Read Star Trek: The Original Series - 082 - Federation for Free Online Page B

deploying battlefield pulse emitters designed to be used against armored infantry. The civilians taking part in the demonstration had had no radiation armor. Hundreds had been killed. Thousands left impaired, their synaptic connections sundered at a molecular level.
    Then Thorsen had joined with the Optimum Movement in the Pursuit of Perfection. Perfection was whatever Colonel Green and those of his countless analytical committees said it was. And if something, or someone, or some group of people wasn’t perfect, then that thing, or that person or group, didn’t deserve to exist.
    Cochrane understood what Brack had said about history repeating itself. The coldly efficient bureaucracies of Green’s Analytical Committees, the stark design of the interlinked OM triangles, all were just new skins for an old and hideous ideology that should have been consigned to its ashes more than a century ago.
    “I’ve had nothing to do with the Optimum,” Cochrane said.
    “Why does he want to see me?”
    “Don’t flatter yourself. He wants to see your ship.” “Our ship.” ‘ The point is, he wants to make it his.” The answer seemed obvious to Cochrane. “But we won’t let him.” Brack sighed. “There have been a great many changes while. ou’ve been away, Zefram. The Optimum Movement has been expanding its influence. Rapidly. There are some nations on Earth that don’t like the way things are going. They’re the ones clinging to the illusion of order the Optimum offer, and ignoring the price they’ll have to pay.” “Well,” Cochrane said, his mind working quickly, “if Thorsen leh two hours ago, then we’ve still got a few days before he gets here. We can work out something tomorrow.”
    “Colonel Thorsen will arrive on Titan in nine hours.” Cochrane’s eyes widened. Whatever vehicle Thorsen was in, he was traveling at almost five percent the speed of light. Impulse drives could boost a space vehicle to that kind of velocity in less than an hour, but the rapid acceleration would crush any living thing on board into a thin organic paste against the aft bulkhead.
    True, there were specially constructed impulse ships designed to operate at multi-g accelerations with humans aboard, for military or emergency rescue missions, but those required the pilots to be suspended in liquid-filled command capsules, “breathing” an oxygen-rich saline solution to prevent their lungs from being crushed. Crewed ships could reach light-speed velocities without harming their living cargo only through gradual acceleration. But even at a constant, military-standard three-g acceleration, it would take almost five days to achieve the speed with which Thorsen was coming to Titan.
    “What’s he sending? An artificial-intelligence surrogate?” “He’s coming himself, Zefram.” “Not in nine hours, he’s not. This time of year, we’re thirty-seven light-minutes from Earth. No human could survive that kind of impulse acceleration.” A handful of people were walking across the bare soil to Cochrane and Brack. They only had a minute left to talk undisturbed.
    “As I said,” Brack said emphatically, “there have been a great many changes since you left.” Cochrane’s eyes widened as he realized what Brack was implying. “Inertial damping?” Brack frowned. “l’ve spent a fortune trying to develop that over the past thirty years, too. And the breakthrough came out of the R-and-D section of a chain of simulator theaters, of all things.” He looked away to gauge the approach of the party guests. “But on the bright side, between your superimpellor and control of inertia, there’s not a place i’n the universe humans can’t travel.” cochrane felt as if he’d been kicked. Control of inertia put the full power of vectored-impulse space travel in the hands of human crews and passengers. The solar system could be crossed in hours.
    An Earth-moon flight would be little longer than a maglev train trip between San Francisco