Variable Star

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “He just told you we don’t have any minutes to spare,” Jinny said sharply.

  “I agree with Andrew. But that begs my question: who’s ‘we,’ exactly?”

  Everybody did a lot of blinking.

  “Ten seats. Seven of you. If Evelyn has her way, I take seat number eight. Who gets the other two?”

  Very loud blinking. Herb looked less sleepy than usual.

  Andrew cleared his throat. “As I was leaving, Mr. Hattori had just agreed to join us.”

  “Really?” Jinny said. “Why?”

  Andrew frowned. “To be honest, I’m not sure. It made sense when Richard explained it.”

  “Hattori!” Lieutenant Bruce squawked, ruining his efforts to avoid being caught eavesdropping. “Why in space should he get one of the first berths? He’s a bean counter!”

  Jinny’s stare basted him with superheated contempt, and he withered. “I’m sure you would prefer to share your Bridge with people interested in your opinions, Lieutenant, so we will take our leave now. Your hospitality has been exceeded only by your courtesy. Shall we go, all?”

  Evelyn turned her head to look at me. “Is there anything you want to pack, Joel?” One eyebrow rose slightly, copied accurately by the same side of her mouth. “Anyone you want to say good-bye to?”

  I had absolutely no idea where we were going to go, or what we intended to do when we got there, or what if any contribution I could make.

  I raised my voice a little. “Herb? Say good-bye to everybody for me, will you? You know how to say it pretty.”

  “If I don’t get the tenth seat, sure,” he called back. “Don’t bother leaving me your porn folder; I hacked into it years ago.”

  “Captain Conrad?” I said at the same volume. “Would my baggage allotment aboard your ship accommodate a baritone saxophone?”

  “Anna?” Evelyn asked.

  I smiled. “You read liner notes carefully. Yes, my Yanigasawa.”

  Andrew called, “If it didn’t, I’d tear out a couple of instrument panels or something.”

  He and I exchanged a look. “I’ll meet you all at the airlock with my saxophone, then,” I said.

  Andrew pretended to clear his throat. “Joel, I hope you will forgive my presumption. I took the liberty of asking that your silver baritone be loaded aboard the Mercury shortly after our arrival. Evelyn said that was the one you’d want.” His eyes went back and forth between Jinny and Evelyn twice. “It seemed the prudent course.”

  I knew what he meant. Jinny and Evelyn were twin forces of nature. If one of them said a man was coming aboard, the smart money said to save time and start loading his luggage. “I’m sure it was,” I agreed, and a silent understanding passed between us. “Let’s go, then. I’m eager to see your ship, Captain. I presume you docked down by the main passenger airlock?”

  “That’s right.” He turned to Herb. “Mr. Johnson, will you accompany us? I can show you that thing I was talking about on our way up here.” Herb nodded.

  Bruce looked like he wanted to cry. Rennick looked like he could happily boil me. Dorothy looked like she wanted to suddenly extrude a judge’s robes and marry Evelyn and me on the spot. Andrew looked as proud as a puppy who’s learned some really amazing new tricks and is dying to show everyone.

  And Evelyn looked like the rest of my life, smiling at me.

  The trip was nearly the whole length of the ship, and took longer than I had expected. We did not pass a lot of people I knew well… we passed few people at all; it seemed a lot of us were waiting in our rooms to be told what the hell was going on. But of the few friends we did encounter, there were none that either Herb or I could bring ourselves to simply float past without a word of personal leave-taking. We also wanted to make sure the news spread as quickly as possible throughout the ship that everyone was going to get out of this alive, sooner or later. I never did find a really satisfactory way to say it in a few sentences. Herb did much better, of course. All but one of the reactions I got were positive, supportive. The one—Richie—was just gaping at me, then turning and jaunting away without a word.

  We had gotten all the way to the airlock antechamber before things started to shift around in my head.

  I found myself thinking over everything that had been said since I’d gotten to the Bridge, and who had been saying it. Everything made sense, everything added up, except for a single term in the equation. It nagged at me. Gave me a faint sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I could not seem to either justify or explain away.

  I was so preoccupied I was barely paying attention to Andrew’s eager babbling about his discovery, even though I did want very much to hear it. It was the genuine Secret of the Ages he was telling me. But I was distracted, and it didn’t help that hardly anything he said conveyed much meaning to me.

  Then all at once, three words leaped out of the noise, burrowed into my consciousness, and there exploded with great force. I lost my grip on my p-suit, and didn’t bother jaunting after it.

  “Andy,” I interrupted rudely. “Did you just say, ‘…irrespective of…’ a moment ago?”

  He was struggling with his own p-suit, trying to get his feet in. He had the klutziness of the true supergenius. “Excuse me? Yes, Joel. Quite irrespective. As I was saying, the basis of the DIS principle—”

  I stepped on him again. “Evelyn? Do you understand Andrew’s drive? Has he explained it to you?”

  She paused in her own suit-up checklist procedure. “He tried to,” she said, puzzled but game. “It didn’t take. I’m afraid I don’t have anything like your background in physics.”

  I nodded. “Dorothy?”

  She shook her head. “I was handicapped by my background in physics. It kept turning out that everything I thought I knew was wrong. I gave up listening at about the fourth sentence, when I seemed to hear him telling me that all mass is infinite in the first place.”

  “It is, in a sense,” Andrew tried to explain. “You see—”

  “Andrew, my new friend,” I told him, “we don’t. Very likely we can’t. But I want to be as certain as I can be of at least one datum, so I’m going to ask you one more time. Have I just understood you to tell me that the DIS effect functions under any circumstances, irrespective of mass? Do those three words mean to you what they mean to us? Or is this some sort of semantic confusion?”

  “No, you’re correct,” he said, puzzled. “Mass really is imaginary, you know. Like inertia. What you need to understand—”

  I turned to Evelyn. “Do you get it?”

  She was frowning hugely. Her own p-suit drifted away from her hands, forgotten. I saw understanding wash over her, like a wave of ice water. “Oh, no. Oh, no! Joel—”

  Now the equation solved itself: the dubious term had been defined, and others adjusted themselves to match with the inexorable beauty of math working out.

  “What are you talking about?” Jinny asked.

  My stomach lurched. I turned and stared at her. “You know, don’t you? Of course you do.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “What does she know?” Herb asked me.

  I could see from Dorothy’s face that she got it, was thinking it through, and becoming as angry as I was. I could also see that Rennick had known all along, and was not even faintly surprised. He started edging toward the hatch that led back out into the rest of the Sheffield.

  Uptake. Uptake was going to be important, now. I spoke quickly and in my loudest talking-to-the-audience voice.

  “Everyone here has a mental picture of Richard Conrad. Can any one of you really picture him spending the next thirty-odd years rescuing a few hundred farmers?”

  General consternation. Rennick made it all the way to the door and put his back to it.

  “But he himself wouldn’t—” Jinny began.

  “Do you honestly think he believes that would be the best use for his one and only superluminal starship, during these next crucial empire-building decades?”
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  “He wanted to own the entire Solar System,” Herb said. “Now he’ll have to settle for what’s left. But I think he would consider that the absolute minimum acceptable.”

  “My grandfather is with your own Captain this very minute, trying to—”

  “Your grandfather is lying his aristocratic ass off at this minute,” I said, “trying to persuade Captain Bean he’s ever going to see him again after the Mercury leaves. That way he can consign more than four hundred people to death with an absolute minimum of harsh words or other unpleasantness. And we can all depart without Alice Dahl having to hold a gun on anyone.”

  “You’re insane!” Jinny snapped.

  “If he really wanted to help us, all he’d have had to do was order his grandson-in-law to unship his DIS drive from the Mercury… and install it in the Sheffield! Andrew just got finished telling us the silly thing doesn’t believe in mass.”

  Jinny gasped in shock—but not as loud as her husband. “Coventry, what was I thinking of?” Andrew said, his face stricken. “I… I… I’d have to destroy the Mercury in the process, I guess that’s why it simply never occurred to me, but—yes, damn it to seven hells, there’s no real reason in the universe why I couldn’t recalibrate and ramp it up to make the field large enough to enfold even a ship this large. I could have it done in a few weeks! I think…”

  “Don’t destroy the Mercury,” Herb advised. “Just bring it aboard. It’s about the size of one of our landing craft.”

  “That would work—”

  “I heard earlier it took you five or six subjective weeks to overtake and match orbits with us,” I told Jinny. “The Mercury was a private yacht on its shakedown cruise when Sol exploded. Even given Conrad family paranoia, I’d be surprised if she carried more than a couple of months’ worth of provisions for a crew of seven. My guess is your ship’s just about out of food, water, and air by now.” Andrew’s groan told me my guess was accurate. “That’s why the old bastard really let himself be talked into picking us for his first destination! He needs to be fully reprovisioned before he reaches an established colony planet, so he can deal from a position of strength. To him, we’re no more than a supplies cache en route, disposable. We’re the smallest number of people that stand between him and self-sufficiency.”

  “And the easiest to con,” Herb said. “Because we’re scared and tired and vulnerable. And we have evidence other than Conrad’s word that Sol has been destroyed and hellfire is coming.”

  “Oh, Grandfather,” Evelyn groaned. “Oh, this is awful!” She started for the exit. “Joel, you’re absolutely right: we have to—”

  Rennick reached into his blouse and produced the smallest hand weapon I had ever seen, the size of a stylus, waved it across us all once. “You have to stay right where you are,” he barked. “Evelyn, I mean it! Don’t!” He aimed his weapon at her, and I gathered myself to leap into the line of fire, and his head exploded into red mist, most of which boiled out of existence even as it formed. A few tiny drops made it all the way across the room and spattered my face and hands. His little weapon flew from his hand and started caroming off things.

  Dorothy Robb had something even smaller in her hand. It looked like the smaller half of a stylus, with the pocket clip on it. As I saw it, she released it like a soiled tissue and let it drift from her. “I thought I’d get all the way out of this life without ever using that,” she said thoughtfully, as if to herself, in the sudden ringing silence. “But it was worth carrying it, all these years.”

  I wondered how she’d gotten it past the Gurkhas back home. But then, Rennick had managed with a larger one. Maybe the Gurkhas had known—and just figured they could deal with it. “Thank you, Dorothy,” I managed to say, wiping my face with my sleeve.

  “You may always leave these little things to me,” she said, making it sound like a quote. Then she brushed a hand across her face and made a sound of revulsion. “I would not have thought his brain was large enough to make that much of a splash.”

  Herb was instantly at her side with a pack of tissues. She thanked him gravely and accepted one.

  The heat of the explosion had briefly been so intense, Rennick’s massive wound had cauterized itself. Most of the red mist had already been dealt with by the Sheffield’s intensive zero-gee airflow, and the rest would be soon.

  “They’ll be here any minute,” Herb said to me.

  “I know,” I said.

  “You understand the problem. You’ve seen her.”

  I wished I didn’t. “Yeah. I’ve seen Alice.”

  We shared a wordless glance that lasted ten seconds or more. He smiled suddenly. “I don’t see another way. Do you?”

  I thought as hard as I know how. Finally, reluctantly, I shook my head no. “Not with the tools at hand.”

  He nodded.

  I retrieved Dorothy’s weapon, glanced at it briefly, and tossed it to him.

  “It’s empty,” Dorothy said urgently. “It was a single-shot.”

  Herb held it up. “Could you tell it’s empty by looking at it?”

  She made no reply, but her face said she understood now, and that the answer to his question was no.

  A bounce took Rennick’s weapon past me and I picked it out of the air. I looked around at the scene, studying it closely. Just behind me, beside the airlock hatch, was a large display showing data of several kinds. I found the right switch and powered it off. Then I stepped back, measured angles, and said, “What do you think?” to Herb.

  “Good as it’s liable to get,” he said. “This is what a long time ago used to be called a Hail Mary play.”

  I nodded. “I really wish it was better,” I said.

  With infinite kindness in his eyes, he said not “Me, too,” but “I know.” Then he moved, to position himself just beside the hatch out to the Sheffield. Dorothy began gathering the p-suits we hadn’t finished donning, and stowing them out of the way.

  “What are you doing?” Jinny asked dangerously. “Damn it, what is going on?” Andrew couldn’t decide which of us to gape at. He wore a look I could empathize with—a man rearranging the entire contents of his brain, and heart.

  “Can you handle her?” I asked Evelyn.

  She looked me in the eye and said not “I think so,” but, “Yes.” Everybody was being very helpful to me today. I nodded thanks, and she left my side, jaunting over to dock beside Jinny.

  “Cousin Jinny,” she said clearly and firmly, “zip it.”

  Jinny was too shocked to respond, and before she could regroup, we all heard the sound of the party approaching the antechamber from outside.

  “Joel—” Dorothy began.

  “I think it’ll be all right,” I told her. “But stay alert.”

  She shut up, chose a spot well away from the hatch, near the air outflow, and tugged Rennick’s body there. She held onto the grille with one hand, and held Rennick near it with the other. “Evelyn, over here, dear.”

  Evelyn looked to me, I nodded, and she joined Dorothy.

  Herb and I shared one last long look. Nothing to be said.

  * * *

  The hatch irised open.

  Alice Dahl entered first, and she was as good as I had presumed she must be. The instant she cleared the hatchway she sensed that something was wrong—body language? Blood scent the airflow hadn’t finished flushing yet?—and went hyperalert well before she could have seen Rennick’s body. She didn’t actually kill anyone, but she was very ready to. And it was me she focused on.

  Failing to notice, Conrad came in behind her, followed by Solomon Short. “All right, everyone,” he was saying, “thanks to Captain Bean’s insights, and Relativist Short’s gift for lateral thinking, I think we’ve come up with a plan that will—”

  It took him that long to see Rennick’s drifting corpse and stop speaking. He must have been very tired. But he was still sharp, and quick. He didn’t bother asking what was wrong.

  “All right,” he went on. “Everyone on board now. We will disc
uss this later.”

  “Gran’ther, how can you?” Evelyn asked him with infinite sadness.

  He did not seem to understand her question.

  “The race made a small mistake,” Herb said. Alice’s head turned to track him. “We did finally make some progress at stamping out war. But maybe it would have been better to start with greed.”

  “What’s going on?” Solomon asked mildly.

  “Conman of Conman here,” I said, “was just about to depart, leaving behind a boatful of suckers who thought he’d be coming back to start a rescue shuttle.”

  Solomon caught on at once, and turned to glare at Conrad. “Really?”

  “He also forgot to mention to anybody that with a little work, Andy’s Magic Carpet drive will push anything you put it in, just as fast. Irrespective of its mass.”

  Solomon’s face darkened even further. “I see. He had better things to do with it. Sure, he did.”

  “Sol,” I said quickly. “It’s covered. Okay? Watch out for green mist.”

  I saw him take my meaning. Stay out of the line of fire and await developments.

  “Oh, for Covenant’s sake!” Conrad snarled. “Jinny, you understand. Evelyn, dear, history is being made. Right now, by us. We need to form and consolidate the Confederation of Human Stars, get it organized. Ferry telepaths around until rational communication can take place, and then get busy and avenge our star. For all we know, a second wave of attacks is just about to happen—there is no way we have time to waste rescuing a bunch of losers from their own incompetence. Please try to be rational. You’re a Conrad, for the—”

  “I am a Johnston,” she told him.

  He rolled his eyes. “Young love. Oh, I love being old! Fine. I don’t care what name you go by, as long as you get into that damned pressure suit and back aboard the ship, now.”

  She looked him in the eye and slowly shook her head. “I will not.”

  Conrad of Conrad sighed, irritated beyond endurance. “Alice.”

  Alice Dahl reached for her right hip, and Time slowed to its lowest possible velocity.

  “Alice!” I shouted.

  She was very good, gave me less than half her attention at first despite my shout.