Fundamental Force Episode One (11 page)

“Yes, so
what?”

“The thing is,
in the first version, the heaviest ship, the transporter, was at
the tail end, but now it’s in the middle...”

“I still don’t
see how that’s connected to...”

Clive rolled
his eyes up towards the ceiling. He had never lost this childish
habit, Steve thought to himself. It’s not surprising that few
people could work with him.

“Really, a
child could understand it! We have the synchronizer ahead of us on
a rod, but on the transporter, it’s in line with the center of
mass. The loaded transport has so much mass that with a tolerance
of only 10 nanometers, it causes quite a large gravity well and
interferes with the laser beams of your synchronizers.

“Did you take
account of the deviations of the geodesic lines close to the
heaviest ship? When it is in the center of the formation, not at
the tail end, the deviations are laid on top of each other, because
the beams from the other ships pass through its synchronizer
several times.”

The engineer’s
face changed when he took in the sense of what Clive was saying.
His expression of smug superiority vanished instantly. Looking like
a whipped dog, he turned back to the screen in front of him. After
instructing the computer to calculate the correction, he brought
the synchronizer’s task up to date and sent the calculations to the
cargo ship, which activated its micro-jets. Almost instantly, the
laser spot of the synchronizer changed to the interference picture.
Clive chuckled contentedly.

“Skip, we’ve
found the reason,” the pilot said into the microphone.

This time it
did not take the team anything like as long to assemble in the
pilot’s compartment. Their burning curiosity was apparent.

“In the repeat
calculation,” explained the engineer, “we started from the same
formation sequence as before, but we forgot to take into account
that the transport ship is now in the middle, not at the tail end.
And its mass is greater than that of all the other ships put
together. Due to its new position, certain relativistic effects
were introduced and we forgot to allow for them. After the
president’s unplanned chatter, we did the calculations in a hurry
and we missed this point.”

“But why was
the transport placed in the middle?” asked Steve.

The engineer
shrugged.

“That was the
order, I have no idea why.”

“OK, that’s not
important. We’ll leave the investigation of that question to the
historians,” said the captain, rolling up his sleeves. “Right now
we have more important things to do.”

He signaled to
the computer to call the Lunar Base, while switching on a small
radio with his other hand. Static from the ether was heard from the
speakers.

“Base,
synchronization completed. Ready to jump.”

“Roger. Twenty
seconds to jump!”

The countdown
proceeded rapidly.

Steve’s
heartbeat became louder and faster, just like his first ride on a
roller coaster when he was a child. He had spent the whole of the
week before imagining what it would be like to rush along the rails
at tremendous speed and perform crazy loops, but when the day
arrived and his car finally began climbing slowly to the top of the
first peak, his heart fell into his boots. Gripping the handrail in
fear and panic, he would have given anything to be safely back on
the ground.

“Jump!”
proclaimed the engineer loudly, his voice a tone higher than usual
with excitement.

“Good lu...”
The operator’s response from the Lunar Base was cut off in
mid-word. Space, as seen through the thick multilaminar glass,
suddenly became black. The stars that had shone so brightly
suddenly went out. The interference lines disappeared. The data
graphs from the sensors of space and the cosmic microwave
background radiation gradually went down to zero. The analogue
radio, set to low volume, went dead in an instant. Instead of the
sound of static, there was only absolute silence.

END OF EPISODE
ONE

###

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Albert
Sartison, 2016