"No, but I'm familiar with tunnel diodes."
"OK. Well, Dr. Stanley Raymond here thinks there are ways to confirm the theory on a microscopic, electronic level, where it diverges slightly from quantum mechanics and relativity."
"I see—I think," Elliot typed. "Thanks."
"Sure," the other replied and disconnected from Elliot's line.
Turning his attention back to the main discussion, Elliot listened to the last half of the speakers answer to someone's question on actual hyperspace travel. "...basic hardware is still at least a decade or two away. Probably more like a century, given the disinterest of the scientific community."
He paused, and a new voice spoke up. "That's as good a lead-in, I think, as any for our next speaker. Proving that Bobdonovitch was right is, of course, the key to getting other scientists interested in the whole idea of star travel. Dr. Hans Kruse, at Syracuse, will now discuss some possible ways to test the theory."
Elliot settled back comfortably in his chair as Dr. Kruse cleared his throat and began to speak.
—
"I see my fears were groundless. I have apparently wasted some time," said the Drymnu. "Not wasted," the Sirrachat disagreed. "All knowledge is valuable. And it was an easy mistake to make. Fragmented races look so powerful, sometimes."
"Yes," the Drymnu agreed ruefully. "A shame that they waste their energy on the idle pursuit of fun."
"Their loss. But, ultimately, our protection."
"True."
—
Elliot worked late into the night, an electronics textbook propped up on his keyboard, a notepad balanced on his knees, and Bobdonovitch's paper displayed on his TV screen. Many of the concepts were new to him, but that was all right—it simply added to the challenge. He had the time it would take to learn the basics; the time and, thanks to the Net, the information. In its own way, this was a more exciting puzzle than any he'd met in Deathworld—and the possible rewards were infinitely greater. Elliot Burke might someday be hailed as the man who took humanity to the stars. Glancing out the window at the starlike lights of the city, he smiled.
This was going to be fun.
Afterword
"The Challenge" was one of the first stories I wrote after going pro in 1980, and I'm reasonably sure it predates most of the crush of game-oriented stories that have appeared since then. If a leader is defined as one who sees which direction the crowd is going and gets in front of them, then I suppose I could claim to have started a trend. But I wouldn't claim it very loudly.
For any of you sharp-eyed, perfect-memoried people who may have recognized the Drymnu as also having made an appearance in the 1982 Analog story "Final Solution": yes, they (it?) are (is) the same. Like "The Shadows of Evening," "The Challenge" was originally to be the first of a series which somehow got sidetracked. I've really got to stop doing that.
The Cassandra
It had been raining all morning the day Alban Javier left Aurora: a dull, cold, persistent drizzle out of a uniformly gray sky. Looking up from under the wide brim of his hat, Javier wished that the rain could have been accompanied at least by roiling thunderheads and crashing lightning—something that would have lent dignity to the event taking place. But perhaps it was more fitting this way, he told himself blackly. It was, after all, with a whimper instead of a bang that mankind was abandoning this world.
He had been scheduled to leave on the nine A.M. flight, but it was now nearly two and his part of the long line had barely made it past the landing field's inner gate. Behind him, outside the fence, the waiting crowd had abandoned any semblance of order and was pressing close to the mesh, taking advantage of the minuscule shelter offered by the fence's two-meter overhang. Javier glanced back at them from time to time, but always turned away quickly. Too many of the rain hats and poncho hoods had bits of pure-white hair poking from beneath them, and with the nearer ones Javier could see the emerald green of their eyes as well. It was something like looking in a multiple-image mirror, and it made him feel all the more uncomfortable.
Ahead of him, the line shuffled forward a half meter. Picking up his single travelbag—all that the colonists were permitted to bring—Javier moved up and focused on the building into which the line ultimately disappeared. A good hundred meters away yet. Still, a considerable number of the city's residents had left in the past week. Perhaps the inevitable trance would hold off long enough for him to escape finally into space.
It didn't. He had, in fact, covered barely five more meters when the familiar tingle rippled through his body, and as his muscles locked in place the gray rain faded from before him....
A fireball becomes a river of flame racing through a dark, narrow corridor, erupting finally from a wood-shored entrance to blacken the grassy knoll above. The screams from within fill the air, but even as swearing rescuers plunge into the mine they are fading into the silence of death. Those still alive are brought out first, their agony muted by drugs. The rescuers who carry out the dead are no longer swearing. All are grim-faced; some are crying. The blackened bodies pass closely enough to touch....
And Javier was back on Aurora, standing in the rain with knotted muscles and a throat full of nausea. Behind him someone—a younger teen, probably—was sobbing with reaction. Ahead of him, the people had bunched together a bit more closely, leaving a small bubble of space around him, as if he were the carrier of some loathsome disease. He didn't bother to turn around; he knew that his own inner horror was mirrored in a hundred pairs of green eyes, and he had no desire to see it. Even misery could get tired of company.
With a shuddering sigh he slid a wet hand under his collar and massaged the taut neck muscles there. One final going-away present, he thought dully; with love, from Aurora.
—
The cubicle euphemistically referred to as the kitchen manager's office was about the size of a king-sized coffin, Javier decided as he stood silently in the half- meter of space between the front wall and the cluttered desk. Wedged into a chair across the mound of paper was a man so fat that it was hard to understand how he had ever gotten into such a limited area. Unbidden, an irreverent thought flickered through Javier's sense of futility: that Hugo Schultz had been placed behind the desk as a child and allowed to grow into his current position.
Schultz looked up from the application he'd been reading and fixed Javier with a pig-eyed stare. "You didn't put down what job you wanted," he said, his voice just loud enough to cut through the sounds of the hotel kitchen that the cubicles walls made only token effort to keep out.
"I'll take anything that's open," Javier said simply, matching the other's volume.
Schultz nodded. "Uh-huh. I see you've got Earth citizenship. You born here?"
A lie would be so easy—and so useless. Javier's entire public information file was available via a single phone call, should Schultz choose to check on it. Besides, to anyone who had followed the events at the frontier over the past few years, his hair and eyes were a dead giveaway. "No, I was born on Aurora."
"Thought so," Schultz grunted. "You're a Cassandra, then?"
Javier winced at the term, but its use was far too widespread these days to be avoided. "Yes."
Schultz grunted again and studied the application some more. "A master's degree, no less. You get that on Earth?"
"No, on Aurora."
"I thought all the schools went when the rest of the planet fell apart."
"They did. But I was one of the first of my generation—the first generation of Cassandras. The society didn't begin its collapse until we entered the labor force, and by then I had my degree." He shuddered slightly at the memories. "I stayed on Aurora to try and help. Six months later Earth ordered the planet evacuated."