To Outlive Eternity

by Poul Anderson

  "Well, what can I do?"

  "Give me . . . us . . . your advice," Telander said.

  "But sir, you're the captain!"

  "We've been over this ground before, Carl. I can, well, yes, I suppose I can make the decisions, issue the commands, order the routines, which will take us crashing on through space, more or less safely." Telander extended his hands. They trembled like autumn leaves. "More than that I can no longer do, Carl. I have not the strength left. You must tell our shipmates."

  "Tell them we've failed?" Reymont grated. "Tell them, in spite of everything, we're damned to fly on till we go crazy and die? You don't want much of me, do you, Captain?"

  "The news may not be that bad," Nilsson said.

  Reymont snatched at him, missed and hung with the breath raw in his throat. "We have some hope?"

  The little man spoke with a briskness that turned his pedantry into a sort of bugle call:

  "Perhaps. I have no data yet. The distances are too vast. We cannot choose another galactic clan as being accessible to us, and aim for it. We would see it with too great an inaccuracy, and across too many millions of years of time. But I do believe we can base a hope on sheer statistics. Someplace, eventually, we could meet the right configuration. Either a large clan through whose galaxy-densest portions we can lay a course; or else two or three clans, rather close to each other, more or less in a straight line, so that we can pass through them in succession. Do you see? If we could come upon something like that, we would be in good shape. We would be able to brake ourselves in a mere few years of ship's time."

  "What are the odds?" Reymont's words rattled.

  Nilsson shook his head. "I cannot say. But perhaps not too bad. This is a big and varied cosmos. If we continue sufficiently long, I should imagine we have a fair probability of encountering what we need."

  "How long is sufficiently long?" Reymont lifted a hand. "Stop. Don't bother answering. It's on the order of billions of years. Tens of billions, maybe. That means we need a lower tau yet. A tau so low that we can actually circumnavigate the universe . . . in months, maybe in weeks. And that, in turn, means we can't start braking as we enter this clan up ahead. No. We accelerate again. After we've passed through—well, no doubt we'll have a shorter period of ship's time in free fall than this one was, until we strike another clan. Probably there, too, we'll find it advisable to accelerate, running tau still higher. We'll do so at every chance we get, from now till we see a journey's end we can make use of. Right?"

  Telander shuddered. "Right," he said. "Can any of us endure it?"

  "We'll have to," Reymont said. Now, once more, he spoke in the voice of command. "I'll figure out a tactful way to announce your news. I'll have the few men I can trust ready . . . no, not for violence. Ready with leadership, steadiness, encouragement. And we'll embark on a training program for free fall. No reason why it has to cause this much trouble. We'll teach every one of those groundlubbers how to handle himself in zero gee. How to sleep. By God, how to hope!" He smote his palms together with a pistol noise.

  "Don't forget, we can depend on some of the women too," Nilsson said.

  "Yes. Of course. Like Ingrid Lindgren."

  "Like her indeed," Nilsson said gravely. "You know what she has done for me."

  "M-hm. She is quite a girl, isn't she? I'm afraid you will have to go rouse her, Elof. We've got to get our cadre together—the unbreakables; the people who understand people—we must plan this thing. Start suggesting some names."

  XII

  "Oh, please," Jane Sadler had begged. "Come help him."

  "You can't?" Reymont asked.

  She shook her head. "I've tried. But I think I make matters worse. In his present condition. I being a woman." She flushed. "Know what I mean?"

  "Well, I'm no psychologist," Reymont said. "But I'll see what I can do."

  He left the bower where she had caught him in a private moment. The dwarfed trees, tumbling vines, grass and flowers made a place of healing for him. But he had noticed that comparatively few others went into that room any longer. Did it remind them of too much?

  A zero-gee handball game bounced from corner to corner of the gymnasium. They were spacemen who played, though, and grimly rather than gleefully. Most of the civilians came here for little except their compulsory exercises and—in a sporadic, uninterested fashion—their meals. No one hailed Reymont as he went by.

  Further down the main corridor, a door stood open on a workshop. A lathe hummed within, a cutting torch glowed blue, several men were gathered around a bench discussing something. That was good. The instrument project continued. But it did so terminally, as mere refinement. Most of the labor was finished; cargo had been shifted. Number Two hold converted to an observatory, its haywire tangle neatened. There wasn't any work left for the bulk of Nilsson's team. There wasn't anything left except to abide.

  Abruptly the ship quivered.

  Weight grabbed at Reymont. He barely avoided falling to the deck. A metal noise toned through the hull, like a basso profundo gong. It was soon over. Free flight resumed. Leonora Christine had gone through another galaxy.

  Such passages were becoming more frequent by the day. Would they never meet the right configuration to stop?

  Well, of course you had to employ your force screens, either accelerating or decelerating. And you dared not decelerate till you were quite sure. But each spate of acceleration made the required conditions for coming to a halt that much more tight. So you went on. And inverse tau grew.

  Reymont knocked on the cabin door he wanted. Hearing no reply, he tried it. Locked. But Sadler's adjoining door wasn't. He entered her cabin half and slid back the panel.

  Johann Freiwald floated against his bunk. The husky shape was curled into an imitation of a fetus. But the eyes held awareness.

  Reymont grasped a stanchion, encountered that stare, and said noncommittally, "I wondered why you weren't around, Hansi. Now I hear you aren't feeling well. Anything I can do for you?"

  Freiwald grunted.

  "Well, you can do a lot for me," Reymont said. "I need you pretty badly. You're a deputy. One of the half dozen who's stood by me—policeman, counselor, work-party boss, idea man—through this whole thing. You can't be spared yet."

  Freiwald spoke as if with difficulty. "I shall have to be spared."

  "Why? What's the matter?"

  "I can't go on any more. That's all. I can't."

  "Why not?" Reymont asked. "What jobs we have left to do aren't hard, physically. Anyhow, you're tough. Weightlessness never bothered you. You're a trained engineer, a pragmatist, a cheerful earthy soul. Not one of those self-appointed delicates who have to be coddled because their tender souls can't bear a long voyage." He sneered. "Or are you one?"

  Freiwald stirred. His cheeks reddened a little. "I am a man," he said. "Not a robot. Eventually I start thinking."

  "My friend, do you imagine we would have survived this far if the officers, at least, did not spend every waking hour thinking?"

  "I don't mean your damned measurements, computations, course adjustments, equipment modifications. That's nothing but the instinct to stay alive. A lobster trying to climb out of a kettle has as much dignity. I ask myself, though, why? What are we doing? What does it mean?"

  "Et tu, Brute." Reymont sighed.

  Freiwald twisted about so that his gaze was straight into the constable's. "Because you are so insensitive . . . Do you know what year this is?"

  "No. Neither do you. We have no way of determining it. And if you wonder what the year is on Earth, that's meaningless. Under these conditions, we have no simultaneity with—"

  "Be quiet! I know that whole quacking. We have come many billion light-years. We are rounding the curve of space. If we came back, this instant, to the Solar System, we would not find anything. The sun died long ago. It swelled and brightened till Earth was devoured; it became a variable, guttering like a candle in the wind; it sank away to a white dwarf, an ember, an ash. The human race is dead
!"

  "Not necessarily," Reymont said.

  "Then it's become something we could not comprehend. We are ghosts." Freiwald's lips trembled. He bit them till blood ran. "We hunt on and on, senselessly, meaninglessly—" Again acceleration thundered through the ship. "There," he whispered. His eyes were wide, white-rimmed, as if with fear. "We passed through yet another galaxy. Another good part of a million years. To us, seconds."

  "Oh, not quite that," Reymont said. "Our tau can't be that low. We probably quartered a spiral arm."

  "Destroying how many worlds? Don't tell me. I know the figures. We are not as massive as a star. But our energy—I think we could pass through the very heart of a sun and not notice."

  "Perhaps."

  "That's part of our hell. That we've become a menace to—to—"

  "Don't say it. Don't think it. Because it isn't true. We're interacting with dust and gas, nothing else. We do transit many galaxies, because galaxies lie comparatively close to each other in terms of their own size. Within a family, the members are about ten diameters apart, or even less. Individual stars within any single galaxy, though, that's another situation entirely. Their diameters are such tiny fractions of a light-year. In a nucleus, the most crowded part . . . well, the separation of two stars is still like the separation of two men, one at either end of a continent. A big continent. Asia, say."

  Freiwald looked away. "There is no more Asia," he said. "No more anything."

  "There's us," Reymont said. "We're alive, we're real, we have hope. What more do you want? Some grandiose philosophical significance? Forget it. That's a luxury. Our descendants will invent it, along with tedious epics about our heroism. We just have the sweat, tears, blood—" his grin flashed—"in short, the unglamorous bodily secretions. And what's so bad about that? Your trouble is, you think a combination of acrophobia, sensory deprivation and nervous strain is a metaphysical crisis. Myself, I don't look down on our lobster-like instinct to survive. I'm glad we have one."

  Freiwald floated motionless.

  Reymont clapped his shoulder. "I'm not belittling your difficulties," he said. "It is hard to keep going. Our worst enemy is despair; and it wrestles every one of us to the deck, every now and then."

  "Not you," Freiwald said.

  "Oh, yes," Reymont said. "Me too. I get my feet back, though. So will you."

  "Well—" Freiwald scowled. "Maybe."

  Reymont reached under his tunic and extracted a small flat flask. "Rank has its privileges," he smiled. "Here."

  "What?"

  "Scotch. The genuine article, not that witch's brew the Scandinavians think is an imitation. I prescribe a hearty dose for you, and for myself, as far as that goes. I'd enjoy a relaxed talk. Haven't had any such for longer than I can remember."

  They had been at it for some while, and life was coming back in Freiwald's manner, when the intercom said with Ingrid Lindgren's voice: "Is Constable Reymont there?"

  "Uh, yes," Freiwald said.

  "Sadler told me so," the mate said. "Could you come to the bridge?"

  "Urgent?" Reymont asked.

  "Not really, I guess. The latest navigational sights seem to indicate a—a changing region of space. We may have to modify our cruising plan. I thought you might like to discuss it."

  "All right," Reymont said.

  "Me too," the other man said. He looked at the flask, shook his head sadly and offered it back.

  "No, you may as well finish it, "Reymont said. "Not alone, however. That's bad, drinking alone. I'll tell Sadler."

  "Well, now." Freiwald genuinely laughed. "That's kind of you."

  Emerging, closing the door behind him, Reymont glanced up and down the corridor. No one else was in sight. Then he sagged, eyes covered, body shaking. After a minute he drew a breath and started for the bridge.

  Norbert Williams happened to come the other way. "Hello," the chemist said.

  "You're looking cheerier than most," Reymont remarked.

  "Well, yes, I guess I am. Emma and I, we got talking, and we may have hit on yet another way to tell at a distance whether a planet has our type of life. A plankton-type population, you see, ought to impart certain thermal radiation characteristics to ocean surfaces; and given Doppler effect, making those frequencies something we can properly analyze—"

  "Good. Do go ahead and work on it. And if you should co-opt a few others, that'd be a help."

  "Sure, we've already thought of that."

  "And would you pass the word, wherever she is, Sadler ought to go to her cabin? Her boy friend's waiting with a surprise."

  Williams's guffaw followed Reymont on down the corridor.

  But the companionway to the bridge was empty and still; and Lindgren stood watch alone. Her hands strained around the grips at the base of the viewscope. When she turned about at his entry, he saw that her face was quite without color.

  He closed the door. "What's wrong?" he asked hushedly.

  "You didn't let on to anyone?"

  "No, of course not, when the business had to be grim. What is it?"

  She tried to speak and could not.

  "Is anyone else due at this meeting?" Reymont asked.

  She shook her head. He went to her, anchored himself with a leg wrapped around a rail, and received her in his arms. "No," she said against his breast. "Elof and . . . Auguste Boudreau . . . they told me. They asked me to tell . . . the Old Man. They don't dare. Don't know how. I don't either." Her fingers clutched at him until the nails bit through his tunic. "Carl, what shall we do?"

  He ruffled her hair, staring across her head, feeling her tension. Again the ship boomed and leaped; and soon again. The notes that rang through her were noticeably higher pitched than before. The draft from a ventilator felt cold. The metal around seemed to shrink inward.

  "Go on," he said at last. "Tell me, alskling."

  "The universe—the whole universe—it's dying."

  He made a noise in his gullet. Otherwise he waited.

  At length she was able to pull far enough back from him that they could look into each other's eyes. She said in a slurred, hurried voice:

  "Maybe the universe has a shorter lifespan than was thought. Or maybe we have traveled longer, in cosmic time, than we knew. Fifty, a hundred billion years. I don't know. I just know what the others told me. What they have been observing. The galaxies we see are growing dimmer. As if, one by one, the stars are going out. And no new stars being formed. No new galaxies. The men weren't sure. The observations are so hard to make. But they began to wonder. And then they started checking Doppler shifts more carefully. Especially of late, when we seem to pass through so many galaxies. They found that what they observed could not be explained by any tau that we can possibly have. Another factor had to be involved. The galaxies are getting more crowded. Space isn't expanding any longer. Its reached its limit and is collapsing inward again. Elof says the collapse will go on. And on. To the end."

  "We?" he asked.

  "Who knows? Except that we can't stop. We could, I mean. But by the time we did, nothing would be left . . . except blackness, burned-out suns, absolute zero, death, death. Nothing."

  "We don't want that," he said stupidly.

  "No. What do we want? I think—Carl, shouldn't we say good-by? All of us, to each other? A last party, with wine and candle-light. And afterward go to our cabins. You and I to ours. And say good night. We have morphine for everyone. And oh, Carl, we're all so tired. It will be so good to sleep."

  Reymont drew her close to him again.

  "Did you ever read Moby Dick?" she whispered. "That's us. We've pursued the White Whale to the end of time. And now . . . that question. What is man, that he should outlive his God?"

  Reymont put her from him, gently and went to the viewscope. Looking forth, he saw, for a moment, a galaxy pass. It must be only some ten-thousands of parsecs distant, for he saw it across the dark very large and clear. The form was chaotic. Whatever structure it had once had was disintegrated. No individual suns
could be seen; those would have had to be giants, therefore young, and no young stars existed any more. The galaxy was a dull vague red, deepening at the fringes to the hue of clotted blood.

  It drifted away from his sight. The ship went through another, storm-shaken by it, but of that one nothing was visible—nothing at all.

  Reymont returned himself to the command bridge. Teeth gleamed in his visage. "No!" he said.

  XIII

  From the dais of commons, he and she looked upon their assembled shipmates.