In the gulf that runs from Sol to Alpha Centauri there were now two ships.
One was far ahead. But the second ship was possessed of an infinite patience and a greater speed. With every space-league the gap between them grew a little smaller.
On the second ship there was a silence, within and without. Nothing human lived in it. There was no need of anything human. The ship was sufficient unto itself. From its dark hull the sensor field spread wide, infinitely sensitive, tirelessly inquisitive. It touched an object, plunging nearer on an oblique course. Through its external contact-points the sensor-field transmitted a series of impulses to the "bridge"—the walled heart, the protected mind, the cold precise soul of the ship. There were brains there, large and a small, cybernetic brains of transistors and coils and wires, whose thought was a swift shuttling of electrons. They thought, now. With inhuman swiftness they evaluated the information, set up curves and plotted vectors on the computers, and reached their conclusion. Object, meteor. Course, collision.
The cold, limited, unfrightened minds acted.
A message was flashed to relays, which sprang instantly alive. Throttles opened. The port lateral generators produced blasts of energy. The ship, moving at a velocity just under the speed of light, changed course—not a fraction too much, not a fraction too little.
The meteor went safely past. The relays clicked again. The compensators hummed. There was another little burst of energy. On a master panel red needles on several dials crawled back until they were once more contact-aligned exactly with the black ones that monitored the course. The necessity for the thought passed, and the cybernetic brains ceased to think. And again, the all-pervading silence fell.
No passengers, no crew. But the ship carried a cargo. Ranked in the nether darkness, their atomic warheads pointing down the launching tubes, the missiles slept and waited, until their own relay systems should call them to go forth and fulfill themselves.
In the RSS-1, peace and no time.
In the Lucy B. Davenport, far too much time and no peace at all.
Lying in his bunk, Kirby tried to sleep and failed. From across the tiny cabin Shari's even breathing mocked him. She seemed able to detach herself from her surroundings and exist undisturbed inside a kind of cocoon of patience that he envied but could not emulate. In the darkness Kirby lit a cigarette and swore inaudibly, and felt old beyond Methuselah.
Time.
Chronometer. Calendars. Clocks. Days with no sunrise, nights with no moon. Arbitrary segments cut from a universal blackness, formlessness, nothingness. Segments cut and shaped into little symbols and named with names that had no longer any meaning. What is Monday, in the spaces between the stars?
Time.
I should have done this when I was young, thought Kirby. I was sure of myself then. Now I don't know. I don't know at all. And I've got 'em here, the whole howling lot of 'em. Say the other men are as much to blame as I am, we were all in it together, made the plans and did the work and took the chances all the same. Okay. But it all hung on a pilot, and that's me. Pop Barstow is too old. Joe Davenport—and he was the start of it all, this was his ship and he hid her out of love and kept her safe and started the whole plan—he's been dust on the Martian wind for years now. There aren't any young pilots any more, except the ones I've trained myself right here aboard. That's why the voyage had to be made pretty soon, or never, because there aren't too many pilots left. So it was up to me. I did it. If it wasn't for me they'd all be sitting safe at home right now.
Time.
Computers. You know your own velocity. You know the top potential of the R-ship. You know the distance. You figure as near as you can how long it takes to get that particular R-ship out of mothballs and in shape to go. You pare down even that interval, so as to be sure you're not giving yourself an edge you don't have. You feed all this stuff into the computer and you get an answer, and you still don't know. You can't be sure. It's too close. You just have to sit and wait and sweat and pray, and it's one hell of a feeling.
The cigarette was burned down to his fingers. He ground it out very carefully and reached for another, and then stopped. Presently there would not be any more cigarettes, and there was no use pushing it. Shari's peaceful breathing began to rasp on his nerves. He wanted to wake her up and make her sit and twitch with him, but he fought down that desire too. Instead he got up and pulled on his pants and crept out without making any sound.
Outside in the corridor he stood for a moment trembling, thinking how it would be if anything happened to her. One in a million, she was. If they made it, if things worked out, they could still have kids. It wasn't too late.
Or was it? How close? his mind asked. How close is that black shadow behind you in the void, the shadow you haven't seen or heard but that you know is there, the swift shadow following?
He went forward to the bridge. Pop Barstow slumbered on the bench, and in the co-pilot's seat young Marapese, still too new to his responsibilities to be bored with them, sat rigidly erect watching the bank of indicators that had said nothing for far too long a time. Radarman Shaw sat in his cubby half asleep. He needed a shave, and in repose his face bore the sulky expression of a child kept after school. Kirby walked over and kicked the bench hard where Pop Barstow was lying.
"Hell of a watch you keep," he said.
Pop grunted and sat up, blinking at Kirby. "Too conscientious," he said. "That's the trouble with all you young fellows. Look." He pointed to Marapese and then to Shaw. "What's the good of me staying awake, too?"
"Because you're the senior officer," Kirby snarled. "Because it's customary. Because the kid's only a theoretical pilot as yet. Suppose something comes up he doesn't know how to deal with?"
"He'll wake me," Pop said reasonably. "You worry too much. That's bad. Ages a man before his time. Go back and get your sleep, Kirby. Anything happens, I'll let you know."
"All right, damn it, but stay awake!"
Kirby left the bridge. He started to go back to his cabin, but he had never felt less ready for sleep. He was tired, but there was a quivering restlessness on him, a sense of oppression. He did not know whether it was an honest presentiment or only the result of thinking too much about the same thing. Anyway, he could not go back into that dark little coop.
He went instead to the hatch that led to the cargo deck.
It was kept closed. You couldn't have a bunch of kids swarming around the bridge, handling things. He opened it as quietly as he could and went down the ladder. It was dark below, except for a few dim lights. It was nighttime. You knew that because a bell rang and after a while the main lighting tubes blinked off. Otherwise there was no change. There were no ports in the cargo deck, but if there had been it would have made no difference. What was outside had not altered since the day when, as a sort of afterthought, He made the stars also.
Kirby stood on the ladder and listened.
A child was crying, somewhere at the far end of the deck. People snored and turned and whimpered in their sleep. It was warm. The air was pure enough, but it had a stale flat taste from being breathed too many times and run through chemicals and across the hydroponics tanks. It smelled in here, of people and washing and cooking and babies. Especially babies. Especially babies.
The child stopped crying. The muffled stirrings and sighings blended into a dim monotone. Kirby took hold of the iron rail. For some reason he had begun to shake. The air was heavy. The curtained cubicles wherein the families slept looked queer and shadowed in the dimness. The people were all hidden. There was not a human face. It was as though he stood alone, and underneath his feet the ship seemed weighted with a dreadful burden.
Suddenly he turned and sprang up the ladder.
Shari was in the corridor. He thought she had been waiting for him beside the hatch. He looked at her and then past her, his eyes bright and hard, with an unnatural wideness.
"I'm going to turn back," he said.
"No."
"Damn it," he said roughly, "don't tell me no. I'm going back. I can't lead them all to the slaughter. I thought I could. I can't. We'll never make it. We haven't a chance in hell of making it. At least in prison they'd live. And the kids—they'd be all right."
"Kirby, listen." She put her hands gently on his shoulders. "Don't be afraid now when it's too late. You had a great thought."
"Who am I to have great thoughts? I'm going back."
"Kirby—"
"Shut up. Don't argue with me." He was shaking all over, hard, and he couldn't stop. He had never felt like this before. It scared him. The iron walls of the corridor bent and wavered, and the deck moved under his feet. "I've got to get them back. I—"
"Kirby, they want you on the bridge."
Her voice. Her quiet voice. Death, destruction, the hammer stroke, the end. He turned his head. There was no corridor now, no iron wall, the outer darkness had crept in and covered everything except her face. And it was close, and pale, and strange, and the eyes in it were shining.
He said, in a voice that was not his own, but very softly, "They haven't called me."
"They will."
The paleness and the blur that were Shari moved toward him and touched him with living lips, and his own flesh was cold, cold.
Someone was coming down the corridor, coming fast.
Kirby straightened up. The steps rang loudly against the metal, a man's steps, running.
Kirby waited.
It was Marapese. He was a young man and ashamed of fear, and he was trying not to show it, but when he spoke the words stumbled and stammered in his throat.
"Sir, Shaw says—" Pause. Tighten the lips and swallow and try again. "On the radar, sir—"
"All right." Kirby's voice was easy. It was confident, soothing, even jovial. He didn't know where it came from. He nodded to the hatch. "We don't have to tell them just yet. Shari, see about some coffee for us, will you? We'll be on the bridge." He put his hand on Marapese's shoulder. The hand was steady as a rock. It seemed to be not his own hand, but it was steady and it would do. The shoulder underneath it quivered. Kirby said, "Come on."
He walked forward toward the bridge. He felt hollow inside, there was nothing to him but a shell, but no one could see that deep but Shari, so no one would know. Marapese glanced sidelong at him, a glance of worship. His own backbone stiffened and grew straight.
Behind them, Shari smiled.
Kirby and the boy came into the bridge. Shaw was hunched over the scope. Pop Barstow stood with one hand on the pilot's chair, his eyes riveted on Shaw, like one uncertain whether to go forward or back, and he was an old man. Kirby had never realized before how truly old he was.
Shaw said, "It's a long way off, but it's. . ." he hesitated. ". . . it."
"Yes," said Kirby. He glanced through the port of the inner bulkhead into the space where the computers were. "That's all the good they were to us. They didn't even come close."
Pop Barstow said, in an unnaturally dry voice, "Too many variables. We were slower than we'd hoped. The R-ship was faster."
Marapese asked, "What do we do now?"
"We stop it," Kirby said, as though it were the simplest thing in the world.
Marapese stared at him. "Stop it?" he repeated. "Stop an R-ship?"
Pop Barstow laughed, a laugh of unutterable sadness. "They have a plan," he said. "I've seen it. It's a pretty plan. It looks real good, all drawn up neat on a big white sheet of paper." He sat down in the pilot's seat and looked at Kirby. "You know what? We were crazy, and I was crazier than the rest of you. I was old enough to know better." He shook his head. "I'd have liked to live a while longer. Young folks think it doesn't matter to folks like me, but even when you're old you like living."
Kirby did not speak. He seemed to be thinking very hard. Shaw squirmed and sweated over the radarscope. Marapese, very pale now, looked at them.
Shari came in with the coffee.
Kirby looked up suddenly, and Shari set the tray down with such violence that the metal cups rattled. "No," she said. "I couldn't do that, Kirby, it isn't the same."
Kirby said slowly, "A cybernetic brain isn't so different from a human one. The principle is the same. It thinks."
The color had run out from under Shari's skin, leaving it ashen. "But you have seen, Kirby—I am only a little able; I could not do it."
A strange ruthlessness had risen in Kirby. "It might give us the edge we have to have. Pop's right, the plan we've got is so much for the birds, unless we add something to it."
Marapese stared at Shari's stricken face, not understanding. But Pop Barstow understood, and was shaken.
"It don't seem right or human," he muttered, "but it might work. It might."
Kirby said to Shaw, "Keep tracking it. We need an absolutely accurate check on course and velocity. I'm going down to get Wilson and Krejewski." And Oh God, he thought, I've got to tell them all, and when they hear it—
He got the surprise of his life, when he went below and told them. He spoke as casually as he could to Wilson, and to Krejewski who had spent his adult life building and repairing R-ships, and to Weiss, who had been a junior assistant in the Cybernetic Division. He spoke, and braced himself for the outcry.
There wasn't any. Sally Wilson began to cry, and Mrs. Krejewski took her by the shoulder in what was half a shake and half a comradely gesture of comfort. "They have to go," she said. "Don't make it any harder for them." Then she turned to Kirby. "Just don't come back without my George, that's all." Kirby looked into her eyes and thought that if anything did happen to George it had better happen to him, too. It would be easier.
He herded his three lagging heroes ahead of him to the ladder, and all around him the women were quiet, quieter than he had ever known them. One small child said shrilly, "What's the matter, Mommy?" And her mother said, "Nothing, dear, go back to your play." As he climbed the ladder he could hear the normal child noises resuming. But underneath them there was still a quiet that made the roots of his hair prickle.
He was still shaking his head when he got back to the bridge. "I thought they'd all have hysterics," he said. "They didn't. Not one of 'em."
Pop Barstow grinned a little. "I told you don't understand women, young Kirby. They'll make your life miserable over some little bitty thing that doesn't matter, but when something really big comes along they've got more guts than we have." He nodded. "Look at Shari."
Kirby looked. Her face was pale, but no longer stricken. "Still afraid?" he asked her.
"Yes. But I see that I have to try. And I would rather go with you than stay behind." She added, very earnestly, "Don't trust in me too much. I don't know that it can be done at all, and if it can, I don't know whether I will read it right."
"You'll be okay," Kirby said, with a fine simulation of casual confidence. "Pop, take them along, get them ready, and give everything a final double-check. Everything. Take your time; don't hurry it. I've got to work out the timing and the course."
He turned to Shaw, and ultimately to the computers. Velocity of Lucy B. Davenport, so much. Velocity of R-ship, so much. Differential. Rate of approach. Course of Lucy B. Davenport. Course of R-ship, which cannot possibly fire its missiles ahead of it because it is already traveling at absolute top under the speed of light and has therefore to parallel and head the slower ship, releasing its missiles on a reverse arc. Relative position of two ships now, plus mean distance on plane of flight, plus potential velocity of life-skiff, plus estimated relative position of—
You plot the parallelograms on nothing, you look at the figures and they are only figures, not realities. The realities are Nemesis, and fear, and human beings trapped in an iron trap, and folly, and a dream.
You plot the parallelogram, and it is only the beginning.
The R-ship is intelligent. It is wary. It will not permit a skiff, or a man, or a chunk of cosmic drift to get closer to it. The sensor field provides a barrier, a defense impossible to penetrate. So you think again and figure again. You extend the short line in the parallelogram that is the projected course of the life-skiff, and you add to it so many degrees of arc after it heads the still unfinished long line that is the course of the approaching R-ship. And then you bend that long line inward and then outward again in a swift apex, and you make a circle at that apex, a circle on nothing which will enclose the lives of Wilson and Weiss and Krejewski, of Shari and yourself. And if you have not forgotten how, you pray.
When there is no more value either in figuring or prayer, you rise and go.
The corridor seemed curiously foreshortened. There seemed no distance at all between the bridgeroom and the place where the port life-skiff was housed, an iron embryo in an iron womb. The others were already inside. Pop helped Kirby on with his space suit.
"Everything's right," Pop said. "I checked real careful. All the tools and stuff."
Kirby looked down at the bulky suit. "I hoped we wouldn't have to use these things. Oh, well. Put Fenner on the radio and see he keeps it wide open. I want contact all the way."
He climbed into the skiff and took the controls. The lock sealed. A roar, a grinding, a whistle and a leaping shock, and they were free. The booster jets howled, briefly doubling the normal rocket-thrust to break the gravitational pull of the mother ship. Behind Kirby, Shari sat very stiff and silent. Kirby paid no attention to the others. He was too scared himself. He set his course, repeating the coordinates over aloud. He had Wilson check them too, just to be on the safe side.
"Kirby." Wilson's voice was a little raw. "Kirby, why did they have to drive us to this? They're human, like us."
"Yes. But they're dedicated to a status quo. If we licked the R-ships and made it to a new world, too many people would want to follow."
Wilson said, "But we'd be too far away to bother them. Why?"
Kirby shook his head. "Nothing stays too far away forever. Forget about it. Shut up."
The skiff rushed on, making the first leg of its appointed course. The rockets drummed. Kirby glared at the indicators. The others sat, in quiet agony, in stolid dread.
Presently Kirby said, "Time. Secure your helmets and check oxygen flow. Everybody's audio working? Okay." He switched on the small but very powerful communication unit built into the suit and spoke briefly to Fenner aboard the Lucy B. Davenport, "Clear both ways. One of us will be in contact with you from now on. We're going out now."
Wilson made one sound that might have been a sob.
Kirby cut in the starboard laterals, throttled down to one-quarter maximum thrust. Moving fast now, he saw that the space-line was secure, the long line that strung four men and one woman together like bundles on a cord. "Get your hand rockets ready," he said, "but be damned careful how you fire them!" He added with a last-minute touch of gentleness, "Don't worry. This won't be different from an ordinary space-jump for salvage. I've done that before."
He threw over the lever. The small lock opened and spewed them out