Nebula (12 page)

“Well, I still don’t like the idea of being up there with just the few of us and an alien invasion force, but I guess that it does sound like a logical plan.”

The following months were spent perfecting the human-machine interaction techniques that Lars and Yuri had been developing and getting Harry trained to work with the others for controlling the collective behaviors of the robots. He had a good head start from his prior research and quickly bonded with Yuri and then with the rest of the team. Everything was almost ready for the final preparations on Mars, but Harry still needed one last piece of training.

Brad entered the lab as Harry and Yuri were going over their notes and making some slight adjustments in the logic that would be programmed for supervisory control. They had promised Ludmila that they’d have it for her by the end of the week and were now a couple of days ahead of schedule. Things looked pretty good in all the simulations, and it looked like the job was finished.

“Harry,” Brad said as he approached them, “can you spare a few hours? There’s something that we need to do.”

“Yeah, I think that Yuri and I were just about to wrap up anyway.”

“Good. You and Milo and I need to take a little ride. Is it OK with you, Yuri, if we steal him for the rest of the day?”

“Sure. Like he said, we were just about to quit for the day. We think that we have everything that Ludmila needs, so go ahead for the ride. Harry earned a bit of fun.”

“What’s this fun? Do you have an amusement park down here too?”

“Better than that,” Brad replied. “We’re going on a quick trip to Mars. We want to show you around before we go there for the job, and we also need to train you to fly the spacecraft. Everyone needs to know the basics, just in case something comes up, and it’s pretty easy. You’ll be a pro in a couple of hours - not as good as Milo, he’s the best, but good enough to do whatever you’ll need to do in a pinch.”

Harry had expected this to happen at some point, but it still took him by surprise. “We’re going now? Don’t I have to do something to get ready?”

“No, we just get in and go, like we’re going shopping in the family car. We have space suits so we can go outside, but we don’t wear them inside the ship.”

So, off they went to the docking area, where a small ship like the one that they flew in before waited. Harry recognized Milo, who actually responded when Harry said hello to him. “Welcome to spaceship 101,” he said as he shook Harry’s hand and ushered him onboard. “You take this seat on the right, and I’ll handle things until we get safely away from Earth.”

Harry obeyed, and sat down. Milo sat to his left, and Brad settled into a seat behind them. Milo then explained the set of controls in front of them and in a console between them.

“OK, it’s pretty easy to fly this thing, unless you want to do something fancy. That’s for course 102. For now, let’s get the basics.”

He pointed to an array of buttons on the front panel. He had one of them in front of himself, and there was an identical one in front of Harry. “These are the controls for everything except the gravitational vectors that propel and steer the ship. Those are in the console, like the throttle controls in an airplane. If you’ve learned to fly an airplane, this will be a piece of cake. If not, it may take a bit of practice, but it’s very easy.”

He then pointed out each of the buttons on the front panel. They controlled the landing gear, outer door and ramp, interior gravity field, temperature, air pressure, radios, sensors, and a few other things that he said Harry could learn from the operator’s manual. Then he explained the console with the flight controls. It was more like the joystick for a video game than like the controls in an airplane. Each of them had his own joystick, on their respective sides of the console.

“OK,” Milo continued. “The joystick is what we use for all maneuvering. Push it forward, and we go faster. It applies force, like thrust, so as long as it’s pushed forward, we continue to accelerate. Pull it back, and it decreases the thrust. If you pull back beyond the neutral point, the thrust reverses, and we slow down. If you push to one side or the other, the thrust vector changes, and we move to that side, still accelerating if we haven’t gone to neutral in the front-back direction. The ship automatically reorients itself so that the front is pointed in the direction of flight, but you can change that by rotating the handle at the top of the joystick. If you pull the handle up, the ship rises, and if you push it down, it descends, but that usually is done only at low speeds for takeoff and landing. It sounds a lot more complicated than it really is. When you get the feel of it, you’ll see how easy and natural it is.

“The speedometer is this display in between our two panels. At low speeds, the numbers are black and indicate kilometers per hour. When we go to higher speeds, still non-relativistic, the numbers change color, first to bright green and then to bright blue. That means they’re showing speed first in kilometers per minute and then in kilometers per second. When we go to relativistic speed, the numbers turn red and show our speed in percentages of the speed of light. It’s actually a lot simpler than it looks, since you know in advance when you are going to make a transition, so you expect to see the right colors and numbers.

“You can also cause the ship to tilt by tilting that handle. Tip it to one side, and the ship tips to that side. Tip it forward or backward, and the ship tilts its nose up or down. You can also pull up or push down on the handle. That will produce acceleration up or down. Remember that it’s acceleration that you’re controlling, so the ship’s motion will accelerate at a rate determined by how much force you put on the stick, and it will continue until you let it return to neutral. Give it a try. Rotate and tilt the handle to see how it feels. I haven’t powered up yet, so nothing will happen.”

Harry gripped the ball handle at the top of his joystick and found that it rotated and tipped forward, backward, and sideways with just enough resistance to make it feel right. He saw that there was a cleverly designed hinge and rotator sleeve that allowed those motions and still allowed the handle to be able to move the joystick itself in both front-to-back and side-to-side directions.

“Have you ever flown an airplane?” Milo asked.

“Only a couple of times, when I was with a friend that owned one. He let me fly when we were in the air, but I never took off or landed.”

“Good. That’s most of what you’ll need to know. As I said, the ship is controlled by acceleration. It’s a lot like an airplane, so you already have some experience controlling by acceleration vectors. You should get the hang of it very quickly. And don’t worry about takeoff or landing. This is a lot easier than with an airplane, since we can control our external gravitational forces and just stop in mid-air or hover and slowly settle down or climb. We don’t have a high speed approach or takeoff to worry about. OK, let’s power up and go for our quick trip to Mars.”

Milo pressed a large red button on the front panel. The ship came to life, and the view screens turned on and gave the impression of windows with almost unobstructed view in all directions. Milo then used his left hand to work the buttons on the front panel while his right hand controlled the joystick. The ship rose about half a meter off the floor and drifted through the large door that had opened. Harry had been through this before and knew that they were entering the air lock between the docking port and the ocean. The ship floated into the air lock, and the large door closed behind them. Then water filled the air lock, and the ship rose to where it could exit through the door to the ocean.

“Now we get to the only delicate part,” Milo said, as he worked with the front panel. “Here’s where we do some sound cancellation and tricky maneuvers to hide from the undersea sensors. Once we get to the surface, things are much easier. Fortunately, we have the tricky stuff programmed into the flight control computer, so I just have to set it on autopilot and let it do its thing. Even our exit just now was mostly preprogrammed.”

The ship broke the surface of the ocean and began to ascend nearly straight up. Harry could see in the sensor screens that they had tipped upward, more or less pointing in the direction of flight. If this were a normal airplane, he would feel gravity pulling him back into the seat, but he felt none of that. It was if he were just sitting in a room, not moving at all and not tipped at a crazy angle toward the sky.

“I’ve got the internal gravity field set on automatic,” Milo explained. “That’s also preprogrammed. You just have to turn it on with this button,” and he pointed to a green one on the panel. “We try to use colors and shapes that tell us about the function. Green is for the internal gravity field. It’s just on or off since there really isn’t any other setting that would make any sense. Once it’s on, we don’t feel any acceleration or change in orientation. We turn it off only if we need to do something that requires weightlessness. OK, we’ve left the atmosphere, so we can speed up a bit. I’ll wait until we’re beyond the geosynchronous satellite orbits, and then we can go to near light speed for a bit. Then you can have a try.”

Several seconds later, Milo hit another of the buttons on the front panel and pushed the joystick forward. The speedometer numbers went from black to green to blue, and the Earth and Moon, which
could be seen through the rear-looking viewer, got smaller and smaller as the ship charged ahead. Then he did something with his left hand and the numbers changed to red as they accelerated to nearly the speed of light. After about thirty seconds, Milo pulled back on the joystick, and they slowed almost to a full stop. Harry was impressed by the way that he used both his hands to work the front panel and joystick.

“Your turn. These three buttons and the joystick are all that you’ll need to use for this trip.” He pointed to three buttons at the lower left hand corner of his panel and then at the same colored buttons at the lower right hand corner of Harry’s panel. “You’ll have to work the panel with your right hand and the joystick with your left hand. In the pilot’s seat, it’s the opposite, but it’s easy to get used to moving from seat to seat once you get the hang of it. OK, are you ready?”

“I guess so. What should I do?”

“We’ll start with a bit of low speed maneuver, so you can get the feel of the controls. Then we’ll graduate to relativistic speed. You’ll take us most of the way to Mars and vary the speed between 90% and 99% of the speed of light. You’ll see how easy it is. When we get near Mars, I’ll take over again, so don’t worry about crashing. This is just the first lesson. We’ll get to the delicate maneuvers later. OK?”

“OK,” Harry replied. He was a bit nervous, but Milo seemed to know what he was doing, so on with the lesson. He actually was also excited and eager to try to fly the ship.

They first went through some basic maneuvers, going straight up and down, tipping, and traveling more or less like an airplane would fly. Harry found it easy, as Milo had said, and he enjoyed the feel of freedom to make the ship do whatever he wanted. The controls were extremely intuitive. A bit of a push, and whoosh, off you went in the direction that you chose. More of a push and the acceleration increased, almost instantaneously, but none of the usual inertial reactions could be felt at all. It was like a video game. After about half an hour of basics, Milo decided that it was time to let Harry try his hand at relativistic travel.

“OK, now we’re going to get this buggy into high gear. That control button on the right hand side of your seat is the one that amplifies all the forward and backward accelerations. Do you see it?”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t do anything else. All the tipping and rotating is still at normal rotational acceleration, so there’s no danger of getting into a relativistic spin when you change the attitude of the ship. The high speed setting returns to off automatically if you pull the joystick back all the way, and then the ship will stop. When you push the button in, you can accelerate to near light speed in just a few seconds. You can’t go at high speed in reverse, but you can decelerate at the high rate until you stop, either in an emergency stop like I explained or in a more gradual deceleration.”

“How can I be sure not to hit anything when we move so fast?”

“Good question. When you’re moving that fast, you have little ability for emergency maneuvers. You’re basically trying to guide a bullet, not flying an airplane. But the ship has two means of protection. It has a sensor and a computer-controlled autopilot that sees far enough ahead to avoid anything large enough to cause damage. Unfortunately, that works reliably only up to about 99% of the speed of light. Above that, there’s not enough time for the computer and gravitational drive to react since the sensor is like a radar, and the signal has to travel to the obstructing object and then back to the ship. The signal travels a bit faster, but the reaction time is still too small when we really get moving.

“The other protection that helps us at high speed is a short range gravitational repulsion field that’s part of the ship’s shield system. It protects us from cosmic rays and other things that might hit us. The shield can also fend off objects like asteroids up to several meters in diameter, even when the relative velocity is nearly the speed of light, so we only have to plot a course that avoids much larger objects. The shield is produced by the same gravitational field generator that does everything else, but it’s a more complex form of gravity than what we use for propulsion and inertia control. It falls off as the inverse sixty-fourth power of range, and it’s enormously strong when you get near the ship. It’s turned on automatically only when we’re going at near light speed in open space so that it doesn’t interfere with our normal gravitational maneuvers near Earth or other objects. But we can turn it on manually if we want to use it at lower speeds, like for a shield against kinetic weapons, or even to diffuse the plasma and x-ray beams. It’s not a perfect defensive force field, but it does work against very long range plasma and x-ray attacks, and it’s very good against kinetic attacks.