Джон Макдональд - Wine of the Dreamers [= Planet of the Dreamers]

“Initial lift on atomic drive? Poison the air?”

“With a very short-life emission. Launch site will be clean in ten hours. At half-diameter outbound, they switch to standard A fuel, and keep it on CA. That means that—”

“—at twelve thousand miles out they go right onto the same old A-six atomic propulsion fuel and stay in constant acceleration. I’m not a civilian, Doctor. So this marvelous ship is just one big son of a bitch of an oversized A-six with a flywheel gyro, a short-life mix for takeoff. Wonderful!” His smile was ironic, his eyes cold.

“With one more little change, Major. Eighty days of CA will put her clear of the system. Then they switch to Beatty Drive. Drive is an inaccurate word, but we haven’t come up with a better one yet. I worked with Beatty and ran the team that completed his equations after he died two years ago. Do you have any background in theoretical physics?”

“Some exposure. Try me, Doctor.”

“What does ‘frames of reference’ mean to you?”

“The old analogy about three elevators and one man in each one. Elevator A is going up at top speed, Elevator B is going down slowly and Elevator C is stuck between floors. Each one is moving at a different speed in relation to each of the other two.”

“Very good. But you have one motionless elevator. Take it a step further. Your motionless one is at zero velocity. Okay, where is the motionless point in space? You can be hanging in space absolutely motionless in relation to one star, but moving at ten thousand miles per second in relation to a star in some other direction. On a theoretical basis you would find a motionless point in space by computing the velocity and direction of movement of all the stars in all the galaxies and finding that point from which all those velocities both toward you and away from you, on whatever angle of inclination or declination, would average out to zero. If we had the math to solve a problem with an infinite number of unknowns, we do not have all the knowns to feed into it, due to the temporal limits — and physical limits — of observation. Are you with it?”

“I think I... Well, keep going.”

“Here is the heart of it. Beatty called that the space-frame — the problem of finding the zero point in space. So he made the assumption there must also be a time-frame. He pictured a universe curved in upon itself in the Einsteinian concept, but composed of not only varying velocities and directions, but also varying temporal relationships. From this he extrapolated the idea that an average of the time relationships would give you a zero place, a place where time does not exist, just as an average of speed-relationships would give you a zero place where movement does not exist. So he applied that theory to the paradox of the expanding universe, and his equations did what the red shift ‘tired light’ theories failed to do. He proved that the apparent expansion was in fact the interrelationship of the velocity of light with a varying time warp throughout the observable galaxies, with the effect more apparent the greater the warp — i.e., in the most distant galaxies. I think I’ve lost you.”

“Afraid so.”

“Try it this way then. Until Beatty’s work we believed that maximum attainable velocity would always be a fractional percentage point under the speed of light itself, because according to the Fitzgerald equations, at the speed of light the contraction of mass is infinite. Beatty gave us a way to bypass that barrier by thrusting a ship into another frame of reference of time. Here is our standard simplistic analogy. You are driving from El Paso to New York. It will take you three days. You leave on Monday. You expect to get to New York on Wednesday. So as soon as you are outside the El Paso city limits you push a little button on the dashboard labeled ‘Wednesday.’ And there is the skyline of New York, right down the road.”

“Didn’t... the Fitzgerald equations say that time contracts along with mass in ratio to velocity?”

“Excellent, Major! Beatty’s equations showed that the time gradient between different systems, instead of having to be traversed at nearly light speed, can be capsuled into an abrupt time shift, just as when you drive across from one time zone into the next.”

“Your jumps would be a little bigger than Monday to Wednesday, I’d imagine.”

“The increments are in standard segments of one hundred years. But don’t think of it as a hundred years passing in a flash. It is more a distance measurement. You arrive in New York at the precise moment that you left El Paso.”

“So when do you know when to make the jump, how far you’ll jump, and where you’ll be when you get there?”

Bard Lane shrugged and smiled. “That’s what took seven months of programming and three months of integral and digital computer time. Then we built the control panels according to the results of the calculations.”

“And that nut smashed them?”

“Do you mean Doctor Kornal? He did. He is back on the job. My decision to take him back will stand up, so don’t step over the line you seem to be edging too close to.”

“Me? Hell, let’s be friends. Life is too short. It’s your risk, not mine. What do we look at next?”

“Dinner. I’ll take you through the labs tomorrow morning.”

“Where do I find the action?”

“I’ll point out the club on our way back down to the launch pad.”

Bard Lane sat on the edge of his bed. It was after midnight on the same day that he had taken Major Leeber on the tour of inspection.

He sat and little rivulets of fear ran through his mind the way that rain will trickle erratically down a window-pane. The night was cool and the wind that came through the screen touched his naked chest and shoulders, but it did not stop the perspiration that made an oiled sheen on his face.

It was like a return to childhood, to the long-dead nights of terror. The scream. “Mommy, Mommy! It was a moldy man and he was sitting on my bed!”

“It’s all right. It was just a dream, dear.”

“He was here! He was! I saw him, Mommy.”

“Shh, you’ll wake your father. I’ll sit here and hold your hand until you get back to sleep.”

Sleep voice. “Well he was here.”

He shivered violently. Now there was no one to call. There was someone you should call, but that might mean... defeat.

You can fight all the outside enemies in the world, but what if the enemy is in your own mind? What then?

It was a decision to make. He made it. He dressed quickly, snatched a leather jacket from the closet hook, shouldered his way into it as he left his quarters. From the slope he looked down on the project buildings. A thin moon rode high, silvering the dark buildings. He knew that inside the darkness there were lights, hum of activity, night shifts in the labs in the caves.

Sharan Inly had a room in the women’s barracks. He walked down the slope and across the street. The girl at the switchboard was reading a magazine. She glanced up and smiled, “Good evening, Dr. Lane.”

“Good evening. Dr. Inly, please. Would you connect the call in the booth?”

He shut himself in. Her voice was sleepy. “Hello, Bard.”

“Did I wake you up?”

“Ten seconds later and you would have. What is it, Bard?”

He glanced through the booth door. The girl had returned to her magazine. “Sharan, would you please get dressed and come down. I must talk to you.”

“You sound... upset, Bard. I’ll be down in five minutes.”

She was better than her word. He was grateful for her promptness. She came out beside him, asking no questions, letting him choose time and place. He led her over to the porch of the club. It was after hours and the chairs had been stacked on the tables. He set two of them on their legs. A dog howled in the hills. Over near the labor barracks someone laughed loudly.