“We’ll go back up to the dorm now and get you settled in, then get something to eat. Your schedule should be up and posted on your terminal under your employee ID. number— the one on the badge. You’ll want to sleep and freshen up before you start in. You almost certainly have an audience with His Nibs tomorrow.”
His bushy eyebrows rose. “Dr. van Haas?”
“Nobody else. Landscape engineering is one of his passions. You see, he’s one of those brilliant minds that can grasp just about anything anyone is doing around here with a minimum of explanation, although he’s not expert at any. That’s what makes him the ideal administrator—the only one of the big bosses who’s not from the unified military commands.”
He looked at her and frowned. “And what about you? What do you do when you’re not meeting adverts for New Zealand wool?”
She laughed. “I am with the Department of History.”
“Huh?”
“History. Our job is to record every bit of what is happening here for future reference and understanding, as well as the organized history of the development of the world itself. After we’re there, my office will also try to keep the links to Earth’s cultures among the young who will be born and raised there, so that they will never be ignorant of or cut off from their heritage. Not a very glamorous job, I’m afraid, and not one that the leadership here or the scientific establishment believes is very important. Fortunately, some of our most affluent backers do.”
“History was never one of my strong suits, I’m afraid.”
“It should be—and will be.” She looked out at the drab grayness of the small research station. “This,” she said softly, “is history.”
Rembrandt van Haas was a tall gaunt man with a lantern jaw and tiny eyes that seemed jet black. Although barely forty, he was mostly bald except for some gray fringes on the sides and in back, and he tended to walk like an old man with a slight stoop. That, and his large hawklike nose, earned him the nickname of The Vulture, but never within earshot of him.
His grandparents had been the Netherlands’ ambassador and trade attaché to Indonesia when the great blackout was triggered. Their tiny country survived—it was one of those nations that had evolved under rough conditions and always seemed to survive—but in a wrecked and ruined state. They had gone back, of course, to see what they could do in aid. and coordinated a great deal of the initial relief efforts, but ultimately they had returned to Djakarta, where the children had remained with the small but still cohesive Dutch community there. Shortly after he was born they’d immigrated to Australia, which had better opportunities for them and for him, yet was close enough to the family that it wasn’t a complete parting. He always considered Melbourne his home.
He was an only child and spoiled rotten. His mother had been a talented sculptor, his father eventually became a symphony conductor, and she hoped that, he would be the ultimate fusion of the arts and had named him Rembrandt. The few friends he made called him Van, but to almost everyone he was Dr. van Haas.
He had always been somewhat cold and distant to others, and never really related well one-to-one, but it was clear early on that while he was gifted with tremendous intelligence, he was not inclined to the arts but to physics. He had his doctorate at nineteen, and before he was thirty he had designed the regulatory mechanisms for the Borelli Point and presented the first theoretical models of how to terraform with Flux. This had brought him to Westrex, and the Titan Multinational Experimental Station Project had been handed to him. Within five years Titan had proved out all his theories and designs, and he was ready for bigger and better things.
When the first probe had electrified humanity by its message and its data, back when van Haas was just a toddler, it had been followed up with a second, armed with more extensive communications and data-collection equipment. The ships had not emerged near black holes or neutron stars, but they had emerged well out in solar systems containing rather dense stars. It was theorized that the greater forces somehow interacted in the Flux universe and deflected the injected foreign energy to some secondary point. Why one star over another they hadn’t figured out. As new trails were blazed there didn’t seem to be any common thread, but there was always a solar system at the end.
The first such system discovered was a dry hole, a solar system with a tremendous amount of debris but no planets at all. The star map proved useless, as the computer had complained. Although with imagination it was possible to match patterns here and there with models of the sky, there really were no reference points. It appeared to be impossibly distant, although probably still within the Milky Way somewhere.
The theory behind that was simply that the speed of light in the Flux universe was many times, perhaps thousands of times, faster than in our own, and our injection at (our) speed of light was taken and stepped up to the Flux universe’s speed. This meant, quite literally, that the computer probes could be almost anywhere at all, so long as it was a spiral galaxy.
Once something was proved, it was discovered how to do it quicker, cheaper, and better. Unmanned but computer-controlled stations were set up at Base One, as it was called, and from there they shot more arrows. In twenty-five years they had established a road of sorts through Flux from one base to the next, extending through thirteen different systems. The route was serial—everything launched from the solar system went to Base One; everything sent from Base One went to Two, and so on. The road we had built in the Flux universe, which we could neither see, measure, nor understand, seemed quite solid and quite linear.
When van Haas was twenty-nine Base Fourteen was established. It was in fact the next to last. Funding was drying up. Titan looked more promising as a payoff than pure exploration with no immediate utility or return, and the project itself was winding down to a data-collection station, but Fourteen changed all that—and got Titan fully funded as well.
A solar system somewhat like our own, one with planets and a star the right age. It was not a star like our sun, and none of the planets were like any known to humankind, nor in the least bit habitable, but they were there. Eleven planets, five inhospitably awful, making the hells of Mercury and Venus seem tame by comparison, five enormous ringed gas giants, and one totally frozen ball of something or other solid about the size of Mars at the end. But the gas giants had moons, lots of moons, and some were very familiar in various ways. Some were frozen, some were volcanically active, some were misshapen things battered by cosmic debris, but some had poisonous atmospheres that still protected their physical integrity. One in particular was about the size of Titan, a fact not unnoticed by Westrex.
Everyone was nervous about the whole project. Such a long-term project, over such a long period of time, was unprecedented in human history, and it had cost tremendously. The always fragile alliance had often been on the verge of breaking apart, as the nations and allies involved were hardly friendly to one another and often were at great odds throughout various parts of the world—even shooting odds. The Union of Hispanic Socialist Republics held the remains of North America in an iron grip and threatened an encircled Brazil, even with its Guianan allies. The Chinese were threatening Indonesia on the south and Greater India, which included Bangladesh, on the southwest, after having swallowed what remained of Japan. The U.S.S.R. held the top of the globe, from its historic borders to Ireland on the west, Alaska on the east, and Canada down to the Great Lakes and the U.H.S.R border. All hated each other’s guts, and all were meddling in Africa and the Pacific regions, where only the loose Commonwealth and a lot of protectorates of that Commonwealth existed.
The Commonwealth had only one thing—its leadership in research of Flux—but it hadn’t the money to do it on its own. Much of the technology had to be shared with the others just to get things going. The Soviets had Mars almost entirely to themselves, and there really weren’t too many other places to go worth going to.
That was why the leaders of government and industry throughout the Commonwealth had been gathered at the Auckland Conference, and why Madalyn Graham had briefed them. The time was now or never. Either Westrex established the first Flux colony, free to experiment with and control Flux as an independent, secure research colony far from the solar system, or they faced the certain disintegration of the alliance and the takeover of the project by one or more of the others.
It would cost more than any project in history, and those least able to afford it were being asked to pick up the cost at the price of depriving their populations, but it came down to a matter not of supremacy but of survival.
The path through Flux was linear. If Fourteen were established as exclusively Commonwealth, all future colonies would have to pass through it to get there and back. The Commonwealth would have the others as hostages of a sort, and would be in a position to demand sharing of discoveries by future colonies while not being in a position to be forced to divulge all they knew. That alone would keep some of the cooperation going. And, being first, they would retain their leadership in this technology. A whole world as a Philosopher’s Stone, with unlimited energy to play with and a place to do it so distant they could take chances, take risks, that couldn’t be dared on Titan or anywhere even near the solar system.
Of course, the others all demanded a multinational colony with divided areas of control, such as had been established on Titan, and Westrex was having a great deal of trouble fending them off, but now there was a stroke of misfortune for many that was a stroke of luck to the weakest alliance.
The cause of the war wasn’t clear to anyone, including those fighting it, and it was all the more frustrating because as thousands died and armies moved, none of the leaders of the great multinational blocs involved would admit there was a war, while trying to limit its scope. All that was clear is that the Hispanic Republics and the Soviets had come to blows in North America and that China was taking full advantage of it to make some moves of her own in the area of Mongolia and also in the northern Pacific. The weapons were nonnuclear, of course, but that mattered very little to those killed that they were killed by “conventional” bombs on “limited range” missiles and that the disintegration projectors that dissolved whole towns didn’t leave any nasty radiation or blow debris high into the atmosphere.
Van Haas had no trouble providing the calculations, and prayed only that there was enough time for him to get the upper hand. As the neutral in the fray, Westrex had taken general control of the entire Flux network for the duration, and it was taking full advantage of it.
One might design the machines to do the job, but they could not be built overnight—or so everyone, including the combattants, believed. They underestimated Westrex and its own research. One machine, and one only, needed to be built, and it was built in many parts and assembled deep in space. They had learned a lot about Flux, more than anyone dreamed. They opened their own Borelli Point in space, separate from any of the others, and they drew Flux into their magnetic coils, and they inserted the great machine in it as long ago their grandfathers had inserted the crude ashtray.
They made as many as they needed, and they did it on the cheap, out of Flux. Each was a perfect copy of the original in every detail.
The Westrex computers had estimated that it would take seven controlled Borelli Gates in permanent operation to effectively terraform their little distant world. Three would also be used for incoming traffic, three for outgoing traffic to future Bases. One would serve as the carrier to keep the Flux universe road consistent with seven Points in operation and to maintain the master levels.
The operation was a tricky one, since in order to maintain adequate Flux on the new little world the Gates would have to be constantly opening and closing in perfect synchronization other than when used for transportation outlets. Additionally, the Flux had to maintain a balance with the gravitational and magnetic forces that would be present on the worldlet in any event. Too much could cause all sorts of chain reactions and imbalances, particularly when Flux was transformed into matter and added to the planetary ecosystem; too little and they could risk not having a sufficient amount to maintain an atmosphere, water, power, and heat. They would be much too far from the sun in that solar system to depend on it for more than keeping the parent planet in its proper place.
And, of course, there was the minor matter that when Haller had arrived on Titan, there had not yet been an attempt to break down a human being into energy and shoot it someplace else. There had been a number of successes, even with higher animals, but there had been far more notable failures, most ugly enough and numerous enough that volunteers were not exactly standing in line to try it out, and the clock was running.
There was a very real chance of peace breaking out on Earth almost any week now.
She was tall, thin, in her mid-forties, a light-skinned African with strong coastal West African features and hair. Her name was Miriam Ikeba, and her title was Personnel Evaluation Supervisor, but everybody knew she was the division’s chief psychologist. She greeted Haller warmly and told him to take a seat in a comfortable, high-backed reclining chair.
He did so, and waited until she took her own seat behind her desk.
“This what they’re using instead of couches these days’?” he asked lightly.