We Have Fed Our Sea

5

The Authority booked first-class passages for all expeditionary personnel, which in the case of a hop up to the Moon meant a direct ferry traveling at one gee all the way. Standing by the observation window, an untasted drink in his hand, David Ryerson remarked: “You know, this is only the third time I’ve been off Earth. And the other two, we transshipped at Satellite and went free-fall most of the way.”

“Sounds like fun,” said Maclaren. “I must try it sometime.”

“You… in your line of work… you must go to the Moon quite often,” said Ryerson shyly.

Maclaren nodded. “Mount Ambarzumian Observatory, on Farside. Still a little dust and gas to bother us, of course, but I’ll let the purists go out to Plato Satellite and bring me back their plates.”

“And — No. Forgive me.” Ryerson shook his blond head.

“Go on.” Maclaren, seated in a voluptuous formfit lounger, offered a box of cigarettes. He thought he knew Ryerson’s type, serious, gifted, ambitious, but awe-smitten at the gimcrack fact of someone’s hereditary technic rank. “Go ahead,” he invited. “I don’t embarrass easy.”

“I was only wondering… who paid for all your trips, the observatory or—”

“Great ancestors! The observatory?” Maclaren threw back his head and laughed with the heartiness of a man who had never had to be very cautious. It rang above the low music and cultivated chatter; even the ecdysiast paused an instant on her stage.

“My dear old colleague,” said Maclaren, “I not only pay my own freight, I am expected to contribute generously toward the expenses of the institution. At least,” he added, “my father is. But where else would money for pure research come from? You can’t tax it out of the lower commons, y’ know. They haven’t got it. The upper commons are already taxed to the limit, short of pushing them back down into the hand-to-mouth masses. And the Protectorate rests on a technic class serving but not paying. That’s the theory, anyhow: in practice, of course, a lot of ‘em do neither. But how else would you support abstract science, except by patronage? Thank the Powers for the human snob instinct, it keeps both research and art alive.”

Ryerson looked alarmed; glanced about as if expecting momentary arrest, finally lowered himself to the edge of a chair and almost whispered: “Yes, sir, yes, I know, naturally. I was just not so… so familiar with the details of… financing.”

“Eh? But how could you have missed learning? You trained to be a scientist, didn’t you?”

Ryerson stared out at Earth, sprawling splendor across the constellations. “I set out to be a spaceman,” he said, blushing. “But in the last couple of years I got more interested in gravitics, had to concentrate too much on catching up in that field to well… also, I was planning to emigrate, so I wasn’t interested in — The colonies need trained men. The opportunities—”

Pioneering is an unlimited chance to become the biggest frog, provided the puddle is small enough, thought Maclaren. But he asked aloud, politely, “Where to?”

“Rama. The third planet of Washington 5584.”

“Hm-m-m? Oh, yes. The new one, the GO dwarf. Uh, how far from here?”

“Ninety-seven light-years. Rama has just passed the five-year survey test.” Ryerson leaned forward, losing shyness in his enthusiasm. “Actually, sir, Rama is the most nearly terrestroid planet they have yet found. The biochemistry is so similar to Earth’s that one can even eat some of the native plants and — Oh, and there are climatic zones, oceans, forests, mountains, a single big moon—”

“And thirty years of isolation,” said Maclaren. “Nothing connecting you to the universe but a voice.”

Ryerson reddened again. “Does that matter so much?” he asked aggressively. “Are we losing a great deal by that?”

“I suppose not,” said Maclaren.

Your lives, perhaps, he thought. Remember the Shadow Plague on New Kashmir? Or your children — there was the mutation virus on Gondwana. Five years is not long enough to learn a planet; the thirty-year quarantine is an arbitrary minimum. And, of course, there are the more obvious and spectacular things, which merely kill colonists without threatening the human race. Storms, quakes, morasses, volcanoes, meteorites. Cumulative poisoning. Wild animals. Unsuspected half-intelligent aborigines. Strangeness, loneliness, madness. It’s no wonder the colonies which survive develop their own cultures. It’s no wonder they come to think of Earth as a parasite on their own tedious heroisms. Of course, with ten billion people, and a great deal of once arable country sterilized by radiation, Earth has little choice.

What I would like to know is, why does anyone emigrate in the first place? The lessons are ghastly enough; why do otherwise sensible people, like this boy, refuse to learn them?

“Oh, well,” he said aloud. He signaled the waiter. “Refuel us, chop-chop.”

Ryerson looked in some awe at the chit which the other man thumbprinted. He could not suppress it: “Do you always travel first-class to the Moon?”

Maclaren put a fresh cigarette between his lips and touched his lighter-ring to the end. His smile cocked it at a wry angle.

“I suppose,” he answered, “I have always traveled first-class through life.”

The ferry made turnover without spilling a drink or a passenger and backed down onto Tycho Port. Maclaren adjusted without a thought to Lunar gravity, Ryerson turned a little green and swallowed a pill. But even in his momentary distress, Ryerson was bewildered at merely walking through a tube to a monorail station. Third-class passengers must submit to interminable official bullying: safety regulations, queues, assignment to hostel. Now, within minutes, he was again on soft cushions, staring through crystalline panes at the saw-toothed magnificence of mountains.

When the train got under way, he gripped his hands together, irrationally afraid. It took him a while to hunt down the reason: the ghost of his father’s God, ranting at pride and sloth from the tomb which the son had erected.

“Let’s eat,” said Maclaren. “I chose this train with malice aforethought. It’s slow enough so we can enjoy our meal en route, and the chef puts his heart into the oysters won-ton.”

“I’m not… not hungry,” stammered Ryerson.

Maclaren’s dark, hooked face flashed a grin. “That’s what cocktails and hors d’oeuvres are for, lad. Stuff yourself. If it’s true what I’ve heard of deep-space rations, we’re in for a dreary month or two.”

“You mean you’ve never been on an interstellar ship?”

“Of course not. Never been beyond the Moon in my life. Why should I do any such ridiculous thing?”

Maclaren’s cloak swirled like fire as he led the way toward the diner. Beneath an iridescent white tunic, his legs showed muscular and hairless, down to the tooled-leather buskins; the slant of the beret on his head was pure insolence. Ryerson, trailing drably behind in spaceman’s gray coveralls, felt bitterness. What have I been dragged away from Tamara for? Does this peacock know a mass from a hole in the ground? He’s hired himself a toy, is all, because for a while he’s bored with wine and women… and Tamara is locked away on a rock with a self-righteous old beast who hates the sound of her name!

As they sat down at their table, Maclaren went on, “But this is too good a chance to pass up. I found me a tame mathematician last year and sicced him onto the Schrodinger equation — Sugimoto’s relativistic version, I mean; Yuen postulates too bloody much for my taste — anyhow, he worked it out for the quantities involved in a dark star, mass and gravitational intensities and cetera. His results make us both wonder if such a body doesn’t go over to an entirely new stage of degeneracy at the core. One gigantic neutron? Well, maybe that’s too fantastic. But consider—”

And while the monorail ran on toward Farside, Maclaren left the Interhuman language quite behind him. Ryerson could follow tensors, even when scribbled on a menu, but Maclaren had some new function, symbolized by a pneumatic female outline, that reduced to a generalized tensor under certain conditions. Ryerson stepped out on Farside, two hours later, with his brain rotating.

He had heard of the cyclopean installations which fill the whole of Yukawa Crater and spread out onto the plains beyond. Who has not? But all he saw on his first visit was a gigantic concourse, a long slideway tunnel, and a good many uniformed technicians. He made some timid mention of his disappointment to Maclaren. The New Zealander nodded: “Exactly. There’s more romance, more sense of distance covered, and a devil of a lot better scenery, in an afternoon on the bay, than in a fifty light-year leap. I say space travel is overrated. And it’s a fact, I’ve heard, that spacemen themselves prefer the interplanetary runs. They take the dull interstellar watches as a matter of duty, by turns.”

Here and there the tunnel branched off, signs indicating the way to Alpha Centauri Jump, Tau Ceti Jump, Epsilon Eridani Jump, all the long-colonized systems. Those were for passengers; freight went by other beams. There was no great bustle along any of the tubes. Comparatively few Earthlings had occasion to visit outsystem on business; still fewer could afford it for pleasure, and of course no colonial came here without a grudging O.K. The Protector had trouble enough; he was not going to expose the mother planet and its restless billions to new ideas born under new skies, nor let any more colonials than he could help see first-hand what an inferior position they held. That was the real reason for the ban, every educated Terrestrial knew as much. The masses, being illiterate, swallowed a vague official excuse about trade policy.

The branches leading to Sirius Jump, Procyon Jump, and the other attained but uncolonizable systems, were almost deserted. Little came from such places — perhaps an occasional gem or exotic chemical. But relay stations had been established there, for ‘casting to more useful planets.

Ryerson’s heart leaped when he passed a newly activated sign: an arrow and WASHINGTON 5584 JUMP burning above. That tunnel would be filled, come next week!

He should have been in the line. And Tamara. Well, there would be later waves. His passage was already paid for, he had had no difficulty about transferring to another section.

To make conversation, he said through a tightness: “Where are the bulkheads?”

“Which ones?” asked Maclaren absently.

“Safety bulkheads. A receiver does fail once in a great while, you know. That’s why the installations here are spread out so much, why every star has a separate ‘caster. There’s a vast amount of energy involved in each transmission — one reason why a ‘casting is more expensive than transportation by spaceship. Even a small increment, undissipated, can melt a whole chamber.”

“Oh, yes. That.” Maclaren had let Ryerson get pompous about the obvious because it was plain he needed something to bolster himself. What itched the kid, anyhow? One should think that when the Authority offered a fledgling a post on an expedition as fundamental as this — Of course, it had upset Ryerson’s plans of emigration. Rut not importantly. There was no danger he would find all the choice sites on Rama occupied if he came several weeks late: too few people had the fare as it was.

Maclaren said, “I see what you mean. Yes, the bulkheads are there, but recessed into the walls and camouflaged. You don’t want to emphasize possible danger to the cash customers, eh? Some technic might get annoyed and make trouble.”

“Some day,” said Ryerson, “they’ll reduce the energy margin needed; and they’ll figure how to reproduce a Frank tube, rather than manufacture it. Record the pattern and recreate from a matter bank. Then anyone can afford to ride the beams. Interplanetary ships, even air and surface craft, will become obsolete.”

Maclaren made no answer. He had sometimes thought, more or less idly, about the unrealized potentialities of matter-casting. Hard to say whether personal immortality would be a good thing or not. Not for the masses, surely! Too many of them as it was. But a select few, like Terangi Maclaren — or was it worth the trouble? Even given boats, chess, music, the-No Drama, beautiful women and beautiful spectroscopes, life could get heavy.

As for matter transmission, the difficulty and hence the expense lay in the complexity of the signal. Consider an adult human. There are some 1014 cells in him, each an elaborate structure involving many proteins with molecular weights in the millions. You had to scan every one of those molecules — identify it structurally, ticket its momentary energy levels, and place it in proper spatio-temporal relationship to every other molecule — as nearly simultaneously as the laws of physics permitted. You couldn’t take a man apart, or reassemble him, in more than a few microseconds; he wouldn’t survive it. You couldn’t even transmit a recognizable beefsteak in much less of a hurry.

So the scanning beam went through and through, like a blade of energy. It touched every atom in its path, was modified thereby, and flashed that modification onto the transmitter matrix. But such fury destroyed. The scanned object was reduced to gas so quickly that only an oscilloscope could watch the process. The gas was sucked into the destructor chamber and atomically condensed in the matter bank; in time it would become an incoming passenger, or incoming freight. In a sense, the man had died.

If you could record the signal which entered the transmitter matrix — you could keep such a record indefinitely, recreate the man and his instantaneous memories, thoughts, habits, prejudices, hopes and loves and hates and horrors, a thousand years afterward. You could create a billion identical men. Or, more practically, a single handmade prototype could become a billion indistinguishable copies; nothing would be worth more than any handful of dirt. Or… superimpose the neurone trace-patterns, memories, of a lifetime, onto a recorded twenty-year-old body, be born again and live forever!

The signal was too complex, though. An unpromising research program went on. Perhaps in a few centuries they would find some trick which would enable them to record a man, or even a Frank tube. Meanwhile, transmission had to be simultaneous with scanning. The signal went out. Probably it would be relayed a few times. Eventually the desired receiving chamber got it. The receiver matrix, powered by dying atomic nuclei, flung gases together, formed higher elements, formed molecules and cells and dreams according to the signal, in microseconds. It was designed as an energy-consuming process, for obvious reasons: packing fraction energy was dissipated in gravitic and magnetic fields, to help shape the man. (Or the beefsteak, or the spaceship, or the colonial planet’s produce.) He left the receiving chamber and went about his business.

A mono-isotopic element is a simple enough signal to record, Maclaren reminded himself, though even that requires a houseful of transistor elements. So this civilization can afford to be extravagant with metals — can use pure mercury as the raw material of a spaceship’s blast, for instance. But we still eat our bread in the sweat of some commoner’s brow.

Not for the first time, but with no great indignation — life was too short for anything but amusement at the human race — Maclaren wondered if the recording problem really was as difficult as the physicists claimed. No government likes revolutions, and molecular duplication would revolutionize society beyond imagining. Just think how they had to guard the stations as it was, and stick them out here on the Moon …otherwise, even today, some fanatic could steal a tube of radium from a hospital and duplicate enough to sterilize a planet!

“Oh, well,” he said, half aloud.

They reached the special exploration section and entered an office. There was red tape to unsnarl. Ryerson let Maclaren handle it, and spent the time trying to understand that soon the pattern which was himself would be embodied in newly-shaped atoms, a hundred light-years from Tamara. It wouldn’t penetrate. It was only words.

Finally the papers were stamped. The transceivers to/from an interstellar spaceship could handle several hundred kilos at a time; Maclaren and Ryerson went together. They had a moment’s wait because of locked safety switches on the Southern Cross: someone else was arriving or departing ahead of them.

“Watch that first step,” said Maclaren. “It’s a honey.”

“What?” Ryerson blinked at him, uncomprehending.

The circuit closed. There was no sensation, the process went too fast.

The scanner put its signal into the matrix. The matrix modulated the carrier wave. But such terminology is mere slang, borrowed from electronics. You cannot have a “wave” when you have no velocity, and gravitational forces do not. (This is a more accurate rendition of the common statement that “gravitation propagates at an infinite speed.") Inconceivable energies surged within a thermonuclear fire chamber; nothing controlled them, nothing could control them, but the force fields they themselves generated. Matter pulsed in and out of existence qua matter, from particle to gamma ray quantum and back. Since quanta have no rest mass, the pulsations disturbed the geometry of space according to the laws of Einsteinian mechanics. Not much: gravitation is feebler than magnetism or electricity. Were it not for the resonance effect, the signal would have been smothered in “noise” a few kilometers away. Even as it was, there were many relayings across the parsecs until the matrix on the Cross reacted. And yet in one sense no time at all had passed; and no self-respecting mathematician would have called the “beam” by such a name. It was, however, a signal, the only signal which relativity physics allowed to go faster than light — and, after all, it did not really go, it simply was.

Despite the pill inside him, Ryerson felt as if the bottom had dropped out of the world. He grabbed for a handhold. The after-image of the transmitter chamber yielded to the coils and banks of the receiver room on a spaceship. He hung weightless, a thousand billion billion kilometers from Earth.