Methuselah's Children (17 page)

"Uh, I hardly think he did, Ralph."

"Are you
sure,
Zaccur?"

"No, but- Well. . ."

"You see? The truth about his original intentions is a secret between him and his God. You don't know and neither do I. But the dynamics of the proposition are a separate matter. Zaccur, by the time my rumor gets back to you three or four times, even you will begin to wonder." The psychometrician paused to stare at nothing while he consulted an intuition refined by almost a century of mathematical study of human behavior. "Yes, it will work. If you all want to do it, you will be able to make a public announcement inside of twenty-four hours."

"I so move!" someone called out.

A few minutes later Barstow had Lazarus fetch Ford to the meeting place. Lazarus did not explain to him why his presence was required; Ford entered the compartment like a man come to judgment, one with a bitter certainty that the outcome will be against him. His manner showed fortitude but not hope. His eyes were unhappy.

Lazarus' had studied those eyes during the long hours they had been shut up together in the control room. They bore an expression Lazarus had seen many times before in his long life. The condemned man who has lost his final appeal, the fully resolved suicide, little furry things exhausted and defeated by struggle with the unrelenting steel of traps-the eyes of each of these hold a single expression, born of hopeless conviction that his time has run out.

Ford's eyes had it.

Lazarus had seen it grow and had been puzzled by it. To be sure, they were all in a dangerous spot, but Ford no more than the rest. Besides, awareness of danger brings a
live
expression; why should Ford's eyes hold the signal of death?

Lazarus finally decided that it could only be because Ford had reached the dead-end state of mind where suicide is necessary. But why? Lazarus mulled it over during the long watches in the control room and reconstructed the logic of it to his own satisfaction. Back on Earth, Ford had been important among his own kind, the short-lived. His paramount position had rendered him then almost immune to the feeling of defeated inferiority which the long-lived stirred up in normal men. But now he was the
only
ephemeral in a race of Methuselahs.

Ford had neither the experience of the elders nor the expectations of the young; he felt inferior to them both, hopelessly outclassed. Correct or not, he felt himself to be a useless pensioner, an impotent object of charity.

To a person of Ford's busy useful background the situation was intolerable. His very pride and strength of character were driving him to suicide.

As he came into the conference room Ford's glance sought out Zaccur Barstow. "You sent for me, sir?"

"Yes, Mr. Administrator." Barstow explained briefly the situation and the responsibility they wanted him to assume. "You are under no compulsion," he concluded, "but we need your services if you are willing to serve. Will you?"

Lazarus' heart felt light as he watched Ford's expression change to amazement. "Do you really mean that?" Ford answered slowly. "You're not joking with me?"

"Most certainly we mean it!"

Ford did not answer at once and when he did, his answer seemed irrelevant. "May I sit down?"

A place was found for him; he settled heavily into the chair and covered his face with his hands. No one spoke. Presently he raised his head and said in a steady voice, "If that is your will, I will do my best to carry out your wishes."

The ship required a captain as well as a civil administrator. Lazarus had been, up to that time, her captain in a very practical, piratical sense but he balked when Barstow proposed that it be made a formal title. "Huh
uh!
Not me. I may just spend this trip playing checkers. Libby's your man. Serious-minded, conscientious, former naval officer-just the type for the job."

Libby blushed as eyes turned toward him. "Now, really," he protested, "while it is true that I have had to command ships in the course of my duties, it has never suited me. I am a staff officer by temperament, I don't
feel
like a commanding officer."

"Don't see how you can duck out of it," Lazarus persisted. "You invented the go-fast gadget and you are the only one who understands how it works. You've got yourself a job, boy."

"But that does not follow at all," pleaded Libby. "I am perfectly willing to be astrogator, for that is consonant with my talents. But I very much prefer to serve under a commanding officer."

Lazarus was smugly pleased then to see how Slayton Ford immediately moved in and took charge; the sick man was gone, here again was the executive. "It isn't a matter of your personal preference, Commander Libby; we each must do what we can. I have agreed to direct social and civil organization; that is consonant with
my
training. But I can't command the ship as a ship; I'm not trained for it. You are. You must do it."

Libby blushed pinker and stammered. "I would if I were the only one. But there are hundreds of spacemen among the Families and dozens of them certainly have more experience and talent for command than I have. If you'll look for him, you'll find the right man."

Ford said, "What do you think, Lazarus?"

"Um. Andy's got something. A captain puts spine into his ship . . . or doesn't, as the case may be. If Libby doesn't hanker to command, maybe we'd better look around."

Justin Foote had a microed roster with him but there was no scanner at hand with which to sort it. Nevertheless the memories of the dozen and more present produced many candidates. They finally settled on Captain Rufus "Ruthless" King.

Libby was explaining the consequences of his light-pressure drive to his new commanding officer. "The loci of our attainable destinations is contained in a sheaf of paraboloids having their apices tangent to our present course. This assumes that acceleration by means of the ship's normal drive will always be applied so that the magnitude our present vector, just under the speed of light, will be held constant. This will require that the ship be slowly precessed during the entire maneuvering acceleration. But it will not be too fussy because of the enormous difference in magnitude between our present vector and the maneuvering vectors being impressed on it. One may think of it roughly as accelerating at right angles to our course."

"Yes, yes, I see that," Captain King cut in, "but why do you assume that the resultant vectors must always be equal to our present vector?"

"Why, it need not be if the Captain decides otherwise," Libby answered, looking puzzled, "but to apply a component that would reduce the resultant vector below our present speed would simply be to cause us to backtrack a little without increasing the scope of our present loci of possible destinations. The effect would only increase our flight time, to generations, even to centuries, if the resultant-"

"Certainly, certainly! I understand basic ballistics, Mister. But why do you reject the other alternative? Why not increase our speed? Why can't I accelerate directly along my present course if I choose?"

Libby looked worried. "The Captain may, if he so orders. But it would be an attempt to exceed the speed of light. That has been assumed to be impossible-"

"That's exactly what I was driving at. 'Assumed.' I've always wondered if that assumption was justified. Now seems like a good time to find out."

Libby hesitated, his sense of duty struggling against the ecstatic temptations of scientific curiosity. "If this were a research ship, Captain, I would be anxious to try it. I can't visualize what the conditions would be if we did pass the speed of light, but it seems to me mat we would be cut off entirely from the electromagnetic spectrum insofar as other bodies are concerned. How could we see to astrogate?" Libby had more than theory to worry him; they were "seeing" now only by electronic vision. To the human eye itself the hemisphere behind them along their track was a vast black; the shortest radiations had dopplered to wavelengths too long for the eye. In the forward direction stars could still be seen but their visible "light" was made up of longest Hertzian waves crowded in by the ship's incomprehensible speed. Dark "radio stars" shined at first magnitude; stars poor in radio wavelengths had faded to obscurity. The familiar constellations were changed beyond easy recognition. The fact that they were seeing by vision distorted by Doppler's effect was confirmed by spectrum analysis; Fraunhofer's lines had not merely shifted toward the violet end, they had passed beyond, out of sight, and previously unknown patterns replaced them.

"Hmm . . ." King replied. "I see what you mean. But I'd certainly like to try it, damme if I wouldn't! But I admit it's out of the question with passengers inboard. Very well, prepare for me roughed courses to type 'G' stars lying inside this trumpet-flower locus of yours and not too far away. Say ten light-years for your first search."

"Yes, sir. I have. I can't offer anything in that range in the 'G' types."

"So? Lonely out here, isn't it? Well?"

"We have Tau Ceti inside the locus at eleven light-years."

"A G5, eh? Not too good."

"No, sir. But we have a true Sol type, a G2-catalog ZD9817. But it's more than twice as far away."

Captain King chewed a knuckle. "I suppose I'll have to put it up to the elders. How much subjective time advantage are we enjoying?"

"I don't know, sir."

"Eh? Well, work it out! Or give me the data and I will. I don't claim to be the mathematician you are, but any cadet could solve that one. The equations are simple enough."

"So they are, sir. But I don't have the data to substitute in the time-contraction equation . . . because I have no way now to measure the ship's speed. The violet shift is useless to use; we don't know what the lines mean. I'm afraid we must wait until we have worked up a much longer baseline."

King sighed. "Mister, I sometimes wonder why I got into this business. Well, are you willing to venture a best guess? Long time? Short time?"

"Uh . . . a long time, sir. Years."

"So? Well, I've sweated it out in worse ships. Years, eh? Play any chess?"

"I have, sir." Libby did not mention that he had given up the game long ago for lack of adequate competition.

"Looks like we'd have plenty of time to play. King's pawn to king four."

"King's knight to bishop three."

"An unorthodox player, eh? Well, I'll answer you later. I suppose I had better try to sell them the G2 even though it takes longer . . . and I suppose I had better caution Ford to start some contests and things. Can't have 'em getting coffin fever."

"Yes, sir. Did I mention deceleration time? It works out to just under one Earth year, subjective, at a negative one gee, to slow us to stellar speeds."

"Eh? We'll decelerate the same way we accelerated-with your light-pressure drive."

Libby shook his head. "I'm sorry, sir. The drawback of the light-pressure drive is that it makes no difference what your previous course and speed may be; if you go inertialess in the near neighborhood of a star, its light pressure kicks you away from it like a cork hit by stream of water. Your previous momentum is canceled out when you cancel your inertia."

"Well," King conceded, "let's assume that we will follow your schedule. I can't argue with you yet; there are still some things about that gadget of yours that I don't understand."

"There are lots of things about it," Libby answered seriously, "that I don't understand either."

The ship had flicked by Earth's orbit less than ten minutes after Libby cut in his space drive. Lazarus and he had discussed the esoteric physical aspects of it all the way to the orbit of Mars-less than a quarter hour. Jupiter's path was far distant when Barstow called the organization conference. But it killed an hour to find them all in the crowded ship; by the time he called them to order they were a billion miles out, beyond the orbit of Saturn-elapsed time from "
Go!
" less than an hour and a half.

But the blocks get longer after Saturn. Uranus found them still in discussion. Nevertheless Ford's name was agreed on and he had accepted before the ship was as far from the Sun as is Neptune. King had been named captain, had toured his new command with Lazarus as guide, and was already in conference with his astrogator when the ship passed the orbit of Pluto nearly four billion miles deep into space, but still less than six hours after the Sun's light had blasted them away.

Even then they were not outside the Solar System, but between them and the stars lay nothing but the winter homes of Sol's comets and hiding places of hypothetical trans-Plutonian planets-space in which the Sun holds options but can hardly be said to own in fee simple. But even the nearest stars were still light-years away.
New Frontiers
was headed for them at a pace which crowded the heels of light-weather cold, track fast.

Out, out, and still farther out . . . out to the lonely depths where world lines are almost straight, undistorted by gravitation. Each day, each month . . . each year . . . their headlong flight took them farther from all humanity.

PART TWO

1

The ship lunged on, alone in the desert of night, each light-year as empty as the last. The Families built up a way of life in her.

The
New Frontiers
was approximately cylindrical. When not under acceleration, she was spun on her axis to give pseudo-weight to passengers near the outer skin of the ship; the outer or "lower" compartments were living quarters while the innermost or "upper" compartments were storerooms and so forth. 'Tween compartments were shops, hydroponic farms and such. Along the axis, fore to aft, were the control room, the converter, and the main drive.

The design will be recognized as similar to that of the larger free-flight interplanetary ships in use today, but it is necessary to bear in mind her enormous size. She was a city, with ample room for a colony of twenty thousand, which would have allowed the planned complement of ten thousand to double their numbers during the long voyage to Proxima Centauri.