A week had passed. The ship wasn’t even as far away from Mars as Uranus was, but video communications were worthless. It was all text now, like a letter carried to northern California from Southern Mississippi in 1867 with the Pony Express. Half a year had passed on Mars, and it was the first birthday Billy had spent without his daddy. He wished the stupid video would let him talk to his grandpa again, especially today.
But there was a birthday party, with presents, and cake, and candy, and all the other kids and their parents were there. It was a bittersweet day for the now five year old Billy.
Meanwhile, Mort had regained consciousness but was still in really bad shape. It looked like he was going to need both heart and brain surgery. Doc was glad it wasn’t ancient times, when physicians had to perform surgery by hand, and often inadvertently killed or crippled their patients. Today, the robots did the surgery. Many medical robots were almost too small to see. He simply supervised.
Charlie called Bill. “Time to turn around and go home. For us, anyway.” That gave Bill a crooked grin; Charlie’s crew would be going home to Mars, but his may never be able to, and if they ever did return to Mars, it would no longer be “home.” It would be unrecognizable. That had been drilled into everyone before they were ever allowed to sign up. Bill had an inkling of this, having seen small changes to society after long runs.
Charlie was a week away from Mars, and when he returned there in another week, a year and a half would have passed on Mars since they left its orbit. Charlie marveled that Bill had known his great great grandfather, who had died when Charlie was an infant, having spent most of his adult life at a desk on Mars, and spending little time in space after promotion to a safer, better paying, boring job.
Thrust was now close to Mars’ gravity and very, very slowly climbing, and nobody had noticed. It would be months back on Mars, with speed continually climbing far, far faster than thrust was increasing. It would take about as long to reach the heliopause as it would from there to halfway to Anglada.
Will was astonished at how fast little Billy was growing, and the faster they went, the faster he grew. Their speed was now incredible. He understood the time shift intellectually, but it was still unbelievably weird. Billy was seven by the time they reached the heliosphere.
But the messages, recorded and sent daily from both teams, came farther and farther apart. That would change when they turned around, and both teams would get messages more quickly. By the time they reached Anglada both teams would be flooded with them, especially the Centauri team, considering all the books and movies and other media that was transmitted along with the personal correspondence from the solar system.
Bob’s second concert was coming up. His guitar sat on a stand on the stage as he sat at the bar, sipping a Marley’s Natural Wheat, what was often nicknamed “Natty Wheat.” Marley’s was a newer brewery on Ceres. Martians had invented what Earthians had called “space beer” when it was first developed on Mars centuries earlier, with ingredients mixed differently because of Mars’ lower gravity when brewing, and later the recipe was adjusted for the incredibly low gravity on the asteroids.
Bob was barely old enough for the trip, having just turned fifty five a week before takeoff, and he had to talk his way onto the flight. He wouldn’t have been accepted if there hadn’t been five empty slots. He had also almost missed the spaceplane to the Titanic back on Mars; it was a miracle he was on board. As he sipped his beer, an old woman (they were all old, he thought) sat down next to him.
“Mind if I smoke?” She asked. Bob smiled.
“Not if I get a toke or two!”
She lit a joint, a giant, a real hog’s leg. “I’m Sue. I play Flute. I’ve convinced myself I’m pretty good.”
“Yeah? I’ve convinced myself that I suck!”
She laughed.
He asked “Is that why you’re here?”
“No,” she replied. “I have a PhD in agronomy and a Master’s in hydrology. They need to know if Anglada’s earth can sustain agriculture, and if not, what we can do to make it so. I’ll be working closely with Mark.”
“Mark?”
“Mark Whitney. He’s a biochemist.”
“Oh. Hey, if you want to, when I take a break I’ll let you do a number and the audience can let you know if you’re any good.”
Will had just walked by and overheard, but didn’t say anything. He was embarrassed at his lack of talent on his own guitar that he’d had the robots onboard construct for him. He had been surprised at how good it sounded, lots better than the one he had back on Mars, and the action put his Martian guitar to shame; musical instruments had always been expensive ever since the dawn of music itself in prehistoric Africa. “I need to practice,” he thought, and sat down next to Bob, lit a joint, toked, and passed it to the musician.
“Oh, thanks,” he said, taking the doobie and noticing that the fingertips on Will’s left hand were calloused, like everyone who plays guitar too often. “You play, too? Seems everyone here is a musician!”
Will laughed. “Yeah, but I suck.”
Sue was considering whether to take Bob up on his offer. She had never before had an audience, not even an audience of one. He handed the doobie to her as she considered it.
“So how bad are you?” Bob asked. “You can’t be much worse than a computer!”
Will laughed as Sue passed the joint back down. He hit it, and said, “Well, the only songs I know are...” he coughed. “...computer songs, and I don’t sound anything like the computer. I suck.”
Bob stood up. “Let’s see, there’s my guitar over there,” he said, pointing to the stage.
“Well, I don’t know...”
“Hey, it isn’t like you didn’t warn us. Come on!”
“Well, okay.” He sat on the stool on the stage with the guitar, and started playing, with the strap hanging in his lap rather then over his shoulder. He was terribly self-conscious; it was the first time he had ever played in front of people.
Bob recognized the tune, and was impressed. It seemed he had left out a lot of the notes in the computer-generated tune, but it sounded better than the computer’s rendition. Leaving out the notes had improved it; they were superfluous and really added nothing to the music. It was typically bland and soulless computer music that Will had added some heart to.
He finished the tune. “I told you I sucked,” he said as he put the guitar back on its stand.
Sue was applauding. Bob said “Dude, that’s a much better version than what the computer plays.”
“You’re just being nice.”
Sue said, “No, really, that was good! Bob’s right, it was better than the computer version. The computer version has a lot more notes but no soul at all. You could make money playing that!”
“You think so?” he said.
“No,” Bob interjected. “A two hundred year old Earthian law says that an ancient corporation owns the tune and you have to pay them. There’s no way you could profit. Copyrights have been perpetual for two hundred fifty years now. Let me teach you some of the old, pre-copyright tunes. Here, here’s one called a Bolero...”
 
Duane MacPherson was a twenty year old Scotsman in the Earthian Imperial Guard who was stationed in Arizona, and six months after the Titanic left for Alpha Centauri he was ordered to report to launch control immediately, with not even time to kiss his new bride goodbye. They had known each other since childhood and had only been married for six months.
This was strange, as Earthians were prohibited from flying farther than the moon. Why were they sending him to the moon? Wasn’t it that all there was there were scientists and elderly tourists?
A voice broke his reverie. “Private MacPherson, congratulations on this assignment. You’re our boots on the ground. We claimed the Centauri system decades ago, and your boots will tread on it.”
“Uh, sir? Huh? Uh, what? I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t understand.”
“You’re going to another star system.”
“Uh, due respects, sir, but doesn’t travel to other stars cause insanity?”
“That’s an urban myth you can forget. Now, the spacers have launched...”
 
The farther the ship went, the more Jerry worried about Mary. She had become sullen and argumentative and given signs that she thought everyone hated her, which wasn’t far from the truth. The truth itself usually was very far from her. The lies had been Jerry’s first hint.
But he couldn’t get her to admit that she had any kind of problem, so her problems just kept getting worse. And there was nothing he could do to help her as long as she didn’t seek help.
Then when she passed out in the commons from drink-ing way too much, he had his chance. He had a robot take her to the infirmary and had Doc immobilize her.
After, that is, treatment for alcohol poisoning. Doc and Jerry had a long talk about their shared patient.
A week later after she had pretended to cooperate, Jerry gave up on her. At least, he thought, until it gets to the point when she wants to be helped. He could, of course, discern that she was only pretending to cooperate.
He worried about her well being, but Doc released her from the infirmary. There was nothing Jerry could do about it, Doc was adamant.
 
The heliosphere isn’t like some kind of barrier; at least, not a barrier to a space ship or any other solid object. The heliosphere is a giant soap bubble without any soap. It is a bubble the sun forms in the interstellar medium, the matter and radiation between the stars in a galaxy. A star’s heliosphere contains its star’s system. So of course, nobody noticed when they passed through it.
Nobody but Bill, anyway. His pilot room readings and logs told him. Later he was at the bar, sipping a beer. Joe sat down next to him, but as it had been obvious despite Bill’s never having said anything about not liking the smell of ganja smoke, he didn’t light a muggle.
“Say, Bill, what’s new?”
Bill smiled. “We passed the heliosphere. We’re in interstellar space.”
“Really? We went through the Kuiper Belt?”
“No, that’s in the orbital plane. Centauri is south.”
“South?”
“In space, there’s no east or west, but inside a heliosphere there’s north and south. The star’s north is everything in its system’s north, and most of its planets share its north. Both of the sun’s belts are around its equator.”
Joe grinned. “Two belts. The sun must be afraid of its pants falling down. So we don’t have to dodge any mountains until we get close to Proxima?”
“Well, there’s the Oort cloud. Nothing to worry about.”
Going through the Oort cloud is easier than an airplane flying through a vapor cloud on Earth. Sometimes when flying through clouds on Earth there is terrible turbulence. Turbulence when flying through Earthian clouds has sometimes been fatal.
But the Oort cloud is like the belts, in that space has a lot of space everywhere in space, it’s so spacious. There’s really, really a lot of space in space. You can’t imagine how much space there is.
Unlike the belts, the Oort cloud is a spherical shell made up of very small bodies over fifty million kilometers apart. Fifty million kilometers is a really long way on Earth with its forty thousand kilometer circumference. It’s not hard to navigate through spaces that big.
But again, there can still be problems. Comets, for example, some of which can be at least as big as the asteroid Ausonia and can trail an awful lot of ice. Asteroids don’t trail ice, although they sometimes trail moons, inhabit the Oort, and sometimes have smaller asteroids hanging around them. Hitting a rock or that ice, let alone the comet or an asteroid itself, would be disastrous. And the comets and everything else were all moving, and very fast, although nowhere near as fast as the Titanic.
Bill’s alarm rang on his phone. He would have to go to the pilot room and at least supervise, and may need the passengers to strap in. He excused himself and went to the pilot room.
“Oh, shit!” he exclaimed when he got there and saw the readings. This was bad. The angles of motion of the two bodies, the ship and the outer space iceberg, were such that the computers hadn’t detected it until it was almost too late. It still might be too late. He grabbed his phone, which of course was also the ship’s microphone when talking to other ships, or as a phone and public address microphone inside the ship.
“Attention passengers, please strap down immediately. There’s a slight problem and gravity is going to get bad. Please hurry or it could really, really hurt.” As he spoke he was working the controls and fastening his own belt. “Sorry, folks, I know you hate this.” He had increased thrust to over a full gravity while the ship turned, thrust growing by the second.
In all the (altered) time Bill had spent in space in his career, there had only been a handful of times he’d had to dodge rocks or giant ice cubes. Pirates, yes, lots and lots of pirates, but almost no asteroids or comets. But he’d never gone as far or as fast.
They were well over a full gravity for a full minute. The asterites were miserable, and some were calling Doc, who as an asterite himself was equally miserable. Three who had either ignored the request or were slow in strapping in had broken bones. One of them also had a ruptured spleen, she was in really bad shape. Harold called a medic to take him to the infirmary to supervise their robotic treatment, but it took more than a minute for it to get there, so he walked after it was possible.
Bill was sweating at the controls as he got past the comet. He was even more relieved than those from Sylvia, all of whom strapped down quickly. Or Sylvia, who was one of those who had called Doc complaining she couldn’t breathe. All were thankful the gravity was back down. Bill was grateful the stupid computers hadn’t managed to kill them all.
Yet. Hundreds of years after the Oort cloud had been discovered, they still didn’t know how far the other side was. Maybe there wasn’t an “other side.” Maybe all of interstellar space is strewn with rocks and icebergs, he thought. Too bad he didn’t have access to the Sirius trip logs. And maybe that’s what had happened to the Earthian robot ship.
At the same time this was happening, it was years later on Earth, an entire planet ruled by a despotic autocrat who held the office of President by right of birth. Its government had psychologists in its service, all press on Earth was run by the government, and had convinced the populace that its four billion were too many people.
With an overpopulation problem, people were hesitant to complain about all the political crimes that had death sentences, or the lack of any government-funded health care. Not the least bit social, its government called itself “socialism” despite being a cross between Soviet style communism and 1930s Italian fascism. It doesn’t matter if government controls business or business controls government, the result has always been dictatorship.
Earthian history had been castrated under the dic-tatorship. Files were deleted and physical books and other paper records were burned, despite the ban on combustion. Religion was illegal. Most said everything was illegal, and indeed, one could be arrested for doing anything that wasn’t expressly permitted by law. No one on Earth had a holy text from any religion. No one on Earth knew that the Jews had been enslaved thousands of years earlier by the Egyptians, or that the Africans were enslaved hundreds of years earlier by the North American Europeans, or that wars against dictatorships were fought and won by those who believed in democracy. Much of Earth’s history was gone forever, what was left that wasn’t lies was with historians in space.
The population problem the government always complained about was about to solve itself. A deadly strain of a very common and very virulent but usually mostly harmless virus was running rampant. It had first shown itself over two centuries earlier when everyone aboard a ship studying Venus from orbit had all died from it, and the ship itself was towed to the sun for disposal. Everyone in the solar system thought it had been eradicated.
Billy was glad he had left that horrible place, and wondered if he would ever meet Grandpa, who was still years and years in the past. At least, that’s how George explained it. He didn’t understand it and doubted that George did, either. Reality is that everyone is always in the present all the time, no matter when, where, or how fast. It’s always now, regardless of the speed of entropy.
They say “time flies like an arrow” but they don’t know what they’re talking about. Time warps and twists with speed and gravity just like space does. Two years after the ship left Mars, they had passed the heliosphere, were well inside the Oort cloud, and it was Billy’s thirteenth birthday.
Your birthday is either a terrible day to get in trouble, or the best time possible, depending on your outlook. George’s nephew Paul was Mary Watkins’ Martian counterpart. Assigning Paul to the Solarian group was a bigger mistake than assigning him to Mary, or Mary to the project at all.
Mary had suggested a book his teacher hadn’t read, and the book got him on the road to muggles. The anti-cannabis advertising hadn’t helped keep adolescents off of ganja, despite the harm to a developing brain. He and Billy, who now insisted on being called “Bill,” had been caught smoking on Billy’s thirteenth birthday. It was Billy’s first experience with pot.
Billy barely remembered his birth father, and thought of Grandpa as such. He hadn’t heard from Will for several years, the time it took the signal to travel plus the time dilation.
Luckily, psychology was king in this study, and that science, born hundreds of years earlier in the twentieth century, was now fully matured, or at least as mature as any other science. There is always more that isn’t known than what is known in any science, and always will be.
George explained to Billy how ganja worked, how it could damage his adulthood, and how it could actually get him thrown out of the program and he would never see his grandpa again, and explained it in words that would stick. He might not even imbibe when he was grown, even though it was virtually harmless to an adult.
Will, Bob, and Sue had been performing together since the week after they had all met for the first time in the commons. Afterwards they had performed every Saturday night; or at least, what would have been a Saturday night if time made any sense.
It made sense as long as you didn’t think about it too much, or notice the date stamp on a message from Mars.
Bob had written a new song. None of them had ever heard of a human writing a song, it was as strange a thought as a man digging a ditch with his fingers. But the crew on the ship applauded fiercely when they had performed it on a “Saturday night.” Bob sent a copy of a holographic recording of it, along with the sheet music, to the Martian copyright authorities, who would receive the message years in the future, like all such messages to Mars and the belt.
“You know,” Bob said when they were at practice, “we’re a band now. We ought to give it a name.”
“Why?” Will asked. “We’re the only musicians on the ship. ‘The band’ should be enough, at least until we get back to Mars.”
“Well,” Sue said, “We haven’t played a note in half an hour. If all we’re going to do is gab, lets do it in the commons over a beer.”
At the commons, Mary was at the bar. “Lets sit at a table,” Will said. Nobody objected. No one much cared for the selfish, greedy, thoughtless Mary, who still refused to let the psychologists help her.
That may be the worst part of some mental illnesses. If you have arthritis you’ll beg for something, anything, to relieve you of the torture. The same with cancers, which hurt far worse but are thankfully at least fatal, unlike arthritis. But many mental illnesses have as part of their symptoms an inability of the ill to believe that there’s anything wrong with them at all.
Others like Mary, or those suffering from diseases like acute clinical depression or bipolar disorder, may think they deserve to suffer. Like others like her, despite her outward behavior, inside she was very fragile. She feared Ralph and Jerry might destroy her, that she would disappear and another her would take her place.
There had been an urban legend an Earthian had told her about “body snatchers” that made it worse. Legend had it that before the world-wide government, the Australians had developed a device that would replace one brain’s mind with a completely different mind from a quadriplegic. The crippled body was then cremated and its owner, in its new body, pretended to be the person whose body they had stolen.
Sometimes Ralph wished he’d studied astrophysics or paleontology or geology or anything else, especially when he was forced to treat a patient who refused treatment, especially those who believed stupid bunk like the “body snatchers” nonsense. And especially one who had heard that stupid story, which he was sure Mary had.
Doc released Mort from the infirmary, but had forbidden him go back to work. Salter fought it, but was no match for two trained psychologists with doctorates in that field.
After almost three years’ journey, Will’s four year old grandson was fifteen years old, already graduated from high school and working on a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He planned to go on for a Master’s after graduation. Will was immensely proud when he found out years later. In college at fifteen! And he was only four. Or five. Or six? Except, he wasn’t. This relativity stuff was crazy, he thought.
It seemed to him that Billy was more like him than Arnold, who, if it had been admitted, had been a criminal who had come to a bad end. At least, that’s how the Earthians saw it. It wasn’t how Will saw it. Wasn’t it supposed to have been a freak accident?
A few days later, Doc’s phone chirped again. It was the computer referencing Captain Salter, who had just gotten out of bed in a bad mood, with high blood pressure, for no discernible reason for the mood or the pressure. He had only released him from the infirmary the previous “afternoon.” Harold walked down to his flat. Salter was still very ill, all this time later. The elderly very often heal much more slowly than youth, and he was even older than Kelly.
Salter had just started drinking his coffee as a knock came at his door, which was the sound he had programmed the doorbell to respond with. “Let ‘em in,” he said to the ship itself. The door opened and Doc entered.
“Are you all right?” Harold asked.
“Huh? Sure, Doc, why?”
Harold looked at his phone again. Mort’s blood pressure was even higher. “The computer says you’re not feeling well, maybe you should drop by my office for an exam?”
“No thanks, Doc, I feel fine. Want a cup of coffee?”
“No thanks. You sure you don’t want me to look you over?”
“No, I’m fine. Sure you don’t want a cup?”
“No, thanks, I’ll see you.”
Because of the Martian HIPPO law, which stood for “Health In Patient Permission Only” that guaranteed the rights of patients to be left alone, there was nothing he could legally do.
Mary had turned out to be a huge pain to everyone on the ship, and since no science is completely mature, the psy-chologists were no help. Except, of course, whenever anyone threatened to throw her out of the airlock and had to be reminded that jokes like that weren’t funny on an interstellar trip.
A few months later, Doc was days away from letting Morton resume his duties when Salter, an atheist, had another stroke. This time he was in the commons, arguing with the pseudo-religious Mary about religion, and Doc was right there at the next table that time, with his tool bag. As usual, Harold was prepared, but he couldn’t get a pulse or make his heart start again. He and his vast knowledge, extensive expertise, and the best, most advanced tools that existed might as well have been a cave man with a rock.
Everyone on the ship was invited to his funeral, of course, but the only ones who showed up were Bill, Harold, Jerry, and Ralph. Jerry wasn’t surprised that Mary wasn’t there, his diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder had been borne out, although disassociative identity disorder was thankfully off the table. A person with a normal personality would have felt like a murderer if someone collapsed and died during an argument, or even as soon after as the next day, even though it really wouldn’t be their fault.
By now, at this speed, messages from Mars were few and far between. They were nearing the point where they would turn around, going the fastest they would on the trip, and time going the slowest.
The time on the clocks and phones on the ship were all fed from the ship’s clock. Centuries earlier when boots first stood on Mars it was believed that one couldn’t get more precise time than on an atomic clock, but three hundred years before that they thought that going faster than the speed of sound was impossible, despite the evidence of a sonic boom from a whip’s tip cracking sound’s speed limit. The ship’s clock was far more accurate than an atomic clock, and said they had been gone from Mars for three years, seven months, six days, fourteen hours, seven minutes, and twelve seconds.
It wouldn’t have mattered if the result was carried to five trillion decimal places. Whatever the ship’s clock said, regardless of its accuracy, was nonsense. Years had passed on Mars. The ship’s clocks only measured entropy inside the ship and was meaningless anywhere else in the universe.