Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

home. Well, I had better like it, because it’s all I’ve got to live in for a very long stretch to come. I am homesick for my cabin—my real cabin. Log walls, cedar shake roof, wood-burning stove (legal if owned as a historical artifact, illegal to actually use), my rock garden, the stream, an occasional wild trout. I ache when I think of the greenhouse, my cacti experiments, my chainsaw (also illegal). Alas, it was confiscated last year by the inspector who spotted evidence of crime in my back yard.
    “Looking for tapeworms?” I queried, hoping to throw him off track. “I don’t know what you mean by tapeworms, Dr. de Hoyos”, he said, with a severe look. “But I recognize woodchips when I see them.”
    “Uh-huh. And you just happened to be passing by my remote abode with your band of merry eco-police.”
    “You have destroyed a tree without authorization, sir, and under Article 4978b3, you have committed an indictable—”
    “All right, all right, all right. The truth is, the chips are from a diseased pine, and I was trying to stop the progress of the pine-bark beetle before it infected the surrounding forest.”
    “Why didn’t you contact my department for authorized removal of the afflicted tree?”
    “I was concerned about the danger of disease spreading before the department responded.”
    He smirk-sneered at me—understandably, because it was a lame excuse. They always respond, instantaneously, rappelling down from their hovercraft in the most unlikely places. He warned me that unless the firewood was turned over to his response team, he would be forced to take me to court. I refused, arguing that the tree had grown in my own back yard; I had planted it when it was a sapling. Not convinced, he ordered a thorough search and confiscated the entire five cords of sweet dry pine I had split and stored in my garage. He also showed me the satellite photo of my off-the-chart heat emissions. I pleaded guilty. My two Nobels prevented imprisonment, but I had to pay a hefty fine.
    It’s interesting that they allowed an eco-criminal like me onto a ship like this. But I suppose they decided that banishing me from the voyage would have been a PR loss with too high a cost.
    As you can see, my good self, my very old self of the future, my ship’s cabin is fourteen feet long and about ten feet wide. (Digital photo attached.) Both outer and inner walls curve a few degrees, parallel double parentheses, but the end walls are flat. The walls, ceiling, and floor are made of some new material, neither metal nor plaster nor fiberglass, in an off-white hue that hints at early morning sunlight, which I presume is for soothing the ever-unstable human propensity to moods. When I draw my finger down a light strip beside the door, the ceiling and walls glow with whatever intensity I desire. There are three lamps for focused reading, round mini-spotlights that can be slid along the wall to any position one prefers. They think of everything!
    The bed is nowhere to be seen until you press a tiny, glowing button by the door, and a slab projects into the room. Touch another button, and a compartment rises from beneath the slab, containing pillows. The bed is dressed with linen sheets and a light wool blanket. Real linen and wool: no expense has been spared. Press another button, and a synthetic wood desktop pops out of the facing wall, a padded spinal-friendly seat automatically unfolds from beneath it. The desk is equipped with the inlaid max , symmetrically positioned beneath its wall screen (invisible when not in use), plus a single drawer for stationery materials, containing at present only a mini-printer and the resident’s guide, a wafer-thin e-book of 2,200 pages, titled The Manual , a kind of sacred scripture for the voyage.
    On another wall, inbuilt drawers contain clothing. More buttons—closet doors disappear into the walls, no sharp edges to hurt an old fellow during storms at sea. Note of interest: I brought along my