“Stop it!” Bonnie snapped.
He looked at her. “It hurts,” he said.
She put her arms around him and rested her head against his shoulder. “I know it hurts, Lou. I know.”
A loudspeaker set into the ceiling broke in: “Tonight’s special showing of photographs from the Starfarer mission will begin in five minutes.”
Bonnie straightened up, looked briefly into Lou’s eyes, and then turned to open the door.
They sat side by side on the sofabed, the only sittable piece of furniture in the cramped compartment, and watched the viewscreen set into the wall next to the door. The listened to Kori’s voice explaining what the pictures showed, watched the stars, the myriad stars. They saw Alpha Centauri again, and focused on the fat yellow-green planet with its ice-white clouds.
Then suddenly Lou was on his feet, shouting:
“The stars! That’s the way out! The stars!”
He felt as if someone had just lifted a heavy mask from his eyes.
Bonnie was standing beside him, her eyes wide with bewilderment. “Lou, what is it? What’s wrong?”
He grabbed her and lifted her off her feet and kissed her.
“The stars, Bonnie! That’s our escape, that’s our purpose. Instead of staying here in exile, we can leave! Head for the stars! We can turn this prison into mankind’s first starship!”
21
“Flatly impossible,” snapped Dr Kaufman.
Lou was standing at the end of the conference table in Kaufman’s office Kori was sitting at his side The members of the Council showed a full spectrum of emotions from thoughtful skepticism to outright scorn.
“It’s absolutely impossible, the most ridiculous suggestion I’ve ever heard,” Kaufman continued.
Lou held on to his steaming temper. “Why do you say that? The scheme is physically possible.”
“To turn this entire satellite into a starship? Accelerate it to the kind of velocity that Starfarer reached, or even more? Nonsense!”
Kori said, “With the kind of fusion engines we now know how to build, we could accelerate this pinwheel to reach Alpha Centauri in less time than it took Starfarer. After all, the Starfarer was launched nearly two generations ago, it’s a primitive ship, compared to what we can do now.”
“But your own pictures showed that Alpha Centauri’s planets are not enough like Earth to serve as a new home for us,” said Mettler, one of the Europeans on Kaufman’s Council.
“You’re missing the point,” Lou countered “The important thing is that Alpha Centauri has planets. Barnard’s Star has planets, they’ve been detected from Earth. Seven of the nearest ten stars are known to have planets, one of them is bound to be enough like Earth to suit us.”
“Yes, I know. But it might take you a century or two to find a fully Earth-like planet.”
“Let me ask something else,” Charles Sutherland said in his nasal whine. “Have you thought about the structural stresses on this satellite when you hook a fusion drive engine to it?”
Kori answered, “I’ve done some rough calculations. It doesn’t look too bad. I’d need a computer to do the job properly, of course.”
“And there’s no computer here,” Sutherland said, grinning sardonically. “And the government won’t give us one. Neither will they give us fusion engines. So the whole scheme is meaningless.”
“I think they would give us anything we asked for,” Lou said, “if they knew they’d be getting rid of us. Permanently.”
“Oh, it’ll be permanent, all right. One way or the other,” Sutherland said.
Kaufman frowned. “By even asking for permission to try such a stunt, we’d be telling the government that we’ve given up all hope of ever being reinstated on Earth. We’d be admitting that we expect to be exiled for the rest of our lives.”
“Don’t you expect to be here for the rest of your life?” Kurtz asked.
“No!” Kaufman slapped the table with the flat of his hand. “I have friends who are working right now to end this nonsense. I’m sure they are. And I’m sure that they must be making some headway. And so do the other leaders from the other laboratories around the world. The government can’t keep this farce going forever.”
Lou shook his head. “I’ve talked with the General Chairman himself. There’s no doubt in his mind that we’re here to stay.”
“He’s a feeble old man. He’ll be replaced soon.”
“By Kobryn,” said Mettler. “Who is not going to hand out any pardons.”
Greg Belsen turned to Kori, sitting beside him. “You really think you can do it? Get us out to the stars?”
“Of course. It’s only a question of getting the right equipment and support from Earth.”
“And finding the right planet,” Lou added.
“The planet needn’t be exactly like Earth,” Greg mused. “We could modify our children genetically, so they’re physically adapted to the conditions on their new world.”
“But the rest of us could never live on that world,” Kaufman said.
“Mmm… well,” Greg said, “it’s just a thought; we’d still be able to make a homework! for the children, even if we couldn’t find one exactly suited for us. I think it’s worth the gamble. Let’s try it. If nothing else, it’ll give us something substantial to work on.”
“Until the government refuses to give you what you need,” Kaufman muttered.
“Let’s vote on it,” Greg suggested.
“Now wait,” said Kaufman. “Before there’s any voting…”
But there were already three hands in the air: Greg’s, Ron Kurtz’s, and Mettler’s. With a shrug, Tracy, the other European on the Council, added his hand. Only Kaufman and Sutherland were opposed.
Kaufman snorted. “All right. We’ll look into it. Dr. Kori, you can ask your colleagues to help you with the rocketry and astronautics work.” From the tone of his voice, it was clear that Kaufman expected the older rocket scientists to regard Kori as a madman.
Some of them did just that. They shook their heads and walked away from Kori, unbelieving. But a few accepted the idea. More as an amusement, perhaps, than a real possibility. But they toyed with the notion, they started jotting down notes, equations. Within a week the handful of rocket scientists and engineers aboard the satellite were all hard at work, no matter how implausible some of them thought the scheme to be. They soon took over all the desk top calculators in the satellite, watching the numbers flickering fluorescently in the viewscreens, getting more enthusiastic each day.
Greg Belsen was eager from the beginning. He started looking into the possibilities of deep-freezing people, putting them into suspended animation in cryogenic sleeping units. It was done on Earth, in rare medical emergencies, for a few days at a time. Greg wanted to put most of the satellite’s seven thousand people into cryogenic sleep for decades.
“Either most of the people are going to sleep most of the time,” he told Lou, “or we have to rebuild this ship into a gingerbread house. Do you have any idea of how many megatons of food seven thousand people can eat in a century or so?”
Gradually, some of the other biochemists started working with Greg. Even a few of the geneticists let themselves be dragged into the problem, although it was well out of their field.
Within a month, Lou was asking a very suspicious government computer expert for time on high-speed computers. After a week of checking with Earth-bound scientists and government officials, the computer man allowed Lou to establish direct radio and Tri-V contact with a huge government computer in Australia.
“They’re double-checking everything we do,” Lou told Bonnie, “to make sure we’re not slipping in any work on genetic engineering. Slows us down,, but we’re getting there just the same. Kori says he can’t see anything to stop us. If we can get the engines built and the radiation screens, and the other equipment, that is.”