“I should hope so. But I don’t think Ann is much of a mystic either.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know. Such a . . . such a pure scientist that, that she can’t stand to have the data contaminated? That’s a silly way to put it. An awe at the phenomena. Do you know what I mean by that? Worship of what is. Live with it, and worship it, but don’t try to change it and mess it up, wreck it. I don’t know. But I want to know.”

“You always want to know.”

“True. But this I want to know more than most things. More than anything else I can think of! Truly.”

“Ah Sax. I want Provence; you want Ann.” Michel grinned. “We’re both crazy!”

They laughed. Photons rained onto their skin, most shooting right through them. Here they were, transparent to the world.

Part 10: Werteswandel

Part Ten

Werteswandel

Prologue

It was past midnight, the offices were quiet. The head adviser went to the samovar and started dispensing coffee into tiny cups. Three of his colleagues stood around a table covered with handscreens.

From the samovar the head adviser said, “So spheres of deuterium and helium3 are struck by your laser array, one after the next. They implode and fusion takes places. Temperature at ignition is seven hundred million kelvins, but this is okay because it is a local temperature, and very short-lived.”

“A matter of nanoseconds.”

“Good. I find that comforting. Then, okay, the resulting energy is released entirely as charged particles, so that they can all be contained by your electromagnetic fields— there are no neutrons to fly forward and fry your passengers. The fields serve as shield and pusher plate, and also as the collection system for the energy used to fuel the lasers. All the charged particles are directed out the back, passing through your angled mirror apparatus which is the door arc for the lasers, and the passage collimates the fusion products.”

“That’s right, that’s the neat part,” said the engineer.

“Very neat. How much fuel does it burn?”

“If you want Mars gravity-equivalent acceleration, that’s three-point-seventy-three meters per second squared, so assume a ship of a thousand tons, three hundred and fifty tons for the people and the ship, and six-fifty for the device and fuel— then you have to burn three hundred and seventy-three grams a second.”

“Ka, that adds up fairly fast?”

“It’s about thirty tons a day, but it’s a lot of acceleration too. The trips are short.”

“And these spheres are how big?”

The physicist said, “A centimeter radius, mass point-twenty-nine grams. So we burn twelve hundred and ninety of them per second. That ought to give passengers in the ship a good continuous g feel.”

“I should say so. But helium3, isn’t it quite rare?”