Hogan, James P - Voyage from Yesteryear

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file:///F|/rah/James%20P.%20Hogan/Hogan,%20James%20P%20-%20Voyage%20from%20Yesteryear.txt
PROLOGUE
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, our guest of honor tonight-Henry B. Congreve." The toastmaster completed his
introduction and stepped aside to allow the stocky, white-haired figure is black tie and dinner
jacket to move to the podium. Enthusiastic applause arose from the three hundred guests gathered
in the Hilton complex on the western outskirts of Washington, D.C. The lights around the room
dimmed, fading the audience into white shirtfronts, glittering throats and fingers, and mask like
faces. A pair of spotlights picked out the speaker as he waited for the applause to subside. In
the shadows next to him, the toastmaster returned to his chair.
After sixty-eight years of tussling with life, Congreve's bulldog frame still stood upright,
his shoulders jutting squarely below his close-cropped head. The lines of his roughly chiseled
face were still firm and solid, and his eyes twinkled good-humoredly as he surveyed the room. It
seemed strange to many of those present that a man so vital, one with so much still within him,
should be about to deliver his retirement address.
Few of the younger astronauts, scientists, engineers, and North American Space Development
Organization executives could remember NASDO without Congreve as its president. For all of them,
things would never be quite the same again.
"Thank you, Matt." Congreve's voice rumbled in a gravelly baritone from the speakers all
around. He glanced from side to side to take in the whole of his audience. "I, ah--I almost didn't
make it here at all." He paused, and the last whispers of conversation died away. "A sign in the
hall outside says that the fossil display is in twelve-oh-three upstairs." The American
Archeological Society was holding its annual convention in the Hilton complex that week. Congreve
shrugged "I figured that had to be where I was supposed to go. Luckily I bumped into Matt on the
way, and he got me back on the right track." A ripple of laughter wavered in the darkness,
punctuated by a few shouts of protest from some of the tables. He waited for silence, then
continued in a less flippant voice. "The first thing I have to do is thank everybody here, and all
the NASDO people who couldn't be with us tonight, for inviting me. Also, of course, I have to
express my sincere appreciation for this, and even more my appreciation for the sentiments that it
signifies. Thank you--all of you." As he spoke, he gestured toward the eighteen-inch-long, silver
and bronze replica of the as yet unnamed, untried SP3 star probe that stood on its teak base
before Congreve's place at the main table.
His voice became more serious as he continued. "I don't want to go off into a lot of personal
anecdotes and reminiscences. That kind of thing is customary on an occasion such as this, but it
would be trivial, and I wouldn't want my last speech as president of NASDO to be marked by trivia.
The times do not permit such luxury. Instead, I want to talk about matters that are of global
significance and which affect every individual alive on this planet, and indeed the generations
yet to be born--assuming there will be future generations." He paused. "I want to talk about
survival--the survival of the human species."
Although the room was already quiet, the silence seemed to ~intensify with these words. Here
and there in the audience, faces turned to glance curiously at one another. Clearly, this was not
to be just another retirement speech. Congreve went on. "We have already come once to the brink of
a third world war and hung precariously over the edge. Today, in 2015, twenty-three years have
passed since U.S. and Soviet forces clashed in Baluchistan with tactical nuclear weapons, and
although the rapid spread of a fusion based economy at last promises to solve the energy problems
that brought about that confrontation, the jealousies, mistrusts, and suspicions which brought us
to the point of War then and which have persistently plagued our race throughout its history are
as much in evidence as ever.
"Today the sustenance that our industries crave is not oil, but minerals. Fifty years from now
our understanding of controlled-fusion processes will probably have eliminated that source of
shortages too, but in the meantime shorter sighted political considerations are recreating the
climate of tension and rivalry that hinged around the oil issue at the close of the last century.
Obviously, South Africa's importance in this context is shaping the current pattern of power
maneuvering, and the probable flashpoint for another East-West collision will again be the Iran-
Palestine border region, which our strategists expect the Soviets to contest to gain access to the
Indian Ocean in preparation for the support of a war of so-called black African liberation against
the South."
Congreve paused, swept his eyes from one side of the room to the other, and raised his hands
in resignation. "It seems that as individuals we can only stand by as helpless observers and watch
the events that are sweeping us onward collectively. The situation is complicated further by the
emergence and rapid economic and military growth of the-Chinese-Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere,
which threatens to confront Moscow with an unassailable power bloc should it come to align with
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ourselves and the Europeans. More than a few Kremlin analysts must see their least risky gamble as
a final resolution with the West now, before such an alliance has time to consolidate. In other
words, it would not be untrue to say that the future of the human race has never' been at greater
risk than it is at this moment."
Congreve pushed himself back from the podium with his arms and straightened. When he resumed
speaking, his tone had lightened slightly. "In the area that concerns all of us here in our day-to-
day lives, the accelerating pace of the space program has brought a lot of excitement in the last
two decades. Some inspiring achievements have helped offset the less encouraging news from other
quarters: We have established permanent bases on the Moon and Mars; colonies are being built in
space; a manned mission has reached the moons of Jupiter; and robots are out exploring the
farthest reaches of the Solar System and beyond. But" --he extended his arms in an animated sigh---
"these operations have been national, not international. Despite the hopes and the words of years
gone by, militarization has followed everywhere close on the heels of exploration, and we are led
to the inescapable conclusion that a war, if it comes, would soon spread beyond the confines of
the surface and jeopardize our species everywhere. We must face up to the fact that the danger now
threatening us in the years ahead is nothing less than that."
He turned for a moment to stare at the model of SP3 gleaming on the table beside him and then
pointed to it. "Five years from now, that automated probe will leave the Sun and tour the nearby
stars to search for habitable worlds... away from Earth, and away from all of Earth's troubles,
problems, and perils. Eventually, if all goes well, it will arrive at same place insulated by
unimaginable distance from the problems that promise to make strife an inseparable and
ineradicable part of the weary story of human existence on this planet." Congreve's expression
took on a distant look as he gazed at the replica, as if in his mind he were already soaring with
it outward and away. "It will be a new place," he said in a faraway voice. "A new, fresh, vibrant
world, unscarred by Man's struggle to elevate himself from the beasts, a place that presents what
might be the only opportunity for our race to preserve an extension of itself where it would
survive, and if necessary begin again, but this time with the lessons of the past to guide it."
An undercurrent of murmuring rippled quickly around the hall. Congreve nodded, indicating his
anticipation of the 'objections he knew would come. He raised a hand for attention and gradually
the noise abated.
"No, I am not saying that SP3 could be modified from a robot craft to carry a human crew. The
design could not feasibly be modified at this late stage. Too many things would have to be thought
out again from the beginning, and such a task would require decades. And yet, nothing comparable
to SP3 is anywhere near as advanced a stage of design at the present time, let alone near being
constructed. The opportunity is unique and cannot, surely, be allowed to pass by. But at the same
time we cannot afford the delay that would be needed to take advantage of that opportunity. Is
there a solution to this dilemma?" He looked around as if inviting responses. None came.
"We have been studying this problem for some time now, and we believe there is a solution. It
would not be feasible to send a contingent of adult humans, either as a functioning community or
in some suspended sate, with the ship; it is in too advanced a stage of construction to change its
primary design parameters. But then, why send adult humans at all?" He. spread his arms
appealingly. "After all, the objective is simply to establish an extension of our race where it
would be safe from any calamity that might befall us here, and such a location would be found only
at the end of the voyage. The people would not be required either during the voyage or in the
survey phase, since ' machines are perfectly capable of handling everything con-
nected with those operations. People become relevant only when those phases have been successfully
completed. Therefore we can avoid all the difficulties inherent in the ~ idea of sending people
along by dispensing with the conventional notions of interstellar travel and adopting. A totally
new approach: by having the ship create the people after it gets there" "
Congreve paused again, but this time not so much as a whisper disturbed the silence.
Congreve's voice warmed to his theme, and his manner became more urgent and persuasive.
"Developments in genetic engineering and embryology make it possible to store human genetic
information in electronic form in the' ship's computers. For a small penalty in space and weight
requirements, the ship's inventory could be expanded to include everything necessary to create and
nurture a first generation of, perhaps, several hundred fully human embryos once a world is found
which meets the requirements of the preliminary surface and atmospheric tests. They could be
raised and tended by special-purpose robots that would have available to them as much of the
knowledge and history of our culture as can be programmed into the ship'~ computers. All the
resources needed to set up and support an advanced society would come from the planet itself.
Thus, while the first generation was being raised through infancy in orbit, other machines would
establish metals- and materials-processing facilities, manufacturing plants, farms, transportation
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systems, and bases suitable for occupation. Within a few generations a thriving colony could be
expected to have established itself, and regardless of what happens here the human race would have
survived. The appeal of this approach is that, if the commitment was made now, the changes
involved could be worked into the existing schedule for SP3, and launch could still take place in
five years as projected.'
By this time life was flowing slowly back into his listeners. Although many of them were still
too astonished by his proposal to react visibly, heads were nodding, and the murmurs running
around the room seemed positive. Congreve nodded and smiled faintly as if savoring the thought of
having kept the best part until last.
"The second thing I have to announce tonight is that such a commitment has now been made. As I
mentioned a moment ago, this subject has been under study for a considerable period of time. I can
now inform you that, three days ago, the President of the United States and the Chairman of the
Eastern Co-Prosperity Sphere signed an agreement for the project which I have briefly outlined to
be' pursued on a joint basis, effective immediately. The activities of the various national and
private research institutions and other organizations that will be involved in the venture will be
coordinated with those of the North American Space Development Organization and with those of our
Chinese and Japanese partners under a project designation of Starhaven."
Congreve's face split into a broad smile. "My third announcement is that tonight does not mark
my retirement from professional life after all. I have accepted an invitation from the President
to take charge of the Starhaven project on behalf of the United States as the senior member
nation, and I am relinquishing my position with NASDO purely in order to give undivided attention
to my new responsibilities. For those who might believe that I've given them some hard times in
the past, I have to say with insincere apologies that I'm going to be around for some time longer
yet, and that before this project is through the times are going to get a lot harder."
Several people at the back stood up and started clapping. The applause spread and turned into a
standing ovation. Congreve grinned unabashedly to acknowledge the enthusiasm, stood for a while as
the applause continued, and then grasped the sides of the podium again.
"We had our first formal meeting with the Chinese yesterday, and we've already made our first
official decision." He glanced at the replica of the star-robot probe again. "SP3 now has a name.
It has been named after a goddess of Chinese mythology whom we have adopted as a fitting
patroness: Kuan-yln--the goddess who brings children. Let us hope that she watches over her
children well in the years to come."
CHAPTER ONE
ABOUT TWO HUNDRED feet below the ridgeline, the Third Platoon of D Company had set up its Tactical
Battle Station in a depression surrounded by interconnecting patches of sagebrush and scrub. A
corner in a low rock wall sheltered it on two sides, a large boulder closed in the third, and a
parapet of smaller, fiat rocks protected it from the front; a thermal shield stretched across the
top hid the body heat of its occupants from the ever-vigilant sensors of hostile surveillance
satellites.
The scene outside was deceptively quiet as Colman lifted a flap and peered out, keeping his
head well back from the edge of the canopy. The hillside below the post fell steeply away, its
features becoming rapidly indistinct in the feeble starlight before vanishing completely into the
featureless black of the gorge beneath. There was no moon, and the sky was clear as crystal. When
his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, Colman shifted his attention to the nearer ground and
methodically scanned the area in which the twenty-five men of the platoon had been concealed and
motionless for the past three hours. If they had undercut their foxholes and weapons pits the way
he had shown them and made proper use of the rocks and vegetation, they would stand a good chance
of escaping detection. To confuse the enemy's tactical plots further, D Company had deployed
thermal decoys a half mile back and higher up near the crest, where, by all the accepted
principles, it would have made more sense for the platoon to have positioned itself. Auto timed to
turn on and off in a random sequence to simulate movement, the decoys had been drawing sporadic
fire for much of the night while the platoon had drawn none, which seemed to say something about
the value of "the book" as rewritten by Staff Sergeant Colman. "There are two ways to do
anything," he told the recruits. "The Army way and the wrong way. There isn't any other way. So
when I tell you to do something the Army way, what does it mean?'
"It means do it your way, Sergeant."
"Very good."
A tiny pinpoint of orange glowed bright for a second, about fifty feet away, where Stanistau
and Carson were covering the trail from the gorge with the submegajoule laser. Colman scowled to
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himself. He turned his head a fraction to whisper to Driscoll. "The LCP's showing a cigarette.
Tell them to get rid of it."
Driscoll tapped into the finger panel of the compack, and from a spike pushed into the ground,
ultrasonic vibrations spread outward through the soil, carrying the call sign of the Laser Cannon
Post. "LCP reading," a muted voice acknowledged from the compack.
Driscoll spoke into the microphone boom projecting from his helmet. "Red Three, routine
check." This would leave an innocuous record in the automatic signal logging system. In the
darkness Driscoll pressed a key to deactivate the recording channel momentarily. "You're showing a
light, shitheads. Douse it or cover it." His finger released the key. "Report status, LCP."
"Ready and standing by," the voice replied neutrally. "Nothing to report." Outside, the
pinpoint of light vanished abruptly.
"Remain at ready. Out."
Colman grunted to himself, made one final sweep of the surroundings, then dropped the flap
back into place and turned to face inside. Behind Driscoll, Maddock was examining the bottom of
the gorge through the image intensifier, while in the shadows next to him the expression of
concentration on Corporal Swyley's face was etched sharply by the subdued glow of the forward
terrain display screen propped in front of him.
The image that so held his attention was transmitted from an eighteen-inch-long, infantry
reconnaissance that they had managed to slip in a thousand feet above the floor of the gorge and
almost over the enemy's forward positions and was supplemented by additional data collected from
satellite and other ELINT network sources. The display showed the target command bunker at the
bottom of the gorge, known enemy weapons emplacements as computed from backplots of radar-tracked
shell trajectories, and the locations of observation and fire command posts from source analysis
triangulations of stray reflections from control lasers. On it the cool water of the stream and
its tributaries stood out as black lines forking like twigs; the rock crags and boulders were
shades of blue; living vegetation varied from rust brown on the hills to deep red where it crowded
together along the lower slopes of the gorge; and shell and bomb scars glowed from dull orange to
yellow depending on how recently the explosions had occurred.
But what Corporal Swyley was concentrating on so intently were the minute specks of brighter
reds that might or might not have been imperfectly obscured defensive positions, and the barely
discernible hairline fragments that could have been the thermal footprints of recent vehicle
movements.'
How Swyley did what only he did so well was something nobody was quite sure of, least of all
Swyley himself. Whatever the reason, Swyley's ability to pick out significant details from a
hopeless mess of background garbage and to distinguish consistently between valid information and
decoys was justly famed and uncanny. But since Swyley himself didn't understand how he did it, he
was unable to explain it to the systems programmers, who had hoped to duplicate his feats with
their image-analysis programs. That had been when the "-sits" and the "-zoologists' began their
endless batteries of fruitless tests. Eventually Swyley made up plausible-sounding explanations
for the benefit of the specialists, but these were exposed when the programs written to their
specifications failed to work. Then Swyley began claiming that his mysterious gift had suddenly
deserted him completely.
Major Thorpe, Electronics Intelligence Officer at Brigade H.Q., had read somewhere that spinach
and fish were sure remedies for failing eyesight, so he placed Corporal Swyley on an intensive
diet. But Swyley hated spinach and fish even more than he hated being tested, and within a week he
was afflicted by acute color-blindness, which he demonstrated by refusing to see anything at all
in even the simplest of training displays.
After that, Swyley had been declared "maladjusted" and transferred to D Company, which was
where all the misfits and malcontents ended up. Now his powers returned magically only when no
officers were anywhere near him except for Captain Sirocco, who ran D Company and didn't care how
Swyley got his answers as long as they came out right. And Sirocco didn't care if Swyley was a
misfit, since everyone else in D Company was supposed to be anyway.
It probably meant that there was no easy way of getting out of D Company again let alone out
of the regular service, Colman reflected as he watched in the darkness and waited for Swyley to
deliver his verdict. And that made it unlikely that Colman would get the transfer into Engineering
that he had requested,
It seemed self-evident to him that nobody in his right mind would want to get killed, or to
be sent to places he'd never heard of by people he'd never met in order to kill other people he
didn't know. Therefore nobody in his right mind would be in the Army. But since the Army was full
of people whom it had judged to be acceptably sane and normal, it seemed to follow that the Army's
ideas of what was normal had to be very strange. Now, to transfer into something like Engineering
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seemed on the face of it to be a perfectly natural, reasonable, constructive, and desirable thing
to want to do. And that seemed enough to guarantee that the Army would find the request
unreasonable and him unsuitable.
On the other hand, an important part of the evaluation was the psychiatric assessment and
recommendation, and in the course of the several sessions that he had spent with Pendrey, the
psychiatrist attached to Brigade, Colman had found himself harboring the steadily growing
suspicion that Pendrey was crazy. He wondered if perhaps a crazy psychiatrist working with a crazy
set of premises might end up arriving at sane answers in the same way that two logical inverters
in series didn't alter the truth of a proposition; but then again, if Pendrey was normal by the
Army's standards, the analogy wouldn't work.
Sirocco had endorsed the request, it was true, but Colman wasn't sure it would count for very
much since Sirocco ran D Company, and anything he said was probably inverted somewhere along the
chain as a matter of course. Perhaps he should have persuaded Sirocco not to endorse the request.
On the other hand, if anything recommended by Sirocco was inverted to start with, and if Pendrey
was crazy but normal by the Army's standards, and if the premises that Pendrey was working with
were also crazy, then the decision might come out in Colman's favor after all. Or would it? His
attempt to think the tortuous logic of the situation once again was interrupted by Swyley at last
leaning back and turning his face away from the screen.
"They've got practically all their strength out on the flanks both ways along the gorge,"
Swyley announced. "There are some units moving down the opposite slope, but they won't be in
position for about another thirty minutes." The glow from the screen highlighted the mystified
look that flashed across his face. He shrugged. "Right now they're wide open, right down below
us."
"They don't have anything here?" Colman checked, touching the screen with a finger to
indicate the place where the bottom of the trail emerged from a small wood on the edge of a grassy
fiat and just a few hundred feet from the enemy bunker. The display showed a faint pattern of
smudges on either side of the trail in just the positions where defensive formations would be
expected.
Swyley shook his head. "Those are decoys. Like I said, they've moved practically all the guys
out to the flanks"-he jabbed at the screen with a finger--"here, here, and here."
"Getting round behind B Company, and up over spur Four-nine-three," Colman suggested as he
studied the image.
"Could be," Swyley agreed noncommittally.
"Looks dead as hell down there to me," Maddock threw in without taking his eyes from the
viewpiece of the intensifier.
"What do' the ' seismics and Sniffers say about Swyley's decoys?" Colman asked, turning his
head toward Driscoll.
Driscoll translated the question into a computer command and peered at the data summary on one
of the compack screens. "Insignificant seismic above threshold at eight hundred yards. Downwind
ratio less than five points up at four hundred. Negative corroboration from acoustics-background
swamping." The computers were unable to identify vibration patterns correlating with human
activity in the data coming in from the sensing devices quietly scattered around the gorge by low-
flying, remote piloted "bees" on and off throughout the night; the chemical sensors located to the
leeward of the suspected decoys were detecting little of the odor molecules characteristic of
human bodies; the microphones had yielded nothing in the way of coherent sound patterns, but this
was doubtless because of the white-noise background being generated in the vicinity of the stream.
Although the evidence was only partial and negative at that, it supported Swyley's assertion that
the main road down to the objective was, incredibly, virtually undefended for the time being.
Colman frowned to himself as his mind raced over the data's significance. No sane attacking
force would contemplate taking an objective like that by a direct frontal assault in the center--
the lowermost stretch of the trail was too well covered by overlooking slopes, and there would be
no way back if the attack bogged down. That was what the enemy commander would have thought anyone
would have thought. So what would be the point of tying up lots of men to defend a point that
would never be attacked? According to the book, the correct way to attack the bunker would be
along the stream from above or by crossing the stream below and coming down from the spur on the
far side. So the other side was concentrating at points above both of the obvious assault routes
and setting themselves up to ambush whichever attack should materialize. But in the meantime they
were wide open in the middle.
"Alert all section leaders on the grid," Colman said to Driscoll. "And open a channel to Blue
One."
Sirocco came through on the compack a few moments later, and Colman summarized the situation.
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file:///F|/rah/James%20P.%20Hogan/Hogan,%20James%20P%20-%20Voyage%20from\%20Yesteryear.txtPROLOGUELADIESANDGENTLEMEN,ourguestofhonortonight-HenryB.Congreve."The oastmastercompletedhisintroductionandsteppedasidetoallowthestocky,white-hairedfigureisblacktieanddinnerjackettomovetothepodium.Enthusiast...

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