By seven the room had settled down, they were up live on the networks, and Jon was back at the panel. The clock activated with three minutes to go. When the signal arrived, it would come in the form of a voice message, the words Greetings from Pluto. Jon had argued for a simple series of beeps, especially with the world watching. “It has a little more class.” But Rudy was part showman, had to be, or the Foundation would never have survived. So Greetings from Pluto it became. They were using the voice of a well-known character actor, Victor Caldwell. Caldwell, a major force in promoting the Foundation, had died the year before. But his baritone was known around the world.
Hutch stood in a corner calmly drinking coffee. She could be a cold number when she wanted to.
The room went dead silent as the last seconds drained off. Rudy told himself to relax. The counter hit zero, and everybody strained forward. He could hear himself breathing.
Somebody coughed.
Somewhere a door closed. Distant voices.
Jon pushed back in his chair.
Plus one minute.
Rudy shoved his fists into his pockets. Come on, Victor. Where are you?
Reporters began to look at one another. Jani Kloefmann leaned in his direction. “When do we reach a point where it becomes a problem?” she asked, keeping her voice low.
“Don’t know, Jani,” he said. “We’re in unknown territory here.”
Two minutes.
When six minutes had passed, Jon stood up and faced the cameras. His face told it all. “No way it could have taken this long,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”
It was as if the air went out of the room. Everything deflated. There was another barrage of questions, a few laughs, and lots of people talking on commlinks.
Rudy took time to commiserate with Jon, who managed to maintain a brave demeanor. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “The numbers were right. It should have worked. It had to work.”
They waited a half hour. People came over to shake their hands, tell them they were sorry. Then the crowd drifted away. Rudy decided he’d waited long enough. He corralled Jon and Hutch, was unable to find Paul, and went up to the main concourse. While they walked, Jon speculated that maybe there’d been a problem with the Happy Times. “Maybe the main engines were defective,” he said. “Maybe they screwed up the wiring. That’s all it would have taken. With no AI on board, nobody would have known.”
They ended in the Orbital Bar & Grill, where they could watch the sun rise. It was soaring into the sky as the station rushed toward the horizon. Not like on the ground, where movement wasn’t quite visible.
Jon couldn’t stop talking about where things might have gone wrong. He mentioned several possibilities, other than the ship. “There are areas,” he confessed, “where the theory becomes elastic. Where the parameters are not entirely clear. Where you have to test. Find out.” They needed to learn from this, he continued. Make some corrections. He thought all it might take would be an adjustment in fueling correspondences.
And, of course, another ship.
Rudy wondered why he hadn’t brought these details up before.
“We need to find a tech,” Jon said. “One of the people who helped with the launch.”
“Why?” asked Hutch.
But he was already signaling for his bill and pushing himself away from the table.
Rudy and Hutch followed him back to the operations section, where they prowled the passageways until they found a technician who seemed to have time on her hands. Jon identified himself. “I was part of the Happy Times experiment earlier today,” he added.
She nodded. “I’m sorry about the way it turned out, Dr. Silvestri.”
“I’d like to look at the last few seconds again. The ship’s transit. Can you arrange that?”
She gave him a sympathetic smile and took them into a room with several cubicles, all empty. “Pick one,” she said.
He sat down in front of a display, and she brought up the Happy Times, adjusted the clock, and froze the picture. Twelve fifty-eight P.M. One minute to jump. “Thanks,” he said.
“Sure.” She explained the controls. “This starts it again. This freeezes it. And this slows it down or speeds it up. Okay?”
“Fine.”
“When you’re finished, just leave it. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He started it forward, and played it in real time. The ship filled the screen, moving quietly against the field of stars. The clock counted down, and it vanished.
He backed it up and ran it again. At a slower pace.
Watched as it blinked out.
Something was there.
He ran it again, still more slowly this time, and slower still as it approached the critical moment.
The ship began to fade out of the three-dimensional universe. The transition started in the Happy Times’s after section, where the Locarno Drive was installed, and moved forward.
Something else was happening: The ship was bending, folding up, as if it were cardboard, as if an invisible hand had taken hold of it, had begun squeezing it. Or maybe pulling it apart. Metal bent in extraordinary ways, and in those last moments, as it faded to oblivion it no longer resembled a ship. Rather it might have been a clay model that had simultaneously exploded and crumpled.
He threw his head back in the chair. “It didn’t survive entry.”
“No,” Rudy said. “I guess not.”
The failure of the Locarno Drive is a major setback for us all. The talking heads are telling us we’re better off, that it could only lead to another interstellar age, and thereby drain funds needed elsewhere. And it may be true that there are places too dangerous to go. New York Online has cited the classic Murray Leinster story “First Contact,” in which a human starship encounters an alien vessel, and neither ship feels it can safely leave the rendezvous point without risking the possibility that the other will follow it home. And thereby betray the location of the home world to God knows what.
That is the argument we are now hearing from those who think we should not venture into deep space. The stakes are too high, the risk too great. What chance would we have against technologies wielded by a million-year-old civilization? And these fears have been underscored by the recent discovery, and subsequent loss, of an alien vessel said to be more than a billion years old.
But one has to ask whether we wouldn’t still be sitting in the middle of the forest if we were a species that first and foremost played it safe.
Eventually we will move out into the galaxy. We will, or our children will. If we can perfect a drive to enable more extensive exploration, then we should do it. And I’d go a step farther. One of the objections most often raised to the development of an enhanced transport system is the fear that somebody will make for the galactic core, stir up whatever force exists in the Mordecai Zone, and bring them down on our heads. This is haunted house logic. If somebody is still there, still orchestrating the omegas that drift through the galaxy blowing things up, maybe it’s time we explained things to them.
A new propulsion technology might put us in a position to stop the production of omegas. That will not matter much to any but our most distant descendants. The omegas are, apparently, already in the pipeline for well over a million years to come. But if we can shut the operation down, we should do it. We owe that much to ourselves, and to any other reasoning creatures in the path of the damned things.