Part Ten

Werteswandel

Prologue

It was past midnight, the offices were quiet. The head adviser went to the samovar and started dispensing coffee into tiny cups. Three of his colleagues stood around a table covered with handscreens.

From the samovar the head adviser said, “So spheres of deuterium and helium3 are struck by your laser array, one after the next. They implode and fusion takes places. Temperature at ignition is seven hundred million kelvins, but this is okay because it is a local temperature, and very short-lived.”

“A matter of nanoseconds.”

“Good. I find that comforting. Then, okay, the resulting energy is released entirely as charged particles, so that they can all be contained by your electromagnetic fields— there are no neutrons to fly forward and fry your passengers. The fields serve as shield and pusher plate, and also as the collection system for the energy used to fuel the lasers. All the charged particles are directed out the back, passing through your angled mirror apparatus which is the door arc for the lasers, and the passage collimates the fusion products.”

“That’s right, that’s the neat part,” said the engineer.

“Very neat. How much fuel does it burn?”

“If you want Mars gravity-equivalent acceleration, that’s three-point-seventy-three meters per second squared, so assume a ship of a thousand tons, three hundred and fifty tons for the people and the ship, and six-fifty for the device and fuel— then you have to burn three hundred and seventy-three grams a second.”

“Ka, that adds up fairly fast?”

“It’s about thirty tons a day, but it’s a lot of acceleration too. The trips are short.”

“And these spheres are how big?”

The physicist said, “A centimeter radius, mass point-twenty-nine grams. So we burn twelve hundred and ninety of them per second. That ought to give passengers in the ship a good continuous g feel.”

“I should say so. But helium3, isn’t it quite rare?”

The engineer said, “A Galilean collective has started harvesting it out of the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. And they may be working out that surface collection method on Luna as well, though that’s not been going well. But Jupiter has all we’ll ever need.”

“So the ships will carry five hundred passengers.”

“That’s what we’ve been using for our calculations. It could be adjusted, of course.”

“You accelerate halfway to your destination, turn around and decelerate for the second half of the trip.”

The physicist shook his head. “Short trips yes, longer trips no. You only need to accelerate for a few days to be going quite fast. Longer trips you should coast through the middle, to save fuel.”

The head adviser nodded, handed the others full cups. They sipped.

The mathematician said, “Travel times will change so radically. Three weeks from Mars to Uranus. Ten days from Mars to Jupiter. From Mars to Earth, three days. Three days!” She looked around at the others, frowning. “It will make the solar system something like Europe in the nineteenth century. Train trips. Ocean liners.”

The others nodded. The engineer said, “Now we’re neighbors with people on Mercury, or Uranus, or Pluto.”

The head adviser shrugged. “Or for that matter Alpha Centauri. Let’s not worry about that. Contact is a good thing. Only connect, the poet says. Only connect. Now we will connect with a vengeance.” He raised his cup. “Cheers.”