Tau Zero

by Poul Anderson

  Captain Telander sat throughout those shipboard hours, so unmoving that you might have thought him dead. A few times he bestirred himself. (“Heavy concentration of stuff identified, sir. Could be too thick for us. Shall we try to evade?”) Responses came from him. (“No, carry on, take every opportunity to bring down tau, if you estimate even fifty-fifty odds in our favor.”) Their tone was calm and unhesitant.

  The clouds around the nucleus were thicker and made heavier weather than those in the home galaxy. Thunders toned in the hull, which rocked and bucked to accelerations that changed faster than could be compensated. Equipment broke from its containers and smashed; lights flickered, went out, were somehow rekindled by sweating, cursing men with flash beams; folk in darkened cabins awaited their deaths. “Proceed on present course,” Telander ordered; and he was obeyed.

  And the ship lived. She broke through into starry space and started out the other side of the immense Catherine wheel. In little more than an hour, she had re-entered intergalactic regions. Telander announced it without fanfare. A few people cheered.

  Boudreau came before the captain, trembling with reaction but his features altogether alive. “Mon Dieu, sir, wedidit!! was not sure it would be possible. I would not have had the courage, me, to issue the commands you did. You were right! You won us everything we hoped for!”

  “Not yet,” said the seated man. His inflection was unchanged. He looked past Boudreau. “Have you corrected your navigational data? Will we be able to use any other galaxies in this family?”

  “Why … well, yes. Several, although some are small elliptical systems, and we will probably only manage to cut a corner across others. Too high a speed. By the same token, however, we should have less trouble and hazard each time, considering our mass. And we can certainly use at least two other galactic families, maybe three, in similar fashion.” Boudreau tugged his beard. “I estimate we will be into, er, interclan space — well into it, so we can make those repairs — in another month.”

  “Good,” Telander said.

  Boudreau gave him a close regard and was shocked. Beneath its careful expressionlessness, the captain’s countenance was that of a man drained empty.

  Dark.

  The absolute night.

  Instruments, straining magnification and amplification, reconverting wave lengths, identified some glimmer in that pit. Human senses found nothing, nothing.

  “We’re dead.” Fedoroff’s words echoed in earplugs and skulls.

  “I feel alive,” Reymont replied.

  “What else is death but the final cutting off? No sun, no stars, no sound, no weight, no shadow—” Fedoroff’s breath was ragged, too clear over a radio which no longer carried the surf noise of cosmic interference. His head was invisible against empty space. His suit lamp threw a dull puddle of light onto the hull that was reflected and lost in horrible distances.

  “Let’s keep moving,” Reymont urged.

  “Who’re you to give orders?” demanded another man. “What do you know about Bussard engines? Why are you out with this work party anyhow?” “I can manage myself in free fall and armor,” Reymont told him, “and so provide you an extra pair of hands. I know we’d better get the job done fast. Which seems to be more than you bagelbrains realize.”

  “What’s the hurry?” Fedoroff mocked. “We have eternity. We’re dead, remember.”

  “We will indeed be dead if we’re caught, forceshields down, in anything like a real concentration of matter,” Reymont retorted. “It’d take less than one atom per cubic meter to kill us with our present tau — which puts the next galactic clan only weeks away.”

  “What of it?”

  “Well, are you absolutely certain, Fedoroff, that we won’t strike an embryo galaxy, family, clan … some enormous hydrogen cloud, still dark, still falling it on itself … at any instant?”

  “At any millennium, you mean,” the chief engineer said. But, evidently stung out of his dauntedness, he started aft from the main personnel lock. His gang followed.

  It was, in truth, a flitting of ghosts. No wonder he, never a coward, had briefly heard the wingbeats of the Furies. One had thought of space as black. But now one remembered that it had been full of stars. Any shape had been silhouetted athwart suns, clusters, constellations, nebulae, sister galaxies; oh, the cosmos was pervaded with light! The inner cosmos. Here was worse than a dark background. Here was no background. None whatsoever. The squat, unhuman forms of spacesuited men, the long curve of the hull, were seen as gleams, disconnected and fugitive. With acceleration ended, weight was ended also. Not even the slight differential-gravity effects of being in orbit existed. A man moved as if in an infinite dream of swimming, flying, falling. And yet … he remembered that this weightless body of his bore the mass of a mountain. Was there a real heaviness in his floating; or had the constants of inertia subtly changed, out here where the metric of Space-time was flattened to nearly a straight line; or was it an illusion, spawned in the tomb stillness which engulfed him? What was illusion? What was reality? Was reality?

  Roped together, clinging with frantic bondsoles to the ship’s metal (curious, the horror one felt of getting somehow pitched loose — extinction would be the same as if that had happened in the lost little spaceways of the Solar System — but the thought of blazing across gigayears as a stellar-scale meteor was peculiarly lonely), the engineer detail made their way along the hull, past the spidery framework of the hy-dromagnetic generators. Those ribs seemed terribly frail.

  “Suppose we can’t fix the decelerator half of the module,” came a voice. “Do we go on? What happens to us? I mean, won’t the laws be different on me edge of the universe? Won’t we turn into something awful?”

  “Space is isotropic,” Reymont barked into the blackness. “‘The edge of the universe’ is gibberish. And let’s start by supposing we can fix the stupid machine.”

  He heard a few oaths and grinned like a carnivore. When they halted and began to secure their lifelines individually to the ion drive girders, Fedoroff laid his helmet against Reymont’s for a private talk carried by conduction.

  “Thanks, Constable,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Being such a prosaic bastard.”

  ‘‘Well, we have a prosaic job of repair to do. We may have come a long way, we may by now have outlived the race that produced us, but we haven’t changed from a variety of proboscis monkey. Why take ourselves so mucking seriously?”

  ‘‘Hm. I see why Lindgren insisted I let you come along.” Fedoroff cleared his throat. “About her.”

  “Yes.”

  “I … 1 was angry … at your treatment of her. It was mainly that. Of course, I was, uh, humiliated personally. But a man should be able to get over that. I cared for her, though, very much.”

  “Forget it,” Reymont said.

  “I cannot do that. But maybe I can understand a little better than I let myself do in the past. You must have hurt too. And now, for her own reasons, she has gone from both of us. Shall we shake hands and be friends once more, Charles?”

  “Surely. I’ve wanted this myself. Good men are hard to come by.” Gauntlets groped to find each other in the murk and clasp.

  ‘‘All right.” Fedoroff switched his transmitter back on and pushed clear of the ship. “Let’s get aft and have a look at the problem.”

  Chapter 17

  Light began to glimmer ahead, a scattering of starlike points which waxed, in numbers and brightness, toward glory. Their dominion widened; presently the viewscope showed them occupying nearly half of heaven; and still that area grew and brightened.

  They were not stars forming those strange constellations. They were, at first, entire families of galaxies making up a clan. Later, as the ship advanced, they broke into clusters and then into separate members.

  The viewscope’s reconstruction of this stationary-observer sight was only approximate. From the spectra received, a computer estimated what the Doppler shift, and thus the aberratio
n, must be, and made corresponding adjustments. But these were nothing except estimates.

  It was believed that the clan lay about three hundred million light-years from home. But no charts existed for these deeps, no standards of measurement. The probable error in the derived value of tau was huge. Factors like absorption simply were not in any reference work aboard.

  Leonora Christine might have sought a less remote destination, for which more reliable data were tabulated. However — bearing in mind that at ultra-low tau she was not very steerable — that route would have taken her through less matter within the Milky Way-Andromeda-Virgo clan. She would have gained less speed; and now she was running so close to c that every increment made a significant difference. Paradoxically, shipboard time to the nearest possible target would have been more than to this one.

  And it was not known, either, how long her people could endure.

  The cheer brought by the repair of the decelerator was short-lived. For neither half of the Bussard module could work in interclan space. Here the primordial gas had finally gotten too thin. For weeks, therefore, the ship must go powerless on a trajectory set by the eldritch ballistics of relativity. Within her hull was weightlessness. There was some talk of using lateral ion jets to put a spin on her and thus provide centrifugal pseudo-gravity. Despite her size, it would have generated radial and Coriolis effects that were too troublesome. She had not been designed nor had her folk been trained for such.

  They must bear the weeks, while the geological epochs passed by outside.

  Reymont opened the door to his cabin. Weariness made him careless. Bracing himself a trifle too hard against the bulkhead, he let go the handhold and was propelled away. For a moment he cartwheeled in mid-air. Then he bumped into the opposite side of the corridor, pushed, and darted back across. Once within the cabin, he grabbed another bar before shutting the door behind him.

  At this hour, he had expected Chi-Yuen Ai-Ling to be asleep. But she floated wakeful, a few centimeters off their joined beds, a single line anchoring her. As he entered, she switched off the library screen with a quickness that showed she hadn’t really been paying attention to the book projected on it.

  “Not you too?” Reymont’s question seemed loud. They had been so long accustomed to the engine pulse as well as the force of acceleration that free fall still brimmed the ship with silence.

  “What?” Her smile was tentative and troubled. They had had scant contact lately. He had too much work under these changed conditions, organizing, ordering, cajoling, arranging, planning. He would come here merely to snatch what slumber he might.

  “Have you also become unable to rest in zero gee?” he asked.

  “No. That is, I can. A strange, light sort of sleep, filled with dreams, but I seem fairly refreshed afterward.”

  “Good,” he sighed. “Two more cases have developed.”

  “Insomniac, you mean?”

  “Yes. Verging on nervous collapse. Every time they do drift off, you know, they wake again screaming. Nightmares. I’m not sure whether weightlessness alone does it to them, or if that’s only the last thing needed for breaking stress. Neither is Urho Latvala. I was just conferring with him. He wanted my opinion on what to do, now that he’s running short of psychodrugs.”

  “What did you suggest?”

  Reymont grimaced. “I told him who I thought unconditionally had to have them, and who might survive awhile without.”

  “The trouble isn’t simply the psychological effect, you realize,” Chi-Yuen said. “It is the fatigue. Pure physical tiredness, from trying to do things in a gravityless environment.”

  “Of course.” Reymont hooked one leg around the bar to hold himself in place and started to unfasten his coverall. “Quite unnecessary. The regular spacemen know how to cope, and you and I and a few others. We don’t get worn out trying to coordinate our muscles. It’s those groundlubber scientists who do.”

  “How much longer, Charles?”

  ‘‘Like this? Who knows? They plan to reactivate the force fields, at minimum strength off the interior power plant, tomorrow. A precaution, in case we strike denser material sooner than expected. The last estimate I heard for when we’ll reach the fringes of the clan is a week.”

  She relaxed in relief. “We can stand that. And then … we will be making for our new home.”

  “Hope so,” Reymont grunted. He stored his clothes, shivered a little though the air was warm, and took out a pair of pajamas.

  Chi-Yuen started. Her tether jerked her to a stop. “What do you mean by that? Don’t you know?”

  “Look, Ai-Ling,” he said in an exhausted tone, “you’ve been briefed like everybody else on our instrumentation problems. How in hell’s flaming name can you expect an exact answer to anything?”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Are the officers to blame if the passengers don’t listen to their reports, won’t understand?” Reymont’s voice lifted in anger. “Some of you are going to pieces again. Some of you have barricaded yourselves with apathy, or religion, or sex, or whatever, till nothing registers on your memories. Most of you — well, it was healthy to work on those R D projects, but that’s become a defense reaction in its own right. Another way of narrowing your attention till you exclude the big bad universe. And now, when free fall prevents you carrying on, you likewise crawl into your nice hidey-holes.” Lashingly: “Go ahead. Do what you want. The whole wretched lot of you. Only don’t come and peck at me any longer. D’you hear?”

  He yanked the pajamas on, soared to the bed, and clipped the safety line around his waist. Chi-Yuen moved to embrace him.

  “Oh, love,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. You are so tired, are you not?”

  “Been hard on us all,” he said.

  “Most on you.” Her fingers traced the cheekbones standing out under taut skin, the deep lines, the sunken and bloodshot eyes. “Why don’t you rest?”

  “I’d like to.”

  She maneuvered his mass into a stretched-out position and drew herself closer yet. Her hair floated across his face, smelling of sunshine on Earth. “Do,” she said. “You can. For you, isn’t it good not to be heavy?”

  “M-m-m … yes, in a way… Ai-Ling, you know Iwasaki pretty well. Do you think he can manage without tranquilizers? The doctor and I weren’t sure.”

  “Hush.” Her palm covered his mouth. “None of that.”

  “But—”

  “No, I will not have it. The ship isn’t going to fall apart if you get one decent night’s sleep.”

  “Well … well … maybe not.”

  “Close your eyes. Let me stroke your forehead — there. Isn’t that better already? Now think of nice things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Have you forgotten? Think of home. No. Best not that, I suppose. Think of the home we are going to find. Blue sky. Warm bright sun, light falling through leaves, dappling the shade, blinking on a river; and the river flows, flows, flows, singing you to sleep.”

  “Um-m-m.”

  She kissed him very lightly. “Our own house. A garden. Strange colorful flowers. Oh, but we will plant seeds from Earth too, roses, honeysuckle, apple, rosemary for remembrance. Our children…”

  He stirred. The fret returned to him. “Wait a minute, we can’t make personal commitments. Not yet. You might not want, uh, any given man. I’mfondofyou, of course, but—”

  She brushed his lids shut again before he saw the pain on her. “We are daydreaming, Charles,” she laughed low. “Stop being all solemn and literal-minded. Just think about children, everyone’s children, playing in a garden. Think about the river. Forests. Mountains. Bird song. Peace.”

  He tightened an arm around her slenderness. “You’re a good person.”

  “You are yourself. A good person who ought to be cuddled. Would you like me to sing you to sleep?”

  “Yes.” His words were becoming indistinct. “Please. I like Chinese music.”

  She continued smoothing his brow while she
drew breath.

  The intercom circuit clicked shut. “Constable,” said Telander’s voice, “are you there?”

  Reymont snapped awake. “Don’t,” Chi-Yuen begged.

  “Yes,” Reymont said, “here I am.”

  “Would you come to the bridge? Confidential.”

  “Aye, aye.” Reymont undid his lifeline and pulled the pajama top over his head.

  “They could not give you five minutes, could they?” Chi-Yuen said.

  “Must be serious,” he answered. “Don’t mention it around until you hear from me.” In a few motions he had resumed coverall and shoes and was on his way.

  Telander and, surprisingly, Nilsson awaited him. The captain looked as if he had been struck in the belly. The astronomer was excited but had not wholly lost his self-command of recent months. He clutched a bescribbled sheet of paper.

  “Navigation difficulties, eh?” Reymont deduced. “Where’s Boudreau?”

  “This doesn’t concern him immediately,” Nilsson said. ‘‘I have been computing the significance of observations I’ve made with the newest instruments. I have reached a, ah, frustrating conclusion.”

  Reymont wrapped fingers around a grip and hung in the stillness, regarding them. The fluorolight cast the hollows of his face into shadow. The gray streaks which had lately appeared in his hair stood forth sharp by contrast. “We can’t make that galactic clan ahead of us after all,” he foretold.

  “That’s right.” Telander drooped.

  “No, not right in a strict sense,” Nilsson declared fussily. ‘‘We will pass through. In fact, we will pass through not only the general region, but — if we choose — through a quite a fair number of galaxies within certain of the families which comprise the clan.”

  “You can distinguish thatmuch detail already?” Reymont wondered; “Boudreau couldn’t.”

  “I told you I have new equipment, with its balkiness now tinkered out,” Nilsson said. “You recollect that after Ingrid gave me some special lessons, I became able to work in free fall with a degree of efficiency. The precision of my data seems even more than hoped for when, ah, we instigated the project. Yes, I have a reasonably accurate map of that part of the clan which we might traverse. On such basis, I have calculated what options are open to us.”