Tau zero (17 page)

He sprang to his feet. She did too. Their hands clasped.

Suddenly they became aware of Nilsson. He sat less than dwarfish, hunched, shivering, collapsed.

Lindgren went to him in alarm. "What's wrong?"

His head did not lift. "Impossible," he mumbled. "Impossible."

"Surely not," she urged. "I mean, you wouldn't have to discover new laws of nature, would you? The basic principles are known."

"They must be applied in unheard-of ways." Nilsson covered his face. "God better me, I haven't the brains any longer."

Lindgren and Reymont exchanged a look above his bent back. She shaped unspoken words. Once he had taught her the Rescue Corps trick of lip reading when spacesuit radios were unusable. They had practiced it as something that made them more private and more one. "Can we succeed without him?"

"I doubt it. He is the best chief for that kind of project. At least, lacking him, our chance is poor."

Lindgren squatted down beside Nilsson. She laid an arm across his shoulders. "What's the trouble?" she asked most softly.

"I have no hope," he snuffled. "Nothing to live for."

"You do!"

"You know Jane . . . deserted me . . . months ago. No other woman will— Why should I care? What's left for me?"

Reymont's lips formed, "So behind everything was self-pity." Lindgren frowned and shook her head.

"No, you're mistaken, Elof," she murmured. "We do care for you. Would we ask for your help if we didn't honor you?"

"My mind." He sat straight and glared at her out of swimming eyes. "You want my intelligence, right. My advice. My knowledge and talent. To save yourselves. But do you want me? Do you think of me as, as a human being? No! Dirty old Nilsson. One is barely polite to him. When he starts to talk, one finds the earliest possible excuse to leave. One does not invite him to one's cabin parties. At most, if desperate,

one asks him to be a fourth for bridge or to start an instrument development effort. What do you expect him to do? Thank you?"

"That isn't true!"

"Oh, I'm not as childish as some," he said. "I'd help if I were able. But my mind is blank, I tell you. I haven't had an original thought in weeks. Call it fear of death paralyzing me. Call it a sort of impotence. I don't care what you call it. Because you don't care either. No one has offered me friendship, company, anything. I have been left alone in the dark and the cold. Do you wonder that my mind is frozen?"

Lindgren looked away, hiding what expressions chased across her. When she confronted Nilsson again, she had put on calm.

"I can't say how sorry I am, Elof," she told him. "You are partly to blame yourself. You acted so, well, self-sufficient, we assumed you didn't want to be bothered. The way Olga Sobieski, for instance, doesn't want to. That's why she moved in with me. When you joined Hussein Sadek—"

"He keeps the panel closed between our halves," Nilsson shrilled. "He never raises it. But the soundproofing is imperfect. I hear him and his girls in there."

"Now we understand," Lindgren smiled. "To be quite honest, Elof, I've grown bored with my current existence."

Nilsson made a strangled noise.

"I believe we have some personal business to discuss," Lindgren said. "Do ... do you mind, Constable?"

"No," said Reymont. "Of course not." He left the cabin.

Chapter 15

Leonora Christine stormed through the galactic nucleus in twenty thousand years. To those aboard, the time was measured in hours. They were hours of dread, while the hull shook and groaned from stress, and the outside view changed from total darkness to a fog made blinding and blazing by crowded star clusters. The chance of striking a sun was not negligible; hidden in a dust cloud, it could be in front of the ship in one perceived instant. (No one knew what would happen to the star. It might go nova. But certainly the vessel would be destroyed, too swiftly for her crew to know they were dead.) On the other hand, this was the region where inverse tau mounted to values that could merely be estimated, not established with precision, absolutely not comprehended.

She had a respite while she crossed the region of clear space at the center, like passing through the eye of a hurricane. Foxe-Jameson looked into the viewscope at thronged suns—red, white and neutron swarfs, two- and three-fold older than Sol or its neighbors; others, glimpsed, unlike any ever seen or suspected in the outer galaxy—and came near weeping. "Too bloody awful! The answers to a million questions, right here, and not a single instrument I can use!"

His shipmates grinned. "Where would you publish?" somebody asked. Renascent hope was often expressing itself in a kind of gallows humor.

But there was no joking when Boudreau called a conference with Telander and Reymont. That was soon after the ship had emerged from the nebulae on the far side of the nucleus and headed back through the spiral arm whence she came. The scene behind was of a dwindling fireball, ahead of a gathering darkness. Yet the reefs had been run, the journey to the Virgo galaxies would take only a few more months of human life, the program of research and development on planet-finding techniques had been announced with high optimism. A dance and slightly drunken brawl was held in commons to celebrate. Its laughter, stamping, lilt of Urho Latvala's accordion drifted faintly down to the bridge.

"I should perhaps have let you enjoy yourselves like everybody else," Boudreau said. His skin was shockingly sallow against hair and beard. "But Mohandas Chidambaran gave me the results of his calcu-

lations from the latest readings after we emerged from the core. He felt I was best qualified to gauge the practical consequences ... as if any rulebook existed for intergalactic navigation! Now he sits alone in his cabin and meditates. Me, when I got over being stunned, I thought I should notify you immediately."

Captain Telander's visage drew tight, readying for a new blow. "What is the result?" he asked.

"What is the subject?" Reymont added.

"Matter density in space before us," Boudreau said. "Within this galaxy, between galaxies, between whole galactic clusters. Given our present tau, the frequency shift of the neutral hydrogen radio emission, the instruments already built by the astronomical team obtain unprecedented accuracy."

"What have they learned, then?"

Boudreau braced himself. "The gas concentration drops off slower than we supposed. With the tau we will probably have by the time we leave the Milky Way galaxy . . . twenty million light-years out, halfway to the Virgo group ... as nearly as can be determined, we will still not dare turn off the force fields."

Telander closed his eyes.

Reymont spoke jerkily: "We've discussed that possibility in the past." The scar stood livid on his brow. "That even between two clusters, we won't be able to make our repair. It's part of the reason why Fedoroff and Pereira want to improve the life support systems. You act as if you had a different proposal."

"The one we talked about not long ago, you and I," Boudreau said to the captain.

Reymont waited.

Boudreau told him in a voice turned dispassionate: "Astronomers learned centuries back, a cluster or family of galaxies like our local group is not the highest form in which stars are organized. These collections of one or two dozen galaxies do, in turn, tend to occur in larger associations. Superfamilies—"

Reymont made a rusty laugh. "Call them clans," he suggested.

"Hein? Why ... all right. A clan is composed of several families. Now the average distance between members of a family—individual galaxies within a cluster—is, oh, say a million light-years. The average distance between one family and the next is greater, as you would expect: on the order of fifty million light-years. Our plan was to leave this family and go to the nearest beyond, the Virgo group. Both belong to the same clan."

"Instead, if we're to have any hope of stopping, we'll have to leave the entire clan."

"Yes, I am afraid so."

"How far to the next one?"

"I can't say. I didn't take journals along. They would be a bit obsolete by now, no?"

"Be careful," Telander warned.

Boudreau gulped. "I beg the captain's pardon. That was a rather dangerous joke." He went back to lecturing tone: "Chidambaran doesn't believe anyone was sure. The concentration of galactic clusters drops off sharply at a distance of about sixty million light-years from here. Beyond that, it is a long way to other rich regions. Chidambaran guessed at a hundred million light-years, or somewhat less. Else the hierarchical structure of the universe would have been easier for astronomers to identify than it was.

"Surely, between clans, space is so close to a perfect vacuum that we won't need protection."

"Can we navigate there?" Reymont snapped.

Sweat glistened on Boudreau's countenance. "You see the hazard," he said. "We will be bound into the unknown more deeply than we dreamed. Accurate sightings and placements will be unobtainable. We shall need such a tau—"

"A minute," Reymont said. "Let me outline the situation in my layman's language to make sure I understand you." He paused, rubbing his chin with a sandpapery sound (under the distant music), frowning, until his thoughts were marshalled.

"We must get . . . not only into interfamily, but interclan space," he said. "We must do this in a moderate shipboard time. Therefore we must run tau down to a value of a billionth or less. Can we do it? Evidently, or you wouldn't talk as you've done. I imagine the method is to lay a course within this family that takes us through the nucleus of at least one other galaxy. And then likewise through the next family—be it the Virgo cluster or a different one determined by our new flight pattern—through as many individual galaxies as possible, always accelerating.

"Once the clan is well behind us, we should be able to make our repair. Afterward we'll need a similar period of deceleration. And because our tau will be so low, and space so utterly empty, we'll be unable to steer. Not enough material will be there for the jets to work on, nor enough navigational data to guide us. We'll have to hope that we pass through another clan.

"We should do that. Eventually. By sheer statistics. However, we may be out yonder a long while indeed." "Correct," Telander said. "You do understand." They had begun to sing upstairs.

"— But me and my true love will never meet again On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond."

"Well," Reymont said, "there doesn't appear to be any virtue in caution. In fact, for us it's become a vice."

"What do you mean?" Boudreau asked.

Reymont shrugged. "We need more than the tau for crossing space to the next clan, a hundred million light-years or however far off it is. We need the tau for a hunt which will take us past any number of them, maybe through billions of light-years, until we find one we can enter. I trust you can plot a course within this first clan that will give us that kind of speed. Don't worry about possible collisions. We can't afford worries. Send us through the densest gas and dust you can find."

"You ... are taking this . . . rather coolly," Telander said.

"What am I supposed to do? Burst into tears?"

"That is why I thought you should also hear the news first," Boudreau said. "You can break it to the others."

Reymont considered both men for a moment that stretched. "I'm not the captain, you know," he reminded them.

Telander's smile was a spasm. "In certain respect, Constable, you are."

Reymont went to the closest instrument panel. He stood before its goblin eyes with head bent and thumbs hooked in belt. "Well," he mumbled. "If you really want me to take charge."

"I think you had better."

"Well, in that case. They're good people. Morale is upward bound again, now that they see some genuine accomplishment of their own. I think they'll be able to realize, not just intellectually, but emotionally, that there's no human difference between a million and a billion, or ten billion, light-years. The exile is the same."

"The time involved, though—" Telander said.

"Yes." Reymont looked at them again. "I don't know how much more of our life spans we can devote to this voyage. Not very much. The conditions are too unnatural. Some of us can adapt, but I've learned that others can't. So we absolutely have to push tau down as low as may be, no matter what the dangers. Not simply to make the

trip itself short enough for us to endure. But for the psychological need to do our utmost."

"How is that?"

"Don't you see? It's our way of fighting back at the universe. Vogue la galere. Go for broke. Full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes. I think, if I can put the matter to our people in those terms, they'll rally. For a while, anyhow."

"The wee birdies sing and the wild flowers spring, And in sunshine the waters are sleeping —"

Chapter 16

The course out of the Milky Way was not straight; it zig-zagged a little, as much as several light-centuries, to pass through the densest accessible nebulae and dust banks. Nevertheless, the time aboard was counted in days until she was in the marches of the spiral arm, outward bound into a nearly starless night.

Johann Freiwald brought Emma Glassgold a piece of equipment he had made to her order. As had been proposed, she was joining forces with Norbert Williams to devise long-range life detectors. The machinist found her trotting about in her laboratory, hands busy, humming to herself. The apparatus and glassware were esoteric, the smells chemically pungent, the background that endless murmur and quiver which told how the ship plunged forward; and somehow she might have been a new bride making her man a birthday cake.

"Thank you." She beamed as she accepted the article.

"You look happy," Freiwald said. "Why?"

"Why not?"

His arm swept in a violent gesture. "Everything!"

"Well ... a disappointment about the Virgo cluster, naturally. Still, Norbert and I—" She broke off, blushing. "We have a fascinating problem here, a real challenge, and he's already made a brilliant suggestion about it." She cocked her head at Freiwald. "I've never seen you in this black a mood. What's become of that cheerful Nietzsche-anism of yours?"