Tau Zero

Chapter 8

Everything that could be done had been. Now, spacesuited, strapped into safety cocoons that were anchored to the beds, the folk of Leonora Christine waited for impact. Some left their helmet radios on so they could-talk with their roommates; others preferred solitude. With head secured, no one could see another, nor anything except the bareness above his faceplate.

Reymont and Chi-Yuen’s quarters felt more cheerless than most. She had stowed away the silk draperies that softened bulkheads and overhead, the low-legged table she had made to hold a Han Dynasty bowl with water and a single stone, the scroll with its serene mountainscape and her grandfather’s calligraphy, the clothes, the sewing kit, the bamboo flute. Fluorolight fell bleak on unpainted surfaces.

They had been silent awhile, though their sets were tuned. He listened to her breath and the slow knocking of his own heart. “Charles,” she said finally.

“Yes?” He spoke with the same quietness.

“It has been good with you. I wish I could touch you.”

“Likewise.”

“There is a way. Let me touch your self.” Taken aback, he had no ready reply. She continued: “You have always held most of you hidden. I don’t imagine I’m the first woman to tell you so.”

“You aren’t.” She could hear the difficulty he had saying it.

“Are you certain you weren’t making a mistake?”

“What’s to explain? I’ve scant use for those types whose chief interest is their grubby little personal neuroses. Not in a universe as rich as this.”

“You never mentioned your childhood, for instance,” she said. “I shared mine with you.”

He snorted out a kind of mirth. “Consider yourself spared. The Polyugorsk low-levels weren’t nice.”

“I’ve heard about conditions there. I never quite understood how they came about.”

“The Control Authority couldn’t act. No danger to world peace. The local bosses were too useful in too many ways to higher national figures to be thrown out. Like some of the war lords in your country, I imagine, or the Leopards on Mars before fighting got provoked. A lot of money to be had in the Antarctic, for those who didn’t mind gutting the last resources, killing the last wildlife, raping the last white wilderness—” He stopped. His voice had been rising. “Well, that’s all behind us. I wonder if the human race will do any better on Beta Three. I rather doubt it.”

“How did you learn to care about such things?” she asked mutedly.

“A teacher, to begin with. My father was killed when I was young, and by the time I was twelve, my mother had nearly finished going down the drain. We had this one man, however, Mr. Melikot, an Abyssinian, I don’t know how he ended up in our hellhole of a school, but he lived for us and for what he taught, we felt it and our brains came awake… I’m not certain if he did me a favor. I got to thinking and reading, and that got me into talking and doing, and that got me into trouble till I had to skip for Mars, never mind how… Yes, I suppose it was a favor in the long run.”

“You see,” she said, smiling in her helmet, “it isn’t hard to take off a mask.”

“What do you mean?” he demanded. “I’m trying to oblige you, no more.”

“Because we may soon be dead. That tells me something about you also, Charles. I begin to see the why of things, the man behind them. Why they say you were honest but tight-fisted with money in the Solar System, to name a trivial detail. Why you’re often gruff, and never try to dress well though it would look good on you, and hide that possessiveness of yours behind a ‘Go your own way if you don’t want to go mine’ that can be really freezing, and—”

“Hold on! A psychoanalysis, from a few elementary facts about when I was a kid?”

“Oh no, no. That would be ridiculous, I agree. But a bit of understanding, from the way you told them. A wolf in search of a den.”

“Enough!”

“Of course. I’m happy that you — No further, not ever again, unless you want.” Chi-Yuen’s figure of speech evidently lingered in her consciousness, for she mused: “I miss animals. More than I expected. We had carp and songbirds in my parents’ house. Jacques and I had a cat in Paris. I never realized till we traveled this far, how big a part of the world the rest of the animal creation is. Crickets in summer nights, a butterfly, a hummingbird, fish jumping in me water, sparrows in a street, horses with velvet noses and warm smell — Do you think we will find anything like Earth’s animals on Beta Three?”

The ship struck.

It was too swiftly changing a pattern of assault too great. The delicate dance of energies which balanced out acceleration pressures could not be continued. Its computer choreographers directed a circuit to break, shutting off that particular system, before positive feedback wrecked it.

Those aboard felt weight shift and change. A troll sat on each chest and choked each throat. Darkness went ragged before eyes. Sweat burst forth, hearts slugged, pulses brawled. That noise was answered by the ship, a metal groan, a rip and a crash. She was not meant for stresses like these. Her safety factors were small; mass was too precious. And she rammed hydrogen atoms swollen to the heaviness of nitrogen or oxygen, dust particles bloated into meteoroids. Velocity had flattened the cloud longitudinally, it was thin, she tore through in minutes. But by that same token, the nebulina was no longer a cloud to her. It was a well-nigh solid wall.

Her outside force-screens absorbed the battering, flung matter aside in turbulent streams, protected me hull from everything except slowdown drag. Reaction was inevitable, on the fields themselves and hence on the devices which, borne outside, produced and controlled them. Frameworks crumpled. Electronic components fused. Cryogenic liquids boiled from shattered containers.

So one of the thermonuclear fires went out.

The stars saw the event differently. They saw a tenuous murky mass struck by an object incredibly swift and dense. Hydromagnetic forces snatched at atoms, whirled them about, ionized them, cast them together. Radiation flashed. The object was encompassed in a meteor blaze. During the hour of its passage, it bored a tunnel through the nebulina. That tunnel was wider than the drill, because a shock wave spread outward — and outward and outward, destroying what stability there had been, casting substance forth in gouts and tatters.

If a sun and planets had been in embryo here, they would now never form.

The invader passed. It had not lost much speed. Accelerating once more, it dwindled away toward remoter stars.