Tau Zero

“I expect we’ll be taking every opportunity to accelerate that we come upon, till we see a journey’s end we can make use of, if we ever do. Agreed?”

Telander shuddered. “Can any of us hold to it?” he said.

“We must,” Reymont stated. Once more he spoke crisply.’TU figure out a tactful way to a

“Don’t forget, we can depend on some of the women too,” Nilsson said.

“Yes. Certainly. Like Ingrid Lindgren.”

“Like her indeed.”

“M-hm. I’m afraid you will have to go rouse her, Elof. We’ve got to assemble our cadre — the unbreakables; the people who understand people — assemble them and plan this thing. Start suggesting names.”

Chapter 18

The reaches of space-time ca

Leonra Christine spent most of a year getting within 1 per cent of light velocity. The time aboard was about the same, because the value of tau only began to drop sharply when she was quite near c. During that initial period, she covered half a light-year of space, approximately five trillion kilometers.

Thereafter the decrease became constantly more swift. Aided by the higher acceleration now possible, she required somewhat under two more years, in her own measure, to get about ten light-years from Earth. That was where she met her grief.

The decision being made to seek the Virgo cluster of galaxies, she must gain such a tau that she could bridge the distance in a tolerable shipboard time. At maximum acceleration — a maximum which increased as she traveled — she swung half around the Milky Way and into its heart in a little more than one year. According to the cosmos, it took better than a hundred mille

In the Sagittarian clouds, she won a tau which brought her out of her native galaxy in days. Then her people discovered that the vacuum between the family of star groups they were in and the Virgo assemblage at which theirplans were aimed, was not hard enough. They must go beyond the entire clan.

In intergalactic space, Leonora Christine remained able to pile on speed. It took her weeks to fare a couple of million light-years to a chosen neighbor galaxy. Spa

The accessible mass of the whole galactic clan that was her goal proved inadequate to brake that velocity.

Therefore she did not try. Instead, she used what she swallowed to drive forward all the faster. She traversed the domain of this second clan — with no attempt at manual control, simply spearing through a number of its member galaxies — in two days.

On the far side, again into hollow space, she fell free. The stretch to the next attainable clan was on the order of another hundred million light-years. She made the passage in about a week.

When she arrived there, of course, she spent the star stuff she found to force herself still closer to the ultimate speed.

“No — don’t — look out!”

Margarita Jimenes missed the handhold that would have checked her flight. Scrabbling for it, she struck the bulkhead, caromed, and floundered in air.

“Ad i chawrti!” Boris Fedoroff snorted.

He gauged vectors and launched himself to intercept her. It was not a conscious calculation; that would have been impossibly cumbersome. Like a hunter who aimed for a moving target, he used the skills and multiple senses of his body — angular diameters and shifts, muscle pressures and tensions, kinesthesia, the unseen but exactly known configuration of every joint, the several time derivatives of each of these factors and many more — his organism, a machine created with incomprehensible complexity and precision and, as it soared, beauty.

He had a ways to fly. They were on Number Two deck, well aft near the engine rooms. It was devoted to storage; but a major part of the materials it had held were now fashioned into objects. Where the cargo had been was a cavernous, echoing space, coldly lit, seldom visited. Fedoroff had brought his woman there for some private instruction in free-fall techniques. She was doing miserably in the classes that Lindgren had decreed for groundlubbers.

She spun before him, head lost among loose ringlets, arms and legs and breasts flopping. Sweat oiled her bare skin and broke off in globules that glittered around her like midges. “Relax, I tell you,” Fedoroff called. “The first damn thing you must learn is, ‘Relax.’”

He passed within reach and grabbed her at the waist. Linked, the two of them formed a new system that spun on a crazy axis as it drifted toward the opposite bulkhead. Vestibular processes registered their outrage in giddiness and nausea. He knew how to suppress that reaction; and he had given her an antispacesickness pill before the lesson started.

Nevertheless she vomited.

He could do nothing except hold her through their trajectory. The first upheaval caught him by surprise and struck him in the face. Thereafter he clasped her back against belly. His free hand swatted at stinking yellow liquid and gobbets. Inhaled under these conditions, the stuff could choke a person.

When they hit metal, he snatched the nearest support, an empty rack. Hooking an elbow joint in it, he could use both arms to keep her and soothe her. Eventually the dry phase passed too.

“Are you better?” he asked.

She shivered and mumbled, “I want to be clean.”

“Yes, yes, we’ll find a bath. Waithere. Hang on, don’tlet go. I’ll come in a few minutes.” Fedoroff shoved free again.

He must close the ventilators before the splashed foulness got drawn into the ship’s general air system. Afterward he could see about catching it with a vacuum cleaner. He would do that himself. If he detailed another man to this mess, the fellow might do more than resent it. He might start a rumor about—

Fedoroff’s teeth slammed together. He finished his precautions and dove back to Jimenes.

Though still white-faced, she appeared in command of her movements. “I’m dreadfully sorry, Boris.” Her speech came hoarse out of a larynx burned by stomach acid. “I should never have agreed … to come this far … from a suction toilet.”

He poised in front of her and asked grimly, “How long have you been puking?”

She shrank away. He caught her before she drifted loose. His clasp was savage on her wrist. “When was your last period?” he demanded.

“You saw—”

“I saw what could easily have been a fake. Especially considering how busy I’ve been in my work. Give me the truth!”

He shook her. Unanchored, her body was twisted at the shoulder. She screamed. He let go as if she had turned incandescent. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he gasped. She bobbed from him. He got her just in time, hauled her back and held her tightly against his besmeared breast.