Terror leaped from the screen. Houghton’s junta had seized the Capitol and White House. He had declared a state of emergency and martial law. A number of military units, here and there across the country, had mobilized to resist, and battle had erupted at several locations. She saw combat in the air above Seattle, street fighting in Houston, a city block burning in Minneapolis.
She turned and seized Olivares’s hand again. Through her own tears she saw his. “No, God damn it!” she cried. “We’ve got work to do, you and I!”
— Conflict sputtered out in the next few days, as Houghton prevailed. After all, he and his cause were widely popular. He was now the permanent Chief Advisor to any and every President of the United States. The trial and execution of his predecessor assured the docility of Congress and the courts. His reign lasted until his death, nineteen years later.
Olivares lived much longer in history.
Once an aspect of nature is known, quantum computers and nanotechnic construction make for rapid progress. Barely ten years passed between the publication of his theory and the departure of the first spacecraft for Alpha Centauri.
Surely billions of eyes watched on screens as it left Earth orbit. A few persons on Himalia were luckier. That little moon of Jupiter chanced to be near when the vessel passed by. For many hours before and after the moment, work ceased. Almost everyone crammed into the habitation domes from which it would be directly visible.
Dmitri Sumarokov and Karl Vogel did not leave their station. They and their robots were prospecting the Stephanos Crater area. It might have been more exciting to watch with a group, but would certainly have been more uncomfortable. The partners simply donned spacesuits, took what optical gear they had, and went out of their roundhut.
Low above a topplingly near horizon, the giant planet loomed close to fullness. Larger in this sky than Luna in Earth’s, lion-tawny, banded with clouds and swirled with storms in subtle hues, a glimmer of rings offside, it flooded most stars out of vision. The radiance fell soft over ice, rocky upthrusts, scars, and pockmarks. Breath and pulsebeat sounded loud in the silence.
Trouble with the air recycler had caused a delay. Repairs couldn’t wait; dead men can’t watch anything. With scant time to set up, they wasted none in speech, except for an occasional muttered curse. But when they had their telescope aimed and an image appeared in the display, Sumarokov whooped, “There! See, Karl, see!”
A point of light swelled rapidly within the frame. It turned into a jumble of glints and shadows. It became a bright spheroid from which reached structures that seemed as fragile as spiderwebs. The telescope swung, tracking. Vogel peered along it. Pointing, he said, his tone not quite steady, “Selbst das Schiff.” In the English they shared: “Someday our children will envy us, Dmitri.”
The naked eye saw a spark flit above a crag and across the night. It could have been any satellite, catching the rays of the sunken sun. Two Galilean moons outshone it. But Sumarokov and Vogel stood enthralled.
It faded, dwindling away into distance. Their gaze went back to the display. Abruptly the magnified image vanished in a flare. They glimpsed the reality as a wink near the Jovian disc. “What was that?” Sumarokov exclaimed.
“The jet fired,” Vogel answered. He had studied the subject more closely than the other man. “Approach maneuver.”
“So soon?”
“You would not want to operate a plasma jet in Jupiter’s radiation belt.”
“No. . . . No, certainly not.” Again the shape was in telescopic view, coasting along on gravity and momentum, shrinking, shrinking. “The day will come,” Sumarokov said raptly, “when none of this will be necessary.”
“Um, I don’t know,” Vogel replied. “They, those robots, they do have to be well away from the sun before they turn on the zero-zero drive. Something about space not being too warped.”
Sumarokov blinked at him. “Zero-zero?”
“That is what they are lately calling the quantum field gate drive. Have you not heard? A ship springs from the energy state normal in this universe, what they call the zero level, to the superhigh energy level it gets from below the universe, and then falls back down again to normal, over and over.”