It was a very efficient reaction. Much better than that pathetic "atomic power" the old people used to use.
It is always true that e = mc2, all right, but it is not easy to get all of the e out of the m. The sort of nuclear power plant that human beings built in the late twentieth century had a lot of mass left over when its reactions were complete. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the fuel mass remained mass and stubbornly refused to turn into energy at all.
But when antimatter reacts with an equal amount of normal matter no mass whatever is left. It isn't only a tenth of a percent of the mass that becomes driving force when you react normal matter with its antiparticles. It is all of it.
By the fourth day after Viktor's unplanned defrosting, the crew of Mayflower had gotten over their first heart-stopping fear. The flare star showed signs of dimming. The situation didn't seem critical, exactly. Puzzling, yes: Why had a very ordinary little K-5 star suddenly blossomed into flame? But it didn't seem to be life-threatening.
As panic subsided to surprised resentment aboard the New Mayflower, and then as the resentment changed to the work of coping with the consequences, Viktor Sorricaine's days became routine. Everybody's did. Fifth (Navigator) Officer Pal Sorricaine stopped being a navigator so he could become an astrophysicist, since one of his CalTech degrees had been on the dynamics of stellar cores. That was what was needed. The problem wasn't just how to rig the light sails and decide how much thrust to order from the deceleration engines, it was to predict how long the flare would last—and precisely what its curve toward extinction would be.
For that even Viktor's father's skills weren't quite enough, so they defrosted Mayflower's best astrophysical brain. And so Frances Mtiga (three months, or you could say ninety-odd years, pregnant) woke up, blinking, to find a dandy dissertation problem facing her.
When she was thawed and bathed and fed and dressed Pal Sorricaine sat her before a screen and punched up the relevant menu for her. "This is what we've got on the flare star, Frances," he said. "I've filed it under NEWFLARE, and here are all the relevant studies I've been able to find—they're under FLARECITES—and this is the preliminary report that I sent back to Earth. That file's marked TENTATIVE. Maybe I should have called it GUESSWORK. It doesn't matter much anyway, Fanny. By the time any of this gets to Earth and back we'll be getting ready to land on the new planet."
"Or we won't," Frances Mtiga said dourly, rubbing her belly for reassurance as she studied the citation file.
"Or we won't," Pal Sorricaine agreed, grinning. "But there isn't any real reason to doubt that we will, Fanny. It looks like it's an interesting problem in astrophysics, that's all. Not any real threat to the mission. Anyway, we just won't go back into the freezer until we've got the whole thing studied out and under control."
Mtiga sighed, scratching her belly again. It was barely beginning to round out. "We'll give it as long as it takes," she said fretfully. "But tell me, Pal, don't you think my husband's going to have a surprise when he wakes up and finds he has a ten-year-old kid?"
Indeed it began to look that way. The astrophysical information stored in New Mayflower's databank was comprehensive, but there wasn't much that was useful on flaring K-5 stars, because K-5 stars of that spectral type had never previously been observed to flare that way.
Viktor happily shared his father's puzzlement, all the more happily because no one expected him to solve the conundrum of the flare. His father was less lucky. He laid out the latest stretch of film to show his son, scowling at it. Although Viktor knew that it was supposed to be a spectrum, because his father had told him so, the film wasn't in color. It wasn't a rainbow. "It's a spectrogram, Vik," his father explained. "It shows the frequencies of the light from a star, or anything else. The diffraction grating bends the light, but the different frequencies bend to different amounts. The shorter the wavelength, the more it bends, so the red end doesn't get bent very much and the violet bends way over to here. Well, actually," he corrected himself, "this end is really the far ultraviolet, and down here is infrared. We can't see them with our eyes, but the film, can … Only it's not a very good spectrogram," he finished, scowling again. "That grating's been out there for a hundred years, and all that time it's been bombarded with gases and fine particles of interstellar dust. The lines are blurred, do you see?"
"I guess so," Viktor said, peering uncertainly at the ribbon of grayed lines. "Can you fix it?"
"I can put a new one in," his father said, and displayed the thing he meant. It was a curved bit of metal, as long as Viktor's forearm, the shape of a watermelon rind when the flesh has been eaten away. His father handled it with care, showing Viktor the infinite narrow lines that had been ruled onto its concave face.
Well, that part was pretty exciting—it meant someone would have to suit up and crawl out onto the skin of New Mayflower to pull the fuzzed grating out and put the new one in—anyway, it would have been exciting, if Viktor had seen it. To his annoyance it all happened while he was asleep. By the time he knew it was over his father was pondering over a newer, sharper, but still baffling spectrogram.
"Christ," he grumbled, "look at the thing. It looks like that star's spilling its guts two ways at once. Only Doppler interferometry doesn't show any increase in diameter, so it's not a nova-type explosion. So what is it?"
No one expected Viktor to answer that question. They did expect it of his father and of Frances Mtiga, but the astrophysicists didn't know the answer either. Every day they checked twenty-four hours of observations, which the computer matched against the latest revised models Sorricaine and Mtiga had prepared to draw its best-fit curves. And every day the fit wasn't really good enough.
"But it's going to be all right, Pal," Viktor's mother told her husband. The three of them, for once, were having dinner together in the big refectory. "I mean, isn't it? There's plenty of fuel. You can just shove the ship around on the drive and forget about the sails, can't you?"
"Sure we could," Pal Sorricaine said absently. "Oh, we'll get there all right, I guess."
"Then—"
"But it's not very goddamn elegant!" he barked.
Viktor understood what his father meant. The wondrous thing about astrophysics was that the more you learned, the better everything fit together. Things didn't get more complicated, they got more breathtakingly clear. In Pal's view (as in the view of all scientists) oddball events spoiled the symmetry of the laws that ruled the universe. They were a disgrace that could only be repaired by figuring out how, after all, they did fit. "Anyway," Pal Sorricaine said after a moment, "there's a price tag on this thing. That fuel's not just supposed to get us there. It's going to power industry and stuff. The more we use, the more we're stealing from our future." And that was true enough, because when Mayflower was just a hulk in orbit the colony would need the microwaves it would be beaming down to the surface. "But mostly it's not elegant," he said again dismally. "We're supposed to know all about these things. And we don't!"