Nemesis (41 page)

“
What
?”

“There’s no choice, Eugenia. And no danger to her. You see, I now believe you were right when you suggested there was some permeating life-form on the planet that could exert some sort of power over us. You pointed out that I was deleteriously affected, and you were, and the guard was, and always when Marlene was in any way opposed. And I just saw precisely that happen to Ranay. When Ranay tried to force a brain scan on Marlene, she doubled up. When I persuaded Marlene to accept the brain scan, Ranay immediately improved.”

“Well, there you are, then, Siever. If there’s a malevolent life-form on the planet—”

“Now, wait, Eugenia. I didn’t say it was malevolent. Even if this life-form, whatever it might be, caused the Plague as you suggested it did, that stopped. You said it was because we seemed to be content to remain in the Dome, but if the life-form were truly malevolent, it would have wiped us out and it would not have settled for what seems to me to have been a civilized compromise.”

“I don’t think it’s safe to try to consider the actions of a totally alien life-form and deduce from that its emotions or intentions. What it thinks might well be totally beyond our understanding.”

“I agree, Eugenia, but it’s not harming Marlene. Everything it has done has served to
protect
Marlene, to shield her from interference.”

“If that’s so,” said Insigna, “then why was she frightened,
why did she begin to run to Dome, screaming? Not for one moment do I believe her tale that the silence made her nervous and she was just trying to make some noise to break that silence.”

“That
is
hard to believe. The point is, though, that the panic subsided quickly. By the time her would-be-rescuers reached her, she seem perfectly normal. I would guess that something the life-form had done had frightened Marlene—I would imagine it was as unlikely to understand our emotions, as we are to understand its—but, seeing what it had done, it proceeded to soothe her quickly. That would explain what happened and would demonstrate, once again, the humane nature of the life-form.”

Insigna was frowning. “The trouble with you, Siever, is that you have this terrible compulsion to think good of everyone—and everything. I can’t trust your interpretation.”

“Trust or not, you will find we can in no way oppose Marlene. Whatever she wants to do, she will do, and the opposition will be left behind, gasping in pain or flat-out unconscious.”

Insigna said, “But what
is
this life-form?”

“I don’t know, Eugenia.”

“And what frightens me more than anything, now, is: What does it want with Marlene?”

Genarr shook his head. “I don’t know, Eugenia.”

And they stared at each other helplessly.

Crile Fisher watched the bright star thoughtfully.

At first, it had been too bright to watch in the ordinary sense. He had glanced at it every once in a while and would see a bright after-image. Tessa Wendel, who was in a state of despair over developments, had scolded and spoken of retinal damage, so he had opacified the viewport and had brought the brightness of the star down to just bearable levels. That dimmed the other stars to a downcast, tarnished glitter.

The bright star was the Sun, of course.

It was farther away than any human being had ever seen it (except for the people of Rotor on
their
journey away from the Solar System). It was twice as far away as one would see it from Pluto at its farthest, so that it showed no orb and shone with the appearance of a star. Nevertheless, it was still a hundred times the brightness of the full Moon as seen from Earth, and that hundredfold brightness was condensed and compacted into one brilliant point. No wonder one still couldn’t bear to turn a direct and unflinching gaze upon it through an un-opacified glass.

It made things different. The Sun, ordinarily, was nothing to wonder at. It was too bright to look at, too unrivaled in its position. The minor portion of its light that was scattered into blueness by the atmosphere was sufficient to blank out the other stars altogether, and even where the stars were not blanked out (as on the Moon, for instance) they were so overridden by the Sun that there was no thought of comparison.

Here, so far out in space, the Sun had dimmed at least to the point where comparison was possible. Wendel had
said that from this vantage point, the Sun was one hundred and sixty thousand times as bright as Sirius, which was the next brightest object in the sky. It was perhaps twenty million times as bright as the dimmest stars he could see by eye. It made the Sun seem more marvelous by comparison than when it shone, uncompared, in Earth’s sky.

Nor did he have much more to do than watch the sky, for the
Superluminal
was merely drifting. It had been doing that for two days—two days of drifting through space at mere rocket velocities.

At this speed it would take thirty-five thousand years to reach the Neighbor Star—
if
they had been heading in the right direction. And they weren’t.

It was this that had turned Wendel, two days earlier, into a picture of white-faced despair.

Until then, there had been no trouble. When they were due to enter hyperspace, Fisher had tensed himself, fearing the possible pain, the piercing flash of agony, the sudden surge of eternal darkness.

None of that had happened. It had all been too fast to experience. They had entered into and emerged from hyperspace in the same instant. The stars had simply blinked into a different pattern with no perceptible moment in which they had lost their first pattern, yet not gained their second.

It was relief in a double sense. Not only was he still alive, but he realized that if something had gone wrong and he had died, then death would have come in such a no-time way that he could not possibly have experienced death. He would simply have been dead.

The relief was so keen that he was scarcely aware that Tessa had let out a gasp of disturbance and pain, and dashed out to the engine room with an outcry.

She came back looking disheveled—not a hair out of place, but looking
internally
disheveled. Her eyes were wild and she stared at Fisher as though she did not really recognize him.

She said, “The pattern should not have changed.”

“Shouldn’t it?”

“We haven’t moved far enough. Or shouldn’t have. Only one and a third milli-light-years. That would not have been enough to alter the star pattern to the unaided
eye. However”—she drew a deep, shuddering breath—“it’s not as bad as it might have been. I thought we had slipped and moved out thousands of light-years.”

“Would that have been possible, Tessa?”

“Of course it would have been possible. If our passage through hyperspace weren’t tightly controlled, a thousand light-years is as easy as one.”

“In that case, we can as easily just go—”

Wendel anticipated the conclusion. “No, we couldn’t just go back. If our controls were that slipshod, every pass we would make would be uncontrolled travel, ending at some random point, and we’d never find our way back.”

Fisher frowned. The euphoria of having passed through hyperspace and back—and stayed alive—began to leak away. “But when you sent out test objects, you brought them back safely.”

“They were far less massive and were sent out through far shorter distance. But, as I said, it’s not too bad. It turns out we went the correct distance. The stars are in the correct pattern.”

“But they changed. I saw them change.”

“Because we’re oriented differently. The long axis of the ship has veered through an angle of better than twenty-eight degrees. In short, we followed a curved path rather than a straight one for some reason.”

The stars, as seen through the viewport, were moving now, slowly, steadily.

Wendel said, “We’re turning to face the Neighbor Star again, just for the psychological value of facing in the right direction, but then we must find out why we curved in passage.”

The bright star, the beacon star, the star of brilliance entered the viewport and moved across it. Fisher blinked.

“That’s the Sun,” said Wendel, answering Fisher’s look of astonishment.

Fisher said, “Are there any reasonable explanations why the ship curved in passage? If Rotor also curved, who knows where they ended?”

“Or where we will end either. Because I don’t have any reasonable explanation. Not right now.” She looked at him, clearly troubled. “If our assumptions were correct, then we should have changed position but not direction.
We should have moved in a straight line, a Euclidean straight line, despite the relativistic curve of space-time, because we weren’t in space-time, you see. There may be a mistake in the programming of the computer—or a mistake in our assumptions. I hope the former. That can be corrected easily.”

Five hours passed. Wendel came in, rubbing her eyes. Fisher looked up uncomfortably. He had been viewing a film, but had lost interest. He had then watched the stars, allowing the patterns to hypnotize him, like anesthesia.

He said, “Well, Tessa?”

“Nothing wrong with the programming, Crile.”

“Then the assumptions must be wrong?”

“Yes, but in what way? There are an infinite number of assumptions we might make. Which are correct? We can’t try them one after another. We’d never finish, and we’d be hopelessly lost.”

Silence fell between them for a while and then Wendel said, “If it had been the programming, it would have been a stupid mistake. We would have corrected it, without learning anything, but we’d have been safe. But now, if we must go back to fundamentals, we have a chance of discovering something really important, but if we fail, we may never find our way back.”

She snatched at Fisher’s hand. “Do you understand, Crile? Something is wrong and if we don’t find out what, there’s no way—except sheer incredible accident—that will allow us to find our way home. No matter how we try, we may continue to end up in the wrong place, and find ourselves steadily wronger and wronger. Which means death eventually, when our cycling fails, or our power supply peters out, or deep despair drains away our ability to live. And it’s I who’ve done this to you. But the real tragedy would be the loss of a dream. If we don’t come back, they’ll never know if the ship was successful at all. They might conclude the transition was fatal and they might never try again.”

“But they must if they expect to escape from Earth.”

“They may give up; they may sit cowering, waiting for the Neighbor Star to complete its approach and pass on, and dying bit by bit.” She looked up, her eyes blinking rapidly, her face looking terribly tired. “And it would be the end of your dream, too, Crile.”

Crile’s lips tightened, and he said nothing.

Almost timidly, Wendel said, “But for years now, Crile, you’ve had me. If your daughter—your dream—is gone, was I enough?”

“I might ask: If superluminal flight is gone, was
I
enough?”

There seemed no easy answer on either side, but then Wendel said, “You’re second-best, Crile, but it has been a good second-best. Thank you.”

Fisher stirred. “You speak for me, too, Tessa, something I wouldn’t have believed at the start. If I had never had a daughter, there would have only been you. I almost wish—”

“Don’t wish that. Second-best is enough.”

And they held hands. Quietly. And gazed out at the stars.

Until Merry Blankowitz poked her face through the doorway. “Captain Wendel, Wu has an idea. He said he had it all along, but was reluctant to mention it.”

Wendel started to her feet. “Why was he reluctant?”

“He said he once suggested the possibility to you, and you told him not to be a fool.”

“Did I? And what has convinced him that I’m never wrong? I’ll listen to it now and if it’s a good idea, I’ll break his neck for not forcing it on me earlier.”

And she hurried out.

Fisher could only wait during the day and a half that followed. They all ate together as they always did, but silently. Fisher did not know if any of them slept. He slept only in snatches, and woke to renewed despair.

How long can we go on like this? he thought on the second day, as he looked at the beauty of that unattainable bright dot in the sky that, so brief a time ago, had warmed him and lighted his way on Earth.

Sooner or later, they would die. Modern space technology would prolong life. Recycling was quite efficient. Even food would last a long time if they were willing to accept the tasteless algae cake they would end up with. The micro-fusion motors would dribble out energy for a long time, too. But surely no one would want to prolong
life through the full time that the ship would make possible.

With a lingering, dragging, hopeless, lonely death finally certain, the rational way out would be to use the adjustable de-metabolizers.

That was the preferred method for suicide on Earth; why should it not be onboard ship as well? You could—
if
you wished—adjust the dose for a full day of reasonably normal life, live it out as joyously as you could—a known last day. At the end of the day, you would grow naturally sleepy. You would yawn and release your hold on wakefulness, passing into a peaceful sleep of restful dreams. The sleep would slowly deepen, the dreams would slowly fade, and you would not wake up. No kinder death had ever been invented.

And then, Tessa, just before 5
P.M.
, ship-time, on the second day after the transition that had curved instead of being straight, burst into the room. Her eyes were wild and she was breathing hard. Her dark hair, which, in the last year had become liberally salted with gray, was mussed.

Fisher rose in consternation. “Bad?”

“No, good!” she said, throwing herself into a chair rather than sitting down.

Fisher wasn’t sure he had heard correctly, wasn’t sure that perhaps she might only have been speaking ironically. He stared at her and watched her as she visibly gathered herself together.

“Good,” she repeated. “Very good! Extraordinary! Crile, you’re looking at an idiot. I don’t suppose I’ll ever recover from this.”