Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

But some Loonies might conceivably have lasted whole seconds, broiling in lava, before it became too hot for even lava to exist.

“Everyone you or I knew back home is surely dead,” Herb said. “So is everyone Balvovatz knew. But his were among those who suffered worst.”

I rejected the image, and the thought. I knew I was going to miss Balvovatz badly. I had liked him a lot. Loved him. “Okay. You said ‘for one…’ Who else is gone?”

“Diane,” Herb said. “And Mariko.”

Mariko Stupple was the girl I’d used for consolation for a few weeks after Diane Levy had taken my virginity, glanced at it, and returned it. I wondered how close Diane had come to achieving her goal of sampling every male aboard. I found that I hoped she had. “Anyone else?”

“Nobody else you know well, I think,” Pat said.

“None of your lot, Solomon? Not even Kindred?”

“None of us has the luxury of that option,” Solomon said dully.

“I don’t follow.”

“We have no way of knowing exactly what happened to Sol—so we must assume worst case: total destruction.”

It took a second or two to hit me. If all or nearly all the mass of the sun had been converted to energy, a wave of lethal gamma rays was even now racing after us . Faster than we were going, or could go…

I said, “Sorry, Sollie. I am not doing at all well on thinking things through, today.”

He nodded. “Happens to me, too, every time I’ve been dead.”

If even one Relativist became incapacitated, sooner or later the ramjet was going to go out and stay out. The Sheffield would never make port. She could remain self-sustaining for a maximum of three or four generations—but that didn’t matter, because we wouldn’t have anywhere near that long to live. We were only traveling at 0.976 c … and death was chasing us at c .

“Will we be able to outrun it, do you think? By the time the wavefront catches up, will it still be—are we dead?”

Herb gave me a baleful look. “How long is a piece of rope?”

“He’s right,” Solomon said. “Tell me exactly what happened to the sun, what percentage of its mass was converted to what forms of energy in what proportion by the explosion, and perhaps a horseback guess could be made, by somebody as smart as Matty was. But we know hardly anything beyond the bare fact of humanity’s annihilation. It could easily have been a violent enough event to fry us even as far away as Bravo. Indications are it was. We may be as dead as those poor bastards in Luna—just on a longer string.”

“Jesus Christ!” Pat said, at the same time I said, “Covenant!” in the same tone of voice. I’d never heard him say that before, and took it as a clue to why discussion of religion upset him. Diehard closet Old Christians in the family might even help explain what a man like him was doing on a voyage to nowhere in the first place.

“If the explosion was that powerful,” Herb said, “we’ll never reach Immega, will we? At no time will we exceed the speed of light, and the wavefront is only six years and change behind us—”

“ Ten years and change,” Solomon corrected. “We’ve been traveling for 6.41 years. But we passed half the speed of light in the first year, and by now we’re making more than ninety-seven percent of it. Lorentz time contraction. It adds up.”

“So will it catch us along the way, or not? I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to think of the question.” I’d always prided myself on being quick on the uptake… but I decided to give myself a pass, this time.

Solomon shrugged. “I can’t believe I don’t have the exact answer ready for you. Al Mulherin’s been crunching away at it, but I haven’t checked since yesterday. We’ve all been thinking of other things than survival, that’s all. Give me a second.” He began tapping on a keyboard.

I tried to work it out roughly in my head. The Sheffield and waves of evil start out just under ten and a half light-years apart, then race. Us at a very high fraction of c which will get even higher, but will never reach one. Them at c. At what point will the second train catch the first? It seemed like a classic grade school math puzzle. But relativistic factor kept royally screwing up my calculations. And then I realized I’d forgotten to factor in deceleration… I gave up and waited for Solomon. I knew my father would have closed his eyes for a moment and just known the answer.

“I think we’re all right,” Solomon said finally. “As long as the ramjet keeps ramming. We expect to reach Bravo after twenty years, our time, 90.4 years in Sol time.” He winced slightly as the phrase left his lips, but kept going. “Assuming a lethal concentration of gamma rays is in fact after us, it will arrive at our neighborhood about seven and a half years later. With luck, we can get dug in deep enough to weather it out in time.”

Herb stood up to his full height and clapped his hands together, loud enough to make all of us flinch. “Well, that is just the best fucking news in the fucking Galaxy,” he said loudly. “That makes my fucking day.”

He spun on his heel and went to get the Irish whiskey. Solomon and I exchanged a nervous glance. If Herb were to go berserk in this enclosed space we would have a serious problem. He turned around and caught us at it, and his booming laughter was as loud and almost as startling as his handclap had been.

“You dopes, I’m serious! The distance between one and infinity is nothing compared to the distance between zero and one.”

I decided to assume he was not cracking up. “What do you mean, Herb?”

“Think it through. There’s one and only one reason we know, for sure, what’s happened behind us. Chance dictated that two of our three telepaths in the System were in blast shadow. For my sister, Hell didn’t arrive at lightspeed, but at something closer to the speed of Terra’s rotation. She had time—barely—to hear and comprehend what was coming at her.”

Get him off this subject. “Okay. I don’t take your point.”

“How many other colonies do you think were that lucky?”

Oof.

“Prophet’s prick !” Pat said. “I never even thought—”

“Telepath pairs were even scarcer on the ground in the early days,” Herb said. “Most of the earlier colonies made do with two. And most of those that shipped three are down to two, now. Li kept up on such things.”

“We’ve got to send a laser!” Pat cried, and started to get up.

Solomon caught his shoulder and pulled him back down. “Calm down, son. Captain Bean has already long-since notified the only colony we can help.”

“But there are—” He frowned. “Oh. Oh. Shit.”

Any laser or radio message we sent would travel at lightspeed. Only one human colony happened to even lie in the constellation of Boötes: 44 Boo, from which our destination had been discovered. Taking into account the offset (it was not dead ahead), it was something like thirty-five years ahead of us by laser… and doom would arrive there in forty-one years. That was the one and only colony we could possibly hope to warn, and we could give them an absolute maximum of six years in which to prepare. That had already been done.

Any other colony lacking a telepath whose partner had chanced to be in apposition at the moment of explosion, and thus needing us to warn it, was screwed. Hellfire was coming for them at the speed of light, and we were powerless to alert them in time.

Between us, the Sheffield and 44 Boötes probably now held the very last surviving fragments of the human race. All the rest would probably be gone within sixty-five years.