Leaping to the Stars

by David Gerrold

  I couldn't answer that.

  She was right.

  And then I got it. Some things were true. They were so, whether you believed in them or not. And some things were just stories—

  I floated there in the lounge, realizing the truth of what she'd said, and my anger started to drain away. I actually felt lightheaded. And it wasn't just the zero gee.

  "You're right," I said, grinning.

  She grinned back. "Then I apologize."

  "Me too."

  And then she kissed me. This apologizing business wasn't so bad after all …

  FOURTEEN

  Except every so often, the boredom ends, and then things get real exciting.

  The first thing that happened was that I turned fourteen.

  I almost forgot, except Mom remembered. She came to me and apologized that she didn't have anything to give me as a birthday present, and I said that was all right, I didn't really need a present. I'd gotten my family back and that was all I wanted, and she said that was the nicest thing I'd ever said to her, and then she hugged me tight. "Have I told you how much I love you?" And that was the best birthday present she could have given me, because I'd waited so long to hear it.

  But we did have a party, and that surprised me, because a lot of the Revelationist families showed up—and not too many of the Outbeyond colonists, which surprised me even more.

  Trent's Mom and Dad came. She baked cookies—with real chocolate chips—and told me to eat as many as I wanted. Trent's Dad thanked me for spending so much time teaching Trent the clarinet. And Trent's aunts and uncles and cousins showed up too, and a bunch of other people I didn't know, but they all seemed to know each other. And then Commander Boynton passed through on his way from someplace to someplace else; I was sure that wasn't accidental, but he did take a moment to say he was glad to have me aboard, especially for the music. So of course, we had an impromptu concert—and we were all lousy, but no one seemed to mind; they applauded enthusiastically and cheered.

  But in the middle of that, Kisa floated over and whispered, "Be careful, Charles."

  "Why?"

  "They're trying to love-bomb you."

  "Love-bomb?"

  "I'll explain later. Just don't agree to anything." And she grabbed a handful of chocolate chip cookies—they were stuck to a sticky-plate—and sailed off. And then I forgot about it because I was having too much fun. J'mee was holding my hand, except when her dad stopped by and grumbled a happy birthday.

  He hadn't said anything to us since that first day, and he still didn't like us very much, so I think he was just checking up on J'mee. J'mee said that her dad was sort of coming around to accepting the way things were; he'd even begun talking about teaching us how to use the HARLIE properly. If we were interested. But we'd have to ask. Because he wasn't going to volunteer. Because he didn't want to look pushy and aggressive. That's what J'mee said.

  It was a short party—most parties were, because we were all on different shifts, and some of us had to get to work and others had to get to school and still others had to get some sleep. And besides, we were only two days from transit and all the preparations we had to do before launch we had to do again, three times over. Launch-prep was the drill; this was for real—because once we leapt into, hyperstate, that was it, there was no possibility of coming back ever.

  Right up to the moment of transition, we could change our minds. We could turn the ship around, we could decelerate for as long as we had accelerated, and then we could start accelerating back to L-5 again. If we wanted to. It would take at least three and a half weeks of deceleration to burn off the speed we'd built up, and then at least seven more weeks of acceleration and deceleration back toward Earth. Actually, according to Douglas, it would be nine or ten weeks returning, because Earth would have moved a third of the way around the sun in the ensuing four months, and we'd have to cover that distance too.

  But that was all theoretical. We weren't going back. The transition to hyperstate was the real launch to New Revelation and Outbeyond. Everything up to now had just been taxiing on the runway—getting out far enough to where it would be safe to initiate a hyper-state envelope.

  There was a rumor going around that Reverend Dr. Pettyjohn had petitioned Commander Boynton to observe transition on the flight deck. Commander Boynton hadn't wanted to, but Reverend Pettyjohn was insistent. I guess he wanted to make sure that HARLIE was only observing and wasn't actually participating. According to the rumor, Commander Boynton had agreed. But nobody I asked would say if it was true. They just said, "Yep, I heard that rumor too."

  And then, in the middle of my sleep shift, I woke up with a start. Something went klunk in my head.

  Being right—everything that J'mee had said—that's why all these people were afraid of HARLIE. That's why everybody was afraid of HARLIE.

  And me too.

  Because HARLIE was always right.

  HARLIE had been built to be right. It was hardwired into him—even more so than human beings. He had to find the right answer. Every time. And he had to tell it. Every time.

  And every time he did that … it drove human beings crazy and made everything worse.

  Did HARLIE figure that into his logic … ?

  Or didn't he care?

  How could being right be wrong?

  Was it possible to be right in a way that didn't hurt others?

  THE HIDEOUT

  The Cascade had two centrifuges, spinning in opposite directions to neutralize the effects of torque.

  Both centrifuges had galleys and gyms and shower rooms, but only one of them was open for use. (And there was a lot of grumbling about that.) The other one was out of service, filled with crates of rice, noodles, and beans. Blame HARLIE for that too.

  There were fifteen hundred people on the starship, each of whom was required to spend at least two hours a day at Earth-normal (or higher) gee. And no matter how you sliced it, that meant that at any given time, there were 125 people in the wheel. Usually more.

  The wheel was pretty big and people spaced themselves around it as well as they could, but it was like being in a giant subway car with curved floors—always crowded. Enough to be annoying.

  But as part of one of the Moebius races, we had to go into the other centrifuge. It was a lot like the first, only it was stuffed full of extra supplies: boxes and tanks and drums of all sizes and kinds. Medicine. Tools. Fabric. Chemicals. Shelterfoam. Fabricators. Machines. Seeds. Microchips. Everything. And of course, lots of boxes of rice and beans and noodles. There was a gym in this centrifuge too, though all the gym machines were dismantled, and even the shower room was jammed full of boxes. But there was just enough wiggle room to get into the corner, and for some reason, the six of us had turned it into a hideout. Me and J'mee, Trent and Gary, Kisa and Chris. (Chris liked Kisa a lot, it was obvious he wished that she would be his girlfriend, but Kisa didn't seem to notice. Or maybe she did. Who knew?)

  Whenever we could, we found time to hang out down there. There wasn't a lot of time—in fact, there was less time than there was room; but it was a place where we could go where we wouldn't be seen by some passing crew member and grabbed for an extra work detail. Usually some make-work thing like wiping down walls with disinfectant or something.

  The crew had this really nasty habit—they couldn't stand to see anyone sitting or resting. You had to be doing something productive all the time. And if you weren't doing anything, they found something for you to do. And by the end of the second week, we were getting resentful. All of the Moebius teams were.

  Yes, we knew that this was a life-or-death journey, and we were just as committed as everybody else, but it wasn't fair that any passing crew person could put us to work whenever he felt like it. We didn't object to doing our fair share—even more than our share, if necessary; but we had full schedules of classes and work details too, so we didn't have a lot of free time. What little we had was important to us—we objected to having it taken away on a whim by someon
e who didn't know and didn't care that we might be doing something much more important than wiping the wall down one more time—like talking to each other about important stuff.

  We'd complained about it—to the Colony Council, to the Ship's Officers, to our parents—even to Commander Boynton. They all said the same thing, although not all in the same words: "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it … "

  So we found hideouts. The centrifuge wasn't the easiest, but it was the best, because nobody came here except on purpose.

  We were a pretty good team. Even our differences were interesting. Gary was from Kenya; Chris was from New Jersey—although to look at them, side by side, you'd have guessed the opposite. J'mee was from Canada. Kisa was from Quebec. Trent was from Idaho.

  What was interesting to me was that even though I didn't like a lot of what the Revelationists believed, Trent was the nicest of the group. And even though I agreed with most of what Kisa had to say, most of the time I wished she'd shut up and not say it, because when she did say it, people got pissed off. More than once, J'mee and I exchanged glances. (Kisa is being right again.)

  And that was one of the things we talked about too—about how most of the Revelationists were really good people. Sincere. Kind. Compassionate. Helping. Generous. It was just that everything was "God bless this" and "God bless that." Nobody ever got credit for doing a good job. It was always God's victory. And if something went wrong, God was trying to teach us a lesson. "God never gives you a cross bigger than you can carry." And so on.

  One day, Kisa finally told us why her family had broken away from the others—it was a long story and I didn't pay attention to a lot of it, because by then I was getting pretty bored with Kisa being angry all the time; but it was clear that she had a good reason to be angry and I couldn't fault her for that. But once in a while, could she please stop doing anger and just do something else? Please?

  But mostly, despite our differences of opinion, we actually liked each other. Because even if we disagreed, we could still talk to each other. And not just talking—listening too. Because sometimes, that's all you really need, someone who can just listen while you unload for a while.

  Back in El Paso, I'd always used my music to get away. I would go off into the hills above the tube-town. Only, now … I didn't need the music for hiding out anymore. And that was nice to realize. It was funny, though—that I had to go to a different kind of hideout to discover I didn't need to hide out.

  MOMENTUM

  For about a hundred years, hyperstate was only a theory.

  If gravity worked like light—it doesn't, but if it did—then it could be focused, reflected, amplified, made coherent, lased, phased, and disarrayed. Whatever. It was a terrific theory, and a lot of scientists sold a lot of books writing about it. And a lot of other scientists sold a lot more books explaining why this terrific theory was just so much wishful thinking.

  And then somebody who hadn't paid too much attention to either of the theories discovered this really weird effect of light and electricity and magnetism—that a gravity field could be stretched, sort of, pushed in or pulled out like a rubber ball, but not quite, because it did strange things to the space around it too. And he called that a gravitational lens. And it didn't fit anybody's theory, so a lot more scientists sold a lot more books explaining that too.

  For the longest time it was a laboratory trick, because nobody could figure out what to do with it. You could use it to push things down or pull them up, but there were other, faster, better ways to push things down or pull them up that used a lot less energy.

  But then one day, somebody began to wonder what would happen if you overlaid a whole bunch of gravitational lenses all focused on the same place, and he managed to blow a hole in New Jersey three kilometers in diameter. Pretty impressive. But just before that particular part of the state disappeared, for just an instant, there was this thing—and when the thing disappeared, so did part of New Jersey. But the weird part was that the lab itself was untouched. It was still standing unscathed at the epicenter of nine square kilometers of rubble and dead bodies.

  So they repeated the experiment in deep space—out between the orbits of Earth and Mars, and this time the thing lasted for several seconds. And when the thing disappeared this time, the spaceship was on the other side of the solar system. Out beyond the orbit of Neptune. Out in the Kuiper Belt. They were six weeks coming back.

  The next time they tried it—well, you can look it up—they spent a lot of time sending spaceships all over everywhere, because they had no way to control where they were going. They spent twenty years experimenting and eventually somebody figured it out.

  When you focus enough gravity lenses on the same place, you rip a hole in space. Sort of. You turn a part of space inside out—like a black hole, except it isn't—it's more like blowing a bubble from the inside. The bubble is its own little universe, infinite in size, except it isn't—its event horizon is really very close, like a couple of kilometers away from the locus of probability.

  If you twiddle the shape of the bubble—you do this by altering the push and pull of the individual gravity lenses, and you have to be real careful when you do this—the bubble moves through real-space. But because it doesn't have any mass or inertia or even existence in real-space, the real-space laws of physics don't apply. So it can travel as fast as you want. Theoretically, you can go a couple gazillion times the speed of light. Theoretically. But the best any Earth-built starship had achieved so far was seventy-five C, and that was only on a short run, and they burned out two hyperstate fluctuators trying it.

  The problem was that the lenses needed to focus on a target of very dense mass. The heavier the better. You can't just point your lens anywhere—you have to point it at something because you have to have some gravity to stretch. Neutronium would be ideal, but nobody had any neutronium laying around, so the Lunar colliders were used to generate quantities of eugenium 932, which wasn't anywhere near as good as neutronium, but it was six times better than lead or uranium. Inert, dense, and otherwise useless, except for taking up space.

  According to one theorist, a pinpoint black hole would be the best target, but nobody had any of those lying around either—although this same guy said that if you could focus enough gravitational lenses on a sufficiently dense mass, you could implode it and create a pinpoint black hole, and last we'd heard he was raising the money to build a black-hole generator—except with the polycrisis on Earth, that probably wasn't going to happen now. But according to his theory, you would only need six lenses focused on a pinpoint black hole, and that would still be so efficient that you could probably achieve speeds of three hundred to four hundred C.

  We had to learn all this in class. Because maybe someday somebody would invent starships that fast, and then travel between Earth and Outbeyond would be possible in only one month instead of seven. And then it wouldn't be so much of a one-way trip anymore.

  The other problem with hyperstate was gravity wells. Stars and planets have enormous gravity wells—stars especially—much larger than most people realize. The effects of Sol's gravity, for instance, can be felt all the way out beyond the Kuiper Belt, all the way out beyond the Oort Cloud. It's very faint at that distance, but it's still detectable. The point is that the sun's gravitational field affects the size and shape of the hyperstate bubble when it's initiated. It makes it hard to shape and control precisely.

  Boynton said that if we had a pinpoint black hole as our target mass, we'd have more leverage and we could initiate hyperstate within the solar system without risking dangerous deformation of the hyperstate envelope, but we didn't, so we had to go farther out to get a spherical bubble. The same problems would apply at our destination. We'd have to drop out of hyperstate far from the star. Fortunately, we'd still have all the inherent velocity that we'd built up moving away from the Earth, so we'd use that to approach the target planet, decelerating all the way in. We might also loop around a planet or even the star to bu
rn off velocity—I wasn't sure about the orbital mechanics on that yet; we hadn't gotten that far in class.

  Our teachers didn't expect any of us to become quantum engineers, but they did want everybody onboard to understand that star-ship technology is very complex, and not just because it involves a lot of math, but because it involves a lot of momentum. An object in motion will continue to move in the same direction—changing direction requires the application of energy; usually lots of it. So the idea that we could just hop in a starship, point it at our destination, and punch the "on" button—well maybe that looks good on TV, but it doesn't work that way in real life.

  Dr. Oberon, our science teacher, explained it this way: "Everything costs energy. The question you have to ask is whether or not you can afford to spend that energy and whether or not the result is worth the expenditure. This is going to be a very important question when we get to Outbeyond. You're going to have to ask it about everything you do for a long long time. Maybe your entire life."

  But finally, after all the talk and all the classes and all the preparations and all the checklists and all the drills and all the double-checks and all the warnings and all the triple-checks and everything else—finally, we were ready for transit.

  FAREWELL TO EARTH

  We couldn't see the Earth anymore. We were too far out. Even the sun had dwindled to the size of every other star. It was still the brightest one, but not for much longer. Pretty soon, we wouldn't be able to identify which star was Sol unless somebody asked a computer.

  The last day before transition, the last hours, even the last minutes—everybody on board was sending their good-byes to Earth. Because once we jumped into hyperstate, we wouldn't be able to send or receive any radio or laser communication with Earth. All communication with the homeworld would be cut off.

  Most communication had ceased already anyway. A lot of stations had stopped broadcasting, or they'd dropped off the network. Mostly what we were getting from Earth now were news reports of who was still viable. It was assumed that if someone wasn't broadcasting, they weren't there anymore. They'd succumbed to one thing or another.