Of course you shall. It’s all you know how to do. It’s what makes you what you are. “Farewell, Overlord Bikrut.”
But the line was already dead.
— 12 —
The four helots who wanted to see how things would end—the last actions to be performed by the Photrek Courser—accompanied Harrod to the command module. There, he used a key wrench to open what looked like an oversized closet; the accessway led into a room packed with relays and command consoles: the auxiliary bridge. Harrod activated the screens and the sensors. Within seconds he detected the Shaddock flight to the surface: about a dozen away-craft, preparing to land near the prepositioned caches and test-settlement at the eastern end of the large landmass in the south. The remains of House Mellis were hard on their heels—and unexpected, since House Shaddock had never been told that the bridge module could function as a separate vehicle.
While the helots gawked at the descending ships, Harrod surveyed the engineering readouts. The fusion drives were gone, but the attitude and short maneuver thrusters were still functional and fully fueled. Bringing those slowly on-line, Harrod steadied Photrek Courser and altered her trajectory so that she would be over the north hemisphere in the first half of her orbit, but above the south in the second half. He turned to the helots. “It is time for you to leave. Go to the escape pods. Enter them as I have shown you and wait. I will do the rest.”
The big helot who had helped Harrod after the whipping stared at the monitors and the course plots with a frown. “I fear for you, Harrod-Lord: how can you be sure you will escape this Ark in time?”
“All is arranged,” he answered. “Now, you must go—and lead your people wisely. And kindly.”
The square-jawed helot frowned even more mightily, but then nodded and left, the other three trailing behind him.
Harrod rolled the ship slightly to port, bringing up the evacuation tubes so that they would fire at an angle, sending the escape pods into a tight cluster of islands in the mid-northern hemisphere. He had just finished calculating the pods’ collective entry angle when the lead helot’s voice boomed from the command suite’s speaker. “We are ready, Harrod-Lord.”
“Very good. Now seal up.”
“And you will be coming down, too?” The voice was worried.
“Yes. I am. I’m coming down, too.” And with that Harrod cut the commlink.
Three minutes later, Harrod discharged the escape pods. Spat free of their keel-lining launch tubes, the pods began their glittering, and ultimately, red-hot arcs down toward Senrefer Tertius Seven. And once the last of them was away, and he saw that the four hundred glowing dots had survived their entry and were now well within the atmosphere, Harrod sul-Mellis angled the great, crippled Ark into a more acute transequatorial trajectory. He checked the sensors: House Shaddock’s away-craft had landed. House Mellis’s bridge module was almost upon them. And as the tattered remains of those two embittered Houses commenced their planetside struggle for dominion, they would certainly not think to look over the shoulder. After all, no threat was expected from that direction.Consequently, given the opportunity to surprise them both, Harrod pushed the Photrek Courser into a steeper descent, watching the blue margin of the atmosphere rise up to meet him as he set his course guidon directly atop the icons denoting the survivors of both Houses.
As he rode the Ark down toward their conjoint landing ground that was, by now, also a killing field, Harrod wondered if this outcome was, in fact, not the best of all possible occurences. With the Courser crippled and now plunging to her own death, later generations from this worldlet would have no starship with which to send away yet another wave of bitter, defeated Exiles. This time, descendants of the helots—who were even now emerging from their surf-caught escape pods—would have to learn to settle their differences, find ways to understand and even embrace their enemies, rather than exterminate and banish them.
Or maybe not: he couldn’t know. Harrod could only give those future generations—and the forces of hope and fate—a chance to create a better society than the one they had come from.
Atmospheric buffeting made the Courser’s bow begin to buck. A bit of downward thrust steadied the nose, which eased into the smooth arc of a fast descent. He checked the ship’s projected impact point and smiled: for an Intendant, a lesser being, he was doing a most admirable job.
Most admirable indeed.
FUSION STARSHIPS
Dr. Gregory Matloff
When the history of humanity’s expansion into the galaxy is written in the capital city of Tau Ceti Three, the entry for Gregory Matloff may well read, “He was one of the pioneers in the field of interstellar travel. His theoretical analyses of the technologies that might enable the human species to travel between the stars inspired generations of scientists and engineers, and are the basis of the starships that enabled settlement of this part of the galaxy.”
This is the second of his essays for Going Interstellar, and in it he describes a propulsion system that many believe will be the first to take us to the stars.
Okay, you want to go to the stars! If you are not in too much of a hurry, if you have lots of money and if you’ve got access to solar-system resources, there is a way. If we had to, we could probably manage all this in the not-too-distant future.
We’re talking about nuclear-fusion-propelled starships. A common physics joke goes something like this: “fusion is the energy source of the future and always will be!” But it may be that our first crude terrestrial fusion-power pilot plants will soon be ready. And space applications will inevitably follow.
Fusion will not provide Star-Trek style spacecraft. But it could propel and power robotic probes requiring a century or so to cross the interstellar gulf. Human-occupied ships requiring generations to cross between stars may also be fusion powered.
Although this type of experimental reactor (more properly called “thermonuclear fusion”) is still not on line, the physical basis for it has been around a long time. Humanity’s understanding of thermonuclear fusion (and other nuclear processes) can in fact be traced to Albert Einstein’s Miracle Year of 1905.
Early Fusion History
Few of his contemporaries would have guessed that Albert Einstein would change the world. Working as a Swiss patent clerk, this young German Jew had not distinguished himself in college. Without the help of his wife (also a physicist), Albert might not have completed the studies leading to his bachelor’s degree.
Hardly a man of action, young Albert was a dreamer. After work he would travel by tram to enjoy dinner with friends in local cafes and restaurants. He loved this mode of travel. One day, he daydreamed that the tram was a light beam upon which he was a passenger, looking back at the Earth. Suddenly, in a flash of inspiration, he had it! This was the secret of Special Relativity. For better or for worse, the Atomic Age was born.
For decades, physicists had grappled unsuccessfully with the observationally confirmed fact that the speed of light in vacuum was a constant 186,300 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second). Even if you observed a laser projected from a starship passing at near-light speed, the velocity of the photons in the beam would still be measured as traveling at 186,300 miles per second.
As a consequence of this inconvenient truth, physicists had to accept the strange aspects of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald Contraction. As you observe a speeding starship fly past, it will be foreshortened or contracted. As its velocity approaches that of light, the Earth-bound observer will see the ship’s mass increase. Even less comprehensible, time on the ship will slow down. It sounds almost like Alice falling into the rabbit hole, or a Timothy Leary-style acid trip!