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Copyright © 1998 by Shane Tourtellotte

First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July/August 1998


Douglass Taliaferro groggily pulled himself into the bridge of the Armstrong against the tug of tenth-gee deceleration. He had been asleep for twenty-four years, and as captain, was awakened some hours before the other three crewmembers. Fifty years to Alpha Centauri and back, and now Earth was two hundred million kilometers distant. One week away. Unimaginably close.

First things first. He transmitted a message to Earth, one he had composed before entering cryostasis, announcing their return. He appended a thorough upload of their data banks, all the information they had gathered on their mission, including a detailed inventory of samples.

He didn’t include his subordinates’ actions in the last days before leaving Centauri. No real use. They had lost enough already.

As the message went out, he began a long, pleasantly numbing checklist. Near the end, he looked at computer logs of course corrections during their return leg. He expected to see one big one early on.

There were five.

Taliaferro hung loosely in his seat harness for a moment, absorbing what that meant, wondering what the others would think. Suddenly, the board chirped with an incoming message. It was their command center, replying even while Armstrong’s upload continued. He put the message on screen, surprised that anyone cared any more. Not after Tsiolkovsky changed all their plans …


Scott Kroft’s voice came through the intercom. “I said, may I take manual control of the sensor arrays, Captain? There’s something I want to check out.”

“Go ahead.” Taliaferro turned back to the two men crammed into the bridge with him. ”Rich and famous, you were saying?”

Russell Rearden nodded forcefully. “Don’t tell me neither of you have thought about that. Speaking fees alone should keep us well-off for life. It better. I’m not spending fifty years in stasis for nothing.”

“John may steal your thunder, Russell. Geology did fine, but biology hit the jackpot.” Their scout had thrusted out of orbit a day ago, to rendezvous with Armstrong’s main drive. Behind them was Alpha Centauri A’s second planet, a living world. Not as teeming as Earth, but no less wondrous. “So, John, how will you spend your millions?”

John Hu’s baby face flushed, either from embarrassment or freefall nausea. “I’ll probably go back to school, get a degree in geology. No, seriously. Doing this field work, you start to understand how soil compositions, erosion patterns, volcanism can affect biology. I’ve had a good teacher for that, even if he is planning early retirement.”

Russell held up his hands. “Don’t get me wrong, John. I’ll stay in the field -- someone has to explain all our data to the rock-jockeys back home -- but I’ll do it on my terms. We’ll all be able to do whatever we want with the rest of our lives. Nothing wrong with that.”

“No, suppose not. What about you, Captain? What are your plans when we get home?”

Kroft appeared behind Taliaferro before he could speak. “Captain, someone’s coming!”

They replied as one. “What?”

“There’s a--a--let me show you.” He squeezed between them, to reroute the real-time data from his engineering station. “There’s an intense gamma ray source entering the system. The flare bunker wouldn’t slow it down if it were pointed at us, but it isn’t. There’s a thin matter stream accompanying it.”

Kroft put a graph on a secondary monitor. A huge spike erupted from the flat line at the left, with several minuscule ticks after it. He magnified the stretch of ticks.

“The big spike is a helium signature. The twins are helium-3 and tritium, helium-3 more common. Those little scratches are deuterium and lithium-6.”

“Those sound like fusion residua,” Rearden said, “and that first spike must be hydrogen.”

“They are. They’re exactly what I’d expect from a hydrogen fusion engine.” A beatific wonder glowed in his face. “Regular hydrogen.”

A long moment of silence stretched after that. “Where’s it coming from?” Taliaferro finally asked.

Kroft replaced the isotope display with a chart of the Centauri system. A projected track pierced the ecliptic from far above. Perspective shifted, swinging the track into an edge-on dot, which then winked out. In its place remained a bright yellow dot from the background starfield.

Kroft didn’t name the star, or the planet. They all knew.

“Nobody said they were sending another,” Rearden objected. “Do you suppose Houston thought we were lost?”

“They couldn’t build another ship in two years,” Hu insisted, “not with all the bureaucratic failsafing ours had.”

“How distant is it?” Taliaferro asked. “When will it arrive?”

Up went another display. “About four light-hours. Three months of deceleration, if this were our ship -- but it’s not. Give me time to pin down its delta-vee, then I can give you a real number.”

“Please do that,” said the captain, his resonant voice unusually faint.


Rearden knocked off his cataloguing duties early in ship‘s night, and went to get rations. He carried his heated box from the mess, down a spoke ladder and into the ring, which was spinning again after their boost from orbit.

“Got a minute, Scott?”

Kroft glanced up from his own dinner in the engineering niche, and grunted softly. Rearden sat nearby. “What’s the word with our guests?”

“There is none. They’ve had two days to respond. I have their position, velocity, and delta-vee nailed; our signal couldn’t miss. Maybe they aren’t listening for us, but why shouldn’t they?”

“Hibernation?”

“Ship’s computer could respond for them.”

“Yeah.” Rearden waited a measured moment. “Are you sure about those numbers?”

Kroft eyed him coldly. “The captain and I triple-checked them all. They’re right.”

Rearden whistled softly. “Six years. A quarter of what we took. That doesn’t count time dilation, either. They might not have needed hibernation.”

Kroft said nothing, giving a long scroll of numbers his attention. Rearden edged closer. “Scott, it isn’t right.”

“I said the numbers checked out.”

“I mean them coming here. Alpha Centauri was our mission, and suddenly they send another ship, a ship that’ll beat us home by years.” Kroft studied a diagnostic readout. “There are so many other systems to explore. Why did they duplicate our assignment?”

The engineer shrugged. “To get the results faster.”

“Well, doesn’t that bother you?”

“I can’t blame them. They have advanced technology. Why shouldn’t they use it?” Kroft stared blankly at a screen. “Okay, Russell, it bothers me, but what can we do about it?”

“You tell me. You’re the engineer.”

Kroft didn’t answer. Rearden quietly slipped back up the ladder, and into the mess to reheat his dinner.


“Greetings, Captain Taliaferro, crew of Armstrong. I am Grigori Ilyich Kozlov, captain of the Euro-Russian Space Agency Ship Tsiolkovsky. Apologies for the delay, but our crewmember on duty did not think she should respond on her own authority. She informed me first thing out of hibernation.”

Sound and video were fuzzy, thanks to distance and uncompensated Doppler effect. They were clear enough to show the lank, balding man, and convey his words in Russian-accented English.

“We received your messages, are still receiving them. Our planned insertion trajectory should not expose you to undue radiation. Please check the data we are sending on frequency 147 megahertz, and confirm.

“We would be glad to have any other information you can send us, so we do not start cold here, have to feel our way around. We can perhaps combine our efforts. How long are you still to remain in the system?

“Send us your latest information when you can. We will be busy, but not too busy to hear from you. Kozlov, Tsiolkovsky, signing off.”

The four watched his image blink off the bridge display. Hu was the first to react. “Well, he didn’t say very much.”

Rearden was fuming. “Of all the arrogant--”

“Scott,” Taliaferro broke in, “send them confirmation of our flight plan. There’s no hazard of them frying us, but they should know.”

“We should ask for some Earth history, too,” Rearden said, “like why we so desperately needed a follow-up mission.”

“And how they followed up so fast,” Kroft added.

“First things first, gentlemen … but I wouldn’t mind knowing, either.”


Reasonable lag-time made Kroft’s work easier. Tsiolkovsky readily confirmed that it had hydrogen-fusion drive, a breakthrough made seven years before launch and eagerly applied to a new generation of spaceship. The increased thrust allowed Tsiolkovsky to accelerate at one-gee, making things much more comfortable for the ‘sleepwalking’ officer.

Their crewmembers, three of each sex, each took a shift out of cryostasis for monitoring and maintenance. Armstrong’s original call had reached Winifred Mitscher. The planetologist, at twenty-eight, was almost too young to remember Armstrong’s launch.

The flow of data soon reached a bottleneck at Captain Kozlov. He insisted on having more information from Armstrong’s surveys, especially about Centauri A II, which they could already tell bore life. Captain Taliaferro was swamped with preliminary preparations for the boost home, and simply told Kroft to handle it.

He handled it by taking Rearden’s advice, and going around Kozlov’s end. He figured out the duty shifts aboard Tsiolkovsky through study of the message logs and some guesswork, and convinced their engineer to keep their conversations “between professionals”. He likewise kept their chats off Armstrong’s logs.


“I suspected it for a while,” Hu said, “but I didn’t want to believe Russell had you convinced. Why, Scott?”

“Because I’m right,” Rearden answered for him. The three junior crewmen had the mess alcove to themselves, but still kept their voices at half strength. “There was an implicit understanding when we signed up for this mission. We give up fifty years of life on Earth, take the risks of cryostasis and isolation, and in return we get the glory for being the first humans to another star system.”

“First, Russ, I don’t concede your premise. Second, Tsiolkovsky doesn’t change that. We still were first.”

“But we won’t return first,” Rearden countered. “They’ll make it back over fifteen years ahead of us. They’ll make the big impact in the scientific community; they’ll get the medals, the parades, the fame and fortune. We’ll return to indifference, to family and friends dead or so aged they may not remember us. Everything we’ve done will go for naught. Alpha Centauri will be old news, and so will we.”

“Decades of technology.” Kroft was absorbed in a readout crammed with abstruse schematics, but he finally spared part of himself for the conversation. “Decades of advances gone past, and nobody particularly interested in whether we catch up. Perhaps we’ll become fodder for historians, exhibits from the primitive mists of the Deuterium Age.”

“What do you propose we do about that?” said Hu. “Ask Tsiolkovsky to give us a twenty year head start, or to go visit some other stars before heading home?”

“I asked about that,” Kroft said. “Short surveys of both Centauris, then straight back.”

“That settles it. We can’t outrun Tsiolkovsky with deuterium engines. The end.”

“Assuming we couldn’t retrofit our engines,” Kroft said.

“Well, that’s impossible.” Hu saw Kroft’s face shift subtly. “Right?”

Kroft mulled over his answer. “I don’t have all the specifications, but my theoretical discussions with Marashchenko are promising. Look.” He showed the schematic on his screen, which Hu soon gave up trying to comprehend. “It’s a plain matter of increasing pressure and temperature. We have abundant hydrogen as reactant. Converting it to fuel isn’t tough.”

“The equipment won’t handle hydrogen fusion, Scott.”

Armstrong’s design team was very conservative. They had to be: it’s a fifty-year mission. We don’t tax the fusion chamber or the reactant nozzles to half their safety limits, and they’ll work past those limits too.”

Hu stared. “You can’t be serious.”

Rearden jumped back in. “Wipe off that horrified face, John. If Scott says something can work, it can work.”

“Fine. Can it work?”

Kroft shrugged distractedly. “I’m working on it.”

“That’s pretty confident, from the--”

Rearden whisted him quiet, two seconds before Captain Taliaferro pulled himself inside. “Am I interrupting something, gentlemen?”

“No,” said Kroft, poking at his lunch.

Rearden said nothing, but gave Hu a warning glare. “Nothing?” Taliaferro probed.

“Actually--” Hu nervously clasped his hands. “We were talking about getting home, sir. It’s been a long mission.”

“A considerable understatement, John, but don’t get wrapped up in it. Any of you. We still have plenty of work before then. I have a course correction planned for--” Things slowly returned to normal in the mess, except that Hu angrily refused to meet Russell Rearden’s eyes. His stomach had enough trouble, and not from freefall.


Two days from rendezvous, the main drive of Armstrong was visible as a bright dot, slowly resolving into detail. Immense photovoltaic arrays gathered power for the ship’s batteries. A larger but invisible magnetic scoop harvested the solar wind for separators to comb into hydrogen reactant, deuterium fuel, and waste elements.

Automatic systems had the drive section in running order: so said Kroft’s microwave link with the ship. He had its status reports running on half his boards, while he pored over engine diagrams and materials inventories on the other half.

To see these schematics, these designs of elegant power, at once enraptured and humbled him. They had gone so far; they could do so much. He sometimes despaired of duplicating their feats, before the light of intellect dispelled that shadowfall.

Conversion would be terribly hard: leaping the chasm of technological progress carved out by his quarter century of isolation; scaling the precipice of bending old implements to new purposes. But the knowledge was at his fingertips, the materials close at hand. No exigency--no metaphors, he joked to himself--would stymie him forever. He could do this.

“I know you’re in there, Scott.”

Kroft calmly switched his engine plans for status boards before Taliaferro pulled inside. He spent most of each day cooped up in here; it was no surprise the captain could divine his whereabouts.

Armstrong’s systems all nominal,” he reported upon seeing Taliaferro’s head. “Batteries are charged; separators running well; the tanks will top off fine. Just wish we had kept more hydrogen.” The separators had started dumping hydrogen three months before, when they had enough to get home. Restarting them two weeks ago amounted to drops in the bucket.

“We’re better off without the excess mass.” He pensively looked Kroft over. “You look like you’re bracing to get hit. Whatever it is, spill it.”

Kroft thought fast. He always had their scheme in mind, giving him a continuous anxiety with the undertow tug of worrying how to break the plan to Captain Taliaferro. He hastily substituted the first plausible trouble he could think of. “Do you plan on ordering me to upload all our discoveries to Tsiolkovsky, as Captain Kozlov, er, requested?”

Tsiolkovsky had swung into orbit around the lump of rock that was Centauri A’s closest planet the previous day. Kozlov’s messages now verged on belligerent, with talk of “unfraternal behavior” and “no secrets among scientists.” Kroft bit his lip the instant the words were out. Douglass would do it, and they’d be that much worse off.

“I don’t see why we should. Don’t look so surprised, Scott. Why should he give our data a lift, if he can’t do the same--” Taliaferro’s eyes suddenly hardened. “Stupid. Never thought--we’ve done this the wrong way all along.”

The captain clapped him on the shoulder. “Scott, call up Tsiolkovsky. Ask if they have extra cryochambers for a few deadheading astronauts. Ask if they have extra room and power conduits. We can dismantle our own pods, and reinstall them on their ship.”

Kroft hesitated. It was the wrong time to call--but how could he explain how he knew that? “Will do,” he finally replied, poorly feigning enthusiasm.

“Cancel that. Just make the connection. I’ll ask them myself.”

Kroft listened to Taliaferro’s request, if anything too deferential in language and tone. “If they had planned ahead for us,” he said after ending the broadcast, “they would have said so.”

“Assuming they didn’t expect to cross us in transit, where transfer would be impossible.”

“Maybe. We could get lucky,” he said unenthusiastically, “get their engineer, maybe one of the dirtside scientists. Kozlov won’t budge.”

“Confidence, Scott. Besides, nothing lost either way.”

Taliaferro stayed to count the seconds. Two hundred six out, an interval for the length of the message, two hundred six in, plus however long composing a reply took. It might be a while…

Grigori Kozlov appeared, his pate a mottled red. “Captain Taliaferro--” He was now deliberately mispronouncing the name. “--this stratagem of yours is transparent. No, we have no spare chambers, or room for yours. Besides, our power consumption projections are calculated to the kilowatt, never mind the difficulties of conversion to your equipment. I cannot imagine how you would propose to get the chambers, or yourselves, aboard.

“If you will not share your data, then fine. We will collect our own, on schedule, by the book. Let us waste no more time over theoretical exercises. Good day, Captain.”

Kroft felt a surge of anger he thought he had moved past. “‘I cannot imagine--’” he mocked at the blank monitor. “No, you can’t. You won’t even examine the problem, you--”

“Easy, Scott. No loss, except maybe for him. I’ll let you get back to work.”

He departed, and Kroft did get back to work--his work.


Docking was smoother than glass, Captain Taliaferro not even needing the computer the last five klicks. They devoted the rest of that day to powering up the newly rejoined Armstrong and moving their most perishable samples into the bulk cryochamber. They worked well past ship’s midnight, and none of them lost a moment falling asleep when the opportunity arose.

Kroft foggily roused himself after a scant four hours. He and the others planned this days before. He would begin rerouting reactant conduits to the laser chamber, and reconstruct the plasma containment fields to handle a hotter product. Rearden would be his shield, coming clean to Taliaferro the moment the captain became suspicious of his engineer’s activities. He would explain their plan, with Hu’s help if necessary, and convince him through logic, or if necessary through fait accompli. He’d need lots of time for that, though.

He took control of a work robot from the telepresence booth, and commenced disconnecting the deuterium feed conduit. He was ready to cannibalize the constriction field generator when the speaker clicked on. “Mister Kroft, could I see you in my quarters, immediately?”

His innards lurching sickeningly, Kroft left the booth in a blur. He found Taliaferro’s door open, with the captain perched against the far wall, and the other two crewmen at his side. Hu particularly looked like a scared puppy.

“I didn’t expect you to get busy so early. I thought you should come clean about your plans now, before you make too many changes I’ll only have to set right.”

He gulped. “W-what we intended, sir, Russell and John and--”

“Rearden and Hu weren’t in the telepresence booth doing God knows what. You were. What were you doing?”

Kroft quailed before the mounting wrath of the captain. “I see I’ll have to prime the pump,” Taliaferro said. “I know the basics. Tsiolkovsky stuck in your craws, and you wanted a way to beat them home. Don’t look so incredulous. I’m not blind. It was in your faces from the day we detected them. Not all of you at once, but eventually.

“I thought keeping you busy would snuff your resentment, or at worst that you’d recognize the patent impossibility of remedying the situation. Except for the deadheading idea, that is. That was no ruse, Scott. I really didn’t think of it until the other day.”

“Regardless, not only didn’t you dismiss the notion, you built some harebrained intrigue around it. What is it?” He pulled himself toward Kroft by the ceiling grips. “Well?”

His resistance stripped away, Kroft began spouting. He told Taliaferro of his secret consultations with Marashchenko, his plans to retrofit the reactor and engines, his hopes of matching Tsiolkovsky’s speed with their fresh knowledge, properly applied.

“Have you thought any of this through?” Taliaferro demanded, his voice like a breaking thunderstorm. “Forgetting whether your new containment configurations could possibly hold for years, you’d drain the batteries long before then.” “I’ll supplement them with surplus power from the reactor. I’ll bypass the batteries; I know they weren’t manufactured for constant recharging.”

“What about hydrogen? Our stores won’t last nearly long enough for constant one-gee acceleration and deceleration.”

Kroft showed an instant of anger. “You opened my encrypted files.”

“No, but let’s say that Mister Marashchenko kept both his consultations confidential.” He reached for a portable monitor, and pulled up a long scroll of equations. “Did you really think we were going to beat Tsiolkovsky with a burn that short?”

“No, but I have a way around that. I’m going to align the magscoop to collect interstellar hydrogen in flight, like the old Bussard designs.”

“All right, how wide a field will give Armstrong enough hydrogen for full boost throughout the return leg?” Kroft’s mouth worked around nothing. “I thought so. The answer is, you can’t. You two, come over. May as well get the story straight with all of you.”

He extracted a fresh set of figures. “That’s how wide your magscoop field can be before increased drag and power consumption make anything larger counterproductive. That’s your net hydrogen gain, compared to your requirements.” Surprised faces surrounded him. “I used Tsiolkovsky’s best-case numbers, to be sure there wasn’t a chance. There isn’t.”

Rearden and Hu didn’t linger long on the numbers. “We trusted you,” Hu hissed at Kroft. “You said this could work.”

“It can,” Kroft answered, clinging to the present tense. “I have a grip on the technology. The engine refit will work. Fuel’s a secondary consideration; it can wait. I--I can use our deuterium as a reserve.”

“After you’ve refit the laser chamber for hydrogen reactions?” said Rearden.

Kroft faltered. “Give me time. If I don’t go into cryostasis immediately, work and adjust things while we’re underway--”

“You can’t,” Taliaferro said. “Armstrong wasn’t built for this. You can’t change that fast enough to matter against Tsiolkovsky. We’ll end up drifting, or screaming past Earth with no way to decelerate, or fatally irradiated, or any calamity in between.”

He wheeled. “Then where will your place in history be, Mister Rearden? Lost in space! Not even first to Alpha Centauri, if Captain Kozlov and crew conveniently neglect to mention us. That’s the hazard in your great gamble, gentlemen. Still care to roll the dice?”

Kroft looked at Hu, who wouldn’t look back. Rearden glared sulphurously, then turned in scorn. Kroft tried to show Taliaferro a flash of defiance, but his countenance dissolved in mortification.

Taliaferro grunted weakly. “Rearden, initiate the solar array refolding sequence. Hu, start bringing the cryochambers back on line. Scott … Scott.” Kroft arose partially from his remorse. “I’ll go with you to help reverse your modifications. Dismissed.”

The junior officers disappeared from Taliaferro’s presence with all speed, but Kroft had to be led along. “Captain … Doug … I’m so ….” Taliaferro interjected nothing into Kroft’s misery, except for their necessary work ….


Taliaferro observed his crewmates, out of their chambers, all looking and feeling lousy. One by one they turned his way. “First the bad news. Tsiolkovsky wasn’t the first ship to return from Alpha Centauri.”

“Wh--” In his surprise, Rearden slipped from his perch, and drifted to the deck in tenth-gee freefall.

“What happened?” Hu mumbled through a cottony mouth. “Explosion? Collision?”

Kroft shook his head. “With our luck, another ship came and beat us both.”

“Would you believe two ships?”

Kroft goggled. Rearden disgustedly thunked his head against the deck, and lay there. Hu nodded, almost smiling. “Yeah, I think we can believe that.”

“I worked out a rough timetable from the course corrections the computer made. Fortunately, Houston’s data are far more thorough.”

All eyes turned to the recording rod he produced in his hand. “This is the good news, and I think you’ll want to hear it all.”


They all gathered at a viewer to watch Houston’s broadcast, and receive a short, copious lesson in the history of the Second Space Race.

Hydrogen fusion brought the launch of Tsiolkovsky, at a time when graviton generators were clearly on the horizon. With that breakthrough came the avalanche. Ships could boost at far above one-gee with no ill effects on crew or superstructure. First Yamato Uchusen, then Aldrin set off to lap Tsiolkovsky, Yamato barely winning the race back.

New missions darted to other nearby stars, one straggling back from Sirius the previous year, two others long overdue. Many had been first to a particular system, or briefly held speed or acceleration records. None of them held what Armstrong did: cargo bays and computer banks filled with knowledge.

As far back as Tsiolkovsky, the nature of the Race made tarrying to collect pictures, measurements, and samples counter-productive. Earth knew of the living world orbiting Centauri A, but precious little of its geology, meteorology, biology, or compatibility with Terran life forms--until Armstrong returned.

“We couldn’t send other ships,” their contact said in her welcome Texas accent. “The Race drained the economies of every spacefaring country. The United Nations is still in debt to two dozen banks for their Barnard’s Star mission. Public hostility has barely receded enough for us to begin building another Centauri explorer.

“With these preliminary results you’ve given us, though, mission scientists are already jamming computer lines to get at your data. They’re talking about shifting the mission to permanent research, even civilian colonies. But don’t worry. You’ll have a couple years of rest before anybody starts begging you to join the new crew.

“We’ll want reports from the junior officers, including evaluations of the captain. He’s already sent his, and they’re everything we expected of you. Good work.

“That’s all from us. See you in seven days. Out.”

Eight eyes lingered on the darkened screen for a second, until Rearden whooped loudly enough to shiver the bulkheads. “Yeehah! We won after all!”

Kroft and Hu nearly joined in his revelry, before the looming, silent presence of Captain Taliaferro doused their ardor. “Gentlemen, if you can wait a week to celebrate, I will gladly join you. For now, we still have duties.”

Rearden and Hu headed off quickly, while Kroft stayed a moment. “Thank you, Doug. Thanks for all you did--and something you didn’t do.”

“Don’t mention it. I wanted to give this crew a break. Who knew they had a bigger one coming? Off with you, Scott.”

“Sir.” Kroft left Douglass Taliaferro alone. After a moment of rigid solemnity, a gleaming smile cracked the face of the first captain to Alpha Centauri.

Then he got to work.


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