Tau Zero

Reymont did not stir at the insult. Lindgren caught her breath. After a moment Fedoroff sagged.

“Well,” he said tiredly, “the accelerators were also in use, at a much higher level of power. Doubtless on that account, their field strength protected them. The decelerators — Out. Wrecked.”

“How?”

“We can only determine that there has been material damage to their exterior controls and generators, and that the thermonuclear reaction which energized them is extinguished. Since the meters to the system aren’t reporting — must be smashed — we can’t tell exactly what is wrong.”

Fedoroff looked at the deck. His words ran on, more soliloquy than report. A desperate man will rehearse obvious facts over and over. “In the nature of the case, the decelerators must have been subjected to greater stress than the accelerators. I would guess that those forces, reacting through the hydromagnetic fields, broke the material assembly in that part of the Bussard module.

“No doubt we could make repairs if we could go outside. But we’d have to come too near the fireball of the accelerator power core in its own magnetic bottle. The radiation would kill us before we could do any useful work. The same is true for any remote-control robot we might build. You know what radiation at that level does to transistors, for instance. Not to mention inductive effects of the force fields.

“And, of course, we can’t shut off the accelerators. That would mean shutting off the whole set of fields, including the screens, which only an outside power core can maintain. At our speed, hydrogen bombardment would release enough gamma rays and ions to fry everybody aboard within a minute.”

He fell silent, less like a man ending a lecture than a machine ru

“Have we no directional control whatsoever?” Reymont asked, still toneless.

“Yes, yes, we do have that,” Boudreau said. “The accelerator pattern can be varied. We can damp down any of the four Venturis and boost up any others — get a sidewise as well as a forward vector. But don’t you see, no matter what path we take, we must continue accelerating or we die.”

“Accelerating forever,” Telander said.

“At least,” Lindgren whispered, “we can stay in me galaxy. Swing around and around its heart.” Her gaze went to the periscope, and they knew what she thought of: behind that curtain of strange blue stars, blackness, intergalactic void, an ultimate exile. “At least … we can grow old … with suns around us. Even if we can’t ever touch a planet again.”

Telander’s features writhed. “How do I tell our people?” he croaked.

“We have no hope,” Reymont said. It was hardly a question.

“None,” Fedoroff replied.

“Oh, we can live out our lives — reach a reasonable age, if not quite what antisenescence would normally permit,” said Pereira. “The biosystems and organocycle apparatus are intact. We could actually increase their productivity. Do not fear immediate hunger or thirst or suffocation. True, the closed ecology, the reclamations, are not 100 per cent efficient. They will suffer slow losses, slow degrading. A spaceship is not a world. Man is not quite the clever designer and large-scale builder that God is.” His smile was ghastly. “I do not advise that we have children. They would be trying to breathe things like acetone, while getting along without things like phosphorus and smothering in things like earwax and belly-button lint. But I imagine we can get fifty years out of our gadgets. Under the circumstances, that seems ample to me.”

Lindgren said from nightmare, staring at a bulkhead as if she could see through: “When the last of us dies — We must put in an automatic cutoff. The ship must not keep on after our deaths. Let the radiation do what it will, let cosmic friction break her to bits and let the bits drift off yonder.”

“Why?” asked Reymont.

“Isn’t it obvious? If we throw ourselves into a circular path … consuming hydrogen, always traveling faster, ru

“No, not that,” said Telander. He retreated into pedantry. “I have seen calculations. Somebody did worry once about a Bussard craft getting out of control. But as Mr. Pereira remarked, any human work is insignificant out here. Tau would have to become something like, shall we say, ten to the minus twentieth power before the ship’s mass was equal to that of a minor star. And the odds are always literally astronomical against her colliding with anything more important than a nebula. Besides, we know the universe is finite in time as well as space. It would stop expanding and collapse before our tau got that low. We are going to die. But the cosmos is safe from us.”

“How long can we live?” Lindgren wondered. She cut Pereira off. “I don’t mean potentially. If you say half a century, I believe you. But I think in a year or two we will stop eating, or cut our throats, or agree to turn the accelerators off.”

“Not if I can help it,” Reymont snapped.

She gave him a dreary look. “Do you mean you would continue — not just barred from man, from living Earth, but from the whole of creation?”

He regarded her steadily in return. His right hand rested on his gun butt. ‘‘Don’t you have that much guts?” he replied.

“Fifty years inside this flying coffin!” she almost screamed. “How many will that be outside?”

“Easy,” Fedoroff warned, and took her around the waist. She clung to him and snatched after air.

Boudreau said, as carefully dry as Telander: “The time relationship appears to be somewhat academic to us, n’est-ce pas? It depends on what course we take. If we let ourselves continue straight outwards, naturally we will encounter a thi

Lindgren hid against Fedoroff’s breast. He held her, patted her with a clumsy hand. After a while (an hour or so in the history of the stars) she raised her face again.

“I’m sorry,” she gulped. “You’re right. We do have each other.” Her glance went among them, ending at Reymont.

“How shall I tell them?” the captain beseeched.

“I suggest you do not,” Reymont answered. “Have the first officer break the news.”

“What?” Lindgren said.

“You are simpбtico, ” he answered. “I remember.”

She moved from Fedoroff’s loosened grasp, a step toward Reymont.

Abruptly the constable tautened. He stood for a second as if blind, before he whirled from her and confronted the navigator.

“Hoy!” he exclaimed. “I’ve gotten an idea. Do you know—”

“If you think I should—” Lindgren had begun to say.

“Not now,” Reymont told her. “Auguste, come over to the desk. We have a bit of figuring to do … fast!”