Dreams of the Stars

Felter noticeably recoiled. But to his credit he didn’t allow himself to be perturbed. He knew Boddy too well to be intimidated by command theatrics. “I have no intention of doing that. Just relax. Some well-meaning advice, for Christ’s sake.”

Boddy realized he had been deliberately goading Felter into making some sort of comment that could be construed as mutinous. He would have enjoyed confining Felter to his quarters or even arresting him, but Joe Felter was Boddy’s second-in-command and had the leisure of his own executive position to say a might more than other members of the crew would dare. And whether he liked the ambitious and sometimes uncomfortably insightful pilot or not, Boddy knew he had to take Felter’s concerns seriously. He didn’t smile, but his tone softened. “I know you’re just giving me constructive criticism. It’s no big deal. I know it must look to you like I’m overreacting. But I don’t want anyone here to question my abilities. A captain can’t afford that.”

“All right, okay, you’ve made your point. Well, I got lots to do, so I’m gonna have to bug out.”

“Please do.”

Boddy returned to the report and, in the corner of his eye, saw Felter depart. “I’m gonna have to bug out,” Felter had said; so utterly typical of him to turn what would have been Boddy’s command into a personal choice. He had a talent for anticipating Boddy’s orders and jumping in before Boddy could speak, saying in that so-casual yet so-loud voice, “Weeeelllll, I’m gonna” –whatever Boddy was about to say. Some might say he was fortunate to have a second who could anticipate him, who knew instinctively what to do without being told, but Boddy saw it for what it really was—a power play. Felter seemed to be in a constant power play with everyone around him, as though the alpha male challenge had somehow become a way of life in every conceivable social situation.

It was a maddening situation for someone like Boddy, who had never cared much who was “in charge”—but since legally he was “in charge” of the ship, he had to assert himself.

He had a long history of dealing with problems by escaping from them. He had escaped his father’s drinking by running away from home, then escaped the dangers of street life by returning five years later. When the Nanotech War broke out, he had escaped being drafted into the Army by joining the Star Force. And now—what greater escape than from the planet Earth itself, for all time?

The Eldorado was essentially a rotating box, ninety feet by one hundred feet by eighty-five feet. A news commentator had once said, accurately but sarcastically, that the ship looked exactly like a giant air conditioner. The gridlike superstructure, composed of oxygen tanks, coolant, superconducting materials, radiators, telescopes, instrument booms, thrusters, and masses of varied instrumentation shoved in wherever there was extra space, surrounded the liquid hydrogen-shielded, cylindrical pressure hull. The ship’s rotation produced centrifugal force about equal to Mars gravity, generally considered the most comfortable gravity field for man.

The constant acceleration could not be depended upon to produce artificial gravity, for it was not a result of thrust, and therefore the laws of inertia did not apply. Thanks to a series of spinning, superconducting disks, the Eldorado canceled the intricate electromagnetic force that bound its every particle to the quantum fluctuations of the zero-point field. In effect, the ship “fell” faster and faster through space, bound for the edge of the galaxy.

It had been a challenge for the World Space Agency to convince the taxpayers that their money would be well spent on a spacecraft that would never return; or if it did, not for many thousands of years. But although the litany of the Eldorado mission is “knowledge for the crew alone,” the big dish at the top of the box remained steadfastly pointed at Sol as the ship rotated around it, and the ship’s findings were constantly beamed back. But although the crew had experienced less than a year since departure, almost three hundred years had passed back home. And with the ever lengthening distance the radio waves had to travel, coupled with the fact that they were emitted from a rapidly receding target, they would be reaching Earth at increasingly lower frequencies—to the point that, depending on the advancements back home, they may no longer be discernible.

Communication was not Aldiss Jameson’s specialty, but no one matched his knowledge of physics and math. He felt sure that not only were the ship’s signals being received by Earth, but were being expertly deciphered. Why, he felt he could do the job himself. The Eldorado itself received Earth’s messages in ultra low frequency, yet accelerated to chipmunk-speak by time dilation, and filtering that low-frequency mumble from the intense gamma rays and cosmic rays that bombarded the ship as its force field annihilated speeding atoms was a hobby for him, a hobby at which he excelled.

But that was why he was here. Science was his hobby. Math was his hobby. Today as he jogged around the exercise ring his mind played idly with possible proofs for Fermat’s final theorem, that xn + yn = zn has no non-zero integer solutions for x, y, and z when n is less than two—as usual, taking cues from Andrew Wiles’ proof that every elliptic curve is modular; a perplexing contradiction, since in 2054 Wu had shown that under certain circumstances Frey elliptic curves could exist. As to whether Wu’s proof applied to the “real” world mattered little to Jameson, since in his relativistic state there was little difference between the real and the imaginary. Here, in the peace and solitude of his own sanctuary aboard a ship hurtling through the infinite quiet of the void of space, Jameson was free to run the numbers through his head over and over again, exploring every pathway, searching every unexplored corridor. The elegance, perfection, and reliability of Math—and its son Science—always comforted Jameson. Where others saw a chaotic and confusing universe, he saw order and total predictability.

That was what had brought the Eldorado out this far, the total, immutable predictability of math. A century or two before the ship’s departure, he could have told you exactly where and when the ship would be at this point, given the knowledge of its departure time and acceleration rate. The nonmathematical variables, such as the mental state of the unpredictable crew, he could not have guessed. That was why he got along better with numbers than with people. Numbers gave him no trouble, never baffled him, never behaved contrary to his expectations, unless he himself made an error which he could easily discover by backtracking a few steps.

Human beings, with their irrational drives, their multilayered needs, their multiple combinations of personality types, psychological issues, and wildly variable and unpredictable life experiences, produced a phenomenon that even a chaotician could not predict—and Jameson had little time for chaoticians. To derive an entire mathematical field from a fractal peculiarity, and to pretend simple iterated functions could predict outcomes which were, by definition, unpredictable, defied the simple rationality of math and science. Chaoticians sought to worm their way around Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and though Jameson admitted the Uncertainty Principle could be annoying, any quantum computer programmer could tell you the universe would be much more annoying without it.

For this reason, Jameson often isolated himself from his own assistant. If humans were essentially irrational, then Dennis Samuels was a prince among them. Not that Jameson didn’t like Samuels, but he could only endure so much sentimental talk about the beauty and wonder of the cosmos—and the shipboard gossip stretched his patience even more. He was conscious that Samuels was lonely, since the others were about their own duties and had no more time for the assistant scientist than Jameson did, but Jameson couldn’t be bothered with that. Science was objective, rational, and self-correcting, but it was also completely static without the human observer to experiment and verify. Samuels had his uses, of course, since no scientist could work alone, but today Jameson was too close to a breakthrough and Samuels was feeling too talkative.

Alone among the Eldorado’s crew, Jameson was glad there were no women on board. That was a distraction he definitely did not need. He had gotten enough A-minuses in college because a nearby girl pushed his runaway libido like a Mandelbrot Set into his brain, zooming in tighter and tighter upon an infinity which consumed all, that he never cared to see another woman again. Had the others known his unnatural feeling on the matter, they would no doubt have considered him odd; but of necessity, women were a taboo subject aboard the Eldorado.

There were mathematicians who took an utterly different viewpoint than his own; practically chaoticians, some of them, with their disordered view of the perfect world of math. Jameson neither feared nor was baffled by the stranger aspects of math. Gödel’s stake through the heart of absolute proof did not ruffle Jameson; it was merely another part of math, no more irritating or baffling than the Uncertainty Principle. Non-Euclidean geometries and transfinite groups may persuade some that mathematics was an inexact science; to Jameson, that point of view made no sense. Why, if that were true, the system would collapse, and one could never do a simple equation like 2+2=4. The lack of absolute proof was no more obstacle to the doing of the equation than the Uncertainty Principle negated the existence of matter. Not knowing simultaneously the location and momentum of an electron did not prevent hydrogen and oxygen from burning, so why must the lack of absolute proof negate the validity of equations which accurately predicted the behavior of the universe?

Spurred on by his confidence and by the sheer joy of delving deeper and deeper into his equations, Jameson returned to his work, delighted that the equations he derived matched the observational data. The computer lab lay to the side of the exercise ring, just next to the engineering section; he had insisted on that, and the designers had accommodated. Wiping his forehead with his shirt, he sat at his favorite desk and touched the screen. At once his last recorded equations filled the screen. He ordered up a glass of tea and settled his body into the leather chair, utterly content. This was his favorite place, his favorite activity. He sipped the tea; a trifle too hot yet, but a soothing warmth slid down his throat, expanded through his torso, and filled him with a sense of well being that he relished. He placed the mug lovingly next to the screen, leaned forward, and began to work.

How much fun his work was with the ship rotating! A mere accelerating body was interesting enough, but a spinning body approaching relativistic velocity? Gravity waves, gamma rays, dissonant dilatory effects, oh, such wonderful applications of E=mc2! But there were oddities...Jameson was not among those who would advocate a “creative” application of math; he would follow the equations to their inescapable conclusions—but it almost seemed as though there were theorems missing. Jameson had never created a theorem and wasn’t sure he could. It would be fun to try...but how could he do it without resolving the equations first—and how could he do that without the right theorems to guide him? It was perplexing, but he would not be discouraged.

Perhaps he might need Samuels’ help after all.

He rose, saved his data, and turned toward the hall. But something wasn’t right. Here he was in the computer lab, a brightly lit chamber with a door on one end leading into the exercise ring, and another door at the far end leading into the engineering section—a section parallel to the exercise ring but technically a level “down,” closer to what the designers designated the ship’s keel; though such pedantic designations meant nothing in space. Yet...yet something was off.

He stood, alarmed. What was it?

What it was was a sense of terror—pure, instinct-ive terror. He could identify no source, nor was his ultra-rational mind in any mood to think rational thoughts. He needed only to escape. To escape...to where?

He started to run, but found his body moved sluggishly, as if the air had turned to sap. And then he fell. He tumbled end-over-end down a flight of stairs and landed on a stone or concrete floor. The back of his head rested against stone, his legs awkwardly sprawled up the staircase. He neither knew nor cared how he had gotten here, wherever he was, from the computer lab of the Eldorado. He knew only blind, searing, claustrophobic panic. Breathless, frantic, he struggled to regain his feet, to find a way to move. Scrambling and clawing, he worked his body slowly upright, only to find his head jammed against a low-hanging ceiling of rock.

He scrambled up the stairs, slipping and clawing with now-bloody fingernails. He reached the closed and locked door. He pounded on it, feeling somehow that someone, Samuels, Boddy, Felter, his mother, someone who loved him, was on the other side, someone who would come to his aid if only he could make him, her, it hear his cries.

“Let me in!” he cried. “Let me in!”

But the grinding of a gate stilled him. A musty odor waffed through the confined chamber. Trapped again at the bottom of the stairs, he looked up in horror at what emerged from the gaping wall.

Twenty feet long, matted fur caked with filth, gleaming, expressionless eyes staring at him above a mouth lined with proportionally small yet formidably pointed teeth, was something halfway between rat and hedgehog. Despite the impossibility of the sight, despite the fact that never had he seen, never had he imagined such a thing before, he felt a profound recognition, as though this were a scene in a movie he had missed the beginning of, and this were a plot twist he should have been expecting all along.

Unable to move in the confined space, he let slip from unembarrassed lips a genuine, full-throated scream as the rat thing lifted him up. Helpless, paralyzed, he screamed, screamed like a girl, as the rat thing carried him toward what he knew in his gut was a dinner table.

He blinked. There was Samuels. He was in the computer lab. He stood at the door, exactly where he had intended to be. It was as if the entire sequence of events had not happened.

“You all right?” Samuels asked—the most cliché line from old science fiction when a character wakes from an alien-induced daydream.

But this had been no dream. Jameson knew the difference between dreams and reality, and this had been no dream, it had definitely happened. “What did you see when you came in?” Jameson asked breathlessly.

“Just you,” Samuels said.