I stood by the viewplate, watching this alien sky, this strange repellent planet that we had come here to explore, its yellow sun, its neighbor worlds wandering the dark sky all about us, and the hint of other stars in the sky behind them, mere bright specks, betokening the vastness of the universe in which we are soon once more to be wandering; and then, in a twinkling, the whole scene was gone, wiped from my sight in a single abolishing stroke, and I was looking once again at the rippling, eddying, shimmering blankness that is nospace. We had successfully made our shunt. How I had missed that dazzling gray emptiness! How I rejoiced now at seeing it once more!
So again we are outside space and time, crossing through unfathomable nowhere on our route from somewhere to somewhere, and I realize that I have in some fashion begun to become a denizen of nospace: I am happiest, it seems, when we have ripped ourselves loose of the fabric of normal space and time and are floating in this quiet featureless other reality, this void within the void, this inexplicable strangeness, this mathematical construct, that we call nospace. Nospace travel is only a means to an end; why, then, do I take such pleasure in returning to it? Can it be that my secret preference, unknown even to me, is that we never find any suitable world at all, that we roam the galaxy forever like the crew of the accursed Flying Dutchman? Surely not. Surely I want us to discover that Planet B is a warm and friendly land, where we will settle and thrive and live happily ever after.
Surely.
The journey, Paco tells me, will take five or six months, or perhaps as many as eight — he can’t be entirely certain, the mathematics of nospace travel being the paradoxical business that is. No less than five, no more than eight, anyway. And then we do the whole survey-mission thing all over again, with better luck, let us hope, than this time.
The chances are, of course, that B won’t work out any better than A did. Our requirements are too fastidious: a place with our kind of atmosphere, a place with actual H2O water, one that isn’t too hot or too cold, that doesn’t already belong to some intelligent species, et cetera, et cetera. But Hesper has more worlds up his sleeve, eight or ten of them by now that strike him as promising prospects. And there will be others beyond those. The galaxy is unthinkably huge, and we are, after all, still essentially in Earth’s own backyard, bouncing around a sphere no more than a hundred light-years in diameter, out here in one small arm of the galaxy, 30,000 light-years from the center. The galaxy in its entirety has — how many stars? two hundred billion? four hundred billion? — and if only one out of a thousand of those has planets, and one planet out of a thousand falls within the criteria for habitability that we must impose, then there are more potential worlds for us out there than we could ever reach in our lifetimes, or in those of the children that may be born aboard this starship as our voyage proceeds. Surely one of those will work out for us.
Surely.
They are well along now in this leg of their journey, and interference problems have developed again for Noelle. The static, the fuzziness of transmission quality, that first had begun to set in in the fifth month of the voyage, and that had at some points become severe and at others had almost vanished, has returned again in much greater force than before. There are some days when Noelle can barely make contact with her sister at all.
Though the voyage is uneventful now, one serene day following another, the year-captain insists on making the daily transmissions to Earth. He continues to believe that that is an important, even essential, activity for them: that the people of Earth are vicariously living the greatest adventure of their languid lives through the men and women of the Wotan, and derive immense psychological value from their daily dose of news from those intrepid travelers who fearlessly roam the distant stars. It does his crew some good, too, to get word from Earth regularly of the things that are taking place there, such as they are.
But now, day by day, the transmission problems are becoming more extreme, and Noelle must struggle with ever-greater outlay of effort to maintain her weakening connection with far-off Yvonne. She is working at it so hard that the year-captain has begun to fear for her. He is feeling the strain himself.
“I have the new communiqué ready to send,” he tells her edgily. “Do you feel up to it?”
“Of course I do.” She gives him a ferocious smile. “Don’t even hint at giving up, year-captain. There absolutelyhas to be some way around this interference.”
“Absolutely,” he says. He rustles his papers restlessly. “Okay, then, Noelle. Let’s go. This is shipday number—”
“Wait,” she says. “Give me just another moment to get ready, all right?”
He pauses. She closes her eyes and begins to enter the transmitting state. She is conscious, as ever, of Yvonne’s presence. Even when no specific information is flowing between them, there is perpetual low-level contact, there is the sense that the other is near, that warm proprioceptive awareness such as one has of one’s own arm or leg or hip. But between that impalpable subliminal contact and the actual transmission of specific content lie several key steps. Yvonne and Noelle are human biopsychic resonators constituting a long-range communications network; there is a tuning procedure for them as for any other transmitters and receivers. Noelle opens herself to the radiant energy spectrum, vibratory, pulsating, that will carry her message to her Earthbound sister. As the transmitting circuit in this interchange she must be the one to attain maximum energy flow. Quickly, intuitively, she activates her own energy centers, the one in the spine, the one in the solar plexus, the one at the top of the skull; a stream of energy pours from her and instantaneously spans the galaxy.
But today there is an odd and troublesome splashback effect: Noelle, monitoring the circuit, is immediately aware that the signal has failed to reach Yvonne. Yvonne is there, Yvonne is tuned and expectant, yet something is jamming the channel and nothing gets through, not a single syllable.
“The interference is worse than ever,” she tells the year-captain. “I feel as if I could put my hand out andtouch Yvonne. But she’s not reading me and nothing’s coming back from her.”
With a little shake of her shoulders Noelle alters the sending frequency; she feels a corresponding adjustment at Yvonne’s end of the connection; but again they are thwarted, again there is total blockage. Her signal is going forth and is being soaked up by — what? How can such a thing happen?
Now she makes a determined effort to boost the output of the system. She addresses herself to the neural center in her spine, exciting its energies, using them to drive the next center to a more intense vibrational tone, harnessing that to push the highest center of all to its greatest harmonic capacity. Up and down the energy bands she roves. Nothing. Nothing. She shivers; she huddles; she is visibly depleted by the strain, pale, struggling for breath. “I can’t get through,” she murmurs. “Yvonne’s there, I can feel her there, I know she’s working to read me. But I can’t transmit any sort of intelligible coherent message.”
A hundred, two hundred, however many light-years from Earth it is that they are, and the only communication channel is blocked. The year-captain finds himself unexpectedly beleaguered by frosty terrors. They can report nothing to the mother world; they can receive nothing. It should not matter, really, but it does. It matters terribly, somehow. The ship, the self-sufficient autonomous ship, has become a mere gnat blowing in a hurricane. There is darkness on all sides of them. The voyagers now hurtle blindly onward into the depths of an unknown universe, alone, alone, alone.
He sits by himself in the control cabin, brooding. He has failed Noelle, he knows, fleeing helplessly from her in the moment of her need, overwhelmed by the immensity of her loss, for it is her loss even more than it is theirs. All about him meaningless readout lights flash and wink. He is dumbfounded by the depth of the sudden despair that has engulfed him.
He had been so smug about not needing any link to Earth, but now that the link is gone he shivers and cowers. He barely can recognize himself in this new unraveled man that he has become. Everything has been made new. There are no rules. Human beings have never been this far from home, and the tenuous, invisible bond between the sisters had been their lifeline, he realizes now, and now the sisters are sundered and that lifeline is gone. It is gone. The water is wide and their ship is very small. He walks out into the corridor and presses himself against the viewplate; and the famous grayness of the Intermundium just beyond, swirling and eddying, the grayness that had been so beautiful to him and so full of revelations, mocks him now with its unbearable immensity. Mocks and seduces all at once. Leap into me, it calls. Leap, leap, lose yourself in me, drown in me.
Behind him, the sound of soft footsteps. Noelle. She touches his hunched, knotted shoulders. “It’s all right,” she whispers. “You’re overreacting. Don’t make such a tragedy out of it.” But it is. Her tragedy in particular, hers and Yvonne’s. He is amazed that she can even think of giving comfort to him in this moment, when it is he who should be comforting her. Noelle and Yvonne have spent their lives in the deepest of unions, a union fundamentally incomprehensible to everyone but them, and that is lost to them now. How brave she is, he thinks. How strong in the face of this, her great disaster.
But also, he knows, it is his disaster, his tragedy, theirs, everybody’s. They are all cut off. Lost forever in a foggy silence. Whatever triumphs they may achieve out here, if ever any triumphs there are to be, they will never be able to share them with the mother world. Or at least will not be able to share them for a century or more, until the news of their accomplishments creeps finally back to Earth on whatever conventional carrier wave they use to send it. None of the fifty who sailed the stars aboard the Wotan can hope still to be alive by then.
From the gaming lounge, far down the corridor, comes the sound of singing. Boisterous voices, Elliot, Chang, Leon. They know nothing, yet, of what has happened.
Well, Travelin’ Dan was a spacefarin’ man
Who jumped in the nospace tube —
The year-captain still has not turned. Something that might have been a sigh or might perhaps have been a sob escapes from Noelle, behind him. He whirls, seizes her, pulls her against him. Feels her trembling. Comforts her, where a moment before she had been comforting him. “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” he murmurs. With his arm around her shoulders he swings around, pivoting so that they both are facing the viewplate. As if she could see. Nospace dances and churns a couple of centimeters from his nose, just beyond that transparent shield. That shimmering grayness, that deep infinite well of nothingness, his great Intermundium. It frightens him now. He feels a fierce wind blowing out of the viewplate and through the ship, the khamsin, the sirocco, the simoom, the leveche, a sultry wind, a killing wind coming out of the gray strangeness, all the grim, dry deadly winds that rove the Earth bringing fire and madness, hot winds and cold ones, the mistral, the tramontana. No, he thinks. No. He forces himself not to fear that wind. He tells himself that it is a wind of joy, a cool sweet wind, a wind of life. Why should he think there is anything to fear in the realm beyond the viewplate? Until today he has always loved to stand here and stare into it: how beautiful it is out there, how ecstatically beautiful, that is what he has always thought! And it is. It is. Noelle is quivering against him as if she sees what he sees, and he begins to grow calm, begins to find beauty in the sight of the nospace realm again. How sad, the year-captain thinks, that we can never tell anyone about it now, except one another.
A strange peace unexpectedly descends on him. He has found once more that zone of calm that he had learned, in his monastery days, the secret of attaining. Everything is going to be all right, he insists. No harm will come of what has happened. And perhaps some good. And perhaps some good. Benefits lurk in the darkest places.
Noelle playsGo obsessively, beating everyone. She seems to live in the lounge twenty hours a day. Sometimes she takes on two opponents at once — an incredible feat, considering that she must hold the constantly changing intricacies of both boards in her memory — and defeats them both: two days after losing verbal-level contact with Yvonne, she simultaneously triumphs over Roy and Heinz before an astounded audience of fifteen or twenty of her shipmates. She looks animated and buoyant; they all have been told by now what has happened, but whatever sorrow she must feel over the snapping of the link she takes care to conceal. She expresses it, the others suspect, only by her manicGo -playing. The year-captain is one of her most frequent adversaries now, taking his turn at the board in the time he would have devoted to composing and dictating the communiqués for Earth. He had thoughtGo was over for him years ago, but he, too, is playing obsessively these days, building walls and the unassailable fortresses known as eyes. There is satisfaction and reassurance in the rhythmic clacking march of the black and white stones. But Noelle wins every game she plays against him. She covers the board with eyes.
The quest for Planet B serves, to a considerable degree, to distract the voyagers from the problems that the disruption of contact with Earth has created. Expectations quickly begin to rise. Suddenly there is great optimism about Planet B among the members of the expedition. If there are no more cozy messages from home, there is, at least, the counterbalancing pleasure of contemplating the possibility that a wonderful new Earthlike home lies at the end of this stretch of their voyage.
Hesper has refined his correlation techniques and is able to provide them with a plethora of data of high-order reliability, so he claims, about the world toward which they go. It is, he says, the second of five planets that surround a medium-size K-type star. Whether a star of that spectral type can be hot enough to sustain temperatures in the range agreeable for protoplasmic life is something that arouses some debate aboard ship, but Hesper assures everybody that the star that is their destination is a K of better-than-median luminosity, and that Planet B is close enough to it so that there should be ample warmth, perhaps even a little too much for complete comfort.
How can Hesper know all this stuff? No one can figure it out: it is a perpetual mystery aboard the ship. He doesn’t have access to direct astronomical observation of the target system, not out here in nospace; they all are aware that he is simply playing around with a bunch of cryptic reality-analogs, a set of data-equivalents that he decodes by means of methods that nobody else can comprehend. Still, he was right enough about Planet A, so far as the question of its size, temperature range, atmospheric makeup, and other salient points was concerned. Hesper had indeed missed one small detail about Planet A that made it notably unsuitable for human settlement, but that was one that no instrument yet devised could have detected in advance of an actual manned landing.
What Hesper says about Planet B is even more encouraging than his preliminary reports on its unhappy predecessor. Planet B, Hesper asserts, is a planet of goodly size, with a diameter that is something like 15 percent greater than that of Earth, but it must be made up largely of the lighter elements, because its mass is no bigger than Earth’s and its gravitational pull, presumably, is about the same. It definitely has an atmosphere, according to Hesper, and here the news is very good indeed, the good old oxygen-nitrogen-and-a-smattering-of-CO2, mixed pretty much the way human lungs prefer to have it, except that there’s a tad more CO2than is found on Earth. Possibly a tad more than a tad, in truth — a bit of a greenhouse effect, Hesper admits, probably giving rise to a sort of steamy Mesozoic texture for the place. But the Mesozoic on Earth was a life-friendly era, a time of gloriously flourishing fauna and flora, and there should be nothing to worry about, Hesper tells them. Think tropical, he says; and, child of the sunblasted tropics that he is himself, his eyes light up with the thrill of anticipation. All will be well. It will be a planet-size Hawaii, he indicates. Or a planet-size Madagascar. Warm, warm, warm, lots of moisture where moisture does the most good, a shining, humid paradise, a sweet lush leafy Eden.
Well, maybe so. Some of the older members of the crew remember that the Mesozoic was the dinosaur era, and they don’t see anything particularly enticing about setting up a colony in the midst of a lot of dinosaurs. But there isn’t any logical necessity to the analogy, which others promptly point out. Evolution doesn’t have to follow the same track on every world. High humidity and tropical temperatures from pole to pole and an extra dollop of CO2in the air may have given rise to a dominant race of giant reptiles on Earth, sure, but on Planet B the same circumstances may have brought forth nothing more complex than a tribe of happy jellyfish dreamily adrift in the balmy oceans.
Oh, the oceans. A bit of a puzzle there, Hesper has to concede. His long-distance proxy-equivalent hocus-pocus has, at least so far, failed to turn up evidence that thereare any oceans on Planet B. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, considering the apparent prevalence of water molecules in the atmosphere and the generally high global mean temperatures, which might reasonably have been expected to induce a lot of rainfall. But Planet B’s surface, as manifested in the surrogate form of Hesper’s long-range data, seems to have the same even texture everywhere, no inequalities of albedo or temperature or anything else significant, so either there is a single vast planetary ocean or none at all. The latter is by far the more probable hypothesis. So a little mystery exists in that quarter — one that will have to await resolution for a while, until they are much closer and can carry out some direct optical inspection of the place itself.
And then, one would assume, once there has been a good look-see from low orbit and the place is found worthy of further checking out, there will be the whole thing of sending down a drone probe again, followed, if everything looks good, by a manned ship, an exploratory party. Everyone has started to assume that thingswill look good down there, in fact that things will be downright ideal, and therefore that an exploratory party is ultimately in the cards. Which brings up some questions that have already arisen once before in the course of the voyage — the makeup of the landing party that will go down to confirm the usefulness and beauty of Planet B, and the concomitant issue of the expiration of the year-captain’s second year in office.
That second year is almost up now. And he will want to be part of any exploration team that goes down to visit Planet B, of course. So they have the troublesome business of an election to deal with, once again.
It is dealt with, quietly and quickly, in a caucus consisting of the dozen members of the expedition who care most about these matters.
“He is essential and indispensable,” Heinz says. “There’s no other plausible possibility for the job, is there? Is there?”
“Well, is there?” Paco asks. “You tell us.”
“Obviously there’s no one,” says Elizabeth. “He’ll have to be reelected.”
“You three have it very neatly worked out, don’t you?” Julia says.
Heinz gives her a quick look. “You don’t like it? Does that mean you’re volunteering to run again yourself?”
“You know I would, if I thought it would do any good. But I have to agree with you that if we took another vote, I wouldn’t be elected. He would.”
“And he will be,” says Heinz. “Just as he was last year.”
Huw says, “He’ll erupt. He’ll absolutely explode.”
“If we hand hima fait accompli ?” Sylvia says. “Simply tell him that he’s been reelected again by acclamation, and appeal to his sense of duty?”
“His sense of duty,” says Huw, “is directed entirely toward the exploration of the planets we discover. He didn’t sign on to be captain for life. It’s a job that’s supposed to rotate from year to year, isn’t it? So why would he let himself be stuck with it forever if it permanently disqualifies him from doing the one thing that he signed on to do?”
They consider that for a while. It’s a valid enough point; but in the end they agree that there’s no one else on board who can rally the necessary support. The year-captain has established himself in everyone’s mind as the captain-for-life; replacing him now with somebody else would have something of the quality of an insurrection. And who would they choose, anyway? Roy, Giovanna, Julia, Huw, Leon? Those who are qualified, even remotely, for the captaincy are either unwilling to take the job or else unsuitable by virtue of their existing responsibilities.