The trip, he reiterated, would be possible before the end of the 21st century.
The phone rang and Lyles took it, allowing me a moment to consolidate my thoughts. His team, he said, had opted for a 50-year trip because it represented a time span most engineers could get their heads around. Fifty years, however, made no sense from the point of view of a practical mission, because even if it could be accomplished technologically, old age (or boredom) would have killed most of the crew long before they ever got there, let alone back again.
But that wasn't the point. The "extra-Solar System" portion of ASTP was about getting scientists to think about realizing impossible journeys. In 1960, there were those who said that landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade would be impossible. That we weren't colonizing Mars by the end of the 20th century, they maintained, was directly attributable to the drop-off in research activity that followed the Apollo program. If we wanted to get to the stars by the end of the 21st, Lyles said, we needed to be thinking about it now. Which, though he didn't know it, was why I was here. In 1956, a group of engineers had talked openly about an impossible idea. Lyles' "fast trip" to Alpha Centauri was so impossible, his team was having to really reach — to think way out of the box — to come up even with half-answers to the challenge. To make the fast trip happen, NASA had no choice but to tap heavily into some taboo areas of science. That was my lead.
Supposing for a moment that NASA could come up with a vehicle capable of light-speed, a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri would take 4.3 light-years. Since the speed of light was a constant 186,000 miles per second, by extrapolation, the spaceship would be moving at almost 670 million miles per hour.
The 50-year journey time reduced the requirements to a more manageable 16,000 miles per second or 57.6 million miles per hour.
I had only once come across real hardware (aside from a laser, the ultimate "speed of light" weapon) about which comparable speeds had been mentioned.
Shiva Star, the 250-ton capacitor I'd seen at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico in 1992, had had a task to fire a plasma bullet at 10,000 km per second.
And then, just a few years later, when I returned to Kirtland, it was like the program never existed. In the carefully regulated temperature of Lyles' office, I shivered. Shiva's plasma bullet, designed to be dumped into the soft electronics of an incoming nuclear warhead at one-thirtieth the speed of light, was but one of a handful of deep black programs I'd encountered in the course of my career.
How many more secrets existed below the waterline of accountability? What other secrets were out there? What was the ultimate weapon? The questions churned, as they always did in a place like this, almost too fast for me to get a hold on them.
What Lyles and his counterparts in the black world shared was their absolute belief that they could engineer things other people said were impossible. It was a part of the feeling I got when I visited facilities like this and it thrilled and scared me with equal measure. Why had Marckus sent me here? What did Lyles know? When he got off the phone, I asked Lyles if he ever felt NASA was developing technology that had previously been developed by the Air Force in the black. He took a moment before answering, choosing his words carefully. I thought that by tweaking his professional pride I might be able to ruffle some of that soft, southern savoir-faire. But Lyles had seen me coming. "Yeah, sometimes we do. But you have to understand that going into space is a very hard thing to accomplish. It takes a lot more than money. I would guess — certainly when it comes to single-stage-toorbit technology — that NASA is at the cutting edge."
This was the essence of the multilayered conundrum that Marckus had touched upon during our meeting on the estuary. While NASA was struggling to develop technology that would reduce the cost of space access, there were those that said that the Air Force had already solved the problem. Believers in Aurora, the large triangular aircraft supposedly sighted over the oil rig in the North Sea, maintained that at least one variant was capable of conducting single-stage missions to low Earth orbit. If, as George S. Trimble and his contemporaries had stated back in 1956, the U.S. was on the threshold of developing antigravity technology, why spend billions on something as conventional (by comparison) as Aurora 20 years later? Or any other advanced kind of weapon system for that matter?
But when Lyles said that he doubted the Air Force had cracked single stage-to-orbit, I actually had no way of knowing what he really knew. There was every chance that NASA was simply repeating work the Air Force had already carried out — and this applied to all aspects of its work "on the cutting edge."
I knew of several Congressmen who were deeply pissed off about it. On their watch, they'd committed money to a number of NASA programs knowing damn well, but unable to prove it, the Air Force had duplicate technology up its sleeve.
A number of NASA scientists I had spoken to in other fields of endeavor had acknowledged a feeling — though it was often no more than this — that their work was a mirror image of some hidden effort, something they couldn't see, that was going on in the black. If NASA scientists, therefore, were thinking "way out of the box" to come up with science that would enable them to reach another star system by the end of the century, maybe someone, somewhere had experienced that same feeling.
If anyone at Marshall had sensed such a presence, it would have been George Schmidt. Lyles recommended I go talk to Schmidt, because Schmidt, being a project engineer, was right on the cutting edge. A big, genial man with a football player's physique and a marine-style haircut, Schmidt, as head of propulsion, research and technology on the ASTP effort, waded routinely through the theory that could one day transform Lyles' interstellar vision into real hardware. Still under escort, I found him down a maze of corridors in a different part of the von Braun administrative complex.
Schmidt punctuated his remarks with references to "superlumi nal velocities" — faster-than-light speeds — and "space-time distortion," phenomena that weren't even accepted by mainstream physics ("although General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics don't discount the possibility"). By the same token, he said, there were some holes in current thinking—"some windows of opportunity we may be able to take advantage of — that might transition the theory sooner rather than later. One of these related to so-called "wormholes," shortcuts through the universe that could be created with large amounts of "negative-energy density matter": material that existed only on the very fringes of theory.
Since it was known from the established physics of General Relativity that gravity, electromagnetism and space-time were interrelated phenomena, he said, it followed that any distortion of space-time might well yield an antigravity effect.
Questioned on the principles of a wormhole, Schmidt quickly warmed to his theme. "It's based on the idea that you can actually curve space," he told me. "Einstein discovered that large masses curve space. Well, it's the same thing with a wormhole. You're curving and distorting space so that you don't have to follow the usual dimensions — you can go up and out, so to speak, into another dimension, if you will. And that allows you to travel much faster than the speed of light."