Acts of Conscience by William Barton Page B

permission to test our experimental apparatus. It was so damned little, we figured we could fire it off in one of the desert wastelands on the farside of Crater. Hell, it’s just like the Moon was in the early days, when there were hardly any colonists...”
    Only sort of like the Moon of course. Maybe halfway between the Moon and Mars? But colder than both.
    He said, “We figured it’d just be a little bang, you know? Fifty, maybe sixty kilotons... Guy in charge of authorizing potentially-destructive experiments made me read up on something called Castle Bravo , the first test of a lithium-deuteride-fueled thermonuclear bomb, back in the 1950s. Seems the scientists who put that one together didn’t know about the lithium-6 reaction. Maybe they knew about it and just failed to take it into account. Scientists are always forgetting crucial numbers. That’s why they call them experiments ... Anyway, they were surprised as hell when their nice little five-megaton bomb made a fifteen-megaton bang.”
    He said, “They made us do a space test, which of course led us to build a much bigger test apparatus. Our engineering test models suggested we develop a prototype toroidal gravity polarizer, one that could fly the ship as well as test my suspicions about event horizon canceling in a massively accelerated inertial reference frame. People thought we were nuts.
    “You know, those paranoid bastards not only made us test the ship in the outer system, they made us go to a point in space that placed 61 Cygni A in the line of sight between our test site and Earth. I guess they were afraid if we made a big enough bang, somebody might notice and come asking questions.
    “Made us wait ‘til Crater itself was behind 61 Cygni C relative to our position as well. Paranoid. Silly...we went to our appointed position, ran it up to full throttle, accelerating directly toward 61 Cygni A...”
    Strachan said, “What the hell for?”
    “Funny you should ask that. I wanted to accelerate away from the system’s barycenter. Just in case, you know?” He shrugged. “Ntanë insisted we aim for something that could catch our debris cone, if worse came to worst...
    “So we fired the test apparatus and discovered ourselves on the opposite node of our orbit around 61 Cygni, at the center of an expanding energy shell that appeared to have originated in the experimental device, basically a soft gamma ray burst in the few hundred megaton range. As if the ship had exploded or something.”
    As if. Or something. His calm amusement wasn’t the way I was imagining the scene.
    “You know, if we’d done it my way, pointed the damned thing straight up, the apparatus would have carried us to a point... oh, I think we calculated it was something like 219,000 parsecs from here in the direction of the classical constellation of Cygnus, as seen from Earth.”
    Empty space, but...
    “As it happens, zero time passes for the passengers on a Berens-Vataro starship, even a primitive one like our test apparatus, so we’d’ve popped out, instantaneously to us, somewhere in intergalactic space. Think how surprised we’d’ve been when we figured out where. And, of course, when. It turned out the test apparatus moved us at something like fifteen cee...”
    The calculator in my head chattered softly. 14,600 years? I said, “It would’ve been interesting if you’d gotten home some time around the year 30,000...” Imagine that. Will things be different then? Or, trapped in our own corner of space with no Berens-Vataro drive...
    That same smile and hapless shrug. “Well, no Mr. du Cheyne. In order to run a reverse geodesic, conditions at our emergence point would have had to mirror those at our departure point. They wouldn’t be, of course...”
    No, of course not. Stupid.
    He said, “No, we would’ve wandered around the universe, hopping here, hopping there, completely at random, until the end of time. Or until our supplies ran out. Whichever came