Tau zero (24 page)

I've got friends who'll make me welcome. It makes no diffrence where I end up when I die."

Michael O'Donnell, entering late after his watch ended—there were live stand-bys at every stress point, these days—pushed through the crowd. "Hey, Boris!" he called. The racket drowned him out.

"— Oh, you've got no use for money when you die.

For St. Peter wants no ticket

When you stand at heaven's wicket. Oh, you've got no use for money when you die."

He reached the stage. "Hey, Boris! Congratulations!"

'You shall have my old bicycle when I die. You shall have —"

"Thank you," Fedoroff boomed. "Mainly Margarita's work. She runs quite a shipyard, no?"

"For the final kilometer

Goes on tandem with St. Peter. — "

"What will you name the kid?" O'Donnell asked.

"I'll shoot craps with old St. Peter when I die. —"

"Haven't decided yet," Fedoroff said. He waved a bottle. "I can tell you, though, it won't be Eve."

"If I shoot as I've shot here —"

"Embala?" Ingrid Lindgren suggested. "The first woman in the Eddie story."

"/ can take him for a beer."

"Not that either," Fedoroff said.

"I'll shoot craps with old St. Peter when I die."

"Nor Leonora Christine," the engineer went on. "She's not going to be any damned symbol. She's going to be herself." The singers began dancing in a circle.

"It's not certain we'll get liquor when we die. It's not certain we'll get liquor when we die.

Let us then drink hell for leather

Now tonight when we're together. It's not certain we'll get liquor when we die."

Chidambaran and Foxe-Jameson seemed dwarfed by the sprawling masses of the observatory apparatus, and artless amidst its meters and controls and flickering indicator lights, and loud and clumsy in the humming stillness that pervaded this deck. They rose when Captain Telander appeared.

"You asked me to come?" he said pointlessly. His wasted features set. "What news? We've had calm this past month. . . ."

"That won't last." Foxe-Jameson spoke half in exultation. "Elof s gone in person to fetch Ingrid. We couldn't do that for you, sir. The image is still very faint, might get lost if we don't ride herd. You should be the first to know." He returned to his chair before an electronic console. A screen above it showed darkness.

Telander shuffled close. "What have you found?"

Chidambaran took him by the elbow and pointed at the screen. "There. Do you see?"

On the edge of perception gleamed the dimmest and tiniest of sparks.

"A good ways off, naturally," Foxe-Jameson said into the silence. "We'll want to maintain a most respectful distance."

"What is it?" Telander quavered.

"The germ of the monobloc," Dhidambaran answered. "The new beginning."

Telander stood long and long, staring, before he went to his knees. The tears ran quietly down his face. "Father, I thank Thee," he said.

Rising: "And I thank you, gentlemen. Whatever happens next . . . we have come this far, we have done this much. I think I can carry on again . . . after what you have just shown me."

When he finally left to return to the bridge, he walked with the stride of a commander.

Leonora Christine shouted, shuddered, and leaped.

Space flamed around her, a firestorm, hydrogen aglow from that

supernal sun which was forming at the heart of existence, which burned brighter and brighter as the galaxies rained down into it. The gas hid the central travail behind sheets, banners, and spears of radiance, aurora, flame, lightning. Forces, unmeasurably vast, tore through and through the atmosphere: electric, magnetic, gravitational, nuclear fields; shock waves bursting across megaparsecs; tides and currents and cataracts. On the fringes of creation, through billion-year cycles which passed as moments, the ship of man flew.

Flew.

There was no other word. As far as humanity was concerned, or the most swiftly computing and reacting of machines, she fought a hurricane—but such a hurricane as had not been known since last the stars were melted together and hammered afresh.

'Ya-a-ah-h-h/" screamed Lenkei, and rode the ship down the trough of a wave whose crest shook loose a foam of supernovae. The haggard men on the steering bridge with him stared into the screen that had been built for this hour. What raged in it was not reality—present reality transcended any picturing or understanding—but a display of exterior force fields. It burned and roiled and spewed great sparks and globes. It bellowed in the metal of the ship, in flesh and skulls.

"Can't you stand any more?" Reymont shouted from his own seat. "Barrios, relieve him."

The other jet man shook his head. He was too stunned, too beaten from his previous watch.

"Okay." Reymont unharnessed himself. "I'll try. I've handled a lot of different types of craft." No one heard him through the fury around, but all saw him fight across the pitching, whirling deck. He took the auxiliary control chair, on the opposite side of Lenkei from Barrios, and laid his mouth close to the pilot's ear. "Phase me in."

Lenkei nodded. Together their hands moved across the board.

They must hold Leonora Christine well away from the growing monobloc, whose radiation would otherwise surely kill them; at the same time, they must stay where the gas was so dense that tau could continue to decrease for them, turning these final phoenix gigayears into hours; and they must keep the ship riding safely through a chaos that, did it ever strike her full on, would rip her into nuclear particles. No computers, no instruments, no precedents might guide them. It must be done on instinct and trained reflex.

Gradually Reymont entered the pattern, until he could steer alone. The rhythms of rebirth were wild, but they were there. Ease on starboard . . . vector at nine o'clock low . . . now push that thrust! . . . brake a little here . . . don't let her broach . . . swing wide of

that flame cloud if you can. . . . Thunder brawled. The air was sharp with ozone, and cold.

The screen blanked. An instant later, every fluoropanel in the ship turned simultaneously ultraviolet and infrared, and blackness plunged down. Those who lay harnessed alone, throughout the hull, heard invisible lightnings walk the corridors. Those in command bridge, pilot bridge, engine room, who manned the ship, felt a heaviness greater than planets—they could not move, nor stop a movement once begun—and then felt a lightness such that their bodies began to shake asunder—and this was a change in inertia itself, in every constant of nature as space-time-matter-energy underwent its ultimate convulsion—for a moment infinitesimal and infinite, men, women, child, ship, and death were one.

It passed, so swiftly that they could not tell if it had been. Light came back, and outside vision. The storm grew fiercer. But now through it, seen distorted so that they flew, fountaining off in two huge curving sheets, now came the nascent galaxies.

The monobloc had exploded. Creation had begun.

Reymont went over to full deceleration. Leonora Christine started slowly to slow; and she flew out into a reborn light.

Chapter 22

Boudreau and Nilsson nodded at each other. They grinned. "Yes, indeed," the astronomer said.

Reymont looked restlessly around the observatory. "Yes, what?" he demanded. He jerked one thumb at a visual screen. Space swarmed with little dancing incandescences. "I can see for myself. The galactic groups are still close together. Most of them are still nothing but hydrogen nebulae. And hydrogen atoms are still thick between them, comparatively speaking. What of it?"

"Computation on the basis of data," Boudreau said. "I have been consulting with the team leaders here. We felt you deserved as well as needed to hear in confidence what we have learned, so that you might make the decision."

Reymont stiffened. "Lars Telander is the captain."

"Yes, yes. Nobody wants to go behind his back, especially when he is once more doing a superb job with the ship. The folk within the ship, though, they are another matter. Be realistic, Charles. You know what you are to them."

Reymont folded his arms. "Well, proceed, then."

Nilsson went into lecture gear. "Never mind details," he said. "This result came out of the problem you set us, to find in which directions the matter was headed, and which the antimatter. You recall, we were able to do this by tracing the paths of plasma masses through the magnetic fields of the universe as a whole while its radius was small. And thereby the officers were enabled to bring this vessel safely into the matter half of the plenum.

"Now in the course of making those studies, we collected and processed an astonishing amount of data. And here is what else we have come up with. The cosmos is new and in some respects disordered. Things have not yet sorted themselves out. Within a short range of us, compared to distances we have already traversed, are material complexes—galaxies and protogalaxies—with every possible velocity.

"We can use that fact to our advantage. That is, we can pick the clan, family, cluster, and individual galaxy we want to make our destination—pick one at which we can arrive with zero relative speed at any point of its evolution that we choose. Within fairly wide limits, anyhow. We couldn't get to a galaxy which is more than about fifteen

billion years old by the time we reach it: not unless we wanted to approach it circuitously. Nor can we overtake any before it is about one billion years old. But otherwise we can choose what we like.

"And . . . whatever we elect, the maximum shipboard time required to come there, braked, will be no longer than weeks!"

Reymont said an amazed obscenity.

"You see," Nilsson explained, "we can select a target whose velocity will be almost identical with ours when we fetch it."

"Oh yes," Reymont mumbled. "I can see that. I'm just not used to having luck in our favor."

"Not luck," Nilsson said. "Given an oscillating universe, this development was inevitable. Or so we perceive by hindsight. We need merely use the fact."

"Best you decide on our goal," Boudreau urged. "Now. Those other idiots, they would wrangle for hours, if you put it to a vote. And every hour means untold cosmic time lost, which reduces our options. If you will tell us what you want, I'll plot an appropriate course and the ship can start off on it very shortly. The captain will take your recommendation. The rest of our people will accept any fait accompli you hand them, and thank you for it. You know that."

Reymont paced for some turns. His boots clacked on the deck. He rubbed his brow, where the wrinkles lay deep. Finally he confronted his interlocutors. "We want more than a galaxy," he said. "We want a planet to live on."

"Understood," Nilsson agreed. "May I speak for a planet—a system—of the same approximate age as Earth had? Say, five billion years? It seems to take about that long for a fair probability of the kind of biosphere we like having evolved. We could live in a Mesozoic type of environment, I imagine, but we would rather not."

"Seems reasonable," Reymont nodded. "How about metals, though?"

"Ah, yes. We want a planet as rich in heavy elements as Earth was. Not too much less, or an industrial civilization will be hard to establish. Not too much more, or we could find numerous areas where the soil is poisonous. Since higher elements are formed in the earlier generations of stars, we should look for a galaxy that will be as old, at rendezvous, as ours was."

"No," Reymont said. "Younger."

"Hein?" Boudreau blinked.

"We can probably find a planet like Earth, also with respect to metals, in a young galaxy," Reymont said. "A globular cluster ought to have plenty of supernovae in its early stages, which ought to enrich the

interstellar medium locally, giving second-generation G-type suns about the same composition as Sol. As we enter our target galaxy, let's scout for that kind."

"We may not detect any that we can reach in less than years," Nilsson warned.

"Well, then we don't," Reymont answered. "We can settle for a planet less well-endowed with iron and uranium than Earth was. That's not crucial. We have the technology to make do with light alloys and organics. We have hydrogen fusion for power.

"The important thing is that we be about the first intelligent race alive in those parts."

They stared at him.

He smiled in a way they had not seen before. "I'd like us to have our pick of worlds, when our descendants get around to interstellar colonization," he said. "And I'd like us to become—oh, the elders. Not imperialists; that's ridiculous; but the people who were there from the beginning, and know their way around, and are worth learning from. Never mind what physical shape the younger races have. Who cares? But let's make this, as nearly as possible, a human galaxy, in the widest sense of the word 'human.' Maybe even a human universe.

"I think we've earned that right."

Leonora Christine took only three months of her people's lives from the moment of creation to the moment when she found her home.

That was partly good fortune but also due to forethought. The newborn atoms had burst outward with a random distribution of velocities. Thus, in the course of ages, they formed hydrogen clouds which attained distinct individualities. While they drifted apart, these clouds condensed into sub-clouds—which, under the slow action of many forces, differentiated themselves into separate families, then single galaxies, then individual suns.

But inevitably, in the early stages, exceptional situations occurred. Galaxies were as yet near to each other. They still contained anomalous groups. Thus they exchanged matter. A large star cluster might form within one galaxy, but having more than escape velocity, might cross to another (with stars coalescing in it meanwhile) that could capture it. In this way, the variety of stellar types belonging to a particular galaxy was not limited to those that it could have evolved at its own age.

Zeroing in on her destination, Leonora Christine kept watch for a well-developed cluster whose speed she could easily match. And as she entered its domain, she looked for a star of the right characteris-