Tricentennial Read online

  Tricentennial

  Joe William Haldeman

  Hugo Best Short Story Winner (1977)

  Nebula Best Short Story Nominee (1977)

  Locus Best Short Story Nominee (1977)

  Joe Haldeman is a public relations department’s dream. Handsome, with a dashing beard, and in his early thirties, he is not only a world traveler, a teacher, a lecturer, a former senior editor of ASTRONOMY magazine, guitar player, and skin diver, but in addition to his science fiction he has written adventure novels, nonfiction books, short stories, articles, poems, and songs. In 1976 he won a Nebula Award for his novel THE FOREVER WAR, which also that year won a Hugo, the award given out by the World Science Fiction Convention annually. This year he is nominated in two categories for the Hugo—both his novel MINDBRIDGE and “Tricentennial,” the short story that follows.

  You would think that this would be enough for anyone. Add, however, the fact that Joe Haldeman’s university degree is in astrophysics, with postgraduate work in mathematics, computer science, statistics, and art, and the further fact that he is a decorated Vietnam War veteran who was severely wounded in combat, and you have, as I said, a package that a public relations department even one that deals with authors year in and year out—tends to find almost embarrassingly rich in interesting details.

  Nonetheless, all these things are as true and real as Joe Haldeman himself is real. And you will see as you read “Tricentennial,” on the pages that follow, that this is one of his geniuses as a writer—his writing also has a rare element of reality within it.

  Joe William Haldeman

  TRICENTENNIAL

  December 1975

  Scientists pointed out that the Sun could be part of a double star system. For its companion to have gone undetected, of course, it would have to be small and dim, and thousands of astronomical units distant.

  They would find it eventually; “it” would turn out to be “them”; they would come in handy.

  January 2075

  The office was opulent even by the extravagant standards of twenty-first-century Washington. Senator Connors had a passion for antiques. One wall was lined with leather-bound books; a large brass telescope symbolized his role as Liaison to the Science Guild. An intricately woven Navajo rug from his home state covered most of the parquet floor. A grandfather clock. Paintings, old maps.

  The computer terminal was discreetly hidden in the top drawer of his heavy teak desk. On the desk: a blotter, a precisely centered fountain pen set, and a century-old sound-only black Bell telephone. It chimed.

  His secretary said that Dr. Leventhal was waiting to see him. “Keep answering me for thirty seconds,” the Senator said. “Then hang it and send him right in.”

  He cradled the phone and went to a wall mirror. Straightened his tie and cape; then with a fingernail evened out the bottom line of his lip pomade. Ran a hand through long, thinning white hair and returned to stand by the desk, one hand on the phone.

  The heavy door whispered open. A short thin man bowed slightly. “Sire.”

  The Senator crossed to him with both hands out. “Oh, blow that, Charlie. Give ten.” The man took both his hands, only for an instant. “When was I ever ‘Sire’ to you, you fool?”

  “Since last week,” Leventhal said, “Guild members have been calling you worse names than ‘Sire.’ ”

  The Senator bobbed his head twice. “True, and true. And I sympathize. Will of the people, though.”

  “Sure.” Leventhal pronounced it as one word: “Willathapeeble.”

  Connors went to the bookcase and opened a chased panel. “Drink?”.

  “Yeah, Bo.” Charlie sighed and lowered himself into a deep sofa. “Hit me. Sherry or something.”

  The Senator brought the drinks and sat down beside Charlie. “You should of listened to me. Shoulda got the Ad Guild to write your proposal.”

  “We have good writers.”

  “Begging to differ. Less than two percent of the electorate bothered to vote: most of them for the administration advocate. Now you take the Engineering Guild—”

  “You take the engineers. And—”

  “They used the Ad Guild.” Connors shrugged. “They got their budget.”

  “It’s easy to sell bridges and power plants and shuttles. Hard to sell pure science.”

  “The more reason for you to—”

  “Yeah, sure. Ask for double and give half to the Ad boys. Maybe next year. That’s not what I came to talk about.”

  “That radio stuff?”

  “Right. Did you read the report?”

  Connors looked into his glass. “Charlie, you know I don’t have time to—”

  “Somebody read it, though.”

  “Oh, righty-o. Good astronomy boy on my staff: he gave me a boil-down. Mighty interesting, that.”

  “There’s an intelligent civilization eleven light-years away—that’s ‘mighty interesting’?”

  “Sure. Real breakthrough.” Uncomfortable silence. “Uh, what are you going to do about it?”

  “Two things. First, we’re trying to figure out what they’re saying. That’s hard. Second, we want to send a message back. That’s easy. And that’s where you come in.”

  The Senator nodded and looked somewhat wary.

  “Let me explain. We’ve sent messages to this star, 61 Cygni, before. It’s a double star, actually, with a dark companion.”

  “Like us.”

  “Sort of. Anyhow, they never answered. They aren’t listening, evidently: they aren’t sending.”

  “But we got—”

  “What we’re picking up is about what you’d pick up eleven light-years from Earth. A confused jumble of broadcasts, eleven years old. Very faint. But obviously not generated by any sort of natural source.”

  “Then we’re already sending a message back. The same kind they’re sending us.”

  “That’s right, but—”

  “So what does all this have to do with me?”

  “Bo, we don’t want to whisper at them—we want to shout! Get their attention.” Leventhal sipped his wine and leaned back. “For that, we’ll need one hell of a lot of power.”

  “Uh, righty-o. Charlie, power’s money. How much are you talking about?”

  “The whole show. I want to shut down Death Valley for twelve hours.”

  The Senator’s mouth made a silent O. “Charlie, you’ve been working too hard. Another Blackout? On purpose?”

  “There won’t be any Blackout. Death Valley has emergency storage for fourteen hours.”

  “At half capacity.” He drained his glass and walked back to the bar, shaking his head. “First you say you want power. Then you say you want to turn off the power.” He came back with the burlap-covered bottle. “You aren’t making sense, boy.”

  “Not turn it off, really. Turn it around.”

  “Is that a riddle?”

  “No, look. You know the power doesn’t really come from the Death Valley grid; it’s just a way station and accumulator. Power comes from the orbital—”

  “I know all that, Charlie. I’ve got a Science Certificate.”

  “Sure. So what we’ve got is a big microwave laser in orbit, that shoots down a tight beam of power. Enough to keep North America running. Enough—”

  “That’s what I mean. You can’t just—”

  “So we turn it around and shoot it at a power grid on the Moon. Relay the power around to the big radio dish at Farside. Turn it into radio waves and point it at 61 Cygni. Give ‘em a blast that’ll fry their fillings.”

  “Doesn’t sound neighborly.”

  “It wouldn’t actually be that powerful—but it would be a hell of a lot more powerful than any natural 21 centimeter source.”

  “I don’t k
now, boy.” He rubbed his eyes and grimaced. “I could maybe do it on the sly, only tell a few people what’s on. But that’d only work for a few minutes … what do you need twelve hours for, anyway?”

  “Well, the thing won’t aim itself at the Moon automatically, the way it does at Death Valley. Figure as much as an hour to get the thing turned around and aimed.

  “Then, we don’t want to just send a blast of radio waves at them. We’ve got a five-hour program, that first builds up a mutual language, then tells them about us, and finally asks them some questions. We want to send it twice.”

  Connors refilled both glasses. “How old were you in ‘47, Charlie?”

  “I was born in ‘45.”

  “You don’t remember the Blackout. Ten thousand people died … and you want me to suggest—”

  “Come on, Bo, it’s not the same thing. We know the accumulators work now—besides, the ones who died, most of them had faulty faiL-5afes on their cars. If we warn them the power’s going to drop, they’ll check their faiL-5afes or damn well stay out of the air.”

  “And the media? They’d have to take turns broadcasting. Are you going to tell the People what they can watch?”

  “Fuzz the media. They’ll be getting the biggest story since the Crucifixion.”

  “Maybe.” Connors took a cigarette and pushed the box toward Charlie. “You don’t remember what happened to the Senators from California in ‘47, do you?”

  “Nothing good, I suppose.”

  “No, indeed. They were impeached. Lucky they weren’t lynched. Even though the real trouble was ‘way up in orbit.”

  “Like you say: people pay a grid tax to California. They think the power comes from California. If something fuzzes up, they get pissed at California. I’m the Lib Senator from California, Charlie; ask me for the Moon, maybe I can do something. Don’t ask me to fuzz around with Death Valley.”

  “All right, all right. It’s not like I was asking you to wire it for me, Bo. Just get it on the ballot. We’ll do everything we can to educate—”

  “Won’t work. You barely got the Scylla probe voted in—and that was no skin off nobody, not with L-5 picking up the tab.”

  “Just get it on the ballot.”

  “We’ll see. I’ve got a quota, you know that. And the Tricentennial coming up, hell, everybody wants on the ballot.”

  “Please, Bo. This is bigger than that. This is bigger than anything. Get it on the ballot.”

  “Maybe as a rider. No promises.”

  March 1992:

  From Fax & Pix, 12 March 1992:

  ANTIQUE SPACEPROBE ZAPPED BY NEW STARS

  1. Pioneer 10 sent first Jupiter pix Earthward in 1973 (see pix upleft, upright).

  2. Left solar system 1987. First man-made thing to leave solar system.

  3. Yesterday, reports NASA, Pioneer 10 begins AM to pick up heavy radiation. Gets more and more to max about 3 PM. Then goes back down. Radiation has to come from outside solar system.

  4. NASA and Hawaii scientists say Pioneer 10 went through disk of synchrotron (sin kro tron) radiation that comes from two stars we didn’t know about before.

  A. The stars are small “black dwarfs.”

  B. They are going round each other once every 40 seconds, and take 350,000 years to go around the Sun.

  C. One of the stars is made of antimatter. This is stuff that blows up if it touches real matter. What the Hawaii scientists saw was a dim circle of invisible (infrared) light, that blinks on and off every twenty seconds. This light comes from where the atmospheres of the two stars touch (see pic downleft).

  D. The stars have a big magnetic field. Radiation comes from stuff spinning off the stars and trying to get through the field.

  E. The stars are about 5000 times as far away from the Sun as we are. They sit at the wrong angle, compared to the rest of the solar system (see pic downright).

  5. NASA says we aren’t in any danger from the stars. They’re too far away, and besides, nothing in the solar system ever goes through the radiation.

  6. The woman who discovered the stars wants to call them Scylla (skill-a) and Charybdis (ku-rib-dus).

  7. Scientists say they don’t know where the hell those two stars came from. Everything else in the solar system makes sense.

  February 2075

  When the docking phase started, Charlie thought, that was when it was easy to tell the scientists from the baggage. The scientists were the ones who looked nervous.

  Superficially, it seemed very tranquil—nothing like the bone hurting skin stretching acceleration when the shuttle lifted off. The glittering transparent cylinder of L-5 simply grew larger, slowly, then wheeled around to point at them.

  The problem was that a space colony big enough to hold 4000 people has more inertia than God. If the shuttle hit the mating dimple too fast, it would fold up like an accordion. A spaceship is made to take stress in the other direction.

  Charlie hadn’t paid first class, but they let him up into the observation dome anyhow, professional courtesy. There were only two other people there, standing on the Velcro rug, strapped to one bar and hanging on to another.

  They were a young man and woman, probably new colonists. The man was talking excitedly. The woman stared straight ahead, not listening. Her knuckles were white on the bar and her teeth were clenched. Charlie wanted to say something in sympathy, but it’s hard to talk while you’re holding your breath.

  The last few meters are the worst. You can’t see over the curve of the ship’s hull, and the steering jets make a constant stutter of little bumps: left, right, forward back. If the shuttle folded, would the dome shatter or just pop off?

  It was all controlled by computers, of course. The pilot just sat up there in a mist of weightless sweat.

  Then the low moan, almost subsonic shuddering as the shuttle’s smooth hull complained against the friction pads. Charlie waited for the ringing spang that would mean they were a little too fast: friable alloy plates, under the friction pads, crumbling to absorb the energy of their forward motion; last ditch stand.

  If that didn’t stop them, they would hit a two-meter wall of solid steel, which would. It had happened once. But not this time.

  “Please remain seated until pressure is equalized,” a recorded voice said. “It’s been a pleasure having you aboard.”

  Charlie crawled down the pole, back to the passenger area. He walked rip, rip, rip back to his seat and obediently waited for his ears to pop. Then the side door opened and he went with the other passengers through the tube that led to the elevator. They stood on the ceiling. Someone had laboriously scratched a graffito on the metal wall:

  Stuck on this lift for hours, perforce: This lift that cost a million bucks. There’s no such thing as centrifugal force: L-5 sucks.

  Thirty more weightless seconds as they slid to the ground. There were a couple of dozen people waiting on the loading platform.

  Charlie stepped out into the smell of orange blossoms and newly mown grass. He was home.

  “Charlie! Hey, over here.” Young man standing by a tandem bicycle. Charlie squeezed both his hands and then jumped on the back seat. “Drink.”

  “Did you get—”

  “Drink. Then talk.” They glided down the smooth macadam road toward town.

  The bar was just a rain canopy over some tables and chairs, overlooking the lake in the center of town. No bartender: you went to the service table and punched in your credit number, then chose wine or fruit juice; with or without vacuum-distilled raw alcohol. They talked about shuttle nerves awhile, then:

  “What you get from Connors?”

  “Words, not much. I’ll give a full report at the meeting tonight. Looks like we won’t even get on the ballot, though.”

  “Now isn’t that what we said was going to happen? We shoulda gone with Francois Petain’s idea.”

  “Too risky.” Petain’s plan had been to tell Death Valley they had to shut down the laser for repairs. Not tell the groundhogs about
the signal at all, just answer it. “If they found out they’d sue us down to our teeth.”

  The man shook his head. “I’ll never understand groundhogs.”

  “Not your job.” Charlie was an Earth-born, Earth trained psychologist. “Nobody born here ever could.”

  “Maybe so.” He stood up. “Thanks for the drink; I’ve gotta get back to work. You know to call Dr. Bemis before the meeting?”

  “Yeah. There was a message at the Cape.”

  “She has a surprise for you.”

  “Doesn’t she always? You clowns never do anything around here until I leave.”

  All Abigail Bemis would say over the phone was that Charlie should come to her place for dinner; she’d prep him for the meeting.

  “That was good, Ab. Can’t afford real food on Earth.”

  She laughed and stacked the plates in the cleaner, then drew two cups of coffee. She laughed again when she sat down. Stocky, white-haired woman with bright eyes in a sea of wrinkles.

  “You’re in a jolly mood tonight.”

  “Yep. It’s expectation.”

  “Johnny said you had a surprise.”

  “Hooboy, he doesn’t know half. So you didn’t get anywhere with the Senator.”

  “No. Even less than I expected. What’s the secret?”

  “Connors is a nice-hearted boy. He’s done a lot for us.

  “Come on, Ab. What is it?”

  “He’s right. Shut off the groundhogs’ TV for twenty minutes and they’d have another Revolution on their hands.”

  “Ab …”

  “We’re going to send the message.”

  “Sure. I figured we would. Using Farside at whatever wattage we’ve got. If we’re lucky—”

  “Nope. Not enough power.”

  Charlie stirred a half-spoon of sugar into his coffee. “You plan to … defy Connors?”

  “Fuzz Connors. We’re not going to use radio at all.”

  “Visible light? Infra?”

  “We’re going to hand-carry it. In Daedalus.”

  Charlie’s coffee cup was halfway to his mouth. He spilled a great deal.

  “Here, have a napkin.”