He leaned towards me. “Think back to the time — how many million years ago? — when Vandell was first ejected from its stellar system. It had been close to the system’s suns, exposed to great forces. It was hot, and maybe geologically active, and then suddenly it was thrown out, out into the void between the stars. What happened then?”
He paused, but I knew he was not expecting an answer. I waited.
He shrugged. “Nothing happened,” he said. “For millions or billions of years, Vandell was alone. It slowly lost heat, cooled, contracted — just as the planets of the Solar System cooled and contracted after they were first formed. But there is one critical difference: the planets circle the Sun, and each other. As tensions inside build up, tidal forces work to release them. Earth and the planets release accumulating internal stresses through sequences of small disturbances — earthquakes, Marsquakes, Jupiterquakes. They can never build up a large store of pent-up energy. They are nudged continuously to internal stability by the other bodies of the system. But not Vandell. It wanders alone. With no tidal forces to work on it — not even the forces caused by its rotation in the galactic gravitational and magnetic fields — Vandell became super-critical. It was a house of cards, unstable against small disturbances. Apply one shock, and all the stored energy would be released in a chain reaction.”
He paused and looked around. Then he blushed and seemed surprised at his own sudden eloquence. We all waited. Nothing else was forthcoming.
I had followed what he said without difficulty, but accepting it was another matter. “You’re telling me that everything on Vandell came from the pod’s landing,” I said. “But what about the dust clouds? And why the intense fields? And how could they arise from an internal adjustment — even a violent one? And why were there peaks in the disturbance, like the one when we lifted off?”
Sven Wicklund didn’t answer. He had apparently done his speaking for the day. He looked beseechingly for support to McAndrew, who coughed and rubbed at his head.
“Now, Jeanie,” he said, “you could answer those questions for yourself if you wanted to give it a minute’s thought. You know about positions of unstable equilibrium as well as I do. Make an infinitesimal displacement, and produce an unbounded change, that’s the heart of it. Compared with the disturbances on Vandell for the past few eons, the landing of a pod was a super-powerful shock — more than an infinitesimal nudge. And you expect a set of spherical harmonics — with a pole at the source of energy — when you distribute energy over a sphere. As for the fields, I’ll bet that you’re not enough of a student of science to know what a Wimshurst machine is; but I’ve seen one. It was an old way of generating tremendous electromagnetic fields and artificial lightning using simple friction of plates against each other. Vandell’s crustal motion could generate fields of billions of volts, though of course they’d only last a few hours. We were there right at the worst time.”
We looked back at the planet. To my eye it was maybe a little less visible, the lightning flashes less intense across the dusty clouds.
“Poor old Vandell,” said Jan. “Peaceful for all these years, then we come and ruin it. And we wanted to study a rogue planet, a place of absolute quiet. It’ll never be the way it was before we got here. Well, never mind, there should be others. When we get back we’ll tell people to be more careful.”
When we get back.
At those words, the world snapped into a different focus. For twelve hours I had been completely absorbed by the events of the moment. Earth, the Office of External Affairs, the Institute, they had not existed for me two minutes ago. Now they were present again, still far away — I looked out of the port, seeking the bright distant star of the Sun — but real.
“Are you all right, Jeanie?” asked Jan. She had observed my sudden change of expression.
“I’m not sure.”
It was time we told her everything. About Tallboy’s decision on the future of the Institute, about the cancellation of the Alpha Centauri expedition, the proposed decommissioning of the Hoatzin, and the way we had disobeyed official orders to follow them to Vandell. It all came rolling out like a long-stored fury.
“But you saved our lives,” protested Jan. “If you hadn’t taken the ship we’d be dead. Once they know that, they won’t care if you ignored some stupid regulation.”
McAndrew and I stared at her, then at each other. “Child, you’ve got a lot to learn about bureaucracy,” I said. “I know it all sounds ridiculous and trivial out here — damn it, it is ridiculous and trivial. But once we get back we’ll waste weeks of our time, defending what we did, documenting everything, and writing endless reports on it. The fact that you would have died won’t make one scrap of difference to Tallboy. He’ll follow the rule book.”
There was a moment of silence, while Mac and I pondered the prospect of a month of memoranda.
“What happened to the old Administrator?” asked Jan at last. “You know, the one you always talked about before. I thought he was your friend and understood what you were doing?”
“You mean Woolford? There was a change of Administration, and he went. The top brass change with the party, every seven years. Woolford left, and Tallboy replaced him.”
“Damn that man,” said McAndrew suddenly. “Everything ready for the Alpha Centauri expedition, heaps of supplies and equipment all in place; and that buffoon signs a piece of paper and kills it in two seconds.”
Ahead of us, I saw a faint blink against the starry background. It had to be Hoatzin’s pulsed beacon, sending a brief flash of light outward every two seconds. I made a first adjustment to our orbit to take us to rendezvous, and pointed out the distant ship to the others. Mac and Sven moved closer to the port, but Jan surprised me by remaining in her seat.
“Seven years?” she said to me thoughtfully. “The Administration will change again in seven years. Jeanie, what was the shipboard travel time you planned to Alpha Centauri?”
I frowned. “From Earth? One way, standing start to standing finish, would take Hoatzin about forty-four days.”
“So from here it would be even less.” She had a strange gleam in her eyes. “I noticed something before we set out. Vandell sits in Lupus, and that’s a neighboring constellation to Centaurus. I remember thinking to myself before we started, it’s an odd coincidence, but we’ll be heading in almost the same direction as Mac and Jeanie. So Alpha Centauri would take less time from here, right? Less than forty-four days.”
I nodded. “That’s just in shipboard time, of course. In Earth time we would have been away—” I stopped abruptly. I had finally reached the point where Jan had started her thinking.
“At least eight and a half years,” she said. “Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light-years from Earth, right? So by the time we get back home, we’ll find a new Administration and Tallboy will be gone.”
I stared at her thoughtfully. “Jan, do you know what you’re saying? We can’t do that. And as for that `we’ you were using, I hope you don’t think that Mac and I would let you and Sven take the risk of a trip like that. It’s out of the question.”
“Can’t we at least talk about it?” She smiled. “I’d like to hear what Mac and Sven have to say.”
I hesitated. “Oh, all right.” I said at last. “But not now. Let’s at least wait until we’re back on board Hoatzin. And don’t think I’ll let you twist those two around, the way you usually do.”
I frowned, she smiled.
And then I couldn’t help smiling back at her.
That’s the trouble with the younger generation. They don’t understand why a thing can’t be done, so they go ahead and do it.
We were going to have a mammoth argument about all this, I just knew it. One thing you have to teach the young is that it’s wrong to run away from problems.