He took a long breath, relaxed into the observer’s chair and headpiece, and let the slow, long wavelength rumble of the starship run through his bones. And thought.
The Wickramsinghs felt it was a matter of biology. Wake the biologist!
Cliff wrinkled his nose. He had been irked, sure, but the Wickramsinghs were right: You see trouble, you call for help. But he wasn’t prepared for this. But as well he saw that none of that now mattered.
Science had speculated about intelligence for centuries, as probes spread out through a desert of dead worlds. The Big Eye telescopes in the twenty-first century had found warm, rocky worlds resembling Earth, and some had the ozone spectral lines that promised oxygen atmospheres. There the promise had ended. Here and there flourished slime molds in deep caverns, or simple ocean life, maybe — cellular colonies still unable to shape themselves into complex forms, as Earth’s life had more than a billion years ago. Sure, there was life, the consensus said … boring life.
To find an artifact of such immensity … it made his mind reel.
Then Abduss said, almost casually, “There is something more. Why we realized the protocols demanded that you be awakened. We have detected narrow-band microwave traffic from near the star.”
Cliff realized that he should have seen this coming. “Coded?”
“Yes. It may be broadcasting from near the hole in the center — the angle is right — and we’re getting some scattered, reflected signals.”
“Are they hailing us?”
“There’s nothing obvious that we can figure out, no,” Mayra said. “There are many transmissions, not a long string. It looks like a conversation, perhaps.”
“So they don’t know we’re here, maybe.”
“We could hear the traffic once we were within view of the hole, I believe. Perhaps it comes from within the hemisphere, and leaks through. It is not broadcast for others to pick up — or so we think. And unintelligible, at least to us.”
Cliff eyed them both and said carefully, “I agree that the protocols call for my revival. But this is more than anybody ever visualized, when those protocols were invented.…” He was still dazed after a day awake. And cold; he rubbed his arms to get blood moving. “I wonder if you didn’t wake me too early, though. We’re not looking at plants and animals yet. If we wake too many of us…”
“Yes,” Abduss said.
“We’d run short.”
“We’re short now,” Mayra said. “That is the other problem. It is high time someone woke the captain, we felt.”
“So you did, right after me? Me, because my secondary specialty is in rations and ship biology. Mostly, though, I’m a field biologist. But sure, call me up. Then the cap’n, to take over all the other implications. Right.”
“And now we are happy to turn both problems over to you.” Abduss gave him a broad smile without any trace of irony. Mayra beamed, too. They had faced all this together, and the weight of it showed in their evident relief.
It didn’t take long to see why they were handing off to him and the captain.
The opportunity: an artifact bigger than planets.
The problem:
Not a big difference, but in starflight it was crucial. At 0.081, their trip would take 550 years. They had stocks for a bit over 500 years.
Early space travel had been like this, with tiny margins of safety. Reaching the Moon six out of seven tries had been a miracle. They’d run aging X-planes for a quarter of a century, losing two shuttles before they built something better. Interplanetary travel still cut close to the bone, and interstellar was a crapshoot. And still there were always those who would take the gamble.
Of course,
But this slower speed was eating their safety window.
He checked the log. Five watch cycles had worked on the problem in their ramscoop drive without really spotting a cause. None of them had wakened the captain. It was an engineering problem, not a command structure one. And they were on a centuries-long voyage.
The big magnetic fields at
Still, it had huge consequences. “We won’t get to Glory in time,” Cliff said.
The Wickramsinghs nodded together. Mayra said, “So…” She did not want to draw the conclusion.
“We have cut our rations to a minimum, all five watches, yes,” Abduss rushed in, eyes large. “It was a major decision we made, you see — to revive you and the captain.”
Cliff slurped down more coffee. It tasted incredibly good — another symptom of revival. “You’ve done the calculation. Can we make it?”
“Marginal at best,” Mayra said precisely. “The last five watches have run at the minimum crew number: two. Plus we are pushing the hydroponics to the maximum. We fear it is not enough.”
“Damn!” Cliff grimaced. Starve to death between the stars. “That’s also why nobody woke the captain. One more gut, one more pair of lungs. Until … yeah.” Until they saw the strange thing up ahead.
He knew the deeper reason, too. What could the captain do, after all? If the engineers could not find a solution, mere managerial ability would not help. So the engineers had followed the protocols that had been drilled into them: Follow mandates and hope for the best. Especially since an error could kill them all with relativistic speed.
They gazed at him, calm and orderly and patient, the perfect types for a watch crew. Which he was not. Too restless and a touch excitable, the psych guys had said. That was fine with Cliff; he wanted to see Glory, not black interstellar space. All crew were calm, steady types, or they wouldn’t have made the first cut in the long selection filters.
The Wickramsinghs were waiting. He was in charge until the captain woke up. That he did not understand the situation did not matter; he was a superior officer, so he had to make the decisions.
First, he had to rest. About that, the revival procedures were as hard-nosed as the mission protocols. At least that would give him a little time to think.
They found him twelve hours later, in the kitchen.
The first thing he ordered was a thorough study of the star they were approaching. The Wickramsinghs called up screens of data and vibrant images. This gave him a jumpy image of a star massing about nine-tenths of Sol’s mass. There were plenty of those in the galaxy, but this one was not behaving like a serene, longer-lived orange dwarf. Fiery tendrils forked and seethed at the center of the apparent disk. “There is blurring in the image,” Abduss remarked, “by the plasma plume.”
Squinting, at first he did not understand the implication of the roiling spikes that leaped from a single hot spot, a blue white furnace. “Ah — that spot is directly under the center of the artificial bowl, the cap.”
Abduss nodded. “Something is disturbing the star, making it throw out great flaming tongues. Very dangerous, I would think.”
They were coming up on this system pretty fast. Cliff thumbed in the whole data field. The obviously artificial disk — okay, call it the cap, because he could sense from the image that it was curved away from their point of
