Starborne

That’s quite a spread of worries, for one little journal entry. But it’s of some therapeutic value, I suppose, to set all this stuff down. In actuality I’ll deal with all of those problems the way I deal with everything, tackling them one at a time in the appropriate order. No need to worry about our rejecting a nearly suitable world until we’ve found one. No need to worry about whether the shunt mechanism will fail until it does. As for choosing the next year-captain, I ought to trust to the common sense and good judgment of my companions, instead of fretting about my own supposed indispensability and the likelihood that they will replace me with some clown.

What matters right now is simply to locate Planet A in some kind of Einsteinian-universe coordinates, get ourselves as close as we can to it before we leave nospace, and shunt back into the real continuum within easy exploring range of Planet A’s star’s solar system.

We’re supposed to know how to do that. If we can’t manage it, none of the other problems are going to be very important.

And so we get started on the grand quest. I don’t seriously believe we’re going to find our New Earth on the very first try. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And there’d a chance — small, but real — that we’ll find what we need right away. Both of these two planets look as though they just may be the real thing, insofar as we can tell very much about that at these distances and with the sca

The morning transmission. Noelle, sitting with her back to the year-captain, listens to what he reads her and sends it coursing over a gap that now spans more than twenty light-years. “Wait,” she says. “Yvo

He pauses, goes back, reads again:

“Metabolic balances remain normal, although, as earlier reported, some of the older members of the expedition have begun to show trace deficiencies of manganese and potassium. We are, of course, taking appropriate corrective steps, and—”

Noelle halts him with a brusque gesture. The year-captain waits. She bends forward, forehead against the table, hands pressed tightly to her temples.

“Static again,” she says. “It’s worse than ever today.”

“Are you getting through at all?”

“I’m getting through, yes. But I have to push, to push, push. And still Yvo

“The distance—”

“No!”

“Better than twenty light-years.”

“No,” she says again, a little less explosively this time. “We’ve already demonstrated that distance effects aren’t a factor. If there’s no falling off of signal after a million kilometers, after one light-year, after ten light-years — no measurable drop in clarity and accuracy whatever — then there shouldn’t be any qualitative diminution suddenly at any greater distance. Don’t you think I’ve thought about this?”

“Of course you have, Noelle.”

“It’s not as if we’re getting out of earshot of each other. We were in perfect contact at ten light-years, perfect at fifteen. Those are already immense distances. If we could manage that, we ought to be able to manage at any distance at all.”

“But still, Noelle—”

“Attenuation of signal is one thing, and interference is another. An attenuation curve is a gradual slope. Remember, Yvo

“Yes, like sunspots, I know. Perhaps when we head out for Planet A, things will clear up.”

“Perhaps,” Noelle says crisply. “Let’s start again, shall we, year-captain? Yvo

” — manganese and potassium. We are taking appropriate corrective steps—”

The year-captain visualizes the contact between the two sisters as an arrow whistling from star to star, as fire speeding through a shining tube, as a river of pure force coursing down a celestial wave guide. He sees the joining of those two minds as a stream of pure light binding the moving ship to the far-off mother world. Sometimes he dreams of them both, Yvo

I have a fu

This is the first brainstorming session for the group that is pla

“If that happens, then we find a nice nospace planet somewhere and we settle down there instead,” Paco answers. “That’s our fallback plan.”

Roy gives him a glowering stare. “What you say is absurd and irrelevant. There aren’t any nospace planets. Such a thing is a logical impossibil—”

Heinz, smiling as always but displaying an edge of controlled a

“And if it does?” Sieglinde asks.

“Heinz is right,” says the year-captain wearily. “It won’t fail. It simply won’t. You can count on that.”

“I count on nothing,” Sieglinde says, speaking in a throaty mock-dramatic way. Maybe sheis trying to be fu

“Not highly probable, though,” says Heinz. “The odds favor us, you say.”

“Not highly probable, no, but possible, distinctly possible, and what is possible is worth a little thought when that possibility can be fatal to our endeavor. You are an engineer, Heinz; you deal in tangible things, in absolute concepts of what works and what does not I am a mathematician. We are more poetic than you, do you understand me? I deal in axioms and certainties; but I also know that beneath the axioms lie only assumptions, and beneath the assumptions lies — chaos!”