Chapter Two:

A scholar at the Academy becomes a Professor when other professors agree he has something to teach or to offer.

Viniker’s professorship was approved in record time. Suddenly he had accommodations, a meal plan and younger scholars working for him.

With that sort of acknowledgement came prestige. With prestige came attention. Viniker had been warned that, as a single Professor, he would receive attention that he didn’t want, however and no matter how far society had come, there were women who would attach themselves to the star of a man who would clearly have no problem providing for them.

Working another late night, trying to get a system of servos to move three of his cones in such a way that his every movement didn’t create a sonic boom, Viniker became aware of a young woman watching him from his doorway, across a lab / office strewn with parts and clippings and other evidence of the presence of a physical scientist. He straightened, noticing that she was now aware that she had his attention.

He straightened, realizing that his back was sore. The ends of his fingers were ragged from cuts from fine wires. The woman was a beauty – long, brown hair, big, brown eyes, olive skin and a full body. She was his age, a scholar here, and although he’d seen her before, he couldn’t remember her.

Not that he wanted to. He was busy – this was a distraction.

“Yes?” he said, not being rude, however side-stepping being polite.

She frowned. “You should use four,” she told him.

“What?”

Her eyes looked up into his. “Four cones,” she said. “You want to make a lift-off mechanism, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

She nodded. “Four cones will give you more stability. You’re going to want a platform, and four sets of four cones, so you can get off the ground and go as high as you want, not as far as you’re thrown.”

Viniker couldn’t help but be intrigued. Actually, he’d wanted to do the whole thing with one set of three cones, and move something that was like a rocket across the sky. What Maree was suggesting would be more like a platform – it would be more maneuverable with the right controllers in place.

“That’s – that’s brilliant,” Viniker informed her.

“I can help you…,” she continued, stepping gingerly into the room. She looked down, then back up into his eyes again, flashing a big, white smile.

“That is, if you want help,” she added.

It turned out to be a long night, but an eventful one.

A month later, Viniker was standing in the bottom of a bowl thirty feet wide, twenty feet above the ground, holding a box with two tactile pads on it for his thumbs.

He could swirl his thumbs on the pads, and the ‘ship’ would move in any direction, from any direction, silently. The bowl shape ensured that he was standing on a flat surface relative to the ground – he’d fallen off of the flat platform as it picked up speed more than once. As far as he knew, one of those platforms was still traveling through space.

Below him, Maree and Professor Maglen were watching and shouting advice to him. He’d found that he was beyond advice at this point. As he became more used to the platform, the movement became more and more natural, until he finally thought about moving in a direction, and his thumbs, and then the ‘ship,’ simply responded.

After a few more adjustments, he landed. He could already tell that Maglen was going to demand ‘his turn.’ The older man didn’t adjust as easily to this mode of steering, but could manage the controls if there was nothing to get in his way.

“I think we’ve learned what we can from this,” Viniker announced, seeing the dismay in the faces of the other two. “Install seats, surround the hull in plastic so there’s no damage when they bump into each other, and I think that transportation can be considered permanently changed on Syriahs.”

The second sun was just rising before him – they’d worked all night again. On a planet with two suns, complete darkness was a rarity that happened less than one season in a year, and a year could be long or short, depending on the effects of the sun around which the planet didn’t rotate. Night, then became a measure of when only the weaker remote sun, Anatoll, hung in the sky.

“But…” Maglen complained, his eyes darting back and forth between the other two. “But – the controls, the power source –“

The power requirements had turned out to be negligible. Solar power had long been a staple on Syriahs, where there was always light to shine on a panel. A small, 200-watt panel was more than sufficient for even a large ‘ship,’ with a battery backup for days obscured by clouds and other utilities that passengers would want, such as radio and air conditioning. These decisions were for technicians to make, regardless – not for scientists like himself.

As far as he was concerned, the problem was solved, and it was time to move on to the next one – Maree’s concern.

How could this move through space?

“These things are not our province,” Maree said, echoing his thoughts. She was still considered a scholar here. Her donations to his work had furthered it tremendously, however she hadn’t used her own discoveries, just moved forward with someone else’s.

Even though that move had entirely revolutionized his discovery, it wasn’t even a consideration for professorship.

Maglen clearly distinguished between the two of them now. Where Maree had been a protégé to him, and he an outcast ready for expulsion just months before, now Maglen curried Viniker’s opinions and clearly his favor, and looked at Maree as the hanger-on.

The better Viniker came to know Maree, the more he valued her contributions. She’d come up with the mating of the cones into a platform, and the idea of using a bowl rather than a flat piece of steel. Even with the additional cost of milling the large bowl, the increased performance more than justified it. In the future, retractable legs would stabilize the ‘ship’ for when people needed to enter and exit it, and a flat floor on bearings might be inserted on the bowl, so that the passenger remained level to the ground while the ‘ship’ turned, but the original design was stable and entirely her idea.

Maglen took the controls from Viniker and stepped into the ‘ship.’ Viniker was almost glad of it. This would give him the opportunity to watch the craft from the ground, and to discuss his next step with Maree.

When Maglen lifted shakily into the atmosphere, Viniker asked the scholar, “Have you decided on how to move it without a planet to push against?”

Space travel, what little there was of it, was accomplished today with rockets and a fuel of combined oxygen and hydrogen. Both gasses were plentiful, their resultant expulsion was, essentially, heat and water, and they sufficed to send rockets into the air. Once the rocket cleared the atmosphere, it would fall back to the planet, usually into Syriahs’ one ocean, where it could be salvaged. It would leave in space a glider with its own, smaller propulsion system that also released gas, allowing astronauts to soar through weightless space and then return on a reusable craft.

Space flight had been held back over a century while scientists debated that, in empty space, there was nothing to push against, and therefore anything that left the planet would hang in space just hand’s breadth away, completely helpless. Even when this theory was finally debunked, and unmanned craft were sent soaring towards the other planets in their trinary solar system, the first manned craft were launched specifically into Syriahs’ path through space, so that if they were marooned, the planet would just pick them up again.

With their new craft, however, this possibility was real. As any ship they created moved farther from the planet, even if it could get a ‘bounce’ from the gravity of their two suns, eventually it be too far away and be doomed to drift in space.

“Even the test unit we released couldn’t get out of the solar system,” Maree informed him. A week before, they’d launched one of Viniker’s original ‘rocket’ ideas in between Sol and the second sun, and scholars at the Academy observatory had tracked its passage. While its solar cells powered its battery and it sent back its simple, “I am OK” signal, its motion stopped accelerating at a distressing 4,000,000 miles and was now adrift. It had travelled 2,000,000 more miles since, but at an acceleration of zero.

They would all be dead of old age before it found its way to the closest star, much less a habitable planet.

Maglen zoomed past them, far too close to the ground and too fast, as the two resisted the urge to duck. Viniker thought he could hear the Professor saying, “I’m OK, I’m OK,” as he passed.

“We could pack the next ship with fuel,” Viniker began, but Maree was already shaking her head.

“No,” she said. “The ship we’d need would be gigantic, would require extensive resources,” she said. She was watching the Professor as he banked the ‘ship’ dangerously far to one side, then levelled off and came back toward them.

“And, of course, it could never achieve light speed,” she added. “We’d have to bring living cargo with us – to breed the people who land on the closest planet. No, we just… no.”

Viniker watched Maree’s mind race. He knew she had an idea about how to do this, but she wasn’t ready to articulate it yet.

Maglen plunked the ‘ship’ down roughly ten yards from them, nearly bouncing himself out of the bowl. Had the platform been flat, Viniker doubted that he could have remained within it.

As he climbed, sweating and grinning, out of the craft, Maree turned to him.

“I need one of your cones,” she said, “and then we need to book some time with the observatory.”

Two weeks later, the three of them were joined by two other scholars and a Professor Ambergee, a woman renowned for her command of the Academy’s observatory, her knowledge of astrophysics and, of course, her impatience.

She was as tall as any man, spindly as Viniker had been months before, when Maree introduced herself and regular eating into his life, with green eyes and white hair over a pinched face and a mouth framed with the lines of a perpetual frown.

It had taken hours to convince her to let them use her own, close-in resources that would allow them to follow a craft barely skimming out of Syriahs’ atmosphere, and even then the promise of her name appearing first on a paper on anything they discovered had to be promised. Maree dared not even speak to this woman, and instead relayed all of her information through Viniker.

Viniker – he’d proven himself to be a gift that kept giving, and perhaps a handsome one as well. She couldn’t help but wonder if she should pair with him. The work they did could hardly suffer – if they stopped now, they’d have money and fame to last for generations, just on what they’d delivered to humanity. In fact, before the year was out, they’d receive commissions on the first ‘Flivers,’ flying hovercraft which ran on the power of the suns, in any direction one could imagine, in complete comfort of a setting more like a living room than a vehicle.

While the Academy drank deep of the profits from these ‘flivers’, Viniker’s cut had been exceptionally generous, not that he seemed to care. Maree had managed to read Viniker’s reimbursement contract before he’d signed it, and to change it marginally so that, for example, all renditions of the ‘fliver’ paid out a commission to him and, after his death, to his family, such as it may be. As it read, a ‘fliver version 2’ would have been completely the property of the Academy, as would all profit the moment Viniker passed.

Inserting herself into his life, she’d changed ‘the ghost.’ He’d filled out since she made him eat three times a day. He’d come to confide in her, to share his thoughts and his theories. She’d yet to decide if he was brilliant, or just abnormally persistent. Did he see things none of them did, or did he simply have the drive to grind all impediments out of the way, until all that remained was art?

He had a remote control to a sealed ship they’d put together two days before, and its signal was broadcast through the observatory’s satellite system. Already he’d launched the craft through the atmosphere and had it circling between two satellites where they could make sure that it had taken no damage on the trip up.

“Knock those satellites out of their orbit, and you’ll pay for them from your own reserves,” Ambergee threatened them. It wasn’t her first threat of the day, and Maree had no doubt that she meant them all.

“By this time next year,” Viniker said, distracted, “I’ll have enough to afford my own.”

She scowled, clearly taking the statement as a slight, rather than the statement of fact that Viniker probably thought it to be. The man had no inner voice and no couth, Maree knew, having suffered countless comments which, though not meant as insults, had offended her and caught her off guard.

The craft was perfect. Unlike others of its kind, on one end, it had another cone poised perpendicular to the rest, and in line with the craft itself. This craft, unlike previous bowl shapes, was more like an oblong, as if they’d molded it from a bathtub.

Which, of course, they had.

Inside of it, there was equipment which Maree had designed. Not only might this further her dream, this was her ticket to a professorship of her own.

Viniker turned to her. “Ready?” he asked.

It was impossible not to see how excited he was, if you knew him, Maree thought.

She nodded.

“Dropping the EM Cones,” Viniker said, and flicked a switch. The craft immediately began to drift in the last direction it had been moving, starting to spin to one side as the port side cones cut off a second more slowly than the starboard.

“Engaging the acoustic drive,” he said, and flipped another switch.

This was purely theory, Maree knew, but a theory no one had really considered as much more than an oddity. Certainly no one had any interest in basing any sort of career on it.

But, in space, with no resistance, and when properly modulated, a sound wave would compress on itself and essentially push the speaker that was creating it. This allowed for an entirely electric form of propulsion, meaning entirely sustainable in space.

The craft continued to spin. The satellite to which it was nearest recorded no acceleration. Those watching let out a collective sigh. Maree wasn’t even aware that she’d been holding her breath.

“Well, at least we know what doesn’t - ” Ambergee began, but Viniker held up his hand.

“A moment,” he said.

Maglen, one hand on his paunch, put the other on the younger professor’s shoulder. “Professor Ambergee, I’m sure,” he began, but Viniker held up one finger, silencing him.

“It’s moving,” he almost whispered.

All eyes turned back to the screen, showing them what the satellite had witnessed seconds before.

And, in fact, the craft, while still spinning to one side, was now turning to that side.

“It must have come off of center on the flight up,” Viniker said. Now that the fact was obvious, other’s standing by nodded their agreement. The acoustic cone, by design, could move using cables they’d designed, connected at six equidistant points halfway down its sides. Their fear was that this would interfere with the sound wave. Apparently, it had not.

“Compensating,” Viniker told the rest of the room, moving his thumb on a pad similar to the one that controlled the EM Cones. With a few adjustments, he moved the cone to one side and had the craft accelerating in a direction he wanted, deeper into space and away from the planet.

It was painfully slow. One of the scholars in attendance calculated it at less than twenty miles per hour at first, but that acceleration was itself increasing as the craft moved farther from the planet.

In an hour, it peaked at a steady acceleration of one third the speed of sound. With this technology, however, bigger engines would make a difference, while the mass of the craft would not, once forward motion was established.

And that could happen with their existing technology.

Maglen claimed the honor of returning the craft back to Syriahs. They would land it, and study the effects of this short trip on it.

Viniker caught her attention, looking at her. “I think,” he said, “the Academy will have to make room for one more professor.”

Maree smiled, even as Ambergee harrumphed and asked Maglen his opinion on a name for her paper.

Maree spent a joyous night imagining herself receiving a coveted professorship at so young an age, even younger than Viniker. The next morning, she held back her tears.

The craft, 10 feet long and five feet wide, had been recovered and moved to a new, more modern lab dedicated to the study of objects brought from outer space. Here, asteroids had been harvested of precious metals and probes returned to Syriahs were dissected for a better idea of the contents of ‘empty’ space.

The front of the craft was horribly pitted. Its cover, a clear, plastic designed for deep sea exploration, was permeated in a dozen places and scored to the point where it was no longer see through.

“How much of this was collected from the atmosphere?” she asked the open air – her voice more timid than she would have liked.

The local Professor, Grellin Esteve, regarded her with something close to sympathy. It was rare that a person ‘of name’ would choose a life of science – such people were more likely of the ruling or financial class, however it was said that Grellin’s appetites were all for knowledge, and nothing else would satisfy. It was convenient to have him on a project, if that project were going to need money or influence to move forward.

In this case, it was likely the opposite: the Esteves likely saw the future of this research and inserted this wayward uncle to tap into it. Grellin was unremarkable as a man – barely taller than Maree, mud-brown hair, skin and eyes, dressed in taupe and white rather than Professorial black, if he sat on a brown couch, Maree thought, he would likely disappear.

His mind was sufficiently adroit to keep him visible, fortunately.

“Almost none,” he told Maree. Other scholars, his hand-picked students, nodded. “This is travel through space – we’ve seen it more and less, but this is ‘fighting the dust.’”

Maree was beginning to hate that term.

Viniker looked up from the cracked and pitted craft. “There is nothing?” he asked.

Grellin shook his head. “We’ve tried static shields,” he said. “We polarized the craft, we’ve electrified it to zap dust out of existence. While satellites benefit from the same protection as the planet, once you move into space, you encounter random particles like these, and they chew like tiny teeth on any craft.”

Viniker turned to Maree. “This was at an acceleration of one third the speed of sound,” he said.

Maree nodded. At the speed of light, dust particles would strike any hull like so many sledge hammers.

She couldn’t help but think, “They were so close!”

Viniker took Maree to dinner that night. The Academy was surrounded by restaurants owned by some of the best scholars who’d ever failed out, or so he’d been told, and for some reason they’d adopted food preparation as a career.

Viniker had grown used to seeing Maree in her white and yellow – he almost didn’t recognize her in a form-hugging blue dress, cut low in the front to reveal a tantalizing amount of her cleavage. He took her hand when he met her at the door, and guided her to a table that was already waiting for them.

Others would have to wait, and maybe in the future so would he. Right now, he was the inventor of what had become the Fliver, and any restaurant would want him to become a regular.

They were offered wine and recommended the restaurant’s specialties. They made their decisions and sat uncomfortably, Viniker using every ounce of restraint he had, not to focus on her breasts.

“The particles aren’t charged,” Maree said, suddenly. He’d just set down his wine or he might have dropped it. She did this – Maree started a conversation as if the two of them were already half way through it.

“The particles in space?” Viniker asked. “Why should they be?”

“I could think of a lot of reasons,” she said, lifting her own glass. “However, they are not, so we can’t repel them with a charge of our own.”

“No,” he agreed.

“So – what other properties do they have?”

Viniker had to think about that. She took a sip of her wine; he did the same. He’d thought they’d reached an impasse; Maree was clearly just looking for the right bridge.

“They have mass,” he said. “They’re in free-fall. They must not be accelerating or they would already be in the deeper reaches of space.”

“Or they have a source,” she said, “and we just don’t know it.”

Viniker nodded. He had no interest in spending any amount of time on the source of dust. It would be easier to simply study old logs from the observatory and determine whether most of it was accelerating or not.

“Do they have gravity?” Maree asked.

Viniker frowned. “Well, everything that has mass, has gravity, theoretically. Every object in the universe exerts a pull on every other –“

She waved her hand in front of her face as if his words were insects. “That’s theory,” she said. “We know that our first ship stopped accelerating at 4,000,000 miles. Whatever was out there, what we sent couldn’t push against it.”

“Or it pushed it away,” Viniker asserted.

Maree smiled. “Or it pushed it away,” she agreed.

A waiter set their food down in front of them, but they barely noticed it.

“I wonder if that craft will still fly?” Viniker asked.

Two days later, a coat of permeable rubber covered their second space craft from stem to stern, and the cables that had been damaged before were strengthened. A camera had been placed on its nose and, next to that, a very small EM cone, controlled independently from the others.

Professor Ambergee was almost pleasant to them when they wanted back into her lab. After decades where almost nothing was interesting in astrophysics, suddenly she was publishing a much-sought paper with a by-line from one of the new sensations in academe, and now perhaps she would publish another.

Once again, their craft was hovering in free-fall, outside of the atmosphere. Once again, it began to spin to one side.

“Energizing the deflector cone,” Viniker announced to the room. This was the EM cone on the front of the craft. Viniker had to wait for the craft’s spin to move it away from one of Ambergee’s precious satellites.

“Engaging the acoustic drive,” he added.

They were a little farther from the planet this time. There was less pull and, therefore, the craft began to accelerate more quickly.

“Switching to onboard camera,” Ambergee announced, and pointed to one of her scholars. The woman in yellow and white turned a knob on her control panel, and they were seeing through the lens onboard their craft.

As if through a virtual display, they saw a fine sheen of dust parting like a ripple before their craft. The faster the ship moved, the more pronounced the wave, until it was almost like the ship moved through a grey river in space.

The new, smaller EM cone, pushing against smaller dust particles, all with mass, all with gravity. Where Siryahs had sent the original cone flying into space, now this ‘deflector cone’ did the same to the dust particles that crossed in front of it, their relative mass being a tiny fraction of that of the craft.

They turned the craft around. Hours later, they had it back in Grellin’s lab, Grellin and his scholars all bent over it.

“You say this was just in space?” Grellin asked, possibly for the third time.

“We can prove it if you like,” Viniker assured him.

One of the scholars, armed with a pair of tweezers, extracted a tiny particle from half-way down the craft, embedded in the spray-on rubber coating.

Another stepped up to her, peering bare inches into the rubber coating.

“There’s more down here,” he said. “Not much – some.”

Maree and Viniker leapt to the side of the craft. Yes, towards the acoustic cone, there was a thin coat of dust laying on the rubber surface. Not destroying it, just there.

“We can’t ring the craft in EM cones,” Viniker asserted.

“I don’t see why you would have to,” Grellin said. Viniker looked up at him.

Grellin was shaking his head. “This is nothing,” he said. “It might add a little to your mass. In fact, it might not. If this weren’t a rubber coating, I can’t think we would have noticed it at all.”

Viniker turned to Maree. She was nodding. “I can’t think of anything that travels anywhere and comes back perfectly clean,” she said.

Viniker touched the dust and then looked at his own finger. It was simple, common dust, like anyone would find almost anywhere.

Maree smiled her wide, perfect smile, directed at Viniker. “You know what this means?” she asked him.

He nodded. “This beats the dust.”