Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

“I bullied them into coming for you,” she said. “I said I would space myself if they did not. They knew I meant it. Right now, Gran’ther would rather cut off his own feet than lose fifty percent of the universe’s remaining supply of egg-laying Conrads.” Her voice dropped so low then that even I needed to follow her exaggerated lip movements to know she was adding, “But… he… is… going to.”

It wasn’t so much any of the words as looking at her mouth that forced me to kiss her.

Very little coherent thought took place during that kiss. So it must have gone on for a long time, because I had time to think that no woman in my life had ever given me her attention for so many years in a row for any reason, let alone without reasonable hope of any possible return. That she had done this for years before she’d ever heard me play a note. That she had learned to play because of me. That she was far and away the best kisser I had ever met or even fantasized. And that it would be very convenient if our first two children happened to take to the bass and drums. Drums first, no doubt.

Then our faces were whole decimeters apart again, and there was a ship around us.

“You are coming with us, right?” she asked solemnly.

“I’m coming with you, ” I said just as solemnly.

We both grinned at the same instant. “This is insane, right?” I asked her.

“Believe it,” she agreed.

“Oh, thank heavens. For a second there I was afraid I was going sane.”

“Little danger of that,” Jinny said from across the room.

I glanced over at her, found her expressionless. I realized that not once during that timeless kiss had it even momentarily occurred to me that Jinny was watching us. It made me want to grin even wider, but it seemed politer not to. The disease had come close to killing me—but the cure was now complete. Andrew, poor bastard, was welcome to her. I wished him well, hoped he was genius enough to hold his own with her. He had licked lightspeed; maybe he could.

My heart suddenly sprang a leak, and joy started to leak out into reality. It began to sink in that I had no clear idea what was going to happen next, what I was going to do now. Or how I was going to live with myself afterward. I wanted with my whole heart to go with Evelyn, wherever she might go. But how could I leave so many of my friends—any of my friends—behind to die in the Sheffield ? If I stayed, I could save at most one other life—if it hadn’t been for me, nobody would have lived—those and a dozen other rationalizations raced through my mind, but were of no help whatsoever.

Evelyn saw the change in my face. From her distance she could scarcely have helped it. “Joel, what’s wrong?”

I sighed. “I really hate with my whole heart the idea of leaving anyone at all to die of old age in this bucket. I don’t know if I can… I don’t know how to…” I did not even know how to express my dilemma, even to myself.

Dorothy Robb spoke up. “Am I the only one here comfortable with arithmetic?”

Everyone turned to stare at her.

She was frowning mightily. “Admittedly, the math does become hairy. But surely someone must know how to operate a calculator.”

“What do you mean, Dorothy?” Evelyn called.

She replied, “Joel, how many passengers does the Sheffield now carry?”

I wasn’t at all sure. Too many deaths lately, no time to keep the figures current. “Can we call it four hundred and fifty for now?”

She nodded and closed her eyes, saying, “So: nine passengers at a time yields a total of forty-five trips, with a series of geometrically decreasing trip lengths beginning with seventy-five light-years—we assume zero turnaround time for convenience—” She stopped speaking, but her lips kept moving. We all gave her time. After a while she said, “Call it very roughly a hundred and fifty-one years.”

My heart sank in my chest, but I nodded and kept going, needing to know just how bad it was. “How many could we transport in the first seventy or eighty years? You know, before we all die of old age.”

Dorothy gave me the look a grandmother gives a child who has just picked his nose in company. “Joel, Joel—those are a hundred and fifty-one real years.”

“Pardon— oh !” My heart leaped.

“Since this ship is doing nearly ninety-eight percent of the speed of light, that works out to… half a tick, now… a bit under thirty-three local, shipboard years.”

Blood roared in my ears. We could all live! Her figures assumed zero turnaround, zero downtime for maintenance, and a lot of other things—but it didn’t matter: the thing was doable . Andrew had saved us all.

This changed everything . For the first time since the quantum ramjet had gone out, I started to feel real hope. With it came a phantom memory of an ancient film about a man struggling with Time, who said to a companion near the end, “It’s not the despair—I can live with the despair. It’s the hope that’s killing me!”

Well, being killed beats being dead. I’d been dying for two dozen years now, since the moment of my birth. Another seventy-five years of it sounded very good.

If I could spend them with Evelyn.

The hatch opened and Andrew entered, as if invoked by my thinking of him. Herb came in on his heels, must have guided him there.

“Hi, darling,” was the first thing Andrew said, I noticed, and then, “Hello, everybody. I hope I’m not—” He saw me and Evelyn. “But apparently I am. I should have tapped first; crave pardon.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Herb told him. “That’s the way I usually find him.”

“Usually with his girlfriend,” I agreed.

Evelyn turned to me, eyes twinkling, and we gave each other our best deadpan. She was good; I nearly lost it. “So I’m going about this backward, then?” she asked.

“I for one work best in that mode,” I told her. “Come on in, Andrew—I can work with an audience. How goes the confabulation?”

He looked pained. “Well, they’re still discussing what should be done to evacuate the Sheffield as efficiently as possible. Your grandfather’s come up with the seed of a very interesting plan, actually. Several problems still to be solved, of course, but… look, could we talk about it on the way? Richard sent me to tell you he’d be pleased if we all returned to the Mercury right away, and began preparing for an immediate launch. It’s very important to lose as little time as possible, obviously, since every loss will cascade down through the whole sequence, and he’s determined to hit the ground running.”

Evelyn and I exchanged a glance and adjusted our position until we were side by side, each with an arm around the other’s waist. “They’re that close to agreeing on a plan?” Jinny asked.

Her husband shrugged. “Your grandfather wants to be under way two seconds after the airlock shuts behind him. We don’t even know if all the provisions we were offered have been loaded aboard yet, much less stowed properly.”

She nodded. “I guess we can continue the conversation there. Let’s go.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Question.”

“He just told you we don’t have any minutes to spare,” Jinny said sharply.

“I agree with Andrew. But that begs my question: who’s ‘we,’ exactly?”

Everybody did a lot of blinking.

“Ten seats. Seven of you. If Evelyn has her way, I take seat number eight. Who gets the other two?”

Very loud blinking. Herb looked less sleepy than usual.

Andrew cleared his throat. “As I was leaving, Mr. Hattori had just agreed to join us.”