Star Trek: The Original Series - 082 - Federation Read Online Free PDF Page A

the universe.
    Judging from Cochrane’s reception in Christopher’s Landing, everything Brack had said had come true. Cochrane sometimes wondered about the insight or science behind his friend’s ability to predict the future. He did it so often and so well. But Brack himself denied having any special gifts. “The events of the future are reflected in the events of the past,” he often said. He claimed only to be an attentive student of history.
    Cochrane looked back up at the dome, but the brief twilight clearing had passed. The mists of Titan’s night billowed beyond the transparent slabs, roiling in the external floodlights, as if the colony were a lone oceangoing vessel, plying Earth’s North Atlantic in the winter. Cochrane tried not to think about icebergs.
    “What was that you said about infinity?” he asked his friend.
    Brack grinned and the years dropped from his face. Cochrane guessed the billionaire was in his fifties, middle-aged for the citizens of Earth’s industrialized nations. His short hair was white—Brack paid no attention to fashion or fads—and worn in a style reminiscent of the Caesars. But his eyes sparkled like those of a much younger man, and the smile in his rugged face was always full of the promise of youth. Cochrane guessed having enough wealth to affect the course of human history might give a person reason enough to feel young and energetic, but he often thought there was more complexity within Brack than the man would ever reveal.
    “I saw you looking at the stars,” Brack answered. “So wasn’t that what you were thinking? About the new limits to human growth? Or, should I say, that now there are no limits.” “But how did you know that u’as what I was thinking?” Brack glanced away, a smaller smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. Cochrane recognized the expression. Brack wasn’t going to answer the question. Instead he asked one of his own.
    “What are the prospects for a colony?” “At Centauri B II?” Cochrane was surprised by Brack’s sudden change of subject. He was operating in his business mode now.
    .-Those surveys were complete before I left,” Cochrane answered.
    ,’They were complete practically before I was born, weren’t they?”
    The whole world knew the prospects for a colony at Alpha Centauri were good, and had for decades. Of the hundred or so known solar systems detected beyond Earth, the Centauri system xvas the most thoroughly mapped, primarily because it was also the closest solar system to Earth’s.
    Seen with the unaided eye, Alpha Centauri was the third brightest star in the sky, though only visible south of latitude + 30o. Its brilliance was due to its closeness and to it being, in fact, a ternary system composed of three separate stars. Alpha Centauri A was a spectral-type G2 star, a close twin to Earth’s own sun, gravitationally locked to Alpha Centauri B, a slightly larger and brighter K0 star. Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B orbited each other about the same distance apart as the diameter of Earth’s solar system. The third stellar component of the system, Proxima Centauri, was a much smaller red dwarf star, in excess of 400 times more distant from A and B than they were from each other.
    Just after the turn of the century, astronomers on Earth, using ground-based, adaptive optic telescopes, had resolved at least two additional bodies in the Alpha Centauri system: two large planets caught up in a complex, oscillating orbital pattern around the A and B stars. The scientific world was shocked by their discovery because common wisdom presumed that no planet could main-rain a stable orbit between two such closely situated stars.
    In the decades that followed, a new generation of astronomers employed liquid vacuum telescopes on the moon’s farside to resolve three more planets in the Alpha Centauri system. One, about the size of Mercury, was locked in an eccentric orbit around Alpha Centauri A. The other two Earth-size