Tau Zero

Atop its pillar, the Hand of God upbearing the Genius of Man lifted in silhouette against a greenish-blue dusk.

If the voyage is really fortunate, we will never come home. If we do—She broke off. He would be in his grave.

Intermolecular binding forces let go with a faint smacking noise that answered the slap-slap of water on hull.

Central Stockholm was a many-colored unrestful fire and a thousand noises blent into one somehow harmonious growl.

It's going to be lonely in space, Carl, so far from our dead.

I won't have time for nuances and rituals. It could end with me in a situation I don't want. Unless I think ahead and make preparations. As I'm doing.

The night was wild with suns.

In free fall, his gaunt and gawky figure became lovely to watch, like a fish in water or a hawk on the wing.

Telander studied her fluttering lashes. 'I know he's skilled in free fall, and he'll come on the first ferry, but is he that good?'

Light soared over Earth's immense horizon, breaking in a thousand colors from maple-leaf scarlet to peacock blue.

We are leaving more than most of us have yet understood, Charles Reymont. It is a kind of death—followed by resurrection, perhaps, but nonetheless a death.

The air gusting from the ventilators was more than purified by the plants of the hydroponic section and the colloids of the Darrell balancer; it went through changes of temperature, ionization, odor.

The time could come when we won't survive, unless we can act as one and jump to a command.

You've never taken off your armor, Carl.

Lighting was poor: unshielded glare in the sun, ink blackness in shadow except for what puddles of undiffused radiance were cast by helmet lamps.

The vibration was faint, on the very edge of awareness, but it wove its way through metal, bones, and maybe dreams.

It hurt to say good-by. But I've had experience in that. One learns how to look forward.

Consider: a single light-year is an inconceivable abyss. Denumerable but inconceivable.

The process was not steady. Rather, it shared the instability of living metabolism and danced always on the same edge of disaster.

Yet when he talked... then you forgot his arrogance and flatulence, you remembered his observations which had finally proven the oscillating universe, and you saw him crowned with stars.

He's nothing butavictim oftheromantic nationalism thatourtooorderly world hasbeen consoling itself with, thispastgeneration.

Constellations grew lopsided, grew grotesque, andmelted, as theirmembers crawled across thedark.

Well before then, however, through one unforeseeable factor or another, when travel time between maser projector and ship stretched into months, the beam was sure to lose her.

Meeting it was like, like seeing a woman one loved become a slut.

The fact is,man has never stayed byasingle ideal.

There was no other way by which men might possess the galaxy.

The closer that v comes to c, the closer tau comes to zero.

By tacit agreement, no one mentioned that each second which passed laid Earth three hundred thousand kilometers farther behind.

Reymont had sucked in a single breath. Every expression went out of his face. He stood moveless, except that his fists clenched till nails dug into palms and skin stretched white across knuckles.

When fifty people are locked into one hull, everybody conducts himself right or everybody dies.

I knew a tame hawk once. That is, it wasn't tame in dog fashion, but it hunted with its man and deigned to sit on his wrist. You come awake the same way.

Then the jaws of the universe snapped shut.

Unless you believe in God, regulations are now the only comfort we have.

In a pioneering era, one learns chiefly by experience.

We'll either get by in reasonable shape or we'll die.

Ingrid Lindgren regarded him foratime thatshivered—aminute ormore, ship's chronology, which wasaquarter hour inthelivesofthestarsandplanets—before shesaid, very softly, 'What didyouwant ofhim?'

Fluorolight fell bleak on unpainted surfaces.

If a sun and planets had been in embryo here, they would now never form.

I have a headache like carpenters in my skull.

At our speed, hydrogen bombardment would release enough gamma rays and ions to fry everybody aboard within a minute.

They would be trying to breathe things like acetone, while getting along without things like phosphorus and smothering in things like earwax and belly-button lint.

The ship jeered at him in her tone of distant lightnings.

We'd be slow about any course change anyway. We can't turn on a ten-ore coin at our speed!

Into this homeostatis, this tightrope walk across the chance of a response that was improper or merely tardy—which would mean distortion and collapse of the fields, nova-like destruction of the ship—entered a human command.

Loneliness closed on the ship like fingers.

Bythetime sheemerged, shewasgoing sofastthatthe normal oneatom percubic centimeter counted forabout asmuch as thecloud haddone.

In short, your good gray friend Lars Telander is about to change into the Old Man.

We don't have to be absolutely abbot and nun, we two.

The idea that others might be speeding from star to star like birds—like me from town to town when I was home—while we're caged here . . . that would be too cruel.

She fled,weeping butoneager feet.

The effects of prolonged sensory impoverishment are slower, subtler, but in many ways more destructive.

I've had a bellyful of this little tin Jesus, and now's the time to do something about him.

The fluoropanel spilled light onto her frost-blond hair; the voice in which she bade Reymont commence, after they were all seated, was equally cold.

Atpresent, Ibelieve itisabout annoDomini 10,000 athome. Give ortake several centuries.

It's healthier to be mad at me than to dwell on personal woes... as you, my love, have been doing.

The sky was no longer black; it was a shimmering purple, which deepened and brightened as interior months went by: because the interaction of force fields and interstellar medium—eventually, interstellar magnetism—was releasing quanta.

They talked business forhalfanhour. (Centuries passed beyond the hull.)

Facing that emptiness, she retreats—unconsciously, no doubt—toward a permissible form of suicide.

I haven't the faintest idea, but I suspect that he hopes eventually to include everybody.

Among your many loathsome characteristics, Nilsson, is your habit of droning the obvious through your nose.

We are adrift in space and time; the world we knew is a hundred thousand years in its grave; we are rushing nearly blind into the most crowded part of the galaxy.

I should think you could find ways to use relativity effects to give you information that wasn't available at home.

In cosmic time, we'll have hours or days to check whatever planet interests us.

I have been left alone in the dark and the cold. Do you wonder that my mind is frozen?

The scene behind was of a dwindling fireball, ahead of a gathering darkness.

Not enough material will be there for the jets to work on, nor enough navigational data to guide us.

I never thought that I, grown up, would again be afraid of the dark.

Graves arecalling withopen mouths, And earth sucksdown ev'ry light-shy horror.

Occasional giant stars came sufficiently close to show in the now-modified screens, distorted with the speed effects that sent them whirling past as if they were sparks blown by the wind that shouted against the ship.

One had thought of space as black. But now one remembered that it had been full of stars.

He heard a few oaths and grinned like a carnivore.

They had been so long accustomed to the engine pulse as well as the force of acceleration that free fall still brimmed the ship with silence.

Another way of narrowing your attention till you exclude the big bad universe.

The captain looked as if he had been struck in the belly.

A tau so low that we can actually circumnavigate the universe ... in years or in months.

The accessible mass of the whole galactic clan that was her goal proved inadequate to brake that velocity.

Hisfreehand swatted at stinking yellow liquid andgobbets. Inhaled under these conditions, the stuffcould choke aperson.

If you . . . you cut my baby out of me—I'll kill you! I'll kill everyone aboard!

For another instant, the vizor lifted. This time a death's head looked out. 'Too bloody clawing much!' he shouted. He flung the door wide and whipped into the corridor.

You mean, the whole universe is growing enough older for us to notice?

For a moment the blue eyes were wild and blind.

They stood alone amidst the ornaments and souvenirs of a country that died gigayears before, and regarded each other.

A metal noise toned through the hull, like a basso profundo gong.

Everything weknew, everything thatmade us,isdead. Startingwith thehuman race.

Emerging, closing thedoor behind him,Reymont glanced the length ofthecorridor. Nooneelsewas insight.Hesagged, then, eyes covered, body shaking.

The form was chaotic. Whatever structure it had once had was disintegrated. It was a dull, vague, redness, deepening at the fringes to the hue of clotted blood.

It was a dull, vague, redness, deepening at the fringes to the hue of clotted blood.

I propose we go on to the next cycle of the cosmos.

My God—very literally, my God—we can't go on . . . having regular bowel movements . . . while creation happens!

The baby's first cry responded to the noise of inward-falling worlds.

Space flamed around her, afirestorm, hydrogen aglow from that supernal sun which was forming attheheart ofexistence.

Those who lay harnessed alone, throughout the hull, heard invisible lightnings walk the corridors.

Reymont paced forsome turns. Hisboots clacked onthedeck.He rubbed hisbrow, where thewrinkles laydeep.

But let's make this, as nearly as possible, a human galaxy, in the widest sense of the word 'human.' Maybe even a human universe.

Once a crisis is past, once people can manage for themselves . . . what better can a king do for them than take off his crown?

Thatmeant theyhad tokeep accelerating. Ordie.

Atop its pillar, the Hand of God upbearing the Genius of Man lifted in silhouette against a greenish-blue dusk.

At our speed, hydrogen bombardment would release enough gamma rays and ions to fry everybody aboard within a minute.

We'd be slow about any course change anyway. We can't turn on a ten-ore coin at our speed!

Not enough material will be there for the jets to work on, nor enough navigational data to guide us.

You mean, the whole universe is growing enough older for us to notice?

The form was chaotic. Whatever structure it had once had was disintegrated. It was a dull, vague, redness, deepening at the fringes to the hue of clotted blood.

I propose we go on to the next cycle of the cosmos.

Space flamed around her, afirestorm, hydrogen aglow from that supernal sun which was forming attheheart ofexistence.

Those who lay harnessed alone, throughout the hull, heard invisible lightnings walk the corridors.

But let's make this, as nearly as possible, a human galaxy, in the widest sense of the word 'human.' Maybe even a human universe.