-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Readalikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Planning and a sketchy runthrough had gone before, and the business went more
smoothly than might have been awaited. But then, it offered a brief escape from what was
outside.
After the cameras had scanned the booklined room, the battered desk, the portrait of
Einstein, while Fleury gave her introduction, "scientist, mathematical physicist,
as famous as he is modest. We'll discuss his latest and greatest achievement. . . "
they moved in on her and him, seated in swivel chairs. A projector spread a representation
of the galaxy behind them, ruddy nucleus and outcurving bluetinged spiral arms, awesome
athwart blackness. Somehow his slight frame belonged in front of it.
She gestured at the grandeur. 'Alien spacecraft traveling there, almost at the speed of
light," she said. "Incredible. Perhaps you, Dr. Olivares, can explain to us why
it took so long to convince so many experts that this must be the true explanation."
"Well," he replied, "if the Xray sources are material objects, the
radiation is due to their passage through the gas in interstellar space. That's an
extremely thin gas, a hard vacuum by our standards here on Earth, but when you move close
to c we call the velocity of unimpeded light c - then you slam into a lot
of atoms every second. This energizes them, and they give back the energy in the form of
hard X rays."
For a minute, an animated diagram replaced the galaxy. Electrons tore free of atoms,
fell back, spat quanta. The star images returned as Olivares finished: "To produce
the level of radiation that our instruments measure, those masses must be enormous."
"Mostly due to the speed itself, am I right?" Fleury prompted.
Olivares nodded, "Yes. Energy and mass are equivalent. As a body approaches c,
its kinetic energy, therefore its mass, increases without limit. Only such particles as
photons, which have no rest mass, can actually travel at that velocity. For any material
object, the energy required to reach c would be infinite. This is one reason why
nothing can move faster than light.
"The objects, the ships, that we're talking about are moving so close to c
that their masses must have increased by a factor of hundreds. Calculating backward, we
work out that their rest masses the masses they have at ordinary speeds must amount
to tens of thousands of tonnes. In traditional physics, this means that to boost every
such vessel, you would have to annihilate millions of tonnes of matter, and an equal
amount to slow down at journey's end. That's conversion on an astrophysical scale.
Scarcely sounds practical, eh? Besides, it should produce a torrent of neutrinos; but
we have no signs of any."
Fleury picked up her cue. 'Also, wouldn't the radiation kill everybody aboard? And if
you hit a speck of dust, wouldn't that be like a nuclear war head exploding?"
A jet snarled low above the roof Thunder boomed through the building, Cameras shivered
in men's hands. Fleury tensed. The noise passed, and she found herself wondering whether
or not to edit this moment out of the tapes.
"Go on, please," she urged.
Olivares had glanced at the galaxy, and thence at Einstein. They seemed to calm him.
"Yes," he told the world. "There would have to be some kind of I'm
tempted to say streamlining. The new spaceborne instruments have shown that this is indeed
the case. Gas and dust are diverted, so that they do not encounter the object itself, but
flow smoothly past it at a considerable distance." An animation represented the
currents. The ship was a bare sketch. Nobody knew what something made by nonhumans might
be like. "This can, in principle, be done by means of what we call
magnetohydrodynamics."
Excerpted from Starfarers by Poul Anderson. Reproduced with the permission of the publisher. Published by Tor Books. No part of this book can be reproduced without permission from the publisher. Copyright (c) 1998 Poul Anderson,
 (1).gif)
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
