Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

“I have no hope,” he snuffled. “Nothing to live for.”

“You do!”

“You know Jane … deserted me … months ago. No other woman will — Why should I care? What’s left for me?”

Reymont’s lips formed, “So behind everything was self-pity.” Lindgren frowned and shook her head.

“No, you’re mistaken, Elof,” she murmured. “We do care for you. Would we ask for your help if we didn’t honor you?.”

“My mind.” He sat straight and glared at her out of swimming eyes. “You want my intelligence, right. My advice. My knowledge and talent. To save yourselves. But do you want me? Do you think of me as, as a human being? No! Dirty old Nilsson. One is barely polite to him. When he starts to talk, one finds the earliest possible excuse to leave. One does not invite him to one’s cabin parties. At most, if desperate, one asks him to be a fourth for bridge or to start an instrument development effort. What do you expect him to do? Thank you?”

“That isn’t true!”

“Oh, I’m not as childish as some,” he said. “I’d help if I were able. But my mind is blank, I tell you. I haven’t had an original thought in weeks. Call it fear of death paralyzing me. Call it a sort of impotence. I don’t care what you call it. Because you don’t care either. No one has offered me friendship, company, anything. I have been left alone in the dark and the cold. Do you wonder that my mind is frozen?”

Lindgren looked away, hiding what expressions chased across her. When she confronted Nilsson again, she had put on calm.

“I can’t say how sorry I am, Elof,” she told him. “You are partly to blame yourself. You acted so, well, self-sufficient, we assumed you didn’t want to be bothered. The way Olga Sobieski, for instance, doesn’t want to. That’s why she moved in with me. When you joined Hussein Sadek—”

“He keeps the panel closed between our halves,” Nilsson shrilled. “He never raises if. But the soundproofing is imperfect. I hear him and his girls in there.”

“Now we understand.” Lindgren smiled. “To be quite honest, Elof, I’ve grown bored with my current existence.”

Nilsson made a strangled noise.

“I believe we have some personal business to discuss,” Lindgren said. “Do … do you mind. Constable?”

“No,” said Reymont. “Of course not.” He left the cabin.

Leonora Christine stormed through the galactic nucleus in twenty thousand years. To those aboard, the time was measured in hours. They were hours of dread, while the hull shook and groaned from stress, and the outside view changed from total darkness to a fog made blinding and blazing by crowded star clusters. The chance of striking a sun was not negligible; hidden in a dust cloud, it could be in front of the ship in one perceived instant. (No one knew what would happen to the star. It might go nova. But certainly the vessel would be destroyed, too swiftly for her crew to know they were dead.) On the other hand, this was the region where inverse tau mounted to values that could merely be estimated, not established with precision, absolutely not comprehended.

She had a respite while she crossed the region of clear space at the center, like passing through the eye of a hurricane. Foxe-Jameson looked into the viewscope at thronged suns — red, white and neutron dwarfs, two- and three-fold older than Sol or its neighbors; others, glimpsed, unlike any ever seen or suspected in the outer galaxy — and came near weeping. “Too bloody awful! The answers to a million questions, right here, and not a single instrument I can use!”

His shipmates grinned. “Where would you publish?” somebody asked. Renascent hope was often expressing itself in a kind of gallows humor.

But there was no joking when Boudreau called a conference with Telander and Reymont. That was soon after the ship had emerged from the nebulae on the far side of the nucleus and headed back through the spiral arm whence she came. The scene behind was of a dwindling fireball, ahead of a gathering darkness. Yet the reefs had been run, the Journey to the Virgo galaxies would take only a few more months of human life, the program of research and development on planet-finding techniques had been announced with high optimism. A dance and slightly drunken brawl was held in commons to celebrate. Its laughter, stamping, lilt of Urho Latvala’s accordion drifted faintly down to the bridge.

“I should perhaps have let you enjoy yourselves like everybody else,” Boudreau said. His skin was shockingly sallow against hair and beard. “But Mohandas Chidambaran gave me the results of his calculations from the latest readings after we emerged from the core. He felt I was best qualified to gauge the practical consequences … as if any rulebook existed for intergalactic navigation! Now he sits alone in his cabin and meditates. Me, when I got over being stunned, I thought I should notify you immediately.”

Captain Telander’s visage drew tight, readying for a new blow. “What is the result?” he asked.

“What is the subject?” Reymont added.

“Matter density in space before us,” Boudreau said. “Within this galaxy, between galaxies, between whole galactic clusters. Given our present tau, the frequency shift of the neutral hydrogen radio emission, the instruments already built by the astronomical team obtain unprecedented accuracy.”

“What have they learned, then?”

Boudreau braced himself. “The gas concentration drops off slower than we supposed. With the tau we will probably have by the time we leave the Milky Way galaxy … twenty million light-years out, halfway to the Virgo group … as nearly as can be determined, we will still not dare turn off the force fields.”

Telander closed his eyes.

Reymont spoke jerkily: “We’ve discussed that possibility in the past.” The scar stood livid on his brow. “That even between two clusters, we won’t be able to make our repair. It’s part of the reason why Fedoroff and Pereira want to improve the life support systems. You act as if you had a different proposal.”

“The one we talked about not long ago, you and I,” Boudreau said to the captain.

Reymont waited.

Boudreau told him in a voice turned dispassionate: “Astronomers learned centuries’ back, a cluster or family of galaxies like our local group is not the highest form in which stars are organized. These collections of one or two dozen galaxies do, in turn, tend to occur in larger associations. Superfamilies—”

Reymont made a rusty laugh. “Call them clans,” he suggested.

“ Hein? Why … all right, A clan is composed of several families. Now the average distance between members of a family — individual galaxies within a cluster — is, oh, say a million light-years. The average distance between one family and the next is greater, as you would expect: on the order of fifty million light-years. Our plan was to leave this family and go to the nearest beyond, the Virgo group. Both belong to the same clan.”

‘‘Instead, if we’re to have any hope of stopping, we’ll have to leave the entire clan.”

“Yes, I am afraid so.”

“How far to the next one?”

“I can’t say. I didn’t take journals along. They would be a bit obsolete by now, no?”

“Be careful,” Telander warned.

Boudreau gulped. “I beg the captain’s pardon. That was a rather dangerous joke.” He went back to lecturing tone: “Chidambaran doesn’t believe anyone was sure. The concentration of galactic clusters drops off sharply at a distance of about sixty million light-years from here. Beyond that, it is a long way to other rich regions. Chidambaran guessed at a hundred million light-years, or somewhat less. Else the hierarchical structure of the universe would have been easier for astronomers to identify than it was.