Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel by Michael D. O'Brien Read Free Book Online Page B

lecturing in universities, I delivered an erudite and perhaps baffling address derived from my NP materials, spiced up a bit with conjectures about warped-space / warped-time and gravity effects, drawing the audience toward the climax with my final words:
    “Does relativity relativize existence? We may feel that it does, since our psychological / perceptual / conceptual bearings are determined by planetary-based measurements, and tend to blur and even disorient us in the face of principles of cosmic physics. Yet relativity has no pretensions to being an ontological system. Indeed, philosophy may in the end prove to be a more coherent model of existence than physics.”
    As I had prearranged, at this point, the screen filled with photos of Alpha Centauri. Hubble-8 is now parked outside the orbit of Pluto-Charon, giving us the best shots of our destination we’ve ever had.
    The star Alpha Centauri is of course a close grouping of three stars: the white binary stars Alpha Centauri-A and Alpha Centauri-B, and the red dwarf Proxima Centauri (or AC-C), which revolves around the two binaries. Proxima is technically our closest neighbor, but so dense, so packed magnetically, that we will give her a wide berth. AC-A is a tad larger than our sun, AC-B a tad smaller.
    Then came the zoom photo of AC-A. Her planets appeared, all eighteen of them, in wondrous diversity, colors, sizes. Three of them are considerably larger than our Earth, but do not qualify as gas giants. Binary stars are unfavorable to the formation of giants.
    Then the zoom to AC-A-7, the planet of our desire. The seventh out from the system’s sun, slightly larger than Earth, slightly farther from its sun than Earth is from our sun. The advance probes that were sent out into the deep several years ago compose a telescope array about twenty kilometers wide, which gives us data integrated into an image the size of a pea. Increase the magnification beyond this, and we get a blur composed of square pixels. But it is blue, which may be gas clouds or may be water. Our onboard telescopes will give us steadily improving pictures, the closer we get to the destination.
    I wanted music to accompany the visuals. After considering the soaring violin in Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending , and the saccharine arias of Ciccoletti’s latest opera, The Seas of Mars, I had discarded both in favor of the magnificent drama of Holst’s The Planets .
    As the symphony progressed, a tremendous stillness settled on the crowd. Strangely, many people in the audience began weeping, mostly women, but also a few men wiping their eyes. The audience sat in silence for a few minutes, then left the auditorium one by one.
    Day 27 :
    After an early breakfast, I went down to the arboretum and found that the lighting had been dimmed, with only pinprick lights along the pathways to guide nocturnal strollers. I was alone, like an old man in a park walking his dog just before dawn. The birds had been turned off, and the sound system was playing one of Mozart’s concertos for wind instruments. I sat down on a bench and closed my eyes.
    Later, a gardener passed by and spotted me in the shrubbery.
    “Morning, sir.”
    “And a good morning to you”, I replied.
    “It’s only 0600 hours, but I could turn on the sunrise, if you’d like.”
    “No thanks.”
    “People usually start coming around 0700. That’s when I turn on the birds. Would you like the birds now?”
    “No, the Mozart is excellent. Is classical played every morning? If so, I’d make a habit of sitting in.”
    “You’re welcome any time, night or day. The music isn’t always classical though. I like variety, so we do a lot of ethnic and folk. African. Celtic. Some soft Blues.”
    “Jazz?” I asked.
    “I’m a Jazz-fiend myself, Neo-Orleans and Post-J, but I listen to it in my own room.”
    “How about Ancient Rock?”
    He frowned. “We don’t do that to the trees.” He shook his head. “It warps proper molecular