had said that, but then he had to admit now and then that his father said wise things.
He stared with drooping eyes through the foggy gel as the prep team gave him a collective thumbs up and lowered and sealed the coverplate into place.
"Can you . . . also . . . patch . . . outside . . . telemetry."
Ivan correctly interpreted Matt's slurring words. A virtual screen popped up in Matt's vision, seeming to hover in front of his eyes but with clarity unimpeded by the mistiness of the gel. The screen patched into the prep room camera. Technicians were milling about, connecting to the pod and then disconnecting them. Matt drifted in and out of consciousness.
He'd had dreams that were more vivid. Certainly he'd had dreams that were more interesting.
As the gel affected his time sense, Matt saw the technicians begin to dart back and forth frenetically. A fork lift hurled toward the pod and then raced outside to a launch pad. The view switched to a launch pad camera and the shuttle countdown ticked away as if minutes were seconds. A flash of light and smoke, and the shuttle that contained the pod that contained Matt was a speck in the Kansas sky. Ivan smoothly transitioned external camera views from ground to shuttle hull. Matt watched the sky turn from blue to black and the Earth become a shrinking blue and white ball.
Matt was certain he was in a state of awareness the whole time, but it should have taken hours for the shuttle and interorbital transports to deliver him to the L-5 pod launch station in trailing lunar orbit, yet it only seemed like a few more seconds. It should have taken hours to attach the pod to all the square kilometers of its magnetic sail but that seemed to take no time at all.
Ivan switched from camera views to Mission Control graphics. The schematic showed the proton cannon array focusing beams on the magnetic sail. The view wasn't to scale, of course. In reality, even the building-sized cannons and city-sized sails were specks compared to the distances separating them.
It all seemed so natural now, so obvious, but Matt remembered back to when he was very young, and had thought that interstellar travel was accomplished with starships with star drives that moved faster than light, just like in the old-fashioned science fiction movies. In reality, after almost two centuries of whole-hearted trying, human physics still couldn't break the light barrier. Even to reach a fraction of the speed of light required enormous expenditures of time and energy. Enter proton beam propulsion: a humongous infrastructure that remained in place to push a tiny payload to the stars.
"Proton Cannon Array Number One reports that it is charging," Ivan said. "Pod navigation systems report magnetic sail is receiving proton stream. Acceleration .001 gee. Acceleration .002 gee . . . . "
From thousands of kilometers away, the cannons in the array were firing their proton beams at the pod's magnetic sail. The protons bounced off the sail's magnetic field, pushing the sail and hence the pod out of Earth orbit and toward interstellar space.
Matt was about to tell Ivan not to bother counting all the milligees, but then it seemed no time at all had passed and Ivan was saying, "Acceleration at 2.0 standard gee, acceleration stabilized."
Once more, Matt drifted in and out of consciousness. Seconds passed, yet the pod chronometer insisted they were days. Proton Cannon Array Number One, in orbit around Earth, handed Matt off to Array Two, a hundred million kilometers away and well off the solar ecliptic. Array Two handed to Array Three, then . . . Matt lost count. And then there were no more arrays, and the pressure of the beam declined to negligible, and the Distance To Sol reading increased by a few billion kilometers every time his attention drifted.
In his state of quasi-sleep, Matt mused that being pushed by a proton beam was such a strange way to travel between
He stared with drooping eyes through the foggy gel as the prep team gave him a collective thumbs up and lowered and sealed the coverplate into place.
"Can you . . . also . . . patch . . . outside . . . telemetry."
Ivan correctly interpreted Matt's slurring words. A virtual screen popped up in Matt's vision, seeming to hover in front of his eyes but with clarity unimpeded by the mistiness of the gel. The screen patched into the prep room camera. Technicians were milling about, connecting to the pod and then disconnecting them. Matt drifted in and out of consciousness.
He'd had dreams that were more vivid. Certainly he'd had dreams that were more interesting.
As the gel affected his time sense, Matt saw the technicians begin to dart back and forth frenetically. A fork lift hurled toward the pod and then raced outside to a launch pad. The view switched to a launch pad camera and the shuttle countdown ticked away as if minutes were seconds. A flash of light and smoke, and the shuttle that contained the pod that contained Matt was a speck in the Kansas sky. Ivan smoothly transitioned external camera views from ground to shuttle hull. Matt watched the sky turn from blue to black and the Earth become a shrinking blue and white ball.
Matt was certain he was in a state of awareness the whole time, but it should have taken hours for the shuttle and interorbital transports to deliver him to the L-5 pod launch station in trailing lunar orbit, yet it only seemed like a few more seconds. It should have taken hours to attach the pod to all the square kilometers of its magnetic sail but that seemed to take no time at all.
Ivan switched from camera views to Mission Control graphics. The schematic showed the proton cannon array focusing beams on the magnetic sail. The view wasn't to scale, of course. In reality, even the building-sized cannons and city-sized sails were specks compared to the distances separating them.
It all seemed so natural now, so obvious, but Matt remembered back to when he was very young, and had thought that interstellar travel was accomplished with starships with star drives that moved faster than light, just like in the old-fashioned science fiction movies. In reality, after almost two centuries of whole-hearted trying, human physics still couldn't break the light barrier. Even to reach a fraction of the speed of light required enormous expenditures of time and energy. Enter proton beam propulsion: a humongous infrastructure that remained in place to push a tiny payload to the stars.
"Proton Cannon Array Number One reports that it is charging," Ivan said. "Pod navigation systems report magnetic sail is receiving proton stream. Acceleration .001 gee. Acceleration .002 gee . . . . "
From thousands of kilometers away, the cannons in the array were firing their proton beams at the pod's magnetic sail. The protons bounced off the sail's magnetic field, pushing the sail and hence the pod out of Earth orbit and toward interstellar space.
Matt was about to tell Ivan not to bother counting all the milligees, but then it seemed no time at all had passed and Ivan was saying, "Acceleration at 2.0 standard gee, acceleration stabilized."
Once more, Matt drifted in and out of consciousness. Seconds passed, yet the pod chronometer insisted they were days. Proton Cannon Array Number One, in orbit around Earth, handed Matt off to Array Two, a hundred million kilometers away and well off the solar ecliptic. Array Two handed to Array Three, then . . . Matt lost count. And then there were no more arrays, and the pressure of the beam declined to negligible, and the Distance To Sol reading increased by a few billion kilometers every time his attention drifted.
In his state of quasi-sleep, Matt mused that being pushed by a proton beam was such a strange way to travel between
Similar Books
