To Outlive Eternity Read online

  TO OUTLIVE ETERNITY

  AND OTHER STORIES

  Poul Anderson

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

  fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  TO OUTLIVE ETERNITY and Other Stories © 2007 Trigonier, Inc.

  To Outlive Eternity originally appeared in Galaxy Magazine, June 1967 and August 1967, copyright 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

  "No Truce with Kings" originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1963. Copyright 1963 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  "Progress" originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1962. Copyright 1961 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  "Un-Man" originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, January 1953. Copyright 1953 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  "The Big Rain" originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, October 1954. Copyright 1954 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  After Doomsday originally appeared in Galaxy Magazine as The Day After Doomsday, December 1961 and February 1962, copyright 1961 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. First book publication as After Doomsday by Ballantine Books, 1962. Copyright 1962 by Poul Anderson.

  "Epilogue" originally appeared in Analog Science Fact—Science Fiction, March 1962. Copyright 1962 by The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 10: 1-4165-2113-5

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-2113-6

  Cover art by Bob Eggleton

  First Baen printing, March 2007

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Anderson, Poul, 1926-2001.

  To outlive eternity and other stories / by Poul Anderson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-2113-6 (trade pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-2113-5 (trade pbk.)

  1. Science fiction, American. I. Title.

  PS3551.N378T62 2007

  813'.54--dc22

  2006101312

  Printed in the United States of America

  TO OUTLIVE ETERNITY

  I

  Leonora Christine was in the tenth year of her journey when grief came upon her.

  An outside watcher, quiescent with respect to the stars, might have seen the thing before she did; for at her speed she must need to run half blind. Even without better instrumental capabilities, he would have known of the disaster a few weeks ahead. But he would have had no way to cry his warning, and it could not have helped her.

  And there was no watcher anyhow: only night, bestrewn with multitudinous cold points that were suns, the frosty cataract of the Milky Way and the rare phantom glimmer of a nebula or a sister galaxy. Nine light-years from Sol, the ship was ilimitably alone.

  An automatic alarm roused Captain Telander. As he struggled upward from sleep, First Mate Lindgren's voice followed: "Kors i Herrens namn!" The horror in it jerked him fully awake. He didn't stop to use the intercom; he left his cabin and ran toward the command bridge. Nor would he have stopped to dress. They didn't trouble much with uniforms, and some of the people aboard were ceasing to trouble with clothes.

  But as it happened, he was clad. Lulled by the sameness of nine and a half years—even in ship's time, more than one year—he had been reading a microtaped novel and had dozed off in his chair. And then jaws of the universe snapped shut.

  The corridor throbbed faintly around him, an endless pulse of driving energies. Ventilators gusted fresh air in his face, and it was subtly scented with clover. Murals hid metal and plastic with scenes of forest around a sunlit lake. The deck covering was green and springy as grass. But always the ship whispered and shivered, always one remembered the deeps outside.

  Lars Telander flung himself up the companionway and into the bridge compartment. Ingrid Lindgren stood near the viewscope. It was not what counted; however massive and sophisticated, it was almost a toy. What truth could tell was in the instruments which glittered across the entire forward bulkhead. But her eyes would not leave it.

  The captain brushed past her. The warning which had caused him to be summoned was still blazoned on a screen linked to the primary computer. He read. The breath sucked in between his teeth. As he stood, a slot opened with a click and extruded a printout. He snatched it. His gaze whipped across letters and figures. Quantification—decimal-point detail, after more data had come in and more calculation had been done—the basic Mene, Mene stood unchanged on the screen.

  He stabbed the general alarm button. Sirens wailed; echoes went ringing down the corridors. On the intercom he ordered all hands not on duty to report to commons with the passengers. After a moment, harshly, he added that channels would be open so that those people standing watch could also get the news.

  "But what are we going to do?" Lindgren cried.

  "Very little, I fear." The captain went to the viewscope. "Is anything visible in this?"

  "Barely. I think. Fourth quadrant." She clenched her fists and turned from him.

  He took for granted that she meant the eyepiece for dead ahead and peered into that. At high magnification, space leaped at him. The scene was somewhat blurred and distorted. Optical circuits did not compensate perfectly for the aberration and Doppler effect experienced when one crowded the speed of light. But he saw starpoints, diamond, amethyst, ruby, topaz, emerald, a Fafnir's hoard. Near the center burned the one called Beta Virginis, whither they were bound, thirty-three years after they said farewell to Earth. It should have looked very like the sun of home, but something of spectral shift remained to tinge it ice blue. And, yes, on the verge of human vision . . . that wisp? That smoky cloudlet, perhaps to wipe out this ship and these fifty human lives?

  Noise broke in on his concentration, shouts, footfalls, the sounds of fear. He straightened. "I had better go aft," he said without tone. Lindgren moved to join him. "No, keep the bridge."

  "Why?" Her temper stretched thin and broke. "Regulations?"

  "Yes," he nodded. "You have not yet been relieved." A smile of sorts touched his lean face. "Unless you believe in God, regulations are now the only comfort we have."

  II

  There was no space to spare in space. Every cubic centimeter inside the hull must work. But human beings intelligent and sensitive enough to adventure out here would have gone crazy without some room and privacy. Thus each of the twenty-five cabins could be divided into two cubicles if the pair who occupied it chose. And commons was more than a place for meals and meetings. The largest section was ball court and gymnasium. Offside rooms held tiny bowers, gardens, hobby shops, a swimming pool. Along one bulkhead stood three dream booths.

  In this moment, however, none of these things had any more meaning than did drapes or murals or the bright casual clothes of the gathered people. They had not taken time to set out chairs. Everyone stood. Every eye locked onto Telander as he mounted the dais. Nobody stirred save to breathe, but sweat glistened on faces and could be smelled. The murmur of the ship seemed somehow to have grown louder.

  The captain hesitated for a moment. They were from so many nations, those men and women—Europe, Asia, America, Africa, Luna. Of course they all knew Swedish; like every other extrasolar expedition, this one went in a Control Authority ship. But some did not know it well. For scientists, particularly, English and Russian remained the chief international tongues. Since Telander happened to be more at ease in the former, he sighed and fell back on it.

 
"Ladies and gentlemen, I have just gotten grave news. Let me say immediately that our prospects of survival are not in the least hopeless, as far as can be judged from present data and computations. But we are in trouble. The risk was not unforeseen, but by its nature is one that cannot be provided against, at any rate in the present rather early stage of Bussard drive technology—"

  "Get to the point, God damn it!" Telander couldn't see who shouted out of the pack, but knew that voice: Williams, the short, cocky North American chemist.

  "Quiet, you," said Constable Reymont. Unlike most of them, who stood with male and female hands clutched together, he was alone, a little apart from the rest: a stocky, dark, hard-featured man with a scar seaming his brow. He wore a drab gray coverall and had pinned on his badge of authority.

  "You can't—" Someone must have nudged Williams, for he spluttered into silence.

  Telander's gaunt body shifted nervously from foot to foot. "Instruments have . . . have detected an obstacle. A small nebula. Extremely small, a mere clot of dust and gas, probably less than a thousand million kilometers across. It is traveling at an abnormal velocity. Perhaps it is the remnant of a larger thing cast out by a supernova, a remnant still held together by hydromagnetic forces. Or perhaps it is a proto-star. I do not know. The fact is, we are going to strike it. In about twenty-four hours, ship's time. What will happen then, I do not know either. With luck, we can ride out the impact and not suffer serious damage. Otherwise . . . well, we knew this journey would have its hazards."

  He heard indrawn breaths, like his own on the bridge, and saw eyes go white-rimmed, mouths mutter, fingers trace signs in the air. Quickly, he went on: "We cannot do much to prepare. A little, ah, battening down, yes; but in general, the ship is as taut as possible already. When the moment approaches, most of you will be ordered into shock harness, and everyone will wear space armor. But—the meeting is now open for discussion." Williams's hand rocketed past the shoulder of tall M'Botu.

  "Yes?"

  One could imagine the red-faced indignation. "Sir! An unmanned probe did make the trip to Beta Virginis first, did it not? It did radio back an assurance that this route was free of danger. Did it not? Well, then, who is responsible for our blundering into this muck?"

  Voices lifted toward a babble. "Quiet!" Charles Reymont called. He didn't speak loud, but he pushed the sound from his lungs in such a way that it struck home. Several resentful glances were cast at him, but the talkers came to order.

  "I thought I had explained," Telander said. "The cloud is small, nonluminous, undetectable at any great distance. It has a high velocity. Thus, even if the robot carrier had taken our identical path, the nebulina would have been well offside at the time—more than fifty years ago, remember. Furthermore, we can be quite certain the robot did not go exactly as we are going. Quite apart from the relative motions of the stars, the distance between Sol and Beta Virginis is thirty-two light-years. That is greater than our poor minds can picture. The slightest variation in the curves taken from star to star means a difference of many astronomical units in the middle."

  "This thing couldn't have been foreseen," Reymont added. "The odds were against our running into it. But somebody has to draw the long odds now and then."

  Telander stiffened. "I did not recognize you, Constable," he said.

  Reymont flushed. "Captain, I was trying to expedite matters, so some clotbrains won't keep you there explaining the obvious till we smash."

  "No insults to shipmates, Constable. And kindly wait to be recognized before you speak."

  "I beg the captain's pardon." Reymont folded his arms and blanked his features.

  Telander said with care: "Please do not be afraid to ask questions, however elementary they may seem. You are all supposed to be educated in the theory, at least, of interstellar cosmonautics. But I, whose profession this is, know how strange the paradoxes are, how hard to keep straight in one's mind. Best if everyone understands, as well as may be, exactly what we face . . . Professor Glassgold?"

  The molecular biologist lowered her hand and said timidly, almost too low to hear: "Can't we—I mean—nebular objects like that, they are hard vacuums by ordinary standards. Aren't they? And we, we are not only traveling just under the speed of light . . . we are gaining more speed every second. And so more mass. Our mass right now, as far as the rest of the universe is concerned, must be, well, several hundred thousand tons. Which is enormous for a spaceship, even this big a spaceship, isn't it? So why can we not smash right on through? Why should we notice a bit of dust and gas?"

  "A good point," Telander said, "and if we are lucky, that is more or less what will happen. Not entirely, though. Remember, we are going unbelievably fast, so fast that we can actually use the hydrogen of space for fuel and exhaust. So if we run into a concentration of matter perhaps a hundred times as dense, at this speed, ja, we must hope that our forcefields can handle it, and the material components endure the stresses. Engineering extrapolations suggest we will not suffer grave damage. But those are mere extrapolations. There has been no chance as yet to test them. We are, after all, in a pioneering era . . . Dr. Iwamoto?"

  "S-s-sst! I presume we have no possibility of avoidances? One day ship's time is maybe one month cosmic time, so? We have not time to go around this nebu—nebulina?"

  "No, I fear not. We perceive ourselves as accelerating at a steady five gravities. At least, our instruments do, if not our bodies." Telander paused. His mouth twisted. "Excuse me. I maunder. But I want to make certain that everyone is quite clear about the facts. In terms of the outside universe, our acceleration is not constant, but steadily decreasing. Therefore we cannot change course fast. Even a full vector normal to our velocity would not get us far enough aside before the encounter. Ah, Engineer Fedoroff?"

  "Might it help if we decelerated? We must keep one or another mode operative at all times, to be sure, but I should think that deceleration now would soften the collision."

  "The computer has not made any recommendations yet. Probably the information is insufficient. In any event, the difference would be slight, a few hundred kilometers per second, out of almost three hundred thousand. No, regardless of what we do, we have no choice except to—ah—"

  "Bull through," Reymont murmured. Telander heard and cast him a look of annoyance. Reymont didn't seem to mind.

  As discussion progressed, though he grew increasingly tense, his eyes flickered from one speaker to the next and the lines between lips and nostrils deepened in his face. When at last Telander said, "Dismissed," the constable pushed almost brutally through the uncertain milling of the rest and plucked the captain's sleeve.

  "I think we had better hold a private talk, sir." His Swedish, like his English, was fluent, but marred by a choppy accent. He had been born and raised in the turbulent sublevels of Polyugorsk and somehow made his way to Mars (Telander was sure the means had been devious), where he fought with the Zebras during the troubles. Later he went homeward as far as Luna, joined the Rescue Corps and soon rose to colonel's rank. Telander knew Reymont had done much to organize the police branch of his service along more efficient lines than before, but nonetheless doubted the Authority's wisdom in offering him a berth on this expedition.

  The captain said with a chill, "Now is hardly the time to deny anyone access to information, Constable."

  "Oh, call our working by ourselves politeness, not to antagonize people," Reymont answered impatiently.

  Telander shrugged. "Come with me to the bridge, then. I have no time for special conferences."

  Williams and a couple of others seemed to feel differently, but Reymont drove them off with a glare and a bark. Telander must perforce smile a bit as he left the commons. "You do have your uses," he confessed.

  "As a parliamentary hatchet man? I think . . . I am afraid . . . there will be more call on me than that," Reymont said.

  "Well, conceivably at Beta Virginis. Dubious, though. The robot sent back no indication of intelligent life on the one seemin
gly Earthlike planet. At most, we might encounter a few savages armed with spears—who would probably not be hostile to us. The dangers are subtler."

  Reymont flushed as before. "I'm sorry," Telander added in haste. "I was thinking aloud. No intention of talking to you like a three-year-old. Of course you know all this. I am not entirely convinced by your claim that a degree of military-type discipline may be essential to surviving hazards like possible diseases. But we shall see. Certainly a specialist in rescue and disaster control is going to be welcome."

  "You maunder again, Captain," Reymont said. "You're pretty badly shaken by what we're driving into. I believe our chances are not quite as good as you pretended. Right?"

  Telander looked around. The corridor was empty, but still he lowered his voice. "I simply don't know. No Bussard ship has been tested under conditions like those ahead of us. Obviously! We will either get through in reasonable shape or we will die, a quick clean death. I saw no reason to make worse what hours remain for our people, by dwelling on that last."