The Titans
Fred Jacobson, the assistant director, gave me the definitive history of titan. I don’t think anyone else dared to be so free with highly classified information.
FMA stands for Free Mass Acceleration. Apart from the official, sanctified jargon, it is also known as “the female principle.”
It seems that Einstein, for all his heroic attempts to make life into equations, wasn’t quite right. Not, you understand, that he was actually wrong, but he just tended to oversimplify a little. It happens to the best of us. (And the worst — more often the worst.) The Einstein theory really had very little to say about traveling faster than light except that it was patently absurd. The idea of the tachyonic phase — wherein things could only travel faster than light and whereby traveling slower than light became an absurdity — cropped up first in somebody’s fertile imagination. But it did get people to thinking, even without any observations to back them up.
Einstein, it seems, was a bit of a fundamentalist. He never quite appreciated the hideous complexity of reality. He thought that mass was mass, and only one form of energy. According to Jacobson, there is mass and mass. Bound mass, free mass, and energetic mass. So what’s the difference? Don’t ask me, I only work here. The man was knocking himself out trying to tell me in the simplest way he could, but it’s just not my field. I didn’t have an adequate command of the jargon. I couldn’t quite follow him into the further regions of abstrusity.
The sum total of the theory was this: that effective mass can be reduced to zero by the adroit manipulation of a countermass. Once mass is zero, one doesn’t have to bother one’s pretty head about minor concerns such as gravity or elegant equations which tend to involve one in the mysteries of infinity.
Hence, titan one. A tin can loaded with hardware. They sent it out and brought it back. It went out a little further than the orbit of Pluto, and spent a good sixty hours, in three bursts, at faster-than-light velocities relative to Earth. The purpose of the flight was purely and simply to prove that it could be done. No measurements were taken, no useful data were gleaned. It was simply a yes/no question, and the universe gave the right answer.
Perhaps the nicest thing about the Project at this stage was its cheapness. No rockets. No waste. No fuel. Titan one was flown on the same sort of power that you use to heat your house. All the hardware came back intact, and it soft-landed, too.
It was the technological accountant’s dream. A ticket to the stars for the price of a hamburger and a cup of coffee. It was Mike Sobieski’s dream, too, or it became that dream — the escape from what he called a cage of darkness.
A second ship was built — much bigger — intended eventually to accommodate personnel and all kinds of equipment — lab fittings and operative hardware. This ship became titan two and was dispatched on a programmed flight which would take it once around Proxima Centauri and back again.
In the meantime, the first ship was touched up again — no point in putting it in a museum just yet — and modified so that she could go out again and accomplish just a little bit more. She was still designed purely as a probe, though. She was sent out to loop Barnard’s Star. Both probes came back, and the human race had touched the stars, although with mechanical fingers. What we learned from these probes came as no surprise.
There was already quite a lot known about both the stars involved, including the fact that they had no planets. But titan base was obliged to know that both stars possessed a retinue of dust and debris of various density and composition. Many people took this as an indication that with only minor changes in the way things were/might have been, the stars could have had planets, and other stars almost certainly would.
And so the second ship was refitted as titan four and was sent out once again. This time it had a name — the Ambassador — and a pilot. The pilot’s name was Doug Mason, and he and his ship were the subject of one of the biggest PR campaigns in history. Mason was an experienced Air Force flyboy who’d rocket-jockeyed a good deal in his time.
The press coverage was extensive. Millions and millions of words were printed about what the whole thing meant to the human race. The public didn’t actually get to know much about titan — only that four was lifting at such and such a date, and was due back in approximately so long. But they got to know an awful lot about Mason and about the great big wonderful galaxy.
Doug Mason and titan four simply disappeared from human ken. They went into tachyonic phase right on schedule, and that was the last the world ever heard of its ambassador to the stars.
You can imagine what happened. At titan, panic, fear, and execution. In the world, not a lot. Doug Mason was just another celluloid hero, just another figment of media imagination. Who cared? Who’d ever cared? The public had become virtually immune to the reality behind the headlines. Nobody told them about titan four’s failure, and they didn’t make a fuss. But the cage door, which had been officially declared open, was now shut firmly once again. There was just no point in throwing more parties in advance, to wish the heroes on their way. Titan died in the media, and continued on its own. The pressmen and the cameras came to watch launches, came to be ready for return deadlines, but nothing went out. Nothing was going to go out until someone came home. The next time the opening of the cage door was advertised, it would have to be for real.
There was absolutely nothing that anyone could know about what had — or might have — happened to titan four. Once Mason took her into tachyonic phase she was beyond human ken. The signals she might have sent just couldn’t get back. Once a titan was lost, it was lost forever. And titan four was lost.
Mike Sobieski had already conveyed to me the emotional meaning of the loss, and that was far more important, really, than the loss to the economy.
The new ship was bigger, better, and safer than Ambassador. Not that the first ship hadn’t had its complement of backup devices, fail-safes, and duplicate controls. Nothing should have gone wrong with Ambassador. But one can always make extra certain. One can always find a little more safety margin to allow. Jacobson, like Mike and many others on the project, was always of the opinion that it was not the Ambassador but its pilot who had failed, and so they duplicated him, too.
Titan five — the Destiny — carried Patrick Bowen and Michael Janusson (Pat and Mike. Neither was Irish. Janusson was USAF; Bowen was Army). Janusson was set to look after the ship. Bowen was set to look after Janusson. Anything which took out one of them would have to take out both.
Everyone knew, however, that there was just one thing Janusson and Bowen might need that they couldn’t have, and that was time. The tachyonic tin can couldn’t be brought back sub-c just like that. There was no ejector seat. The brakes just couldn’t make an emergency stop. They were sent out with instructions to keep as close to the magic c as was reasonable, but even then, time wasn’t really on their side. The phase shift was a delicate operation — it wasn’t like flicking a switch. If something did go badly wrong aboard the Destiny, neither Janusson nor Bowen would be coming back.
And they didn’t.
Ideas now had to be found and they had to be good, despite the almost total lack of data. There was a split in the Project, about what was going wrong, about what could be done to stop it going wrong again. The military blamed the technical staff, the technical staff blamed the pilots, and the PR brigade hated everybody because the public and political image of the Project had been shot to hell. PR didn’t know whose fault it was, but it sure as hell wasn’t theirs.
This was a bad time. But Mike Sobieski weathered it. The sacking of the first figurehead had been ritualistic. There was no point in being recriminative. Titan had to be given every chance to sort itself out. Mike thought there was only one way to look at the problem. The ships came back on their own. If they didn’t come back with men aboard, then something was going wrong with the men.
The scientific method provided one logical step. The next ship had to be sent out with no provision whatsoever for manual interference. A robot tin can carrying a coffin. In the coffin — a passenger.
They built a newer, glorified version of the first robot probe. They used the same FeMAle that had brought titans one and three safely home. They trusted her. They dressed her in steel and put her robot controls in a sealed cavity. The living quarters were simply one tin can inside another — a cage within a cage, exactly like Block C. Titan six was scheduled to loop Proxima at high speed and then come home. The drive had already done a longer trip just as fast.
Even so, perhaps the Proxima loop was just a trifle ambitious. In all, the ship would be trans-c for several days. Why not a couple of hours? Why not a couple of minutes, just to try? But there was no such thing as a couple of minutes, or a couple of hours. Phase shift took twelve hours at least. That was the minimum time the ship could spend pretending to be a creature born and bred to tachyonic existence.
The “pilot” of six was Kel Furin. He was in no way connected with the military, though he had passed all the tests which the military could devise in order to test his fitness (in their eyes) to undertake the mission. Furin was a physicist — a personal friend of Sobieski.
The new ship was called Hope. I don’t know who named the ships, but the sequence of names was close to black comedy. The people who built and sent out those ships meant every word of it, though. From their point of view there was no kind of comedy at all in the name Hope. That ship really did carry their hope. There was nobody on the base, by the time that titan six went into tachyonic phase, who hadn’t encountered the suspicion that the human race might never be able to claim the stars, whether they could be reached or not.
There were no press releases at all concerning titan six. The fact that a fourth man was being sent into deep space was simply not talked about, as if it were rank bad taste to even think about it.
And, thanks to the discretion of all the Project people involved, there were no headlines when six made her reappearance right on schedule. They failed to make radio contact with Furin.
He was dead. He had killed himself by electrocution.
Every man on the Project knew that he hadn’t done it for terrestrial reasons. Something out there had made him do it. Something out there was hostile to human life. The conquest of space was to be no kind of cakewalk. Space was fighting back.
In came the psychologists then, in their legions. Jenny was already on the Project, but not until six came back was she a major figure. She’d known Kel Furin, too.
Titan seven was built from the ground up. They knew they didn’t have to worry about cogs and circuits now. But they didn’t leave out a single thing. If anything, they made even more certain than they ever had.
This time, the capsule wasn’t so much a prison cell as a minihospital ward. There were two men again: Cartland and Napier. Cartland was a careful, clever young man with a reputation for absolute stability. And not just a reputation. The brainwashers had virtually dismantled his mind to make sure it was put together exactly as they would have wished if they’d been designing him. I can imagine how hard they must have searched for Cartland. He was on the technical staff of the Project — a clock watcher and a button pusher, pretty low in the hierarchy. But he was what the situation — at that time — seemed to demand. Napier was Cartland’s watchdog. He was a psychiatrist (and perhaps a bad risk simply because of that). The logic of including him in the team was that if something did go wrong he was at least capable of describing what it was. He was there to collect data, to make sure that when seven came back there would be something to go on.
There were cameras to watch Cartland and Napier, record every second of their time on seven. There was a vast battery of instruments, some scheduled to give constant readings, others that they were obliged to use periodically.
With the number of instruments that were there to gather data, it was quite impossible to deny Cartland and Napier the wherewithal to commit suicide if they so desired. They knew that, and they accepted the risk. It wasn’t made easy for them — they weren’t issued knives — but it was known by all concerned that suicide was in the cards.
The cards turned up just that way. Seven (which was called Lady Luck) brought them back. Dead.
Titan base knew how, and when. But they didn’t know why. Cartland and Napier hadn’t bothered to put their reasons, or their thoughts, on record. In fact, they hadn’t done anything at all, except die. They hadn’t moved from their beds — it was electrocution, as with Furin. They had survived only two hours and a few minutes of hyperspace. (Their deaths were not simultaneous, but Cartland — the man picked for his stability — survived Napier by only seven minutes.)
All the tapes, all the film, all the monitors told titan exactly nothing that they could use.
And so: Lindquist.
They were determined that Lindquist wasn’t going to kill himself. They built him into a machine. He was totally immobilized. The machine breathed for him, fed him, extracted his wastes, and would beat his heart for him if he somehow forgot to do it himself. They rigged Johnny Lindquist so they could run him by remote control. They weren’t even satisfied with that. They put him into a perpetual sleep. He wasn’t to be conscious for a single moment while titan eight was in tachyonic phase. He’d be able to talk to them all the way out to the testing ground, and they intended to bring him around as soon as he was safely sub-c. But apart from that, they asked nothing of him but that he should live, and they gave him as much help as was mechanically possible with that.
These were desperate measures. Titan was a desperate Project.
They profiled him — took a comprehensive tape of his mind as revealed by resonance phenomena. They made a start on an analysis, exactly along the lines of the Lee-Segal handbook for brain-pickers. They put a monitor tape on him so they could track his mind activity while he was in hyperspace.
Mike Sobieski still insisted on Proxima. It was no good sending him out to do a lightning tour around Pluto. It had to be Proxima. The stars were the purpose of the Project, and Mike insisted on dealing with the stars.
Lindquist was a volunteer. He was Army, but I don’t think his military status came into it. He was one of a couple of hundred volunteers from titan base. Titan eight was a one-way ticket to hell, and everybody knew it, but there were still two hundred volunteers. I don’t know how they chose Lindquist. Probably by ballot. Everybody loved Johnny. Outside the base, he was nothing and had never seemed likely to be anything. He’d flown a rocket just once, but not an important rocket. But he was a great guy.
The machines saved him, of course. You can rely on machines. Machines aren’t human. They don’t give in. Johnny Lindquist came back. Alive and in one piece. But not quite the same piece they sent out. It looked the same, but it wasn’t. The piece they sent out was intent and serious, full of memories of smiling and friends and youth. He’d smoked and he’d drunk and he’d screwed his share of women. He had a lot of life and every reason to want it back. Every bit of it. . . .
But he came back completely catatonic. His body was all there, heart beating, breathing, blood flowing, nourished, and clean. But his mind had gone away. It just wasn’t there anymore — either that or it had changed beyond recognition. It took hours of studying tapes and monitors to find a trace of Johnny Lindquist inside his skull. They found traces. Only traces. Lindquist’s mind had been exploded, and there was only wreckage left.
You could still find traces of him inside his body. You could see them there, on the tape. I saw them there myself. The monitors clicked on and on, and the nickering needles gave out fugitive evidence that somewhere Johnny Lindquist still existed. But so far away.
He was ultimately schizophrenic. Hopelessly insane. They said. But their words weren’t in any way adequate to describe. Their words were worthless in the face of what the universe had sent back in exchange for Johnny Lindquist.
Titan eight, by the way, was called simply Traveler.
They found a whole host of new theories to account for Johnny not holding out. They knew from the monitor he’d stayed together for a day or more, then got steadily worse. They knew it was only a matter of time extending that day into days, and then to weeks. If they could lay their hands on the right kind of mind . . .
There were still one hundred and ninety-nine volunteers. But they chose me instead.