Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

He moved toward her. Her eyes widened. She crawled from him, handhold to handhold. “No!” she yelled. “I know what you’re after! You’ll never take my baby! He’s yours too! If you … you cut my baby out of me — I’ll kill you! I’ll kill everyone aboard!”

“Quiet!” he bellowed. He backed off a little. She clung whereshewas, sobbing and baring teeth. “I won’t do a thing myself,” he said. “We’ll see the constable.” He went to the exit. “Stay here. Pull yourself together. Think how you want to argue. I’ll fetch clothes for us.”

On his errand, the sole words he uttered were through the intercom, requesting a private talk with Reymont. Nor did he speak to Jimenes, or she to him, on their way to their cabin.

When they were inside, she seized his arms. “Boris, your own child, you can’t — and Easter coming—”

He tethered her. “Calm down,” he warned. “Here.” He gave her a squeeze bottle with, some tequila in it. “This may help. Don’t drink much. You’ll need your wits about you.”

The door chimed. Fedoroff admitted Reymont and closed it again. “Would you like a dram, Charles?” the engineer asked.

The features he confronted might have been a vizor on a war helmet. “We’d Setter discuss your problem first,” said the constable.

“Margarita is pregnant,” Fedoroff told him.

Reymont floated quiet, lightly gripping a bar. “Please—” Jimenes began.

Reymont waved her to silence. “How did that happen?” he inquired, softly as the ship’s breath from the ventilators.

She tried to explain, and couldn’t. Fedoroff put it in a few words.

“I see.” Reymont nodded. “About seven months to go, hm? Why do you consult me? You should have gone directly to the first officer. She’ll be the one in any event who disposes of the case. I have no power except to arrest you for a grave breach of regulation.”

“You — We are friends, I thought, Charles,” Fedoroff said.

“My duty is to the whole ship,” Reymont answered in the same monotone as before. “I can’t go along with anyone’s selfish action that threatens the lives of the rest.”

“One tiny baby?” Jimenes cried.

“And how many more desired by others?”

“Must we wait forever?”

“It would seem proper to wait till you know what our future is likely to be. A child bom here could have a short life and a grisly death.”

Jimenes locked fingers over her abdomen. “You won’t murder him! You won’t!”

“Be still,” spat from Reymont. She choked but obeyed. He turned his gaze on Fedoroff. “What are your views, Boris?”

Slowly, the Russian retreated until he was beside his woman. He drew her to him and said: “Abortion is murder. This should not have happened, maybe, but I cannot believe my shipmates are murderers. I will die before I permit it.”

“We’d be in bad shape without you.”

“Exactly.”

“Well—” Reymont averted his eyes. “You haven’t yet told me what you imagine I can do,” he said.

‘‘I know what you can,” Fedoroff answered. “Ingrid will want to save this life. She may not be able without your advice and backing.”

“Hm. Hm. So.” Reymont drummed the bulkhead. “It isn’t the worst thing for us, this,” he said at length, thoughtfully. “There might even be some gains to make. If we can pass it off as an accident, an oversight, whatever, instead of a deliberate infraction… It was, at that, in a way. Margarita acted insanely; still, how sane are any of us by now? … Hm. Suppose we announce a consequent relaxation of the rules. A very limited number of births will be authorized. We’ll compute how many the ecosystem can stand and let the women who want draw lots. I doubt that many will … under present circumstances. The rivalry shouldn’t be great. Having infants to coo over and help take care of, that might well relieve certain tensions.”

Briefly, his voice rose. “Also, by God, they’re apledge of confidence. And a fresh reason to survive. Yes!”

Jimenes tried to reach him and embrace him. He warded her off. Above her weeping and laughter, he ordered the engineer: “Get her calmed. I’ll discuss this with the first officer. In due course, we’ll all confer together. Meanwhile, no word or sign to anybody.”

“You … take the affair … coolly,” Fedoroff said.

“How else?” Reymont’s answer was edged. “Been too bloody much emotion around.” For another instant, the vizor lifted. This time a death’s head looked out. “Too bloody clawing much!” he shouted. He flung the door wide andi whipped into the corridor.

Boudreau peered through the viewscope. The galaxy toward which Leonora Christine rushed showed as a blue-white haze on a darkling visual field. When he had finished, a scowl bent his brow. He walked to the main console. His footfalls thudded in the restored weight of an intrafamilial passage.

“It is not right,” he said. “I have seen plenty of them; I know.”

“Do you mean the color?” Foxe-Jameson asked. The navigator had bidden the astrophysicist come to the bridge. “Frequency seem too low for our speed? That’s mainly due to simple space expansion, Auguste. The Hubble constant. We’re overhauling galactic groups whose velocity gets higher and higher with respect to our starting point, the farther we travel. Good thing too. Otherwise the Doppler effect might present us with more gamma radiation than our material shielding can handle. And, to be sure,.as you very well know, we’re counting heavily on the same space expansion to help us into a situation where we can stop. Eventually the velocity changes in themselves ought to overbalance their reduction of Bussard efficiency.”

“That part is plain.” Boudreau leaned on the desk, shoulders hunched, brooding over the notes he had made. “I tell you, however, I have watched each single galaxy we passed through, or in observation distance of, these months. I have grown familiar with their types. And gradually those types are changing.” He jerked his head at the viewscope. “That up ahead, for instance, it is of the irregular sort, like the Magellanic Clouds at home—”

“I daresay, in these parts, the Magellanic Clouds count as home,” Foxe-Jameson murmured.

Boudreau chose to ignore the aside. “It should have a high proportion of Population n stars,” he went on.

“From here we should be able to see many individual blue giants. Instead, we see none.

“All the spectra I take, to the extent I can interpret them, they are becoming different from what is normal for the types. No kind of galaxy looks right any more.”

He raised his eyes. “Malcolm, what is happening?”

Foxe-Jameson appeared surprised. “Why’d you pick me to query?” he countered.

“I had only a vague impression at first,” Boudreau said. ‘‘I am not a real astronomer. Besides, I could not get accurate navigational sights. To obtain a value of tau, for instance, requires such a cat’s cradle of assumptions that — Bien, when I finally felt sure the nature of space was altering, I approached Charles Reymont. You know how he puts down panic-mongers, and he is correct in that. He told me to call in one of your team, quietly, and report the answer back to him.”

Foxe-Jameson chortled. “Why, you two pathetic beggars! Haven’t you anything else to stew about? Actually, I thought it’d be common knowledge. So common that none of us pros happened to mention it, starved though everyone is for fresh conversation. Makes a chap wonder what else he’s overlooking, eh?”

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

“Consider,” Foxe-Jameson said. He settled one thigh and buttock on the desk. “Stars evolve. They build heavier elements than hydrogen in thermonuclear reactions. If one is so big that it explodes, a supernova, at the end of its life, it scatters some of those atoms back into the interstellar medium. A more important process, though, if less spectacular, is the shedding of mass by smaller stars, the majority, in their red-giant stage on the way to extinction. New generations of stars and planets condense out of this enriched medium and add to it in their turn. Over the ages you get a rising proportion of metal-rich suns. That affects the over-all spectrum. But of course no star gives back more than a percentage of the material which formed it. Most matter stays locked in dense bodies, cooling toward absolute zero. So the interstellar medium becomes depleted. Space within the galaxies grows more clear. The rate of star formation declines.”