Chapter 4
They announced that they were done with combat, at least until those who wanted to leave had left.
And they also announced that a quick sightseeing trip - expected to be completely safe - to Alpha Centauri was planned.
The crew agreed to stay for that.
Before they left for Alpha Centauri, the sensor operators detected, and then analyzed, a partially-built moon-base.
It was decided to check that out too.
Agamemnon flew to the moon in under two seconds, on the slowest speed setting for their star drive.
They found the moon base and scanned it again from nearby.
Finding no signs of inhabitants, or active usage of electrical or any other type of energy, they went ahead and landed the whole ship on a nearby flat spot.
They could have ferried down in shuttles, but this was faster.
No natural spot of ground is entirely flat, and even a little bump could potentially have broken the keel of a ship this size and weight. But Basil remembered his Grandfather discussing this kind of scenario and assuring him that this battleship could take that kind of strain - that the ground underneath, even if it was rock, would be crushed flat before this battleship broke.
And if you were ever to test such an assertion, doing so in the moon's one-sixth gravity was one of the safest ways to do so.
Plus the repair robots had already fixed all the structural damage the ship had taken while battling the monster in Earth's orbit.
Grandpa had invented a console - number 24, labeled Shape Matter - that allowed any material to be reshaped as easily as soft wax in a mold. The repair robots could direct that console's output, and, with it, repair damage very quickly.
There had been dozens of dents in the battleship, ranging from basketball-sized to the size of large van. Some dents had been in their thinnest armor - only 4 inches thick. But some had been in 12-inch-thick armor. Either kind would otherwise have taken major repair facilities to fix. But with the Shape Matter ability, it took only a few minutes before all dents were gone, with the metal having been restored to it's original shape according to the blueprints the robots had.
It would be a little longer before other repairs were complete. Various things - wiring, plumbing etc - had cracked or been shaken loose in the fight. But the robots were good at repairing those too, once they found them.
They landed on the moon with no trouble.
But the first Replicated dune-buggies full of people in Replicated space-suits went nowhere.
When they figured out that that was because there was no air, they dismissed the dune-buggies, which vanished back into the non-specific quantum probability waves they had come from.
Then some walked while others tried to ride Replicated bicycles. This proved not to be easy in space-suits.
So many people ended up taking their Star Trek style shuttle-craft anyway, even for the trip of just half a mile.
The moon-base was incomplete, and had obviously been quite ambitious in scope - intended for a city at least.
It mostly consisted on several domes, with two of them already inhabitable, though far from fully-furnished.
In one of those domes, they found the corpse of a dead man - the only person in the whole base.
They found several construction robots of various sorts.
Apparently they needed someone to direct them and make even simple decisions for them, since they had all run their batteries dry, even though there were several fully-charged banks of batteries in the domes, each fed and kept full by banks of solar panels.
Basil went around scanning everything with one of the Replicator console's remote scanning units.
Much of this stuff could be useful to Mars colony.
They stayed and explored until people were tired of it.
When they left, they left behind a communication system connected to a television, through which they hoped to be able to direct the robots to continue the construction.
In case that didn't work, they also left behind a Duplicate of Ron.
He said he could deal with the resulting toothache, at least long enough to make sure the whole setup here was back on track.
Once sure of that, they could dismiss that Duplicate, and it would revert to the undifferentiated quantum probability waves it had started as.
Then they plugged the robots in to recharging stations and left.
During the time they'd been there, the red light went out on the Determine Destiny console, which they understood to mean it was ready to use again. They set it for the best luck they could get after charging for a week - since they expected to be at Alpha Centauri that long
Then they set out.
The Astronomy club cautioned that space navigation was difficult, and they certainly were no experts.
Basil said "what's so hard - just point at the target and go. It isn't like we need to do things like take a particular off-ramp on one interstate to get onto another one, or turn when we get to the right street."
Simon, who had spoken extensively with the astronomy club, summarized for them. "Everything in space is moving, usually in several different directions at once, and at fantastic speeds. That is normally the source of most of the difficulty. Space probes have to aim at where things will be, not at where they are now."
"Granted," he continued, "we can move so much faster than they do that we could indeed, just point right at the target, zip along at 1000 times the speed of light until we get there, then stop, possibly make a small correcting move, and be done."
"But," he held up a finger, "If you don't think ahead, you could have real trouble getting back. If you keep very careful track of all your movements - how fast you went in what heading for what length of time etc - then it is possible to sort of 'reverse course' and come right back. Even then, it is not trivial, since determining what heading you are facing is quite complicated. We don't have a compass that works in interstellar space, or traditional navigational aids like that. We can look at the stars and constellations, but - and here is the key point - they will be changing appearance as we move among them. Alpha Centauri is only a little over four and a third light-years away, so they won't change too much. But if we were to take things for granted and make assumptions such as 'Sol will be the brightest star, just head for it' we could get very very lost. Proxima Centauri is the closest star to Earth, yet not visible to the naked eye from there. Alpha Centauri A and B, between them, are quite bright as seen from Earth, but not the brightest."
"Point taken" Basil agreed. "But we do have an excellent inertial navigation system installed, which tracks all our movements and can compute a reverse course automatically."
"And," he added," in an attempt to avoid hurting anyone's feelings, "we have some very smart people in our astronomy club, who, I'm sure, can back up the system more than adequately in case it fails us somehow."
Basil had been listening to Ron and Simon's advice on how to deal with people.
"Well, then, let's go!" A cheerful Simon chirped.
Their trip to Alpha Centauri was uneventful.
During the whole day and a half it took to arrive, they had cameras and telescopes pointed in all directions, recording everything. They did this both for the science value, and for a navigation aid, in case of need.
They arrived first at Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star almost a quarter light-year from the paired stars that were Alpha Centauri A and B.
The red dwarf didn't give off much light, but did fine as far as giving off heat. It had 2 planets in its 'liquid-water zone': one about the size of Earth, and one a lot bigger.
It had 4 other planets further out, and a small one closer in.
Oddly, there were no gas giants - all the planets were of the type called 'rocky', like Earth's moon, or the planet Mercury.
None of the planets had atmospheres either.
Realizing that they were still in Dimension 29 - the dimension where they had fought the 11-winged monster - they switched back to Dimension 1, their home dimension, and compared the two.
They seemed to be the same.
They spent a day exploring each planet, landing on it - sometimes the whole ship, sometimes in shuttles - filming videos, and collecting samples.
Five and a half days in to those explorations - just about when they'd arranged to have good luck - they could see a meteor was going to hit the 3rd planet out, so they took a brief side-trip to go observe that. They set up cameras and telescopes to catch the event from several angles too, and some seismographs on the surface of the planet to record what those could.
To say that its impact was dramatic would be a big understatement. It was a colossal explosion and they got it all on film.
Meteor impacts were rare enough that scientists back home would be glad to get the data.
Nobody liked being on the third planet - it had a bit over one and a half times the gravity that Earth did. So doing anything while there was a strenuous workout.
They preferred planet 2, which was in the liquid-water zone around the star, had gravity a little less than that of Earth, and was a pretty green from all the copper ores in the rocks.
While there, they left Replicated copies of all the robots that had been building the moon base, plus some Replicated copies of their own repair robots.
They figured if humans ever came back, it would be nice to have a base already there to make getting started easier.
They couldn't leave the robot Replicants there forever - the next time they needed the Replicator's full memory to 'observe' other things, they'd have to tell it to stop 'observing' these. But whatever the roots built while they still existed would still be there.
Ron's Duplicate back at the Moon base had, before it was dismissed, set things up better there.
He wasn't a computer programmer who could alter the code running the robots. But he was a good observer and had noticed that the robots worked according to alterable work-schedules or task-lists. So he'd simply added an item to those schedules, so that, whenever they observed another robot standing still, they would plug it into a recharging station.
That should keep them operating longer - hopefully much longer.
While things were building on planet 2, the ship went looking for comets.
The right couple of comets delivered to the planet and stored in domes could really help out, since any humans coming here in the future would need air and water.
They had to go all the way to Alpha Centauri A and B to find comets. But there they found a dizzying number of them.
They made a few trips back and forth, each trip taking two hours, each time towing their maximum tractor-beam load of comets - about 64,000 tons: roughly 3 and two-thirds times as heavy as the battleship itself - and setting them on the surface of planet 2, which they named Shamrock, after its color. There the robots would build domes around them, to try to keep the water and oxygen in place rather than scattering all over the planet. They also brought back a comet made of methane and stored it the same way, for use as fuel.
Then, in case any future visitors might have trouble landing, they left a watery comet in orbit as Shamrock's new moon.
For fun, they used lasers to carve a giant 'Kilroy Was Here' symbol into the ground. It was a mile across, with lines etched 3 feet deep and wide.
Lastly, they set up orbital solar panel arrays connected to telescopes and big transmitters, so that the people of Mars and Earth could see things from Proxima Centauri's perspective - once the signal got there, in a little more than 4 and a third years.
These, too, were Replicated, but while they lasted would be very useful to science.
Then they set out to explore A and B in detail
With the ship floating in space, examining a ring of comets around Alpha Centauri A, Basil remarked to Simon "my encyclopedia was wrong about this place."
Simon smiled, "It's not so bad - it got the bits about the suns pretty close: A is about ten percent heavier than our star Sol, and about half again as luminous, while B is about ten percent lighter than Sol and only half as luminous."
He paused before adding "Isn't it odd that, between them, mass and brightness both add up to twice that of Sol, but the distribution isn't what you'd expect."
Basil snorted, "that's just one odd point among many."
"Are you thinking of their orbit again?" Simon asked. "It is weird that the two stars, A and B, orbit a common center, and do so eccentrically, getting as close to each-other as 11.2 AU - roughly the distance from Sol to Saturn - and as far as 35.6 AU - about the distance from Sol to Pluto".
"Which is still a planet no matter what anyone says!" Basil added, only half-jokingly. "It orbits the sun and has enough gravity to squish itself into a spherical shape - that's a planet. Who cares that it hasn't cleared its orbit of other objects? By that standard, Neptune isn't a planet either, since Pluto's orbit crosses Neptune's and Neptune hasn't 'cleared' it. Some lazy scientists just changed the standard because they didn't want to bother with having to classify Ceres and several Kupier-belt objects as planets. Bah!"
"Agreed."
Basil nodded. They'd been over that ground before. He added, "yah, I haven't heard any reasonable explanation for why A and B would orbit like that. Nor for why folks call it a triple star system when C - Proxima Centauri - is 13000 AU or .21 light years away from A and B. But what I'm really amazed by is the planets. This," he gestured at the screen", is not at all what the encyclopedia led us to expect."
"Well, now." Simon began, "you have to be patient with the poor scientists - they're doing the best they can with what they've got."
They both laughed and Simon continued, "Our best telescopes can't see any planets outside our solar system - even Pluto is barely more than a dot to them. They have to infer those planets and things about them by using some logic and lots of math. They figure that, when a star dims a little bit on a regular basis, that might be from a planet passing in front of it regularly. If they have really precise measurements and good records, they can figure how much the star dims and how regularly, then do a bunch of math and see what diameter a planet would have to be, at what orbit, to cause such dimming."
He continued, "then, if they have really good measurements, they can back that up by seeing if the tiny bright dot that is the star they are observing wobbles at all. Gravity works both ways, so a big planet orbiting a star will pull that star - just a tiny little bit - towards it as it orbits. If such a wobble matches the timing of the dimming, they have a probable planet. Then they do more math to figure its gravity from the degree of the wobble, and apply that to the diameter they already calculated to guess at its density and some things it is likely to be made of."
"That sounds so solid - how did they get it so wrong?" Basil asked.
"Everything sounds great in 'best-case scenarios' like that." Simon grinned. "One, maybe two, nice big heavy worlds orbiting close to a sun is pretty easy to imagine them finding by the wobble and dimming they produce. But the real world is almost never best-case, nor even close. There's something called a 'signal-to-noise ratio', where, basically, too many signals at once step all over each-other and become 'noise', meaning it's too hard to get any useful meaning from them."
"Imagine, for a moment, an intelligent being living in the Alpha Centauri system and observing Sol to try to find planets by those methods."
"We've got nine," he grinned, "or more, planets, plus things like asteroid belts, a million or more 'trojan' asteroids in Jupiter's L4 and L5 Lagrange points, the Kupier Belt and Oort Cloud, and more. And they're all going around at different speeds, with ever-varying proportions of them on the same side of Sol at once, or on opposite sides. And different orbital periods complicate it more - Saturn for example takes almost twenty-nine and a half years to go around the sun just once, while Jupiter takes just under 12 years. Just imagine what all that does to the wobble and the dimming. Saying it gets 'complicated' is like saying that there is 'a lot' of sand on the seashore."
"Good points."
"And all of that is completely apart from the other, admittedly less-likely, possible causes of wobble or dimming. Pulsars, for example, are thought to have a bright spot, which, when they rotate, effectively sends a powerful beam of light - one kind or another - out. They don't know why the stars known as pulsars are like that. But imagine if, like some stars having bright spots, some others have dim spots. That'd cause dimming, from our perspective, too."
"You've been talking to the astronomy club a lot, haven't you?"
"Yes," Simon admitted. "I like talking to people, as you know. But in fairness, I knew this stuff before."
Basil shrugged. He didn't understand how Ron and Simon saw social interactions. To them, interacting socially was restful somehow. It energized them.
But social interaction made Basil nervous and tired him out.
He was glad he had their help.
They both looked out at the display screen, showing their best diagram of the Centauri star system.
Their encyclopedia said that Alpha Centauri A had one, Neptune-sized planet in the habitable zone - the zone where water was liquid - and that B had 2 planets which were as-yet unconfirmed.
In fact the whole twin star system was 'awash' with comets of all sizes. Most of them were in the liquid-water zone, and therefore blobs of water rather than frozen blocks of ice.
Blobs of water 'accrete' easily, joining as one by default when encountering each-other, and so there were several planet-sized blobs of water orbiting both A and B, from about 4 AU - one AU being the distance from the Earth to Sol - in. Anything orbiting either A or B further out than 4 AU got shattered by tidal forces when the two stars got to their closest approach of just over 11 AU, and the bits could be, and apparently had been, flung in almost any direction, with most of the resulting orbits being unstable.
So the twin system was a chaos of watery globs close in to the stars, and frozen comets further out.
The astronomy club was trying to classify it all - working on figuring out what was in a stable orbit & what wasn't, which things were in the Lagrange points of which other things, and so on. But it was a lot of work to sort out the very chaotic system.
They'd be enjoying the task for years, most likely.
There were two planet-sized globs of water, in the same orbit 1.6 AU out from, but on opposite sides of, Alpha Centauri A. These were effectively in each-other's L3 Lagrange points, and therefore stable. They got named Drip and Drop.
There was a similar pair on opposite sides of B, .9 AU out. One of that pair had smaller globs of water orbiting in its L4 and L5 Lagrange points. The two in each-other's L3 points were named Puddle and Pond, with Ponds 2 smaller L4 and L5 companions named Sploosh and Splash.
Sol had one asteroid belt that extended from 1.5 AU out to about 3 AU, depending on how you wanted to count the limits.
Alpha Centauri cometary belts were plentiful and would take years of data crunching and argument before anybody could say where one ended and the next began, and why that was.
Suffice it to say there were comets everywhere.
Many of those comets were water, but some, especially further out, were ammonia, methane, or other materials.
And that was the oddest thing yet about the triple star system - Alpha Centauri A and B seemed to have attracted almost all of the lighter elements - things below Silicon on the periodic table of the elements, while Proxima Centauri, also known as Alpha Centauri C, had attracted almost all of the heavier elements from about Silicon and up on the periodic table.
Nobody had any idea why.
Nevertheless, there was a fair amount of Sodium and Chlorine, combined as Sodium Chloride, otherwise known as salt, orbiting star A about 1.2 AU out in a unique way.
Apparently the salt had been dissolved in water, which periodically boiled and re-condensed as the stars A and B got closer or further apart. This had provided the right conditions such that, over time, the salt had formed crystals - very large crystals, many of which had the kind of perfection you only got in zero-gravity conditions.
There was debate over whether they should go get one and take it home with them. A perfect crystal the size of a house makes a nice conversation piece, even if it is just salt.
And that was the other debate - many wondered if such conditions had formed other types of crystals as well. They hadn't seen any yet, but they had set up space-based telescopes, powered by solar panels, to watch for and report, if anything like, say, an aluminum-oxide crystal such as a sapphire, should be found.
The astronomy club could have happily stayed in that star system for years.
But, as amazing as it all was, everyone else got their fill after 2 weeks or less.
So they found ways to entertain themselves.
They started simple, by Replicating mini-subs, crewing them with Replicated robots, for safety, and using them to explore within the various globs of water.
When that proved to be safe, they crewed the subs with actual people.
They didn't see any fish - or any native life of any kind - while there. Simon had won several bets about that, saying that people just could not grasp the enormity of the odds against it.
And without fish or reefs etc, there wasn't a lot to see.
So they started experimenting to see what else they could do.
Agamemnon landed on the surface of Drip and sailed around for a while. Then they did the same with Drop, Pond, Puddle, Sploosh and Splash, and a couple large melted comets.
The battleship could actually sail on water faster - at 63 miles per hour - than it could fly - only 25 miles per hour when not in star drive.
Nobody knew why.
But it did give them an idea.
Pretty soon they were experimenting with water-skiing behind the battleship as it sailed the surfaces of the various alien planets.
It was awkward, due to the protective gear they must wear.
Earth has almost 80% nitrogen, in the form of N2, an inert gas, plus about 20% oxygen in the form of o2.
The 6 local watery planets - Sploosh and Splash were large enough to be called planets - had atmospheres including varying amounts of oxygen, but had no inert Nitrogen. Instead they had varying amounts of ammonia - NH3 - which would be hazardous to breathe.
They also had methane - CH4 - and other gasses, but the ammonia was the real problem.
So they had to wear protective gear, to protect their lungs from breathing in ammonia, but even that was risky since a wipe-out while water-skiing was easily capable of stripping off such gear.
A few volunteers tried it.
Some ended up in the hospital ward, where Console 13's - labeled Healing - amazing effectiveness was demonstrated. It's functions were partly based on the technology behind the Duplicator - both scanned the subject with the same intense, in-depth scan. The Healing Console then used that information to locate within the subject at least one stem cell - even the very old and the very sick still had a small number of these - and Duplicate as many more as were needed, where they were needed, then activate them, so they'd grow as the type of tissue needed. It could also locate and remove things that shouldn't be there, like ammonia in the lungs, or bullets, shrapnel, gravel, toxins, poisons, heavy metals, diseases of all kinds, cancer, drugs and their metabolites etc. It could even do it selectively, such as removing some of the salt in a body that had too much, or removing the cholesterol buildup from along the walls of blood vessels.
But the Healing Console got really potent for subjects who it had previously scanned. For them, it could restore any damage somebody had taken, as long as they got to it alive. After repairing someone, it avoided the problem of constantly having to 'observe' the repairs by gradually dismissing those repairs in very small amounts over time, even if that needed to be a single cell at a time. This allowed the body to replace them via the normal healing process.
But the hospital ward could only take care of a certain number of folks at once.
So to prevent a flood of thrill-seekers from overwhelming it, Basil tried to distract them by admitting that the battleship could act as a submarine as well.
It was airtight, built strongly enough to resist great pressure, could propel itself by its reaction-less drive, and could go up or down by gravity control, so it didn't need dive fins and ballast tanks and all that.
Grandpa had realized all that and strengthened the ship in certain ways to make sure it would work.
So they spent the rest of their visit acting as a submarine, exploring all 6 planets and a few watery comets as well.
Abe even convinced Basil to try out a Replica ME-163 Komet rocket plane which Grandpa had built, modified, then scanned.
Since it used rocket propulsion, it could fly in space, and Grandpa had given it variable-thrust nozzles, so it could change directions using vectored thrust, even when outside an atmosphere.
Both were pilots.
Abe used to fly for, and jump with, a skydiving company primarily serving tourists and operating out of Tortola.
Basil had supported himself while in college by flying sightseeing tours around the Virgin Islands and by shuttling people and things among the islands.
So they tried flying the rocket-planes, first with Duplicates, so in case anything went wrong, nothing was lost.
That worked well, and they even tried some mock dog-fights.
Before it was time to go, they were dog-fighting for real, with live ammo but still with Duplicate pilots and Replica planes, so nothing was lost when one got shot down.
Or rather, when Basil got shot down.
Abe was the better pilot and always won in one-on-one matches.
The matches didn't stay one-on-one though.
Others wanted in on the fun and joined in. Some were pilots, and some were not. And that was OK, because safety was not a concern with Duplicates. If the Duplicate behind the controls of a Replica rocket-plane made mistakes and crashed, the Duplicate and Replica were lost with no real harm done.
The Duplicate didn't even have to feel what it was like to get crushed in a crash, or die exposed to vacuum, or get shot, because Grandpa had built "Conditionals" into the consoles, so they could stop "observing" a Duplicate or Replica if certain conditions were met.
So when a Duplicate was about to take massive damage, it simply winked out of existence instead.
Other conditionals prevented any Replica plane or munitions from impacting the battleship. This was especially important, since the battleship's usual defenses, especially the Drain and Nullify fields, had "allow" lists - things they would exclude from their effects - and the ship's own creations were on those lists. It had to be that way, to allow them to fire Replicated shells and missiles, or even to Replicate those shells and missiles - or anything else - in the first place.
So it was very good that the Replicator and Duplicate consoles could watch for certain conditions under which to dismiss their creations.
Once folks understood the conditionals, many non-pilots wanted to try flying too.
Soon they set more conditionals to keep the shuttles safe too, since they were constantly coming and going on various outings and explorations, and nobody wanted them rammed by a new untrained pilot.
Then they had to set rules for traffic control to prevent crashes. So Shuttles still took off from and landed on the top of the boxy superstructure, but rocket planes took off from the flat space in front of the front 12 inch gun turret, and they landed - when they even bothered trying to land, rather than just dismissing the Replica and Duplicate - on the flat space behind the rear 12" turret.
Larger dogfights had very different dynamics than one-on-one dogfights did. But Basil still lost most of them.
He was solidly competent, but just didn't have the reflexes - the fast-twitch muscles - that were required to excel in such activities.
He did win sometimes. But when he did, it was through knowing his equipment better than the other guy did.
He was at-peace with that. Fast-twitch muscles were not usually important for what he did, and certainly not central to his sense of self-worth.
And when they were important?
Well, that was why Abe 'drove' the battleship in combat.