Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  A faster-than-light drive: that was the way to go. The only way. Unfortunately, you couldn't even mention FTL to the Science Foundations who funded us. Marcus had tried it, and been ridiculed for his pains. Their committee of advisors was quite adamant. Nothing could go faster than light, the theory of relativity “proved” that, so not one cent should be wasted in trying. Instead we should spend the Foundation's money on something useful , like plodding ion drives or bone-jarring pulsed fission.

  “Dummies!” said Marcus, when he got back to the lab. “Stupid jerks.” He had said much the same thing to the committee, and it hadn't helped his case.

  “I know,” I commiserated. “They're a bunch of idiots. Curse ‘em all."

  I did a lot of cursing in those days, and without Marcus, that would have been all that I could do. With him, though, I had as my partner a top-drawer physicist who had studied the absolute basics of quantum theory and relativity, instead of taking them as gospel. He had done so with one goal in mind: looking for the loopholes.

  They were there, of course. Everyone from Einstein onwards had pointed out that the two fields were inconsistent with each other. And even within the framework of those inconsistencies, the structure of spacetime at a subnuclear level had to be a sea of singularities, continuously forming and dissolving. The very notion of “travel” through such a discontinuous medium in its constant flux was meaningless, said Marcus. It was the learned advisors to our funding sources, sitting in their smug certainty, who needed to go back and do “something useful."

  I knew he was smarter than me, and anyone else I'd ever met. When he said that he saw a ray of hope, I believed him. His failure with the committee, and their ridicule, didn't shake my faith in him one bit.

  “We have to keep trying,” I said. “Show them they're wrong."

  He shook his head gloomily, but soon he was working harder than ever. Rejection merely drove him to greater efforts. In the next few months he developed the theory further, and it looked good (to him, I mean—I admit that I couldn't follow it).

  The next steps had to be mine, though. I was the fix-it member of the team, because Marcus was terrible at practical details, and the diverse techniques for lubrication of egos that these days are lumped together as “human relationships” were quite beyond him.

  So I “fixed it.” With, if I say it myself, my usual efficiency. (I sometimes think that the only thing in life that I find truly irresistible is the challenge to finagle something that everyone else says can't be done.)

  Money wasn't the issue. Marcus had inherited bundles of that, and had found little use for it, but the equipment that we needed couldn't be bought. It was available only through government programs. So the prototype construction, and the first small-scale tests, had to be worked secretly using materials bootlegged from approved conventional projects. If that sounds easy, remember that all the construction had to be done in space . Without assistance from Inventory Control, who owed me quite a few favors, it could not have been done at all. Even then, it was not totally invisible. Someday an enthusiastic auditor would discover that the equipment orders and use did not match, and the game would be over. Long before that I expected to have gone to hell or Alpha Centauri.

  It took five and a half years from the day of Marcus's key theoretical insight to the first space test. On that day the two of us, crowded into a small cargo capsule never intended for anything but free-fall storage, paused and looked at the little payload, then at each other.

  “Well?” he said.

  I nodded. He drew a long breath, shrugged, and toggled the switch.

  The payload vanished without a sound.

  The test transition—Marcus insisted that it shouldn't be called a test flight , since the payload would not be “traveling” through normal space—had been designed to carry an array of sensors eighty million kilometers to the vicinity of Mars, take a handful of pictures there, and return to the cargo capsule. It was supposed to be gone for just twenty minutes, almost all of it spent out near Mars.

  Twenty minutes? I have known shorter months.

  When the tiny payload popped back into existence, we both gasped. And when we examined the data it had collected, I at least got a lot more than I had bargained for.

  The payload had not made the journey to Mars in a single hop. Instead, Marcus had programmed it to drop back periodically into normal space, make an instant navigation fix, and use that to direct the next transition. The resulting set of images was mind-blowing. The fixes had been taken every hundredth of a second, two hundred thousand kilometers apart. Seen in real time, they provided the series of frames that would have been obtained by a ship traveling at twenty million kilometers a second—nearly seventy times the speed of light. God speed.

  I watched those movies about a hundred times in the next twenty-four hours, drunk with euphoria and the conviction that Marcus and I would ourselves be remembered as gods. We were the New Prometheans, the men who gave humanity the universe. (Like most people who play with fire, I had forgotten what happened to Prometheus). I wanted to go public with our results, right away. As I told Marcus, we had more than enough evidence to justify funding for a complete series of operational tests.

  At that point, he dug in and couldn't be budged. The establishment hadn't just said a polite “No thanks” to his theory, or pleaded poverty to explore it. They had mocked his ideas, suggesting that he was a crank or worse. Now he wanted to make a manned flight, go out in person farther than anything had ever been, and take hand-held pictures. Then he would come home, go to the skeptics who had told him he was a charlatan, show them our results, and invite them to stick it in their ear. Before that, he wanted complete secrecy.

  Fame and fortune weren't enough, you see. He wanted revenge.

  I should have refused to go along with him, but he always burned a lot brighter than me. We argued for hours, until at last I gave in. He told me what he wanted for the Big Test: out a thousand astronomical units, so Marcus could get a shot of theStarseed , against a backdrop of the shrunken Sun and scarcely visible planets.

  If finding the resources for the small test had been difficult, the new one—manned ship, life-support, full navigation and control systems—had me tearing out what was left of my hair. To be honest I also had a wonderful time, juggling three dozen people and organizations at once, but it was still another six months before I could go into his office and say, “Well, you asked for it, Marcus, and you got it. We're in business. All-up manned test for Project Godspeed is set for one week today."

  “You actually got the flight permits, Wilmer?"—that's me—"How'd you fix it? I'd have bet it was impossible."

  This had been one of our main worries. Stealing equipment had become fairly routine, and we had even managed to divert attention from our true activities by describing the Godspeed itself during the ship's construction as a “pulsed fission-fusion pre-experimental post-design model,” which was enough to put off anyone. The earlier test had been on a scale small enough to hide. But the new one could not be concealed, since although the FTL transition should produce no detectable signal, according to Marcus the macroscopic quantum events leading up to it would make the Godspeed 's whole exterior sparkle and glitter like a cut gemstone catching the noonday sun.

  “It was impossible,” I said. “I had to use all my chips on this one. I wouldn't be surprised if we get caught."

  “Who cares?” he said. “When we get back from this trip—"

  And at that precise moment, when the day of glory was within reach, Sally Brown from Ground Operations came running into my office without knocking, switched on the little tv set that perched on the corner of my desk, and said breathlessly: “Messages and pictures. Coming in from space. All over the world, hundreds of different wavelengths. Not from Earth. From the stars."

  * * * *

  I don't know what Sally Brown's words did to Marcus, but they created in me such a conflict of emotions that I wanted to throw up. On the one hand,
the arrival of aliens and their superior technology would make all our work for the past few years as obsolete as the horse and carriage; on the other hand, I would have what I had wanted for so long: access to the stars.

  We froze in front of the tv screen, waiting for our first look at the Genizee.

  What we got instead was a look at their ships, inside and out, and at their technical equipment. No pictures of aliens, not then. We learned later that they weren't sure Earth people were ready for three-foot-long cylinders of quaking black jelly, topped by a writhing mass of yellow spaghetti. Instead, we got pictures of technology.

  Oddly enough, it was the sight of the ships that Marcus and I, alone of all the people on Earth, found hardest to take. The video signals had been beamed to Earth a few hours earlier, from just beyond the orbit of Saturn, along with a series of radio messages—in seven major Earth languages—proclaiming peaceful intentions and giving a projected arrival time at Earth equatorial orbit in less than a week. The radio messages we could take. But the ships...

  Marcus caught on first. “Where is it?” he said, almost under his breath. “Wilmer, where’s the drive ?"

  No one else would have been able to understand his question. But I did.

  The forms of certain technologies are dictated completely by the laws of chemistry and physics. That includes all propulsion technology. For instance, a rocket is a rocket, no matter whether the propellant is hot neutral gas, ionized particles, or radiation; and it makes little difference if the energy comes from chemical or nuclear processes. Similarly, a laser is a laser, regardless of wavelength or energy level. And the FTL drive that Marcus had conceived, and that we had both been working on so hard, had its own characteristic physics and signature.

  The Genizee ships showed no sign of that signature. Either they had traveled across the interstellar void using a method which was so advanced that we could not recognize it; or—far more likely, in Marcus's paranoid view—they were deliberately withholding all information on their FTL drive.

  Neither Marcus nor I could imagine a third possibility.

  When the third option was proposed, Marcus did not believe it. He has never believed it, to this day.

  * * * *

  In retrospect, the aliens broke it to us slowly and carefully.

  First, they brought their three ships into orbit around the Earth, five hundred miles up, and sat there quietly for a week and a half, doing nothing except chatting over the radio and making sure that their mastery of Earth languages was complete. They told us a lot about themselves during that period, and asked for nothing in return but our idiomatic phrases. On the first day we learned that they came from the Tau Ceti system. (Marcus and I had been right on target, though we received little satisfaction from the thought). Day Two they gave us a description of their civilization, with its five populated planets and moons and its links to other, more distant intelligences; all, according to the Genizee, were as peaceful, well-meaning and sympathetic as they were.

  The fifth day brought a first look at the Genizee themselves. By that time they had soothed us so well that most people's reaction when they saw a picture of a Genizee was sympathy that any rational being had to live with being so ugly.

  The sympathy faded a little when the Genizee told us that they lived, on average, for twenty-seven thousand Earth years. When asked if they would make the longevity formula available to humans, they replied, with an apologetic quiver, that there was no formula. The Genizee had always been so long-lived. Almost everyone except Marcus believed them. He was already full of dark surmise.

  The bombshell dropped by the Genizee near the end of the second and final week confirmed his suspicions. Asked during a tv broadcast (the world had lived glued to tv sets since the arrival) about their journey to the solar system, they offered an implausible reply. They had not used an FTL drive at all, they said, but an efficient sub-lightspeed drive that allowed them to reach over half the speed of light. They had been on the way from Tau Ceti for twenty-five years. All their journeys between the stars were made at a fraction of lightspeed.

  The blue ribbon panel of elderly scientists who had been assembled to interact with the aliens were, if you can believe it, pleased by that reply. It confirmed, they said, their own conviction, that faster-than-light travel was a physical impossibility. Nothing could ever move from one point to another, faster than light would cover the distance.

  Well, said the Genizee, quaking apologetically, that's not exactly the case. In fact, the reason why we embarked on this long journey to Earth in person, rather than sending messages that you might not believe, or might think to ignore, was just this: Certain of your scientists have been conducting FTL experiments...

  No one had looked to Marcus Aurelius Jackson or me for help and advice when the Genizee arrived. Why should they? We were young and junior, without reputation or known accomplishments, and Marcus had already been branded as a crank. Even if we had offered our services, no one would have taken them, or listened to what we might have to say.

  That changed in ten minutes—the ten minutes when the Genizee explained that faster-than-light travel was not impossible; that it offered enormous danger and possible total destruction to any species that attempted it, for reasons that they would be happy to explain to us; that such attempts were being conducted on Earth at this very moment; and that the Genizee had come here with two main goals: to pinpoint the location of those experiments, and to warn the inhabitants of Earth, telling them to cease and desist.

  My own immediate reaction was total disbelief, with good reason. If the Genizee had been on the way for twenty-five years, they must have left twenty years before we had even the theory for an FTL drive. So they couldn't have started out for Sol just because they'd picked up evidence of what Marcus and I were doing.

  It was Marcus himself, no fan of the Genizee, who quickly put me straight on that one. He had long known that any FTL drive would give rise to both advanced and retarded potentials, similar to those of conventional electromagnetic theory. Both potentials propagated through spacetime, and died out in magnitude—but the advanced potential moved backwards in time. The experiments that we had thought to be so secret might be detectable by the Genizee, before we had performed them.

  They confirmed his comment later in the same broadcast. They could detect the signal from afar, they said, even as far away as Tau Ceti. But only when they came very close to Earth could their equipment pinpoint an exact location . They had done that now. They would be happy to provide that location to Earth authorities.

  They did so, and added a few more minutes of stern warning on FTL drives. Half a dozen uses, they said, were often enough to cause “major repercussions” in the region of space.

  Having said that, to everyone's amazement they started their ship drives and headed away from Earth.

  It was bad for an emerging civilization, explained their departing message as the three ships lumbered off towards Saturn, to suffer major exposure to an older and more advanced one. Now that their warning had been delivered, the only responsible thing for them to do was to leave, and let us humans make our own way. Goodbye and good luck, people of Earth.

  I gather that our scientists and politicians went into shock—they had been hoping for free technology from the Genizee, and had received nothing but talk. Marcus and I didn't take much notice at the time, because we had our own worries. Within hours of the last Genizee broadcast, our lab had been closed and was guarded by enough military men to fight a major war. Marcus and I were arrested. We were charged with theft of government equipment, misuse of grant funds, and travel without suitable permits.

  Those crimes should not have been enough to hold us in confinement. They were. After what the Genizee had said, no one was willing to let us go free, not because of what they thought we would do, but because of what the aliens told them we could do.

  Relax, said Marcus and I to each other. We can't really be kept in jail like this for more than a day. C
an we?

  What innocents! We sure could. For the first time in my life, I learned what was meant by a witch hunt. I doubt if one person in a million understood the explanation that the Genizee had offered of the dangers of a faster-than-light drive, but they didn't care. The Genizee themselves had fingered us, so we were guilty. We'd be kept under close guard, without a trial, unless the Genizee returned and said we were to be released.

  I myself didn't understand what the Genizee warning was all about when I heard it, but my cell-mate was Marcus Aurelius Jackson. He knew what they were telling the whole world—and he didn't believe a word of it.

  * * * *

  Marcus didn't just explain his views to me. He told the guards, our family members, and finally, after two months of work from me, the three members of the press who could be persuaded to come out to our maximum-security prison in the Nevada desert to interview us.

  “A faster-than-light drive needs a tremendous amount of energy,” he said to the three reporters. We were all sitting in one room, without bars between us, because I had been working hard on our guards, and finally had them to the point where they thought we might be crazy, but we were surely harmless. The room even had a tiny barred window, with only four guards posted inside, and another two just beyond the door.

  “A huge amount of energy,” went on Marcus. “The only practical—or even theoretical—way to get that much energy is from the vacuum itself. You have to tap into it."