Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

In intergalactic space, Leonora Christine remained able to pile on speed. It took her weeks to fare a couple of million light-years to a chosen neighbor galaxy. Spanning this in hours, she filled herself so full of kinetic energy that she crossed a similar distance in days … and presently she used a week or so to depart from her original cluster and reach another one … through which she passed quite rapidly… She coasted across the almost total emptiness of interclan space; meanwhile her engineers fixed the damaged unit. Although without acceleration, she needed only a pair of her own months to lay two or three hundred million light-years behind her.

The accessible mass of the whole galactic clan that was her goal proved inadequate to brake that velocity.

Therefore she did not try. Instead, she used what she swallowed to drive forward all the faster. She traversed the domain of this second clan — with no attempt at manual control, simply spearing through a number of its member galaxies — in two days.

On the far side, again into hollow space, she fell free. The stretch to the next attainable clan was on the order of another hundred million light-years. She made the passage in about a week.

When she arrived there, of course, she spent the star stuff she found to force herself still closer to the ultimate speed.

“No — don’t — look out!”

Margarita Jimenes missed the handhold that would have checked her flight. Scrabbling for it, she struck the bulkhead, caromed, and floundered in air.

“Ad i chawrti!” Boris Fedoroff snorted.

He gauged vectors and launched himself to intercept her. It was not a conscious calculation; that would have been impossibly cumbersome. Like a hunter who aimed for a moving target, he used the skills and multiple senses of his body — angular diameters and shifts, muscle pressures and tensions, kinesthesia, the unseen but exactly known configuration of every joint, the several time derivatives of each of these factors and many more — his organism, a machine created with incomprehensible complexity and precision and, as it soared, beauty.

He had a ways to fly. They were on Number Two deck, well aft near the engine rooms. It was devoted to storage; but a major part of the materials it had held were now fashioned into objects. Where the cargo had been was a cavernous, echoing space, coldly lit, seldom visited. Fedoroff had brought his woman there for some private instruction in free-fall techniques. She was doing miserably in the classes that Lindgren had decreed for groundlubbers.

She spun before him, head lost among loose ringlets, arms and legs and breasts flopping. Sweat oiled her bare skin and broke off in globules that glittered around her like midges. “Relax, I tell you,” Fedoroff called. “The first damn thing you must learn is, ‘Relax.’”

He passed within reach and grabbed her at the waist. Linked, the two of them formed a new system that spun on a crazy axis as it drifted toward the opposite bulkhead. Vestibular processes registered their outrage in giddiness and nausea. He knew how to suppress that reaction; and he had given her an antispacesickness pill before the lesson started.

Nevertheless she vomited.

He could do nothing except hold her through their trajectory. The first upheaval caught him by surprise and struck him in the face. Thereafter he clasped her back against belly. His free hand swatted at stinking yellow liquid and gobbets. Inhaled under these conditions, the stuff could choke a person.

When they hit metal, he snatched the nearest support, an empty rack. Hooking an elbow joint in it, he could use both arms to keep her and soothe her. Eventually the dry phase passed too.

“Are you better?” he asked.

She shivered and mumbled, “I want to be clean.”

“Yes, yes, we’ll find a bath. Waithere. Hang on, don’tlet go. I’ll come in a few minutes.” Fedoroff shoved free again.

He must close the ventilators before the splashed foulness got drawn into the ship’s general air system. Afterward he could see about catching it with a vacuum cleaner. He would do that himself. If he detailed another man to this mess, the fellow might do more than resent it. He might start a rumor about—

Fedoroff’s teeth slammed together. He finished his precautions and dove back to Jimenes.

Though still white-faced, she appeared in command of her movements. “I’m dreadfully sorry, Boris.” Her speech came hoarse out of a larynx burned by stomach acid. “I should never have agreed … to come this far … from a suction toilet.”

He poised in front of her and asked grimly, “How long have you been puking?”

She shrank away. He caught her before she drifted loose. His clasp was savage on her wrist. “When was your last period?” he demanded.

“You saw—”

“I saw what could easily have been a fake. Especially considering how busy I’ve been in my work. Give me the truth!”

He shook her. Unanchored, her body was twisted at the shoulder. She screamed. He let go as if she had turned incandescent. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he gasped. She bobbed from him. He got her just in time, hauled her back and held her tightly against his besmeared breast.

“Th-th-three months,” she stammered through her weeping.

He let her cry while he stroked the matted hair. When she was done, he helped her to a bathroom. They sponged each other fairly clean. The organic liquid they used had a pungency overriding the stench on them, but its volatilization was so rapid and thorough that Jimenes shuddered with chill, Fedoroff chucked the sponges into the chute of a laundry-bound conveyor and turned on a hot-air blower. He and she basked for minutes.

“Do you know,” he said after much silence, “if we have solved the problem of hydroponics in zero gravity, we should be able to design something that will give us a real bath. Or even a shower.”

She didn’t smile, only huddled near the grille. Her hair billowed backward.

Fedoroff stiffened. “All right,” he said, “how did it happen? Isn’t the doctor supposed to keep track of every woman’s contraceptive schedule?”

She nodded, not looking at him. Her reply was scarcely to be heard. “Yes. One shot a year, though, for twenty-five of us … and he had, he has many things on his mind other than routine …”

“You didn’t both forget?”

‘‘No. I went to his office on my usual date. It’s embarrassing when he has to remind a girl. He wasn’t in. Out taking care of someone in trouble, maybe. His chart for us lay on his desk. I looked at it. Jane had been in for the same reason, I saw, this same day, probably an hour or two earlier. Suddenly I snatched his pen and wrote ‘OK’ after my own name, in the space for this time. I scribbled it the way he does. It happened before I really knew what I was doing. I ran.”

“Why didn’t you confess afterward? He’s seen battier impulses than that since this ship went astray.”

“He should have remembered,” Jimenes said louder. “H he decided that he must have forgotten I was in — why should I do his work for him?”

Fedoroff cursed and grabbed after her. He stopped his hand short of the bruised wrist. “In the name of sanity!” he protested. “Latvala’s worked to death, trying to keep us functional. And you ask why you should help him?”

Her defiance grew more open. She faced him and said: “You promised we could have children.”

“Why — well, yes, true, we want as many as we can, once we have a planet—”

“And if we do not find a planet? What then? Can’t you improve the biosystems as you’ve been bragging?”

“We’ve put that aside in favor of the instrumentation project. It may take years.”

“A few babies won’t make that much difference meanwhile … to the ship, the damned ship … but the difference to us—”