Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

“How are you?” he asked.

“I hurt, and I don’t seem to have any strength, but—”

He stripped away the rest of her spacesuit. She winced at his roughness. “Without this load, you should be able to get up to the gym,” he said. “Dr. Latvala can check you. No one else was too badly hammered, so it’s unlikely you were.” He kissed her, a brief meaningless brush of lips. “Sorry to be this unchivalrous. I’m in a hurry.”

He went on. The bridge door was closed. He knocked. Fedoroff boomed from within, “No admittance. Wait for the captain to address you.”

“This is the constable,” Reymont answered.

“Well, go carry out your duties.”

“I’ve assembled the passengers. They’re getting over being stunned. They’re beginning to realize something isn’t right. Not knowing what, in their present condition, will crack them open. Maybe we won’t be able to glue the pieces back together.”

“Tell them a report will be issued shortly,” Telander called without steadiness.

“Shouldn’t you tell them, sir? The intercom’s working, isn’t it? Tell them you’re making exact assessments of damage in order to lay out a program for prompt repair. But I suggest, Mr. Captain, you first let me in to help you find words for explaining the disaster.”

The door flew wide. Fedoroff grabbed Reymont’s arm and tried to pull him through. Reymont yanked free, a judo release. His hand lifted, ready to chop. “Don’t ever do that,” he said. He stepped into the bridge and closed the door himself.

Fedoroff growled and doubled his fists. Lindgren hurried to him. “No, Boris,” she begged. “Please.” The Russian subsided, stiffly. They glared at Reymont in the thrumming stillness: captain, first officer, chief engineer, navigation officer, biosystems director. He glanced past them. The panels had suffered, various meter needles twisted, screens broken, wiring torn loose.

“Is that the trouble?” he asked, pointing.

“No,” said Boudreau, the navigator. “We have replacements.”

Reymont sought the viewscope. The compensator circuits were equally dead. He moved on to the electronic periscope and put his face inside its hood.

A hemispheric simulacrum sprang from the darkness at him, the distorted scene he would have witnessed outside on the hull. The stars were crowded forward, streaming thinly amidships; they shone steel blue, violet, X ray. Aft the patterns approached what had once been familiar — but not very closely, and those suns were reddened, like embers, as if time were snuffing them out. Reymont shuddered a little and drew his head back into the cozy smallness of the bridge.

“Well?” he said.

“The decelerator system—” Telander braced himself, “We can’t stop.”

Reymont went expressionless. “Go on.”

Fedoroff spoke. His words fell contemptuous. “You will recall, I trust, we had activated the decelerator part of the Bussard module to produce and operate two units. Their system is distinct from the accelerators, since to slow down we do not push gas through a ramjet but reverse its momentum.”

Reymont did not stir at the insult. Lindgren caught her breath. After a moment Fedoroff sagged.

“Well,” he said tiredly, “the accelerators were also in use, at a much higher level of power. Doubtless on that account, their field strength protected them. The decelerators — Out. Wrecked.”

“How?”

“We can only determine that there has been material damage to their exterior controls and generators, and that the thermonuclear reaction which energized them is extinguished. Since the meters to the system aren’t reporting — must be smashed — we can’t tell exactly what is wrong.”

Fedoroff looked at the deck. His words ran on, more soliloquy than report. A desperate man will rehearse obvious facts over and over. “In the nature of the case, the decelerators must have been subjected to greater stress than the accelerators. I would guess that those forces, reacting through the hydromagnetic fields, broke the material assembly in that part of the Bussard module.

“No doubt we could make repairs if we could go outside. But we’d have to come too near the fireball of the accelerator power core in its own magnetic bottle. The radiation would kill us before we could do any useful work. The same is true for any remote-control robot we might build. You know what radiation at that level does to transistors, for instance. Not to mention inductive effects of the force fields.

“And, of course, we can’t shut off the accelerators. That would mean shutting off the whole set of fields, including the screens, which only an outside power core can maintain. At our speed, hydrogen bombardment would release enough gamma rays and ions to fry everybody aboard within a minute.”

He fell silent, less like a man ending a lecture than a machine running down.

“Have we no directional control whatsoever?” Reymont asked, still toneless.

“Yes, yes, we do have that,” Boudreau said. “The accelerator pattern can be varied. We can damp down any of the four Venturis and boost up any others — get a sidewise as well as a forward vector. But don’t you see, no matter what path we take, we must continue accelerating or we die.”

“Accelerating forever,” Telander said.

“At least,” Lindgren whispered, “we can stay in me galaxy. Swing around and around its heart.” Her gaze went to the periscope, and they knew what she thought of: behind that curtain of strange blue stars, blackness, intergalactic void, an ultimate exile. “At least … we can grow old … with suns around us. Even if we can’t ever touch a planet again.”

Telander’s features writhed. “How do I tell our people?” he croaked.

“We have no hope,” Reymont said. It was hardly a question.

“None,” Fedoroff replied.

“Oh, we can live out our lives — reach a reasonable age, if not quite what antisenescence would normally permit,” said Pereira. “The biosystems and organocycle apparatus are intact. We could actually increase their productivity. Do not fear immediate hunger or thirst or suffocation. True, the closed ecology, the reclamations, are not 100 per cent efficient. They will suffer slow losses, slow degrading. A spaceship is not a world. Man is not quite the clever designer and large-scale builder that God is.” His smile was ghastly. “I do not advise that we have children. They would be trying to breathe things like acetone, while getting along without things like phosphorus and smothering in things like earwax and belly-button lint. But I imagine we can get fifty years out of our gadgets. Under the circumstances, that seems ample to me.”

Lindgren said from nightmare, staring at a bulkhead as if she could see through: “When the last of us dies — We must put in an automatic cutoff. The ship must not keep on after our deaths. Let the radiation do what it will, let cosmic friction break her to bits and let the bits drift off yonder.”

“Why?” asked Reymont.

“Isn’t it obvious? If we throw ourselves into a circular path … consuming hydrogen, always traveling faster, running tau down and down as the thousands of years pass … we get more massive. We could end by devouring the galaxy.”

“No, not that,” said Telander. He retreated into pedantry. “I have seen calculations. Somebody did worry once about a Bussard craft getting out of control. But as Mr. Pereira remarked, any human work is insignificant out here. Tau would have to become something like, shall we say, ten to the minus twentieth power before the ship’s mass was equal to that of a minor star. And the odds are always literally astronomical against her colliding with anything more important than a nebula. Besides, we know the universe is finite in time as well as space. It would stop expanding and collapse before our tau got that low. We are going to die. But the cosmos is safe from us.”