“How long. ..” Marygay said, “how long can we last on auxiliary power?”
“About five days, at the normal rate of consumption. Several weeks, if we close off most life support and confine everybody to one floor.”
“We’re still losing it?”
“Yes. The rate of loss appears to be increasing. If this continues, we will be out of fuel in twenty-eight minutes.”
“Should we sound the general alarm?” I asked Marygay.
“Not yet. We have enough to worry about.”
“Ship, do you have any idea where the fuel could be going; whether we could get it back?”
“No. Nothing consistent with physics as I know it. There is an analogy in the Rhomer model for transient-barrier virtual particle substitution, but it has never been demonstrated.” I’d have to look that up sometime.
“Wait!” Marygay said. “The escape ships. Is their antimatter evaporating, too?”
“Not yet. But it is not transferable.”
“I’m not thinking about transferring it,” she said to me. “I’m thinking about getting the hell out of here before something worse happens.”
“Very sensible,” the ship said.
We put on robes and hurried down to the first floor. From the viewing port we could see the antimatter sphere as it shrank. It otherwise didn’t look any different, a ball of blue sparkles, but it did grow smaller and smaller. Finally, it blinked out.
Acceleration stopped and the automatic zerogee cables unreeled, with a soft regular chiming, loud enough to wake most of the people. We could hear a few louder bells from some residences.
We’d done zerogee drill five times, twice unannounced, so it was not a big deal, yet. People floated out of their homes in various states of undress and started monkey-climbing to the common floor’s assembly area.
Eloi Casi, the sculptor, was fully dressed, with a work apron covered with wood shavings. “Damned silly time to pull a drill, Mandella. I’m trying to work.”
“Wish it was a drill, Eloi.” We drifted past him.
“What?”
“No power. No antimatter. No choices.”
Those six words were about all we could tell the company assembled, with the ship adding numbers and times. “We might as well zip up in the escape ships and get the hell out of here,” Marygay said. “Every second we delay, it’s another twenty-four thousand kilometers we have to make up.”
“We’re going eight percent of the speed of light,” I said. “The escape ships have a slow steady thrust of 7.6 centimeters per second, squared. It will take us ten years to slow down to zero, and another fourteen to get back to MF”
“Why do we have to rush it?” Alysa Bertram said. “That antimatter might come back as mysteriously as it disappeared.”
“Yeah, suppose it does?” Stephen Funk said, coming to my elbow. “Do you want to rely on it then? What if it went fine for another couple of months and then disappeared for good? You want to risk ten thousand years in suspended animation?”
Antres 906 had entered, and was floating just inside the door. I looked its way and it bobbed its head: Who knows? “I agree with Steve,” I said. “Show of hands? How many want to zip up and leave?”
Slightly more than half the hands went up. “Wait a minute here,” Teresa Larson said. “I haven’t had my goddamned coffee yet, and you want me to decide whether to give all this up and go flinging into space?”
Nobody had put more work into revitalizing the ship. “I’m sorry, Teresa. But I watched the stuff disappear, and I don’t see any alternative.”
“Maybe it’s our faith being tested, William. Though you wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“No, I wouldn’t. But I don’t think the antimatter’s going to come back just because we really, sincerely want it to.”
“Those escape ships are death traps,” Eloy Macabee whined. “How many people die in SA, one out of three? Four?”
“Suspended animation has a survival rate of over eighty percent,” I said. “The survival rate here aboard ship is going to be zero.”
Diana had come up to float beside me. “The less time we spend in SA, the more likely we are to survive. Teresa, you have your cup of coffee. But then come down and get in line. I’m going to prep people as quickly as possible.”