Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

The last word stopped them. He filled his lungs. “But remember,” he said, “we have no limit on our inverse tau. We can accelerate at a lot more than three gee, too, if we widen our scoopfields and choose a path through sections of this galaxy where matter is dense. The exact parameters we’ve been using were determined by our course to Beta Virginis. The ship isn’t restricted to them. Navigator Bou-dreau and Professor Nilsson estimate we can travel at an average of ten gee, quite likely more. Engineer Fedoroff is reasonably sure the accelerator system can stand that, after certain modifications he knows he can make.

“So. The gentlemen made rough calculations. Their results indicate we can swing halfway around the galaxy, spiraling inward till we plunge straight through its middle and out again on this side. We’d be slow about any course change anyway. We can’t turn on a tea- цre coin at our speed! And this’ll enable us to acquire the necessary tau. Don’t forget, that’ll decrease constantly. Our transit to Beta Vee would have been a lot quicker if we hadn’t meant to stop there: if, instead of braking at mid-passage, we’d simply kept cramming on velocity.

“Navigator Boudreau estimates — estimates, mind you; we’ll have to gather data as we go; but a good, informed guess — considering the speed we already have, he thinks we can finish with this galaxy and head out beyond it in a year or two.”

“How long cosmic time?” sounded from the gathering.

“Who cares?” Reymont retorted. “You know the dimensions. The galactic disk is about a hundred thousand light-years across. At present we’re thirty thousand from the center. One or two hundred millennia altogether? Who can tell? It’ll depend on what path we take, which in turn will depend on what long-range observation can show us.”

He stabbed a finger at them. “I know. You wonder, what if we hit a cloud such as got us into this miserable situation? I have two answers for that. First, we have to take some risks. But second, as our tau gets less and less, we’ll be able to use regions which are denser and denser. We’ll have too much mass to be affected as we were this time. Do you see? The more we have, the more we can get, and the faster we can get it in ship’s time. We may conceivably leave the galaxy with an inverse tau on the order of a hundred million. In that case, by our clocks we’ll be outside this entire galactic family in days!”

“How do we get back?” Glassgold said — but vigilant and interested.

“We don’t,” Reymont admitted. “We keep on to the Virgo cluster. There we reverse the process, decelerate, enter one of the member galaxies, bring our tau up to something sensible, and start looking for a planet where we can live.

“Yes, yes, yes!” he rapped into the renewed surf of their speech. “Millions of years in the future. Millions of light-years hence. The human race most qwlikely extinct … in this corner of the universe. Well, can’t we start over, in another place and time? Or would you rather sit in a metal shell feeling sorry for yourselves, till you grow senile and die childless? Unless you can’t stand the gaff and blow out your brains. I’m for going on as long as strength lasts. I think enough of this group to believe you will agree. Will anyone who feels differently be so good as to get out of our way?”

He stalked from the stage. “Ah … Navigation Officer Boudreau, Chief Engineer Fedoroff, Professor Nilsson,” Telander said. “Will you come here? Ladies and gentlemen, the meeting is open for general discussions—”

Chi-Yuen hugged Reymont. “You were marvelous,” she sobbed.

His mouth tightened. He looked from her, from Lindgren, across the assemblage, to the enclosing bulkheads. “Thanks,” he replied curtly. “Wasn’t much.”

“Oh, but it was. You gave us back hope. I am honored to live with you.”

He didn’t seen to hear. “Anybody could have presented a shiny new idea,” he said. “They’ll grasp at anything, right now. I only expedited matters. When they accept the program, that’s when the real trouble begins.”

Force fields shifted about. They were not static tubes and walls. What formed them was the incessant interplay of electromagnetic pulses, whose production, propagation, and heterodyning must be under control at every nanosecond, from the quantum level to the cosmic. As exterior conditions — matter density, radiation, impinging field strengths, gravitational space-curvature — changed, instant by instant, their reaction on the ship’s immaterial web was registered; data were fed into the computers; handling a thousand simultaneous Fourier series as the smallest of their tasks, these machines sent back their answers; the generating and controlling devices, swimming aft of the hull in a vortex of their own output, made their supple adjustments. Into this homeostasis, this tightrope walk across the chance of a response that was improper or merely tardy — which would mean distortion and collapse of the fields, novalike destruction of the ship — entered a human command. It became part of the data. A starboard intake widened, a port intake throttled back: carefully, carefully. Leonora Christine swung around onto her new course.

The stars saw the ponderous movement of a steadily larger and more flattened mass, taking months and years before the deviation from its original track was significant. Not that the object whereon they shone was slow. It was a planet-sized shell of incandescence, where atoms were seized by its outermost force-fringes and excited into thermal, fluorescent, synchrotron radiation. And it came barely behind the wave front which announced its march. But the ship’s luminosity was soon lost across light-years. Her passage crawled through abysses which seemingly had no end.

In her own time, the story was another. She moved in a universe increasingly foreign — more rapidly aging, more massive, more compressed. Thus the rate at which she could gulp down hydrogen, burn part of it to energy and hurl the rest off in a million-kilometer jet flame … that rate kept waxing for her. Each minute, as counted by her clocks, took a larger fraction off her tau than the last minute had done.

Inboard, nothing changed. Air and metal still carried the pulse of acceleration, whose net internal drag still stood at an even one gravity. The interior power plant continued to give light, electricity, equable temperatures. The biosystems and organocycles reclaimed oxygen and water, processed waste, manufactured food, supported life. Entropy increased. People grew older at the ancient rate of sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour.

Yet those hours were always less related to the hours and years which passed outside. Loneliness closed on the ship like fingers.

Jane Sadler executed a balestra. Johann Freiwald sought to parry. Her foil rang against his in a beat. Immediately, she thrust. “ Touchй! ” he acknowledged. Laughing behind his mask: “That would have skewered my left lung in a real duel. You have passed your examination.”

“None too soon,” she panted. “I’d … have … been out of air … ’nother minute. Knees like rubber.”

“No more this evening,” Freiwald decided.

They took off their head protection. Sweat gleamed on her face and plastered hair to brow; her breath was noisy; but her eyes sparkled. “Some workout!” She flopped onto a chair. Freiwald joined her. This late in the ship’s evening, they had the gymnasium to themselves. It felt huge and hollow, making them sit close together.

“You will find it easier with other women,” Freiwald told her. “I think you had better start them soon.”

“Me? Instruct a female fencing class at my stage?” “I will continue to work out with you,” Freiwald said. “You can stay ahead of your pupils. Don’t you see, I must begin with the men. And if the sport draws as much interest as I would like, it will take time to make the equipment. Besides more masks and foils, we need йpйes and sabers. We cannot delay.”