Tau zero (4 page)

"Constable, do relax! The other expeditions made it, more or less sanely. Why not us? Take your swim." She grinned wider. "While you're at it, soak your head."

Reymont imitated a smile, removed his clothes, and hung them on a rack. She whistled. "Hey," she said, "I hadn't seen you before in less'n a coverall. That's some collection of biceps and triceps and things you pack around. Calisthenics?"

"In my job, I'd better keep fit," he replied uncomfortably.

"Some offwatch when you've nothing else to do," she suggested, "come around to my cabin and exercise me."

"I'd enjoy that," he said, looking her up and down, "but at present Ingrid and I—"

"Yeah, sure. I was kidding, sort of, anyway. Seems like I'll be making a steady liaison soon myself."

"Really? Who, if I may ask?"

"Elof Nilsson." She lifted a hand. "No, don't say it. He's not exactly Adonis. His manners aren't always the sweetest. But he's got a wonderful mind, the best in the ship, I suspect. You don't get bored listening to him." Her gaze shifted aside. "He's pretty lonely too."

Reymont stood quiet for a moment. "And you're pretty fine, Jane," he said. "Ingrid's meeting me here. Why don't you join us?"

She cocked her head. "By golly, you do keep a human being hidden

under that policeman. Don't worry, I won't let out your secret. And I won't stay, either. Privacy's hard to come by. You two use this while you've got it."

She waved and left. Reymont peered after her and back down into the water. He was standing thus when Lindgren arrived.

"Sorry I'm late," she said. "Beamcast from Luna. Another idiotic inquiry about how things are going for us. I'll be positively glad when we get out into the Big Deep." She kissed him. He hardly responded. She stepped back, trouble clouding her face. "What's the matter, darling?"

"Do you think I'm too stiff?" he blurted.

She had no instant reply. The fluorolight gleamed on her tawny hair, a ventilator's breeze ruffled it a little, the noise of the ball game drifted through the entrance arch. Finally: "What makes you wonder?"

"A remark. Well meant, but a slight shock just the same."

Lindgren frowned. "I've told you before, you've been heavier-handed than I quite liked, the few times you've had to make somebody toe the line. No one aboard is a fool, a malingerer, or a saboteur."

"Should I not have told Norbert Williams to shut up the other day, when he started denouncing Sweden at mess? Things like that can have a rather nasty end result." Reymont laid a clenched fist in the other palm. "I know," he said. "Military-type discipline isn't needed, isn't desirable . . . yet. But I've seen so much death, Ingrid. The time could come when we won't survive, unless we can act as one and jump to a command."

"Well, conceivably on Beta Three," Lindgren admitted. "Though the robot didn't send any data suggesting intelligent life. At most, we might encounter savages armed with spears—who would probably not be hostile to us."

"I was thinking of hazards like storms, landslips, diseases, God knows what on an entire world that isn't Earth. Or a disaster before we get there. I'm not convinced modern man knows everything about the universe."

"We've covered this ground too often."

"Yes. It's old as space flight; older. That doesn't make it less real." Reymont groped for sentences. "What I'm trying to do is—I'm not sure. This situation is not like any other I was ever in. I'm trying to . . . somehow . . . keep alive some idea of authority. Beyond simple obedience to the articles and the officers. Authority which has the right to command anything, to command a man to death, if that's

needful for saving the rest—" He stared into her puzzlement. "No," he sighed, "you don't understand. You can't. Your world was always good."

"Maybe you can explain it to me, if you say it enough different ways." She spoke softly. "And maybe I can make a few things clear to you. It won't be easy. You've never taken off your armor, Carl. But we'll try, shall we?" She smiled and slapped the hardness of his thigh. "Right now, though, silly, we're supposed to be off duty. What about that swim?"

She slipped out of her garments. He watched her approach him. She liked strenuous sports and lying under a sun lamp afterward. It showed in full breasts and hips, slim waist, long supple limbs, a tan against which her blondness stood vivid. "Bozhe moi, you're beautiful!" he said low in his throat.

She pirouetted. "At your service, kind sir—if you can catch me!" She made four low-gravity leaps to the end of the diving board and plunged cleanly off it. Her descent was dreamlike slow, a chance for aerial ballet. The splash when she struck made lingering lacy patterns.

Reymont entered directly from the poolside. Swimming was hardly different under this acceleration. The thrust of muscles, the cool silken flowing of water, would be the same at the galaxy's rim, and beyond. Ingrid Lindgren had said once that such truths made her doubt she would ever become really homesick. Man's house was the whole cosmos.

Tonight she frolicked, ducking, dodging, slipping from his grasp again and again. Their laughter echoed between the walls. When at last he cornered her, she embraced his neck in turn, laid her lips to his ear and whispered: "Well, you did catch me."

"M-m-m-hm." Reymont kissed the hollow between shoulder and throat. Through the wetness he smelled live girlflesh. "Grab our clothes and we'll go."

He carried her six kilos easily on one arm. When they were alone in the stairwell, he caressed her with his free hand. She kicked her heels and giggled. "Sensualist!"

"We'll soon be back under a whole gee," he reminded her, and started bounding down to officer level at a speed that would have broken necks on Earth.

—Later she raised herself on an elbow and met his eyes with hers. She had set the lights dim. Shadows moved behind her, around her, making her doubly gold- and amber-hued. With a finger she traced his profile.

"You're a wonderful lover, Carl," she murmured. "I've never had a better."

"I'm fond of you too," he said.

A hint of pain touched brow and voice. "But that's the only time you really give of yourself. And do you, altogether, even then?"

"What is there to give?" His tone roughened. "I've told you about things that happened to me in the past."

"Anecdotes. Episodes. No connection, no— There at the pool, for the first time, you offered me a glimpse of what you are. The tiniest possible glimpse, and you hid it away at once. Why? I wouldn't use the insight to hurt you, Carl."

He sat up, scowling. "I don't know what you mean. People learn about each other, living together. You know I admire classical artists like Rembrandt and Bonestell, and don't care for abstractions or chromodynamics. I'm not very musical. I have a barrack-room sense of humor. My politics are conservative. I prefer tournedos to filet mignon but wish the culture tanks could supply us with either more often. I play a wicked game of poker, or would if there were any point in it aboard this ship. I enjoy working with my hands and am good at it, so I'll be helping build the laboratory facilities once that project gets organized. I'm currently trying to read War and Peace but keep falling asleep." He smote the mattress. "What more do you need?"

"Everything," she answered sadly. She gestured around the room. Her closet happened to stand open, revealing the innocent vanity of her best gowns. The shelves were filled with her private treasures, to the limit of her mass allowance—a battered old copy of Bellman, a lute, a dozen pictures waiting their turn to be hung, smaller portraits of her kinfolk, a Hopi kachina doll . . . "You brought nothing personal."

"I've traveled light through life."

"On a hard road, I think. Maybe someday you'll dare trust me." She drew close to him. "Never mind now, Carl. I don't want to harass you. I want you in me again. You see, this has stopped being a matter of friendship and convenience. I've fallen in love with you."

When the appropriate speed was reached, lining out of Earth's domain toward that sign of the zodiac where the Virgin ruled, Leonora Christine went free. Thrusters cold, she became another comet. Gravitation alone worked upon her, bending her path, diminishing her haste.

It had been allowed for. But the effect must be kept minimal. The uncertainties of interstellar navigation were too large as was, without

adding an extra factor. So the crew—the professional spacemen, as distinguished from the scientific and technical personnel—worked under a time limit.

Boris Fedoroff led a gang outside. Their job was tricky. You needed skill to labor in weightlessness and not exhaust yourself trying to control tools and body. The best of men could still let both bondsoles lose their grip on the ship frame. You would float off, cursing, nauseated by spin forces, until you brought up at the end of your lifeline and hauled yourself back. Lighting was poor: unshielded glare in the sun, ink blackness in shadow except for what puddles of undiffused radiance were cast by helmet lamps. Hearing was no better. Words had trouble getting through the sounds of harsh breath and thuttering blood, when these were confined in a spacesuit, and through the cosmic seething in radio earplugs. For lack of air purification comparable to the ship's, gaseous wastes were imperfectly removed. They accumulated over hours until you toiled in a haze of sweat smell, water vapor, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, acetone . . . and your undergarments clung sodden to your skin . . . and you looked wearily through your faceplate at the stars, with a band of headache behind your eyes.

Nevertheless, the Bussard module, the hilt and pommel of the dagger, was detached. Maneuvering it away from the vessel was tough, dangerous labor. Without friction or weight, it kept every gram of its considerable inertial mass. It was as hard to stop as to set in motion.

Finally it trailed aft on a cable. Fedoroff checked the positioning himself. "Done," he grunted. "I hope." His men clipped their lifelines to the cable. He did likewise, spoke to Telander in the bridge, and cast off. The cable was reeled back inboard, taking the engineers along.

They had need for haste. While the module would follow the hull on more or less the same orbit, differential influences were acting. They would soon cause an undesirable shift in relative alignments. But everyone must be inside before the next stage of the process. The forces about to be established would not be kind to living organisms.

Leonora Christine extended her scoopfleld webs. They glistened in the sunlight, silver across starry black. From afar she might have suggested a spider, one of those adventurous little arachnids that went flying off with kites made of dewy silk. She was not, after all, anything big or important in the universe.

Yet what she did was awesome enough on the human scale. Her interior power plant sent energy coursing into the scoopfleld generators. From their controlling webwork sprang a field of magnetohydro-dynamic forces—invisible but reaching across thousands of kilometers; a dynamic interplay, not a static configuration, but maintained

and adjusted with nigh absolute precision; enormously strong but even more enormously complex.

The forces seized the trailing Bussard unit, brought it into micro-metrically exact position with respect to the hull, locked it in place. Monitors verified that everything was in order. Captain Telander made a final check with the Patrol on Luna, received his go-ahead, and issued a command. From then on, the robots took over.

Low acceleration on ion thrust had built up a modest outward speed, measurable in tens of kilometers per second. It sufficed to start the star-drive engine. The power available increased by orders of magnitude. At a full one gravity, Leonora Christine began to move!

Chapter 4

In one of the garden rooms stood a viewscreen tuned to Outside. Sable and diamonds were startlingly framed by ferns, orchids, overarching fuchsia and bougainvillea. A fountain tinkled and glittered. The air was warmer here than in most places aboard, moist, full of perfumes and greenness.

None of it quite did away with the underlying pulse of driving energies. Bussard systems had not been developed to the smoothness of electric rockets. Always, now, the ship whispered and shivered. The vibration was faint, on the very edge of awareness, but it wove its way through metal, bones, and maybe dreams.

Emma Glassgold and Chi-Yuen Ai-Ling sat on a bench among the flowers. They had been walking about, feeling their way toward friendship. Since entering the garden, however, they had fallen silent.

Abruptly Glassgold winced and pulled her vision from the screen. "It was a mistake to come here," she said. "Let us go."

"Why, I find it charming," the planetologist answered, surprised. "An escape from bare walls that we'll need years to make sightly."

"No escape from that." Glassgold pointed at the screen. It happened at the moment to be scanning aft and so held an image of the sun, shrunken to the brightest of the stars.

Chi-Yuen regarded her narrowly. The molecular biologist was likewise small and dark-haired, but her eyes were round and blue, her face round and pink, her body a trifle on the dumpy side. She dressed plainly whether working or not; and without snubbing social activities, she had hitherto been observer rather than participant.

"In—how long?—a couple of weeks," she continued, "we have reached the marches of the Solar System. Every day—no, every twenty-four hours; 'day' and 'night' mean nothing any longer—each twenty-four hours we gain 845 kilometers per second in speed."

"A shrimp like me is grateful to have full Earth weight," Chi-Yuen said with attempted lightness.

"Don't misunderstand me," Glassgold replied hastily. "I won't scream, 'Turn back! Turn back!' " She tried a joke of her own. "That would be too disappointing to the psychologists who checked me out." The joke dissipated. "It is only ... I find I require time ... to get used, piece by piece, to this."

Chi-Yuen nodded. She, in her newest and most colorful cheong-sam—among her hobbies was making over her clothes—could almost have belonged to a different species from Glassgold. But she patted the other woman's hand and said: "You are not unique, Emma. It was expected. People begin to realize with more than brains, in their whole beings, what it means to be on such a voyage."