"Wait a minute, Varien," George Traylor interrupted, brow furrowed with thought. "Okay, so we can't follow the, uh, Lirauva Chain to Tareil. But even if we can't do it the easy way, via displacement points, can't we still do it the hard way?"
"What do you mean?" Varien barely sounded interested.
"Well, why can't we take your continuous-displacement drive all the way back to Tareil? I know it's a long way. But we could enter the Tareil system from nowhere near
any
displacement point!"
"
That'd
shake 'em up!" Levinson leaned forward, dark eyes snapping.
"Don't be absurd!" All at once, Varien was his old, fortunately inimitable self, and once again DiFalco was surprised at his own relief. " 'A long way' indeed! It is, in point of fact, a thousand of your light-years! At the maximum speed of which most of our ships are capable, that means a journey of . . ."
" . . . almost twenty years. And since we're not talking about real velocity, there's no time dilation effect. Yeah, yeah, yeah." Traylor did not take well to being patronized, which made for problems in dealing with Varien. "But you Raehaniv are way ahead of us in cryogenic suspension; you can actually freeze the metabolism altogether, not just slow it down. Maybe we could spend most of the trip frozen, and man the ships in shifts!"
Varien took a deep breath. "Permit me to elucidate certain facts. First, the suspended-animation techniques to which you refer involve substantial risks. If the subject is to have an acceptable chance of safe revival, an extensive array of equipment is needed. We have very little of such equipment, never having needed it except in rare medical emergencies. Even if it is practical for us to build more of it—as to which I would have to consult with medical experts—such a project would make our departure deadline even more unrealistic than it is already proving to be.
"Secondly, as a practical matter the journey would take far, far more than twenty years. You must understand that the continuous-displacement drive, involving millions of intense gravitic pulses per second, requires
enormous
amounts of power, even on the standards of our technology. To make the concept workable, I had to develop a special type of fusion reactor, which attains an unprecedented output-to-volume ratio at the expense of fuel efficiency. It consumes hydrogen at a rate which necessitates frequent refueling—most of our ships can only sustain continuous-displacement drive for thirty or forty light years. Fortunately, the refueling requires no special facilities; we can skim hydrogen from the atmospheres of gas-giant planets and process it into useable form, using the same techniques with which we obtain reaction mass for our fusion drives. But it takes time! And we could not proceed in a straight line; we would have to . . . 'leapfrog' is the expression, I believe, from one hopefully planet-bearing star to another."
They were silent. They had all known, in the abstract, what an energy hog the continuous-displacement drive was, but they hadn't thought through the implications. There had been no need to—the drive merely had to get them to Alpha Centauri!
No one even suggested collecting hydrogen from the interstellar medium en route with the electromagnetic ramscoops so beloved of twentieth-century science fiction writers; such a thing was still beyond Earth's engineering capabilities, and the Raehaniv had never developed it. Besides, as Varien was overly given to pointing out, the continuous-displacement drive, with its ongoing series of quantum jumps, imparted no actual velocity beyond what the ship already possessed at the time it engaged the drive. A ramscoop would require near-relativistic velocities.
"Thirdly, we would not even know what star to set our course for." Varien saw the surprise on his Terran listeners' faces. "Oh, you didn't know that? Well, we've never
had
to locate Tareil in the sky—it's just one of the countless millions of small main-sequence stars roughly a thousand light-years from this one. In fact, that realspace distance, like its approximate bearing, is only an estimate we arrived at using the positions of certain identifiable supergiant stars as seen from here and from Tareil—an intellectual game of no practical value, since we travel between here and there using displacement transitions.
"Finally," Varien continued in a voice whose despair could no longer be masked by annoyance, "the whole idea is fundamentally impractical. It is beyond belief that ships—especially improvised ships using hybrid technology—could endure over twenty years of continuous-displacement flight, stopping and starting thirty or more times, without suffering breakdowns. No engineer would take such a notion seriously." Traylor's expression confirmed it. "No, I fear we must relinquish our hopes and begin to consider what other alternatives are open to us."
DiFalco and the other Terrans sat, stunned. However irritiating Varien could be, he had become more and more their oracle, with his knowledge of things far beyond Earth's horizons. If he had indeed abandoned hope, then what hope was there? And none of his "other alternatives" could be pleasant ones for them, who had effectively burned whatever bridges were not being burned for them on Earth.
Varien seemed to sense it, for when he spoke it was with an odd gentleness. "You of Earth—no, of RAMP—have committed yourselves to this enterprise on the strength of my promises, my schemes, and my hopes. I fully recognize my responsibility to you, and you may rest assured that whatever plans we Raehaniv make will take that responsibility into account . . . ."
All at once, a computer that had never been taught manners cut in with a stream of Raehaniv that seemed to come from the middle of the air. The effect was electrifying; Varien, suddenly agitated, snapped out a series of queries to which the computer responded in its precise way, while the other Raehaniv sprang to their feet in an incomprehensible babble of excitement. DiFalco cursed himself for not having learned more Raehaniv—there had never been a pressing need, as all the Raehaniv knew English. He had picked up some, of course, but even people like Rosen who were approaching fluency in it were baffled by this rapid-fire exchange.
Varien finished with what was clearly a command to the computer and then turned to the Terrans, switching to English. "Your pardon. The ship's computer, which has had standing orders to maintain gravitic scanner coverage of the appropriate region of space, reports a ship's arrival, under continuous-displacement drive, from the direction of Altair!"
A storm of exclamations and questions followed, but DiFalco heard nothing after Varien's final word.
"We detected Altair's two displacement points almost immediately after our arrival. So I decided to test out the experimental devices for predicting the realspace direction of a displacement point's terminus."
Aelanni was addressing a briefing room that was full to capacity—predominantly with Raehaniv, but also as many Terrans as could manage to be there for the tale of her adventures. All of them knew, or had been told, that heretofore the only way to find out where you would arrive after transiting an unfamiliar displacement point was to actually do it. Now it was possible to infer the bearing of your destination in advance, and the more experienced Raehaniv space captains were already being heard to mutter that the younger generation had it soft.
"The results for one of the displacement points were inconclusive," she continued. "But the second one provided unambiguous readings: the displacement chain clearly led in the direction of Raehaniv-explored space!
"I therefore decided to take
Pathfinder
through and confirm these findings." She gave Varien the kind of apologetic/embarrassed/defiant look with which a teenage daughter presents her father with the
fait accompli
of an unconventional hairstyle that she
knows
he doesn't like. And, for a fact, Varien didn't like the way the younger Raehaniv were starting to bestow names on their ships in the Terran fashion. His expression showed it as he sat in the front row beside DiFalco, two men united in their mixed emotions.
"Why the hell didn't you come back and report this instead of charging through on your own?" Difalco blurted out. "I . . . we were worried sick! Of all the . . . !" He could not continue. He could only look at her, lovely and strong, a living dark-red flame, eyes gleaming as if with the reflected light of suns they alone had seen. He was absolutely furious with her. And he loved her as he had never loved her before, as he had never imagined it was possible to love anyone.
She smiled at him, but answered in precisely the tone one would use to address a senior officer of an allied power. "I judged that to be an impractical course of action, Colonel. Even if I had returned immediately, and even if another ship could have been dispatched without delay on my arrival, simple arithmetic shows that that ship would barely have been able to go to Altair and return here in time for our scheduled departure date. It would have had no time for any extensive displacement-point exploration. The fact that
Pathfinder
was already on the scene gave us a priceless opportunity to investigate a highly relevant new datum."
DiFalco had no answer. He and Varien subsided as one, exchanging a rueful glance of shared futility.
"We transited the displacement point," Aelanni resumed, "and emerged in the vicinity of a young type F1iv subgiant"—she used Terran stellar classifications for the benefit of her American and Russian listeners as she indicated a light in the holographic display generated by the ship's computer from data downloaded from
Pathfinder
—"which proved to be almost three hundred light-years closer to Raehaniv space, and which possessed three displacement points. Using the new instrumentation, we chose the most likely of them, and transited to a red giant/white dwarf binary which seemd no closer to Tareil than the previous star, though at a significantly different bearing from it. This, and the fact that the binary possessed no planetary bodies suitable for refueling caused us to seriously consider turning back. However, we still had enough reaction mass to cross the binary system to its other displacement point."
Varien could no longer contain himself. "And what if the next system had had no gas giant planet from which to obtain more reaction mass? How, pray tell, would you have gotten back?"
"That," she admitted thoughtfully, "might have presented a problem. But," she hurried on before her father could have a stroke, "inasmuch as the vast majority of stars seem to be accompanied by gas giants, the commonest type of planet by far, I deemed the risk to be an acceptable one. At any rate, we transited"—a white light obligingly flashed along the string of pale-blue luminescence indicating the final displacement connection of what was already being called the Altair Chain—"to find ourselves in a G0v system with only the one displacement point. We were able to determine that this system is only ten light-years from Seivra in realspace." As the Raehaniv all began to talk at once, she explained to the Terrans. "Seivra is a system without habitable planets. It has been known to us for some time because it is only one displacement connection from Tareil. In fact, it is separated from Tareil in realspace by little more than one hundred light-years." As they sat absorbing the implications, she continued to the room at large. "What is more, the star has a life-bearing planet. The ecosystem is a rather young one, and the planet is less than comfortable for us . . . but we can live there!"
The hubbub rose in volume, then began to subside as DiFalco stood up and turned to face the crowd. He waited until he had silence.
"I think, people, that what we've just heard knocks our earlier gloom and doom into a cocked hat." Most of the Raehaniv had never heard the expression, but they caught his meaning. "The front door to Tareil may be closed to us now, but Aelanni has given us a way of entering through the back door!"
Varien also rose, and faced the American. "If I understand what you are suggesting, Colonel . . ." He shook his head uncertainly. "Remember, we've already come to the conclusion that we can't be fully ready by our departure date, and that we will therefore need the help of the Raehaniv resistance fleet in the Tareil system. There would be no such help awaiting us in an uninhabited system."
"No, there wouldn't. We'd have to make our own help." DiFalco swung around as he spoke, facing everyone in turn, and his voice gradually rose in volume. "When Moving Day for Phoenix arrives—less than three months from now—that's the end of the Project. We'll
have
to depart this system. That's the inflexible deadline we've been up against from the beginning. We can depart under continuous-displacement drive then, taking as much of our industrial plant as possible . . . depart for Altair, not for Alpha Centauri! Once we've transited the Altair Chain and established ourselves on this new planet, we'll be able to complete our preparations. Oh, yes, we'll have to do it on our own; we'll be isolated like no other group of human beings, Terran or Raehaniv, has ever been isolated before. But we won't have a rigid deadline to work against! We can take however long the job requires. I say we can do it!" Traylor nodded slowly, and some of his Raehaniv counterparts began to do likewise.
DiFalco turned back to Varien. "Can you suggest any viable alternative?" The question could have been belligerent, but it wasn't; it was asked in a tone that was oddly deferential.
The old Raehaniv gazed at him for a long moment. Then he smiled, and spoke almost inaudibly. "No, I cannot." He sat down, and a few in the room dimly sensed that a change of command had occured, as surely as the one that had accompanied Kurganov's departure, for all that it had required no honor guards or music.
"I
still
wish you'd come straight back! The risk . . . !"
Aelanni gave him her impish smile. "And if I had, where would we all be now?"
"Don't confuse the issue with facts!" DiFalco grinned at her like an idiot—he suspected he had been doing that a lot, of late—as she stood in the starlight of the wide viewport outside
Liberator
's engineering spaces, which had become a special place for them. (Varien had, with much grumbling, granted his crew's petition to name the ship. The name was really
Arhaelieth
, but English translations were more and more widely used.) On an impulse, he reached out and brushed a lock of hair away from her forehead, emphasizing her hairline—it came to the sharp widow's peak that characterized far more Raehaniv than Terrans, one of the little differences of degree that kept popping up whenever one began to forget that the two races had spent at least thirty-two thousand years a light-millennium apart. She flinched slightly at the physical contact that was still less than entirely natural to her, then relaxed, her smile softening.