Time
Fuze
by
Randall Garrett
Commander
Benedict kept his eyes on the rear plate as he activated the
intercom. "All right, cut the power. We ought to be safe enough
here."
As
he released the intercom, Dr. Leicher, of the astronomical staff,
stepped up to his side. "Perfectly safe," he nodded,
"although even at this distance a star going nova ought to be
quite a display."
Benedict
didn't shift his gaze from the plate. "Do you have your
instruments set up?"
"Not
quite. But we have plenty of time. The light won't reach us for
several hours yet. Remember, we were outracing it at ten lights."
The
commander finally turned, slowly letting his breath out in a soft
sigh. "Dr. Leicher, I would say that this is just about the
foulest coincidence that could happen to the first interstellar
vessel ever to leave the Solar System."
Leicher
shrugged. "In one way of thinking, yes. It is certainly true
that we will never know, now, whether Alpha Centauri A ever had any
planets. But, in another way, it is extremely fortunate that we
should be so near a stellar explosion because of the wealth of
scientific information we can obtain. As you say, it is a
coincidence, and probably one that happens only once in a billion
years. The chances of any particular star going nova are small. That
we should be so close when it happens is of a vanishingly small order
of probability."
Commander
Benedict took off his cap and looked at the damp stain in the
sweatband. "Nevertheless, Doctor, it is damned unnerving to come
out of ultradrive a couple of hundred million miles from the first
star ever visited by man and have to turn tail and run because the
damned thing practically blows up in your face."
Leicher
could see that Benedict was upset; he rarely used the same profanity
twice in one sentence.
They
had been downright lucky, at that. If Leicher hadn't seen the star
begin to swell and brighten, if he hadn't known what it meant, or if
Commander Benedict hadn't been quick enough in shifting the ship back
into ultradrive – Leicher had a vision of an incandescent cloud of
gaseous metal that had once been a spaceship.
The
intercom buzzed. The commander answered, "Yes?"
"Sir,
would you tell Dr. Leicher that we have everything set up now?"
Leicher
nodded and turned to leave. "I guess we have nothing to do now
but wait."
When
the light from the nova did come, Commander Benedict was back at the
plate again – the forward one, this time, since the ship had been
turned around in order to align the astronomy lab in the nose with
the star.
Alpha
Centauri A began to brighten and spread. It made Benedict think of a
light bulb connected through a rheostat, with someone turning that
rheostat, turning it until the circuit was well overloaded.
The
light began to hurt Benedict's eyes even at that distance and he had
to cut down the receptivity in order to watch. After a while, he
turned away from the plate. Not because the show was over, but simply
because it had slowed to a point beyond which no change seemed to
take place to the human eye.
Five
weeks later, much to Leicher's chagrin, Commander Benedict announced
that they had to leave the vicinity. The ship had only been
provisioned to go to Alpha Centauri, scout the system without landing
on any of the planets, and return. At ten lights, top speed for the
ultradrive, it would take better than three months to get back.
"I
know you'd like to watch it go through the complete cycle,"
Benedict said, "but we can't go back home as a bunch of starved
skeletons."
Leicher
resigned himself to the necessity of leaving much of his work
unfinished, and, although he knew it was a case of sour grapes,
consoled himself with the thought that he could as least get most of
the remaining information from the five-hundred-inch telescope on
Luna, four years from then.
As
the ship slipped into the not-quite-space through which the
ultradrive propelled it, Leicher began to consolidate the material he
had already gathered.
*
* * * *
Commander
Benedict wrote in the log: Fifty-four
days out from Sol. Alpha Centauri has long since faded back into its
pre-blowup state, since we have far outdistanced the light from its
explosion. It now looks as it did two years ago. It –
"Pardon
me, Commander," Leicher interrupted, "But I have something
interesting to show you."
Benedict
took his fingers off the keys and turned around in his chair. "What
is it, Doctor?"
Leicher
frowned at the papers in his hands. "I've been doing some work
on the probability of that explosion happening just as it did, and
I've come up with some rather frightening figures. As I said before,
the probability was small. A little calculation has given us some
information which makes it even smaller. For instance: with a
possible error of plus or minus two seconds Alpha Centauri A began to
explode the instant we came out of ultradrive!
"Now,
the probability of that occurring comes out so small that it should
happen only once in ten to the four hundred sixty-seventh seconds."
It
was Commander Benedict's turn to frown. "So?"
"Commander,
the entire universe is only about ten to the seventeenth seconds old.
But to give you an idea, let's say that the chances of its happening
are – once – in millions of trillions of years!"
Benedict
blinked. The number, he realized, was totally beyond his
comprehension – or anyone else's.
"Well,
so what? Now it has happened that one time. That simply means that it
will almost certainly never happen again!"
"True.
But, Commander, when you buck odds like that and win, the thing to do
is look for some factor that is cheating in your favor. If you took a
pair of dice and started throwing sevens, one right after another –
for the next couple of thousand years – you'd begin to suspect they
were loaded."
Benedict
said nothing; he just waited expectantly.
"There
is only one thing that could have done it. Our ship." Leicher
said it quietly, without emphasis.
"What
we know about the hyperspace, or superspace, or whatever it is we
move through in ultradrive is almost nothing. Coming out of it so
near to a star might set up some sort of shock wave in normal space
which would completely disrupt that star's internal balance,
resulting in the liberation of unimaginably vast amounts of energy,
causing that star to go nova. We can only assume that we ourselves
were the fuze that set off that nova."
Benedict
stood up slowly. When he spoke, his voice was a choking whisper. "You
mean the sun – Sol – might.…"
Leicher
nodded. "I don't say that it definitely would. But the
probability is that we were the cause of the destruction of Alpha
Centauri A, and therefore might cause the destruction of Sol in the
same way."
Benedict's
voice was steady again. "That means that we can't go back again,
doesn't it? Even if we're not positive, we can't take the chance."
"Not
necessarily. We can get fairly close before we cut out the drive, and
come in the rest of the way at sub-light speed. It'll take longer,
and we'll have to go on half or one-third rations, but we – can –
do it!"
"How
far away?"
"I
don't know what the minimum distance is, but I do know how we can
gage a distance. Remember, neither Alpha Centauri B or C were
detonated. We'll have to cut our drive at least as far away from Sol
as they are from A."
"I
see." The commander was silent for a moment, then: "Very
well, Dr. Leicher. If that's the safest way, that's the only way."
Benedict
issued the orders, while Leicher figured the exact point at which
they must cut out the drive, and how long the trip would take.
The
rations would have to be cut down accordingly.
Commander
Benedict's mind whirled around the monstrousness of the whole thing
like some dizzy bee around a flower. What if there had been planets
around Centauri A? What if they had been inhabited? Had he, all
unwittingly, killed entire races of living, intelligent beings?
But,
how could he have known? The drive had never been tested before. It
couldn't be tested inside the Solar System – it was too fast. He
and his crew had been volunteers, knowing that they might die when
the drive went on.
Suddenly,
Benedict gasped and slammed his fist down on the desk before him.
Leicher
looked up. "What's the matter, Commander?"
"Suppose,"
came the answer, "Just suppose, that we have the same effect on
a star when we – go into – ultradrive as we do when we come out
of it?"
Leicher
was silent for a moment, stunned by the possibility. There was
nothing to say, anyway. They could only wait....
*
* * * *
A
little more than half a light year from Sol, when the ship reached
the point where its occupants could see the light that had left their
home sun more than seven months before, they watched it become
suddenly, horribly brighter.
A
hundred thousand times brighter!
Time Fuze was published in IF Worlds
of Science Fiction March 1954. For more information on Randall
Garrett, click here.
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