Battle Station

by Ben Bova

  Ivan Bekey, director of Advanced Programs for NASA, foresees a wrist phone system that can provide 25 million users in seven thousand U.S. cities instant access to each other. While the wrist phones would be small and cheap (less than twenty-five dollars, Bekey believes), they would be linked by a very powerful and sophisticated communications satellite hovering in a geostationary orbit. The satellite would weigh more than fifteen tons, and would require a 220-foot-wide antenna and 280 kilowatts of electrical power—far beyond that of any satellite in operation today.

  With millions of simultaneous calls to relay, the wrist phone system will have to use higher frequencies than today’s commsats, which operate at the C-band frequencies: between 4 and 6 billion cycles per second (four to six gigahertz). By comparison, the electrical current in your home is sixty hertz. The wrist phone will demand frequencies of twenty to thirty gigahertz, which communications engineers call the Ka-band.

  Given that the communications links for wrist phones and other advanced systems will be created, that the Creature will continue to grow and evolve, what happens next?

  Clearly, as the Creature grows in complexity and capability, as its tendrils bind all the world together ever more closely and its terminals become so ubiquitous that we carry them on our persons, human society will change drastically. In Arthur Clarke’s words, instead of commuting, we will communicate.

  Currently, about 11 million Americans work at home: some 7 percent of the labor force works at home full-time, and 6 percent more “moonlights” at part-time jobs from their homes. Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and The Third Wave, predicts that as many as 15 million workers will “telecommute” by the end of this decade.

  It will be preposterous for millions of office workers to create traffic jams twice a day merely to get to work in the morning and back home in the evening. The paper shuffling they do in a business office can be done at home—without the paper—with smart-phone terminals. The face-to-face conferences they must attend can also be done at home with videophone services. The gallon of gasoline that will move an automobile twenty-some miles through urban traffic can provide enough electricity for more than one hundred hours of videophone communications.

  John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends, welcomes the growing decentralization that telecommuting brings. “Decentralization … means more opportunities and more choices for individuals … . Your home computer [and telephone] … will enable you to work at home … . On the other hand, the cities that some leave will become less crowded and more pleasant for the others who stay.”

  But I wonder about the effect of telecommuting on today’s large cities. Already most large cities in the United States are suffering from urban sprawl and downtown blight because their taxpayers, both individuals and corporations, have fled to the suburbs or hinterlands.

  When it is no longer necessary for any office worker to come downtown for business, the last vestiges of most cities’ tax base will dry up. Major cities can become crumbling ghost towns, inhabited only by those who are too poor to get away.

  What of the suburban home dweller, with his or her smart-telephone terminal, who never has to leave the house to earn a living? The children need not go to school, school can come to them, electronically, with better teachers and more sophisticated curricula than most schools offer today.

  Pundits such as Marshall McLuhan have spoken of “the electronic cottage,” but the home of the future will evolve into a self-sufficient electronic castle, guarded from intruders by its smart phone, its heating, electrical, and water systems monitored microsecond by microsecond, and powered by solar cells on the roof that will generate the electricity to run the house.

  A new affliction could strike such homes: electronic cabin fever. Every member of a family needs time away from the others, time outside the home. The self-sufficient electronic castle will have a strong impact on family relations, child rearing, and the divorce rate.

  As miniaturization keeps shrinking the size of the communications hardware, it seems likely that early in the next century, microminiaturized communicators can be mated directly with the human nervous system.

  The marriage of biology and electronics began with the search for better medical devices that can be implanted in the human body to monitor body functions and release medications into the bloodstream in a controlled, continuous manner. Biosensor research has been conducted at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, the University of Lund, in Sweden, the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, and at several commercial research laboratories.

  The development of molecular electronics, which is pointing toward electronic devices made of biological materials such as proteins, is taking place at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and at EMV Associates, of Rockville, Maryland.

  This research can result in biocommunicators wired directly to the human brain or sensory nervous system, a capability so revolutionary, and so far beyond the realm where scientists are willing to even speculate, that only the science fiction writers have contemplated what this may mean to the human spirit.

  Let me share a science fiction writer’s vision of what the world may be like when we can intimately link molecular electronic devices to the human nervous system.

  Sometime in the next century, such implants may be put into babies’ skulls at birth. More likely, they will be implanted after the person has reached full growth. Perhaps a twenty-first-century puberty rite will include implantation of a microcommunicator in the skull or some other part of the anatomy—an evolution of today’s ritual of giving a teenager his or her own telephone.

  If microelectronic communicators can be wired into the nervous system, then eventually the wiring can be connected so intimately with sensory receptors that a person will not merely talk and listen to phone messages, he or she will experience the full range of sensory stimuli with every communication: see, hear, feel, taste, and smell each communication.

  It will be possible to reproduce, electronically, all the aspects of hallucinations. And then some.

  The teenagers of today who saunter through city streets with earphones clamped to their heads, blasting rock music directly into their semicircular canals, will become the catatonics of the twenty-first century, totally immersed in their very private worlds of sensory stimulation.

  It may even become possible to wire the stimulating input directly to the brain’s pleasure center(s). Today we worry about drug and alcohol addiction. Tomorrow we may have the technology to create “juice heads” who would rather be tuned in to their own pleasure centers than do anything else—including eating, sleeping, and perhaps even breathing.

  Even though the Creature’s only professed desire is to serve humankind (and make a profit for the various phone companies), it is clear that over the past century, the Creature has become so important to human society that we now live in a symbiotic relationship with it. Our lives could not be the same without telephones.

  In tomorrow’s society, this symbiosis will be even stronger—for better or for worse.

  Indeed, our grandchildren will find it strange, even quaint, to learn that there were once human beings who went through their entire lives without a communicator implanted in their skulls, with nothing up there between the ears except the gray matter they were born with, without the ability to tap into the Library of Congress whenever they wanted to, or to share an experience with a friend halfway across the world.

  “How lonely you must have been,” they will tell us, “in olden times.” And we will hear their words inside our brains, and see their faces, and hold their hands in our own—even though they may be standing on the red sands of Mars as they converse with us.

  Foeman

  High-tech warfare may be in our future. Has it existed in our distant past? There is a small but fascinating subgenre of science fiction that is made up of stories dealing with high human civilizations that existed before our current “historical” era. This story is part of that group.
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br />   This is the only story I ever wrote in response to a picture. Frederik Pohl, who was then editor of the nowgone and much-missed Galaxy magazine, showed me a cover sketch for a future issue and asked me to write a novelet based on it. This I did. Fred liked the story, but not the title. (He was always changing titles!) Onto my masterpiece he appended the title “Foeman, Where Do You Flee?” Which I hated.

  The story used one of the characters and much of the background material from one of my earliest magazine stories, “The Towers of Titan,” which graced the cover of the January 1962 issue of Amazing Stories. Eventually I combined the two with additional material to produce the novel As on a Darkling Plain (Tor Books, 1985).

  But this original novelet, by itself, still strikes me as the best part of that longer tale. I have shortened the title to “Foeman,” mainly because I cannot remember what my original title was. In those days before word processors, before electric typewriters, when editors never returned manuscripts after they had been published, keeping records was much chancier than it is now. I lost my carbon of the original manuscript somewhere along the line, and with it went the original title.

  I

  Deep in cryogenic sleep the mind dreams the same frozen dreams, endlessly circuiting through the long empty years. Sidney Lee dreamed of the towers on Titan, over and again, their smooth blank walls of metal that was beyond metal, their throbbing, ceaseless, purposeful machines that ran at tasks that men could not even guess at. The towers loomed in his darkened dreams, standing menacing and alien above the frozen wastes of Titan, utterly unmindful of the tiny men that groveled at their base. He tried to scale those smooth, steep walls and fell back. He tried to penetrate them and failed. He tried to scream. And in his dreams, at least, he succeeded.

  He didn’t dream of Ruth, or of the stars, or of the future or the past. Only of the towers, of the machines that blindly obeyed a builder who had left Earth’s solar system countless millennia ago.

  He opened his eyes.

  “What happened?”

  Carlos Pascual was smiling down at him, his round dark-skinned face relaxed and almost happy. “We are there … here, I mean. We are braking, preparing to go into orbit.”

  Lee blinked and sat up. “We made it?”

  “Yes, yes,” Pascual answered softly as his eyes shifted to the bank of instruments on the console behind Lee’s shoulder. “The panel claims you are alive and well. How do you feel?”

  That took a moment’s thought. “A little hungry.”

  “A common reaction.” The smile returned. “You can join the others in the galley.”

  The expedition’s medical chief helped Lee to swing his legs over the edge of the couch, then left him and went to the next unit, where a blonde woman lay still sleeping. With an effort, Lee recalled her: Doris McNertny, primary biologist, backup biochemist. Lee pulled a deep breath into his lungs and tried to get himself started. The overhead light panels, on full intensity now, made him want to squint.

  Standing was something of an experiment. No shakes, Lee thought gratefully. The room was large and circular, with no viewports.

  Each of the twenty hibernation couches had been painted a different color by some psychology team back on Earth. Most of them were empty now. The remaining occupied ones had their lids off and the life-system connections removed as Pascual, Tanaka, and May Connearney worked to revive the people. Despite the color scheme, the room looked uninviting, and it smelled clinical.

  The galley, Lee focused his thoughts, is in this globe, one flight up. The ship was built in globular sections that turned in response to gee-pulls. With the main fusion engines firing to brake their approach to final orbit, “up” was temporarily in the direction of the engines’ thrusters. But inside the globes it did not make much difference.

  He found the stairwell that ran through the globe. Inside the winding metal ladderway the rumbling vibrations from the ship’s engines were echoing strongly enough to hear as actual sound.

  “Sid! Good morning!” Aaron Hatfield had stationed himself at the entrance to the galley and was acting as a one-man welcoming committee.

  There were only a half-dozen people in the galley. Of course, Lee realized. The crew personnel are at their stations. Except for Hatfield, the people were bunched at the galley’s lone viewport, staring outside and speaking in hushed, subdued whispers.

  “Hello, Aaron.” Lee didn’t feel jubilant, not after a fifteen-year sleep. He tried to picture Ruth in his mind and found that he couldn’t.

  She must be nearly fifty by now.

  Hatfield was the expedition’s primary biochemist, a chunky, loud-speaking, overgrown kid whom it was impossible to dislike, no matter how he behaved. Lee knew that Hatfield wouldn’t go near the viewport because the sight of empty space terrified him.

  “Hey, here’s Doris!” Hatfield shouted to no one. He scuttled toward the entrance as she stepped rather uncertainly into the galley.

  Lee dialed for coffee. With the hot cup in his hand, he walked slowly toward the viewport.

  “Hello, Dr. Lee,” Marlene Ettinger said as he came up alongside her. The others at the viewport turned and muttered their greetings.

  “How close are we?” Lee asked.

  Charnovsky, the geologist, answered positively, “Two days before we enter final orbit.”

  The stars crowded out the darkness beyond their viewport: spattered against the blackness like droplets from a paint spray. In the faint reflection of the port’s plastic, Lee could see six human faces looking lost and awed.

  Then the ship swung, ever so slightly, in response to some command from the crew and computers. A single star—close and blazingly powerful—slid into view, lancing painfully brilliant light through the polarizing viewport. Lee snapped his eyes shut, but not before the glare burned its afterimage against his closed eyelids. They all ducked back instinctively.

  “Welcome to Sirius,” somebody said.

  Man’s fight to the stars was made not in glory, but in fear.

  The buildings on Titan were clearly the work of an alien intelligent race. No man could tell exactly how old they were, how long their baffling machines had been running, what their purpose was. Whoever had built them had left the solar system hundreds of centuries ago.

  For the first time, men truly dreaded the stars.

  Still, they had to know, had to learn. Robot probes were sent to the nearest dozen stars, the farthest that man’s technology could reach. Nearly a generation passed on Earth before the faint signals from the probes returned. Seven of the stars had planets circling them. Of these, five possessed Earthlike worlds. On four of them, some indications of life were found. Life, not intelligence. Long and hot were the debates about what to do next. Finally, manned expeditions were dispatched to the Earthlike ones.

  Through it all, the machines on Titan hummed smoothly.

  “They should have named this ship Afterthought,” Lee said to Charnovsky. (The ship’s official name was Carl Sagan.)

  “How so?” the Russian muttered as he pushed a pawn across the board between them. They were sitting in the pastel-lighted rec room. A few others were scattered around the semicircular room, reading, talking, dictating messages that wouldn’t get to Earth for more than eight years. Soft music purred in the background.

  The Earthlike planet—Sinus A-2—swung past the nearest viewport. The ship had been in orbit for nearly three weeks now and was rotating around its long axis to keep a half-gee feeling of weight for the scientists.

  “We were sent here as an afterthought,” Lee continued. “Nobody expects us to find anything. Most of the experts back on Earth didn’t really believe there could be an Earthlike planet around a blue star.”

  “They were correct,” Charnovsky said. “Your move.”

  Picture our solar system. Now replace the sun with Sirius A, the Dog Star; a young, blue star, nearly twice as hot and big as the sun. Take away the planet Uranus, nearly 2 billion kilometers from the sun, and replace it with
the white dwarf Sirius B, the Pup: just as hot as Sirius A, but collapsed to a hundredth of a star’s ordinary size. Now sweep away all the planets between the Dog and the Pup except two: a bald chunk of rock the size of Mercury, orbiting some 100 million kilometers from A, and an Earth-sized planet some seven times farther out.

  Give the Earth-sized planet a cloud-sprinkled atmosphere, a few large seas, some worn-down mountain chains, and a thin veneer of simple green life clinging to its dusty surface. Finally, throw in one lone gas giant planet, far beyond the Pup, some 200 billion kilometers from A. Add some meteoroids and comets and you have the Sirius system.

  Lehman, the psychiatrist, pulled up a webchair to the kibitzer’s position between Lee and Charnovsky.

  “Mind if I watch?” He was trim and athletic-looking, kept himself tanned under the UV lights in the ship’s gym booth.

  Within minutes they were discussing the chances of finding anything on the planet below them.

  “You sound terribly pessimistic,” the psychiatrist said.

  “The planet looks pessimistic,” Charnovsky replied. “It was scoured clean when Sirius B exploded, and life has hardly had a chance to get started again on its surface.”

  “But it is Earthlike, isn’t it?”

  “Hah!” Charnovsky burst. “To a simpleminded robot it may seem Earthlike. The air is breathable. The chemical composition of the rocks is similar. But no man would call that desert an Earthlike world. There are no trees, no grasses, it’s too hot, the air is too dry …”

  “And the planet’s too young to have evolved an intelligent species,” Lee added, “which makes me the biggest afterthought of all.”

  “Well, there might be something down there for an anthropologist to puzzle over,” Lehman countered. “Things will look better once we get down to the surface. I think we’re all getting a touch of cabin fever in here.”