The Wire Continuum

In The imaginative mapping and mensuration of the future, [Clarke's] record is mixed but intriguing....In one of his first published stories, Travel by Wire! (in Amateur Science Fiction Stories, December 1937), he remarkably predicted the launch of a British radio-transporter system--in 1962! [Clarke] used a similar idea in his first professionally published story, Loophole (Astounding Science Fiction, May 1946).

Martian Times, December 1997

1947: Hatfield, North London, England

The engineers gave Henry Forbes a thumbs-up, and he let the Vampire roll down the runway. The roaring jets gave him that familiar smooth push in the back, and when he pulled on his stick the Vampire tipped up and threw him into the sky.

It was a cloudless June morning.

The English sky was a powder-blue uncluttered dome above him, and the duck's egg-green hull of the Vampire shone in the sunlight. He pulled the kite through a couple of circuits over London. The capital was a gray-brown cluttered mass beneath him, with smoke columns threading up through a thin haze of smog. Beautiful sight, of course. He could still make out some of the bigger bomb sites, in the East End and the docks, discs of rubble like craters on the Moon.

He remembered Hatfield at the height of the show: dirty, patched-up Spits and Hurricanes and B-24 bombers, taxiing between piles of rubble; kites bogged in the mud on days so foul that even the sparrows were walking; flight crew in overalls and silk scarves cranking engines, their faces drawn with exhaustion.

That was then. Now the planes were like visitors from the future, gleaming metal monocoque jets with names such as Vampire, Meteor, Canberra, Hunter, Lightning. And Henry Forbes, 30, was no longer a squadron leader in blue RAF braid with a career spanning the fall of France, the Battle of Britain and D day; now he was nothing more exotic than a test pilot for de Havilland, and not even the most senior at that.

Still, there were compensations. He was testing an engine for the new M-52, which should be capable of flying at 1000 mph, thereby knocking the socks off the Americans in California with their X-1.

Forbes settled in his cockpit. The single-seater fighter was a tight squeeze, like the Spits used to be, even though he was wearing no more than a battered sport suit, a Mae West and a carnation in his buttonhole. Cocooned in his cockpit, alone in the empty sky, he felt an extraordinary peace. He wished Max could be up here with him, or, at least, that he could communicate to her some of what he felt about this business of flying. But he never could. And besides, she was much too busy with her own projects.

Susan Maxton was a couple of years younger than Forbes. When he'd met her during the war she'd been an intense young Oxford graduate, drafted into the Royal Signals, making rather hazardous trips to V2 impact sites across the scarred countryside of southern England. She had been seeking surviving bits of the sophisticated guidance systems that had delivered the Third Reich's missiles--advanced far beyond anything the Allies had, she said--and since the war she'd traveled to Germany, to Peenemünde and the Ruhr and elsewhere, delving into more Nazi secrets.

It was all supposed to be classified, of course. He didn't believe half of what she hinted to him so excitedly, lurid stuff of secret Nazi labs that had come within a hair of developing an A-bomb for Hitler--or even a way of transporting people by telephone wires, so Hitler could mount a new electronic blitzkrieg even from the heart of his collapsing Reich.

After the war, they had agreed, Forbes and Max were going to marry. But it hadn't happened yet. Like so many women during the war, Max had developed what Forbes had been brought up to regard as an altogether unhealthy liking for her work. No doubt it would all pan out. In the meantime, as his ground crew at Hatfield pointedly reminded him by radio, it was time to stop wool-gathering and get on with his day's work.

He took a couple of plugs of cotton wool and stuffed them into his ears. Then he tipped up the nose of the Vampire once more and, pouring on the coals, launched the kite at the sky.

The blue was marvelous, and it deepened as he rose.

He throttled back on the jet as the air grew thinner. The Vampire arced toward the top of its climb, 60,000 feet up. The earth was spread out beneath him, curving gently, landscape painted green and brown and gray, and the sky was so blue it was almost black. From an English suburb to the edge of space, in a few minutes. Ruddy peculiar.

Of course, the hairy stuff was still to come, as he went into a high-speed compressibility dive on the way home. He'd expect to lose control around 24 thou, saying a few prayers as per, until he reached the denser air at 15 thou or so and his controls came back.

Still, if he did the right things, he would be home in time for lunch.

He stuffed the nose down and began his long fall back into the atmosphere.

1957: Preston, England

Susan Maxton Forbes watched, amused, as her husband made his slow ceremonial walk through the English Electric design offices. Even as the electrifying countdown to the latest Blue Streak launch played over a crackling radio line from Woomera, the young aerodynamicists clustered around Henry. She had to admit he carried it off well.

"Impressive place," he said for the fifth time.

"Well, you should have seen us just after the war," said one grizzled oldtimer (perhaps 34). "All we had was a disused garage over on Corporation Street. But it was there that we hatched the Canberra."

"Ah! I tested her, you know. 'The plane that makes time stand still.'"

"Yes," said a breathy young thing. "It must have been exciting."

"Not really. Journalists can get jolly good stories out of test pilots. But the work is methodical, progressive, technical."

"Will you feel like that when you take up our Mustard, Henry?"

"I should ruddy hope so, or I won't get paid!"

There was general laughter. They walked on to another part of the office, and Max took the chance to slip an arm through her husband's and steer him away from the breathy young thing.

"Don't tell me you don't enjoy all this attention," she whispered to him.

"Of course I do. You know me. All this bushy-tailed enthusiasm makes me feel a bit less of an old duffer--"

They exchanged a glance, and he shut up. It was just such exchanges about age that usually led to their gloomy arguments about whether they should have a sprog and, if so, when, or even if they should have already.

She squeezed his arm. "I wish people got so excited about my work," she said.

He grunted. "There was enough ballyhoo when you sent through that wooden cube. Nothing else in the Daily Mirror for weeks, even forced Suez off the front page."

"But it didn't work. The cube came through in little spheres, and--"

"But they put it in the ruddy Science Museum even so! What more do you want? Not to mention the poor hamster that died of shock and that you had stuffed."

She giggled. "I suppose it was all a little cruel. But I don't mean that, the stunts for the press. It's the intellectual adventure--"

He pulled a face and momentarily sniffed the flower in his buttonhole. "Ah. Intellectual."

"The way we're settling the problems that baffled the Germans--how to get around the wretched Uncertainty Principle."

She tried to explain the latest progress at the Plessey labs in their research into the principles of radio-transportation. In fact, matter wouldn't be transported, but rather the information that encoded, say, a human being. It had been thought radio-transporters were impossible, because you'd need to map the position and velocity of every particle of a person, and that would violate the Uncertainty Principle. But there was a loophole.

It had been a real drama: the struggles, the dead ends, the race with the (continued on page 170) Wire Continuum (continued from page 78) Americans at Bell Labs to be first--before the researchers realized that an unknown quantum state could be disassembled into, then later reconstructed from, purely classical information using measurements called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations, and that said classical information could then be sent down a wire as easily as a telegraph message.

That was the nub of it, though there was devil in the details of bandwidth and sampling requirements and storage capacity.

"Of course, you can't copy quantum information," she said. "You have to destroy the object you're going to radio-transport. And it's just as well, or our machine would work as a copier. Imagine a hundred Hitlers roaming the planet, each with an equally valid claim to being the original!"

He grunted, looking at drafting tables and jigs. "If you ask me, a hundred Bill Haleys would be worse."

She knew he wasn't really listening.

Now they were buttonholed by the manager, a portly young man with thinning hair who wanted to lecture them about the Mustard.

"'Mustard,' for Multi-Unit Space Transport and Recovery Device, you see. We know the Americans are going for the dustbin theory, a virtually uncontrollable capsule. But the practical way forward in space has to be a recoverable vehicle, if only the Aviation Ministry will back us--"

Max listened sourly. What was a spaceship, after all, but plumbing? And all these glamorous spaceship projects were coming about only because of anticipation of the potential of radio-transport, and the international race to launch the first extraterrestrial relays into stationary orbit around the Earth.

And meanwhile in her field, all but ignored, such exciting developments were going on, right at the fringe of human understanding! Even now she had a letter in her purse from Eugene Wigner at Princeton, about his ideas on using quantum tunneling effects to get around the light-speed barrier.

If only Henry could see that they were actually on the same team--in fact, they were mutually dependent! But his suspicion of an expertise he didn't share, and of her own growing reputation, seemed only to be widening the gap between them.

Now, in remote Woomera, the Blue Streak countdown was nearing its climax. Ten, nine, eight. . . . The two of them gathered with the English Electric staff under a loudspeaker. "To think," said the portly manager, "that once Prospero is up there, we will be able to watch the next launch on our televisions!

Or, Max thought, simply step to Australia in person.

Maybe, she thought, we should have had children after all. But is the desire to solve our own problems a good motive for wanting a child? If only I could answer such simple questions as well as I master the paradoxes of quantum mechanics.

Three, two, one.

•

1967: Woomera, South Australia

In the upended cockpit, lying on his back with his legs in the air, Forbes listened to the voices relayed from the Operations Room, cultured British and crisp Australian. Everything was going well, and he was content to let his co-pilot--a bright young chap even if he was a Yorkshireman--field the various instructions and requests, and press whichever flesh was appropriate.

Forbes was relaxed. The g forces he would have to endure during the Congreve's flight would be easier than those he'd tolerated during dogfights with 109s, when he'd hauled Spits through turns so tight he'd actually blacked out. And besides, nobody could get through as many hours on readiness--preparing for more trade with the Hun, and nothing to distract him but shove-halfpenny in the Dispersal Hut--as he had without learning to take it easy.

Forbes leaned forward and peered through his periscope. The red-brown Australian desert spread for miles around him, lifeless save for saltbushes and clumps of spiny grass. He peered down the flank of the Mustard, and lox vapor swirled across his vision.

The Congreve, ready for launch, looked like three Comet aircraft stood on end, belly to belly, with a crew of two in each nose. Fueled by hydrogen and oxygen, the three units would take off together, the boosters feeding fuel to the central core; then, at 200 thou, 150 seconds after launch, the boosters would break away for their turbojet landings and allow the core, under Forbes' command, to carry on to orbit. Since the three aircraft were reusable and of a single design, the boffins claimed Mustards could be 20 to 30 times cheaper per pound of payload than the converted missiles the Americans and Russians used--so cheap, in fact, that the imminence of this first flight had caused the Americans to close down their own rather vainglorious ballistic-capsule manned program, including the planned Apollo Moon missions.

But now the bally thing has to work, Forbes thought gloomily. The new space outposts, to be reached by the Wire platforms nestling in the kite's belly, depended on the Mustard's heavy-lift capacity. The Herschel Space Telescope, for instance, was already being assembled at the Pilkington glass factory in Lancashire.

The launch complex stood on an escarpment overlooking a dry lake, isolated save for the gleaming shells of lox tanks. The launch stand was not much more than a metal platform, in fact, with a single gaunt gantry rising alongside the ship itself.

The Woomera facilities were crude compared with Cape Canaveral, where he'd done a little training with the Americans. The Atlantic Union had smoothed his path there, though he was sure the Americans would have been generous enough to help anyhow. Unlike, for example, the French. He'd been delighted when the government had finally given up its attempts to persuade the European Common Market to let in Britain. A union with America made much more sense, in terms of a common culture and language--especially now that the Wire had made distances on the Earth's surface irrelevant.

Since May 1962, when Harold Macmillan had launched the first Wire link to Paris with a silly Union Jack stunt, the Wire and its possibilities had exploded across the world. Trade and travel had been transformed.

The Americans had been particularly inventive, as you might expect. There had been that awful Kennedy business in Dallas--the first flash crowd, they called it now--and the transporting of wounded GIs home from Vietnam to their parents' arms within minutes of their injury, and LBJ's campaign to enforce desegregation laws by putting Wire platforms in every school yard.

And on it went, the Wonder of the Second Elizabethan Age, and, because Max at Plessey had won her race with the Americans, it was British, by God. Sometimes it seemed you couldn't open a newspaper without having those silly slogans thrust in your face: "Travel by phone!" "It's quicker by Wire!" The young, particularly, seemed to be flourishing in this new distance-free world, if sometimes in rather peculiar ways. Even today, those caterwauling ninnies the Beatles were Wiring their way around the world singing All You Need Is Love live before 200 million people.

The Wire had touched them all. Max had actually gotten rich by investing in companies developing the new digital computers required to run the spreading Wire networks.

If only she could have been here to see this, his apotheosis! But, as ever, she was too busy.

The Wire had turned his own life into something of a paradox, however. Only one flight-ready Mustard had been built; only a handful of flights would be required to haul up the orbital receiver platforms, and after that the Wire could take over, hauling freight and passengers up to orbit much more cheaply than any rocket ever could.

And what then? The Americans were talking of a new international program to push on to the Moon. Forbes, despite his age, was considered a leading candidate to work on that. To the ruddy Moon! But it would mean another decade or more of intensive training and testing. And of course Max would just say he was running away again. Chasing a youth he'd already lost.

What nonsense. He expected it would all get easier when the divorce came through, and he could let this odd jealousy the Wire inspired in him fade away.

But that's all for tomorrow, old lad, he told himself. First you need to get through today with your hide intact.

For in just eight minutes, Henry Forbes, 50 years old, would be a thousand miles high--in orbit around the Earth itself.

Two seconds before the launch, six main engines ignited. There was a flare of brilliant white light. Smoke, white but tinged with red Australian dust, billowed out to the left and right of the triple spacecraft. Forbes heard a deep, throaty roar, far beneath him, like a door slamming in hell.

And, just for a second, he was transported back across more than 20 years, to that raid on the V2 launch site at Haagsche Bosch, when one of the birds had actually taken off in front of him, a cool pillar of flame rising up among the contrails of the warring kites--

And then the vibration rose up to engulf him.

1977: Procellarum Base

From the cabin of Endeavour, Forbes was staring down at a disc-shaped piece of the Moon, no more than ten feet below him. The low light of the lunar morning picked out craters of all sizes, from a few yards down to pinpricks.

Buzz Aldrin, the first man to walk on the Moon, stood at the foot of the rope ladder, foreshortened from Forbes' vantage.

Aldrin turned around, stiff as a mannequin, his Haldane suit glowing white in the sunlight. "Beautiful view," he said. "Magnificent desolation."

"Endeavour, Stevenage. That's a nice phrase, Buzz."

"I have my moments," said Aldrin, and he bounded away across the surface, testing out his locomotion, moving out of Forbes' sight.

Forbes appreciated his co-pilot's lack of portentousness about his big scene. After all, the identity of the man to take the first actual footstep up here hardly mattered; the three crews--a Brit, a Yank and a Russki--had landed on the moon at precisely the same instant, at the climax of this cooperative program.

Now it was Forbes' turn. He took a moment to check the plastic carnation pinned to his white oversuit. Then, with the help of Alexei Leonov, Forbes lowered himself through the hatch and clung to the plastic rope ladder. He was stiff inside his balloonlike inflated Haldane suit, but he was an old crock of 60 and stiff as a board most of the time anyhow; being encased in a Moon cocoon hardly made a difference.

He dropped quickly, the shadows of Endeavour's landing legs shifting around him until--after a final, heart-thumping moment of hesitation--his feet crunched into the surface. The dust rose up slowly in neat little arcs, settling back on his legs.

He moved out from beneath the lander. Every time he took a step he could feel rock flour crackle under his weight. The light was oddly reversed, like a photographic negative: The pocked ground was a bright gray-brown under a sky as black as a cloudy night in Cleethorpes. The horizon was close and sharp, and it curved. The Moon really was very small, just a little rocky ball, and Forbes was stuck to its outside.

"Endeavour, Stevenage. Good to see you, Henry. How do you feel?"

"Ruddy peculiar," said Forbes.

"It would," said Leonov drily, "be ruddy peculiar indeed if you lent us a hand, Commander."

Forbes turned and saw that Aldrin and Leonov were halfway through the main task of the expedition, which was erecting the Wire transceiver. This first affair was a rough-and-ready Heath Robinson lash-up, assembled by pulling on lanyards fixed to the base of the Endeavour and letting the thing fold down. It didn't matter as long as it worked; the engineers who would follow would bring components for much more permanent establishments.

He bounced forward to join in the work.

The Earth was a round blue ball, much fatter than a full Moon, so high in the black sky he had to tilt back to see it. It was, he saw, morning in Europe; he could make out the continent clearly under a light dusting of cloud, though England was obscured. The air had become a lot clearer in recent years, though, of course, it was no long-term solution to Wire-dump industrial pollutants at the bottom of the oceans--eventually the noxious gases would escape to the atmosphere anyway--and in fact one proposed use of the Moon was as a global waste dump. Of course, as Max never tired of explaining to him, the quantum translation process at the heart of the Wire relied on having an inert mass to transform at the receiver end. It would, he thought, be a nice puzzle for future archaeologists to find, at the heart of decommissioned nuclear power stations, lumps of irradiated Moon dust.

He hadn't spoken to Max for months. Perhaps even now she was watching some BBC broadcast of the Moonwalk, commentated on by James Burke, Patrick Moore and Isaac Asimov.

Or perhaps not. The new developments being opened up by the billions of sterling dollars poured by the Wire corporations into quantum studies--there was talk of quantum computers, even of some kind of Dan Dare starship motor--more than absorbed Max' attention now. Forbes found it all baffling, and rather spooky. The quantum computers, for instance, were supposed to attain huge speeds by carrying out computations simultaneously in parallel universes.

When the transceiver was erected, it was time for the flags. The Union Flag and the Hammer and Sickle were allowed to drape with a courtroom grace, but Aldrin, embarrassed, had to put up a Stars and Stripes stiffened with wire, to "wave" on the airless Moon. And now came the gravity pendulum, a simple affair knocked off by the London Science Museum to demonstrate to the TV audience that they really were up here, embedded in the Moon's weaker pull.

The three of them saluted, each in his own fashion, and took one another's photographs.

"Endeavour, Stevenage. OK, gentlemen, the show's over. We'll see you back home in a couple of minutes."

So soon? Forbes thought wistfully.

But already Leonov and Aldrin were filing obediently toward the Wire transceiver. They disappeared in the characteristic blue flashes of radio-transport and were replaced by polythene sacks of water.

For a moment, Forbes was alone on the Moon. His breath was loud in his helmet, and he thought of the Puffing Billies, the foul-smelling oxygen economizer bellows they'd been forced to use in the high-altitude Spits.

In just a few minutes, the engineers would start coming through, and a squad of journalists and lunar surface scientists, even some scholars from the Science Museum to start the instant preservation of the Endeavour. He looked around at the untrodden plains of the Sea of Storms and wondered how it would look here in a few weeks or months, as humans spread out from this beachhead, building busily.

The Endeavour stood proudly behind the flags, 50 feet tall, the blunt curve of the ceramic heat shield at her hemispheric nose swathed in shimmering Kevlar insulation blankets. There was raying, streaks in the dust, under the gaping nozzle of the high-performance Rolls-Royce liquid rocket engine that had, Forbes thought with some pride, performed like a dream.

But Endeavour was the first and last of her kind. A new generation of complex, intelligent, unmanned craft, with names like Voyager and Mariner and Venera, were already sailing out from Earth, taking Wire platforms to Mars and Venus and the moons of Jupiter. Buzz Aldrin had been lucky; the first man or woman on Mars would almost certainly be a politician, not a pilot. Once again, thanks to the inexorable advance of technology, Forbes' usefulness was over.

Of course, when he got home this lunar flight would be regarded as the peak of his career. He would be expected to retire: to pass on the torch to the rather peculiar set of young people growing up with the Wire.

But he wasn't ready for his carpet slippers just yet, no matter what the calendar told him. He knew what Max would say to that--it was all of a piece with their failure to have children, his refusal to accept his own aging and similar modern psychobabble. But he had a private medical report which indicated that retiring to the cottage in the country might not be a sensible option anyway.

He closed his eyes and stepped through the transceiver's sketchy portal. There was a stab of pain as the electronbeam scanners swept over him.

For two seconds, as an S-band signal leaped from Moon to Earth, he did not, presumably, exist.

Suddenly weight descended on him, six times as much as on the Moon, and he staggered under the bulk of his suit. But there were hands on his arms to support him, noise all around him.

He opened his eyes. Beyond the walls of the quarantine facility, the sky of England was gray and enclosing.

1987: Brunel Dock, Low Earth Orbit

He awoke when the slow thermal roll of the dock brought bright water-blue Earthlight slanting into his cabin.

He floated out of his sleeping bag. He ran his fingers through what was left of his hair, and made himself tea. This consisted of pumping a polythene bag full of hot water and sucking the resulting pale brown mush through a nipple. Revolting--even the strongest brew never masked the taste of plastic. And of course with the low pressure up here, the Rosie Lee was never properly hot.

Still, he lingered. Although he had some suspicion that his work here, as a consultant on Discovery's control systems, was something of a sinecure, his days were busy enough; at 70, he had learned to give himself time to wake up.

Of course, the view was always a terrific distraction.

Today, in bright noon sunlight, under smog-free air, England glittered with scattered homes. Even from up here, Forbes could see how the great old cities had shrunk--even London--with those huge misty-gray scars of suburbs eaten into by the new green reforestation swaths. Commuting--by train, or car, anyway--was a thing of the past; the capital's workers flickered directly into the heart of the city, popping out of Wire transceivers in the old tube stations. The M1 motorway was now a singularly long racetrack. Some people maintained "distributed careers" with desks in a dozen capital cities around the world, jumping from morning to night. It would never have suited Forbes.

There were costs, of course. Even from up here Forbes could see the blue sparkle of swimming pools, sprinkled across the mountains and valleys of Scotland and Wales and Northumberland. The people of Britain had scattered across their tiny islands in search of illusory wilderness, but there was just no ruddy room. There had been some attempt to preserve the more beautiful areas. In the Lake District, for instance, tourists were Wired into great glass viewing boxes, peering out at Wordsworth's beloved landscape like so many goldfish in a bowl.

And some Wire-related costs were not visible from orbit. He remembered the panic when rabies had swept over England soon after the opening up of the first French links. And there had been some more serious plagues, such as the explosion in AIDS cases in the early Eighties. Some commentators said that the various viruses and bacteria that feasted on man were enjoying an unprecedented explosion in evolutionary growth, such was the expansion of possible infection vectors. Others said that on a Wired planet, man must evolve in response, or perish.

Some of the lingering anti-Wire hysteria was absurd, of course, even to a crusty old skeptic like Forbes. Since 1963, a year after the Wire's opening, there had been no serious accidents with the system itself--such as the loss or corruption of a human pattern in transit--and it had been quite irresponsible for Twentieth Century Fox to remake The Fly in such gruesome detail.

The Wire could be a force for good, its fans argued. It was being used to defuse the Cold War, with teams of UN inspectors Wiring back and forth between the nuclear silos held by each side, and rushing peacekeepers to any potential trouble spot. And the Wire had averted so many possible catastrophes--getting the American hostages out of Iran in 1981, averting a war between the Atlantic Union and the Argentines over the Falklands in 1982, distributing aid to those wretched famine victims in Ethiopia in 1984--that it was, it seemed, in danger of provoking an outbreak of utopianism, all across the planet.

So Max had said anyhow, the last time he'd seen her. But they'd argued.

They had been like ambassadors from two alien species, stiff and made suddenly old. She'd been more interested in lecturing him about the work she was doing with Feynman and Deutsch on quantum computers than asking about him. It was strange that two people whose lives had been so shaped by a communications technology should find themselves incapable of communication themselves, and Forbes couldn't help but wonder if a child--grown by now!--might have served to link them better.

But in a sense Max did have children. Sometimes he envied her the easy bond she seemed to form with the new generation, her students and colleagues and others. There are no boundaries for the young now, she'd said, only access. War, she said, is inconceivable for these people. The Wire is transforming them, Henry. And so on. Of course it hardly mattered to Forbes whether she was right or not, since he wasn't allowed home anymore.

Over the years, he had been rather a silly ass about the length of time he had spent in zero gravity. And he never had been very conscientious about physical jerks. The quacks had explained how his skeletal and cardiac muscles were deeply atrophied, and he had piddled away so much of his bone calcium that the inner spongy bone had vanished altogether, without hope of regeneration.

On Earth, he would be wheelchair-bound and a nuisance to everybody. Better here, working on the construction of star clipper Discovery, even if he suspected the youngsters up here tolerated rather than valued him.

He took one last lingering look at sunlit Britain, remembering the exhilaration of hauling a Spit in a battle climb into the blue skies of June 1940, with the clatter of the prop loud in his ears, the stink of engine oil and leather in his nostrils. Ruddy peculiar. Here he was in orbit. He'd even been to the Moon. But somehow nothing ever compared to those vivid moments of his youth.

The slow roll of the dock removed Britain from his view and replaced it with the sleek, streamlined form of Discovery, the future appropriately replacing the past.

Forbes finished his tea and, with a sigh, prepared for the daily ordeal of the zero-gravity toilet. The Americans were wonderful people, but they couldn't design plumbing for toffee.

1997: "Discovery," Martian Orbit

The launch of humanity's first starship struck Forbes as a remarkably low-key event, compared with the thrilling takeoffs he remembered aboard Endeavour and Congreve, not to mention all those exhausting scrambles at wartime airfields. After all, there was drama: Even now, hydrogen was circulating in the nozzle of the huge NERVA 4 nuclear fission rocket, cooling before passing on to the core to be superheated and expelled, and so driving the great ship forward.

Surely even Captain Cook had made a little more fuss about his departure for the Pacific, in an earlier Discovery. And after all, this was the first journey to the stars....

But there wasn't even a countdown. Forbes had simply to sit in his frame couch with the rest of the crew, a few rows behind the commander and his copilot--both women, incidentally--and listen to their brisk young voices working through checks with the ground crew at Port Lowell.

Even the setting was mundane, like the interior of a small aircraft, with foldout equipment racks and miniaturized galleys and lavatories and zero-gravity up-down visual cues. Only the creased orange skin of Mars, visible through the windows, made for an element of the extraordinary, the ancient landscape now mottled by the green domes of the colonies that had provisioned Discovery after its shakedown interplanetary hop.

Humanity's first starship was shaped something like a huge arrow. The habitable compartment--its interior, designed by Cunard, frankly luxurious--made a streamlined arrowhead, separated for safety from the NERVA 4 by the arrow's shaft: 100 yards of open scaffolding, crammed with shielding, antennae and liquid-hydrogen fuel tanks.

The streamlining amused Forbes, for it made the habitable compartment look like nothing so much as the V2-shaped spaceships that had rattled their way through the beloved Saturday morning specials of his youth--a shape that had become derided in the Sixties and Seventies as insectile ships such as the Endeavour, adapted to airless space, had taken shape on drafting boards.

But it turned out that the experts, not for the first time, were wrong. Interstellar space was not empty. There was gas and dust--desperately thin, only 50 or 60 bacterium-sized specks per cubic mile--but that was enough to give a respectable battering to the prow of any starship unwise enough to approach a decent fraction of the speed of light, as Discovery intended to achieve. So the ship was streamlined and coated with a thick impact shield and even mounted with a rather powerful dust-busting shortwave-radiation generator in her nose.

A decent fraction of the speed of light: Such velocities would be far beyond the capacity even of the NERVA 4--a huge, overengineered American monstrosity originally intended to take much smaller spacecraft no farther than Mars--if not for the HRP effect.

HRP--for Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff, as Max had explained to him, the physicists who had made the crucial quantum vacuum breakthrough. The empty vacuum was not empty at all, it seemed, but a wash of seething energy, with virtual particles popping in and out of existence constantly. This so-called zero point field created an electromagnetic drag on any object that passed through it, and it was that drag which created the effect of mass and inertia, the reason it took so much effort to start anything moving.

The big Wire operators--immensely rich, with 40 years' expertise in quantum effects--had seized on the HRP results immediately. And Discovery was the result, rendered virtually massless by its inertial suppressors, and so capable of being driven to enormous velocities by a modest engine.

And now, low-key or not, the pilots' preparations were reaching a climax.

The rest of the crew, young and healthy and intelligent, seemed unconcerned. They simply sat in their couches in their couples--or breeding pairs, as Forbes sourly thought of them. They would tolerate this 30-year voyage to Alpha Centauri, confined as they would be within the streamlined hull of Discovery, living their lives, studying quietly, maintaining their craft, even raising children. They wouldn't even have to suffer the rigors of zero gravity--the manipulation of the HRP fields would see to that.

He tried to talk to them, of course.

Such as about the flap he'd gotten into in 1941 when he brought down a Heinkel 111 near St. Abbs Head in Berwickshire. Circling overhead, he saw the crew scramble clear, and he realized they were going to set fire to their almost intact bomber, so he decided to land alongside and stop them. But the Spit hit a patch of mud as it rolled down the field and turned over onto its back. Forbes was unhurt but had hung helplessly upside down in his straps until the Heinkel's crew came to rescue him. Then, with Local Defense Volunteers approaching, the Germans surrendered to Forbes, handing him their Luger pistols, but the LDV boys had thought he was one of the enemy and promptly arrested him, and it was only when he produced an Inland Revenue tax return form from his pocket that he managed to extricate himself.

And so on. These youngsters, bound for the stars, listened politely. But to them, Forbes, with his stories of war and heroism and the Inland Revenue, was a figure from some impossibly remote Dark Age.

Perhaps Max was right: that these patient, fearless youngsters--shaped in a Wire-connected world without frontiers or limits, growing richer and richer by the year--really were a different lot from their forefathers.

Even, said Max, a new species.

Perhaps. It often seemed absurd even to him that such an old fool as himself was undertaking such a trip at all. It was just that payload costs, even on a star-ship, had been made invisibly low by the HRP effect. And besides, the Martian Times had put up rather a handsome advance for the observations he would be broadcasting back en route.

He was sure, though, he would not live to see the light of Alpha Centauri, nor would he get to Wire-step back to Earth. But that was no cause for regret. For him, the escape from a baffling Earth was the thing.

Forbes, who remembered different days, had grown uncomfortable with some of the complacent assumptions of modern times. Was the Wire-delivered hegemony of the Western world really such a good idea? There had been the Gulf war, for instance, in which U.S. Marines had used a hidden Wire gateway to storm Saddam's bunker, deposing him with scarcely a shot and then liberating that country. There was no doubt Saddam had been a monster. But Forbes recalled that rather similar schemes had been hatched by the Nazis. How must such actions look to the average Iraqi?

But such arguments were just excuses, Max said. Once again, she had told him, he was attempting to outrun the future. He really must let go at last, learn to trust the young people, not fear them ... and so on. He had stopped listening to all that long ago.

But in the end, he was sorry to lose her. He could not say they were friends, and certainly they were no longer in love; she was, simply, Max. And increasingly her lined face was overlaid in his mind by images of a bright, excitable young redhead in khakis.

He was becoming, he decided, a sentimental old fool.

Forbes felt a low thrumming, transmitted to him through the frame of his couch. It was smooth, subdued, and yet it inevitably reminded him of the scream of a Spitfire's Merlin engine, the subterranean rumble of a Mustard's gigantic liquid-fuel rockets.

The cabin seemed to tip, as acceleration built up. The autumn light of Mars faded.

Forbes felt a surge of exhilaration. Bugger old age. He was going to the stars!

2007: Oxford, England

I go to the seminars when I can; Wire travel is hardly a challenge, even for an old lady like me. The last one I attended was at the university's new Shaw Library--have you heard of it? A room in the Bodleian is connected, via Wired doors, to rooms on the Moon, Mars, Ganymede, Triton--

But though I religiously turn up, Henry, you probably won't believe me when I say that the new ideas leave me behind most of the time! Let me mention some of them to you.

First of all, the Wiring of minds. That may seem rather spooky to you--and to me!--but believe me, it's a real possibility, now that we understand the equations that govern consciousness processes--for consciousness itself, of course, is a quantum phenomenon. It's all an outgrowth of quantum computing. I'm sure you know, Henry, your precious Discovery is guided by a million-quantum-dot Factorization engine, no matter how spooky you think it is! And because computational power is combinatorial--oh, dear Henry, I don't think I have time to explain it all--suffice it to say that two minds are much better than one! And so are three, or four--or a billion. Some commentators feel we're on the verge of the most dramatic leap in human evolution since Homo habilis.

What else?

Well, you've probably read about the new nanogates--miniature Wire gates that can transmit an atom at a time. There was a piece in The Lancet outlining medical applications. It would be possible to inject a patient with smart nanogates that could hunt out and radio-transport away toxins, or cancerous cells! A little too late for me, unfortunately.

And then there is the possibility of faster-than-light travel. It's all based on something called quantum tunneling. If you try to contain a photon by a barrier, there is a small but finite probability--because of quantum uncertainty--that you'll suddenly find it on the far side of the barrier. And if you do, there is no appreciable delay. I've been following the theoretical research for decades, but the practical breakthrough came in the Nineties when an Austrian team transmitted a rather scratchy recording of Mozart's 40th Symphony at 4.7 times the speed of light! And this year, Bell Labs is going to try to send a wooden cube across a few miles--just like our first experiments with the Wire.

Henry, I hope you don't find that by the time you reach Centauri in your rather lumbering inertial-drive Sopwith Camel, you haven't been overtaken by a faster-than-light Spitfire!

So my work continues to absorb me. And, Henry, you must believe me when I say--and I know I repeat myself--these young people are wonderful, so much better than we were, if sometimes a little scary. Do you know, the new prime minister wasn't even born when the first Wire service was opened up! Do you remember that ridiculous affair with the flag? It seems hardly yesterday... prime minister: foolish me, I meant the governor, of course. Dates me, doesn't it!

They say that for the young in the schools now, even the concept of nation seems absurd. They can't believe that a mere half century ago we'd just come out of a war--it seems to them like a hideous human sacrifice. It makes us old folk uncomfortable sometimes, but it's hard to deny the logic! Our young live in a rich, clean world, and there's no reason why anyone should go short of the fundamentals of life, not until the solar system itself starts to run dry--and even then we'll have the stars, thanks to you and Discovery.

I know it's hard to accept change. This new world often seems very strange to me, and I sometimes wonder where humanity will be in ten, or 20, or 30 years' time, when even human thought has been Wired. In a way I understand why you've continued to flee, my dear--at last, all the way to the stars! But there was nothing to fear. Perhaps if you had had a child of your own, or if we had had one, you might be able to see it.

Now, you mustn't be distressed by my little bit of news, Henry my dear. I'm not in any pain or discomfort. I've been involved in a lot of wizard japes in my time, which is just the sort of thing your old RAF pals used to say, so you see I was paying attention to you after all, even all those years ago! My only regret is I won't get to see any more of the wonderful future that's opening up--and I won't see you again, and, yes, that is important to me.

2017: Between Stars

He lay in his cabin, an old mechanical clock softly ticking. He could smell nothing, taste nothing, every breath hurt, and all he could see was a series of vague blurs. He was a crock and no mistake, and he'd really had enough of this caper.

Somehow he knew today was the day.

It didn't seem so tragic to Forbes. It was rather like the elephants, he thought. He once knew a chap who had been to India--and this was before the Empire broke up, before the war--and this chap came back with stories of the elephants, and how they would know when it was their time. They would leave their herds and seek out a quiet place, without any fuss.

Perhaps it was true. And perhaps humans shared the same instinct, and if so, it was a remarkable comfort. After all, he'd had good innings; he might have bought it at any time in the Forties, and a lot of good men had done just that.

His breath was scratching in his throat. It was a blithering nuisance--

The walls dissolved around him.

He felt a stab of shock--and irritation. He was scared. But what on Earth was the point of his being frightened now?

But he was suspended in stars, stars above and below and all around him. Ahead, they were tinged the subtlest blue.

You shouldn't fear us.

A uniform light came up--just a little, leaving the sky a deep midnight blue, but enough to wash out the stars.

A cramped cabin. A stick in his hand. Something in his ears--he lifted his hand--it was cotton wool.

Good God. He was back in a Vampire, its duck's egg-green hull all around him. There was even a fresh carnation in his buttonhole.

You didn't have to flee into the dark.

The nose of the Vampire dipped, and the Earth itself was spread out beneath him, curving gently, glowing with a network of light, a Wire continuum.

We are you. You are us. Because of your courage, mankind will live forever. We honor you. We want you to join us.

So they, the young people--or whatever ruddy thing they had become--had brought him all the way home, from the stars. To be able to do such a thing--they were like gods. It occurred to him he ought to be frightened of them, as he always had been, a little.

But they were human children, all the same.

Perhaps Max had been right. Perhaps it was time, at last, for him to place his destiny in other hands.

There was no Max down there, though. Even they couldn't reach beyond the grave. Not yet, anyhow.

Welcome home.

He would be safe down there, when he landed. But there was no rush. A few more minutes wouldn't harm. Perhaps he could take the kite for a couple of turns over London.

He stuffed the Vampire's nose down and began his long fall back into the atmosphere.

If only Henry could see that they were actually on the same team, mutually dependent!