Common Time
“… the days went slowly round and round, endless and uneventful as cycles in space. Time, and time-pieces!
How many centuries did my hammock tell, as pendulum-like it swung to the ship’s dull roll, and ticked the hours and ages.”
Herman Melville, in Mardi
Don’t move.
It was the first thought that came into Garrard’s mind when he awoke, and perhaps it saved his life. He lay where he was, strapped against the padding, listening to the round hum of the engines. That in itself was wrong; he should be unable to hear the overdrive at all.
He thought to himself: Has it begun already?
Otherwise everything seemed normal. The DPC-3 had crossed over into interstellar velocity, and he was still alive, and the ship was still functioning. The ship should at this moment be traveling at 22.4 times the speed of lighta neat 4,157,000 miles per second.
Somehow Garrard did not doubt that it was. On both previous tries, the ships had whiffed away toward Alpha Centauri at the proper moment when the overdrive should have cut in; and the split second of residual image after they had vanished, subjected to spectroscopy, showed a Doppler shift which tallied with the acceleration predicted for that moment by Haertel.
The trouble was not that Brown and Cellini hadn’t gotten away in good order. It was simply that neither of them had ever been heard from again.
Very slowly, he opened his eyes. His eyelids felt terrifically heavy. As far as he could judge from the pressure of the couch against his skin, the gravity was normal; nevertheless, moving his eyelids seemed almost an impossible job.