Collision Course Read online

  Shrugging, Bernard gave him the book. Dominici opened it at random, and almost immediately began to scowl. He looked up after a moment.

  “I can’t read it! Don’t tell me you’ve been reading him in the original? What is this, Greek? Sanskrit?”

  “English,” Bernard said. “It’s a hobby of mine, studying old languages. But go ahead; look at each word, pronounce it phonetically if you can. Shakespeare’s English isn’t that far removed from modern-day Terran. It just looks strange. But that’s the direct ancestor of our own language, you know.”

  Dominici frowned, muttered a couple of words aloud experimentally, and gave up. “It’s hopeless. Even if I could figure out all the words, I’d never get the sense. Take it back.”

  Bernard retrieved his book. Odd, he thought; he had taken naturally to old English, and read it without a hitch now. But, he had to admit, it was not really very much like contemporary Terran. Hundreds of years of transmat civilization had blended the languages of Earth into one homogeneous tongue, founded on English but vastly different.

  It was strange to think of a time when men had spoken hundreds of different languages, thousands of subdialects. But so the world had been, not many centuries ago. Only the transmat, enabling a person to outstrip the lightning in his travels, ensured the continuing uniformity of Terran language and culture everywhere.

  He put the book away. Concentration was impossible; too many extraneous fears intervened. His hands were cold with tension. He paced the narrow cabin. The viewscreen showed nothing but gray; it was impossible to tell that they were moving—but they were, incalculable strides each fragment of a moment, plunging on toward Earth.

  Bernard did not want to see the Technarch McKenzie’s face when he received the news of the Norglan ultimatum. He wished there were some way of submitting a written report instead. But there would be no help for it; they would have to report in person. It would be an ugly little moment, Bernard was certain.

  The cabin was silent. Havig was sunk in that impenetrable cloak of abstraction of his, communing with his God; no use seeking company there. Dominici had gone to sleep. Stone stared at the viewless vision screen, no doubt thinking of his shattered diplomatic career. A man who goes forth to negotiate a treaty and returns with an enemy ultimatum jammed down his gullet does not rise to the Archonate.

  Bernard made his way forward, past the walls studded with rivets, past the galley, into the control cabin at the nose of the ship. The door was open. Within, he could see all five of them at work, parts of the same organism, extensions of the ship. For minutes, no one took notice of the sociologist as he stood at the entrance to the control cabin peering at the flashing lights, listening to the droning click of the computer. Then Laurance saw him. Turning, the Commander’s eyes narrowed; his face, Bernard thought, looked strangely rigid, almost tortured.

  “Sorry, Dr. Bernard. We’re very busy. Would you mind remaining in your cabin?”

  “Oh—of course. Sorry to intrude…”

  Rebuked, Bernard returned to the passenger half of the ship. Nothing had changed. The clock showed that nearly fourteen hours of no-space travel remained.

  He was growing hungry. But as the clock-hands crawled on, no one appeared from the crew to announce that it was meal-time. Bernard waited.

  “Getting hungry?” Stone asked.

  “Plenty. But they looked busy up front when I went fore,” Bernard said. “Maybe they can’t take time out for a meal break yet.”

  “We’ll wait another hour,” Stone decided. “Then we eat without them.”

  The hour went by, and half an hour more. Stone and Bernard went fore. Tiptoeing past the galley, Bernard glanced into the control cabin and saw the five crewmen as frantically busy as ever. Shrugging, he stole away again, unnoticed.

  “They don’t look as if they plan to eat,” he told Stone; “we might as well help ourselves.”

  “What about the other two?”

  “Dominici’s asleep, Havig’s meditating. They can eat whenever they feel like it, after all.”

  “You’re right,” Stone agreed.

  They fell to, dishing out the synthetics. Nakamura kept the galley spotlessly, everything in its place. Staring into the storage cabinets, Bernard discovered with some surprise that the ship carried enough food to last for months. In case of emergency, he thought automatically. Then he checked himself. Emergency? For the first time he realized that the XV-ftl, was an experimental ship, that faster-than-light travel was in its puling infancy.

  He prepared the synthetics with something less than Nakamura’s culinary skill, and they ate a silent meal. It was the seventh hour of no-space travel by the time they finished. In less than half a day, the XV-ftl would wink back into the familiar universe somewhere near the orbit of Pluto.

  Returning to the cabin, Bernard settled himself in his bunk. Dominici had awakened. “Did I miss lunch?” he wanted to know.

  “The crew’s too busy to take a break,” Stone said. “We made lunch ourselves. You were sound asleep, so we didn’t wake you.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Dominici went forward to see about his meal; after a moment, Havig followed him. Bernard lay back, nestling his head on his hands, and dozed for a while. When he woke, six hours remained; he was hungry again.

  “You haven’t missed a thing,” Dominici assured him. “They’re awfully busy up front.”

  “Still?” Bernard asked. He began to feel uneasy.

  The hours trickled away. Three hours left, two, one. He counted minutes. The seventeen-hour no-space interim had expired. They ought to be converting back, but no news came from the control cabin. Conversion was twenty minutes overdue, thirty minutes. An hour.

  “Do you think there’s some reason why we should spend more time in no-space on the way back than on the way out?” Stone asked.

  Dominici shrugged. “In no-space theory almost anything goes. But I don’t like this. Not at all.”

  When they were three hours past the conversion time, Bernard said through lips dry with tension: “Maybe we ought to go up front and find out what’s what?”

  “Not yet,” Stone said. “Let’s be patient.”

  They tried to be patient. Only Havig succeeded, sitting wrapped in his unbreakable calm. Another hour went by, more tortuously than any of the others. Suddenly the gong sounded, three times, reverberating through the entire ship.

  “At last,” Bernard muttered. “Four hours late.”

  The lights dimmed; the indefinable sensation of transition came over them, and the viewscreen blazed with light. They had returned to the universe!

  Then Bernard frowned. The viewscreen…

  He was no astronomer, but even so he spied the wrongness. These were not the constellations he knew; the stars did not look this way in the orbit of Pluto. That great blazing blue double, with its attendant circlet of smaller stars—he had never seen that formation before. Panic swirled coldly through him.

  Laurance entered the cabin suddenly. His face was paper-white, his lips bloodless.

  “What’s going on?” Bernard and Dominici demanded in the same instant.

  Laurance said quietly, “Commend yourselves to whatever gods you happen to believe in. We went off course the moment we converted yesterday. I don’t know where we are —but it’s most likely better than a hundred thousand light-years from home.”

  ELEVEN

  “You mean we’re lost?” Dominici asked, his voice rising to an incredulous screech.

  “I mean just that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us about this before?” Bernard demanded. “Why did you leave us to stew here in uncertainty all this time?”

  Laurance shrugged. “We were making course compensations, trying to find our way back to the right path; but it didn’t work. There wasn’t even a trace of a single one of our course referents. And everything we did only seemed to make things worse. In the final analysis we really don’t know the first bit about faster-than-light navigation.” Lau
rance’s shoulders slumped wearily. “We decided to give up trying, a little while ago, and converted back to the normal universe. But there isn’t a single familiar landmark. We’re as lost as can be.”

  “How could such a thing happen?” Stone wanted to know. “I thought our course was pre-set—everything calculated automatically in advance…”

  “To a certain extent, yes,” Laurance agreed. “But there were the minute adjustments, the position feedbacks, and somewhere along there we went astray. Maybe it was a mechanical failure, maybe a human error. We don’t know.”

  “Does it matter now?” Bernard said.

  “Hardly. A millionth of a second of parallax error— widening into an enormous departure from course almost instantly. And so—here we are.”

  “Where?” Stone asked.

  “The best I can offer you is an educated guess. We think we’ve emerged from no-space somewhere in the region of the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Hernandez is busy taking observations now. We’ve spotted one star we’re pretty sure is S Doradus, and that would clinch things.”

  “So we’re not too far from home,” Dominici said with a harsh chuckle. “Only in the next galaxy, that’s all. What’s a mere 50,000 parsecs?”

  “If we know where we are,” said Stone, “shouldn’t we be able to find our way back to Earth?”

  “Not necessarily,” Laurance replied. “No-space travel doesn’t follow any logical pattern. There’s no correlation between time and distance, and no way of telling direction. We’re traveling blindfolded; the best we can do is send out an experimental ship unmanned, track its course, find out where it goes, and then duplicate the course. Only we don’t have any unmanned ships to send out. Our only hope for getting home is trial-and-error computation—and it’s just as reasonable to assume that on our next jump we’ll wind up in Andromeda as back in our own galaxy.”

  “But we’ll give it a try, at least,” Bernard said.

  “I’m not so sure we ought to. Right now we’re in a galaxy very much like our own. We may be wiser simply to pick out an Earth-type planet and settle there, rather than go shooting off into no-space again and possibly ending up stranded between galaxies, slowly starving to death.”

  “Better to starve in the attempt to reach home,” Havig said, breaking his silence, “than to waste away on some strange world.”

  “Probably you’re right,” Laurance agreed. “But we’ll have to think things out very carefully before we rush ahead and do anything. We have about three months’ food on board ship. So we have some time to play around before we have to start looking for a habitable planet. I…”

  Nakamura entered the cabin suddenly. In a low voice he said to Laurance, “Commander, could you come up front for a moment? There’s something we’d like to show you.”

  “Certainly. Excuse me, gentlemen.”

  The spacemen left. For a long moment there was silence in the cabin after they had gone.

  Bernard stared at the vision screen. It was a breathtaking view: a sprawling field of stars, a Milky Way no human eyes had ever seen before. Blazing blue-white giants and dim red stars studded the field of vision. And down in the lower part of the screen hung a dazzling white cloud, a coil with an arm drifting loose at either end. With a jarring sense of shock Bernard realized he was looking at his own galaxy. Somewhere within that seemingly tightly packed mass of light lay Sol, and the thousands of worlds of the Terran system; in there, too, were the Norglan worlds, and as many millions more of uninhabited, unexplored planets. And there they all were, both rival empires and perhaps all the intelligent life of the universe, looking at this distance like a bright blotch the size of a man’s hand.

  Bernard caught his breath. It was a numbing sight to see the galaxy from a distance of some 50,000 parsecs. It tended to provide a different perspective on things, to demonstrate beyond the power of all words to convey how small was man and all his aspirations, how unintelligibly mighty the universe. At this distance, no single star of the home galaxy could be discerned by the unaided eye. And yet, in that inconsequential cluster of stars in the corner of the screen, how many grandiose plans for universal conquest were born before each sunrise?

  Stone laughed, bitterly, mirthlessly. “Which is worse, anyway?” he asked. “To get lost out here fifty thousand parsecs from home—or to return to Earth with the Norglan ultimatum? Me, I almost think I’d rather stay lost, and at least not have to bring that kind of news home.”

  “Not me,” Dominici retorted without hesitation. “I’m not in the same boat you are. If we got back home, I’d survive the Technarch’s anger, and maybe I’d be lucky enough to live through the war with the Norglans. At least if I died it wouldn’t be a lingering death. I can’t buy your preference for staying lost. It wouldn’t have been so bad with a couple of women on board, maybe, but to be stranded this way, on the edge of nowhere? Nine Adams and no Eves? Uh-uh. Not for me, friends.”

  Ignoring the discussion, Bernard continued to stare at the alien sky in the vision screen.

  Ten thousand light-years had seemed so far from home, once. A staggering distance, inconceivably vast. But it wasn’t, not really, not when you put matters into their proper perspective. Earth and Norgla were virtually next-door neighbors when you stood this far away and looked back. Bernard smiled ironically. And to think that we and the Norglans were all set to divvy up the universe between us! What cosmic arrogance, what, supreme gall! What right do any of us, in our puny little galaxy, have to stake even a tentative claim out here?

  “How about you, Bernard?” Dominici asked. “You haven’t been saying much. What do you think of Stone’s idea? Would you rather stay lost out here, or be the bearer of evil tidings?”

  “Oh, I’d like to get back home,” Bernard said mildly. “No doubt about it. I miss my books, my music, I even miss my teaching chores.”

  “No family?” Dominici asked.

  “Not really.” Bernard leaned back. “Two marriages; both dissolved. I have a son somewhere, by my first wife. David Martin Bernard, that’s his name. I haven’t seen him in fifteen years. I guess he doesn’t use my last name. He’s been raised to think that someone else is his father. If I met him on the street, he wouldn’t know me even by name.”

  “Oh,” the biophysicist said in embarrassment. “Sorry to bring it up.”

  Bernard shrugged. “You don’t have to apologize. It’s not a wound that rankles in my bosom, anything like that. I simply wasn’t cut out to be a family man. Can’t get myself sufficiently involved with other people except on non-practical levels of scholarship or connoisseurship or the like. More’s the pity I didn’t realize that before my first marriage, that’s all.” Bernard wondered why he was saying all this. “It wasn’t till the second marriage broke up,” he went on, “that I realized that temperamentally I was a born bachelor. So I’ve got no family ties with Earth. But I’d still like to get home, all the same.”

  “I guess we all do,” said Stone. “I didn’t really mean what I said a few minutes ago. It was just a thought off the top of my head.”

  “I was married once too,” Dominici said to no one in particular. “She was a lab technician with golden hair, and we honeymooned in Farrarville on Arcturus X. She died ten years ago.”

  And you obviously haven’t gotten over it, Bernard thought, seeing the sudden anguished look on Dominici’s face.

  The sociologist felt uncomfortable. Up till now there had been a certain understanding of reserve in effect between the four of them; cooped up though they were, they had kept back details of their private lives. But if it all came spilling forth now as a relief from stress, all the long sad autobiographies of frustrations and petty disappointments and lost loves, the situation in the cabin would be intolerable. Each man would clamor to spew out his autobiography, while the others would wait their turns. And, Bernard knew, it would be his fault for having touched off the revelations.

  Stone had caught it now. “I never married,” he was saying, “so in a sense I
don’t have much to go home to. Not that there wasn’t a girl, but it didn’t work out, and—well, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to rot for the rest of my life on some strange planet half the universe away from Earth. To die unmourned, alone, forgotten…”

  “It would be the will of God, wouldn’t it?” Dominici asked. “Everything’s the will of God. You just sit back and let God pour trouble all over you, and you shrug your shoulders stoically because it’s His will and therefore there’s just no use complaining.” Dominici’s voice had taken on a shrill, flippant edge. “Isn’t that so, Havig? You’re our expert on God. How come you haven’t been spouting your usual stuff to console us? We— Havig!”

  Bernard swung around.

  It was a startling sight. Sitting by himself, as usual, in his corner bunk, taking no part in the conversation, the lanky Neopuritan was very quietly having what looked like a fit of hysterics.

  Like every other aspect of the man, even his very hysteria was subdued, repressed. His body was being racked with great whooping sobs, but Bernard realized that he was choking them back with an almost demonic intensity of concentration. His eyes were wet with tears; his jaws were tightly clenched, his white-knuckled hands gripped the edge of the bunk. The sobs rippled up through him, and grimly he forced them back, not letting a sound escape from his mouth. The conflict between discipline and collapse was evident. The effect was totally astonishing.

  The three other men were frozen in surprise a moment. Then Dominici snapped curtly, “Havig! Havig, what’s the matter with you? Are you sick, man?”

  “No—not sick,” Havig said, in a low, dark, hollow voice.

  “What’s wrong, then? Is there anything we can get for you? Do for you?”

  “Leave me alone,” Havig muttered.

  Bernard stared at the Neopuritan in consternation. For once, the sociologist felt that he had penetrated Havig’s mask and understood.

  “Can’t you see what he’s thinking?” Bernard said quietly to Dominici and Stone. “He’s thinking that all his life he was a good man, kept the ways of God as he saw them, worked hard, prayed. Worshipped Him as he thought He must be worshipped. And—and then this. Lost here, billions and billions of miles from home, church, family. Wife. Children. Gone, and why? He’s breaking up under that. He doesn’t know why.”