Tau Zero

Freiwald stirred. His unshaven cheeks darkened a trifle. “I am a man,” he said. “Not a robot. Eventually I start thinking.”

“My friend, do you imagine we would have survived this far if the officers, at any rate, did not spend every waking hour thinking?”

“I don’t mean your damned measurements, computations, course adjustments, equipment modifications. That’s from nothing but the instinct to stay alive. A lobster trying to climb out of a kettle has as much dignity. I ask myself, why? What are we really doing? What does it mean?”

“Et tu. Brute,” Reymont muttered.

Freiwald twisted about until his gaze was straight into the constable’s. “Because you are so callous… Do you know what year this is?”

“No. Neither do you. The data are too uncertain. And if you wonder what the year would be at Sol, that’s meaningless.”

“Be quiet! I know the whole simultaneity quacking. We have come something like fifty billion light-years. We are rounding me whole curve of space. If we returned this instant to the Solar System, we would not find anything. Our sun died long ago. It swelled and brightened till Earth was devoured; it became a variable, guttering like a candle in the wind; it sank away to a white dwarf, an ember, an ash. And the other stars followed. Nothing can be left in our galaxy but waning red dwarfs, if that. Otherwise clinkers. The Milky Way has gone out. Everything we knew, everything that made us, is dead. Starting with the human race.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Then it’s become something we could not comprehend. We are ghosts.” Freiwald’s lips trembled. “We hunt on and on, monomaniacs—” Again acceleration thundered through the ship. “There. You heard. “His eyes were white-rimmed, as if with fear. “We passed through another galaxy. Another hundred thousand years. To us, part of a second.”

“Oh, not quite,” Reymontsaid. “Our tau can’t be that far down, can it? We probably quartered a spiral arm.”

“Destroying how many worlds? I know the figures. We are not as massive as a star. But our energy — I think we could pierce the heart of a sun and not notice.”

“Perhaps.”

“That’s one section of our hell. That we’ve become a menace to— to—”

“Don’t say it.” Reymont spoke earnestly. “Don’t think it. Because it isn’t true. We’re interacting with dust and gas, nothing else. We do transit many galaxies. They lie comparatively close together in terms of their own size. Within a cluster, the members are about ten diameters apart, often less. Single stars within a galaxy — that’s another situation altogether. Their diameters are such a microscopic fraction of a light-year. In a nuclear region, the most crowded part … well, the separation of two stars is still like the separation of two men, one at either end of a continent. A big continent. Like Asia.”

Friewald looked away. “There is no more Asia,” he said. “No more anything.”

“There’s us,” Reymont answered. “We’re alive, we’re real, we have hope. What else do you want? Some grandiose philosophical significance? Forget it. That’s a luxury. Our descendants will invent it, along with tedious epics about our heroism. We have the sweat, tears, blood” — his grinflashed — “in short, the unglamorous bodily excretions. And what’s bad about that? Your trouble is, you think a combination of acrophobia, sensory deprivation, and nervous strain is a metaphysical crisis. Myself, I don’t despise our lobsterish instinct to survive. I’m glad we have one.”

Freiwald floated motionless.

Reymont crossed to him and squeezed his shoulder. “I’m not belittling your difficulties,” he said. “It is hard to keep going. Our worst enemy is despair; and it wrestles every one of us to the deck, every now and then.”

“Not you,” Freiwald said.

“Oh yes,” Reymont told him. “Me too. I get my feet back, though. So will you. If you’ll only stop feeling worthless because of a disability that is a perfectly normal temporary result of psychic exhaustion — as Jane understands better than you, young fellow — why, the disability will soon go away of itself. Afterward you’ll see the rest of your problems in perspective and start coping once more.”

“Well—” Freiwald, who had tensed while Reymont spoke, relaxed the barest bit. “Maybe.”

“I know. Ask the doctor if you don’t believe me. If you want, I’ll have him issue you some psychodrugs to hasten your recovery. My reason is that I do need you, Joha

The muscles beneath Reymont’s palm softened further. He smiled. “However,” he continued, “I’ve got with me the only psychodrug I expect is called for.”

“What?” Freiwald looked “up.”

Reymont reached under his tunic and extracted a squeeze bottle with twin drinking tubes. “Here,” he said. “Rank has its privileges. Scotch. The genuine article, not that witch’s brew the Scandinavians think is an imitation. I prescribe a hefty dose for you, and for myself too. I’d enjoy a leisurely talk. Haven’t had any for longer than I can remember.”

They had been at it an hour, and life was coming back in Freiwald’s ma

“Uh, yes,” Freiwald replied.

“Sadler told me,” the first officer explained. “Could you come to the bridge, Carl?”

“Urgent?” Reymont asked.

“N-n-not really, I guess. The latest observations seem to indicate … further evolutionary changes in space. We may have to modify our cruising plan. I thought you might like to discuss it.”

“All right.” Reymont shrugged at Freiwald. “Sorry.”

“Me also.” The other man considered the flask, shook his head sadly, and offered it back.

“No, you may as well finish it,” Reymont said. “Not alone. Bad, drinking alone. I’ll tell Jane.”

“Well now.” Freiwald genuinely laughed. “That’s kind of you.”

Emerging, closing the door behind him, Reymont glanced the length of the corridor. No one else was in sight. He sagged, then, eyes covered, body shaking. After a minute he filled his lungs and started for the bridge.

Norbert Williams happened to come the other way along the stairs. “Hi,” the chemist greeted.

“You’re looking cheerier than most,” Reymont remarked.

“Yeah, I guess I am. Emma and I, we got talking, and we may have hit on a new gimmick to check at a distance whether a planet has our type of life. A plankton-type population, you see, ought to impart certain thermal radiation characteristics to ocean surfaces; and given Doppler effect, making those frequencies something we can properly analyze—”

“Good. Do work on it. And if you should co-opt others, I’ll be glad.”

“Sure, we thought of that.”

“And would you pass the word that wherever she is, Jane Sadler’s dismissed from work for the day? Her boy friend has something to take up with her.”

Williams’ guffaw followed Reymont through the stairwell.

But the command deck was empty and still; and in the bridge, Lindgren stood watch alone. Her hands strained around the grips at the base of the viewscope. When she turned about at his entry, he saw that her face was quite without color.

He closed the door. “What’s wrong?” he said hushedly.

“You didn’t let on?”

“No, of course not, when the business had to be fierce. What is it?”

She tried to speak and could not.

“Are more people due at this meeting?” Reymont asked.

She shook her head. He went to her, anchored himself with a leg wrapped around a rail and the other foot braced to the deck, and received her in his arms. She held him as tightly as she had done on their single stolen night.

“No,” she said against his breast. “Elof and … Auguste Boudreau … they told me. Otherwise, just Malcolm and Mohandas know. They asked me to tell … the Old Man. They don’t dare. Don’t know how. I don’t either. How to tell anyone.” Her nails bit through his tunic. “Carl, what shall we do?”

He ruffled her hair awhile, staring across her head, feeling her heartbeat quick and irregular. Again the ship boomed and leaped; and soon again. The notes that rang through her were noticeably higher pitched than before. The draft from a ventilator blew cold. The metal around seemed to shrink inward.