Variable Star

by Robert A. Heinlein

  In Rup-Tooey I found Herb, Pat, and Solomon, sitting around and bullshitting like students after curfew, though it was midafternoon. The moment I laid eyes on Solomon, it came into my mind that none of us were probably ever going to be able to bear to call him by anything but his full first name, ever again. Or at least for years to come.

  He looked up and nodded as I came in. “Hey, Joel. How are you feeling?”

  “Swell,” I said. “You okay, Herb?”

  “No,” he said, with no more affect than if I’d asked him if he were left-handed.

  “You going to be?”

  “Yes,” he said the same way.

  I believed him both times. We nodded at each other. I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder, but knew he would hate it. It can be frustrating to care about people who hate to be touched, sometimes.

  Solomon said, “I was such a big help the first time you woke up, I thought this time I’d leave you alone.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder, and squeezed. He reached up and squeezed my hand back.

  “You want coffee?” Pat asked. “Or ethanol?”

  “Yes.”

  Herb nodded, got up, and made me an Irish coffee. I pulled my desk chair over to join the group and sat. “Somebody bring me up-to-date on what’s happened while I was out. Do we know anything, yet?”

  “Everyone in the Solar System is dead,” Herb said over his shoulder. “All other information follows at lightspeed. Sorry.”

  I wished I had asked anything else. “We’re sure it wasn’t just Ter—”

  “Gene’s twin sister Terry was behind Jupiter. She had time to know what she was seeing. Poor woman. The times match. Doom arrived from Solward at lightspeed. QED.”

  I’d forgotten I had already worked that out, back in the autodoc. Another ill-considered question, in any event.

  Solomon said, “The specks of data we do have indicate that conversion of Sol’s mass to energy was at least ninety percent efficient, and could have been perfect.”

  If there is an intelligent response to that statement, none of us found it.

  “Is there a consensus guess what went wrong, even?” I tried finally. The smell of fresh coffee filled the room.

  Solomon snorted. “First, we have to settle how many angels can dance their way into a pinhead.”

  “Solomon—” Pat began.

  Herb said, “He’s saying it’s a religious question.”

  Pat looked scandalized.

  “Exactly,” Solomon agreed. “Everybody is going to end up with a firm opinion, based on intuition, but nobody’s going to be able to defend his. The first scraps of actual hard data aren’t going to catch us for years to come. And I doubt they’ll settle anything. I don’t think the question will be answerable in my lifetime. Except on faith.”

  “I just hate to even use the word ‘religion’ in this context,” Pat said. “It makes my skin crawl.”

  “Occam’s Razor,” Herb said, bringing me my Irish coffee. He’d made one for himself as well.

  “What?” Pat asked.

  “We forgot Occam’s Razor,” Herb said.

  “I don’t follow.” I could see that Solomon did.

  Herb sat and drank some of his coffee. “The sky has always been full of things we can’t explain,” he said. “It still is. Anomalies always abound. Gamma ray bursts. Missing matter. Quasars. Dozens of things. Generations of astrophysicists have made careers creating different, complicated explanations for each of them—often brilliantly. But one explanation for all of them, a quite likely one, they have never once considered. Or at least, anyone who did propose it instantly lost all credibility.”

  “Oh, Herb, no!”

  He nodded. “Intelligent design.”

  Pat tried to speak, but could only sputter.

  “That’s exactly why, too,” Herb said. “For some reason, we let the god-botherers appropriate that term as a euphemism for their stupid deities, and let our revulsion for the latter cloud our understanding of the former.”

  Solomon spoke up. “He’s right, Pat. Once you get over the baseless idea that an intelligent designer must necessarily be God, it gets easier to deal with. Nothing whatsoever except a lot of dead fools says an intelligent designer has to be omnipotent—just more powerful than us. He need not necessarily be omniscient—just smarter than us.”

  Herb said, “And God Himself knows there is no reason why an intelligent designer must—or even can—be omnibenevolent. He need not even be as nice as us. And we’re swine with starships.”

  Pat’s mouth hung open. Perhaps mine did, too.

  “And finally,” Solomon said, “nothing says there has to be only one—or even some low prime number.”

  “We found sentient life on Mars and Venus,” Herb said. “But nothing at all outside the System. And the Martians and Venerian dragons were just so… irrelevant to us, it was easy to stop thinking about them. Even after we got bright enough to go out and look for ourselves, more than a dozen times in a row we found whole star systems containing nothing more complicated than a cat. For some reason, we concluded our star system must be unique. We got the notion we were the only sentients in the Galaxy. We should have seen how preposterous that was, and looked for more reasonable explanations.”

  “I really really really hate this,” Pat told him.

  “Exactly our problem. Hate does not add clarity.”

  I felt a powerful inexplicable impulse to put some music on. It would make us all feel better. I summoned up my library on my desk display and was going to choose one of my favorite old jazz records, a Charlie Haden/Gonzalo Rubalcaba collaboration that had never failed to soothe me when I needed it. But before I could start it, the album title sunk in. It was called La Tierra del Sol.

  And every song on it had been written by a dead man, to whom it was a posthumous tribute.

  I cleared the screen. So much for the power of music. I had thousands of other albums available, but suddenly I didn’t want to hear any music by dead men. I wondered if the next time I picked up my horn, any sound would come out.

  “Why can’t it have been a natural occurrence?” Pat was saying. “It seems to me that would be Occam’s Razor. Occam’s Razor says don’t multiply entities unnecessarily. Which is less likely? One single cosmic event we can’t explain yet? Or a galaxy full of lethal monsters, hiding perfectly, explaining dozens of astrophysical mysteries at once?”

  “What does Matty say?” I asked.

  The silence told me I was still asking bad questions.

  “Aw, shit—”

  “Don’t be mad at him, Joel,” Solomon said. “He spent every minute of the last six and a half years praying to a God I happen to know he didn’t even believe in that he was wrong, that nothing was wrong with the sun. But he knew he wasn’t; that’s why he came apart. The measurements he lucked onto as we were leaving told him something unprecedented and scary was going on. He was too good at what he did to be wrong. Having it confirmed was just too much.”

  He was right: Matty had hinted about this to me, more than once. Something about a perfect solar eclipse by Terra occurring as we’d left the System, and something wrong about the predicted displacement of some stars behind Sol. Whatever had happened—or been done—to our star had taken six or more years to finish happening. The few subtle signs had been visible only to someone outside the System. One day, our descendants might find that a useful clue. If we had any.

  Oh, no wonder Matty had gone to pieces.

  Not that he could conceivably have done anything to prevent the tragedy. With no one else in a position to replicate his data—until whenever the next starship containing a good astronomer was built and launched to a point where it happened to see a perfect solar eclipse from the right distance—he could not possibly have gotten anyone to listen to him in time to do the slightest good. At most, he might have created a disastrous System-wide panic.

  “He probably had more people he cared strongly about back in the System than anybody e
lse aboard,” Pat said. “Except maybe Dr. Amy. No, no, she’s all right,” he added hastily, seeing my expression. “But she’s hurting.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment. Might as well get it over with. “Who else that I know is gone?”

  Another awkward pause. I should probably never ask another question again.

  Solomon answered. “Balvovatz, for one.”

  “What?” I was stunned. One of the last people I’d have guessed would ever suicide was Balvovatz, that cynical, fun-loving old Loonie.

  But then as I heard that last word in my mind, I started to understand. His tragedy was, impossibly, even greater than that of most of the rest of us. Everyone he cared about back in the System lived—had lived—in Luna. It was the preposition killing him.

  All the other planets mankind had used, it had lived on the surface of. Even the Marsmen had been aboveground for over a century now. Only Luna was too small to terranize. Loonies had still lived almost exclusively underground. Some of them quite deep.

  By now, if there were any solids at all among the particles expanding from the place where the System had been, they would probably be only a pair of smelted lumps formerly known as Jupiter and Saturn. Even they might not still exist, if the destruction had been as complete as Solomon believed.

  But some Loonies might conceivably have lasted whole seconds, broiling in lava, before it became too hot for even lava to exist.

  “Everyone you or I knew back home is surely dead,” Herb said. “So is everyone Balvovatz knew. But his were among those who suffered worst.”

  I rejected the image, and the thought. I knew I was going to miss Balvovatz badly. I had liked him a lot. Loved him. “Okay. You said ‘for one…’ Who else is gone?”

  “Diane,” Herb said. “And Mariko.”

  Mariko Stupple was the girl I’d used for consolation for a few weeks after Diane Levy had taken my virginity, glanced at it, and returned it. I wondered how close Diane had come to achieving her goal of sampling every male aboard. I found that I hoped she had. “Anyone else?”

  “Nobody else you know well, I think,” Pat said.

  “None of your lot, Solomon? Not even Kindred?”

  “None of us has the luxury of that option,” Solomon said dully.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “We have no way of knowing exactly what happened to Sol—so we must assume worst case: total destruction.”

  It took a second or two to hit me. If all or nearly all the mass of the sun had been converted to energy, a wave of lethal gamma rays was even now racing after us. Faster than we were going, or could go…

  I said, “Sorry, Sollie. I am not doing at all well on thinking things through, today.”

  He nodded. “Happens to me, too, every time I’ve been dead.”

  If even one Relativist became incapacitated, sooner or later the ramjet was going to go out and stay out. The Sheffield would never make port. She could remain self-sustaining for a maximum of three or four generations—but that didn’t matter, because we wouldn’t have anywhere near that long to live. We were only traveling at 0.976 c… and death was chasing us at c.

  “Will we be able to outrun it, do you think? By the time the wavefront catches up, will it still be—are we dead?”

  Herb gave me a baleful look. “How long is a piece of rope?”

  “He’s right,” Solomon said. “Tell me exactly what happened to the sun, what percentage of its mass was converted to what forms of energy in what proportion by the explosion, and perhaps a horseback guess could be made, by somebody as smart as Matty was. But we know hardly anything beyond the bare fact of humanity’s annihilation. It could easily have been a violent enough event to fry us even as far away as Bravo. Indications are it was. We may be as dead as those poor bastards in Luna—just on a longer string.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Pat said, at the same time I said, “Covenant!” in the same tone of voice. I’d never heard him say that before, and took it as a clue to why discussion of religion upset him. Diehard closet Old Christians in the family might even help explain what a man like him was doing on a voyage to nowhere in the first place.

  “If the explosion was that powerful,” Herb said, “we’ll never reach Immega, will we? At no time will we exceed the speed of light, and the wavefront is only six years and change behind us—”

  “Ten years and change,” Solomon corrected. “We’ve been traveling for 6.41 years. But we passed half the speed of light in the first year, and by now we’re making more than ninety-seven percent of it. Lorentz time contraction. It adds up.”

  “So will it catch us along the way, or not? I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to think of the question.” I’d always prided myself on being quick on the uptake… but I decided to give myself a pass, this time.

  Solomon shrugged. “I can’t believe I don’t have the exact answer ready for you. Al Mulherin’s been crunching away at it, but I haven’t checked since yesterday. We’ve all been thinking of other things than survival, that’s all. Give me a second.” He began tapping on a keyboard.

  I tried to work it out roughly in my head. The Sheffield and waves of evil start out just under ten and a half light-years apart, then race. Us at a very high fraction of c which will get even higher, but will never reach one. Them at c. At what point will the second train catch the first? It seemed like a classic grade school math puzzle. But relativistic factor kept royally screwing up my calculations. And then I realized I’d forgotten to factor in deceleration… I gave up and waited for Solomon. I knew my father would have closed his eyes for a moment and just known the answer.

  “I think we’re all right,” Solomon said finally. “As long as the ramjet keeps ramming. We expect to reach Bravo after twenty years, our time, 90.4 years in Sol time.” He winced slightly as the phrase left his lips, but kept going. “Assuming a lethal concentration of gamma rays is in fact after us, it will arrive at our neighborhood about seven and a half years later. With luck, we can get dug in deep enough to weather it out in time.”

  Herb stood up to his full height and clapped his hands together, loud enough to make all of us flinch. “Well, that is just the best fucking news in the fucking Galaxy,” he said loudly. “That makes my fucking day.”

  He spun on his heel and went to get the Irish whiskey. Solomon and I exchanged a nervous glance. If Herb were to go berserk in this enclosed space we would have a serious problem. He turned around and caught us at it, and his booming laughter was as loud and almost as startling as his handclap had been.

  “You dopes, I’m serious! The distance between one and infinity is nothing compared to the distance between zero and one.”

  I decided to assume he was not cracking up. “What do you mean, Herb?”

  “Think it through. There’s one and only one reason we know, for sure, what’s happened behind us. Chance dictated that two of our three telepaths in the System were in blast shadow. For my sister, Hell didn’t arrive at lightspeed, but at something closer to the speed of Terra’s rotation. She had time—barely—to hear and comprehend what was coming at her.”

  Get him off this subject. “Okay. I don’t take your point.”

  “How many other colonies do you think were that lucky?”

  Oof.

  “Prophet’s prick!” Pat said. “I never even thought—”

  “Telepath pairs were even scarcer on the ground in the early days,” Herb said. “Most of the earlier colonies made do with two. And most of those that shipped three are down to two, now. Li kept up on such things.”

  “We’ve got to send a laser!” Pat cried, and started to get up.

  Solomon caught his shoulder and pulled him back down. “Calm down, son. Captain Bean has already long-since notified the only colony we can help.”

  “But there are—” He frowned. “Oh. Oh. Shit.”

  Any laser or radio message we sent would travel at lightspeed. Only one human colony happened to even lie in the constellation of Boötes: 44 Boo, fr
om which our destination had been discovered. Taking into account the offset (it was not dead ahead), it was something like thirty-five years ahead of us by laser… and doom would arrive there in forty-one years. That was the one and only colony we could possibly hope to warn, and we could give them an absolute maximum of six years in which to prepare. That had already been done.

  Any other colony lacking a telepath whose partner had chanced to be in apposition at the moment of explosion, and thus needing us to warn it, was screwed. Hellfire was coming for them at the speed of light, and we were powerless to alert them in time.

  Between us, the Sheffield and 44 Boötes probably now held the very last surviving fragments of the human race. All the rest would probably be gone within sixty-five years.

  We had to get to Bravo. We had to survive. It was far more than just our own lives at stake, now. It was our species. We were The Last Of The Solarians.

  I remembered a spiritual book Dr. Amy had had me read the year before, by a man named Gaskin. I had been easy to persuade because the farmer in me had resonated to its title, This Season’s People. It turned out to derive from a famous saying of the Jewish mystic Shlomo Carlebach:

  We are this season’s people.

  We are all the people there are, this season.

  If we blow it, it’s blown.