Chapter 5

It was officially called a "mission briefing," and was closed to the public and the news media. Even so, popular interest in the return to Eden had reached a sufficient pitch that a variety of SES brass who had little of substance to contribute took up the first 90 minutes with what were mostly tendentious platitudes.

The keynote speaker was Abel Langston himself, who thankfully gave to those who'd be light-years away in the coming election an abbreviated version of his remarks (they'd later be "revised and extended" for media distribution). Other SES officials, of insufficient status to warrant the same public attention, regrettably felt it necessary to shore up their bureaucratic credentials with full-blown speeches that mostly bored the pants off even the colleagues they were seeking to impress, much less the task-oriented crew who simply waited out the oratory.

An hour and a half usually warrants a break in any meeting. When the crew returned after restroom and coffee-pot visits, the bureaucrats were conspicuously absent and now the real substance of the session could begin.

First, what would the voyage itself entail? Ship's captain Margaret Ziang offered a detailed description to which her audience, with no starfaring experience, now paid rapt attention. Shuttles would ferry them to the orbiting starship Gardener, she said (the ship had been re­christened for the mission, von Braun—its original name—not being deemed adequately symbolic). She told them how much gear, by mass, each was permitted, spelled out what items were mandatory and offered suggestions on optional additions. She also described the ship's equi­p­age: sleeping accommodations, scientific equipment, recreational facilities (including a large physical fitness compartment), game and entertainment paraphernalia to alleviate boredom, an impressively extensive library of both scientific and recreational reading, food options and arrangements, etc.

Once all crew was aboard with gear stowed, acceleration would commence. There would be no physical sense of movement, Ziang told her audience; gravitronic compensators would maintain Earth-normal conditions inside the ship. But the vessel itself would be gaining speed very rapidly indeed, to the degree that if any crew member needed real-time communication with Earth, he or she had better do so within 48 hours of touch-off; after that, transmission and receiving delays would become first intolerable, then impossible within just another few days.

"Acceleration will continue for roughly six weeks," she continued. "Even at the acceleration we can maintain, we must travel to about a distance halfway between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn before we reach worm speed—the speed we need before we can use the worm drive.

"The worm drive actually isn't a drive at all. It doesn't propel us. It merely opens a wormhole in space—the formal name is an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, it's something akin to a black hole—and holds it long enough for us to enter if we're traveling fast enough. The first law of thermodynamics says matter and energy can't be destroyed, so we have to come out somewhere; some very complex math called worm mechanics is used to determine just where we do come out, which can be controlled by the way the wormhole is opened."

She looked around at her audience to check for possible questions, but there seemed to be none.

"As I said, it will take us about six weeks to reach worm speed. I like to keep a clean ship at all times, but we can't dispose of any waste during our wormhole jump, so toward the end of our acceleration period I'll ask for a special sweep."

"What happens to the trash?" someone asked.

"An ejection tube automatically dispatches it directly at the nearest star, where it will be consumed. We don't want to be space litterbugs," she added, and was rewarded by a small laugh. "If there's no star near enough, nothing will be ejected and waste will simply accumulate in the tube until it's full and overflows into our living area. So we get rid of it while we can.

"Now, our transit to the Eden system will be instantaneous, but it won't feel that way on board; the worm gap to the Eden system—the lapse of time we perceive while we're passing through the wormhole—will seem like about two weeks. When we reach our programmed destination we'll emerge back into real space. But we keep all the speed we built up accelerating, which we now have to lose, so it'll take us about the same six weeks to align with the planetary orbit.