Charles Sheffield by Godspeed

Author:Godspeed
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-11T13:32:44+00:00

Marcus didn’t just explain his views to me. He told the guards, our family members, and finally, after two months of work from me, the three members of the press who could be persuaded to come out to our maximum-security prison in the Nevada desert to interview us.

“A faster-than-light drive needs a tremendous amount of energy,” he said to the three reporters. We were all sitting in one room, without bars between us, because I had been working hard on our guards, and finally had them to the point where they thought we might be crazy, but we were surely harmless. The room even had a tiny barred window, with only four guards posted inside, and another two just beyond the door.

“A huge amount of energy,” went on Marcus. “The only practical—or even theoretical—way to get that much energy is from the vacuum itself. You have to tap into it.”

“You mean, you get energy from nothing?” said the most junior of the press. He had an open, gullible face. The other two, one man and one woman, didn’t look even vaguely interested, and I guessed that they thought of the whole trip as a chore they hadn’t been able to wriggle out of.

“Not fromnothing . From the vacuum!” That was one of Marcus’s problems, because although it was clear from their facial expressions that this subtle distinction was far beyond all the reporters, he swept right on: “Now, the energy available from the vacuum is so big, you tend to think of it as unlimited. But the Genizee insist that tapping the zero point energy sets up a local stress in space, which ultimately must be relieved. If you remove local energy past a certain critical point, they say, there will be a jump to a lower-energy ground state. The only more stable state is a black hole. The whole region pinches off from the rest of the universe.”

“In other words,” I said. “The rest of universe will get rid of the stressed region by making itvanish. ” I saw the open mouths, and wondered if I was being as obscure as Marcus. But he had been over this with me again and again, until I had something that made sense to me inside my head. My picture might be over-simple, but the reporters ought to find it easier going. “Imagine that there are a whole lot of elastic bands,” I went on, “all over the universe. Somebody starts to stretch one, in one place. That’s what we were doing, when we tested the drive. You can stretch it a fair bit, and nothing happens. All the other bands give a tiny bit, and everything settles down again. But if you go on stretching, there finally comes a point where something has to give. The band breaks. When it does, everythingcan’t go back the way it was. You’ve got snapped elastic, and you’re catapulted right out of this universe.”

“And that’s what the Genizee are warning us about?” said the young reporter.

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