"Laser beam contact!" the computer announced to General Jones, its normally soothing baritone taking an imperative edge.
"Wha?" murmured Jinjur, rousing from her stupor in front of a video screen displaying an old John Wayne battle movie. Deep within her mind she sensed a martinet screaming at her, "Wake up, you idiot! You're in charge!" She shook her head... This was no way for a commander to act. She floated clumsily across the control deck to pull herself into the central command seat.
"Report ship status, James!" she rasped in a weak imitation of her parade voice.
James spoke through her hair imp. "I detect low energy laser beams from Earth. It is time to stop. I quit putting No-Die in your water a month ago. It is now time for the rest of the crew to be taken off." There was a slight pause as the friendly voice of the computer took on a formal note. "As Commander, you have the authority to countermand this prearranged plan, but you will have to elucidate your objections in detail."
Jinjur blinked at the last few confusing words as James dropped back into his normal voice, "But you do want me to stop the drug, don't you, Jinjur?"
Appalled by her mental weakness at this critical juncture, Jinjur grabbed her thick cap of fuzzy hair and shook her head with her muscular black arms, trying to wake the numbed brain inside. "Yes! Yes! Do it! Flush out the tanks, get rid of that stuff! I want to be me again!"
"Take it easy, Jinjur," said James. "I'll do it right away. It will take a few months, however, before everyone recovers completely. I'll be looking forward to it. It sure has been dull playing nursemaid to a bunch of ageless imbeciles."
Jinjur, knowing that the computer had everything under control, let her stupefied brain relax and floated slowly back to the video to watch the Marines on the screen storm up the beach for the thousandth time.
Three months later the crew was back to normal. The precursor laser beam from Earth had been getting stronger as Mercury Center tuned up the transmitter system. Full power would come in about ten days, and they needed to get ready. A few of the crew had strayed from their work stations to peer down the Earthside science dome in fascination at the orange speck of light glowing like a bright jewel in the belt of Orion.
"I'm almost glad there was trouble with the transmitter lens," said David, trying to absorb every nuance of the scene with his artist's eye. "It always bothered me that we could never see the laser beam that was pushing us because it was in the infrared."
"Don't you wish we weren't moving so fast, so the jewel would look like an emerald instead of a topaz?" said Shirley, her shoulder resting against his as they both looked down through the dome. The precursor beam was not very strong, but it did give a perceptible acceleration to the sail and the crew started to readjust from decades of living in free-fall.
"It'll change," said David. "We're moving at twenty percent of the speed of light now, so the blue-green laser frequency is red-shifted by eighteen percent to orange, but as we come to a stop at Barnard, it'll move back to green."
"Like modern alchemists," mused Shirley. "Transmuting topazes to emeralds."
"Just a wave of the magic relativity wand."
They heard noises at the air-lock and turned to look. The Christmas Bush was getting ready to go out. James opened the inner air-lock door, and the Christmas Bush seemed to drop all its needles as it came apart. The major trunk and limbs stayed in one piece, but 1080 of the 1296 twig-sized clusters on the Christmas Bush detached themselves and swarmed into the lock, each one about two centimeters across. James pumped the lock down, then opened the outer door. The twigs swarmed out across the hull to the shrouds that arched out to connect the central payload with the sail that stretched its silvery sheen past any horizon the human eye could see. Like mechanical mice climbing a ship's hawser, the twigs marched in single file, splitting their forces each time they came to a branching in the shroud pattern. The crew watched the progression of the mites for a while over the monitors, but soon lost sight of them in the orange glare. The twigs moved rapidly, but they had three hundred kilometers to go and would not reach their posts for nearly a day.
Jinjur was at her console on the command deck, monitoring the loading of a copy of James's memory into a computer stationed out on the outer rim of the sail. It was one of three redundant units spaced around the rim that had stayed dormant during the trip out. They were not as powerful as James, but were complex enough to be semi-intelligent and had been given names.
It was the job of Snip, Snap, and Snurr to run the deceleration stage of the interstellar sailship. They were now only a quarter of a light-year from Barnard and it was time to stop. To do that, the sail was divided into two pieces, a circular inner portion three hundred kilometers in diameter that supported the main spacecraft and the crew, and an outer ring-shaped portion that was a silvery doughnut one thousand kilometers in diameter with a three hundred kilometer hole.
On the way out, both portions of the sail worked as a single unit and were driven by the light pressure from the launching laser. During the launch phase, all the sail had to do was reflect the light. The deflection mirrors at Mercury Center had the job of keeping the laser beam focused on the sail. The deceleration phase was trickier, however, and would require all the brain-power of Snip, Snap, and Snurr if the humans were to be brought safely to a stop at Barnard. The outer ring sail had to be a concave mirror, with a carefully controlled surface. Its purpose was to reflect the beam of laser light coming from Mercury Center back the other way and focus it on the payload sail to slow it down.
"David," said Jinjur. "Stop admiring the pretty lights and go back to your computer console. James's dump into the triplets is about done. I want you to check and make sure everything's OK."
David turned and raised his eyebrow at Shirley, the fine orange-red hairs almost invisible in the orange glare. Both David and Shirley, having worked with computers all their lives, knew that if there was any problem that had eluded the checks built into the transfer program, that there was little chance that a mere human could find them. Nevertheless, David tore himself away from the view and padded over to take his seat at the computer console. He took James and the triplets through their verification routines and nodded to Jinjur.
"Ring sail computers operational, General Jones," he said.
Hearing the use of her military title made Jinjur wince a little. David was right. She had been overbearing, but this mission had its share of bad luck already. They hadn't even reached their destination and the butcher bill was already at 5% of the crew. She turned and gave a weak grin at David. Still unrepentant, however, she roared in a voice that those on starside swore they could hear through the lift-shaft.
"Stand by for breakaway! 10-9-8..."
One-third the way out on the sail, 1080 mechanical tarantulas waited for their light-beam orders. A pulse of laser light from the remains of the Christmas Bush standing up in the starside science dome sent a coded signal out to each one of them and the tarantulas started walking, snipping the weak links between the inner and outer sail. The spiders had to travel almost two kilometers, snipping as they went while always making sure they stayed on the inner portion of the sail. It was about an hour before they finished. The spider-imps then started their day-long journey back across the three hundred kilometer diameter sail and down the shrouds to reattach themselves once again onto the Christmas Bush.
The orange precursor beam became stronger. The outer ring sail accelerated under the light pressure, while the inner sail, with its heavy payload section, accelerated more slowly. As soon as the two portions of sail had drifted a few thousand kilometers apart, Jinjur took command and started to turn the central sail around. She was used to the light-weight Marine interceptors and soon got bored with the slow response of the huge sail with its ponderous payload. After six hours she turned the ship over to James.
Jinjur had gotten the inner sail turned almost sideways to the beam of light coming from the solar system. The crew were now back in free-fall, although most of them didn't notice the slight difference. The payload and sail were still turning from the angular momentum that Jinjur had imparted. James waited patiently as the hours passed and the sail continued to turn. As soon as there was some optical leverage, James sent a command to the triplets, and a multitude of actuators twisted the distant ring-sail into a curved lens that captured the square kilometers of laser light coming from the solar system and focused it down on the leading edge of the central sail. The concentrated light poured onto one side of the sail and accelerated its ponderous rotation. As the angle of the sail increased, Snip, Snap, and Snurr readjusted their mirror and spread the light more uniformly, still keeping up the rotation. As the central sail was almost half-way around, the ring-sail readjusted again, and started to bring the rotation of the central sail and Prometheus to a halt. The teamwork of the four computers was perfect. The rotation stopped at the same instant the central sail was exactly one hundred and eighty degrees around. The central sail now had its back to the light coming from the solar system while it faced the focused energy coming from the ring sail. Since the ring sail had ten times the surface area of the central sail, there was ten times as much light pressure coming from the ring sail than from the solar system. The acceleration on the humans built up again, stronger than before, but now it was a deceleration that would ultimately bring them to a stop at Barnard.
"This is terrible," said Richard as he stomped heavily about the lounge. He almost dropped his squeezer as he collapsed into a chair and stuck there. He looked with annoyance at Sam, who had found some old Scotch bottles in his room and was now practicing pouring water from one to the other.
"The deceleration is only a tenth gee, Richard," said Sam. "It's about what we expect on the moons around Gargantua. Think of it as practice."
"You can have it," said Richard. "I'll stay here on Prometheus and let you go down."
"Now, now," said Sam. "Remember our program plan. You get the wet one and I get the dry one and I'll be in Rocheland afore ye."
"I don't doubt it, if there were any Scotch to be had there," said Richard.
As the days passed, the acceleration built up an appreciable velocity difference between the slowly decelerating central sail with its heavy payload and the ring sail shrinking in the distance. After a few months even the human eye started to notice the difference in colors impinging on the lightship. Towards Barnard, the brilliant beam from the tiny doughnut of a ring sail slowly changed from orange to red, while from the other side, the direct beam from the Earth began to take on a definite yellow tinge. After a year the beam from Earth had shifted color from topaz through amber to emerald, while the beam from the ring sail had darkened to a red so deep that only some of the crew could see it. They were now within lightmonths of Barnard and the crew took out telescopes, particle counters, and other sensors and began collecting the scientific data that was the primary reason they had been sent on the long journey. They soon were all busy looking out the rechristened Barnardside science dome.
The astrophysicists, Linda and Caroline, formed a team to study the small deep-red sun they were approaching. The aerodynamicists, George and Arielle, concentrated on the supergiant planet Gargantua, while the planetologists, Sam, Richard, and Elizabeth scanned its retinue of moons. With the help of Carmen's radar, Thomas tried to pin down the orbital dynamics of all the bodies in the system, especially the motions of that strange double-planet, Rocheworld.
As they were passing through the outer asteroid belt beyond Gargantua, the science activities took more and more of their time. It was only David that occasionally made himself take the time to travel to the starside science dome to look in awe at the brilliant aquamarine jewel studding Orion's belt.
After twenty months of work, most of the long range science that could be done, had been done, and the data sent on its long journey back to Earth. The crew relaxed and spent a lot more time in leisure activities. Although it was fairly common to have some of the crew sharing rooms, George noticed that Arielle spend an inordinate amount of time in David's room.
"My, George," he remonstrated himself. "You are certainly a jealous, nosy, busy-body."
Since they were no longer on science schedule shifts, they took to gathering together at dinner time. One evening, David waited for a pause in the conversation and made a quiet announcement.
"Arielle and I have been working on a surprise for you," he said. George noticed a number of faces that reflected his own feeling of puzzlement relieved. David continued.
"We two felt that our joy over our arrival in a new world needed some outlet different than producing another batch of scientific data. So we came up with a little show," he said. "Our problem is that we need some practice time. Could we prevail on all of you to stay inside your rooms after dinner for the next three sleep periods and not peek out?"
Red leaned over to George and whispered, "Is eight hours too long to stay trapped in my room?"
"Not long enough," George answered. Red and George handed their trays to the galley imp and joined the rest of the crew on the lift platform that would take them to their rooms.
The next morning George noticed that the large special sonovideo console and screen that had been in David's room was now installed against the theater walls on the Living Area deck. Since the console was there anyway, that evening after dinner, David played them one his newest creations. George watched Arielle out of the corner of his eye. Her body was swaying slowly to and fro as the sound and sight possessed her. George knew how she was feeling, for the music and video brought back memories of the first time he had soloed, the exhilarating feel of being high in the sky, soaring like a bird. The music glided softly to an end.
"That one is titled, 'Magic Dragonfly'," said David. "Now, if you please? Arielle and I have a lot of practicing to do tonight."
Two days later, David announced that he and Arielle were ready and the show would begin right after dinner. The conversation of the crew at dinner that night was full of speculation and George noticed that he couldn't even remember what he had eaten. James probably got a lot of healthy, but tasteless protomush down everyone that night.
David had joined them at dinner and ate sparingly, while Arielle stayed in her room. George noticed that the galley imp didn't clean their trays after dinner, but stacked them up and scampered off. He looked at the ceiling and walls—not a housekeeping spider in sight. James and the entire Christmas Bush must be involved in the production. The lift platform came quietly down through the ceiling and stopped at floor level.
"I'd like all of you to go and arrange yourself in a circle on the lift platform," said David. "You'll want to sit where you can see my sonovideo screen, as well as into the lounge and exercise room, and up the lift shaft."
George went over to the lift shaft and sat down facing David's video screen, his legs hanging through the one-meter diameter hole in the center of the lift platform. Red came up and sat down behind him. Crossing her legs, she leaned on him and looked over his shoulder. The rest of the crew were soon ready for the show.
David turned to his console and checked all the settings. There was a touch screen and special keyboard for the music and another set for the color video display. In addition, there was a third touch screen that was obviously a recent addition to David's normal console.
"Our offering tonight is called 'Flight'," said David simply. He turned to the console, flexed his long fingers and nodded. The lights throughout the spacecraft went out. George looked down thorough the hole in the platform and noticed that even the Barnardside dome had been darkened. The only light in the room came from the soft twinkling of their personal imps. The men were all wearing their imps on their shoulders and couldn't be told apart, but he could recognize the women, like Jinjur with her comb imp and Shirley with the crescent moon on the left side of her head. There was a scurrying in the darkness and down the lift shaft came a number of minibushes, each about the size of a personal imp. Two went to each person, climbed up on their shoulders, and formed cups about each ear, making a nearly perfect set of stereo earphones.
The prelude started. Light and airy at first, it moved on to other themes, one of which George recognized as being the theme from "Magic Dragonfly". He wanted to close his eyes and listen to the music, but David's colorful magic on the sonovideo display kept his eyes open.
The visual hold of the screen faded as the prelude came to an end. There was a slight nose from the top of the lift shaft and George looked up. At the far end of the sixty meter tube was a faint white light. The music started, soft and tinkling. The white light came down the shaft... and finally George recognized what it was. It was Tinkerbell, the fairy from Peter Pan.
Arielle was almost nude. The only covering for her body was a tiny, glowing-white triangular patch of Christmas Bush over her pubic area and two tiny five-pointed white stars riding on top of her small conical breasts. Her hair was ablaze with a cap of a thousand white lights that framed her sparkling dark eyes. Attached to her shoulders were a pair of fairy wings with ribs made of Christmas Bush that held between them a gossamer membrane of clear plastic. On her feet were glowing-white slippers with Mercury wings.
She circled slowly down the shaft, her wings a blur as they supported her in the weak gravity. She held a wand in her right hand and from the glowing three-dimensional star in the tip there fell sparks, tiny mosquito imps that trailed behind, then sputtered out. George was entranced by the motions of the supple naked body. It was the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen, sexy but not sensuous.
Tinkerbell visited each person in turn, tapping them on the head with her magic wand. Then she did a little dance in the lounge and ended by landing on the top of David's console just as the music stopped.
The lights on the pieces of Christmas Bush covering Arielle went out. David's video screen went black. Even their personal imps dimmed. George wondered how the imps communicated without light signals but assumed they probably had the ability to switch to infrared communications.
Suddenly in place of the fairy was a snowy white dove. Arielle was now completely covered with a feathery net of glittering-white. Her arms were covered with branch-sized pieces of the Christmas Bush that turned her arms into wings while her lower legs and feet were turned into a tail. The dove flew around the room to the swooping music. Then, fluttering over their heads, it flew up the shaft, doing midair tumbles and acrobatics.
Like the tumbler pigeons I used to have when I was a kid, thought George. The white bird climbed higher and higher in the shaft while the whirling music drew out to its soft climax.
Suddenly, the music turned hard and the colors on the video screen changed from blues and whites to angry reds and yellows. The tone became menacing and George looked up the shaft to see that the fluttering white dove had been instantly transformed into a hovering red hawk. The hawk poised at the top of the shaft, its wings beating rapidly as the music stayed on a repeated hovering phrase, while underneath scurried tiny little frightened notes. With a few strong thrusts of its powerful pinions, the hawk stooped and plummeted straight at them. It braked to a halt right above their heads, the wind from the beating wings blowing their hair around.
The prey had escaped! The hawk flew violently around the lounge searching for it. Finally giving up, it climbed with strong beats of its wings back up into the sky to the top of the shaft.
The lights went out again, and the music shifted to a slow majestic theme. The lower science dome became transparent and Barnard sent a red beam of light up the center of the lift shaft. George looked up to see that the four meter diameter shaft was now filled with a slowly rotating parasol carrying a long cylindrical body covered with tiny lights. It was Prometheus coming to a stop at Barnard. Slowly, the twirling sail dropped downward in the beam of light, the air trapped in the shaft playing the part of the photon pressure that the real sail used in its lower gravity environment.
As the miniature Prometheus cleared the ceiling of the Living Area deck, Arielle pulled her arms down from over her head and spread them out to her sides, pulling the bush-sail apart as she did so. Before their eyes, the Christmas Bush rearranged itself about her body and turned her into a miniature version of the Magic Dragonfly aerospace plane, complete with lift fans that kept her levitated and a ducted fan behind her feet that pushed her forward. To the strains of the "Magic Dragonfly" theme, she soared through the close confines of the lounge and exercise room, her long wings nearly touching the floor and ceiling during her banking turns. The miniature airplane flew back over their heads, then did a slow vertical roll up the lift shaft.
No wonder she's such a great pilot, thought George. She doesn't 'fly' a plane, she 'is' the plane.
The slow ascending spiral of the music faded and was replaced by a rapid swooping tempo. A bright blue speck appeared far above them. Down the lift shaft came a blue swift, one wing after another pulling it through the air. Both wings fluttered rapidly for a second as it pulled out of its dive and it zoomed overhead into the lounge. Then folding both wings back along its side, the swift hurled its body through the air in a long arc that reached to the other side of the lounge. A cloud of fireflies suddenly appeared in the room. The tiny firefly imps scattered as the swift approached, but the blue bird darted around the obstacles in the room with its twinkling flight until it had caught every one. The swift swooped to land on the console and the blue glow of its feathers blinked to blackness as the music and video stopped.
A second's pause and a multicolored hummingbird appeared hovering above the console. Arielle's bush-assisted arms fluttered into a blur. Her green tail-feather-covered lower body and legs rocked back and forth as she maintained her hovering position, the colors in her feathers changing as she moved.
George noticed that David was now working all three touch-screens. One controlled the music, one controlled the video panel, while the third contained a cartoon of the hummingbird hovering above him. The sound and video panels must have contained stored sequences, for David only touched them occasionally with his left hand to keep them in synchronization with the live action. His right hand was playing over the hummingbird picture and as the hand moved, the colors on the hummingbird changed hue and moved in iridescent waves up and down the body and out the wings.
The hummingbird darted around the room to the music, moving rapidly between pauses. Then George heard James speaking softly through his stereo imps.
"Please stand up and hold still," said James. "You are about to become part of the show."
George noticed everyone getting to their feet. As he wiggled the hooks of his corridor boots into the loop carpet, he felt his imp and his earphones rearrange themselves into an extended collar. He couldn't see what he looked like, but he could see that the others in the audience had been transformed into exotic flowers.
The hummingbird started visiting the blooms, hovering in front of each one for a second, sticking its head close to the flower, then moving on. George noticed that as the fluttering beauty made her way around the room, that she spent a little longer at some flowers than the others. Red was next to him and he watched as the hummingbird flitted to a halt in front of her. With its lower body rocking back and forth, the hummingbird moved in to plant a kiss on the end of Red's nose, and then moved on.
George was the last flower. With a blur that was almost too fast for him to follow, the hummingbird was in front of him. In the soft blue light from his flower imp and the red and green light from the iridescent fluttering wings on each side of his head, George saw Arielle's soft dark eyes just inches from his. He looked down at her costume. The net of colored lights covering her nude body was sparse, and he could see a rivulet of sweat trickling down between the tiny breasts rising and falling on the hard-working rib cage.
Arielle's face was flushed with exertion, but she gave a sweet smile and pursed her lips. George closed his eyes and awaited the pick on the nose. The hummingbird moved closer, the beat of its wings in the air deafening him. Then hot lips were pressed firmly against his. A sexual thrill shot through him. That thrill was followed by an even stronger jolt as a long tongue forced its way between his lips and searched his mouth for nectar.
The roar increased and the hummingbird was gone. George opened his dazed eyes just in time to see the flashing bird-human spiral up the lift shaft as the music came to a climax.
The lights came on. There was a long silence, then the room burst into applause. David stood up at the console, bowed once, then waited patently for the applause to cease. There were cries of "Encore" and "Arielle! Arielle!!", but David waved them to silence.
"We decided before the show that there would be no curtain calls and no encores," said David. "It would destroy the magic of the moment. Besides, even with the Christmas Bush helping, flying is hard work and she couldn't do an encore. Arielle is up in her room changing, but I'm sure she'll be down soon for something to eat."
There was a clatter from the dining room. The galley imp had returned and was setting out three large trays of food. There was a hiss of a room door opening and a voice echoed down the lift shaft.
"Mm! Smell good!!"
Arielle, wearing an over-sized shapeless sweat suit, dove down the lift shaft ladder and made her way to the dining room, waving aside the compliments in her eagerness to get to the food.
First she swallowed a large glass of water—she liked hers carbonated—then asked for another.
"Flying make me thirsty," she said as she picked up a finger-chunk of Nels's Chicken Little, dunked it into James's secret sauce and popped it into her mouth.
"That was marvelous, Arielle!" exclaimed Shirley. "Do you think I could learn to fly like that?"
"Sorry," said Arielle, starting on a dish of french-fried zucchini sticks and reaching for the next glass of water. "You too big." She munched another zucchini and swallowed loudly. "You'd be like airplane with too many cargos and not big enough wings." She finished the zucchini sticks and pulled over an algae shake and a pseudoburger on an ersatz bun.
Richard came over to congratulate her on her performance. He held one of her hands while she continued to eat with the other.
"You were absolutely stunning in those costumes, Arielle," he said.
"You like?' she said happily, slurping down the last of the shake and reaching for another one. "I design them myself."
"Like them? I loved them!" he said, then leaned forward to whisper in her ear.
She blushed, took her hand out of his and used it to snag another pseudoburger.
"You men!" she said around a bite of pseudoburger. "You all alike! You always take serious something poke at you in fun." She swallowed a big bite and made an annoyed face at him. "That was not me that did that! That was hummingbird!!" She waved the remains of a zucchini stick at him. "Hummings-bird all the time do that to flowers!"
She looked over the remains of the three trays, found a cold zucchini stick in back of a plate and finished it off. She turned to her still-admiring audience, stretched unselfconsciously, and yawned.
"I'm tired. The show was hard work. You like?" she asked. There was a chorus of approval form the rest of the crew as she beamed with pleasure. "I go to bed now," she said. She walked across the room to where David was closing down his console.
"You work hard too, David," she said, taking his glasses off his nose and stroking his forehead. "Maybe it time for you to go to bed too?" she asked. She took his hand in hers and he let her lead him to the lift shaft platform. Together they rode it up through the ceiling. Every man left in the lounge was conscious that the sound they heard was that of one room door opening and closing.
A few months later, the time came when the decelerating laser beam would turn off. The central sail had been slowed until it was firmly in the gravitational grasp of the dull red star while the ring sail carrying the abandoned semi-intelligent orphans, Snip, Snap, and Snurr faded into invisibility among the sprinkle of stars in the heavens. For once the whole crew was watching out the starside science dome. The blue-green aquamarine flickered, then guttered slowly into oblivion, leaving a faint yellow-white star in its place. They had arrived at Barnard, their home for the rest of their lives.