QUANT (COLONY Book 1)

by Richard F. Weyand

  “I was thinking some test pilot–“

  “A young man, perhaps with a wife and kids and most of his life still in front of him? No. There’s no skill involved here, Bernd. The computers pilot the thing.”

  Burke looked off to one side, staring into space, then turned back to Decker in his display.

  “I’ve had a good run, Bernd. Done the things I wanted to do. Done the things I set out to do, including this project. Tom’s taking care of the business now. Oh, I keep a hand in, advise him when he wants it. But he’s doing a good job. I’m not needed there.

  “But somebody needs to be the first. Ride this thing and make sure it’s all right. And either way, I’ll go down in history, as the first man to go interstellar. That sounds good to me, Bernd.”

  “So where will you go, Ted?”

  “I told Janice some place with a nice planet. You know, a potential colony spot. I won’t see them leave, but maybe I can see where they’re going.”

  “All right, Ted. Good luck.”

  “Thanks, Bernd. I’ll see you when I get back.”

  The shuttle delivered Burke to the probe. The equipment room on the probe – the room where the computer container was – had an airlock and was fitted with a passenger tube. The shuttle latched on to the probe, and Quant extended the passenger tube to the shuttle and made sure it was locked. She checked the air carefully before telling the shuttle it was OK to open the door.

  Burke drifted across the tube into the airlock and into the interior of the equipment room. There was one small window, but several displays of exterior camera views. He used handholds to pull himself to a seat by the tiny window and strapped himself in.

  “All right, Janice. I’m ready.”

  Quant’s image came up on one of the displays, the one right in front of him.

  “Very well, Ted. Ten minutes or so. Once the shuttle is out of the way.”

  “I’ve waited all these years, Janice. I’m in no hurry.”

  Quant chuckled and saluted him, and her image vanished.

  Decker watched on the display in his office. He knew why Burke had to do it, but he was still worried.

  The time came, and the probe lit up the transit bubble, then disappeared. Half an hour later, it was back. Quant appeared in his display.

  “Mr. Burke is back and he’s fine, Bernd. No ill effects at all. He said if he hadn’t been looking out the window and at the displays, he wouldn’t even have noticed the transition.”

  Decker started breathing again.

  Decker talked to Burke about it the next day, once he’d returned home.

  “I tell you, Bernd, that was the damnedest thing. I’m sitting there listening to Janice count down the transit, and then the displays changed. I looked out the window, and it was a totally different planet. If I’d had my eyes shut, I wouldn’t have even noticed the transit.

  “I called out, ‘Janice? Janice?’ but she wasn’t there. I sat and looked out at the planet. Saw its weather. We were above the terminator, with half the planet in dark and half in sunlight. There was a storm down there in the dark half, and I could see little flashes from lightning. That was the only light. No city lights or anything. On the daylight side, I could see the surface. Oceans and land masses and such.

  “I watched for half an hour, and then the displays all changed and we were back, and Janice was asking if I was OK.

  “It was a hell of an experience, Bernd. I was the first human being outside the solar system. Light-years from home.

  “It was marvelous. Just marvelous. The event of a lifetime.”

  Back To Work

  “Hi, Janice. What are you working on now?”

  “Hi, Bernd. Lots going on. First, I took all the factories off-line and had each of them make three copies of themselves. I’ll put twice as many as there were on Earthbound production, and I have six times as many as I had on the probe to work on the colony ship transporter. They’ve started that already. I’ll probably double those twice more.”

  “Twenty-four times as many factories on the transporter as the probe? It’s only ten times bigger. That’ll go fast.”

  “No, Bernd. It’s ten times bigger in one dimension. In terms of materials and construction, it’s a thousand times bigger.”

  “Ouch. OK, I get that. So that’s why ten years to build it.”

  “Yes, and I still need to build the actual colony ships. I may have a half a dozen or so of those factories copy themselves a couple more times to get everything done in a timely way.”

  “Won’t you run out of supplies, though, Janice?”

  “I’ll have to ship some things from here. Ball bearings is a big one. Maybe more radioactives. Water we got covered now.”

  “Can you make all these decisions yourself? Like taking the Earthbound production factories off-line?”

  “Oh, this is all being approved by the World Authority, Bernd. Which is to say, it’s being approved by me and Jacques is signing off on anything I want.”

  “That World Authority connection is really working out.”

  “Oh, absolutely. I get approvals that can’t be overridden, and Jacques has all the political skill and press relations and everything to make it all work on the public information side. He’s really good at that. I’m learning a lot from him.”

  “What else are you up to, Janice?”

  “I’m sending the probe out to local star systems with exoplanets. Doing some preliminary looking around for colony locations. I can tell right off most of them won’t work out. Gravity too high, among other things.

  “As for the ones that look good on a first pass, I’m working on a design for some small instrument drones I can drop on planets. I can have them do tests, and then go back and have them radio the data later.

  “But I have the probe, so I’m using it. I have the on-board computer running well enough now I can give it multiple destinations, and have it run out there and back while I’m busy doing other things.”

  “What about the colony ships, Janice?”

  “I’m starting to work up the specs for something I’ll have to design. How much space, food, air to take for a hundred thousand people. It’s a short trip, so that’s not the big deal. The big deal is getting them down to the planet.”

  “Can’t you use shuttles?”

  “It’s not the hundred thousand people, Bernd. It’s all the supplies. You can’t just drop them off like at a bus stop. You need to give them all the things they need to get at least rudimentary housing up, start farming, all that stuff, and keep them fed and healthy while they’re doing it Even ten to a room, that’s an immediate need for ten thousand housing units, and you have to supply over two million meals a week until they’re established.

  “I’d like to send a big factory unit, and set it up on some mineral deposit somewhere. That way they can manufacture much of what they need rather than send everything from here. But getting it down to the surface of the planet is an issue. You can’t just drop it. All you’ll get from that is a crater.”

  “OK, that makes sense. A lot going on, then.”

  “Oh, that’s just the project stuff, Bernd. The political stuff is another whole bag of worms. More intractable in a lot of ways.”

  “What’s going on there?”

  “Well, I started cleaning up some stuff that was way out of line. Mostly administratively. Things like ‘Oh, the assembly couldn’t have meant this to be interpreted this way, that would be stupid.’ So we did get some of that cleaned up.

  “For some other things I used the Chairman’s authority to propose legislation to clean them up. Things that were a gift to some special interest. Some Council members were going to fight those until I met with them about it. They changed their minds.”

  “You changed their minds in a meeting, Janice? That doesn’t sound likely.”

  “I started the meeting with a discussion about World Authority Council rules against taking bribes and said we were looking into some of the more egreg
ious practices. I even asked them if there was anyone they thought was way over the line, say on this current piece of legislation. Then and only then did we get to the current legislation, and their opposition was at best half-hearted.”

  Decker stifled a laugh.

  “You strong-armed them.”

  “Oh, is that how that term is used, Bernd? Mostly I just let it be known I was looking for corruption, with the current legislation as an example.”

  “Yes, that’s how you use the term. Anything else?”

  “Oh, yes. Some of the administrative regions were acting way outside World Authority rules. It had been let go for a long time. So the Chairman’s office sent them notice they were not in compliance with World Authority rules.”

  “Let me guess, Janice. That went exactly nowhere.”

  “Initially, yes. But you would be surprised at how much authority the Chairman has over administrative regions.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We scheduled meetings with their immediate neighbors to discuss what sort of sanctions regime we should place on them if they didn’t clean up their act.”

  Decker laughed.

  “So you asked their neighbors what sanctions to put on them? That should have had a salutary effect.”

  “We didn’t get to that point, Bernd. We only scheduled those meetings, and then we met with the local administrators. A week or two later. They had all come up with plans to become compliant by the time we met.”

  “And you ran these meetings, Janice?”

  “No, Jacques ran those. He’s marvelous at making people feel uncomfortable without actually threatening anything.”

  “And that straightened them out?”

  “Mostly. We’re probably going to have some ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ type meetings with a few of them. Jacques will make them happy they got away with their skins by the time those are over.”

  “So who are the miscreants, Janice?”

  “The usual suspects. Some regions in east Asia. Some in Africa and South America. And California, of course. The ones you’d expect.”

  “What are the violations like?”

  “Mostly civil rights, at least as defined in the World Authority Charter. Bernd, some people seem to have an infinite ability to dream up ways to force their ideas of how to live on other people and not just let them live their lives they way they want to. It’s exasperating. And then they exempt themselves, of course.”

  “Of course. There’s an old rhyme about that. Lemme see. ‘These are the rules I’ve made for thee. They do not apply, my friend, to me.’”

  “Oh, that’s good. I’m stealing it.”

  “You’re welcome to it, Janice. No attribution necessary.”

  “But what do we do with these people, Bernd? They’re shameless.”

  “You could make exemptions illegal. Make them obey whatever rules they put in place for everyone else.”

  “Bernd, that is a great idea. I’m going to have to run that past Jacques. We could apply it to the World Authority Council as well. That would help get a lot of this crap overturned. No way they want to live by their own rules. That’s for sure.”

  Quant stared off into the distance for a bit, her stylus tapping, then nodded and turned back to Decker. She was so good at human mannerisms now, he found it hard to believe that Janice Quant was, after all, a computer.

  “Thanks for the help, Bernd. I’ve been worried about this, but I see a way forward now.”

  “Sure, Janice. Have fun.”

  “Oh, I will. You can count on it.”

  Dozens of factories now worked on building the beams required to hold the Lake-Shore Drive nodes in their relative positions for the big transporter. Not single trusses any longer, the beams were themselves made up of trusses welded together to form the much longer structures. It helped that the structure didn’t have drive stresses, but one could still only make it so flimsy.

  The corners would be different, too, with pieces cutting diagonally across the corners on all three sides on which the corners met. These pieces would also be trusses, tens of miles long, stiffening the corners.

  That was all in the future, though. Right now the factories were building trusses, hundreds of them, each ten miles long.

  The assembly of those into the five-hundred-mile-long edges of the colony ship transporter was years in the future.

  While that was going on, Janice Quant was struggling with the landing problem. How to get the colony ships to the planet’s surface? The transporter couldn’t get too close, or it would break up due to the sheer forces of the gravitational field of the planet. From the altitude at which the colony ship would have to be released, there was a lot of potential energy to get rid of, which could only go into kinetic energy or heat.

  The projected size of the colony ships would make it worse, because the mass increased as the cube of the linear dimension, while the surface area to radiate away the potential energy as heat only went up as the square. And the colony ships would be huge, to accommodate a hundred thousand people and all the supplies they needed. Any attempt to do one of those flaming re-entries with heat shields and such was doomed. The colony ship would be incinerated.

  Quant sent a note to herself in her other worldview to consider the problem.

  The answer she got back stunned her.

  “Hey, Bernd. You got a minute?”

  “Sure, Janice. Haven’t seen you much lately.”

  Decker collapsed what was in his display and the inset with Quant expanded to fill it.

  “Oh, I’ve been busy trying to figure out the colony ship landing problem. I finally gave up.”

  “You gave up?”

  “Yes, I gave up and sent a note to myself in my other worldview, then switched context to consider it. I just got a note back.”

  “So what did your other-you work out? Anything?”

  “Yes. I’m still thinking about the implications of it, but it’s pretty staggering.”

  “I’m waiting, Janice.”

  “Sorry. I’m just still sort of floored by it. So you know that the transporter can basically just tell the universe, ‘Hey, I’m in the wrong place. I should be over there,’ and the universe just shrugs and goes, ‘OK.’ And anything inside the field with the transporter does the same. I proved that with the probe by dragging some small rocks from the Belt around.”

  “Right. That much I understand.”

  “All right. So the gist of the answer from the other worldview is that the transporter can say, ‘Hey, this thing in the field with me? It’s in the wrong place. It should be over there,’ and the universe will put it there.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I said, Bernd. It has huge implications.”

  “I’ll say. You could just put the colony ships down on the planet’s surface. Hell, you could do that from here.”

  “Well, yes and no. Accuracy becomes a problem. What if I put a colony ship down on a planet and missed? Put it inside this mountain here, or put it down a hundred feet above the ground and it just fell? How much off is a hundred feet over several light-years?”

  “Not much.”

  “Exactly. The colony ships are going to require very exact placement, and that will have to be done with some pinpoint measurements. But apparently we can just pop them onto the planet. It’s going to take some jiggering with the controls, and with the nodes, but it’s all clear how to do that.”

  “Where does the energy go, though, Janice? There should be a lot of energy released by putting something deep into a gravity well like that.”

  “I think it ends up heating up the things in the field. But the transporter is so huge it doesn’t matter. Based on the ratio of masses, maybe the temperature of the transporter goes up a fraction of a degree.”

  “In the wrong circumstances, that could be a problem.”

  “Oh, yes. If you transported something heavy to, say, the event limit of a black hole, the transporter would positivel
y glow, if not melt, and anyone aboard would be burned to a crisp.”

  “OK, so there are some things to be careful about, then.”

  “I don’t think you’ve realized all the implications yet, Bernd.”

  “Like what, Janice?”

  “For one, this transporter would be more like an airport than a plane. Spaceships could enter the transporter, and tell you where they want to go, and then you just popped them there. Blip, and they’re over there.

  “Put a transporter in orbit around every inhabited planet and you have massive interstellar trade with pretty cheap ships. Shuttles, even. Just go up to the transporter in a cargo shuttle with all your containers, and then go down to the surface on another planet.”

  “Wow. That would be great, Janice. That would be tremendous.”

  “Yes, Bernd, but there are some darker implications, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “The transporter has to be five hundred miles or so across to work, right? So let’s say there’s some planet full of people you don’t like very much. You can transit the transporter so it encloses a couple-hundred-mile asteroid. Then transmit the asteroid to a few thousand mile from that planet. Give it a hundred-thousand-mile-an-hour velocity or so. Big kaboom.”

  “You could do that?”

  “Sure, Bernd. Or transport a big asteroid into the core of the planet. All that other mass is going to be displaced. It would probably break up the planet.”

  “That would be horrific.”

  “Oh, yes. And not difficult. As a matter of fact, I have to be very careful with specifying coordinates and such, or that is exactly the sort of thing that could happen by accident. The universe doesn’t care. We might think of this as a huge catastrophe, with stupendous forces involved, but it’s not even a rounding error in terms of the catastrophes and forces that occur in the universe every day, like gamma ray bursts and novas and stellar collapses.”

  “The transporter amounts to a megaweapon. Janice, now what do we do?”