A Hole In Space

"Uh huh. And how fast is the rescue ship moving?"

"...Oh." Lazarus would flash past the rescue ship at a seventh of lightspeed.

"We've got better ships than the best they could do in 2004. Sure we do. But, censored dammit, they don't travel the same way!"

"Well, yes, but there's got to be-"

"You're cheating a little," Karin said. "A rescue ship of the Lazarus type could get up to speed and still have the fuel to get home. Meanwhile you send a drop ship to intercept Lazarus. The rescue ship drops through the receiver cage, picks them up-hmm."

"It would have to be self-teleporting, wouldn't it? Like Phoenix."

"Yah. Hmmm."

"If you put a transmitter hull around something the size of Lazarus, fuel tanks included, you'd pretty near double the weight. It couldn't get up to speed and then decelerate afterward. You'd need more fuel, more weight, a bigger hull. Maybe it couldn't be done at all, but sure as hell we're talking about something a lot bigger than Lazarus."

There had never been another ship as big as Lazarus.

Karin said, "Yah. You'd ditch a lot of fuel tanks getting up to speed, but still-hmmm. Fuel to get home. Dammit, Whyte, I left Earth nine years ago. You've had nine years to improve your space industry! What have you done?"

"We've got lots better drop ships," Whyte said quietly. Then, "Don't you understand? We're improving our ships, but not in the direction of a bigger and better Lazarus."

Silence.

"Then there's the drop ship itself. We've never built a receiver cage big enough to take another Lazarus. Phoenix isn't big; it doesn't have to go anywhere. I won't swear it's impossible to build a drop ship that size, but I wouldn't doubt it either. It doesn't matter. We can't build the rescue ship. We don't even have the technology to build Lazarus again! It's gone, junked when we started building drop ships!"

"Like those damn big bridges in San Francisco Bay," whispered Karin. "Sorry, gentlemen. I hadn't thought it out."

Jerryberry said, "You've still got the Corliss accelerator. And we still use reaction drives."

"Sure. For interplanetary speeds. And drop ships."

Jerryberry drained his Screwdriver in three swallows. With his mind's eye he saw six coffins, deathly still, and six human beings frozen inside. Three men, three women. Someone must have thought that a scout crew might just decide to colonize the Centunrus system without waiting. Fat chance of that now. Three men, three women, frozen, falling through interplanetary space forever. They couldn't possibly have been expecting rescue. Could they?

"So we don't get them back," he said. "What are we holding, a wake?"

"They knew the risks they were taking," said Whyte. "They knew, and they fought for the chance. We had over a thousand volunteers at the start of training, and that was after the preliminary weeding-out. Jerryberry, I asked you before about how you felt about the space program."

"I told you. In fact-" He stopped. "Publicity."

"Right."

"I thought I was doing you some good. Public support for the space program isn't heavy right now, and frankly, Doctor Sagan, your report didn't help much."

She flared up. "What were we supposed to do, build a planet?"

"Failure of the first expedition. No planets. A whole colony fleet on its way home without ever having so much as seen Alpha Centaurus! I know, it's safer for them, and better not to waste the time, but dammit!" Jerryberry was on his feet and pacing. There was an odd glow in his eyes, an intensity that could communicate even through a teevee screen. "I tried to emphasize the good points. Now-I damn near promised the world a rescue mission, didn't I?"

"Just about. You weren't the only one."

He paced. "I'm pretty good at explaining. I have to be. I'll just have to tell them-no, let's do it right. Robin, will you go on teevee?"

Whyte looked startled.

"Tell you what," said Jerryberry. "Don't just tell them why we can't rescue Lazarus. Show them. Set up a cost breakdown, in dollars and years. We all know-"

"I tell you it isn't cost. It-"

'We both know that it could be done, If we gave up the rest of the space industry and concentrated solely on rescuing Lazarus for enough years. R and D, rebuilding old hardware-"

"Censored dammit! The research alone on a drop ship that size-" Whyte cocked his head as if listening to an i

"I don't know. It's one way. Set up a cost estimate you can defend. It won't end with just one broadcast. You'll be challenged, whatever you say. Can you be ready in two days?"

Karin gave a short, barking laugh.

Whyte smiled indulgently. "Are' you out of your mind? A valid cost estimate would take months, assuming I can get anyone interested in doing a cost estimate of something nobody really wants built."

Jerryberry paced. "Suppose we do a cost estimate. CBA, I mean. Then you wouldn't have anything to defend. It wouldn't be very accurate, but I'm sure we could get within a factor of two."

"Better give yourselves a week. I'll give you the names of some people at JumpShift; you can go to them for details. Meanwhile I'll have them issue a press release saying we're not pla

JumpShift Experimental Laboratory, Building One, was a tremendous pressurized Quonset hut. On most of his previous visits Jerryberry had found it nearly empty; too many of JumpShift's projects are secret. Once he had come here with a camera team, and on that occasion the polished, smoothly curved hull of Phoenix had nearly filled the building.

He had never known exactly where the laboratory was. Its summers and winters matched the Northern Hemisphere, and the sun beyond the windows now stood near noon, which put it on Rocky Mountain time.

Gemini Jones was JumpShift's senior research physicist, an improbably tall and slender black woman made even taller by a head of hair like a great white dandelion. "We get this free," she said, rapping the schematic diagrams spread across the table. "The Corliss accelerator. Robin wants to build another of these. We don't have the money yet. Anyway, we can use it for the initial boost."

On a flattish disk of asteroidal rock a mile across, engineers of the past generation had raised a tower of metal rings. The electromagnetic ca

Jerryberry studied the tower of rings, wider than any ship ever built. "Is it wide enough for what we've got in mind?"

"I think so. We'd fire the rescue ship in sections, then put it together in space. But we'd still have to put a transmitter hull around it."

"Okay, we've got the accelerator, and we'd use standard tanks. Beyond that-"

"Now hold up," said Gem. "There's an easier way to do this. I thought of it this morning. If we do it my way we won't need any research at all."

"Oh? You interest me strangely."

"See, we've still got this problem of building a ship big enough to make the rescue and then decelerate, and a drop cage big enough to take it. But we already know we can build self-transmitting hulls the size of Phoenix. What we can do is put the deceleration fuel in Phoenix hulls. We wouldn't need an unreasonably big drop cage that way."

Jerryberry whistled. He knew what Phoenix had cost. Putting a rescue ship together would be like building a fleet of Phoenixes. And yet- "Robin was wrong. We could do that. We've got the hardware."