What follows is most of the second chapter of the novel I'm working on.  The first and last four chapters have already been submitted together as a story to a SF magazine.

So why are we here?  Why did we escape the Solar System and settle on the planets of Alpha Centauri?

The fact is that we live in a dynamic universe.  A universe whose internal material components are subject to change by entirely natural means.  All life, including human life, is the result of a series of an entirely natural processes.  The process of life is also a localized acceleration of the process of entropy, the conversion of matter to energy.  Simply by living each of us is accelerating the ultimate decline of the known universe. 

Please don’t tell the environmentalists about this.

For simple forms of life survival is simply an accident of nature.  For Humanity survival is the result of the function of the active rational mind.  And we will perceive, think and do what is necessary to live what is properly a human life.

Believe it or not there were people back on Earth who objected to our escape from extinction and actively worked to prevent it. 

I am not kidding.                           

Some of those people believed that our lives were the result of the will of a being commonly known as God.  And that the event that would ultimately destroy all life on Earth was also the will of God.  They believed that the extinction event was the response of God to our collective sins.  The primary sin being the  constant refusal to obey the commands of God as transmitted  through his self appointed spokesmen.  The vilest of our sins apparently being our persistent habit of actually thinking on the basis of the actual identifiable facts of reality.  The believers in the God Premise deemed us guilty of these crimes and wanted us to sit down without resistance and accept the divine punishment for our sins.

This was absolute nonsense that we wouldn’t submit to.

The idea that God, a supposedly omnipotent being, could eliminate Mankind at a thought and did not require an actually natural event to kill off every living person simply did not enter their minds.  This of course assumed that those who believe in the concept of God had actually functioning minds.

Then there were also those who believed in the concept of material equality for each person.  That everyone had to be materially equal regardless of the actual amount of productive thought and labor they ever performed in their lives.  This lot  of morons believed it was unfair that those of us who could build starships to escape the Solar System.  And we who could do so  should not because it was unfair to those who could not.  That the truly just course of action was for us to do nothing and for all of us to die together.

This view, which was purely emotional, was also clearly wrong.

And finally there were the self appointed elites.  They believed that only they had the best of the collective interests of Mankind in mind.  And that only the best and the brightest members of the Human collective, as defined by themselves, should be allowed to escape extinction by the means available.

That the elites in history have always lived off the thought and labor of those they deemed inferior and invariably made decisions for their own benefit was never--ever--mentioned by them or their willing intellectual servants.

The fact was that we would not sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of what was in fact a mob of lazy and mindless losers.

The fundamental moral value is life.  But human life is not simply physical existence.  The human mode of life also requires an active mental existence.  In order to live as human beings we must see things as they are and act as we conceive as necessary.

Live with it.

So what actually happened?  How did we come here?

My dad’s last big project when he was alive was the Niven Deep Space Observatory.  It had been placed in an orbit that took it well outside the plane of the ecliptic in the Solar System.  For those readers unfamiliar with orbital dynamics it means that the orbit of the NDSO was at an angle above that of the planet Earth and other bodies of the Solar System.  The primary mission of the NDSO was to detect and observe neutron stars.

So what is a neutron star?

A neutron star is simply the dead body of a star at the last stage of decay.

Some stars are so massive that at death they collapse into a black hole, a body whose gravitational pull does not allow light to escape it.  Stars that collapse into black holes are never seen again.  But some stars lack the mass to fully disappear and they simple collapse into a white dwarf.  A remnant made purely of neutrons gives off the residual energy of it’s collapse.  But eventually even an ancient white dwarf will fade out and become a neutron star.

A neutron star still has the gravitational attraction of a fully functional star and will still pull in matter from the space that surrounds it, gas, dust and the occasional large body as an asteroid.  When this stray matter impacts on the neutron star it’s converted to neutrons and emits energy across the electromagnetic spectrum in the process.  It was the emission of this energy--the screaming matter--that the NDSO detects and tracks.

The Astronomy Department at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California was the prime contractor on the NDSO.  The Boatman Corporation having built the NDSO now had the contract to maintain and upgrade it.  I made a rare visit to Earth to speak with the program director, Dr. Robert Petrovitch, about the next series of upgrades.

At his office we shook hands and I began the conversation.

“So Bob, what did you want to discuss?”

“Well there’s an very odd series of readings we got on one of our objects with the NDSO.”

“And you want to eliminate the possibility of a fault with the platform before you publish a paper on it?”

“Yes.”  He said.

“So what is it?”

“One of our objects, designated Niven Sixty Nine, is very close to the Solar System.”

“How close?”

“Well within a light year.”

A light year was the distance that a photon, the theoretical particle of light, would travel in the time of a year.  It’s a distance of just under ten trillion kilometers.  In interstellar astronomy that distance was very close.

“Possibly?”  I said.

“We haven’t done a full parallax reading on it but the screaming matter signature is also the strongest that we’ve seen with any object.”

Parallax is a method of determining the distance of an object.  From opposite positions in the solar orbit of observer the object is located against the stellar background. With the known distance of the two observation points serving as the base of a triangle the distance of the other two sides of the triangle is worked out as simple geometric math.

At least it’s simple to astronomers and engineers like me.

I then had a question.

“So what is its lateral movement?”

“We haven’t detected any.”  He replied.

I was stunned, I’m sure of it.  All objects in space should have a detectable lateral movement.  It took time for me before I could reply.

“Bob,” I said, “is the screaming matter signature getting stronger over time?”

The screaming matter signature is the energy given off by the dust and gas normally found in interstellar space as it is gravitationally sucked into the neutron star and converted to neutrons.

“Yes, it appears to be.”

The conclusion was obvious.  It was moving straight into the Solar System. 

I sat in stunned silence.  After a minute Bob spoke again.

“We don’t know if it will hit anything yet.”

“It doesn’t have to.”  I replied.  “We both know that an object with the mass of a star will radically alter the orbit of every other object as it passes through the Solar System--including the Earth.  It may even cause some bodies to be ejected from the system altogether.”

Then I had another thought.

I asked another question.

“Have you spoken about this to anyone outside the project?”

“No.”

I thought for another moment.

“Bob, my next stop is the JPL next door.”

“What about?”

“To report on the Daedalus.”

“How is the Daedalus?”

Daedalus was the unmanned interstellar probe our firm had just completed for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  The original version of the project was proposed by the British Interstellar Society back in the late Twentieth Century.  We had followed the original BIS concept of a two stage system in the design and construction of the probe.

“Apart from uploading the latest version of the operations software and fueling the ship we are ready to launch.  I think you should have a word with them, the committee still wants to send her to Sirius.”

Bob nodded.

“Yes, I’ll come over there with you.”  He replied.

My next meeting was scheduled with the Daedalus Committee.  In the lobby of the JPL we walked by the display of Mariner II, the first successful American interplanetary probe which had performed a fry-by of the planet Venus roughly a century and half ago.  It had been recovered and brought back to Earth.  When we arrived at the conference room the committee hadn’t sat down yet.  Bob and I made straight for the chairman of the committee, Dr. Douglas Marsh.

“Doug,” I said, “I believe you know Doctor Petrovitch?”

“Yes.”  He replied and they both shook hands.  “So what brings you over here?”

“We think you should change the destination of the Daedalus.”

“Both of you?”  Said Doctor Marsh.

“Yes.”  I replied.

“Not likely.”  Marsh said.  “But I think we can find time for you to speak on it.”

I spoke up.

“Doug, we’re serious, very dead serious.”

I’m certain that he saw that we were serious.

“Okay then.”  He replied.

At this point we sat down and went through the normals rituals of a board meeting.  Then it was my turn to speak.

“First, Im here to report that apart from fueling the ship  and updating the command software package we are ready to launch.  Second, I want to request that we change the target system to Alpha Centauri with the goal of finding a habitable planet.

A board member spoke in reply.

“Why,” he said, “the only point to finding a Goldilocks world is to colonize it.  And who’s going to fund a colonization mission?”

A reasonable question.  I answered it.

“Basically everyone on Earth.”

At this point every board member was surprised to hear that, and then Doug spoke up.

“Why?”

“I brought along Doctor Petrovitch of the NDSO to explain.”

Bob stood up and spoke.

“Basically, we at the NDSO found a neutron star that is within a light-year of the Solar System and it appears to be heading straight towards us.”

A woman wearing glasses and who was about my age spoke up.