Time for the Stars

by Robert A. Heinlein

  It was shortly after that that Pat got married.

  CHAPTER XI

  SLIPPAGE

  My relations with Pat got steadily better all during that first boost, after Dr. Devereaux took me in hand. I found out, after I admitted that I despised and resented Pat, that I no longer did either one. I cured him of bothering me unnecessarily by bothering him unnecessarily—he could shut off an alarm clock but he couldn’t shut off me. Then we worked out a live-and-let-live formula and got along better. Presently I found myself looking forward to whatever time we had set for checking with each other and I realized I liked him, not “again” but “at last,” for I had never felt that warm toward him before.

  But even while we were getting closer we were falling apart; “slippage” was catching up with us. As anyone can see from the relativity formulas, the relationship is not a straight-line one; it isn’t even noticeable at the beginning but it builds up like the dickens at the other end of the scale.

  At three-quarters the speed of light he complained that I was drawling, while it seemed to me that he was starting to jabber. At nine-tenths of the speed of light it was close to two for one, but we knew what was wrong now and I talked fast and he talked slow.

  At 99% of c, it was seven to one and all we could do to make ourselves understood. Later that day we fell out of touch entirely.

  Everybody else was having the same trouble. Sure, telepathy is instantaneous, at least the trillions of miles between us didn’t cause any lag, not even like the hesitation you get in telephoning from Earth to Luna nor did the signal strength drop off. But brains are flesh and blood, and thinking takes time…and our time rates were out of gear. I was thinking so slowly (from Pat’s viewpoint) that he could not slow down and stay with me; as for him, I knew from time to time that he was trying to reach me but it was just a squeal in the earphones so far as making sense was concerned.

  Even Dusty Rhodes couldn’t make it. His twin couldn’t concentrate on a picture for the long hours necessary to let Dusty “see” it.

  It was upsetting, to say the least, to all of us. Hearing voices is all right, but not when you can’t tell what they are saying and can’t shut them off. Maybe some of the odd cases in psychiatry weren’t crazy at all; maybe the poor wretches were tuned in on a bad wave length.

  Unc took it the worst at first and I sat with him all one evening while we both tried together. Then he suddenly regained his serenity; Sugar Pie was thinking about him; that he knew; so being, words weren’t really necessary.

  Pru was the only one who flourished; she was out from under the thumb of her sister. She got really kissed, probably for the first time in her life. No, not by me; I just happened to be wandering down for a drink at the scuttlebutt, then I backed away quietly and let the drink wait. No point in saying who it was, as it didn’t mean anything—I think Pru would have kissed the Captain at that point if he had held still. Poor little Pru!

  We resigned ourselves to having to wait until we slid back down closer into phase. We were still hooked ship-to-ship because the ships were accelerating to the same schedule, and there was much debate back and forth about the dilemma, one which apparently nobody had anticipated. In one way it was not important, since we would not have anything to report until we slowed down and started checking the stars we were headed for, but in another way it was: the time the Elsie spent at the speed of light (minus a gnat’s whisker) was going to seem very short to us—but it was going to be ten solid years and a bit over to those back Earth side. As we learned later, Dr. Devereaux and his opposite numbers in the other ships and back in LRF were wondering how many telepathic pairs they would have still functioning (if any) after a lapse of years. They had reason to worry. It had already been established that identical twins were hardly ever telepairs if they had lived apart for years—that was the other reason why most of those picked were young; most twins are separated by adult life.

  But up to then, we hadn’t been “separated” in Project Lebensraum. Sure, we were an unthinkable distance apart but each pair had been in daily linkage and in constant practice by being required to stand regular watches, even if there was nothing to send but the news.

  But what would a few years of being out of touch do to rapport between telepartners?

  This didn’t bother me; I didn’t know about it. I got a sort of an answer out of Mr. O’Toole which caused me to think that a couple of weeks of ship’s time would put us back close enough in phase to make ourselves understood. In the meantime, no watches to stand so it wasn’t all bad. I went to bed and tried to ignore the squeals inside my head.

  I was awakened by Pat.

  “Tom…answer me, Tom. Can you hear me, Tom? Answer me.”

  (“Hey, Pat, I’m here!”) I was wide awake, out of bed and standing on the floor plates, so excited I could hardly talk.

  “Tom! Oh, Tom! It’s good to hear you, boy—it’s been two years since I was last able to raise you.”

  (“But—”) I started to argue, then shut up. It had been less than a week to me. But I would have to look at the Greenwich calendar and a check with the computation office before I could even guess how long it had been for Pat.

  “Let me talk, Tom, I can’t keep this up long. They’ve had me under deep hypnosis and drugs for the past six weeks and it has taken me this long to get in touch with you. They don’t dare keep me under much longer.”

  (“You mean they’ve got you hypped right now?”)

  “Of course, or I couldn’t talk to you at all. Now—” His voice faded out for a second “Sorry. They had to stop to give me another shot and an intravenous feeding. Now listen and record this schedule: Van Houten—” He reeled off precise Greenwich times and dates, to the second, for each of us, and faded out while I was reading them back. I caught a “So long” that went up in pitch, then there was silence.

  I pulled on pants before I went to wake the Captain but I did not stop for shoes. Then everybody was up and all the daytime lights were turned on even though it was officially night and Mama O’Toole was making coffee and everybody was talking. The relativists were elbowing each other in the computation room and Janet Meers was working out ship’s time for Bernie van Houten’s appointment with his twin without bothering to put it through the computer because he was first on the list.

  Van failed to link with his brother and everybody got jittery and Janet Meers was in tears because somebody suggested that she had made a mistake in the relative times, working it in her head; But Dr. Babcock himself pushed her solution through the computer and checked her to nine decimals. Then he announced in a chilly tone that he would thank everyone not to criticize his staff thereafter; that was his privilege.

  Gloria linked with her sister right after that and everybody felt better. The Captain sent a dispatch to the flagship through Miss Gamma and got an answer back that two other ships were back in contact, the Nautilus and the Cristoforo Colombo.

  There was no more straggling up to relieve the watch and stopping to grab a bite as we passed the pantry. If the recomputed time said your opposite number would be ready to transmit at 3:17:06 and a short tick, ship’s time, you were waiting for him from three o’clock on and no nonsense, with the recorder rolling and the mike in front of your lips. It was easy for us in the ship, but each one of us knew that his telepair was having to undergo both hypnosis and drastic drugging to stay with us at all—Dr. Devereaux did not seem happy about it.

  Nor was there any time for idle chit-chat, not with your twin having to chop maybe an hour out of his life for each word. You recorded what he sent, right the first time and no fumbles; then you transmitted what the Captain had initialed. If that left a few moments to talk, all right. Usually it did not…which was how I got mixed up about Pat’s marriage.

  You see, the two weeks bracketing our change-over from boost to deceleration, during which time we reached our peak speed, amounted to about ten years Earthside. That’s 250 to 1 on the average. But it wasn’t all average; at the mi
ddle of that period the slippage was much greater, I asked Mr. O’Toole what the maximum was and he just shook his head. There was no way to measure it, he told me, and the probable errors were larger than the infinitesimal values he was working with.

  “Let’s put it this way,” he finished. “I’m glad there is no hay fever in this ship, because one hard sneeze would push us over the edge.”

  He was joking, for, as Janet Meers pointed out, as our speed approached the speed of light, our mass approached infinity.

  But we fell out of phase again for a whole day.

  At the end of one of those peak “watches” (they were never more than a couple of minutes long, S-time) Pat told me that he and Maudie were going to get married. Then he was gone before I could congratulate him. I started to tell him that I thought Maudie was a little young and wasn’t he rushing things and missed my chance. He was off our band.

  I was not exactly jealous. I examined myself and decided that I was not when I found out that I could not remember what Maudie looked like. Oh, I knew what she looked like—blonde, and a little snub nose with a tendency to get freckles across it in the summertime. But I couldn’t call up her face the way I could Pru’s face, or Janet’s. All I felt was a little left out of things.

  I did remember to check on the Greenwich, getting Janet to relate it back to the exact time of my last watch. Then I saw that I had been foolish to criticize. Pat was twenty-three and Maudie was twenty-one, almost twenty-two.

  I did manage to say, “Congratulations,” on my next linkage but Pat did not have a chance to answer. Instead he answered on the next. “Thanks for the congratulations. We’ve named her after Mother but I think she is going to look like Maudie.”

  This flabbergasted me. I had to ask for Janet’s help again and found that everything was all right—I mean, when a couple has been married two years a baby girl is hardly a surprise, is it? Except to me.

  All in all, I had to make quite a few readjustments those two weeks. At the beginning Pat and I were the same age, except for an inconsequential slippage. At the end of that period (I figure the end as being the time when it was no longer necessary to use extreme measures to let us telepairs talk) my twin was more than eleven years older than I was and had a daughter seven years old.

  I stopped thinking about Maudie as a girl, certainly not as one I had been sweet on. I decided that she was probably getting fat and sloppy and very, very domestic—she never could resist that second chocolate eclair. As a matter of fact; Pat and I had grown very far apart, for we had little in common now. The minor gossip of the ship, so important to me, bored him; on the other hand, I couldn’t get excited about his flexible construction units and penalty dates. We still telecommunicated satisfactorily but it was like two strangers using a telephone. I was sorry, for I had grown to like him before he slipped away from me.

  But I did want to see my niece. Knowing Sugar Pie had taught me that baby girls are more fun than puppies and even cuter than kittens. I remembered the idea I had had about Sugar Pie and braced Dusty on the subject.

  He agreed to do it; Dusty can’t turn down a chance to show how well he can draw. Besides, he had mellowed, for him; he no longer snarled when you tried to pet him even though it might be years before he would learn to sit up and beg.

  Dusty turned out a beautiful picture. All Baby Molly lacked was little wings to make her a cherub. I could see a resemblance to myself—to her father, that is. “Dusty, this is a beautiful picture. Is it a good likeness?”

  He bristled. “How should I know? But if there is a micron’s difference, or a shade or tone off that you could pick up with a spectrophotometer, from the pic your brother mailed to my brother, I’ll eat it! But how do I know how the proud parents had the thing prettied up?”

  “Sorry, sorry! It’s a swell picture. I wish there were some way I could pay you.”

  “Don’t stay awake nights; I’ll think of something. My services come high.”

  I took down my pic of Lucille LaVonne and put Molly in her place. I didn’t throw away the one of Lucille, though.

  It was a couple of months later that I found out that Dr. Devereaux had seen entirely different possibilities in my being able to use the “wave length” of Uncle Alf and Sugar Pie from the obvious ones I had seen. I had continued to talk with both of them, though not as often as I had at first. Sugar Pie was a young lady now, almost eighteen, in normal school at Witwatersrand and already started practice teaching. Nobody but Unc and I called her “Sugar Pie” and the idea that I might someday substitute for Unc was forgotten—at the rate we were shifting around pretty soon she could bring me up.

  But Doc Devereaux had not forgotten the matter. However the negotiations had been conducted by him with LRF without consulting me. Apparently Pat had been told to keep it to himself until they were ready to try it, for the first I knew of it was when I told him to stand by to record some routine traffic (we were back on regular watches by then). “Skip it, old son,” he said. “Pass the traffic to the next victim. You and I are going to try something fresh.”

  (“What?”)

  “LRF orders, all the way down from the top. Molly has an interim research contract all of her own, just like you and I had.”

  (“Huh? She’s not a twin.”)

  “Let me count her. No, there’s just one of her—though she sometimes seems like an entire herd of wild elephants. But she’s here, and she wants to say hello to Uncle Tom.”

  (“Oh, fine. Hello, Molly.”)

  “Hello, Uncle Tom.”

  I almost jumped out of my skin. I had caught it right off, with no fumbling. (“Hey, who was that? Say that again!”)

  “Hello, Uncle Tom.” She giggled. “I’ve got a new hair bow.”

  I gulped. (“I’ll bet you look mighty cute in it, honey. I wish I could see you. Pat! When did this happen?”)

  “On and off, for the past ten weeks. It took some tough sessions with Dr. Mabel to make it click. By the way, it took some tougher sessions with, uh, the former Miss Kauric before she would agree to let us try it.”

  “He means Mommy,” Molly told me in a conspirator’s whisper. “She didn’t like it. But I do, Uncle Tom. I think it’s nice.”

  “I’ve got no privacy from either one of them,” Pat complained. “Look, Tom, this is just a test run and I’m signing off. I’ve got to get the terror back to her mother.”

  “She’s going to make me take a nap,” Molly agreed in a resigned voice, “and I’m too old for naps. Good-by, Uncle Tom. I love you.”

  (“I love you, Molly.”)

  I turned around and Dr. Devereaux and the Captain were standing behind me, ears flapping. “How did it go?” Dr. Devereaux demanded, eagerly—for him.

  I tried to keep my face straight. “Satisfactorily. Perfect reception.”

  “The kid, too?”

  “Why, yes, sir. Did you expect something else?”

  He let out a long breath. “Son, if you weren’t needed, I’d beat your brains out with an old phone list.”

  I think Baby Molly and I were the first secondary communication team in the fleet. We were not the last. The LRF, proceeding on a hypothesis suggested by the case of Uncle Alfred and Sugar Pie, assumed that it was possible to form a new team where the potential new member was very young and intimately associated with an adult member of an old team. It worked in some eases. In other cases it could not even be tried because no child was available.

  Pat and Maude had a second baby girl just before we reached the Tau Ceti system. Maudie put her foot down with respect to Lynette; she said two freaks in her family were enough.

  CHAPTER XII

  TAU CETI

  By the time we were a few light-hours from Tau Ceti we knew that we had not drawn a blank; by stereo and doppler-stereo Harry Gates had photographed half a dozen planets. Harry was not only senior planetologist; he was boss of the research department. I suppose he had enough degrees to string like beads, but I called him “Harry” because everybody
did. He was not the sort you call “Doctor”; he was eager and seemed younger than he was.

  To Harry the universe was a complicated toy somebody had given him; he wanted to take it apart and see what made it go. He was delighted with it and willing to discuss it with anybody at any time. I got acquainted with him in the bottle-washing business because Harry didn’t treat lab assistants like robots; he treated them like people and did not mind that he knew so much more than they did—he even seemed to think that he could learn something from them.

  How he found time to marry Barbara Kuiper I don’t know, but Barbara was a torch watchstander, so it probably started as a discussion of physics and drifted over into biology and sociology; Harry was interested in everything. But he didn’t find time to be around the night their first baby was born, as that was the night he photographed the planet he named Constance, after the baby. There was objection to this, because everybody wanted to name it, but the Captain decided that the ancient rule applied: finders of astronomical objects were entitled to name them.

  Finding Constance was not an accident. (I mean the planet, not the baby; the baby wasn’t lost.) Harry wanted a planet about fifty to fifty-one million miles from Tau, or perhaps I should say that the LRF wanted one of that distance. You see, while Tau Ceti is a close relative of the Sun, by spectral types, Tau is smaller and gives off only about three-tenths as much sunshine—so, by the same old tired inverse square law you use to plan the lights for a living room or to arrange a photoflash picture, a planet fifty million miles from Tau would catch the same amount of sunlight as a planet ninety-three million miles from Sol, which is where Earth sits. We weren’t looking for just any planet, or we would have stayed home in the Solar System; we wanted a reasonable facsimile of Earth or it would not he worth colonizing.