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.”