Tau Zero

“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 u

“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 a

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.

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 sudde

“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.