Scientists announced yesterday that the restlessness gene has been discovered. It is believed to be responsible for the inability of so many people to derive a sense of satisfaction from their lives, no matter how successful they have been. In addition, it may make it impossible to settle down into a quiet life. Persons believed to have possessed this gene include Francis Bacon, Charles XII, Winston Churchill, and Edna Cummings.
—Chicago Tribune, August 6, 2021
SPECIALISTS WARN AGAINST NOMAD MANIPULATION
Prospective parents looking for a quiet home life with submissive kids may want to think twice about neutralizing the so-called nomad gene, the French Psychiatric Society warned today. Manipulation is difficult to reverse, and researchers have discovered that a strikingly high percentage of those who have achieved success in a wide variety of fields, have an abnormally active nomadic impulse. The conclusion: If you want creative and successful children, resign yourself to jousting with rebels.
—Le Monde (Paris), August 9, 2021
chapter 10
MATT DARWIN WAS also disappointed by the failure. “I’m not surprised you’d feel that way,” said Reyna. “But I really can’t see what difference it makes.”
He shrugged. How could he explain it if she did not understand already? She was practical and down-to-earth. Thought real estate mattered. She was a political junkie, and she was intrigued by technology that could be put to practical use. But a star drive that made the entire Milky Way accessible? What was there on the other side of the galaxy that anybody really cared about?
They sat at the Riverside Club, with its lush, moody view of the Potomac, surrounded by well-heeled types who thought exactly as she did. If it didn’t produce a practical benefit, it wasn’t worth doing. But he’d been looking forward to the Locarno Drive, to being able to watch the first real deep-space missions go out.
There were a hundred commentators already, speculating about the fatal flaw. Some were citing Jacobsen, the towering genius of the first half of the twenty-third century, who’d predicted the Hazeltine would prove to be the last word. “Lucky to have that,” he’d been fond of saying. “We used to think it would take centuries to get to Alpha Centauri. Be grateful. The structure of the universe simply won’t allow an alternate drive. It can’t be done.”
He’d died trying to prove himself wrong. But there’d been numerous claims for a new system over the past two decades. Government had funded some, private industry others. Nothing had worked. Nothing came close. By the time news began leaking out of Barber’s camp, that he was closing in on a workable system, nobody believed it.
“I’d just like to know what’s out there,” Matt told her.
She looked out at the river. A cabin cruiser, its lights casting a glow on the water, was moving slowly past, leaving laughter and music in its wake. “Dust and hydrogen, Matt. And empty space. We’ll never do better than where we are right now.” Her eyes were gorgeous, and they promised all kinds of rewards if he just got himself together.
“This place has too many lights,” he said.
She glanced around them, thinking he was talking about something else.
HE SLEPT AT her place that night. Usually, he avoided bedroom encounters with Reyna. One-night stands with people he barely knew were better. Reyna was attractive enough, beautiful really, and usually willing. But she was a friend as well as an occasional date, and he could not jettison the feeling he was taking advantage of her. She was an adult, knew what she was doing, knew there was no future for them. So it should have been okay. But somehow it wasn’t. She was good company, a guarantee against spending weekends alone, but eventually he was going to walk. Or she would. So he tried to keep everything at arm’s length. It wasn’t easy to do if they were tangled up in a bedsheet.
That night, when the signal hadn’t come back, and the networks had shown the pictures of the shattered Happy Times, he’d known the Locarno was dead. Jon Silvestri and the rest of the Foundation crowd had tried to put the best face on things, saying they’d take a look at the situation in the morning, that maybe they could find the problem. But he knew they wouldn’t, and it weighed on him, as if he were personally involved. Defeat was in their voices, in their eyes. “They’re not going to try again,” he told Reyna.
“How do you know, Matt?”
They’d looked beaten. Maybe they had figured out why the Locarno hadn’t worked; maybe they’d known all along it wasn’t going anywhere. It might have been nothing more from the start than a gamble. A toss of the dice. And they’d lost.
He’d been in no mood to go back to his lonely apartment. So when she’d invited him up, he’d gone, and they sat on her sofa drinking dark wine and watching the aftermath, watching the commentators tell each other it was just as well. “The Interstellar Age,” said one of the guest experts, “is over. It’s time we accepted that.”
Later, while Reyna lay asleep beside him, his mind wandered. Where had the Golden Age gone? Twenty-five years ago, when he was just coming to adolescence, people had predicted that everyone who wanted to move off-world would, by the middle of the century, be able to do so. There was talk of establishing colonies at Quraqua and Masterman’s and Didion III. But there’d been complications, objections to killing off the local biology, long-range health issues, the question of who would pay for a massive transfer of people and supporting equipment. The world was crowded, but moving people elsewhere would never be an answer. People reproduced far more quickly than they could be moved around in ships.
One day, maybe, a human presence would extend through the Orion Arm. Maybe people would even fill the galaxy. But it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
He listened to the sounds of passing traffic. Somewhere in the building, there were voices. An argument.
“It’s the Gorley’s, Matt.”
“I thought you were asleep.”
Her legs touched his. But she held him at a distance. “They’re always fighting.”
“Sounds ugly.”
“He’s told me not to get married.”
“Really?”
“Ever.”
The argument was getting louder.
“You don’t have to say anything, Matt.” She pressed her lips close to his ear. “I know this isn’t going anywhere. But I want you to know it has been a special time for me.”
“I’m sorry, Reyna,” he said.
“I know. You wish you loved me.” She looked glorious in the light from the streetlamps filtering through the windows. “It’s just as well. Nobody gets hurt this way.”
They didn’t stop what they were doing. She didn’t get up and walk off. Didn’t go into a sulk. But the passion had gone out of the evening, and everything was mechanical after that. She told him it was okay, she understood. He waited for her to say she had to move on. But she didn’t. She simply clung to him.
He’d never understand women.
MATT SPENT THE morning showing clients around. They were looking at commercial properties, land that could be rezoned for malls and bars if the right buttons were pushed. He took one of them to lunch and did more escort work in the afternoon. When he finally got back to the office, everyone had left except Emma and the financial tech.
She poked her head in, asked how things had gone, and expressed herself satisfied with the results. In fact it had been a good day. No sales had been confirmed, but two big ones were on the cusp. And one they’d thought would back out was hanging in. But he still had a cloud over his head and wasn’t sure whether it was Reyna or the Happy Times debacle. Moreover, he couldn’t understand why the Happy Times problem really mattered to him.
He kept telling himself it had been a good day. But he felt no sense of exhilaration. In fact, he rarely did. He was capable of feeling good. But exhilarated? That was a thing of the past. That was a woman who took his breath away. Or maybe gliding through a system of moons and rings and spectral lighting. Over the years, after a successful day, he’d gone out with Emma and the ot
hers to celebrate. They’d headed out for Christy’s and toasted each other the way the researchers had when they discovered living cells on a remote world. But he’d just never felt very much.
“Headed home,” she said. “We have tickets tonight for Group Sex.” The show, of course. It was a live musical at the Carpathian. “By the way, you been near the news today? They’ve apparently given up on the new star drive.”
“Why?” he asked. “Did they say?”
“I guess because everybody says it won’t work.” She said good night and, minutes later, was gone. Matt put on the news, directed the AI to find the Locarno stories, and poured himself a coffee.
SILVESTRI INSISTS LOCARNO IS VALID, said the Capital Express.
The Post headlined: LOCARNO CRASHES.
The London Times said: STAR DRIVE FIASCO.
Commentary was similar: DEEP-SPACE SYSTEM SHOULD BE DUMPED.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
He found an interview with a Prometheus spokesman. The guy was small and washed-out and tired-looking. But he claimed the Foundation hadn’t made up its mind yet. “We’re still looking at our options.”
Would the Foundation risk its remaining ship in another test? “Anything’s possible.”
The spokesman could say what he wanted, but it was easy enough to read the signals. Unless someone intervened, the Locarno was dead.
Two people, one of each sex, discussed the drive itself on The Agenda. They were both identified as physicists, and they claimed to have gone over the theory. Both found it defective. It looks good on the surface, the woman said, but it doesn’t take into account the Magruder Effect. She was unable to explain the Magruder Effect in terms lucid enough for Matt. Her colleague agreed, adding that Silvestri had also not allowed sufficient flexibility for the required level of interdimensional connectivity. “You’d be able to get a vehicle out to Pluto,” he said, “but you wouldn’t recognize it once it arrived.”
“How do you mean?” asked the interviewer.
“It would be bent out of shape by hypertronic forces. That’s what happened to the Happy Times.”
“Jenny.” Matt was speaking to the AI. “Get me what you can on Jonathan Silvestri. On his scientific reputation.”
“One moment,” she said. Then: “Where would you like to start?”
THE ONLY WORKING physicist Matt knew was Troy Sully, to whom he’d sold a villa outside Alexandria two years earlier. Sully worked for Prescott Industries, which manufactured a wide range of electronic equipment. He’d come to the NAU from northern France, expecting to remain only a year, but had instead found his soul mate—his expression, not Matt’s—and elected to stay.
“There’s no way to know, Matt,” Troy told him over the circuit. “Let me advise you first it’s not my field.”
“Okay.”
“You get into some of this highly theoretical stuff, and you have to do as Silvestri says: Run the tests. Until you do that, you just don’t know.”
“But if almost every physicist on the planet says it can’t happen, which appears to be the case, doesn’t that carry some weight?”
“Sure.” Troy was a big, rangy guy. He looked more like a cowboy than a researcher. Except for the French accent. “But you have to keep in mind that what people say for the record isn’t necessarily what they really think. When physicists are asked to comment, officially, they tend to be very conservative. Nothing new will work. That is the safe position. One does not wish to be branded an unskeptical dreamer. If it should turn out that this Silvestri’s notions were in fact to prove correct, you would hear every physicist within range of a microphone explaining that he thought there was a chance it would happen because of so-and-so. You understand?”
“I assume if you were to bet—”
“I’d say the odds against it are substantial. But the truth is, with something like this, there’s no way to know until you try it.”
JON HAD DINNER at Brinkley’s Restaurant across the park and came back to another flurry of messages. “There’s one that might be of interest,” Herman said. “Do you know a Mr. Matthew Darwin?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He wants to know if you need a new test vehicle.”
Jon was planning on spending the evening watching Not on Your Life, a Broadway comedy. He needed something to laugh at. “What have you got on Darwin, Herman? Who is he?”
“A real estate agent, sir.”
He snickered. “You sure? Have we got the right guy?”
“That’s him.”
“A real estate agent.”
“There’s something else of interest.” There was a sly pause. “He used to pilot superluminals, mostly for the Academy.”
“Really? You think he knows where we can lay our hands on a starship?”
“I don’t know, sir. It might be worth your time to ask him.”
“Did he indicate whether he was representing someone?”
“No, Jon.”
“All right, let’s get him on the circuit and hear what he has to say for himself.”
MATT DARWIN WAS seated by a window. He looked too young to be a guy who’d been piloting for years, then built another career in real estate. It was hard to tell a person’s age this side of about eighty if he took care of himself and got the treatment. These days, of course, everybody got the treatment. Darwin could have been in his twenties.
He looked efficient rather than thoughtful. A bit harried rather than at ease. He had black hair, brown eyes, and there was something in his manner that suggested he had no doubts about himself. “I appreciate your calling, Dr. Silvestri,” he said. “I’m sure this has been a hectic time for you.”
Jon was in no mood for idle chitchat. “What can I do for you, Mr. Darwin?”
“I might be able to do something for you, Doctor. I’ve been watching the reports about the Locarno. I’m sorry things went wrong yesterday.”
“Thank you.”
“It sounds as if the Foundation won’t try again. Is that true?”
“It looks unlikely.”
“Okay. Clear something up for me, if you will. This propulsion method, the Locarno: Its power source, I take it, is different from the Hazeltine.”
“I’m sorry, Darwin. I’m really worn-out. This has been a long few days.”
“Doctor, I can imagine how difficult it must be to come by another starship to test your system. If you’d be kind enough to answer my question, I might be able to make a suggestion.”
He was tempted simply to say good night, but something in Darwin’s manner implied it might be a good idea to continue. “The Hazeltine is powered by the main engines,” he said. “You know that, I’m sure. The Locarno carries its own power pack. It has to, because the power flow has to be carefully modulated. You need a rhythm. Trying to control the power flow from a starship’s engines simply isn’t practical.”
“So you really don’t need a set of engines?”
“Only to charge the power pack.”
“Can’t that be done in advance?”
“Sure. But it goes flat with each jump.”
“All right. But you don’t need a starship’s engines, right?”
From the mouths of real estate dealers. “No,” he said. “Actually, we don’t.”
“Okay.” Darwin allowed himself a smile. “Why did you use a starship in your test? Why didn’t you try a shuttle? Or a lander? Something a little cheaper?”
Jon had no answer. Using a different kind of vehicle had never occurred to him. Jumps were always made by starships. Not by landers. But he saw no reason they couldn’t have done it that way. “You’re right,” he said. “That probably would have been a better idea.”
“Okay,” said Darwin. “So all you need for the next test is a lander.”
Or for that matter, a taxicab. Well, maybe not. They’d need something that could navigate a little bit. “Thank you, Mr. Darwin. You may be on to something.” Even a lander, though, would not come cheap.
“A lander? You could do that? Really?”
“Maybe. Are you interested?”
“How much would you want for it?”
Darwin’s face clouded with disapproval. “You have an ultimate drive, and you can’t spring for a lander?”
Jon laughed. “Probably not at the moment.”
“Let me look into it. I’ll get back to you.”
“MATT,” SAID JULIE, “that’s goofy.” They were sitting in Cleary’s, over lunch, while a soft rain pattered against the windows. “They won’t do it.”
“How do you know?”
“Look, it’s a great idea. But they’re a school board. They aren’t usually tuned to great ideas.”
“What can we lose by asking them?”
“Oh,” she said, “by all means, ask them. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t. But I’d hate to see this guy blow up our lander. And the board is going to feel the same way.”
“Maybe I can give them a reason to take the chance.”
“I hope you can. But I can tell you they won’t be happy.” She was eating roast beef on rye, with a side of potato salad. She took another bite and chewed it down. “Six thousand physicists can’t be wrong,” she said. “That’ll be their position.”
“Julie, you know most of the people on the school board.”
“Yes, but I don’t have any influence over them. They don’t take teachers very seriously.”
“You don’t think there’s a chance they’d go along?”
She lifted her iced tea and jiggled the cubes. “What you’d have to do is persuade them they’d get something out of it. They’re politicians, Matt. Maybe you could tell them what it would mean to their careers if they took a chance with the lander, and it worked. Next step—”
“The governor’s house. Beautiful. I like that.”
She grinned and took another bite out of the sandwich. “I’ll be there to watch the show.”
“Julie,” he said, “how long has the school system had the lander?”
“Six years. No, wait, I think it’s more like five. It was my second year here when they got it.”
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