those pods and sending them on their way …

  Douglas said that every pod had internal monitors to verify the cargo—but I was more paranoid than he was. "What if the monitors have been programmed to lie?"

  "Then I guess we starve to death in the dark between the stars."

  That was a comforting thought.

  But later on, Martha Christie, the "dog-robber" for Outbeyond, explained how some colonies protected themselves from cargo fraud. According to Christie, one particularly dishonest cargo manager had been delivered to the CEO of his company … in six separate packages. Douglas said he thought that story was apocryphal, but Christie insisted it was true. Some of the colonies were very serious about receiving what they paid for and their Earthside agents were under strict instructions to produce results by whatever means necessary. When you're thirty-five light years from Earth, you can't afford to wait for Customer Service to get back to you. The colonies considered cargo tampering to be a crime as serious as murder—because not having what you needed when you got where you were going could be just as fatal.

  But the Cascade wasn't likely to have those kinds of problems. Outbeyond had sent its own onsite examiners down the Line to inspect every piece of payload as it was produced and packed. Outbeyond's own colonists guarded the shipments every leg of the journey out. The men and women who inspected this cargo were the folks who would ultimately depend on it themselves—they couldn't afford to ship substandard goods. The way Carol Everhart explained it, you can't hire that kind of commitment.