Read Online Worlds Apart by Joe Haldeman - Free Book Online

twenty years or so. Hell, I’d like to work on it myself. But not until we have things… straightened out.”
    “Seems to me we could do both, once Deucalion comes in. Give people more of a sense of purpose, less bitterness. Everything else is just cleaning up after the groundhogs’ damned war.”
    “You know, they wouldn’t even have to H-bomb us.” Daniel had had an hour’s head start on the gin, and it was beginning to show. “Just walk in the fuckin’ airlock and sneeze. All be dead in a week.”
    She patted his hand. “Watch the girl, Dan. She’s winking at you.”
    The basic idea behind the starship was even older than the Worlds. A generation ship: hundreds or even thousands of people aboard a vessel that would crawl out to the stars on a voyage of centuries. Their n-times-great-grandchildren would land on another world.
    By the twenty-first century it was not such a preposterous idea. People who lived in the Worlds might as well be aboard such a ship; an incurious person, or one who didn’t care for the zerogee at New New’s only observation dome, could live his entire life without seeing Earth, Sun, or stars. If you have to live in a hollow rock anyhow, it might as well be going somewhere.
    Furthermore—as had not been true in the previous century—the generation ship would have a definite target. A lunar observatory had discovered several earthlike planets orbiting “nearby” stars; one was only eleven light years away.
    The main problem was energy. Not just the enormous push it would take to move a World-sized spaceship, but also the energy necessary to maintain life. The Worlds had been possible in the first place only because of the abundant free energy from the Sun. The generation ship would have to carry its own sunlike power source, with fuel enough for centuries.
    In theory, the power could be supplied by conventional fusion. The deuterium could be mined either from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere or the frozen surface of Callisto. But the scale involved was vast.
    A more elegant, but necessarily untested, power source was the mutual destruction of matter and antimatter. Antimatter could be contained in a magnetic bottle and fed out a few particles at a time, and the result was pure E =mc squared. It had never been done on a large scale because antimatter was tremendously expensive, in terms of energy, to produce: like burning down a forest to warm your hands. To manufacture enough antimatter to fuel the ship would require a solar collector the size of a planet; a synchrotron the size of the Moon.
    Fortunately, the antimatter didn’t have to be manufactured. It could just possibly be mined. In A.D. 2012 astronomers had discovered the tiny double star Janus, tagging along with the Sun a mere tenth of a light year away. The stars were both black dwarfs, barely hot enough to be considered stars. But one of them, Alfvén, was made of antimatter.
    O’Hara belonged to a discussion group, where bright young people met one evening each week to talk over current issues with one or both Coordinators. For the past couple of weeks they had been talking about the administrative and engineering problems associated with a possible starship project. O’Hara was not fascinated by engineering, but she was intelligent enough to understand and be awed by the scope of the undertaking.
    The outline was simple enough: two overlapping stages. With raw materials supplied both from Deucalion and the salvage from various wrecked Worlds, they would build two starships. S-1 was just a fuel-gathering vessel, hardly a proper starship at all. It would take a small crew out to Alfvén, to collect antimatter sufficient for the actual long voyage.
    Meanwhile, S-2 would be a-building—a smaller versionof New New York, large enough to support ten thousand people. It should be finished by the time S-1 came back. They’d gas up and head for Epsilon Eridani, a ninety-eight-year voyage.
    The projected expense in dollars was