Lalande 25372 is a Spectral Class M star, a faint red dwarf not visible
to the naked eye from Earth, Sol. Lalande 25372 lies fifteen point
nine light years from Sol, about fifteen degrees north of the celestial
equator and not quite opposite the vernal equinox. It has planets,
but this does not make Lalande 25372 unique. Like most of the planets
found in space, neither mad dogs nor Englishmen would have anything to
do with them--willingly. They are suitable only for the hapless wight
whose erring foot has unhappily landed on the tender official toe.
The planet Flatbush, Lalande 25372, received its name from an obscure
medieval reference to a form of punishment known as "Walking a beat in
Flatbush," if we are to believe MacClelland's authoritative volume _The
Origin of Place Names_.
Observed through the multipane window of the Station, Flatbush, Lalande
25372, was a pleasant enough planet, provided one could ignore the fact
that there was not a sign nor trace of vegetation from the Installation
Building to the horizon. A couple of hundred yards from the building
there was a pleasant looking lake. The lake was indeed water, but
it contained dissolved substances that would have poisoned a boojum
snark. The warm wind of Flatbush rippled the surface of the lake, but
no square yard of sail would be hoisted until someone first built a
gas mask that would filter out the colorless gases that turned silver
black. Fluffy clouds floated across the sky, but they rained down a
mess that etched stainless steel.
Out There, near the perimeter of Man's five-parsec range of operations,
subelectromagnetic detector beams scoured the sky. Taking the most
pessimistic standpoint--the least possible combinations of Nature's
infinite variety of environment--Nature's own profligacy with
life-forms still demanded that somewhere, Out There, another race was
plying the spaceways.
Someday this hypothetical race was certain to touch wings with mankind.
When that took place it was the duty of the Bureau of Operations to
detect them, to intercept them, and to warn the men of Earth, Sol,
that Mankind was no longer alone. The fact that the subelectromagnetic
detecting beams had been sweeping space for a couple of hundred years
without detecting anything had no bearing on the future. The beams must
be maintained so long as a human man remained alive in space.
In addition to the detector beams, the outlying planets carried
astrogation beacons. They were subelectromagnetic lighthouses, so
to speak, that rang across space with known direction and ranging
telemetered signals. Someday, Man hoped to fill the space lanes with
spacecraft and the planets with interstellar commerce.
Someday there might be another _Marie Celeste_ plying its course with
its crew inexplicably missing. But if this ever happened, it was not
going to happen without the Space Service knowing precisely how many
and which spacecraft were operating through that volume of space
before, during, and after D-for-Disaster Day and M-for-Mysterious
Minute.
The equipment, of course, was automated to modern perfection, with
multi-lateral channels that would take over in case of component
failure. Its factor of reliability was well above six or seven nines
of perfection. But to admit that this perfection was adequate would
have deprived the Space Service of a convenient minor penal detail to
take care of brash junior officers. Manning such a station provided the
junior officer with a wealth of time to contemplate his sins, and to
mend his evil ways.
In the case of Junior Spaceman Howard Reed, this process consisted of
locating the flaw that prevented Hansen's Folly from being Hansen's
Analysis.
* * * * *
Now, from the time of Alexander Selkirk, romantic history has been
dotted with accounts of men who have been cast away with nothing more
than their hands and their brains. And with these, they have succeeded
in raising their caveman environment up to the level of modern
technical conveniences.
Like them--having been unable to locate the flaw in Hansen's Folly by
the theoretical approach during his tour of duty on Earth, Sol, and
having similarly failed to locate the error in experimental hardware
during his tour of duty on Eden, Tau Ceti--Junior Spaceman Howard
Reed began to experiment on the spacecraft that stood parked on its
launching pad two hundred feet from the Installation. There was
plenty of equipment to work with. The Space Service did not stock its
perimeter stations in a slipshod manner.
Furthermore, Junior Spaceman Howard Reed had plenty of time.
The account of his life and adventures is hardly worth telling. He had
no distractions. He worked. The months passed one after the other.
Flatbush, Lalande 25372 was so far out that there was no provision
made for a regular tour of inspection. Nobody bothered to drop in on
Junior Spaceman Howard Reed. Gabbling on the official communication
channels was strictly forbidden, so the young junior officer was
denied even contact by voice. No one had come up with an economically
sound means of producing entertainment programs from Earth, Sol, on
the subelectromagnetic beams and so he--like his fellows in the other
perimeter stations--received neither news nor music from home.
He could terminate this tour of duty only by solving the riddle of
Hansen's Folly, and then notifying his superiors on the official
communications channels--or by tucking a note in the once-each-year
supply drone that came laden with enough of Earth's environment to keep
the young expatriate alive for another year.
The set-up was wholly conducive to work. There was time and there was
equipment; his orders were to remain there until he had studied his way
through the problem.
With nothing else to do, Junior Spaceman Howard Reed was deep in
his investigation ... when the drone spacecraft came down along the
subelectromagnetic beacon and made its landing a dozen yards away.
The drone was standard spacecraft size, an unmanned hull laden with the
necessities of life that would support him for a year.
It was the first one that he had ever seen. This was the first time
that Junior Spaceman Howard Reed had had to face the problem of Supply.
Packed in that droneship was enough earth environment to last a man
a year. The perishables and expendables, as well as replacement for
the lost fractions of the recyclables, were all there. They were
dehydrated and deep frozen after all waste had been removed, then
compressed into cubes of identical size for the most favorable packing
fraction. Even so, it was a prodigious amount of stuff. Supply would
have been impossible on a once-per-year basis, if the foul water of
Flatbush, Lalande 25372, hadn't been distillable with ease.
* * * * *
The junior spaceman eyed the droneship with a sudden burst of pride
in his fellow man's accomplishment. Given a pre-programmed flight
along telemetered beacons originating at either terminus, the running
equipment within the drone would bulk much less than the same mass and
size as a human and his needs. Until flight-decisions were necessary,
the hardware pilot was as good as the human pilot--and far less subject
to headache, tantrum, disappointment at not getting the Saturday night
pass and resentment over being passed by at promotion time.
Then his pride gave way to sudden, prolonged thought.
The range of a spacecraft is computed from point of takeoff to point of
no return. There was no way of restoring the powerbanks of a spacecraft
except on Earth, Sol.
Now, of course, it is entirely possible to take off and just keep going
until the powerbanks are depleted.
That will cover twice the stated range to the point of no return.
Ships have gone out and off and away and have never been heard of
again. It is possible that one or more of these have succeeded in
locating an Earth-like planet beyond the point of no return, but the
Earthmen at home will never know about it until the range is extended.
The possibility of such a planet favoring human life and ultimately
harboring a culture of technical competence enough to create and
maintain the power restoring equipment is extremely remote.
For spacecraft that carry women are few and far between.
And it takes more than one man's lifetime to make use of the know-how.
Junior Spaceman Howard Reed knew that away back in the Twentieth
Century, the average engineer could make a guess, count on his fingers,
and come up with a pretty shrewd estimate of the horsepower per cubic
inch that could be stored by the various ways and means available to
the age.
Removing the human pilot and his needs did give the droneship quite a
bit more space for cargo and power. But, as he looked at the droneship
standing there, it became plain to Junior Spaceman Howard Reed that
there was not room in that size of hull for both the necessary
powerbanks and the full year's store of supplies for one man.
Whereupon Junior Spaceman Howard Reed dropped his tools. He donned his
space suit and crossed the intervening space to the droneship.
He began to examine the ship's running gear with a critical and
suspicious eye.
He was examining hardware that was familiar to him. It took him no
more than two hours to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that
the droneship's drive was built along the theories and mathematical
analysis that he had been told simply did not work!
Someone had reduced Hansen's Folly to practice!
* * * * *
He paused again. Hansen's Folly had been called a failure about two
hundred years ago, but what did that really mean? He considered his
history.
In 1724, Stephen Gray and Granville Wheeler made the proud announcement
that they had succeeded in transmitting an electrical phenomenon along
a wire for a distance of 682 feet. Two hundred years later the entire
Earth was girdled with telegraph, telephone and cable wires and linked
with the invisible bonds of radio waves.
In about 1904 the Wright Brothers made their first powered airplane
flight. Forty years later men were flying in airplanes that carried a
wingspread greater than the distance of the Wright's first flight.
Einstein's Barrier was accepted scientific dogma for a hundred years;
but he, Howard Reed, was now standing in a spacecraft that had crossed
the gulf between the stars at a speed that not only exceeded the
velocity of propagated light--but exceeded this speed by a few hundred
orders of magnitude.
So? So maybe they were right. Maybe Hansen's Folly was a failure.
But the running gear in this droneship was designed to the analysis
produced by Junior Spaceman Howard Reed, and it worked. Furthermore,
he had only the scornful word of Commander Briggs of the Bureau of
Research that his arguments had been parallel to those of the hapless
Hansen.
It would hardly be the first time in the history of the human race that
some bureaucrat got fat on the work of his underlings who not only
received no credit for their work, but were often hushed, hidden, or
otherwise prevented from proving their right to the fame and fortune.
Angrily, Howard Reed stood up and cursed. They were not going to
smother him in a peg-whittling job on a single-man post sixteen light
years from home base, denied of all but official communications.
He was going to find out about this very strange business!
Junior Spaceman Howard Reed did not even bother going back to the
Station. Its Outside detectors had been sweeping deep space for a
couple of hundred years without detecting anything; its astrobeacons
were employed once each year when the droneship arrived. Furthermore,
both equipments were automatic, on the trips, set up to bypass the
one-man crew of the Station by transmitting the information on the
regular Channels. So, there in the droneship, the junior spaceman
merely disconnected the pre-programmed autopilot, clamped his hands
around the manual gear, and took off for far-off Earth, Sol.