Stop that, Doolittle. That’s not healthy.
It was different back on Earth. He could remember liking it then. The universe had seemed a friendly place those nights, a magnificient tapestry of suns and nebulae woven solely as a proper background for the blue-white jewel of Earth as seen from the moon.
But Earth wasn’t over his shoulder here. In their present position it was a distant pinprick of light which only the ship’s computer could identify.
Oh, and Talby, of course. He hid his smile. Just like he claimed to be able to identify suns by sight, the astronomer persisted in claiming he could pick Sol out of the sky. That was impossible, considering all the course changes they had made in the lost, gone years.
But if asked, Talby would unhesitatingly point to some point in the sky and say, “Sol? There it is. But why do you want to know? It’s not a very important star?” And he would return to his solemn study of the surrounding heavens.
Doolittle didn’t really know why being up in the dome for a while bothered him. It shouldn’t have. That was one thing he didn’t have to lie about—he had shown no symptoms of space fear. Fear of the great open spaces between the stars.
No, the vastnesses of the galaxy supposedly held no terrors for him. But then, the psychologists who had told him that hadn’t spent years floating away from sight of Earth in a tiny metal triangle, years without even a glimpse of their own sun. A journey like this brought home to a man something about space no psychometrician could ever approximate.
Not that it was complicated. No. Space was big, man was small, and you couldn’t dwell on that very long or the bigness would assume its proper proportions and come down on the mind and smash it. But Talby, he reflected, seemed to have licked that problem. He was going to turn some theories around when he got back home, if they could ever pry him out of his precious dome. Talby thrived on the emptiness.
Doolittle hated him for it.
Talby had removed his headset and was ripping the protective foil off his breakfast. Wadding up the thin metal into a ball, he tossed it with casual unconcern down the open hatchway. Doolittle followed its path until it had vanished from sight, then he turned his gaze back on the astronomer, who was starting to suck on a tube of concentrated eggs.
“You know, Talby, you really ought to come down and eat your meals with the rest of us. Or at least come down to sleep. You spend too much time up here.”
At least a thousand times now he had repeated similar statements of identical content to the astronomer. And for the thousandth time Talby, as unperturbed as ever, came back with the same answer—after swallowing a mouthful of food.
“Why? I like it up here. I don’t bother any of you, do I? You should be glad of the extra privacy.”
“We’ve got plenty of privacy, Talby. We’ve got a whole ship that’s almost empty now in which to hide from each other.” He paused, then went on in a different vein. “You used to come down and eat with the rest of us. Doesn’t it get lonely being up here so much? I mean, privacy is one thing, Talby, but…”
He trailed off as the astronomer finished his eggs. Finished them quickly, Doolittle thought. In a hurry to get the awkward refueling of his body out of the way. That wasn’t natural. Mealtime was one of their few remaining ties to Earthly habits. Talby opened a tube of bread substitute.
“I don’t like going below since Commander Powell died,” he said. “I feel too enclosed down there.”
“Yeah,” muttered Doolittle helplessly. What could he say to that? “You should spend more time below, though. You know, see more of the ship.”
“Me?” Talby answered, hearing him and yet not hearing him. “What do I want to look at the ship for? I know what the ship looks like. That’s not why I came on this mission, Doolittle.” He leaned back and stared outward with that peculiar, farsighted stare Doolittle now knew instantly.
“Up here, I can watch things, Doolittle. I love to watch things. Just stare at the sun systems and nomad meteors, gas clusters and distant galaxies. You know, I bet I’ve seen more stars than any human being alive, Doolittle. And you never know what may come tumbling by to say hello in overdrive or hyperdrive. Some of them would surprise you, Doolittle.”
“Yeah,” Doolittle mumbled again. Talby was making him increasingly nervous these days. “But you’ll have plenty of time for that later, though. I mean, think of it this way: we’ve been in space twenty years now and we’ve only aged three years physically, so there’ll be plenty of time later for staring around. Won’t there, Talby? Talby?”
“Are we really going into the Veil Nebula region?” the astronomer whispered.
“Of course we are,” Doolittle insisted. “I mean, I gave the order and supervised the course correction, didn’t I? It’s programmed, isn’t it?”
“You know, Doolittle,” Talby said quietly, “if we are going into the Veil region, we may actually find a strange and beautiful thing: the Phoenix Asteroids. They should be passing through there about now, if the predictions are really correct.”
“Oh. Phoenix Asteroids.” Doolittle’s brow furrowed. It seemed to him that that was a name he should know, a name he’d heard before. It wasn’t that he’d cheated his way through the astronomy courses, too. It was just that he hadn’t paid much attention to anything but the basics for navigation and plotting. Sightseeing highlights he had kind of glossed over.
“Phoenix Asteroids?” he confessed finally. “I don’t think I ever heard of them.”
Talby gave him a look Doolittle couldn’t quite interpret. Anger. Contempt. Pity.
“They’re a body of asteroids—at least, that’s what the best guesses think they are—that are running on a definite orbit, but one so vast that for years nobody could calculate it.
“They were detected right after the development of the first big lunar telescopes. They don’t travel in a straight line like most asteroid groupings. Nor do they belong to any one sun system. But they have a true orbit.
“Once every twelve point three trillion years they circle our universe. They pass through our galaxy in the region of Sol just once, and they’ll return in slightly less than twelve point three trillion years from now. But the Earth won’t be here to meet them. The Earth may not be anyplace by then. The universe may not be anyplace. But the Phoenix will.”
“Crazy… how can anybody calculate an orbit like that?” muttered Doolittle, and then he felt stupid for asking it because, obviously, somebody had calculated it.
“I don’t know, Doolittle. I’m no computer, but it’s been done. As for the Phoenix itself, we don’t know much about it. Its composition is just a guess. An asteroidal grouping seems as logical as anything for something that defies as many laws as this does.” He leaned back in his chair and looked outward, outward. The Phoenix Asteroids…
“They’re something different, Doolittle. Something so different we can’t even begin to assign an explanation for them. For example, for the scopes on the moon to pick them up visually means they must have their own internal source of light, Doolittle, and an incredibly intense one at that. They glow. Their spectrum changes constantly, the colors on the charts flow like wine. Nobody knows how, or why. By rights, an astronomical object that small should be invisible to us at such distances. You shouldn’t be able to detect them from Earth at all, let alone distinguish something like color. But you can, Doolittle, you can.”
Doolittle just stared at Talby, thinking. It seemed to him that he would remember something as spectacular as the Phoenix Asteroids, despite his often lackadaisical approach to some courses. Were they real… or another figment of Talby’s all-too-active imagination, the product of too much stimulation from an unrelenting universe viewed too long?