Orbitsville

four

They were able to put off the decision for three days.

During that time there was only one direction in which the Bissendorf could logically go — towards the galactic south, in pursuit of the single vagrant wisp of particles which lingered behind the retreating weather fronts. They had caught it, barely, and the vast insubstantial ramjets formed by the ship’s magnetic fields had begun to gather power, boosting it towards light-speed and beyond. It was the prototypes of starships such as the Bissendorf which, a century earlier, had all but demolished Einsteinian physics. On the first tentative flights there had been something of the predicted increase in mass, but no time dilation effect, no impenetrable barrier at the speed of light. A new physics had been devised — based mainly on the work of the Canadian mathematician, Arthur Arthur — which took into account the lately observed fact that when a body of appreciable mass and gravitic field reached speeds approaching .2c it entered new frames of reference. Once a ship crossed the threshold velocity it created its own portable universe in which different rules applied, and it appeared that the great universal constant was not the speed of light. It was time itself.

On his earlier missions Garamond had been grateful that Einstein’s work had its limitations and that time did not slow down for the space traveller — he would have had no stomach for finding his wife ageing ten years for his one, or having a son who quickly grew older than himself. But on this voyage, his last for Starflight, with Aileen and Christopher aboard, it would have resolved many difficulties had he been able to trace a vast circle across one part of the galaxy and return to Earth to find, as promised by Einstein, that Elizabeth Lindstrom was long dead. Arthurian physics had blocked that notional escape door, however, and he was faced with the question of where to go in his year of stolen time.

His thinking on the matter was influenced by two major considerations. The first was that he had no intention of condemning the 450-strong crew of the Bissendorf to a slow death in an unknown part of the galaxy in a year’s time. The ship had to return to Earth and therefore his radius of action was limited to the distance it could cover in six months. Even supposing he travelled in a straight line to one preselected destination, the six-month limitation meant he would not reach far beyond the volume of space already totally explored by Starflight. Chances of this one desperate flight producing a habitable world on which to hide had been microscopic to begin with; when modified by the distance factor they vanished into realms of fantasy.

The other major consideration was a personal one. Garamond already knew where he wanted to go, but was having trouble justifying the decision.

“Cluster 803 is your best bet,” Clifford Napier said. He was leaning back in a simulated leather chair in Garamond’s quarters, and in his hand was a glass of liqueur whisky which he had not yet tasted but was holding up to the light to appreciate its colour. His heavy-lidded brown eyes were inscrutable as he continued with his thesis.

“You can make it with time to spare. It’s dense — average distance between suns half a light-year — so you’d be able to check a minimum of eight systems before having to pull out. And it’s prime exploration territory, Vance. As you know, the S.E.A. Board recommended that 803 should be given high priority when the next wave is being planned.”

Garamond sipped his own whisky, with its warmth of forgotten summers. “It makes sense, all right.” The two men sat without speaking for a time, listening to the faint hum of the ship’s superconducting flux pumps which was always present even in the engineered solitude of the skipper’s rooms.

“It makes sense,” Napier said finally, “but you don’t want to go there. Right?”

“Well, maybe it makes too much sense. Admincom could predict that we’d head for 803 and send a hundred ships into the region. A thousand ships.”

“Think they could catch us?”

“There’s always that chance,” Garamond said. “It’s been proved that four flickerwings getting just ahead of another and matching velocities can control it better than its own skipper just by deciding how much reaction mass to let slip by.”

There was another silence, then Napier gave a heavy sigh. “All right, Vance — where’s your map?”

“Which map?”

“The one showing Pengelly’s Star. That’s where you want to go, isn’t it?”

Garamond felt a surge of anger at having his innermost thoughts divined so accurately by the other man. “My father actually met Rufus Pengelly once,” he said defensively. “He told me he’d never known a man less capable of trickery — and if there was one thing my father could do it was judge character just by…” He broke off as Napier began to laugh.

“Vance, you don’t need to sell the idea to me. We’re not going to find the third world, so it doesn’t matter where we go, does it?”

Garamond’s anger was replaced by a growing sense of relief. He went to his desk, opened a drawer and took out four large photoprints which appeared to be of greyish metallic or stone surfaces on which were arranged a number of darker spots in a manner suggestive of star maps. The fuzziness of the markings and the blotchy texture of the background were due to the fact that the prints were computer reconstructions of star charts which had been destroyed by fire.

A special kind of fire, Garamond thought. The one which robbed us of a neighbour.

Sagania had been discovered early in the exploratory phase. It was less than a hundred light-years from Sol, only a quarter of the separation the best statisticians had computed as the average for technical civilizations throughout the galaxy. Even more remarkable was the coincidence of timescales. In the geological lifespans of Sagania and Earth the period in which intelligent life developed and flourished represented less than a second in the life of a man, yet the fantastic gamble had come off. Saganians and Men had coexisted, against all the odds, within interstellar hailing distance, each able to look into the night sky and see the other’s parent sun without optical aid. Both had taken the machine-using philosophy as far as the tapping of nuclear energy. Both had shared the outward urge, planned the building of starships, and — with their sub-beacons trembling in the blackness like candles in far-off windows — it was inevitable that there would have been a union.

Except that one day on Sagania — at a time when the first civilizations were being formed in the Valley of the Two Rivers on Earth — somebody had made a mistake. It may have been a politician who overplayed his hand, or a scientist who dealt the wrong cards, but the result was that Sagania lost its atmosphere, and its life, in an uncontrolled nuclear reaction which surged around the planet like a tidal wave of white fire.

Archaeologists from Earth, arriving seven thousand years later, had been able to discover very little about the final phase of Saganian civilization. Ironically or justly, according to one’s point of view, the beings who had represented the peak of the planet’s culture were the ones who removed virtually all trace of their existence. It was the older, humbler Saganian culture which, protected by the crust of centuries, had been uncovered by the electronic probes. Among the artifacts turned up were fragments of star maps which excited little comment, even though a few researchers had noticed that some of them showed a star which did not exist.

“This is the earliest fragment,” Garamond said, setting the photoprint on a table beside Napier. He pointed at a blurry speck. “And that’s the sun we’ve christened Pengelly’s Star. Here’s another map tentatively dated five hundred years later, and as you see — no Pengelly’s Star. One explanation is that at some time between when these two maps were drawn the star vanished.”

“Maybe it got left out by mistake,” Napier prompted, aware that Garamond wanted to go over all the familiar arguments once more.

“That can’t be — because we have two later maps, covering the same region but drawn several centuries apart, and they don’t record the star either. And a visual check right now shows nothing in that region.”

“Which proves it died.”

“That’s the obvious explanation. A quick but unspectacular flare-up — then extinction. Now here’s the fourth map, the one found by Doctor Pengelly. As you can see, this map shows our star.”

“Which proves it’s older than maps two and three.”

“Pengelly claims he excavated it at the highest level of all, that it’s the youngest.”

“Which proves he was a liar. This sort of thing has happened before, Vance.” Napier flicked the glossy prints with blunt fingers. “What about that affair in Crete a few hundred years ago? Archaeologists are always…”

“Trying to win acclaim for themselves. Pengelly had nothing to gain by lying about where he found the fragment. I personally believe it was drawn only a matter of decades before the Big Burn, well into the Saganians space-going era.” Garamond spoke with the flatness of utter conviction. “You’ll notice that on the fourth map the star isn’t represented by a simple dot. There are traces of a circle around it.”

Napier shrugged and took the first sip of his whisky. “It was a map showing the positions of extinct suns.”

“That’s a possibility. Possibly even a probability, but I’m betting that Saganian space technology was more advanced than we suspect. I’m betting that Pengelly’s Star was important to them in some way we don’t understand. They might have found a habitable world there.”

“It wouldn’t be habitable now. Not after its sun dying.”

“No — but there might be other maps, underground installations, anything.” Garamond suddenly heard his own words as though they were being spoken by a stranger, and he was appalled at the flimsiness of the logical structure which supported his family’s hopes for a future. He glanced instinctively at the door leading to the bedroom where Aileen and Chris were asleep. Napier, perceptive as ever, did not reply and for a while they drank in silence. Blocks of coloured light, created for decorative purposes by the same process which produced solid-image weather maps, drifted through the air of the room in random patterns, mingling and merging. Their changing reflections seemed to animate the gold snail on Garamond’s desk.

“We never found any Saganian starships,” Napier said.

“It doesn’t mean they didn’t have them. You’d find their ships anywhere but in the vicinity of a burnt-out home world.” There was another silence and the light-cubes continued to drift through the room like prisms of insubstantial gelatin.

Napier finished his drink and got up to refill his glass. “You’re almost making some kind of a case, but why did the Exploratory Arm never follow it up?”

“Let’s level with each other,” Garamond said. “How many years is it since you really believed that Starflight wants to find other worlds?”

“I…”

“They’ve got Terranova, which they sell off in hectare lots as if it was a Long Island development property in the old days. They’ve got all the ships, too. Man’s destiny is in the stars — just so long as he is prepared to sign half his life away to Starflight for the ride, and the other half for a plot of land. It’s a smooth-running system, Cliff, and a few cheap new worlds showing up would spoil it. That’s why there are so few ships, comparatively speaking, in the S.E.A.”

“But…”

“They’re more subtle than the railroad and mining companies in the States were when they set up their private towns, but the technique’s the same. What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to agree with you.” Napier punched his fist through a cube of lime-green radiance which floated away unaffected. “It doesn’t matter a damn where we go in this year, so let’s hunt down Pengelly’s Star. Have you any idea where it ought to be?”

“Some. Have a look at this chart.” As they walked over to the universal machine in the corner Garamond felt a sense of relief that Napier had been so easy to convince — to his own mind it gave the project a semblance of sanity. When he was within voice-acceptance range of the machine he called up the map it had prepared for him. A three-dimensional star chart appeared in the air above the console. One star trailed a curving wake of glowing red dashes in contrast to the solid green lines which represented the galactic drift of the others.

“I had no direct data on how far Pengelly’s Star was from Sagania,” Garamond said. “But the fact that we’re interested in it carries the implication that it was a Sol-type sun. This gives an approximate value for its intrinsic luminosity and, as the dot representing it on the earliest Saganian map was about equal in size to other existing stars of first magnitude, I was able to assign a distance from Sagania.”

“There’s a lot of assuming and assigning going on there,” Napier said doubtfully.

“Not all that much. Now, the stars throughout the entire region share the same proper motion and speed so, although they’ve all travelled a long way in seven thousand years, we can locate Pengelly’s Star on this line with a fair degree of certainty.”

“Certainty, he says. What’s the computed journey time? About four months?”

“Less if there’s the right sort of dust blowing around.”

“It’ll be there,” Napier said in a neutral voice. “It’s an ill wind…”

Later, when Napier had left to get some sleep, Garamond ordered the universal machine to convert an entire wall of the room into a forward-looking viewscreen. He sat for a long time in a deep chair, his drink untouched, staring at the stars and thinking about Napier’s final remark. Part of the invisible galactic winds from which the Bissendorf drew its reaction mass had been very ill winds for somebody, sometime, somewhere. Heavy particles, driven across the galactic wheel by the forces of ancient novae, were the richest and most sought-after harvest of all. An experienced flickerwing man could tell when his engine intakes had begun to feed on such a cloud just by feeling the deck grow more insistent against his feet. But a sun going nova engulfed its planets, converting them and everything on them to incandescent gas, and at each barely perceptible surge of the ship Garamond wondered if his engines were feeding on the ghosts of dawn-time civilizations, obliterating all their dreams, giving the final answer to all their questions.

He fell asleep sitting at the viewscreen, on the dark edge of the abyss.

Aileen Garamond had been ill for almost a week.

Part of the trouble was due to shock and the subsequent stress of being catapulted into a difficult environment, but Garamond was surprised to discover that his wife was far more sensitive than he to minute changes in acceleration caused by the ship crossing weather zones. He explained to her that the Bissendorf relied largely on interstellar hydrogen for reaction mass, ionizing it by continuously firing electron beams ahead of the ship, then sweeping it up with electromagnetic fields which guided it through the engine intakes. As the distribution of hydrogen was constant the ship would have had constant acceleration, and its crew would have enjoyed an unchanging apparent gravity, had there been no other considerations. Space, however, was not the quiescent vacuum described by the old Earth-bound astronomers. Vagrant clouds of charged particles from a dozen different kinds of sources swept through it like winds and tides, heavy and energetic, clashing, deflecting, creating silent storms where they met each other head-on.

“On available hydrogen alone our best acceleration would be half a gravity or less,” Garamond said. “That’s why we value the high-activity regions and, where possible, plot courses which take us through them. And that’s why you feel occasional changes in your weight.”

Aileen thought for a moment. “Couldn’t you vary the efficiency of the engines to compensate for those changes?”

“Hey!” Garamond gave a pleased laugh. “That’s the normal practice on a passenger ship. They run at roughly nine tenths of full power and this is automatically stepped up or down as the ship enters poor or rich volumes of space, so that shipboard gravity remains constant. But Exploratory Arm ships normally keep going full blast, and on a trip like this one…” Garamond fell silent.

“Go on, Vance.” Aileen sat up in the bed, revealing her familiar tawny torso. “You can’t take it easy when you’re being hunted.”

“It isn’t so much that we’re being hunted, it’s just that to make the best use of our time we ought to move as fast as possible.”

Aileen got out of the bed and came towards where he was seated, her nakedness incongruous in the functional surroundings of his quarters. “There’s no point in our going to Terranova, is there? Isn’t that what you’re telling me?”

He leaned his face against the warm cushion of her belly. “The ship can keep going for about a year. After that…” “And we won’t find a new planet. One we can live on, I mean.”

“There’s always the chance.”

“How much of a chance?”

“It has taken the entire fleet a hundred years of searching to find one habitable planet. Work it out for yourself.”

“I see.” Aileen stood with him for a moment, almost abstractedly holding his face against herself, then she turned away with an air of purpose. “It’s about time for that guided tour of the ship you promised Christopher and me.”

“Are you sure you’re feeling well enough?”

“I’ll get well enough,” she assured him.

Garamond suddenly felt happier than he had expected to be ever again. He nodded and went into the main room where Chris was eating breakfast. As soon as the boy had got over his unfortunate introduction to spaceflight on board the shuttle, he had adapted quickly and easily to his new surroundings. Garamond had eased things as much as possible by putting in very little time in the Bissendorf’s control room, allowing Napier and the other senior officers to run the ship. He helped his son to dress and by the time he had finished Aileen had joined them, looking slightly self-conscious in the dove-grey nurse’s coverall he had ordered for her from the quartermaster.

“You look fine,” he said before she could ask the age-old question.

Aileen examined herself critically. “What was wrong with my dress?”

“Nothing, if you’re on the recreation deck, but you must wear functional clothing when moving about the other sections of the ship. There aren’t any other wives on board, and I don’t like to rub it in.”

“But you told me a third of the crew were women.”

“That’s right. We have a hundred-and-fifty female crew of varying ages and rank. On a long trip there’s always a lot of short-term coupling going on, and occasionally there’s a marriage, but no woman is taken on for purely biological reasons. Everybody has a job to do.”

“Don’t sound so stuffy, Vance.” Aileen looked down at Christopher, then back at her husband. “What about Christopher? Does everybody know why we’re here?”

“No. I blocked the communications channels while we were on the shuttle. The one other person on board who knows the whole story is Cliff Napier — all the others can only guess I’m in some sort of a jam, but they won’t be too concerned about it.” Garamond smiled as he remembered the old flickerwingers’ joke. “It’s a kind of relativity effect — the faster and farther you go, the smaller the President gets.”

“Couldn’t they have heard about it on the radio since then?”

Garamond shook his head emphatically. “It’s impossible to communicate with a ship when it’s under way. No signal can get through the fields. The crew will probably decide I walked out on Elizabeth the way a commander called Witsch once did. If anything, I’ll go up in their estimation.”

It took more than an hour to tour the various sections and levels of the Bissendorf, starting with the command deck and moving ‘downwards’ through the various administrative, technical and workshop levels to the field generating stations, and the pods containing the flux pumps and hydrogen fusion plant. At the end of the tour Garamond realized, with a dull sense of astonishment, that for a while he had managed to forget that he and his family were under sentence of death.

Boosted by the ion-rich tides of space, the ship maintained an average acceleration of 13 metres per second squared. Punishing though this was to the crew, whose weight had apparently increased by one third, it was a rate of speed-increase which would have required several months before the Bissendorf could have reached the speed of light under Einsteinian laws. After only seven weeks, however, the ship had attained a speed of fifty million metres a second — the magical threshold figure above which Arthurian physics held sway — and new phenomena, inexplicable in terms of low-speed systems, were observed. To those on board acceleration remained constant, yet the Bissendorf’s speed increased sharply until, at the mid-point of the voyage, only twelve days later, it was travelling at vast multiples of the speed of light.

Retardation produced a mirror image of the distance-against-time graph, and in an elapsed time of four months the ship was in the computed vicinity of Pengelly’s Star.

“I’m sorry, Vance.” Cliff Napier’s heavy-boned face was sombre as he spoke. “There’s just no sign of it. Yamoto says that if we were within ten light-years of a black sun his instruments couldn’t miss it.”

“Is he positive?”

“He’s positive. In fact, according to him there’s less spatial background activity than normal.”

I’m not going to let it happen, Garamond thought irrationally. Aloud he said, “Let’s go down to the observatory — I want to talk to Yamoto about this.”

“I’ll put him on your viewer now.”

“No, I want to see him in person.” Garamond left the central command console and nodded to Gunther, the second exec, to take over. This was the moment he had been dreading since the Bissendorf’s engines had been shut down an hour earlier, making it possible — in the absence of the all-devouring intake fields — to carry out radiation checks of the surrounding space. The reason he was going to the observatory in person was that he had a sudden need to move his arms and legs, to respond to the crushing sense of urgency which had been absent while the ship was in flight and now was back with him again. He wanted some time away from the watchful eyes of the bridge personnel.

“I’m sorry, Vance.” Napier always had trouble adjusting to zero-gravity conditions and his massive figure swayed precariously as he walked in magnetic boots to the elevator shaft.

“You said that before.” “I know, but I’d begun to believe we were on to something, and somehow I feel guilty over the way it has turned out.”

“That’s crazy — we always knew it was a long shot,” Garamond said. You liar, he told himself. You didn’t believe it was a long shot at all. You had convinced yourself you’d find a signpost to the third world because you couldn’t face the fact that you condemned your wife and son to death.

As the elevator was taking him down he thought back, for perhaps the thousandth time, to that afternoon on the terrace at Starflight House. All he had had to do was keep an eye on Harald Lindstrom, to refuse when asked for permission to run, to do what anybody else would have done in the same circumstances. Instead, he had let the boy trick him into doing his hardened spacefarer bit, then he had allowed himself to be pressured, then he had turned his back and indulged in daydreams while Harald was climbing, then he had been too slow in reaching the statue while the first fatal millimetre of daylight opened up between the boy’s fingers and the metal construction and he was falling… and falling… falling.

“Here we are.” Napier opened the elevator door, revealing a tunnel-like corridor at the end of which was the Bissendorf’s astronomical observatory.

“Thanks.” Garamond fought to suppress a sense of unreality as he walked out of the elevator. He saw, as in a dream, the white-clad figure of Sammy Yamoto standing at the far end of the corridor waving to him. His brain was trying in a numbed way to deal with the paradox that moments of truth, those instants when reality cannot be avoided, always seem unreal. And the truth was that his wife and child were going to die. Because of him.

“For a man who found nothing,” Napier commented, “Sammy Yamoto’s looking pretty excited.”

Garamond summoned his mind back from grey wanderings.

Yamoto came to meet him, plum-coloured lips trembling slightly. “We’ve found something! After I spoke to Mister Napier I became curious over the fact that there was less matter per cubic centimetre than the galactic norm. It was as if the region had been swept by a passing sun, yet there was no sun around.”

“What did you find?”

“I’d already checked out the electro-magnetic spectrum and knew there couldn’t be a sun nearby, but I got a crazy impulse and checked the gravitic spectrum anyway.” Yamoto was a fifty-year-old man who had looked on many worlds in his lifetime, yet his face was the face of a man in shock. Garamond felt the first stirrings of a powerful elation.

“Go on,” Napier said from behind him.

“I found a gravity source of stellar magnitude less than a tenth of a light-year away, so…”

“I knew it!” Napier’s voice was hoarse. “We’ve found Pengelly’s Star.”

Garamond’s eyes were locked on the astronomer’s. “Let Mister Yamoto speak.”

“So I took some tachyonic readings to get an approximation of the object’s size and surface composition, and… You aren’t going to believe this, Mister Garamond.”

“Try me,” Garamond said. “As far as I can tell…” Yamoto swallowed painfully. “As far as I can tell, the object out there… the thing we have discovered is a spaceship over three hundred million kilometres in diameter!”