Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

It no longer looked like a sun. When they’d arrived, only a few days ago, Delta Karpis had been a standard class G star, serene, placid, drifting quietly through the great deeps with its family of worlds, as it had done for 6 billion years. Now it was a misshapen bag, dragged through the night by an invisible hand. Its mass seemed to have shriveled beneath the tidal pressures; and a stream of radiant gas, millions of kilometers long, jetted from the neck of the bag, connecting the stricken star with a glowing point.

A point. Chek Boland looked at it a long time, marveling that something so small as to be virtually invisible could be so disruptive, could literally distort a sun.

You haven’t seen anything yet, the astronomers from the other ships were saying. It hasn’t even begun.

He turned his attention to Klassner. “Nine hours left, Marty,” he said.

“Showtime.”

Klassner was sitting in his favorite chair, the gray-green one with the side table, his unfocused eyes fixed on the bulkhead. Gradually he blinked and turned toward Boland. “Yes,” he said. And then: “Showtime for what?”

“The collision.”

He was wearing the puzzled expression that they saw all too often now. “Are we going to hit something?”

“No. The dwarf is about to hit Delta Kay.”

“Yes,” he said. “It is remarkable. I’m glad we came.”

The telescopes revealed the point to be a dull red disk surrounded by a ring of shining gas. It was a white dwarf, the naked core of a collapsed star. Its electrons had been torn from their nuclei and jammed together, producing an object one step short of a black hole. A year ago, it had penetrated the planetary system, scattering worlds and moons, and now it had become a dagger aimed directly at the heart of Delta Karpis itself.

Klassner had been lucid last evening, and they’d been talking about the human tendency to project personality onto inanimate objects. To develop loyalty to a ship.

To think that a childhood home welcomes one back. Now they could not escape a sense of sadness, watching the death struggle of the star, as if it were a living thing, somehow conscious of what was happening to it.

Nancy White had been part of the conversation. Nancy was a popularizer of science and had produced shows watched by millions. She’d commented that it was nonsense, that she couldn’t bring herself to indulge in that particular fantasy when a genuine catastrophe was taking place on the third world, which was home to large animals, living oceans, and vast forests. They called the place Kissoff in sullen reaction. Kissoff had, so far, survived the general turmoil in the system caused by the presence of the interloper. Its orbit had become eccentric, but that was of no moment compared with what was about to happen to it and its biosphere. Within the next few hours, its oceans would boil off, and the atmosphere would be ripped away.

On a different scale, watching the approaching destruction of Martin Klassner was also painful. Klassner had demonstrated, after thousands of years of speculation, that alternate universes did exist. It was the breakthrough everyone had thought impossible. They’re out there, and Klassner had predicted that one day transportation to them would become possible. Now they were called Klassner universes.

Last year he’d come down with Bentwood’s Syndrome, which induced occasional delusions and bouts of memory loss. His long, thin hands trembled constantly. The disease was terminal, and there was doubt whether he’d survive the year. The medical community was working on it, and a cure was coming. But Warren Mendoza, one of two medical researchers on board, insisted it would be too late.

Unless Dunninger’s research held the answer.

“Kage.” Klassner was addressing the AI. “What is its velocity now?” He meant the white dwarf.

“It has increased slightly to six hundred twenty kilometers, Martin. It will accelerate another four percent during its final approach.”

They’d just finished dinner. Impact would take place at 0414 hours ship time.

“I never expected,” said Klassner, turning his gray, watery eyes on Boland, “to see anything like this.” He was back. It was amazing the way he came and went.

“None of us did, Marty.” The frequency of such an event anywhere within the transport lanes had been estimated at one every half billion years. And here it was.

Incredible. “God has been very kind to us.”

Klassner’s breathing was audible. It sounded whispery, harsh, labored. “I would have wished, though, if we were going to have a collision,” he said, “it could have taken place between two real stars.”

“A white dwarf is a real star.”

“No. Not really. It’s a burned-out corpse.” Part of the problem with Bentwood’s was that, along with its other effects, it seemed to reduce intelligence. Klassner’s enormous intellect had at one time glowed in those eyes. You could look at him and literally see his brilliance. There were times now when it seemed he was on automatic, that no one was behind the wheel. It would not have been correct to say that his gaze had turned vacuous, but the genius was gone, save for an occasional glimmer. And he knew it, knew what he had once been. It’s a burned-out corpse.

“I wish we could get closer,” Boland said. The link to the bridge was on, and he intended the comment for Madeleine English, their pilot.

“As far as I’m concerned,” she responded, “we’re already too close.” Her voice was cool and crisp. She wasn’t impressed by the six celebrities who constituted the entire passenger list for the Polaris.

The Sentinel was somewhere above Delta Kay’s north pole; the Rensilaer lay on the far side of the dwarf. Both were filled with working researchers, measuring, counting, recording, gathering data that specialists would still be analyzing years hence. One of the major objectives of the mission was to measure, finally, the natural curve of space-time.

The conversations among the ships had grown increasingly enthusiastic during the buildup. You ever see anything like this? I feel as if everything I’ve done has been leading up to this moment. Look at that son of a bitch. Cal, what are you getting on acceleration? But it had all died away during the last few hours. The comm links were silent, and even Boland’s fellow passengers had little to say.

They’d all gone back to their cabins after dinner, to work, or read, or while away the final hours however they could. But the herd instinct had taken over, and one by one they’d filtered back. Mendoza in white slacks and pullover, always a brooding figure, absorbed to the exclusion of everything else by the drama playing out in the sky. Nancy White, scribbling notes to herself between exchanges with Tom Dunninger, Mendoza’s occasional colleague. They were microbiologists. Dunninger had earned an extraordinary reputation in his chosen field. He’d dedicated the latter years of his career to pursuing a way to stave off the ageing process. And Garth Urquhart, who had for two terms been one of the seven councillors of the Associated States.

On the screens, the torture of Delta Karpis grew more intense. The solar bag was becoming more and more stretched. “Who would have believed,” said Mendoza, “that one of these things could become that distorted without blowing up.”

“It’s coming,” said White.

The hours counted down, and the conversation never wandered from the spectacle. What’s the mass of that thing anyhow? Is it my imagination, or is the sun changing color? The ring around the dwarf is getting brighter.

Shortly before midnight they set up a buffet. They wandered around the table, sampling fruit and cheese. Dunninger opened a bottle of wine and Mendoza offered a toast to the dying giant outside. “Unmarked for six billion years,” he said. “All that time just waiting for us.”