Wendel was silent for a considerable time while Fisher watched her carefully.
‘You're right, my dear wheedler of secrets,’ she said at last. ‘I made a mistake in thoughtlessly considering you a lover rather than an adviser.’
‘Why should the two necessarily be mutually exclusive?’ asked Fisher.
‘Although,’ said Wendel, ‘I know very well that you have your own motivations in this.’
‘What does that matter,’ said Fisher, ‘even if it's true, provided mine run parallel with yours?’
43A delegation of Congressmen eventually arrived, along with Igor Koropatsky, the new Director of the Terrestrial Board of Inquiry. He had been in subordinate positions at the Office for years, so he was not completely unknown to Tessa Wendel.
He was a quiet man, with smooth, thinning gray hair, a rather bulbous nose, a comfortable double chin, who looked well-fed and good-natured. He was shrewd undoubtedly, but he obviously lacked Tanayama's almost diseased intensity. At a full kilometer, you could see that.
Congressmen were with him, of course, as though to show that this successor was their property and under their control. They must surely be hoping it would stay that way. Tanayama had been a long and bitter lesson.
No-one suggested that the project be ended. Rather, the concern was that it be hastened - if possible. Wendel's cautious attempt to stress the possibility that the Settlements might overtake Earth, or be hot on its heels, was accepted without demur, almost dismissed as obvious on the face of it.
Koropatsky, who was allowed to be spokesman and to take the responsibility, said, ‘Dr Wendel, I do not ask for a long, formal tour of Hyper City. I have been here before, and it is more important that I spend some time reorganizing the Office. I mean no disrespect to my distinguished predecessor, but any shifting of an important administrative body from one person to another requires a great deal of reorganization, especially if the predecessor's tenure has been a lengthy one. Now I am not, by nature, a formal man. Let us, therefore, speak freely and informally, and I will ask some questions which I hope you will answer in a way that a man of my own modest attainments in science will have no trouble in understanding.’
Wendel nodded. ‘I will do my best, Director.’
‘Good. When do you expect to have a superluminal starship in operation?’
‘You must realize, Director, that this is an essentially unanswerable question. We are at the mercy of unforeseen difficulties and accidents.’
‘Assume only reasonable difficulties and no accidents.’
‘In that case, since we have completed the science and need only the engineering, if we are fortunate we will have a ship in three years, perhaps.’
‘You will be ready in 2236, in other words.’
‘Certainly not sooner.’
‘How many persons will it carry?’
‘Five to seven, perhaps.’
‘How far will it go?’
‘As far as we wish, Director. That is the beauty of superluminal velocity. Because we are passing through hyperspace, where the ordinary laws of physics do not apply, not even the conservation of energy, it costs no more effort to go a thousand light-years than to go one.’
The Director stirred uneasily. ‘I am not a physicist, but I find it difficult to accept an environment without constraints. Are there not things you cannot do?’
‘There are constraints. We need a vacuum and a gravitational intensity below a certain point if we are to make the transition into and out of hyperspace. We will, with experience, undoubtedly find additional restraints which might have to be determined through test flights. The results might necessitate further delays.’
‘Once you have the ship, where will the first flight take you?’
‘It might seem prudent to allow the first trip to go no farther than the planet Pluto, for instance, but that might well be considered an unbearable waste of time. Once we have the technology with which to visit the stars, the temptation to actually visit one would be overwhelming.’
‘Such as the Neighbor Star?’
‘That would be the logical goal. Ex-Director Tanayama wanted that visited, but I must point out that there are other stars far more interesting. Sirius is only four times as far away and it would give us a chance to observe a white dwarf star at close range.’
‘Dr Wendel, I think that the Neighbor Star must be the goal, though not necessarily for Tanayama's reasons. Suppose you travel far out to some other star - any other star - and return. How would you prove that you had indeed been in the neighborhood of another star?’
Wendel looked startled. ‘Prove? I don't understand you?’
‘I mean, how would you counter accusations that the supposed flight was actually a fake.’
‘A fake?’ Wendel rose furiously to her feet. ‘That is insulting.’
Koropatsky's voice suddenly grew dominating. ‘Sit down, Dr Wendel. You are being accused of nothing. I am trying to foresee a situation and to guard against it. Humanity moved into space almost three centuries ago. It is a not-altogether-forgotten episode in history and my subdivision of the globe remembers it particularly well. When the first satellites went up in those dim days of terrestrial confinement, there were those who insisted everything presented by those satellites were fakes. The first photographs of the far side of the Moon were accused of having been faked. Even the first pictures of Earth from space were called fakes by some few who believed the Earth was flat. Now if Earth claims to have superluminal flight, we may run into similar trouble.’
‘Why, Director? Why should anyone think we would lie about a thing like that?’
‘My dear Dr Wendel, you are naïve. For over three centuries, Albert Einstein has been the demigod who invented cosmology. People, for generation after generation, have grown used to the concept of the speed of light as an absolute limit. They will not readily give it up. Even the principle of causality - and one can't think of anything more basic than that cause must precede effect - seems violated. That's one thing.
‘Another, Dr Wendel, is that the Settlements might find it politically useful to convince their peoples, and Earthmen, too, that we are lying. It will confuse us, involve us in polemics, waste our time, and give them more of a chance to catch up. So I ask you: Is there a simple proof that any flight you might make would be a truly legitimate one?’
Wendel said icily, ‘Director, we would permit scientists to inspect our ship once we return. We will undertake to explain the techniques used-’
‘No, no, no. Please. Don't go any further. That would only convince scientists as knowledgeable as yourself.’
‘Well then, when we come back we will have photographs of the sky and the nearer stars will be positioned slightly differently with respect to each other. From the change in relative positions, it will be possible to calculate exactly where we were relative to the Sun.’
‘Also just for scientists. Completely unconvincing to the average person.’
‘We'll have close-up pictures of whatever star we visit. It will be quite different from our Sun in every respect.’
‘But this sort of thing is done in every trivial holovision program dealing with interstellar travel. It is the small change of the science fiction epic. It would be no more than a “Captain Galaxy” program.’
‘In that case,’ said Wendel with teeth-clenching exasperation, ‘I don't know of any way. If people will not believe, then they will not believe. It is a problem you must handle. I am only a scientist.’
‘Now, now, Doctor. Keep your temper, please. When Columbus returned from his first trip across the ocean seven and a half centuries ago, no-one accused him of fakery. Why? Because he brought back with him native people from the new shores he had visited.’