In the meantime, a new and different project was undertaken using Titan, the near-Earth-sized moon of cold and distant Saturn, thick with poisonous air precipitated from deadly half-frozen seas. Here they would slowly open Borelli Points, slowly build up a concentration of Flux completely around the small world, until they had the density necessary to do something with it. Here Westrex and its cousins, and the Russians, and Chinese, and French, and Brazilians, among others, would combine to create the project and work their individual projects on it.
The Titan project was barely off the drawing boards, though, before something that seemed both magical and revolutionary beyond measure happened. Only weeks after the first probe had been launched, and while the second was just being readied, there came back, through the small device designed for that purpose, a message cylinder from the first probe. It punched through and resolidified exactly where it should have, and for the first time proved the computer mathematics.
The computer they sent had in fact arrived somewhere. It also had a sense of humor, it appeared, although whom that was due to was open to discussion. There was a massive amount of data in the small craft that returned, but the opening lines were carefully considered by the far-off computer for their historical import.
“One. Having wonderful time,” it said. “Wish you were here.
“Two. Wish one of us knew where ‘here’ is.”
“I must be frank with you all,” said Graham. “We still do not know where ‘here’ is. We know only that it is someplace, and that it is in the direct line along the road to everywhere else. So, in answer to where it is, we must just say that it is there. The first one that takes it and settles it will have the freedom of an entire world, perhaps an entire sector of the galaxy, to experiment with Flux. It will also be the doorway, the way through, for everyone else who wishes to do so themselves. Do not tell me how poor our nations are—I know it. Do not tell us that we cannot afford it, that no nation, and perhaps not even all nations together, can afford it. We must afford it, because we cannot afford not to have it. I won’t dwell on it as necessary to human advancement. Those things can and have been postponed. It is necessary for our survival, our direct freedom and independence from the power blocs of this world.”
“But if it ruins us before we get any gain, what is the difference?” a voice asked from the audience.
She stared directly at the speaker. “You must get this into your head. There is no choice for us. There are no alternatives. We are reaching our limits on this planet. Energy is dear. The land is depleted and has been pushed as far as it can be by technology. Colonies on the L-5 model are only temporary expediency and very vulnerable. We do this, or our children starve and die.” A hand shot up. “Yes?”
“What sort of population do you envision for this place?”
“Good question. First, space has always been a high-tech frontier, where it is the common man, the displaced, the alienated, and the poor who build frontier societies. We propose a compromise, and for practical reasons. We wish them to be self-sufficient. It will never be cheap to send large ships back and forth along these energy roads. Although there will be the finest scientific and technical minds there, and the most advanced computers ever built, nothing is foolproof. Robotics cannot be depended upon when the factories and the associated industrial base are perhaps millions of light years away. We propose a dual structure—the high tech devoted to where it is most needed, and profitable, in the maintenance of the environment and in research and development, and the basic needs furnished by those who know how to do it even now, without our fancy methods. The farmers of the Nile, and the rain forests and the parched plains of Africa and Asia will provide those skills that depend on no machine. They will go for their own land, their own world, their own new start, with skills most of us have forgotten. It will be primitive at the start, but it will have the ability to be self-sufficient even if totally cut off from us.”
They were aghast. “Is that a possibility?” someone finally voiced aloud.
“Anything is possible,” Graham admitted. “However, if the space-agronomy projects have taught us anything, it is never to depend on mechanization totally for your basics. One can die before the repairman arrives. And we don’t know what they will discover out there, but they have the potential to eventually tap all of the energy anyone ever requires—the ships already are powered by the very Flux medium they travel in—and what they might create with it is anyone’s guess. They might be able eventually to make anything they need. The things they will explore are quite dangerous, far too dangerous to risk here, but their potential is limitless.”
“Theirs is,” said an Australian woman, “but what do we get out of it?”
“Knowledge. That is their export. What they successfully do there, we can duplicate here. If they can create a self-sufficient paradise out of a barren, cold rock, then what might we be able to do to reclaim our own world?”
“You make it sound like they could become like gods,” noted a man in an Arab burnoose. “It smacks of blasphemy.”
“Which is the blasphemy?” Graham shot back. “To learn all that can be learned, to do everything possible to end poverty, misery, and hunger, or to not do so when we have the chance? Should we not irrigate parched fields because God did not wish the water there? Should we not use genetics to grow hardy food where none would grow before because God willed such famine? Which is good and which is evil? To alleviate misery and suffering or to tolerate it when it is not necessary? Your own religious leaders have already answered that. We are humans or we are animals, and if we are humans, then we progress. Only the devil would ever want things to stop. ,
“No, sir. These people will need all the blessings God can bestow, far more than even we.”
3
PROJECT DEMIGOD
“All stations stand by,” the public address system said. “All passengers remain seated and belted in your cabins until instructed to do otherwise.”
There was a sudden uneasy feeling of falling and lurching in his stomach, but it was over quickly. He understood, though, why passengers were forbidden breakfast the morning of a docking.
There were sudden massive banging sounds echoing hollowly through the ship, then two gongs sounded and everything returned somewhat to normal.
“Docking sequence complete,” announced the PA. “Passengers should proceed to their designated shuttle airlocks. Do not rush. The shuttles will not leave until all passengers are comfortably aboard. Thank you for being with us.”
He sighed, undid the mass of webbing that held him in place during all that banging and shaking, then checked his tiny room one last time to see if he’d forgotten anything, pressed the door stud, and, when the door slid back with a quiet wishhhh sound, stepped into the central corridor.
In spite of the pleasant P.A. announcements and the pretensions of civility, there were no passenger liners to Titan, nor were there likely to be. The ship and its accommodations were spartan, and in spite of some efforts by the company to provide some diversions, it was pretty damned dull. This particular ship was run by Commonwealth Unified Transport Command, an intergovernmental military unit, and passengers were treated less like passengers than like military cargo.
Part of the problem, he’d decided long ago, was that the more experienced people got, the less they seemed to learn. Here was the greatest combined project in human history, an unprecedented cooperative effort of many different cultures, languages, and social and political systems, and it was still the damned military running the show. Or, rather, militaries. Russians came in Soviet Space Command vessels and went down to the Socialist Allied Research Center, firmly under military control and off limits to anyone else unless invited and escorted. Ditto the Chinese, and even the damned Franco-Brazilian project. Naturally, that meant that his folks had to do the same.
Westrex was, in fact, the most polyglot of all the projects, having representatives from more than forty nations and so many different races and cultures, it was impossible to keep track of them all. The only thing they had in common was that more than two thirds had once been colonies or outposts of Great Britain in its heyday, and forced the commonality of the English language on each other and the rest.
He got into the shuttle with the others going down to Westrex’s complex and grumbled to himself when he saw that there was nothing but an enclosed cabin here as well. More spartan seats, no privacy, and not even any sign of a lavatory. He would have liked to actually see Titan from this point, and particularly the great and dominant orb of Saturn, but they really hadn’t provided anything for folks like him. Considering the alternative, rudely suggested to complainers, was to get out and walk, he knew he had to put up with it.
Except for a sergeant coming by to see that everyone was strapped in and colored lights to indicate ship progress and conditions, there was nothing other than one initial bang to indicate that the shuttle had left the mother ship and was now making its way down to the surface of Titan.
Titan. Somehow it still didn’t seem real. That was the trouble with the lack of viewing screens and the near lack of sensation. It hardly seemed that he had moved at all, particularly since boarding the ship in Earth orbit. Now, the takeoff from Earth—that had been an experience. And at Station G there had been plenty of provision for looking back at the blue and white Earth. After boarding the tin can, though, there had been no such sensations and no comparisons. He might as well have spent six weeks in solitary confinement.
The trip down wound up being a corker though. You could really feel and hear when they hit the atmosphere, really get pains from the straps as you were flung this way and that, and at the extreme end of the journey it was like a cross between being on a runaway roller coaster and a small plane in a fierce thunderstorm. No one aboard said very much, and the sensations and restrictions of the seat webbing made it impossible to socialize even with people you’d made friends with on the trip out.
Finally, though, with a rude bump they were down, and now there was all sorts of hissing and clanging about. It sounded like monsters were attacking the outer hull. He was only vaguely aware that the artificial gravity was off, when the sergeant walked back through and announced, “All right, ladies and gents, disconnect yer belts. We’ll unload from the rear forward, row by row, please! You up front just stay seated—we’ll get to you.”
The airlock opened, and, in turn, they emerged from the shuttle into a long tube of translucent yellow. Now, walking down the tube, he could feel the difference between the ship’s gravity and Titan’s, although the ship had been deliberately set close to Titan’s so that everyone could get used to it. There was some unexplainable differences between artificial and real gravity, something the body seemed to sense and not like.
To his great surprise, he emerged finally into a very typical-looking customs-and-immigration-type setup such as one might find at an airport on Earth. The only difference was that his personal documents for this were quiet a bit different from a mere passport, and the checkers were in the blue berets and dark greens of Commonwealth Security Command. All of them looked like they were designed in some factory to invade Mars and take it with their bare hands.
“Papers, please.” The big corporal looked both suspicious and bored at one and the same time. He took the papers, then looked at the newcomer as if doubting everything about him. Probably an Australian, the newcomer thought.
“Um, let’s see,” said the corporal, punching some numbers into a console. “Yes. Haller, Tobias Gregson. Born Wanganui, New Zealand—”
“No, that’s not correct. I was born in Wellington,” Haller told him politely. “I’ve tried to get that changed for the past two years.”
“Says here you were born in Wanganui.”
“Ah, yes, well, the person who took it was Pakistani, and I think she had some relations in Wanganui and it was the only city she knew in New Zealand. I met two other involuntary Wanganui natives on the ship out.”
The corporal sighed. “Dr. Haller, I don’t give a flying New Zealand lamb’s ass about that. If you are Haller of Wanganui, I can admit you. If you are disputing this data, I will be forced to refuse entry unless you can prove the error incontrovertably. You will be sent back to reboard the ship. Now, which will it be? There’s others waiting.”
He sighed. “I’ll take Wanganui, Corporal. At least it’s on the right island.”
The corporal inserted a card in his machine, and there was a grinding noise, then another small card came out of a slot all neatly laminated and with an alligator clip on the back. He took it, and saw that it was a green badge with his particulars on it, including a nice hologram of his face. But for the size and the clip, it reminded him of his driver’s license.
“Wear that at all times while here,” the corporal told him. “Go only into areas that have the same color as the badge unless authorized by and in company of someone with a higher clearance. Proper clearances for your job will come in due course from another office. Move along.”
Haller now moved beyond the gate to the second area, where he found the special shipping carton containing all his worldly goods, few as they were. One was not allowed much here.
Another security man, this one a mere private, came over to him. “You are cleared, sir,” the soldier told him. “We’ve already gone through and found nothing to question. If you’ll sign the release form, it will be sent directly to your quarters if there’s nothing in it you need now.”
He nodded absently and signed the form. He was a product of a very socialist culture, more so than the Soviets in some ways, although only in the economy, not the political form that went with it, yet he had a deep hatred and contempt for bureaucracy that only endless encounters with it could breed. That the military was the worst of the lot in this regard wasn’t surprising, but he at least expected them to be a bit more efficient at it. He had some reservations about signing without checking to see if indeed it all was still there, but he knew that if they’d taken or broken anything, they’d never admit it anyway, only tie him up for an eternity in bureaucratic knots. He’d made a clean break; there wasn’t anything in there that was really vital.
He walked beyond the customs check to another sliding door, which opened for him as he approached, apparently scanning the badge he wore and reacting accordingly. He had worked on a number of classified projects back on Earth, and the system wasn’t much different. He often wondered, though, just how effective it was. No system was ever really safe and secure unless it could either be completely automated, which was out of the question after what automation had tried to do to people, or until they could peer into the very heart and soul of everyone working there. That last they probably could do now, but if they did, they wouldn’t have anybody left who could be cleared who knew their ass from a hole in the ground.
“Dr. Haller?”
He was startled at the sound of his name, and turned to see a small, thin Chinese woman, perhaps in her mid-thirties, her hair shorter than his own, dressed in casual shirt and jeans. Clipped to the shirt was a badge that seemed to have every color of the rainbow, depending on how the light struck it. “Yes?”
“I’m Lisa Wu. I’ve been asked to see that you get oriented and settled.”
He nodded, feeling a bit less lost and a little more wanted. “Glad to get some assistance. Where do we go from here?”
“Depends on you. If you’re tired, we can go directly to your quarters and I’ll meet you later for dinner, or, if not, I can show you around a bit and take you over to where you’ll be working.”
“After six weeks in a tin can I’d like to roam,” he responded. “Lead on.”
Outside the terminal he stepped, for the first time, into the open. It was a nervous experience, since while he knew it was safe, he also knew just how far the sun was and just how nasty Titan had been in all his schoolbooks.
The sky was a dull gray and not really penetrable, but the temperature seemed quite comfortable, perhaps twenty-four degrees Celsius, with a very slight breeze. The air smelled quite normal, with a few unpleasant odors easily attributed to the spaceport and some nearby other large buildings. He might be somewhere at home on a cloudy day in early spring.
She led him to a small electric cart in one of the parking areas and he got in beside her. All around, others were doing the same.
“Is it usually this busy, Ms. Wu?” he asked her.
“Lisa, please. We all go by first names or nicknames around here. Too many doctors of this and that, too many fancy titles. About the only ones we call by family names or title are the military folks and His Nibs, of course. And if your first name’s too common, we sometimes just use the last as a proper name. You are—Tobias, I think?”
He winced. “Toby, please. I had to suffer through Tobias through all my grade-school years and I’ve never used it unless I had to. Meant to get it changed someday, but never got around to it.”
She smiled and nodded. The base itself was both impressive and totally unimpressive at one and the same time. It was a very plain, drab place, although quite large, with massive gray buildings against the gray sky, wide boulevards for the electric cart traffic, lots of folks in lab whites or utility olives, and a singularly ugly and unappealing kind of grass, the best thing that could be said about which was that it was a sickly green.
What was impressive was that it was here at all, and that it hadn’t been blasted out of the savage surface of Titan and domed but almost literally created out of thought by some good computers, a lot of hairy programming and applied physics, and a massive amount of bled-in Flux.
She pointed out the various buildings, which had a prefabricated sameness to them. They were, in fact, prefabricated, as were all the man-made things he saw, not by Flux but in the old-fashioned way and trucked in here. These days they could do quite a bit more with it using Flux, but it was more trouble than it was worth considering that it was already here. The aesthetics of the place repelled him—early army camp— but, then, one of the reasons they’d hired him and many like him was to do something about that when the time came.
“Those are dormitories over there,” she told him, pointing to a tall building perhaps two square blocks around. “The accommodations aren’t all that wonderful, I’m afraid, but you’ll have a private room and a decent bed, desk, and a terminal in the room. You share the bathroom with whoever is next door, I fear. The second floor is a dining hall, where meals are served at all hours of the day and night. If you wish breakfast, there’s a cafeteria area for it. Lunch, another, and also one each for supper and for just a tea. Over there in that building is a health club, swimming pool, sauna, whirlpool, and other such things. It’s quite nice, but all the instructors seem to be army sergeants, so beware before you ask them to work out an exercise program for you.”
He chuckled. “I’ll remember. Oh—I meant to ask. How did you pick me out of that crowd without a photograph?”
She chuckled. “They told me to look for someone huge who appeared to be an advert for New Zealand wool.”
He felt suddenly provincial. It was true though. He was 188 centimeters tall and built solid as a rock, weighing in at a bit over 111 kilograms. He had dark red hair and a neatly trimmed reddish beard, and was given to wearing wool sweaters, slacks, and tough station boots, and his eyes were a steely blue. His face was blocky and square-jawed, and he knew he looked more rugged than handsome, but this hadn’t been the first time he’d been teased about looking like a man in some advertising poster.
“I’m originally from Singapore,” she told him, “although I spent a great deal of time in Kenya and went to school there and I tend to think of that as home. No matter which one you choose, it’s pretty far from here.”
He nodded, feeling a little far away from home himself.
“Before we go up to the labs, I’m going to swing by and show you the master Flux Gate,” she said. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”
Because of the physics involved, the Gate, which was the source of all this, was in the center of the enclave. It was enclosed by a high metal wall and its own entrance was guarded by armed military personnel. With a little talking, her clearance seemed enough to get them through.
They parked just inside the entrance and went over to a railing, then looked down at the Gate itself. It was a dish-shaped thing, ribbed so that it provided some footing, leading down to a dark central area.
“We aren’t allowed down the hole itself right now, although later on they’ll probably take you in. It’s a pretty awesome sight in there.”
“It’s pretty awesome right here,” he told her. “And a little scary, if I do admit it.”
Deep below here was, he knew, an environmental maintenance computer controlling the air, the temperature, the humidity—everything. Back inside that dark hole, at its very end, was nothing less than a Borelli Point, quite small, yet, because of the forces and energy fields at work, probably very impressive indeed to look at. The Point was constantly opening and closing, far too briefly for any human to see, letting in just a little Flux at a time, as needed, to be converted by the machinery there into whatever was required to retain stability. Its steady operation was a matter of life and death to them, and it was unnerving to consider that all this, and all life, could be wiped out with a single major malfunction of that equipment. It had happened before, although not in the past decade, and not when things were set up this well, and if it failed, there was no emergency procedures that would do any good. The only margin was a matter of a few hours, the time it would take for the temperature to drop below any tolerance and for the population to use up the last of the energy and atmosphere. There were three shuttles, of course, but like the lifeboats on the Titanic, they were far too few to save many people.
“A power grid is bonded into the surface here, under everything you see and stand on,” she told him. “All our general power comes from here as well, although there’s some independent storage supplies for the labs, of course.”
They walked back to the electric cart, and for the first time he noticed the small strips dropping from under it to the pavement. Even the cart took its power from the grid.