Tau Zero

Chapter 10

The silence went on and on. Ingrid Lindgren stared from the stage, where she stood with Lars Telander, down at her people. They looked back at her. And not a one in that chamber could find words.

Hers had been well chosen. The truth was less savage in her throat than in any man’s. But when she came to her planned midpoint—” We have lost Earth, lost Beta Three, lost the mankind we belonged to. We have left to us courage, love, and and, yes, hope” — she could not continue. She stood with lip caught between teeth, fingers twisted together, and the slow tears flowed from her eyes.

Telander stirred. “Ah … if you will,” he tried. “Kindly pay attention. A means does exist…” The ship jeered at him in her tone of distant lightnings.

Glassgold broke. She did not weep loudly, but her struggle to stop made the sound more dreadful. M’Botu, beside her, attempted consolation. He, though, had clamped such stoicism on himself that he might as well have been a robot. Iwamoto withdrew several paces from them both, from them all; one could see how he pulled his soul into some nirvana with a lock on its door. Williams shook his fist at the overhead and cursed. Another voice, female, started to keen. A woman considered the man with whom she had been keeping company, said, “You, for my whole life?” and stalked from him. He tried to follow her and bumped into a crewman who snarled and offered to fight if he didn’t apologize. A seething went through the entire human mass.

“Listen to me,” Telander said. “Please listen.”

Reymont shook loose the arm which Chi-Yuen Ai-Ling held, where they stood in the first row, and jumped onto the stage. “You’ll never bring them around that way,” he declared sotto voce. “You’re used to disciplined professionals. Let me handle these civilians.” He turned on them. “Quiet, there! “Echoes bounced around his roar. “Shut your hatches. Act like adults for once. We haven’t the personnel to change your diapers for you.”

Williams yelped with resentment. M’Botu bared teeth. Reymont drew his stunner. “Hold your places!” He dropped his vocal volume, but everyone heard him. “The first of you to move gets knocked out. Afterward we’ll court-martial him. I’m the constable of this expedition, and I intend to maintain order and effective cooperation.” He leered. “If you feel I exceed my authority, you’re welcome to file a complaint with the appropriate bureau in Stockholm. For now, you’ll listen!”

His tongue-lashing activated their adrenals. With heightened vigor came self-possession. They glowered but waited alertly.

“Good.” Reymont turned mild and holstered his weapon. “We’ll say no more about this. I realize you’ve had a shock which none of you were prepared psychologically to meet. Nevertheless, we’ve got a problem. And it has a solution, if we can work together. I repeat: if.”

Lindgren had swallowed her weeping. “I think I was supposed to—” she said. He shook his head at her and went on:

“We can’t repair the decelerators because we can’t turn off the accelerators. The reason is, as you’ve been told, at high speeds we must have the force fields of one system or the other to shield us from interstellar gas. So it looks as if we’re bottled in this hull. Well, I don’t like the prospect either, though I believe we could endure it. Medieval monks accepted worse.

“Discussing it in the bridge, however, we got a thought. A possibility of escape, if we have the nerve and determination. Navigation Officer Boudreau ran a preliminary check for me. Afterward we called in Professor Nilsson for an expert opinion.”

The astronomer harrumphed and looked important. Jane Sadler seemed less impressed than others.

“We have a chance of success,” Reymont informed them.

A sound like a wind passed through the assembly. “Don’t make us wait!” cried a young man’s voice.

“I’m glad to see some spirit,” Reymont said. “It’ll have to be kept on a tight rein, though, or we’re finished. To make this as short as I can — afterward Captain Telander and the specialists will go into detail — here’s the idea.”

His delivery might have been used to describe a new method of bookkeeping. “If we can find a region where gas is practically nonexistent, we can safely shut down the fields, and our engineers can go outside and repair the decelerator system. Astronomical data are not as precise as we’d like. However, apparently throughout the galaxy and even in nearby intergalactic space, the medium is too dense. Much thinner out there than here, of course; still, so thick, in terms of atoms struck per second, as to kill us without our protection.

“Now galaxies generally occur in clusters. Our galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, M31 in Andromeda, and thirteen others, large and small, make up one such group. The volume it occupies is about six million light-years across. Beyond them is an enormously greater distance to the next galactic family. By coincidence, it’s in Virgo too: forty million light-years from here.

“‘In that stretch, we hope, the gas is thin enough for us not to need shielding.”

Babble tried to break out afresh. Reymont lifted both hands. He actually laughed. “Wait, wait!” he called. “Don’t bother. I know what you want to say. Forty million light-years is impossible. We haven’t the tau for it. A ratio of fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand, does us no good. Agreed. But.”

The last word stopped them. He filled his lungs. “But remember,” he said, “we have no limit on our inverse tau. We can accelerate at a lot more than three gee, too, if we widen our scoopfields and choose a path through sections of this galaxy where matter is dense. The exact parameters we’ve been using were determined by our course to Beta Virginis. The ship isn’t restricted to them. Navigator Bou-dreau and Professor Nilsson estimate we can travel at an average of ten gee, quite likely more. Engineer Fedoroff is reasonably sure the accelerator system can stand that, after certain modifications he knows he can make.

“So. The gentlemen made rough calculations. Their results indicate we can swing halfway around the galaxy, spiraling inward till we plunge straight through its middle and out again on this side. We’d be slow about any course change anyway. We can’t turn on a tea-цre coin at our speed! And this’ll enable us to acquire the necessary tau. Don’t forget, that’ll decrease constantly. Our transit to Beta Vee would have been a lot quicker if we hadn’t meant to stop there: if, instead of braking at mid-passage, we’d simply kept cramming on velocity.

“Navigator Boudreau estimates — estimates, mind you; we’ll have to gather data as we go; but a good, informed guess — considering the speed we already have, he thinks we can finish with this galaxy and head out beyond it in a year or two.”

“How long cosmic time?” sounded from the gathering.

“Who cares?” Reymont retorted. “You know the dimensions. The galactic disk is about a hundred thousand light-years across. At present we’re thirty thousand from the center. One or two hundred millennia altogether? Who can tell? It’ll depend on what path we take, which in turn will depend on what long-range observation can show us.”

He stabbed a finger at them. “I know. You wonder, what if we hit a cloud such as got us into this miserable situation? I have two answers for that. First, we have to take some risks. But second, as our tau gets less and less, we’ll be able to use regions which are denser and denser. We’ll have too much mass to be affected as we were this time. Do you see? The more we have, the more we can get, and the faster we can get it in ship’s time. We may conceivably leave the galaxy with an inverse tau on the order of a hundred million. In that case, by our clocks we’ll be outside this entire galactic family in days!”

“How do we get back?” Glassgold said — but vigilant and interested.

“We don’t,” Reymont admitted. “We keep on to the Virgo cluster. There we reverse the process, decelerate, enter one of the member galaxies, bring our tau up to something sensible, and start looking for a planet where we can live.

“Yes, yes, yes!” he rapped into the renewed surf of their speech. “Millions of years in the future. Millions of light-years hence. The human race most qwlikely extinct … in this corner of the universe. Well, can’t we start over, in another place and time? Or would you rather sit in a metal shell feeling sorry for yourselves, till you grow senile and die childless? Unless you can’t stand the gaff and blow out your brains. I’m for going on as long as strength lasts. I think enough of this group to believe you will agree. Will anyone who feels differently be so good as to get out of our way?”

He stalked from the stage. “Ah … Navigation Officer Boudreau, Chief Engineer Fedoroff, Professor Nilsson,” Telander said. “Will you come here? Ladies and gentlemen, the meeting is open for general discussions—”

Chi-Yuen hugged Reymont. “You were marvelous,” she sobbed.

His mouth tightened. He looked from her, from Lindgren, across the assemblage, to the enclosing bulkheads. “Thanks,” he replied curtly. “Wasn’t much.”

“Oh, but it was. You gave us back hope. I am honored to live with you.”

He didn’t seen to hear. “Anybody could have presented a shiny new idea,” he said. “They’ll grasp at anything, right now. I only expedited matters. When they accept the program, that’s when the real trouble begins.”