Man's first sally across the gulf of interstellar space had been more
fruitful than his first fumbling exploration of the Solar System by a
score of one to nothing. Of all the celestial real estate that orbits
around old Sol, only the Earth will support life--at least as we know
it. Survival elsewhere depends upon taking enough of Earth environment
along to last of the trip. From the scientific standpoint, the first
exploration of space was a brilliant operation, but before finding a
place to accept the teeming millions of Earth's exploding population,
the patient nearly died. For it was a quarter of a century until
Murray, Langdon, and Hanover cracked the Einstein barrier.
By careful design, and then by counting the last gram and striking a
mathematically adjusted balance between power bank and crew space, the
range of a spacecraft was found to be slightly more than seventeen
light-years to the point of no return.
Within seventeen light-years of Sol, there are forty-one other stars.
Of these forty-one stars, three are triple-sun systems, and twelve are
doubles, which eliminates fifteen of them. Of the remaining twenty-six
single stars, one is the blinding-blue giant Altair, two are white
dwarf stars, and nineteen of them are the faint red dwarf stars of
Spectral Class M, and that eliminates all but four of the original
forty-one. Of this remaining four, Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi, and
Groombridge 1618 fall into the orange Spectral Class K, which is not
too far away from Sol's Spectral Class G. But K is only close; it is
no bull's eye when the combination of all the factors must add up to
produce a planetary environment that will support human life.
And so, having eliminated forty out of the forty-one stars in Sol's
neighborhood, only Tau Ceti remains. Tau Ceti is also a Spectral
Class G star and therefore Tau Ceti was voted the star most likely to
succeed, long before Man had the foggiest notion of how to cross the
light-years, long before instruments sensitive enough to ascertain that
Tau Ceti possessed a planetary system were developed.
Tau Ceti's planetary system can be used as an example of the brilliance
of logic and reasoning. The second planet in the family of Tau Ceti is
the planet Eden.
Eden supports life.
Or perhaps it is more proper to say that Eden's environment permits
life to support itself. Voltaire, through the mouths of his characters
Candide and Pangloss, had a lot to say about Earth being the best of
all possible worlds, both pro and con. He had never been to Eden. Eden
was christened by the rules of real estate that dictate that a housing
development situated on a tree-bald plain in central Kansas shall be
called "Sylvan Heights."
V
Junior Spaceman Howard Reed went through a brief period of excitement
and then settled down to boredom. The excitement came from his first
experience in space travel, and the thrill of standing on soil almost
twelve light-years from home base. This thrill faded as soon as he
discovered that the people on Eden, Tau Ceti, were far too busy to be
bothered with the reactions of a junior spaceman.
If his duties had been demanding, Reed might have gone on for some time
without becoming bored. But as a junior officer in the Space Service,
Reed had no roots, no property, no basic interests on Eden.
The Space Service had been born out of interservice rivalry during a
tense period of international competition. There had been a strong
upsurge during the early years of the initial interstellar exploration.
The leaders of the Space Service were quite willing to featherbed
themselves into permanent positions of high authority. They discovered
the best method lay in exploiting every method of scaring the public
with the bogey of meeting some warlike culture "Out There." Then the
years passed with neither sight nor evidence of any other form of life
but Man and the creatures he carried with him. The Space Service found
itself with little to do.
It did not stop the clamor for money, men and materiel. But the job of
the Space Service was not hunting space pirates. The only place where
the power banks of a spacecraft could be restored was in the hands
of the Space Service itself, and it was an installation vast enough
to tax the wealth and ingenuity of a whole continent to create. The
job was not fighting interstellar wars with fierce, super-intelligent
interstellar aliens with a taste for human flesh--not, at least, until
human and alien met.
So, in a desultory manner, the Space Service maintained a perimeter
of lookout and detection stations that could have been completely
automated ... if it hadn't been that there were more Space Service
Personnel than the Service could find work for.
The whole situation gave Junior Spaceman Howard Reed a lot of time to
think.
The culture of Eden, Tau Ceti, completed the process.
Eden used old-fashioned telephones because its people were too
widespread across the face of the planet to make the use of the
vidphone practical. Radio broadcasting was maintained by the government
as a public service information agency. It had to be. There were not
commercial enterprises enough to support radio broadcasting on a
profit-making basis. For there simply were not enough people. And if
simple radio broadcasting could not be supported, there was not yet
room for even the old flat-faced television, much less trivideo.
Theirs was a culture in a mixed state. They had the know-how for a
highly technical, closely-integrated urban civilization, but lacked the
hardware necessary to construct it. They were an aircar people, but
they used horses. Horses can be raised. Aircars have to be fabricated.
It would not have been prohibitive to trans-ship the basic tools and
dies for aircar assembly from Earth, Sol, to Eden, Tau Ceti. But it
would have been economic suicide to attempt to keep the voracious maw
of an automated assembly plant satiated with raw material shipped from
home base. And then, one week's run would have saturated the Tau Ceti
market. They were a people who played their own musical instruments
because they were faced with the very odd economic fact that the
first phonograph record from the die costs five thousand dollars.
Nobody makes a dime until fifty thousand of its brothers are sold. The
population to buy fifty thousand did not exist.
In simple fact, Eden, Tau Ceti, was far from a flourishing colony.
It was a classic example of the simple economic truth that a fully
integrated mechanistic society can not be supported by a sparsely
populated region.
* * * * *
Ambition has many origins. The urge to return home became a drive. The
result was Junior Spaceman Howard Reed's complete preoccupation with
the mathematics known as Hansen's Folly.
As the months went by he exhausted his original knowledge. He took to
the library, to the local schools, and to self-study to improve his
grasp. He approached the basic mathematics of the space drive from
several different angles, even going back to the old original Einstein
Equations and learning their fault in the hope that this study might
point the way.
Then, as the months began to grow into the close of his first year,
Reed took advantage of the casually informal operation at the Space
Service Base. He began to experiment with hardware on the theory that
he would have a better grasp of the problem if he tried some empirical
work as well as the academic approach.
Junior Spaceman Howard Reed had been on Eden, Tau Ceti, for eighteen
terrestrial months before his superior officer, making a tour of
inspection, opened the office reserved for him at the Administration
Building. On the eighth day of his visit, Commander Breckenridge
summoned the junior spaceman to his office. He asked, "Mr. Reed, have
you been successful in solving the flaw in Hansen's Folly?"
"Well, sir, not exactly."
"Have you improved your grasp of the facts of life?"
"Sir? I don't quite understand."
"You don't? Well, perhaps you need some help. For instance, Mr. Reed,
can you give me an estimate of the useful land area of Eden, Tau Ceti?"
"Sir, the total land area is about fifty million square miles. Perhaps
about half of that is useful, or could be."
"Ah. You said 'could be'. Why, Mr. Reed?"
"Let's put it this way, sir. Whether a given acreage is useful often
depends upon how badly it is needed. For instance, a plot of wooded
land might well be ignored for centuries by a sparsely populated
agrarian culture who had a lot of open plain to cultivate. At a later
date, an increasing pressure of population might make it expedient and
sensible to clear vast areas of tree stumps, boulders and all sorts of
hazards."
"And here on Eden?"
"Well, sir, at the present time the population of Eden is about a
hundred thousand. Fertile plains are growing wild with weeds because
the land isn't needed yet. That is--er--"
"That is what?"
"Maybe I shouldn't have said 'wild with weeds' sir. After all, they
have been encouraged. I'm told that the atmosphere smelled a lot
stronger when Man first arrived."
* * * * *