Scaevola's Triumph (Gaius Claudius Scaevola trilogy Book 3) (7 page)

"You believe that?" the Tin Man asked curiously.

"I do," Gaius said firmly. This was based on the expression that had passed across Klendor's face when he had said that, and also on the way the Tin Man was making an issue of it. It seemed important to stake out whatever position he could.

"So what do you conclude?"

"Romans tried to measure it," Gaius said slowly. "This is probably ridiculous to you, but people stood on distant hills with lamps, and when one was flashed, the reply was given."

"And you concluded?" the Tin Man asked.

"That the delay had nothing to do with the speed of light," Gaius shrugged, "and everything to do with the reactions of the people. Nevertheless, we think it has a speed."

"It has," the Tin Man said. "You once said you thought your planet was about 33 million kilometers from your sun?"

"Yes, I did, but I suspected it could be further."

"It's about 150 million kilometers," the Tin Man said, "and light takes about five hundred seconds to travel that far. That's about eight minutes. For your information, such light would take nine years to get from your planet to your star Sirius, and over six hundred years to get to Ulse."

Gaius said nothing.

"Now, back to your clock, fixed on your planet, that makes regular drops, and have something else to read how many drops have occurred by counting the waves. Imagine it sends out a wave defined as now. The next wave is one year later, the next two, and so on. These are waves of steady time, and while you sit beside your lake, the number of waves read by your counter equals the number of drops. Can you see that?"

"Yes."

"Now, suppose you get on a boat that travels with the speed of a wave. You set off at the time 'now', but because you are travelling with the speed of the wave, according to your reader it is always 'now'. Your clock has stopped."

Gaius still said nothing.

"Now, if you are in a ship travelling nearly as fast as the waves, the amount of time you think has passed is the number of waves that overtake you. Comment please?"

"That's Timothy," Gaius muttered.

"Sorry," the Tin Man said. "I promised I wouldn't."

"It doesn't sound right?" Gaius frowned. "A wave of constant time would . . . It's just . . . I don't know. I have never seen anything at all consistent with that!"

"The wave of constant time," the Tin Man said, "travels at the speed of light. For you to feel no time elapsing, you must travel at the speed of light along the time wave. Another way of looking at it might be to think of time flowing like a stream. If you stand at the bank, the time flows by. Get in a boat and get into the stream, if you go as fast as the stream, no time overtakes you."

"You mean," Gaius said, suddenly struck by the enormity of something, "that if we had decided to turn around and go back, we would have run into all those waves, and died of old age?"

"No," the Tin Man said. "It resets. In that sense, my example was imperfect. Think of the stream of time, which is independent of the direction in which you travel. You cannot go upstream; you cannot travel to the past. Let's try again. You know that ship over there is flying parallel to us?"

"Yes."

"Which means it is at a constant distance?"

"Yes."

"So if I send a beam of light across to it and bounce it back from a mirror to us, it takes a certain time?"

"Yes."

"Now, suppose the ships are travelling. If I send of a pulse of light towards it, by the time it gets there the ship has moved, so if you think of a right-angled triangle, our ship travels along one side, while light has to travel along the hypotenuse, so the distance is further?"

"Of course!"

"Well, it is a principle of physics that you cannot tell how fast your absolute velocity is, but you can only tell how fast you are going relative to something else. In this case, the only thing that you can be relative to is the other ship, and by definition its distance from you is constant, so the time light takes to get there and back has to be constant. Since the distance the light travels is further as you approach the speed of light, and since the speed of light is a fundamental constant, this can only be right if your clock, and everything you sense about time, slows. Do you understand?"

"I follow your argument," Gaius nodded, "and if you are telling the truth about the principles, I agree that if you were travelling at the speed of light . . ."

"Yes?"

"You would never see the reflected message or the other ship," Gaius said, a little hesitantly. "If something along the side of such a triangle is travelling at the speed of light, the message can never get there because it has to go along the hypotenuse, which by geometry, has to be longer than the side?"

"Correct!" the Tin Man said. Gaius also noted that Klendor seemed a little stunned that Gaius had come up with that conclusion. "So you can see now it doesn't matter which way you are going. If you go back, your clock runs as slowly as required for your velocity. Not only your clock, but all the things going on inside you that make you you. Your friends, not travelling, are stuck with their clock. Travelling on a space ship going near the speed of light, you leave out hundreds of years going one way, and when you turn around, you miss out the same number of hundreds of years going the other way. I was telling the truth. You can go back, but your friends will be dead, and Rome as you knew it would have changed forever.

"Perhaps I can persuade you in a further way. Light from Ulse takes over three hundred years to get here, Klendor has come from there, and you cannot travel faster than light. If the time did not slow down, Klendor would have died of old age long before he got here. It is only because of this time dilation effect that travel between stars makes any sense."

"In that case," Gaius shrugged, "going back can wait. If you accept my terms, let us travel to Ulse."

As Vipsania was to point out later, there was no reason at all to believe that once they got to this Ulse they would ever be permitted to board another ship. This could well have been their only chance. Indeed, later, when boredom on Ulse set in, Vipsania was to remind Gaius of this far too often. Gaius had to agree, but also had to point out that this was also their only chance to see things that no human had ever seen, and also, it was what this Ulsian called Klendor seemed to want. If they went with him, they might have one friend; if they insisted on being returned, they might still be forced to go to Ulse without any friend, or they might be dumped on some other planet, or, if they did get to Earth, they could be dumped somewhere totally remote from Rome, or even in the middle of a war. The problem was they were totally dependent on the alien good will, and there was a limit to that good will if they refused to cooperate on something apparently very important to them.

Chapter 4

Setting out for Ulse did not start immediately. The ships motors soon slowed.

"The planet where you could have been kept in a zoo is called Kroth," the Tin Man explained. "The Krothian military has demanded we stop accelerating and be inspected. Three warships are approaching."

"And we cannot outrun them?" Gaius said.

"No, we cannot. But do not be afraid. I do not think there will be a problem."

"They may want us back for their zoo," Vipsania said in a desperate voice. "You might have scared off two zoo-keepers, but . . ."

"No, that will not happen," the Tin Man replied, "or at least I very much doubt it. That would be against their own laws, and the military will not be interested in what a couple of zoo-keepers want."

"Then what do they want?" Gaius asked.

"We shall have to wait and see," the Tin Man said. It was difficult to argue with that. Through further interpretation, Klendor informed the Romans that Kroth was part of the Ulsian Federation, and had been a very loyal ally previously.

"Then why did they permit your enemies into their system?" Gaius asked.

"Who says they did?"

"Well, they were there, and they attacked you."

"There may have been a reason for that," Klendor said. "I had come from Ulse, bringing them news of the war, and an official request for assistance. It is always possible that the enemy wished to stop my conveying that message."

"In that case, Ulse has yet another problem," Gaius offered.

"And that is?" As the Tin man translated Klendor's question, he also added that Klendor was a little irritated that Gaius seemed to be finding fault with Ulse.

"Quite simple," Gaius said to the Tin Man. "Tell him that if the enemy wished to stop him conveying a message, they had to know he was conveying it, which means someone on Ulse must have told them. The size of space is too big for it to be an accident."

When Klendor was told, he seemed stunned for a moment, then he said, "I guess that must be so, although I suppose they could have guessed we might send such a ship."

"Yes, but they would not know when, and if they parked outside this system for years, wouldn't they be detected?"

"They should have been," Klendor agreed, "so it seems you may be right. We have a problem."

"However, there is good news," Gaius said with a smile. "You got them so the enemy have to assume the message got through, and now you have the opportunity to deliver it."

"Actually, I did send a message when I was attacked," Klendor said.

"Then you will now see the response of the Krothian government," Gaius said. "Either they are allies or we are in deep trouble."

They waited, and while they waited, Gaius asked the question he needed answered. What were Klendor's other names? The response surprised him. Ulsians only had one name, but they also had a large series of numbers after it. There had been millions of Klendors, but each one was clearly identified, together with what they achieved in their lives, in a great catalogue. But for the numbers, there could be confusion. Gaius had to agree, given the propensity of Romans to have the same name.

In the event, there were two reasons for the delay. The first was understandable. The Krothians, having discovered that they seemed to have been drawn into a war, wanted to inspect the alien vessel, to determine the level of technology available to their enemy, and to study their weapons system, and any defences.

"This may not be their most advanced ship," Gaius cautioned, when he was informed.

"No," Klendor said, "but it won't be the least advanced either, since I had a reasonably advanced ship, and they would have to assume they might run into a Krothian fleet."

Gaius had to bite his tongue. His initial reaction was, if Klendor's vessel had been an advanced "top of the line" warship, then Ulse was in trouble. As if reading his thoughts, Klendor added that his ship had been built for speed, and it was only lightly armed, and had only basic armour.

Gaius smiled, and nodded understanding, although whether the Ulsian recognized this was another matter, so he added verbally, "Of course. When I used to send messages, it would be one man who I thought could get there faster than anyone else." He had started thinking about saying 'one man on a horse', but decided there was no need to explain horses right now.

The second reason was that the Krothians had decided to send a senior military representative to Ulse, specifically an Admiral Merly. He had already departed, but the Krothians wanted to take advantage of the freight carrying capacity of this vessel to send some foods and beverages to make the Admiral's time on Ulse more pleasant. Apparently there were also some similar goodies for the Romans. Before the alien had collected them, he had also collected samples, just in case, and these had been shipped down with the necessary foods for the other animals. These were now being returned to this ship and would be used to make their life on Ulse a little more enjoyable.

Eventually the inspections were complete, and the ship set off. The Romans were given some more basic food, water, and were then shown rooms with beds, and it was suggested that they go to sleep. The sleep would be long; they would be kept in some sort of stasis, while the ship made its way to Ulse.

Chapter 5

The last few days had been extraordinary; they had seen more new and wonderful things each day than they had seen in all their lives, yet they felt flat. Perhaps it was because so much had happened that they had become saturated, and now that had stopped happening, they were simply dazed.

First, they had awoken to see this marvellously blue/green ball in space with two tiny white balls around it. They saw these balls grow, then they began to orbit the planet. The tiny white balls now resolved themselves into one white-coloured moon slightly smaller than the moon they knew from Earth, and a much smaller moonlet at about two and a half times the distance from the planet as the first one.

From their view in space, there were three main colours to the planet. The major colour was white: white at the poles, which Klendor explained were made of ice, and a lot of white everywhere else, which Klendor explained were clouds. Ulse was a planet on which there was a lot of rain. There were also large expanses of blue, and it appeared that this world had a large area covered with sea. Then, finally, there were the areas of green/brown that could be seen beneath the clouds. Land.

"More water than Earth, not so much desert," Gaius explained to Vipsania.

"And that is one way to summarize the most important planet of this part of the galaxy," the Tin Man said in a tone which, despite the content, was totally without expression. "Are you interested in finding out more?"

"Yes, please." If nothing else, Gaius knew he had to learn as much about this planet as he could. He was to be disappointed, because the Tin Man was to totally avoid giving any information that could be of practical value.

"Let us examine this map," the Tin Man said. "It shows the land without the clouds. Now, see this ocean?"

"Yes."

"Now, look at this. There is a string of islands leading up to those small mountains."