Tau zero (11 page)

"No doubt we could make repairs if we could go outside. But we'd have to come too near the fireball of the accelerator power core in its

own magnetic bottle. The radiation would kill us before we could do any useful work. The same is true for any remote-control robot we might build. You know what radiation at that level does to transistors, for instance. Not to mention inductive effects of the force fields.

"And, of course, we can't shut off the accelerators. That would mean shutting off the whole set of fields, including the screens, which only an outside power core can maintain. At our speed, hydrogen bombardment would release enough gamma rays and ions to fry everybody aboard within a minute."

He fell silent, less like a man ending a lecture than a machine running down.

"Have we no directional control whatsoever?" Reymont asked, still toneless.

"Yes, yes, we do have that," Boudreau said. "The accelerator pattern can be varied. We can damp down any of the four Venturis and boost up any others—get a sidewise as well as a forward vector. But don't you see, no matter what path we take, we must continue accelerating or we die."

"Accelerating forever," Telander said.

"At least," Lindgren whispered, "we can stay in the galaxy. Swing around and around its heart." Her gaze went to the periscope, and they knew what she thought of: behind that curtain of strange blue stars, blackness, intergalactic void, an ultimate exile. "At least . . . we can grow old . . . with suns around us. Even if we can't ever touch a planet again."

Telander's features writhed. "How do I tell our people?" he croaked.

"We have no hope," Reymont said. It was hardly a question.

"None," Fedoroff replied.

"Oh, we can live out our lives—reach a reasonable age, if not quite what antisenescence would normally permit," said Pereira. "The bio-systems and organocycle apparatus are intact. We could actually increase their productivity. Do not fear immediate hunger or thirst or suffocation. True, the closed ecology, the reclamations, are not 100 per cent efficient. They will suffer slow losses, slow degrading. A spaceship is not a world. Man is not quite the clever designer and large-scale builder that God is." His smile was ghastly. "I do not advise that we have children. They would be trying to breathe things like acetone, while getting along without things like phosphorus and smothering in things like earwax and belly-button lint. But I imagine we can get fifty years out of our gadgets. Under the circumstances, that seems ample to me."

Lindgren said from nightmare, staring at a bulkhead as if she could see through: "When the last of us dies— We must put in an automatic cutoff. The ship must not keep on after our deaths. Let the radiation do what it will, let cosmic friction break her to bits and let the bits drift off yonder."

"Why?" asked Reymont.

"Isn't it obvious? If we throw ourselves into a circular path . . . consuming hydrogen, always traveling faster, running tau down and down as the thousands of years pass ... we get more massive. We could end by devouring the galaxy."

"No, not that," said Telander. He retreated into pedantry. "I have seen calculations. Somebody did worry once about a Bussard craft getting out of control. But as Mr. Pereira remarked, any human work is insignificant out here. Tau would have to become something like, shall we say, ten to the minus twentieth power before the ship's mass was equal to that of a minor star. And the odds are always literally astronomical against her colliding with anything more important than a nebula. Besides, we know the universe is finite in time as well as space. It would stop expanding and collapse before our tau got that low. We are going to die. But the cosmos is safe from us."

"How long can we live?" Lindgren wondered. She cut Pereira off. "I don't mean potentially. If you say half a century, I believe you. But I think in a year or two we will stop eating, or cut our throats, or agree to turn the accelerators off."

"Not if I can help it," Reymont snapped.

She gave him a dreary look. "Do you mean you would continue— not just barred from man, from living Earth, but from the whole of creation?"

He regarded her steadily in return. His right hand rested on his gun butt. "Don't you have that much guts?" he replied.

"Fifty years inside this flying coffin!" she almost screamed. "How many will that be outside?"

"Easy," Fedoroff warned, and took her around the waist. She clung to him and snatched after air.

Boudreau said, as carefully dry as Telander: "The time relationship appears to be somewhat academic to us, n'est-ce pas? It depends on what course we take. If we let ourselves continue straight outwards, naturally we will encounter a thinner medium. The rate of decrease of tau will grow proportionately smaller as we enter intergalactic space. Contrariwise, if we try for a cyclical path taking us through the densest hydrogen concentrations, we could get a very large inverse tau. We might see billions of years go by. That could be quite wonderful." His

smile was forced, a flash in the spade beard. "We have each other too. A goodly company. I am with Charles. There are better ways to live but also worse ones."

Lindgren hid against Fedoroff s breast. He held her, patted her with a clumsy hand. After a while (an hour or so in the history of the stars) she raised her face again.

"I'm sorry," she gulped. "You're right. We do have each other." Her glance went among them, ending at Reymont.

"How shall I tell them?" the captain beseeched.

"I suggest you do not," Reymont answered. "Have the first officer break the news."

"What?" Lindgren said.

"You are simpdtico," he answered. "I remember."

She moved from Fedoroff s loosened grasp, a step toward Reymont.

Abruptly the constable tautened. He stood for a second as if blind, before he whirled from her and confronted the navigator.

"Hoy!" he exclaimed. "I've gotten an idea. Do you know—"

"If you think I should—" Lindgren had begun to say.

"Not now," Reymont told her. "Auguste, come over to the desk. We have a bit of figuring to do . . . fast!"

Chapter 10

The silence went on and on. Ingrid Lindgren stared from the stage, where she stood with Lars Telander, down at her people. They looked back at her. And not a one in that chamber could find words.

Hers had been well chosen. The truth was less savage in her throat than in any man's. But when she came to her planned midpoint—"We have lost Earth, lost Beta Three, lost the mankind we belonged to. We have left to us courage, love, and and, yes, hope"—she could not continue. She stood with lip caught between teeth, fingers twisted together, and the slow tears flowed from her eyes.

Telander stirred. "Ah ... if you will," he tried. "Kindly pay attention. A means does exist. . . ." The ship jeered at him in her tone of distant lightnings.

Glassgold broke. She did not weep loudly, but her struggle to stop made the sound more dreadful. M'Botu, beside her, attempted consolation. He, though, had clamped such stoicism on himself that he might as well have been a robot. Iwamoto withdrew several paces from them both, from them all; one could see how he pulled his soul into some nirvana with a lock on its door. Williams shook his fist at the overhead and cursed. Another voice, female, started to keen. A woman considered the man with whom she had been keeping company, said, "You, for my whole life?" and stalked from him. He tried to follow her and bumped into a crewman who snarled and offered to fight if he didn't apologize. A seething went through the entire human mass.

"Listen to me," Telander said. "Please listen."

Reymont shook loose the arm which Chi-Yuen Ai-Ling held, where they stood in the first row, and jumped onto the stage. "You'll never bring them around that way," he declared sotto voce. "You're used to disciplined professionals. Let me handle these civilians." He turned on them. "Quiet, there!" Echoes bounced around his roar. "Shut your hatches. Act like adults for once. We haven't the personnel to change your diapers for you."

Williams yelped with resentment. M'Botu bared teeth. Reymont drew his stunner. "Hold your places!" He dropped his vocal volume, but everyone heard him. "The first of you to move gets knocked out. Afterward we'll court-martial him. I'm the constable of this expedi-

tion, and I intend to maintain order and effective cooperation." He leered. "If you feel I exceed my authority, you're welcome to file a complaint with the appropriate bureau in Stockholm. For now, you'll listen!"

His tongue-lashing activated their adrenals. With heightened vigor came self-possession. They glowered but waited alertly.

"Good." Reymont turned mild and holstered his weapon. "We'll say no more about this. I realize you've had a shock which none of you were prepared psychologically to meet. Nevertheless, we've got a problem. And it has a solution, if we can work together. I repeat: if."

Lindgren had swallowed her weeping. "I think I was supposed to—" she said. He shook his head at her and went on:

"We can't repair the decelerators because we can't turn off the accelerators. The reason is, as you've been told, at high speeds we must have the force fields of one system or the other to shield us from interstellar gas. So it looks as if we're bottled in this hull. Well, I don't like the prospect either, though I believe we could endure it. Medieval monks accepted worse.

"Discussing it in the bridge, however, we got a thought. A possibility of escape, if we have the nerve and determination. Navigation Officer Boudreau ran a preliminary check for me. Afterward we called in Professor Nilsson for an expert opinion."

The astronomer harrumphed and looked important. Jane Sadler seemed less impressed than others.

"We have a chance of success," Reymont informed them.

A sound like a wind passed through the assembly. "Don't make us wait!" cried a young man's voice.

"I'm glad to see some spirit," Reymont said. "It'll have to be kept on a tight rein, though, or we're finished. To make this as short as I can—afterward Captain Telander and the specialists will go into detail—here's the idea."

His delivery might have been used to describe a new method of bookkeeping. "If we can find a region where gas is practically nonexistent, we can safely shut down the fields, and our engineers can go outside and repair the decelerator system. Astronomical data are not as precise as we'd like. However, apparently throughout the galaxy and even in nearby intergalactic space, the medium is too dense. Much thinner out there than here, of course; still, so thick, in terms of atoms struck per second, as to kill us without our protection.

"Now galaxies generally occur in clusters. Our galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, M31 in Andromeda, and thirteen others, large and small, make up one such group. The volume it occupies is about six

million light-years across. Beyond them is an enormously greater distance to the next galactic family. By coincidence, it's in Virgo too: forty million light-years from here.

"In that stretch, we hope, the gas is thin enough for us not to need shielding."

Babble tried to break out afresh. Reymont lifted both hands. He actually laughed. "Wait, wait!" he called. "Don't bother. I know what you want to say. Forty million light-years is impossible. We haven't the tau for it. A ratio of fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand, does us no good. Agreed. But."

The last word stopped them. He filled his lungs. "But remember," he said, "we have no limit on our inverse tau. We can accelerate at a lot more than three gee, too, if we widen our scoopfields and choose a path through sections of this galaxy where matter is dense. The exact parameters we've been using were determined by our course to Beta Virginis. The ship isn't restricted to them. Navigator Boudreau and Professor Nilsson estimate we can travel at an average of ten gee, quite likely more. Engineer Fedoroff is reasonably sure the accelerator system can stand that, after certain modifications he knows he can make.

"So. The gentlemen made rough calculations. Their results indicate we can swing halfway around the galaxy, spiraling inward till we plunge straight through its middle and out again on this side. We'd be slow about any course change anyway. We can't turn on a ten-ore coin at our speed! And this'll enable us to acquire the necessary tau. Don't forget, that'll decrease constantly. Our transit to Beta Vee would have been a lot quicker if we hadn't meant to stop there: if, instead of braking at mid-passage, we'd simply kept cramming on velocity.

"Navigator Boudreau estimates—estimates, mind you; we'll have to gather data as we go; but a good, informed guess—considering the speed we already have, he thinks we can finish with this galaxy and head out beyond it in a year or two."

"How long cosmic time?" sounded from the gathering.

"Who cares?" Reymont retorted. "You know the dimensions. The galactic disk is about a hundred thousand light-years across. At present we're thirty thousand from the center. One or two hundred millennia altogether? Who can tell? It'll depend on what path we take, which in turn will depend on what long-range observation can show us."

He stabbed a finger at them. "I know. You wonder, what if we hit a cloud such as got us into this miserable situation? I have two answers for that. First, we have to take some risks. But second, as our tau gets

less and less, we'll be able to use regions which are denser and denser. We'll have too much mass to be affected as we were this time. Do you see? The more we have, the more we can get, and the faster we can get it in ship's time. We may conceivably leave the galaxy with an inverse tau on the order of a hundred million. In that case, by our clocks we'll be outside this entire galactic family in days!"

"How do we get back?" Glassgold said—but vigilant and interested.

"We don't," Reymont admitted. "We keep on to the Virgo cluster. There we reverse the process, decelerate, enter one of the member galaxies, bring our tau up to something sensible, and start looking for a planet where we can live.

"Yes, yes, yes!" he rapped into the renewed surf of their speech. "Millions of years in the future. Millions of light-years hence. The human race most likely extinct ... in this corner of the universe. Well, can't we start over, in another place and time? Or would you rather sit in a metal shell feeling sorry for yourselves, till you grow senile and die childless? Unless you can't stand the gaff and blow out your brains. I'm for going on as long as strength lasts. I think enough of this group to believe you will agree. Will anyone who feels differently be so good as to get out of our way?"