The director shrugged his shoulders. “Sit down,” he said. He was never one to dispense with the formalities—he just took a little time to get around to them, on occasion.
We sat down. So did Schumann.
“Earth Spirit checked in with Marsbase the moment she came out of hyperspace,” he said. “She also got on the priority beam to Earth. Jason Harmall—he’s a space agency exec at Marsbase—will be jetting up here to meet her. He’s bringing a woman named Angelina Hesse—does that mean anything to you?”
I glanced at Zeno. “She’s a biologist,” I said. “Physiology—linked to our field. She’s very good.”
“Apparently,” Schumann went on, “she thinks highly of you, too. She named the pair of you as essential personnel. Harmail requested your secondment. A request from Harmall is the closest thing to a royal command I ever face.”
The whole thing had been ticking over in my mind for several minutes by now, and it fell into place at last.
“Jesus Christ!” I said. “They’ve found it! Earth Three!”
“I think,” murmured Zeno, “my friend means Calicos Three.”
Either way, it stacked up the same. We had twelve worlds on the books that boasted so-called Earthlike biology, but only two of them were worlds where human beings—or Calicoi—could walk around in comfort. The rest had no life more complicated than protista, and not enough oxygen to allow a man to breathe. For fifty years we’d been looking for the third world. It looked very much as if I’d hit the jackpot by being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Politically speaking, Earth Three might belong to Jason Harmall (whoever he might be), but biologically, it was going to be mine. And Zeno’s, of course. Not to mention Angelina Hesse...but I was sure there’d be enough to go around.
“I’m not sure that I understand,” said Zeno, in the meantime. “Everyone seems to be acting as though there were some urgency about this matter. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to have the Earth Spirit return to Earth orbit in order to be re-equipped?”
“Earth orbit is a long way away,” said Schumann. “Star Station is on the other side of the sun just now. Earth Spirit has to get back with the minimum possible delay. You aren’t going on any pleasure trip. There’s trouble.”
“How much?” I said. “And what kind?”
The director shook his head. “No information,” he said. “We’ve just been told what to do. She’ll be docking in thirty-six hours. Can you two get your affairs in order by then? Do you have someone who can take over necessary work in progress?”
I shrugged, having virtually lost interest in work in progress. “You must know something,” I said.
“Not about the kind of problems they’ve run into out there,” he said. “All I know is that the HSB that the Earth Spirit homed in on was lit by another ship—the Ariadne.”
“I never heard of an FTL ship called the Ariadne,” I said.
“That,” he said, “is the point. The Ariadne, so the reference tapes assure me, left Earth orbit three hundred and fifty years ago. She went the long way around.”
I’d already had my fill of surprises. My mind could no longer boggle. “Well, well,” I said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. “So one of the flying freezers finally thawed out. Plan B worked out after all.”
“I’m sorry,” put in Zeno. “I don’t quite understand.” I looked at Schumann, but he just raised his eyebrows and let me tell it.
“It was long before the golden moment when our two species made the marvelous discovery that they were not alone,” I said. “When we first realized that hyperspace gave us a gateway to the universe but that we couldn’t navigate in it. We lost a number of ships which couldn’t find their way home before hoisting HSB-One. That solved half the problem—but the probes we sent out, jumping at random, kept coming out in the middle of nowhere. We realized for the first time how big space is and how little solar systems are. People got depressed about having the means to dodge the problems of relativity without having any obvious way to make it pay off. Without other HSBs to use as targets, hyperspace was just one big sea of nothing. It dawned on people pretty quickly that the only immediately obvious way to establish a hyperspace route to Alpha Centauri—or even to Pluto—was to transport an HSB on an orthodox ship at sub-light speed. It made the business of opening up the universe a pretty slow and painful one, but it was all we had—and all we have.
“Nowadays, of course, we use robot ships, which we dispatch with clinical regularity from Earth orbit, targeting them at all the G-type stars in the neighborhood. In those days, it wasn’t so obvious that that was the way to play it. We didn’t know then how very few of those stars would have planets with usable habitats—though we might have guessed that the neighborhood wasn’t exactly overpopulated by virtue of the fact that no one else had any HSBs already hoisted. The wise guys of the day decided that if hyperspace was a bust as far as quick access to the universe was concerned, they might as well put some eggs in another basket. The flying freezers were ships carrying a crew, mostly in suspended animation, and passengers—mostly conveniently packaged as fertilized eggs ready to be incubated in artificial wombs. The idea was that they were to travel from star to star, planting beacons but not hanging around. Eventually, it was thought, they’d find a new Earth, and could set about the business of colonization right away.”
“I don’t see how that makes sense,” said Zeno.
“It doesn’t,” said Schumann. “Not now. But it seemed to, then. Now we know that there are very, very few habitable worlds; and we also know that anywhere we can live is likely to be inhabited already. Neither of those things was obvious in the early days. We had no standards for comparison. There was a popular myth, bred by a couple of hundred years of speculation, that somewhere out in space we might find a paradise planet—green and lovely and hospitable, just waiting for people to move in. In fact, we thought there might be dozens of them. The idea of colonizing twenty or thirty planets via hyperspace seemed out of the question. Too difficult to sustain a warp field around anything much bigger than a touring caravan—too many trips to transport the essentials. Now, of course, if we really did find ourselves knocking at the Gates of Eden, we wouldn’t care if it took a thousand trips—because we’d know it was once in a dozen lifetimes. They were hoping it would be a regular thing; far easier to do the trick in one fell swoop. The colony ships seemed to make sense.”
“It wasn’t just that,” I pointed out. “This was the last part of the twenty-first century. The time of the Crash. We were making big strides in space, and stumbling over our feet at home. Earth itself was in a bad way. The colony ships made another kind of sense: they were a kind of insurance policy. Seeds...in case the parent plant shriveled up and died. Eggs in more than one basket, see?”
“I think so,” answered Zeno.
I turned my attention back to Schumann.
“How far did the Ariadne get?”
He shook his head. “No details—but the records show that she never planted a beacon. She never passed through a single system. That means she was rerouted from every one she got close enough to survey, probably with minimum slowdown. Taking into account the relativistic effects, I’d say she may have covered a hundred and fifty or a hundred and eighty light-years.”
Known space, as we are pleased to call it, is a bumpy spheroid about sixty light-years in radius. Only the G-type stars within it are “known,” of course. and not all of them. We could have done better, if we’d only worked harder. More ships, more strategy, more sense. A station a hundred and eighty light-years away—even if it were just a station, and not a living world at all, would be a very useful stepping stone.
“Toward galactic center?” I asked.
He nodded. After a moment’s pause, he said: “That’s all there