Time for the Stars
by Robert A. Heinlein
***
You’d think if you were among the few surviving heroes whose
efforts led to almost-unimaginable benefits for humanity that you might get a
little respect once you made it back home. Maybe that’s not what young Tom
Bartlett expected when he signed up for a galaxy-wide survey of habitable
planets, knowing that even if he returned, everyone he knew on Earth would
probably be long dead. Maybe he didn’t think that far ahead. He was, after all,
still a teenager. But even in his
wildest dreams, he couldn’t have expected what he found when he returned from the
near light-speed expedition chronicled in Robert Heinlein’s 1956 Time for the Stars.
Tom and his identical twin brother, Pat, were among the
mindreading pairs chosen by the nonprofit, nongovernmental Long Range
Foundation for one of its very longest research projects. One expected to last,
as Tom and Pat told their mother at the beginning, more than a century. Their
mother understandably fainted at the news.
Not that she expected to lose both of her boys. One twin
(Pat as it turned out), would stay on Earth. The other twin, Tom, would take
flight on the nuclear-powered “torchship” Lewis
and Clark, whose speed would approach that of light. According to the
theory of relativity, as the speed of the ship increased, those on board would
experience a slowed down version of time relative to observers back on Earth.
Except that those observers would include several
telepathically-linked partners. What the foundation hopes to find is that the
telepath pairs will be able to remain in simultaneous communication with each
other despite the increasing distance between them and despite the difference
in their experience of time.
What could that mean for Tom and Pat (as well as the other
telepaths)? A proof that telepathic communication may be the only thing in the
universe that can travel faster than the speed of light.
“Telepathy,” the project’s head psychologist informs them,
“is faster than the speed of light. . .”
And she knows this “. . . because we measured it. . . we sent this one twin out
to Ganymede – such an awfully long way. Then we used simultaneous
radio-telephone and telepathy messages, with the twin on Ganymede talking by
radio while he was talking directly – telepathically, I mean – to his twin back
in Buenos Aires. The telepathic message always beat the radio message. . .”
Even to the young Bartlett twins, this sounds
like hocus-pocus. But adventure beckons! And the money is great – with Tom’s
salary being banked by his Earth-bound family.
Although the Lewis and Clark has two clocks, one showing
ship time, the other Earth time, it isn’t until the clocks show a week’s lag
between the twins’ birthday on Earth (as reported telepathically by Pat) and
the day Tom’s shipmates present him with a birthday cake that the time
difference begins to feel real. Then a year on the ship translates into 12
years on Earth and time stretches ever further. On Earth, Pat marries, has children, and forms “Bartlett
Brothers, Inc.,” to receive Tom’s accruing salary. An aging Pat passes the
telepathic link to his daughter (Tom’s niece), then to a granddaughter, then a
great-granddaughter, until more than 60 years have passed on Earth, but only
four aboard the Lewis and Clark, now
suddenly recalled to Earth, its mission – irrelevant.
“Don’t you see, Tommie?” says the ship’s mathematician. “You
(telepaths) proved that ‘simultaneity’ was an admissible concept. . . and the
inevitable logical consequence was that time and space do not exist.”
Tom’s head begins to ache. “Then what is that we seem to be
having breakfast in?” he asks. “Just a mathematical abstraction, dear," she answers. "Nothing more.”
And the torchship and its crew pass into irrelevance,
virtually ignored as they return to an Earth that has changed beyond their
imaginings.
“We were going to be a short paragraph in history and a
footnote in science books,” Tom muses. “I decided that even a footnote averaged
well and forgot it.”
Tom can afford to forget fame. Physically barely in his
20’s, he finds himself fabulously wealthy from his accrued salary, and more
than a match psychologically for the extremely aged twin who had bullied him
all his life. And confronted by his current telepathic partner, Pat’s beautiful
young great-great-granddaughter who doesn’t find Tom at all uncle-like. Life
and love, Tom decides, are the best revenge.
(Next week, Adventure classics concludes a July of science
fiction adventures with Gregory Benson’s Heinlein-influenced Tides of Light.)
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