Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

“Dr. Louis is the best there is.”

As I thought about what that statement said, and what it didn’t say, the yellow light turned amber. I knew that wasn’t good, and started doing my quartered-breathing trick. By the first exhalation, the light had dropped back to yellow. “Li died, didn’t she? His twin? While they were in rapport.” The light went out.

“Everybody did,” Sol said. “Almost.” He turned away and began pacing slowly around the room.

I assumed he spoke metaphorically: all of us aboard shared Herb’s pain. His voice was as odd as his words.

“Covenant, how horrible for him!” Involuntarily imagining what it must have been like for him, to share his twin sister’s death, turned my panel light yellow again. I focused on my breathing, tried to force the image from my mind, but the light stayed on. “What did she die of?”

He hesitated a moment, his back to me. “Let’s talk about it later.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.” He resumed his pacing.

It was beginning to dawn on me that Solomon Short had spoken seven sentences in a row to me without saying a single funny thing. “Sol, what’s wrong? Is Herb brain dead? Did somebody else aboard die?”

“No one on this ship has died, physically or mentally,” he said.

“Okay, what is it then? Why are you acting so weird?”

“Let’s talk about it later,” he said dully.

“Why? Look at me.”

“You’re not ready.”

I sat up on that one, yellow light or no yellow light. “I’d like a second opinion on that,” I said. “Come to think of it, where the hell is Dr. Amy, anyway? Why isn’t she here?”

“She is,” he said, and pointed.

I followed his finger. Dr. Amy was in the autodoc next to mine.

I had never before seen anyone in a ’doc with any sort of facial expression whatsoever. Hers looked as if it weren’t working, as if she were in serious pain in there. That was silly, and a glance at the monitors confirmed it, but still—

“Prophet’s dick , Solomon, what’s wrong? What is going on? I want to know now .” Yellow became amber.

For the first time he smiled—and I was very sorry. It was a ghastly parody. “Of course you do,” he said softly.

He came back to my bedside, and to my astonishment and alarm, reached into the ’doc and took both my hands in his, captured both my eyes with his. “This will sound crazy. Because it is . I swear to you it’s true.”

“Okay.”

“Sol is gone.”

Was he telling me that he had gone insane? Or that he was an alien who had taken over my friend’s body? Did it make a difference? Had he put Dr. Amy in that autodoc?

All that went through my mind in the second that it took him to see my incomprehension in my eyes, and to realize that for the first time in his life he had failed to notice an obvious pun.

“Not me,” he said. “My namesake. The star.”

He wasn’t helping. “What the fuck are you—”

“Joel, Sol has exploded. It’s gone. The whole System is gone. What isn’t annihilated is sterilized.”

I must have gaped at him. “Don’t be silly. The sun can’t explode! Gs don’t go nova. They don’t have the materials. It simply isn’t—”

“I know,” he interrupted. “I know that.”

“But—then—I—what are you saying? Did a, did a black hole, or a neutron star, or a, a, some extrasolar—but that’s silly ! It would have been detected, we’d have known about it long before it got to…” I trailed off, confounded.

“I’m telling you Sol exploded. I know it can’t happen. It did anyway.”

“What?”

“I’m telling you everyone we left behind us is dead. Clear out to the Oort Cloud by now. All that’s left in the universe of the human race is nineteen colonies. Excuse me, twenty; I was forgetting the New Frontiers .”

By now the literal meaning of his words, at least, had reached me. “You’re serious. You can’t be serious. The sun blew up? ”

He could shrug with just his face. “The one we used to use, yeah.”

“Bullshit. How—how can that possibly be? It has to be the most studied star in the universe! How could they conceivably fail to notice an instability so—” I was distracted by a pulsing in my peripheral vision, took my eyes from his, and saw that my panel light was now bright ruby red, and blinking.

Sol said, “I see only two possibilities. First, it could be there is some fundamental and monumental mistake in our understanding of stellar processes. A true scientist never says, ‘That cannot have happened.’ The most he can say is, ‘This is the first instance of that I have observed, and I cannot account for it.’” He let go of my hands, and spread his. “Maybe G2s do explode sometimes. This one did.”

“Sol, we’ve been looking closely at the stars for half a fucking millennium—”

He nodded. “And it is perfectly possible that G2s explode at a rate of one a millennium or less. That may turn out to be the clue that leads to an explanation one day.”

“What does Matty say?”

He pointed farther down the row of autodoc capsules. “He’s over there. Sedated.”

“Prophet!”

“He said he’s been half expecting it for six years. Something about observations he made as we were leaving the System, that nobody would have believed without backup, and nobody else was in a position to repeat.”

“That’s what’s been chewing his guts?”

“It’d chew mine.”

My mind rejected Matty’s problem. I could tell it was going to take a lot of time to imagine what it must have been like to have known about this, for years, and been unable to do anything about it. I was busy now. “You said two possibilities. What’s the other one?”

His face became as perfectly expressionless as Dr. Amy’s should have been. Except the eyes, they looked as haunted as hers. “Just before Hal disarmed him and put him out, the last thing Matty was screaming was, ‘The paradox is fucking resolved, Enrico! I told you so!’”

“What?”

His meaning slowly percolated in.

Enrico Fermi asked, Where is everybody?

If intelligent life can arise once, it must arise more than once. There must be other star-going civilizations, lots of them. Where are they all?

Answer: maybe laying up in the tall bushes. Behind cover, wearing camo gear and face paint. Slowly and methodically quartering the battlefield through sniperscopes. Looking for game big enough to be tasty, but stupid enough to step out on the plain and start yelling, “Yoo hoo! Anybody out there?” Every millennium or so, one gets lucky.

I rejected the question, as I had Matty’s torment. The emotional impact was just beginning to arrive, then. To start arriving.

It started to sink in that everyone I knew who wasn’t aboard this ship was dead. Irretrievably, beyond any resuscitation, even if anyone were left to resuscitate them. Everybody , from Terra to Pluto. Everyone from the Secretary General of the System down to whoever ranked lowest in Coventry—hell, down to the last virus . Dead and already cremated. Tens of billions of human beings. Martians. Venerian dragons. All animals of all planets, cooked. All birds, baked in a pie. All fish, fried. Uncountable lower life-forms gone extinct ahead of schedule.

Lucky humanity. The cockroach did not outlive it after all. We had none aboard.

I started to ask how we even knew what had happened, when death must have arrived out of the sky before any possible warning could be given or received. But before I got the question completed, I knew the answer.

Two of the System halves of the Sheffield ’s three telepath pairs had, for obvious reasons, been well paid to locate themselves equidistantly around Terra. One of them, Herb’s sister, must have chanced to be on the nightside of Terra. Perhaps with several minutes of useless warning, before the wave of superheated steam arrived at well below lightspeed—