Into the Sea of Stars (4 page)

"Thank you"—she hesitated for a moment, and then
smiled icily—"Doctor."

He took several deep breaths in a vain attempt to calm
himself,
then
decided to start in again. "And another thing, Captain
Leminski
stated that our gross weight is a hundred and twenty kilos over." He eyed her bulging form sarcastically, and she started to color into a deeper shade of
purple that went beyond the flaming red of her hair.

"I know where we can dump off that weight right now,"
she replied evenly.

"I don't see anything coming off your manifest."

"Because it doesn't need to."

"A hundred and fifty kilos of survey forms in triplicate!
You call that necessary!" Richard shouted.

"Dr. Croce, I've already explained to you that I've
been sent on this expedition by our Chancellor to gather
important data. The best way for a sociologist and col
lective psychologist to gather information is through ob
servation and survey."

"You don't even know if they'll be able to read the
damn things. Did you get your precious forms translated into Old English or Japanese or Russian? Well, did you?"

"There is no need of that. I'm sure your good friend
Ian will be able to translate for us."

The loathing she put into the word Ian was almost
frightening in its intensity. The faculty battles between
Ian
Lacklin
and Ellen Redding were near legend. Richard
pitied poor Ian when he came aboard.

"Dr. Redding, I'm sure the Chancellor doesn't give a
good damn about these so-called Lost Colonies. Personally, I think this whole charade is nothing more than a
hairbrained
move on the Chancellor's part to get rid of
his most embarrassing tenured faculty."

"Now, Croce, you—"

"Dr. Croce, to you."

Boiling with anger, Ellen stumbled for a response, and
Richard pushed on.

"If—and I say, if—we find these colonies, I think Ian will have more to do with his time than to translate your
half-witted sociological surveys to a bunch of people who
most likely won't want to be surveyed in the first place.
Therefore, my dear doctor, I think it only logical that your
damn bloody forms should be heaved out right now."

"If anything is to be heaved, it should be those ten
cases of alleged surgical and sterilization equipment."
A
smug smile lit up her pudgy face, and she laughed mali
ciously. "Besides, Doctor, a half hour ago I managed to
put one of those cases through the airlock."

"You bitch! Do you know how hard it was to get that
gin up
here!
" His voice trailed off into incoherent screams.
One-tenth of his liquor, gone! Three years for this damned
mission, and only nine cases to see him through! Richard
barely heard
Leminski
shout over the intercom about a
ship's docking alongside as he launched himself through
the air toward Ellen.

The hatch behind them opened. A green face peered
through.
"Oh, my God."
Ian groaned.

"Ah, Ian, old friend," Richard shouted, as he drifted within striking distance of Ellen, "you're just in time to
witness the effect of zero gravity on blubber."

"Why, you pickled sot—"

"Enough! I've had enough!" A wiry form in blue cov
eralls pushed through the doorway behind Ian.

"Ah, Ian," Richard said with sudden cheer, "
meet
our
pilot and guide through the universe,
Stasz
Leminski
."

Ian extended his hand, but
Stasz
ignored him.

"I have my orders,"
Stasz
whispered in a sharp, hissing
voice. His five-and-a-half-foot, hundred-pound frame
seemed to be a coiled bundle of energy ready to explode
in violent rage at any second.

"The problem is simple. We need to dump one hundred
and twenty kilos. You must decide which one hundred
and twenty kilos within twenty-three hours. Antimatter
ignition sequencing will start in twenty-six hours. If by
three hours before departure you have not dumped the
excess mass, I will do it for you."

Grabbing hold of a handrail, he turned himself about
as if getting set to leave.

"Ah,
Leminski
, I don't think you quite understand," Ellen Redding said. She spoke with the pedantic style typical of a professor addressing an idiot or a first-year
university student.

"I understand perfectly, Miss Redding." He smiled a
tight wolfish grin as she stiffened to the form of address.
"You see, Miss Redding, I am the craft pilot and engineer,
therefore I am responsible for the function of this wreck
which the Confederation has pawned off on you... well,
never mind that. As I was saying, when it comes to the
function of this vessel, I am in control."

Pushing off, he floated back down the corridor.

Ellen turned on Ian, who quailed at the sight of his old nemesis. But before she could speak,
Stasz's
voice drifted
back to them. "By the way, Dr. Redding, I'm declaring
that Croce's 'surgical supplies' are now part of my ship's maintenance stores, therefore they are not to be touched.
Dr.
Lacklin
, I'd suggest that those damned forms get
dumped right now. Heaven knows how I hate forms; in
fact, I've already got eighty kilos' worth in the airlock."
He laughed sardonically and disappeared into the forward
control room.

Sensing an impending explosion, Richard pushed past
Ellen and mumbled an excuse about checking his equipment. As he drifted by Ian, his nose wrinkled at the sour
smell.

"Good luck, old boy," Richard whispered.

"If I'd known that she was going to be aboard, I'd have
stayed home in spite of the Chancellor," Ian whispered in reply. "Writing grants would be heaven compared to this."

"I heard that, Ian."

Richard grabbed Shelley's arm and pushed her out the hatch, abandoning Ian to what Richard told her would be
"a friendly Social Science Departmental Meeting."

The shouting between the two old rivals filled the ship until
Stasz
finally called it to halt and begged for a little
sleep before departure.

"I thought it essential that we all sit down together
before departure and briefly review what we can expect."
Ian was trying to speak with an authoritative voice,
but it came out more as a strangled croak. He and Ellen
Redding had had such a knock-down drag out over who
was in control of the mission that he had actually shouted
himself hoarse. He looked across at her and tried a wan
smile, but from her response it must have looked to her
to be a threatening grimace. Nevertheless she said noth
ing; his halfhearted threat to call the Chancellor and resign
over her presence, for the moment at least, had been the lever to submission.

"Why we've been assigned is the Chancellor's decision and not mine. But I can see where, if anything, he wished
to get rid of three tenured faculty and bring in his own
people—and, Ellen, I'd think even you'd agree with that."
She nodded her head sadly. Most of the campus staff
knew about the affair between Ellen and the Chancellor
a dozen years back, when he was still the glad-handing, ever-smiling young hotshot assistant to the assistant vice
president. Out of that had come the famous nickname
"C.C." Redding, which most faculty could guess at but usually would not discuss with anyone less than a grad
uate student.

Leminski
floated to one side of the table and looked vacantly off into space with a slightly bored expression
of disdain.

Ian cleared his throat and tried to continue. "
Stasz
,
are we in trim for flight weight?"

"Yeah, and one kilo under.
Croce and me drained off
an extra bottle of gin and just discharged it a little while ago."

Oh, great, Ian thought, Richard has a new drinking
buddy.
The pilot to whom we've entrusted our lives.

"All right then, we've got our ship, everything is loaded,
and now we have to decide where to go."

Richard looked up at Ian. "What do you mean, where do we go? Why, I thought this expedition was to look for
the Lost Colonies."

"It's not that simple," Ian said softly. "Shelley's grant
request mentioned in general terms the seven hundred lost colonies, and indeed if all of them survived, which is highly unlikely, we are now presented with an inter
esting piece of math which our dear sponsors never
grasped."

"Go on," Ellen said softly, without a trace of anger.
When it came to questions of odds and statistics, she was
all professional and, in fact, even cordial.

"All right, here is what we know—the givens, so to
speak. Starting in the year 2079 the first colonial units
came to the decision to abandon Earth in light of the
coming war. Their propulsion systems were
stationkeep
ing
units, not heavy-lift devices. Given the tech level of
the period, the only propulsion units available were ion
drive, plasma drive, solar sail, antimatter, and thermo
nuclear pulse.

"Within four years the first unit completed its modi
fications and was away. Seven hundred and twenty-three departed before August 7, 2087, when the first wave of
EMP detonations on Earth and the subsequent strikes wiped out all communication."

Ian was really getting into form now, and for once he
had an interested audience. His was no longer dry his
tory—it was the information that would be the center of
their lives for the next three years.

"Could more units have left afterward?" Richard asked.

"Possibly.
And just that question shows the problems
of this quest. There is only one absolute given in this
whole scheme. Six hundred and twelve units did pull out
of near-Earth orbit and one hundred and eleven others
pulled out from various deep-space orbits, including three
asteroid mining-survey colonies.

"But the data stops the day the war started, when the
tracking facilities on the Moon and Mars were knocked
out. So there is the potential that approximately seven hundred other units, which were preparing to abandon
Earth orbit, did indeed abandon orbit."

"So that increases our odds tremendously?" Ellen asked
cautiously,

"Yes, from next to impossible to almost next to impossible. And I'm not being sarcastic. You see, the Co
pernicus site did have the initial trajectory data. In fact,
for the units that left several years before the war, the
data are pretty darn good, since they had time to do some
pinpoint tracking.

"So here we have the raw data of seven hundred-odd
colonies to start with, that's great. However, did you ever
stop to think"—and Ian was talking in general, but every
one could sense that it was directed toward Shelley— "just how big it is out there?"

She smiled wanly and nodded. The stares of the other
three focused on her, and she could feel the hostility grow
ing as each one thought about the fact that it was the
overzealous young student who had pulled them from
their more-comfortable niches and sent them to synchron
ous orbit.

"It's not that bad," she said meekly.

"Not that bad!"
Stasz
interjected. "My hand to God,
for I speak the truth, it's merely numbing in size.

"How far could they have gone?" he asked, shifting
his gaze from Shelley back to Ian.

"Not far. It's estimated that their drive systems at best could take them up to point-one light.
Therefore, a max
imum of 112 light-years out.
That gives us a cubic volume
of
..
.let
me
see."

"Nearly ten million cubic light years."
Ellen said softly,
obviously proud that she could outdo them all in a little exercise of mental calculation.

"Therefore," Ian responded, "I present our problem— where do we start? We shall be looking for approximately
seven hundred units in an area of ten million cubic light-
years."

"Can't we eliminate a good part of that?" Richard asked.

"I think so,"
Stasz
interjected. "The fifteen stars nearest to Earth have already been checked out—without any
sign of refugee colonies. That eliminates nearly a hundred
craft right there, since their trajectories carried them that
way. Now, it is of course possible that they went to those
systems,
slingshoted
around them, and went off on tangent trajectories
,,
thereby making predictions of their
whereabouts more difficult."

"And I think we can also eliminate two hundred or so
colonies because the data we have on them indicates that
they would not have survived the journey for long."

"Why so, Dr.
Lacklin
?"
Shelley asked, curiosity
overcoming her desire to hide.

"The answer is simple. We are dealing with closed
ecosystems. There is a certain amount of free hydrogen
available in interstellar space, and if you could accelerate
up to ramjet velocities that would be useful, but outside
of the propulsion systems, the colonies had to be one
hundred percent closed."

"I'm not sure that I follow you," Ellen admitted.

"Well, let us say that a colony had a ninety-nine point nine percent reclamation rate for all combinations of ox
ygen. Let's say that across a time period of
X
, point one
percent of the total oxygen supply is lost due to faulty
reclamation, leaks, and such. Now, point one is not bad
for any vessel if
X
equals one year. But look at the simple
math—in one thousand years, unless another oxygen sup
ply was found, the colony would be dead. Now, this equa
tion applies to every resource: oxygen, amino acids, carbon
compounds, nitrogen, various electronic components, and
even worse, any catalysts, substances that are changed
by the interaction of a process."

"The first critical point of scarcity," Richard interrupted, "defines the limits of growth or survival." He
looked around with a self-satisfied smile, as Ian and the
others turned to him.

"Well, it's an ecological point, and that's what these
colonies are—closed ecologies. The first point of scarcity
will define their possible limit, any
bioscientist
knows that. So you're saying that a number of these units had
limited carrying capacity."

"At least a hundred are most likely dead by now," Ian
continued, "unless they entered another star system for
resupply
and possible colonization. But from what
Stasz
has said of the.
survey
, there were no signs of that."

"So far we've checked the fifteen nearest stars,"
Stasz
responded.

"And nothing?"
Shelley asked.

"Not a sign."

"It's damn peculiar," Shelley replied. "You'd have
thought that the units would have naturally gravitated to the nearest star systems."

"Maybe none of them were appropriate," Richard interjected.

"Two of the systems had planetary bodies that might have been useful for
resupply
, but the others, except for
the energy from the star, were next to useless,"
Stasz
replied.

"Let's get back to the question of which direction to
take," Ellen said, sensing that the rest of them would soon
be off on a technical discussion that could last for days.

"Ah, yes," Ian responded, as if being drawn back from
a drifting line of thought that he wished to pursue. "Which
way..." His voice trailed off.

"How about
thataway
," Richard announced melodramatically, while pointing off vaguely toward the "down"
direction of the room.

"Dr.
Lacklin
," Shelley said quietly, waiting for the laughter at Richard's comment to die down. "Dr.
Lacklin
,
what about toward SETI Anomaly One and the galactic
center?"

Ian brightened up at her suggestion.

"Precisely what I was leading to, of course," he said hurriedly. "You see, there was one general trend in the
movement.
Colonial 237
, which was the second unit to
depart, was headed straight for the galactic center, and
our records show that one hundred thirty-five other units
went within ten minutes of arc to either side of that point."

"Well, that narrows the volume tremendously."

"Still a bit of a problem, Ellen,"
Stasz
replied.

Ellen groaned. "It only gives us an area about twenty-
one thousand A.U. in diameter to search at a range of
fifty light-years out."

Ian chuckled softly and gave Shelley a baleful glance. "I tried to explain this to the Chancellor, but do you think
he cared about the mathematics of our search? Oh no.
You see, a bright young graduate assistant had convinced
a bunch of drone-head bureaucrats that this expedition
could work." His normally high voice started to crack
into falsetto.
"Twenty-one thousand A.U."
And shaking
his head, he fell silent.

"Why the galactic center?"
Richard asked.

"Why not?
There were several stars they could orbit
into along the path, and somehow it seemed appropriate.
Sort of like going to the center of everything, if you will.
And if we were to find anything in terms of life, I guess that would be the place to look for it.
That,
and the SETI
contact back in 2018, coming straight out from the galactic
center. Even though the contact point was estimated to
be four thousand light-years away, it was still something
to go for in all that immensity of space."

"Are there any other areas of such promise?"
Stasz
asked.

"No," Ian said softly, "the other colonies were pretty
evenly distributed. A fair number going toward the thirty nearest stars, and, like I already said, the paradox of this
is that in the first fifteen checked out so far, not one
sighting has been made. If we head toward the galactic
center, within a hundred light-years three stars not too
far off the trajectory might be worth checking out. Twenty-
three units used solar sails as their propulsion, and with
our survey-ship
telescopies
, we can run a computerized
scan as we head out. Forty of the units were using the
old Orion concept—nuclear-blast pulsing."

"God, how primitive,"
Stasz
muttered.

"Yeah, almost barbaric, but it worked. We might get
lucky and detect a detonation or, at least, residual radiation from the
pulsers
. The ramjets will leave a certain
amount of disturbance in their wake, and with luck, we can latch on. We'll have to trust to the
nav
-detection
computer system to pick out anything and hope that there
is some semblance of communication between them which
we can home in on. Many of the units carried a powerful
beacon system and we know the frequencies, so we can
track on that, as well.