Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

“In short, your good gray friend Lars Telander is about to change into the Old Man.”

“It sounds like Reymont’s kind of scheme,” she said bitterly.

“He’s convinced me it’s desirable,” the captain replied.

“With no thought for what it can do to you!”

“I’n manage. I never was hail-fellow-well-met. We have many books along in the microtapes that I always wanted to read.” Telander regarded her earnestly. Though the air was nearing the warmest part of its cycle and was tinged with a smell like new-mown hay, the fine hairs were standing erect on her arms. “You have a role also, Ingrid. More than ever, you will handle the human problems. Organization, mediation, alleviation … it won’t be easy.”

“I can’t do it alone.” Her words wavered.

“You can if you must,” he told her. “In practice you can delegate or divert much. That’s a question of proper planning. We’ll work it out as we go.”

He hesitated. Uneasiness came upon him; color actually entered his cheeks. “Ah … a matter in that connection—”

“Yes?” she said.

The door chime rescued him. He accepted the coffee tray from the bull cook and made a performance of carrying it to his desk and pouring. It enabled him to keep his back to her.

“In your position,” he said. “That is, your new position. The necessity of giving officers a special status — You needn’t hold aloof like me, entirely — but a certain limitation of, well, accessibility—”

He couldn’t see if it was actual amusement coloring her voice. “Poor Lars! You mean the first officer should not change boy friends so often, don’t you?”

“Well, I don’t suggest, ah, celibacy. I myself must, of course, ah, hold back from such things hereafter. In your case — well, the experimental phase is past for most of us. Stable relationships are forming. If you could make one—”

“I can do better,” she said. “I can turn solitary.”

He could delay no further handing her a cup. “Th-that isn’t required,” he stammered.

“Thanks.” She inhaled the coffee’s fragrance. Her eyes crinkled at him over the rim. “We don’t have to be absolutely abbot and nun, we two. The captain needs a private conference once in a while with his first officer.”

“Er — no. You are sweet, Ingrid, but no.” Telander paced the narrow width of the cabin, back and forth. “In as little and cramped a community as this, how long can any secret last? I dare not risk hypocrisy. And while I … I would love to have you for a permanent partner … it can’t be. You have to be everyone else’s liaison with me: not my, my direct collaborator. Do you follow me? Reymont explained it better.”

Her humor died. “I don’t altogether like the way he’s jockeyed you.”

“He’s had experience in crisis situations. His arguments were sound. We can go over them in detail.”

“We will. They might be logical at that … whatever his motives.” Lindgren took a sip of coffee, set the cup down on her lap, and declared in a whetted voice:

“Regarding myself, all right. I’m tired of the whole childish business anyway. You’re correct, monogamy is becoming fashionable, and a girl’s choices are poxy limited. I’ve already considered stopping. Olga Sobieski feels the same. I’ll tell Kato to trade cabin halves with her. Some calm and coolness will be welcome, Lars, a chance to think about several things, now that we really have gone by that hundred-year mark.”

Leonora Christine was aimed well away from the Virgin, but not yet at the Archer. Only after she had swung almost halfway around the galaxy would the majestic spiral of her path strike toward its heart. At present the Sagittarian nebulae stood off her port bow. What lay beyond them was inferred, not known. Astromoners expected a volume of clear space, with scant dust or gas, housing a crowded population of ancient stars. But no telescope had seen past the clouds which surrounded that realm, and no one had yet gone to look.

“Unless an expedition went off since we left,” pilot Lenkei suggested. “It’s been centuries on Earth. I imagine they’re doing marvelous things.”

“Not dispatching probes to the core, surely,” cosmologist Chidambaran objected. “Thirty millennia to get there, and as much to flash a message back? It does not make sense. I expect man will spread slowly inward, colony by colony.”

“Failing a faster-than-light drive,” Lenkei said.

Chidambaran’s swarthy features and small-boned body came as near registering scorn as had ever been seen on him. “That fantasy! If you want to rewrite everything we have learned since Einstein — no, since Aristotle, considering the logical contradiction involved in a signal without a limiting velocity — proceed.”

“Not my line of work.” Lenkei’s greyhound slenderness seemed abruptly haggard. “I don’t want faster-than-light, anyhow. The idea that others might be speeding from star to star like birds — like me from town to town when I was home — while we’re caged here … that would be too cruel.”

“Our fate would not be changed by their fortune,” Chidambaran replied. “Indeed, irony would add another dimension to it, another challenge if you will.”

“I’ve more challenge than I want,” Lenkei said.

Their footfalls resounded on the winding stairs and up the well. They had come together from a low-level shop where Nilsson had been consulting Foxe-Jameson and Chidambaran about the design of a large crystal diffraction grating.

“It’s easier for you,” exploded from the pilot. “You’ve got a real use. We depend on your team. If you can’t produce new instruments for us — Me, till we reach a planet where they need space ferries and aircraft, what am I?”

“You are helping build those instruments, or will be when we have plans drawn up,” Chidambaran said.

“Yes, I apprenticed myself to Sadek. To pass this bloody empty time.” Lenkei collected his wits. “I’m sorry. An attitude we’ve get to steer clear of, I know. Mohandas, may I ask you something?”

“Certainly.”

“Why did you sign on? You’re important today. But if we hadn’t had the accident — couldn’t you have gone further toward understanding the universe back on Earth? You’re a theoretician, I’m told. Why not leave the fact gathering to men like Nilsson?”

“I would scarcely have lived to do much with reports from Beta Virginis. It seemed of possible value that a scientist of my sort expose himself to wholly new experiences and impressions. I might have gained insights that would never come otherwise. If I didn’t, the loss would not be large, and at a minimum I would have continued thinking approximately as well as at home.”

Lenkei tugged his chin. “Do you know,” he said, “I suspect you don’t need dream-box sessions.”

“It may be. I confess I find the process undignified.”

“Then for heaven’s sake, why?”

“Regulations. We must all receive the treatment. I did request exemption. Constable Reymont persuaded First Officer Lindgren that special privilege, albeit justified, would set a bad precedent.”

“Reymont! That bastard again!”

“He may be correct,” Chidambaran said. “It does me no harm, unless one counts the interruption of a train of thought, and that happens too seldom to be a major handicap.”

“Huh! You’re more patient than I’d be.”

“I suspect Reymont must force himself into the box,” Chidambaran remarked. “He, too, goes as infrequently as allowed. Have you observed, similarly, that he will take a drink but will never get tipsy? I believe he is under a compulsion, arising perhaps from a buried fear, to stay in control.”

“He is that. Do you know what he said to me last week? I’d only borrowed some sheet copper, it’d have gone right back by way of the furnace and the rolling mill, soon as I was through with it, so I hadn’t bothered to check it out. That bastard said—”