Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

“Surely, between clans, space is so close to a perfect vacuum that we won’t need protection.”

“Can we navigate there?” Reymont snapped. Sweat glistened on Boudreau’s countenance. “You see the hazard,” he said. “We will be bound into the unknown more deeply than we dreamed. Accurate sightings and placements will be unobtainable. We shall need such a tau—”

“A minute,” Reymont said. “Let me outline the situation in my layman’s language to make sure I understand you.” He paused, rubbing his chin with a sandpapery sound (under the distant music), frowning, until his thoughts were marshalled.

“We must get … not only into interfamily, but interclan space,” he said. “We must do this in a moderate shipboard time. Therefore we must run tau down to a value of a billionth or less. Can we do it? Evidently, or you wouldn’t talk as you’ve done. I imagine the method is to lay a course within this family that takes us through the nucleus of at least one other galaxy. And then likewise through the next family — be it the Virgo cluster or a different one determined by our new flight pattern — through as many individual galaxies as possible, always accelerating.

“Once the clan is well behind us, we should be able to make our repair. Afterward we’ll need a similar period of deceleration. And because our tau will be so low, and space so utterly empty, we’ll be unable to steer. Not enough material will be there for the jets to work on, nor enough navigational data to guide us. We’ll have to hope that we pass through another clan.

“We should do that. Eventually. By sheer statistics. However, we may be out yonder a long while indeed.”

“Correct,” Telander said. “You do understand.” They had begun to sing upstairs.

“Well,” Reymont said, “there doesn’t appear to be any virtue in caution. In fact, for us it’s become a vice.”

“What do you mean?” Boudreau asked.

Reymont shrugged. ‘‘We need more than the tau for crossing space to the next clan, a hundred million light-years or however far off it is. We need the tau for a hunt which will take us past any number of them, maybe through billions of light-years, until we find one we can enter. I trust you can plot a course within this first clan that will give us that kind of speed. Don’t worry about possible collisions. We can’t afford worries. Send us through the densest gas and dust you can find.”

“You … are taking this … rather coolly,” Telander said.

“What am I supposed to do? Burst into tears?”

“That is why I thought you should also hear the news first,” Boudreau said. “You can break it to the others.”

Reymont considered both men for a moment that stretched. “I’m not the captain, you know,” he reminded them.

Telander’s smile was a spasm. “In certain respects. Constable, you are.”

Reymont went to the closest instrument panel. He stood before its goblin eyes with head bent and thumbs hooked in belt. “Well,” he mumbled. “If you really want me to take charge.”

“I think you had better.”

“Well, in that case. They’re good people. Morale is upward bound again, now that they see some genuine accomplishment of their own. I think they’ll be able to realize, not just intellectually, but emotionally, that there’s no human difference between a million and a billion, or ten billion, light-years. The exile is the same.”

“The time involved, though—” Telander said.

“Yes.” Reymont looked at them again. “I don’t know how much more of our life spans we can devote to this voyage. Not very much. The conditions are too unnatural. Some of us can adapt, but I’ve learned that others can’t. So we absolutely have to push tau down as low as may be, no matter what the dangers. Not simply to make the trip itself short enough for us to endure. But for the psychological need to do our utmost.”

“How is that?”

“Don’t you see? It’s our way of fighting back at the universe. Vogue la galère. Go for broke. Full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes. I think, if I can put the matter to our people in those terms, they’ll rally. For a while, anyhow.”

The course out of the Milky Way was not straight; it zigzagged a little, as much as several light-centuries, to pass through the densest accessible nebulae and dust banks. Nevertheless, the time aboard was counted in days until she was in the marches of the spiral arm, outward bound into a nearly starless night.

Johann Freiwald brought Emma Glassgold a piece of equipment he had made to her order. As had been proposed, she was joining forces with Norbert Williams to devise long-range life detectors. The machinist found her trotting about in her laboratory, hands busy, humming to herself. The apparatus and glassware were esoteric, the smells chemically. pungent, the background that endless murmur and quiver which told how the ship plunged forward; and somehow she might have been a new bride making her man a birthday cake.

“Thank you.” She beamed as she accepted the article.

“You look happy,” Freiwald said. “Why?”

“Why not?”

His arm swept in a violent gesture. “Everything!”

“Well … a disappointment about the Virgo cluster, naturally. Still, Norbert and I—” She broke off, blushing. “We have a fascinating problem here, a real challenge, and he’s already made a brilliant suggestion about it.” She cocked her head at Freiwald. “I’ve never seen you in this black a mood. What’s become of that cheerful Nietzscheanism of yours?”

“Today we leave the galaxy,” he said. “Forever.”

“Why, you knew—”

“Yes. I also knew, know I must die sometime, and Jane too, which is worse. That does not make it easier.” The big blond man exclaimed suddenly, imploringly: “Do you believe we will ever stop?”

“I can’t say,” Glassgold answered. She stood on tiptoe to pat his shoulder. “It was not easy to resign myself to the possibility. I did, though, through God’s mercy. Now I can accept whatever comes to us, and feel how good most of it is. Surely you can do the same, Johann.”

“I try,” he said. “It is so dark out there. I never thought that I, grown up, would again be afraid of the dark.”

The great whirlpool of suns contracted and paled astern. Another began slowly growing forward. In the viewscope it was a thing of delicate, intricate beauty, jeweled gossamer. Beyond it, around it, more appeared, tiny smudges and points of radiance. Despite the Einsteinian shrinkage of space at Leonora Christine ’s velocity, they showed monstrously remote and isolated.

That speed continued to mount, not as fast as in the regions left behind — here, the gas concentration was perhaps a hundred thousandth of that near Sol — but sufficiently to bring her to the next galaxy in some weeks of her own time. Accurate observations were not to be had without radical improvements in astronomical technology: a task into which Nilsson and his team cast themselves with the eagerness of escapers.

Testing a photoconverter unit, he personally made a discovery. A few stars existed out here. He didn’t know whether random perturbations had sent them drifting from their parental galaxies, uncountable billions of years ago, or whether they had actually formed in these deeps, in unknown fashion. By a grotesquely improbable chance, the ship passed near enough to one that he identified it — a dim, ancient red dwarf — and could show that it must have planets, from the glimpse his apparatus got before the system was swallowed anew by distance.