‘As a matter of fact,’ Kivi smiled, ‘I suspect the crew would prefer to return at once. I know I would.’
‘I’ve explained how shortsighted that would be, from your own viewpoint,’ said Coffin. ‘Space travel has never shown a financial profit. It’s always been a scientific venture, an exploration – an ideal, if you like. It won’t survive unless people are interested in supporting it. A successful colony on Rustum will provide the inspiration which Earth needs to keep on sending out explorers.’
‘That’s your opinion,’ said Kivi.
‘I hope you realize,’ said the very young man with ornate sarcasm, ‘that every second we sit here arguing takes us 150,000 kilometers further from home.’
‘Dinna fash yourself,’ said Lochaber. ‘Whatever we do, that girl of yours will be an old carline before you reach Earth.’
De Smet was still choking at Kivi: ‘You lousy ferryman, if you think you can make pawns of us —’
And Kivi snapped back, ‘If you don’t watch your language, clodhugger, I will come over there and stuff you down your own throat.’
‘Order!’ cried Coffin. ‘Order!’
Teresa echoed him: ‘Please … for all our lives’ sake … don’t you know where we are? You’ve got a few centimeters of wall between you and zero! Please, we can’t fight or we’ll never see any planet again.’
But she did not say it weeping, or as a beggary. It was almost a mother’s voice (strange, in an unmarried woman) and it quieted the male snarling more than Coffin’s shouts.
The fleet captain said finally: That will do. Everybody’s too worked up to think. Debate is adjourned for four duty periods, sixteen hours. Discuss the problem with your shipmates, get some sleep, and report the consensus at the next meeting.’
‘Sixteen hours?’ yelped someone. ‘Do you know how much return time that adds?’
‘You heard me,’ said Coffin. ‘Anyone who wants to argue may do so from the brig. Dismissed!’
He snapped off the screen switch.
Kivi, temper eased, gave him a slow confidential grin. That heavy-father act works nearly every time, no?’
Coffin pushed from the table. ‘I’m going out,’ he said. His voice sounded harsh to him, unfamiliar. ‘Carry on.’
He had never felt so alone before, not even the night his father died. O God, Who spake unto Moses in the wilderness, reveal now Thy will But God was silent, and Coffin turned blindly to the only other help he could think of.
3
Space armored, he paused a moment in the airlock before continuing. He had been an astronaut for twenty-five years – for a century if you added time in the vats – but he could still not look upon naked creation without fear.
An infinite blackness flashed: stars beyond stars, to the bright cataract of the Milky Way and on out to other galaxies and flocks of galaxies, until the light which a telescope might now register had been born before the Earth. Looking from his airlock cave, past the radio web and the other ships, Coffin felt himself drown in enbrmousness, coldness, and total silence. But he knew that this vacuum burned and roared with lethal energies, roiled with currents of gas and dust more massive than planets, and travailed with the birth of new suns; and he said to himself the most dreadful of names, I am that I am, and sweat formed chilly globules under his arms.
This much a man could see within the Solar System. Traveling at half light-speed stretched the human mind still further, until often it ripped across and another lunatic was shoved into deepsleep. For aberration redrew the sky, crowding stars toward the bows, so that the ships plunged at a cloud of Doppler hell-blue. The constellations lay thinly abeam; you looked out into the dark. Aft, Sol was still the brightest object in heaven, but it had gained a sullen red tinge, as if already grown old, as if the prodigal would return from far places to find his home buried under ice.
What is man that Thou art mindful of him? The line gave its accustomed comfort; for the Sun-maker had also wrought this flesh, atom by atom, and at the very least would think the soul worthy of hell. Coffin had never understood how his atheist colleagues endured free space.
Well —
He took aim at the next hull and fired his little spring-powered crossbow. A light line unreeled behind the magnetic bolt. He tested its security with habitual care, pulled himself along until he had reached the other ship, yanked the bolt loose and fired again, and so on from hull to slowly orbiting hull, until he reached the Pioneer,
Its awkward ugly shape was like a protective wall against the stars. Coffin drew himself past the ion tubes, now cold. Their skeletal structure seemed impossibly frail to have hurled forth peeled atoms at ½Rc. Mass tanks bulked around the vessel. Allowing for deceleration, plus a small margin, the mass ratio was about nine to one, nine tons expelled for each ton that went to e Eridani. Months would be required at Rustum to refine enough reaction material for the voyage home. Meanwhile, such of the crew as weren’t producing it would help the colony get established.
If the colony ever did.
Coffin reached the forward airlock and pressed the ‘doorbell.’ The outer valve opened for him and he cycled through. First Officer Karamchand met him and helped him doff armor. The other man on duty found an excuse to approach and listen, for monotony was as corrosive out here as distance and strangeness.
‘Ah, sir. What brings you over?’
Coffin braced himself. Embarrassment roughened his tone: I want to see Miss Zeleny.’
‘Of course…. But why come yourself? I mean, the telecircuit—’
‘In person!’ barked Coffin.
‘What?’ escaped the crewman. He propelled himself backward in terror of a wigging. Coffin ignored him.
‘Emergency,’ he snapped. ‘Please intercom her and arrange for a private discussion.’
‘Why … why … yes, sir. At once. Will you wait here … I mean … yes, sir!’ Karamchand shot down the corridor.
Coffin felt a sour smile on his own lips. He could sympathize with the men’s confusion. His own law about the women had been like steel, and now he violated it himself.
The trouble was, he thought, no one knew if it was even required. Hitherto there had been few enough women crossing space, and they only within the Solar System, on segregated ships. There was no background of interstellar experience. It seemed obvious, though, that a man on his year watch should not be asked to tend deep-sleeping female colonists. (Or vice versa!) And would not waking men and women, freely intermingling, be potentially even more explosive? Coffin had decided that harem-like seclusion was the best approach. Husbands and wives were not to be awake at the same times.
Bad enough for the ordinary male to know that a woman lay within a few kilometers. Bad enough to see her veiled whenever there was a teleconference. (Or did the masks make matters worse, by challenging the imagination? Who knew?) Best seal off the living quarters and coldvat sections of the craft which bore her. Crewmen standing watches on those particular ships had better return to their own vessels to sleep and eat. Do it that way, pray God you were being wise, and hope Satan would not snatch too many opportunities when everyone was roused on Rustum.
Coffin braced his muscles. The rules wouldn’t apply if a large meteor struck us, he reminded himself. What has come up is more dangerous than that. So never mind what anyone thinks.
Karamchand returned to salute him and say breathlessly: ‘Miss Zeleny will see you, Captain. This way, if you please.’
‘Thanks.’ Coffin followed to the main bulkhead. Only the women had a key to its door. But now the door stood ajar. Coffin pushed himself through so hard that he overshot and caromed off the farther wall.
Teresa laughed. She closed the door and locked it. ‘Just to make them feel safe out there,’ she said. ‘Poor well-meaning men! Welcome, Captain.’
He turned about, almost dreading the instant. Her tall form was decent in baggy coveralls, but she had dropped the hood. She wasn’t pretty, he supposed: Snub-nosed, square-jawed, verging on spinsterhoo
d. But he had liked her way of smiling.
‘I—’ He found no words.
‘Follow me.’ She led him down a short passage, handover-hand along the null-gee rungs. ‘I’ve warned the other girls to stay away. You needn’t fear being shocked.’ At the end of the corridor was a partitioned-off cubicle. Few enough personal goods could be taken along, but she had made this place hers with a painting, a battered Shakespeare, the works of Anker, a microplayer. Her tapes ran to Bach, late Beethoven, and Richard Strauss, music which could be studied endlessly. She took hold of a stanchion and nodded, abruptly growing serious.
‘What do you want to see me about, Captain?’
Coffin secured himself by the crook of an arm and stared at his hands. The fingers strained against each other. ‘I wish I could give you a clear reply,’ he said, low and with difficulty. I’ve never encountered any problem like this before. If it involved only men, I guess I could handle it. But there are women along, and children.’
‘And you want a female viewpoint. You’re wiser than I had realized. But why me?’
He forced himself to meet her eyes. ‘You appear the most sensible of the women awake.’
‘Really!’ She laughed. ‘I appreciate the compliment, but must you deliver it in that parade ground voice, and glare at me to boot? Relax, Captain.’ She cocked her head, studying him. ‘I’ve a question for you, too. Several of the girls don’t get this business of the critical point. I tried to explain, but I was only an R. N. at home and never did have any mathematical brains, so I’m afraid I muddled it rather. Could you put it in words of one and a half syllables?’
‘Do you mean the equal-time point?’
‘The Point of No Return, some of them call it.’
‘Nonsense! It’s only— Well, look at it this way. We accelerated from Sol at one gravity. We dare not apply more acceleration, though we could, because so much equipment aboard has been lightly built to save mass. The coldvats, for example, would collapse and kill the people inside, if we went as high as one-point-five gee. Very well. It took us about 180 days to reach maximum velocity. In the course of that period, we covered not quite one and a half light-months of distance. We will now go free for almost forty years. (Cosmic time, that is. The relativistic clock paradox will make it around 35 years aboard ship. No matter.) At the end of our journey, we’ll decelerate at One gee for some 180 days, covering a final light-month and a half, and enter the e Eridani System with low relative speed. Our star-to-star orbit was plotted with care, but of course the unavoidable errors may add up to many Astronomical Units. Furthermore, we have to maneuver, put our ships in orbit around Rustum, send ferry craft back and forth. So we carry a reaction-mass reserve which allows us a total velocity change of about 1000 kilometers per second once we get there.
‘Now imagine we’d decided to turn back immediately after reaching full speed. We’d have to decelerate at the same one gee. We’d have been a year in space and almost a quarter light-year from Sol before we achieved relative rest and could start back. To go those three light-months at 1000 K.P.S. takes roughly 72 years. But the whole round trip as originally scheduled, with a one-year layover at Rustum, runs just about 83 years!
‘Obviously there’s some point in time beyond which we can actually get home quicker by staying with the original plan. This date lies after eight months of free fall, or not quite fourteen months from departure. We’re only a couple of months from the critical moment right now. If we start back at once, we’ll still have been gone from Earth for about 76 years. Each day we wait adds months to the return trip. No wonder there’s impatience!’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘What they’re afraid of, the ones who want to go back, is that the Earth they knew will have slipped away from them, changed beyond recognition, in the extra time. But can’t they understand that it already has?’
‘Maybe they’re afraid to understand,’ Coffin said.
‘You keep surprising me, Captain,’ said Teresa with a hint of her smile. ‘You actually show a bit of human sympathy.’
And, thought a far-off impersonal part of Coffin, you showed enough to put me at ease by getting me to lecture you with safe impersonal figures. But he didn’t mind. She had succeeded. He could now free-sit, face to face, alone, and talk to her like a friend.
‘What puzzles me,’ he said, ‘is why anybody at all, not to speak of so many, wants to give up. If we turned home this minute, we’d only save about seven years. Why don’t we simply continue to Rustum and decide there what to do?’
‘I think that’s impossible,’ said Teresa. ‘You see, no one in his right mind wants to be a pioneer. To explore, yes; to settle rich new country with known and limited hazards, yes; but not to risk his children, his whole racial future, on as wild a gamble as this. The colonizing project resulted from an insoluble conflict at home. If that conflict has ended —’
‘But… you and Lochaber … you pointed out that it has not ended. That at best, Earth offers you a breathing spell.’
‘Still, most people would like to believe otherwise, wouldn’t they?’
‘All right,’ said Coffin. ‘But I’m sure a number of people now in deepsleep would agree with you and elect to stay on Rustum. Why can’t we take them there first? It seems only fair. Then those who don’t want to settle can return with the fleet.’
‘Uh-uh.’ Her hair was short, but it floated in loose waves when she shook her head, and light rippled mahogany across it. ‘I’ve studied your reports. A handful couldn’t survive on Rustum. Three thousand is none too many. It will have to be unanimous, whatever is decided.’
‘I was trying to avoid that conclusion,’ he said wearily, ‘but I guess I can’t. Okay, why don’t they want to look Rustum over and put it to a vote? The quitters must realize they have a majority. They can afford to do the fair thing.’
‘No. And I’ll tell you why, Captain,’ she said. ‘I know Coenrad de Smet well, and one or two others. They’re good men. You do wrong to call them quitters. But they do believe, quite honestly, it’s best to go back. Now maybe they haven’t figured it out consciously, but they must know intuitively that if we got to Rustum, the vote might well go against them. I’ve seen plenty of your photographs, Captain. Rustum may be hard and dangerous, but it’s so beautiful that I can hardly wait for the reality. There’s room, freedom, unpoisoned air. We’ll remember all that we hated on Earth; we’ll see the horror of going back into deepsleep; we’ll reflect much more soberly than now, when we’re fed up with being in space, how long a time will have passed before we can get back to Earth, and what a gamble we’d be taking on finding a tolerable situation there. Except for the higher gravity, and it won’t seem so bad until we start doing heavy manual labor, none of the hardships of Rustum will have touched us; whereas the hardships of space travel and of Earth will still be vivid memories. A lot of people will change their minds and vote to stay. Perhaps a majority will. De Smet knows that. He won’t risk it. He might get trapped himself, by the glamor of Rustum!’
Coffin murmured thoughtfully: ‘After just a few days of deceleration, there won’t be enough reaction mass left to do anything but continue back to Sol.’
‘De Smet knows that too,’ said Teresa. ‘Captain, you can make a hard decision and stick to it. That’s why you have your job. But maybe you forget how few people can – how most of us pray that someone or something will come along and tell us what to do. Even under severe pressure, the decision to go to Rustum was difficult. Now that there’s a chance to undo our act, to go back to being safe and comfortable – but nevertheless a real risk that by the time we get home, Earth will no longer be safe or comfortable for anyone – we’ve been forced to decide all over again. It’s agony, Captain! De Smet and his supporters are strong men, in their way. They’ll compel us to do the irrevocable, as soon as possible, simply because it will make a final commitment. Once we’re really headed back, it’ll be out of our hands. We can stop thinking.’
He regarded her with a sort o
f wonder. ‘But you look calm enough,’ he said.
‘I made my decision back on Earth,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen no reason to change it.’
‘What’s the consensus of the women?’ he asked, leaping back to safely denumerable things.
‘Most want to give up, of course.’ She said it with a mildness that softened the judgment. ‘They came only because their men wanted to. Women are much too practical to care about a philosophy or a, frontier, or anything except their families.’
‘Do you?’ he challenged.
She shrugged ruefully. ‘I have no family, Captain. At the same time, I suppose … a sense of humor? … kept me from sublimating it into a Cause of any kind.’ Counterattacking: ‘Why do you care what we do?’
‘Why?’ He found himself stammering. ‘Why … be-be-because I’m in charge —’
‘Oh, yes. But also, you spent years promoting the idea of a Rustum colony. And then you accepted this thankless job, commanding the colonial fleet, when you might have been off doing your real work, visiting some star men have never visited before. Rustum must be a deep symbol to you. Don’t worry. I won’t go analytic. I happen to think myself that this colony is enormously important. If our race muffs this chance, we may never get another. But that’s only an academic proposition, really. Why does it matter so much to me, personally, unless it touches some intimate basic in me? Let’s face the facts, Captain. Neither of us is a bit coldblooded about this. We need to have that colony planted.’
She stopped, laughed, and color went across her cheeks.
‘Oh, dear, I do chatter, don’t I? Pardon me. Let’s get back to business.’
‘I think,’ said Coffin, slowly and jaggedly, ‘thanks to your remarks, I’m beginning to realize what’s involved.’
She settled back and listened.
He bent a leg around a stanchion to hold his lean body in place and beat one fist softly into the palm of the other hand. ‘Yes, God help us, it is an emotional issue,’ he said, the words carving the idea to shape. ‘Logic is entirely irrelevant. There are some who want so badly to go to Rustum and be free, or whatever they hope to be there, that they’ll dice with their lives for the privilege – and their wives’ and children’s lives. Others went reluctantly, against their own survival instincts, and now that they think they see a way of retreat, something they can justify to themselves, they’ll fight any man who tries to bar it. Yes. It’s a ghastly situation. One way or another, the decision has got to be made soon. And the facts can’t be hidden. Every deepsleeper must be wakened and nursed to health by someone now conscious. The word will pass, year after year, always to a different combination of spacemen and colonists. Whatever is done, a proportion of them will be furious at what was decided while they slept. No, furious is too weak a word. Onward or backward, whichever way we go, we’ve struck at the emotional roots of people. Andinterstellar space can break the calmest men…. How longbefore just the wrong percentage of malcontents, weaklings, and shaky sanities goes on duty? What’s going to happen then? Lord God of Hosts, deliver us or we perish!’
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