The Dark Beyond the Stars

by Frank M. Robinson

  She pointed at the blackness between and was silent for a moment. I stared at the empty space covered by her hand and tried to translate it into distance and time. I shivered.

  “It would take a thousand generations. The planetary systems are very few and far apart. We would run out of mass for the converters as well as most of the elements we need for subsistence and repairs. And we would run out of them in a generation—this generation, Sparrow.” She hesitated, then said flatly: “Even if that part of space weren’t empty, we would never see the other side. The Astron is falling apart, it can’t make it.”

  “The Captain knows the ship as well as you,” I objected, jittering on the inside with panic and anger. “Why would he risk it and his crew?”

  “Because he can’t help himself,” Ophelia said bitterly.

  I felt confused—she wasn’t making sense. Noah edged into the argument, ticking off the points with his fingers.

  “The requirements for captain at Launch were very specific. They didn’t want a man who lacked courage or determination and they didn’t want a man who would return to Earth too soon. So they picked a man whom they were sure… believed.”

  Ophelia broke in, impatient.

  “Read his bio in the computer’s memory matrix, Sparrow—that’s one thing that is in it. Kusaka was an atmosphere pilot on earth, then ran freight to the Moon and the O’Neill colonies. When he volunteered for the interstellar mission, they grabbed him because he was one of the few who could take the medical treatments. He was the most important member of the crew and they made sure he was immune to any of the degenerative diseases—nobody knew that long life would be one of the side effects. The treatments also made him sterile but I doubt he cared about that.

  “Equally important, Kusaka sincerely believed there was alien life in the universe. They strengthened that belief with intense psychological indoctrination and sent him out knowing that he wouldn’t return—couldn’t return—until he found it. They were hugely successful in programming him. More than a hundred generations later, he’s still searching.”

  “He’ll find it,” I said confidently.

  “That’s a religious assumption!” Ophelia snapped.

  “He convinced me,” I said, my voice squeaky with anger. “He’ll convince you, too, if you’ve nerve enough to ask him.”

  Ophelia looked at me with contempt.

  “Ask him? I don’t have to ask him! It’s a hundred lifetimes later, Sparrow—we’ve explored a thousand systems and fifteen hundred planets, from gas giants to lumps of airless rock, and we haven’t found so much as a flea or a germ or a single living cell! The only life in the universe is what’s inside this ship and in that thin green layer of scum covering the Earth!”

  She paused for breath. In the sudden silence I could hear my own breath rattle through my nostrils. I was suddenly afraid of her and her convictions. Tybalt was a believer and so was she but they didn’t believe in the same things. I was terrified I would have to choose between them.

  “There’s you and me and three hundred others on the Astron. We’re all the life there is for light years around. There are no lobster men on Galileo III and there isn’t any advanced civilization of intelligent slugs on Quietus II. There isn’t, there wasn’t, there never will be!”

  She spread her arms to take in the whole view of Outside, much as the Captain had done on the bridge.

  “There’s nothing out there, Sparrow! Nothing at all!”

  Chapter 9

  Ophelia touched the palm terminal and the image of Outside faded to the sweating surface of the bulkhead. I glanced at Crow and Loon for help but both of them had turned to stone.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said desperately.

  Noah sighed. It was his turn to try and convince me.

  “Men have always hoped they weren’t alone in the universe, Sparrow. Long before the Astron was launched, they believed there might be life on Venus and Mars. There wasn’t. Then they thought there might be life on some of the satellites of the gas giants. They were disappointed once again. Before they built the Astron, they spent decades with radio telescopes listening for signals from other systems. They never heard any. We haven’t, either. Oh, our equipment will pick up what we think are signals, but inevitably they turn out to be due to phenomena that have nothing to do with life. We haven’t run across anything yet that could be traced to sentience, not even any Dyson spheres.”

  “We will!” I cried. I was close to tears.

  “That was a joke, Sparrow.” He took off his glasses and polished the thick lenses with his sash. He was going to lecture me and I didn’t want to listen. I didn’t have the knowledge to refute him and if he convinced me he was right, he would destroy everything that I had come to value.

  “Sparrow, only so many stars are formed each year in the galaxy, and only so many of those can possibly support life. The development of life takes time. Some stars are too massive and have too short a lifetime. Others are binaries and can have no planets, while still others are unstable for a variety of reasons. The result is that only a small fraction of stars can support a planetary system at all.”

  His voice seeped through the chinks of my beliefs like smoke. “You know that, don’t you?”

  I thought of all the questions he had asked at mealtime and the dozens of occasions he had sent me to the computer to check for an answer. He had been educating me for this meeting.

  “We seem to have found a number of systems,” I said, sullen.

  He nodded. “We were lucky, if you want to call it that. But the only planets that matter are those in the CHZ, the continuously habitable zone. If they’re too close to the primary, the gases and liquids with low boiling points will boil off. If they’re too far, all the volatiles remain and you have the gas giants. The only chance for life lies with those in the middle, the iron-core planets with water and an atmosphere.”

  “So life is rare. We know that.”

  “Perhaps you don’t know how rare, Sparrow.” He paused, the fussy teacher carefully choosing his words.

  “You have to have water and you have to have an atmosphere. If the planet is too close to its sun, the water vapor can’t condense into oceans, it stays in the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide from volcanoes stays in the atmosphere as well and the temperature of the planet’s surface will become too hot to support life. If the planet is too far out, its water freezes and you have a lifeless, frozen waste.”

  “I know that,” I said sarcastically. I had a pretty good idea where he was going.

  “The CHZ is small,” he continued, ignoring me. “Alarmingly small. Some scientists thought that if the Earth had been five percent closer to the sun, it would have been another Venus. One percent farther out, another Mars—those are the planets flanking Earth.”

  I promised myself I would check on it later, even though I was certain he wasn’t making it up. The others were studying my face for my reactions, but I kept it as blank of emotion as I could.

  Noah cleared his throat. “Even on a planet in the CHZ, there has to be a reducing atmosphere with an energy source that will produce the amino acids that make up the proteins that in turn make up life.”

  He paused, waiting for me to nod in agreement, and smiled slightly when I did so.

  “The next step is crucial. The simple organic molecules have to be shielded from the ultraviolet radiation of the primary. That requires a large body of water—an ocean—to protect them. No protection and the molecules break up as soon as they’re formed. And oceans of water are… extremely rare.”

  I desperately wanted to clap my hands over my ears.

  “But something else is rarer still. The next step in the creation of life is when the amino acids form into long chains. Left in the ocean, they drift apart as easily as they join together. There has to be a means of concentrating them. Once a certain level of concentration is reached, they’ll form long chains, more complex molecules, automatically. Heating isolated bodies of water w
ould help, say tidal pools warmed by hot lava and occasionally replenished by the sea.”

  He looked at me quizzically. “I had you check that out in the computer, didn’t I?”

  I didn’t answer and he leaned closer, as if proximity would convince me.

  “Do you understand, Sparrow? Tidal pools implies tides and that means a moon large enough to raise them—though not too frequently, because you might dilute the pool too much. A combination of the primary and the moon would raise larger tides less often, and that would be a happy medium. What’s required, then, is a planet that has land surfaces, oceans, and a large enough satellite to raise suitable tides. The action would concentrate the simple amino acids and they could combine into the longer chains.”

  From somewhere, a latent knowledge of physics came to my rescue.

  “You could concentrate them by freezing,” I said smugly.

  He nodded his approval. “A good thought. But reducing the temperature would slow the process, it would take too long.”

  I cursed myself for having listened to him. “How long?”

  “Probably longer than the lifetime of the universe.”

  I didn’t have the facts and figures to argue with him, though I was sure the Captain did. Then a stray thought popped up and I grabbed at it as I might have grabbed at a bulkhead ring.

  “You’re talking about life—”

  “—as we know it,” he interrupted, anticipating my objection. “A carbon-based life. Carbon is plentiful and it forms chains long enough to make DNA, which contains millions of atoms. Silicon is also plentiful and makes chains, but its chains are only thirty to forty atoms long. On a planet with liquid nitrogen, the chains would be longer—but at that temperature, the process might take forever.”

  I could feel the blood drain from my face. Ophelia had been right. Whether there was other life in the universe wasn’t a question of science so much as it was a question of faith. And Noah was attacking my faith.

  “Some of the requirements for life are met relatively easily. Others are remote possibilities. Put them all together and you come up with a statistical improbability, so improbable that we know of only one anomaly in this galaxy. Perhaps only one in the universe.”

  He leaned back in the sling and sighed, knowing he hadn’t convinced me. “I agree with Ophelia, Sparrow—there’s nothing out there. The Astron has spent more than a hundred generations looking for something that doesn’t exist.”

  “And how much of the galaxy have we actually explored?” I sneered. “A millionth of one percent? Maybe two?”

  “A lot more than that,” Ophelia snapped back. “The radio telescopes on board have searched space for two thousand years—hundreds of thousands of stars and millions of frequencies.” It was her turn to be contemptuous. “There’s nothing out there,” she repeated, “nothing at all.”

  “That’s n-not true,” I stuttered in outrage. “The Captain said we had discovered signals in the waterhole range coming from Aquinas II.”

  Noah shrugged. “We’ve discovered signals in the waterhole range before, hundreds of times. I told you—all of them were explained by causes which had nothing to do with any form of life.”

  “You want to go back,” I suddenly blurted. “You want to seize the ship and go back.” I was a slow study but not so slow I couldn’t recognize mutineers when I saw them.

  Ophelia looked relieved that at last I understood what they were driving at. “That’s exactly what we want to do. Take over the Astron and go back—go back to the one planet where we know there’s life.”

  “So why don’t you?” I cried. “Choose a new captain and go back. That should be easy enough for you to do, you only outnumber the Captain three hundred to one!”

  Ophelia stared at me in frustration.

  “The ship’s drive is tied to the computer and the computer only takes orders from the Captain. Only he can run the ship—they made sure of that at Launch. They didn’t want the crew seizing the Astron and returning to Earth too soon. Since they couldn’t program everybody, they settled for programming Kusaka. If you want to be poetic, it’s a dead hand that controls the Astron, Sparrow.”

  I stared at them, more bewildered now than angry.

  “Why tell me? I don’t believe you and even if I did, there’s nothing I can do—” I broke off, finally aware of what the meeting had been all about. “You w-want me to join you! You want to start a mutiny you can’t p-possibly win and you want me to join you!”

  I was trapped halfway between tears and laughter. They wanted me to join them in a mutiny against the man on board whom I admired the most, and in so doing destroy what little meaning I had found in life. And Crow and Loon, supposedly my best friends, were part of it. Even Snipe…

  “Why are you telling me?” I repeated. “I’m nobody.”

  Another long silence, broken when Ophelia said tightly: “Don’t flatter yourself that you’re the only one we’ll talk to.”

  “You can’t be that foolish,” I said angrily. “I would never join a mutiny against the Captain.”

  Then I realized what was at stake and all the bravado seeped out of me. They had told me too much, they couldn’t afford to let me leave the compartment alive.

  “What good would I be to you?” I said slowly. “I know nothing about the ship, there’s no way I could help…”

  As I spoke, my eyes flicked around the compartment, desperately searching for something to use as a weapon. I finally found it, a piece of a broken writing slate clinging beneath the ledge that held the terminal pad. I dove for it, then waved it at them like a knife. I tried to look fierce, curling my lips away from my teeth as I fumbled at the hatch with my other hand.

  What astonished me then was the look of shocked surprise on their faces.

  “What are you doing, Sparrow?” Snipe asked. There was a tremor in her voice; she was badly frightened.

  Ophelia held out her hand toward me and closed her fingers so they formed a fist, then uncurled them one by one.

  “There’s nothing else in the entire universe that can do that, Sparrow—but it’s taken us more than a hundred generations to realize it.” She twisted her wrist and bent her hand back and forth and I followed it with my eyes. “Life is too rare and too valuable. None of us would harm anything living. None of us could.”

  I kept a firm grip on the piece of slate.

  “Somebody killed Judah,” I accused. “I saw the bloodstains on the deck mat.”

  For the first time since I met her, Snipe looked close to tears.

  “I wanted to tell you before, Sparrow. Nobody killed Judah; he killed himself.”

  “He committed suicide?” I was stunned. On a ship where life was so highly valued, it was difficult for me to comprehend—perhaps even more so for them.

  Snipe nodded. “None of us can take a life, Sparrow. Except our own.”

  Noah looked grim. “If the Astron goes into the Dark, we couldn’t replenish mass and minerals at some planet every five years or so. We’d run out of vital elements very quickly and die within eight to ten generations.”

  “A lot can happen in eight to ten generations,” I said coldly.

  Noah’s expression faded to one of sadness.

  “We won’t have that long, Sparrow. Judah lost faith and others will, too. The danger is right now, this generation.”

  When crew members went to Reduction, it was with the hope and understanding that they were bequeathing themselves to future generations. But for Judah, there had been no future.

  I lowered my hand that held the piece of slate and stared at them, trying to make up my mind what to do.

  “I’ll tell the Captain,” I said at last. “Hell have an answer.”

  Ophelia laughed cynically. “And implicate us all.”

  “If he did,” Crow said hotly, speaking for the first time since the argument began, “he’d implicate himself as well.”

  “You’re lying!” I shouted.

  He shook his head, ignor
ing a whispered objection from Noah.

  “You were with us before, Sparrow—it was you who persuaded Loon and me to join in the first place.”

  I didn’t really know if Crow was lying, but for the first time since I had lost my memories on Seti IV, I didn’t want them back. I didn’t want to know who I had been or what I had believed or how I had been involved. I was safe enough from the mutineers: If I could believe Ophelia, in a hundred generations the crew members had learned to so love life they could not take one even if their own depended on it.

  But the Captain had been raised on a world where life was commonplace and I knew instinctively that their reluctance didn’t apply to him.

  Chapter 10

  I had nothing more to say to them or they to me. Noah let his tray float to the deck and glanced in consternation at Ophelia. Neither of them spoke. Crow put his hand lightly on my shoulder as if he were about to reason with me some more but I was tired of words and arguments I couldn’t win and brushed him aside. I undogged the hatch and slipped out through the shadow screen.

  My duty was plain, and that was to report them to the Captain. I kicked up through the different levels but found myself growing increasingly reluctant the closer I got to the bridge. What I had to tell the Captain would mean punishment for the plotters. Two of them had been good friends. I was afraid I was falling in love with another, while still another had “taken an interest” at a time when I desperately needed somebody to show me both attention and affection.

  But the Captain would punish them, and what his punishment might be gave me great pause.

  I was still thinking about it as I kicked past the level with the passageway bazaar. I ducked in to glance at the few books offered for sale while I made up my mind what I would do about the mutiny. Two pages into an ancient astronomy text I decided to do nothing. I would wait for a period or so and see what happened. Ophelia and Noah must have talked to other crewmen besides me and certainly not all of them would remain silent.