Tau zero (13 page)

He could delay no further handing her a cup. "Th-that isn't required," he stammered.

"Thanks." She inhaled the coffee's fragrance. Her eyes crinkled at him over the rim. "We don't have to be absolutely abbot and nun, we two. The captain needs a private conference once in a while with his first officer."

"Er—no. You are sweet, Ingrid, but no." Telander paced the narrow width of the cabin, back and forth. "In as little and cramped a community as this, how long can any secret last? I dare not risk hypocrisy. And while I ... I would love to have you for a permanent partner ... it can't be. You have to be everyone else's liaison with me: not

my, my direct collaborator. Do you follow me? Reymont explained it better."

Her humor died. "I don't altogether like the way he's jockeyed you."

"He's had experience in crisis situations. His arguments were sound. We can go over them in detail."

"We will. They might be logical at that . . . whatever his motives." Lindgren took a sip of coffee, set the cup down on her lap, and declared in a whetted voice:

"Regarding myself, all right. I'm tired of the whole childish business anyway. You're correct, monogamy is becoming fashionable, and a girl's choices are poxy limited. I've already considered stopping. Olga Sobieski feels the same. I'll tell Kato to trade cabin halves with her. Some calm and coolness will be welcome, Lars, a chance to think about several things, now that we really have gone by that hundred-year mark."

Leonora Christine was aimed well away from the Virgin, but not yet at the Archer. Only after she had swung almost halfway around the galaxy would the majestic spiral of her path strike toward its heart. At present the Sagittarian nebulae stood off her port bow. What lay beyond them was inferred, not known. Astronomers expected a volume of clear space, with scant dust or gas, housing a crowded population of ancient stars. But no telescope had seen past the clouds which surrounded that realm, and no one had yet gone to look.

"Unless an expedition went off since we left," pilot Lenkei suggested. "It's been centuries on Earth. I imagine they're doing marvelous things."

"Not dispatching probes to the core, surely," cosmologist Chidambaran objected. "Thirty millennia to get there, and as much to flash a message back? It does not make sense. I expect man will spread slowly inward, colony by colony."

"Failing a faster-than-light drive," Lenkei said.

Chidambaran's swarthy features and small-boned body came as near registering scorn as had ever been seen on him. "That fantasy! If you want to rewrite everything we have learned since Einstein—no, since Aristotle, considering the logical contradiction involved in a signal without a limiting velocity—proceed."

"Not my line of work." Lenkei's greyhound slenderness seemed abruptly haggard. "I don't want faster-than-light, anyhow. The idea that others might be speeding from star to star like birds—like me

from town to town when I was home—while we're caged here . . . that would be too cruel."

"Our fate would not be changed by their fortune," Chidambaran replied. "Indeed, irony would add another dimension to it, another challenge if you will."

"I've more challenge than I want," Lenkei said.

Their footfalls resounded on the winding stairs and up the well. They had come together from a low-level shop where Nilsson had been consulting Foxe-Jameson and Chidambaran about the design of a large crystal diffraction grating.

"It's easier for you," exploded from the pilot. "You've got a real use. We depend on your team. If you can't produce new instruments for us— Me, till we reach a planet where they need space ferries and aircraft, what am I?"

"You are helping build those instruments, or will be when we have plans drawn up," Chidambaran said.

"Yes, I apprenticed myself to Sadek. To pass this bloody empty time." Lenkei collected his wits. "I'm sorry. An attitude we've got to steer clear of, I know. Mohandas, may I ask you something?"

"Certainly."

"Why did you sign on? You're important today. But if we hadn't had the accident—couldn't you have gone further toward understanding the universe back on Earth? You're a theoretician, I'm told. Why not leave the fact gathering to men like Nilsson?"

"I would scarcely have lived to do much with reports from Beta Virginis. It seemed of possible value that a scientist of my sort expose himself to wholly new experiences and impressions. I might have gained insights that would never come otherwise. If I didn't, the loss would not be large, and at a minimum I would have continued thinking approximately as well as at home."

Lenkei tugged his chin. "Do you know," he said, "I suspect you don't need dream-box sessions."

"It may be. I confess I find the process undignified."

"Then for heaven's sake, why?"

"Regulations. We must all receive the treatment. I did request exemption. Constable Reymont persuaded First Officer Lindgren that special privilege, albeit justified, would set a bad precedent."

"Reymont! That bastard again!"

"He may be correct," Chidambaran said. "It does me no harm, unless one counts the interruption of a train of thought, and that happens too seldom to be a major handicap."

"Huh! You're more patient than I'd be."

"I suspect Reymont must force himself into the box," Chidambaran remarked. "He, too, goes as infrequently as allowed. Have you observed, similarly, that he will take a drink but will never get tipsy? I believe he is under a compulsion, arising perhaps from a buried fear, to stay in control."

"He is that. Do you know what he said to me last week? I'd only borrowed some sheet copper, it'd have gone right back by way of the furnace and the rolling mill, soon as I was through with it, so I hadn't bothered to check it out. That bastard said—"

"Forget it," Chidambaran advised. "He had a point. We are not on a planet. Whatever we lose is lost for good. Best not to take chances; and surely we have time for bureaucratic procedures." The entrance to commons appeared. "Here we are."

They headed toward the hypnotherapeutic room. "I trust your experience will be pleasant, Matyas," Chidambaran said.

"Me too." Lenkei winced. "I've had a few terrible nightmares in there." Brightening: "And a wild lot of fun!"

Stars grew scattered. Leonora Christine was not crossing from one spiral arm of the galaxy to another—not yet; she was just in a lane of comparative emptiness. For lack of much intake mass, her acceleration diminished. That condition was very temporary, so shrunken was her tau: a few hundred cosmic years. But for some time inboard, the viewscreens to starboard opened mainly on black night.

A number of the crew found it preferable to the eldritch shapes and colors blazing to port.

Another Covenant Day arrived. The ceremonies and the subsequent party were less forlorn than might have been expected. Shock and grief had gotten eroded by ordinariness. At present, the dominant mood was of defiance.

Not everybody attended. Elof Nilsson, for one, stayed in the cabin he and Jane Sadler shared. He spent a lengthy while making sketches and estimates for his exterior telescope. When his brain wearied, he dialed the library index for fiction. The novel he selected, at random out of thousands, proved absorbing. He hadn't finished it when she returned.

He raised eyes that were bloodshot with fatigue. Except for the scanner screen, the room was unlighted. She stood, big, gaudy, not altogether steady, in shadow.

"Good Lord!" he exclaimed. "It's five in the morning!"

"Have you finally noticed?" She grinned. The whisky haze around

her reached his nostrils, together with a muskiness. He took a pinch of snuff, a luxury that occupied a large part of his baggage allowance.

"Vm not due at work in three hours," he said.

"Nor I. I told my boss I wanted a week's leave. He agreed. He'd better. Who else has he got?"

"What attitude is that? Suppose others on whom the ship depends behaved thus."

"Tetsuo Iwamoto . . . Iwamoto Tetsuo, really; Japanese put last name first, like Chinese . . . like Hungarians, did you know?—'cept when they're being polite to us ignorant Westerners—" Sadler captured her thought. "He's a nice man to work for. He can manage a spell 'thout me. So why not?"

"Nevertheless—"

She lifted a finger. "I will not be scolded, Elof. You hear? I've borne with that o-ver-com-pensated inferiority complex of yours more'n I should've. And a lot else. Thinking maybe the rest of you'd grow up to match that IQ of yours. Enough's enough. Gather ye roses while ye may."

"You're drunk."

"Sort of." Wistfully: "You should've come along."

"What for? Why not confess how weary I am of the same faces, the same actions, the same inane conversations? I'm far from unique in that."

Her voice dropped. "Are you tired of me?"

"Why—" Nilsson's Kewpie-doll form clambered erect. "What's the matter, my dear?"

"You haven't exactly bowled me over with attention, these past months."

"No? No, perhaps not." He drummed a dresser top. "I've been preoccupied."

She drew a breath. "I'll say it straight. I was with Johann tonight."

"Freiwald? The machinist?" Nilsson stood speechless for a humming minute. She waited. Soberness had come upon her. He said at length, with difficulty, watching the tattoo of his fingers: "Well, you have the legal and doubtless the moral right. I am no handsome young animal. I am . . . was . . . more proud and happy than I knew how to express when you agreed to be my partner. I let you teach me a number of things I did not understand before. Probably I was not the most adept pupil anyone ever had."

"Oh, Elof!"

"You are leaving me, aren't you?"

"We're in love, he and I." Her vision blurred. "I thought it'd be easier than this to tell you. I didn't figure you cared a lot."

"You wouldn't consider a discreet— No, discretion isn't feasible. Besides, you couldn't bring yourself to it. And I have my own pride." Nilsson sat down again and reached for his snuffbox. "You had better go. You can remove your things later."

"That quick?"

"Get out!" he shrieked.

She fled, weeping but on eager feet.

Leonora Christine re-entered populated country. Passing within fifty light-years of a giant new-born sun, she transited the gas envelope that surrounded it. Being ionized, the atoms were seizable with maximum efficiency. Her tau plummeted close to asymptotic zero: and with it, her time rate.

Chapter 12

Reymont paused at the entrance to commons. The deck lay empty and quiet. After an initial surge of interest, athletics and other hobbies had become increasingly less popular. Aside from meals, the tendency was for scientists and crew-folk to form minute cliques or retreat altogether into reading, watching taped shows, sleeping as much as possible. He could force them to get a prescribed amount of exercise. But he had not found a way to restore what the months were grinding out of the spirit. He was the more helpless in that respect because his inflexible enforcement of basic rules had made him enemies.

A propos rules— He strode down the corridor to the dream room and opened its door. A light above each of the three boxes within said it was occupied. He fished a master key from his pocket and unlocked the lids, which passed air but not light, one by one. Two he closed again. At the third, he swore. The stretched-out body, the face under the somnohelmet, belonged to Emma Glassgold.

For a space he stood looking down at the small woman. Peace dwelt in her smile. Doubtless she, like most aboard, owed her continued sanity to this apparatus. Despite every effort at decoration, at actual interior construction of desired facilities, the ship was too sterile an environment. Total sensory deprivation quickly causes the human mind to lose its hold on reality. Deprived of the data-flow with which it is meant to deal, the brain spews forth hallucinations, goes irrational, and finally collapses into lunacy. The effects of prolonged sensory impoverishment are slower, subtler, but in many ways more destructive. Direct electronic stimulation of the appropriate encephalic centers becomes necessary. That is speaking in neurological terms. In terms of immediate emotion, the extraordinarily intense and lengthy dreams generated by the stimulus—whether pleasurable or not—become a substitute for real experience.

Nevertheless. . . .

Glassgold's skin was loose and unhealthy in hue. The EEG screen behind the helmet said she was in a soothed condition. That meant she could be roused fast without danger. Reymont snapped down the override switch on the timer. The oscilloscopic trace of the inductive pulses that had been going through her head flattened and darkened.

She stirred. "Shalom, Moshe," he heard her whisper. There was

nobody along of that name. He slid the helmet off. She squeezed her eyes tighter shut, knuckled them, and tried to turn around on the padding.

"Wake up." Reymont gave her a shake.

She blinked at him. The breath snapped into her. She sat straight. He could almost see the dream fade away behind those eyes. "Come on," he said, offering his hand to assist. "Out of that damned coffin."

"Ach, no, no," she slurred. "I was with Moshe."

"I'm sorry, but—"

She crumpled into sobbing. Reymont slapped the box, a crack across the ship's murmur. "All right," he said. "I'll make that a direct order. Out! And report to Dr. Latvala."

"What the devil's going on here?"

Reymont turned. Norbert Williams must have heard them, the door being ajar, and come in from the pool, because the chemist was nude and wet. He was also furious. "You've gotten to bullying women, huh?" he said. "Not even big women. Scram."

Reymont stood where he was. "We have regulations about these boxes," he said. "If a person hasn't the self-discipline to obey them, I have to compel."

"Yah! Snooping, peering, shoving your nose up our privacy—by God, I'm not going to stand for it any longer!"

"Don't," Glassgold implored. "Don't fight. I'm sorry. I will go."

"Like hell you will," the American answered. "Stay. Insist on your rights." His features burned crimson. "I've had a bellyful of this little tin Jesus, and now's the time to do something about him."