Month: May 2025

“When we returned from Pluto we began the planning for the first interstellar trip.  We had about fifty stellar systems that had earthlike planets in what we measured to be the Goldilocks Zones around their stars.  We selected a red dwarf about fifty light years from earth; LHS 1140 whose second planet was believed to be a super-earth well within the habitable zone of its star.  We intended to take a lot of measurements of the planet and its neighborhood and then head straight home.

The crew would be me, McKenzie and a six-man science team that would take the measurements of the exoplanet and the surrounding system.  I also insisted that Bertram train one of his colleagues on his star drive in case any accident incapacitated him before the return.  He started laughing when I told him this, “Afraid I’ll jump ship and go native?”  I told him this was a dangerous mission and we had to have some redundancy for something as important as the astrogation.  He laughed again but he put together a manual for running his equipment and trained one of his “bosses” for the upcoming flight.

McKenzie set up the program for LHS1140 and the ship was equipped for a one-month voyage; oxygen, water, food, medicine.  I even brought some firearms, only because I realized where we were going there was no law in effect other than force.  I kept the locker those were in under lock with me the only one with a key or even knowledge of their existence.  I guess that was a little paranoid but you never know.

Came the morning of the trip everything had been inspected three times and the dashboard was all green lights.  We launched into the upper atmosphere and McKenzie set the program and a display counted down from sixty seconds.  When it reached zero, we felt the strange sensations of the drive for a few moments and then we felt normal again.  When we uncovered the viewing port there was a strange world far below us and the light of a red star was illuminating it.  The whole crew burst into spontaneous cheers.  You never saw seven nerds happier than these boys.  I thought they would never stop slapping each other on the back and jabbering about who had been most right about the planet’s appearance.  I have to admit I was pretty excited too.  That world was a mostly ocean planet with white clouds and what looked like island chains sprinkled across the equator.  There were even what looked like ice caps at the poles.  It was an amazing sight.

The boys spent the next week photographing and taking spectrograms of everything they could see.  I made a decision that for this first trip we would not enter the atmosphere of the planet.  Probably out of an exaggerated sense of caution I wanted to make sure that no microbes from this alien world found their way back to Earth.  The boys were bitterly disappointed but shrugged their shoulders and took it in stride.  After all, even a week flew by shockingly fast because of how busy all the observations and tests kept them.

Finally, I set the return hour for the morning of the eighth day.  McKenzie recalibrated his instruments by stellar observation and as the final minutes ticked off, we took our places and strapped in for the ritual.  Once again, the skin numbness and mental unease hit me but a few moments later it ceased and we cleared the viewing port to see Earth below us.  The rotation of the Earth had us facing the Eastern Hemisphere and so we could see Africa and Asia.  But something was screwed up.  India was floating off shore.  There was ocean between it and the Asian continent.  And when you looked at the whole world all of the land masses were “off.”

One of the scientists explained it to me, “That’s what Earth looked like 55 million years in the past.”  I looked at McKenzie and said, “I hope you brought your tools because we’re a long way from home.””

“Devon, what was your genius’s name?” I asked.  “Bertram McKenzie.  He was originally from rural Maine and all the rest of his family were working class people who labored in the fishing and lumber industries.  But he had always had a mind that looked at things differently.  When he looked at a landscape of hills and trees his mind saw curves intersecting in geometric figures.  Everything was a jigsaw puzzle waiting for him to find the missing pieces.” said Devon.

I could see he had lost focus and was stewing over whatever loss he had suffered.  I said, “Had he made any progress on your FTL drive?”  Devon startled, then nodded, “Yes, yes, he had figured out a way to produce tachyons and use them to freeze time while a vessel moving at normal speed was translated across any distance in almost no time at all.  It had to do with a particular juxtaposition of different atomic environments adjacent to an electron flow.  Very thin layers of complementary metallic elements produced a surface against which time slipped by without aging what was enclosed in the field within the surface.

He had performed thousands of tests to perfect the environment needed.  He’d been sending out orders to a firm that did atom thickness vacuum metal vapor deposition work.  He’d built small test units with a number of crazy metallurgies.  Various platinum metals with layers of gold, tantalum, niobium and several other exotic elements sandwiched between in various geometric shapes.  Finally, he identified the perfect metallurgy.  There were even hollow spaces designed to allow cryogenic liquid hydrogen and helium to be pumped in.  With these as walls he built his miniature ship, about three feet long.  Inside he installed various generators to produce electric current and a control system to run the programs that his machines needed to perform.  It was fascinating.  The test program was to place the ship on a platform at the top of a cell tower and then when it disappeared, to immediately inspect a spot fifty miles away that lay in line with the rotation of the Earth from that spot.  The first fifty-three times the experiment was run absolutely nothing happened.  The ship stayed completely still.  But Bertram doggedly retrieved his test vessel and changed some of the parameters of the equipment or the program.  On the fifty fourth run the vessel disappeared.  It did not show up at the site it was meant to reach.  A careful inspection of the ground in between found it embedded in a tree about half a mile south of the expected line of motion.  The tree had been knocked down and the vessel was a flattened hunk of junk.  But it worked.  The concept had been proven.

Bertram’s budget was expanded asymptotically.  No expense was spared.  We got to work on a prototype that would be a craft one hundred feet long and capable of flight inside and outside of planetary atmosphere.  The work was done under the highest level of secrecy.  But somehow the secret leaked out.  Intelligence agencies around the world were buzzing with news that we had a star drive.  Washington was livid.  But what could they do?

Once the vessel was built and its first few trials to the Moon had been successfully run it was decided that the first exploratory mission would be to Pluto.  After all that was a good tune-up for a stellar mission.  I insisted on being aboard and since Bertram was game, I made sure he would be there too.  And after all, he might be needed for repairs.  The takeoff was a traditional aircraft ascent into the upper atmosphere, no gee force, no rapid climb.  When we reached a cruising height the field was built up and the program was activated.  It was the strangest feeling when the ship energized.  I could no longer hear the rush of the air against the outer skin of the vessel.  All I could hear was the hum of the drive.  But I also felt some strange sensory effects.  It was as if my skin became numb and I had a feeling of depression settle on my mind.  But when the drive shut off all the effects ceased.

When we uncovered the viewing window there was the strange heart-shaped vista of Tombaugh Regio visible on the surface of Pluto!  An unforgettable sight.  I sat there and stared for half an hour before I could believe it was true.  We had a star drive.  I congratulated Bertram and realized he hadn’t heard me.  He was doing some calibration measurements for the journey home and was singing lowly what sounded like the “Ride of the Valkyrie.”  When I floated closer to where he was sitting, I could make out the words, “Death to the Wabbit, Death to the Wabbit, Death to the Wabbit.”  He really was a strange man.  But he was also the greatest genius of all time.”