Tau Zero

Chapter 16

The course out of the Milky Way was not straight; it zigzagged a little, as much as several light-centuries, to pass through the densest accessible nebulae and dust banks. Nevertheless, the time aboard was counted in days until she was in the marches of the spiral arm, outward bound into a nearly starless night.

Johann Freiwald brought Emma Glassgold a piece of equipment he had made to her order. As had been proposed, she was joining forces with Norbert Williams to devise long-range life detectors. The machinist found her trotting about in her laboratory, hands busy, humming to herself. The apparatus and glassware were esoteric, the smells chemically. pungent, the background that endless murmur and quiver which told how the ship plunged forward; and somehow she might have been a new bride making her man a birthday cake.

“Thank you.” She beamed as she accepted the article.

“You look happy,” Freiwald said. “Why?”

“Why not?”

His arm swept in a violent gesture. “Everything!”

“Well … a disappointment about the Virgo cluster, naturally. Still, Norbert and I—” She broke off, blushing. “We have a fascinating problem here, a real challenge, and he’s already made a brilliant suggestion about it.” She cocked her head at Freiwald. “I’ve never seen you in this black a mood. What’s become of that cheerful Nietzscheanism of yours?”

“Today we leave the galaxy,” he said. “Forever.”

“Why, you knew—”

“Yes. I also knew, know I must die sometime, and Jane too, which is worse. That does not make it easier.” The big blond man exclaimed suddenly, imploringly: “Do you believe we will ever stop?”

“I can’t say,” Glassgold answered. She stood on tiptoe to pat his shoulder. “It was not easy to resign myself to the possibility. I did, though, through God’s mercy. Now I can accept whatever comes to us, and feel how good most of it is. Surely you can do the same, Johann.”

“I try,” he said. “It is so dark out there. I never thought that I, grown up, would again be afraid of the dark.”

The great whirlpool of suns contracted and paled astern. Another began slowly growing forward. In the viewscope it was a thing of delicate, intricate beauty, jeweled gossamer. Beyond it, around it, more appeared, tiny smudges and points of radiance. Despite the Einsteinian shrinkage of space at Leonora Christine ’s velocity, they showed monstrously remote and isolated.

That speed continued to mount, not as fast as in the regions left behind — here, the gas concentration was perhaps a hundred thousandth of that near Sol — but sufficiently to bring her to the next galaxy in some weeks of her own time. Accurate observations were not to be had without radical improvements in astronomical technology: a task into which Nilsson and his team cast themselves with the eagerness of escapers.

Testing a photoconverter unit, he personally made a discovery. A few stars existed out here. He didn’t know whether random perturbations had sent them drifting from their parental galaxies, uncountable billions of years ago, or whether they had actually formed in these deeps, in unknown fashion. By a grotesquely improbable chance, the ship passed near enough to one that he identified it — a dim, ancient red dwarf — and could show that it must have planets, from the glimpse his apparatus got before the system was swallowed anew by distance.

It was an eerie thought, those icy shadowy worlds, manyfold older than Earth, perhaps one or two with life upon them, and never a star to lighten their nights. When he told Lindgren about it, she said not to pass the information any further.

Several days later, returning home from work, he opened the door to their cabin and found her present. She didn’t notice him. She was seated on the bed, facing away, her eyes on a picture of her family. The light was turned low, dusking her but falling so coldly on her hair that it looked white. She strummed her lute and sang … to herself? It was not the merriment of her beloved Bellman. The language, in fact, was Danish. After a moment, Nilsson recognized the lyrics, Jacobsen’s Songs of Gurre, and Schцnberg’s melodies for them.

The call of King Valdemar’s men, raised from their coffins to follow him on the spectral ride that he was condemmed to lead, snarled forth.

She started to go on with the next stanza, Valdemar’s cry to his lost darling; but she faltered and went directly to his men’s words as dawn breaks over them.

For a little space there was silence. Nilsson said. “That strikes too near home, my dear.”

She looked about. Weariness had laid a pallor on her face. “I wouldn’t sing it in public,” she answered.

Concerned, he went to her, sat down by her side and asked: ‘‘Do you really think of us as being on the Wild Hunt of the damned? I never knew.”

“I try not to let on.” She stared straight before her. Her fingers plucked shivering chords from the lute. “Sometimes — We are now at about the million-year mark, you know.”

He laid an arm around her waist. “What can I do to help, Ingrid? Anything?”

She shook her head the least bit.

“I owe you so much,” he said. “Your strength, your kindness, yourself. You made me back into a man.” With difficulty: “Not the best man alive, I admit. Not handsome or charming or witty. I often forget even to try to be a good partner to you. But I do want to.”

“Of course, Elof.”

“If you, well, have grown tired of our arrangment … or simply want more, more variety—”

“No. None of that.” She put the lute aside. “We have this ship to get to harbor, if ever we can. We dare not let anything else count.”

He gave her a stricken glance; but before he could inquire just what she meant, she smiled, kissed him, and said: “Still, we could use a rest. A forgetting. You can do something for me, Elof. Draw our liquor ration. Help yourself to most of it; you’re sweet when you’ve dissolved your shyness. We’ll invite somebody young and ungloomy — Luis, I think, and Maria — and laugh and play games and be foolish in this cabin and empty a pitcher of water over anybody who says anything serious… Will you do that?”

“That I can,” he said.

Leonora Christine entered the next galaxy in its equatorial plane, to maximize the distance she would traverse through its wealth of gas and star dust. Already on the fringes, where the suns were as yet widely scattered, she began to bound at high acceleration. The fury of that passage vibrated ever more strongly and noisily through her.

Captain Telander kept the bridge. Seemingly he had little control. The commitment was made; the spiral arm curved ahead like a road shining blue and silver. Occasional giant stars came sufficiently close to show in the now modified screens, distorted with the speed effects that sent them whirling past as if they were sparks blown by the wind that shouted against the ship. Occasional dense nebulae enclosed her in night or in the fluorescence of hot newbom stellar fires.

Lenkei and Barrios were the men.who counted then, conning her manually through that fantastic hundred-thousand-year plunge. The displays before them, the intercom voices of Navigator Boudreau explaining what appeared to lie ahead or Engineer Fedoroff warning of undue stresses, gave them some guidance. But the vessel had gotten too swift, too massive for much veering; and under these conditions, once-reliable instruments were turned into Delphic oracles. Mostly the pilots flew on skill and instinct, perhaps on prayer.

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.”