Tau Zero

“We don’t,” Reymont admitted. “We keep on to the Virgo cluster. There we reverse the process, decelerate, enter one of the member galaxies, bring our tau up to something sensible, and start looking for a planet where we can live.

“Yes, yes, yes!” he rapped into the renewed surf of their speech. “Millions of years in the future. Millions of light-years hence. The human race most qwlikely extinct … in this corner of the universe. Well, can’t we start over, in another place and time? Or would you rather sit in a metal shell feeling sorry for yourselves, till you grow senile and die childless? Unless you can’t stand the gaff and blow out your brains. I’m for going on as long as strength lasts. I think enough of this group to believe you will agree. Will anyone who feels differently be so good as to get out of our way?”

He stalked from the stage. “Ah … Navigation Officer Boudreau, Chief Engineer Fedoroff, Professor Nilsson,” Telander said. “Will you come here? Ladies and gentlemen, the meeting is open for general discussions—”

Chi-Yuen hugged Reymont. “You were marvelous,” she sobbed.

His mouth tightened. He looked from her, from Lindgren, across the assemblage, to the enclosing bulkheads. “Thanks,” he replied curtly. “Wasn’t much.”

“Oh, but it was. You gave us back hope. I am honored to live with you.”

He didn’t seen to hear. “Anybody could have presented a shiny new idea,” he said. “They’ll grasp at anything, right now. I only expedited matters. When they accept the program, that’s when the real trouble begins.”

Chapter 11

Force fields shifted about. They were not static tubes and walls. What formed them was the incessant interplay of electromagnetic pulses, whose production, propagation, and heterodyning must be under control at every nanosecond, from the quantum level to the cosmic. As exterior conditions — matter density, radiation, impinging field strengths, gravitational space-curvature — changed, instant by instant, their reaction on the ship’s immaterial web was registered; data were fed into the computers; handling a thousand simultaneous Fourier series as the smallest of their tasks, these machines sent back their answers; the generating and controlling devices, swimming aft of the hull in a vortex of their own output, made their supple adjustments. Into this homeostasis, this tightrope walk across the chance of a response that was improper or merely tardy — which would mean distortion and collapse of the fields, novalike destruction of the ship — entered a human command. It became part of the data. A starboard intake widened, a port intake throttled back: carefully, carefully. Leonora Christine swung around onto her new course.

The stars saw the ponderous movement of a steadily larger and more flattened mass, taking months and years before the deviation from its original track was significant. Not that the object whereon they shone was slow. It was a planet-sized shell of incandescence, where atoms were seized by its outermost force-fringes and excited into thermal, fluorescent, synchrotron radiation. And it came barely behind the wave front which a

In her own time, the story was another. She moved in a universe increasingly foreign — more rapidly aging, more massive, more compressed. Thus the rate at which she could gulp down hydrogen, burn part of it to energy and hurl the rest off in a million-kilometer jet flame … that rate kept waxing for her. Each minute, as counted by her clocks, took a larger fraction off her tau than the last minute had done.

Inboard, nothing changed. Air and metal still carried the pulse of acceleration, whose net internal drag still stood at an even one gravity. The interior power plant continued to give light, electricity, equable temperatures. The biosystems and organocycles reclaimed oxygen and water, processed waste, manufactured food, supported life. Entropy increased. People grew older at the ancient rate of sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour.

Yet those hours were always less related to the hours and years which passed outside. Loneliness closed on the ship like fingers.

Jane Sadler executed a balestra. Joha

“None too soon,” she panted. “I’d … have … been out of air … ’nother minute. Knees like rubber.”

“No more this evening,” Freiwald decided.

They took off their head protection. Sweat gleamed on her face and plastered hair to brow; her breath was noisy; but her eyes sparkled. “Some workout!” She flopped onto a chair. Freiwald joined her. This late in the ship’s evening, they had the gymnasium to themselves. It felt huge and hollow, making them sit close together.

“You will find it easier with other women,” Freiwald told her. “I think you had better start them soon.”

“Me? Instruct a female fencing class at my stage?” “I will continue to work out with you,” Freiwald said. “You can stay ahead of your pupils. Don’t you see, I must begin with the men. And if the sport draws as much interest as I would like, it will take time to make the equipment. Besides more masks and foils, we need йpйes and sabers. We ca

Sadler’s merriment faded. She gave him a studying look. “You didn’t propose this of your own accord? I’d assumed, you being the only person who’d fenced back on Earth, you wanted partners.”

“It was Constable Reymont’s idea, when I happened to mention my wish. He arranged that stock be issued me to produce the gear. You see, we must maintain physical fitness—”

“And distract ourselves from the bind we’re in,” she said harshly.

“A sound physique helps keep a sound mind. If you go to bed tired, you don’t lie awake brooding.”

“Yes, I know. Elof—” Sadler stopped.

“Professor Nilsson is perhaps too engaged in his work,” Freiwald dared say. His gaze left her, and he flexed the blade between his hands.

“He’d better be! Unless he can develop unproved astronomical instrumentation, we can’t plot an extragalactic trajectory on anything except guesswork.”

“True. True. I would suggest, Jane, your man might benefit, even in his profession, if he would take exercise.”

It was forced from her: “He’s getting harder to live with every day.” She took the offensive. “So Reymont’s appointed you coach.”

“Informally,” Freiwald said. “He urged me to take leadership, develop new, attractive sports — Well, I am one of his unofficial deputies.”

“Uh-huh. And he himself can’t. They’d see his motives, they’d think of him as a drillmaster, the fun would be gone, and they’d stay away by dozens.” Sadler smiled. “Okay, Joha

She offered her hand. He took it. The clasp continued.

“Let’s get out of this wet padding and into a wet swimming pool,” she proposed.

He replied scratchily: “No, thank you. Not tonight. We would be alone. I don’t dare that any longer, Jane.”

Leonora Christine encountered another region of increased matter density. It was more tenuous than the nebulina which had caused her trouble, and she ran it without difficulty. But it reached for many parsecs. Her tau shrank at a pace which in her own chronology was stupefying. By the time she emerged, she was going so fast that the normal one atom per cubic centimeter counted for about as much as the cloud had done. Not only did she keep the speed she had gained, she kept the acceleration.

Her folk continued regardless to follow Earth’s calendar, including observances for the tiny congregations of different religions. Each seventh morning, Captain Telander led his handful of Protestants in divine service.