Tau Zero

Reymont spoke by intercom to the pilot. That man would not board the ship, but would boost off as soon as his human cargo was discharged. “Do you mind if we unshutter? Give our friends something to look at while they wait?”

“Go ahead,” said the voice. “No hazard indicated. And … they won’t see Earth again for a spell, will they?”

Reymont a

Fourth in line was Chi-Yuen Ai-Ling. She had twisted about in her safety webbing to face the port entirely. Her fingers were pressed against its surface. “Now you, please,” Reymont said. She didn’t respond. “Miss Chi-Yuen.” He tapped her shoulder. “You’re next.”

“Oh!” She might have been shaken out of a dream. Tears stood in her eyes. “I, I beg your pardon. I was lost—”

The linked spacecraft were coming into another dawn. Light soared over Earth’s immense horizon, breaking in a thousand colors from maple-leaf scarlet to peacock blue. Momentarily a wing of zodiacal radiance could be seen, like a halo over the rising fire-disk. Beyond were the stars and a crescent moon. Below was the planet, agleam with her oceans, her clouds where rain and thunder walked, her green-brown-snowy continents and jewel-box dries. You saw, you felt, that this world lived.

Chi-Yuen fumbled with her buckles. Her hands looked too thin for them. “I hate to stop watching,” she whispered in French. “Rest well there, Jacques.”

“You’ll be free to observe on the ship screens, once we’ve commenced acceleration,” Reymont told her in the same language.

The fact that he spoke it startled her back to ordinariness. “Then we will be going away,” she said, but with a smile. Her mood had evidently been more ecstatic than elegiac.

She was small, frail-boned, her figure seeming a boy’s in the high-collared tunic and wide-cut slacks of the newest Oriental mode. Men tended to agree, however, that she had the most enchanting face aboard, coifed in shoulder-length blue-black hair. When she spoke Swedish, the trace of Chinese intonation that she gave its natural lilt made it a song.

Reymont helped her unstrap and laid an arm around her waist. He didn’t bother with shuffling along in bondsole shoes. Instead, he pushed one foot against the chair and flew down the aisle. At the lock he seized a handhold, swung through an arc, gave himself a fresh shove, and was inside the starship. In general, those whom he escorted relaxed; it was easier for him to carry them passive than to contend with their clumsy efforts to help. But Chi-Yuen was different. She knew how. Their movements turned into a swift, swooping dance. After all, as a planetologist she had had a good deal of experience with free fall.

Their flight was not less exhilarating for being explainable.

The companionway from the airlock ran through concentric layers of storage decks: extra shielding and armor for the cylinder at the axis of the ship which housed perso

The cabins for those other than officers opened on two corridors which flanked a row of bathrooms. Each compartment was two meters high and four square; it had two doors, two closets, two built-in dressers with shelves above, and two folding beds. These last could be slid together on tracks to form one, or be pushed apart. In the second case, it then became possible to lower a screen from the overhead and thus turn the double room into two singles.

“That was a trip to write about in my diary. Constable.” Chi-Yuen clutched a handhold and leaned her forehead against the cool metal. Mirth still trembled on her mouth.

“Who are you sharing this with?” Reymont asked.

“For the present, Jane Sadler.” Chi-Yuen opened her eyes and let them glint at him. “Unless you have a different idea?”

“Heh? Uh … I’m with Ingrid Lindgren.”

“Already?” The mood dropped from her. “Forgive me. I should not pry.”

“No, I’m the one who owes the apology,” he said. “Making you wait here with nothing to do, as if you couldn’t manage in free fall.”

“You can’t make exceptions.” Chi-Yuen was altogether serious again. She extended her bed, floated onto it, and started harnessing in. “I want to lie awhile alone anyway and think.”

“About Earth?”

“About many things. We are leaving more than most of us have yet understood, Charles Reymont. It is a kind of death — followed by resurrection, perhaps, but nonetheless a death.”

Chapter 3

“—zero!”

The ion drive came to life. No man could have gone behind its thick shielding to watch it and survived. Nor could he listen to it, or feel any vibration of its power. It was too efficient for that. In the so-called engine room, which was actually an electronic nerve center, men did hear the faint throb of pumps feeding reaction mass from the tanks. They hardly noticed, being intent on the meters, displays, readouts, and code signals which monitored the system. Boris Fedoroff’s hand was never distant from the primary cutoff switch. Between him and Captain Telander in the command bridge flowed a mutter of observations. It was not necessary to Leonora Christine. Far less sophisticated craft than she could operate themselves. And she was in fact doing so. Her intermeshing built-in robots worked with more speed and precision — more flexibility, even, within the limits of their programming — than mortal flesh could hope for. But to stand by was a necessity for the men themselves.

Elsewhere, the sole direct proof of motion that those had who lay in their cabins was a return of weight. It was not much, under one tenth gee, but it gave them an “up” and “down” for which their bodies were grateful. They released themselves from their beds. Reymont a

Reaction mass entered the fire chamber. Thermonuclear generators energized the furious electric arcs that stripped those atoms down to ions; the magnetic fields that separated positive and negative particles; the forces that focused them into beams; the pulses that lashed them to ever higher velocities as they sped down the rings of the thrust tubes, until they emerged scarcely less fast than light itself. Their blast was invisible. No energy was wasted on flames. Instead, everything that the laws of physics permitted was spent on driving Leonora Christine outward.

A vessel her size could not accelerate by this means like a Patrol cruiser. That would have demanded more fuel than she could hold, who must carry half a hundred people, and their necessities for ten or fifteen years, and their tools for satisfying scientific curiosity after they arrived, and (if the data beamed by the instrumented probe which had preceded her did actually mean that the third planet of Beta Virginis was habitable) the supplies and machines whereby man could begin to take a new world for himself. She spiraled slowly out of Earth orbit. The dwellers within her had ample chances to stand at her viewscreens and watch home dwindle among the stars.