The Forever War #2.1

Awright blew the whistle two minutes early, as expected, but Rogers and I and the other two stringers got to sit for a minute while the epoxy and floor teams finished covering our stringer. It got cold fast, sitting there with our suits turned off, but we remained inactive on principle. There really wasn‘t any sense in having us train in the cold. Typical army half-logic. Sure, it was going to be cold where we were going, but not ice-cold or snow-cold. Almost by definition, a portal planet remained within a degree or two of absolute zero all the time-since collapsars don‘t shine-and the first chill you felt would mean that you were a dead man. Twelve years before, when I was ten years old, they had discovered the collapsar jump. Just fling an object at a collapsar with sufficient speed, and out it pops in some other part of the galaxy. It didn‘t take long to figure out the formula that predicted where it would come out: it travels along the same „line“ (actually an Einsteinian geodesic) it would have followed if the collapsar hadn‘t been in the way-until it reaches another collapsar field, whereupon it reappears, repelled with the same speed at which it approached the original collapsar. Travel time between the two collapsars.. . exactly zero. It made a lot of work for mathematical physicists, who had to redefine simultaneity, then tear down general relativity and build it back up again. And it made the politicians very happy, because now they could send a shipload of colonists to Fomaihaut for less than it had once cost to put a brace of men on the moon. There were a lot of people the politicians would love to see on Fomalbaut, implementing a glorious adventure rather than stirring up trouble at home. The ships were always accompanied by an automated probe that followed a couple of million miles behind. We knew about the portal planets, little bits of flotsam that whirled around the collapsars; the purpose of the drone was to come back and tell us in the event that a ship had smacked into a portal planet at .999 of the speed of light. That particular catastrophe never happened, but one day a drone limped back alone. Its data were analyzed, and it turned out that the colonists‘ ship had been pursued by another vessel and destroyed. This happened near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, but since „Aldebaranian“ is a little hard to handle, they named the enemy „Tauran.“ Colonizing vessels thenceforth went out protected by an armed guard. Often the armed guard went out alone, and finally the Colonization Group got shortened to UNEF, United Nations Exploratory Force. Emphasis on the Then some bright lad in the General Assembly decided that we ought to field an army of footsoldiers to guard the portal planets of the nearer collapsars. This led to the Elite Conscription Act of 1996 and the most cutely conscripted army in the history of warfare. So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging cutely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.