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Q: Having lost nine years.
"That's right. Just like me and the rest of the crew of Phoenix. The colonists left the Pluto transmitter two months after we did."
Q: What are the chances of terraforming B-3 someday?
Karin was glad to drop the subject of the colony ships. Somehow she felt that she had failed those first potential colonists of another star system. She said, 'Pretty good, someday. I'm just talking off the top of my head, you understand. I imagine it would take thousands of years, and would involve seeding the atmosphere with tailored bacteria and waiting for them to turn methane and ammonia and hydrocarbons into air. At the moment it'll pay us better to go on looking for worlds around other stars. It's so bloody easy, with these interstellar drop ships."
Them was nodding among the newstapers. They knew about drop ships, and they had been briefed. In principle there was no difference between Lazarus II and the drop ships circling every planet and most of the interesting moons and asteroids in the solar system. A drop ship need not be moving at the same velocity as its cargo. The Phoenix, at rest with respect to Sol and the Centaurus suns, had emerged from Lazarus II's receiver cage at a third of lightspeed.
"The point is that you can use a drop ship more than once," Karin went on. "By now Lazarus II is one and a third light-years past Centaurus. We burned most of its fuel to get the ship up to speed, but there's still a maneuver reserve. Its next target is an orange-yellow dwarf, Epsilon Indi. Lazarus II will be there in about twenty eight years. Then maybe we'll send another colony group."
Q: Doctor Sagan, you were as far from Sol as anyone in history has ever gotten. What was it like out there?
Karen giggled. 'We were as far from any star as anyone's ever gotten. It was a long night. Maybe it was getting to us. We had a bad moment when we thought there was an alien ship coming up behind us." She sobered, for that moment of relief had cost six people dearly. "It turned out to be Lazarus. I'm afraid that's more bad news. Lazarus should have been decelerating. It wasn't. We're afraid something's happened to their drive."
That caused some commotion. It developed that many of the newstapers had never heard of the first Lazarus. Karin started to explain...and that turned out to be a mistake.
The first interstellar spacecraft had been launched in 2004, thirty-one years ago.
Lazarus had been ten years in the building, but far more than ten years of labor had gone into her. Her life-support systems ran in a clear line of development back to the first capsules to orbit Earth. The first fusion-electric power plants had much in common with her main drive, and her hydrogen fuel tanks were the result of several decades of trial and error. Liquid hydrogen is tricky stuff. Centuries of medicine had produced suspended-animation treatments that allowed Lazarus to carry six crew members with life-support supplies sufficient for two.
The ship was lovely-at least, her re-entry system was lovely, a swing-wing streamlined exploration vehicle as big as any hypersonic passenger plane. Fully assembled, she looked like a haphazard collection of junk. But she was loved.
There had been displacement booths in 2004: the network of passenger teleportation had already replaced other forms of transportation over most of the world. The cargo ships that lifted Lazarus' components into orbit had been fueled in flight by JumpShift units in the tanks. It was a pity that Lazarus could not, take advantage of such a method. But conservation of momentum held. Fuel droplets entering Lazarus's tanks at a seventh of lightspeed would tear them apart.
So Lazarus had left Earth at the end of the Corliss accelerator, an improbably tall tower standing up from a flat asteroid a mile across. The fuel tanks-most of Lazarus's mass-had been launched first. Then the ship itself, with enough maneuvering reserve to run them down. Lazarus had left Earth like a string of toy balloons, and telescopes had watched as she assembled herself in deep space.
She had not been launched into the unknown. The telescopes of Ceres Base had found planets orbiting Alpha Centaurus B. Two of these might be habitable. Failing that, there might at least be seas from which hydrogen could be extracted for a return voyage.
"The first drop ship was launched six years later," Karin told them. "We should have waited. I was five when they launched Lazarus, but I've been told that everyone thought that teleportation couldn't possibly be used for space exploration because of velocity differences. If we'd waited we could have put a drop ship receiver cage on Lazarus and taken out the life-support system. As it was, we didn't launch Lazarus II until-" She stopped to add up dates. "Seventeen years ago. 2018."
Q: Weren't you expecting Lazarus to pass you?
"Not so soon. In fact, we had this timed pretty well. If everything had gone right, the crew of Lazarus I would have found a string of colony ships pouring out of Lazarus II as it fell across the system. They could have joined up to explore the system, and later joined the colony if that was feasible, or come home on the colony return ship if it wasn't."
Q: As it is, they're in deep shit.
"I'm afraid so. Can you really say that on teevee?"
There were chuckles at her naiveté.
Q: What went wrong? Any idea?
"They gave us a full report with their distress signal. There was some trouble with the plasma pinch effect, and no parts to do a full repair. They tried ru
Q What are your plans for rescue?
Karin made her second error. "I don't know. We just got back two days ago, and we've spent that time traveling. It's easy enough to pump energy into an incoming transition particle to compensate for a jump in potential energy, but the only drop ship we've got that can absorb potential energy is at Mercury. We couldn't just flick in from Pluto; we'd have been broiled. We had to flick in to Earth orbit by way of Mercury, then go down in a shuttlecraft." She closed her eyes to think. "It'll be difficult. By now Lazarus must be half a light-year beyond Alpha Centaurus, and Lazarus II more than twice that far. We probably can't use Lazarus II in a rescue attempt."
Q: Couldn't you drop a receiver cage from Lazarus II, then wait until Lazarus has almost caught up with it?
She smiled indulgently. At least they were asking intelligent questions. "Won't work. Lazarus II must have changed course already for Epsilon Indi. Whatever happens is likely to take a long time."
Teevee was mostly news these days. The entertainment programs had been largely taken over by cassettes, which could be sold devoid of advertisements, and which could be aimed at more selective audiences.
And newspapers had died out; but headlines had not. The a