Tau Zero

“That I can,” he said.

Leonora Christine entered the next galaxy in its equatorial plane, to maximize the distance she would traverse through its wealth of gas and star dust. Already on the fringes, where the suns were as yet widely scattered, she began to bound at high acceleration. The fury of that passage vibrated ever more strongly and noisily through her.

Captain Telander kept the bridge. Seemingly he had little control. The commitment was made; the spiral arm curved ahead like a road shining blue and silver. Occasional giant stars came sufficiently close to show in the now modified screens, distorted with the speed effects that sent them whirling past as if they were sparks blown by the wind that shouted against the ship. Occasional dense nebulae enclosed her in night or in the fluorescence of hot newbom stellar fires.

Lenkei and Barrios were the men.who counted then, co

Captain Telander sat throughout those shipboard hours, so unmoving that you might have thought him dead. A few times he bestirred himself. (“Heavy concentration of stuff identified, sir. Could be too thick for us. Shall we try to evade?”) Responses came from him. (“No, carry on, take every opportunity to bring down tau, if you estimate even fifty-fifty odds in our favor.”) Their tone was calm and unhesitant.

The clouds around the nucleus were thicker and made heavier weather than those in the home galaxy. Thunders toned in the hull, which rocked and bucked to accelerations that changed faster than could be compensated. Equipment broke from its containers and smashed; lights flickered, went out, were somehow rekindled by sweating, cursing men with flash beams; folk in darkened cabins awaited their deaths. “Proceed on present course,” Telander ordered; and he was obeyed.

And the ship lived. She broke through into starry space and started out the other side of the immense Catherine wheel. In little more than an hour, she had re-entered intergalactic regions. Telander a

Boudreau came before the captain, trembling with reaction but his features altogether alive. “Mon Dieu, sir, wedidit!! was not sure it would be possible. I would not have had the courage, me, to issue the commands you did. You were right! You won us everything we hoped for!”

“Not yet,” said the seated man. His inflection was unchanged. He looked past Boudreau. “Have you corrected your navigational data? Will we be able to use any other galaxies in this family?”

“Why … well, yes. Several, although some are small elliptical systems, and we will probably only manage to cut a corner across others. Too high a speed. By the same token, however, we should have less trouble and hazard each time, considering our mass. And we can certainly use at least two other galactic families, maybe three, in similar fashion.” Boudreau tugged his beard. “I estimate we will be into, er, interclan space — well into it, so we can make those repairs — in another month.”

“Good,” Telander said.

Boudreau gave him a close regard and was shocked. Beneath its careful expressionlessness, the captain’s countenance was that of a man drained empty.

Dark.

The absolute night.

Instruments, straining magnification and amplification, reconverting wave lengths, identified some glimmer in that pit. Human senses found nothing, nothing.

“We’re dead.” Fedoroff’s words echoed in earplugs and skulls.

“I feel alive,” Reymont replied.

“What else is death but the final cutting off? No sun, no stars, no sound, no weight, no shadow—” Fedoroff’s breath was ragged, too clear over a radio which no longer carried the surf noise of cosmic interference. His head was invisible against empty space. His suit lamp threw a dull puddle of light onto the hull that was reflected and lost in horrible distances.

“Let’s keep moving,” Reymont urged.

“Who’re you to give orders?” demanded another man. “What do you know about Bussard engines? Why are you out with this work party anyhow?” “I can manage myself in free fall and armor,” Reymont told him, “and so provide you an extra pair of hands. I know we’d better get the job done fast. Which seems to be more than you bagelbrains realize.”

“What’s the hurry?” Fedoroff mocked. “We have eternity. We’re dead, remember.”

“We will indeed be dead if we’re caught, forceshields down, in anything like a real concentration of matter,” Reymont retorted. “It’d take less than one atom per cubic meter to kill us with our present tau — which puts the next galactic clan only weeks away.”

“What of it?”

“Well, are you absolutely certain, Fedoroff, that we won’t strike an embryo galaxy, family, clan … some enormous hydrogen cloud, still dark, still falling it on itself … at any instant?”

“At any mille

It was, in truth, a flitting of ghosts. No wonder he, never a coward, had briefly heard the wingbeats of the Furies. One had thought of space as black. But now one remembered that it had been full of stars. Any shape had been silhouetted athwart suns, clusters, constellations, nebulae, sister galaxies; oh, the cosmos was pervaded with light! The i