She felt Brant's arm around her and welcomed their comfort against the loneliness of space. This was where she belonged; her heart would not stray again. For at last she understood; though she had loved Loren for his strength, she loved Brant for his weakness.

Good-bye, Loren, she whispered - may you be happy on that far world which you and your children will conquer for mankind. But think of me sometimes, three hundred years behind you on the road from Earth.

As Brant stroked her hair with clumsy gentleness, he wished he had words to comfort her, yet knew that silence was the best. He felt no sense of victory; though Mirissa was his once more, their old, carefree companionship was gone beyond recall. All the days of his life, Brant knew, the ghost of Loren would come between them - the ghost of a man who would not be one day older when they were dust upon the wind.

When, three days later, Magellan rose above the eastern horizon, it was a dazzling star too brilliant to look upon with the naked eye even though the quantum drive had been carefully aligned so that most of its radiation leakage would miss Thalassa.

Week by week, month by month, it slowly faded, though even when it moved back into the daylight sky it was still easy to find if one knew exactly where to look. And at night for years it was often the brightest of the stars.

Mirissa saw it one last time, just before her eyesight failed. For a few days the quantum drive - now harmlessly gentled by distance - must have been aimed directly towards Thalassa.

It was then fifteen light-years away, but her grandchildren had no difficulty in pointing out the blue, third magnitude star, shining above the watchtowers of the electrified scorp-barrier.

 

56 Below the Interface

They were not yet intelligent, but they possessed curiosity - and that was the first step along the endless road.

Like many of the crustaceans that had once flourished in the seas of Earth, they could survive on land for indefinite periods. Until the last few centuries, however, there had been little incentive to do so; the great kelp forests provided for all their needs. The long, slender leaves supplied food; the tough stalks were the raw material for their primitive artifacts.

They had only two natural enemies. One was a huge but very rare deep-sea fish - little more than a pair of ravening jaws attached to a never-satisfied stomach. The other was a poisonous, pulsing jelly - the motile form of the giant polyps - which sometimes carpeted the seabed with death, leaving a bleached desert in its wake.

Apart from sporadic excursions through the air-water interface, the scorps might well have spent their entire existence in the sea, perfectly adapted to their environment. But - unlike the ants and termites - they had not yet entered any of the blind alleys of evolution. They could still respond to change.

And change, although as yet only on a very small scale, had indeed come to this ocean world. Marvellous things had fallen out of the sky. Where these had come from, there must be more. When they were ready, the scorps would go in search of them.

There was no particular hurry in the timeless world of the Thalassan sea; it would be many years before they made their first assault upon the alien element from which their scouts had brought back such strange reports.

They could never guess that other scouts were reporting on them. And when they finally moved, their timing would be most unfortunate.

They would have the bad luck to emerge on land during President Owen Fletcher's quite unconstitutional, but extremely competent, second term of office.

 

IX

Sagan 2

 

57 The Voices of Time

The starship Magellan was still no more than a few light-hours distant when Kumar Lorenson was born, but his father was already sleeping and did not hear the news until three hundred years later.

He wept to think that his dreamless slumber had spanned the entire lifetime of his first child. When he could face the ordeal, he would summon the records that were waiting for him in the memory banks. He would watch his son grow to manhood and hear his voice calling across the centuries with greetings he could never answer.

And he would see (there was no way he could avoid it) the slow ageing of the long-dead girl he had held in his arms - only weeks ago. Her last farewell would come to him from wrinkled lips long turned to dust.

His grief, though piercing, would slowly pass. The light of a new sun filled the sky ahead; and soon there would be another birth, on the world that was already drawing the starship Magellan into its final orbit.

One day the pain would be gone; but never the memory.

 

CHRONOLOGY

(Terran years)

1956 Detection of neutrino 1967

Solar neutrino anomaly discovered 2000

Sun's fate confirmed 100

Interstellar probes 200

300 Robot seeders planned

400 Seeding started 2500 (embryos)

600 (DNA codes)

700

751 SEEDER LEAVES FOR THALASSA 800

900

999 LAST MILLENNIUM

3000 THALASSA 100

First Landing 0 200

Birth of Nation 100

Lords of The Last Days 200

Contact with Earth 300

Contact Lost 300

Mt Krakan Erupts, 400

3500 400

QUANTUM DRIVE

600 FINAL EXODUS

Stasis 617

STARSHIP MAGELLAN 3620

END OF EARTH

3864 Magellan arrives 718

3865 Magellan leaves 720

4135 SAGAN 2 1026

 

Bibliographical Note

The first version of this novel, a 12,500-word short story, was written between February and April 1957 and subsequently published in IF Magazine (US) for June 1958 and Science Fantasy (UK) in June 1959. It may be more conveniently located in my own Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich collections The Other Side of the Sky (1958) and From the Ocean, From the Stars (1962).

In 1979, I developed the theme in a short movie outline that appeared in OMNI Magazine (Vol. 3, No. 12,1980). This has since been published in the illustrated Byron Preiss/Berkley collection of my short stories, The Sentinel (1984), together with an introduction explaining its origin and the unexpected manner in which it led to the writing and filming of 2010: Odyssey Two.

This novel, the third and final version, was begun in May 1983 and completed in June 1985.

COLOMBO, SRI LANKA

1 JULY 1985

 

Acknowledgements

The first suggestion that vacuum energies might be used for propulsion appears to have been made by Shinichi Seike in 1969. ('Quantum electric space vehicle'; 8th Symposium on Space Technology and Science, Tokyo.)

Ten years later, H. D. Froning of McDonnell Douglas Astronautics introduced the idea at the British Interplanetary Society's Interstellar Studies Conference, London (September 1979) and followed it up with two papers: 'Propulsion Requirements for a Quantum Interstellar Ramjet' (JBIS, Vol. 33,1980) and 'Investigation of a Quantum Ramjet for Interstellar Flight' (AIAA Preprint 81-1534, 1981).

Ignoring the countless inventors of unspecified 'space drives,' the first person to use the idea in fiction appears to have been Dr Charles Sheffield, Chief Scientist of Earth Satellite Corporation; he discusses the theoretical basis of the 'quantum drive' (or, as he has named it, 'vacuum energy drive') in his novel The McAndrew Chronicles (Analog magazine 1981; Tor, 1983).

An admittedly naive calculation by Richard Feynman suggests that every cubic centimetre of vacuum contains enough energy to boil all the oceans of Earth. Another estimate by John Wheeler gives a value a mere seventy-nine orders of magnitude larger. When two of the world's greatest physicists disagree by a little matter of seventy-nine zeros, the rest of us may be excused a certain scepticism; but it's at least an interesting thought that the vacuum inside an ordinary light bulb contains enough energy to destroy the galaxy ... and perhaps, with a little extra effort, the cosmos.

In what may hopefully be an historic paper ('Extracting electrical energy from the vacuum by cohesion of charged foliated conductors,' Physical Review, Vol. 30B, pp. 1700-1702, 15 August 1984) Dr Robert L. Forward of the Hughes Research Labs has shown that at least a minute fraction of this energy can be tapped. If it can be harnessed for propulsion by anyone besides science-fiction writers, the purely engineering problems of interstellar -or even intergalactic - flight would be solved.

But perhaps not. I am extremely grateful to Dr Alan Bond for his detailed mathematical analysis of the shielding necessary for the mission described in this novel and for pointing out that a blunt cone is the most advantageous shape. It may well turn out that the factor limiting high-velocity interstellar flight will not be energy but ablation of the shield mass by dust grains, and evaporation by protons.

The history and theory of the 'space elevator' will be found in my address to the Thirtieth Congress of the International Astronautical Federation, Munich, 1979: 'The Space Elevator: "Thought Experiment" or key to the Universe?' (Reprinted in Advances in Earth Orientated Applications of Space Technology, Vol. I, No. 1, 1981, pp. 39-48 and Ascent to Orbit: John Wiley, 1984). I have also developed the idea in the novel The Fountains of Paradise (Del Rey, Gollancz, 1978).

My apologies to Jim Ballard and J. T. Frazer for stealing the title of their own two very different volumes for my final chapter.

My special gratitude to the Diyawadane Nilame and his staff at the Temple of the Tooth, Kandy, for kindly inviting me into the Relic Chamber during a time of troubles.