Tau zero (3 page)

"He'll be staying with me."

"Um-m-m. . . ." Telander rubbed his chin. "To be honest, I'd rather have him in the cabin already agreed on, in case of trouble among the, um, passengers. That's what he's for, en route."

"I could join him," Lindgren offered.

Telander shook his head. "No. Officers must live in officer country. The theoretical reason, having them next to bridge level, isn't the real one. You'll find out how important symbols are, Ingrid, in the next five years." He shrugged. "Well, the other cabins are only one deck abaft ours. I daresay he can get to them soon enough if need be. Assuming your arranged roommate doesn't mind a swap, have your wish, then."

"Thank you," she said low.

"I can't help being a little surprised," Telander confessed. "He doesn't appear to me as the sort you'd choose. Do you think the relationship will last?"

"I hope it will. He says he wants it to." She broke from her confusion with a teasing attack: "What about you? Have you made any commitments yet?"

"No. In time, doubtless, in time. I'll be too busy at first. At my age these matters aren't that urgent." Telander laughed, then grew earnest. "A propos time, we've none to waste. Please carry out your inspections and—"

The ferry made rendezvous and docked. Bond anchors extended to hold its stubby hull against the larger curve of Leonora Christine. Her robots—sensor-computer-effector units—directing the terminal maneuvers caused airlocks to join in an exact kiss. More than that would be demanded of them later. Both chambers being exhausted, their outer valves swung back, enabling a plastic tube to make an airtight seal. The locks were repressurized and checked for a possible leak. When none was found, the inner valves opened.

Reymont unharnessed himself. Floating free of his seat, he glanced down the length of the passenger section. The American chemist, Norbert Williams, was unbuckling too. "Hold it," Reymont commanded in English. While everyone knew Swedish, some did not know it well. For scientists, English and Russian remained the chief international tongues. "Keep your places. I told you at the port, I'll escort you singly to your cabins."

"You needn't bother with me," Williams answered. "I can get around weightless okay." He was short, round-faced, sandy-haired, given to colorful garments and to speaking rather loudly.

"You all had some drill in it," Reymont said. "But that's not the same thing as getting the right reflexes built in through experience."

"So we flounder a bit. So what?"

"So an accident is possible. Not probable, I agree, but possible. My duty is to help forestall such possibilities. My judgment is that I should conduct you to your berths, where you will remain until further notice."

Williams reddened, "See here, Reymont—"

The constable's eyes, which were gray, turned full upon him. "That's a direct order," Reymont said, word by word. "I have the authority. Let us not begin this voyage with a breach."

Williams resecured himself. His motions were needlessly energetic, his lips clamped tight together. A few drops of sweat broke off his forehead and bobbed in the aisles; the overhead fluoro made them sparkle.

Reymont spoke by intercom to the pilot. That man would not board the ship, but would boost off as soon as his human cargo was discharged. "Do you mind if we unshutter? Give our friends something to look at while they wait?"

"Go ahead," said the voice. "No hazard indicated. And . . . they won't see Earth again for a spell, will they?"

Reymont announced the permission. Hands eagerly turned cranks on the spaceward side of the boat, sliding back the plates that covered the glasyl viewpoints. Reymont got busy with his shepherding.

Fourth in line was Chi-Yuen Ai-Ling. She had twisted about in her safety webbing to face the port entirely. Her fingers were pressed against its surface. "Now you, please," Reymont said. She didn't respond. "Miss Chi-Yuen." He tapped her shoulder. "You're next."

"Oh!" She might have been shaken out of a dream. Tears stood in her eyes. "I, I beg your pardon. I was lost—"

The linked spacecraft were coming into another dawn. Light soared over Earth's immense horizon, breaking in a thousand colors from

maple-leaf scarlet to peacock blue. Momentarily a wing of zodiacal radiance could be seen, like a halo over the rising fire-disk. Beyond were the stars and a crescent moon. Below was the planet, agleam with her oceans, her clouds where rain and thunder walked, her green-brown-snowy continents and jewel-box cities. You saw, you felt, that this world lived.

Chi-Yuen fumbled with her buckles. Her hands looked too thin for them. "I hate to stop watching," she whispered in French. "Rest well there, Jacques."

"You'll be free to observe on the ship screens, once we've commenced acceleration," Reymont told her in the same language.

The fact that he spoke it startled her back to ordinariness. "Then we will be going away," she said, but with a smile. Her mood had evidently been more ecstatic than elegiac.

She was small, frail-boned, her figure seeming a boy's in the high-collared tunic and wide-cut slacks of the newest Oriental mode. Men tended to agree, however, that she had the most enchanting face aboard, coifed in shoulder-length blue-black hair. When she spoke Swedish, the trace of Chinese intonation that she gave its natural lilt made it a song.

Reymont helped her unstrap and laid an arm around her waist. He didn't bother with shuffling along in bondsole shoes. Instead, he pushed one foot against the chair and flew down the aisle. At the lock he seized a handhold, swung through an arc, gave himself a fresh shove, and was inside the starship. In general, those whom he escorted relaxed; it was easier for him to carry them passive than to contend with their clumsy efforts to help. But Chi-Yuen was different. She knew how. Their movements turned into a swift, swooping dance. After all, as a planetologist she had had a good deal of experience with free fall.

Their flight was not less exhilarating for being explainable.

The companionway from the airlock ran through concentric layers of storage decks: extra shielding and armor for the cylinder at the axis of the ship which housed personnel. Elevators could be operated there, to carry heavy loads forward or aft under acceleration. But probably the stairs which spiraled through wells parallel to the elevator shafts would see more use. Reymont and Chi-Yuen took one of these to get from the center-of-mass deck devoted to electrical and gyroscopic machinery, bow-ward to the living quarters. Weightless, they hauled themselves along the stair rail never touching a step. At the speed they acquired, centrifugal and Coriolis forces made them

somewhat dizzy, like a mild drunkenness bringing forth laughter. "And ay-round we go ay-gain . . . whee!"

The cabins for those other than officers opened on two corridors which flanked a row of bathrooms. Each compartment was two meters high and four square; it had two doors, two closets, two built-in dressers with shelves above, and two folding beds. These last could be slid together on tracks to form one, or be pushed apart. In the second case, it then became possible to lower a screen from the overhead and thus turn the double room into two singles.

"That was a trip to write about in my diary, Constable." Chi-Yuen clutched a handhold and leaned her forehead against the cool metal. Mirth still trembled on her mouth.

"Who are you sharing this with?" Reymont asked.

"For the present, Jane Sadler." Chi-Yuen opened her eyes and let them glint at him. "Unless you have a different idea?"

"Hen? Uh . . . I'm with Ingrid Lindgren."

"Already?" The mood dropped from her. "Forgive me. I should not pry."

"No, I'm the one who owes the apology," he said. "Making you wait here with nothing to do, as if you couldn't manage in free fall."

"You can't make exceptions." Chi-Yuen was altogether serious again. She extended her bed, floated onto it, and started harnessing in. "I want to lie awhile alone anyway and think."

"About Earth?"

"About many things. We are leaving more than most of us have yet understood, Charles Reymont. It is a kind of death—followed by resurrection, perhaps, but nonetheless a death."

Chapter 3

" — zero!"

The ion drive came to life. No man could have gone behind its thick shielding to watch it and survived. Nor could he listen to it, or feel any vibration of its power. It was too efficient for that. In the so-called engine room, which was actually an electronic nerve center, men did hear the faint throb of pumps feeding reaction mass from the tanks. They hardly noticed, being intent on the meters, displays, readouts, and code signals which monitored the system. Boris Fedoroff s hand was never distant from the primary cutoff switch. Between him and Captain Telander in the command bridge flowed a mutter of observations. It was not necessary to Leonora Christine. Far less sophisticated craft than she could operate themselves. And she was in fact doing so. Her intermeshing built-in robots worked with more speed and precision—more flexibility, even, within the limits of their programming— than mortal flesh could hope for. But to stand by was a necessity for the men themselves.

Elsewhere, the sole direct proof of motion that those had who lay in their cabins was a return of weight. It was not much, under one tenth gee, but it gave them an "up" and "down" for which their bodies were grateful. They released themselves from their beds. Reymont announced over the hall intercom: "Constable to personnel off watch. You may move around ad libitum —forward of your deck, that is." Sarcastically: "You may recall that an official good-by ceremony, complete with benediction, will be broadcast at Greenwich noon. We'll screen it in the gymnasium for those who care to watch."

Reaction mass entered the fire chamber. Thermonuclear generators energized the furious electric arcs that stripped those atoms down to ions; the magnetic fields that separated positive and negative particles; the forces that focused them into beams; the pulses that lashed them to ever higher velocities as they sped down the rings of the thrust tubes, until they emerged scarcely less fast than light itself. Their blast was invisible. No energy was wasted on flames. Instead, everything that the laws of physics permitted was spent on driving Leonora Christine outward.

A vessel her size could not accelerate by this means like a Patrol cruiser. That would have demanded more fuel than she could hold,

who must carry half a hundred people, and their necessities for ten or fifteen years, and their tools for satisfying scientific curiosity after they arrived, and (if the data beamed by the instrumented probe which had preceded her did actually mean that the third planet of Beta Virginis was habitable) the supplies and machines whereby man could begin to take a new world for himself. She spiraled slowly out of Earth orbit. The dwellers within her had ample chances to stand at her view-screens and watch home dwindle among the stars.

There was no space to spare in space. Every cubic centimeter inside the hull must work. Yet persons intelligent and sensitive enough to adventure out here would have gone crazy in a "functional" environment. Thus far the bulkheads were bare metal and plastic. But the artistically talented had plans. Reymont noticed Emma Glassgold, molecular biologist, in a corridor, sketching out a mural that would show forest around a sunlit lake. And from the start, the residential and recreational decks were covered with a material green and springy as grass. The air gusting from the ventilators was more than purified by the plants of the hydroponic section and the colloids of the Darrell balancer. It went through changes of temperature, ionization, odor. At present it smelled like fresh clover—with an appetizing whiff added if you passed the galley, since gourmet food compensates for many deprivations.

Similarly, commons was a warren occupying a whole deck. The gymnasium, which doubled as theater and assembly room, was its largest unit. But even the mess was of a size to let diners stretch their legs and relax. Nearby were hobby shops, a clubroom for sedentary games, a swimming pool, tiny gardens and bowers. Some of the ship's designers had argued against putting the dream boxes on this level. Should folk come here for fun be reminded by the door of that cabin that they must have ghostly substitutes for the realities they had left behind them? But the process was, after all, a sort of recreation too; having it in sick bay might be unpleasant, and that was the sole alternative.

There was no immediate need for that apparatus. The journey was still young. A slightly hysterical gaiety filled the atmosphere. Men roughhoused, women chattered, laughter was inordinate at mealtimes, and the frequent dances were occasions of heavy flirtation. Passing the gym, which stood open, Reymont saw a handball match in progress. At low gee, when you could virtually walk up a wall, the action got spectacular.

He continued to the pool. In an alcove off the principal corridor, it could hold several without crowding; but at this hour, 2100, no one

was using it. Jane Sadler stood at the edge, frowning thoughtfully. She was a Canadian, a biotechnician in the organocycle department. Physically she was a big brunette, her features ordinary but the rest of her shown to high advantage by shorts and tee shirt.

"Troubles?" Reymont asked.

"Oh, hullo, Constable," she responded in English. "Nothing wrong, except I can't figure out how best to decorate in here. I'm supposed to make recommendations to my committee."

"Didn't they plan on a Roman bath effect?"

"Uh-huh. That covers a lot of ground, though. Nymphs and satyrs, or poplar groves, or temple buildings, or what?" She laughed. "Hell with it. I'll suggest N & S. If the job gets botched, it can always be done over, till we run out of paint. Give us something further to do."

"Who can keep going five years—and five more, if we have to return—on hobbies?" Reymont said slowly.

Sadler laughed again. "Nobody. Don't fret. Everyone aboard has a full program of work lined up, whether it be theoretical research or writing the Great Space Age Novel or teaching Greek in exchange for tensor calculus."

"Of course. I've seen the proposals. Are they adequate?"