Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

“Really?” Jinny said. “Why?”

Andrew frowned. “To be honest, I’m not sure. It made sense when Richard explained it.”

“Hattori!” Lieutenant Bruce squawked, ruining his efforts to avoid being caught eavesdropping. “Why in space should he get one of the first berths? He’s a bean counter !”

Jinny’s stare basted him with superheated contempt, and he withered. “I’m sure you would prefer to share your Bridge with people interested in your opinions, Lieutenant, so we will take our leave now. Your hospitality has been exceeded only by your courtesy. Shall we go, all?”

Evelyn turned her head to look at me. “Is there anything you want to pack, Joel?” One eyebrow rose slightly, copied accurately by the same side of her mouth. “Anyone you want to say good-bye to?”

I had absolutely no idea where we were going to go, or what we intended to do when we got there, or what if any contribution I could make.

I raised my voice a little. “Herb? Say good-bye to everybody for me, will you? You know how to say it pretty.”

“If I don’t get the tenth seat, sure,” he called back. “Don’t bother leaving me your porn folder; I hacked into it years ago.”

“Captain Conrad?” I said at the same volume. “Would my baggage allotment aboard your ship accommodate a baritone saxophone?”

“Anna?” Evelyn asked.

I smiled. “You read liner notes carefully. Yes, my Yanigasawa.”

Andrew called, “If it didn’t, I’d tear out a couple of instrument panels or something.”

He and I exchanged a look. “I’ll meet you all at the airlock with my saxophone, then,” I said.

Andrew pretended to clear his throat. “Joel, I hope you will forgive my presumption. I took the liberty of asking that your silver baritone be loaded aboard the Mercury shortly after our arrival. Evelyn said that was the one you’d want.” His eyes went back and forth between Jinny and Evelyn twice. “It seemed the prudent course.”

I knew what he meant. Jinny and Evelyn were twin forces of nature. If one of them said a man was coming aboard, the smart money said to save time and start loading his luggage. “I’m sure it was,” I agreed, and a silent understanding passed between us. “Let’s go, then. I’m eager to see your ship, Captain. I presume you docked down by the main passenger airlock?”

“That’s right.” He turned to Herb. “Mr. Johnson, will you accompany us? I can show you that thing I was talking about on our way up here.” Herb nodded.

Bruce looked like he wanted to cry. Rennick looked like he could happily boil me. Dorothy looked like she wanted to suddenly extrude a judge’s robes and marry Evelyn and me on the spot. Andrew looked as proud as a puppy who’s learned some really amazing new tricks and is dying to show everyone.

And Evelyn looked like the rest of my life, smiling at me.

The trip was nearly the whole length of the ship, and took longer than I had expected. We did not pass a lot of people I knew well… we passed few people at all; it seemed a lot of us were waiting in our rooms to be told what the hell was going on. But of the few friends we did encounter, there were none that either Herb or I could bring ourselves to simply float past without a word of personal leave-taking. We also wanted to make sure the news spread as quickly as possible throughout the ship that everyone was going to get out of this alive, sooner or later. I never did find a really satisfactory way to say it in a few sentences. Herb did much better, of course. All but one of the reactions I got were positive, supportive. The one—Richie—was just gaping at me, then turning and jaunting away without a word.

We had gotten all the way to the airlock antechamber before things started to shift around in my head.

I found myself thinking over everything that had been said since I’d gotten to the Bridge, and who had been saying it. Everything made sense, everything added up, except for a single term in the equation. It nagged at me. Gave me a faint sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I could not seem to either justify or explain away.

I was so preoccupied I was barely paying attention to Andrew’s eager babbling about his discovery, even though I did want very much to hear it. It was the genuine Secret of the Ages he was telling me. But I was distracted, and it didn’t help that hardly anything he said conveyed much meaning to me.

Then all at once, three words leaped out of the noise, burrowed into my consciousness, and there exploded with great force. I lost my grip on my p-suit, and didn’t bother jaunting after it.

“Andy,” I interrupted rudely. “Did you just say, ‘…irrespective of…’ a moment ago?”

He was struggling with his own p-suit, trying to get his feet in. He had the klutziness of the true supergenius. “Excuse me? Yes, Joel. Quite irrespective. As I was saying, the basis of the DIS principle—”

I stepped on him again. “Evelyn? Do you understand Andrew’s drive? Has he explained it to you?”

She paused in her own suit-up checklist procedure. “He tried to,” she said, puzzled but game. “It didn’t take. I’m afraid I don’t have anything like your background in physics.”

I nodded. “Dorothy?”

She shook her head. “I was handicapped by my background in physics. It kept turning out that everything I thought I knew was wrong. I gave up listening at about the fourth sentence, when I seemed to hear him telling me that all mass is infinite in the first place.”

“It is, in a sense,” Andrew tried to explain. “You see—”

“Andrew, my new friend,” I told him, “we don’t. Very likely we can’t. But I want to be as certain as I can be of at least one datum, so I’m going to ask you one more time. Have I just understood you to tell me that the DIS effect functions under any circumstances, irrespective of mass ? Do those three words mean to you what they mean to us? Or is this some sort of semantic confusion?”

“No, you’re correct,” he said, puzzled. “Mass really is imaginary, you know. Like inertia. What you need to understand—”

I turned to Evelyn. “Do you get it?”

She was frowning hugely. Her own p-suit drifted away from her hands, forgotten. I saw understanding wash over her, like a wave of ice water. “Oh, no. Oh, no ! Joel—”

Now the equation solved itself: the dubious term had been defined, and others adjusted themselves to match with the inexorable beauty of math working out.

“What are you talking about?” Jinny asked.

My stomach lurched. I turned and stared at her. “You know , don’t you? Of course you do.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

“ What does she know?” Herb asked me.

I could see from Dorothy’s face that she got it, was thinking it through, and becoming as angry as I was. I could also see that Rennick had known all along, and was not even faintly surprised. He started edging toward the hatch that led back out into the rest of the Sheffield .

Uptake. Uptake was going to be important, now. I spoke quickly and in my loudest talking-to-the-audience voice.

“Everyone here has a mental picture of Richard Conrad. Can any one of you really picture him spending the next thirty-odd years rescuing a few hundred farmers ?”

General consternation. Rennick made it all the way to the door and put his back to it.

“But he himself wouldn’t—” Jinny began.

“Do you honestly think he believes that would be the best use for his one and only superluminal starship, during these next crucial empire-building decades?”

“He wanted to own the entire Solar System,” Herb said. “Now he’ll have to settle for what’s left. But I think he would consider that the absolute minimum acceptable.”