Return to Tomorrow - Chapter V - Where in Space are We?

The way our viewpoint character "joined" the crew of the Hound of Heaven means we never got a look at its outside, did we?  But the author does take a moment to describe how it's laid out.  And how badly it's maintained.

The bridge was 'midships, deck running the total diameter and perpendicular, like all decks, to the line of march. Like a belt around her center ran the observation ports and jutting a trifle from her otherwise smooth lines were the bridge wings, bubbles of gamma and psi proof glass from which a landing could be conned. The metal controls were dull beneath a coating of scum and the meter faces and screens were smudged with fingerprints. Half the dials were broken and the deck coating was worn through to the metal in the most frequented places. But it was a bridge and while on it one had the feeling of silence and smartness.

Okay, I'm a little confused.  I'm assuming the Hound is more or less rocket-shaped, because come on, 1954.  But the bridge is in the middle of the ship, so it's more like modern ocean-going vessels, which have a bridge on a tower around the ship's center.  Except the Hound's bridge probably isn't jutting out of the hull, because that's not aerodynamic and this thing is capable of atmosphere landings.  And the bridge deck is running the diameter of the vessel - i.e. the width of the rocket - but perpendicular to the line of march, which I'm assuming is the direction the ship flies.  So this bridge "deck" is just a section of one of the much longer decks running the length of the vessel?  Why'd they stick it in the middle where you have to get in "bridge wings" to see what's going on rather than up in the nose?  Maybe Hubbard eventually realized the advantages in sticking a cockpit up front, since that's where he puts the bridges of the spaceships in his later works.

Also, the place sounds pretty grungy.  What, is the Apparatus crewing it?

Anyway, Corday's learning the ropes, one five-hour watch at a time, relieving someone named Bucky Hale to be relieved in turn by Captain Jocelyn.  Except Jocelyn doesn't physically take a place on the bridge, but sends in a substitute, an often-drunk Englishman named Swifty who flies the Hound's scout plane in case there's an atmosphere that needs exploring.  And when Corday is on watch, he's attended by a junior officer who is simultaneously watching to make sure he doesn't run off and also there to explain what everything does because again, Corday is not actually trained to do this job.

And that's Corday's new life - five hours watching the stars go by and other people operate the ship, then he's relieved and makes some final notes in a logbook before leaving to work on the ship's steering systems, then maybe five hours of sleep before he starts the cycle anew with a crappy breakfast.  Don't ask what he's eating, it's "soggy" whatever it is.

On top of this, he's also trying to learn navigation from Hale when both of them can find the spare time.  Hale warns that you can't just decide to go off somewhere, and you always need to be in search for new star charts, since they don't print these on Earth anymore "aside from a little hand-copied stuff they want fifty-hundred thousand dollars for around the spaceports."  Which is a bit weird, isn't it?  Like highway rest stops not stocking anything but the most overpriced and bare-bones road maps.  It seems that between the relativity concerns and economic uncertainty, this future society has given up on commercial space travel, even while maintaining the facilities to allow spaceships to land and resupply and take off again.

If you're hoping to learn the mechanics of astronavigation from this story, good luck.

"Now behind you, you see stuff one way and ahead you see it another. Age is strung out to the rear and run up a few hundred dozen times to the front. Wouldn't be so bad if you was always goin' or comin' from the same stars. But you ain't. So you have to calculate the spectrum for each angle of approach and departure, and the spectrum changes for every angle. So it's a pile of memory. But we navigate in close so you only have to know about a thousand spectrums for each of sixteen navigational stars and then you got identity."

I think Hale is talking about redshift and blueshift, where the observed wavelength of electromagnetic radiation appears to lengthen or shorten because the thing emitting it is moving further or closer to you, respectively.  So if you'd memorized the various spectrums of radiation emitted by various stars, then you could tell whether they were receding from or closing with your position, which would allow you to get a sense of where you were in relation to them.  Or maybe Hubbard is suggesting that the sort of energy emitted from stars varies from angle to angle, so if you memorize what kind of stuff Betelgeuse is emitting when you're thirty degrees above the galactic plane, and how Aldebaran looks rimward from it, then you can puzzle out where you are?

But if you know what stars you're looking at, couldn't you just use more conventional navigation without worrying about "spectrums" and "angles of approach?"  Or, if you have a starmap at launch, and know where you launched from, and keep records of how long and how fast you were going at various headings, couldn't you deduce your position through nothing but mathematics?

"But how do you know Earth?" Corday had consistently asked.

"Well, Earth's easy.  You just figure out where it ain't and head for where you guess it might be and pick out a pin point amongst a lot of bigger pin points and you come right on in.  You read Leckwalader on Star Selection, Mr. Corday."

Or maybe it's all just guesswork.  Oh, that Leckwalader is Algernon Leckwalader, whose "First Steps" is an unhelpful handbook to spectrum navigation that uses so many "ifs" and "probably"s that it's little surprise Hale turned out the way he did.

Also, no navigational beacons hanging out in space, emitting signals to tell ships where they are?  No satellites in Earth orbit to guide spaceships home? 

Anyway, as vague and unhelpful as Hale and Leckwalader are, Corday gradually learns how to use a "celestolabe" well enough that he can guess which star he's sighted on.  He also grows familiar with the Hound's maneuvering system, which has been rebuilt three times now, so that only sixteen of her sixty maneuvering jets (thirty each in rings around the nose and tail) still work, and their fuel tanks have been converted to water storage tanks while the jets now run off fuel from the "chemical landing" tanks, and on top of that someone had "hidden" new steering tanks in each end of the ship.

If nothing else, this explains how the Hound ended up hitting a planet's atmosphere that one time.

So Corday gets to spend some time clomping around the hull in a space suit and magnetic boots.  And when he's not doing that, or his job, or learning to navigate, he's being quietly enraged by Captain Jocelyn's condescending orders to make sure decks get cleaned ("How can you let your people live in such filth?"), or fix communication breakdowns, or check on bad food supplies ("That confounded cook will have us all down with bellyaches.")   Or else Jocelyn is coming by to maliciously take up Corday's free time by chatting about contemporary music and such.

But there is one occasion where Jocelyn unsarcastically comments that "A few more weeks like this and you'll make a first-rate officer."  Yet all the while, Queen keeps passing by, asking how things are "with a wink and a nudge," saynomore, saynomore.

Or in other words, this chapter is mostly a montage showing how Corday is learning the space ropes.  But there's a rising tension, as Jocelyn keeps winding him up, and Corday seethes against his captivity, while Queen offers a chance for vengeance and freedom.  All the while, Corday has to deal with feelings of guilt as he wonders "how low a man of honor can fall."  What is more important, Corday's personal honor, or his liberty and ambitions?  Is it better to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and make the best of a horrible situation, to be the best damn officer Corday can be, or risk it all to retake control of his own destiny at the cost of his integrity?

Don't bother trying to answer these questions, they won't matter, as we'll see next chapter.


Back to Chapter IV

Forward to Chapter VI 

Return to Tomorrow - Chapter IV - One Deuce and Two Dames

We join Corday sitting in the second mate's cabin, not-quite-listening to someone the narration refers to only as "the Deuce" blather on about the Hound of Heaven's mechanical issues for nearly three pages straight.  It's unclear how much time has passed since the previous chapter, but there's no mention of any bandages on his twice-stabbed hand, or a still-bleeding wound, or even some old scars that bring up impotent fury, so... well, what's time on a fast-moving spaceship?

The Deuce has the Hound's blueprints spread out on a table, documents "much-chewed by cockroaches, dimmed with mold and overlaid time after time with smudged pencil marks showing a multiplicity of changes."  No, there's no digital data storage or anything, this was written before computers really took off.  Which isn't to guarantee that Hubbard would have had these guys pull the schematics up on-screen even if he'd written the story at the dawn of personal computing.

The Hound is a mess because 1) she's old, and 2) she gets tinkered with whenever she comes to port, that is "if yer lucky and the devils ain't terrin' Earth apart with er war or if yer ain't got a dictator or if yer just plain suffered in the docks."  We learn a bit about the ship's history, that it was military vessel when it was first launched two millennia ago, made entirely of the then-new "Shieldite," the first metal "that would insulate gammas" (so what, aluminum?).  But by the time the ship returned from a failed trip to "Alpha" in which half her crew jumped ship and the rest mutinied, the Hound was fifty years obsolete.  So she was set to be scrapped, only to be outfitted with a "high drive" for Ze Long Passage, and her new owners made another trip to Alpha Centauri, a trip that should only take

Nine years they figured and come back with a fortune. But you know what happens. Alpha ain't got any fortunes and never did have and greed took them farther and yer crew came home to people they didn't know... well, we won't talk about that. But yer see the mess she's in."

If there's no profit to be made in trips to Alpha Centauri, why is the Hound going that way now?

As for Corday, he's assigned to fix the Hound's bulkheads, bridge instruments, berthing, communications, and steering systems, the later of which got wrecked when the Hound "went appetite over tincup when we hit an atmosphere in Rigel Kentaurus."  All the sort of things an "engineer-surveyor" of the tenth class would know how to do, yeah?  After looking hopefully at Corday's ration of booze but being unable to get the guy to take a hint, il Deuce takes his leave.  As far as I can tell, he doesn't make a reappearance, but he wasn't really important so meh.

Corday eventually realizes the chief engineer is gone after spending some time staring down at the sixty-year-old blueprints... of a two-thousand-year-old spaceship... well, obviously they have to periodically copy them onto fresh parchment, right?  Space roaches and all that.  Except when they did they kept using "spelling so ancient that it almost required a linguist to translate," just to keep things interesting.

Anyway, Corday notices there's someone standing at the door, who turns out to be the girl who was hanging on Jocelyn's arm back at that bar.  She's "poised and indolent, looking at him, her eyes soft, a little taunting," wearing clothes "designed to show what they were supposed to hide."  A woman who knows she's pretty and knows how to use her looks to maximum effect.  One of them fatal femmes, in other words.

She introduces herself as "Mistress Luck," tsk-tsks about the "beastly little room they've given you," then... wait, the start of the chapter said this was the second mate's cabin... oh, the second mate is the ship's navigator, so that's probably the position Corday has been enslaved to fill.  So the Deuce must've been an engineer or something.  So why was he called the Deuce?

Anyway, Corday's head is spinning only partially because of Mistress Luck's perfume, and his thoughts turn to Chica... oh, that's right, the girl he left behind.  Anyway, he takes a panicked moment to wonder how old she'll be when he returns.

She mustn't wait!  She mustn't.  But she would be happy for two years and hopeful.  Then she would worry a little for three.  And at last she would have to assume that he was dead.  The long passage would never occur to her.  It was not too well known.  The ships which returned were few, and new ones seldom joined the strange trade.

That strange, rarely-profitable, and life-destroying trade.  Like if I showed up in port tomorrow on a ship full of poodle skirts and doo-wop music and had to come to terms with the fact that Elvis was long dead.

She mustn't wait.  And yet fear told him that she would.  And the years would pass by--

Mistress Luck was pouring him a stiff drink.  "Now you mustn't neglect your rations.  That keeps a man going, keeps him from thinking.  You don't want to think, you silly boy.  Why think?  The Universe is broad."

See, this is how you deal with bored sailors - not mind-crushing psychology, but mind-numbing alcohol.

But no sooner does Miss Luck pour Corday a drink than Captain Jocelyn appears in the doorway to tell Ms. Luck "I've a thing or two to be done."  The lady gives Corday some last advice to not let the others bully him and reminds the guy that he's third in command, at which words Jocelyn "twitched at his belt" - his gunbelt?  And it's his hand that's twitching, right, and not-

Anyway, Jocelyn informs Corday that "it is part of my lady's duties to see that officer's country is comfortable," but advises the newcomer to not "make yourself too comfortable, Mr. Corday."  And he clarifies that Corday has yet to earn third-in-command status.  And then he takes Mistress Luck with him and slams the door behind them.

Well that was something.  No, this isn't the herald of any sort of love triangle as Corday tries to steal Jocelyn's girl all while agonizing over whether to remain faithful to Chica back on Earth - unlike Deuce, Mistress Luck will make reappearances in later pages, but as best I can remember she's just kind of there.  Not sure what narrative purpose she serves other than to establish Jocelyn's heterosexuality.  No sodomy in the captain's quarters on this boat.

Corday immediately opens the door and rushes into the hallway to watch them leave, I guess in case they start tearing off their clothes en route to Jocelyn's quarters?  But then a heavy voice, one made husky with years of tobacco use, observes "Well, well, sonny.  So you run afoul of that."  The newcomer is a "heavily, even magnificently" dressed woman, an old and flabby woman, I'm talking rolls of "white, lardulous flesh," but "her eyes were young and there was a coquetry in her voice" that makes Corday shudder.

The newcomer advises young Corday to reflect on what happened to the previous second mate (without telling him what happened to Corday's predecessor), and joins the list of people who've told him that he has much to learn.  Especially about ladies, if he's interested in someone like Mistress Luck - after all, "Takes experience to know what a man wants.  Lots of experience, Mr. Corday."

So yes, so far every female character in this story has hit on our hero, with the exception of the runner from the previous chapter, presumably because she was too young and too nervous to try.

Cigars and lard eventually introduces herself as Queen, the only Queen among the 120 people on the Hound, and someone who knows and is friends with all the rest, "even the ones the sawbones drove daffy."  Corday makes the mistake of wondering if Queen is married, and is flatly told that she was, once, but he died ten ship-years and several sidereal centuries ago.

Well, the devil with it.  It's over and last trip I couldn't even find his grave.  There was a city on it.  Would have amused Jerry.  Buildin' a city on his bones.  You got any cigars?

Awkward.  But this isn't a strictly social call.

Queen looks around for eavesdroppers, and then in a low, urgent voice talks about how Corday is "the first chance we've had," someone educated enough to navigate the ship and well-connected to contemporary society, and someone who does not want to be on the boat.  To Corday's credit he tries to explain that his family is actually broke, but Queen presses on about how few of the crew is here by choice and how much of a devil Captain Jocelyn is.  Plus, there's enough loot on the Hound to smooth any transactions back to terrestrial life.  You can see where she's going with this.

"That's mutiny?"

"Call it an ugly word if you like.  There's no law in the long passage but a captain's and captains come and go.  They come and go, kid.  You understand me?  And there's only one way to go on the long passage."

"If you mean murder-"

"More ugly words.  Call it murder.  You won't get spattered.  Will you play?"

And after hesitating for a moment, Corday asks what he has to do.  Queen tells him to lay low for now, learn all he can about operating the ship, figure out how to chart a course for Earth, and fix the Hound's problems as best he can.  And then when everyone's ready, he'll get a signal and it'll be go-time.  Corday's shaking with excitement at the prospect of getting home sooner than later, and Queen departs with a wink, praising him with "You're a good boy, Mr. Corday.  I know we're in good hands."

So it looks like we've got some tension set up for the rest of the book, a countdown of doom hanging over Captain Jocelyn's head until the crew rises up against the cruel taskmaster and brings him to justice in a thrilling and satisfying battle sequence.

Looks can be deceiving.


Back to Chapter III

Forward to Chapter V 

Return to Tomorrow - Chapter III - When Navigation Aids Attack

One day, or night, an indeterminate amount of time after the previous chapter, a nervous fourteen-year-old girl enters the sickbay and eventually is able to rush out an order from the captain for Mr. Corday to get to the bridge, quickly.  Dr. Strange complies by untying his patient, but asks this Snoozer, Captain Jocelyn's runner, for the latest news.  But while Snoozer is fidgeting and "fascinated" by the head doctor, she's been given strict orders not to talk, even when Strange tries to bribe her with not one but two "cognac bonbons."

I'm not sure if these are alcoholic candies or just brandy-flavored treats.  I'm also not sure whether Snoozer is shy by nature, crushing on Corday a little, or having a natural and understandable reaction to being in the presence of a known psychologist.  Or maybe she's uneasy for another reason, since just when it looks like she'll accept the candy bribe and spill to the doctor, she becomes "suddenly conscious of a bruise on her wrist which she began to nurse."  Stay classy, Captain Jocelyn.

Whatever the reason, Snoozer tears herself away from the offered sweets with a sigh, leading Corday from the med bay to the bridge, and with that the narration focuses on our main character again.  Corday's had time to think about what he'll say when he has a proper face-to-face encounter with the man who imprisoned him, but the author doesn't actually tell us about the rant Corday's been preparing because it won't matter.  Instead our hero focuses on following little Snoozer - oh, and he thinks she's "very pretty, would be more so if she ever washed her face or combed her hair."  Gonna give the author the undeserved benefit of a doubt and assume that this is a platonic appraisal of a minor's beauty.

Corday doesn't pay a whole lot of attention to his surroundings as he's led through the Hound of Heaven, since he considers it "a very temporary prison and he was little interested in her."  He does notice that it's a "complicated" ship with multiple decks and no wasted space, and is surprised by the number of children in the berths he passes, and notes all the women hanging around playing cards or listening to a storyteller in the mess hall, and the whole time Corday is on the lookout for an airlock leading to a "space lifeboat" he could take to Earth.  But other than all that, he's not paying attention.

After one last ladder, helpfully labeled with a scrawled sign of "Bridge Country," Corday arrives on a deck featuring "a thick double port at the blackness of space and the blazing stars," which I'm taking for a window.  Right?  I mean, it might be a heavy entry/exit port, but then how could he see the stars through it?  At any rate, Corday is directed to an open door by "the gangling pasty man who had held in the dive," the guy known as Gow-eater, who must have been silently shadowing him the entire trip.

A frightened Snoozer flees, and Corday comes face-to-face with his nemesis once again.  Jocelyn is in an archaic "chart room" featuring three-dimensional maps, a globe, a "ledge for computation," and honest-to-Space-God compasses for plotting courses.  And not magnetic compasses, the kind you use to precisely draw circles.

And as a I said, whatever rant Corday had prepared doesn't matter, because before he can get started Jocelyn begins talking without even looking up, plus his "presence" just silences the young man.  The captain orders Corday to take a seat so he can start learning his new job.

Alan hesitated and then spoke angrily.

"Captain Jocelyn, you seem to have decided that I would do a lot of things.  I do not intend to do them.  You have taken me, without my consent, into a rotten life.  I dare say you consider yourself very well above the law.  But let me promise you, before we go further, that the first port into which we call will find me before the authorities bringing charges for kidnapping.  I have no intention-"

Jocelyn looked up and his mouth curled.  "You are a fool, Corday.  Sit down."

Well, our hero isn't one to take such arrogant disrespect sitting down.  He feigns sitting down on one of the magnetic-footed stools, but then dives for Jocelyn's gunbelt and pistol sitting on a desk among charts and pens.

Now in case you didn't get a chance to use one during your education, old-school compasses are basically two legs connected by a hinge, which can be opened or closed depending on how wide a circle or arc you want to draw.  One leg holds a pen or other writing implement, while the other has a spike you stab into your paper or whatever to anchor the device.

I bring this up because

Instantly the sharp pointed compasses came up and stabbed.  They bore straight through muscle and bone and pinned Alan's hand to the chart board, points penetrating all the way through and a half an inch deep into the wood.

Though most compasses I believe don't have spikes long enough to stab through the width of an adult male's hand and still dig into the surface below.

In agony Alan struck with his free fist, wrenching at his imprisoned hand the while.  Jocelyn deflected the blow and struck back.  Alan reeled and slumped, held up only by the impaling compasses.

And I'm a bit curious how heavy these particular compasses are if they're able to pin Corday's hand to the table so securely.  Maybe they're technical drawing tools that were also designed with close combat in mind.

Jocelyn chides that Corday has much to learn, "But he looked different for a moment, his eyes probing hopefully into the slack face of the younger man."  Maybe it's a Sith thing where the apprentice is expected to hate and try to kill the master.  At any rate, Jocelyn removes the stabbing compasses and gives Corday a lecture, about how he's young and has "a lot of romantic nonsense in you about the freedom of the individual."  In fact, Jocelyn insists he's doing Corday a favor, offering a position of responsibility like this, one that will surely pay well once they're back from their "short cruise" of a few weeks.

Corday asks Jocelyn to "Do me the honor of not lying," showing the captain that he understands a bit about relativistic space travel.  Jocelyn asks if Corday knows "the latest" about such physics equations, and when the surveyor-engineer asks why the captain would be interested, delivers a good page-long rant.

Jocelyn looked at him contemptuously.  "Do you suppose, Mr. Corday, that I enjoy, that anyone on this ship enjoys the fate of the long passage?  Do you think that we want this sentence to continue forever?  Are you such a fool as to believe that people in such ships as this have no hope of a country, a society, of belonging?

I don't think society changes that much in fifty years or so.  I mean, the gadgets will the different, the music will the weirder, and your home country may have decided that perhaps people shouldn't be forced to go to separate schools based on the color of their skin and how a couple's genitalia match up shouldn't be the deciding factor in whether or not they can marry.  But the core values of that nation, its identity, shouldn't have changed.

Unless you took off from like the USSR and came back to a modern Russian kleptocracy, I guess.  But then you can just join a "nostalgia for the good old days" message board somewhere.

Or maybe these people really can't belong or fit in with their former countries.  Maybe they should go somewhere and start a colony somewhere.  The bottom line is, if they all hate "the fate of the long passage," get off the damn spaceship.

"What are we?" he cried in sudden rage.  "Outcasts.  Pariahs.  We land and are gone a few weeks in our lives and we return to find that years have stripped away everything we have left.  On a normal fifty light-year voyage, a century can pass on Earth.  And what happens in a century, Mr. Corday?  We age in weeks on the long passage.  Earth and the Universe age by decades.  And who wants us?  Who will be there when we return?  What government?  What technologies?  We bring back wealth from the stars to the descendants of those who commissioned us.

This kind of begs the question of whether this "long passage" commerce is even economically viable.  I mean, why would you throw your life away taking a cruise to Manco for a shipment of lepertige fur, or whatever, if there's no guarantee that there will be any demand for your goods when you got back?  Or that the firm that commissioned your trip would still be in business?  Or that there would be a functioning civilization when you returned, and not a bunch of irradiated, mutant-infested ruins?  Or heck, maybe there are buyers for your goods, but two decades after you took off, another more advanced spaceship set out and came back with the same stuff before you even got to your first stop, so the market is glutted and you operate at a huge loss.

We speak archaic tongues more ancient on every trip.  Our learning is nothing, and in any society we would misfit and starve and we're outward bound again.  Do you know what it is to be without a country, Mr. Corday?  Without people?  Without a home?  Who cares what happens to us.  We have this little hell of a ship.  Not even another engaged on the long passage can be our friend.  We are out of time, out of step.  We are nothing!

Airlock's in the med bay, angst-lord.

"Ponder if you want the joy of seeing the centuries crush and destroy whatever we leave behind us.  It's an empty sight, Mr. Corday.  We are hated and we do not belong."

"Which is why I did you such a favor by kidnapping you."

This impassioned speech about the horrible fate he's sentenced Corday to tuckers Jocelyn out, and he has to drink down some medical powder before continuing.  He again asks Corday if there's any new "time equations," something he might want have to check from the professionals rather than any random engineer he happens to abduct from dingy bars.  Corday takes a bit of sadistic revenge by informing the captain that there aren't any, bringing Jocelyn to a long silence.

But then the captain recovers, and explains how there's a lot of work for someone with Corday's education aboard a spaceship like the Hound.  As far as the crew is concerned the ship is sixty years old, but in actuality the vessel is two thousand years out of date, so there's plenty for Corday to fix with his "newer technology."  Uh, I guess that's mental technology or something, since there's no mention of Corday's big bag of fancy tools.  Point is, Corday "is here, you cannot help it.  I would advise you to make the best of your situation."  Why, "it is possible" that less than five decades will have passed on Earth by the time they return, and what's half a century?

Alan looked bleakly at the black heavens and the blazing stars.  He was stunned even though he had known.  Half a century.  Half a century.  How old would his girl be then?

However old she is now plus fifty, dumbass.

And she would wait.

Really?  If her father's forbidding her from getting married until certain conditions are met, I'm skeptical that she's in such control of her marital status that she'd be able to hold out for a year or two after that initial five-year deadline passed.  Especially if people find out that Corday just disappeared one night, and there's no record of him actually getting a ticket to Mars.

Numbly he got up from the stool and fumbled his way down the ladder.  He turned once and looked back.  Captain Jocelyn was emptying a paper into a brimming drink.

I'm just having trouble accepting the drama here.  Not Corday missing his wedding, but Jocelyn and the other sailors angsting about the long passage.  Like, what about it couldn't also be applied to sufficiently old folks who look around and see a country radically different from the one they remember in their youth?  And yet there's no society of timelost octogenarians roaming around because they just don't fit in anywhere.

Maybe because their hips aren't so good.


Back to Chapter II

Forward to Chapter IV

Return to Tomorrow - Chapter II - Fuzzy Math and Hubbard's Favorite Profession

Corday is delirious, strapped into a bunk in a dark room, "his mind a seething maelstrom of nightmare."  He's being haunted by visions appearing before his waking eyes, specters formed from the shadows around him.  He's being tortured by physics equations.

Cold, dispassionate hand of science - how glibly it could write!  "When the velocity of mass approaches one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second, Time approaches zero; as mass approaches one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second is approaches infinity."  They had discovered that years and years ago and it had stood, the barricade to the long passage; and Alan saw it now with nightmare clarity.  Time approaches zero, time approaches zero, time approaches zero...

Though maybe "barricade" isn't the best term, this little equation isn't exactly preventing long-distance space flight, it just makes it a bit inconvenient.

Oh, and the author is nice enough to clarify that "time approaches zero" nonsense by adding "for the mass" in the next paragraph.  Which is to say, less time will pass for that fast-moving mass compared to a clock ticking on Earth.  So if Corday's on a spaceship flying at 108,000 miles per second, which is just shy of 58% lightspeed, and he's headed to Alpha Centauri, which is... uh-oh.

Guys, we have a problem.  Hubbard's spaceship is traveling at a little over half the speed of light, but he says it'll reach Alpha Centauri in three weeks.

Alpha Centauri is 4.367 light-years away from Earth. 

Okay, so the Hound of Heaven is simultaneously moving slower and much faster than the speed of light, let's just ignore that.  Let's do some math to figure out just how much more time is going to pass for the lovely Wossername back on Earth while Corday's shanghaied on a six-week cruise to Alpha Centauri.

Lucky for us, someone was nice enough to set up a special relativity calculator so we can plug n' chug to our physics-loving hearts' content.  If we convert 108,000 miles/second to 173,809.152 kilometers/second, and six weeks into 3,628,800 seconds, then the elapsed time for a stationary observer would be 4,453,696.8277556 seconds, or...

7.3 weeks?  That's it?  Or am I reading things wrong?

You know what?  It doesn't matter, because the Hound of Heaven isn't just going to Alpha Centauri, but other colony worlds around undefined stars.  Since we don't have the information to properly run the numbers, who cares if they wouldn't add up?

So Corday is stuck on a cruise with "the outcasts and pariahs of space," but he's not concerned with them, his thoughts are only for the girl he left behind.  He knows she'll wait for him, he's loved her since childhood, but before he can reminisce about this woman whose name I've already forgotten, Corday gets prodded by a red-faced, gray-haired, gnomish fellow.

"Hello! Awake again?" Now, now, calm down, young fellow. They say you'll be second mate and I'm to take care of you. So steady as she goes and sheer off the asteroids, eh?"

Alan spoke thickly: "Go to the devil."

Hmm, this Corday guy is growing on me.

"Dare say we'll meet, but neither of us are in a hurry, the devil gets enough from Time-zero." He laughed with delight at his own pleasantry and repeated it, "The devil gets his fill from Time-zero." This cheered him up so much that he had to skip backwards and turn a whirl. Then he peered very close and solemn at Alan. "I'm Dr. Strange.

What?!

You weren't on dope or anything when you ran away?"

"I didn't run away! I'm here from no choice!"

"Don't want to kill you. Compound Theta Seven won't work on opium. Fights it. Kills the patient. Wanted to be sure. But you're to be second when you come around. Bad case. Hard to work."

And then for no reason there's a break in the paragraphs.

Captain Jocelyn walks onto the scene, his footsteps loud in a spaceship otherwise silent save for a slight vibration.  He looks around at other beds and sleepers, and Corday realizes they're in a sick bay.  Jocelyn orders Strange to "Jar one up" because he needs a "phoneman for Second Con," and the doctor obligingly takes a needle from an eight-year-old in an oversized doctor's coat and sticks it into a "spaceman" in the cot opposite of Corday's.  Strange sheepishly warns that he can't guarantee that the crewman he jabbed is in the best condition, since he "tried to work them over but some of them are tough.  Resistant."  Corday, for example, won't even "trace" at all.

Jocelyn is not amused.

"I told you to leave his mind alone!  What do I care what happens to these cattle.  But you've got a trained brain there.  Leave it alone!  You fool, will you dabble with your confounded hypnosis-"  He quieted himself with an effort.  "Leave his mind alone, doctor.  Psychiatry or no, there's much you have to learn about men."

You can just imagine the dawning expression of glee on my face during this section.  Could it be?  Why yes, Dr. Strange is a psychologist!  He's not a major character and doesn't make nearly enough appearances, but it's just so reassuring to have a quack head-plumber around for Hubbard to ridicule after all those pulp spy stories and tales of body-swapping little people and other such nonsense.

Jocelyn orders Strange to unstrap the spaceman that just got juiced, meanwhile Corday is still confined in his bunk, searching "like an animal in a trap" for an escape.  That heavy door on one wall with the huge wheeled handles and Emergency sign might lead to an escape pod, so there's one option.  Turns out the other guy has similar thoughts.

The narration explains that the freshly-freed patient is a young blond guy with a "rayburn" across his forehead, a five-year veteran of the Venusian run, though there's no way for our viewpoint character to know that last tidbit.  At any rate, the guy with the sunburn is cunning enough to feign weakness as he's helped to his feet, before lashing out at his captors.  And it's not a Hubbard action sequence.

But he came up with a powerful blow in each hand, striking Jocelyn a heavy backhand smash in the chest and throwing the doctor aside like a sack.  There was a blazing insanity in the young man's face, caused half by drugs, half by his terror.  Even while Jocelyn staggered, the spaceman lunged for the emergency port.  Behind it there might be a lifeboat.  Beyond it might lie freedom

See?  It's an actual paragraph, no terse exclamations of improbable feats of strength.

It's also a wasted effort, as Jocelyn draws an "arc pistol" and shoots the escaping crewman.  The kid freezes with his hands on the door's wheel, staggers back, "drifting with the acceleration of the ship," grabs a stanchion, and slumps to the floor with a "mild, apologetic look" on his face.  Then Jocelyn has to get up and secure the door, because "Air was seeping out of the compartment, sucked greedily by outer space."

Why is there an airlock in the medical bay?  Wait, no, why is there an open porthole to hard vacuum in the medical bay, particularly a med bay filled with doped-up prisoners who might not want to be on the spaceship?  And a psychologist with a fondness for drink.

Or maybe the doorway to space was installed because there was a psychologist in the adjacent room, so you'd need an emergency exit, am I right?  Anyway, Jocelyn dusts himself off and orders Strange to try again with another patient, so off the good doctor goes with needle in hand and young orderly at his elbow.

It was a process Alan was to find common and necessary on the long passage - psychotherapy.  Brutal therapy.  Nothing delicate about it.  If you had to take a man's mind half away to make him useful on a ship, take it away.  Crush his memories, rob his personality, stamp out his rebellion.  There wasn't much time that could be spent, drugs were cheap and crewmen were dear.  Narco-hypnosis was the most effective speed tool.  A vessel on the long passage was never full complement and a man made into an idiot, if he could steer, was better than a full personality with revolt in his brain.

Or instead of going through all this hassle to turn shanghaied crewmen into loyal sailors, maybe it'd be easier to hire people who actually wanted the job.

Also, this all seems a bit melodramatic for a three-week cruise to Alpha Centauri.  It took longer than that to cross the Atlantic back in the age of sail, and people seemed to manage without lobotomizing anyone.

Even though Jocelyn forbade Dr. Strange from doing his thing on Corday, there's two instances where our hero wakes up to find the psychologist hovering over him, and in one case Corday is able to get a hand free and come close to throttling Strange before getting hit with a tranquilizer.  Strange later laughs the incident off with a "No hard feelings," and explains he "thought you might have had a lecture or two on your modern psychiatry stashed away in your cranium," and he was drunk and didn't want to go through the trouble of finding a book.  The doctor claims that he doesn't usually drink, "but once in a while when you come back and see things changed you want to drink."  And then he has to look away for a moment before going back to his usual bouncy, manic self.

Corday asks how old Strange is, and the doctor replies that he's been on the Flea Circus, the crew's nickname for the Hound of Heaven, for some fifty-six years.  He's evasive about his sidereal age, but Strange does mention his contemporaries just inventing the "Weaver cellular exhaustion technique" when he was a boy, and Corday knows that said technique is over three thousand years old!

Wait, what?  So this story is set x + 3,000 years in the future, but rocketships are still taking off from "racks" and Mars is the hotspot for economic opportunity instead of some place outside the solar system?

Disappointing.  Well, it turns out Dr. Strange isn't having much luck with Corday because the guy is completely immune to hypnotic suggestion, which might be what interested Captain Jocelyn to begin with.  Corday stiffly explains that a tenth-class engineer, like all noble-born children, is "proofed" in this way shortly after being born, and that "building a bridge and breaking a mind are two different things.  Leave me alone."  Then he turns his attention to the wall.

Outward bound on the long passage, outward bound to the stars.  He did not know the speed of this pariah nor how close it would come to light.  If it was as slow as ninety-four per cent it still meant that for every moment ticked by the clocks of the Hound of Heaven, hundreds passed on Earth.  If the Hound spent six weeks in a round trip to Alpha Centauri, nine years would pass on Earth."

If I've done the math right, at that speed one second would pass on the Hound for every 2.93 seconds on Earth, so that six-week round trip would end with Corday returning to find that 17-and-a-half weeks had passed on Earth, which is what, just over four months?

Also, is there a typo throwing things into even further confusion?  At the start of the chapter Hubbard's talking about the speed of light as 186,000 miles per second, which is correct give or take a couple hundred m/s, but then Corday starts 108,000 miles per second, like he rounded to 180 thousand and got the order wrong.

I guess this is why Hubbard eventually moved on to spaceships that traveled faster than light by projecting an artificial mass against Time itself to bounce the vessel forward.  It's less likely that someone's going to sit down with a calculator for a few minutes, then get up, look you in the eye, and inform you that your story's premise is just flat-out wrong.

Damn it all, I'm curious.  Okay, so the Hound of Heaven can make it to Alpha Centauri, which is 4.367 light-years away, in just three weeks.  Alpha Centauri is 41,230,000,000,000 kilometers away, so the Hound would be traveling... 1,814,400 km/s, is that right?  Six times lightspeed?  So after six weeks, or 3,628,800 seconds, at that speed, the time dilation back on Earth would be... aww, that's the square root of a negative number, and calculators hate that.

Eh, I'm a liberal arts major, maybe I've made a mistake and it all works out somehow. 


Back to Chapter I

Forward to Chapter III

Return to Tomorrow - Chapter I - Not to be Confused with the Pizza Place

We start our story off with a rocket blasting off.

Alan Corday stopped, momentarily blinded by the flash of a Mars-bound liner getting free from Earth.  For an instant the skeletal racks had flashed red against the ink of sky.  The rack that had been used now pulsated as it cooled.  Corday did not like to be blinded here in this place, even for a moment.  He wiped a tired hand against his blouse, carefully reassuring himself that his papers and wallet were still in place.

Well, I say rocket, but the wording of our opening paragraph is a bit ambiguous.  The "racks," which I'm assuming are the superstructure supporting a rocket ship as it stands on its tail on the launch pad, are what flash and glow, but there's no mention of a searing spear of fire stabbing into the sky as the snarling spaceship tears itself free of Earth's gravity.  Maybe these "racks" are some sort of magnetic accelerator that shoot vessels into space like a railgun.  And the passengers and cargo somehow don't get squashed in the firing process.

Also, "blouse."  Technically correct, in that the word can be traced back to 19th century France where it referred to a lower-class worker's smock, but not quite accurate for our modern world.

But where is Corday, and why is he worried about his wallet?

To the north glowed New Chicago, a broad humming city.  Beneath its five stages were its hungry, its sick and its lame.  Civilization was mushroomed up from a mire; the columns were pretty, the fountains in the rich gardens played many hues, cafes winked their invitations to the rich - and under it all was the beggar's whine; a shrill, lost note but steady enough to some day bring these towers in wreck.

It's not quite Neo Chicago or anything, but I suppose it'll do.  Unfortunately with the talk of "stages" and "columns" I'm having a hard time not visualizing it as one of those tiered wedding cakes.

And as for our hero,

To an engineer-surveyor of the tenth class, New Chicago was a grave in which he could bury all his years of school and field work for a pittance and eventually wander out of life as poor as he had entered it.  People were polite to an engineer tenth because of his education and breeding, but they were distant because they realized a man in need of a job must be poor.

An expertly-trained aristocratic engineer, where have we heard that one before?  Also, there's a smidgen of foreshadowing here.

Corday is visiting the crappy parts of Chicago Nova because his family's gone bankrupt and he needs a job.  Or more specifically, he wants to marry a plot device named Chica, but her father refuses to let them wed unless Corday can get his own business started in five years.  The good news is that the latest duke of Mars is just handing out the spacebux to fund his latest public works project, and an engineer tenth would be in high demand.  The bad news is that Corday is too poor to afford the trip, and none of the four spaceships he's looked at already were willing to take someone without two thousand spacebux up front.  They're especially confused that one of them fancy gentleman-engineers can't "Sell a couple of polo ponies and go cabin" to make ends meet.

And once again Hubbard is going with a Feudal Future.  This trope isn't so bad when you see it in the Dune books or Warhammer 40,000 game since they take place thousands of years from now, but this story's taking place on Earth, in the near-er future.  So it's a bit bothersome to think that the good ol' US of A is on its way to a society of hereditary titles, as opposed to our current system of political dynasties and do-nothing heirs to corporate fortunes.

At any rate, here's Corday feeling somewhat conspicuous in his white silk jacket, jumping at a black cat darting out of an alleyway as he travels along the trash-strewn streets of "the officers' neighborhood."  But then he hears something, a melody: "Strange, eerie notes, haunting and terrible, were being plucked from an ancient piano - slow music, simple and yet complex."  Entranced, the engineer is drawn to a "cheap glass building," and I immediately get distracted.  The whole building's made of glass, is that right?  And yet Corday evidently can't see through its walls, because he's surprised at the number of people he finds inside the tavern once he steps inside.  Maybe in the near-future, opaque glass is a cheaper building material than wood or something.

Anyhoo, the place is a dive, with a bloody, snoring drunk slumped outside, a stinking blue haze filling the air inside, and a buttload of people crowded around the musician.  But Corday notices "they were not listening.  They were waiting and they were afraid."  Might have something to do with the fellow playing the battered old piano.

He was a strange young man.  In this bluish light his face looked too sharp, too white, too handsome.  There were strange qualities mingled in that face, raptness uppermost now.  A helmet and spaceman's gloves lay nearly [sic] on the piano top.  A shirt and trousers, startlingly white, gave no clue to any age - but certainly they did not belong to this century.  And about the young man's waist was a wide belt of gold metal from which hung a weapon Alan had never seen before.  And the room waited, hushed.

I'm assuming that "nearly" is meant to be "neatly," or possibly "nearby."  I'm also assuming that the gold metal is gold.  And while I appreciate the notion of a throwback classic "spaceman" appearing in what is itself an old sci-fi story, what I'd appreciate even more is an explanation as to how Corday knows this guy's uniform is from a bygone era, and what contemporary spacemen look like in our story.

The hands strayed for the final notes and then hung in memory of the melody dying away now in the strings. Then the young man stood and Alan saw that he was not young. Gradually the reverie left his face, gradually other expressions began to combine in it. The man was nearing fifty and his eyes were hard. His mouth was cynical and his whole thin face was cruel. But he was handsome to the point of beauty, handsome and diamond hard.

I think it's safe to assume that any homoerotic undertones are accidental here.

The bar's owner, entranced, calls the piano player "Your worship" and asks "may we serve again," and the musician smiles - "if it was a smile" - before telling a burly old man to get the liquor flowing.  Said old burly man speaks in a soft voice that nevertheless gets the place a-shaking, "Fill up and drink to Captain Jocelyn!  Jocelyn and the Hound of Heaven."  And then, worryingly, the old man burly grabs and knocks out someone who tries to make it to the door.

Before Corday can so much as have a thought, he's spotted by the young old man, and ordered to have a seat while the burly old man starts roaring - "Two more rounds and then we'll open the books for your names.  Right ones or wrong ones, but by Jupe you better sign!"

I'm a little disappointed that our hero can't spot what's going on here.

The old young man is indeed Captain Jocelyn, but ignores Corday's offered hand, which drives him to a silent rage.  Instead he offers a Corday a drink, and instead of answering the engineer's question about whether the Hound of Heaven is going to Mars, he then commands Corday to drink.  Corday does so - "there was something in Jocelyn's being which reached out and entangled Alan's will."  Please continue to ignore any homosexual undertones.

Jocelyn ignores Corday's offered resume, doesn't seem too impressed when he's told he's looking at a trained engineer-surveyor, and we he learns Corday is only twenty-six, he declares him a child and a fool to be out on the "flats" this late at night.  Corday explains he's here because of a "private matter," Jocelyn immediately realizes a girl is involved and suggests Corday was indiscreet, and Corday loses his temper and angrily explains his backstory.  Then Jocelyn loses his temper when Corday talks about getting married, and our protagonist gets knocked to the sawdust.

Huh.  This setting has Mars-bound spaceships but sawdust is still the go-to way of dealing with messes on a bar floor.  That's kind of disappointing.

Well, Corday isn't one to be knocked on his ass with impunity, and bounces back to grab for Jocelyn's throat, only for some men to come up behind him with knives.  Jocelyn again calls Corday a "young fool" and orders him to get a drink and go home - "his hand shook as he poured the liquor, which spilled over to become a black pool on the ringed table."  But the thugs don't let go, and the burly old burly notices that they've got a vaunted tenth class engineer who would make a fine addition to their crew.  Jocelyn coldly states that Corday isn't going, but the old burly old is strangely enamored with this engineer-surveyor.

"Well, I'm blessed if I know what that is," said the burly one, "but it do sound like he might be taught one end of a celestolade from 'tother.  Built nice, too.  You'll like the Flea Circus, youngun."

"I said he wasn't going!" snapped Jocelyn.

"Shucks, skipper. You'n me, watch on watch while these logheads ride in comfort and security and here's a fine second mate-"

Okay, these homosexual undertones might be intentional.  Also, I'm a bit confused - wasn't Jocelyn just introduced as the captain?  So why can't he seem to give these people orders?  Why-

"I'll sign if you're going to Mars," said Alan.

Jocelyn looked at him in deep contempt.

"Mars, why sure.  Sign to Mars.  Gow-eater, take your slimy paws off that youngun and get the articles."

Well, there's mistake number... I'm going to say three, for the good Mr. Corday.  First mistake was not leaving the bar immediately upon seeing the mesmerized look of Jocelyn's audience, second mistake was pushing the captain's angry button.  The fourth mistake will come shortly.

Jocelyn exits by draining his glass, grabbing some girl whose "dreamy and veiled" eyes are nonetheless locked on Corday, and exiting with her to go clothes shopping.  And I guess while Jocelyn was doing that, Corday must have signed the paperwork, because he looks down to see his name on it.  Though I suppose someone might have signed it for him, after hearing him say his name once while introducing himself to Jocelyn, in a rowdy bar shaking from the shouts of the burly old guy.

At any rate, it's only after his name is on the paper that Corday notices that the Hound of Heaven is "Outward Bound for Alpha Centauri, Betelgeuse and Other Ports of Call."  And this would be mistake number four.

"Now, now," said the burly one, "you'll get to Mars some day."

"You can't hold me!" shouted Alan.  "You can't do it!  You're on the long passage!"

Unfortunately they can hold him, even when Corday desperately tries to squirm and thrash free.  But the big guy, shortly after introducing himself as Bucko Hale, gives our hero a well-aimed blow, and then wraps a belt around Corday's torso.

"No need to attrac' a patrol," said Bucko.  "Now the rest of you boys step up and sign and we'll have a merry time.  Wine, women and billions, me boys, and a nice, long look at history-"

Yeah.  Our hero's been shanghaied.  If you skim through the Wikipedia article, you'll learn that this practice was caused by a demand for unskilled labor on sailboats, exacerbated by stuff like the California Gold Rush luring sailors to dry land, and was more or less stamped out by the early 20th century thanks to a combination of legislation and technology changing how ships were run.  But I guess Hubbard likes his throwbacks to old pirate stories and whatnot, so here we are, with a shanghaiing in the space age.

Taking place in a city with a sprawling slum area full of people desperate for work.  But despite this, the Hound of Heaven's officers resort to captivating a bunch of bargoers with music and beer to get them to sign, and then they kidnap someone who isn't actually qualified for the position they want him in.

Guess the story wouldn't work if the hero wanted to take that long voyage.  We need to have some drama over whether or not he'll get home in time to marry that girl, after all.


Back to the Intro

Forward to Chapter II

Return to Tomorrow - Intro - Physics is a Cruel Mistress

I guess you could say we're going back to the future.

Return to Tomorrow was published in 1954, towards the tail end of Hubbard's "Golden Age pulp writer" period but before his "criminal cult leader" period began in earnest.  It actually debuted four years earlier as To the Stars, a two-part story in the monthly Astounding Science Fiction, which is why the only Wikipedia page for "Return to Tomorrow" refers to a Star Trek episode.  And I think this means that the book cover is lying to me when it claims this story is "An ACE BOOK Original Novel, Never Before Published."  Not even an asterisk explaining "as a complete story" to cover their asses.

As you can see from that cover, this here's a vintage sci-fi story.  We've got classic rocket ships landed on their tail ends, we've got sleek weapons that can only be ray guns, and we've got useless fins on the helmets of the "space suits," which I refer to with sarcastic quotation marks because the things don't even have gloves.  At least put on some mittens, dearie, space is cold.

Our story hook on the back cover is "Shanghaied Into Eternity" - our protagonist Alan Corday is doomed to be captured by a Captain Jocelyn to crew a spaceship, since "not even wealth and women were sufficient to fill his crew vacancies."  That's because of the terrible price you pay for sailing between worlds, which will be elaborated on later.  So we're due for a mutiny, swashbuckling pirates, and "the acrid fumes of a war of annihilation" as Mr. Corday tries to get home.

Also, I'm tickled that "women" is listed as a lure to entice sailors.

"You there, strapping young lad!  Would you like to leave your old life behind and sign on for months of labor inside a cold steel shell wrapped in the colder void of space, possibly to never see your home world again?"
"No."
"You might get laid."
"I've reconsidered."

But what is this fearsome price that all star sailors must pay?  Perhaps the prologue will elaborate.

Space is deep, Man is small, and Time is his relentless enemy.

Do we have to be so disparaging?  Can't we say that Man is big, but Space is just bigger?

In an ancient and forgotten age, 

The early 20th century.

he first discovered the barricade.  Before space travel first began he knew the barricade was there.  It was an equation.  Without the equation, the basic equation of mass and time, Man could not have progressed beyond barbaric fire.

Er... I think we had at least made it to the Medieval Age, maybe even the Industrial Era, before busting out this particular physics equation.

But he did progress

Oh, well, objection withdrawn then.  I mean, if you are going to immediately contradict yourself...

and he used fission and his mechanicians 

Did you mean "machinations?"

became mighty and his hopes large.  But the terms of his salvation were the terms of his imprisonment as well.

AS MASS APPROACHES INFINITY, TIME APPROACHES ZERO.

Ah, I see.  As Man sits on the couch and eats microwave dinners, he gains weight exponentially, but his time runs out and he dies of heart failure.

The narrator credits this equation to Lortentz and "Fitzgerald" and especially a "theoretical philosopher" named Einstein.  With the power of this equation that Man fellow was able to colonize the Solar System, yet at the same time it "almost denied to him the stars."  And by "almost" I mean "didn't."

And yet, despite the difficulty derived by these great men and confirmed first by nuclear physicists and then by actual use, there were still those who accepted and yet defied the law, a small cohort of ships and men who, throughout the ages have kept the routes alive.  The outcasts and pariahs of extra-atmosphere travel, the cursed and shunned by Man, they course their lonely ways, far-bound but prisoners too, shackled fast by Time.

Knowing well their waiting fate, who would volunteer to become part of that thin group?

Er, the outcasts and pariahs, those cursed and shunned by-

But amongst the societies of man there are always those who are outcasts from character or force of circumstance, and there are adventurers who will not heed equations.  And so the stars were reached and partially explored despite the fact of those who made the runs.

This narrator is going to keep answering his own questions by repeating information he gave before asking them.

Also, my hunch is that's supposed to be "despite the fate of those who made the runs."

But let's get down to the brass tacks, whatever those are.  These outcasts take what's called "the long passage" to places like Alpha Centauri, which a spaceship can reach in six weeks.  Sometimes they're earnest adventurers, sometimes they're criminals and fugitives trying to evade capture.  At any rate, if they ever get back to their port of origin, they'll find it irrevocably changed, because while it's a six-week voyage for them, many years will have passed planetside.  This can be a bit inconvenient.

He who is gone for a century cannot well return.  He knows too little.  His people are dead.  He has no place and he does not fit.  And what may have begun as an adventure for a crew invariably ended in the same way - another passage out while behind them further age accumulated while the crew stayed young.

The only fraternity was within the ship.

The only hope was that some day someone might discover another equation, a solution to the barricade:

AS MASS APPROACHES THE SPEED OF LIGHT, TIME APPROACHES ZERO.

The outcasts of the long passage, those that stayed alive, never ceased to hope.

See, this is a story about time dilation.  And true to form, the author is muddling it up.

As I've said before, my career in hard science was cut short by some bad experiences in high school, so I'm not the most qualified person to discuss this topic.  But as far as I've been able to piece together, the idea goes like this - the faster you're moving compared to another frame of reference, the less time seems to pass for you by their standards.  On your spaceship zipping around at Warp Whatever, you wouldn't notice anything weird, but if you went back to Earth, you'd find that your ship's clocks marked less time on your voyage than what your departure and return times on Earth would indicate.  Thus, flying around at high speeds is a form of one-way, only-forward time travel.

As for where mass enters his equation, err... I think Hubbard's latched on to the notion of "relativistic mass," but I don't think this actually means you get bigger or anything as you approach lightspeed.  And the "time approaches zero" bit is also perplexing, since it would imply that what, as you move fast you get bigger and then stop moving at all?  It's probably better to ignore this cruel equation altogether and just keep in mind that weeks aboard a spaceship can equal years for your family back home.

Except it sounds like this story is going to be about trying to find a breakthrough new equation.  This could be problematic, a story based on solving a misunderstanding of advanced physics.

Forward to Chapter I

Mission Update

Apologies for the silence over the past few weeks, but I've been short on both free time and sporking material.  This has been rectified, however, so operations will recommence soon.

In the short term, I picked up the very last thing with Hubbard's name on it that my local used book store had to offer, a 157-page story focusing on an actually interesting subject.  I've only just started, but I look forward to learning how Hubbard will screw it up.

In the long term, I'm considering options.  The big question will be whether I continue on Blogger or go through the hassle of building my own website; either way, I'll be looking at ways to make this blog a more lucrative use of time in hopes that I'll be able to spend more of my time working on it. 

The less-big question will be what to do after this next novelette is finished.  There are one or two Hubbard titles that I'm interested in but haven't found locally yet, so I could hunt those down.  Or - and this is a radical notion - I could leave Hubbard behind entirely.  After all, there are other authors out there with strongly-held beliefs who'd rather lecture the reader than tell a good story.  And it just so happens that my friendly local bookseller had a used copy of Wizard's First Rule for dirt cheap...

If nothing else it might be refreshing to take a dip in the one genre that Hubbard vociferously disdained.  All this to say, watch this space, regular posting should resume before the end of the month.