Tau zero (8 page)

Reymont grinned. "That's obvious. Don't worry, I won't linger. But this is rather urgent."

Fedoroff bridled. "It cannot wait until I am on duty?"

"The thing is, it had better be discussed confidentially," Reymont said. "Captain Telander agrees." He slipped around Fedoroff, into the cabin. "An item was overlooked in the plans," he went on, speaking fast. "Our schedule has us changing over to high-acceleration mode on the seventh of January. You know better than I how that takes two or three days of preliminary work by your gang and considerable upsetting of everybody else's routine. Well, somehow the flight planners forgot that the sixth is important in West European tradition. Twelfth Night, the Even of the Three Holy Kings, call it what you will, it climaxes the merrymaking part of the holidays. Last year celebrations were so riotous that nobody thought about it. But I learn that this year a final feast and dance, with the old rituals, is being talked of, as something that would be pleasant if only it were possible. Think what such a reminder of our origins can do to help morale. The skipper and I wish you'd check the feasibility of postponing high acceleration a few days."

"Yes, yes, I will look into it." Fedoroff urged Reymont toward the open door. "Tomorrow, please—"

He was too late. Ingrid Lindgren came around its edge. She was in uniform, having hurried up from the bridge when her watch ended.

"Gud!" broke from her. She stopped dead.

"Why, why, Lindgren," Fedoroff said frantically, "what brings you here?"

Reymont had sucked in a single breath. Every expression went out of his face. He stood moveless, except that his fists clenched till nails dug into palms and skin stretched white across knuckles.

A new carol began.

Lindgren looked back and forth, between the men. Her own features were drained of blood. Abruptly, though, she straightened and said: "No, Boris. We'll not lie."

"It wouldn't help any more," Reymont agreed without tone.

Fedoroff whirled on him. "All right!" he cried. "All right! We have been together a few times. She's not your wife."

"I never claimed she was," Reymont answered, his eyes on her. "I did intend to ask her to be, when we arrived."

"Carl," she whispered. "I love you."

"No doubt one partner gets boring," Reymont said like winter. "You felt the need of refreshment. Your privilege, of course. I did think you were above slinking behind my back."

"Let her alone!" Fedoroff grabbed blindly for him.

The constable flowed aside. His hand chopped edge-on. The engineer gasped in anguish, collapsed to a seat on the bed, and caught his injured wrist in the other hand.

"It's not broken," Reymont told him. "However, if you don't stay where you are till I leave, I'll disable you." He paused. Judiciously: "That's not a challenge to your manhood. I know single combat the way you know nucleonics. Let's stay civilized. She's yours anyway, I suppose."

"Carl." Lindgren took a step and another toward him, reaching. Tears whipped down her cheeks.

He sketched a bow. "I will remove my things from your cabin as soon as I have found a vacant berth."

"No, Carl, Carl." She clutched his tunic. "I never imagined— Listen, Boris needed me. Yes, I admit it, I enjoyed being with him, but it was never deeper than friendship . . . help . . . while you—"

"Why didn't you tell me what you were doing? Wasn't I entitled to know?"

"You were, you were, but I was afraid—a few remarks you'd let drop)—you are jealous—and it's so unnecessary, because you're the only one who counts."

"I've been poor my whole life," he said, "and I do have a poor man's primitive morality, as well as some regard for privacy. On Earth there might be ways to make matters—not right again, really, but tolerable. I could fight my rival, or go away on a long trip, or you and I could both move elsewhere. None of that is possible here."

"Can't you understand?" she implored.

"Can't you?" He had closed his fists anew. "No," he said, "you honestly—I'll assume honestly—don't believe you did me any harm. The years will be hard enough to get through without keeping up that kind of relationship."

He disengaged her from him. "Stop blubbering!" he barked.

She shuddered and grew rigid. Fedoroff growled. He started to rise. She waved him back.

"That's better." Reymont went to the door. There he stood and

faced them. "We'll have no scenes, no intrigues, no grudges," he stated. "When fifty people are locked into one hull, everybody conducts himself right or everybody dies. Mister Engineer Fedoroff, Captain Telander and I would like your report on the subject I came to discuss as soon as can be managed. You might get the opinion of Miss First Officer Lindgren, bearing in mind that secrecy is desirable till we're ready to make an announcement one way or another." For an instant, the pain and fury struck out of him. "Our duty is to the ship, hell damn you!" Control clamped down. He clicked his heels. "My apologies. Good evening."

He left.

Fedoroff got up behind Lindgren and laid his arms around her. "I am very sorry," he said in his awkwardness. "If I had guessed this might happen, I would never—"

"Not your fault, Boris." She didn't move.

"If you would share quarters with me, I would be glad."

"No, thank you," she answered dully. "I'm out of that game for the time being." She released herself. "I'd better go. Good night." He stood alone with his sandwiches and wine.

"O holy child of Bethlehem, Descend to us, we pray."

The proper adjustments being made, Leonora Christine raised her acceleration a few days after Epiphany.

It would make no particular difference to the cosmic duration of her passage. In either case, she ran at the heels of light. But by decreasing tau faster, and reaching lower values of it at midpoint, the higher thrust appreciably shortened the shipboard time.

Extending her scoopfields more widely, intensifying the thermonuclear fireball that trailed her trailing Bussard engine, the ship shifted over to three gravities. This would have added almost thirty meters per second per second to a low velocity. To her present speed, it added tiny increments which grew constantly tinier. That was in outside measurement. Inboard, she drove ahead at three gee; and that measurement was equally real.

Her human payload could not have taken it and lived long. The stress on heart, lungs, and especially on body fluid balance would have been too great. Drugs might have helped. Fortunately, there was a better way.

The forces that pushed her nearer and nearer to ultimate c were not

merely enormous. Of necessity, they were precise. They were, indeed, so precise that their interaction with the outside universe—matter and its own force fields—could be held to a nearly constant resultant in spite of changes in those exterior conditions. Likewise, the driving energies could safely be coupled to similar, much weaker fields when the latter were established within the hull.

This linkage could then operate on the asymmetries of atoms and molecules to produce an acceleration uniform with that of the inside generator itself. In practice, though, the effect was left incomplete. One gravity was uncompensated.

Hence weight inboard remained at a steady Earth-surface value, no matter how high the rate at which the ship gained speed.

Such cushioning was only achievable at relativistic velocities. At an ordinary pace, their tau large, atoms were insufficiently massive, too skittish to get a good grip on. As they approached c, they grew heavier—not to themselves, but to everything outside their vessel— until the interplay of fields between cargo and cosmos could establish a stable configuration.

Three gravities was not the limit. With scoopfields fully extended, and in regions where matter occurred more densely than hereabouts, such as a nebula, she could have gone considerably higher. In this particular crossing, given the tenuousness of the local hydrogen, any possible gain in time was not enough—since the formula involves a hyperbolic function—to be worth reducing her safety margin. Other considerations, e.g., the optimization of mass intake versus the minimization of path length, had also entered into computing her flight pattern.

Thus, tau was no static multiplying factor. It was dynamic. Its work on mass, space, and time could be observed as a fundamental thing, creating a forever new relationship between men and the universe through which they fared.

In a shipboard hour that the calendar said was in April and the clock said was in morning, Reymont awoke. He didn't stir, blink, yawn, and stretch like most men. He sat up, immediately alert.

Chi-Yuen Ai-Ling had ended sleep earlier. His suddenness caught her kneeling in Asian fashion at the foot of the bed, regarding him with a seriousness altogether unlike her playful mood of the night before.

"Is anything wrong?" he demanded.

She had only shown startlement in a widening of eyes. After a moment, her smile came to slow life. "I knew a tame hawk once," she

remarked. "That is, it wasn't tame in dog fashion, but it hunted with its man and deigned to sit on his wrist. You come awake the same way."

"Mph," he said. "I meant that worried look of yours."

"Not worried, Charles. Thoughtful."

He admired the sight of her. Unclad, she could never be called boyish. The curves of breast and flank were subtler than ordinary, but they were integral with the rest of her—not stuccoed on, as with too many women—and when she moved, they flowed. So did the light along her skin, which had the hue of the hills around San Francisco Bay in their summer, and the light in her hair, which had the smell of every summer day that ever was on Earth.

They were in his crew-level cabin half, screened off from his partner Foxe-Jameson. It made too drab a setting for her. Her own quarters were filled with beauty.

"What about?" he inquired.

"You. Us."

"It was a gorgeous night." He reached out to stroke her beneath the chin. She made purring noises. "More?"

Her gravity returned. "That's what I was wondering." He cocked his brows. "An understanding between us. We've had our flings. At least, you have had, in the past few months." His face darkened. She went doggedly on: "To myself, it wasn't that important; an occasional thing. I don't want to continue with it, really. If nothing else, those hints and attempts, the whole courtship rite, over and over . . . they interfere with my work. I'm developing some ideas about planetary cores. They need concentration. A lasting liaison would help."

"I don't want to make any contracts," he said grimly.

She caught his shoulders. "I realize that. I'm not asking for one. Nor offering it. I have simply come to like you better each time we have talked, or danced, or spent a night. You are a quiet man, mostly; strong; courteous, to me at any rate. I could live happily with you— nothing exclusive on either side, only an alliance, for the whole ship to see—as long as we both want to."

"Done!" he exclaimed, and kissed her.

"That quickly?" she asked, astonished.

"I'd given it some thought too. I'm also tired of chasing. You should be easy to live with." He ran a hand down her side and thigh. "Very easy."

"How much of your heart is in that?" At once she laughed. "No, I apologize, such questions are excluded. . . . Shall we move into my

cabin? I know Maria Toomajian won't mind trading places with you. She keeps her part closed off anyway."

"Fine," he said. "Sweetheart, we still have almost an hour before breakfast call—"

Leonora Christine was nearing the third year of her journey, or the tenth year as the stars counted time, when grief came upon her.

Chapter 7

An outside watcher, quiescent with respect to the stars, might have seen the thing before she did; for at her speed she must run half-blind. Even without better sensors than hers, he would have known of the disaster a few weeks ahead. But he would have had no way to cry his warning.

And there was no watcher anyhow: only night, bestrewn with multitudinous remote suns, the frosty cataract of the Milky Way and the rare phantom glimmer of a nebula or a sister galaxy. Nine light-years from Sol, the ship was inimitably alone.

An automatic alarm roused Captain Telander. As he struggled upward from sleep, Lindgren's voice followed on the intercom: "Kors i Herrens namn!" The horror in it jerked him fully awake. Not stopping to acknowledge, he ran from his cabin. Nor would he have stopped to dress, had he been abed.

As it happened, he was clad. Lulled by the sameness of time, he had been reading a novel projected from the library and had dozed off in his chair. Then the jaws of the universe snapped shut.

He didn't notice the gaiety that now covered passageway bulkheads, or the springiness underfoot or the scent of roses and thundershowers. Loud in his awareness beat the engine vibrations. The stairs made a metal clatter beneath his haste, which the well flung back.

He emerged on the next level up and entered the bridge. Lindgren stood near the viewscope. It was not what counted; at this moment, it was almost a toy. What truth the ship could tell was in the instruments which glittered across the entire forward panel. But her eyes would not leave it.

The captain brushed past her. The warning which had caused him to be summoned was still blazoned on a screen linked to the astronomical computer. He read. The breath hissed between his teeth. His gaze went across the surrounding meters and displays. A slot clicked and extruded a printout. He snatched it. The letters and figures represented a quantification: decimal-point detail, after more data had come in and more calculation had been done. The basic Mene, Mene stood unchanged on the panel.

He stabbed the general alert button. Sirens wailed; echoes went ringing down the corridors. On the intercom he ordered all hands not

on duty to report to commons with the passengers. After a moment, harshly, he added that channels would be open so that those people standing watch could also take part in the meeting.

"What are we going to do?" Lindgren cried into a sudden stillness.

"Very little, I fear." Telander went to the viewscope. "Is anything visible in this?"