 
FUNDAMENTAL FORCE

episode one

by

Albert Sartison
Published by Albert Sartison at Smashwords

Copyright 2016 Albert Sartison

1.00

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# Contents

Prologue

#  Prologue

The bright beam of a projector cut through the darkness of the lecture theater. Thousands of dust particles floated lazily in the air, dancing on the almost tangible draught in the room. They jumped upwards then fell gently back down, the shaft of light illuminating them like a galaxy of microscopic stars as they continued to cavort in the air, skipping in every direction.

"Gravity is a great mystery of nature. From a physical point of view it is just a force, one of the modes of interaction. It is the weakest that we know of, but it is dominant in space and is the only one that changes space-time itself..."

The lecturer's voice gradually softened as it became tinged with emotion. He walked slowly around the podium, his head occasionally illuminated by the beam of the projector aimed at a large canvas screen. At such moments, his eyes were lit up by the reflected light. He could not conceal his passion for the subject and nor did he try to.

"What's so special about that, you may ask? Gravity is the only force capable of slowing down, stopping, and even turning back time..."

The noise of someone getting to their feet broke the silence in the hall like a clap of thunder, cutting the lecturer off mid-sentence. Out of sight of the podium, a tall lanky figure stood up in the semi-darkness of the back row. Clearly not considering it necessary to apologize for such a noisy departure, he turned around and headed for the exit.

The lecturer sighed disappointedly at such tactlessness and turned to face the screen onto which his slides were being projected, gathering his thoughts for a few seconds so he could continue from where he had been so rudely interrupted. It's just sacrilege to make so much noise, breaking the magical atmosphere of a lecture theater holding its breath. Especially when the subject is the most cryptic, the most powerful property of the Universe. Some people just don't appreciate the fascinating mystique of Nature. They don't even know how much they're missing...

Meanwhile, the tall man was hurrying up the stairs toward the exit, a phone in one hand and his other covering the microphone. Opening the huge door, he stepped out into an empty corridor and the lecturer's voice and the silence of the dark hall were left behind, as if in another world. He removed his hand from the microphone.

"Half a second?" he asked, pressing the phone to his ear.

"Yes, sir! 480 milliseconds, to be exact. It's even visible to the normal eye!"

"And when will I be able to see it first hand?"

"Whenever you like, sir."

The man glanced at his watch, looked around for the nearest door and moved quickly toward it. With his long thin legs and awkward gait, he looked like he was walking on stilts.

"I'll be there in three minutes."

"Oh... so soon?"

"Is there a problem?"

"No, sir. It's just..."

"I'll see you shortly."

Outside, the weather was already heating up. The morning air of the emerging summer's day was still heavy with dew not yet evaporated by the hot rays of the rising sun. A cobbled path snaked through leafy trees, their sprawling branches creating a canopy that offered dense shade to the people walking beneath.

The path was too narrow for the crowd of students streaming towards the man, but he did not slow his pace. He walked purposefully with rapid steps, but there was nothing hurried in his manner and the crowd heading towards him parted instinctively to make way. It seemed that even a brick wall would have been incapable of stopping such a force...

Turning onto a deserted path leading downhill, he found himself alone. Unlike the crowded cobbled path he had just left, there was not a soul here. He quickly looked behind him to check he had not been followed then stopped, took out a cigarette and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. He flicked the lighter he was holding, but did not raise the flickering flame to the end of his cigarette.

After waiting a few seconds and still not having lit up, he took a few steps back, slowly this time, and rang a bell next to a door made of cracked wood.

"Yes?" came a voice from the entry phone. "Who is it?"

A camera above the door came to life and diodes lit up around the lens. Rather than turn his face towards it, the man lowered his head and examined the shadow of his silhouette on the building's stone façade.

"It's you, sir... Please, come in!"

The contemporary interior was in sharp contrast to the building's decaying exterior, the walls and ceilings a dazzling white. Flickering paths of LEDs embedded in the floor showed guests the right way to go and on either side of the corridor were small rooms crammed with scientific equipment. People in white coats bustled around him, paying no attention to the tall man walking by.

At the end of the corridor, one of the doors was open and in the doorway stood a man in a white coat thrown over a crumpled shirt that had been hastily tucked into jeans. The collar was buttoned all the way to the top, where a clumsily knotted tie was visible.

The tall man entered without bothering with a greeting and the man in the white coat moved to let him in then closed the door quickly. The glass it was made of darkened immediately, cutting them off from the goings on outside.

The scientist shrugged his shoulders uncertainly and, after taking a huge breath, he froze, clearly not knowing where to start. Unlike the scientist, the visitor was completely at ease. He took off his jacket and threw it carelessly over the back of the nearest rolling chair.

"You said the results were visible to the normal eye..." he said.

The man in the white coat came back to life.

"Oh... yes! Here's the microscope, sir. Take a look..."

The tall man sat down and bent over the eyepiece. His jaw muscles could be seen moving under the skin of his cheeks, which were covered with deep pockmarks, either as a result of teenage acne or smallpox. With his left hand he held onto his black tie to stop it hanging loose. The focused light from the microscope's lenses, compressed into two circular beams, fell directly onto his pupils. He froze, examining the image.

"Is this it?" he asked after a few seconds.

"That is just where the anomaly occurs. Now pay attention to the laser light spot..."

The man's pupils moved upwards slightly and froze.

"I'm going to shift the angle and move the beam, but you, sir, will see it before I do it..." The man in the white coat touched a lever carefully and moved it upwards. "See?"

The tall man pulled away from the lens slightly and threw the scientist a quick glance.

"Again," he said. Even an ordinary request sounded like an order from his lips.

"Of course, sir."

The man in the white coat touched the level again, this time pushing it downwards.

The tall man smiled.

"Let me try..."

The scientist took a step back, clasping his hands behind his back self-consciously. The feigned enthusiasm in his voice was unable to hide the relief with which he moved away from his guest, who held out a long skinny hand and took hold of the lever with bony fingers. He moved it carefully upwards. Then downwards. And then upwards again. Letting go of the lever, he continued looking into the eyepiece. He then took hold of the lever again.

"Your light spot is hard to deceive," he said, moving it in all directions.

The man in the white coat smiled, adjusting his glasses.

"No, sir. It is impossible to deceive..."

"Are you sure?"

The man pulled away from the microscope lens and turned to the scientist. There was a look of interest on his face. The scientist fiddled with his collar. It was clearly too tight and was digging into his neck, the shirt itself being slightly too small. But people of science can be forgiven such things...

"The threads you passed on to us are forming a local anomaly, folding space-time into a microscopic tunnel. It is through this tunnel that we pass the laser beam. You saw its tiny spot... But the beam leaves the tunnel before it enters it at the other end..." The scientist paused to take a deep breath. "The image in the microscope precedes what is happening in our Universe by 480 milliseconds..."

#  1

How do you know which moment in life is the most important? It's hard to say, there are so many... At the time they happen they do so without fanfare, quietly, unremarkably... They just happen, that's it! Nothing special.

The true value of such a moment can only be realized after some time has elapsed, after they have been absorbed in the mind, after they have ripened, after they have sunk to the bottom of your memory and been covered with a deposit of recollections. And then, in retrospect, maybe 20 years later, you can say with absolute confidence that that moment was really the most important moment of your life.

The president's limousine, surrounded by an escort of honor with various colored lights winking, drove swiftly away from the crowd and the light-flooded platform. Outside, engines were roaring and sirens were howling, but inside silence reigned, apart from some soft light jazz and the barely noticeable rustle of the cool breeze from the air conditioner.

Now he could relax. The president removed his jacket, threw it onto the opposite seat, took off his shoes, loosened his tie and stretched out to his full length. His part of the work on this, the greatest project of his life, had finished. He had done all he could, now it was just a technical matter, boring routine. And that part of it he could delegate to others, people below him in rank. He opened the bar and took out a glass. After putting in three ice cubes, he splashed in a generous amount of bourbon, not worried about overdoing it. When such an important project went into the fulfilment stage, it was a good excuse for a drink, even if he was on his own. The president only had a few friends with whom he could discuss important matters, and none of them were around at the moment. And he needed to rest. Thinking the drink must be cool enough by now, he took a large gulp.

So, back to the important moment. The most important in his life. Had it only happened just ten minutes ago? Or had it been the greatest mistake of his career? Time would tell. It was funny how bad he was at recognizing such moments when they occurred. But there was no doubt that this was one of them. The completion of such an important project would be a turning point in the life of any politician, whether a president or someone lower down the scale. You could say that life had existed before it, but everything after it was another world, another man, another universe. Well, in the political sense at least.

It had all begun five years ago, when aliens had suddenly arrived from space and, in doing so, had turned the normal course of life in the Solar System upside down. Unfortunately, the first attempt at interstellar diplomacy had not been altogether successful and soon afterwards, the uninvited guests disappeared. But it got really interesting when they returned a few months later, bringing with them the idea of a very exciting joint project. And what a project! The terraforming of the Solar System's inner planets and the creation of a gigantic Dyson sphere around the Sun, capable of giving people more energy than they had ever imagined possible.

Even according to modest estimates, the economic benefits and scale exceeded all previous projects since the building of the Great Pyramids of Giza. People had received a huge amount of top-class living space. Not like on Mars, where, with Earth's technology, life was possible only inside hermetically sealed premises and special cunning medical tricks were required to alleviate the problem of its low force of gravity, but the same living space quality as on Earth! And, in addition to this, half of all the energy radiated by the Sun! Just think, the power of a whole star!

When mankind mastered thermonuclear energy a century earlier, there was so much of it that it easily covered the energy requirements back then, but it seemed there was no way of expanding further – until the aliens flew in and offered their help to take the next step: in this case, controlling the energy of an entire star.

And this had happened just when he was sitting in the president's chair. Not a bad gift from fate, eh?

Altogether, the proposal was so tempting that it could not be refused. In spite of the warnings, risks and a million other counter-arguments, the project was accepted. And now it had begun...

It was not reliably known how far these aliens from another planet had advanced with regard to morals, but, to give them their due, they were thousands of years ahead of Earthlings in organizing global projects. The project had been approved by the parliament of the Union of World States and the aliens had begun the construction work that very night. We could sure envy that!

The preceding debates had been a real nightmare. There turned out to be so many moaners and pessimists in the world! During the debates, enough counter-arguments had been put forward to suffice for the next thousand presidential terms. And God knows how many other worries had been expressed.

Among all this was one simple question, to which there had been no obvious answer back then. What were they getting out of it all? At first glance the reason was unclear. Why do we build bridges, roads, orbital stations? Because they are infrastructure. Without it, there would be no modern life, no development, no economy. That was clear enough. But in the case of the aliens, it was a serious objection. Indeed, why should such a developed civilization create joint projects with those who were, from the aliens' point of view, savages? What interest was being pursued by a mega-civilization that had colonized the entire Milky Way in setting up a project in the galactic outback with primitive tribes whose achievements in science and technology were barely sufficient to assimilate even their neighboring planet, Mars? And 'assimilate' was a huge overstatement. We had simply flown in and built a few towns and industrial clusters. That had not prevented us from multiplying considerably there, but was that anything worth talking about? Black beetles also multiply well, even in the most adverse conditions... Anyway, we 'Earthlings', as we call ourselves, were not even clever enough to terraform Mars.

It had been a hundred and fifty years before we had laid the first brick on the planet, a planet that was not really suitable for our form of life with an atmosphere that was not fit for us to breathe and which had been left as it was. And even if there was a possibility of us developing the technology to change the atmosphere somewhere in the distant future, we hadn't the faintest idea how to change gravity. And this created serious problems for the full colonization of Mars.

Yet it was with such ignorant creatures that the most advanced civilization in the galaxy had wanted to engage in a joint project. Huh! Such offers should usually ring warning bells in the ears of any right-thinking person. No, the advantages for us were easily understood, but what could be the interest for the aliens? There was something underhand about it and everyone knew it – the intelligence agencies, the military, the scientists... There were even many politicians who felt the same. But the bait offered was too big and juicy to be refused simply because "I have an uneasy feeling about this."

Furthermore, the aliens were polite, but their proposal was one that could not be refused in any case. Either we agreed to the project and, by giving our consent, would obtain dividends from it, or the aliens would go ahead with it anyway against our will and then instead of dividends, humankind would only get a rude gesture, along with a potential conflict against the overwhelming force of the enemy. When put like that, there was really no choice at all. Well, if events could not be changed, one could only change one's attitude towards them...

The aliens' plan was revealed sooner than anyone had expected. As soon as the sphere constructed around the Sun began to generate energy, it was not hard to work out where the aliens were sending their share of it. And knowing where, one could guess why. That was when the aliens' true motive became clear.

Having achieved everything they could in their own galaxy, they decided it was too crowded for them. The next logical step took them beyond the bounds of the Milky Way to its nearest neighbor, a galaxy called Andromeda. But that was when the aliens' plan to colonize the entire Universe beyond the limits of their own galaxy suddenly went awry.

It gradually became clear that the aliens had started work on their plans for a jump from the Milky Way a very long time ago. By comparing astronomical observation data and the study of recently discovered templates of gravity waves emanating from the interstellar travel portals, scientists managed to date the construction of the first unit to some 200,000 years ago.

At that time, humankind had only just begun to emerge from the rest of the animal world, discovering and making use of primitive tools, but the aliens' civilization had already sailed the limitless expanses of space, setting up transport portals throughout the galaxy. This made it all the more surprising that such an advanced civilization should commit such a grave and foolish error.

There was nothing foolish about the idea of colonizing space beyond the galaxy per se, only in the way they set about it. After all, before setting off for another galaxy that could surpass our own in every way, they should have taken safety precautions. When it became clear that intelligent life was not just a random mistake but occurs all over the place, they should have started from the assumption that Andromeda was already populated. And not only populated, but, considering its characteristics, that the alpha-civilization there would be a much older and more powerful race that would hardly rejoice at the appearance of uninvited guests and competitors.

This perfectly obvious conclusion was apparent to our terrestrial scientists as soon as the aliens' main plan was revealed. Was it possible that an alien civilization that had colonized the Milky Way so successfully was too stupid to work this out themselves? However self-satisfied and blinded by their own success they might be, it was criminally negligent to ignore such risks!

The answer to this question remained a complete mystery, however. For whatever reason, the aliens decided on a jump to Andromeda without bothering to ask the permission of those who lived there. The reaction was not long in coming. One of the reasons why the aliens had managed to colonize the Milky Way so successfully was its powerful transport infrastructure, which covered the whole galaxy like a gigantic spider's web. It appeared that the aliens had realized long ago that they would not succeed without rapid communication between stars. How could two star systems be combined to form a single integrated economic entity if they were hundreds of light years apart? Therefore, 200,000 years ago, they had built portals enabling interstellar distances to be covered in a reasonable time.

And even then they were thinking one step ahead. More than one step, in fact; dozens, maybe hundreds of steps! When they laid the foundation of their first transportation portal, they already knew where, and more importantly when, they were going. That's what you call efficient planning – two hundred thousand years ahead! We on Earth have yet to learn how to plan even as little as fifty years into the future.

Yet it turned out that the most developed, the most cunning, the quickest and most capable civilization in the whole Milky Way had been guilty of such stupidity!

The very day the aliens began construction, events developed exactly according to the scenario predicted by the astrophysicist Professor Shelby, the chairman of the academic council that had been monitoring the aliens' actions. When the sphere constructed around our Sun began operating, the aliens had brought their portals into action, including the one not far from the Solar System.

Combined into one vast whole, they concentrated sufficient energy to project a ship not only to an adjacent star system, but to another galaxy. The array of portals had been charged with tremendous energy, opened – and disappeared.

After spending some time crouched intently over its astronomical apparatus, the academic council had come to the conclusion that the reason for the disappearance was not a technical failure, but simply a black operation. Apparently, the Andromedan civilization had been prepared for the appearance of uninvited guests and it seemed that hospitality was not something they particularly valued. The reaction had been rapid, decisive, and had had the maximum effect.

The jump to Andromeda had been intended to be a huge epoch-making step by the aliens on the way to colonizing space beyond the limits of their own galaxy. Instead of that, however, it had been their doom.

It was not known on Earth whether the aliens' ship had reached its destination, or if it had been destroyed halfway there. All that was known for sure was that certain minor, almost completely insignificant, changes had been made to the set of fundamental constants of our Universe. As a result, the aliens' entire transport infrastructure had collapsed within an hour. The portals had died and their wonder ships, capable of such enormous speeds and untouchable by the most powerful of Earth's weapons, had simply evaporated. This was because all of their technology had been based on the same principles of hyperspace manipulation...

Their best ace had been trumped. Their ability to travel between stars had perished in an instant. Their entire 200,000-year-long project had been turned into a mist to be evaporated by the heat from the bright summer sun.

So, the mighty aliens had just fallen from their pedestal. The sacrosanct place at the apex of the pyramid of power in the galaxy had suddenly become vacant. The former ruler was lying alongside, writhing in agony, and the question was – what should a competitor do in such circumstances?

The idea of taking the initiative into their own hands did not cause rejoicing in political circles. Warnings were heard once again. History is changed not by gallant gestures, however, but by hard and decisive actions. Capricious Lady Luck rarely offers such opportunities, but when she does, she doesn't give you long to think about it.

What hellish efforts it had cost him to convince the others that his idea was a sound one! How much moaning and small-minded criticism he had had to listen to! Time after time, an endless number of times, the very same fears and cowardly speculation as to why the project was doomed to failure. He had remained polite and patient, but even that hadn't helped with some of them, so he had had to unpack his goody bag full of various promises of favors and when those hadn't worked either, threats were all that were left. Yes, the lord of the political Olympus had claws too, something many people forgot...

And now, this evening, the fruit of this hellish work had finally ripened and the official ceremony marking the start of the project had ended about half an hour ago. The unthinkable project. This evening, Earth's civilization had been brave enough to grasp its historic opportunity. At the same time, it had entered a new era, the era of deep space colonization, the space beyond the bounds of the Solar System, on the way to ruling its entire home galaxy...

"Mr. President, Mr. LeRoy is on the line. Will you take it?" called the secretary.

On one of the screens appeared the face of the president's public communications assistant. The man was a slick opportunist, always smiling even when bearing bad tidings, to the intense irritation of all those around him. Had it not been for his inspired capacity for pulling the wool over the voters' eyes, it would hardly have been possible to work with him. But it was better to have such a man in his own team rather than the enemy's. Particularly when great matters are being accomplished.

"Hello?"

"Good evening, Mr. President."

"Good evening. How was I?"

"Not bad on the whole, but when you cut the ribbon, you were standing with your back to the photographers. I'm looking at the photos now, not one of them captures the most important moment successfully."

The president took a gulp from his glass and screwed up his face, perhaps from the taste of the alcohol, perhaps from what he had just heard.

"What else?"

"Well, in general, the ratings are going up. A positive reaction prevails. This is what I would propose. You've been criticized all this time for not wanting to discuss the project openly with those seriously against it. Now the wheels are turning, why don't you make up for lost time by meeting with them and talking?"

"Who exactly?"

"I've just been told that Gates and McAllister went off to the bar together after your speech, probably to cry into their beers."

"Gates and McAllister? Together?"

"It's incredible, isn't it?"

"Are they really suffering that much?"

"Judging from appearances, yes. Considering their spectacular failure, they intend to drink a great deal, so tomorrow they won't exactly be on top form. They will make a striking contrast to the healthy face of the president and they will have thick heads, too. I think that would be the perfect time to discuss what they find so painful. I'll get in touch with them first thing in the morning and propose a joint discussion on primetime TV."

"They won't agree so quickly, it's too soon."

"Oh, but they will! They need publicity on any pretext right now. And it's such a hot topic, the first time with you on such a show... They'll take the bait and you'll knock them out of the election campaign once and for all. So what about it? Unless you yourself do not intend to celebrate the event as it deserves..."

The plan sounded tempting. Knowing that LeRoy had a nose for such things, he could be sure that it would work out just as he had said. He would be killing two birds with one stone, taking out his two most dangerous political rivals. And if the project went as planned, the chances of those two competing successfully in the forthcoming elections would be zero. The president sighed heavily and set his unfinished glass aside.

"Not in my wildest dreams..."

#  2

"Close the door, please," said Shelby.

There were only two circumstances when Professor Shelby, the dean of his astrophysics faculty, kept his door closed when he was inside: when he was on the phone to his wife and when something extremely important was going on.

Steve obediently closed the door behind him.

"I told you about our meeting with the president in Canada, didn't I? Directly after the aliens screwed up in Andromeda?" asked Shelby, settling in his chair and motioning to Steve to sit in the chair opposite.

"I believe so, yes..."

"I thought at the time that he was joking."

"Who?"

"The president."

"I thought he never joked, even if he was being witty."

"You got that right... The day the aliens tried to go on an excursion to Andromeda, MacQueen and I immediately flew to the president. To inform him at first hand, so to speak, and to receive further instructions."

"Interesting..."

"As soon as he learned what had happened, his eyes lit up. Really twinkled. 'If they've left a vacancy,' he said, 'it would be foolish not to fill it.'"

"Just the reaction you might expect from a professional politician..."

"It now seems to me too that it was to be expected, very much so. A reflex, you might say. But at the time, I was rather surprised. Yes... And what do you think of the idea?"

"Of what idea? A confrontation with the aliens?"

"No, no-one's talking about a war. Let's just say of establishing diplomatic relations with our galactic neighbors. Thanks to the aliens, we now know where to look for them."

"You mean the Gliese system?"

Shelby nodded.

"I don't know," replied Steve. "I'm not a diplomat. After all, we have already established some sort of relations with the aliens..."

"So we have, but now they have left us without even saying goodbye."

"Yes, but there is a reason for that."

"But that doesn't bind us to anything. What, are we not allowed to fly anywhere now?"

"Why shouldn't we fly anywhere? I've nothing against making contact with our neighbors, but in the case of Gliese, they are not just our neighbors, but part of their civilization. Who knows how jealous the parent state might be, if there is one? I reckon it would be a dangerous move. I wouldn't provoke them. Who knows how they'd take it?"

"I completely agree with you. But that isn't what those up there" – Shelby pointed upwards – "want to hear from you."

"So what would they like me to say?"

"They would like to know how to check that."

"How should I know?"

"Well, you are running a project involving the monitoring of communications in the gravity band, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am."

"So that makes you the master in electronic intelligence concerning the aliens. All other methods of communication are limited to the speed of light, consequently we can only extract up-to-date information from gravity communications. After all, it takes hundreds of thousands of years for a signal to reach the other edge of the galaxy, so that makes you the possessor of vary rare information. That's why your opinion is important."

"I do have an opinion, but they reject it as unsuitable. As a scientist..."

"Steve, here in the university you are a scientist living in the world of science, but if they involve you in this project, you will be in another universe. The universe of politics. They have their own laws of nature, unlike normal people."

"Do you mean no-one is going to ask me if I want to become involved?"

"That brings me to another question: do you want to leave the military to face the aliens one-to-one?"

Instead of replying, Steve pressed his lips together in a sign of disapproval.

"All right, let's get back to our observations. On their basis, what can you say about the state of their civilization?"

"After that Andromeda fiasco, their activity fell sharply and has remained at the same low level ever since. The portals, in the form in which we saw them near the Solar System, no longer exist. On the whole, I think the theory about their collapse is correct. There can't be any other explanation."

"Concerning the spheres around the stars from which they obtain their energy. Like the one they wanted to build around us..."

"The problem of the speed of light arises here. The spheres are only visible in the electromagnetic band and these waves need time to reach us. So in that respect, there are no changes yet. Of course I am referring to a distance of no more than five light years – after all, this happened five years ago, didn't it? And we don't know if the spheres still exist at such a distance."

"By the way, how many spheres have we detected so far? Eight, did you say?"

"About ten."

"And now remind me where exactly..."

Shelby gestured to the computer. The window glass darkened, plunging the room into semi-shadow. A huge hologram of the Milky Way appeared in the center of the office. Billions of shining stars floated slowly past the bookcases, rotating around the bright center of the galaxy, and the room was instantly transformed, the vivid, amazingly lifelike hologram filling it with an incredible beauty.

Steve stood up and, without taking long to think about it, pressed on several points with his finger.

"Here, here, here, here... And here too. Interesting that there is an accumulation of spheres appearing in this region. It looks as if the mother planet of their civilization must be somewhere in this sector... They clearly began their expansion from this point in the galaxy."

Shelby suddenly started up from his chair to get a better view of the place in the hologram to which Steve's finger was pointing.

"Interesting... We always assumed that life was born in other sectors of the Milky Way..."

"Yes, in quieter ones. But this does not mean that they colonized the galaxy from their cradle. Something similar took place here on Earth. Life was born in Africa, but the greatest expansions of civilization took place elsewhere: Mongolia, Europe, China... Anywhere you like, in fact, but not Africa."

Steve fell silent, mulling over a thought that had unexpectedly come into his head.

"By the way, are there already volunteers for this mission?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, to become heroic voyagers... That's a one-way ticket. It's 20 light years to the Gliese system, after all..."

"But would you not like to be one of them?"

"Me? Not for the world! I have things to do here on Earth. I couldn't even get used to Mars, let alone another star system. Or even worse to open space, inside a tin can..."

"And if it were not a one-way journey?"

"That's another matter... although it still depends on how long the flight would take. I could maybe stand a year or two, but no longer. Anyway, that's all fantasy, the portals are not possible any more, thanks to the magicians from Andromeda."

Steve returned silently to his seat without taking his eyes off Shelby.

"Professor, I feel there is something you are not telling me..."

Shelby gave a sign to make the windows transparent. The hologram faded at once and the room became a normal office again. Voices from outside, which had been heard only in muffled form, suddenly became sharper, filling the room with animated sound.

"Maybe, maybe. The future will show."

Steve stood up and picked up his jacket.

"Then we'll wait."

"By the way, have you heard what this new project is called?" asked Shelby, holding out his hand in farewell.

"It looks as if I'm always the last to know. No, I haven't heard."

"Supremacy."

"Supremacy... As the name of a project to establish diplomatic relations..." Steve shook his head in disapproval. "That's not a good sign, not good at all..."

#  3

There was an incredible crush in the corridors. By tradition, this was Open Doors Day in the university, allowing the professors and their assistants to praise their faculties to school pupils.

Forcing his way through the crowd of future students, Steve looked for Auditorium A3, which was where Clive usually performed this function. He was a creature of habit and always selected the same auditorium for his lectures, which made it much less difficult to find him.

The door to the packed auditorium was open and Clive's voice, amplified by microphones, could be heard from within. There were so many wanting to listen to what he had to say that there were not enough seats for them. The school pupils were sitting and standing in passages and on steps, some even within the doorways. Among the young faces, sporting fluff instead of moustaches and beards and some still with child-like rounded cheeks, were some a little older. They differed from the younger ones in that they were carefully taking notes of what was being said.

To the sound of muffled whispers, Steve forced his way through the crowd. Gently pushing through the mass of people, he proceeded deeper into the hall.

"Let me pass please, excuse me, sorry," he kept on repeating, stepping over the many legs, arms and satchels of those sitting on the floor. The school pupils shyly moved out of the way to let him through. There was only a difference of a few years between them and the students, but what a difference in behavior... If he'd tried to force his way so unceremoniously into a hall full of students, he would have been eaten alive!

Clive suddenly stopped speaking when he noticed the annoying motion being caused by Steve as he pressed forward through the tangled undergrowth of people's bodies. Steve waved to Clive in greeting. The irritated expression on Clive's face was instantly replaced by one of pleasant surprise. He nodded in reply, then turned back to his presentation display on an enormous screen.

"Here on Earth, the speed of light may seem incredibly fast, even instantaneous, but in space, everything is quite different. Even the distances within our own star system, however negligible they may be on the scale of the Universe, are so great that photons of light need minutes and even hours to traverse them..."

Steve moved on without stopping, getting closer to the stage, half-listening to Clive's speech as he went. Today, his voice sounded strange in the auditorium somehow, unusual. For him, an assistant professor in a complex technical discipline, this was quite remarkable. Yes, the appearance of the aliens had meant that their specialty was the one most in demand in the entire university, but the difficult technical subject matter unceremoniously separated the true space romantics from those simply following the current fashion, who could barely last one semester. The lecture halls, packed to bursting at the beginning of the year, rapidly thinned out after the first exams.

"The finite speed of light gives us astrophysicists more trouble than anything else," continued Clive. "It is something which restricts our frontier of knowledge in the Universe. When we turn our telescope lenses to the limitless expanses of space, we catch the light of remote stars and galaxies. That is how we learn about the Universe. Unfortunately, the only light available for observation is that which has had time to reach our Solar System.

"As you know, our Universe was formed fourteen billion years ago. Over this period only the light from those galaxies at a distance of not more than fourteen billion light years has had time to reach us. It is this distance which is the horizon of our knowledge in the limitless sea of stars."

Steve eventually stopped, deciding he was now sufficiently close to the podium. With his back resting against the nearest wall, he began paying more attention to what Clive was saying as he waited for the event to end. They usually ended at eight, so he could wait fifteen minutes, even in this uncomfortable position.

Clive stopped talking and pointed to somewhere in the hall where a hand had gone up requesting permission to speak.

"But the aliens could travel faster than the speed of light, couldn't they?"

Clive, who could not abide questions about the aliens, threw a quick glance at Steve. Clive was just like a colleague of theirs who had been born in Transylvania and hated questions about vampires. But the situation obliged him to explain patiently.

"During our observations, they moved at sub-light speed. They never once exceeded the speed of light."

"Even so, they were able to move from one star to another through their portals. Is that not exceeding the speed of light?"

"In order to understand the concept of the finite speed of light, we must go into the details. Our everyday experience tells us that speed cannot be finite and physicists long accepted this falsely obvious concept, taking it as axiomatic. To their dismay, the better our instruments became, the more precise our experiments were and the more obvious it was that there was something wrong with their idea of speed. It took many centuries for scientists to finally resolve this riddle.

"As I said earlier, the maximum speed of transmission of a signal in our space-time is the speed of light in a vacuum. However cunning you are, whatever clever tricks you think up, you cannot overcome this barrier. At least as far as accelerating any object whose mass at a state of rest is greater than zero.

"And suddenly we are visited by aliens who have travelled from a neighboring star system at a distance of hundreds of light years from us in a matter of minutes. Does this not mean that by doing so, they have refuted the Theory of Relativity, which postulates that speed is finite? Does this fact not contradict what I said earlier?

"Not in the least. Not at any moment in time did the aliens travel faster than light. They simply shortened their route by going into hyperspace. An analogy with a labyrinth is probably appropriate here: if you travel along the corridors from entry to exit, you will travel a long way. A kilometer, say. But if you climb into a bulldozer and smash your way through the walls, your route will be drastically shortened.

"And then you reach the exit from the labyrinth. What was the average speed of the bulldozer? To answer that question, you need to know the distance travelled. So what distance do you take in this case as a point of reference? If you take the length of the labyrinth corridor, your bulldozer will prove to have travelled at the speed of a sports car, which is impossible. This means that your speed from point A to point B depends not only on the speed of your vehicle, but also on the method selected to cover that distance.

"It's the same with the aliens. With the aid of their portals, they found a way to shorten the route, but their ships never at any time exceeded the speed of light.

"To our great regret, after the event known as 'the Andromeda incident', the existence of such portals is no longer possible."

"And apart from their portals, is there no other possibility?"

"In theory there are many possibilities, but until they are built and tested, it is not clear which of them are practical and which are not."

"Could you give examples?"

Clive hesitated slightly, fiddling with a pencil.

"I'm not a fan of science fantasies, I don't like listening to them or telling them..."

"But all the same?"

"The outcome of the Andromeda incident was the reconfiguration of the fundamental constants of our Universe. Whether it affects the entire Universe or only part of it, we do not know. But the fact is that the parameters have been changed in such a way that the portals used by the aliens to jump from our galaxy to another have become impossible.

"Today, now that a few years have passed, we have been able to look at the reconfiguration more thoroughly, and we have come to the conclusion that these changes were not spontaneous, but were specifically targeted at the destruction of the portals. Portals of a particular type, those the aliens used. This enables us to hope that not all the possibilities are now closed off, but only the one used by the aliens."

"So there is the possibility of faster-than-light travel?"

"In science, anything remains possible until proven otherwise. So such travel remains theoretically possible. From the point of view of our present-day knowledge in the field of physics, it cannot be ruled out, though we don't actually know a method of doing it."

"Has our study of the aliens' technology advanced us in any way, as regards creating such methods?"

"We haven't actually had much chance to study their transport technology. We never flew right up to their ship, so we had no opportunity of looking inside, of studying the materials, the engines... So the aliens' technology has not given us any knowledge new in principle. But at least they have pointed to a lot of interesting ideas, which I hope will bear fruit in the future.

"Furthermore, let us not forget the sphere, which is now supplying us with virtually unlimited energy. This broadens our opportunities considerably, because it reduces costs in fields of high energy consumption and gives us far more energy for research needs.

"I understand your interest in questions connected with our visitors from another planet, but I would like to return to astrophysics."

"So do we now know that there is life in other galaxies?"

"Other galaxies? We know for certain that in our galaxy alone, a minimum of two intelligent races exist. Our own, and that of those who visited us. And from what the aliens told us, though unfortunately we have no way of checking it yet, there are many others too.

"In scientific circles, after the appearance of the aliens, we were almost sure that life exists in other galaxies even before the Andromeda incident. The incident simply showed that we were right in our assessment."

Clive glanced at his watch.

"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for finding the time to visit this event and I hope that most of you decide to become astrophysicists. I wish you a very good evening."

The silence was instantly broken by a roar. The crowd split up as it rushed to different exits and Steve waited patiently until the hall was empty. When the aisles were free again, he went up to Clive.

"Shelby hasn't asked you in for a chat, has he?" asked Steve, sitting on the edge of a nearby table.

"No, why?"

"I've just come from him. He was asking if I had any desire to join the expedition."

"You? But the team hasn't been chosen yet, has it? There are more than enough people who want to get as far away from our Solar System as they can, without you! What did you say?"

"I refused to fly on a one-way ticket, naturally."

"A wise decision."

"But is wasn't exactly a direct offer. Shelby was talking in riddles. It seems to me he knows something that others don't."

"Anything is possible. Since the incident, he seems to have remained an advisor to the military on matters of interaction with other races."

"And he hasn't discussed anything of the sort with you?"

Clive thought it over for a second or two, then shook his head.

"No. Not directly, at least. Maybe he hinted, but I've never been much good at understanding hints. If he wants something, let him say so straight out. But anyway, what did he hint to you?"

"That the expedition might possibly not be one-way."

Clive finished putting his things in his briefcase, locked it, and stared at Steve in surprise.

"You mean to say they've found a way?"

"How else would it be possible to return?"

Clive paused for thought again. He always took all questions literally. Steve clapped him on the shoulder.

"Relax, it was a rhetorical question."

"Hang on a minute. Do you remember the Denebola photos?"

"What about them?"

"It was lined up with the Moon at the time and its light was strangely distorted somehow..."

"The static? I remember... What about it?"

"But was it? We were the ones who decided it was static. What if it was from the Moon where they are conducting the remote manipulation experiments?"

"They warn us when they play with gravity."

"Exactly. But that static was very like what happens when they 'play with gravity', as you put it. They don't tell us about everything..."

#  4

The main advantage of being president was that you never had to wait for anyone. The participants in the show had already taken their seats to wait for him. Beaming with a practiced smile, the president entered the hall, greeting the public and his opponents with a modest gesture.

As LeRoy had suggested, they looked the way he wanted them to. Although Gates was still trying to appear in a good mood, continuously sipping cold soda water, McAllister was in quite a bad way. The buttoned collar of his shirt pressed tightly on his swollen neck and large beads of perspiration glistened on his broad forehead. His green shirt and tie emphasized his unhealthy appearance, creating the impression that his face had a greenish tint to it too. Yes, LeRoy knew his way around cunning plans...

"Their brains will still be splashing about in the left-overs of their evening cocktails," he had explained. "They'll have trouble thinking straight. You'll easily fool them. All you have to do is talk a lot and the cleverer you make it sound, the better. Drown them in floods of information. Their little grey cells won't be able to cope with it all so quickly. Talk them to death!" he insisted.

If there was one thing the president could do better than anyone else, it was to talk without stopping. And he was in the mood for chattering today. The disheveled appearance of his long-standing critics gave him added energy. Just wait, you jerks. You'll get your comeuppance for all the crap you've thrown at me in the last few months and years. It was shaping up to be an enjoyable evening.

"Where should I start with my criticisms?" said Gates, when he finally managed to get a word in edgeways. "Let's assume that over the whole voyage, not one serious technical problem arises. So our flotilla steadily approaches the Gliese system and – surprise, surprise! There's nobody there! Empty planets, not a living soul on them. No-one! Though maybe we'll get lucky and find something there that will recoup costs equal to thirty-five percent of the world gross annual product! How can you be sure the game will be worth the candle? So far we don't have a single scrap of scientific proof that life exists on the Gliese planets..."

"Why shouldn't it? The aliens themselves told us they'd colonized the Gliese system. What more proof do you need?"

Gates laughed theatrically.

"Mr. President, from a man of your level of intelligence, I would have expected a less naïve attitude to general statements. As a politician, you must know how little words are worth."

"The best criterion for assessing my capacity for accurately evaluating what has been said is the result. And if we look at the whole history of our dealings with the aliens – their first appearance and more particularly their second one, when they offered us this splendid project – I have always been right.

"Believe me, I was surrounded by many very clever people who made some very solid arguments against the project of terraforming and building the sphere. I was faced with a great river of arguments for and against and my task was to weigh all these appropriately and take the right decision. I took it, and it was the correct one.

"Thanks to my shrewdness – I'm not afraid of calling it that – we now possess the energy resources of a whole star! Five years ago we entered a new era. We became a different civilization, we reached a new level! The events of recent years will go down in history alongside the first space flight, the Moon landings and the colonization of Mars."

After a pause to catch his breath and wet his whistle with a mouthful of water, the president threw a glance at Gates, whose face showed he was thinking intently. He had clearly lost the thread of the conversation and was trying to find a reason to butt in with some scathing comment. But just as he had breathed in enough air to say something, the president put his glass back on the table in front of him and continued.

"Returning to your objection... Up to the present moment, they have not deceived us in anything. Yes, they prefer to leave some things unsaid, as is more or less customary in politics, but they don't lie."

"But why the great hurry, Mr. President? Perhaps it would be more sensible to wait for confirmation from the scientists that life exists in the Gliese system before rushing headlong into a venture with an unknown outcome?"

"Excuse me, Mr. Gates, but your inexperience in ruling a state is blatantly obvious. The outcome of projects on a strategic scale are never known in advance. That's life, Mr. Gates. Even after confirmation from the scientists, the project will still be one with an unknown result.

"But let us imagine for a moment that you are right and the Gliese system is uninhabited. Would that really be such a problem? Our scientists know for sure that it has at least one planet in the Goldilocks zone. If it is empty, we shall simply colonize it!"

"That idea is likely to create a million new problems..."

"What problems do you have in mind, Mr. Gates?"

"I don't believe we are capable of colonizing a whole planet twenty light years away. For the spacecraft we have today, that distance would mean a voyage taking a century. Even if we could, technically, colonize such a star system, it would never belong to us. It would be an autonomous colony, created at the expense of our taxpayers, which would never be linked to Earth. It's all costs and no income. Why, they could even declare war on us eventually!"

"Perhaps you are not fully informed of our plans?"

"Mr. President, you are always insinuating that only you have a broad enough view to assess the project properly, but this is not the case. Any right-minded person is quite capable of realizing that this is an extremely risky plan. It is a reckless venture, a crazy idea!

"You have no right to finance such a venture from general taxation. I know quite enough about the project to tell you unhesitatingly that we are on the way to a fiasco... The project has already cost us 20% of gross world product and by the time it is completed, we can add another 15% to that. Mr. President, stop this madness before it is too late!"

"Well, in that case, let me inform you, and Mr. McAllister, and all those watching us, that we have found a very elegant solution to the problem of the great distance. We have a technical means by which the travelling time between our systems will be reduced to just a few weeks."

"But, but... that's... impossible!" babbled Gates after a brief hiatus. He fell silent, unable to find anything coherent to say in reply and looking almost pleadingly at McAllister in the hope of hearing some intelligible criticism from him. The president and the program host followed his glance.

McAllister sat in his chair with his head on his chest. The green ring on his microphone lit up when it was switched on, but instead of his voice, the sound of quiet snoring carried across the studio. The president could hardly stop his face taking on a triumphant expression. He looked back offstage, where LeRoy, along with his two secretaries, was observing the discussion. Even from that distance, a wicked smile could be seen spreading across his face.

#  5

Coming out onto the doorstep of his house, Space Fleet Commander General MacQueen stopped for a moment, taking deep breaths of the cool moisture-laden morning air. At this early hour, when the Sun had not yet even risen above the horizon, everything around was covered in cold wet dew. In such weather, the organism of any warm-blooded animal opposes with all its being the idea of leaving a warm dry dwelling and poking its nose into the street.

In cold damp weather, the amount of energy expended on maintaining the body at optimum temperature rises sharply, which is why, recalling many millions of years of evolutionary experience, every cell of MacQueen's organism was urging him to change his mind and go back to bed.

Time served in the Special Space Service kills off sensitivity to such weaknesses of one's own fragile shell once and for all. At first, effort is required to force these weaknesses into the remotest corner of the consciousness, to prevent them influencing behavior, but over time this becomes second nature. In the whole Solar System, the last thing to whose complaints the general was prepared to listen and give way was his own body. Having made several circular motions with his arms to relax his shoulder joints, still sluggish with sleep, he stepped onto the asphalt path in front of the house towards the invigorating cold. At first his steps were slow, but he gradually speeded up. A little faster still and MacQueen was running.

Twelve kilometers stretched out ahead of him, after which he would return invigorated and with a clear head. His sleepiness and inertia would leave him, and his brain would begin to work rapidly and efficiently. This state of vigor and filling the organism with vital force was why every day, before anyone else in the district, he left his warm bed and submitted his body to the cool of the morning, or to cold rain and wind.

Over the past forty years, the general had not missed a single morning run, no matter where he was, whether in a space ship in the open cosmos, an orbital station or another planet of the Solar System.

At one time, he had been quite different. Having grown up in an ordinary, unremarkable family, like billions of others on his home planet Earth, he had not had any kind of special abilities or iron will that had distinguished him from his peers. The parents of several of his acquaintances had had their own small shops and their children had had to help them in their work from an early age, but MacQueen was not among those who had learned the burden of hard work from childhood.

Nor had he suffered any deprivations. His family had not been rich, but he had never been short of the basic necessities, even if he had not been able to permit himself anything special. Life had not been sweet, but need had not made it bitter either. By the time he left school, the future general was among those whom most teachers would describe as a lazy kind of lad. They didn't spare the jokes when they learned he was preparing for the Special Space Service entrance exams. In the eyes of the average Joe, in what they called popular culture, the typical SSS soldier was stupid, but hard as iron. The diametrical opposite of the young MacQueen, whose sharp mind fitted comfortably in a spoiled body.

Looking back, it must be admitted that they were partly right. The SSS seemed much less suited to him than studying in some university. The comfortable seats of an academic auditorium were closer to his nature, he believed, than physical deprivation and regular mortal danger outside assimilated space. Nevertheless, though he had had some doubts about his choice of profession at first, they were finally dispersed by his resentment of the jokes of those around him who considered him a spoiled brat.

Once in the SSS, he was initially haunted by the thought that he had sold his soul. The space fleet took all of him, including the buttons on his shirt and the laces in his shoes. Whereas the colleges that people normally went to on leaving school filled only part of their time, the Fleet permitted no such indulgence. It avidly took up all of his time, apart from a few free minutes before sleep.

He found it hard, just like all the others. But after a few months, once his body was in good shape, MacQueen suddenly realized that his personality had somehow thrown off its rough scale and rusty crust, laying bare a core of sterner stuff. His service changed something in him for the better, and this in itself began to bring him satisfaction. He liked what was happening to him, how the harmful impurities of laziness and indecisiveness were being sweated out of him, leaving a pure residue of an unknown but unusually strong material.

In the combat simulator, his platoon started as a disorganized mob, but suddenly an internal structure took shape in this random group of rookies. They began to understand each other from half a word, half a look, and the chain of command ended with MacQueen of its own accord.

The sergeant yelling at them was no longer yelling at all of them, but mainly at him, when they did not manage to take cover from the virtual fire of the holographic enemy in the close corridors of the simulator. When the platoon failed to complete a combat mission, it became MacQueen's fault. They began looking at him as a leader long before he was officially promoted to powers of command.

And that was how he realized that the SSS was his calling. To the astonishment of all who had known him as a civilian, and to his own even greater astonishment, the SSS proved to be the element that had been lacking in him, the catalyst of his personality, without which he would have remained an ordinary clerk, lawyer or shopkeeper just like all the others.

He had now covered half his jogging route. MacQueen left the city and ran through the morning forest. The air gradually became filled with the songs of awakening birds and the upper edge of the Sun peeped over the distant mountains, hidden from sight by the trees. His time to be alone with his thoughts had passed and he would now be inundated with calls. Although he had personal secretaries to sort the unimportant from the important without mercy, it was not much help. As commander of the space fleet, the mightiest force in the Solar System, there was so much coming in every second that he had to be on the line continuously.

The watch on his wrist vibrated. This was the first call to get through.

"Good morning, general. Have you heard the news?" It was Shelby's voice.

Their first conversation had taken place five years ago, when an alien ship crossed the boundary of the Solar System for the first time. The team of this droll professor, the dean of the astrophysics faculty, had been the first people on Earth to set eyes on the strange flight trajectory of the alien craft. It was still far beyond the orbit of Neptune at the time.

"Good morning, professor. What news, exactly?"

"The president spoke about the SM openly on the air yesterday."

"Well, it had to become known to the public sooner or later."

"I am amazed by your calmness."

MacQueen just smiled sadly. It was easy to observe an actual battle in space and take note of the losses of one's own ships with an indifferent appearance. Unlike many of his secretaries however, who had seen such clashes only on a computer screen, he had actual combat experience and knew very well what a direct hit from a ship's gun or missile meant.

Images of an explosion wave spreading through the compartments of a damaged ship passed before his eyes, how the eardrums and lungs of those unfortunate enough to be inside burst, how the blood flowed from their mouths and ears. In a flash, an unsealed ship loses its atmosphere to space, allowing the cosmic vacuum in. To be in space at such a moment with no protective spacesuit, mouth gaping like a fish pulled ashore and without the strength to fill the lungs with air, was the worst nightmare of all those who served in the SSS. Suffocation was a terrible death.

The objective laws of battle cannot be changed, however. This element is not under human control, so it is easy to maintain a professional calm at such losses, however awful they might be. But when the most important link in the command chain permits himself to blurt out matters of the highest secrecy as if it were just some sort of gossip, endangering the mission and the lives of many people, then this really made the general furious.

But there was no sense in crying over spilt milk. What was done was done. Rage should not be allowed to enter the soul or it will eat away at the consciousness from the inside, giving rise to a fury that clouds common sense.

"It had to become public knowledge sooner or later," answered MacQueen laconically. "It's my job to safeguard the mission and leave emotion to the politicians. Hot air is their prerogative."

"In that case, we shall have to plan the technical parameters of entry all over again."

"I'll order a ship to be sent for you."

#  6

"This way please, Mr. LeRoy..."

Swinging her hips coquettishly, the shapely secretary led the president's advisor along the corridor. Her markedly business-like appearance and slightly cold attitude did not fully conceal her flirtatious inclinations.

A position high up in the hierarchy is always an attraction for women. The president's chief advisor, despite his unsightly looks and dwarf-like height, was a prime example of this.

While studying at school and then at university, he became accustomed to being totally deprived of attention from the opposite sex. His first job upon graduating had taken his bank account well into the black. His hopeless poverty was gradually lost in the mists of the past, however, and the subsequent success of his career sent the mocking glances from women the same way. He suddenly became interesting to those who had previously looked down on him.

They say that for people like him, career success in some way compensates for an inferiority complex. Maybe so, but he wasn't bothered about that. The main thing was that it worked, enabling him to obtain in excess that which he had previously lacked. The rest of it didn't matter.

They reached a closed door at the very end of the corridor. The secretary pressed her finger to the electronic lock, which clicked loudly as soon as her finger passed over its biometric scanner, unlocking the door. LeRoy looked around the sparse furnishing of the corridor. "It's rather gloomy here, isn't it?"

The secretary turned her head towards him more sharply than usual, playfully showing off her thick head of hair braided into a pitch-black plait, and giggled guiltily.

"You don't say! It clearly lacks a woman's touch. But sessions aren't often held here. Usually..." She broke off after noticing someone at the other end of the corridor and immediately put a serious expression on her face.

Not bothering to take even a brief glance towards what had so frightened her, LeRoy stepped into the room and, ignoring the customary behavior expected of guests, flopped down in the chair at the head of the table. He put his hand in his pocket, got out a small object and set it down on the table in front of him.

Half a minute later there was the sound of approaching steps. Three people in smart business suits entered the cramped room. LeRoy, sprawling languidly in his chair, did not think it necessary to stand up and greet them or shake hands.

Showing no surprise at such disrespect, they sat a little further along the table. Two of them were taller than the third, who was the oldest. To a trained eye, their subordination to him was obvious. In spite of their height, they looked up to him and he behaved as one would expect of the leader of a herd, appearing almost indifferent.

"Well, Mr. LeRoy, it seems to me that our job has become a lot easier," began the tallest of the three, who appeared to be the lowest in rank.

"Why is that?"

"We still need to cooperate, of course, but..." cut in the other one, then stopped significantly.

LeRoy nodded approvingly and, maintaining his usual smile, lifted the small object from the table. It proved to be a holographic cube. With an exaggerated basketball-throwing movement, he put it in a black briefcase standing open by the table leg. It could be heard striking the leather interior of the briefcase a few times as it came to rest.

"I think you're right, we won't need this..."

His opponents, instantly becoming animated, made calming gestures.

"No, no, of course not..." said the leader, no longer with any trace of arrogance. "Without your invaluable help, we would not have had the faintest idea of how to proceed with the project. Please, Mr. LeRoy..."

LeRoy looked at them across the table.

"With your permission, I'll get down to business. So, the entry parameters will be changed. We don't yet know exactly how, work on that is going on right now. There are several proposals, but the president will only have the exact information on his desk a few hours before switching on..."

"Only a few hours? We shan't have time! As you know, the approach time of large space ships is... they are like space elephants, they aren't responsive enough. Surely it ought to be possible to provide the information earlier?"

"I was the one who proposed that the president should only have the information just before the start. He is not in charge of the technical side, there's no reason for him to have information he doesn't need. That's why, as I say, the data will come in just a few hours beforehand, no earlier than that. We don't want to arouse unnecessary suspicions, do we?"

"But..."

The senior of the three made a calming gesture to the others, who shut up at once.

"If there's no other way, we'll just have to put up with it."

The smile finally left LeRoy's face, which nevertheless became more friendly.

"Quite right. I'll make sure we get it done in time. To do that, we'll have to use some reserve ships. I don't know where the jump will be from, but for technical reasons, there are only four regions in question. Therefore, we need four absolutely identical ships at four points, ready for takeoff."

The three put their heads together and began whispering. LeRoy turned his back on them and started softly whistling some tune or other as he looked at his fingers.

"I'm afraid that four ships with the equipment we need will cost us a considerable sum. So considerable that the viability of the project would be called into question," said the leader, when they had finally finished whispering.

LeRoy stopped whistling and turned back towards them.

"You mean you won't be able to find enough to finance it?"

"No, of course we can finance it. It's something else. These are different conditions, after all. The cost of the project has increased. To keep to the previous share of participation would be..."

LeRoy leaned forward, groped in his briefcase, took out the cube and put it on the table.

"The game will go on as long as our agreement is in force. Changing the terms, even the hint of a change, means I leave the project. Remember that, gentlemen. Have a productive day."

#  7

For the whole 20 minutes Steve was on the train, he kept looking away from his tablet and at the drinks and snacks machine humming softly a few paces away. Its bright display was showing cyclic video clips of rivers of cold beer and fresh fruit juices, periodically interspersed with contented people cracking big nuts and eating succulent hot dogs, crunchy potato chips.

The images were having a torture-like effect on Steve's hungry body, since he had overslept that morning and had not had time for breakfast, but he steeled himself against the thought of approaching the machine. There was complete silence outside as the mountain landscapes rushed past. It would only be another five minutes to the campus, ten at most. He would lunch there and lunch well, giving full reign to his hunger. It would be a pity to spoil his appetite with snacks. He once again forced himself to ignore the mental picture of getting up, going to the machine, pulling out a steaming hot dog and adding a generous amount of ketchup before devouring it.

Steve opened today's menu for their university refectory on his tablet. Over the past few years, it had improved the dishes it had on offer considerably and had even won a prize for the best university refectory in the country... Ah, his favorite pancakes with vanilla custard were on today. One serving usually consisted of two pancakes, which he had always considered somewhat inadequate. Perhaps he'd place a double order today... Steve closed his tablet and put it away in his rucksack. He still couldn't keep his mind on science. Thoughts of food were forcing everything else out...

The train suddenly entered a tunnel. Not far to the campus now. He rose from his seat, collected his things and moved towards the door. Outside, a couple of feet from the windows, the tunnel lights were flashing past. The train's very high speed produced the effect of someone having switched on a stroboscope to put the passengers in festive mood. Just like a disco, enough to hurt your eyes...

Steve caught the aroma of vanilla custard a good few meters from the refectory. The smell, multiplied by his hunger, made him quicken his pace. He heard someone running up behind him and glanced back over his shoulder.

Clive's unbuttoned jacket was blowing in the wind as he ran and he waved to attract Steve's attention. Typical of him to appear just at the most inappropriate moment.

"I'm so glad I found you!" puffed Clive as he reached him.

"What's happened?"

"I had a call from Shelby, he wants us both to go and see him at once."

"Couldn't it wait till after lunch?"

"No, no, no! He said it's a matter of the greatest urgency. It's a bit late for lunch anyway..."

Steve looked sadly at the entrance to the refectory building and sighed deeply. The aroma of vanilla was so intense and tempting that the thought of going to Shelby's study instead filled him with deep regret.

"Clive, I've come straight from the conference, I've only just landed. I haven't had a bite to eat since yesterday evening. You go, I'll be along in half an hour or so."

He would have walked on towards the refectory, but Clive grabbed his sleeve.

"Just tell him you couldn't find me."

Clive took Steve by the arm and pulled him the other way.

"I can't do that!"

"So what's all the hurry about?"

The roar of turbines could suddenly be heard overhead as a small ship, painted in the dark grey of the space fleet, appeared from behind the façades of the old buildings on the other side of the lake. It passed over them, throttled back to low thrust, did a half-turn and slowed down somewhere above the building of the astronomy and astrophysics faculty. Its silhouette could be seen through the sparse trees as it smoothly came in to land. Once it had landed, the turbine noise soon faded to nothing.

"You can see why..."

"You mean that's come for us?"

"It looks like it."

Steve sighed in disappointment. There would be no pancakes with vanilla custard for him today.

Shelby was standing next to the ship and discussing something with one of the officers.

"There you are at last!" he said, nodding to the officer, in whose hands appeared a small instrument with a black antenna. It looked like a metal detector. Without saying a word, he passed it in front of and behind Clive and Steve, scanning their bodies.

"It's a security measure," explained Shelby.

After completing the scan, the officer nodded approvingly.

"All clear."

They sat inside the small yet spacious-looking passenger compartment and unbuttoned their coats while the officer who had scanned them closed the outside door. The plane's engines started up again, raising a mighty storm of dust, grass and yellow leaves from where it had landed.

The façade of the faculty buildings and the tops of the trees floated past the porthole. Gradually gaining speed, the plane rose sharply.

"I am consulting with MacQueen in connection with the Gliese flight project," began Shelby. "I think you will have guessed that already. But there's something else interesting that has been kept secret. Until yesterday. Did you see the evening debate with the President?"

Clive and Steve both shook their heads.

"In that case, you will be interested to learn that the military has an experimental space travel technology by which we can reach the Gliese system in three weeks."

"Twenty light years in three weeks? You mean they've discovered the secret of the aliens' portals?"

"You could put it that way. We have theoretical models of the physical principle and they look quite convincing. As we now know for certain, the portals changed the structure of space-time by threads of Planck-length thickness, but this principle does not work anymore.

"When it became clear that this was a dead-end technology, the study was wound up. It was no longer suitable for creating portals. But the new way is based on different principles."

"It's strange that I haven't heard anything about these studies," said Clive in surprise.

"There's nothing strange about it. These studies were not made publicly accessible. By the way, I should warn you that unauthorized revelation of the details carries a penalty of life imprisonment. I am telling you about this because your former status allowing you access to secret information has been restored."

"All the same, it's not clear how this portal would work using the secret technology," said Clive.

"You can ask technical questions when we arrive at the Lunar Base. The portal is controlled from there. You'll see what's what with your own eyes."

"And have they restored unlimited credit too?" asked Clive.

Shelby laughed.

"For where the journey is going this time, credit will not be needed."

"Do you want us to join the expedition?" asked Clive.

Shelby nodded.

"Do you have any objection?"

"How long will we be away?" asked Steve.

"The estimate for the whole expedition is twelve weeks."

"As little as that?"

"The military authorities believe that will be long enough. As I said, the one-way journey itself lasts three weeks. We start from the Lunar Base, then two weeks to reach a safe distance from the inner planets. After that the portal opens and the whole group jumps to the Gliese system. This will take no more than a few minutes. The rest of the time will be spent reaching a point from which we can make contact and conduct negotiations.

"We shall have six weeks to settle everything, after which the group will set the opposite course and a week later will be far enough away from the aliens to make a jump safely again. The portal will reopen and transport us back to the Solar System. Another two weeks and we'll be home."

"But why all the hurry?"

"Two versions of the project were produced initially. A flight of 20 light years for our ships by the classic method would take a little over a hundred years. The people who flew would have to be prepared to leave the Solar System forever. They would be in a similar position to the first Mars colonists, except that contact with Earth from where they were would be impossible.

"In parallel with this project, the military experimented with a new high-speed travel technology. Today they have advanced far enough for us to try to use not the initial plan, but the quicker version. The public only knew about the first version. Until yesterday, when the president revealed that we had the new portal technology in an open broadcast. Now that everyone knows, we have to set off as soon as possible."

"Why?"

"For security reasons. It will not be a mini-portal. It will stretch across space for several light hours, which means that everyone who knows the coordinates and vector will be able to fly to Gliese. It is too large a sector of space for the Fleet to monitor it and prevent such attempts. Therefore, we are starting as soon as we can, so as not to let third parties jump into Gliese along with the official expedition. The less time the preparations take, the less chance of unauthorized use of the portal."

"Are you talking about pirates?"

"No, at least not primarily. They are too poorly equipped. It's more a matter of various industrial groups of interests that would like to use the portal to reach Gliese. They have sufficient resources to do that sort of thing. The military think that is too great a risk."

"But why do they need to do it?"

"Business, what else?"

"What business could they have in Gliese?"

Shelby laughed.

"Just wait till we've made contact, Steve. Five or so years later, you will see how many opportunities exist there. The military have no reliable information on the exact plans, but what they have discovered clearly points to the activities of certain very influential economic groups who are collecting data to this end. And for security reasons, we cannot allow anyone else, with unclear intentions, to be in Gliese apart from the official expedition. It's too dangerous."

"Why us in particular?"

"You must be joking, Steve," said the professor in surprise. "Your role in the first contact and in the second one too... You are now doomed to be linked to all such projects for evermore. That is a cross you'll have to bear for the rest of your life."

The ship was flying at an altitude of several thousand feet. Far below, a few clouds floated by, throwing a shadow on the empty bluish ocean extending from horizon to horizon.

"Where are we flying now?"

"You are bound for the Lunar Base, but first we have to cover our tracks a bit. They may be on our tails."

Soon the ship began its descent into a grey mist. The further it descended, the darker it became outside the porthole. It was gloomy weather over the place to which the ship was heading.

Steve looked out of the porthole. Nothing could be seen because of the dense cloud. The ship passed through the cloud base and the clouds outside disappeared. Before them, in the middle of the ocean, lay an island. In its brightly illuminated center, military ships could be seen parked here and there. But instead of landing next to them, their ship flew around the base and carefully taxied into one of the tall hangars. Through the portholes, they could see the servicing personnel inside turning away from the hurricane of wind from its engines.

"Here we go our different ways," said Shelby, releasing the straps and getting out of his seat. "You will fly to the base from here and I shall stay here to work. Your spacecraft is already waiting."

He pointed to the other end of the hangar then pulled his suitcase from under the seat.

"We left the campus in such a hurry that we don't have our things with us, but we can get everything we need when we reach the Lunar Base."

The three of them stepped out onto the floor of the brightly lit hangar.

"Well, best of luck, lads," said Shelby, shaking their hands in turn.

"What is your job?" asked Clive.

"We have to change the parameters of the portal. The president should not have blurted out the fact that we have developed this technology, so we have to be cunning, to confuse whoever might try to take advantage of the situation. We shall have to open the portal somewhere else."

Shelby gestured towards a spacecraft standing in a far corner of the hangar.

"That's where you have to go." He went along with them to show them the way.

"What about communication? When we are on the other side of the portal, will we be able to communicate?"

"Unfortunately, live communication will not be possible. We have not yet mastered the technology for transmitting information in the gravity waveband. But we shall regularly open the portal for this purpose and send you a package with instructions. You will do the same, that way there will still be some sort of contact."

"I reckon that's better than nothing," said Steve as he tried to keep up with Shelby, who, in spite of his short stature, was walking so fast that he was finding it difficult.

"When we were working with the aliens' portal, we couldn't communicate live either, on account of the distance," said Clive.

"Yes, so you're already used to it," replied Shelby, without slackening his pace.

"Good luck to us all, then."

"Good luck. And Clive: try to be more careful this time."

#  8

The deafening noise of thousands of loudspeakers resounding through the hall made his whole body vibrate. The human mass on the dance floor, like a swarm of insects, was moving in time to music more like the roar of a waterfall. Laser beams played inwards from all directions, illuminating everything around in frequent flares and making the head throb. How could anyone stay here of their own free will for more than ten minutes?

Were it not for the drink, a bottle of which Zach was holding in his hands, he could hardly have put up with this punishment. It's true what they say, the music of the younger generation is designed to irritate the older. Up until that moment he had not considered himself old, but looking at the ecstasy on the faces of those around him, he suddenly realized that he belonged to a different generation. In his day, having fun really meant enjoying yourself, not like this.

After taking a swig of his drink, he set the bottle of dark brushed metal on the table, where several identical but empty bottles were already standing. This new-fangled gnat's piss had the same effect on the head as alcohol mixed with amphetamines. It was the very thing for a joint like this, but the taste was pure poison, sickly-sweet but impossibly acidic at the same time.

After the second bottle, the multi-colored laser beams took on an unusual appearance. People's movements seemed to slow down and the music didn't sound so loud. Now he could understand how those jerks at the next table were able to keep chatting to each other in spite of all the racket. He looked towards them again. Their table was groaning under the weight of similar empty bottles and their eyes appeared glazed over, even from this distance. Well, that was probably enough of this muck for today. It was supposed to be comparatively weak according to the label, but not being used to it, he hadn't known what to expect. A bottle of cold vodka would go to his head more than this poison, but at least he would recognize the feeling. This stuff just made him feel odd. His body was still under his control, but it felt different. Still, he had to make a pretense of thinking everything here was OK by him.

Zach reached blindly for the bottle again, but instead of the cold dew-covered metal, his palm touched someone's sweaty hand. All his muscles tensed immediately and his other hand crept into his pocket for his gun. His face remained the same, but his internal muscles compressed into a ball, ready to jump into action if the circumstances required.

Zach drunkenly turned his head. Sitting next to him and staring straight at him was some jerk with long dreadlocks, a multitude of piercings and fluorescent tattoos. How could he have reached the table without Zach having noticed him? His stare was too intelligent and unnaturally penetrating for the sort of degenerate he seemed to be. It was out of kilter with his appearance. Usually these doped-up junkies hardly knew what planet they were on, but this one clearly knew what he was about.

"What do you want?" asked Zach, looking at him. His eyes were partly closed, as if he were drunk. He winked, deliberately moving his eyelids slowly, creating the impression that he was barely able to move his tongue.

"Shall we dance?" asked the junkie.

Zach looked around. What sort of game was this?

"I think you have the wrong table, chum," he replied, carefully releasing the safety catch on his gun and aiming it at the junkie's crotch without taking it out of his pocket.

The guy's face expressed neither protest nor annoyance. He was not in the least surprised and did not try to persuade Zach, but simply put his bottle in front of Zach's nose and sighed in disappointment as he clumsily came out from behind the table. Zach pushed the bottle aside in disgust with his fingernail, but then realized that there was something rolling around inside it. His body felt a shock. Could this jerk really be the one?

Zach waited a few minutes, periodically bringing his bottle to his mouth, but only pretending to drink it. Then he got up and cautiously exchanged the bottle in his hand for the one left by the junkie and shakily, clumsily, disappeared into the toilet.

Inside one of the WCs, he raised the bottle to his ear and shook it carefully. There was no liquid inside, only some object bouncing around in the bottom. He overturned it onto his palm. A holographic cube, shining in the light with all the colors of the rainbow, fell onto his hand. So the junkie really was his contact. That was funny, they usually sent him girls...

Fifteen minutes later, Zach was three blocks away from the disco. It was not possible to read all the information from the cube at once, it only displayed brief fragmentary messages, apparently aligned to its position in space.

The first message contained only the coordinates of somewhere in the city, about 20 minutes' walk from the disco. Zach walked quickly, trying to conceal his inner turmoil. He kept catching himself in the thought that he looked too worried and forced himself to slow down. He had a corrosive thought incessantly on his brain. Something was different this time. He didn't understand what, but internally he felt something burdensome taking control of his mind.

Only a few hundred yards remained to the place indicated by the cube, he just had to turn off into a side street that was a dead end. The dark silhouette of a minivan was visible behind the garbage bins. If you looked carefully, you could make out its headlamps, reflecting the pale moonlight imperceptibly. He checked the map. The minivan was positioned exactly on the coordinates he had been given.

Once he had turned into the side street, a long series of apparently meaningless figures and letters appeared on the display of his augmented reality spectacles. Zach glanced through them but, unable to understand what they meant, went on. Unless something had changed, he was on the right track.

He carefully approached the minivan. It was impossible to make out anything inside it through the dark glass since there were no street lights. He looked at the outside of the vehicle. The rear wheels were well settled down, as if the minivan had a full load of bricks inside it. Strange...

He pulled the door handle, more out of curiosity than any desire to open the door, but it clicked and slid aside, revealing a wide entrance. An unlocked minivan with no alarm in this part of town?

This thought had barely flashed through his mind when the interior light came on. A cold shiver ran down Zach's spine. Inside were two infantry robots. Where there should have been faces, dark, wide visors could be made out in the darkness. Standing up, they would have been more than two meters tall, but compacted for travel, they fitted easily inside a normal minivan.

People like Zach disliked these humanoid independent killing machines in the same way that mice dislike cats. The very appearance of the things was horrifying, but they were even more dangerous than you would think from their external appearance. Zach had seen them in action and not just as an observer, but as one of their targets. It was a miracle that he had survived, but since then the sight of these machines, even a silhouette of something like them, aroused mortal terror in him.

They were on his team now, however, and Zach was too experienced a mercenary for dirty work to call off the mission simply at the sight of some metal hardware. Overcoming his primeval terror, he took hold of the handrail to look inside. His mouth went dry at once and his heart beat wildly, just as on his first parachute jump. He pulled on the handrail and stepped inside.

One of the robots instantly came to life and rose up threateningly, its hydraulics whining as its body leaned slightly forward.

"Code?" it asked curtly in a low voice.

Such politeness only meant one thing. The robots were carrying out an advanced program. They usually preferred to express themselves by a burst of large-caliber bullets or pulse discharges. That was a good thing. Iron idiots firing stupidly at everything around them was certainly not what Zach wanted.

He broke into a sweat, but did not let go of the handrail. These machines would break his neck in an instant no matter how brave he was, although he wasn't feeling very brave now. He was standing face to face with his phobia, but he knew that if he gave way to it now, he would not only have to live with it for the rest of his life, but it would make him unemployable in the sort of work he did.

He coughed briefly. Wetting his dry lips, he took a deep breath.

"3V9G4V 53BNX4 3GS57S 3GGS45 G563F4 N29GS3 4BD8S5 T74NCN V234CC"

The robot moved its body back, as if it had lost all interest.

It took Zach some effort to make himself sit in the only seat in the van, facing these steel monsters with their heavy weapons. Compared with their large-caliber barrels, the miniature pistol in his own pocket was like a child's toy.

His feet touched something under the seat. There was a bag on the floor. Inside was a pulse attack rifle with a sawn-off barrel and several spare battery cartridges. He had seen such weapons before, but had never held one in his hands. It was one of the latest models too. Zach gripped the handle firmly, allowing its built-in scanner to read and record his DNA.

The driverless minivan had been tearing along the motorway for four hours now. The only thought filling Zach's head was how to explain to the vehicle that he needed to take a leak. It was cramped inside the van and if he had to do it right here, he couldn't avoid splashing the robots. He knew they were only machines and that they were there to protect him, but he was not comfortable with the idea of pissing on two robots armed to the teeth. Not comfortable at all. He would just have to wait. Goddamn it, if he had to travel as far as this, they might have provided a ship!

Without slowing down, the minivan suddenly turned off the motorway and continued on a dirt road, bouncing over the hummocks. Zach clung on tight to the seat handles to avoid hitting his head on the roof. With each hummock, the moment when he would be forced to relieve himself drew closer. He could already sense his bladder's pulse quite clearly. That lousy new-fangled gnat's-piss...

The minivan slowed down. The road started going downhill and grass could be heard brushing against the body. They turned off the dirt track and continued across grass. He could only hope that the wheels of the overloaded minivan would not get stuck in the rough ground. As it was, he was being flung first one way, then the other, but the electronic brain cleverly compensated for the loss of control and instantly corrected its errors.

The road suddenly started going steeply uphill. The minivan's electric motors roared loudly, barely able to cope with the load on them. It seemed that the two robots weighed more than a vanload of people. After another turn, the vehicle's front end dropped and it was going downhill again.

The autopilot repeatedly applied the brakes. Several times it seemed to Zack that they would overturn, but the program knew what it was about. Unlike a human driver, it knew exactly the wheel braking coefficient, the height and location of the center of gravity and the road's angle of inclination. Its precise knowledge of the boundary characteristics enabled it to drive the van to the limit of its capabilities.

The wheels locked completely and the vehicle skidded to a halt, leaning slightly to the right. They had reached their final destination. Zach did not know why they were there and the holographic cube was in no hurry to explain. It simply showed a new code, even longer than the last one.

Zach opened the sliding door and looked around. They had driven into some sort of ravine. A little way off he could see the entrance to a cave surrounded by some greenery. He released his safety belt and slung the pulse gun over his shoulder.

As soon as he had jumped out of the vehicle, his shoes sank into thick grass. It seemed that the people who had prepared this latest package for him had no experience of conspiracy, since there were bits of garbage here and there. Even in the back of beyond, as they were here, garbage should not be scattered around a secret hideaway. It could attract the attention of passers-by on the road.

He approached the cave cautiously, checking every step. There could be unpleasant surprises in the grass.

Suddenly, several silhouettes appeared above the entrance. Zach raised his head and saw a long gun barrel aimed at him.

"Hey, drop the rod!"

#  9

For space romantics like Steve and Clive, the waiting hall of the spaceport at the Lunar Base was a real paradise, an amusement park. As soon as the Sun fell below the horizon and the blinds to protect those inside the glass dome from the burning light were drawn back, the dark expanse of space spread out overhead, with all the shining lights of the stars embedded in it.

Since the Moon had no atmosphere, after sunset, when the blinding light reflected from the ground faded to nothing, the stars shone unbelievably brightly, just as in open space itself. You had to hand it to the architects of this waiting hall. Realizing what natural beauty was to be found in the Moon's night sky, they decided to make the dome of transparent glass and took advantage of the fact that the low force of gravity enabled them to build lightweight structures of airy appearance and enormous size.

In addition to this, the hall's lighting during the lunar night was localized and illuminated only small local areas, making them light enough to function comfortably without diminishing the enchantment of the night sky.

Steve and Clive sat with their heads pointed skywards, admiring the limitless depths of space opened up before them. If you looked carefully, you could see scratch marks here and there from micrometeorites. These could reach the surface of the Moon undiminished because there was no protective cushion of atmosphere, so they constantly bombarded the dome, leaving tiny scratches. Over time, its external surface acquired a matt appearance. To prevent such a minor matter spoiling the view of the sky for those waiting in the hall, special robots crawled over the dome like snails. Unceasingly, day and night, they worked on regenerating the surface scratched by space dust and tiny meteorites by applying a fine layer of molten glass to it, which cooled rapidly in the vacuum, and then polishing it. Wherever they passed, the dome became ideally transparent again.

Engrossed in the view, they failed to notice the approach of a man with a slim black moustache, the kind that had been fashionable on Earth a good twenty years earlier, but, judging from the appearance of the Lunar Base's male population, had only just become popular there.

"Good day, gentlemen."

Steve jumped up from his seat, higher than he had intended due to the lower gravity. The man with the moustache waited calmly for him to come down again. The comedy of the situation was made greater by his dispassionate face.

"You'll soon get used to the low gravity," he reassured Steve, who was now down on the ground again. "Dr. Gray, head of the SM project. Follow me, please."

Gray had little to say and Steve was too caught up in the surrounding spectacle to try to make conversation. Clive, on the other hand, was simply glad not to be bothered with idle chat. They descended from the waiting hall into a long well-lit tunnel. Unlike on Earth, all the walls on the Moon were of a light material the color of lunar soil. There was no sign of boring grey concrete marked by streaks of water or fungus and this was not surprising. Water in liquid form was a rarity on the Moon and was not to be found in the form of seas or oceans, either surface or subterranean. Deep wells had to be dug for it, like those dug on Earth hundreds of years ago for coal mining. Industrial robots mined ice from them, which could then be used to produce drinking and industrial water. The cost of water on the Moon was too high to waste it by losses through leaky pipes.

A moving walkway quickly brought them out of the tunnel and back under the transparent dome with its view of open space. They were higher up now, having left the waiting hall behind in a small crater. From here they could see most of the Lunar Base: service buildings, gas holders, lubricant stores, thermonuclear power stations, communication antennae and telescopes.

"Why are the power stations switched off?" asked Clive.

"The reactors are on standby for emergencies, but the electricity we use comes from the sphere. There is no sense in us generating more, since we have so much free energy..."

Something flashed brightly above them, imparting a bright bluish light to everything around, like a night-time flash of lightning. Steve and Clive looked anxiously towards the flare. A thunderstorm on the Moon?

"That's the meteorite protection," explained Gray. "We are now passing through the tail of a comet; many small meteorites are falling on the base."

"The Perseids," Clive muttered to himself.

Gray turned his face towards them without slackening pace.

"You are astrophysicists, aren't you?"

"Uh-huh," replied Steve.

"It shows. Yes, that's what they are. The small ones are no danger, they just make more work for the robots on the dome, but those larger than 100 micrometers have to be driven off by a laser beam. You are a little late. This morning there was quite a show, the lasers intercepted several of them per minute. My head's beginning to throb from all the flares. This way..."

A spacious elevator with a matt metal finish took them up rapidly and almost silently.

"Hang onto the handrail or your head will fly up and hit the ceiling," Gray warned them and gestured upwards at several large marks on the ceiling.

"Newbies are always getting bumps on the head, no matter how many times you warn them. Someone is going to break their neck one of these days."

Steve and Clive obediently grabbed the handrails painted in red and yellow stripes that ran around the elevator wall. When the elevator began braking, they really were pulled upwards. It felt strange to be pulled towards the ceiling.

The elevator stopped. They were in the upper part of some sort of tower. Gray left the elevator and approached a transparent wall. From here, the whole base was laid out before them. He pointed to dark lines beginning next to a massive, squat, windowless building and running like gigantic iron rails into the distance and beyond the horizon itself.

"Here we have the first cascade of the SM inductors," said Gray in an unemotional tone, pointing towards the rails. "Actually there is nothing new here, if you are already acquainted with the technology of remote manipulation. Until now we did not have enough energy to conduct such experiments. Once the sphere was built, this problem disappeared, so we started on what you might call untargeted applications of the device. It proved not to be particularly difficult. We only had to learn how to keep the wave stable..."

"Just a minute," interrupted Clive. "Let's keep it in order."

Gray smiled.

"Order is most important in what we do, you won't get anywhere without it. Remote manipulation technology, as we know from the experiment with Mercury, bends space-time, creating a gravity hole. The same thing happens of its own accord close to massive bodies. That is how our nature creates gravitational attraction.

"In the past few years, we have studied many different ideas of what else could be done with this technology. It turned out that the most interesting thing was not simply to create a local gravity hole, but to generate a series of holes in space-time, forming something like a wave.

"Along the vector of propagation of the wave, local regions of compression and expansion formed, resulting in gaps in space-time. If we place an object in one of these gaps, that is to say outside space-time, the wave will pick it up and carry it along with it. The most interesting thing is that the displacement of the object will take place at phase velocity."

"If the wave carries an object which has fallen out of space-time along with it, then it stays in place the whole time in its system of coordinates, doesn't it?" asked Clive.

"Absolutely right. Furthermore, it must remain stationary relative to the phases of the wave, otherwise it will leave the zone being carried along and simply fall out somewhere in some indeterminate place and not necessarily along the vector of the wave."

"So the object carried by the wave will stand still in its own system of coordinates, but move at phase velocity in ours. Is that so?"

"That's how it is."

"But for a wave to carry an object somewhere, it must reach there itself. How can you propagate a wave for 20 light years? It would have to travel faster than the speed of light!"

"Yes, but that isn't a problem."

"Isn't it?"

"No. The rate of propagation of a wave within space-time is limited to the speed of light, but this restriction does not apply to space-time itself. It can be compressed and expanded more rapidly. I imagine you have heard of the inflation phase of the expansion of the Universe after the Big Bang. For a certain time interval, the Universe grew at faster-than-light speed."

"And how fast will such a wave travel?"

"We don't yet know for sure. In the experiments, it was considerably faster than the speed of light, but we did not succeed in measuring to what extent. It's quite possible that the value is infinite."

"So we can travel to any point in the Universe in any time interval?"

"In theory, perhaps. But in practice, the range is limited by the applied energy. Now that we can supply the plant with energies comparable to the radiant energy of an entire star, we can induce a wave for dozens of light years. This is enough to reach Gliese and some way further. We cannot yet manage the more remote distances."

"But how do you know your machine is capable of getting there? You'd have to throw out a transmitter to confirm its position. And its signals in turn would only propagate at the speed of light. They would take twenty years to return from the Gliese system."

"These are calculated figures."

"Calculated? You mean they haven't been confirmed experimentally?"

"Only short jump distances have been confirmed experimentally. We threw beacons out for several light hours, beyond the orbits of the planets. The precise measurements of jump distance and energy consumed corresponded to the calculated figures, so there's nothing to worry about."

Clive and Steve looked at each other.

"Really?" Clive muttered to himself.

"But how do we get back? A wave always moves away from the radiation source, doesn't it?" asked Steve.

"Not quite. As I said, the wave will carry you at phase velocity. The direction of motion will also coincide with that of the phase, which means it's simply a question of polarity. We can send a phase in any direction.

"For your return, we will only have to switch the polarity to create phase motion in the opposite direction. Then, from the point of view of the Gliese system, you will be moving towards the Solar System, not away from it."

"I hope that this at least has been checked in practice?"

Gray laughed.

"You can rest assured that we have checked that in practice."

#  10

Under the sights of the people above, Zach obediently took the automatic rifle sling off his shoulder and laid the weapon down. At once, the tall bushes at the side rustled and two armed men appeared. One of them signaled to Zach to move away from the gun on the ground. He did so, taking a few steps back. Roots and bits of garbage crackled underfoot. While one of the two kept a gun trained on him, the other went up to the pulse rifle and picked it up, whistling.

"Where did you get a gun like this, feller?"

Zach slowly lowered his arms.

"Keep your hands up!" ordered the other one.

"What if I don't?"

The two looked at each other. The one holding the pulse gun raised it, put the butt against his shoulder and aimed it at Zach. Grinning at the imperturbability of his target, he pressed the trigger. Instead of the shot, there was only a click and, at the same time, hydraulic muscles were heard working in the minivan.

The vehicle leaned heavily to one side and, an instant later, the two infantry robots stepped out one after the other. The heavy tread of the steel soldiers was rapid and precise. Relieved of its heavy burden, the minivan's springs straightened out and it sprang back up with a ringing noise.

There was swearing from above and the heads and long barrel instantly disappeared. The two down below froze in horror and immediately dropped their guns to the floor, shivering.

Zach raised his hand to face level with his fingers spread out, then closed them into a fist and pointed to the two on the ground. The electronic brains of the robots wasted no time in querying the order. An instant shower of sparks came from the barrels of the rifles attached to their shoulders as tracer bullets were fired from them. The two, who now had their hands up, fell at the same time as the two shots were heard, one on top of the other.

Zach's lips parted in a smile. He unhurriedly approached the fallen enemy and picked up the pulse gun from where it lay in the grass. There was a bright red diode shining in the handle, slowly pulsating in brightness. He gripped the handle firmly. The red light was replaced by a green one, which winked and went out. The gun had sensed the correct DNA and was ready to fire again.

Zach opened his flies. At last. He had been on the point of wetting himself. Relieved, he took out his tablet and made a sign to one of the robots to relay to him the image from its cameras. A rectangular picture appeared on the screen. It was already getting dark outside, but the image on the tablet, amplified by large top-class optical lenses, looked as if it had been taken in broad daylight with the Sun lighting the area well. Even the shadows, which had almost disappeared, were clearly distinguishable on the tablet.

He pointed up to where the heads of those aiming at him had been. One of the robots squatted down slightly before making a six-meter jump. From the jets around its hips, a barely noticeable flame flared briefly, giving him further impetus. Its metal feet came down heavily on the sandy arch above the entrance, causing an avalanche of small stones.

Through the relayed image, Zach could see two off-roaders racing away along the road at high speed, bouncing over the bumps. In their panic, they were driving too fast for such an uneven road. When they reached the first fork, they turned different ways and rapidly parted from each other. The old strategy of running off in different directions. Zach smiled wryly at such naivety. Tricks like that wouldn't do them any good.

He enlarged the image, the better to see those sitting inside. There were two in the passenger compartment of one vehicle and one in the other. The three silhouettes remained in his memory, making it easier to look for any others. It seemed they were all in the vehicles. They had been waiting for him, so they must have sniffed out something about the package inside. Such witnesses could not be left alive, and he didn't want to do that anyway...

"Targets on the road," he said softly. Bright target indicator circles appeared around the vehicles, which were jumping about like mad on the field road, leaving a long strip of dust behind them. The robot was taking aim.

"Shoot to kill!"

The deafening whoosh of missiles being fired was heard from above. Two shining points could be seen on the relay, soaring up in an anti-aircraft manoeuver, then swooping down like hawks on their prey. In the ravine, a muffled clap echoed back from the nearby hills as the missiles blew the off-roaders into little pieces.

The entrance to the cave led to an artificially constructed tunnel. Traces of building machines could be seen on the stone walls, showing where their metal drills had cut a passage of almost perfect circular form. Embedded in the floor were two rails, covered in a layer of rust but showing fresh scratches. Something had been carried on these rails quite recently. Whoever had done it, their actions had apparently attracted the attention of the gang Zach had just dealt with.

He left one robot to guard the entrance and sent the other one ahead. It stepped boldly into the unknown, illuminating the tunnel with powerful lamps. The light from the lamps ran in all directions, mixing with the red beams of the laser scanners.

The road led downwards. After about a hundred meters, it ended in massive gates. Zach looked around. There were no handles on the gates, nor any hole in which a key could be inserted, nor any visible scanners or code locks.

"Do you not have a key?" he asked the robot.

The robot did not reply. Although robots were poor conversationalists, it was definitely more pleasant crawling around this dusty hole in its company.

Zach got out the tablet with the holographic cube inserted in it and went right up to the gates. Nothing changed. He slowly moved along them, without taking his eyes off the screen. There ought to be some kind of signal...

"Use code?" A message suddenly came up.

"Do it."

Something clicked resoundingly in the gates, the metal screeched briefly and the two halves crawled slowly sideways, creaking due to the sand in the rails. The entrance to a dark hall opened up in front of him.

He signaled to the robot to take the lead. The robot moved forward at once, but as soon as its two metal feet stepped over the threshold, a bright light flared up inside.

"Stop!" ordered Zach.

He cautiously glanced inside. In the center of the hall, reaching almost to the ceiling, stood a dark grey spacecraft. Just a brief look was enough to determine what sort of craft it was. A combat drone – a predator among flying machines – patiently awaited him, its polished sides shining.

Zach whistled in delight. In terms of all the latest toys involved, this job was unlike any other. His employer was obviously not short of cash. He walked around the spacecraft, studying it from all sides and slapping its cool dark belly. Craft like these did not need a man to pilot them, but had several seats so that they could be used as shuttles for short passenger flights. Intended mainly for automatic flights, they were not renowned for comfort, but were fast and stealthy with respect to radar, particularly civil radar...

"Not bad, not bad at all," he said, addressing the infantry robot waiting patiently at the tunnel entrance. It did not seem to share in Zach's delight and made not the slightest sound in reply, but just indifferently felt out the flying machine with its laser scanner.

After completing authorization with the crypto-key stored within the holographic cube, the drone opened a hatch giving access to its cabin. Zach sat in one of the seats and connected his tablet to the onboard computer. A map appeared showing him the flight plan. It indicated that the route was to Mercury. There were no further details. This mission was becoming more and more mysterious...

Before he had time to think, the drone, without any explanations, began a countdown. Zach tried to get into the system, but the onboard computer seemed to be carrying out a completely automatic program and would not allow its passenger to alter it.

The hatch was still open. Zach looked out.

"Quick march to the cargo hold," he ordered the robot, "and call your friend."

The robot obediently went towards the belly of the drone, where shutters opened upon his arrival. It was cramped inside. There was hardly room for a man in there, let alone a two-meter monster, but the drone and the robot had been created to work as a team. The steel warrior extended his manipulators, gripped special locks, and pulled itself into the hold. It folded its legs, retracted the projecting part of its metal body inward like a spider, and reduced itself to the size of a large trunk. In this shape, it fitted ideally into the cavity.

The heavy tread of the second robot could be heard from outside. This one fitted itself into a second compartment in the other side of the belly, the shutters to which had already been opened by the drone.

Zach flopped back into his seat and strapped himself in, keeping an eye on the countdown. His work always included an element of secrecy, but he usually had some idea of the mission from the very beginning. After all, it was up to him to decide whether he could take on a new job, but not this time. He knew precisely nothing about this assignment. He had not intended to retreat from his principles and had stated his position clearly.

"You know, it's really not in your interests to hire me blind. I value my reputation," (Zach could hardly keep a straight face as he said this), "so I only undertake work I know I can do. If I don't know what the mission is, I can't give such a guarantee. So..."

His explanations had been interrupted by a number on the screen of the videophone on which the conversation was taking place.

"I told you, I have to think about it. You certainly shouldn't be revealing any coordinates to me until..."

"Those are not coordinates, that's what we'll pay you."

Thinking later about what had happened, Zach could not think of a single reasonable explanation, except that his brain had simply switched off. With that sort of remuneration, he would no longer need his reputation as a man who could do anything.

So Zach had agreed and now he had to stick with it and be ready for anything. And he was actually ready for most things, but Mercury!? Hell and damnation, he would never have thought of Mercury!

Apart from a number of completely automatic industrial complexes, the planet closest to the Sun was empty. The radiation emitted by the nearby star was so high that it was virtually impossible for people to stay there. Massive protection against the deadly radiation was required constantly. It was only possible to go out onto the surface of the planet in certain latitudes, or on the night side, and as dawn approached it was necessary to hide deep under the surface. And although night on Mercury lasted half an Earth year, what tasks could there possibly be in such conditions, in this fiery desert, particularly under such secrecy?

The countdown reached zero. The drone rocked, and the platform on which its feet, like the claws of a bird of prey, were resting, rolled out on the rails. Zach touched the sensor on the pulse gun display to check how full the magazine was. It was full to its total capacity. The more that was paid for a job, the less you could afford to relax your vigilance. He laid the gun across his knees, keeping his finger near the trigger.

He was almost shocked to find that no surprises were waiting for him outside. The drone unhurriedly left the cave, stopped and closed the hatch. It then initiated the brief starting sequence. Such machines were not accustomed to having fragile flesh-and-blood creatures inside them that could barely withstand even 10 g, but knowing about the passenger, the computer brain decided to keep the acceleration down for a smooth start.

It was only relatively smooth, of course. Zach's eyes went dark and he could hardly keep his mind from jumping out of his body as the drone picked up speed, a grey dot moving up into the sky. At such overloads, the drone only had to get beyond the atmosphere and reach escape velocity, then it would switch off the engines and the flight would proceed smoothly thereafter. Being virtually unable to see anything, Zach began counting out loud the seconds of flight remaining until they had enough kinetic energy to escape the embrace of Earth's gravity.

The sky outside the thick glass quickly became black. The atmosphere had been left behind, but the drone, controlled by its installed program, had no intention of slackening off. The speed continued to increase rapidly, but as if that were not enough, it decided it was time for maneuvers. It began to transform its flight trajectory into an arc of ever-decreasing radius.

"What the hell?"

Zach's shout of desperation came out only as a suppressed croak. With the last of his strength, he began tensing his stomach muscles. Once tensed up, his sight cleared for a second, but he only had to slacken the pressure for his field of vision to fill with darkness again, as if ink were being poured into his eyes. At the same time, he was slowly but surely losing consciousness.

He gritted his teeth and exerted all his force. His clothes were as soaking wet as if he had been out in torrential rain. His ability to see details returned for an instant and he immediately turned his eyes to the radar display. There was a bright spot on the broken line of the trajectory. Or was he seeing spots before his eyes?

He was beginning to lose it again. The image became blurred and Zach made an effort to fill his lungs with oxygen and give the muscles forcing blood to his brain a short rest. Then he clenched his fists and repeated the effort.

Meanwhile, the spot on the screen had grown noticeably. It was the radar echo of a big passenger liner! It appeared to have lifted off from the nearby spaceport and was now heading towards the orbital station for transfers and refueling. Zach had no strength left. He slackened his stomach and was now completely blind. The sounds gradually died away. He had almost lost consciousness...

It returned, along with violet flames flaring from the front jets, easily visible from the pilot's seat. The drone reduced its overload and was now steadily slowing down. Its nose was pointing directly towards the spot of light.

They were rushing towards each other. Were they going to ram it? What was this, a terrorist act? That would explain the sky-high reward. It made no difference how much you promised if you wouldn't have to pay anyway...

But the drone had no intention of ending its existence as a kamikaze. It continued to reduce speed and as it reached the rendezvous point, it was almost synchronized with the liner. Approaching tail first, it was now pressing itself very carefully to the liner's belly, the fire of the giant ship's terawatt engines just a few meters away. Against the huge passenger liner, the drone looked tiny, like a pilot fish next to the tail of a gigantic shark.

Consciousness returned and Zach's head began to return to normal, as if after a tough fight. It was clear now what was going on. The drone was hiding in the radio shadow of the liner. When leaving the atmosphere and until leaving near-Earth space, civil radars thoroughly searched every cubic meter of space, in which there was a great deal of traffic of various kinds. But under the belly of a big passenger liner, there was a good chance of leaving Earth unnoticed. Only military spacecraft could perform such tricks, and not even all of them.

If he couldn't set off openly from Earth, what the devil sort of meeting was he flying to? Having gotten himself involved, he felt like a fly caught up in a web spun by a huge experienced spider. The job not only reeked of danger, but of death too and now he had no choice. Even if he managed to survive to the end of the mission, he would not escape his employers alive. Still, we'll see. There's always a chance...

For now, however, he simply lay back and settled in comfortably to enjoy the flight. Not only had the drone flown on a completely automatic program, it had also blocked all the control systems. Zach had been given the role not so much of a passenger, but more of a prisoner. Even access to radio communication was cut off. That was not good, not good at all. All kinds of things might happen in space, but he would be unable to call for help.

He partly closed his eyes. Why go into details? They would only spoil his mood. When you have to take a big risk, it's better not to think about it. Yes, thinking about a risk he could not control would only spoil his mood...

#  11

The strict secrecy conditions imposed on the mission gave it an element of surprise for all those taking part in the expedition. With the exception of the captains and first pilots of the spacecraft, no-one knew exactly from which part of the Solar System they would be making the jump to the Gliese system.

As on the last mission to the gravitational anomaly, Steve and Clive were at the head of the scientists. Their previous experience of communicating with the aliens had resulted in them being given the authority to take difficult decisions and have the last word in unclear situations.

Also on the ship were the crew, with the addition of a platoon of SSS for security, and some of the mission's scientific personnel. The astrophysicists accompanying the expedition were not the most numerous group, but were under a restriction that did not apply to the other scientists: they were the only ones who were not allowed to travel together on the same ship up to the very moment of their return to the Solar System.

This rule was based on the value of their knowledge of deep space. If something went wrong and the ships in the convoy ended up scattered all over the Galaxy, each of them would be able to determine their location in unexplored space and send an emergency signal to Earth. Their knowledge, unlike that of the pilots, was not restricted to navigation only within the limits of the Solar System.

After leaving lunar orbit, long hours of waiting followed. Clive made good use of the time by trying to absorb as much information about the Gliese system as possible, but Steve decided it would be much better to have a long deep sleep. Twelve hours later, having slept well and with his stomach full of food from the ship's galley, he immersed himself in a novel. When would he get another opportunity for some light reading?

Pacing around in his cabin a few days later, Steve suddenly sensed that the ship was changing course. They were finally turning onto their set trajectory.

He did not have to wait long for things to get started. Forty minutes later, the captain assembled everyone on board except the guards in the pilot's compartment. Steve was one of the last to arrive, after all the seats had been taken. Just after he entered, the pilot looked inquiringly at the captain, who shook his head.

"We'll wait for the others," he said quietly. "In the meantime, you can open the windows."

The pilot nodded, pressed something on his console and the armor plating over the front windows slowly slid aside. The starry sky became visible through the multilaminar glass and although no planetary landmark could be seen and neither could the Sun, Steve soon worked out their direction.

On the left was the constellation Scorpio, on the right Virgo, and between them, directly on their course, was Libra, towards which their route lay. Steve could not determine by eye from where in the Solar System they were starting, however, and his thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of the other two crew members, breathing hard. It seemed they had run from the very tail end of the ship.

The captain looked at those present, counted them and, satisfied with the result, cleared his throat.

"So, we're all here."

The pilot took this as a signal for action. After a few rapid manipulations on his console, he nodded to the engineer sitting next to him.

"We're ready, sir," reported the engineer. "Final synchronization on your command."

"Begin."

Through the window, they could see that a small shaft had opened up on the bow end of the hull plating. A massive object of cylindrical shape, fixed to a long rod, poked out of it. The telescopic tube began to open up, extending forward like a sword.

At first it seemed to Steve that its tip was grey all over, but then it suddenly began to rotate. Reflections of their own ship and of the Sun shining behind them flashed by in it. It turned out that the cylinder was not a single solid object, but that its surface was broken down into a system of mirrors. It gradually increased its rate of rotation, spinning faster and faster.

"That thing out there is the synchronizer," explained the captain in a loud voice. "We use it to carry out what we call deep synchronization. This means synchronization in speed and relative position of our group's ships in space.

"In case you don't already know, we have to fly in the form of a certain geometrical figure – all at the same speed and every ship strictly in its position. Because we shall all jump to Gliese together, and for us all to arrive together, our position relative to each other must be very precisely calibrated.

"We shall be making the interstellar part of our journey on the crest of a wave. All the ships have to be exactly where the very same phase passes through. If someone makes a mistake in speed or position, in the best case he will fly off the crest before reaching Gliese and in the worst, he will end up God knows where..."

"Or will disintegrate," added the pilot softly, earning an angry look from the captain.

"Are those mirrors inside it?" asked Clive.

"It has a system of lasers inside," explained the engineer. "We send a beam to a prism, where it is split in two. One part goes on to the synchronizations of the other ships, passes through them and returns. Here we put them together again and if everything is correct..."

"We see the interference picture, right?" said Clive, finishing the sentence for him.

"Right. But only if each ship with its synchronization is exactly in its position. If only one of them is just slightly out of place, we lose the interference picture."

"What is the permissible error?" asked Steve.

"Ten nanometers," replied the captain.

Several people whistled at the same time, as if on cue.

The engineer pointed to one of the screens.

"The synchronization sends the picture here. As soon as you see alternating light and dark lines, we are ready to jump."

He switched the image on the largest screen to a schematic depiction of the whole formation. Against a black background, it showed points floating above a three-dimensional system of coordinates. Each one was marked by a serial number, followed by about ten digital parameters.

"These numbers are important now. They are the deltas between the vectors of calculated and actual velocity, plus spatial coordinates. They should all be at zero..."

"Engines stop!" ordered the captain.

The pilot gestured to start the program.

"Switch off thrust in three, two, one... All engines stopped!"

The ship's barely noticeable vibration gradually dwindled to nothing. With the engines switched off, they were flying in space, away from the planets, in a straight line and without acceleration. The other ships could start synchronization at last. After stopping their own engines, they set about correcting their position and speed with the aid of special jets, ejecting high-speed plasma in strictly dosed, milligram portions.

Minutes passed by. The parameter values changed rapidly, jumping backwards and forwards. It seemed they would never settle on the required value. Suddenly all the values for one ship jumped to zero. The computer framed it in green on the diagram.

"S3-V ready," reported the engineer in a satisfied tone.

"Synchronization completed," reported the computer when the other ships had achieved the same.

As if on command, everyone turned their heads towards the monitor for the detector. Instead of the interference picture, it showed a pulsating point.

"Is that the way it should be?" asked someone cautiously.

"Where are the strips?" asked someone else.

The engineer stroked his chin thoughtfully.

"Strange. Everything is in the right position..." he muttered to himself after a brief pause. "I don't understand..."

The captain went up to the engineer's seat.

"What's the problem?"

"There appears to be an error in the calculations. All the ships are in position, but there is no interference."

"Could the synchronizer calibration be wrong?"

"Maybe. I can't say from here. We'll need an EVA."

The captain turned to the technicians.

"How long will it take to check the synchronizer?"

"At least four hours."

"You'd better get a move on, then."

"Skip, to save time, couldn't we call the base? Let them recheck the calculations," suggested the pilot. "They could check it quicker than we can."

"No. We'll try to sort it out ourselves first. We'll only break radio silence as a last resort."

The captain turned to the others.

"Everyone apart from the astrophysicists to their positions."

Muttering, they went to the exit, leaving plenty of room in the pilot's compartment for Steve and Clive to sit in empty seats and observe the process. Two people in space suits soon appeared outside. They were accompanied by a robot assistant towing the servicing equipment.

All three, attached by long cables like umbilical cords to the mother ship, floated towards the rotating cylinder of the synchronizer. This continued to rotate extremely quickly on the tip of the telescopic tube, which was a good two hundred meters long. When they reached the synchronizer and began pottering about around it, the repair men looked tiny.

Watching the monitors, Steve saw the green frame around one of the ships disappear but soon reappear. A minute later the same thing happened with another ship.

"Why does the frame keep disappearing and reappearing? We're flying with engines switched off, aren't we?"

"Residual thrust, perhaps?" suggested Clive.

The engineer shook his head.

"That's due to the thermal expansion of the structures under solar radiation. The tolerances are very fine, so even something as small as that can be seen."

"What if this desynchronization took place during a jump?" asked Clive.

"We took that into account. The system knows about these distortions and finds those moments in time when synchronization can be guaranteed within 30 seconds."

It was silent in the pilot's compartment. Long minutes elapsed. An hour went by, then a second, then a third... Clive was fidgeting more and more in his chair. His impatience needed an outlet.

"What the hell are they doing out there?"

"They're checking all the parameters. It's a time-consuming job."

"Surely they've had long enough by now?"

"Be patient," interjected the commander. "They're doing all they can. The synchronizer is a tricky thing. It's not like checking batteries..."

"Skip!" was heard from the loudspeakers. It was one of the repair men calling. "Everything's fine here. The synchronizer is running like clockwork."

"Roger, come back in."

The captain turned to the engineer.

"Any ideas?"

The engineer shrugged.

"Looks like an error in the calculations, but we won't be able to check that ourselves in time. We'll have to call the base."

The captain made no reply, just picked up his mug and went to the exit. He stopped in front of the door.

"I'll be back in ten minutes. If no-one has had any ideas by then, we'll make the call."

As soon as the door had closed behind him, Clive sprang to life. He jumped out of his seat and went up to the engineer.

"Show me the calculations," he demanded.

"They're very complex. You can't do anything on your own, you'll need a whole team..."

"I understand," interrupted Clive. "This is the file, isn't it?"

Without waiting for permission, he started looking through the documents on the engineer's console. The engineer gently pushed Clive away.

"Just a minute. I'll give you access to the calculations. Done. Now you can look at them on your own console," he said, inserting himself between his console and Clive.

Clive returned to his own position and immersed himself in reading. In less than five minutes, he laughed.

"I think I know the reason."

The engineer, with an exaggeratedly tired expression, turned his seat towards Clive.

"So what is it?"

"This wasn't the first calculation, was it?"

"That's right. We had to delete the first one because we were afraid it was compromised."

"OK, so it's a different version. The calculations are based on the initial sequence of the location of the ships in the formation."

"Yes, so what?"

"The thing is, in the first version, the heaviest ship, the transporter, was at the tail end, but now it's in the middle..."

"I still don't see how that's connected to..."

Clive rolled his eyes up towards the ceiling. He had never lost this childish habit, Steve thought to himself. It's not surprising that few people could work with him.

"Really, a child could understand it! We have the synchronizer ahead of us on a rod, but on the transporter, it's in line with the center of mass. The loaded transport has so much mass that with a tolerance of only 10 nanometers, it causes quite a large gravity well and interferes with the laser beams of your synchronizers.

"Did you take account of the deviations of the geodesic lines close to the heaviest ship? When it is in the center of the formation, not at the tail end, the deviations are laid on top of each other, because the beams from the other ships pass through its synchronizer several times."

The engineer's face changed when he took in the sense of what Clive was saying. His expression of smug superiority vanished instantly. Looking like a whipped dog, he turned back to the screen in front of him. After instructing the computer to calculate the correction, he brought the synchronizer's task up to date and sent the calculations to the cargo ship, which activated its micro-jets. Almost instantly, the laser spot of the synchronizer changed to the interference picture. Clive chuckled contentedly.

"Skip, we've found the reason," the pilot said into the microphone.

This time it did not take the team anything like as long to assemble in the pilot's compartment. Their burning curiosity was apparent.

"In the repeat calculation," explained the engineer, "we started from the same formation sequence as before, but we forgot to take into account that the transport ship is now in the middle, not at the tail end. And its mass is greater than that of all the other ships put together. Due to its new position, certain relativistic effects were introduced and we forgot to allow for them. After the president's unplanned chatter, we did the calculations in a hurry and we missed this point."

"But why was the transport placed in the middle?" asked Steve.

The engineer shrugged.

"That was the order, I have no idea why."

"OK, that's not important. We'll leave the investigation of that question to the historians," said the captain, rolling up his sleeves. "Right now we have more important things to do."

He signaled to the computer to call the Lunar Base, while switching on a small radio with his other hand. Static from the ether was heard from the speakers.

"Base, synchronization completed. Ready to jump."

"Roger. Twenty seconds to jump!"

The countdown proceeded rapidly.

Steve's heartbeat became louder and faster, just like his first ride on a roller coaster when he was a child. He had spent the whole of the week before imagining what it would be like to rush along the rails at tremendous speed and perform crazy loops, but when the day arrived and his car finally began climbing slowly to the top of the first peak, his heart fell into his boots. Gripping the handrail in fear and panic, he would have given anything to be safely back on the ground.

"Jump!" proclaimed the engineer loudly, his voice a tone higher than usual with excitement.

"Good lu..." The operator's response from the Lunar Base was cut off in mid-word. Space, as seen through the thick multilaminar glass, suddenly became black. The stars that had shone so brightly suddenly went out. The interference lines disappeared. The data graphs from the sensors of space and the cosmic microwave background radiation gradually went down to zero. The analogue radio, set to low volume, went dead in an instant. Instead of the sound of static, there was only absolute silence.

END OF EPISODE ONE

###

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Albert Sartison, 2016
