"Journeys to the nearby stars are not only possible, they could be done in under a decade. The Alpha-Centaurians proved that. And unless we want to give those bloodthirsty xorns the chance to figure out how to make nuclear weapons of their own, we'd better get travelling — fast."— Col. Ira Henderson,
in his speech to the Earth Committee for Space Travel
When Jerry Redlands opened his eyes, the dusty-tanned face of his co-operative beamed back down at him, framed by the room's blue-white luminance. And his casket lid was open.
"Arnie?" Jerry asked. "What's wrong?"
"We're there," the man said matter-of-factly.
"What?!" Jerry sat up with a start, and discovered he had barely the strength to do so. "What do you mean we're 'there'? I wasn't asleep for more than three seconds!"
"Three years is more like it."
Jerry floated back to horizontal, his weakness that much more acute. "Wow. Just like surgical anesthesia. Close your eyes and the operation's over."
Arnie rubbed his chin. "Mmmm, well . . . not quite. It'll take a few weeks for the chemicals to work themselves completely out of your system. Maybe even a few months, considering that this was the first time you've been 'frozen'."
Jerry tried to sit up again. This time he had a headache. "Wonderful. So —" He noticed his bare arms. Then his bare chest. Then his bare abdomen, groin, and legs. "Wait a minute, where'd my clothes go?!"
Arnie nodded, and picked up a bundle laying beside his capsule. "Right here." He tossed the garments onto Jerry's torso. "Some of the little gizmos inside your coffin took them off just after you went into hibernation. You can't very well go around wearing the same clothes for three years, now can you?"
"I've seen some vagrants back on Earth who could," Jerry commented as he pulled on his undershorts.
Arnie nodded snidely. "Yeah, I believe it. Hmmm . . . I wonder what Earth is like these days. . . ."
"You ever been there?" Jerry inquired, muffled by his undershirt as he pulled it on.
"Oh, sure, but that was a long time ago. Over a hundred years ago, when I was a tyke, as a matter of fact. And with this trip, I get to add another ten years to that figure."
"Ten years?" Jerry stopped half way through pulling on his coveralls. "I thought you said we were asleep for three years."
"Three years ship time," Arnie corrected him. "We've been gone for more than a decade in rest time."
Jerry nodded slowly. "We were going that close to the speed of light, huh?"
Arnie nodded and smirked. "Pretty impressive for a little ion-transfer powered spacecraft, wouldn't you say?"
Jerry zipped his jumpsuit and pulled on a magnetic boot. "Yeah. Yeah, I was wondering about that. How far are we from Sol again?"
"Eight point six light-years," Arnie reminded him.
"Right, eight-and-a-half light-years. But it only took three years worth of ship time for us to get there. That means we would have had to accelerate —"
"— constantly," Arnie finished. "We accelerated all the way up to the half-way point," he thumbed over his shoulder, "Four point three light-years back, then we flipped around and decelerated for the rest of the trip. Accelerating and decelerating, I might add, with a force of three times the gravity of Earth."
"Which was why we had to be put in suspension," Jerry noted, securing his other magnetic boot.
"Among other things, yes."
"Didn't that use up a hell of a lot of fuel?"
"You bet it did. We'll have to sit around here and synthesize deuterium from the star's radiation. And from any naturally occuring deuterium we can strain out of that dirt-ball. We won't be able to leave for at least three months."
Jerry sat up, massaging the stiffness out of his back and legs. "But I thought the whole reason that anything other than a ramscoop couldn't make an interstellar journey was that you'd run out of reaction mass before you even reached half the speed of light."
"With a big passenger liner, yeah. But about nine-tenths of this craft is devoted just to deuterium storage. Plus, the ion-transfer cycle squeezes every last ounce of specific-impulse out of the deuteron reaction. When the SBI issued me this ship twenty years ago, it was absolutely top-of-the-line."
Jerry put his feet on the floor and tried the magnets. It would feel good to walk around again. "I'm surprised the Bureau gives anything 'top-of-the-line' to its agents."
Arnie clicked his teeth. "What I do is pretty special to them."
"I would imagine." Jerry stood up. If there had been any gravity, he wouldn't have been able to do even that, and it still wasn't easy in weightlessness. "Is it true that everything the Mad Scientist concocts works out exactly like he says it will?"
"He's had a few little failures, to be sure, but every big idea he's undertaken has worked out — every single one of them."
Jerry took a few steps forward. The electromagnets on his shoes cut on and off, appropriately, as he stepped. "This one must be pretty big for you to requisition a partner. Even if I've never been outside the solar system before."
"I didn't requisition you, you were assigned to me."
"Huh? Why?"
"Darned if I know. I haven't looked at my orders yet."
"And why not?"
"Because we're supposed to look at them together, once and once only, when we arrive. That's why I came here to thaw you out just now."
"Uh huh. You said we were 'here'."
"Yep," Arnie magnet-walked to the side door, pushed the button which made it slide apart, and crossed to the curtains on the far wall of the room beyond. "And here we are." He drew the curtains wide and bathed both rooms in vermilion light. A bloated, red-orange disk shone through the reflectorized window and dwarfed the blue-white fluorescent light to which they'd grown accustomed. "UV Ceti."
As their eyes adapted, a yellowish tendril of flame resolved itself on the star's right side. The tiny sun was less than a sixth of the diameter of Earth's own Sol, and twenty thousand times dimmer; yet the flare they now witnessed was just as bright as, and reached a hundred times farther and wider than, any flare Sol had produced in four billion years. There was enough radiation in that one flare to wipe out the dinosaurs or bring on another ice age, if Earth had formed in this star system.
"Better get used to it, Jerry," Arnie commented, "'Cause flares like that one are gonna happen every day."
Jerry glared at the prominence. "Aren't they dangerous?"
"You bet. That's why there isn't a trace of life anywhere in the system. Except for us and the Mad Scientist, of course."
Jerry clomped lazily into the room. "So where's our new home gonna be?"
Arnie smirked. "Step up to the window and see."
He did. Arnie pointed at the bottom of the curved glass plate. Jerry could see half of a huge, dirty golf ball, and a marble that looked just as desolate off to one side.
Arnie pointed at the marble. "Desolate, downtown UV Ceti IV. A lifeless chunk of granite with a methane atmosphere just barely thick enough to be annoying. It's one of the least-prized pieces of real estate in known space — which is why they let the Mad Scientist have it. That cratered ball of wasteland beneath us is UV Ceti IV's only natural satellite. It's locked in synchronus rotation with the planet, meaning the same side always faces it. That makes it a perfect vantage point from which to keep an eye on the Mad Scientist."
"What?" Jerry shook his head. "You mean we're not going down there on the planet with him?"
Arnie inhaled uncomfortably. "I've been on the same planet as the Mad Scientist once, and I was scared out of my wits the entire time. There's a reason the Solar government gave him his own planet to work with. Now come on; it's time to read our orders. I want to find out why the SBI wants us to spy on him this time."
He led his comrade out of the viewing room and back through the
fluorescently-lit chamber they'd both hibernated in. Jerry could feel his
strength returning, but slowly. He wondered if enough of his strength
would come back to stomach his orders.
UV Ceti IV's airless moon beamed its crescent greeting down on them through the overhead window. They were standing on what would have been the ceiling had they not been weightless. Arnie ceremoniously ripped the end off the red envelope, blew it open, pulled out the three-inch-square shiny wafer, and flashed it in the light. Slowly, he positioned the square before a slot beneath a meter-wide display screen. "Well," he shrugged, "Here we go."
He popped the square into the slot. Jerry rubbed the last traces of grogginess out of his eyes, blinked hard once, and focussed. The screen flickered to life and a middle-aged woman's face, framed against the emblem of the Solar Bureau of Investigation, spoke its pre-recorded gospel.
"Arnold Hasselberg," she nodded. "Jerrold Redlands. Gentlemen. First, Arnold, let me apologize for forcing you to work with an operative. I understand that you do your best work alone, but should you not survive, this mission is far too vital not to have someone else to report in for you. Secondly, Jerry: I know you requested your first interstellar voyage to be to Alpha-Centauri, but again, this development takes precedence over your getting involved with the counter-culture you so enjoy."
Jerry glanced over his shoulder to a 3-D poster he'd pinned up in this room before they'd left the Solar system. The being pictured had tanned, mottled skin, a cylindrical torso, four arms, four stubby legs ending in feet which had biological wheels embedded in them, four mouths placed between each arm below its shoulders, and a three-pronged eye stalk with a single ear on top which gave it 360 degree, if non-stereoscopic, vision. The half-meter-high stereogram represented an Alpha-Centaurian 132.3 centimeters tall. Its caption read, "Cronazza Heap."
"The Mad Scientist has come up with some strange plans in the past, but nothing to match the potential strategic importance — or the cost — of this one. His idea is an application of known principles that's so simple it almost seems childish."
She explained: "The output of an electron-positron pair annihilation is always two gamma ray photons, whose total energy . . ."
Jerry didn't hear the next few words. He forgot to listen when she said "positron." Antimatter. This was big stuff indeed.
" . . . is the mass of both annihilated particles times c-squared. Proton-antiproton and neutron-antineutron annihilations put out gamma rays plus a few pions as well, although the pions decay into gamma rays a few microseconds later. It's because of this delay between an antiproton annihilation's initial gamma-ray burst and the decay of its by-products that the Mad Scientist's plan calls for only positrons and no antiprotons."
What the speed of a matter-antimatter reaction had to do with the power of the explosion, Jerry and Arnold could only guess. As far as they were concerned, antimatter bombs were antimatter bombs, and if it took an extra millionth of a second to squeeze all the gamma rays out of a proton-antiproton reaction, what difference did that make?
The recorded woman continued. "The principle he seeks to exploit here is that of Stimulated Emmissions. Every physics student will tell you that if a photon of the correct frequency passes close enough to an atom in an excited state, that atom will emit its own photon of the same frequency, perfectly in phase with the photon that triggered it. This is how lasers work. Since the two photons are in phase, the amplitudes of their lightwaves add up. And a third photon, also emitted in phase, will add its amplitude to the first two. As will the fourth, and the fifth, et cetera, until you have one big coherent beam with an amplitude that's the sum of all its photons' amplitudes. But the energy contained in a given beam is proportional not to its amplitude, but to its amplitude squared. This is why laser beams are so much more intense than ordinary randomly-phased light.
"Two months before this recording was made, the Mad Scientist handed our Board of Research Funding a proposal based on a theory almost too mind-boggling to be true. In brief, his theory stated that the phenomenon of phased emissions could also occur in a multiple positron-electron reaction, if the two masses of particles were aimed precisely at each other and there was enough matter and antimatter reacting to flood the immediate space with gamma rays. He contended that the gamma rays must be close enough to the second wave of reacting particles to stimulate them into annihilating into another gamma ray photon in phase, so there had to be a lot of them. Even using the most efficient explosive lenses available, he went on, such a reaction couldn't be guaranteed with anything less than fifty kilograms of positrons and electrons."
If any part of Arnold's or Jerry's attention was elsewhere before, it was totally concentrated on the messenger now. Did she really say fifty kilograms of matter and antimatter? Not fifty grams, fifty KILOgrams?!
Her pre-recorded face leaned closer to the playback screen. "All the pair-creation facilities at Sol's disposal, working in concert at full yield, would take months to collect only a single kilogram of positrons. Twenty-five kilograms of antimatter reacting normally with 25 kilograms of ordinary matter would produce over a million million kilowatt-hours of energy, enough to power a large city for over a year or flatten an entire continent. But if the Mad Scientist's latest idea works as well as all his previous ones, this same fifty kilograms reacting in phase would produce over ten-to-the-thirtieth, or a million million million million million, times as much energy. That's more energy than a supernova — in fact, it's more energy than the entire galaxy will produce in its lifetime — all flashing out from that reaction in under a millionth of a second.
"Needless to say, most of the Board was skeptical. Never mind that this kind of output violates every conservation law known to physics; just building a device to test this theory required the majority of Sol's entire positron stockpile. But the theory was sound. The Mad Scientist's blueprints for a test device passed every scrutiny. The Board gave his Phased Antimatter test project the go-ahead. All pieces of his device that could be assembled prior to shipment were put together and sent on unmanned ramscoops to the fourth planet of Luyten 726-8 B — the UV Ceti system — twelve years prior to the time when you should be reading this message. The Mad Scientist had embarked on a slower craft for the same system the moment the project was approved, two years earlier.
"With twenty-five thousand grams of positrons all in the same room together, there is a very real risk of magnetic containment failure. The Mad Scientist and all the recording equipment he's documenting this experiment with could evaporate in a heartbeat. This is why you've been assigned to monitor his progress from a safe vantage point on UV Ceti IV's moon. You are ordered to establish an observation base on the moon, gather all information possible regarding the Phased Animatter experiment from there, and return it to the SBI once the experiment is at an end.
"Your presence here and any information you gain is classified Top Secret. I don't have to tell you the experiment's strategic implications should it prove successful. Head of SBI strategic surveillance, out."
A red light flashed twice in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, and the message wafer popped back out of the Read slot, its circuitry smoking from a brief but intense current overload.
"A bit dramatic, I'll admit," Arnold commented as he looked the wafer over to
be sure all data areas had been destroyed. "The Bureau doesn't like to
leave secrets lying around any longer than necessary — even if there are
no other humans or Centaurians within four light-years."