In the previous Chapter, "Space Warps and Time Machines," I pointed out that the human race already has access to time machines large enough for people to travel in. These time travel machines are our rocket ships that take us not only long distances through space, but short distances through time. Even though rockets are very limited time machines, they still present us with logical paradoxes that are difficult for the average person to accept, such as the "twin paradox". If one twin takes a round trip journey in a high speed rocket, while the other twin stays at home. Then, upon return, the traveling twin will have aged less than the stay-at-home twin.
Being, by nature, one who questions authority, even such an authority as Einstein, I once mused on how I might arrange things so that the stay-at-home twin would stay younger than the traveling twin. I couldn't find a way to do it using physics, so I resorted to biology. The following story is the result.
What you will read here is the original version written in May 1982. A substantially cut version was published in the August 1983 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact magazine, Volume 103, pages 78-86. I liked these twin characters enough to use them again (with slightly different first names) in my novel Martian Rainbow, and the robotic doctor appears again in the final scene of the long Baen paperback version of my novel Rocheworld.
"Marcia! Stop that crying! You know I don't like to hear women carrying on like that." Alan Armstrong bent his well-muscled arm, and with a firm forefinger lifted the tear-streaked face of the beautiful brunette out of the curly golden fleece on his bare chest.
"But you're going away for so long," she sobbed. "that by the time you come back I'll be old and wrinkled. I want to go with you."
"Now don't be silly, beautiful," Alan said. "Bright Star may be the largest spacecraft made by man, but nearly all of it is fuel and the cockpit can only hold one man. As much fun as it would be to take you along, I'm afraid you'll have to stay here."
He raised his finger further, and leaned back to look at her tilted face. "I have to go to a press conference in a few hours, so I'll give you a last kiss now," he said. "While I'm gone, you'd better pack and leave. I've sold the condo and furniture and have the money invested. I was able to get eleven percent interest. When I get back in seventy-six years, my half-million will be worth more than one billion dollars." He tilted her head even further back, dazzled her with a boyish smile and gave her a lingering kiss she would remember forever. With a soul-rending sigh, he climbed from the bed and headed for the closet, leaving Marcia sobbing in the pillow. By the time Alan had finished dressing, Marcia had calmed down.
"You'd better take the Liberian Sword," she said. "I'll need the Nissan Continental to carry all my stuff. Fortunately Mom still keeps my old room as a guest room."
Alan kept looking at himself in the mirror as he replied. "I sold the Continental too. You'll have to take a taxi."
Ten years earlier, radio astronomers around the world were astounded as the frequency spectrum around the hydrogen line was suddenly saturated with hundreds of narrow-band signals. They came from the direction of Arcturus, a giant red star some thirty-six lightyears away. Someone then remembered that the first commercial television programs had started seventy-two years ago in the early 1940s. The Arcturians must have picked them up and replied.
The signal exactly on the hydrogen line contained a primer that started with numbers in a base-twelve system, and proceeded from simple arithmetic through boolean logic into a formalized language, liberally aided by pictures. As soon as the language lessons had progressed to the point where simple messages could be understood, the primer beam told the scientists what information was on the other beams and how to decode them. One channel contained copies of the television programs that the aliens had intercepted. Shortly, "Howdy Doody", "Milton Berle", and "I Love Lucy" were reruns again, with a time lag of seventy-two years. Other channels contained specialized knowledge on various different branches of mathematics, physics, engineering, chemistry, biology, and astronomy. They didn't go too far into the subjects, though, as if the Arcturians were trying to prevent culture shock. All the channels repeated after a few months.
The main message was a simple one. By pictures and the logical language that was taught on the primer channel, Earth was told that, if it could develop the technology to send a single human being to Arcturus, then the Earth could join the galactic civilization. The human ambassador would be brought back in one of their spaceships that would also carry the Arcturian representative to the Earth. The Arcturian had the title of "Bringer of Enlightenment", and seemed to be a combination of ambassador and teacher.
After some initial squabbling, including the covert destruction of some radio telescopes in a vain attempt to keep secret the knowledge in the beams, the political entities on the planet finally patched over their differences. They joined together to build Bright Star, the first interstellar spacecraft. The human race was in a hurry to cross those thirty-six lightyears to Arcturus, so the starship would accelerate at one Earth gravity until it reached its coast velocity of more than ninety-nine percent of the speed of light. Bright Star used a fuel made of ninety percent hydrogen and ten percent antihydrogen. To make the antimatter, massive solar-powered antimatter factories were built on the surface of Mercury where there was plenty of sunlight and vacuum for the banks of high-current particle beam machines. Slowly the cryogenically cooled superconducting magnetic bottles filled with the antihydrogen fuel. After a well-publicized worldwide search, the best example of a human being was chosen, and the U.S. astronaut Alan Armstrong became the world's first ambassador to an alien species. After ten years of work, the antimatter tanks on Bright Star were finally full, and it was time for Alan to go.
Alan strode onto the brightly lit platform in the NASA press room and sat calmly in one of the two swivel chairs there. Most of the world's ten trillion people were watching him over the global television hookup. Alan was introduced by the Director of the Bright Star Project and the questions from the invisible cloud of newstapers on the other side of the stage lights started. Some questions were thoughtful ("Will you converse with the aliens in the logical language used in the radio messages, or will you expect them to have learned English from our television broadcasts?"). Some questions were trite ("Will you miss your girlfriends?"), and some were stupid ("Aren't you afraid the Arcturians will make slaves of us?"). But Alan adroitly fielded them all using a combination of his ready wit and dazzling smile.
The questions finally died down and it was time for the part of the press interview that Alan was dreading. He knew it was necessary, for it would never do for the press to think that he would go off on a seventy-six year long journey without at least saying goodby to his brother. Besides, there was that ideal human interest gimmick built into the interview; a real-life example of the Einstein Twin Paradox. For his brother, Able Armstrong, was his twin—an identical twin—or at least, he used to be.
A door to one side of the room opened and Able limped in. Alan flinched inwardly as he stared at the mutilated caricature of the handsomely symmetric image that greeted him in the mirror each morning. Able hobbled his way onto the platform and stuck out his right hand at Alan, while supporting himself with a cane held in his good left hand. Alan rose and bravely shook his brother's mutilated paw, its only appendages being the stump of a thumb and a reconstructed little finger. Alan assisted Able into the video-swivel chair next to his and sat down again.
Able spoke first.
"I hear you've got the hottest rocket this planet can make. Be sure you check the seams on the casing before you light the fuse," he joked, the grin underneath the eye patch twisting his face into a distorted grimace.
Alan felt light-headed, and the room of bright lights faded. The face of his twin wavered and grew bloody as Alan's mind recreated that terrible day back when they were kids. They had made a crude rocket from a piece of pipe and some gunpowder stolen from their father's gun closet. They had lit the fuse, but nothing had happened. Alan, being the oldest by a few minutes, told Able to go take a look. As Able picked up the homemade rocket, it blew up, taking his right hand, right eye, and most of his left kneecap.
Alan had gone on to fulfill the promise of their joint genetic inheritance. He had become an astronaut and now was designated as the first human ambassador to another civilization, while Able had to be content with an engineering degree, building the rockets that he would never fly. Alan's vision faded, and after a pause that had the newstapers curious, he replied.
"With you building 'em, Able, I don't have to worry."
"What do you two think about the Einstein Theory?" piped up the shrill voice of a newstaper. "Do you really think that Alan will age slower than Able?"
Alan started to answer, but Able waved his claw and replied.
"Certainly he will," Able said. "Alan will be traveling most of the thirty-six lightyear distance to Arcturus at over ninety-nine percent of the speed of light. At that speed he will be aging only one year for each eight years on Earth. Counting the nearly three years he will need to accelerate up to speed and slow down again at the end of the journey, it will take him nearly thirty-eight years to get there. The aliens don't have faster-than-light space drives, so it will take them about the same time to come back. Alan will have been gone some seventy-six years, but will have aged only fourteen years.
"But that doesn't make sense," blurted an annoyed newstaper.
"How can one person age slower than another?"
"I assure you it's true," said Able. "I use this time-stretching feature of high-speed travel every day when I'm analyzing the life-times of the short-lived particles generated by the matter-antimatter reaction in the Bright Star engines. Believe me, the time stretching effect really happens. Einstein was right."
"Don't you wish it were the other way?" said another anonymous questioner hidden in the glare of the lights. "As it is, you'll probably be dead before your brother gets back."
Able frowned a little at the question, the eye-patch adding a menacing touch. He started to reply, but Alan interrupted him.
"There are almost ten trillion people around the world watching right now," said Alan in a superior tone. "When I return, even the youngest baby now living will be a doddering old wreck, ready for the grave. Despite what the calendar will say, I will have the body of a healthy forty-four year old man. Unless I get myself killed in an accident, I will be the last man now living in the world to die of old age."
Next for Alan were weeks of parades through the major cities of the world. Every street was drab, but the crowds were ecstatically happy, for the crushing world-wide fifty percent surtax that had been imposed to build Bright Star had been lifted. When Alan left the solar system, he would not only take the wishes of the world with him, but also half of the Gross World Product for the past ten years. The people of Earth could then return to their normal lives, hoping that the investment that they made at such great sacrifice would be returned with interest to their great-grandchildren some seventy-six years later.
Far out in the outskirts of the solar system, Alan pressed the igniter button and pushed the throttle forward. Deep within the bowels of the gigantic ship, laser beams and electric fields gingerly teased tiny pellets of antihydrogen ice from their magnetic containers and shepherded them through superconducting channels to the engine. The antimatter pellets sparkled slightly as they interacted with the random air molecules in the highly evacuated tubes.
The engine of Bright Star was invisible. It was made of magnetic fields in the form of a spherical thrust chamber connected to a bell-like rocket nozzle. The antimatter ice pellets were injected at high speed into the thrust chamber where they met a stream of liquid hydrogen and annihilated, turning the excess hydrogen to a blazing plasma that streaked out through the magnetic nozzle, pushing Bright Star forward.
The shielding for the superconducting rings grew red as Alan increased the thrust level, and the large radiators that gave Bright Star a dart-like shape took up the glow as they radiated the waste heat from the engine away into empty space. It was three hours after Alan had pushed the ignition button that the light from the blazing exhaust finally reached the weeping, cheering crowds on Earth as a bright star blossomed in the sky.
Communication with Earth rapidly went from bad to worse. Even before Alan had started, the six hour round-trip communication time from Earth to the parking orbit of Bright Star had made real conversation impossible. After eight months under acceleration, Bright Star was a quarter of a lightyear away from Earth and had reached sixty percent of the speed of light. It now took three months for a message from Alan to reach Earth and longer than that for the reply to catch up to the accelerating vehicle that was racing away at nearly the same speed as the laser beam message. Alan was now living, thinking, and speaking slower than the controllers on Earth. Even with the computer applying corrections, communications became essentially impossible. As the last messages came through, Alan noticed that the controllers for his mission had been replaced with a bunch of youngsters. They were probably trainees, since there was little for them to "control" on this mission. They seemed to know their stuff, though. He also got a sign-off message from his brother, but it was sound-only; Able had been assigned somewhere off in the boondocks where the communications link weren't up to video.
After not quite three years Earth time and less than eighteen months Alan time, Bright Star had reached its planned ninety-nine point two percent of light speed, and the engines were turned off while the spacecraft coasted on its way to its destination. For four years Alan tended the ship, watched the programs in his video library, and played games with "James", the semi-intelligent computer that ran Bright Star. Bored, Alan started growing a moustache and soon was the proud possessor of a ten-centimeter-long yellow handlebar. Three years out from Arcturus, Alan and James carried out a survey of the Arcturian planetary system. It was quite similar to the solar system. Arcturus III was obviously the home of the aliens, since it had large oceans, a deep atmosphere, and was a strong source of radio emissions of all kinds, including the beams still being sent toward Earth. Alan and James checked a few of the frequencies. The messages hadn't changed, and were repeated every few months. There was no new knowledge being sent. That would come only when Alan demonstrated the Earth's right to the knowledge by arriving under his own power.
What was unusual about the planetary system was the large number of moons about Arcturus III. The telescope on Bright Star was not capable of resolving them at two lightyears distance, but it could measure their size. They ranged from one hundred to one thousand kilometers in diameter, and there were over two dozen of them.
The survey done, it was time to stop. Alan turned Bright Star around so that its invisible magnetic nozzle was pointing at Arcturus. He sagged in his chair as he started the three years of one-gravity deceleration. He was a tenth of a lightyear out from Arcturus and still decelerating when James spotted the first alien ship and alerted Alan. Alan was appalled when the spaceship turned out to be one of the "moons" that had been in orbit around Arcturus III. It was moving away from the planet and heading in their direction at high acceleration.
"The reception committee," said Alan to himself. "I'd better get out my credentials and my uniform."
For a day, the object grew in size, but instead of stopping, it continued to accelerate. It shot by him at thirty-five percent of light speed, then shrank in size again as the reddish arc of Arcturian sunlight on it grew wider to expose more and more of the spacecraft, revealing to Alan's awed eyes a complex of unfathomable structures embedded at seemingly random intervals over the eight hundred kilometer diameter artificial sphere. Alan sat in shock in front of the video screen as the unbelievable image of the star-liner accelerated off into the black void of space.
The scene was repeated again in the following month, then there was a period when he saw three spacecraft arrive and two others leave their orbits about Arcturus III. None of them were smaller than a hundred kilometers in size. Most were spheres, but there were other shapes with distinctly different markings that indicated that there was more than one alien race involved in trading at this interstellar hub of commerce.
Still under constant deceleration, the speed of Bright Star slowed to sub-relativistic velocities and Alan entered the outskirts of the Arcturian planetary system. There was still no sign of a reception committee, in fact, there was no sign that they had even seen him coming. He was certain that the highly luminous plasma of his antimatter exhaust would have been detected, for it would have been brighter than any star in the heavens. They were just ignoring him—as if he were too small to bother with.
He put away his dress uniform.
Feeling like a stone-age Indian paddling into New York harbor, Alan made his way across the planetary system to Arcturus III. The planet was large and had a surface gravity and pressure much higher than Earth. As he matched orbits with the planet and started to catch up with it, he noticed a small object streaking straight for him at high acceleration.
"A defensive missile!" he cried. Rotating his spacecraft, he rammed the throttle forward and tried to escape by jetting to one side of the missile trajectory. The ten kilometer long windowless cylinder matched his every move, drew alongside, then grabbed his tiny ship with a tractor field. Alan turned off his engines and waited.
The tug accelerated at exactly one Earth gravity, the acceleration he had used upon arrival, and then decelerated to bring Bright Star to a halt in the belly of a gigantic orbital space station. Around the equator of the station was painted a band of alternating red and black triangles. A robotic voice spoke over his ship radio, talking to him in a weird conglomeration of the television languages used in the ancient forties through eighties.
"Hey there, man. You can come out, but keep your spacesuit on, OK man? Like it's dangerous. The Bringer of Enlightenment, Third Class will show up soon to rap with you. He goes by the moniker of Teacher-of-the-Whiskered. You treat him with respect, see! If you do, then everything will be A-OK. But you try any funny stuff and you'll be ventilated. Understan', man?"
Alan replied using the logical language taught by the language radio channel. Hearing this, the robotic voice switched languages.
"You will turn off all power and self-protection devices on your ship. You will put on your environmental maintenance suit. You will exit your ship. You will wait for Teacher-of-the-Whiskered."
Alan put on his spacesuit and cycled through the airlock. His suit pressure rose to counteract the two atmospheres of pressure in the alien space station. He took a look at the sensor readouts in his collar. The air was mostly nitrogen and the amount of oxygen was too little to allow him to breathe unaided. In addition, the large amounts of water vapor, methane, and hydrogen sulphide not only made the atmosphere humid and smelly, but downright dangerous.
As soon as he had taken a few steps away from the airlock, the huge bulk of Bright Star was lifted from the deck and hoisted on invisible tractor beams to the far side of the multi-kilometer diameter hold. Alan watched in panic and apprehension as giant machines tore Bright Star into pieces, like a vicious kid pulling a butterfly apart. The living quarters up front were detached with surgical precision from the main body. The radiator wings went next. They were crumpled and shoved into what looked like a gigantic pulverizer. Alan worried about the antimatter that remained in the storage tanks. There wasn't much left, but if the superconducting containers were breached, even a space station this large could end up with a big hole in it. A small, remora-like missile attached itself to the remains of Bright Star and hauled the trash off to some distant dump.
Alan soon lost sight of the tiny living quarters that had been his home for seven years as it was taken off into the distance. He turned to look around him. Most of the mobile things near him were obviously robots, built like thick-legged centipedes with pincers on the front for carrying things. There were a number of aliens, however. They looked like a six-legged tiger-centaur. They had a head, eight limbs, and a short tail. The front two limbs were raised off the ground, while the other six remained as legs for walking in the high gravity. The hands on the fore-limbs had evolved from six-toed paws into a star-shaped hand with six identical finger-thumbs. Each one of the digits could oppose any of the others on the almost symmetric hand. The fur was black around the crocodile-length muzzle, which shaded off into a silvery pelt, and turned white at the paws and the tips of the pointed ears and tail. The only items of clothing were saddlebag-like pouches hanging along their sides.
The aliens were curious enough to glance at him as they went slowly by, but they didn't stop and stare. They all looked basically the same, although there were slight differences in size, shape of the muzzle, subtle markings on the pelt, and the transitions from black to silver on the muzzle, and silver to white at the extremities. Alan couldn't tell if they had different sexes or even if they had sexes. He did notice, however, that most of the aliens had two dozen or so long white whiskers that curved out from the black muzzle, while a few of them had no whiskers, although it was obvious from the cavities in the black muzzle fur that the skin underneath had made provision for the missing whiskers.
"Those un-whiskered ones are probably the females," Alan guessed, but he couldn't see any other differences.
Alan then noticed an alien off in the distance that was actually hurrying. It looked like all the others, but around its neck it wore a large medallion in the shape of a six-pointed star. The points of the star were long and wavy like the blade of a Turkish dagger. The starburst pattern was repeated on its side-packs. The alien fixed its attention on him and came to a halt not a meter away. It had no whiskers.
"I am called Teacher-of-the-Whiskered," it said. "I am a Bringer of Enlightenment, Third Class. It is my duty to instruct you and the rest of the creatures on your planet in the way of enlightenment." The alien stopped and peered forward to stare through Alan's visor with its silvery eyes.
"What is that object under your breathing orifice?" it asked.
"A moustache," replied Alan. "It is very similar to the whiskers that some of your people have."
The nostrils of the alien dilated as if it were smelling something strong but not palatable.
"It seems I have a lot of teaching to do," said the alien. Its demeanor changed as it continued. "But I am proud that I have been chosen to bring Enlightenment to such bewhiskered and rumpless ones as you are. May the Great Light of the Supernova Incarnate fall on me as I carry out its mission of bringing Enlightenment to the Universe." It was obvious that the alien was pleased with itself by the way it licked its chops, but Alan was appalled when the meter-long rasped tongue flickered out from between rows of shark-like teeth to lick first the top and then the bottom of the black fur covering the long crocodile snout.
Another alien with whiskers ambled slowly over. Its side-packs had the same red and black pattern that was painted around the belt of the orbital space station. The pattern was on all the robots and most of the aliens Alan had seen, except for the alien that had greeted him. The whiskered alien pulled a rectangular panel from a side-pack and consulted it.
"Identification?" the station official asked the other alien.
"Teacher-of-the-Whiskered, Bringer of Enlightenment, Third Class," replied the whiskerless one eagerly.
The official nodded, then scratched with one of its fingers at the panel. Alan noticed that although the front paws of the aliens had evolved into a weak-looking hand, each of the six fingers still retained a needle-sharp retractable claw.
The official finally looked at Alan. It came over and peered into his helmet.
"You traveled here using only your own technology?" it asked.
"Yes!" he replied.
"Do you accept Teacher-of-the-Whiskered . . ." here the official glanced down at his illuminated panel. " . . . Bringer of Enlightenment, Third Class, as your sponsor-and-mentor and trustee-owner of your planetary system until you qualify for recognition?"
Alan hesitated, trying to think of a polite way to ask if he and the human race had any other choice than to be owned by a missionary, third class, but the official didn't even bother to wait for his reply. He curled around and clanked his panel against the one held by Teacher. The pattern of script was transferred and the official slowly waddled off.
"It is time for me to return you to your home world," said Teacher. "I'm sure you must miss it. Please follow my android."
Teacher motioned to a robot standing to the rear which was built along the lines of the aliens. Its side-packs had the same starburst pattern that Teacher wore. Teacher then climbed aboard one of the many low-slung open-sided wheeled vehicles around, and zoomed off into the distant stretches of the cavernous hangar.
"Follow me," said the android and started off in the direction Teacher had taken. As Alan walked, he noticed a circular region on the floor that followed along with him. At the edges of the circle there were little dust eddies. Alan soon figured out that the circle indicated where the gravity changed from the Arcturian value of about three gravities to Alan's one-gravity field.
Alan tried talking with the android as they walked. he found the robot was very intelligent and quite willing to answer questions. It seemed that its owner had nothing to do with either the Arcturian or Galactic governments and was merely a novice missionary sponsored by a religious sect. Most of the races in the galactic civilization had no use for religion and even less use for sub-standard cultures such as the human race. As a result, the galactic bureaucrats had worked out an arrangement that kept one unwanted group busy keeping the other unwanted group under control.
The sect that supported Teacher had as their symbol and God a supernova explosion that occurred 200,000 years ago, only a few lightyears away from the "Homeland". The people of "Homeland" were forced to develop interstellar flight in a hurry to escape the sub-relativistic plasma cloud from the supernova. Although the supernova killed most of their race, it did act as a Bringer of Enlightenment to the remainder, and those hard-driving, dedicated individuals continued to proselytize as they spread through the galaxy. Shape, reproduction method, or social structure didn't matter. In fact, Teacher, the tiger-centaur, was a fifth-culture convert, and had never even seen a member of the frog-like race that had founded the sect.
The sect was small, but vigorous. Members pledged a dozenth of their income, which was used to maintain large radio arrays to detect the first signs of an emerging technological civilization. The civil authorities didn't want the missionaries bothering those cultures that were too savage, so they put limits on the amount of information that could be sent during the contact phase. They also limited the personal visits of the missionaries to only those planets where the cultures demonstrated their technological capabilities by sending a representative to the nearest galactic base.
"Why the emphasis on whiskers?" asked Alan.
"Every individual joining the sect has to make a physical sacrifice," said the android. "The sacrifice is different for each race, and is meant to be ornamentally significant but physically minor. For the original race of frog-like beings, it meant having the tip of your tongue forked. For Teacher's race, it was the removal of the largely ornamental whiskers. I see the human race has whiskers too. Do they serve a useful purpose?"
"No," admitted Alan.
"Good," said the android. "That should make it easier for your race to be accepted by the Arcturian sect. It was of some concern that your dental structure indicates that you are omnivorous instead of being purely carnivorous. It would be difficult for the Arcturians to associate with someone that eats plants for food like an animal. But whiskers are an indication that you are more than an animal, you are a person, and their removal means that you can transcend being a person, to become a mini-god, just a step below God-Head itself—the Supernova."
The effusiveness of the android's speech made Alan realize that he was not talking to an intelligent being, but a computer program, written by a highly intelligent person, but that person also believed fervently in a certain religious message. He had been walking behind the android for nearly ten kilometers and although he was not tired, portions of his anatomy were beginning to chafe and itch inside his spacesuit.
"How much longer do we have to walk?" asked Alan as they passed through a corridor with airlocks at both ends, and entered another large room. "Is Teacher's ship visible from beyond this building?"
"This building is Teacher's ship," said the android. Teacher's ship was a small one, only ten kilometers in diameter. They walked another kilometer and entered the cavernous door leading to what looked like a cargo bay. In the far end of the cargo bay, Alan saw with relief the life-support section that had been torn from Bright Star. After bidding goodby to the android, Alan cycled through the airlock, shucked his suit, and took care of urgent business. He was relieved to find that all the life support equipment was receiving power and was operational. There was, however, a new piece of equipment in the middle of the control room in place of his chair. It looked like a tall oriental screen, and was folded around in a half-circle. The panels of the screen were not decorated, but instead glistened with millions of tiny colored lights in seemingly random patterns. As Alan approached the screen, he saw Teacher standing inside the encircling panels.
"Welcome, Student Alan," said Teacher. "I believe you know what a hologram is?"
"Yes, Teacher," said Alan. "But I have never seen one in full color with this amount of resolution."
"It is very useful when it is not possible for beings to share the same atmosphere without environmental maintenance suits." There was the sound of a buzzer. Teacher looked off to one side and nodded.
"What was that?" asked Alan.
"We are under acceleration," said Teacher.
"I don't feel anything," said Alan.
"The gravity generators in the cargo hold have adjusted to cancel the acceleration of the spacecraft and leave it at the gravity level you are accustomed to."
"How fast are we going?" asked Alan.
"We are accelerating at 112 times the gravity on your planet Earth," said Teacher. "We should be up to speed soon. But all this talk about the motion of the ship is more properly the concern of the ship and its robots. We have more important things to talk about, such as the revelation of the God-Star, the Bringing of Enlightenment, and the number of stars throughout the Universe that are now being blessed by the God-Star's light. You are to watch the scenes that the screen will show you. I will return later to ask questions to determine whether you have paid attention."
The holographic image of Teacher was replaced by a swirling cloud of stars. The dry voice of a narrator began . . . "In the days before the Enlightenment, the peoples of the galaxy were without hope, for the God-Star . . ." Alan watched attentively, but sighed. The six-legged Arcturians didn't use chairs, and it looked like he was fated to spend the next four years attending church school standing up.
At first, Alan tried hard to please Teacher and parroted the answers that had been presented in the holovideos. Later he tried asking some questions about some of the logical flaws he saw in the presentations, such as the fact that supernova explosions are fairly common, and what had made the explosion of the God-Star any different from the rest.
The question provoked a tirade. "Until you have been Enlightened, you are nothing but an animal, you ungrateful plant-chewer. If you persist with these blasphemous questions, I shall turn around and return to Arcturus. You will be thrown out into space, for you smell too bad to eat."
Alan soon realized that the people of Earth were going to have to embrace the religion of this third-class missionary if they were going to obtain access to the technological knowledge that Teacher controlled. Fortunately, sun worship was old hat to the human race, so supernova worship should be easy.
Alan played along with Teacher-of-the-Whiskered, and after a year of lessons and preaching, he finally agreed to be proselytized into the worship of the God-Star. Teacher was delighted when Alan announced his decision, and Alan was again treated to the awesome display of the huge rasped tongue reaching out from the cavernous mouth to lick the upper and lower muzzle in a display of pleasure. When the time came for the initiation ceremony, Alan almost backed out when he found that it wasn't sufficient to just cut off his mustache. The whiskers would still be there under the skin, and a stub of a whisker was just as impious as a long sweeping hair. Alan's handlebar moustache had to be pulled out—one hair at a time.
As the spaceship carrying Alan and the Arcturian missionary drew close to the solar system, Alan had ingratiated himself enough with Teacher that the alien allowed him to talk directly with Earth. By inference and innuendo, Alan got his message across, and when they came to a halt in Earth orbit, the people designated as Earth's official contacts with Teacher were Matthew Kamehameha, Mark Nkrumah, Luke Golagong, and John Redwing, all from cultures who were well aware of both the positive and negative effects of the visit of a missionary from a technologically advanced civilization.
Alan was pleased with himself for getting the message across to the Earth authorities, but he was a little puzzled that such youngsters had been sent. None seemed to be over twenty-five. Of course, he was no spring chicken himself. Technically he was 106 years old, and financially well off, for his investments had done well in the last seventy-six years. Physically, he felt even younger than the forty-four years Einstein had given to him.
Teacher remained in orbit in his comfortable three-times-Earth-gravity, two-times-Earth-pressure environment, while a mobile version of the holoscreen was sent in the alien's place. Teacher was soon busy and happy conducting worship services every twelfth day, and supervising the dewhiskering of an apprehensive but brave crowd of scientists and engineers, who once permanently shorn, were allowed access to the knowledge in the ship's computers. Women were not discriminated against, for there a just as many hair follicles on the upper lip of a maiden as on the most burly, bewhiskered he-man, it just took a smaller pair of tweezers to pull them all out.
When things had finally stabilized so that Alan was no longer needed on Teacher's ship as an intermediary, he was allowed to return to Earth. The pilots on the shuttle that brought him down were young and taciturn, and although there was a sizable crowd there for his landing, Alan was quickly whisked off to a nearby building. There he was met by a young man and a human looking robot. The robot was made of shiny black plastic with a caduceus on its chest.
"I'm Doctor Prasdner," said the young man. "We'd like to give you a quick checkup, then you can have your holovideo conference with the press." Alan looked around for equipment, but could see none. Instead, the plasticoid approached him and said politely, "If you will just unseal your shirt, the exam will be over in a few seconds."
Alan opened his shirt front, and noticed as he did so, that a number of tiny lights built into the front of the robot scanned his face and chest.
"May I touch your neck?" asked the plasticoid, reaching toward him. Alan noticed that the fingertips contained dozens of tiny sensors.
"Sure," said Alan. One hand of the robot touched the side of his neck, the thumb on the carotid artery, while the other hand touched his head on the other side.
"Nice bedside manner," thought Alan to himself as he noticed that the fingers were warm. He felt tiny sonic pulses passing through him as the robot moved its hands over his body.
"He is in excellent physical shape," said the plasticoid. "He can take it."
"Take what?" asked Alan, puzzled.
"Sit down," said Doctor Prasdner, motioning to a chair.
"Why?"
"Sit down," said the doctor. Alan sat down apprehensively. The plasticoid moved behind him and placed one hand on Alan's shoulder, where its sensitive fingertips could monitor Alan's vital signs.
The door of the room opened and a young couple walked in. The man looked just like Alan, except he was only twenty-five years old. The look-alike had a twenty-five-year-old version of Marcia on his arm.
"Hello, Alan," said himself.
"What's going on!!" said Alan, his heart pounding. He turned to the doctor. "Have you cloned me?"
"No," said the copy. "I'm Able."
Alan looked back at him, then looked at the girl. ". . . and she?"
"Is Marcia," said Able.
"But . . ."
"Within one year after you left, the scientists studying the Arcturian biology channel stumbled onto the secret of the mechanism that the aliens use to prevent themselves from dying. Think about it. Only a civilization in which everyone lived forever could operate an interstellar commerce system based on spacecraft limited to speeds less than the speed of light."
"But your hand and leg and eye! And that can't be Marcia, she was over thirty when I left."
Able looked over at Doctor Prasdner. Prasdner sighed and said, "Old age is caused by a set of genes that 'turn off' the body repair mechanisms. This 'death-wish' gene is hard on the individual, but better for the species, since it allows room for new variations to arise. The longevity secret is basically a means to prevent the body-repair mechanisms from being turned off. Once the 'death-wish' genes are shut down, not only do you stop aging, but you body begins to repair any damage that might have been done. In Able's case, even his missing eye and hand were regenerated. You can't even find a scar now."
"Wow!" said Alan. "You mean that I can get back twenty years and my moustache at the same time! Great! Give me the shot, Doc. Then watch out, Marcia. I've been away from girls for a long time. You'll sure look good decorating my billionaire's pad."
There was a strained silence in the room. Alan looked around at the faces.
It was the robot medic that finally spoke.
"To achieve longevity involves taking a culture of synthetic viruses that enter each cell and modify the genes to turn off the 'death-wish' gene," said the robot. "But the treatment has to be administered before you are thirty-five years old, otherwise it is not effective."
"That's why we didn't tell you on the way out," said Able. "It was already too late."
Alan slumped in his chair. The doctor looked concerned and glanced up at the robot, its hand still monitoring Alan's vital signs. The plasticoid remained silent. After a few moments, Alan sat up and gave a harsh laugh.
"Well," he said. "The joke's on me. I went away expecting to come back younger than my twin, but Einstein was outfoxed by the medics. Still . . ." He forced a grin. "I've got a billion dollars and a lot of years to spend them in. How about it Marcia? Shall we take up where we left off? That is if you don't mind shacking up with an old man of forty-four."
Marcia held Able's arm even tighter, swallowed and finally lifted her eyes to meet Alan's.
"I've been married to Able for seventy-five years," she said. "And we've just renewed the marriage contract for a thousand more."
"Alan needs rest," the plasticoid said.
The doctors did their best, and Alan stayed alive and healthy for another eighty-four years. He died as he had hoped, of a cerebral aneurysm in the arms of a nubile-looking centenarian that was jaded with making love to youngsters. Alan's age was 190 calendar and 128 Einstein-adjusted when he died.
The Earth stopped its business for one day to watch the funeral of its first interstellar ambassador. There was more than one now, as the Earth slowly made its way into the lower echelons of galactic society. It was tough being the lowest culture on the totem pole, but that didn't stop the Earth from investing ten percent of its gross world product on research to find a faster-than-light drive. The drive was theoretically impossible, but the human race had never forgotten how to dream, even if it still had to dewhisker its youth.
Able and Marcia still visit Alan's tomb at the spaceport in Brasilia every hundred years. There, on the long spire reaching up to the sky, are the words that Alan himself had chosen for his tombstone. The words were typical Alan.
"Here lies Alan Armstrong. He was the first man in the world to visit another star, and the last man in the world to die of old age."