Tau Zero

Chapter 9

Reymont struggled back to wakefulness. He could not have been darkened long. Could he? Sound had ceased. Was he deafened? Had the air puffed out of some hole into space? Were the screens down, had gamma-colored death already sleeted through him?

No. When he listened, he made out the familiar low beat of power. The fluoropanel shone steadily in his vision. The shadow of his cocoon fell on a bulkhead and had the blurred edges which betokened ample atmosphere. Weight had returned to a single gee. Most of the ship’s automata, at least, must be functioning. “To hell with melodrama,” he heard himself say. His voice came as if from far off, a stranger’s. “We’ve got work.”

He fumbled with his harness. Muscles throbbed and ached. A trickle of blood ran over his mouth, tasting salty. Or was that sweat? Nichevo. He was operational. He crawled free, opened his helmet, sniffed — slight smell of scorch and ozone, nothing serious — and gusted one deep sigh.

The cabin was a mare’s nest. Dresser drawers had burst open and scattered their contents. He didn’t notice particularly. Chi-Yuen hadn’t answered his queries. He waded through strewn garments to the slight form. Slipping off his gauntlets, he unlatched her faceplate. Her breathing sounded normal, no wheeze or gurgle to suggest internal injuries. When he peeled back an eyelid, the pupil was broad. Probably she had just fainted. He shucked his armor, located his stun pistol, and strapped it on. Others might need help worse. He went out.

Boris Fedoroff clattered down the stairs. “How goes it?” Reymont hailed.

“I am on my way to see,” the engineer tossed back, and disappeared.

Reymont grinned sourly and pushed into Johann Freiwald’s cabin half. The German had removed his spacesuit too and sat slumped on his bed. “Raus mit dir,” Reymont said.

“I have a headache like carpenters in my skull,” Freiwald protested.

“You offered to be in our squad. I thought you were a man.”

Freiwald gave Reymont a resentful glance but was stung into motion.

The constable’s recruits were busy for the next hour. The regular spacemen were busier yet, inspecting, measuring, conferring in hushed tones. That gave them little chance to feel pain or let terror grow. The scientists and technicians had no such anodyne. From the fact that they were alive and the ship apparently working as before, they might have drawn happiness … only why didn’t Telander make an announcement? Reymont bullied them into commons, started some making coffee and others attending to the most heavily bruised. At last he felt free to head for the bridge.

He stopped to look in on Chi-Yuen, as he had done at intervals. She was finally aware, had unharnessed but collapsed on her mattress before getting all armor off. A tiny light kindled in her when she saw him. “Charles,” she susurrated.

“How are you?” he asked.

“I hurt, and I don’t seem to have any strength, but—”

He stripped away the rest of her spacesuit. She winced at his roughness. “Without this load, you should be able to get up to the gym,” he said. “Dr. Latvala can check you. No one else was too badly hammered, so it’s unlikely you were.” He kissed her, a brief meaningless brush of lips. “Sorry to be this unchivalrous. I’m in a hurry.”

He went on. The bridge door was closed. He knocked. Fedoroff boomed from within, “No admittance. Wait for the captain to address you.”

“This is the constable,” Reymont answered.

“Well, go carry out your duties.”

“I’ve assembled the passengers. They’re getting over being stunned. They’re beginning to realize something isn’t right. Not knowing what, in their present condition, will crack them open. Maybe we won’t be able to glue the pieces back together.”

“Tell them a report will be issued shortly,” Telander called without steadiness.

“Shouldn’t you tell them, sir? The intercom’s working, isn’t it? Tell them you’re making exact assessments of damage in order to lay out a program for prompt repair. But I suggest, Mr. Captain, you first let me in to help you find words for explaining the disaster.”

The door flew wide. Fedoroff grabbed Reymont’s arm and tried to pull him through. Reymont yanked free, a judo release. His hand lifted, ready to chop. “Don’t ever do that,” he said. He stepped into the bridge and closed the door himself.

Fedoroff growled and doubled his fists. Lindgren hurried to him. “No, Boris,” she begged. “Please.” The Russian subsided, stiffly. They glared at Reymont in the thrumming stillness: captain, first officer, chief engineer, navigation officer, biosystems director. He glanced past them. The panels had suffered, various meter needles twisted, screens broken, wiring torn loose.

“Is that the trouble?” he asked, pointing.

“No,” said Boudreau, the navigator. “We have replacements.”

Reymont sought the viewscope. The compensator circuits were equally dead. He moved on to the electronic periscope and put his face inside its hood.

A hemispheric simulacrum sprang from the darkness at him, the distorted scene he would have witnessed outside on the hull. The stars were crowded forward, streaming thinly amidships; they shone steel blue, violet, X ray. Aft the patterns approached what had once been familiar — but not very closely, and those suns were reddened, like embers, as if time were snuffing them out. Reymont shuddered a little and drew his head back into the cozy smallness of the bridge.

“Well?” he said.

“The decelerator system—” Telander braced himself, “We can’t stop.”

Reymont went expressionless. “Go on.”

Fedoroff spoke. His words fell contemptuous. “You will recall, I trust, we had activated the decelerator part of the Bussard module to produce and operate two units. Their system is distinct from the accelerators, since to slow down we do not push gas through a ramjet but reverse its momentum.”

Reymont did not stir at the insult. Lindgren caught her breath. After a moment Fedoroff sagged.

“Well,” he said tiredly, “the accelerators were also in use, at a much higher level of power. Doubtless on that account, their field strength protected them. The decelerators — Out. Wrecked.”

“How?”

“We can only determine that there has been material damage to their exterior controls and generators, and that the thermonuclear reaction which energized them is extinguished. Since the meters to the system aren’t reporting — must be smashed — we can’t tell exactly what is wrong.”

Fedoroff looked at the deck. His words ran on, more soliloquy than report. A desperate man will rehearse obvious facts over and over. “In the nature of the case, the decelerators must have been subjected to greater stress than the accelerators. I would guess that those forces, reacting through the hydromagnetic fields, broke the material assembly in that part of the Bussard module.

“No doubt we could make repairs if we could go outside. But we’d have to come too near the fireball of the accelerator power core in its own magnetic bottle. The radiation would kill us before we could do any useful work. The same is true for any remote-control robot we might build. You know what radiation at that level does to transistors, for instance. Not to mention inductive effects of the force fields.

“And, of course, we can’t shut off the accelerators. That would mean shutting off the whole set of fields, including the screens, which only an outside power core can maintain. At our speed, hydrogen bombardment would release enough gamma rays and ions to fry everybody aboard within a minute.”

He fell silent, less like a man ending a lecture than a machine running down.

“Have we no directional control whatsoever?” Reymont asked, still toneless.

“Yes, yes, we do have that,” Boudreau said. “The accelerator pattern can be varied. We can damp down any of the four Venturis and boost up any others — get a sidewise as well as a forward vector. But don’t you see, no matter what path we take, we must continue accelerating or we die.”

“Accelerating forever,” Telander said.

“At least,” Lindgren whispered, “we can stay in me galaxy. Swing around and around its heart.” Her gaze went to the periscope, and they knew what she thought of: behind that curtain of strange blue stars, blackness, intergalactic void, an ultimate exile. “At least … we can grow old … with suns around us. Even if we can’t ever touch a planet again.”

Telander’s features writhed. “How do I tell our people?” he croaked.

“We have no hope,” Reymont said. It was hardly a question.

“None,” Fedoroff replied.

“Oh, we can live out our lives — reach a reasonable age, if not quite what antisenescence would normally permit,” said Pereira. “The biosystems and organocycle apparatus are intact. We could actually increase their productivity. Do not fear immediate hunger or thirst or suffocation. True, the closed ecology, the reclamations, are not 100 per cent efficient. They will suffer slow losses, slow degrading. A spaceship is not a world. Man is not quite the clever designer and large-scale builder that God is.” His smile was ghastly. “I do not advise that we have children. They would be trying to breathe things like acetone, while getting along without things like phosphorus and smothering in things like earwax and belly-button lint. But I imagine we can get fifty years out of our gadgets. Under the circumstances, that seems ample to me.”

Lindgren said from nightmare, staring at a bulkhead as if she could see through: “When the last of us dies — We must put in an automatic cutoff. The ship must not keep on after our deaths. Let the radiation do what it will, let cosmic friction break her to bits and let the bits drift off yonder.”

“Why?” asked Reymont.

“Isn’t it obvious? If we throw ourselves into a circular path … consuming hydrogen, always traveling faster, running tau down and down as the thousands of years pass … we get more massive. We could end by devouring the galaxy.”

“No, not that,” said Telander. He retreated into pedantry. “I have seen calculations. Somebody did worry once about a Bussard craft getting out of control. But as Mr. Pereira remarked, any human work is insignificant out here. Tau would have to become something like, shall we say, ten to the minus twentieth power before the ship’s mass was equal to that of a minor star. And the odds are always literally astronomical against her colliding with anything more important than a nebula. Besides, we know the universe is finite in time as well as space. It would stop expanding and collapse before our tau got that low. We are going to die. But the cosmos is safe from us.”

“How long can we live?” Lindgren wondered. She cut Pereira off. “I don’t mean potentially. If you say half a century, I believe you. But I think in a year or two we will stop eating, or cut our throats, or agree to turn the accelerators off.”

“Not if I can help it,” Reymont snapped.

She gave him a dreary look. “Do you mean you would continue — not just barred from man, from living Earth, but from the whole of creation?”

He regarded her steadily in return. His right hand rested on his gun butt. ‘‘Don’t you have that much guts?” he replied.

“Fifty years inside this flying coffin!” she almost screamed. “How many will that be outside?”

“Easy,” Fedoroff warned, and took her around the waist. She clung to him and snatched after air.

Boudreau said, as carefully dry as Telander: “The time relationship appears to be somewhat academic to us, n’est-ce pas? It depends on what course we take. If we let ourselves continue straight outwards, naturally we will encounter a thinner medium. The rate of decrease of tau will grow proportionately smaller as we enter intergalactic space. Contrariwise, if we try for a cyclical path taking us through the densest hydrogen concentrations, we could get a very large inverse tau. We might see billions of years go by. That could be quite wonderful.” His smile was forced, a flash in the spade beard. “We have each other too. A goodly company. I am with Charles. There are better ways to live but also worse ones.”

Lindgren hid against Fedoroff’s breast. He held her, patted her with a clumsy hand. After a while (an hour or so in the history of the stars) she raised her face again.

“I’m sorry,” she gulped. “You’re right. We do have each other.” Her glance went among them, ending at Reymont.

“How shall I tell them?” the captain beseeched.

“I suggest you do not,” Reymont answered. “Have the first officer break the news.”

“What?” Lindgren said.

“You are simpбtico, ” he answered. “I remember.”

She moved from Fedoroff’s loosened grasp, a step toward Reymont.

Abruptly the constable tautened. He stood for a second as if blind, before he whirled from her and confronted the navigator.

“Hoy!” he exclaimed. “I’ve gotten an idea. Do you know—”

“If you think I should—” Lindgren had begun to say.

“Not now,” Reymont told her. “Auguste, come over to the desk. We have a bit of figuring to do … fast!”