But on second thought, Ranjit told himself, no. That was going too far. She was a nice enough person, but she just didn’t have the material of Astronomy 101 to work with. Such as the space elevator and its wondrous ways.
Even Artsutanov’s lift wasn’t the only game in town. What (asked one of the students one day in astronomy class) about something like the Lofstrom loop? For that you didn’t have to start by putting some humongous satellite into orbit because the thing just sat on Earth’s surface, from which it flung your space capsules into orbit.
But there Dr. Vorhulst began to rein in the class’s speculation. “Friction,” he said succinctly. “Don’t forget friction. Remember what reentry did to a lot of the early spacecraft. If you used a Lofstrom loop, you’d need to accelerate your capsule to that seven miles a second of escape velocity that I was talking about the other day before you let go of it, and then the air friction would burn it right up.”
He paused, eyes roving over his class, expression as good-natured as always but with a faint twinkle that made Ranjit expect some sort of surprise was coming. “So,” the teacher said sociably, “have any of you junior-grade astronauts figured out what kind of rocket drive your ship is going to have yet?”
Ranjit hadn’t thought of anything beyond the usual fuel-plus-oxidizer. He kept his mouth shut, though, because he knew, from the fact that the professor had raised the question in the first place, that Dr. Vorhulst had something else in mind.
So did his seatmate, but he responded in a different way. His hand went right up. “You’re not talking about a chemical rocket, are you, Dr. Vorhulst? So, then, what do you think? Maybe a nuclear-powered one?”
“Good guess,” the teacher said, “but, no, I don’t think a nuclear-powered rocket would be your best bet, at least not the kind of nuclear power you mean. Oh, there are designs around for rockets that were driven by exploding atom bombs, one after another. We can talk about them if you like, but for getting from LEO to Mars I think there are two much better possibilities. Both of them are tailor-made to be used with some kind of space elevator to boost them into low earth orbit because they’re both way too feeble to lift anything off Earth’s surface and into space. One is the solar sail. The other is the electric rocket.”
Ten minutes later Dr. Vorhulst had given short and convincing reasons for avoiding nuclear explosions as rocket propellants—the need for heavy shielding to protect astronauts from the deadly radiation, and anyway who wants to shoot a few hundred atomic bombs off into space? Solar sails had a lot to recommend them, he conceded, but they were dreadfully slow and not very maneuverable. However, the electric rocket, while also pretty slow to accelerate, required no fuel storage and produced no undesired by-products. Where did the electricity come from? Perhaps from an onboard nuclear power plant, Vorhulst conceded, but just as easily from solar power—that is, from solar power in space, where there were no nights or cloudy weather, so that the sun always shone. “And what do you do with that electricity? You use it to ionize some working fluid—a gas like xenon, for instance—and the gas fires itself out of your rocket nozzles at very high velocity, and off you go.”
He paused for a breath. “All right,” he admitted, “an electric rocket would not accelerate very fast.” But it would keep right on accelerating as long as you liked, and the longer the acceleration, the greater its velocity would be. You could accelerate until you were halfway there. Then you could turn around and decelerate until you arrived. Did anyone see what that implied?
Vorhulst gave them a few moments to figure it out, but no one did. “It means,” he told them, “that the farther your trip, the faster the speed that you’ll attain. You wouldn’t want to use an electric rocket to go to the moon. Short trip; you don’t really have time to get going very fast. For Mars, though, it’s optimal. And for the outer planets, say Uranus or Neptune, why, that trip doesn’t take much longer than to Mars! And if you’re really going to go a far piece, say to the Oort cloud, you build up so much velocity with all that acceleration that that enormous journey in fact becomes feasible!”
Then he stopped and grinned. “Well,” he said, “I don’t want to oversell you on the electric rocket, because it has one serious fault. That is, we don’t have any.” He overrode the faint groans of disappointment. “Oh, it’s legitimate in principle, all right. But nobody has ever built one because if you have to start your flight from Earth’s surface, they won’t work. They need something to lift them into low earth orbit first, and then they can strut their stuff. Something like an Artsutanov space elevator, and, as you know, we just don’t have one of those around anywhere.”
He gave them a rueful smile. “Oh, one day we will,” he promised. “Then we’ll have electric rockets by the zillion, and I’d be willing to bet that more than one of you will be riding to all sorts of weird and wonderful places. But not yet, because at the present time they don’t exist.”
Which, when you stopped to think about it, was true enough, at least for the little volume of space near Earth, though it wouldn’t be for long.
Actually, somewhat farther away, there were 154 of those electric rockets that were already taking direct aim for Earth, and the individuals aboard them didn’t think they were unusual at all.
These individuals were the One Point Fives, and they (or their ancestors) had been traveling from star to star in spacecraft just like these for many, many generations. Always on much the same errand, too. The fact of the matter was that the One Point Fives had a unique place among the subordinate sapient species of the galaxy.
Basically they were the Grand Galactics’ hit men.
To a casual observer the One Point Fives might not have seemed to be good candidates for that sort of employment. Stripped of their shields and prostheses the average One Point Five wasn’t much bigger than a terrestrial cat. That casual observer would not be likely, however, to see a One Point Five in that stripped-down condition. A One Point Five’s indispensable protective devices massed just about half as much as his body itself (hence the name One Point Five), and every last bit of these devices was vitally necessary. Some of the devices guarded the fragile organic being inside against radiation—from the ionizing spillover from their nuclear power plants or from the residues of their many long-ago nuclear wars. Or even against the lethally high ultraviolet rays that came from their star and were no longer warded off by their planet’s ozone layer because their earlier activities had resulted in their planet’s no longer having one. Some of their chemical processors removed poisons from the air they breathed or the food and water they ingested. Some merely kept them from going insane from the unbearable din that suffused every part of their world (that took blanketing sound absorbers backed up with frequency nullifiers). Other processors toned down the maddening flashes and flares that accompanied their industry.
There were a few isolated spots on their planet where a One Point Five could strip naked and survive. Those places were the breeding rooms and the birthing rooms, as well as a scattering of spots where medical and surgical procedures were performed. There weren’t many of those. Because there was so much to guard against, neutralize, or prevent on that ravaged world, such places were not only scarce but expensive.
That being so, one might wonder why a species as technologically savvy as the One Point Fives didn’t just go ahead and build themselves a fleet of spaceships and proceed to start a new life on some unspoiled planet somewhere else in space.
Actually, the One Point Fives had done that… once.
The project had not been a success, however. Oh, the ships had got invented and built, all right, and a benign enough planet had been located. But the Grand Galactics had stepped in. After that happened, it had been so little of a success that, though many thousands of years had passed, the One Point Fives had never considered trying it again.
8 (#u6e4205fb-c0f7-5931-a4ba-8b7b55eb9f09)
SUMMER (#u6e4205fb-c0f7-5931-a4ba-8b7b55eb9f09)
By and large the school year had been a disappointment, but the summer began well for Ranjit Subramanian. Take his grades, for instance. When they were posted, he was not surprised at the gentleman’s C he got in philosophy (his grade in psychology didn’t matter, because he’d dropped it out of boredom) and not particularly surprised, either, though pleased, by his A in astronomy. But the A in statistics had been a total mystery. Ranjit could only conjecture that it was the result of the advanced reading he had picked up for himself when he couldn’t stand to see one more box plot or density histogram. The library had saved him, with advanced texts on such matters as stochastic methods and Bayesian analysis.
The bad part about the term’s end, of course, was that the astronomy course was over as well. But there was at least a postscript in the form of the party at Professor Vorhulst’s home.
Still, as he walked from the bus to the address that had been on his invitation, Ranjit was beginning to have second thoughts. In the first place, the neighborhood was refined and therefore unfamiliar to him because he and Gamini had avoided it in their browsings in the city. (Gamini’s family lived in this neighborhood, too.) Then, the Vorhulst home was not only bigger than any single-family home needed to be, it was surrounded by totally unnecessary columned verandas and set in an exquisitely maintained garden.
Ranjit took a deep breath before he pushed the gate open and climbed the couple of steps to the veranda. The first thing he noticed once inside the door was the cooling breeze from overhead fans. That was welcome in Colombo’s heat. More welcome still was catching sight of Joris Vorhulst himself, standing next to a woman almost as ostentatiously oversize as the house they lived in. The professor greeted Ranjit with a wink and a nod. “Ranjit,” he said, steering him down to where the woman stood, “we’re so glad you could come. I’d like you to meet Mevrouw Beatrix Vorhulst, my mother.”
Unsure of what action to take in greeting a woman—and an exceedingly fair-skinned one—who towered over him by at least three or four centimeters and outmassed him by more kilos than that, Ranjit experimentally offered a small bow. Mevrouw Vorhulst was having none of that. She took his hand and held it. “My dear Ranjit, I am delighted to meet you. My son doesn’t have favorites in his classes, but if he did—please don’t let him know I said this—I’m sure you would be one of them. And I’ve had the pleasure of meeting your father. A wonderful man. We worked together on one of the truce commissions, back when we needed truce commissions.”
Ranjit sent a quick glance to Dr. Vorhulst in the hope of getting some clue as to what he should be saying to this good-looking perfumed force of nature. He got no help there. The professor was already bantering with three or four new arrivals, but Mevrouw Vorhulst, well aware of Ranjit’s difficulty, helped him out. “Don’t waste your time with an old widow lady,” she advised. “There are quite a few nice-looking girls inside, not to mention things to eat and drink. There are even some of those horrid American sports drinks that Joris came back from California addicted to, but I would not myself recommend them.” She relinquished his hand with a final pat. “But you must join us for dinner one of these days, after Joris gets back from New York. He’ll be depressed. He always is after he’s tried one more time to get the UN to act on the Artsutanov lift. But of course,” she added, already turning toward the next guests, “you can’t entirely blame them, can you? People just haven’t learned how to play nicely together.”
Entering the house’s wide salon, Ranjit observed that there were indeed some nice-looking girls present, though most of them seemed to be already taken by one or more young men. He exchanged nods with three or four classmates, but what most interested him at that moment was the house itself. It was very little like his father’s modest home in Trincomalee. The floor was made of polished white cement, and the walls were punctuated with open doors leading out to the vast garden with its palms and frangipani and an inviting pool. As a precaution Ranjit had already eaten lunch, so the great spread of food the Vorhulsts had set out was superfluous. The American sports drink Mevrouw Vorhulst had spoken of he passed with a shudder, but was glad to find a supply of good old-fashioned Cokes. When he looked for an opener, a servant appeared from nowhere, whisked the bottle out of his hand, snapped the cap off, and emptied the soda into a tall glass, already iced, that also came from nowhere.
The servant left Ranjit blinking after him until, from another direction, a female voice said, “You were breaking his rice bowl, you know. If the guests opened their own Coke bottles, the beverage wallah would be out of a job. So, Ranjit, how are you?”
When he turned, he recognized the young Burgher woman from his unhappy first year’s sociology class, Mary—Martha—no, “Myra de Soyza,” she supplied. “We met in sociology last year, and it’s nice to see you again. I heard you were working with Fermat’s theorem. How is it going?”
It was not a question Ranjit had expected to be asked, especially by a young woman as good-looking as this one was. He gave her a noncommittal answer. “Pretty slowly, I’m afraid. I didn’t know you were interested in Fermat.”
She looked faintly embarrassed. “Well, I suppose I’d have to say that you were the one who got me interested. After we heard that you’d stolen the math professor’s password—oh, are you surprised? But of course all of his classes heard about it. I think if the semester hadn’t been over, there would have been a movement to elect you class president.” She gave him a friendly smile. “At any rate, I couldn’t help wondering what would so obsess a person like you—is ‘obsession’ too strong a word?” Ranjit, who had long since come to terms with the technical description of his so-far-failed quest, shrugged. “Well,” she went on, “let’s just say I couldn’t help wondering what would account for your strong interest in trying to find a proof for Fermat’s claim. Wiles’s work was certainly not what Fermat had had in mind, was it? If only because nearly every step in Wiles comes from work somebody else did long after Fermat was dead and gone, and there was no way Fermat could have known— Oh, Ranjit, please be careful of your drink!”
Ranjit blinked and saw what she was talking about. He had been so taken aback by the turn the conversation had taken that he had allowed his Coke glass a dangerous tilt. He straightened it and took a quick swallow to clear his head. “What do you know about the Wiles proof?” he demanded, past the point of caring if he was being polite.
Myra de Soyza didn’t seem to mind. “Not a great deal, really. Just enough to get an idea of what it was all about. Certainly not as much as a real mathematician might. Do you know who Dr. Wilkinson is? From the Drexel Math Forum? I think his was the best and simplest explanation of what Wiles really accomplished.”
The thing that was now paralyzing Ranjit’s vocal cords was that he himself, in the days when he had just begun to try to comprehend the Wiles proof, had been really grateful for that same Dr. Wilkinson’s analysis.
He realized that he must have made some sort of vocal sound, because the de Soyza woman was looking at him inquiringly. “I mean,” he clarified, “are you telling me that you can follow Wilkinson’s gloss?”
“Of course I can follow it,” she told him sweetly. “He was very clear. I just had to read his explanation—well,” she admitted, “five times, actually. And had to look up quite a lot in the reference books. And I don’t doubt that I missed a lot, but I do think I got a sort of approximate understanding.” She looked at him silently for a moment before she asked, “Do you know what I might do if I were you?”
With total truth Ranjit said, “I have no idea.”
“Well, I wouldn’t bother with any part of Wiles. I’d take a look at what other mathematicians had done in, say, the first thirty or forty years after Fermat died. You know. I’m talking about work that Fermat might have heard some anticipations of, or perhaps even worked on himself. And—Ah,” she said, with an abrupt change of subject, looking past Ranjit’s right shoulder, “and here is my long-lost Brian Harrigan, with my long delayed champagne.”
The long-lost Brian Harrigan was another of those outsize Americans, and he came trailing a pretty girl of about twenty. He gave Ranjit a one-microsecond glance. Then, “Sorry, hon,” he said to Myra de Soyza, talking through the space occupied by Ranjit Subramanian as though it were empty, “but I got to talking to, uh, Devika? She more or less grew up in this house and she promised to show me around. It’s got some great design features—have you noticed the cement floors? So if you don’t mind…”
“Go,” Myra said. “Just give me the champagne if it isn’t warm by now, and then go.” And he went, arm in arm with the girl, who hadn’t said a word to either Ranjit or Myra de Soyza.
The best part of Brian Harrigan’s departure was that it left Ranjit in exclusive possession of the company of this surprising, perplexing, altogether quite unusual young woman. (Although Ranjit was pretty sure she wasn’t all that young. At least two or three years older than himself, he conjectured. Maybe even more than that.) He did not regard their tête-à-tête as a romantic event. He was too ill-informed on boy-girl dating to take that leap, and anyway there was the matter of this Brian Harrigan, who routinely addressed her as “hon.” Given a hint or two, de Soyza filled in part of the Brian Harrigan portrait for him. Turned out he wasn’t American after all. He was Canadian. Worked for one of those world-girdling hotel chains, currently doing some sort of planning for another luxury hotel on one of Trincomalee’s beaches. She did not, however, supply the one datum about which Ranjit was most curious. Still, he told himself, it really was none of his business whether they were sleeping together.
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