King sighed. “Mister, I sometimes wonder why I got into this business. Well, are you willing to venture a best guess? Long time? Short time?”
“Uh . . . a long time, sir. Years.”
“So? Well, I’ve sweated it out in worse ships. Years, eh? Play any chess?”
“I have, sir.” Libby did not mention that he had given up the game long ago for lack of adequate competition.
“Looks like we’d have plenty of time to play. King’s pawn;to king four.”
“King’s knight to bishop three.”
“An unorthodox player, eh? Well, I’ll answer you later. I suppose I’d better try to sell them the 02 eyen though it takes longer . . . and I suppose I’d better caution Ford to start some contests and things. Can’t have ’em getting coffin fever.”
“Yes, sir. Did I mention deceleration time? It works out to just under one Earth year, subjective, at a negative one-gee, to slow us to stellar speeds.”
“Eh? We’ll decelerate the same way we accelerated-with your light-pressure drive.”
Libby shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. The drawback of the light-pressure drive is that it makes no difference what your previous course and speed may be; if you go inertialess in the near neighborhood of a star, its light pressure kicks you away from it like a cork hit by a stream of water. Your previous momentum is canceled out when you cancel your inertia.”
“Well,” King conceded, “let’s assume that we will follow your schedule. I can’t argue with you yet; there are still some things about that gadget of yours that I don’t understand.”
“There are lots of things about it,” Libby answered seriously, “that I don’t understand either.”
The ship had flicked by Earth’s orbit less than ten minutes after Libby cut in his space drive. Lazarus and he had discussed the esoteric physical aspects of it all the way to the orbit of Mars-less than a quarter hour. Jupiter’s path was far distant when Barstow called the organization conference. But it killed an hour to find them all in the crowded ship; by the time he called them to order they were a billion miles out beyond the orbit of Saturn-elapsed time from “Go!” less than an hour and a half.
But the blocks get longer after Saturn. Uranus found them still in discussion. Nevertheless Ford’s name was agreed on and he had accepted before the ship was as far from the Sun as is Neptune. King had been named captain, had toured his new command with Lazarus as guide, and was already in conference with his astrogator when the ship passed the orbit of Pluto nearly four billion miles deep into space, but still less than six hours after the Sun’s light had blasted them away.
Even then they were not outside the Solar System, but between them and the stars lay nothing but the winter homes of Sol’s comets and hiding places of hypothetical trans-Plutonian planets-space in which the Sun holds options but can hardly be said to own in fee simple. But even the nearest stars were still light-years away. New Frontiers was headed for them at a pace which crowded the heels of light-weather cold, track fast.
Out, out, and still farther out . . . out to the lonely depths where world lines are almost straight, undistorted by gravitation. Each day, each month . . . each year . . . their headlong flight took them farther from all humanity.
PART TWO
The ship lunged on, alone in the desert of night, each lightyear as empty as the last. The Families built up a way of life in her.
The New Frontiers was approximately cylindrical. When not under acceleration, she was spun on her axis to give pseudo-weight to passengers near the outer skin of the ship; the outer or “lower” compartments were living quarters while the innermost or “upper” compartments were store-rooms and so forth. Between compartments were shops, hydroponic farms and such. Along the axis, fore to aft, were the control room, the converter, and the main drive.
The design will be recognized as similar to that of the larger free-flight interplanetary ships in use today, but it is necessary to bear in mind her enormous size. She was a city, with ample room for a colony of twenty thousand, which would have allowed the planned complement of ten thousand to double their numbers during the long voyage to Proxima Centauri.