Ark

10

Liu opened the discussion of his “Category Two.” He brought up graphs and tables and artists’ renderings of exotic worlds. Liu said, “Like many other programs, the work of ‘planet-finding’ was pretty much curtailed by the flood. That is, using advanced telescopic and photographic techniques, including telescopes in space, to detect and study the planets of other stars. Nevertheless several hundred such ‘exoplanets’ were found before the flood came, and more have been found since. And of these, several dozen are like Earth. They have masses similar to Earth’s, and appear to have water oceans-”

“Some of them have life,” Jerzy Glemp said, grinning. “We know that from atmospheric signatures-oxygen, methane. Spectroscopic records of photosynthetic chemicals.”

Patrick was stunned. “We found life on other planets? I didn’t know that.”

Kenzie said dryly, “These days the news agenda tends to be dominated by domestic issues.”

“Think of the irony,” Jerzy said. “We finally discovered life beyond Earth just as we are becoming extinct on Earth itself.”

Liu said, “These worlds are ‘Earthlike’ only in as much as they are more like Earth than Mars is, say. Nevertheless-”

“Nevertheless,” Kenzie said, “if one of them was floating around the solar system we’d fire our kids over there like a shot. Correct? So how far away are these things?”

Jerzy Glemp shrugged. “Well, there’s the rub. The nearest star system is Alpha Centauri-four light-years away. That’s a distance hard to grasp. It’s around forty trillion kilometers. A hundred million times further away than the moon is from Earth.”

Kenzie waved that away. “And the nearest Earth-like world? How far to that?”

Liu said, “The nearest reasonable candidate is sixteen light-years away.”

“Oh, that all? OK, so how do we get there? I’d guess from our previous discussion about the domes on Mars that you guys wouldn’t think we could run a space mission, unsupported, of more than a few years. A decade, tops. So that’s the timescale. Have I got that right? So how do we get to the stars in a decade? I take it chemical rockets, the shuttle and the Saturn, are out. If it took three days for Apollo to fly to the moon-”

Patrick grinned. “Only three million years to Earth II!”

Glemp said, “An alternative is to use electricity to throw ions, charged atoms, out the back as your exhaust. A much higher exhaust velocity gives you a better performance…”

But Liu quickly dug out a whiskery study that suggested that even an ion rocket would need the equivalent of a hundred million supertankers of fuel to reach Alpha Centauri in a century or less.

“Nuclear engines, then,” Glemp went on. “Back in the 60s NASA developed a ground-based test bed of a fission engine-hydrogen heated up by being passed through a hot nuclear fission pile and squirted out the back…” NERVA had worked. But again, as they paged through theoretical studies from the archives, they quickly found that the fuel demands for an interstellar mission on the timescales they required were impossibly large. They did find some useful material, such as a NASA study on lightweight nuclear engines meant to power a generation of unmanned explorers of Jupiter’s moons, probes that never got built; Glemp and Liu flagged such material for further study.

Glemp said, “Look-you don’t actually need any fuel at all to reach the stars. You can use a solar sail…” A sail kilometers across, made of some wispy, resilient substance that would gather in the gentle, unrelenting pressure of sunlight, of solar photons bouncing off a mirrored surface. “Such a craft would take mere centuries to reach the stars.”

“Too long!” Kenzie snapped. “We’re drifting here, guys.” He pushed back his chair and walked around the room. He paused briefly by the kids, who, with Harry patiently filming them, were acting out a siege of their plastic fort. Kenzie said, “Captain Kirk never had this trouble. Where’s a warp drive when you need one?”

They laughed, all save Liu, and Patrick wondered if that was because he’d never heard of Star Trek. But the Chinese said, “That of course would be the solution. A faster-than-light drive.”

“No such thing exists,” said Kenzie.

Jerzy Glemp said firmly, “No such thing can exist. According to Einstein the speed of light is an absolute upper limit on velocity within the spacetime of our universe.”

“True,” Liu said. “But spacetime itself is not a fixed frame. That is the essence of general relativity. In the early moments of the universe, all of spacetime went through a vast expansion. During the interval known as inflation, that expansion was actually faster than light.”

Patrick was lost, but Jerzy Glemp was intent. “What are you suggesting? That we ride a bubble of inflating spacetime?”

“I don’t know,” Liu Zheng said. “I have a faint memory, of a study long ago… May I check it out?” Kenzie waved his permission, and Liu began to scroll through screens of references and citations.

Kenzie said, “You know, maybe we need to step aside from the core problem for a minute. We are after all talking about starting up a space program here in Colorado. However we travel to the stars we’re going to need launch facilities to get to orbit in the first place: gantries, blast pits, liquid oxygen factories, communications, a Mission Control, the whole Cape Canaveral thing. Jerzy, we need to find ourselves some space engineers. And some real-life astronauts, to train our guys. Got to be some of them around.”

“Canaveral itself is long drowned,” Patrick said. “Went under with Florida. There was an alternate launch facility in the west.”

“Vandenberg,” Kenzie said. “Run by the air force. Must be flooded too, but maybe more recently. If we have to salvage equipment from one or other of these places, Vandenberg might be the better choice.”

“But that’s a huge commitment,” Patrick said. “A whole new space program! At such a time of crisis, how can you expect to get the government to back you?”

Kenzie smiled. “There’s always national defense. Look-one effect of the flood has been to knock out our national war-making capabilities. Oh, we’ve been moving nuke-tipped ICBMs out of flooded silos in Kansas. But the basic infrastructure has been hit too. NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain is still operating, not far from here. But all Cheyenne did was gather data and feed warnings to Raven Rock on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, the Pentagon’s deep-bunker control hub, which has now been lost. Meanwhile our satellites are degrading one by one. Even our deep-defense radar systems are failing, now that the bases in Britain and Canada are flooded out. And you have warlike noises coming out of China and Russia and India. What if those guys decide they need a bit of lebensraum over here in the US of A? What are we going to do about it? I think the federal government could be sold the need for a space launch facility, here on the high ground, to give us the means to launch recon sats and to retaliate in case of any strike against us.”

“Isn’t that kind of cynical?”

Kenzie just grinned. “The space program has always run off the back of the military programs. The first astronauts rode honest-to-God ICBMs to orbit. And anyhow, isn’t it for a good cause? Joe-make a note. Start working on fixing me an appointment with the President as soon as we have a reasonable shopping list-”

Liu spoke softly. “I have it.”

He read, “ ‘The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity.’ A 1994 paper. I am no specialist in relativity but I recognize the soundness of the idea. It is only a theoretical concept, but there are a number of citations…”

Jerzy quickly brought up a copy of the paper and skimmed it. “My God, Liu. Riding a wave of spacetime at superluminal speeds. This is it.”

“The engineering details are entirely absent. And the energy requirements are daunting-”

“But we have the concept.” Jerzy grinned at Kenzie. “We must start work immediately.”

Kenzie looked from one to the other, openmouthed. “If this isn’t bullshit-all right. Tell me the first thing you need.”

Jerzy considered. “Mathematicians. Physicists. Computer scientists. Anybody who had contact with predecessor studies, like the old NASA Breakthrough Propulsion program of the 1990s. And, by the way, if we are serious about planning for a long-duration spaceflight we will need life-support experts, biologists, doctors, sociologists, anthropologists.”

Liu said, “Also an artificial intelligence suite, equipped with symbolic manipulator tools.”

“A what-now?”

“We will build a warp bubble. This will be a designer metric.” He mimed a bubble with his hand. “A piece of spacetime, molded to our purposes. To design such a thing we will need a computer system that can solve Einstein’s relativity equations.”

“Make a list.”

Patrick, feeling lost again, shook his head. “Are we serious? Are we really going to try to build a warp drive?”

Jerzy shrugged. “Compared to terraforming a planet, or trying to run a spaceflight lasting centuries to thousands of years, it is a relatively easy option.”

“Fine. So we have something to work on. Meeting adjourned!” Kenzie slammed his palm down on the desk, and toasted them in cold coffee. “Here’s to Ark One, born today. Hey, Joe, make a note of the date and time.”

As the meeting broke up, Patrick went over to collect Holle. The kids were watching a playback of their movie on Holle’s handheld. The teacher, Harry, was cuddling Zane; he moved away, smiling, as Patrick approached.

Holle ran to her father and hugged his knees. “Dad! Did you see what we did?”

“The fort and everything? Some of it. We were busy over there. But you can show me later.”

She looked up at him, her face round and serious. “And did you have a good morning, Dad?”

Which was a question Linda had always asked. He ruffled her hair and said, “Yes, I think so. I hope so. We got stuck for a bit. You know what I always say, sweets. If the answer’s not the one you want, maybe you’re asking the wrong question. I think maybe we asked the right question in the end.”

“That’s good. Is it lunchtime now?”

“Yes, it’s lunchtime. Let’s get out of here.”