Orpheus

9

Half an hour later the entire crew had assembled around the table. Riley sat in a chair while Elise stood by her shoulders. Pratham and Elise stood next to each other, while Owen sat opposite to Riley. Connor had gone up to his bunk, and was soon back a bunch of markers, the white tabletop an impromptu whiteboard.

"Okay people," He began as he plopped all the stuff on the table, "this is Earth." He drew a circle at one end of the table. "And this is the Resilience." He drew a smaller circle near the first one. "We've been orbiting the Earth for about a day and a half now so we have gained maximum velocity to slingshot our way to the wormhole." He drew another circle at the other end of the table, before writing the word WORMHOLE below it. "Now the distance getting from here to there is  200 million kilometers. So what's going to happen is that in the next four hours we will be in the right position to slingshot our way there." He drew a rough trajectory path with dotted lines.

"Now, we have two ways of doing this." Owen pops in, picking up a marker, but just holding it in his fingertips as he continued. "We could use our thrusters the whole way to get us there in about... 150 to 200 earth days, but it'd be costing us a lot of fuel. Now, what we can do is use our thrusters to just escape the Earth's gravitational pull, and then kill engines. Now, this trajectory will cost us a lot more time, but we'd be saving a lot of fuel." Connor kept writing out all the important points as Owen spoke; in case somebody needed to refer to them.

"What about the wormhole? Is it going to hold?" Riley asked.

"The probes we sent detected large amounts of exotic matter in the wormhole." Pratham said.

"Yup; made perfect sense." Elise's comment was oozing with sarcasm.

"Look:" Pratham began to elaborate. "A wormhole usually is extremely small, as in 15-30 centimeters in diameter AND they are highly unstable; they typically last for only about a fraction of a second at a time, before it collapses into its own gravity. But there happens to be a solution to both these problems: exotic matter. Exotic matter stabilizes the wormhole from collapsing. And as space ever expands the hole size keeps increasing. That's why we are up to the point where the Resilience can easily pass through."

"I don't see nothing exotic about space hole openers." Owen smirked at his own joke. Olivia scrunched her nose in disgust. Connor remained impassive.

"They're called exotic because they don't obey the known laws of physics." Pratham just looked slightly pissed. "I didn't come up with the names."

"But Pratham," Elise asked, "Is there enough of 'exotic' matter to hold the wormhole open for that extra time?"

"It's been holding it open for this long, we'd have to assume so."

"Assume?" Olivia

"Look we don't know much about exotic matter, okay? Up until the discovery of the wormhole, they were purely theoretical. Now, the probes we did send couldn't send back any quantifiable data other than there's large amounts of it in there. But the rate of consumption and other properties? We just don't know."

"Why couldn't the probes get more data?" Riley asked placing her elbows on the table to lean forward; she was genuinely curious.

"Because once in the wormhole space-time itself would begin to warp. We could either be zipping in there at speeds almost as fast as that of light and be out in seconds, or spend a hundred years in there; we just don't have any substantial data. Reality doesn't follow its normal rules in there. That's why the probes had to send back data in simple binary pings; harder to mess up."

'A hundred years...'

"Wait... what do you mean a hundred years? How'd the probes send us back data if it was in there a hundred years?" Owen asked.

"Anti-Gravity." answered Pratham. "The exotic matter in the wormhole could generate large pockets of anti-gravity in the neck, causing time to speed up considerably in there compared to ours. We could all grow old, die and not a second would have passed here. The probes were designed to endure long periods in space, potentially hundreds or thousands. That's why they could theoretically send data from the other side. But we don't know for sure because the data relating to time on all the probes are inconsistent."

"Why?" Elise asked.

"Each probe is equipped with an internal clock," elaborated Pratham "but they all seemed to have gone haywire due to the inconsistent gravity in the neck."

Everybody was silent for a few minutes. "That's relativity folks." Pratham added with a dry smile.

"What's the 'neck'?" Olivia inquired.

"The neck is the passage of the wormhole." Pratham explained, "It has two mouths, and hence one neck."

"Okay," Owen butted in "we could talk about this all day and yet reach nowhere. Let's focus on what we can do, shall we? I need to call a vote here." he paused "Do we conserve fuel, or do we conserve time?"

There was a brief silence as everyone contemplated about it.

"The way I see it, time gets screwed over either way. Might as well save fuel." Elise finally broke the silence.

"I agree with her" Riley added. "Besides, if we had to pass one of these 'anti-gravity' pockets, we better pass through them as fast as possible. Rather burn fuel in there than here."

The others gave somber, morbid nods of agreement.

"Well then," Connor said getting up. "Get ready. We do the orbital slingshot in four hours."