Tau Zero

Color mounted in Lindgren’s features. Her eyes grew less dull. “Good’Lord,” she said, “why didn’t you speak of this before?” “I’d other problems on my mind,” Reymont answered. “Why didn’t you, Professor Nilsson?”

“Because the whole thing is absurd,” the astronomer snorted. “You presuppose instrumentation we do not have.”

“Can’t we build it? We have tools, precision equipment, construction supplies, skilled workmen. Your team has already made progress.”

“You demand speed and sensitivity increased by whole orders of magnitude over anything that ever existed.”

“Well?” Reymont said.

Nilsson and Lindgren stared at him. The ship trembled.

“Well, why can’t we develop what we need?” Reymont asked in a puzzled voice. “We have some of the most talented, highly trained, imaginative people our civilization produced. They include every branch of science; what they don’t know, they can find in the microtapes; they’re used to interdisciplinary work.

“Suppose, for instance, Emma Glassgold and Norbert Williams got together to draw up the specifications for a device to detect and analyze life at a distance. They’d consult others as needed. Eventually they’d employ physicists, electronicians, and the rest for the actual building and debugging. Meanwhile, Professon Nilsson, you may have been in charge of a group making tools for remote planetography. In fact, you’re the logical man to head up the entire program.”

Hardness fell from him. He exclaimed, eager as a boy: “Why, this is precisely what we’ve needed! A fascinating, vital sort of job that demands everything everybody can give. Those whose specialties aren’t called for, they’ll be in it too — assistants, draftsmen, manual workers… I suppose we’ll have to remodel a cargo deck to accommodate the gear… Ingrid, it’s a way to save not just our lives but our minds!”

He sprang to his feet. She did too. Their hands clasped.

Suddenly they became aware of Nilsson. He sat less than dwarfish, hunched, shivering, collapsed.

Lindgren went to him in alarm. “What’s wrong?”

His head did not lift. “Impossible,” he mumbled. “Impossible.”

“Surely not,” she urged. “I mean, you wouldn’t have to discover new laws of nature, would you? The basic principles are known.”

“They must be applied in unheard-of ways.” Nilsson covered his face. “God better me, I haven’t the brains any longer.”

Lindgren and Reymont exchanged a look above his bent back. She shaped unspoken words. Once he had taught her the Rescue Corps trick of lip reading when spacesuit radios were unusable. They had practiced it as something that made them more private and more one. “Can we succeed without him?”

“I doubt it. He is the best chief for that kind of project. At least, lacking him, our chance is poor.”

Lindgren squatted down beside Nilsson. She laid an arm across his shoulders. “What’s the trouble?” she asked most softly.

“I have no hope,” he snuffled. “Nothing to live for.”

“You do!”

“You know Jane … deserted me … months ago. No other woman will — Why should I care? What’s left for me?”

Reymont’s lips formed, “So behind everything was self-pity.” Lindgren frowned and shook her head.

“No, you’re mistaken, Elof,” she murmured. “We do care for you. Would we ask for your help if we didn’t honor you?.”

“My mind.” He sat straight and glared at her out of swimming eyes. “You want my intelligence, right. My advice. My knowledge and talent. To save yourselves. But do you want me? Do you think of me as, as a human being? No! Dirty old Nilsson. One is barely polite to him. When he starts to talk, one finds the earliest possible excuse to leave. One does not invite him to one’s cabin parties. At most, if desperate, one asks him to be a fourth for bridge or to start an instrument development effort. What do you expect him to do? Thank you?”

“That isn’t true!”

“Oh, I’m not as childish as some,” he said. “I’d help if I were able. But my mind is blank, I tell you. I haven’t had an original thought in weeks. Call it fear of death paralyzing me. Call it a sort of impotence. I don’t care what you call it. Because you don’t care either. No one has offered me friendship, company, anything. I have been left alone in the dark and the cold. Do you wonder that my mind is frozen?”

Lindgren looked away, hiding what expressions chased across her. When she confronted Nilsson again, she had put on calm.

“I can’t say how sorry I am, Elof,” she told him. “You are partly to blame yourself. You acted so, well, self-sufficient, we assumed you didn’t want to be bothered. The way Olga Sobieski, for instance, doesn’t want to. That’s why she moved in with me. When you joined Hussein Sadek—”

“He keeps the panel closed between our halves,” Nilsson shrilled. “He never raises if. But the soundproofing is imperfect. I hear him and his girls in there.”

“Now we understand.” Lindgren smiled. “To be quite honest, Elof, I’ve grown bored with my current existence.”

Nilsson made a strangled noise.

“I believe we have some personal business to discuss,” Lindgren said. “Do … do you mind. Constable?”

“No,” said Reymont. “Of course not.” He left the cabin.

Chapter 15

Leonora Christine stormed through the galactic nucleus in twenty thousand years. To those aboard, the time was measured in hours. They were hours of dread, while the hull shook and groaned from stress, and the outside view changed from total darkness to a fog made blinding and blazing by crowded star clusters. The chance of striking a sun was not negligible; hidden in a dust cloud, it could be in front of the ship in one perceived instant. (No one knew what would happen to the star. It might go nova. But certainly the vessel would be destroyed, too swiftly for her crew to know they were dead.) On the other hand, this was the region where inverse tau mounted to values that could merely be estimated, not established with precision, absolutely not comprehended.

She had a respite while she crossed the region of clear space at the center, like passing through the eye of a hurricane. Foxe-Jameson looked into the viewscope at thronged suns — red, white and neutron dwarfs, two- and three-fold older than Sol or its neighbors; others, glimpsed, unlike any ever seen or suspected in the outer galaxy — and came near weeping. “Too bloody awful! The answers to a million questions, right here, and not a single instrument I can use!”

His shipmates gri

But there was no joking when Boudreau called a conference with Telander and Reymont. That was soon after the ship had emerged from the nebulae on the far side of the nucleus and headed back through the spiral arm whence she came. The scene behind was of a dwindling fireball, ahead of a gathering darkness. Yet the reefs had been run, the Journey to the Virgo galaxies would take only a few more months of human life, the program of research and development on planet-finding techniques had been a

“I should perhaps have let you enjoy yourselves like everybody else,” Boudreau said. His skin was shockingly sallow against hair and beard. “But Mohandas Chidambaran gave me the results of his calculations from the latest readings after we emerged from the core. He felt I was best qualified to gauge the practical consequences … as if any rulebook existed for intergalactic navigation! Now he sits alone in his cabin and meditates. Me, when I got over being stu

Captain Telander’s visage drew tight, readying for a new blow. “What is the result?” he asked.