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Acceleration Constant

After "The Singing Diamond" was published, I thought of a sequel, "Acceleration Constant". While "The Singing Diamond" was designed to teach the reader that it is conceptually possible to make an "antigravity" machine that will nullify the gravity field of the Earth over a small region, "Acceleration Constant" was designed to teach the reader that orbit-like trajectories aren't always determined by the laws of gravity and orbital mechanics. It is possible, by using the acceleration capabilities of a spacecraft's propulsion system to add to, or subtract from, the gravitational acceleration of the mass being orbited, to make the orbital radius independent of the orbital speed. In fact, it is possible to put a spacecraft into an orbit around a point where there is no attractive mass at all. I used these massless and non-free-fall orbits again in a later novel, Timemaster.
  

Such pseudo-orbital trajectories, however, do require a remarkable propulsion system. One which can maintain a constant acceleration over long periods of time. No rocket known can do the job, except perhaps an antimatter rocket. Even the unidirectional neutrino rocket described in the story has flaws, which I quickly gloss over in the story. It is interesting to note, however, that some recent unusual experimental results on neutrinos indicate that they might have imaginary mass. If that is true, then the neutrinos can have a finite momentum even if they have zero net energy. That, in turn, implies that if a unidirectional neutrino drive engine could be made, it would require no energy to make a neutrino-antineutrino pair, but since the resulting neutrinos have momentum, they would provide thrust to the neutrino drive engine that produced them.
  

I wasn't able to sell this story to Omni, and because it was a sequel to a story that had originally appeared in Omni, I thought it didn't have a market elsewhere. It sat in my files for a number of years until a new agent read it and realized that it could stand on its own. It was finally published in the March 1986 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Volume 106, Number 3, on pages 76-88. 

 

 

 

I was embarrassed.

I was living a cliche right out of the old science fiction pulp thrillers—beautiful heroine clad in a scanty plastic spacesuit in the clutches of a Bug-Eyed Monster.

I swallowed my chagrin and puzzled over my predicament. I was in the capture-hold of the Borc's strange conical spaceship. The hold was in vacuum. I had a suit on, but it was a sports model with only a one-hour tank. I looked up at the alien on the other side of the crystal ceiling. Its myriad of lidless bug-like eyes stared at me—unblinking.

As the Borc ship kept up its constant acceleration of 2.8 times Earth gravity, I began to worry. At constant acceleration, I was getting farther and farther away from Earth and any possible resupply of oxygen. Would they stop to let me out? I was afraid not—for Borcs never stop.

 

The constant acceleration was the first thing the Belt Traffic Control computer noticed about the ship as it dived in from deep space. By the time the radars had picked up its presence in the distant fringes of the asteroid belt, the speed of the object had exceeded the velocity of any of the planets—yet it continued to accelerate. The computer activated an often-tested but never-before-used alarm.

"ALIEN SHIP DETECTED!" modulated the cool mechanical voice.

I had been visiting the Chief Traffic Controller, John McManus, while my ship was being refueled. John used to be a rock-hopper like me, but had to give up prospecting and take an inside job after his legs got chewed up between a couple of million-ton asteroids.

When the computer alarm sounded, I floated to the back of the control room and watched the professionals go to work. The constant acceleration of the unknown ship made it easy to analyze where it came from. Yet that very consistency was puzzling. No one ever ran a ship at high acceleration. It was too wasteful of power.

The controllers traced the track of the ship back along its course. It had come from Jupiter—in a straight line toward the Sun—never deviating from a constant 2.8 gravities acceleration.

"How fast is it going now?" I asked.

One of the younger controllers replied without taking his eyes off his screen. "Over a hundred kilometers per second, Miss Vengeance." As he spoke, the spot on the screen curved in a broad arc, then continued to plummet inward toward the sun.

John gave a soft whistle. "A J-hook turn—every centimeter of it at constant acceleration. First they go hell-bent-for-leather straight at the Sun, then swoop around in a big arc until their tail is pointed backward. Now they are slowing down by applying acceleration in the opposite direction. I wonder where they're going to stop?"

As John spoke he was punching a keyboard. Soon a blow-up of a section of the asteroid belt was on the screen. There was a flashing X that showed the place where the alien ship was predicted to come to a halt.

There was nothing at that point. However, the pattern of large and small asteroids around the blinking X was familiar to me. The aliens were approaching the region where I did my prospecting. I knew the territory well, for that was where I hopped from rock to rock in my ship, The Billionaire, looking for the one rock out of many with enough iron and nickel in it to make it worth dragging back to the Belt Processor.

A year ago I had been lucky, and had found a huge, high-nickel asteroid. Now my ship's name was more of a brag than a wish, but I still kept prospecting. I guess it was in my blood.

Suddenly everything clicked, and I blurted out, "John, that spot is where I made my big strike! You remember—the asteroid that had the cloud of ultradense midges in a bouncing orbit that went back and forth right through the rock."

"The fast-living ones that the scientists think are intelligent, but who won't talk to us?"

"Yes. Perhaps this ship contains more of the midges and they are looking for their friends."

"I doubt it," said John. "If I remember, those gnats couldn't stand one gravity, much less 2.8 gravities." He turned from his screen, and with a thoughtful frown asked, "Say, Red. While we're busy tracking this ship, would you go to a spare console and look up the surface gravity of Jupiter in the library files?"

The computer confirmed John's hunch.

"There's no real surface on Jupiter," I reported back, "but the gravity deep under the cloud layer is 2.8 gravities."

"I thought so," said John. "Whoever those beings are, they like home so much that they even brought their own gravity. I guess they don't like free-fall."

"Maybe it's unhealthful for them," I said, hitting closer to the mark than I realized.

Earth was warned, but there was little that could be done except to alert the various national police forces, who dug out ancient codes and disentombed some nuclear warheads. There was no panic, for one alien ship poking about in the asteroid belt does not make an invasion.

John and his assistants scanned their wide-angle screens, searching for some belter who could get a close glimpse of the alien craft, but none of the prospector or scientific ships was in position. The radars tracked the alien while it approached the empty spot in space where my asteroid used to be.

I thought they would come to a stop and look around, but I forgot their penchant for constant acceleration. The ship approached the rendezvous point and not finding the asteroid, changed course and took off again. This time they went along the asteroid belt instead of across it—still at 2.8 gravities.

"They must be looking around the belt for the asteroid," said John. We continued to watch as their speed increased to higher and higher velocities under the constant acceleration.

"They are well over two hundred kilometers per second now," said the young controller after an hour, "and they are still accelerating. At that speed they are going to go flying off into space!"

"Look at your computer readout," said John. "They have pointed their exhaust just enough to keep them going in a big circular trajectory around the Sun that follows along the asteroid belt, while keeping them at 2.8 gravities."

 

The refueling of my ship was complete. My original plan had been to go back out into the belt to do more prospecting, but I had received an urgent call from my publisher. My book, The Singing Diamond, in which I had described my adventure with the rich asteroid and its buzzing swarm of fast-living creatures, was starting to slip in the best-seller lists. These new aliens, who seemed to be interested in the whereabouts of my midge cloud, were in all the news and the publishers wanted me to come back for some publicity shots. When I left Belt Central the next day, the alien ship was still accelerating, although most of its acceleration was now going into keeping it orbiting in the asteroid belt rather than increasing its speed.

As I poked along toward Earth with my antimatter fueled "water-torch" drive, the alien flashed around the asteroid belt, each orbit taking only nine days instead of an asteroid's five years.

I had a great time on Earth. Although I really don't care for crowds, all those lovely people were making me even richer than I already was, by pushing my book back up to the top of the best-seller lists. I went to autograph parties, had countless interviews, was seen in the best restaurants, and made my second appearance in one year on the "Tomorrow" show.

While I was having fun, the aliens continued to search the belt. A few scientific ships had been able to get close enough to the trajectory of the alien craft to take pictures while it came flashing by at one percent of the speed of light. The intruder ship was a thirty-meter-high cloud-grey cone. The back end—where you would normally expect to see huge rocket nozzles emitting a flaming exhaust—was black. The smoothly rounded surface showed some evidence of a door hatch, but little else. If the scientists had been intrigued before, they were excited now. The aliens didn't use rockets. They had some kind of space drive!

After going around the astroid belt a few times, the alien ship changed course and came toward the Earth. The Earth authorities started to get worried, but the panic was over before it got started. At 2.8 gravities, it only took the aliens a few hours to switch from an astroid belt orbit around the Sun to a polar orbit around the Earth. But again, what a strange orbit. They flew at thirty kilometers altitude! Neither airplanes nor space interceptors could keep up with them.

There is not much air at thirty kilometers, but enough for the alien's ship to produce a continuous sonic boom with its sixteen kilometer per second speed. It circled the Earth every 43 minutes, its outward pointing space drive producing an inward acceleration of 2.8 gravities that augmented the Earth's one gravity pull, so they circled the Earth nearly twice as fast as if they had been in a free-fall orbit.

With the aliens in sight (and sound) overhead, the publicity people for my book went into high gear. They arranged a photographic interview with "Anybody Who Is," the photo/video news magazine that makes and destroys public personalities with the flick of a video editor's erase pen. The photographer assigned to me was a professional, with an expense budget to match. He wanted a shot of me at the San-San zoo, sitting next to my swarm of gnats swirling in free fall inside their diamond cage with its gravity trap.

Instead of the usual "pretty girl in a skimpy dress admiring a large diamond" shot, the photographer decided to have me wear a space suit, for that was what I was wearing when I first encountered the pesky little swarm. True to the code of the photographic journalist, however, my own deep-space work suit would not do. We went to "Vacuum Sports," a small specialty store situated in the recently renovated area of old downtown Beverly Hills.

I've got to admit the suit looked good. It was designed for light travel and games in the vacuum tunnels and caverns of the Moon, asteroids, and orbital stations. It had a modest propulsion pack for free-fall games, and an hour's supply of air in a super-pressure tank. It omitted such niceties, however, as food, water, and disposal facilities that are essential in a real work suit. The feature that sold the photographer was the tough, transparent plastic film that stretched from boots to hips and wrist collars to upper torso, with a bare midriff effect between.

We went back to the zoo and the photographer started to arrange the pose. I had my helmet on, and had it pressed against the side of the barrel-sized diamond. In the center of the diamond was a flat plate of ultra-dense matter—four million tons of it. The plate was the gravity trap that our scientists had made to capture the pesky little midges bouncing back and forth through my asteroid. The diamond casing was to keep the ultradense matter in the plate from expanding back into normal matter. The matter was so dense that the gravity field generated by the plate was one gravity on each side. But since the Earth was contributing its own gravity field, there were two gravities on top of the disc, and zero gravity underneath. Below the disc, the one-gravity downward pull of the Earth was canceled by the one-gravity upward pull of the plate, creating a zero-gravity region where the cloud of dense gnats swirled in free-fall. As the dense bodies of the tiny midges moved through the ultra-hard diamond like it wasn't there, the crystal would protest with a singing sound.

We didn't realize it at the time, but while we had been shopping, the sonic booms from the alien ship had stopped. The aliens had left Earth orbit and gone out in a wide arc that would bring them down at high speed directly toward the San-San zoo. As the photographer was setting up his lights, the alien ship was descending toward us—its invisible drive engines slowing it down from its immense speed. I was all posed, mentally saying "cheese" through the fishbowl of the helmet, when the ship came down upon us like a runaway elevator.

I looked up at the sound of rushing air to see the blunt end of the alien craft drop down the last twenty meters. It came to a momentary stop just above my head—then took off again—all at constant acceleration. In that split second while the ship was nearly motionless, a pair of long mechanical arms reached out of an open hatch to grab the barrel-sized diamond. The arms flipped the gem upside down, trapping the swarm of specks on the dense disc encased inside. As the arms swiftly pulled the diamond toward the hatch opening, I was in the way. Together, the diamond and I were scooped through the cavernous doors in the base of the ship.

Through the closing hatch doors, I looked down to see the Earth dropping rapidly away as the ship accelerated upward towards space. I then looked up to see a strange sight above me. Floating in a slightly bluish liquid on the other side of a large glass viewing port were a group of miniature hot-air balloons. Each had a spherical orange gas-bag about a meter across. Where the neck of the balloon would normally be, there was a number of short tentacles encircling a mouth with many sharp-looking triangular teeth. Hanging by six long, violet cords from the topside of each balloon was a smaller, heavier gondola part. These were purple, with four short tendrils hanging down. There were large and small black spots all over the purple bodies.

I pried myself off the diamond and slowly lowered my heavy limbs to the floor. I tried sitting up, but the weight of the backpack was just too much in the 2.8-gravity acceleration. I carefully lay on the floor and turned my head to look more closely at the beings floating above me.

There were four of them. Three were smaller, with yellow-orange gas sacs and a bright violet lower body. They were constantly in motion, moving from one control panel to another, the splayed tips of their lower tendrils flitting over the illuminated buttons on the wall panels. The fourth being was a slightly larger creature, with a dark orange balloon and a gray-violet underbody. It was now hovering right over the viewing port. One of the tendrils carried a small weighted sack, and another tendril was pulling tiny yellow spheres from it. The tendril would reach up into the space between the upper body and the lower body and release the small ball. It would shoot rapidly upward and would immediately be captured by the tiny eating arms hanging beneath the orange globe, to be pierced and devoured by the slashing triangular teeth.

After finishing its snack, the large creature went over to a trapezoidal platform with buttons on the sloping sides. It lowered itself on the flat top of the trapezoid and let its four tendrils hang down around the sides. The fine "fingers" at the end of the tendrils played among the buttons and one of the four large arms in the hold lifted from its fixture and swung toward me. Carefully cradling my body in the high gravity, the arm lifted me up until I was just underneath the crystal ceiling. I was able to move my helmet so it could touch the glass. I could now hear.

There was an overall hum that ran through the ship like an expression of controlled power of enormous magnitude. That must be the invisible drive engines that somehow kept the ship at constant acceleration. I could also hear high pitched chirps and twitters. These seemed to occur when I could see surface vibrations on the violet portions of the creatures. Living in liquid, it was obvious that they must use some type of sonar for communication. The liquid was not water, however, but ammonia, hydrogen, and methane gas under thousands of atmospheres of pressure. I lifted a leaden hand and felt the glass. It was hot to the touch. Although Jupiter is farther from the Sun than Earth and gets less sunlight, the planet itself emits heat from inside. These creatures must live down where the temperature is higher than normal Earth temperatures.

Suddenly, the larger creature released a particularly large bubble from its orange gas-sac and shot over in my direction. As the bubble left its body, I heard a flatulent "Borc!" The being then used finer jets of gas until its double-lobed body was hovering right above me, its myriad of jet-black bug-like eyes staring unblinking at mine—one foot and thousands of atmospheres away. It was then that I recognized the musty old cliche that I was living out.

The being twittered at me. There was no way that I could imitate the nearly inaudible high-pitched sounds that came from its body, so I replied with the only sound that I could vocalize.

"You—Borc!" I said, feeling like a cartoon character.

There was a moment's pause in the twittering. I was afraid that I had committed a breach of Borc etiquette. I then decided that since I could not vocalize its language, I would have to get it to try mine.

"I am 'Red' Vengeance," I said. "I am human. I need to get some air in forty minutes or I'm done for!" I went on, knowing full well the conversation was fruitless. The larger Borc tried some human speech using its gas bag jets, but the best it could do was to get the rhythm.

I was beginning to lose hope that they would understand my predicament in time, when I felt a subtle shift in the gravity forces in the ship. The maneuver was done fairly smoothly, but I could tell that the ship had stopped accelerating in a straight line away from Earth, and was now moving into a circular path. Again, the centrifugal force of the circular path was such that there was always 2.8 gravities toward the base of the ship.

I was not the only thing that felt the slight unbalance in forces as the ship shifted into a circular orbit. The diamond did also. The weighty cargo slid to the other side of the hold. As it moved, the ship swerved wildly as its unseen drive engines attempted to adjust to the shifted load. There were rapid changes in acceleration, and for almost a full second we experienced free fall. I watched as the Borcs above me were tumbled about by the swirling currents in their control room. One of the smaller Borcs was thrown into its gas sac. When the two parts of the body separated again, there was a violet dye staining the bluish liquid from where its lower body had banged into its teeth.

"OUCH!" I said in sympathy. "I bet that is the Borc equivalent of falling on your chin and biting your tongue!"

But the injury was more serious than that. The larger Borc stayed at the control panels, bringing the still wavering ship under control, while the other two gathered around their injured comrade. The lower violet body was limp, but the yellow-orange gas sac was still flailing its stubby feeding tentacles. It seemed to be trying to grasp the six tendon-like strands that arched over its top. The two uninjured Borcs pulled thin silver tubes from recesses in the control room wall and aimed them at the writhing yellow-orange balloon. I heard shrill sounds and watched, horrified, as the gas sac portion of the injured Borc's body was torn to shreds by the ultrasonic lances from the tube. The Borcs were careful, and only the yellow-orange portion was subjected to the disintegrating power of the beams. Soon the six violet cords were lying on the floor around the sluggishly moving lower body. I could now see a raw-looking orange-violet stripe near the tip of each cord.

One of the tube-carrying Borcs jetted over to a cage-like compartment in the far wall. In the cage was a cluster of what looked like orange rags. The Borc did something with his tube through the holes in the door, and then opened it quickly to remove a limp, nearly deflated orange balloon. The ring of teeth and the feeding tentacles were motionless. In its deflated state I could see the top of the bag. There were six nozzles there, each emitting tiny bubbles of gas that floated quickly up to the conical ceiling. The nearly empty gas bag was held on the floor next to the recovering violet body, and the six long thin arms each grasped one of the six gas ports, shutting them off.

The Borc that had been holding the gas bag down to the floor now allowed it to rise. After a few minutes with its valves shut, the orange bag was floating in its normal position above the violet body, with the six long arms under enough tension to keep them away from the tentacles and teeth of the bag. The revived Borc stayed there, feeding its now awake and ravenous symbiote a supper of baby balloons. Slowly the orange sac expanded, turning a translucent yellow-orange as it did so.

I now began to realize what it was that I had seen. No wonder the Borcs always traveled at 2.8 gravities. They had to—or they would be eaten alive! The Borcs consisted of an intelligent spider-like violet creature that captured and controlled a vicious semi-intelligent orange gas balloon which served as its float. I looked more carefully at the violet body and could discern no evidence of any kind of eating port. The symbiosis must have been going on for a long time, for it looked as though those six long arms reaching up to grasp the orange balloons in a dangerous embrace were not just for control of the gas jets. The raw looking orange-violet stripes on the arms were suckers.

Well—the Borcs had their problems, but I had mine. I had only twenty minutes of air left. I started banging on the glass window to get their attention. They had not forgotten me, however. The hatch below me opened. There was only the clumsy mechanical arm between me and a whirling empty sky. There were going to throw me out!

I'm afraid I screamed a little as I grabbed the arm around its mechanical wrist and held on tightly. The arm reached out the hatch and around to the outside of the ship. It was an amazingly long, articulated structure. (It would have to be, I thought. Any outside repairs would have to be done with these arms, since a Borc would not dare put its two antagonistic halves into the close quarters of the same spacesuit.) Holding me carefully against the gravity forces, the arm carried me up to the pointed nose of the ship and beyond. As we traveled upwards, the gravity forces became less and less. Finally, about three meters past the nose of the ship, the arm gave a little toss, and I found myself floating in free fall.

Around and around me at about forty meters distance, the Borc spacecraft was whirling in a close orbit, with me at the center. It took about six seconds for the ship to make one complete orbit. It was like watching a giant toy on the end of a string that I whirled about my head, but there was no string. The invisible drive engines in the spacecraft supplied the force that the missing string could not.

I squinted outward through the glare of the Sun and saw the welcome sight of one of Earth's geosynchronous orbit communication stations a few hundred meters away. With a whistle of relief, I moved my left hand to the jet-pack controls on my chest and did a fancy barrel-roll toward the welcome space-suited figure exiting an open port on the station.

"Greetings!" I boomed through my suit-mike, as I skidded to a full-jet stop not one meter from my new-found friend. "Got any spare air?"

"Miss Vengeance!" exclaimed the nearly invisible visage behind the well-tinted visor. "Get in here quickly! Those sport suits were not made for deep space work; you'll get sun-burned!"

 

I'll never forgive that photographer for making me switch from my regular work suit to the sports model. I was burned everywhere the suit was clear, and that suit had a lot of clear area. Having a red-head's complexion didn't help any either. By the time I recovered, even my freckles had freckles.

After staying long enough to make sure that I was rescued, the Borcs broke from their 2.8-gravity circle and headed in a 2.8 gravity straight line for the asteroid belt. By the time a few scientists and I got out to the belt with our dolphin translator computers and sonar generators, the gnats were once again in a small cloud about ten centimeters across, their dust-speck sized ultradense bodies bouncing back and forth through the iron and rock of an asteroid as if it were a vacuum. Circling the asteroid and its buzzing cloud, the Borcs waited for us in one of the constant acceleration orbits.

We came out prepared to spend as long as necessary learning how to communicate with the Borcs. However, the Borcs had their own translator—the mites. They had had plenty of time in the zoo to observe the human race and learn its language. (Although they had never let on.)

As we approached, we saw the bottom of the Borc ship open again, and one of the mechanical arms threw out a flat sheet of metal. As we exited our port to examine the floating plate, we saw the swarm of flashing specks rising up out of the surface of the asteroid in front of us.

"Stay away from those bees!" I warned. "They won't go out of their way to get you, but they sure sting if you are stupid enough to stand in their path!"

We watched as the swarm passed through the metal plate. It seemed to me that their activity increased as they did so. Our chief scientist and linguist, Abdul Battu, retrieved the plate. He looked at it, smiled broadly, then passed it to me.

"It's for you," he said.

I looked down at the plate. It was covered with tiny little holes. The first batches formed large block letters, which got progressively smaller and smaller until the rest of the plate could only be read through a microscope.

"WELCOME! MISS VENGEANCE," it said, "WE ARE GLAD you were not hurt . . ."

"Well—having an ultra-fast translator is going to make things easy," I said. "I wonder why the bugs talk to the Borcs, when they never would talk to us?"

"I suspect that somehow they belong to the Borcs," said Abdul. "Let's get that plate inside to a microscope and see what it says."

 

Well—it turns out that the Borcs are a very, very old race. They have fully developed some areas of science, but were limited in many others because their planet has no solid crust and their strange physical makeup limits their space travel to constant acceleration missions.

Their space drive is a marvel of elementary particle physics. The Borcs have completely unraveled the mystery of how one elementary particle turns into another. They use antimatter to power their engines just like we do, but instead of their antimatter turning into pions and gamma-rays as it does in our "water-torch" engines, they somehow control the reaction so that the annihilation of the anti-hydrogen and the normal hydrogen always produces two identical high-energy neutrinos, with no energy lost as heat or gamma rays. Their control is so complete that the two neutrinos both shoot off in the aft direction, while kicking the ship in the forward direction. Since neutrinos, once formed, can pass right thorough almost anything, the unstoppable neutrinos just shoot right out through the base of their ship!

After a few days, my first-hand knowledge of the Borcs became less useful to the scientists. I now spent my time in the lounge, poring over some new gravity and thermal survey maps covering my claim in the asteroid belt. I was planning my next prospecting trip, while waiting for the shuttle back to Earth and my ship.

Abdul was going through the fifteenth information plate when he finally learned why the Borcs had the swarm of midges. He told me about it one evening while we were relaxing in the lounge. He looked great in a white silk jump suit and turban, his piercing black eyes peering out from his jovial bearded face. I had on my electric-blue feather-dress, and was having a hard time keeping the artificial feathers out of my face in free fall.

"It's amazing, Red," he said. "It turns out that the bugs are a computer. An intelligent computer made of manufactured—but living—ultra-dense beings that live a trillion times faster than either humans or Borcs."

"I guess you need a computer like that if you are going to design neutrino drives," I said, sipping slowly at a Borc Bombshell floating in front of me. I eyed the two squeeze-bulbs that had been strung together with threads, and switched the straw from the violet-colored bulb to the orange one. The whole idea was to down both of the equally potent drinks without letting the two bulbs drift together through room currents or your mishandling of the straw.

"Well," said Abdul with some hesitation. "The problem the older Borc had given the bugs was one that takes a lot of computer time to solve, but it really wasn't very important."

"What!" I exclaimed. "The Borcs went to all that trouble just to play games?"

"I'm afraid so, Red," he said. "The Borcs have a game that is very much like our 3-D chess. Now—it has long been known that any game like chess, which has no random factors, should allow the person who makes the first move either to win or force a tie—if you only knew the right moves to make. Yet to date, no human-made computer has been fast enough or smart enough to figure out the moves even for our 2-D chess. A good thing too—for it would spoil the game of chess forever."

He paused, took a careful sip from his squeezer of hot mint tea, and continued, "The older Borc was a runner-up in a 3-D chess tourney on Jupiter. He was annoyed, and being rich and powerful, he made a computer and set it to work on the problem of how never to lose. According to our estimates, he started them working 6,550 years ago. He would come out to check on their progress every fifty years or so. This time, when he arrived, he found that you had trapped his bugs and stolen his asteroid."

"You mean the larger Borc is over 6,000 years old!" I exclaimed.

"More like 15,000 years," Abdul replied.

"Fortunately he has his bugs back, so they can continue to work on his problem," I said.

Abdul laughed. "It turns out the bugs had solved the problem not too many years before you trapped them. They were waiting for the elder Borc to return so they could give their final report. He has it now."

"I bet he's anxious to get back to Jupiter so he can win in the next 3-D chess tourney," I said.

"No, I'm afraid not," said Abdul, with a rare frown. "As I said before, once the answer is known, there is no more challenge to the game. I don't know how a distraught Borc looks, but I bet he's about ready to let his gas sac eat him from the tone I am getting from our correspondence. He doesn't even want to go back to Jupiter. He liked the game so much—and has ruined it so completely for himself—that he's afraid that he will unwittingly reveal the strategy that the bugs worked out for him. Once he does, the game will be ruined for everyone else. He's afraid of what will happen to their culture, even their civilization, with such a fundamental element gone."

"But he can't stay here forever," I said. "Even with their super-efficient neutrino drive, he's going to run out of fuel sometime."

"He can stay here and get the 2.8 gravities he needs to survive by splitting his spacecraft into two parts and rotating them on ends of a tether," Abdul said. "But sooner or later he will run out of either food or energy and have to go back to Jupiter."

Suddenly I had a brainstorm. "I know a way," I said. "It will take a lot of time and effort, but I think we can make a comfortable home away from home for our Borc friend—right on Earth."

It did take time—two years in fact. We found a field of granite boulders in the Australian outback with nobody around for hundreds of kilometers. Capsules containing laser-beam suspended antimatter were brought in from the production facility out in the belt. The antimatter was used to compress explosively hunks of granite and carbon into ten centimeter hexagonal tiles of ultra-dense matter encapsulated in diamond. The half-million ton slabs were laid in a compact pattern on the flattened top of a large granite knob until nearly one thousand of them had tiled an area three meters across. The thickness of the ultra-dense matter had been adjusted until the gravity field just above the plates was 1.8 times Earth gravity. When the Earth's gravity pull was added, the resulting 2.8 gravities would keep any Borc from "biting his tongue."

I was in the welcoming contingent that stood in the hot December sunshine of "Down Under," awaiting the Borc elevator. The conical ship came screaming out of the sky—right on schedule. My old friends, the mechanical arms, reached out the open hatch. Three arms struggled with a large, clear, cylindrical pressure capsule filled with blue liquid, a lot of machinery, and a violet and orange Borc. The other carried a much smaller cask of diamond with its cargo of gnats.

"He brought his translator," I said.

Just as quickly as it came, the space ship elevator left again, pulling gravities straight for Jupiter. We have a lot to learn from this willing exile and his talking super-computer. If he can only hold out as long in Australia as he did on Jupiter, it shouldn't be too many millennia before we humans can take our neutrino drive ships down into Jupiter itself—and then, comfortably ensconced in our gravity-controlled cabins—return the visit.

 

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