To Outlive Eternity Read online

  His cabin half was a mess. The brackets holding his meager personal belongings on their shelves had given way and let everything smash across the deck. He found his stunner beneath his regular bunk and strapped it on before sliding aside the panel which cut off the other section.

  Chi-yuen Ai-ling's slight form lay inert. Reymont unlatched her faceplate and listened carefully. Her breathing was normal, no wheeze or gurgle to suggest injured lungs. Probably she had just fainted. He left her. Others might need help worse. No strong sentiment was between him and her anyway. After breaking up with Ingrid Lindgren and playing the field a bit, he'd moved in with Chi-yuen on a basis of mutual convenience. She didn't want to appear standoffish, but her consuming interest was in developing some ideas about planetology which the probe data from their goal had suggested to her. A steady relationship with one man kept the rest from making well-intentioned advances. Similarly, he wanted to retire from close human contacts without being obvious about it. Nobody had to know that the panel across this cabin was usually drawn shut.

  Ivan Fedoroff was already out in the corridor. "How goes it?" Reymont hailed.

  "I am on my way to see," the engineer flung back and ran.

  "But—" Reymont cut off his words and pushed into Johann Freiwald's section. The machinist sat slumped on his bunk. "Raus mit dir," Reymont said. "And don't forget your gun."

  "I have a headache like carpenters in my skull," Freiwald protested.

  "You offered to help me. I thought you were a man."

  * * *

  Freiwald cast Reymont a resentful glance, but got into motion. They were busy for the next hour. Leonora Christine's crew was busier yet, inspecting, measuring, conferring low-voiced and apart. But that, at least, gave them little time to feel pain or let terror grow. The scientist majority had no such anodyne. From the fact that they were alive and the ship apparently working as before, they might have drawn cheer . . . only why didn't Captain Telander announce anything? Reymont bullied them into commons, started some making coffee and others attending to the most badly bruised. At last he went alone to the command bridge.

  The door was closed. He knocked. Fedoroff's voice boomed, "No admittance. Please wait for the captain to address you."

  "This is the constable," Reymont said.

  "Well? Haven't you anything better to do than meddle?" Lindgren called.

  "I've assembled your passengers," Reymont said. "They're getting over being stunned. They're beginning to realize something isn't quite right. Not knowing what, in their present condition, will crack them open. Maybe we won't be able to glue the pieces back together."

  "Go tell them an announcement will be made very soon," Telander said without steadiness.

  "You tell them. The intercom's working, isn't it? Tell them you're making exact evaluations of damage, so you can lay out a program for repair as soon as possible. But first let me in to help find words for announcing the disaster."

  The door flew wide. Fedoroff grabbed Reymont's arm and tried to pull him through. Reymont yanked free, an expert movement. His other hand smacked stingingly edge-on across the engineer's wrist. "Don't do that," he said. "Not ever." He stepped into the bridge and closed the door himself.

  Fedoroff growled and doubled his fists. Lindgren hurried to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. "No, Ivan," she begged. "Please." The Russian subsided, stiffly. They glowered at him in the thrumming stillness: captain, mate, engineer, second engineer, navigation officer, biosystems chief. He looked past them. The console had suffered, some panels twisted, some meters torn loose. "Is that the trouble?" he asked, pointing.

  "No," said Boudreau, the navigator. "Instruments can be replaced."

  Reymont sought the viewscope. The compensator circuits were also dead. He put his head into the hood of the electronic periscope.

  A hemispheric simulacrum sprang from the darkness at him: uncompensated, the view he would actually have seen from outside on the hull. At light speed, aberration distorted the sky. The stars were crowded forward, streaming thinly amidships; and because of Doppler effect they shone steel blue, violet, X-ray. Aft the patterns approached what had once been familiar—but not very closely, and those stars were reddened, like dying embers, as if time were snuffing them out. Reymont shuddered a little and drew his head back into the comforting smallness of the bridge.

  "Well?" he said.

  "The decelerator system—" Telander swallowed. "We cannot stop."

  Reymont's face went altogether expressionless. "Go on," he said.

  Fedoroff spoke. His words came flat with fury. "You will recall, I hope, we had activated the decelerators, two of them anyhow, but they belong to an integrated system. Which has to be a separate system from the accelerators, since to slow down we do not push gas through a ram jet but reverse its vector."

  Reymont did not stir at the insult. Lindgren caught her breath. After a moment Fedoroff sagged.

  "Well," he said tiredly, "the accelerators were operating too. I imagine, on that account, their field strength protected them. But the decelerators—out. Wrecked."

  "How?"

  "We can only determine that the thermonuclear core is extinguished. In the nature of the case, the decelerators must have been subject to greater stress than the accelerators. I suppose that those forces, reacting through the hydromagnetic fields, broke apart the material assembly which they contain. That assembly, you know, generates and maintains the magnetic bottle which itself contains the ongoing atomic reactions." Fedoroff looked at the deck. "No doubt we could repair the system if we could get at it," he muttered. "But no one can go near the reaction which powers the accelerator and live long enough to do any work. Nor could any remote-control robot we might build. Too much radiation for its circuits. And, of course, we cannot shut off the accelerator. That would mean shutting off the whole set of forcefields which it maintains. Hydrogen bombardment would kill everyone aboard within a minute."

  "We have no directional control whatsoever?" Reymont asked, still without tone.

  "Yes, yes, we do that. The accelerator pattern can be varied," Boudreau said. "It has four Venturis, and we can damp down some—get a sidewise as well as forward vector—but don't you see, on any path we take, we must continue accelerating or we die."

  "Accelerating forever," Telander said.

  "At least, though," Lindgren whispered, "we can stay in the galaxy. Swing around and around its heart." Her gaze went to the viewscope, and they knew what she thought of: behind that curtain of blue stars, blackness, intergalactic void, an ultimate aloneness. "At least . . . we can grow old . . . with suns around us. Even if we can't ever touch a planet again."

  Telander's features writhed. He cried, "How do I tell our people?"

  "We have no hope," Reymont said. It was hardly a question.

  "None," Fedoroff said.

  "Oh, we can live out our lives," said Pereira. "The biosystems have triple protection. They are intact. We could actually increase their productivity. Do not fear hunger or thirst or suffocation. But I would not advise that we have children."

  Lindgren said out of nightmare, staring at a bulkhead as if she could see through: "When the last of us dies—We must put in an automatic cutoff. The ship must not keep on running after our deaths. Let the radiation do what it will, let cosmic friction break her to bits and let the bits drift off into those millions of light-years . . . yonder."

  "Why?" asked Reymont like a machine.

  "Isn't it obvious? If we throw ourselves into a circular path . . . consuming hydrogen in our accelerator, always traveling faster, running tau down and down as the thousands of years pass . . . we get more massive. We could end by consuming the galaxy."

  Telander laughed, a harsh little noise in his throat. "No. Not that," he said. "I have seen calculations. They were made in the early stages of discussing Bussard ships. Someone worried about one getting out of control. But it isn't serious. A spacecraft, any human work, is too insignificant. Tau would have to become somethi
ng like, well, shall we say ten to the minus twentieth power, before the ship's mass was equal to that of a very small star. And the odds are always astronomical against her colliding with anything more important than a nebula. Besides, the universe won't last so long. No, we are going to die. But the cosmos is safe from us."

  "How long can we live?" Lindgren breathed. She cut Pereira off. "I don't mean in ship's time. If you say we can manage to die of old age, I believe you. But I think in a year or two we will stop eating, or cut our throats, or agree to turn the accelerator off, or something."

  "Not if I can help it," Reymont snapped.

  She gave him a dreary look. "Do you mean you would continue—not just cut off from man, from living Earth, but from the whole universe?"

  He regarded her steadily in return. One hand rested on his gun butt. "Don't you have that much guts?" he asked.

  "But fifty years inside this flying hell!" she nearly screamed. "How many will that be outside?"

  "Easy," Fedoroff said and took her by the shoulders. She clung to him and snatched after air.

  Boudreau said, carefully dry: "The time relationship appears to be somewhat academic to us, n'est-ce pas? And it depends in any case on what course we take. If we let ourselves continue straight out into space, naturally we will enter a much thinner interstellar medium. The rate of decrease of tau will be proportionately smaller than here, and get smaller as we move beyond this entire group of galaxies. On the other hand, if we stay within our own galaxy, if we try for a cyclical path taking us through the denser hydrogen concentrations, we could soon get a very small tau. We might see billions of years go by. That could be quite fascinating." His smile was forced. "And we have each other. A goodly company. I am with the constable. There are better ways to live, but also worse."

  Lindgren hid her face against Fedoroff's breast. He held her with one arm, patted her awkwardly with the other hand. After a while (an hour or so in the history of the stars) she looked up again.

  "I'm sorry," she gulped. "You're right. We do have each other." Her glance went from one to the next, ending at Reymont.

  "But, but how shall I tell them?" Telander groaned.

  "I suggest you do not," Reymont said. "Let the mate break the news."

  "What?" Lindgren asked.

  "You are a simpático person," he said. "I remember."

  She moved from Fedoroff's loosened grasp, a step toward Reymont. Abruptly the constable tautened. He stood for a second as if blind, before he whirled from her and confronted the navigator.

  "Quick!" he exclaimed. "Do you know—"

  "If you think I should—" Lindgren had begun to say.

  "Not now," he interrupted, "Boudreau, come here! We have some figuring to do."

  V

  The silence went on and on.

  Ingrid Lindgren stared from the dais where she stood with Lars Telander, down at her people. They looked back at her. And not a one in that chamber could find words.

  Hers had been well chosen. The truth was less savage in her voice than in any man's. But when she came to her planned midpoint—"We have lost Earth, lost Beta Three, lost the mankind we belonged to. We have left to us courage, love and, yes, hope"—she could not continue. She stood with lip caught between teeth, fingers twisted together, and the slow tears ran from her eyes.

  Telander bestirred himself. "Ah . . . if you will be so good," he tried, "Kindly listen. A means does not exist . . ." The ship jeered at him in her tone of distant lightnings.

  Glassgold broke. She did not weep loudly, but her very struggle to stop made the sound more dreadful. M'Botu, beside her, attempted consolation. He, though, had clamped such stoicism on himself that he might as well have been a robot. Iwamoto withdrew a little from them both, from them all, one could see how he pulled his soul into some nirvana with a lock on its door. Williams shook his fists at the overhead and raved. Another voice, female, started to keen. A woman considered the man with whom she had been keeping company, said, "You, for my whole life?" and stalked from him. He tried to follow her and bumped into a crewman who snarled and offered to fight if he didn't apologize. A seething went through the entire human mass.

  "Listen to me," Telander called. "Please listen."

  Reymont shook loose the arm which Chi-yuen Ai-ling clutched, in the first row, and jumped onto the dais. "You'll never bring them around that way," he warned sotto voce. "You've always worked with disciplined professionals. Let me handle these civilians." He turned on them. "Quiet, there!" Echoes bounced around his roar. "Shut your hatches. Act like adults for once. We haven't the personnel to change your diapers for you."

  Williams yelped with resentment. M'Botu growled, rather more meaningfully. Reymont drew his stunner. "Hold your places!" He dropped his vocal volume, but everyone heard him as if he stood beside. "The first one to move gets knocked out. Afterward we'll court-martial him. I'm the constable of this expedition, and I intend to maintain order and effective cooperation." He grinned into their faces. "If you feel I exceed my authority, you're welcome to file a complaint with the appropriate bureau in Stockholm. But for now, you'll listen!"

  He tongue-lashed them until their adrenals seemed to be active again. It didn't take long.

  "Very well," he finished and turned mild. "We'll say no more about this. I realize you've had a shock which none of you were prepared psychologically to meet. But we've nevertheless got a problem. And it has a solution, too, of sorts, if we can work together. I repeat: if."

  Lindgren had swallowed her weeping. "I think I was supposed to—" she said. He shook his head at her and went on:

  "We can't repair the decelerators because we can't turn off the accelerators. The reason is, as the mate has explained, we must keep its forcefields for shielding against interstellar gas. So it looks as if we're bottled in this hull. Which was never intended to house us for more than a few years, ship's time. Well, I don't like the prospect either. But I did get an idea. A possibility of escape, if we have the nerve and determination. Navigator Boudreau checked the figures for me. We have a chance of success."

  "Get to the point, will you?" yelled Williams.

  "I'm glad to see some spirit," Reymont said. "It'll have to be kept under control, though or we are finished. But, to make this as short as possible—afterward Captain Telander and the specialist officers can explain details—the idea is this."

  His flat delivery might have been used to describe a new method of bookkeeping. "If we can leave the galaxy, get out where gas is virtually nonexistent in space, we can safely turn off the fields. Then we can go outside of the hull and repair the decelerators. Now astronomical data are not as precise as one might like, but we do know that even in nearby intergalactic space, the medium is too dense. Much thinner than here, of course, but still so thick, in terms of atoms struck per second, as to kill us without protection.

  "However, galaxies generally occur in clusters. Our galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, M31 in Andromeda, and thirteen others, large and small, make one such group. The space it occupies is about six million light-years across. Beyond them is an enormously greater distance to the next galactic family. And in that stretch, we hope, the gas is thin enough for us not to need shielding."

  Reymont lifted both hands. He had holstered his gun. "Wait, wait!" he managed to laugh. "Don't bother. I already know what you're trying to say. Ten or twenty million light-years, however far we must go, is impossible. We haven't the tau for it. A ratio of fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand, does us no good whatsoever. Agreed. But remember, we have no limit on our tau. Especially if we widen our scoop fields and, also, pass through parts of this galaxy where gas is denser than here. Both of these we can do. The exact parameters we've been using were determined by our course to Beta Virginis; but the ship is not restricted to them. We could go as high as ten gee, maybe higher.

  "So. A rough estimate indicates that if we swing partway around this galaxy and then plunge straight inward through its middle and out the other side—we'd have to m
ake that partial circuit anyway; we can't turn on a ten-öre coin at our speed!—we can pick up the necessary tau. Remember, it'll decrease constantly. Our transmit time to Beta would have been much less than we figured on if we hadn't meant to stop there: if, instead of making turnover at midpassage, we had simply kept cramming on the speed. Navigator Boudreau estimates—estimates, mind you; we'll have to gather data as we go; but a good, informed guess—he thinks we can finish with this galaxy and head out beyond it in a little over one year."

  "How long cosmic time?" challenged from the gathering.

  "Does that matter?" Reymont retorted. "You know the dimensions. The galactic disk is about 100,000 light-years in diameter. At present we're some 30,000 light-years from the center. A quarter million years altogether? Who can tell? It'll depend on what course we take, which in turn will depend on what long-range observation can show us." He stabbed a finger at them. "I know. You wonder, what if we hit a cloud such as got us into this miserable situation. Well, I have two answers for that. First, we have to take some chances. But second, as our tau gets smaller and smaller, we'll be able to use regions which are denser and denser. We'll have too much mass to be affected as we were this time. Do you see? The more we have, the more we can get. We may well leave the galaxy with an universe tau on the order of a hundred million. If so, by ship's time we'll be outside of this entire galactic cluster in days!"