The Long Night

green or blue. The nearest were clear to the eye, a few showing tiny disks, but the majority were fuzzy glows rather than lightpoints. Such shimmers grew dim with distance until the mist engulfed them entirely and nothing remained but mist.

A crackling noise beat out of that roiling formlessness, like flames. Energies pulsed through his marrow. He remembered the old, old myth of the Yawning Gap, where fire and ice arose and out of them the. Nine Worlds, which were doomed in the end to return to fire and ice; and he shivered.

“Illusion,” said Jaccavrie’s voice out of immensity. “What?” Laure started. It was as if a mother goddess had spoken.

She chuckled. Whether deity or machine, she had the great strength of ordinariness in her. “You’re rather transparent to an observer who knows you well,” she said. “I could practically read your mind.”

Laure swallowed. “The sight, well, a big, marvelous, dangerous thing, maybe unique in the galaxy. Yes, I admit I’m’ impressed.”

“We have much to learn here.”

“Have you been doing so?”

“At ,,a near-capacity rate,, since we entered the denser part of the cluster.” Jaccavrie shifted to primness. “If you’d been less immersed in discussions with the Kirkasanter navigation officer, you might have got running reports from me.”

“Destruction!” Laure swore. “I was studying her notes from their trip outboard, trying to get some idea of what configuration to look for, once we’ve learned how to make allowances for what this material does to starlight—Never mind. We’ll have our conference right now, just as you requested. What’d you mean by ‘an illusion’?”

“The view outside,” answered the computer. “The concentration of mass is not really as many atoms per cubic centimeter as would be found in a vaporous planetary atmosphere. It is only that, across light-years, their absorption and reflection effects are cumulative. The gas and dust do, indeed, swirl, but not with anything like the velocity we think we perceive. That is due to our being under hyperdrive. Even at the very low pseudo-speed at which we are feeling our way, we pass swiftly through varying densities. Space itself is not actually shining; excited atoms are fluorescing. Nor does space roar at you. What you hear is the sound of radiation counters and other instruments which I’ve activated. There are no real, tangible currents working on our hull, making it quiver. But when we make quantum micro-jumps across strong interstellar magnetic fields, and those fields vary according to an extra ordinarily complex pattern, we’re bound to interact noticeably with them.

“Admittedly the stars are far thicker than appears. My instruments can detect none beyond a few parsecs. But what data I’ve gathered of late leads me to suspect the estimate of a quarter million total is conservative. To be sure, most are dwarfs—”

“Come off that!” Laure barked. “I don’t need you to explain what I knew the minute I saw this place.”

“You need to be drawn out of your fantasizing,” Jaccavrie said. “Thought you recognize your daydreams for what they are, you can’t afford them. Not now.”

Laure tensed. He wanted to order the view turned off, but checked himself, wondered if the robot followed that chain of his impulses too, and said in a harshened voice: “When you go academic on me like that, it means you’re postponing news you don’t want to give me. We have troubles.”

“We can soon have them, at any rate,” Jaccavrie said. “My advice is to turn back at once.”

“We can’t navigate,” Laure deduced. Though it was not unexpected, he nonetheless felt smitten.

“No. That is, I’m having difficulties already, and conditions ahead of us are demonstrably worse.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Optical methods are quite unsuitable. We knew that from the experience of the Kirkasanters. But nothing else works, either. You recall, you and I discussed the possibility of identifying supergiant stars through the clouds and using them for beacons. Though their light be diffused and absorbed, they should produce other effects—they should be powerful neutrino sources, for instance—that we could use.”

“Don’t they?”

“Oh, yes. But the effects are soon smothered. Too much else is going on. Too many neutrinos from too many different sources, to name one thing. Too many magnetic effects. The stars are so close together, you see; and so many of them are double, triple, quadruple, hence revolving rapidly and twisting the force lines; and irradiation keeps a goodly fraction of the interstellar medium in the plasma state. Thus we get electromagnetic action of every sort; plus sunchroton and betatron radiation, plus nuclear collision, plus—”

“Spare me the complete list,” Laure broke in. “Just say the noise level is too high for your instruments.”

“And for any instruments thp.t I can extrapolate as buildable,” Jaccavrie replied. “The precision their filters would require seems greater than the laws of atomistics would allow.”

“What about your inertial system? Bollixed up, too?”

“It’s beginning to be. That’s why I asked you to come take a good look at what’s around us and what we’re headed into, while you listen to my report.” The robot was not built to know fear, but Laure wondered if she didn’t spring back to pedantry as a refuge: “Inertial navigation would work here at kinetic velocities. But we can’t traverse parsecs except by hyperdrive. Inertial and gravitational mass being identical, too rapid a change of gravitational potential will tend to cause uncontrollable precession and nutation. We can compensate for that in normal parts of space. But not here. With so many stars so closely packed, moving among each other on paths too complex for me to calculate, the variation rate is becoming too much.”

“In short,” Laure said slowly, “if we go deeper into this stuff, we’ll be flying blind.”

“Yes. Just as Makt did.”

“We can get out into clear space time, can’t we? You can follow a more or less straight line till we emerge.”

“True. I don’t like the hazards. The cosmic ray background is increasing considerably.”

“You have screen fields.”

“But I’m considering the implications. Those particles have to originate somewhere. Magnetic acceleration will only account for a fraction of their intensity. Hence the rate of nova production in this cluster, and of supernovae in the recent past, must be enormous. This in turn indicates vast numbers of lesser bodies—neutron stars, rogue planets, large meteoroids, thick dust banks—things that might be undetectable before we blunder into them.”

Laure smiled at her unseen scanner. “If anything goes wrong, you’ll react fast,” he said. “You always do.”

“I can’t guarantee we won’t run into trouble I can’t deal with.”

“Can you estimate the odds on that for me?” Jaccavrie was,silent. The air sputtered and sibilated. Laure found his vision drowning in the starfog. He needed a minute to realize—he had not been answered. “Well?” he said.

“The parameters are too uncertain.” Overtones had departed from her voice. “I can merely say that the probability of disaster is high in comparison to the value for travel through normal regions of the galaxy.”

“Oh, for chaos’ sake!” Laure’s laugh was uneasy. “That figure is almost too small to measure. We knew before we entered this nebula that we’d be taking a risk. Now what about coherent radiation from natural sources?”

“My judgment is that the risk is out of proportion to the gain,” Jaccavrie said. “At hest, this is a place for scientific study. You’ve other work to do. Your basic—and dangerous—fantasy is that you can satisfy the emotional cravings of a few semibarbarians.”

Anger sprang up in Laure. He gave it cold shape: “My order was that you report on coherent radiation.”

Never before had he pulled the rank of his humanness on her.

She said like dead metal: “I have detected some in the visible and short infrared, where certain types of star excite pseudoquasar processes in the surrounding gas. It is dissipated as fast as any other light.”

“The radio bands are clear?”

“Yes, of that type of wave, although—”

“Enough. We’ll proceed as before, toward the center of the cluster. Cut this view and connect me with Makt.”

The hazy suns vanished. Laure was alone in a metal compartment. He took a seat and glowered at the outercom screen before him. What had gotten into Jaccavrie, anyway? She’d been making