Gypsy by Carter Scholz

Author:Carter Scholz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2015-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

5.

An old, old man in a wheelchair. Tube in his nose. Oxygen bottle on a cart. He’d been somebody at the Lab once. Recruited Roger, among many others, plucked him out of the pack at Caltech. Roger loathed the old man but figured he owed him. And was owed.

They sat on a long, covered porch looking out at hills of dry grass patched with dark stands of live oak. The old man was feeling pretty spry after he’d thumbed through Roger’s papers and lit the cigar Roger offered him. He detached the tube, took a discreet puff, exhaled very slowly, and put the tube back in.

Hand it to you, Roger, most elaborate, expensive form of mass suicide in history.

Really? I’d give that honor to the so-called statecraft of the past century.

Wouldn’t disagree. But that’s been very good to you and me. That stupidity gradient.

This effort is modest by comparison. Very few lives are at stake here. They might even survive it.

How many bombs you got onboard this thing? How many megatons?

They’re not bombs, they’re fuel. We measure it in exajoules.

Gonna blow them up in a magnetic pinch, aren’t you? I call things that blow up bombs. But fine, measure it in horsepower if it makes you feel virtuous. Exajoules, huh? He stared into space for a minute. Ship’s mass?

One hundred metric tons dry.

That’s nice and light. Wonder where you got ahold of that. But you still don’t have enough push. Take you over a hundred years. Your systems’ll die.

Seventy-two years.

You done survival analysis? You get a bathtub curve with most of these systems. Funny thing is, redundancy works against you.

How so?

Shit, you got Sidney Lefebvre down the hall from you, world’s expert in failure modes, don’t you know that?

Roger knew the name. The man worked on something completely different now. Somehow this expertise had been erased from his resume and his working life.

How you gone slow down?

Magsail.

I always wondered, would that work.

You wrote the papers on it.

You know how hand-wavy they are. We don’t know squat about the interstellar medium. And we don’t have superconductors that good anyway. Or do we?

Roger didn’t answer.

What happens when you get into the system?

That’s what I want to know. Will the magsail work in the solar wind? Tarasenko says no.

Fuck him.

His math is sound. I want to know what you know. Does it work?

How would I know. Never got to test it. Never heard of anyone who did.

Tell me, Dan.

Tell you I don’t know. Tarasenko’s a crank, got a Ukraine-sized chip on his shoulder.

That doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

The old man shrugged, looked critically at the cigar, tapped the ash off its end.

Don’t hold out on me.

Christ on a crutch, Roger, I’m a dead man. Want me to spill my guts, be nice, bring me a Havana.

There was a spell of silence. In the sunstruck sky a turkey vulture wobbled and banked into an updraft.

How you gone build a magsail that big? You got some superconductor scam goin’?

After ten years of braking we come in on this star, through its heliopause, at about five hundred kilometers per second.

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