Читать книгу The Whirlwind's Ride - Tom Boone's Anderson - Страница 5

In this year of mandatory schooling my teacher was a man who placed a major emphasis on giving his students school projects. The school projects always involved giving a presentation to the class.

My Uncle took a great deal of interest in my school projects. He felt that obtaining information from a variety of sources and assembling it in a coherent form for presentation to a select audience, either to educate them in something they did not know or to alter their opinion about something they were familiar with, was much more important than parroting facts remembered by rote or determining answers to problems by using procedures explained in a book. My Uncle was somewhat long winded.

Before my project was due, my Uncle would always have me give my presentation to him. His criticisms were valid and numerous. They left me feeling broken and battered and wanting nothing more than to crawl into a hole and suck my thumb.

This time I felt I had escaped. My ground transport to school would pick me up in a few minutes and my teacher had made it very clear that there was no excuse for tardiness. Even if he had one of the household staff drive me to school, there wasn’t enough time to give my presentation at home to my Uncle.

I had finished my breakfast and was walking through the great room to get to the door that was closest to the road where the transport would pick me up. I noticed my Uncle sitting in a chair that I would have to pass to get to that door. If I doubled back and went through the kitchen and ran around the house, I just might make it to the pickup point before the transport got there. My Uncle looked up and caught my eye.

“Bob, come over here. I want you to give me your presentation.”

“But Uncle, there isn’t time. I don’t want to be late for class.”

“I talked to your teacher and explained the situation to him. He told me that any reasonable tardiness would be excused. I will have someone drive you to school in one of the estate’s land transports when we are done,” my Uncle said with a ‘you have no way out of this so just do it’ look in his eye. “Please start out by explaining the theme of your presentation,” my Uncle said as he settled into his chair.

I moved a couch and a couple of chairs out of the way so I would have room for my display projection in the corner. I turned on the projection cube and put it on the small table next to me. When the cube flashed green I knew it had accessed the room’s lighting system and would respond to my verbal cues. I ignored the knot in my stomach as I forced an appropriate smile on my face.

“The theme of my presentation is how I would explain our method of travel between the stars using Hyperlink Travel between gravity wells, to members of an intelligent species who were on the verge of, but had yet to develop the ability to send manned objects beyond their planet’s gravity dent. This is to be done without using mathematical equations or specific technical details.” I cleared my throat and took a deep breath.

“My assumption is that they have looked at the stars in their birth planet’s night sky and dreamed of traveling to the stars and that they are every bit as intelligent as we are. I will also refer to any craft designed to travel beyond a planet’s atmosphere as a spaceship. A ship designed to travel the space beyond a planet, as a water ship is designed to travel the waters of a planet’s surface, or an airship is designed to travel in a planet’s atmosphere. This will give my audience a point of reference.”

I could not believe my good fortune. I had gotten through the first paragraph that I had composed myself without a single criticism, one paragraph down and about a billion to go.

The first projection was a huge shapeless black mass filled with countless tiny pinpricks of light.

“This is our universe as we perceive it. This is our galaxy which my species refers to as the Milky Way.”

All the pinpricks go out accept one pinprick that expands to fill the entire scene with the familiar spiral galaxy.

“And this is the star around which my home planet circles.”

One star is briefly highlighted and then shrinks back to blend in with the teaming, sparkling, masses of stars in the Milky Way. Then the galaxy shrinks back to a tiny pinprick of light as all the other countless pinpricks of light come back.

“And this is our universe as it really exists.”

The shapeless black mass becomes a huge ball with the pinpricks of light floating on its surface.

“Our universe is made up of light matter and dark matter. We and everything we can perceive using our five senses is light matter. It is as if we have our three dimensions and the dark matter only has two. Say the dark matter has only height and width, but no depth and we are at such an angle that we can only see the dark matter by looking at its depth, which it doesn’t have. It still has mass, it still has gravity, it still affects the light matter of the universe. That is the only reason we know the dark matter exists. It affects our universe and we use mathematics to describe the dark matter’s size and shape and how it functions.”

My Uncle raised his hand and I stopped and waited.

“I thought your presentation was about Hyperlink Travel between gravity wells, not the nature of the universe?” my Uncle asked.

“Uncle, I believe the nature of light and dark matter is necessary to any understanding of Hyperlink Travel. I also assumed that they hadn’t resolved the nature of light and dark matter because most species make that discovery very shortly before they discover Hyperlink Travel. I felt that a species that had yet to send a manned vehicle even beyond their planets own gravity dent had not resolved the nature of light and dark matter.”

My Uncle used that one magic word that he so seldom used to answer my attempts to defend myself against one of his criticisms. “Justified,” he said.

“The vast majority of matter in our universe is dark matter. The dark matter is a giant ball filling most of our universe.”

At this point the pinpricks of light went out leaving only the black ball.

“And the light matter is nothing more than scum floating along on the surface of that ball.”

The black ball was again covered in tiny floating pinpricks of light.

“I must question your use of the term scum, Nephew.”

“I wanted to convey the distain with which the dark matter must view the light matter,” I said while carefully watching my Uncle’s face.

“You are giving emotions to the dark matter as though it were a sentient being?” he asked.

“How do we know it is not? Besides I wanted to make my talk interesting. I don’t want everyone in the class to fall asleep.”

My Uncle smiled. “Go on.” he said.

“Every piece of light matter makes a dent in the dark matter ball on which it floats. The only difference is when a piece of light matter ignites into a star. The nuclear fire of a star forms a gravity well which creates a wormhole that extends all the way to the center of the dark matter ball.”

Half the black ball fell away leaving a circle which showed the center of the ball and the tiny glowing lines extending from the pinpricks of light at the edge of the surface of the ball down to the center of the ball.

“A propulsion coil fitted into a spaceship allows that spaceship to ride the gravity well wormhole deep into the dark matter ball. This makes for practical travel between the stars because gravity well wormholes are so much closer together than the stars are at the surface. The glowing lines are the wormholes. The closer the wormholes are to the center of the ball the closer they are to each other.

“This is the way Hyperlink Travel works. The propulsion coil pulls the spaceship down the gravity well wormhole deep into the dark matter ball. Travel in a wormhole is without the passage of time. The problem is that the propulsion coil is limited to how deep it can pull a spaceship into the wormhole. When the propulsion coil reaches the limit of its ability to pull the spaceship into the dark matter ball, this is the Hyperlink. At this point the propulsion coil uses the spaceship’s momentum to push out from the gravity well wormhole it is in as the propulsion coil pulls against the gravity well wormhole it wants to travel to.

“Travel at the surface of the dark matter ball would be measured in years to eons. Travel between the stars using the interior of the dark matter ball is measured in ship’s time of hours to weeks depending on how far apart the stars are and how deep the propulsion coil can pull the spaceship down the wormhole into the dark matter ball. Also the passage of time inside the dark matter ball is different from the passage of time on the surface of the dark matter ball.

“There are two basic types of propulsion coils. Transport Propulsion Coils and Courier Propulsion Coils.

“Civilian Transport Propulsion Coils are the easiest and cheapest to build. There are variations on design to increase speed slightly. Military Transport Propulsion Coils are vastly more expensive and massive to supply the bursts of speed necessary for combat and the durability to withstand the trauma of battle. Transport Propulsion Coils take you to a level within the ball where ship’s time is about half the time at the surface of the ball.

“Courier Propulsion Coils are the most delicate, the most difficult to build, and by far the most expensive to produce. It is the classic tradeoff between time and utility.

“Courier Propulsion Coils take a spaceship much deeper into the dark matter ball. The sacrifice made for this is that the spaceship’s engines must be exactly fitted to the needs of the Courier Propulsion Coil. There cannot be so much as a drop of energy produced for any other need. The energy needed for life support and communications and any other ship’s need must be supplied by battery power. Effective shielding or weaponry is totally out of the question. Fortunately, Courier Propulsion Coils pull a spaceship so deep into the ball via the wormhole that trips are almost always measured in hours to perhaps a day, ship’s time. Courier craft ship’s time within the dark matter ball is only about a tenth of the passage of time on the surface of the dark matter ball where the light matter universe exists.

“What was my trip from the gravity well of my home planet to the gravity well of your planet like?”

At this point the ball became whole again.

“Traveling in the wormhole is without passage of time so there is no way to perceive anything while traveling in the wormhole. When your spaceship reaches the Hyperlink point of the wormhole and your spaceship enters the dark matter ball, nothing changes accept the stars begin to travel past your spaceship much faster.”

At this point the ball becomes the huge shapeless black mass with the countless pinpricks of light floating randomly inside it.

“There is no dark matter ball hanging in space. The ball is a mathematical concept to explain how the dark matter behaves. We cannot perceive the dark matter at all.

“You may well ask if your species will be welcomed when it achieves the stars. I can tell you an unequivocal yes. That being the case, why don’t we simply show you how to build star traveling vehicles?

“Through trial and error over eons, the star traveling species of this galaxy have determined that a species must find its own way off the planet of its birth. This is more difficult for us than you can imagine because we want so desperately for you to succeed. For every species that makes its way to the stars, incalculable numbers fail and drown in their own waste on the planets of their birth or suffer some catastrophe for which the only solution would be to evacuate the planet, which they cannot do. As a general rule we pay very little attention to the non-star traveling species. If you find a practical way to leave your planet to travel to other stars we will welcome you. If you fail your species will probably not even be listed. The galaxy is huge and there are so many worlds teeming with non- star traveling species.

“And who knows, you may be the species that develops the next generation in propulsion coils, the one that takes us far deeper into the dark matter ball. Maybe you will be the species that develops the ultimate goal of propulsion coil technology, the coil that takes a spaceship all the way to the center of the dark matter ball where all the gravity well wormholes meet. At that point you could travel from any gravity well in the light matter universe to any other gravity well in the light matter universe instantly. Maybe you will develop a way to artificially create a wormhole so you can travel through the dark matter ball to anywhere in the light matter universe without regard to gravity wells. Maybe you will develop a practical method for travel between the stars that we have not dreamed of.

“There are naysayers among you who will tell you it can never be done. That the stars are too far away and you can never go there. They would say that, instead of me being a member of a species that developed on a planet in another gravity well, I am some kind of monster that someone put together in a laboratory as a hoax to fool a gullible world.

“As an answer to this I would say look at the night sky. You have so poisoned your night sky with artificial light that the stars can barely be seen. Find somewhere far from the lights where the stars in the cloudless night sky can be seen in all their glory. I guarantee that if you spend a night looking up into that glorious wonder, you will hear it calling to you.” “It is time to leave the nest. Spread your wings and join us. The wonders of the galaxy are waiting for you.”

My Uncle had a strange expression on his face. He stood up and gave me several slow hard claps. “Bravo. You did make an unsupported supposition to determine that a non-star traveling species would by definition have light pollution blotting out most of the night sky. However, this is common enough that I believe your reasoning is valid. The inducement to come join the star traveling species wasn’t mentioned in the theme, but it was implied. You did very well.

“Regardless of the grade your teacher gives you, I give you a A plus. There will be celebrations tonight and you will have a special reward.”

I came home to decorations and party music and my favorite foods. Everyone congratulated me. Everyone accept my Uncle. My Uncle wasn’t there. He had an important faculty meeting to attend.

As a reward I would be allowed to pick my own major household chore. I asked that my major household chore be the care and feeding of the gardens at the back end of the estate. These gardens faced the ocean.

I had always loved green growing things, especially flowers. But even more than the flowers I loved the huge sandy beach between the gardens and the ocean. It was a nude beach, a woman’s only nude beach. I truly loved tending my gardens.