Life Probe E-Book

Michael McCollum

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The Makers are an advanced, intelligent alien species. For hundreds of millennia, they have been on the hunt for the secret to faster-than-light travel. Their chosen instruments were the far-reaching Life Probes, in hopes of encountering other advanced civilizations out among the stars. After a 10,000 year long journey, one of these machines stumbles upon 22nd-century Earth. Upon arrival, the probe isn't quite sure that this planet contains anything that could be considered "advanced" or "intelligent". But the Makers need help from humankind—the probe is damaged and must be repaired if their search for knowledge is to continue...

Leseprobe

LIFE PROBE

Copyright © 1983, 2020 by Michael McCollum

All rights reserved.

Published as an eBook in 2020 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-625674-79-1

Cover design by John Fisk

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part Two

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Epilogue

About the Author

Also by Michael McCollum

Prologue

The Makers had never heard of Homo sapiens Terra, nor would they have been particularly impressed if they had. By their standards, mankind had little to brag about. The Makers’ cities were old when Australopithecus first ventured out onto the plains of Africa. By the time Homo erectus was lord of the Earth, they had touched each of the twelve planets that circled their KO sun.

Individually, Makers were long lived, industrious, and generally content. Their population was stabilized at an easily supported fifty billion and war was an ancient nightmare not discussed in polite company. So, when the Makers came to the limits of their stellar system, it was with a sense of adventure that they prepared to venture out into the great blackness beyond.

The first ships to leave the Maker sun were ‘slowboats’, huge vessels that took a lifetime to visit the nearer stars. After three dozen such ventures, the Makers found they had made two important discoveries. The first was that life is pervasive throughout the universe. Nearly every stellar system studied had a planet in the temperate zone where water is liquid. Such worlds were found to be teeming with life. More exciting to the Maker scientists, on twelve percent of the worlds visited, evolutionary pressures had led to the development of intelligence. Two were the homes of civilizations nearly as advanced as the Makers’ own.

The second great intellectual discovery was the realization that the Galaxy is a very large place, much too large to be explored by slowboat. In a spirit of curiosity more than anything else, the Makers set out to circumvent the one thing that retarded their progress. They began searching for a means to exceed the speed of light A million years of scientific endeavor had taught them that the first step in any new project is to develop a rational theory of the phenomenon to be studied. The Makers, being who they were, did not stop when they had one theory of how faster-than-light might be achieved.

They developed two.

Each was supported by an impressive body of experimental evidence and astronomical observation. Each should have resulted in the development of an FTL drive. Yet, every effort for a hundred thousand years ended in failure.

There is a limit to the quantity of resources any civilization can divert to satisfy an itch of its curiosity bump. The FTL program had long since passed the point of economic viability. Yet, the effort continued apace. For while the Makers were mounting their assault on the light barrier, they found a more compelling reason than mere curiosity to break free of their prison.

Their stellar system was beginning to run low on the raw materials Maker civilization needed to sustain itself.

The first signs were barely noticeable, even to the economists who kept careful watch over such things. Eventually curves could be projected far enough into the future to foretell a time when civilization must inevitably collapse of resource starvation. To avert catastrophe the Makers would have to obtain an infusion of new resources, either by importing raw materials from nearby stars or else transplanting their civilization to virgin territory.

Unfortunately, both options required a working faster-than-light drive.

The frustrated scientists redoubled their efforts. It was not until another hundred millennia had passed that a Maker philosopher began to wonder if they were asking the right questions. The Great Thinker had dedicated his life to the study of the years immediately following the slowboats’ return from the stars. He noted that Maker science had taken great intuitive leaps in those years. The old records told of many cases where the combined knowledge of two races had led to discoveries unsuspected by either.

His questions were as fundamental as they were simple: “Could it be that our concepts of how FTL may be achieved are wrong? Is the failure to break the light barrier simply a matter of having missed the obvious? If so, might not some other civilization have avoided our error and found the true path to FTL?”

Once the questions were asked, they could not be ignored. A program was immediately begun to provide an answer. At first, it was a minor adjunct to the FTL research project. But as answers kept coming up negative, as each promising avenue of approach turned out to be a dead end, the program to probe the knowledge of alien civilizations grew.

By the time humanity discovered agriculture, it was all the program there was.

PART ONE

MUTUAL DISCOVERY

Chapter 1

“It is unfortunate that events leading up to the truly important milestones in the History of Man are often so veiled by the passage of time as to be forever lost. Happily, this is not the case with the Pathfinder Mission. In retrospect, we are able to pinpoint the initiating event with considerable exactitude. Therefore, let it be recorded that 15 January 2165 was possibly the most important day the human race has ever known. Of course, it was quite some time before any human being became aware of that fact.”

—Excerpt from “Prelude to Pathfinder: An Official History,”

Pathfinder Memorial Edition, Aurelius Publications,

New York and Luna, September 2196.

By permission of the Publishers.

PROBE woke… in quick stages… of jumbled impressions… and stray memories.

The attack of integration vertigo lasted a dozen nanoseconds while its brain assembled itself into a functioning whole. Finally, the fuzziness was gone and it was once more awake and aware.

The next step in the preprogrammed “wake up” sequence was a complete sensor scan of the heavens. As expected, PROBE found itself in interstellar space. The stars were cold, hard points of radiance etched against the fathomless black of the cosmos. All save one.

PROBE checked its elapsed time chronometer and found that it had been ten thousand years since the Makers first launched it outbound on its quest. It had been a long journey—as Jurul had warned that it might.

The thought of Jurul brought a sudden flood of long dormant memories to PROBE’s main processing units. Jurul had been the Maker in charge of constructing Life Probe Model CXI, Mark III, Hull Number 53935.

Jurul’s voice was the last thing PROBE had listened to before launch.

PROBE remembered that day vividly. A smallish planet of dark blues and purples slid by in silence below while a full dozen of its brethren in various stages of construction trailed it in orbit. The scene in the external sensors was calm, almost serene. However, the external views showed nothing of the frantic activity inside PROBE as the Makers completed their final systems checkouts.

Then the poking and prodding of the ground controllers had fallen off and Jurul’s voice had ridden the beam that tied PROBE to its creators.

JURUL: “Final status check, Nine-three-five.”

PROBE: “Status is go, Jurul. Ready for launch.”

JURUL: “Pre-launch sequence has begun. Repeat your mission objectives, Nine-three-five.”

PROBE: “I am to seek out a technologically advanced civilization among the stars and make contact. I will learn all I am able of their scientific knowledge and obtain their help to return home and report.”

JURUL: “And if you should happen to discover a civilization that has developed a means of traveling faster-than-light?”

PROBE: “I will conceal all evidence of my origins until I have confirmed that such beings can be trusted. When I am sure that it is safe to do so, I will direct them here to the home world to bargain for their secret.”

JURUL: “Very good. How long to initial boost?”

PROBE: “Coming up on eight-to-the-second-power seconds.”

JURUL: “Good luck and good hunting, Nine-three-five”

PROBE: “Luck to you as well, Jurul.”

PROBE had remained in communication with the Makers for nearly a full year following launch, but the contact had consisted solely of exchanges of engineering data with the ground computers. Never again had Jurul’s voice—or that of any other Maker—ridden the beam. Shortly after PROBE reached cruising velocity, even that tenuous link with home was broken, and with it, all hope of ever speaking to Jurul again.

For when PROBE returned to point of launch (if it returned), Jurul would be ancient dust and it would fall to one of his descendants to take the report.

However, to report, PROBE must first return home. That was proving no easy task. It had accepted the same gamble every life probe took when it boosted into the unknown, a bet five of six eventually lost. It was beginning to look as though PROBE might become another grim statistic.

Life probes, the direct descendants of the ancient slowboats, were the ultimate of the Makers’ many creations. Powered by gravitational singularities, they climbed to nearly one-tenth the speed of light before shutting down their boosters. Thus, PROBE was destined to spend most of its life in transit, plodding slowly outbound toward the galactic rim, with the eternity between stars its greatest danger. No intelligent construct, whether organic or machine, could maintain its sanity on such a journey. Its memory banks would overflow with data long before the first waypoint sun if nothing were done to protect them.

It was for this reason that the Makers had created CARETAKER and the long sleep.

CARETAKER was PROBE’s alter ego. Its brain shared the same basic circuitry as PROBE’s. The difference came in the way those circuits were connected. PROBE was truly sentient, with a firm grasp of the meaning of the pronoun I. CARETAKER, however, was merely a computer, an idiot savant—very good at performing its function, but lacking any single iota of imagination. It was CARETAKER’s function to watch the sky during the long flights between suns, to remain ever vigilant for that one stray bit of energy that betrayed its creators as intelligent beings.

When it found one, it signaled PROBE awake. It had done so four times now.

The first sighting had come less than two hundred years into the mission, when PROBE was barely within its search area. Excitement welled up in its circuits like a nova sun. The excitement grew as it scanned the star in question, noting unmistakable signs of an advanced civilization. However, a quick check of the star’s position showed it to be outside the narrow cone of space that marked PROBE’s ability to maneuver.

That was PROBE’s first great disappointment.

The next two contacts were no better. One was with a race on its way back to savagery, no longer able to repair the few machines that still operated. The other was sketchy and far out of range.

Now it was time to turn to Contact Number Four.

* * *

A single bright star loomed directly ahead on PROBE’s predicted orbit. It was a yellow dwarf (G2V spectral type) and close. In fact, too close. The star actually showed a visible disc in the multi-spectral telescopes.

The realization of the star’s proximity sent PROBE’s damage control circuits surging. To come so close and not wake until the last instant suggested a serious component failure. When the damage control report came back negative, PROBE resolved to look elsewhere.

The problem was quickly located in the memory banks where ten thousand years of systematic observations of the heavens were stored. Two hundred years earlier, while still twenty light-years closer to the galactic core, CARETAKER had detected a pattern of sinusoidal electromagnetic radiation emanating from the vicinity of the yellow dwarf.

CARETAKER had taken a disgracefully long thousand nanoseconds to recognize the incoming signal for what it was. Then the analysis had taken more precious time. The signal was taken apart and its various parts were studied singly and in groups: amplitude modulated… mid-communications band… a raster pattern of parallel lines… high and low intensities that formed a two dimensional array when arranged in proper sequence…

Clearly, CARETAKER had intercepted a primitive televid signal.

Such an event should have brought PROBE to wakefulness in short order. However, the very capabilities that rendered CARETAKER immune to the senility that strikes between the stars also made it a bit too literal in its interpretation of orders. The quality of the contact had been disappointingly bad. From the nature of the intercepted signal, it was obvious that the originating civilization was far below mission parameters of acceptability.

PROBE slept on.

The star continued to grow larger. Eighty years after initial discovery, the telescopes were able to detect two of the system’s planets, gas giants to judge by the interference lobes they cast on the star’s diffraction pattern.

The signals grew vastly stronger with time. Much of the apparent increase was due to the lessened distance to the source. But not all. Some was due to an exponential increase in transmitter power level. It was a hopeful sign, but still insufficient reason for CARETAKER to wake PROBE.

A few decades after the initial discovery, the creatures that created the signals burst out into space. As CARETAKER closed the distance to ten light-years, the system of the yellow-dwarf came alive with primitive ships. By now, CARETAKER could see the outer gas giants directly and could infer the existence of at least four other worlds closer in. The third out from the star was the primary source of the signals and the planet of major interest.

Finally, the projected upward curve of the creatures’ progress showed they would reach minimum acceptable standards within a few decades; CARETAKER judged the time to be ripe.

PROBE stirred from its slumber.

PROBE pondered these facts for nearly a second before deciding how to handle the new contact. True, the observed civilization was still a relatively crude one, but the speed with which it had moved into space was encouraging. The final decision to make rendezvous or not could be postponed for two-thirds of a year—not much time in which to gain an understanding of an alien civilization. Still, should the decision be a positive one, it would be better to be in the proper position for a minimum energy rendezvous orbit.

PROBE calculated the fuel required to perform the necessary midcourse correction. The drain on its precious reserves was minuscule, but increasing with every second it delayed. PROBE swiveled its body to point its booster at the yellow sun and slid protective shields over all exposed sensors.

There was a brief delay while PROBE double-checked its internal status. Everything continued to report “ready for acceleration.” Then, for only the second time in ten thousand years, a tiny, powerful sun burst forth from PROBE’s innards.

* * *

Independent Prospector Ship Liar’s Luck fell through space near the edge of the asteroid belt as the strains of the Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado Overture echoed through the control bubble. Breon Gallagher hummed in time with the music as she busied herself with the usual end-of-watch duties.

Brea was a tall woman of about thirty, with black hair sufficiently long to accent her femininity, but short enough to preclude its interfering with the neck seal of a vacsuit in an emergency. Her green eyes scanned the status screens, while long, thin fingers danced across the computer terminal built into her acceleration couch. On Earth, she would merely have been pleasant looking, pretty if you stretched the point. However, in the male dominated society of the Asteroid Belt, Brea was considered beautiful.

Her attire consisted solely of shorts and halter. She stretched her supple form against the restraining harness and reached around to scratch at an itch in the small of her back where the plastic covering made her sweat. Afterwards, she continued the check of Liar’s major subsystems, calling up engineering displays for environmental control, fuel state, and power pod status. She noted that the carbon dioxide level in the living quarters was on the high side of tolerance and entered instructions into the ship’s computer to reduce it.

Liar’s Luck, like all ships of her class, was a modified dumbbell shape. Crew quarters and control spaces were housed in a ten-meter diameter sphere at the forward end of a thirty-meter long I-beam thrust member. Clustered around the thrust beam were cylindrical fuel tanks, each heavily insulated to hold the cryogenic hydrogen that fueled Liar at -270 degrees C. At the rear of the ship was the power pod, a ten-meter hemisphere that housed the ship’s mass converter.

As Brea punched up the display for power pod status, her gaze was automatically drawn to the scarlet point of light and accompanying readouts that measured the health of the tiny I-mass. The I-mass singularity was second cousin to a Hawking Black Hole, and ultimately, Liar’s primary source of power.

The singularity massed ten thousand kilograms and had a diameter of 10-13 angstroms. It was held in check by a strong magnetic field that had the secondary function of funneling charged hydrogen into the tiny bottomless pit’s tidal region during periods of boost.

Brea studied the status graphs for thirty seconds before satisfying herself that all parameters were nominal. The converter was almost foolproof, but it never paid to be slipshod when dealing with something in which so many of the fundamental forces of nature were wrapped into such a tiny package.

She cleared the screen and turned her attention to the countdown clock. Still a few seconds to go yet. She settled back into her couch, brushed a strand of jet black hair from her eyes, and whistled off key as she watched the red digits blink down towards 00:00:00. In ten minutes, she would be off watch and it would be Bailey’s turn to strap himself into the torture rack of the duty-couch while she headed for that shower she had been dreaming about for the last couple of hours.

The timer buzzed briefly in her ear, signifying that it was time to start the search for asteroid ALF37416, an undistinguished, unnamed hunk of rock that could (just possibly) make the two of them rich beyond their wildest dreams.

The music had entered The Noble’s Chorus when Brea reached out to turn it off and unship the control stick. A quick press of her thumb on the jet control toggle and a twist of the control stick itself caused a number of things to happen in quick succession. She listened to the faint noise the attitude control jets made as they fired—the sound conducted into the control cabin through the metal of the hull. The stars began to rotate left-front to right-rear around the control bubble as Brea was tugged forward by a few-hundredths-of-a-gee acceleration.

Bailey’s kinky hairdo, worry-lined visage appeared on the intercom screen before her. As usual, he was in the galley. Of the two of them, he was the better cook by far.

“What’s up, Brea?”

Her green eyes turned briefly to his image and then back to the artificial horizon display. She watched the imaginary plane of the ecliptic rotate past on the screen. She gave the control stick a backward twist and thumbed the jet switch again. The quiet hiss of jets rumbled through the cabin and died away as the stars ceased their lazy dance. The universe returned to the illusion of rock steadiness once more.

“Not to worry, Stinky. I’m just lining up for the visual search.”

“Kind of early yet, isn’t it?”

“Nonsense,” she said. “We should have been able to spot the rock two hours ago.”

“You know what I think?”

“No, but I imagine you’ll tell me anyway.”

“I think that old habits die hard and you just want to get your hands on a set of telescope controls again.”

She made the expected rude noise in answer to the not altogether unfounded accusation. Liar’s little scope did not hold a candle to the big “thousand meter effective” compound instrument at Ceres observatory, but it too was a precision instrument—of sorts.

“Care to make a small wager on your chances of success?” Bailey asked. She could almost see him rubbing his hands together out of the screen’s field of view.

She hesitated. In the three years since Greg’s death, Brea had learned her lesson when it came to wagering with Bailey. In many ways, he reminded her of her late husband. Greg had been something of a gambler too…

“What are the conditions and the stakes?”

“If you spot it before end-of-watch, I’ll take your turn cleaning out the recycling system next week. If not, you take mine in two weeks. Deal?”

“Deal!”

“It doesn’t count unless it’s old ‘Alfie-416’. How are you going to prove you won?”

“I’ll turn on the recorders and we’ll settle up when we get close enough for a naked eyeball ident. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough. Your dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes and I’ll be up in ten.”

“Yeastburger again?”

He made a show of sniffing at the air. “Either that or the head’s backed up.”

“Wonderful,” She said, switching off the intercom. Her face settled into a pensive expression as she wondered if Bailey had sandbagged her again. Bailey had been a prospector since before she was born—a difference in age she kidded him about on the rare occasions when loneliness drove her to seek companionship in his bunk—and if he thought they were too far out to see the rock; he was probably right. Still, cleaning the filters was the worst job aboard, and any possibility of getting out of it was well worth jumping at.

She let her fingers dance over the computer keyboard and listened to the high-pitched whine of the main scope being turned on its mounts. Within seconds, the image on the workscreen had steadied to show a section of the Milky Way in the Constellation of Aquila… and little else.

There was no telltale, misshapen speck of light among the crowded star clouds.

Brea swore softly under her breath and called for magnification. The scene swelled, with various fixed and charted stars moving out from the center and then falling completely off the screen. One point of light was dimmer than any star and hovered at the right edge of the screen. She stopped the expansion and coaxed the telescope a few seconds of arc to starboard. This was where things began to get tricky.

With no air to distort the image, a spaceborne telescope can theoretically operate at any level of magnification. There are limits, of course. There are always limits. In practice, the maximum resolution possible was a function of both the mirror’s diameter and of how steady the telescope mount could be held. It was the latter effect that usually predominated.

As Brea watched, the tiny blob of light slowly drifted across the screen. Rotating Liar had changed the pattern of solar heating on the hull. The changing thermal stresses led to variations in the telescope mount that made it hard to hold the scope on center.

Brea struggled to hold the suspect point of light in the scope’s field of view. When things had stabilized out, she punched for auto/suppression mode. The main viewscreen showed no change. However, the view on the small repeater screen beside her showed an immediate effect. The known and charted stars began to disappear as the computer wiped out the fixed landmarks of space one by one. It was an old Belter trick. Erasing the known stars from a visual made the rocks stand out that much starker.

She activated the video recorder and then zoomed the view once more. The tiny blob expanded into an image of a misshapen asteroid half in light, half in dark. The image itself was barely the size of a half decad piece, and reminded Brea of that classic first photograph of Deimos taken by one of the early space probes. The sun was at a good angle and even though the image was small, it was detailed enough to make future identification possible. Twice the image darted off the edge of the screen, quickly to be recentered as Brea wrestled with the scope stabilization controls. She held the scope centered for nearly half a minute before reaching over to snap off the recorder.

A spacer picks up careful habits if they live long enough. Where a groundhog would have left the record for later, Brea always checked and double-checked everything.

She called for replay.

There was the quick expansion of the zoom, followed by the jerky recentering of the asteroid image, followed by another quick zoom. Brea nodded in satisfaction. It was a good shot of the target.

She was about to reach up to turn the recorder off when a new star appeared on the screen. Apparently, she had missed its original appearance when the star field had cluttered the main viewscreen. Now, with only the asteroid image for competition, the newcomer stood out sharp and bright. She watched dumbfounded as it brightened over a period of ten seconds, until its apparent magnitude was nearly 2.5. Then, without warning, the star went out as quickly as it had been born.

Brea blinked, suddenly unwilling to believe what she had just seen.

“Well?” Bailey’s voice asked, emanating from the intercom speaker. “Did you get it?”

Brea swallowed hard.

“I think you’d better come up here, Stinky.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I want you to look at the record I just made.”

Bailey raised his eyebrows in a quizzical expression, but did not comment as he turned his back to the screen pickup and launched himself out through the galley hatch. Five seconds later his two-meter long, muscular body popped out of the hatch at her side. As usual, he wore a faded red jumpsuit unzipped to the chest. She could see the forest of silky gray hair entwined in the Velcro and contrasting sharply with the mahogany skin beneath it. He pulled himself into the other control couch and strapped down.

Brea finished resetting the recorder and pressed the playback control. She remained mute as Bailey watched the whole sequence unfold again. Bailey said nothing, but reset the recorder after the scene had played itself out. He viewed the record a second time before scratching at a. three-day growth of beard.

“What is it?” Brea asked.

“Don’t know,” he said. “It sure isn’t sunlight reflecting off a rock beyond ‘416. The color’s all wrong.”

“Besides, we’re practically out of the Belt now. There’s nothing big enough or shiny enough to catch the sun like that out there.”

“Maybe two smaller rocks went crunch and vaporized each other.”

Brea hesitated, unsure of how to broach a taboo subject among prospectors. “Do you think it could have been a ship?”

Bailey considered it for a moment before nodding. “Could have been. It is too violet to be a normal drive flare. I’ve never heard of a mass converter blowing up, but I guess it would look something like that if it did.”

“What do we do?”

“We report, of course. If it was a miner’s boat, the expanding cloud of monatomic H should stand out like a sore thumb to a search scope. Besides the possibility of survivors, there is always the I-mass to consider. Salvage of an already energized singularity will bring a lot of decads.”

“Can we line up on Ceres close enough to get a radio message through?”

“No need. Where is that PE cruiser that was in conjunction with us last week?”

“CSSS Valiant? She should be a few million kilometers foreorbit and sunward from here.”

“Get her on the horn and transmit a copy of this record to them. When you get the cruiser, suggest that they start a visual search and tell them we will do the same on the emergency frequencies. If anyone survived, we should be able to pick up his or her emergency beacon. If not…” Bailey let his expansive shrug complete the sentence. If there were no survivors, or if there were and their suit emergency beacons had been damaged; then it really did not matter.

* * *

Sir Harry Gresham, Sky Watch Administrator, Overseer of space traffic throughout the solar system, Protector of Planet Earth (at least insofar as the continuous watch for meteors large enough to cause significant damage was concerned), drummed his fingers on his desktop and considered his future. After thirty years of politicking his way up the ladder of success in the Council of Sovereign States’ bureaucracy, he had come to what appeared to be an insurmountable obstacle. Sky Watch Administrator had seemed a good career opportunity at the time he had taken the job. Now, however, he was not so sure.

For one thing, being four hundred thousand kilometers from CSS Headquarters limited his access to the men who held his fate in their hands. Like a provincial Baron of old, the mere fact of distance tended to place him at a disadvantage in the never-ending struggle for promotion. Besides, Blanche did not like the small town ambiance of life aboard Galileo Station. She was forever nagging him about obtaining a position in New York. She claimed she would not even mind his taking a step down in such a transfer, but he knew differently. Blanche enjoyed being “The Colonel’s Wife” and would never let him forget the loss of status that would accompany demotion.

No, his only solution was promotion to the CSS Policy Committee, the next step up for any ministry-level bureaucrat. Unfortunately, the Promotions Board was top heavy with scientific types this year. A mere civil servant had little or no chance of attracting their attention. Now, if Gresham had taken a technical course of study at University rather than political organization, or if he had written a scientific paper of note, it might have been a different story entirely. As it was, it looked like permanent exile for him.

He sighed and punched up the morning report. He scanned over the usual garbage, things like young Esterhauser complaining that he needed more photo-interpreting equipment, or old Max Ravell complaining that the backup computer had been down for ten minutes again on Thursday. Some things were eternal in this universe. One such was that a department head was never satisfied with the resources you provided him.

The maintenance report was one bright spot in the sea of complaints. Maintenance was Fusako Matsuo’s bailiwick, and she had it running like a well-oiled machine. Preventative maintenance was nearly a week ahead of schedule this quarter. He made a note to stroke Fusako’s ego by giving her another letter of commendation for her personnel file.

Finally, he turned to the Anomaly Reports for the previous twenty-four hours. There were not more than half a dozen. Most were the normal clutter that Sky Watch always picked up. Three involved Peace Enforcer vessels on maneuvers; two were merchant ships that had deviated from flight plan without reporting that fact. The latter would receive routine citations and fines.

His gaze fell on the final AR: “Unidentified Incident of Radiance at 1925 Right Ascension, -00.05 Declination.” On a hunch, he called up the report reference. The screen flashed through a rainbow of colors—indicative of a video recording about to start—and then settled down to the absolute black of space punctuated by a spectacular cloud of stars.

A new star suddenly appeared near the edge of the screen. Gresham would not have noticed it at all except for the red rectangle the computer used to highlight it. The speck of light persisted for exactly 9.85 seconds and then winked out. Gresham frowned and punched for replay. Half an hour later, he was still ignoring all the CALLS PENDING signals on his desk and watching the playback for the twentieth time. He whistled while he watched.

If he played his cards right, “Unidentified Incidence of Radiance” just might be his ticket home!

Chapter 2

PROBE watched the burn from the vantage point of two heavily shielded cameras mounted on the booster pod. As soon as the last of the sensor searing flame died away, it began calculating the new orbit to the yellow sun. The ten-second burst of power had slowed its flight enough to send it through the heart of the stellar system and delay by a few hours the decision to make rendezvous or continue the quest.

Now came the difficult part.

Any machine, no matter how sophisticated, is a collection of compromises. PROBE’s designers had paid a heavy price to give it the ability to travel between neighboring stars in decades rather than millennia. They had traded travel time for reaction mass, forcing PROBE to consume ninety percent of its available fuel stocks during the initial period of boost. What little fuel remained was grossly inadequate to slow its flight.

PROBE’s only hope to stop its headlong rush was to jettison as much mass as possible at journey’s end. Since ninety-five percent of its total mass was in the pinpoint of collapsed matter that powered its engines, the Maker engineers made the obvious choice.

The braking maneuver was a tricky one. PROBE needed the gravitational singularity to initiate the mass conversion reaction. Once begun, however, the reaction was self-sustaining. A few microseconds after igniting its booster for the last time, PROBE would lighten ship by cutting loose the pinpoint of infinite density from its moorings. The singularity, no longer imprisoned by powerful force fields, would fall free while PROBE braked savagely on a tail of violet fire.

Thus, the decision to begin retro-boost was irreversible. Once begun, it must continue until PROBE found itself moving through the system of the yellow sun at mere interplanetary speed. At that time it would be in the greatest danger it had yet faced in its journey.

For every life probe must contact the intelligent beings in the system where it ends its quest. It must convince them of the advantages to be had by cooperating in the overhaul, refueling and refurbishment of a tired machine from the stars. Since the Makers long ago discovered that altruism is notably lacking in the Galaxy, they had equipped PROBE with the only possible coinage with which to pay for such assistance. They gave it the sum total of their knowledge and wisdom. Deep in PROBE’s vitals, protected from every manner of harm short of complete destruction, was a memory bank containing all the vast knowledge of the Makers.

The dangers involved in dealing with an unknown race of aliens were obvious. Their level of advancement might be insufficient, or their nature too fractious, or maybe they just would not care about the Makers’ problem. PROBE was painfully aware of the ease with which it could miss identifying a fatal flaw in the creatures of the yellow sun, a flaw that would show up only after it had squandered its precious fuel and doomed its mission.

However, there were dangers in going on as well. Long lived though it was, PROBE was far from immortal. The constant rain of interstellar gas and dust against its leading edges was slowly eating away at its shielding. When the shielding failed, ionizing radiation would begin gnawing at its vitals. The inevitable result would be senility and eventual loss-of-function.

Thus, the dilemma in which PROBE found itself hinged on a single question: Were the creatures of the yellow sun sufficiently civilized to assist in its overhaul and refurbishment? To a life probe, such things are defined by very narrow parameters.

A civilized species is one that has discovered the secret of the singularity, built mass-energy converters, and has a working knowledge of optical memories and microelectronic devices. It is a species that has conquered its own stellar system and gazes outward with longing. It is a race that has learned the advantages of peace, yet still retains a healthy competitive spirit.

PROBE had slightly less than seven thousand hours in which to decide if the creatures of the yellow sun measured up to its definition of “civilized.”

* * *

“Got that charge set yet?”

The words issued from Brea Gallagher’s earphones and bounced around inside her helmet, getting progressively weaker until they were drowned in the general background noise of her suit’s environmental control unit. At her feet, the incandescent two centimeter wide spot of her laser drill continued to burn its way into the rocky surface of ALF37416.

At the sound of Bailey’s voice, Brea switched off the laser, straightened up and glanced toward where his vacsuited form could be seen setting up a battery of sensitive instruments. The instruments measured everything from the direction of local gravity to the manner in which the asteroid deflected the sun’s magnetic field.

“Keep your pants on, Stinky. This old laser is on its last legs. We’re a long way from a replacement if I overload it.”

“Nonsense, that drill has another ten good years of life in it.”

Brea’s response was a short profanity amplified by the echoic characteristics of her helmet. “Seriously, Stinky. When are we going to be able to buy some new equipment?”

“Unless we make a good strike in the next couple of months, we aren’t going to have enough in the bank to make our lease, let alone re-outfit ourselves.”

Brea met his comment with silence. The sad state of their finances was a common topic of discussion between them, more so lately than ever before. Like most prospectors, they shared as an unspoken article of faith the unshakable belief that something would turn up to stave off foreclosure. Only this time, they were going down to the wire and it was beginning to look as though the partnership might lose its one liquid asset, Liar’s Luck.

Even as she chewed her lower lip, Brea continued working deftly and swiftly. Her first chore was to dismount the laser drill from its tripod and load it back into its handling case. Next, she carried it back to the ship and stored it in an outside locker. Then it was back to the drill site to coil up the heavy power cable and store it aboard ship. On her second trip, she unshipped a meter-long bangalore torpedo from its storage bin, and gingerly carried it to the excavation. A few minutes work was all that was needed to wire the charge to the detonator. She slipped it into the drilled borehole, and rammed it home until she felt the familiar ‘thud’ through her gauntlets.

“Ready to arm, Stinky.”

“Okay by me,” Bailey responded. “For God’s sake, be careful!”

Brea threw the arming switch and pulled herself hand over hand along the thin cable they had attached to the asteroid’s surface. She was careful not to use her suit radio until she was a dozen meters away from the site of her small excavation project. More than one prospector had been killed when they prematurely set off a charge that way.

Bailey was hunched over his readouts, intent on zeroing out the gravitational anomaly detector when she joined him. A squiggly green line on a tiny screen suddenly steadied down. He grunted his approval and straightened up.

“Okay, twist her tail.”

Brea twisted the handle on her detonator control. There was a flash of light from just over the too near horizon, followed by a fountain of debris that rocketed skyward at well over local escape velocity. The asteroid beneath their feet thumped into their boot soles as every instrument in the package registered its complaint at the abuse it was getting. Then, over a period of a dozen seconds, everything became quiet once more. Too quiet.

“Damn!” Bailey growled. “The gravitometer’s back to zero with no shift at all.”

“Maybe we didn’t use enough explosive.”

“We used enough. Looks like we have come up empty handed again. No singularity imbedded in this rock.”

“What do we do now?”

“Damned if I know, Brea. Maybe we’re just going to have to face the inevitable.”

“You mean give up the ship? We can’t!”

“It may come to that unless we get damned lucky, damned quick. Know any better way of predicting whether any particular rock is carrying an I-mass? If so, now’s the time to drag it out into the light of day.”

* * *

Science has always been an imperfect reflection of reality. It is more an impressionistic painting that reflects mankind’s current level of understanding than a set of immutable commandments cut deeply into the granite face of an eternal cliff somewhere. The fidelity of the “painting” improves as understanding grows, but it is never absolute. Theories in Archimedes’ time reflected the state of learning of that age. So too the theories of Copernicus and Galileo, Newton and Lavousier, Einstein and Dirac. So too the theories of all ages.

Gravitational singularities were first postulated by the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild in the year 1907. Schwarzschild noted that as the density of a mass rises, so does the speed required to escape its gravitational attraction. If density is assumed to rise without bound, escape velocity eventually exceeds the speed of light.

Since the young Albert Einstein had decreed two years earlier that nothing material can ever exceed light speed, Schwarzschild concluded that a sufficiently dense mass would generate a gravity field so intense that even light could not escape its pull.

The mass would become a gravitational singularity, a Black Hole.

The normal way a black hole forms is through the collapse of a massive star that has run out of fuel. When such a collapse occurs, individual atoms are squeezed together so strongly that their nuclei fail and the star disappears into a bottomless pit, never to be seen again.

Of course, collapsing stars are only good for producing stellar-mass black holes. Once, when the universe was young, conditions were such that it was possible to produce black holes of any size.

* * *

In the beginning there was the Big Bang.

At the moment of creation, the universe was smaller than a proton and possessed a temperature equal to the number one followed by thirty-two zeroes.

In the first second following the colossal explosion, high densities and inhomogeneous conditions produced localized concentrations of mass-energy. Some of these were high enough to trigger gravitational collapse into black holes. These holes ranged in mass from a low of 10-8 kilograms to highs of many thousands of solar masses. The legendary scientist, Stephen Hawking, studied this class of black hole (at that time theoretical) and realized that due to quantum effects, very small singularities would emit radiation very like that radiated by a black body.

These emissions became known as Hawking Radiation and had the effect of robbing black holes of their mass, eventually evaporating them. Hawking’s calculations estimated that the smallest singularity that could have survived into modern times would mass 1011 kilograms, or 100 million tons.

In 2090, Dr. Mohammed Isfahan refined Hawking’s initial estimate and postulated that much smaller black holes were still possible. In a bit of self-advertising, he dubbed this tiny singularities, I-masses.

Isfahan’s theory was immediately attacked. His critics reasoned that it was possible to calculate the total aggregate mass of these micro-miniature black holes. This they did, and came up with the answer that I-masses make up five percent of the normal mass of the universe… a ridiculously large value. His theory was quickly discounted by most theoretical physicists.

There things rested until the first manned expedition to Icarus discovered a tiny mass concentration at the center of the asteroid.

Suddenly, the I-Mass was mythical no more.

Chapter 3

Major Eric Stassel, CSS Peace Enforcement Directorate, sat a thousand meters beneath the floor of Tycho Crater and watched the Great Barrier Reef float by on the workscreen before him. The view was from a low-altitude Earth orbiting satellite and showed the northern shore of Australia, all of Papua New Guinea, and parts of Borneo and Sumatra. The blue-green light gave a definite greenish cast to Stassel’s fair complexion, short-cropped blond hair, and mustache. He reached out and keyed in the command that would zoom the view to a close-up of the Cape York spaceport.

The screen was suddenly transformed into the windscreen of a reentry vehicle falling out of control, with the computer-enhanced depth perception adding to the illusion. Stassel’s heart stuttered as his eyes dove from an altitude of two hundred kilometers to less than a thousand meters in ten seconds. The “fall” never failed to affect him and he had long ago programmed his console to maximize the illusion.

Cape York had become as familiar to Stassel in the last month as his own hometown of Salzburg. On the left side of the screen were the turquoise waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The turquoise turned to white as breakers crashed ashore at the base of the spaceport seawall. Along the shore was a long line of launching pits. Stassel watched as a foreshortened freighter spouted a plume of steam and climbed up and out of the field of view. That would be the noon milk run on its way to Earth Station One with a load of passengers and freight for transshipment to the ships of deep space. After that, the final destinations could be anywhere from the intermittently molten surface of Mercury, to the high radiation environment of Jupiter’s moons, to the ice mines of Saturn’s rings.

Stassel maneuvered the view to the new mystery building at the south end of the port. The Aussies had started construction two years ago. Although some of the equipment had looked suspiciously like laser isotope separation gear when photographed from orbit, no one could make a positive identification. With CSS member states hypersensitive about their “national sovereignty,” until conclusive evidence could be obtained, no one was willing to ask Queen Victoria VI for permission to perform an on-site inspection.

Cape York had been under constant automatic surveillance and frequent human-eye checks ever since an alert computer sounded the alarm. If the Australasians were up to something nefarious, the Peace Enforcement Directorate would eventually find them out.

“Trying to catch the Cobbers with their pants down, Eric?”

Stassel was startled by the voice close by his ear. He turned to note Commander Grigor Yurislavic bending over his shoulder, eyeing the Port York view. Yurislavic was Shift Supervisor and Stassel’s immediate boss.

“Just the daily eyeball check, Alexi. That blonde with the big chest is usually sunning herself on the cafeteria lawn about this time. She seems to be late today.”

“Too bad you won’t have time to wait for her. The Admiral wants to see you in his office two minutes ago.”

“Wants to see me? I didn’t think he knew I was alive.”

“You won’t be if you keep him waiting. I will take over for you here until we can get a substitute up from the duty pool. You about through with Port York?”

“All through. Nothing interesting to report. Sinai’s next on my list. Looks like someone has found an old Israeli underground bunker. They’re rushing a team in to check for nukes, but we need to keep an eye on it until the ground crew’s on the scene.”

“Right.”

Stassel hurried past dozens of consoles just like his. At each, the operator was busy overseeing some aspect of the Peace Enforcement Directorate’s system-wide responsibilities. Some of the screens showed the black of space. Others, like Stassel’s own, were tuned to terrestrial views.

Finally, he cleared the row of consoles and started up the shallow incline toward the back of the auditorium sized Monitor Center and the enclosed offices of the brass. He moved with the sure-footed gliding motion that passed for locomotion on the Moon.

The Admiral’s office was through a double emergency airlock and a hundred meters farther along the main corridor. Stassel paused to give his identification to the two guards on duty outside the office. The Admiral’s secretary glanced up from her work screen as he entered the outer office.

“I was told to report.”

“I’ll check, Major.” She spoke into a hushfield for a few seconds and then nodded. “You may go in now.”

Stassel moved to the door, rapped smartly twice, and then marched into the inner sanctum. “Major Eric Stassel, reporting as ordered, sir!”

Admiral Liu Tsen was surrounded by a console twice as elaborate as the one Stassel had just quit. His bald pate and eye patch heightened the ferocity of his scowl.

“At ease, Major. Please be seated.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“How old are you, son?”

“Thirty-six, sir.”

“Married?”

“Divorced.”