Tau zero (20 page)

"What are the odds?" Reymont's words clanked.

Now Nilsson shook his head. "I cannot say. Perhaps not too bad. This is a big and varied cosmos. If we continue sufficiently long, I should imagine we have a finite probability of encountering what we need."

"How long is sufficiently long?" Reymont made a gesture to halt. "Don't bother answering. I can tell. It's on the order of billions of years. Tens of billions, maybe. That means we've got to have a lower tau yet. A tau so low that we can actually circumnavigate the universe ... in years or in months. And that, in turn, means we can't start slowing as we enter this clan up ahead. No. We accelerate again. After we've passed through—well, we should have a shorter period of ship's time in free fall than the current one has been, until we strike another clan. Probably there, too, we'll find it advisable to accelerate, running tau still lower. Yes, I know, that makes it still harder to find a place where we can come to rest; but anything else gives us no measurable chance at all, right?"

"I expect we'll be taking every opportunity to accelerate that we come upon, till we see a journey's end we can make use of, if we ever do. Agreed?"

Telander shuddered. "Can any of us hold to it?" he said.

"We must," Reymont stated. Once more he spoke crisply. "I'll figure out a tactful way to announce your news. It was among the possibilities that have been discussed by nearly everyone. That helps. I'll have the few men I can trust ready ... no, not for violence. Ready with leadership, steadiness, encouragement. And we'll embark on a general training program for weightlessness. No reason why it has to cause trouble. We'll teach every last one of those groundlubbers how to handle himself in zero gee. How to sleep. By God, how to hope!" He smote his palms together with a pistol sound.

"Don't forget, we can depend on some of the women too," Nilsson said.

"Yes. Certainly. Like Ingrid Lindgren."

"Like her indeed."

"M-hm. I'm afraid you will have to go rouse her, Elof. We've got to assemble our cadre—the unbreakables; the people who understand people—assemble them and plan this thing. Start suggesting names."

Chapter 18

The reaches of space-time cannot be numbered by man's familiar integers. They cannot even be honestly counted by orders of magnitude. To feel this fact, recapitulate:

Leonora Christine spent most of a year getting within 1 per cent of light velocity. The time aboard was about the same, because the value of tau only began to drop sharply when she was quite near c. During that initial period, she covered half a light-year of space, approximately five trillion kilometers.

Thereafter the decrease became constantly more swift. Aided by the higher acceleration now possible, she required somewhat under two more years, in her own measure, to get about ten light-years from Earth. That was where she met her grief.

The decision being made to seek the Virgo cluster of galaxies, she must gain such a tau that she could bridge the distance in a tolerable shipboard time. At maximum acceleration—a maximum which increased as she traveled—she swung half around the Milky Way and into its heart in a little more than one year. According to the cosmos, it took better than a hundred millennia.

In the Sagittarian clouds, she won a tau which brought her out of her native galaxy in days. Then her people discovered that the vacuum between the family of star groups they were in and the Virgo assemblage at which their plans were aimed, was not hard enough. They must go beyond the entire clan.

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. Wait here. Hang on, don't let 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. "If 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 —"

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 where she was, 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 better 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 born 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."