Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

Spiderweb

Written by David Gerrold

Illustrated by Jonathan Robbins

All right, let’s talk about the Oort Cloud. It’s big. It’s not flat. It’s round. It’s a sphere. It’s 7500 trillion kilometers thick and it starts about 7500 trillion kilometers away. The denser, inner part of the Oort is called the Hills Cloud. That’s a little closer in. Only 750 million kilometers; but it extends nearly 10 billion klicks out, give or take a cosmic smidge. The Hills Cloud is nearly 100 times denser than the rest of the Oort. So that’s where the prospectors go.

You start at Luna, and you boost at 1.3 gee for 2-3 months, flipover, and decelerate for almost as long, leaving enough delta-vee to coast. When you get there, wherever you are, you will be as far from home as any human being has ever gotten. At least until the Long Voyage boosts, if it ever does.

Some people think space is a poetic adventure. Cold. Dark. Silent. Those are the people who have never been in space.

Out here, it is not cold and dark and silent.

Inside a ship, inside a suit, it’s hot and bright and loud. Especially loud. Every little creak, clank, or clunk, the vibration rattles its way down the hull, across the decks, even into the carbon-fiber bolts that hold the whole damn ship together. There’s no place else for the sound to go. Every ventilator fan whirrs, every pump throbs, every valve bumps, every pipe whistles, every moving part makes a sound. Hatches open and close, panels unfold, sensors uncover themselves, cameras swivel. It’s a torrent of noises, a cacophony of chirps and buzzes, whooshes and bumps. Space might be silent, but the machineries that keep you alive are loud and incessant. And no, it doesn’t matter what kind of ceramics and polymers and fibers and insulation you use for building the ship, there will always be sound. Even safe inside a suit, the noise never ends; your blood throbs in your veins, your heart thumps in your chest and your breath roars in your ears.

Yes, I know there are some people who say they can tell the health of a ship simply by listening to the sound of it. I say they’re deluding themselves. There are just too many sounds, too much to hear, assimilate, impossible to know. The point is, it’s not silent.

And it’s not cold either. Just like the sound, the heat has nowhere to go. A spaceship is an oven. You can shield it, you can rotate it, you can insulate it with reflectors. You can add radiator fins and heat sinks. You can paint the ship with micro-dots and nano-demons. But the heat still builds up. You have to hide behind a wall of shielding. Two walls. One wall in front, facing the direction you’re going, and the other facing the sun. It works. Well enough.

The shield in front is called the cow-catcher. Back in the days of railroads, the cow-catcher was an iron apron at the front of the locomotive, designed to knock unwitting cows or deer or moose or buffalo off the tracks. The cow-catcher on a spaceship is there to protect the ship against micro-dust. Figure it out. Constant acceleration means a steadily increasing velocity. Space isn’t empty. That’s another one. It only looks empty. Actually, it’s full of stuff, mostly little stuff, all different size pieces. You can stop looking for dark matter, there isn’t any. What there is, is dust. All the leftover flakes of cosmic dandruff. The faster you go, the faster they hit you. One particle per cubic kilometer isn’t a problem—until you’re traveling through a couple hundred million kilometers or more, like getting to Mars when it’s coming around the far side of the sun. Then it’s like driving through very fine sandpaper. It adds up. So you put a shield in front. And every so often, you replace the camera mirrors that are peeking out from behind it.

Now, about the dark. Space isn’t dark. It only looks dark because the human eye doesn’t gather enough light to see how full of radiation space really is. All kinds of radiation. A lot of radio, yes, but all up and down the spectrum there are blares and flares and glares of heat and color. Space is really dazzling. We just can’t see it.

So, if space isn’t dark and it isn’t cold and it isn’t empty and it isn’t silent, what is it?

It’s boring.

There’s nothing for kilometers in any direction except kilometers. And micro-dust—and not much of that, just enough to be an expensive nuisance. And even at 1.3 gees, 5 giga-klicks is still a month-long ride. Except there aren’t many who want to take that ride. Most ships are bot-driven. There’s not a lot of need for a human aboard. Take the human out of the ship and you can carry a lot more payload. It’s not the weight of the human, it’s the weight of all the oxygen and water and food and life support gear and additional fuel to push that weight. Do the math. But sometimes, you need a human onboard anyway. Because there are some decisions bots can’t make, and it isn’t always practical for a ship to phone home for advice, when that advice won’t come back for a year or more. So that’s when you load up the meatware and send it out.

Given that the bots drive the ship, crawl around the outside monitoring and repairing, and handle most of the chores inside as well, there’s not a lot for a human to do. Except inhale and exhale. And answer the mail. There’s always the mail. So you’re not even alone. So you can’t even say that space is lonely. It’s hot and loud and bright and busy.

But you can turn off the mail, you can put on the isolation-hearmuffs, and you can run around naked as long as you want. If you don’t mind your tits or your balls flopping around, whichever you have at the time, either or neither or both. This trip, neither. Myself, I prefer wearing micro-fiber skivvies, if for no other reason than they catch skinflakes, the little crud that turns into dust and eventually clogs up things like filters and fans. If I need to, I’ll wear a bra or a jock while pounding around the centrifuge, an hour a day while I listen to music, but most of the time I prefer to let things float instead of pulling at the musculature.

What I do like about space is that it gives me long uninterrupted hours to work on my book. Every so often, something beeps politely; a double-tone with a half-step up; then I’ll look up at the status board to see if everything is still green, it is, and then I’ll go back to work constructing the webs of connections and matrices, all the specific velocities and dynamic interrelationships, and how they carve their separate channels into the non-linear environment, and which collisions will produce transformations and which will result in emotional implosions. It isn’t easy being a writer. Most people think you just sit and type. That’s only what it looks like. The real job is sitting and thinking, which is something most people don’t like to do. That’s why they buy books—so they don’t have to be alone inside their own heads.

Except this time, the beep was a triple-tone, with a half-step down and a half-step up. A question mark. Boss, you wanna take a look at this?

The status screen showed a yellow question mark.

The Baked Bean—that’s my ship—was supposed to spiral outward for a long while, then spiral back inward for an equally long while. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I’d know when I found it. And it looked like I’d just found it. According to the IRMA, we were experiencing a slight—but measurable—course and velocity deviation. A tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a tenth. Not small enough to be an artifact of the hash at the bottom. When we dithered the noise and weighted the curves and sharpened the data-points and correlated and corrected the neural assessments, it was still there.

It wasn’t unexpected. This was what I’d come looking for. Low-level delta-perturbation. We had more theories than answers. Some of the questions dated all the way back to the first Voyager missions. Those two spacecraft experienced just enough slowdown to have folks at Mission Control scratching their heads about Newton’s second law for a long time. But the V’gers weren’t the only ships to hit the solar shelf. After a century or two, it was a predictable phenomenon. One theory, easily discounted, was that the buildup of dust on the surface of the probe added just enough mass to affect the efficiency of the engines; but any grade-schooler with a calculator could easily demonstrate that the amount of dust collected, even on a thirty year voyage, would be statistically insignificant.

Nevertheless, according to the instruments, The Baked Bean was no longer moving as fast as she had been a week ago. The drives were off and the ship had been coasting for ten days. I had lasers pointed at two dozen different retro-reflector sites: positioning satellites stationed all over the system, and another thirty satellites we had dropped on the way out. Based on the time-corrected, correlated bounce-back, I could locate this ship within 15 meters, anywhere out to a light year. According to IRMA, The Baked Bean was a few kilometers short of a happy meal—26.4 kilometers, to be exact, plus or minus 7.5 meters.

Either the Bean had gained mass or space was a lot thicker here.

Interesting problem.

The first thing to do was triple-check all the readings, then re-calibrate all the instruments and triple-check the readings again. 48 hours and three sleep shifts later, the numbers came up the same. Almost the same. We were now 27.2 klicks short of where the software said we should be.

Hmm. Hardware glitch? Highly unlikely. The IRMA unit had nine separate cores, three each of three different architectures. A glitch on one architecture would not be repeated on the other two. Software error? Equally unlikely. IRMA ran multiple instances of seven different astrogation programs. 7 different programming teams would not all make the same coding error. The astrogation systems were triple-linked with Mission Control Ganymede. They were parallel processing everything. 15 months from now, I would receive their confirmation that all systems were green and confidence remained high.

So, it wasn’t the equipment.

Next up, test the mass of the ship.

There were several ways to do this. The easiest was to bang it with a hammer and measure the vibrations. Of course, you needed a very special hammer, and a very good ear, but the Bean had both of those. Additional tests could be performed by applying an incredibly precise thrust in a specific direction and measuring the shift in velocity. We could also shut down the centrifuge and rotate the ship on her gyros and measure how long that took. There were other tests as well, some as esoteric as comparing the ship’s stress points by comparing her current holographic interference patterns with the patterns recorded on previous tests. All these separate measurements had been performed routinely before launch, and at least half-a-dozen times during the journey, including three times during flipover. Nine days later, the ship’s mass had been sliced and diced 37 different ways. Allowing for the expenditure of fuel, allowing for the expected accretion of a half-gram of micro-dust, The Baked Bean massed essentially the same as it had ninety minutes prior to first boost.

So, if the ship hadn’t gained mass, then either space had gotten thicker, or time ran slower out here. Or something else we hadn’t imagined, and we just weren’t thinking far enough outside the box. This is why a human being had to make the journey.

I don’t know how long I sat there, staring out the window and picking my nose. I suppose I could look it up on the monitors. But it was a long time. First, I had to assume that the answer was knowable, that there was a physically measurable and testable phenomenon at work here. Starting from that assumption, what tests could I run?

There aren’t a lot of ways to measure the speed of time without also measuring the speed of light. And the nasty thing about the speed of light is that it always measures the same, no matter where you are, or how fast you’re going. You can only measure your location and your speed and your time-rate by comparing it with the location and speed and vector of another object. Out here, those measurements would take a long while. But in the meantime, I had to assume that the laws of physics did not metamorphose with distance from Sol. Why? Because the low-level perturbation was not a constant. 293 robot-vehicles had left the Sol system in the past century. 17 of them had ceased functioning by the time they crossed Neptune’s orbit. 187 of them had experienced perturbation, most of them along the forward edge of Sol’s movement in the galactic spin-cycle. Therefore, the phenomenon could be localized.

Gravity. Maybe we had miscalculated the gravitational pull of local objects. Maybe we had miscalculated the combined gravitational weight of multiple objects. Maybe the solar shelf was a gravitational ripple from Sol. But no. The gravitometers hadn’t shown anything unexpected for 5 giga-klicks, and they weren’t showing anything weird now. It wasn’t that.

Solar winds? Maybe this far out, the effect of the solar wind dropped off precipitously? Nope. Nothing. No evidence of that. The solar winds were behaving exactly as they had behaved ever since we started measuring solar winds.

Solar wind. Wind. There was a thought. What if we’d run through a cosmic dust storm? Something with a lot of micro-particles—a zillion little high-speed collisions. Not a lot of mass, but a significant exchange of velocity. What if the low-level perturbation phenomenon was just a dense, fast-moving cloud of micro-particles that had impacted on the cow-catcher and transferred some of their momentum to the Bean?

But the sensors would have detected that, wouldn’t they? Or would they?

I ran it through IRMA. Given the mass and velocity of the Bean, how much mass traveling at what velocity, would have to strike us head on to produce the drag we were experiencing?

The answer was simple. Enough to vaporize the Bean. Force equals mass times acceleration. No matter how you juggled the mass and momentum, the amount of force necessary to slow the Bean was more than enough to shred the cow-catcher and the ship. You could do it slowly or instantly, the result was the same.

What if—? No, that didn’t make sense either. If we had overtaken a patch of dust heading in the same general direction, it wouldn’t have slowed us—not this much.

Hm. What about the external bots? And all the other moving parts outside? The rotating panels? The remote arms? The sensors and antennae? Were they still fully operational? Several hours of tests later—yes, they were all still optimal. Maybe a smidge off, maybe not. If there were any measurable differences, they were so small as to be lost in the hash.

Everything was working just the way it was supposed to. I was almost disappointed.

What else? What was I missing?

Back in school, my graduate thesis required several thousand hours of coding. I intended to prove that software ecologies would inevitably stop evolving when they hit their Skotak radius, the limits of the hardware. The underlying algorithms would generate new ecological entities at random, then evolve them until their inevitable collapse. While long-term stability was achievable, permanent stability was impossible in an evolutionary environment. The stats on the project were impressive. Over thirty thousand mutable objects, agents, and bots, four hundred billion generations of parallel evolution per run. Sixteen hundred hours of high-impact debugging and deconstruction. Three weeks before the submission deadline, I thought I was done. Except—there was something gnawing at the woodwork of my brain. Something didn’t feel right. I spent the better part of a week, studying columns of numbers until I found the one column that didn’t balance. A point and a half of something—one of the minor elements of the ecology—was simply evaporating. It wasn’t a rounding error, that was a beginner’s mistake. It was something else.

Logically, I knew that no one would ever notice this discrepancy—but I would know it was there. I spent most of a week tracing the hundred different processes that accessed element AXO-1011. I could have taken the element out of the ecology, but it had become an obsession. I was going to be right about this. Eventually, I did find