Charles Sheffield - Between the Strokes of Night

The group ate and drank — lightly, knowing that in just a few hours all food and drink would taste infinitely better than it ever could in S-space. The talk was lively, full of guesses about what they might find at Urstar. Emil joined in, but every few seconds his eyes flickered across for another look at Judith Niles.

He had made sure that he sat straight across from her. At first glance, the Director was normal enough. She seemed weary, with black smudges under her eyes, but that might be no more than worries about what the next few days might reveal. Would the Urstar show that it was indeed the first, the original of all the changes in spectral type; or would it — a worry for Emil as much as for Judith Niles — provide no evidence at all, of stellarforming activities or anything else? Emil’s second look provided more information. One of Judith Niles’s eyes was noticeably more prominent than the other, the bulge in the left obvious from a profile view. The facial tics moved around, sometimes in an eye, sometimes affecting the line of her mouth or of one ear.

And Judith Niles herself knew that something was happening to her. At each tic or facial twitch she glanced around to make sure that no one noticed, but there were other problems over which she had less control. Every few minutes her face went rigid, and for as much as thirty seconds she froze into catatonia. When she came out of it her face quivered, and her head wobbled as though it was too heavy for her neck.

Charlene was sitting next to the Director, across the table from Emil. He caught her eye, very briefly. His nod would have been imperceptible to anyone who was not waiting for it. Charlene’s raised eyebrow would be comprehensible to Emil alone. It meant, you see it too. What do we do now?

The timing could not be worse. Judith Niles was their leader, it was assumed that she would control all activities when they reached Urstar. If not she, then who?

Emil looked all along the table. Libby Trask had the necessary cool, but not the experience. Alfredo Roewen had the ego, but not the dispassionate attitude. Who else? Well, if you wanted dispassionate attitude there was always Sy, noticeable at the moment by his absence from the group. On the basis of seniority of service, Sy outranked everyone except Charlene, who in turn was outranked only by Judith Niles herself. They might have to make the best of a bad lot. If Judith Niles continued to deteriorate — and Charlene insisted that she was getting rapidly worse — then it might have to be Sy. Assuming, that is, they could somehow force him to take on the job.

And here came the man himself, slouching his way into the room. Rather than sitting at a place where the robot servers would instantly provide him with food and drink, he placed himself at the very far end, away from everyone. He held his deformed left forearm close to his body — another mystery, why had he never agreed to the minor surgery required to fix it? — and peered with bright gray eyes at the miniature display clutched in his right hand.

He remained like that for several minutes, oblivious to all the others in the room. Finally he seemed to make up his mind. He sat straighter, looked along the length of the table, and said in a clear, penetrating voice, “We’ve stopped, you know. Does anyone have an explanation for that?”

His words produced the effect he had surely been hoping for: dead silence. Everyone looked to Judith Niles. The Director was blinking rapidly, one hand on her throat. Finally, and with apparent effort, she said, “Stopped? What has stopped?”

“We have. The ship has.”

Everyone turned to the monitors, discreetly inlaid as panels along the dining room walls. The Argo’s engines were not scheduled to turn on again until the transition to N-space had been made, when high deceleration for stellar rendezvous could be tolerated. The displays showed exactly that: inactive engines, and a ship speeding toward its target star at a good fraction of the speed of light.

A questioning mutter began, cut off by Sy’s curt, “Don’t go by engine activity. Look at what the external sensors are reporting. We have no Doppler shift with respect to the target star, and the microwave background radiation is close to isotropic. If this ship is moving at all, it can’t be at more than a few tens of meters a second. At this rate it will take millions of years to reach Urstar.” The mutter of voices in the dining room took on a different tone. Everyone in science and engineering had a favorite suite of instruments, and they were polling them without moving from their seats.

Emil looked at Judith Niles, and saw Charlene’s glance turn in the same direction. This was the point where the Director would take over, end the individual efforts, and set a coordinated course to discover exactly what was happening. Instead, JN sat with slack mouth and unfocused eyes. It was one of the younger scientists, Rolf Sansome, whose voice rose above the general hubbub. “Worse than a million years. According to our best instruments, we have absolutely no velocity relative to Urstar’s center of mass.”

Libby Trask, a linguistics expert but no physicist, said, “I don’t understand. How could we go from a sixth of light-speed to zero, with nobody on board noticing?”

“We couldn’t.” That was Dan Korwin, chief engineer on the Argo and a man as blunt and confrontational as Sy was indirect and devious. “Keep your eyes on your instruments, Rolf Sansome, and you too, Sy Day. I’m going to try something.”

Korwin was busy with his own hand-held. A shudder went through the ship, while glasses and plates left on the dining room table by the service robots danced and rattled on the polished surface.

Korwin looked up. “Well?”

Rolf Sansome shook his head. “Still zero velocity with respect to Urstar.” “The engines insist we’re accelerating.”

“The inertial sensors tell me we’re not moving.”

Sy added, “And the visuals say we have negligible velocity with respect to the three-degree cosmic background. You goosed the drive?”

“I sure as hell did.” Dan Korwin glared at his hand-held, as though holding it personally responsible. “I gave the engines as much of a boost as we can take in S-space. We should all have felt it. And with that much drive, all the plates and glasses ought to have slid down to the end of the table and finished in Sy’s lap.”

Everyone again looked to Judith Niles. She shook her head, as though the whole of the past five minutes had been too much for her. It was left to Charlene, reluctantly and after a nod from Emil, to ask the obvious: “Something brought us from a sixth of light-speed to a flat stop. We can’t move toward Urstar, even when we apply the Argo’s own propulsion system. Where do we go from here?” “We go nowhere.” Sy alone, of all the people in the room, was smiling. “We’re stuck, fixed in one place like an insect in amber until whatever decided to stop us decides to get in touch with us, or lets us move again. It looks bad, but there’s one huge piece of good news: we know now that we didn’t come to the wrong place. The star ahead of us, even if we can’t get there, is the real thing. That’s Urstar.”

How could Sy possibly be so cheerful? But then Charlene, surveying her companions, noticed that Emil appeared, if not cheerful, then relieved. He smiled across the table at her. His complacent look said, Well, things do look grim. But at least I can relax now. I may have brought us all to our doom — but at least I didn’t bring us to the wrong place!

Charlene gritted her teeth. Emil! And not just Emil, every man she had ever met. They were all as bad as each other. Which one of the old-timers, back on long-ago and faraway Earth, had said it? — “A man will rather die than look like a fool.”