Starborne

“I count on nothing,” Sieglinde says, speaking in a throaty mock-dramatic way. Maybe sheis trying to be funny. But her eyes are strangely bright. She seems possessed by some powerful contrary energy that will not relent. “Anything may happen. We are dealing with tremendous physical forces and we still have relatively little experience with this equipment. And we work with stochastic processes here. Do you understand what I am saying? Each jump we make is in effect a gamble. The odds are in our favor each time, of course. But with each jump there is always the possibility of the random event, whenever the stardrive is changed from one state to another. It is here in the equations: the random factor, the fatal probability. The more often we jump, the more often we expose ourselves to that small but real probability. And on one of our jumps we may leap from one nospace to another instead of returning to realspace, or experience something even worse. It is possible.”

“Not highly probable, though,” says Heinz. “The odds favor us, you say.”

“Not highly probable, no, but possible, distinctly possible, and what is possible is worth a little thought when that possibility can be fatal to our endeavor. You are an engineer, Heinz; you deal in tangible things, in absolute concepts of what works and what does not I am a mathematician. We are more poetic than you, do you understand me? I deal in axioms and certainties; but I also know that beneath the axioms lie only assumptions, and beneath the assumptions lies — chaos!”

“Rely on faith, then, if you can’t trust your own equations,” says the year-captain. “We all took a leap into the dark when we signed on. If you didn’t think the drive would work property, you should have stayed home.”

“I say only that there is a finite chance that it will not.”

“And therefore — ?”

“And therefore, as I have just said, the more jumps we make, the greater the likelihood that one of them will be a bad one. And so I argue that we ought not to make any shunt that is not absolutely necessary. By which I mean that we should not attempt a realspace reentry without complete assurance that the world we have picked is likely to be a place where we’ll want to settle, because the risk of moving from one reality state to another is so great that we will want to attempt it only when there is a high order of probability that the risk is worth taking.”

Paco says, in what is for him an uncharacteristically subdued and thoughtful tone, “You know, there’s something to that. The odds that any given Earth-size planet has anything like Earthlike living conditions are — what? A hundred to one against? So we may find ourselves having to make a hundred jumps, five hundred, a thousand, if we don’t get lucky right away. Which multiplies the shunt risks enormously, if I follow Sieglinde correctly. If there’s any real likelihood that the drive might fail, we ought to be damned sure ahead of time that whatever place we’re jumping to is—”

Julia, who has the actual responsibility for operating the nospace drive, says irritably, “This is a stupid conversation, and we’re not supposed to be stupid people. Why are we even discussing this? There’s been a vote and we’re going to take a look at Planet A, because we have good reason to believe that it’s the sort of place that we came out here to find, as far as we can tell without actually getting up close to it and taking a good look, and that’s all there is to it. Heinz is right. Sieglinde is pulling demons out of nowhere. When we make our next shunt, the stardrive will behave exactly as we want it to behave, and you all know it. And even if there’s some slight mathematical risk hanging on each jump, we’ve already reached agreement that Planet A is a place worth taking risks to find. Our job is to find the way to Planet A, not to debate hypothetical nightmare scenarios.”

“Yes, we are not stupid,” says Heinz. “But we are restless. We live in a confined place and we think too much. And if we think long enough, eventually we begin to think stupidly. Enough of this, Sieglinde. We will never find any place to live at all, if we are too terrified of these probability problems to undertake even a single survey mission. You knew all this when we set out. Why did you wait until now to say anything? If somebody else had raised this string of last-minute objections while you were trying to get on with the work at hand, you’d be trying to cut off his head by now.” He turns to the year-captain. “Rule her out of order, will you? And then let’s adjourn.”

“What do you say, Sieglinde?” the year-captain asks. “Can we drop this, please?”