Tau Zero

Chapter 4

In one of the garden rooms stood a viewscreen tuned to Outside. Sable and diamonds were startlingly framed by ferns, orchids, overarching fuchsia and bougainvillea. A fountain tinkled and glittered. The air was warmer here than in most places aboard, moist, full of perfumes and greenness.

None of it quite did away with the underlying pulse of driving energies. Bussard systems had not been developed to the smoothness of electric rockets. Always, now, the ship whispered and shivered. The vibration was faint, on the very edge of awareness, but it wove its way through metal, bones, and maybe dreams.

Emma Glassgold and Chi-Yuen Ai-Ling sat on a bench among the flowers. They had been walking about, feeling their way toward friendship. Since entering the garden, however, they had fallen silent.

Abruptly Glassgold winced and pulled her vision from the screen. “It was a mistake to come here,” she said. “Let us go.”

“Why, I find it charming,” the planetologist answered, surprised. “An escape from bare walls that we’ll need years to make sightly.”

“No escape from that.” Glassgold pointed at the screen. It happened at the moment to be scanning aft and so held an image of the sun, shrunken to the brightest of the stars.

Chi-Yuen regarded her narrowly. The molecular biologist was likewise small and dark-haired, but her eyes were round and blue, her face round and pink, her body a trifle on the dumpy side. She dressed plainly whether working or not; and without snubbing social activities, she had hitherto been observer rather than participant.

“In — how long? — a couple of weeks,” she continued, “we have reached the marches of the Solar System. Every day — no, every twenty-four hours; ‘day’ and ‘night’ mean nothing any longer — each twenty-four hours we gain 845 kilometers per second in speed.”

“A shrimp like me is grateful to have full Earth weight,” Chi-Yuen said with attempted lightness.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Glassgold replied hastily. “I won’t scream, ‘Turn back! Turn back!’” She tried a joke of her own. “That would be too disappointing to the psychologists who checked me out.” The joke dissipated. “It is only … I find I require time … to get used, piece by piece, to this.”

Chi-Yuen nodded. She, in her newest and most colorful cheong-sam — among her hobbies was making over her clothes — could almost have belonged to a different species from Glassgold. But she patted the other woman’s hand and said: “You are not unique, Emma. It was expected. People begin to realize with more than brains, in their whole beings, what it means to be on such a voyage.”

“You don’t seem bothered.”

“No. Not since Earth disappeared in the sun glare. And not unbearably before. It hurt to say good-by. But I’ve had experience in that. One learns how to look forward.”

“I am ashamed,” Glassgold said. “When I have had so much more than you. Or has that made me soft in the spirit?”

“Have you really?” Chi-Yuen’s question was muted.

“Why … yes. Haven’t I? Or don’t you recall? My parents were always well-to-do. Father is an engineer in a desalinization plant, Mother an agronomist. The Negev is beautiful when the crops are growing and calm, friendly, not hectic like Tel Aviv or Haifa. Though I did enjoy studying at the university. I had chances to travel, with good companions. My work went fine. Yes, I was lucky.”

“Then why did you enlist for Beta Three?”

“Scientific interest … a whole new planetary evolution—” “No, Emma.” The raven’s wing tresses stirred as Chi-Yuen shook her head. “The earlier starships brought back data to keep research going for a hundred years, right on Earth. What are you running from?”

Glassgold bit her lip. “I shouldn’t have pried,” Chi-Yuen apologized. “I was hoping to help.”

“I will tell you,” Glassgold said. “I have a feeling you might indeed help. You are younger than me, but you have seen more.” Her fingers knitted together in her lap. “I’m not quite sure, though, myself. How did the cities begin to seem vulgar and empty? And when I went home to visit my people, the countryside seemed smug and empty. I thought I might find … a purpose? … out here. I don’t know. I applied for the berth on impulse. When I was called for serious testing, my parents made a fuss till I could not back down. And yet we were always a close family. It was such a pain leaving them. My big, confident father, he was suddenly little and old.”

“Was a man involved too?” Chi-Yuen asked. “I’ll tell you, because it’s no secret — he and I were engaged, and everything about this crew that was ever on public record went into the dossiers — there was for me.”

“A fellow student,” Glassgold said humbly. “I loved him. I still do. He hardly knew I existed.”

“Not uncommon,” Chi-Yuen answered. “One gets over it, or else turns it into a sickness. You’re healthy in the head, Emma. What you need is to come out of your shell. Mix with your shipmates. Care about them. Get out of your cabin for a while and into a man’s.”

Glassgold flushed. “I don’t hold with those practices.”

Chi-Yuen’s brows lifted. “Are you a virgin? We can’t afford that, if we’re to start a new race on Beta Three. The genetic material is scarce at best.”

“I want a decent marriage,” Glassgold said with a flick of anger, “and as many children as God gives me. But they will know who their father is. It doesn’t hurt if I don’t play any ridiculous game of musical beds while we travel. We have enough girls aboard who do.”

“Like me.” Chi-Yuen was unruffled. “No doubt stable relationships will evolve. Meanwhile, now and then, why not give and get a few moments of pleasure?”

“I’m sorry,” Glassgold said. “I shouldn’t criticize private matters. Especially when lives have been as different as yours and mine.”

“True. I don’t agree that mine was less fortunate than yours. On the contrary.”

“What?” Glassgold’s mouth fell open. “You can’t be serious!”

Chi-Yuen smiled. “You have only learned the surface of my past, Emma, if that. I can guess what you’re thinking. My country divided, impoverished, spastic from the aftermath of revolutions and civil wars. My family cultured and tradition-minded but poor with the desperate poverty that none except aristocrats fallen on evil times know. Their sacrifices to keep me in the Sorbonne, when the chance came. After I got my degree, the hard work and sacrifice I made in return, helping them get back on their feet.” She turned her face to the ebbing light of Sol and added most quietly: “About my man. We, too, were students together, in Paris. Later, as I said, I must often be away from him because of work. Finally he went to visit my parents in Peking, I was to join him as soon as possible, and we would be married, in law and sacrament as well as in fact. A riot happened. He was killed.”

“Oh, my dear—” Glassgold began.

“That’s the surface,” Chi-Yuen interrupted. “The surface. Don’t you see, I also had a loving home, perhaps more than you did, because at the end they understood me so well that they didn’t resist my leaving them forever. I saw a lot of the world, more than can be seen traveling carefully by first class. I had my Jacques. And others, before, afterward, as he would have wanted. I’m outward bound with no regrets and no pain that won’t heal. The luck is mine, Emma.”

Glassgold did not respond with words.

Chi-Yuen took her by the hand and stood up. “You must break free of yourself,” the planetologist said. “In the long run, only you can teach you how to do that. But maybe I can help a little. Come down to my cabin. We’ll make you a gown that does you justice. The Covenant Day party will be soon, and I intend for you to have fun.”

Consider: a single light-year is an inconceivable abyss. Denumerable but inconceivable. At an ordinary speed — say, a reasonable pace for a car in megalopolitan traffic, two kilometers per minute — you would consume almost nine million years in crossing it. And in Sol’s neighborhood, the stars averaged some nine light-years apart. Beta Virginis was thirty-two distant.

Nevertheless, such spaces could be conquered. A ship accelerating continuously at one gravity would have traveled half a light-year in slightly less than one year of time. And she would be moving very near the ultimate velocity, three hundred thousand kilometers per second.

Practical problems arose. Where was the mass-energy to do this coming from? Even in a Newtonian universe, the thought of a rocket, carrying that much fuel along from the start, would be ludicrous. Still more so was it in the true, Einsteinian cosmos, where the mass of ship and payload increased with speed, climbing toward infinity as that speed approached light’s.

But fuel and reaction mass were there in space! It was pervaded with hydrogen. Granted, the concentration was not great by terrestrial standards: about one atom per cubic centimeter in the galactic vicinity of Sol. Nevertheless, this made thirty billion atoms per second, striking every square centimeter of the ship’s cross section, when she approximated light velocity. (The figure was comparable at earlier stages of her voyage, since the interstellar medium was denser close to a star.) The energies were appalling. Megaroentgens of hard radiation would be released by impact; and less than a thousand r within an hour are fatal. No material shielding would help. Even supposing it impossibly thick to start with, it would soon be eroded away.

However, in the days of Leonora Christine non-material means were available: magnetohydrodynamic fields, whose pulses reached forth across millions of kilometers to seize atoms by their dipoles — no need for ionization — and control their streaming. These fields did not serve passively, as mere armor. They deflected dust, yes, and all gases except the dominant hydrogen. But this latter was forced aft — in long curves that avoided the hull by a safe margin — until it entered a vortex of compressing, kindling electromagnetism centered on the Bussard engine.

The ship was not small. Yet she was the barest glint of metal in that vast web of forces which surrounded her. She herself no longer generated them. She had initiated the process when she attained minimum ramjet speed; but it became too huge, too swift, until it could only be created and sustained by itself. The primary thermonuclear reactors (a separate system would be used to decelerate), the venturi tubes, the entire complex which thrust her was not contained inboard. Most of it was not material at all, but a resultant of cosmic-scale vectors. The ship’s control devices, under computer direction, were not remotely analogous to autopilots. They were like catalysts which, judiciously used, could affect the course of those monstrous reactions, could build them up, in time slow them down and snuff them out … but not fast.

Starlike burned the hydrogen fusion, aft of the Bussard module that focused the electromagnetism which contained it. A titanic gas-laser effect aimed photons themselves in a beam whose reaction pushed the ship forward — and which would have vaporized any solid body it struck. The process was not 100 per cent efficient. But most of the stray energy went to ionize the hydrogen which escaped nuclear combustion. These protons and electrons, together with the fusion products, were also hurled backward by the force fields, a gale of plasma adding its own increment of momentum.

The process was not steady. Rather, it shared the instability of living metabolism and danced always on the same edge of disaster. Unpredictable variations occurred in the matter content of space. The extent, intensity, and configuration of the force fields must be adjusted accordingly — a problem in? million factors which only a computer could solve fast enough. Incoming data and outgoing signals traveled at light speed: finite speed, requiring a whole three and a third seconds to cross a million kilometers. Response could be fatally slow. This danger would increase as Leonora Christine got so close to ultimate velocity that time rates began measurably changing.

Nonetheless, week by week, month by month, she moved on outward.

The multiple cyclings of matter that turned biological wastes back into breathable air, potable water, edible food, usable fiber, went so far as to maintain an equilibrium in the ethyl alcohol aboard. Wine and beer were produced in moderation, mainly for the table. The hard liquor ration was meager. But certain people had included bottles in their personal baggage. Furthermore, they could trade for the share of abstemious friends and save their own issue until it sufficed for a special occasion.

No official rule, but evolving custom, said that drinking outside the cabins took place in the mess. To promote sociability, this room held several small tables rather than a single long one. Hence, between meals, it could double as a club. Some of the men built a bar at one end to dispense ice and mixers. Others made roll-down curtains for the bulkheads, so that the decorous murals could be hidden during boozing hours behind scenes a little more ribald. A taper generally kept background music going, cheerful stuff, anything from sixteenth-century galliards to the latest asteroid ramble received from Earth.

On a particular date at about 2000 hours, the club stood empty. A dance was scheduled in the gym. Most off-duty personnel who wished to attend it — the majority — were getting dressed. Garments, all ceremony, were becoming terribly important. Machinist Johann Freiwald shone in a gilt tunic and silvercloth trews that a lady had made for him. She wasn’t ready yet, nor was the orchestra, so he allowed Elof Nilsson to lead him to the bar.

“Can we not talk business tomorrow, though?” he asked. He was a large, amiable young man, square-featured, his scalp shining pink through close-cropped blond hair.

“I want to discuss this with you at once, while it’s new in my mind,” said Nilsson’s raspy voice, “It came to me in a flash as I was changing clothes.” His appearance bore him out. “Before carrying my thought further, I wish to check the practicality.”

“Jawohl, if you’re supplying the drink and we can keep it short.”

The astronomer found his personal bottle on the shelf, picked up a couple of glasses, and started for a table. “I take water—” Freiwald began. The other man didn’t hear. “That’s Nilsson for you,” Freiwald told the overhead. He tapped a pitcherful and brought it along.

Nilsson sat down, got out a note pad, and started sketching. He was short, fat, grizzled, and ugly. It was known that an intellectually ambitious father, in the ancient university town Uppsala, had forced him to become a prodigy at the expense of everything else. It was surmised that his marriage had been the result of mutual desperation and had turned into a prolonged catastrophe, for despite a child it dissolved the moment he got a chance to go on this ship. Yet when he talked, not about the humanities he failed to understand and hence disdained, but about his own subject … then you forgot his arrogance and flatulence, you remembered his observations which had finally proven the oscillating universe, and you saw him crowned with stars.

“—unparalleled opportunity to get some worthwhile readings. Only think what a baseline we’ll have: ten parsecs! Plus the ability to examine gamma-ray spectra with less uncertainty, high precision, when they’re red-shifted down to less energetic photons. And more and more. Still, I’m not satisfied.

“I don’t believe it’s really necessary for me to peer at an electronic image of the sky — narrow, blurred, and degraded by noise, not to mention the damned optical changes. We should mount mirrors outside the hull. The images they catch could be led along light conductors to eyepieces, photomultipliers, cameras inboard.

“No, don’t say it. I’m well aware that previous attempts to do this failed. One could build a machine to go out through an airlock, shape the plastic backing for such an instrument, and aluminize it. But induction effects of the Bussard fields would promptly make the mirror into something appropriate for a fun house in Grцna Lund. Yes.

“Now my idea is to print sensor and feedback circuits into the plastic, controlling flexors that’ll automatically compensate these distortions as they occur. I would like your opinion as to the feasibility of designing, testing, and producing those flexors, Mr. Freiwald. Here, this is a rough drawing of what I have in mind—”

Nilsson was interrupted. “Hey, there you are, ol’ buddy!” He and the machinist looked up. Williams lurched toward them. The chemist held a bottle in his right hand, a half-full tumbler in the left. His face was redder than usual and he breathed heavily.

“Was zum Teufel?” Freiwald exclaimed.

“English, boy,” Williams said. “Talk English tonight. ‘Merican style.” He reached the table, set his burdens down, and rested on it so hard it almost tipped over. A powerful whisky smell hung around him. “You ’specially, Nilsson.” He pointed with an oscillant finger. “You talk American tonight, you Swede. Hear me?”

“Please go elsewhere,” the astronomer said.

Williams plumped himself onto a chair. He leaned forward on both elbows. “You don’t know what day this is,” he said. “Do you?”

“I doubt you do, in your present condition,” Nilsson snapped, remaining with Swedish. “The date is the fourth of July.”

“R-r-r-right! Y’ know what ‘at means? No?” Williams turned to Freiwald. “You know, Heinie?”

“An, uh, anniversary?” the machinist ventured.

“Right. Anniversary. How’d yuh guess?” Williams lifted his glass. “Drink wi’ me, you two. Been collectin’ f’ today. Drink!”

Freiwald gave him a sympathetic glance and clinked rims. “Prosit. ” Nilsson started to say, “Skal,” but set his own liquor down again and glared.

“Fourth July,” Williams said. “Independence Day. My country. Wanted throw party. Nobody cared. One drink with me, two maybe, then gotta go their goddam dance.” He regarded Nilsson for a while. “Swede,” he declared slowly, “you’ll drink wi’ me ’r I’ll bust y’r teeth in.”

Freiwald laid a muscular hand on Williams’ arm. The chemist tried to rise. Freiwald held him where he was. “Be calm, please, Dr. Williams,” the machinist requested mildly. “If you want to celebrate your national day, why, we’ll be glad to toast it. Won’t we, sir?” he added to Nilsson.

The astronomer clipped: “I know what the matter is. I was told before we left, by a man who knew. Frustration. He couldn’t cope with modern management procedures.”

“Goddam welfare state bureaucracy,” Williams hiccuped.

“He started dreaming of his country’s sovereign, imperial era,” Nilsson went on. “He fantasized about a free enterprise system that I doubt ever existed. He dabbled in reactionary politics. When the Control Authority had to arrest several high American officials on charges of conspiracy to violate the Covenant—”

“I’d had a bellyful.” Williams’ tone rose toward a shout. “‘Nother star. New world. Chance t’ be free. Even if I do have to travel with a pack o’ Swedes.”

“You see?” Nilsson grinned at Freiwald. “He’s nothing but a victim of the romantic nationalism that our too orderly world has been consoling itself with, this past generation. Pity he couldn’t be satisfied with historical fiction and bad epic poetry.”

“Romantic!” Williams yelled. He struggled fruitlessly in Freiwald’s grip. “You pot-gutted spindle-shanked owl-eyed freak, wha’d’you think it did to you? How’d it feel, being built like that, when the other kids were playing Viking? Your marriage washed out worse’n mine! And I did cope, you son of a bitch, I was meet’n’ my payroll, something you never had to do, you — Lemme go an’ we’ll see who’s a man here!”

“Please,” Freiwald said. “Bitte. Gentlemen.” He was standing, now, to keep Williams held in the chair. His gaze nailed Nilsson across the table. “And you, sir,” he continued sharply. “You had no right to bait him. You might have shown the courtesy to toast his national day.”

Nilsson seemed about to pull intellectual rank. He broke off when Jane Sadler appeared. She had been in the door for a couple of minutes, watching. Her expression made her formal gown pathetic.

“Johann’s telling you truth, Elof,” she said. “Better come along.”

“And dance?” Nilsson gobbled. “After this?”

“Especially after this.” She tossed her head. “I’ve grown pretty tired of you on your high horse, dear. Shall we try to start fresh, or drop everything as of now?”

Nilsson muttered but rose and offered her his arm. She was a little taller than he. Williams sat slumped, struggling not to weep.

“I’ll stay here awhile, Jane, and see if I can’t cheer him up,” Freiwald whispered to her.

She gave him a troubled smile. “You would, Johann.” They had been together a few times before she took up with Nilsson. “Thanks.” Their glances lingered, each on each. Nilsson shuffled his feet and coughed. “I’ll see you later,” she said, and left.