Sy was nodding. “You’re not alone in that. I believe you’ve squeezed out of the data all there is to be squeezed. We could all take another look, but I doubt we’ll add to what you have.”
“So you have nothing to add?” Judith Niles made an attempt to recapture control of the meeting. “In that case — “
“I didn’t say I had nothing to add.” As Sy continued, Charlene could feel the tension returning. “I believe I know exactly what we must do. It’s simple, it calls for huge patience, and it’s going to be enormously frustrating for people like me — because it’s totally passive.”
He became silent, until finally Judith Niles betrayed her own lack of patience and said, “Well, then?”
“We do what you established Gulf City to allow us to do. We remain in S-space, or even in T-state, and we wait. While we wait, our instruments eavesdrop on the whole sky, listening all the while for more signals from the Kermel Objects. Eventually we will acquire the pair of images that we need, a pair which Emil assures us are not in the current data bank. We’ll find two consecutive images in which exactly one star has changed to become a red dwarf in the interval between the two. And that star will be the one we want.”
Judith Niles said, “Eventually! How long might that be? By the time that the images you’re asking for come in, we might be millions of years into the future. The whole spiral arm might be red dwarfs.”
“True.” Sy sounded casual as he stared around the little group. “The Director is quite right. ‘Eventually’ could also mean ‘too late.’ That’s always a possibility. But I still propose to do what I’ve suggested. And if somebody comes up with an idea that’s definitely better, while I’m watching and waiting, then I’ll be delighted to switch.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The Void: A.D. 83,253
Charlene had done none of the work herself, which was perhaps why the results so fascinated her.
She pressed the button again, and in front of her, in all its sprawling orange-red splendor, lay the local galactic arm. It hung for a few moments, glowing and static; then the change began. Here and there, at scattered points within the display, specks of orange-red were replaced by points of cyan, magenta, blue-white, and luminous green. At the same time, the whole spiral arm shifted, creeping to a slightly different configuration.
It was a slow process, because the stars were so numerous; but in the time it took to blink, somewhere in the image a spark of orange-red was turned off and a mote of some other hue took its place.
Blink. Another star was transformed.
Blink: another star.
Again and again and again. Now the display was no longer predominantly orange-red. Other star colors were becoming more numerous, even starting to dominate. The lost stars formed no pattern, but somehow the eye discovered a shrinking circle. As the display proceeded farther, that circle became an explicit overlay, a colored ring whose center might shift but whose size always diminished.
The end came swiftly. The circle narrowed and narrowed, until finally it formed a halo around a single spark of orange. Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then, suddenly and surprisingly, that spark changed from orange to green. The slow crawl of the spiral arm to a different geometry continued, and there were still orange-red stars to be seen; but there were no more color changes. “There it is.” A voice spoke from the darkness behind Charlene. “The Ur-star. Less than three light-years away. Tell me what we will find there.” Charlene touched a button, reversing the time flow in the display. Now it would move forward, from the distant past to the present and then at last to a future where the orange-red glow of red dwarf stars would dominate the spiral arm. She swung around in her seat. “If I knew what we’d find, we wouldn’t need to go. That’s a question for someone smarter than me.”
“As usual, you underestimate yourself.” Emil Garville, a head and a half taller than Charlene and twice her width, squeezed into the chair at her side. “I don’t think so.” She smiled at him. He was unfailingly polite and considerate, and she was always glad to see him. “You know, Emil, I’m not one of your supercompetent Planetfest winners. I’m just an underqualified lab technician who happened to get swept up in this at the very beginning, eighty-one thousand years ago.” Charlene nodded at the display in front of her. “For instance, I could never have done what you did, building that display from bits and pieces of Kermel Object data.”
“You give me too much credit.” Emil rubbed at the fissure on his skull, in what Charlene had decided was an unconscious attempt to hide it. His refusal to wear a wig that covered the scar was a deliberate statement — look all you want to, it said, it doesn’t bother me — but somewhere inside him that wasn’t true. He had a hang-up that made him display what he would most like to conceal. Charlene wanted to tell him that he didn’t need to feel embarrassed, that in an odd way his craggy, fractured skull made him more attractive. Unfortunately, her hang-ups wouldn’t ever permit any such statement.
“The work to track down Urstar,” he went on, “it wasn’t all my doing. Back on Gulf City a lot of it was done by teams working in N-space. I felt like I was in the old fairy stories. Again and again I’d be stumped and go to bed with a tough unsolved problem sitting on my desk. I didn’t leave out any cookies or glass of milk, but as often as not I’d wake up next morning and find a written solution waiting for me.”
Charlene could understand that. So far as she was concerned, once the Urstar location had been determined this whole giant ship, the Argo, had appeared magically, overnight, ready to fly far off across the spiral arm. She said, “Did you ever meet your N-space colleagues?”
“Not once. I believe the N-space team on Gulf City regarded my notes as a direct challenge. They had eight S-hours before I’d be up and about, and that gave them a couple of their years. There wasn’t much they couldn’t crack in that time.” “But you laid out the overall design for what had to be done. Urstar wouldn’t have been found without you. You deserve the main credit.”
This time Emil rubbed at his nose, whose off-center shape suggested that it too had seen its share of woes. “I’m not sure I like to hear you put it that way.” “Why on earth not?”
“Charlene, suppose I’m wrong. We’ve come all this way, and we are getting close to our destination. But suppose our analysis selected the wrong star as Urstar? Would you like to be known as the person who took the Argo and a full crew of thirty-eight specialists in everything from physics to animal behavior more than two thousand light-years, and all for nothing?”
“I don’t believe it will be for nothing. And we’ve spent most of the journey either in cold sleep, or in T-state. It hasn’t felt like a long time for anyone on board.”
“I know. But not everyone in the universe is aboard this ship. Watch.” Emil took a coin from his pocket and flipped it into the air. It rose maybe a meter and a half, then dropped back into his hand.
He closed his big fist on the coin and stared at Charlene. “How long did that coin toss take? Maybe one second, start to finish? But we’re in T-state. That flip lasted twenty-three N-days, more than three weeks on Earth or Pentecost or Kallen’s World. And people are all back there, waiting for results from us. Even if we find what we hope for at Urstar, it will have been one hell of a long wait for answers for them. At its fastest this ship travelled at more than sixteen percent of light speed, faster than anything ever flown before by humans; but when we arrive at our destination we’ll have been on the way for more than fifteen thousand N-years. Do you wonder I’m nervous? Aren’t you nervous, too?” “I am. But not for the same reason as you are.” Charlene turned in her chair, so that she could place her lips just a few inches from Emil’s ear.
He flinched away. “What are you doing?”
“Not what you seem to think I’m doing.” Charlene reached out and pulled Emil’s bald head close to her face. She felt almost guilty, deliberately changing the subject from his concerns to hers; yet it was the right thing to do, to stop hi
s own brooding on a possibly wrong destination. She whispered, “I don’t want anyone else to hear this. And I mean anyone.”
Emil froze. He said in a deep growl, and just as softly, “Charlene, I’ll tell you a secret: blow in my ear and I’ll follow you anywhere. But what’s this about?”
“I want you to do something for me, without making it at all obvious. I’d like you to observe Judith Niles as closely as you can, without ever letting her suspect that you’re doing it.”
“The Director?” Emil turned his head, so that his brown eyes gazed into Charlene’s from just a few inches away. “Charlene, that makes me uneasy. What are you getting at?”
“I’m not sure.” They were still whispering, although the chance that anyone could overhear the conversation was negligible. “I’ve known JN for an awfully long time, in both objective and subjective time. Ever since we came from cold sleep three weeks ago, I’ve sensed something different. At first, I thought maybe the change was in me. But I don’t think so.”
“You could ask Sy for a second opinion. He’s known the Director longer than I have.” Emil saw Charlene’s face. “No, on second thoughts I guess you couldn’t. He doesn’t take much interest in people. The Director would have to turn into a cloud of pink smoke before Sy noticed. But what sort of differences are you talking about?”
Charlene was silent for a while, rocking backward and forward from the hips. “A long, long time ago,” she said at last, “before we came to Gulf City, before we even moved the Institute into space, JN developed some odd habits. She’d rub at her left eye, or she’d sit and stare at nothing for a few seconds during meetings, exactly as if she’d blanked out. I noticed it then, but I didn’t do anything about it. I don’t think I dared — she was too much my boss, everybody’s boss.”
Emil nodded. “Then, and now.”
“Maybe. But I’ve regretted my lack of nerve ever since, because it turned out that JN had a fast-growing malignant brain tumor. We saved her — just — by pushing her into S-space. She was the first human ever to go there, and we left her there until a treatment and cure had been developed.”
“Charlene, you shouldn’t feel guilty about something that happened a million years ago.”
“Eighty-one thousand. I’m not worrying about old guilt, Emil. I’m worrying about now. I’m seeing — or imagining — modes of behavior that bring back disturbing memories.”
“It can’t be a tumor. The medical screening that takes place when anyone goes to and from cold sleep to either T-state or S-space would have caught it.” “I know. I’ve told myself the same thing. But human beings are complicated, there are a million things that can go wrong with us. And I think one of them is affecting the Director. Her behavior has become weird sometimes. If you will keep a close eye on her whenever you can, and make your own evaluation, I would really appreciate it.”
“Of course I will.” Emil stood up. “I’ll go and find her now. I have a good reason for a meeting. We’re close to the time when we’ll all move to S-space for the final approach to Urstar, and the Director will want special data capture procedures.” He reached down and squeezed Charlene’s hand. “You should have shared this with me sooner. It is not a burden for anyone to struggle with alone.”
* * *
Charlene was right. Emil would never have noticed it without her prompting, but when you knew what to look for…
The whole group, everyone on the Argo except a couple who were sleeping or busy with other matters, was together at dinner in the ship’s dining room. The conversation was animated and excited along the ten-meter table, the air filled with speculation about what the next few days would bring. The move to S-space had been smooth. Velocity-shedding had been performed with all the crew briefly in cold sleep, and tomorrow the final transition to N-space would take place. The target system would then lie only four light-days away; light-days in N-space, where hours and days and months flashed by at dizzying speed. Already the high-magnification sensors reported the existence of half a dozen planets in orbit around the glowing red dwarf primary. Three were gas giants, while the inner three were small, metal-rich worlds. Not one of them lay within the life-zone of worlds habitable by Earth-dwelling forms, but who knew the needs of an alien species?
The group ate and drank — lightly, knowing that in just a few hours all food and drink would taste infinitely better than it ever could in S-space. The talk was lively, full of guesses about what they might find at Urstar. Emil joined in, but every few seconds his eyes flickered across for another look at Judith Niles.
He had made sure that he sat straight across from her. At first glance, the Director was normal enough. She seemed weary, with black smudges under her eyes, but that might be no more than worries about what the next few days might reveal. Would the Urstar show that it was indeed the first, the original of all the changes in spectral type; or would it — a worry for Emil as much as for Judith Niles — provide no evidence at all, of stellarforming activities or anything else? Emil’s second look provided more information. One of Judith Niles’s eyes was noticeably more prominent than the other, the bulge in the left obvious from a profile view. The facial tics moved around, sometimes in an eye, sometimes affecting the line of her mouth or of one ear.
And Judith Niles herself knew that something was happening to her. At each tic or facial twitch she glanced around to make sure that no one noticed, but there were other problems over which she had less control. Every few minutes her face went rigid, and for as much as thirty seconds she froze into catatonia. When she came out of it her face quivered, and her head wobbled as though it was too heavy for her neck.
Charlene was sitting next to the Director, across the table from Emil. He caught her eye, very briefly. His nod would have been imperceptible to anyone who was not waiting for it. Charlene’s raised eyebrow would be comprehensible to Emil alone. It meant, you see it too. What do we do now?
The timing could not be worse. Judith Niles was their leader, it was assumed that she would control all activities when they reached Urstar. If not she, then who?
Emil looked all along the table. Libby Trask had the necessary cool, but not the experience. Alfredo Roewen had the ego, but not the dispassionate attitude. Who else? Well, if you wanted dispassionate attitude there was always Sy, noticeable at the moment by his absence from the group. On the basis of seniority of service, Sy outranked everyone except Charlene, who in turn was outranked only by Judith Niles herself. They might have to make the best of a bad lot. If Judith Niles continued to deteriorate — and Charlene insisted that she was getting rapidly worse — then it might have to be Sy. Assuming, that is, they could somehow force him to take on the job.
And here came the man himself, slouching his way into the room. Rather than sitting at a place where the robot servers would instantly provide him with food and drink, he placed himself at the very far end, away from everyone. He held his deformed left forearm close to his body — another mystery, why had he never agreed to the minor surgery required to fix it? — and peered with bright gray eyes at the miniature display clutched in his right hand.
He remained like that for several minutes, oblivious to all the others in the room. Finally he seemed to make up his mind. He sat straighter, looked along the length of the table, and said in a clear, penetrating voice, “We’ve stopped, you know. Does anyone have an explanation for that?”
His words produced the effect he had surely been hoping for: dead silence. Everyone looked to Judith Niles. The Director was blinking rapidly, one hand on her throat. Finally, and with apparent effort, she said, “Stopped? What has stopped?”
“We have. The ship has.”
Everyone turned to the monitors, discreetly inlaid as panels along the dining room walls. The Argo’s engines were not scheduled to turn on again until the transition to N-space had been made, when high deceleration for stellar rendezvous could be tolerated. The displays showed exactly that: inactive engines, and a ship speeding toward its target s
tar at a good fraction of the speed of light.
A questioning mutter began, cut off by Sy’s curt, “Don’t go by engine activity. Look at what the external sensors are reporting. We have no Doppler shift with respect to the target star, and the microwave background radiation is close to isotropic. If this ship is moving at all, it can’t be at more than a few tens of meters a second. At this rate it will take millions of years to reach Urstar.” The mutter of voices in the dining room took on a different tone. Everyone in science and engineering had a favorite suite of instruments, and they were polling them without moving from their seats.
Emil looked at Judith Niles, and saw Charlene’s glance turn in the same direction. This was the point where the Director would take over, end the individual efforts, and set a coordinated course to discover exactly what was happening. Instead, JN sat with slack mouth and unfocused eyes. It was one of the younger scientists, Rolf Sansome, whose voice rose above the general hubbub. “Worse than a million years. According to our best instruments, we have absolutely no velocity relative to Urstar’s center of mass.”
Libby Trask, a linguistics expert but no physicist, said, “I don’t understand. How could we go from a sixth of light-speed to zero, with nobody on board noticing?”
“We couldn’t.” That was Dan Korwin, chief engineer on the Argo and a man as blunt and confrontational as Sy was indirect and devious. “Keep your eyes on your instruments, Rolf Sansome, and you too, Sy Day. I’m going to try something.”
Korwin was busy with his own hand-held. A shudder went through the ship, while glasses and plates left on the dining room table by the service robots danced and rattled on the polished surface.
Korwin looked up. “Well?”
Rolf Sansome shook his head. “Still zero velocity with respect to Urstar.” “The engines insist we’re accelerating.”
Between the Strokes of Night Page 30
