CHAPTER 13
Sixteen hundred light-years from home, her clocks reading four months into the journey, Envoy paused. Shielding force fields down, she moved on intrinsic momentum, at mere tens of kilometers per second, through space that was not shrunken and time that went not as in Elf Hill, among stars that the eye saw in their own colors and at their own stations around the heavens. Need was to take fresh, more accurate navigational sightings and realign the velocity vector accordingly. Here was an ideal place for that, where those aboard who were able to could meanwhile do science.
Spacesuited, Dayan worked outside. Induction boots held her fast to the outer hull; similar footings secured her instruments. Cleland stood by, her assistant.
The great cylinder reached fifty meters right and left. At either end spun the wheels, cliff-sheer, but stars agleam beyond them and aflicker when spokes hurried across. Metal glimmered in the light of star throngs, icily tumbling Milky Way, querning nebulae, galaxies dimmed only by distance. But instruments and minds were aimed straight outward. It had been planned that Envoy would pass within a few light-years of the open cluster NGC 5460.
Some forty suns were gathered close together, a fire-swarm of ruby, gold, and diamond. The brightest burned with the radiancy of more than a hundred Sols. Like Venus at its most brilliant in the sky of Earth, they cast shadows, but they did not glow, they were frozen flame.
Dayan adjusted a spectrometer, switched off the control panel illumination, and waited in weightlessness for night vision to return to her. The noises of her body were the barest flutter beneath silence. When she again saw fully, she breathed, like a prayer, “Yafeh — The glory of it.”
“And — and the questions,” Cleland stammered louder.
“Yes. I’ll be analyzing these data for I don’t know how long. I think we’ll discover things they never could, peering from the Solar System.”
“There may well be some remarkable planets. Formed under those conditions,” in the roiling gravitational fields of huge masses swinging near each other. “And life?”
“I doubt we’ll find signs of that,” in the spectra of planetary atmospheres. “Supernovae going off at such quarters, within ten parsecs or thereabouts, wouldn’t they kill it off?”
“Be that as it may, what could exist — Do we have to go on right away?”
Dayan’s rapture yielded to sympathy. “We’re committed, Tim.” Her gloved hand patted his. “Don’t worry. You’ll find plenty of interesting stuff where we’re bound, I’m sure.”
His mood plunged. “No doubt. I can keep busy.”
Dayan looked at him. His face in the helmet was a chiaroscuro of darkness and faint highlights. “You miss Earth badly, don’t you?” she asked.
“No point in that, is there? The Earth we knew is — is in its grave, with . . . all we cared about. . . forgotten.”
“And you are maybe feeling you have given it up for nothing?”
He had avoided mention of the situation between him and Kilbirnie, obvious though it was to everyone. He straightened so fast that the motion was plain in his spacesuit. “No, of course not. I said I’ll have my work. Everybody will. Work like, uh, like no work ever done before.”
Again Dayan’s hand sought his, and now squeezed. “That’s the spirit, Tim. Don’t give up personal hope, either.”
He stared through the enormous night. “What? Do you really think —” Dayan and Kilbirnie were friends, often talking privately.
“We’ll have to see,” the physicist replied. He could not tell whether she was unwilling to disclose confidences, or had none to share, or had been too sharply reminded of her own losses. She turned back to the instruments. “Let’s get on with our observations.”
Like the voice of a providence, Nansen’s sounded in their helmet receivers. “Hola, out there. I think you two should suspend your project and come inboard as soon as possible.”
The physicist tautened. Unknownness reached everywhere around. And lately the captain and chief engineer had seemed troubled about something they did not speak of. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing wrong.” Nansen’s tone had regained a lilt. “But Yu has tuned the neutrino detectors as you requested. They seem to be registering a nonstellar source — from the cluster.”