“Not physicists.” Limperis had suddenly sobered. “By no means physicists. That is why I am glad you will be accompanying Professor McAndrew. The leader of the original group was Jules Massingham. In the past few days I have taken the time to obtain all the System records on him. He was a man of great personal drive and convictions. His ambition was to apply the old principles of eugenics to a whole society. Two themes run through all his writings: the creation of the superior human, and the idea of that superior being as an integrated part of a whole society. He was ruthless in his pursuit of those ends.”
He looked at me, black face impassive. “From the evidence available, Captain, one might suggest that he succeeded in his aims.”
Hoatzin was a step up from Merganser and Dotterel. Maximum acceleration was a hundred and ten gees, and the living-capsule was a four-meter sphere. I had cursed the staff of the Institute, publicly and privately, but I had got nowhere. They were obsessed with the idea of the lonely genius out there in the void, and no one would consider any other first trip for Hoatzin. So at least I would check out every aspect of the system before we went, while McAndrew was looking at the rendezvous problem and making a final flight plan. We sent a message to the Ark, telling them of our trip and estimated arrival time. It would take two years to get there, Earth-time, but we would take even longer. They would be able to prepare for our arrival however they chose, with garlands or gallows.
On the trip out, McAndrew tried again to explain to me his methods for tapping the vacuum self-energy. The available energies made up a quasi-continuous “spectrum,” corresponding to a large number of very high frequencies of vibration and associated wavelengths. Tuned resonators in the Hoatzin drive units selected certain wavelengths which were excited by the corresponding components in the vacuum self energy. These “colors,” as McAndrew thought of them, could feed vacuum energy to the drive system. The results that had come from the Ark of Massingham suggested that McAndrew’s system for energy extraction could be generalized, so that all the “colors” of the vacuum self-energy should become available.
If that were true, the potential acceleration produced by the drive could go up by a couple of orders of magnitude. He was still working out what the consequences of that would be. At speeds that approached within a nanometer per second of light speed, a single proton would mass enough to weigh its impact on a sensitive balance.
I let him babble on to his heart’s content. My own attention was mostly on the history of the Ark of Massingham. It was an oddity among oddities. Six of the Arks had disappeared without trace. They didn’t respond to signals from Earth, and they didn’t send signals of their own. Most people assumed that they had wiped themselves out, with accidents, wars, strange sexual practices, or all three. Four of the Arks had swung back towards normalcy and were heading in again for the System. Six were still heading out, but two of them were in deep trouble if the messages that came back to Triton Station were any guide. One was full of messianic ranting, a crusade of human folly propagating itself out to the stars (let’s hope they never met anyone out there whose good opinion we would later desire). Another was quietly and peacefully insane, sending messages that spoke only of new rules for the interpretation of dreams. They were convinced that they would find the world of the Norse legends when they finally arrived at Eta Cassiopeia, complete with Jotunheim, Niflheim, and all the assembly of gods and heroes. It would be six hundred years before they arrived there, time enough for moves to rationality or to extinction.
Among this set, the Ark of Massingham provided a bright mixture of sanity and strangeness. They had sent messages back since first they left, messages that assumed the Ark was the carrier of human hopes and a superior civilization. Nothing that we sent — questions, comments, information, or acknowledgements — ever stimulated a reply. And nothing that they sent ever discussed life aboard the Ark. We had no idea if they lived in poverty or plenty, if they were increasing or decreasing in numbers, if they were receiving our transmissions, if they had material problems of any kind. Everything that came back to the solar system was science, delivered in a smug and self-satisfied tone. From all that science, the recent transmission on physics was the only one to excite more than a mild curiosity from our own scientists. Usually the Ark sent “discoveries” that had been made here long ago.
Once the drive of the Hoatzin was up to full thrust there was no way that we could see anything or communicate with anyone. The drive was fixed to the mass plate on the front of the ship, and the particles that streamed past us and out to the rear were visible only when they were in collision with the rare atoms of hydrogen drifting in free space. We had actually settled for less than a maximum drive and were using a slightly dispersed exhaust. A tightly focused and collimated beam wouldn’t harm us any, but we didn’t want to generate a death ray behind us that would disintegrate anything in its path for a few light-years.
Six days into the trip, our journey out shared the most common feature of all long distance travel. It was boring. When McAndrew wasn’t busy inside his head, staring at the wall in front of him and performing the mental acrobatics that he called theoretical physics, we talked, played and exercised. I was astonished again that a man who knew so much about so much could know nothing about some things.
“You mean to tell me,” he said once, as we lay in companionable darkness, with the side port showing the eldritch and unpredictable blue sparks of atomic collision. “You mean that Lungfish wasn’t the first space station. All the books and records show it that way.”
“No, they don’t. If they do, they’re wrong. It’s a common mistake. Like the idea back at the beginning of flight itself, that Lindbergh was the first man to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. He was more like the hundredth.” I saw McAndrew turn his head towards me. “Yes, you heard me. A couple of airships had been over before him, and a couple of other people in aircraft. He was just the first person to fly alone. Lungfish was the first truly permanent space station, that’s all. And I’ll tell you something else. Did you know that in the earliest flights, even ones that lasted for months, the crews were usually all men? Think of that for a while.”
He was silent for a moment. “I don’t see anything wrong with it. It would simplify some of the plumbing, maybe some other things, too.”
“You don’t understand, Mac. That was at a time when it was regarded as morally wrong for men to form sexual relationships with men, or women with women.”
There was what I might describe as a startled silence.
“Oh,” said McAndrew at last. Then, after a few moments more, “My God. How much did they have to pay them? Or was coercion used?”
“It was considered an honor to be chosen.”
He didn’t say any more about it; but I don’t think he believed me, either. Politeness is one of the first things you learn on long trips.
We cut off the drive briefly at crossover, but there was nothing to be seen and there was still no way we could receive messages. We were crowding light speed so closely that anything from Triton Station would scarcely be catching up with us. The Institute’s message was still on its way to the Ark of Massingham, and we would be there ourselves not long after it. The Hoatzin was behaving perfectly, with none of the problems that had almost done us in on the earlier test ships. The massive disc of dense matter at the front of the ship protected us from most of our collisions with stray dust and free hydrogen. If we didn’t come back, the next ship out could follow our path exactly, tracking our swath of ionization.