Jack Falcon and His Quantum Singularity, Chapter 1

“WHERE ARE THEY?” Jack Falcon asked anxiously. “Daniel should have been here an hour ago!”

His wife Irene smiled at him and shook her head. “Calm down, Jack! The Liberty will get here. Just be patient.”

Jack and Irene Falcon were standing just outside Star City’s only spaceport, waiting for their old friend Daniel Hollins to land with some much-needed supplies. The Star City colony was mankind’s first settlement outside the Solar System. It had been founded four years ago when an international conglomerate known as the Barclay Group had approached Falcon Technologies, a company founded by Jack’s grandfather. For three generations the Falcons had spent their lives inventing cutting-edge technologies, and after nineteen-year-old Jack developed a way of traveling between stars the Barclay Group decided it was time for Earth to branch out.

So Jack built the Behemoth, a giant starship that ferried 6,000 brave colonists from Earth to the planet Myra, a rocky, airless world that circled the star Epsilon Eridani. A year later Jack married his lifelong sweetheart Irene Goddard, and the new couple then moved to Myra to help the struggling colony. Together they had worked to turn mankind’s only interstellar colony into a self-sustaining city.

The colony had been built at the bottom of a deep, dry canyon that was twelve miles long and two miles wide. A pair of atmosphere makers that Jack had designed had spent the last four years filling the canyon with air. Even though the rest of the planet’s surface was uninhabitable, there was enough air inside the canyon to allow the colonists to go outside without a spacesuit. It would take decades for the rest of Myra to become terraformed, but the Falcons were patient. To them the end result – turning a dead planet into a live one – was well worth the cost.

In front of Jack and Irene was a large, barren piece of ground that served as the landing field. It was surrounded on three sides by the sheer walls of the canyon. At the far end of the field was the giant starship Behemoth. The giant starship was rarely used anymore, but occasionally the colony would need to send someone to Earth for some much-needed supplies or replacement parts. The ship was the colony’s only way of leaving the planet.

Behind them was a three-story-tall metal tower that served as the planet’s only air traffic control center. The tower was also the tallest building on Myra, as the rest of the colony had been built underground. Jack would have preferred to build the spaceport underground as well but they colony’s mayor had rejected that idea.

Jack glanced at his watch and sighed. “I just don’t understand. What could be keeping them? We’re only eleven light-years from Earth – the Liberty should be able to cover that distance in a matter of hours. I’ve done it many times myself!”

The Liberty was the first interplanetary spaceship that Jack ever built. He had used it to travel to the moon and, later, to tour the Solar System. When Jack invented his faster-than-light drive he decided to retrofit the Liberty with it instead of designing a new starship. Since that time he had developed newer and faster ships, but his first one still had a special place in his heart.

“Maybe they got a late start,” Irene suggested. “Keep in mind, the two of us ordered a lot of equipment! It’s taken Daniel six months to get everything you asked for. He may have discovered at the last minute that he forgot something, and had to have a part flown in to the Falcon Spaceport.”

Jack shook his head. “I talked to Daniel myself just this morning. He told me that he was at Dad’s spaceport and the Liberty was ready to go.”

“Well, worrying about it isn’t going to make your starship get here any faster,” Irene pointed out. “Just think about what you’ll be able to do after it arrives! We’ll be able to make Xenolab I a genuine laboratory, stocked with the latest equipment. It’ll be almost as good as our lab back on Earth.”

“It will be nice to work with modern tools again,” Jack admitted. “We’ve spent years scrounging around as best we could. I would’ve had this equipment flown in years ago but the colony just wasn’t ready for it.”

“I’m afraid that food, water, sanitation, and power are a bit more important than gamma-ray emitters,” Irene teased. The red-headed girl looked up into the empty sky. She was about to say something but was interrupted by a voice behind her. “Hey Jack!”

The young inventor turned around and saw Karen Miller standing at the door to the control tower. Karen, a trained biologist, was the spaceport’s only employee. She came by the tower once a day to see if they had any messages, and she worked there on the rare occasion when a ship was landing or taking off. Otherwise she spent her time managing the colony’s hydroponics gardens.

“Got a message for you, Jack,” she called out. “That friend of yours wants to talk to you.”

“Finally!” Jack exclaimed. He sprinted over to the tower and ran inside. His wife shook her head and calmly followed him. When she got inside the building and climbed upstairs she saw that her husband was already talking to Daniel on one of the room’s small viewsecreens.

“That just doesn’t make any sense,” Jack was saying. “How is that possible?”

“That’s what I want to know!” Daniel replied. “There we were, cruising right along, and then – bam! – the kronolator stopped working and we dropped back into normal space. As far as we can tell there’s nothing wrong with the unit itself. I’ve even had your Dad check it out – in fact, he’s down there now looking it over.”

“Can you turn it on?” Jack asked.

“Sure,” Daniel replied. “I can turn it on and off all day long. I just can’t go any further in your direction. As soon as I tell the ship to head toward Myra the drive cuts out immediately. I can go anywhere else – I just can’t head your way.”

Jack looked puzzled. “Does the sublight drive work?”

“Sure,” Daniel replied. “But keep in mind that we’re still half a light-year away from you. As fast as your sublight drive is, it’s nowhere near faster-than-light. It would take us years to reach Myra at that speed.”

“So the kronolator works, but it won’t let you travel to Myra?” Jack asked, confused.

“How is that possible?” Irene asked.

“It’s not,” Jack complained. “I’ve never heard of anything remotely like that before! It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, let’s start at the beginning,” his wife said. “We’ll figure this out. Now, you designed the kronolator to achieve faster-than-light travel by manipulating the flow of time, correct?”

“Right,” Jack replied. “There’s no way to exceed a speed of 186,000 miles per second in space. So, to get around that, my kronolator alters the flow of time around the starship. Since it can control how much time is passing it can cross vast distances very quickly.”

“That means the drive depends on the ability to manipulate time. Right?”

“Of course,” Jack replied. “You know that! You’re as familiar with the kronolator as I am.”

“Then the problem is obvious,” Irene said. “If there’s nothing wrong with the drive itself then there must be some anomaly near Myra that is keeping the kronolator from altering the flow of time. In other words, outer space must be broken. It’s the only logical conclusion.”

“But we’ve made the trip from Earth to Myra many times!” Jack protested. “This has never been a problem in the past.”

“Then something must have changed,” Irene replied.

“She’s making sense,” Karen said. “We have had a lot of strange things happening around here recently.”

Jack nodded. “Now that’s true. All right. Daniel, just to be on the safe side, can you ask Dad to perform one last system-wide diagnostic? I want to be completely sure that this isn’t some computer-related glitch. Then we can turn our attention to–“

Jack was interrupted in mid-sentence by an ear-shattering siren. He winced involuntary. Karen immediately panicked. “Not again!” she screamed. The biologist ran out of the tower at top speed.

Daniel looked confused. “What’s that awful noise?”

“It’s the colony’s solar flare advance warning system,” he explained over the noise. “I installed it last month. I hate to do this but I’ve got to go. We’ll talk more later.”

Jack reached over and turned off the tower’s equipment, and then he and his wife raced outside. In the distance they saw a silver hovercar driving away at top speed.

“Hey!” Irene shouted. “She took our hovercar! What’s the matter with her?”

“She panicked,” Jack explained. “The last solar flare almost destroyed her hydroponics garden, which would have wiped out our food supply. She’s probably going to make sure it’s properly shielded.”

“But she could have waited for us!” Irene glared angrily at the vehicle as it disappeared out of sight. “Now what are we going to do? We can’t stand here, Jack – if we’re outside when that solar flare hits we’ll be dead for sure!”

Jack glanced back at the control tower. “It’s not shielded enough to protect us,” he said at last. “It’s worse than useless. We’ve got to find a way to get underground.”

The couple quickly took stock of their surroundings. The spaceport was located at the far end of the canyon, several miles from the rest of the city. When the spaceport was built people felt that it should be located as far away from the settlement as possible, in order to protect the colony from space accidents. The only nearby objects were the steep rock walls of the canyon.

“I don’t see any other vehicles here,” Jack said.

“Of course not,” Irene snapped. “We’re the ones that drove Karen out here! I can’t believe she’d do this to us. How much time do we have left?”

“The solar satellite should give us about fifteen minutes,” Jack replied.

Irene gasped. “We can’t possibly walk twelve miles in fifteen minutes!”

“I know,” Jack said. His mind raced, and then he had an idea. “Couldn’t we ask someone in the colony to come out and rescue us?”

Irene shook her head. “I don’t know. Even if they left right now it would be hard to travel all the way out here, pick us up, and then make it back to the colony before the flare hit.”

“But we can try,” Jack argued. He turned around and raced back into the air traffic control tower. The young inventor powered up the equipment and tried hailing the main colony. Several tense minutes went by but no one answered.

“Great!” Irene said at last. “I guess everyone’s underground now.”

“Which is where they should be,” Jack pointed out. “Everyone knows what to do when a solar flare hits. This is really my fault – I should’ve connected this system to the colony’s underground announcement system. Not doing that was a bad mistake.”

“We can discuss that later,” Irene shouted. “We’ve got to do something now!”

At that moment the microphone in Jack’s hand suddenly surged with energy, giving him a powerful shock. Jack involuntary dropped the microphone. Oh no, Jack thought to himself, the first wave of the flare must have arrived! He hastily reached over to turn off the tower’s master power supply, but it was too late! As his hand touched the switch the power converter exploded in a shower of sparks, burning Jack and sending him flying backwards. The energy surge traveled through the power lines to the tower’s primary mainframe, which burst into flames!

Irene helped her dazed husband to his feet and the two raced downstairs. Jack’s hand throbbed painfully, but he chose to ignore it. I’ll deal with it later, he decided. If we don’t get underground right now my hand will be the least of our problems.

As soon as they had cleared the now-smoking building Irene stopped. “I thought you said we had fifteen minutes!”

“The solar particles must be traveling faster than I predicted,” Jack explained. He sprinted across the landing field at top speed.

“Where are we going?” Irene shouted, as she ran close behind him.

“To the Behemoth,” Jack said, pointing. “She’s shielded against radiation. It’s our only chance!”

As Jack and Irene raced toward the enormous starship they heard a roar behind them. Jack glanced back and saw that the entire air traffic control tower was now in flames. Jack winced at the sight. I hope the colony is ok, he thought.

With only moments to spare the young couple finally made it to the starship’s airlock. Irene ran up to the door and yanked on it. It did not move. She anxiously pressed the ‘open’ button but nothing happened. “It’s locked!” she screamed.