Jeffrey D. Kooistra.

Dykstra's War.

Part 1.

Young Again

I.

Genius

"Well, Professor Dykstra, I recommend that you try using a cane."

"A cane?" the old man said. "The dawn of the twenty-second century, and the best that medicine can offer me is a cane?" He said it not with bitterness, or distress, but only ironic amusement.

"I'm sorry, Professor, but you are one hundred twenty-six years old. There's a limit to what we can do with muscle and nerve past the century mark," the doctor said.

"That's quite all right. I expected as much. Now, where might one acquire a cane?" Dykstra stood, steadying himself against the chair until sure of his balance.

"I had one brought up for you." The doctor produced a shiny, titanium walking stick, with a soft but firm handle and a cushion on the tip. "The stud here on the side adjusts the length." He handed it over.

James Christian Dykstra, the archetypal genius of the age, looked over the walking stick, weighed it in his hand, thrust it firmly into the floor, and said, "Serviceable, but short on character, I think, Doctor."

"You don't like it? But it's the best on the market."

"I have something else in mind," Dykstra said. "But I'll use this one for the time being."

And how much time will that be? he thought as he left the university medical center. He was ancient, well beyond the average age of dying in even this era of extended life, with all his roads traveled and behind him, save one that went on but a short distance ahead.

He decided to walk through the quad rather than summon his car to come get him. It was a beautiful day, after all, cane or no cane.

He saw a student at a picnic table, face buried in a textbook of familiar red, stylus in hand, its tip resting on his computer pad. "May I see what you're working at, young man?" Dykstra asked, walking up to the boy.

The student looked at him. Dykstra wondered what he saw. "If you want . . . sir. It's 4-space physics, the Dykstra field equations," the youth said. My physics, Dykstra thought, and it was clear the boy didn't recognize him.

"I recall it well," Dykstra said, examining the book, "from way back in my early days. Is there some particular difficulty you're having? Maybe I can help you."

Skepticism clouded the student's face, then a resigned "it's worth a try" look. "Problem twenty-two. I'm clueless."

Dykstra read the problem, then looked away, letting his mind work, seeing if he still had it in him to solve such problems. He had it. "From the symmetry of the situation, what you should consider is the projection of the 4-space field, its 3-space shadow if you will. Then integrate from zero to pi. The answer is 45.2 joules per meter to the fourth." He smiled, eyes twinkling.

The boy stared at him, his face jumping from pure disbelief to respect bordering on awe. "That's the answer in the back! How did you know?"

"I see it in my mind," Dykstra said. "I see the shape of the field."

"But the only person I've ever heard of who can visualize 4-space is James Christian Dykstra himself."

Dykstra smiled.

"Can I have your autograph?"

Dykstra obliged, though he was embarrassed that his signature was but a shaky shadow of its former self.

He left the boy and continued across the lush lawn to the parking area where his car waited. "Open," he said. The door slid aside. The seat moved outward. He dropped into it and was pulled inside. "Home." Gently the car lifted on its Dykstra repulsors, the fields interacting with the matter of the ground to raise the car into the sky and deliver the inventor of Dykstra field physics to his home in the mountains.

Home was a house in a meadow two kilometers up the western side of the Sierra Nevada range. The car grounded and Dykstra went inside, putting the cane aside since another of his inventions-his world-changing inventions-reduced the interior gravity to half standard. "Ahhh, home sweet home."

James Christian Dykstra, acclaimed by the whole Solar System as the smartest man in the world, was feeling his age. He accepted it philosophically, that he was old, that his days were numbered. But he had made more than his share of marks on human civilization . . . when he was younger.

He sat down in his favorite chair, looking out the window past the meadow and into the distance where the sun was creeping toward the horizon, and reminisced-the old man's entertainment.

He remembered those wild days in college, before the Collapse early in the 21st century, with his friends Jamie and Jenny. Ah, Jenny-she'd written his biography. In a way, she'd loved him, and he, her, though it had gone unconsummated. And then the Collapse years, the desperation, and the Moon Rush following, when he'd been instrumental in getting people to return to space to stay. He recalled his meeting with Paul McAndrew, the first Protestant saint. The man had shaken his hand, then looked at him funny, and said, "You are James Christian Dykstra, and through you God will give Man the stars." The memory still sent shivers through him.

The prophecy had come true, after a fashion. Dykstra field physics had made possible so many dreams of science fiction. Force shields, artificial gravity, repulsor beams, cheap fusion-all of these had resulted from his genius. With his inventions and his physics had come new weapons, weapons that the Belt was now using against the Solar Union. He felt bad about that. But humans will be humans.

Still, if mankind reached the stars, it would be by leaping off his giant shoulders, even if he wouldn't be around to see it.

He sighed.

Rousing himself from his memories, and from his chair, he went into the kitchen.

A package sat on the table, a System Patrol courier container. There was a spot for a thumbprint on the top. If the spot was coded for his print, the package would open at his touch. If not, high explosives would detonate, taking out him and the house, too.

He placed his thumb on the pad without hesitation.

The hemispherical endcaps of the container slowly separated, then the middle section split at the top and folded out. Inside was a data cube and a decidedly odd-looking implement, which reminded Dykstra of a hand weapon, though it wouldn't fit a hand properly. A tube projected from one end of the thing, out of the main bulk of two ten-centimeter diameter spheres and a heavy, padded loop-a handle, perhaps.

Dykstra left the implement in the container and took the data cube to his terminal. The cube booted and he redirected the output to his TV screen, which covered half the north wall. A man in a major's uniform appeared. "Hello, Professor Dykstra. I am Major Gerald Moore of System Patrol Intelligence. Within this cube you will find all the data we've been able to wrestle out of the device in the courier container. It's extremely dangerous, so I'd recommend that you follow the operating instructions our scientists were able to come up with before handling it. We lost a man finding out how to work the thing.

"The device is a weapon of extraterrestrial manufacture. That's right, we've encountered aliens. That fact is not for public consumption. You know what that means. The story of how we came into possession of the device is also in this cube.

"Intelligence has been able to find out how to work the weapon, but not how it works. We know how to fire it, how to adjust the length of the beam, and how to adjust the beam intensity. We also know that the beam itself is an X-ray laser. But how the beam is generated is beyond us. The weapon uses Dykstra fields in a way we've never seen before.

"Beyond that, its power source is a mystery-it doesn't seem to use anything; not batteries, not capacitors, not nuclear micropiles, not mini fusion generators, and not chips of antimatter.

"We hope you can help us out, Professor.

"One other thing-the aliens are hostile. They opened fire on the first human ship they met, out in the Oort cloud. Their technology is beyond ours. God help us if they take us to war.

"As of viewing this message, you are recalled to active status, Professor Dykstra, under the Wartime Civilian Service Act. We have a place all ready for you at the Patrol High Command on Luna. But for now we'll leave you alone for one week. My courier will contact you on the twenty-first.

"Good day, Professor."

They need me. The thought made him happy. He hadn't worked for the military since he was in his nineties, but not for lack of offering on his part. The System Patrol had always treated him politely when he suggested that he might still be of help to them on some technical matter, but always with refusals. Only last year, the Belt, just before the start of the war, had demonstrated the ability to produce antimatter in vast quantities, tons at a time it looked like. Dykstra had received the news through some old friends on the inside. The knowledge that such a thing could be done had set his mind to racing, playing over the possibilities, and in a short time he was ready to make his pitch to the Patrol. He needed intelligence data and the proper facilities, but he was certain he could duplicate the Belt process.

They stiffed him, told him no, said they had their own people working on it, with the underlying implication that he should be content to be a legend and quit bothering them.

"And now you need me, Major Moore." He wasted no time on bitterness over the past, nor gloated that they came to him now. But success, and thus vindication, would taste sweet indeed. He smiled.

"So let us see what else is in this cube." He raced through the contents. Later he would go back for a more thorough investigation, but for now he simply wanted to see what they'd delivered to him.

The speed with which Dykstra perused the information was astonishing, not just for an old man, but for any man. His IQ had never been adequately measured-he never missed any questions on the tests, never reached his limits. One tester, in frustration, had simply written "IQ over 300" across the top of Dykstra's score sheet and let it go at that. There had simply never been anyone in the age of mental testing with his raw intellectual ability.

"Ah, very interesting." Dykstra was watching visual scenes of the weapon being tested. There were its parts, disassembled-it looked remarkably simple. There were three men out in a field, test-firing, manipulating the settings to make the beam change length from less than a meter to unlimited. There were scenes of the weapon being fired at targets-a fifteen-centimeter-thick steel beam, sliced in two effortlessly; a three-meter-wide crater blasted into a granite mountainside; a one-hundred-thousand-liter tank of water brought to the boiling point, and entirely evaporated, and the gun still not short of energy.

He looked away from the screen to his table. He picked up the weapon. "You will not defeat me," he said, but he smiled at it with admiration.

He caught a glint of light out of the corner of his eye. It was the shiny titanium walking stick, leaning securely in the corner by the door. Characterless.

With a twinkle in his sharp eyes, Dykstra carried the gun with him, took the cane in his right hand, and went outside. "Now is as good a time as any to start my tests," he said to the squirrels playing tag around the trunk of an ancient oak.

The cane was a help, he had to admit, walking out here in a full g field. Crossing his yard he approached the edge of the woods. He had a particular branch on a particular young oak in mind. Ah-there it was.

He leaned his cane against a neighboring tree and examined the weapon. If the instructions were correct, then moving this lever to here, and touching this stud just . . . so . . . Fisssss! Out came the beam, glowing brightly, too bright to look at for more than an instant. Dykstra's careful eye estimated the length at eighty-five centimeters.

Somewhere behind his eyes, though almost visible to him, his mind started the process of figuring out how the weapon controlled the length of the beam. He couldn't help it-his mind had always worked that way.

He brought the beam against the base of the limb, quickly, and with a brief burst of flame and a blast of superheated smoke, the branch fell to the ground.

"Marvelous!"

Dykstra took his walking stick from the tree and laid it down alongside the branch, measuring. With another flick of the beam he cut the branch to the desired length. As if born to it, Dykstra played the beam against the branch, severing the remaining branchlets, baking off the bark, delicately charring the surface.

The twinkle still in his eyes, he turned off the beam, then reached down for his creation. It was warm to the touch, but not too hot to hold. It left black marks on his palms, but he didn't care. "I'll have to clean you off, and sand you a bit, and give you a coat of wax," he said to the stick.

But carved from a living oak with an alien weapon-the world's first alien weapon-and shaped by his own hands. . . . Now there was a walking stick with character.

Very late at night, in his shop, with a half-consumed and long forgotten cup of coffee sitting within reach, Dykstra was stymied. In two days, Moore's courier would contact him, and he'd be on his way to the Moon. But he'd done no packing yet, hadn't even thought about it. The weapon consumed him.

It had yielded up its secrets with difficulty, and some still escaped him, but yielded up secrets it had. He knew how the beam length was controlled now, knew how the energy of the X-ray photons arriving at the terminating point was returned to the source. The application of Dykstra fields (he wondered what the aliens called them) was ingenious and unique, but on Earth they were his baby after all. No matter what new wrinkles the aliens may have thought up for them, he was sure he could smooth those wrinkles into understanding.

The power source-that was a tricky one. The weapon used mass conversion, turned matter directly into energy, without any of the fuss and bother of fusion, or nucleus splitting, or combining particles and antiparticles. Any kind of matter would do, but in an atmosphere the weapon just used air molecules. How it converted the matter into energy his mind hadn't finished sorting out yet, but he had clues.

What stymied him now, what had gotten him out of bed after three desperate attempts to shut his brain off and go to sleep, was Dykstra's complete inability to understand why the weapon didn't do something.

The X-ray laser beam had a diameter of 4.238 millimeters. Its projection length could be adjusted from 72.586 centimeters to infinity. The beam intensity could be adjusted from night light to fusion bomb. "So why in the world didn't they make it so you could adjust the beam diameter and the collimation?" Dykstra muttered for the hundredth time. "It would be trivial to add those characteristics. Why didn't they? Didn't they think there would ever arise a time when a microfine beam might be desirable? Could they never foresee a reason to make the beam disperse?

"Did they just plain miss it, or am I missing something?"

By his estimate, the alien technology was seventy-five to one hundred years ahead of human achievement. Why not a thousand? He couldn't answer that question. But why didn't they add those features?

The coffee remained, pointlessly, well within reach.

* * * "Good morning, Professor Dykstra. I'm Lieutenant Robert Nachtegall." "Yes. Major Moore's courier. I've been expecting you. And I prefer 'Doctor.' " The young man stood outside the front door. Dykstra had watched the lieutenant come down onto his mountain, watched the sleek military courier vessel as it dropped below hypersonic speeds way out over the valley and then gently floated down to the meadow that was Dykstra's yard. He had curly blond hair and clear blue eyes, and looked like a nice enough sort. "I'm ready to go."

"What?" Nachtegall said, surprised. "I thought-"

"No, young man. I'm ready to go now. I presume I can find additional clothing on Luna, so everything in that suitcase over there is all I intend to take. Oh, and this cane, too."

"Very well," the lieutenant smiled. "Also, the device . . . ?"

"All packed up in its container. It's on my table. Would you mind getting it while I collect up my

suitcase?"

"Not at all."

Presently they were back on the front porch. "House, seal up command Alpha. Standard stand down

procedure." Locks gave out audible clicks as they snapped into place. "That should hold her until I return," Dykstra said. "That is, if I return." He smiled at Nachtegall. "At my age you never know."

"I'm sure you'll be returning, Doctor."

"We shall see."

Proceeding across the meadow, halfway to the boat Nachtegall finally insisted on carrying Dykstra's suitcase for him. The old scientist raised no protest. They boarded the craft.

"Care to ride up front, Doctor? There's an extra seat."

Delighted, Dykstra said, "I'd like that very much. But isn't it against regulations? It was the last time I did military work."

"Welll . . . yes it is. But if I tell them you insisted . . . ?" The question was in his eyes as well as his tone.

"Sonny, I insist you allow me to ride up front.""Very well, Doctor, but it's against regulations." They both laughed.Dykstra snugged himself into the chair and looked out the windscreen. Earth up close, he thought. It may be a long time before I see her this close again.