Stargate by Stephen Robinett

Author:Stephen Robinett
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780312756000
Published: 2019-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

When the phone hummed again, I let it hum. I collected my things and started for the station Gate. As I passed the control room, Captain Wilkins called my name. I went in.

The night crew, two men, monitored the equipment. Captain Wilkins looked worried.

“What is it, Captain?”

He pointed at a radar screen. “Look at this.”

I looked. The random pattern of blips was meaningless.

“That,” he said, pointing at a blip near the center of the screen, “is the transmitter focusing ring. The smaller blips are constructors and our equipment.”

“What are those other two blips?”

“Spacecraft.”

“Government?”

“Private.”

“Whose are they?”

“It’s impossible to say. They’re unmarked. They’ve taken up orbits matching ours. We tried hailing, but got no answer.”

“Are they drone ships?”

“No. Too small and drones automatically set off beacons after their second shift. These ships don’t have beacons.”

“What do you think they want?”

“Who knows?”

“Thank you, Captain. Inform me immediately of any change.”

I suited up and returned to the surface. On the way home, standing in the packed mono rail car, I reviewed Norton’s program, holding the strap with one hand and the document viewer with the other. Jenson, starting with nothing, had created the matter transmitter. Norton, starting with Jenson’s Gate, had opened the stars to man.

The implications staggered my imagination. Norton could have opened either a treasure chest or a Pandora’s box. I remembered staying awake nights in college, debating the moral issues of technology with my roommate, a social science major. He would pose some hypothetical discovery—dynamite, atomic fusion, genetic manipulation, Jenson Displacement, anything—pointing out its potential for evil. Each could be used to kill and enslave. He expected me to take the opposite side. Each could also save lives and liberate. I never did. Whatever man discovers or invents can be perverted. Split table salt, and you get sodium and chlorine, poisons. The question is how technology is used; not what it is. How to use a discovery is a political question for those in power, not us worker ants.

Yet, Norton’s addition to technology was potentially devastating to human society. Did the scale of its possible impact become a moral question in itself? If the English longbows at the Battle of Agincourt enabled them to pierce French armor, so what? True, it was a technological advantage. But a small corner of medieval Europe, where a battle was won or lost because of technology, remained a small corner of medieval Europe. Norton’s technology could enslave a galaxy. Was it still a question of how the Gate was used? Or was the Gate itself now at the center of the moral storm?

Getting off the monorail, walking down the escalator to the street, it hit me. I had to know the answer to my question. If the Big Gate’s very existence was the issue, I was the only person with the power to enforce the moral decision. I could, if I had to, destroy Norton’s work. I shivered, turning the corner onto our block. Smith’s red Ferrari stood in front of my house. “So what happened to you?”

Smith sat back in my easy-chair, crossing one long leg over the other.

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