180
The Unicorn Trade
Dad: “Well, several score atoms’ worth. Starting with you and Tad and me.”
Mother: “I’d feel a monster, safe and comfortable en route to a new world while behind me they huddled in poverty by the billions.”
Dad: “My first duty is to you two. However, let’s leave that aside. Let’s think about man as a whole. What is he? A beast that is born, grubs around, copulates, quarrels, and dies. Uh-huh. But sometimes something more in addition. He does breed his occasional Jesus, Leonardo, Bach, Jefferson, Einstein, Armstrong, Olveidawhoever you think best justifies our being heredoesn’t he? Well, when you huddle people together like rats, they soon behave like rats. What then of the spirit? I tell you, if we don’t make a fresh start, a bare handful of us free folk whose descendants may in the end come back and teach if we don’t, why, who cares whether the two-legged animal goes on for another million years or becomes extinct in a Hundred? Humanness will be dead.”
Me: “And gosh, Mother, the fun!”
Mother: “You don’t understand, dear.”
Dad: “Quiet. The man-child speaks. He understands better than you.”
Quarrel: till I run from them crying. Well, eight or nine years old. That night, was that the first night I started telling myself stories about Murphy’s Hall?
It is Murphy’s Hall. I say that’s the right place for Dad to be.
MURPHY’S HALL
181
When Hoo Fong, chief engineer, brought the news to the captain’s cabin, the captain sat still for minutes. The ship thrummed around them; they felt it faintly, a song in their bones. And the light fell from the overhead, into a spacious and gracious room, furnishings, books, a stunning photograph of the Andromeda galaxy, an animation of Mary and Tad; and weight was steady underfoot, a full gee of acceleration, one light-year per year per year, though this would become more in shipboard time as you started to harvest the rewards of relativity … a mere two decades to the center of this galaxy, three to the neighbor whose portrait you adored.. .. How hard to grasp that you were dead!
“But the ramscoop is obviously functional,” said the captain, hearing his pedantic phrasing.
Hoo Fong shrugged. “It will not be, after the radiation has affected electronic parts. We have no prospect of decelerating and returning home at low velocity before both we and the ship have taken a destructive dose.”
Interstellar hydrogen, an atom or so in a cubic centimeter, raw vacuum to Earthdwetlers at the bottom of their ocean of gas and smoke and stench and carcinogens. To spacefolk, fuel, reaction mass, a way to the stars, once you’re up to the modest pace at which you meet enough of those atoms per second. However, your force screens must protect you from them, else they strike the hull and spit gamma rays like a witch’s
curse.
“We’ve hardly reached one-fourth c,” the cap—
182
The Unicorn Trade
tain protested. “Unmanned probes had no trouble at better than ninety-nine percent.”
“Evidently the system is inadequate for the larger mass of this ship,” the engineer answered. “We should have made its first complete test flight unmanned too.”
“You know we didn’t have funds to develop the robots for that.”
“We can send our data back. The next expedition”
“I doubt there’ll be any. Yes, yes, we’ll beam the word home. And then, I suppose, keep going. Four weeks, did you say, till the radiation sickness gets bad? The problem is not how to tell Earth, but how to tell the rest of the men.”
Afterward, alone with the pictures of Andromeda, Mary, and Tad, the captain thought: I’ve lost more than the years ahead.” I’ve tost the years behind, that we might have had together,
What shall I say to you? That I tried and failed and am sorry? But am I? At this hour I don’t want to lie, most especially not to you three.
Did I do right?
Yes.
No.
O God, oh, shit, how can I tell? The moon is rising above the soot^clouds. I might make it that far. Commissioner Wenig was talking about how we should maintain the last Lunar base another few years, till industry can find a substitute for those giant molecules they make there.