Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

Eliot Smith clicked a metal finger twice on the table in front of him. “I doubt that we’ll arrive at a consensus today. Let’s just make sure everyone has the same information to work with.

“Start at the beginning. Dan, Len? What do we know about that final transmission from New New?”

Len wood Zylius gestured for Dan to speak. “Matty Lang tells me it was what they call a ‘Borgia program.’ The Borgias sometimes murdered their guests with co-adjuvant poisons—two chemicals that were harmless by themselves, but deadly together. So it was safe to drink the wine, for instance, as long as you stayed away from the cherry pie.

“Most of the sabotage program was already in place, invisibly hidden in the part of our library procedures that deals with recording public occasions. When the last microsecond of transmission arrived from New New, the program completed itself and ran wild through the library.”

“Safeguards?” Tania Seven said.

“Whoever wrote the sabotage program must have had access to most of our security routines. It took more than two seconds to stop the program. As much as nine tenths of some of the library was destroyed, randomized, by then. Muhammed?”

Kamal Muhammed was in charge of Interior Communications. ‘The degree and kind of destruction was different for different areas of knowledge. It depends on how the information was organized. Where there are lots of cross-references, as in physics or mathematics, we only lost about half the data—but that half could be anywhere. Half a definition, half an equation.

“The destruction was faster in things that have the nature of lists, without extensive cross-listings. Things like bookkeeping records, VR images, sheet music, nonkinetic novels, personnel files—they were either destroyed entirely or, in a few cases, left untouched. I’m afraid that as much as ninety percent of them may be lost.” He sat down.

“But for all we know,” Dan said, “New New might resume transmissions tomorrow, in which case we’ll be able to reclaim the most important information. Or they may all be dead.” He looked at the Coordinators. “I guess we go on that assumption.”

“Have to,” Smith said. “We’re taking the obvious precaution of rewriting the safeguard routines, in case they do get in touch with us again. But the expression on Berrigan’s face just before we lost them… I’m afraid New New was attacked at the same time that the killer program went out.”

“The question is, by whom?” Tania Seven said. “It’s natural to blame the Devonites, but there’s an obvious paradox.”

“I’ll state the obvious, for the record.” Eliot looked up at the camera. “Radical Devonites believed that Newhome was built in defiance of God’s will, and they did a pretty good job of sabotage a month before Launch. Cracked the hull, fifty-some people dead. If we’d all died, that would’ve been God’s will.

“There are still thousands of these nut cases in New New, and if they could do this thing, they probably would. But it took one hell of a sophisticated job of programming, and programming is one thing they don’t do. They don’t like machines in general.

“Also, as Dan Anderson pointed out, part of it was an inside job. There aren’t any Radical Devonites aboard; never have been, except for the two that snuck in for the sabotage.”

“We have Reform Devonites,” O’Hara said. “About forty of them.”

“And they’re under suspicion. Not that finding a guilty person would do much good. Except that if we chucked him out the airlock he wouldn’t be able to do any more damage.”

“Whoever did it probably isn’t aboard,” Tania Seven said. “I’d look for someone who was involved in designing the cyberspace and then decided not to come along.

“But as you say, it’s not really important. What’s important is that pretty soon we’re going to call for a referendum on whether to go ahead or turn back.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “And first we have to decide what the results will be.” A few people looked startled to hear her say that in public, though by this time everyone in the Cabinet knew the referenda were rigged.

“Start out with extreme opinions,” Eliot said. “I think it would be crazy to turn back. Who thinks it would be crazy to go on?”

“I don’t know about crazy, Eliot,” Marius Viejo said. “But you gotta admit there’s a whiff of Russian roulette about it.” Viejo was in charge of Life Support Systems.

“I’m listening.”

“Every aspect of Life Support has got components with projected-times-to-failure less than ninety-seven years. The probability of something not going wrong before we get to Epsilon is so small you don’t even have to think about it. Let me have the board. I’m E92.”

Smith tapped three keys on his keyboard, and Viejo unfolded his and typed in a command. The wall screen became a page of gibberish, headed HEíØ EîCJAN&E ËYSTôMW—THPA£R PRJTBCOLí.

“Okay. This says ‘HEAT EXCHANGE SYSTEMS—REPAIR PROTOCOLS.’ You’ve all seen similar things. Since we do have a pretty good notion of what’s in it, sooner or later we’ll be able to decipher it with some confidence. The words, anyhow; numbers will have to be recalculated. Some of them are from measurements that can’t be made while the ship is under way.

“So supposing we could eventually restore this manual to its original status… that ‘eventually’ is a killer. A real killer. If the heat exchange systems shut down right now, we would all fry in about eight hours.”

“Lot of repairs you could make without the manual,” Eliot said. “You are engineers.”

“Yeah, well, this one is a good case in point. I’ve got two women in the heat exchanger subgroup who’ve been pulling heat exchange maintenance all their adult lives. If something went wrong with the heat exchange system in New New, they could fix it with a bucket over their head and somebody beatin’ Ajimbo on the bucket.

“But this ain’t New New. My Life Support heat exchange is slaved into the primary system, which radiates waste heat from the gamma ray reflectors. It’s got to have priority over Life Support—I mean, you want to fry in eight hours or eight nanoseconds? But it’s an added complication, and one that nobody has any experience dealing with.”

He faced the rest of the table. “Now don’t get me wrong. I’m pretty much on Eliot’s side. Even if we did want to go back, that fourteen-month flip is a pretty extreme maneuver—must be eighteen, twenty times the propellant mass we’re designed to have at the flip. Lotta mechanical stress.”

“So we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t?” O’Hara said.

“We’re in shit up to the pits, is what I was going to say. No matter which way we go.”

Eliot pointed at Takashi Sato, Propulsion. “Sato. You have an opinion?”

“Two opinions. As a man, there is no question: I knew I would die aboard this vessel when I agreed to come along. I don’t want to go back, to die in retreat.

“As an engineer… it’s not that simple. Yes, as Mr. Viejo says, the flip at fourteen months is an emergency scenario. But if we were to power down the ship’s spin—live with zero gravity for a few days—and do the flip very slowly, there should be no problem. Possibly much safer, statistically, than continuing on.”

Several people spoke at once. Eliot called on Silke Kleber, I.C.E. Maintenance. “I would not invoke statistics this way. The fact is that whatever happened to them at New New is likely to happen to us if we return. That would be a nice reward for our concern, don’t you think?”

“Suppose they are alive, though, and need us?” O’Hara said. “For all we know, they just lost communication and information, as we did.”