Chapter 1: The proposal

If I am being stuffy, my name is Doctor William Axon Ph.D. Otherwise, it's Bill Axon, a lecturer in Computer Science at USA, the University of Southern Arkansas in Magnolia. My undergraduate degree is in mechanical and electronic engineering, gained before the computing bug infected me. I'm also an amateur astronomer.

Late one Friday afternoon in early May, I was working in my office, thinking about my lectures for the next week. Or rather, I had thought about my lecture material, and was now goofing off. My eyes were gazing vacantly at the ubiquitous Anniversary Tower as the thought passed through my mind that I had never seen ducks on the Duck Pond. I was now deciding what I would do over the weekend.

A colleague from the Physics Department came in through the open door.

"I say Bill, Could I have a word with you?"

"Sure, James, what can I do for you?"

James Burton is a Professor of Quantum Physics at the same college. He has some advanced articles to his name, which are a bit beyond me. I know because I had tried to read some of them. Quantum Physics seems to have nothing in common with the real world. I didn't think he would appreciate being asked for the 'For Dummies' version of his articles.

"I'd really like to chew the fat with you. Perhaps bounce some ideas off you."

"Sure. Take the weight off your feet. I'm more or less finished for the day."

He sat down, crossed his legs and put his fingertips together, and said, "Tell me, Bill, do you watch 'Star Trek'?"

"Yes."

"What do you see as the main problems in building the 'Enterprise'?"

"Do you mean a working version?"

"Yes. I'd like to build a small one so that we have a proof of concept and all that."

"Well, James, you'll need the hull structure, which is airtight. As for the drive, that would probably come in two parts: what in the television series they called the 'Impulse' drive and then there was the 'Warp' drive."

"That describes my thoughts exactly. Would it surprise you to know that for some time, I've been thinking about the 'Warp' drive, to give it, its 'Star Trek' name."

"I thought that Einstein had proved that you can't travel faster than light and that a 'warp' drive was purely fiction. How do you get around that?"

"Time travel is the answer. He didn't prove that time travel was impossible. Let me give you an example. Suppose that you want to travel a thousand light years and that you can travel at half the speed of light."

"Yes. That would mean a trip of two thousand years, just for the travel time, and not counting time for acceleration and deceleration."

"Correct! Now suppose that at the same time, you traveled back in time by nineteen hundred and ninety-nine years. How long would the trip appear to take?"

"Would that be only one year?"

"Yes, and what would your apparent speed be?"

"Would it be a thousand times the speed of light?"

"Correct, again. It would appear to be a thousand Cee," James sounded as though he was leading a slightly retarded student through a thought process.

"So how do you travel through time?" I asked.

"There have been experiments using lasers at the University of Connecticut, which I have been trying to replicate. They are about the distortion of the time component of the space-time continuum. The stumbling block has always been the sub-light drive, but I think I may have come across something that I can develop. The experiments that I've been carrying out on the application of lasers to subquantum kinetics have produced a totally unexpected force."

He took a breath and continued, "So that I could measure the force, I turned the experiment on its end, and mounted the whole thing on a wooden pallet. You see, to measure the force, I lifted it onto a couple of large balance scales that I borrowed from the sports department, and measured the decrease in weight. The trouble is that they need their scales back from time to time. It's making my work more difficult. Now then, how can I set up a suitable environment for further development?"

"Do you mean a working spaceship hull?"

"I suppose so, although it may be a little too early to be thinking of that. One thing about it, though, it mustn't cost the earth."

"How big do you see your drives being?"

"There's just the one. It's a combination of both the 'Star Trek' drives. At the moment, it's about the size of three filing cabinets like those."

He waved at my filing cabinets. Each was about a foot and a half wide, three feet deep and five feet tall. A quick mental calculation gave a total volume of sixty-seven and a half cubic feet.

"Hmm ... I wonder. Would an old airplane body suit you?"

"It might do, particularly if it still had its undercarriage, and if it didn't cost too much."

"How much is too much?"

"Almost anything, at the moment," he chuckled.

"Perhaps we could get a backer?"

"We?"

"You didn't think I'd just walk away from this did you? It's too exciting! In any case, you'll need a lot of ancillary equipment: computerized controls, navigation gear, radar and communications equipment, et cetera. Won't you?" I continued, "I've got one or two ideas that might prove helpful. How can we see where we are going at faster-than-light speed?"

"I'm not altogether sure! I think we'll find that out on a short local trip."

"Why don't you leave it with me and I'll look into things."

He agreed, thanked me for my input, and got up and left. I continued to sit while I thought through the problem of getting a suitable aircraft body and, hopefully, find a backer. I suddenly realized that I was thinking back to front. Find a financial backer and the airframe would look after itself!

I picked up my phone and rang an entrepreneur friend of mine, Steve Edmunds.

"Steve? It's Bill Axon. I think that you could help me with a problem. Do you think we could meet this evening to discuss it? No. Not over the phone. There are too many wagging ears about. The bar at the Magnuson Hotel, at eight? That's fine by me. See you then."

I decided to eat in the College Cafeteria to save time. By eight o'clock, I was in the bar waiting for Steve to turn up. When he arrived, I got both of us drinks and we found a quiet corner for our chat.

"Right, now tell me: how much money do you need and what's so almighty mysterious about it?"

"Have you watched the 'Star Trek' series?"

"Yes," he chuckled, "Don't tell me you've met Zefram Cochrane?"