Ab had felt that, although there was a better than even chance they would be exposed, surely the groundhogs couldn’t stay angry for 23 years—even if they were unimpressed by the antimatter and other wonders. …
Besides, Charlie thought, it’s not their worry anymore.
As it turned out, the crew of Daedalus would have bigger things to worry about.
The Russians had their May Day celebration—Charlie watched it on TV and winced every time they mentioned the good ship Leonid I. Brezhnev—and then things settled back down to normal. Charlie and three thousand others waited nervously for the “surprise” message. It came in early June, as expected, scrambled in a data channel. But it didn’t say what it was supposed to:
“This is Abigail Bemis, to Charles Leventhal.
“Charlie, we have real trouble. The ship has been damaged, hit in the stern by a good chunk of something. It punched right through the main drive reflector. Destroyed a set of control sensors and one attitude jet.
“As far as we can tell, the situation is stable. We’re maintaining acceleration at just a tiny fraction under one gee. But we can’t steer, and we can’t shut off the main drive.
“We didn’t have any trouble with ring debris when we were orbiting since we were inside Roche’s limit. Coming in, as you know, we’d managed to take advantage of natural divisions in the rings. We tried the same going back, but it was a slower, more complicated process, since we mass so goddamn much now. We must have picked up a piece from the fringe of one of the outer rings.
“If we could turn off the drive, we might have a chance at fixing it. But the work pods can’t keep up with the ship, not at one gee. The radiation down there would fry the operator in seconds, anyway.
“We’re working on it. If you have any ideas, let us know. It occurs to me that this puts you in the clear. We were headed back to Earth, but got clobbered. Will send a transmission to that effect on the regular comm channel. This message is strictly burn-before reading.
“End it.”
It worked perfectly, as far as getting Charlie and L-5 off the hook and the drama of the situation precipitated a level of interest in space travel unheard-of since the 1960’s.
They even had a hero. A volunteer had gone down in a heavily shielded work pod, lowered on a cable, to take a look at the situation. She’d sent back clear pictures of the damage, before the cable snapped.
The following news item was killed from Fax & Pix, because it was too hard to translate into the “plain English” that made the paper so popular:
SPACESHIP PASSES 61 CYGNI SORT OF (L-5 Stringer)
A message received today from the spaceship Daedalus said that it had just passed within 400 astronomical units of 61 Cygni. That’s about ten times as far as the planet Pluto is from the Sun.
Actually, the spaceship passed the star some eleven years ago. It’s taken all that time for the message to get back to us.
We don’t know for sure where the spaceship actually is, now. If they still haven’t repaired the runaway drive, they’re about eleven light-years past the 61 Cygni system (their speed when they passed the double star was better than 99% the speed of light).
The situation is more complicated if you look at it from the point of view of a passenger on the spaceship. Because of relativity, time seems to pass more slowly as you approach the speed of light. So only about four years passed for them, on the eleven light year journey.
L-5 Coordinator Charles Leventhal points out that the spaceship has enough antimatter fuel to keep accelerating to the edge of the Galaxy. The crew then would be only some twenty years older-but it would be twenty thousand years before we heard from them. …
(Kill this one. There’s more stuff about what the ship looked like to the people on 61 Cygni, and how cum we could talk to them all the time even though time was slower there, but its all as stupid as this.)
Charlie Leventhal died at the age of 99, bitter. Almost a decade earlier it had been revealed that they’d planned all along for Daedalus to be a starship. Few people had paid much attention to the news. Among those who did, the consensus was that anything that got rid of a thousand scientists at once, was a good thing. Look at the mess they got us in.
Daedalus. 67 light-years out, and still accelerating.
After over seven years of shipboard research and development—and some 1500 light-years of travel—they managed to shut down the engine. With sophisticated telemetry, the job was done without endangering another life.
Every life was precious now. They were no longer simply explorers; almost half their fuel was gone. They were colonists, with no ticket back.
The message of their success would reach Earth in fifteen centuries. Whether there would be an infrared telescope around to detect it, that was a matter of some conjecture.
While decelerating, they had investigated several systems in their line of flight. They found one with an Earth-type planet around a Sun-type sun, and aimed for it.
The season they began landing colonists, the dominant feature in the planet’s night sky was a beautiful blooming cloud of gas that astronomers had named the North American Nebula.
Which was an irony that didn’t occur to any of these colonists from L-5—give or take a few years, it was America’s Trimillennial.
America itself was a little the worse for wear, this three thousandth anniversary. The seas that lapped its shores were heavy with a crimson crust of anaerobic life; the mighty cities had fallen and their remains, nearly ground away by the never-ceasing sandstorms.
No fireworks were planned, for lack of an audience, for lack of planners; bacteria just don’t care. May Day too would be ignored.
The only humans in the Solar System lived in a glass and metal tube. They tended their automatic machinery, and turned their backs on the dead Earth, and worshiped the constellation Cygnus, and had forgotten why.