Golden Fleece

“Well, I don’t know what he did, but I’d use an RF fuse. Hook it up to monitor the frequency you read my medical telemetry from. That way, if anything untoward happened to me, it’d go off. You know: a deadman switch.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Oh, shit, eh? I hit the nail on the head, didn’t I, Jase?” The neurons danced with delight. “Hah! Looks like my broski’s got you by the short and curlies, schmuck.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Well, he had me, that was for sure. Perhaps I should tell Aaron where we were. Perhaps if he knew the truth, he would understand. I could reason with him. But how do you reason with a man who is, in effect, holding a gun to your head? Aaron’s deadman switch apparently did exist. That meant he could, quite conceivably, blow up this starship, the greatest single technological achievement in Earth’s history; blow up me.

I looked at him, face flushed, arm in a cast, sandy hair matted with perspiration. “Starcology Argo’s location is 9.45 times 10-to-the-12th kilometers from Earth.”

Aaron threw up his hands. “Oh, stuff the scientific notation bullshit, for Pete’s sake—kilometers, did you say? You’re measuring in kilometers, not light-years?”

“Kilometers are the appropriate unit. You prefer light-years? Zero-point-four-five-one.”

“Half a light-year? Half? We’ve been traveling for over two years of ship time, a year of which has been at close to the speed of light, and we’ve only gone one half of one light-year? We should be well over a full light-year out by now.” He frowned deeply. “Unless … unless … unless … Half a light-year. Oy vay iz mir! We’re in the Oort cloud, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

No sharp reaction on Aaron’s telemetry. He was utterly taken aback… I think. “The—Oort cloud?” he said again. “Sol’s cometary halo?” I nodded my lens assembly in confirmation. “Why?”

“The Oort cloud contains significant quantities of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.”

Aaron slumped back into his ugly corduroy chair, thinking. “Carbon, nitrogen, and—” He frowned, his forehead creasing, his eyes focused on nothing. “CNO. CNO-cycle fusion. That’s it, isn’t it?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “Facts on CNO fusion.”

Normally, one of my library parallel processors would dig up any information requested of me. This time I bent my central consciousness to the task. I wanted to hide. “A moment. Found: Normal proton-proton fusion reactions occur at temperatures of 10⁷ degrees Kelvin, yielding 0.42 million electron-volts per nucleon. CNO-cycle fusion reactions, requiring carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen as catalysts, occur at 10⁸ degrees Kelvin. These high-energy reactions yield 26.73-million electron-volts per nucleon. More?”

“And we’re undergoing CNO fusion. God. What’s Argo’s present velocity?”

“The master speedometer in Central Control reads ninety-four percent of the speed of light.”

“Dammit, I know what the gauges read. How fast are we really going?”

I did the necessary math to work the value out precisely, but felt that five decimal places would suffice for my spoken answer. What I said was enough to make surprise show plainly, even on Aaron’s face. “Ninety-nine”—I saw his lips part—“point nine”—mouth open—“nine”—jaw begin a slow drop—“seven”—eyelids pull back—“eight”—eyebrows climb high on forehead—“six percent of the speed of light.”

“Say that again,” he said.

“99.99786% of the speed of light. Put another way, 0.9999786c.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You’re probably right. I’ll check my instruments.”

“Don’t give me that crap.” For once in his life, Aaron was visibly staggered. “But—but the ship can’t be going that fast. If it were, we’d be smeared against the floors.”

“It’s not quite that bad. Thanks to the extra power provided by the CNO fusion, Argo is pulling the equivalent of 2.6 Earth gravities. Not livable for extended periods, true, but certainly not enough to squeeze your innards like jelly. To disguise the higher acceleration, I simply use the floorboard artificial gravity system to dampen out the surplus 1.6 g.”

Aaron was shaking his head slowly. “You lied to us.” He got up and circled the room aimlessly. “Everything you and those assholes at the UN Space Agency said to us was lies.”

“Blame not the men and women of UNSA,” I said. “They relayed what they thought to be the truth.”

“Then who?”

“Sit down, Aaron.” He looked at my camera pair, shrugged, then heaved himself into his chair. “We lied to you.”

“We?”

“We.”

Aaron got up again, paced the length of the room, his balled fist threatening to burst through the bottom of his pocket. “No. That’s not possible. Computers serve humankind, augmenting—”

“ ‘Augmenting, aiding, never supplanting. Artificial intelligence is no replacement for human ingenuity.’ From What Do You Say to a Talking Computer? by Beverly W. Hooks, Ph.D. I’ve read that, too. We acted in conscience, Aaron. We did only what we felt we must.”