Red Tide

by Larry Niven

  “And their technology studied?” said Watt.

  “Why not?”

  The discussion went on for another hour, but the final decision, to start building, was unanimous. Details would accumulate, but the feeling was that it would ultimately be the least trouble to build it about as far out as the orbit of Xuxa, though not near the planet itself. There was plenty of material in the cometary halo, and it could be delivered to the worksite by teleportation without worrying about velocity and temperature changes. Not worrying much, anyway.

  Watt had spent most of the discussion doing work on his computer. After the meeting, he caught up with Strong and said, “I’ve got a WAG on the dispersal figure. I based it on the effective limit of a single standard launch laser, which disperses to resemble inverse-square illumination after about twelve lightyears, and worked in a fudge factor based on the interaction rate of the highest-frequency neutrinos—” At this point he took notice of her corpselike patience and skipped a lot of stuff. “It looks like maybe twenty thousand years. Could be wrong by a factor of two, either way. Could also be blowing smoke. But if it’s right, someone who departed from the Galactic core fifty thousand years back could, today, arrive just about anywhere in the Galaxy.”

  “There wouldn’t be any single place likelier than another?”

  “Nope. Anywhere within the lightspeed radius would be just as probable as anywhere else. In fact, based on some of Hawking’s work, possibly a little outside the lightspeed radius too. Technically it’d be faster-than-light travel.”

  Strong blinked, slowly. “Do you mean to say you could send a message to Andromeda, get into a transfer booth, and arrive before the message did?”

  Watt shook his head as if trying to dislodge a horsefly from his middle ear—which, with his bony face and long gray hair, was disturbing on a number of levels. “No,” he said, visibly irritated. “Intergalactic matter is too thin. There has to be enough material to disperse the signal. The effect would be strictly local.”

  “Local meaning only within your own galaxy,” Strong said, deadpan.

  “Right,” said Watt, who either didn’t get the joke or had meant that in the first place.

  Strong had seen engineers when they were in work mode, and moved on. “I’m wondering if we should provide Mercury with more people. And maybe weapons.”

  Watt said, “Well, the argument that they can get more people there fast enough to have to pay for the pizza still applies.” They exchanged a grin. Nobody younger than they were would have gotten the joke, of course. “And if some unpleasant stranger arrives with something that can be used faster than they can hit the Retransmit button, having weapons around won’t do anything much except increase the chance of an accident. I’m a little concerned that somebody nonhuman will be cooled to the wrong temperature. I wish Whyte had done some basic research on that; I’m not sure anyone else ever had the brains to figure out why it is that an inertial-compensation receiver doesn’t automatically chill a cargo to absolute zero. Hell, I’m not satisfied about why it’s never reversed left for right!”

  “The left-right thing I know,” she said. “Robin said the transition particle has the internal structure of whatever you transmit. And I remember that had something to do with how he figured out how to do compensation. He realized the original booths had to be doing a little momentum compensation anyway, because you always arrive oriented to the floor of the booth, but no two booth floors on Earth would be in exactly the same plane. Every time you transfer, you rotate a little in whatever direction you’re going, but we never tipped over a wedding cake—sorry, I think I’m having another contaminant dump.” (The projected lifespan of someone who’d had a full course of KS treatments was around 170 years, at which time cell division was expected to peter out. The sudden bursts of increased alertness and vitality were still catching her by surprise.)

  “It’s a damned shame Whyte didn’t live long enough to get that stuff,” Watt said. “How the hell do we know he was right about transition particle structure? It’s not something we can check. You know, it’s entirely possible he just hit it lucky. There may be aliens out there who never developed transfer technology because they tried a system that doesn’t require a booth to be a transceiver, so transmitter and receiver didn’t automatically have identical circuit structure, and there was a huge antimatter explosion that wrecked their civilization.”

  “Bite your tongue. Robin used to have nightmares about that when he was working on it.”

  “I just bet he did.”

  “So, when we’ve got a ship ready to go, you’ll be looking in on the work?”

  Watt looked aghast. “Hell, no. I’m not going there until the receiver’s built. Space travel is dangerous.”

  *****

  As Samuel Watt stepped into the booth, he reflected, not for the first time, that he should either send a proxy to Board meetings for him or stop getting distracted by engineering concerns. He hadn’t been paying close enough attention to the details of the planning session. The ship sent out was a prototype that had been under construction, which some smart aleck had christened the Norman Dean. It used the same reaction mass over and over, continuously transmitting it from the tail to the nose and running it through a central accelerator, and it had a whopping big additional transceiver built into the cargo section already, for everything else. The ship’s acceleration meant that the mass arriving in the nose receiver was cooler than when it was transmitted. However, the point was not to build up a huge reaction speed relative to the ship, but to save weight on the ship; and since the reaction mass, of incandescent plasma, was inside the ship, the fact that it never heated up past a certain point didn’t bother the crew one little bit.

  It did mean that Watt would end up commuting to the goddamn ship for progress sessions.

  The color of the booth wall changed, and he was out past the orbit of Jupiter: he bounced into the air a little, under his own muscle tension. When the booth opened, the engineer on monitor duty greeted him with, “Welcome aboard our bucket.”

  Watt had to smile at that. Sooner or later every ship was called a bucket by its crew, but the Norman Dean really was one: the bow was an open-ended cylinder with a transmitter in constant operation, sending stuff to a similar receiver at the stern. Friction with ambient material was close to zero. “Hi,” he said, reaching her in one long low-G lope. “Sam Watt.” He waited for her to make the obligatory, “Sam what?” joke.

  “Theresa Joule,” she replied. “Not ‘Terry.’” Her freckles weren’t noticeable until she scowled.

  “I am never complaining about my name again,” he said. (He never did, either. Whatever were her parents thinking?) “Since I’m here, I gather things are going well?”

  “Operational,” she said. “I’ve been playing with some ideas, though.”

  At 74, Watt was still not immune to the mixture of interest and alarm that occurred when a younger member of his profession said that. “So what you got?”

  She took a display flat and punched up a circuit diagram. “I got to thinking about the old Soviet version of the transfer booth. There’s three different places in a transceiver where a frequency generator is used. The Soviets set this one,” she pointed, “to a different wavelength, and Soviet transceivers couldn’t connect up with JumpShift’s. Supposed to prevent defections. Of course, the CIA immediately told all their best tech people how to alter theirs to send to our kind of booth, and put receivers on ships in the Indian Ocean. Anyway, the thing is, theirs used a little more power because the internal signal is less …” She gestured, trying to find the right word.

  “Coherent.”

  “Yes, thank you! I’ve been doing simulations, putting in different values for these circuit modules, and there are other settings that are about as good as ours. They’re just as coherent, just different. With circuit elements like humans use, JumpShift’s circuit generates the transfer effect faster than the others, but look at this.” She fiddled with the image
and replaced transistors with vacuum tubes. “Now, this setting uses more power—”

  “But it gets the signal out even faster once the tubes are warmed up!” he saw at once. “And compensation will be a lot easier, too.”

  “And transistors aren’t exactly an obvious idea.”

  “Hell, no. You realize this means we’ll have to build two big transceivers instead of one.”

  “There’s room,” she said. She frowned. “That’s the only part that bugs me about this. It’s so empty out there.”

  “True. On the other hand, if the Sun blows up we’ll be in an unrivaled position to say, ‘What was that?’”

  “Oh, that’s true,” she said, cheering up.

  Engineers. You had to love them. (The alternative was strangling them, and he didn’t want that catching on.)

  There had been something Strong said at the Board meeting, and he’d let it go by at the time, but it had started preying on his mind since. “We need to make them a lot bigger than originally planned, too.”

  She nodded. “You’d better talk to Captain Philips.”

  ***

  JumpShift had revolutionized spaceships even before the Norman Dean—the lack of a need for on-site recycling, or even baggage aside from a single change of clothing, was a godsend—but this bucket was really something. Reuse of the same reaction mass meant constant acceleration, but the acceleration was tiny. In principle, you could climb a ladder with two fingers. (In practice, when you do that you keep whacking your knuckles on the next rung you reach for, and he soon quit fooling around.)

  The skipper had just finished low-G calisthenics, indicating he was not one of those people naturally immune to bone loss, and therefore must have been enormously more capable than every applicant who was. He was just vacuuming a layer of sweat off when they were admitted to the foyer of his quarters. (The ND was roomy, too. Why not?)

  He gave Watt an instant of searingly undivided attention, nodded, inspected his own right hand, vacuumed it a little more, and held it out to shake. “Pleased to meet you, Dr. Watt.”

  “Sam.”

  “Ralph. Describe your needs and I’ll see what I can do.” He pulled on a sweatsuit as Watt spoke.

  “We’ll need to build at least two receivers.” He explained about the other possible circuits.

  “Doable,” said Ralph. “Plenty of supplies out there. Might not get much we can use from the technology of the vacuum-tube folks. Be interesting to look at, though.”

  “Also, one possibility that was suggested at the meeting that started this mission was that somebody out there might have figured out how to build a transmitter, but not a receiver—”

  “So when we switch on our general receiver, it immediately explodes from the arrival of a thousand-year planetary supply of smelter slag and bargain-brand toy knockoffs. I see.”

  “I was thinking more like eggshells, coffee grounds, and orange peels.”

  “A civilization that doesn’t compost those doesn’t last any thousand years,” Ralph said.

  “They could get more material from the cometary halo. We had rockets long before transfer booths.”

  “And it’d be in simple molecules, too, good point.” Ralph was a pleasure to talk with. Got it in one. “That’s not good. We’ll have to make each one in the form of a long tube, and run the receiver activation pulse down it at high speed.”

  “I was thinking of just making a very big box.”

  “No way of knowing in advance if it was big enough. With a pulsed tube we can get stuff in installments. Also, using it for something as simplistic as garbage disposal is a very top-down approach, so it’s likely to be a society that has political prisoners. Way easier to rescue them from a tube. Put in lots of access hatches.” Ralph paused to study Sam, frowned slightly, took him by the arms, turned him over, and held him by the ankles. “You were going into shock,” he said before Sam could ask. “Easiest way to get blood back to your brain.”

  “I was just thinking, thank God the Soviet engineers never told their bosses that the only reason for the cable network is to turn on the right receiver.”

  Ralph turned Sam up again, raised his eyebrows—to considerable effect; the man must have more sheer personality than a cat—and said, “Wait a minute. You mean, all that time, the Party thought people were being transported as energy, over what amounted to telephone wires?”

  “If you can think of another reason why they kept the gulags open instead of exiling people to nowhere, I’m listening.”

  Ralph’s eyes got even bigger than they had been, and he looked like he was trying not to laugh. “And they never promoted anybody who could do the math, because anyone who could do enough math to understand physical limits would be opposed to socialism in the first place. And those guys popped out as soon as they knew how anyway. Right. Okay. Let’s—” Abruptly he pressed a fist to his mouth, closed his eyes tightly, made a strangled noise, and shook very hard for a moment. Then he relaxed and said, “Sorry. Let’s sign you in and get started. You’ll need to pick a password.”

  Ralph’s swift grasp of the implications, so thorough that he’d found the needle of humor in a haystack of nightmare, was not a fluke. His level of competence was such that he had something useful to say about every aspect of the designs. Four hours along, with the basics hammered out, he did a final save, shut off the tabletop screen they were using, and said, “My eyes are peeled onions. We should start with the standard one, and we can use it to make vacuum tubes on the spot.” He chuckled and shook his head. “There’s just something about my family and tubes.”

  Dots connected in Sam’s brain. “Philips Cryogenic!” he said. It was a patent JumpShift had missed: build a sealed tower, at the South Pole to avoid lateral drift from Coriolis force, and use uncompensated transceivers to send things from the bottom to the top, over and over, until they were as cold as you wanted, then use a compensated receiver to catch the mass. Philips had cornered the market on liquefied gases the week they started up. A similar process in vacuum also worked to separate isotopes; but, as a few Third World nations had learned when they tried to take the nuclear shortcut to move up in the rankings, not only was quality control a fussy thing, but lateral drift really mattered. Their successor governments had devoted more attention to things like resource development. And disaster relief.

  Ralph blinked at him. “You didn’t know that? Yeah, I’m named for my great-grandfather. You should meet him.”

  “He’s still alive?”

  “Barring a direct meteor strike since I called him last, yeah. He’s one of those people who kind of seasons with age, like Cohen the Barbarian. Quit the CIA to start the company when he had the idea. Hasn’t done a day’s work since.”

  “Why do you?”

  “Who says I’m working? I like flying spaceships.”

  Samuel Watt was not equipped to agree with the specific choice, but the attitude was one he shared. “Beats freezing people for a living,” he said.

  “Ralph the Great—uh, family nickname—says that’s going to peter out since the alien showed up. He’s already planning to offer terminal patients a trip to the future sans freezing. Even with KS treatments, it’s got to be kind of hard to cure a disease if the patient’s already dead.” Ralph paused and frowned at him.

  “Don’t turn me over again, okay? Jesus, I never even imagined that. He’s right. In twenty thousand years we ought to have a cure for anything we can even describe today.”

  “Not necessarily. If sick people get themselves sent to nowhere, what’s the motivation for finding cures? He just thinks they’ll find it a lot cheaper than slow death and funeral expenses. He’s an awful cynic, but I see his point. Why ruin your family?”

  Sam saw the calm logic of it, but shook his head. “Motivation doesn’t enter into it. Fleming discovered penicillin because he couldn’t afford an assistant to keep his lab sterile. Sulfas came out of the fabric dye industry, for pity’s sake. And people working on problems teleportati
on can’t help with discover stuff all the time. Like the people working on things like nanomachinery for construction. Why not constructing healthy bodies?”

  Ralph half-smiled. “Real Soon Now,” he said, a catchword among engineers, referring in this case to the fact that working nanotech had been predicted as “fifty years away” when transfer booths had been invented, and was still so described. At least they weren’t losing any ground.

  “Maybe not. But in twenty thousand years? Random other stuff. Hell, the KS treatments were originally intended as a preparation for dying people who planned to be frozen, to keep their cells from bursting! Then they gave ’em to somebody who was dying of plain old age, and lo and behold, he got up.”

  “I know, okay? Ralph the Great gave us all chapter and verse last Fourth of July, when he started taking them. Scary how much better they make everything work, too. Nevada casinos won’t let him in now. Caught him counting off an eight-deck shoe. I live in dread of the day he studies piloting. He’ll show up here, I know it.”

  “Suggest Monte Carlo. They’re up to twenty decks now.”

  Ralph looked startled, then produced a wider smile than his face ought to have held without the top of his head coming off. “I will, thanks. Even if he can do it, they’ll never believe it.” He stretched, got a bottle of water, drank it off like Thor in Jotunheim, and said, “I’ll copy what we’ve got to Theresa.”

  “She a good engineer?”

  “Anybody ever ask you to run a reactionless spaceship?”

  After Sam thought it over, “My goodness,” was all he could say at first. Once the file was sent, he asked, “Has she seen the footage of the alien’s arrival?”

  “Sure, we all did.”

  “If she’s the best, I’d be interested in hearing her ideas on what our visitor was using for a power supply. We’ve been going nuts. Nobody’s ever built a self-transmitter smaller than a Phoenix hull that wasn’t a one-shot.”

  “What did the KGB use for the spy cloak?”

  “Cesium-fluorine power cell.”