Lazarus was smugly pleased then to see how Slayton Ford immediately moved in and took charge; the sick man was gone, here again was the executive. “It isn’t a matter of your personal preference, Commander Libby; we each must do what we can. I have agreed to direct social and civil organization; that is consonant with my training. But I can’t command the ship as a ship; I’m not trained for it. You are. You must do it.”
Libby blushed pinker and stammered. “I would if I were the only one. But there are hundreds of spacemen among the Families and dozens of them certainly have more experience; and talent for command than I have. If you’ll look for him, you’ll find the right man.”
Ford said, “What do you think, Lazarus?”
“Um. Andy’s got something. A captain puts spine into his ship … or doesn’t, as the case may be. If Libby doesn’t hanker to command, maybe we’d better look around.”
Justin Foote had a microed roster with him but there was no scanner at hand with which to sort it. Nevertheless the memories of the dozen and more present produced many candidates. They finally settled on Captain Rufus “Ruthless” King.
Libby was explaining the consequences of his lightpressure drive to his new commanding officer. “The loci of our attainable destinations is contained in a sheaf of paraboloids having their apices tangent to our present course. This assumes that acceleration by means of the ship’s normal drive will always be applied so that the magnitude our present vector, just under the speed of light, will be held constant. This will require that the ship be slowly precessed during the entire maneuvering acceleration. But it will not be too fussy because of the enormous difference in magnitude between our present vector and the maneuvering vectors being impressed on it. One may think of it roughly as accelerating at right angles to Our course.”
“Yes, yes, I see that,” Captain King cut in, “but why do you assume that the resultant vectors must always be equal to our present vector?”
“Why, it need not be if the Captain decides otherwise,” Libby answered, looking puzzled, “but to apply a component that would reduce the resultant vector below our present speed would simply be to cause us to backtrack a little without increasing the scope of our present loci of possible destinations. The effect would only increase our flight time, to generations, even to centuries, if the resultant-“
“Certainly, certainly! I understand basic ballistics, Mister. But why do you reject the other alternative? Why not increase our speed? Why can’t I accelerate directly along my present course if I choose?”
Libby looked worried. “The Captain may, if he so orders. But it would be an attempt to exceed the speed of light. That has been assumed to be impossible-“
“That’s exactly what I was driving at: ‘Assumed.’ I’ve always wondered if that assumption was justified. Now seems like a good time to find out.”
Libby hesitated, his sense of duty struggling against the ecstatic temptations of scientific curiosity. “If this were a research ship, Captain, I would be anxious to try it. I can’t visualize what the conditions would be if we did pass the speed of light, but it seems to me that we would be cut off entirely from the electromagnetic spectrum insofar as other bodies are concerned. How could we see to astrogate?”
Libby had more than theory to worry him; they were “seeing” now only by electronic vision. To the human eye itself the hemisphere behind them along their track was a vasty black; the shortest radiations had dopplered to wavelengths too long for the eye. In the forward direction stars could still be seen but their visible “light” was made up of longest Hertzian waves crowded in by the ship’s incomprehensible speed. Dark “radio stars” shined at first magnitude; stars poor in radio wavelengths had faded to obscurity. The familiar constellations were changed beyond easy recognition. The fact that they were seeing by vision distorted by Doppler’s effect was confirmed by spectrum analysis; Fraunhofer’s lines had not merely shifted toward the violet end, they had passed beyond, out of sight, and previously unknown patterns replaced them.
“Hmm …” King replied. “I see what you mean. But I’d certainly like to try it, damn if I wouldn’t! But I admit it’s out of the question with passengers inboard. Very well, prepare for me roughed courses to type ‘0’ stars lying inside this trumpet-flower locus of yours and not too far away. Say ten lightyears for your first search.”
“Yes, sir. I have. I can’t offer anything in that range in the ‘0’ types.”
“So? Lonely out here, isn’t it? Well?’
“We have Tau Ceti inside the locus at eleven lightyears.” -
“A 05, eh? Not too good.”
“No, sir. But we have a true Sol type, a 02-catalog ZD9817. But it’s more than twice as far away.”
Captain King chewed a knuckle. “I suppose I’ll have to put it up to the elders. How much subjective time advantage are we enjoying?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Eh? Well work it out! Or give me the data and I will. I don’t claim to be the mathematician you are, but any cadet could solve that one. The equations are simple enough.” -
“So they are, sir. But I don’t have the data to substitute in the time-contraction equation . . . because I have no way now to measure the ship’s speed. The violet shift is useless to use; we don’t know what the lines mean. I’m afraid we must wait until we have worked up a much longer baseline.”
King sighed. “Mister, I sometimes wonder why I got into this business. Well, are you willing to venture a best guess? Long time? Short time?”
“Uh … a long time, sir. Years.”
“So? Well, I’ve sweated it out in worse ships. Years, eh? Play any chess?”
“I have, sir.” Libby did not mention that he had given up the game long ago for lack of adequate competition.
“Looks like we’d have plenty of time to play. King’s pawn;to king four.”
“King’s knight to bishop three.”
“An unorthodox player, eh? Well, I’ll answer you later. I suppose I’d better try to sell them the 02 eyen though it takes longer … and I suppose I’d better caution Ford to start some contests and things. Can’t have ‘em getting coffin fever.”
“Yes, sir. Did I mention deceleration time? It works out to just under one Earth year, subjective, at a negative one-gee, to slow us to stellar speeds.”
“Eh? We’ll decelerate the same way we accelerated-with your lightpressure drive.”
Libby shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. The drawback of the lightpressure drive is that it makes no difference what your previous course and speed may be; if you go inertialess in the near neighborhood of a star, its light pressure kicks you away from it like a cork hit by a stream of water. Your previous momentum is canceled out when you cancel your inertia.”
“Well,” King conceded, “let’s assume that we will follow your schedule. I can’t argue with you yet; there are still some things about that gadget of yours that I don’t understand.”
“There are lots of things about it,” Libby answered seriously, “that I don’t understand either.”
The ship had flicked by Earth’s orbit less than ten minutes after Libby cut in his space drive. Lazarus and he had discussed the esoteric physical aspects of it all the way to the orbit of Mars-less than a quarter hour. Jupiter’s path was far distant when Barstow called the organization conference. But it killed an hour to find them all in the crowded ship; by the time he called them to order they were a billion miles out beyond the orbit of Saturn-elapsed time from “Go!” less than an hour and a half.
But the blocks get longer after Saturn. Uranus found them still in discussion. Nevertheless Ford’s name was agreed on and he had accepted before the ship was as far from the Sun as is Neptune. King had been named captain, had toured his new command with Lazarus as guide, and was already in conference with his astrogator when the ship passed the orbit of Pluto nearly four billion miles deep into space, but still less than six hours after the Sun’s light had blasted them away.