Crucible of a Species (5 page)

“Waves of gravity fill the universe. The heart of the Gravitonic or ‘Wave Drive’ is its ability to excite and couple all the electrons of all the masses within its field to these universal waves of gravitation.”

“Okay, but how does this enable the drive to push a spaceship through space faster than light.”

“The Argos is not a spaceship, Mr. Bradley, she is a starship. A Wave Drive is not an engine in the classic sense of providing a push to an object to move the mass. When the drive activates, it grabs the gravitons inside each electron and couples them to the waves of gravity that surround us all.

“The movement of the Argos is like a surfer riding the big wave. Difference is, we aren’t riding our Argos ‘surfboard’, we’re part of the surfboard.” Brittany lifted a small plate above the table, making it skim through the air to illustrate her point. “The Argos can slip or slide along a single wave, tack along its face or, unlike a surfer, switch to another wave moving in a different direction to change course.”

“Mr. Bradley, did you ever wonder how it is we create gravity here on the Skyport? Right at this moment, you are under the very light field of a small drive. The deck is travelling through the cosmos just a tiny bit faster than you are. Instead of some large mass pulling your body to the deck, the Skyport is actually pushing you along as the solar system moves through space. It’s a simple matter of balancing the drive fields. To you it feels like Earth gravity but, if the Skyport drive were to fail, we’d all float away or perhaps be smashed against the deck.”

A devilish little spark entered Brittany’s eye as she leaned forward, “Always respect your ship’s engineer and hope they do their job properly, Mr. Bradley.”

Tom leaned forward to look Brittany in the eye, “I will always respect you, Midshipman Thornsen.

“Scuttlebutt is that we’ll be doing a close fly-by to Jupiter. Why bother? Why not just take off from here?”

“Remember, I used the analogy that the gravity waves of the universe are like waves in the ocean. In deep space these waves are continuous and flow smoothly with very little disturbance. This means we can smoothly surf along them to any destination.

“Inside any star system, the planets are centers of much smaller but sizable sources of gravity. Every object within the solar system emits waves that interact with the smooth waves of open space. It’s like a group of kids on the end of a dock kicking their feet in the water. The bigger the kid, the bigger the waves.

“So the waves inside any solar system are choppy like a bay full of motorboats. We can’t fully engage the Argos in these choppy waters and hope to maintain control. However, there is an area of calm ‘waters’, if you allow the analogy to continue, and it is relatively nearby.

“Jupiter is a giant planet and therefore a colossal source of gravitation, it creates a region of calm ‘water’ that we can access. You’ll hear our navigators call this area the ‘Jovian Well’.

“In the Jovian Well, the Argos will accelerate to near lightspeed. The ship will then go skipping out across the rough waters of the outer system at this incredible speed. After the Argos has travelled roughly eighty times our present orbital distance from the sun, the chop of the gravitic waves will have diminished. At this point Captain Lee will make any small corrections to our flight path and we’ll ramp up to full speed in deep space.”

Ensign Petrika sat back and listened as the midshipman continued her explanation of the drive mechanics to the journalist,
Well, she sounds competent enough. Question is, will she be able to handle the system with the same efficiency as Janet? In any case, I’m no longer low-man on the totem pole in engineering. Thank God for small gifts.

It was all Ensign Mia Waverly
could do to keep her hands under control and firmly on the navigation console. The damn thing itched but he was behind her and there was no way she was going to scratch it with him there.

The trim young woman in an immaculate-white uniform unconsciously swung her head to the side while shifting in her seat in an attempt to move some annoying strands of shoulder-length auburn hair away from it. Dr. Graeme had told her she wouldn’t notice the new communications tattoo behind her ear. Not true! It bothered her whenever the circuit went active and, with the Argos getting ready for departure, the messages were driving her up the wall.

“Ms Waverly, try and relax.” The deep voice of Captain Adrian Lee startled her. “It’s okay to rub ‘em, the itching will go away with time.”

“Sorry sir, I didn’t mean to distract you.”

Lee quietly chuckled at the ensign’s discomfort. It came as a welcome distraction at a point in the launch-ready sequence where the crew carried most of the pre-liftoff burden.

The second of three brothers to graduate from the Naval Academy, he was too tall to be a fighter jock like his brother but he was the first in his family to fly in space and soon would be the first human commanding a vessel traveling to a distant star. A well-built man, he projected a commanding physical presence in any room amplified by a low, resonant voice that carried even in quiet discussions. Colonel Drake and Captain Lee had been classmates at Annapolis and, although a marine colonel and navy captain were equivalent in rank, Lee was subordinate in all matters to the colonel that concerned the expedition except when present on the Argos. On board there could be only one ship’s captain and Lee held the final word in matters of the Argos.

A panoramic of the command bridge spread before him stretching out into space itself. The bridge nested deep inside the ship, just above the central drive-room and the surrounding communications and control centers. The captain’s chair rested up near the rim of the chamber, a location from which he could scan the consoles and, more importantly, the temperament of his bridge crew arrayed in the amphitheater-like galley.

Behind Adrian was a small section of mini-consoles. This was an area known as the ‘Visitor’s Gallery’ for the stations were there as a courtesy to Colonel Drake and Doctors Nolen and Thompson. At Nolen’s request, Lee had approved entry for the journalist, Tom Bradley. Adrian could feel their presence behind him in these last moments as each of them linked into the command network.

Adrian settled back and took a few moments to watch the technical ballet of people preparing for departure. The captain’s eyes settled for a long moment on the grinning face of Aaron Sassaman, a tall, dark complexioned young man who was his helmsman. Aaron had an outgoing, smiling personality and rarely seemed to take things seriously. After a year of working with the helmsman, the captain knew better.

He also knew that this was the helmsman’s moment.

“All right, let’s do one up on Neil Armstrong and take one giant step for man. Mister Sassaman, take her out.”

“Aye aye, Captain. Atmospheric venting complete, initiating extraction.”

Several bangs vibrated the ship. The interior of the loading dock rose above them replaced by a star-filled blackness covering the forward screens.

“All lanyards clear.” The helmsman announced. “All systems green. Dock safe distance threshold in five seconds on my mark. …. Mark!”

“Main drives on Mr. Sassaman. Watch for spindizzies.”

“What are ‘spindizzies’?” Tom Bradley whispered over to Dr. Nolen.

“During the undocking sequence, small objects sometimes break away from the seal or linkage. There’s also a significant probability that some items loosened on the ship’s surface.

“The problem occurs for objects that float up to sit right at the threshold distance from the hull where the drive field begins to push objects out of the way. A portion of the object sits above this threshold and the field tries to eject it out of the flight path. The remainder of the object sits below the threshold so the drive tries to carry it along with the ship. This causes the object to begin spinning like a buzzsaw blade or ‘spindizzy’. They can damage the ship during course changes or introduce errors in our navigation systems if they aren’t ejected or compensated.”

The journalist noticed the lighting in the room had subtly changed. Things looked a bit redder in hue. The Skyport had disappeared, instantly replaced by a field of stars. Anyone raised on Earth was used to stars twinkling in the night skies but these didn’t twinkle, they jittered! Unconsciously his eyes tried to focus on the stars without success and the effort upset him.

A section of the forward walldisplay caught the journalist’s eye. A remote camera view of the Argos played showing their ejection from the dock of the Skyport and emergence into the harsh light of the sun. The helmsman fired the main drive; specter-images of the Earth and distant stars materialized like distorted reflections in a pond as the drive bent photons around the ship’s surface. The Argos pulled slowly out from the dock while the strains of Amazing Grace played on the Korean pipes of the Tae Pyong So filled the ship.

“Godspeed Argos” floated across the ship’s general push from the Skyport Control as she accelerated away from humanity’s home. The journalist turned his eyes forward to the gibbous moon that now lay before them, growing in size as he watched. They had launched!

“Hull surface cleared of two major spindizzies, sir,” announced Ensign Waverly. “Three minor spinners remain; navigation is tracking and compensating.”

“Very well, Ensign.” Captain Lee replied.

The journalist watched in fascination as the aft image of the Skyport faded to a pinpoint. Without turning he asked, “How fast are we travelling? I thought we wouldn’t accelerate until we were at the Jovian Well.”

“Oh, we aren’t even moving at a sizeable fraction of lightspeed.” Nolen replied. “The original pioneers took more than three days to go from the Earth to our moon. Were we speeding along at a hundredth the speed of light we would have reached lunar orbit in about two minutes. At our current rate, we have about thirty minutes before we pass. When we do reach the orbit you’ll have to look quickly but we will pass close enough for you to see the new base construction on Tycho Crater.”

The journalist rose from his seat, “Thank you. Since I have a half-hour, I have time to head to the underside lounge. I want to record some thoughts on the launch and I don’t want to disturb you. I’d like to return before we get to Jupiter if I may?”

“Certainly, Mr. Bradley. We’ll see you then.”

*~~*~~*~~*

Tom Bradley
sat in a small compartment that looked more like a coffee-break room than a lounge until you noticed the floor-to-ceiling walldisplay of the outside cosmos. The journalist was quietly thinking about the best way to enter this grand beginning in his journal
.

The vids taken by the Skyport’s cameras had been astounding. The very skin of the Argos came alive when the engines fired, even the photon rays of the sun bent before the wave drive. The journalist liked a strong, eye-catching start to his documentaries and these shots were now his.

A lounge door opened behind him and through it walked a tall, blond girl who looked like she was still in her teens. She was laughing as she spoke to a thin, older gentleman. The girl spotted Bradley and projected a smile that fluttered the big guy’s heart.

“Mr. Bradley! We wanted to watch the flyby from the lounge. I hope we aren’t intruding. I’m Sandy Shieve and this is Venu Vellanki, our chief programmer. I greatly enjoyed watching your interview.”

“Thank you. Unfortunately, that was Linda’s meeting not mine. However, I get the better end of the deal ‘cause … well, here I am! Just what do you do here on the Argos, Miss Shieve?”

“I’m a geophysicist and it’s Doctor Sandra Shieve if you wish to be formal. I don’t really expect to be very busy until we get to Tau Ceti, so perhaps we could pass some of the travel time together.”

“Thank you, I look forward to it.” Bradley replied as he turned to the older gentleman, “Nice to meet you Doctor Velanki. Chief programmer for the science team, huh? Why do we have to bring programmers along? I thought this ship was fully operational.”

Venu replied with a bit of a lilt colorfully edging his speech, “Ah, you are most kind Mr. Bradley but I manage to get along as ‘Mister Velanki’, thank you. As to the ship, she is the first of her kind. As we’ll be going on a very first trip to new places, I’m sure this will be a learning experience for all of us including my friends with artificial intelligence. I am sure they will have much need of me.

“Please excuse me one moment,” the programmer continued on to the back of the room, “I want to get Sandy and myself a snack and a drink. We don’t have much time before the Argos passes by the moon and the captain told us we would have a very excellent view of the construction on Tycho Base. Can I get anything for you?”

“No thank you, Venu”

“Ah, watch now. Here she comes …”

Dr. Shieve and the journalist turned to watch the moon as Venu waved his hand across the bulkhead to increase the magnification. There, in a large impact crater near the southern lunar highlands, they could see the structure rising from within the basalt rock, the new lunar base. A cloud of dust marked the passage of a caravan of tractors out from the building.

“Look at that!” Venu excitedly pointed to two towers on the edge of the construction. “That’s where they found the strongest concentrations of water. That source of natural water is what will make Tycho a great and self-sufficient lunar base. This is all very, very historic Mr. Bradley!”

The journalist relaxed back into his chair and checked the time before standing, “What we are doing is much more historic. I look forward to some interesting time with both of you but I have to leave. See you later.”

*~~*~~*~~*

The planet growing in size
before the humans was a magnificent, cold killer.

The human species holds a fascination of danger and the deadly beauty and mysteries of Jupiter have drawn human imagination since their first ancestors looked to the sky. Jupiter’s mass is more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the solar system. Its appearance a tapestry of beautiful colors and cyclonic atmospheric violence arrayed in stripes of dark belts and light zones created by strong east-west winds. Within these belts and zones are storm systems that have raged for years; the greatest of which carries its own name as the
Great Red Spot
.

Activity on the bridge increased as they approached. Dr. Thompson was astounded as he watched the crew and saw how little attention they appeared to give the magnificence on display before them.

Dr. Michael Thompson, department head for the experimental physics group, was an Oxford graduate specializing in lenticular fields used to focus and direct high-energy particle beams. A short, rather slim young man with broad shoulders, he looked more like an American football guard than a physicist and people who had the opportunity to meet him quickly felt as ease.

Thompson’s eyes scanned the information displayed on his console. Ship’s instrumentation already detected a smoothing of the gravitic waves. The Argos had been here before performing short trial runs. They had crossed this deadly region two times without incident while correcting instrumentation sensitivities and measuring the uniformity of the gravitic waves. However, they had never accelerated as hard as they would in the next few minutes.

The critical moment was approaching. His calculations warned of an interaction of the planet’s synchrotron radiation and their drive field, the full effects of which he still could not fully understand or predict. This was the argument he had lost with Dr. Nolen, his concerns noisily brushed aside during planning.

Three massive Jovian moons fled by as if he were watching an ISA publicity vid. They represented three members of a system of more than sixty larger satellites orbiting the planet. Eight of these were so huge they would have been called planets if their orbits had centered on the Sun.

Another large moon lay ahead. Io, closest satellite to Jupiter, a volcanic nightmare named by Galileo himself. This was the starting point for their never before attempted ramp up to lightspeed.

The Argos plummeted in toward the calm, radiation torn region between Jupiter and Io like a raptor diving on its prey. The simulators predicted an easy passage with Argos accelerating across the uniform gravitational waves of the region. Here, for the first time, humans would break the light-speed barrier in a flight partially looping the massive planet.

Io flew by so quickly the glow of the lava fields and volcanic ejecta would be resolved only in the slowed playback of record. The bands of Jupiter’s clouds far below filled the sky and then swung to their left as the Argos accelerated across the Jovian Well.

Already travelling faster than any other human vessel had ever moved, the starship raced up to more the eight tenths the speed of light with seemingly little effort. The world outside transformed. Sublight communications with the older satellites became garbled. The planet below and even the small disk of the far off Sun were growing redder.

Ensign Waverly’s voice filled the bridge, “Argos will be passing light-speed in sixty seconds. We will encounter turbulence as we leave the Jovian Well. All hands prepare for warp one speed on my mark.”