Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

ship is vibrating. I hear the faint rumble of the engines.
    Day 3 of Voyage, outward bound :
    I will dispense with the standard day / month / year references, those signposts that we pounded into infinity as if into solid ground. Such references would be precise only “back there”. Of course, Einstein-Minkowski’s theory of the space-time continuum has been amply verified by numerous experiments during the past century. And thus the onboard clocks present two reliable readings side by side: (a) Earth time, Greenwich, calibrated to the hour of our departure, and (b) ship time. Lift-off was arbitrarily established as Day 1, 00:01 hours.
    Even so, I am dissatisfied with both measurements. Which of the two is real time? What, in other words, is time? What is objectively real in an arena where space has three dimensions and time has only one, and they are unified into a single phenomenon? This old mathematics-physics chestnut was cracked long ago, but now we will live it outside of paper and at over half the speed of light when we reach maximum velocity months from now. By that point, though our experience of time (in sensation and measurement) will be felt as normal, we will be about 20% slower than the passage of Earth time. Thus, for every year on Earth (365 days), only 301 days will pass on the Kosmos .
    *
    During the first two days, I could only goggle, gape, listen to my rapidly beating heart. Clichés came rushing to my mouth whenever other human eyes caught mine. We are all, I think, quite astonished. To live inside a dream. To languish in the warm arms of a myth. To tap-dance on an algorithm. Yet here we are.
    *
    We are accelerating in multiples of Earth gravity, which we do not feel, since the complex negotiation of onboard gravity with actual thrust gravity is flawless, the design extrapolated from Dr. Rodney Nihman’s magnificent work at the Royal Astrophysical Institute and his own research foundation Gravitas . Rod died twelve years ago, but not before seeing the small, prototype one-man ship accomplish exactly what his equations predicted. Without this component, the voyage would have been technically possible but humanly unendurable: if the ship’s internal gravity devices had never been invented—those magical mechanisms that sustain our own independent sense of normalcy—we would be reduced to unconsciousness in short order.
    *
    This is going to become a whopping great journal if I put everything on paper. They try to discourage hard copies here. The Manual encourages passengers to use digital memory files, since each cabin has its own minimalist personal computer (oddly named, “the max ”). But I love the sound of my fountain pen scratching on paper. I brought along spare nibs and enough ink cartridges to last a lifetime. The two reams of paper, five hundred sheets each, ate a good way into my baggage allowance, though the allowance is ridiculously arbitrary. Weight is not really a problem; storage space in our “personal apartments” is the problem.
    They like to make us feel at home. This is evidence of foresight on the administration’s part, because they know we’re going to be spending a lot of time together, all six hundred-plus of us, like passengers on a cruise ship that does not reach its port of destination until nineteen years after raising the anchor. More like illegal emigrants locked into a metal shipping container. A comfortable container, mind you.
    My own apartment is presumably designed for upper-class passengers. Officially, we are all equal, all “crew”. It may be that some of us, including myself, are “more equal”, even though we are here for symbolic reasons only. I wonder where the trillionaires live and how they live. And do the grease monkeys in the engine room get a residence as nice as mine? There is no mechanical engine, no grease, but I suppose there are grades of service personnel. Do their swinging hammocks crowd together down in the hold?
    I like my little