Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

He nodded. Teeth caught at his lower lip.

“Is that why you despise today’s women?” she asked.

He started. “No! Never!”

“Why, then, have none of your liaisons lasted beyond a week or two — mostly a single offwatch at a time?” she challenged him. “Why are you only at ease and merry among men? I believe you don’t care to know our half of the human race except as bodies. You don’t think there’s anything else worth knowing. And what you said a minute ago, about sluts—”

“I came from Delta Pavonis wishing for a true wife,” he answered as if being strangled.

Lindgren sighed. “Boris, mores change. From my viewpoint, you grew up in a period of unreasonable puritanism. But it was a reaction to an earlier easiness that had perhaps gone too far; and earlier yet — No matter.” She chose her words with care. “The fact is, man has never stayed by a single ideal. The mass enthusiasm when you were young gave way to cool, rationalistic classicism. Today that’s being drowned in turn by a kind of neoromanticism. God knows where that will lead. I probably won’t approve. Regardless, new generations grow up. We’ve no right to freeze them into our own mold. The universe is too wide.”

Fedoroff was unmoving for so long that she started to rise and go. Suddenly he whirled, caught her wrist, and pulled her back down beside him. His speech labored. “I would like to know you, Ingrid, as a human being.”

“I’m glad.”

His mouth tightened. “You had better leave now, though,” he got out. “You are with Reymont. I don’t want to cause trouble.”

“I want you for a friend too, Boris,” she said. “I’ve admired you since we first met. Courage, competence, kindliness — what else is there to admire in a man? I wish you could learn to show them to your shipmates that happen to be female.”

He opened his grasp on her. “I warn you to go.”

She considered him. “If I do,” she asked, “and we get to talking another time, will you be at ease with me?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I hope it, but I don’t know.”

She thought awhile further. “Let us try to make sure of it,” she suggested finally, gently. “I don’t have to be anywhere else for the rest of my watch.”

Every scientist aboard had planned at least one research project to help fill the half decade of travel. Glassgold’s was tracing the chemical basis of the life on Epsilon Eridani Two. After setting up her equipment, she began putting her protophytes and tissue cultures through their experimental paces. In due course she got reaction products and needed to know exactly what they were. Norbert Williams was performing analyses for several different people.

One day late in the first year, he brought his report on her most recent sample to her laboratory. He had taken to doing this in person. The molecules were strange, exciting him as much as her, and the two of them often discussed the findings for hours on end. Increasingly, the conversation would veer toward other topics.

She gave him cheerful greeting as he entered. The workbench behind which she stood was barricaded with test tubes, flasks, a pH meter, a stirrer, a blender, and more. “Well,” she said, “I’m quite agog to learn what metabolites my pets have been making now.”

“Damnedest mess I ever saw.” He tossed down a couple of clipped-together pages. “Sorry, Emma, but you’re going to have to run it over. And over and over, I’m afraid. I can’t get by with micro quantities. This wants every type of chromatography I’ve got, plus X-ray diffractions, plus a series of enzyme tests I’ve listed here, before I’d venture any guess at the structural formulas.”

“I see,” Glassgold replied. “I regret making more work for you.”

“Shucks, that’s what I’m here for, till we reach Beta Three. I’d go nuts without jobs to do, and yours is the most interesting of the lot, I’ll tell you.” Williams ran a hand through his hair; the loud shirt wrinkled across his shoulder. “Though to be frank, I don’t understand what’s in it for you, other than a pastime. I mean, they’re tackling the same problems on Earth, with bigger staff and better facilities. They ought to’ve cracked your riddles before we come to a stop.”

“No doubt,” she said. “But will they beam the results to us?”

“I expect not, unless we inquire. And if we do, we’ll be very old, or dead, before the reply arrives.” Williams leaned toward her across the bench. “The thing is, why should we care? Whatever type of biology we find at Beta Three, we know it won’t resemble this. Are you keeping your hand in?”

“Partly that,” she admitted. “I do think it will be of practical value. The broader a view I have of life in the universe, the better I should be able to study the particular case where we are going. And so we learn sooner, more certainly, whether we can build our homes there and call others to follow us from Earth.”

He rubbed his chin. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Hadn’t thought of that angle.”

Awe dwelt beneath the prosaic words. For the expedition was not merely going for a look: not at such cost hi resources, labor, skill, dreams, and years. Nor could it hope for anything as easy to subdue as America had been.

At a minimum, these people would spend another half decade in the Beta Virginis System, exploring its worlds in the ship’s auxiliary craft, adding what little they could to the little that the orbiting probe had garnered. And if the third planet really was habitable, they would never come home, not even the professional spacemen. They would live out their lives, and be like their children and grandchildren too, exploring its manifold mysteries and flashing their discoveries to the hungry minds on Earth. For indeed, any planet is a world, infinitely varied, infinitely secret. And this world appeared to be so terrestroid that the strangenesses it must hold would be yet the more vivid and enlightening.

The folk of Leonora Christine were quite explicit in their ambition to establish that kind of scientific base. Their further, largest hope was that their descendants would find no reason ever to go back: that Beta Three might evolve from base to colony to New Earth to jumping-off place for the next starward leap. There was no other way by which men might possess the galaxy.

As if shying away from vistas that could overwhelm her, Glassgold said, reddening a trifle: “Besides, I care about Eridanian life. It fascinates me. I want to know what … makes it tick. And as you point out, if we do stay we aren’t likely to get the answers told us while we are alive.”

He fell silent, fiddled with a titration setup, until ship-drive and ventilator breath, sharp chemical odors, bright colors on the reagent and dye shelves, shoved forward into consciousness. At length he cleared his throat. “Uh, Emma.”

“Yes?” She seemed to feel the same diffidence.

“How about knocking off? Come on down to the club with me for a drink before dinner. My ration.”

She retreated behind her instruments. “No, thank you,” she said confusedly. “I, I do have a great deal of work.”

“You have time for it, too,” he pointed out, bolder. “Okay, if you don’t want a cocktail, what about a cup of coffee? Maybe a stroll through the gardens — Look, I don’t aim to make a pass. I’d just like to get better acquainted.”

She swallowed before she smiled, but then she gave him warmth. “Very well, Norbert. I would like that myself.”

A year after she started, Leonora Christine was close to her ultimate velocity. It would take her thirty-one years to cross interstellar space, and one year more to decelerate as she approached her target sun.