Fundamental Force Episode One Read online

  “It has a system of lasers inside,” explained the engineer. “We send a beam to a prism, where it is split in two. One part goes on to the synchronizations of the other ships, passes through them and returns. Here we put them together again and if everything is correct...”

  “We see the interference picture, right?” said Clive, finishing the sentence for him.

  “Right. But only if each ship with its synchronization is exactly in its position. If only one of them is just slightly out of place, we lose the interference picture.”

  “What is the permissible error?” asked Steve.

  “Ten nanometers,” replied the captain.

  Several people whistled at the same time, as if on cue.

  The engineer pointed to one of the screens.

  “The synchronization sends the picture here. As soon as you see alternating light and dark lines, we are ready to jump.”

  He switched the image on the largest screen to a schematic depiction of the whole formation. Against a black background, it showed points floating above a three-dimensional system of coordinates. Each one was marked by a serial number, followed by about ten digital parameters.

  “These numbers are important now. They are the deltas between the vectors of calculated and actual velocity, plus spatial coordinates. They should all be at zero...”

  “Engines stop!” ordered the captain.

  The pilot gestured to start the program.

  “Switch off thrust in three, two, one... All engines stopped!”

  The ship’s barely noticeable vibration gradually dwindled to nothing. With the engines switched off, they were flying in space, away from the planets, in a straight line and without acceleration. The other ships could start synchronization at last. After stopping their own engines, they set about correcting their position and speed with the aid of special jets, ejecting high-speed plasma in strictly dosed, milligram portions.

  Minutes passed by. The parameter values changed rapidly, jumping backwards and forwards. It seemed they would never settle on the required value. Suddenly all the values for one ship jumped to zero. The computer framed it in green on the diagram.

  “S3-V ready,” reported the engineer in a satisfied tone.

  “Synchronization completed,” reported the computer when the other ships had achieved the same.

  As if on command, everyone turned their heads towards the monitor for the detector. Instead of the interference picture, it showed a pulsating point.

  “Is that the way it should be?” asked someone cautiously.

  “Where are the strips?” asked someone else.

  The engineer stroked his chin thoughtfully.

  “Strange. Everything is in the right position...” he muttered to himself after a brief pause. “I don’t understand...”

  The captain went up to the engineer’s seat.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “There appears to be an error in the calculations. All the ships are in position, but there is no interference.”

  “Could the synchronizer calibration be wrong?”

  “Maybe. I can’t say from here. We’ll need an EVA.”

  The captain turned to the technicians.

  “How long will it take to check the synchronizer?”

  “At least four hours.”

  “You’d better get a move on, then.”

  “Skip, to save time, couldn’t we call the base? Let them recheck the calculations,” suggested the pilot. “They could check it quicker than we can.”

  “No. We’ll try to sort it out ourselves first. We’ll only break radio silence as a last resort.”

  The captain turned to the others.

  “Everyone apart from the astrophysicists to their positions.”

  Muttering, they went to the exit, leaving plenty of room in the pilot’s compartment for Steve and Clive to sit in empty seats and observe the process. Two people in space suits soon appeared outside. They were accompanied by a robot assistant towing the servicing equipment.

  All three, attached by long cables like umbilical cords to the mother ship, floated towards the rotating cylinder of the synchronizer. This continued to rotate extremely quickly on the tip of the telescopic tube, which was a good two hundred meters long. When they reached the synchronizer and began pottering about around it, the repair men looked tiny.

  Watching the monitors, Steve saw the green frame around one of the ships disappear but soon reappear. A minute later the same thing happened with another ship.

  “Why does the frame keep disappearing and reappearing? We’re flying with engines switched off, aren’t we?”

  “Residual thrust, perhaps?” suggested Clive.

  The engineer shook his head.

  “That’s due to the thermal expansion of the structures under solar radiation. The tolerances are very fine, so even something as small as that can be seen.”

  “What if this desynchronization took place during a jump?” asked Clive.

  “We took that into account. The system knows about these distortions and finds those moments in time when synchronization can be guaranteed within 30 seconds.”

  It was silent in the pilot’s compartment. Long minutes elapsed. An hour went by, then a second, then a third... Clive was fidgeting more and more in his chair. His impatience needed an outlet.

  “What the hell are they doing out there?”

  “They’re checking all the parameters. It’s a time-consuming job.”

  “Surely they’ve had long enough by now?”

  “Be patient,” interjected the commander. “They’re doing all they can. The synchronizer is a tricky thing. It’s not like checking batteries...”

  “Skip!” was heard from the loudspeakers. It was one of the repair men calling. “Everything’s fine here. The synchronizer is running like clockwork.”

  “Roger, come back in.”

  The captain turned to the engineer.

  “Any ideas?”

  The engineer shrugged.

  “Looks like an error in the calculations, but we won’t be able to check that ourselves in time. We’ll have to call the base.”

  The captain made no reply, just picked up his mug and went to the exit. He stopped in front of the door.

  “I’ll be back in ten minutes. If no-one has had any ideas by then, we’ll make the call.”

  As soon as the door had closed behind him, Clive sprang to life. He jumped out of his seat and went up to the engineer.

  “Show me the calculations,” he demanded.

  “They’re very complex. You can’t do anything on your own, you’ll need a whole team...”

  “I understand,” interrupted Clive. “This is the file, isn’t it?”

  Without waiting for permission, he started looking through the documents on the engineer’s console. The engineer gently pushed Clive away.

  “Just a minute. I’ll give you access to the calculations. Done. Now you can look at them on your own console,” he said, inserting himself between his console and Clive.

  Clive returned to his own position and immersed himself in reading. In less than five minutes, he laughed.

  “I think I know the reason.”

  The engineer, with an exaggeratedly tired expression, turned his seat towards Clive.

  “So what is it?”

  “This wasn’t the first calculation, was it?”

  “That’s right. We had to delete the first one because we were afraid it was compromised.”

  “OK, so it’s a different version. The calculations are based on the initial sequence of the location of the ships in the formation.”

  “Yes, so what?”

  “The thing is, in the first version, the heaviest ship, the transporter, was at the tail end, but now it’s in the middle...”

  “I still don’t see how that’s connected to...”

  Clive rolled his eyes up towards the ceiling. He had never lost this childish habit, Steve thought to himself. It’s not surprising that few
people could work with him.

  “Really, a child could understand it! We have the synchronizer ahead of us on a rod, but on the transporter, it’s in line with the center of mass. The loaded transport has so much mass that with a tolerance of only 10 nanometers, it causes quite a large gravity well and interferes with the laser beams of your synchronizers.

  “Did you take account of the deviations of the geodesic lines close to the heaviest ship? When it is in the center of the formation, not at the tail end, the deviations are laid on top of each other, because the beams from the other ships pass through its synchronizer several times.”

  The engineer’s face changed when he took in the sense of what Clive was saying. His expression of smug superiority vanished instantly. Looking like a whipped dog, he turned back to the screen in front of him. After instructing the computer to calculate the correction, he brought the synchronizer’s task up to date and sent the calculations to the cargo ship, which activated its micro-jets. Almost instantly, the laser spot of the synchronizer changed to the interference picture. Clive chuckled contentedly.

  “Skip, we’ve found the reason,” the pilot said into the microphone.

  This time it did not take the team anything like as long to assemble in the pilot’s compartment. Their burning curiosity was apparent.

  “In the repeat calculation,” explained the engineer, “we started from the same formation sequence as before, but we forgot to take into account that the transport ship is now in the middle, not at the tail end. And its mass is greater than that of all the other ships put together. Due to its new position, certain relativistic effects were introduced and we forgot to allow for them. After the president’s unplanned chatter, we did the calculations in a hurry and we missed this point.”

  “But why was the transport placed in the middle?” asked Steve.

  The engineer shrugged.

  “That was the order, I have no idea why.”

  “OK, that’s not important. We’ll leave the investigation of that question to the historians,” said the captain, rolling up his sleeves. “Right now we have more important things to do.”

  He signaled to the computer to call the Lunar Base, while switching on a small radio with his other hand. Static from the ether was heard from the speakers.

  “Base, synchronization completed. Ready to jump.”

  “Roger. Twenty seconds to jump!”

  The countdown proceeded rapidly.

  Steve’s heartbeat became louder and faster, just like his first ride on a roller coaster when he was a child. He had spent the whole of the week before imagining what it would be like to rush along the rails at tremendous speed and perform crazy loops, but when the day arrived and his car finally began climbing slowly to the top of the first peak, his heart fell into his boots. Gripping the handrail in fear and panic, he would have given anything to be safely back on the ground.

  “Jump!” proclaimed the engineer loudly, his voice a tone higher than usual with excitement.

  “Good lu...” The operator’s response from the Lunar Base was cut off in mid-word. Space, as seen through the thick multilaminar glass, suddenly became black. The stars that had shone so brightly suddenly went out. The interference lines disappeared. The data graphs from the sensors of space and the cosmic microwave background radiation gradually went down to zero. The analogue radio, set to low volume, went dead in an instant. Instead of the sound of static, there was only absolute silence.

  END OF EPISODE ONE

  ###

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  Albert Sartison, 2016