He said, and his own uncertainty made him sound imperious, “Laborian. I want to see you in my office.”
They were together alone for the first time since well before the compu-drama had been made. “Well?” said Willard. “What do you think, Mr. Laborian?”
Laborian smiled. “That woman who runs the subliminal background told you that it was almost as good as your King Lear was, Mr. Willard.”
“I heard her.”
“She was quite wrong. “ “In your opinion?”
“Yes. My opinion is what counts right now. She was quite wrong. Your Three in One is much better than your King Lear.”
“Better?” Willard’s weary face broke into a smile.
“Much better. Consider the material you had to work with in doing King Lear. You had William Shakespeare, producing words that sang, that were music in themselves; William Shakespeare producing characters who, whether for good or evil, whether strong or weak, whether shrewd or foolish, whether faithful or traitorous, were all larger than life; William Shakespeare, dealing with two overlapping plots, reinforcing each other and tearing the viewers to shreds.
“What was your contribution to King Lear? You added dimensions that Shakespeare lacked the technological knowledge to deal with; that he couldn’t dream of; but the fanciest technologies and all that your people and your own talents could do could only build somewhat on the greatest literary genius of all time, working at the peak of his power.
“But in Three in One, Mr. Willard, you were working with my words which didn’t sing; my characters, which weren’t great; my plot which tore at no one. You dealt with me, a run-of-the-mill writer and you produced something great, something that will be remembered long after I am dead. One book of mine, anyway, will live on because of what you have done.
“Give me back my electronic hundred thousand, Mr. Willard, and I will give you this.”
The hundred thousand was shifted back from one financial card to the other and, with an effort, Laborian then pulled his fat briefcase onto the table and opened it. From it, he drew out a box, fastened with a small hook. He unfastened it carefully, and lifted the top. Inside it glittered the gold pieces, each one marked with the planet Earth, the western hemisphere on one side, the eastern on the other. Large gold pieces, two hundred of them, each worth five hundred globo-dollars.
Willard, awed, plucked out one of the gold pieces. It weighed about one and a quarter ounces. He threw it up in the air and caught it.
“Beautiful,” he said.
“It’s yours, Mr. Willard,” said Laborian. “Thank you for doing the compu-drama for me. It is worth every piece of that gold.”
Willard stared at the gold and said, “You made me do the compu-drama of your book with your offer of this gold. To get this gold, I forced myself beyond my talents. Thank you for that, and you are right. It was worth every piece of that gold.”
He put the gold piece back in the box and closed it. Then he lifted the box and handed it back to Laborian.
Part Two: On Science Fiction
The Longest Voyage
Suppose you want to take a trip across the country from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon.
That’s roughly 3,000 miles. A trip around the world along the equator is only a little over eight times that, 25,000 miles.
To go from the Earth to the moon is only about nine times the equatorial jaunt, about 240,000 miles. Beyond that? Well, Venus at its closest is just over a hundred times the distance to the moon; it is about 25,000,000 miles away. And right now, Pluto is just about as near to Earth as it ever gets, but it is over a hundred times the distance to Venus. It is about 2,800,000,000 miles away.
So far we’ve stayed in our solar system, but beyond that are the stars. Even the nearest star is nearly 9,000 times as far away as Pluto is right now. The nearest star is Alpha Centauri and it is 25,000,000,000,000 miles away. And that’s the nearest star.
The distance across the Milky Way galaxy is 23,000 times the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri. The distance from here to the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest large galaxy to our own, is about twenty-three times the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy. And the distance from here to the farthest quasar is about 4,000 times that from here to the Andromeda.
What about time? It takes a few days to get to the moon; a few months to get to Venus or Mars; a few years to get to the giant planets of the solar system. But that’s about as far as we can go and have it make reasonable sense.
To get to even the nearest star, at the present state of the art, would take hundreds of thousands of years. All that NASA has so far done in sending probes as far as Saturn has been to play games in our backyard. It is interstellar travel, trips to the stars, that represent the longest voyage.
And it is in trips to the stars that science fiction writers and readers are most interested. Our solar system is too well known and too limited. The solar system (outside Earth) is not at all likely to bear life of any kind-certainly not intelligent life. So we’ve got to take the longest voyage and get to the stars, if we’re to find extraterrestrial friends, competitors, and enemies. As long ago as 1928, in The Skylark of Space, E. E. (Doc) Smith took the first science-fictional trip to the stars, and how the readers loved it.
Good old Doc was a little vague on just how his interstellar ships managed to cross those huge spaces, however, and, to tell you the truth, we’re not much better off now. Let’s list the possibilities:
1. We can keep accelerating; going faster and faster and faster until we’re going fast enough to cover vast interstellar and intergalactic distances in a matter of months, or even days. objection: Physicists are strongly of the opinion that the speed of light in a vacuum, 186,000 miles per second, is as fast as anyone can go. At that speed, it will still take years to reach the nearest star, millions of
years to reach the nearest large galaxy.2. Even if we’re limited to the speed of light, that could be good enough. As one approaches the speed of light, the rate of time passage on the speeding object slows steadily, and at the speed of light itself, the rate of time passage is zero. At light speed, then, the crew of a starship would cover enormous distance practically instantaneously. objection: Interstellar and intergalactic space is littered with occasional hydrogen atoms. At light speed, these atoms would strike the ship with the energy and force of cosmic ray particles and would quickly kill the starship’s crew and passengers. Probably, the ship would have to go no faster than one-tenth light speed, and at that speed the time effects are not great enough to help us much.
3. Suppose we attach a kind of “atom-plow” arrangement in front of the starship. It would scoop up all the atoms in front of it, thus preventing cosmic ray problems and, in addition, gathering material to serve as fuel for its nuclear fusion engines. objection: Such atom-plows would have to be many thousands of miles across to be effective. Building such things would represent enormous and perhaps insuperable problems.
4. We can evade the speed-of-light limit altogether by making use of tachyons, subatomic particles that move much faster than the speed of light and that, as a matter of fact, cannot move slower than the speed of light. objection: Tachyons exist only in theory, and have not actually been detected. Most physicists think they will never be detected. Even if they were detected, no one has even come close to figuring out a way of putting them to use.
5. Perhaps we can evade the speed-of-light limit by going through black holes. They at least are known to exist. objection: Even if black holes exist (and astronomers are not yet unanimous on this), no one is even close to suggesting how any stars hip might approach one without, being destroyed by tidal forces. In addition, there is by no means general agreement that one can negotiate long distances quickly by going through black holes.