The Winds of Altair Read Free

all the sunlight. You can't see more than five meters ahead. Your sense of distance and direction goes haywire."
    "Our sensors must be set at the wrong frequencies," Carbo answered. "Come and look at today's tapes. When we see through the animal's eyes everything is bright and clear."
    Foy blinked his narrow, deepset eyes and said nothing.
    "If a wolfcat were brought to Earth," Carbo went on, his soft voice picking up speed with enthusiasm, "it would probably be just as blind as we are on Altair VI."
    "Perhaps. Perhaps," Bishop Foy replied impatiently. "Bring the tapes to my office as soon as you can. There are many details I must discuss with you, in private."
    The picture screen abruptly went blank.
    Carbo stared at it for a moment, then made an elaborate shrug that took in his shoulders, arms, hands, and even the expression on his face. He turned to Amanda and said, "Make sure he gets plenty of food and rest. He has a lot of work ahead of him."
    Amanda gave a small sigh and motioned Jeff toward the door that led out of the control room. Jeff went with her, feeling more like a laboratory animal than a human being. I wonder if they're going to dissect my brain when this is all finished? he asked himself.

    The official name of the ship was Melvin L. Calvin , but the five hundred students, Elders, and scientists aboard called it simply, the Village.
    It did not look like the sleek starships Jeff had seen on video shows, nor like the ungainly rockets that had explored the Moon and the planets of Earth's solar system—all of which were so far away now that the Sun itself was no more than a pinpoint of light, one of the millions of stars that could be seen through the ship's viewports.
    The Village was a cluster of globes, bubbles of plastic and metal linked by spidery tubes. It had no front or back in the usual sense, no up or down. Each globe housed a few dozen people, or was a facility of some sort: a library, a meeting hall, a grassy park lined with trees.
    In actuality, the Village was like a barge or a houseboat that had no real propulsive power of its own. It had been towed from Earth to Altair VI by a squat, stubby vehicle that was little more than a massive engine with a tiny bubble of living quarters for its crew: Captain Olaf Gunnerson, his son, daughter, and son-in-law—and their computer.
    Gunnerson was a professional star-sailor, and his vehicle was nothing more than a tugboat. But it was a tug that could span interstellar distances, for a fee.
    His engines were gravity field drives, not rockets. Generating the kind of gravity warps made in nature by Black Holes, the gravity field drive allowed the human race to expand outward among the stars—again, for a fee.
    The first to go had been robots, of course. Riding the earliest gravity field ships, they had explored the dead gas giant worlds of Barnard's Star and returned in less time than it took light to span the distance. Physicists argued bitterly over whether or not the gravity drive actually propelled the ships faster than light. One of the rock-bottom principles of the universe was being shaken, and campuses all over Earth trembled with the ferocity of the debate. The younger physicists declared that Einstein had been overthrown. Their elders insisted that this was not possible; even though the ships had seemed to go faster than light, what had actually happened was that the gravity warp had bent spacetime so out of shape that the ships left the universe momentarily and then re-entered it elsewhere, lightyears away.
    The politicians didn't care which way the physicists decided. They now had a tool in their hands that they could use.
    "Colonize the stars!" they cried.
    They started to build starships, to be filled with the poorest, most ignorant, least desirable people of Earth. "Export your problems," they whispered to one another. "Send them off to where they'll never bother us again."
    But before they could do that, before they could exile the unemployed,