Tau Zero

“Mind your own business,” Freiwald growled.

“It is my business,” Takh said. “Our unity is essential to our very lives. It won’t be helped by official penalties. I am a friend of both these men. I believe I can mediate their disagreement.”

“We must have respect for the law, or we’re done,” Freiwald replied. “I’m taking them in.”

Takh reached a decision. “May I talk privately with you first? For a minute?” His tone held urgency.

“Well … all right,” Freiwald agreed. “You two stay here.”

He entered the game room with Takh and shut the door. “I can’t let them get away with resisting me,” he said. “Ever since Captain Telander gave us deputies official status, we’ve acted for the ship.” Being clad in shorts, he lowered a sock to show the contusions on an ankle.

“You could ignore that,” Takh suggested. “Pretend you didn’t notice. They aren’t bad fellows. They’re simply driven wild by monotony, purposelessness, the tension of wondering if we will get through what’s ahead of us or crash into a star.”

“If we let anybody escape the consequences of starting violence—”

“Suppose I took them aside. Suppose I got them to compose their differences and apologize to you. Wouldn’t that serve the cause better than an arrest and a summary punishment?”

“It might,” Freiwald said skeptically. “But why should I believe you can do it?”

“I am a deputy too,” Takh told him.

“What?” Freiwald goggled.

“Ask Reymont, when you can get him alone. I am not supposed to reveal that he recruited me, except to a regular deputy in an emergency situation. Which I judge this is.”

“Aber … why — ?”

“He meets a good deal of resentment, resistance, and evasion himself,” Takh said. “His overt part-time agents, like you, have less trouble of that sort. You seldom have to do any dirty work. Still, a degree of opposition to you exists, and certainly no one will confide anything if he thinks Reymont might object. I am not a … a fink. We face no real crime problem. I am supposed to be a leaven, to the best of what abilities I have. As in this case today.”

“I thought you didn’t like Reymont,” Freiwald said weakly.

“I ca

“Oh no. Certainly not. Not even to Jane. What a surprise!”

“Will you let me handle Pedro and Michael?”

“Yes, do.” Freiwald spoke absently. “How many more of your kind are there?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Takh said, “but I suspect that he hopes eventually to include everybody.” He went out.

Chapter 14

The nebular masses which walled in the galaxy’s core loomed thunderhead black and betowered. Already Leonora Christine traversed their outer edge. No suns were visible forward; elsewhere, each hour, they shone fewer and fainter.

In this concentration of star stuff, she moved according to an eerie sort of aerodynamics. Her inverse tau was now so enormous that space density did not much trouble her. Rather, she swallowed matter still more greedily than before and was no longer confined to hydrogen atoms. Her readjusted selectors turned everything they met, gas or dust or meteoroids, into fuel and reaction mass. Her kinetic energy and time differential mounted at a dizzying rate. She flew as if through a wind blowing between the sun clusters.

Nonetheless, Reymont haled Nilsson to the interview room.

Ingrid Lindgren took her place behind its desk, in uniform. She had lost weight, and her eyes were shadowed. The cabin thrummed abnormally loud, and frequent shocks went through bulkheads and deck. The ship felt irregularities in the clouds as gusts, currents, vortices of an ongoing creation of worlds.

“Can this not wait till we have made our passage, Constable?” she asked, alike in anger and weariness.

“I don’t think so, madame,” Reymont replied. “Should an emergency arise, we need people convinced it’s worth coping with.”

“You accuse Professor Nilsson of spreading disaffection. The articles provide for free speech.”

His chair creaked beneath the astromoner’s shifting weight. “I am a scientist,” he declared waspishly. “I have not only the right but the obligation to state what is true.”

Lindgren regarded him with disfavor. He was letting a scraggly beard grow on his chins, had not bathed of late, and was in grimy coveralls.

“You don’t have the right to spread horror stories,” Reymont said. “Didn’t you notice what you were doing to some of the women, especially, when you talked the way you did at mess? That’s what decided me to intervene; but you’d been building up the trouble for quite a while before, Nilsson.”

“I merely brought out into the open what has been common knowledge from the start,” the fat man retorted. “They hadn’t the courage to discuss it in detail. I do.”

“They hadn’t the mea

“No personalities,” Lindgren said. “Tell me what happened.” She had recently been taking her meals alone in her cabin, pleading busyness, and was not seen much off watch.

“You know,” Nilsson said. “We’ve raised the subject on occasion.”

“What subject?” she asked. “We’ve talked about many.”

“Talked, yes, like reasonable people,” Reymont snapped. “Not lectured a tableful of shipmates, most of them feeling low already.”

“Please, Constable. Proceed, Professor Nilsson.”

The astronomer puffed himself up. “An elementary thing. I ca

“That,” Lindgren said. “Why, certainly—”

Nilsson was not to be deprived of his platform. Perhaps he didn’t bother to hear her. He ticked points off on his fingers. “If 1 per cent of the stars are suitable, do you realize how many we will have to examine in order to have an even chance of finding what we seek? Fifty! I should have thought anyone aboard would be capable of that calculation. It is conceivable that we will be lucky and come upon our Nova Terra at the first star we try. But the odds against this are ninety-nine to one. Doubtless we must try many. Now the examination of each involves almost a year of deceleration. To depart from it, in search elsewhere, requires another year of acceleration. Those are years of ship’s time, remember, because nearly the whole period is spent at velocities which are small compared to light’s and thus involve a tau factor near unity: which, in addition, prevents our going above one gravity.

“Hence we must allow a minimum of two years per star. The even chance of which I spoke — and mind you, it is only even — the odds are as good that we will not find Nova Terra in the first fifty stars as they are that we will — this chance requires a hundred years of search. Actually it requires more, because we shall have to stop from time to time and laboriously replenish the reaction mass for the ion drive. Antisenescence or no, we will not live that long.

“Therefore our whole endeavor, the risks we take in this fantastic dive straight through the galaxy and out into intergalactic space, it is all an exercise in futility. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

“Among your many loathsome characteristics, Nilsson,” Reymont said, “is your habit of droning the obvious through your nose.”

“Madame!” the astronomer gasped. “I protest! I shall file charges of personal abuse!”

“Cut back,” Lindgren ordered. “Both of you. I must admit your conduct offers provocation, Professor Nilsson. On the other hand, Constable, may I remind you that Professor Nilsson is one of the most distinguished men in his vocation that Earth has … Earth had. He deserves respect.”