Hal Clement - Longline

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LONGLINE

"We must have missed it! You could see we were going to miss it! What happened? Where are

we?" Wattimlan's voice carried more than a tinge of panic. Feroxtant did not exactly nod, since

this implies not only a head but a shape, but he made a reassuring gesture in his own way.

"We did miss it. We also missed the fact that it was double—two stars so close together that we

sensed only one. We missed the first, and are in the other—a perfectly good landing. If you can

calm down enough to do reliable work, we'd better go through post-flight check. I'd like to be

able to go home again even if this star turns out to be as nice as it seems, and I won't fly a ship

on guesswork. Are you all right now?"

"I—I think so." Wattimlan was young, and unavoidably short in both experience and self-

confidence. This, the longest flight ever made through the void between stars where energy

became so nearly meaningless, had been his first. He had done his routine work competently, but

routine adds little to maturity. "Yes. I can do it, sir."

"All right. It's all yours." Feroxtant knew better than to put the young-ster through any more of

an inquisition; neither of the explorers was even remotely human, but some qualities are

common to all intelligence. They set carefully to work. The mechanism which permitted them to

exist in and to travel through a medium almost devoid of quantum-exchange niches had to be

complex and delicate, and was almost alive in its occa-sional perversity. Until they were certain

that it was in perfect order, ready to carry them back over the incredibly long line they had just

traced, they could feel little interest in anything else, even their new environment.

Just how long the check required is impossible to say, but eventually the Longline floated, stable

and ready for flight, in an equally stable pattern of potential niches, and her crew was satisfied.

"Now what?" Wattimlan's question, the captain suspected, was rhe-torical; the youngster

probably had already made up his mind about what to do next. "I've never seen any star but

home before, and I suppose we should learn enough about this one to permit a useful report

when we announce our arrival—at least, we should have seen more than just the boundary film.

On the other spin, though, there's the other star you say must be close to this one—should we

start casting for it right away? If it's really close, maybe we'd hit it without too many tries."

"You really want to get back into space so quickly?"

"Well—I thought you'd prefer to make the casts, at least at first, but we can take turns if you

prefer. Frankly, I'd rather look over the landscape first."

"I agree," Feroxtant replied rather dryly. "Let's reinforce our identi-ties and get to it."

Landscape is of course a hopelessly crude translation of Wattimlan's communication symbol.

Inside a neutron star there is no close analogy to hills and valleys, rivers and forests, sky,

sunlight, or clouds. It is a virtually infinite complex of potential levels—some unoccupied, others

occu-pied by one or more of the fundamental particles which made up the universe known to the

two explorers, some in flux among the various possible states. This is equally true, of course, of

the matter universe, and just as a man groups the patterns of electrons and other force fields

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around him into perceived objects, so did Wattimlan and Feroxtant. A pattern capable of identity

maintenance, growth, and duplication, which main-tained its existence by ingesting and

restructuring other such patterns, might be called a lion or a shark by a human being; such an

entity would also possess an identification symbol in the minds of the explorers, but translating

that symbol into any human word would be unwise, since the hearer could probably not help

clothing the central skeleton of abstrac-tion with very misleading flesh.

It is therefore not correct to say that Wattimlan was charged by a lion and saved himself by

climbing a tree during their preliminary examina-tion of the new star. It would be even less

accurate, however, to say that the exploration was uneventful. It would be most accurate, but still

very incomplete, to say that when he got back to the Longline the younger traveller held a much

more tolerant attitude toward the boring aspects of space-casting than had been the case earlier.

They had learned enough for an acceptable report. They had named their discovery Brother,

intending to add the prefix of Big or Little when they reached the companion star and found out

which word applied. They had amused themselves, each in his own way—they were individuals,

as different from each other as any two human beings. As a natural conse-quence, they had even

perceived Brother differently, and had already de-veloped different attitudes toward it.

The length of time all this had taken is impossible to state, since their time is not really

commensurable with that in the Einstein-matter uni-verse. Eventually they made their call to

their home star, along the incomprehensibly extended line of uniform potential which their ship

had marked in space. They reported their finds, and received acknowledg-ment. They received

assurance that other ships would follow. They spent more time at their equivalents of working,

eating, drinking, and merry-making; and finally they faced the question of trying to reach Big or

Little Brother, as it might turn out to be—the companion star which Feroxtant had identified in

the instant of their landing.

I feel a little funny about this," Wattimlan admitted as they began the Longline's preflight check.

"I've heard of stars which were close com-panions of each other, but there was always one

difference. You could see one from the other just about anywhere, as long as you hadn't gone

below the surface film, but you could see it only half the time. This one you can see all the time

if you're in the right place in the film, but not at all if you're anywhere else. It scares me. Can it

be a real star?"

"I'm not sure." Feroxtant would not admit to fear, but he was admit-tedly as puzzled as his

junior. "At least, we don't have to worry about start-ing time. Since we can always see it from

here, we can lift any time we choose."

"That's just what bothers me. Of course, no one minds flying when he knows where he's going—

when there's a steady-pot line to follow. I didn't mind the blind start we made on this trip, since

we'd either hit another star sooner or later or be able to reverse and go home. Now I don't know

what we may hit. This constant visibility situation bothers me. Could this other thing actually be

a part of the star we're in now, separated by some strange potential pattern instead of ordinary

space?"

"I hadn't thought of that," Feroxtant replied. "It's a bit wild an idea. I had thought there might be

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some connection between this situation and a lecture I once heard on something called direction."

"Never heard of it."

"I'm not surprised. It's as abstract a notion as I've ever heard of, and I can't put it into ordinary

words."

"Does it suggest any special risks?"

"It makes no suggestions at all on the personal level. You knew when you volunteered for

exploration that it involved the unknown, and therefore meant some risk. Now you're worrying,

apparently without even considering all the peculiarities we are facing."

"What? What haven't I considered?"

"You've said nothing about the neutrino source which must also be in this neighborhood, since it

is bright enough to see, but which is behaving normally—visible half the time, out of sight the

other half."

Wattimlan was silent for a time, checking his own sensory impres-sions, his memories, and the

Longline's instrument recordings. Finally he switched attention back to his commander, and

asked another question.

"Can that possibly be a star?"

"I doubt it. More probably it's a protostar—one of the neutrino sources which we think finally

condenses to an ordinary star. Presumably the neutrinos carry off whatever energy

manifestations prevent the for-mation of a normal star. In any case, it's harmless—people have

probably flown through them without any effect. There's no way to tell whether this one is nearer

or farther than the star we're casting for, but it's nothing to worry about. Now—do you want to

make the first few casts, or shall I?"

The youngster hesitated only a moment. "I'll do it, if you trust me to make an open-space

reversal."

"Sure. You know the routine. I'm not worrying, and you shouldn't be. Take her out."

"You can't make a guess at strike probability, I suppose?"

"No. It depends on target distance, and apparently on target size, though no one knows why—

maybe it's another of those direction phe-nomena. Anyway, we know only that the distance is

small—which makes the chances fairly high—and I'm not suggesting that there's any way to

guess at something's size just by looking at it. Ready for final checkout?"

"Ready."

"Pressor lens?"

"Open."

"Film field one?"

"In synch."

"Line track power..."

The Longline emerged from the surface film of the neutron star and hurtled away from the tiny

body, leaving far behind the burst of neutrino emission which accompanied the lift. The

explorers had only a rough idea of the possible distance to their target, and none at all of their

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vessel's speed in open space. It had been discovered by experience that slowing down

sufficiently to let neutrinos overtake them was apparently impos-sible. The more advanced

theories in fundamental mechanics implied that substance as they understood it became

mathematically unreal below neutrino speed; what this implied in terms of observable properties

was anyone's guess. It was generally believed that stars in galaxies—that is, the neutron stars

which were all they could sense of such bodies—were separated by a few hundred to a few

thousand of their own diameters. Space travel had given them, in addition, the concept of

galaxies separated by a dozen or two times their own size, on the average.

Wattimlan and Feroxtant, therefore, could only guess at the distance needed for their casts. They

had set up an arbitrary travel time; if the pilot failed to make a landing before that was up, he

would reverse and return to the starting point along the new constant-pot line his trip would have

established. The time was short enough so that even the youngster, Feroxtant hoped, could

hardly get either bored or nervous.

The chance of landing on any one cast was presumably very small, though there was no way of

calculating just how small. Feroxtant's sug-gestion that this might become possible when the

concept of direction was finally clarified by the advanced mathematicians was not really a se-

rious prediction, since he had no real idea of what the theory was all about; it was more like the

suggestions in Earth's early twentieth century that radium might prove a cure for cancer and old

age.

Wattimlan, therefore, gave no serious thought to what he would do if and when the Longline

made starfall. It would be routine, anyway. He flew. He readied himself for his first open-space

reversal with some un-easiness, but missed its time only slightly. The miss annoyed him as a

reflection on his professional skill, but it was in no way dangerous; the Longline was suddenly

retracing its outward path. There was none of the deceleration which a human pilot would have

had to plan and experi-ence; the concept of inertia was even stranger and more abstract to Wat-

timlan than that of direction—or would have been if anyone had ever suggested it to him. The

only observable phenomenon marking the re-versal was another burst of neutrinos, vaguely

analogous to the squeal of tires from a clumsily handled ground vehicle but—unlike the time

error or a tire squeal—not indicative of poor piloting.

In the sub-light universe, a simple direction reversal does not involve

change in kinetic energy, except for whatever entropy alteration may be involved; equal speed

means equal kinetic energy. In the tachyon universe,

momentum is naturally as meaningless as direction, kinetic energy almost

equally so, and the interactions between forces and the various fundamental particles follow very

different rules. However, the rules were the ones

Wattimlan knew, and the time interval between the reversal and reentry into

the neutron star's surface film was for him boringly uneventful. He landed.

Feroxtant was nowhere to be seen; he had apparently gone off either

working or playing. Wattimlan decided to be pleased at the implied compliment to his

competence rather than hurt at the suggested indifference

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to his welfare, and went through post-flight and pre-flight checks without waiting for his

commander and instructor to appear. He made another cast, and another, and another...

"So pay up!" Sforza leaned back from the display tank which domi-nated the Manzara's

maneuvering console, and just barely managed to refrain from smirking.

Jeb Garabed, a quarter century younger and correspondingly less restrained, glared first into the

tank and then at the two-liter silvery cube beside it. He didn't quite snarl—the captain was also

present—but there was a distinct edge to his voice.

"I should know better than to let myself get fooled by that old line about mechanical brains. I

know that thing is made of doped diamond, but I didn't realize how much weight the first word

carried!"

Sforza lifted an eyebrow. "I don't seem to appreciate your humor as much as I used to."

"Don't bother to put that eyebrow on top of your head. It would be conspicuous. I wasn't trying

to be funny."

"That's just as well. You—" Sforza cut himself off with an effort, and fell silent. For a moment

each of the men wondered if he had said too much, as Garabed's face and Sforza's scalp both

flushed.

Captain Migna Sarjuk listened to the exchange without too much concern; she knew both men

well, and could tell that the jibes were not serious. When arguments became too frequent, of

course, it was a tempta-tion to separate the disputants for a few months by judicious watch-shift-

ing; but it was possible to be too hasty with this solution. One could break up good working

teams, and even run out of possible combinations. With over eighty people on the Manzara the

latter seemed mathematically im-probable, but since most of the possible combinations were in

fact elimi-nated by conditions of specialty training it was not entirely impossible. The ship had

spent eighteen months—subjective time—en route, would be at least that long going back, and

might remain several years at this end of the flight line; the captain had no intention of running

out of solutions to the most likely personnel problems any sooner than she could help. She

waited silently, paying close attention to Sforza's reactions; the younger man, she knew, would

not lose his temper in her presence.

He didn't. The young radiometrist caught himself in turn, grinned, and tossed a couple of time-

slugs onto the console. Sforza gathered them up. Garabed half-apologized as he continued to

stare into the display.

It was not a picture in the conventional sense. The three-dimensional presentation did show

images of a number of celestial bodies, but they were festooned with numbers, vector arrows in

various colors, and other symbols. To Sforza, it was a completely informative description of all

the detectable objects within a light-day of the ship. Garabed would have felt happier with the

images alone, stripped of the extra symbols. He could then have thought of it as a simple bead-

and-wire model.

He greatly preferred the direct view of space from the Manzara's ob-servation dome, even

though human perception was not really adequate for its analysis. For most of the trip it had been

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an unchanging Milky Way—unchanging, that is, except as his own intellect changed it. He had

found he could change its appearance from a flat spray-paint job on a screen a few yards outside

the dome to a more nearly correct, but far from complete, impression of infinite star-powdered

depths. His home star had been fading throughout the journey, of course, though the change in a

single day had been imperceptible except at the very beginning. It was now an unimpressive

object about as bright as Polaris.

The Manzara's target star was now overwhelmingly bright, and the human mind had no trouble

accepting that it was far closer than Sol; but its white dwarf companion had only recently grown

brighter than the sun the explorers had left some ten objective years before.

But Garabed could read the display symbols even if he preferred to visualize differently, and

now one of them caught his attention. It was typical of him that he did not call immediate

attention to it; his first reaction was to recoup his betting losses. At this distance, a few minutes'

delay in reporting a discovery would not be of importance to the ship's safety—or, more

important, to the captain. He continued the conversa-tion, and even Sarjuk failed to catch any

change in his manner.

"So I was wrong. It just means we'll have to spend a year and a half of our personal time flying

back—unless I turn right while we're here."

"I'll cover another bet on that, if you like."

Garabed shook his head. "I guess not. Now that real work is starting, I don't need so much

distraction—and probably can't afford it. It was different on the way, when I needed amusement.

Conning my way out of boring jobs by smart bets provided that—even when I lost, the jobs

themselves made a change. Now it's time to be serious, though, if you'll pardon the pun. How do

things look to you?"

The ballistician gestured toward the display into which Garabed was still staring. "There you are.

Cutting drive didn't make much difference. It adds up to what we've known for a couple of

centuries, plus what we've picked up in the last few months. One type A main sequence sun,

known since before human history began—with an unexplained, not to men-tion unproved,

charge of having been red instead of white a couple of millennia ago. One white dwarf in a fifty-

year orbit with it, known since the nineteenth century. Four high-density planets discovered by

us in the last few weeks. No gas giants, which would be out where the white dwarf would

perturb them hopelessly anyway. And no trace of the faster-than--light ship you were betting

would be here from Earth waiting for us."

Garabed shrugged. "It was still a reasonable bet. We have artificial gravity, and a field drive

system which can be described as a space warp without lying too grossly. It still seems to me

that those should ease us into FTL flight before I'm very much older."

"In spite of the fact that both the gadgets you mention were devel-oped on the assumption that

Einstein was right? And that even the warp which makes a portable fusion engine practical is an

Einstein applica-tion? I seem to be missing a rung or two in your ladder of logic."

Garabed glanced at the captain before answering. "Yes," he said after a moment. "In spite of

that."

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"And in spite of the fact that this trip was only a political gesture to quiet the people who don't

think Earth is home enough? And that there were long, loud screams about the better things

which could be done with the resources which went into the Manzara and her equipment? Why-

should--we-explore-the-stars, practically-no-chance-of-life, a-waste-of-resources, we've-solved-

all-our-real-problems, let's-sit-back-and-live? You've heard it all."

"Sure I have." Garabed did not look at the captain this time. "But people are still curious—that's

what makes them people. Once we were on the way some of them were bound to want to find

out what we'd see—first. It's being human. You have the same drive, whether you want to admit

it or not; I'll show you." He reached across and flicked off the dis-play in the computer's tank.

"How sure are you that there's nothing really unexpected to be found in the Sirius system? And

would you bet there isn't a clue to it in your data banks right now?"

The older man looked into the blank display unit, and thought. The kid might have seen

something, though Sforza himself should have no-ticed anything important; it was certainly

possible. On the other hand, Sforza had known the young con artist to bluff his way out of one or

another of the ship's less popular jobs on at least four occasions during the trip, three of them at

Sforza's own expense. Had there been anything sur-prising on the display? Something he should,

of course, have seen himself?

The captain had come over to the ballistics console to look for herself, though she of course said

nothing. She knew, far better than Sforza, that Garabed might not be bluffing.

The ballistician hesitated a moment longer, straining his memory with no useful result, and

decided to take a chance.

"All right. Two hours' worth." He put the slugs he had just won on the panel before him. Garabed

covered them with two more, and turned the display back on. For a moment there was silence.

"What was the time limit on this?" the older man finally asked. The captain, unseen behind him,

smiled and slipped back to her own station, where she busied herself at the intercom. The

instrument specialist paid no obvious attention to her; the smile on his face might have been

simply one of triumph.

"No time needed. Look at the white dwarf's radial velocity"

"I see it. So what? You wouldn't expect it to match A's. Even a fifty-year orbit means a few kilos

per second—"

"Changing how fast?" asked Garabed pointedly.

"Not very—" Sforza fell silent again, glued his eyes to the display, and within a minute the

eyebrows were climbing toward the desert above. "It's changing!"

"How right you are. Do you pay now, or calculate first?"

Sforza waved the slugs away with an impatient gesture of his head; his fingers were already

busy. He didn't stop to wonder why the velocity variation had not been spotted sooner; it was

obvious enough. The axis of the previously unknown orbit must point almost exactly at the Solar

system. The Manzara was now so close to the Sirius group that the A star and the white dwarf

appeared fully forty degrees apart, and the ship was well off the line between Sol and the dwarf.

Hence, there was a radial velocity component not previously detectable.

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Hal Clement - Longline

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