“So you have nothing to add?” Judith Niles made an attempt to recapture control of the meeting. “In that case — “
“I didn’t say I had nothing to add.” As Sy continued, Charlene could feel the tension returning. “I believe I know exactly what we must do. It’s simple, it calls for huge patience, and it’s going to be enormously frustrating for people like me — because it’s totally passive.”
He became silent, until finally Judith Niles betrayed her own lack of patience and said, “Well, then?”
“We do what you established Gulf City to allow us to do. We remain in S-space, or even in T-state, and we wait. While we wait, our instruments eavesdrop on the whole sky, listening all the while for more signals from the Kermel Objects. Eventually we will acquire the pair of images that we need, a pair which Emil assures us are not in the current data bank. We’ll find two consecutive images in which exactly one star has changed to become a red dwarf in the interval between the two. And that star will be the one we want.”
Judith Niles said, “Eventually! How long might that be? By the time that the images you’re asking for come in, we might be millions of years into the future. The whole spiral arm might be red dwarfs.”
“True.” Sy sounded casual as he stared around the little group. “The Director is quite right. ‘Eventually’ could also mean ‘too late.’ That’s always a possibility. But I still propose to do what I’ve suggested. And if somebody comes up with an idea that’s definitely better, while I’m watching and waiting, then I’ll be delighted to switch.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Charlene had done none of the work herself, which was perhaps why the results so fascinated her.
She pressed the button again, and in front of her, in all its sprawling orange-red splendor, lay the local galactic arm. It hung for a few moments, glowing and static; then the change began. Here and there, at scattered points within the display, specks of orange-red were replaced by points of cyan, magenta, blue-white, and luminous green. At the same time, the whole spiral arm shifted, creeping to a slightly different configuration.
It was a slow process, because the stars were so numerous; but in the time it took to blink, somewhere in the image a spark of orange-red was turned off and a mote of some other hue took its place.
Blink. Another star was transformed.
Blink: another star.
Again and again and again. Now the display was no longer predominantly orange-red. Other star colors were becoming more numerous, even starting to dominate. The lost stars formed no pattern, but somehow the eye discovered a shrinking circle. As the display proceeded farther, that circle became an explicit overlay, a colored ring whose center might shift but whose size always diminished.
The end came swiftly. The circle narrowed and narrowed, until finally it formed a halo around a single spark of orange. Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then, suddenly and surprisingly, that spark changed from orange to green. The slow crawl of the spiral arm to a different geometry continued, and there were still orange-red stars to be seen; but there were no more color changes. “There it is.” A voice spoke from the darkness behind Charlene. “The Ur-star. Less than three light-years away. Tell me what we will find there.” Charlene touched a button, reversing the time flow in the display. Now it would move forward, from the distant past to the present and then at last to a future where the orange-red glow of red dwarf stars would dominate the spiral arm. She swung around in her seat. “If I knew what we’d find, we wouldn’t need to go. That’s a question for someone smarter than me.”
“As usual, you underestimate yourself.” Emil Garville, a head and a half taller than Charlene and twice her width, squeezed into the chair at her side. “I don’t think so.” She smiled at him. He was unfailingly polite and considerate, and she was always glad to see him. “You know, Emil, I’m not one of your supercompetent Planetfest winners. I’m just an underqualified lab technician who happened to get swept up in this at the very beginning, eighty-one thousand years ago.” Charlene nodded at the display in front of her. “For instance, I could never have done what you did, building that display from bits and pieces of Kermel Object data.”
“You give me too much credit.” Emil rubbed at the fissure on his skull, in what Charlene had decided was an unconscious attempt to hide it. His refusal to wear a wig that covered the scar was a deliberate statement — look all you want to, it said, it doesn’t bother me — but somewhere inside him that wasn’t true. He had a hang-up that made him display what he would most like to conceal. Charlene wanted to tell him that he didn’t need to feel embarrassed, that in an odd way his craggy, fractured skull made him more attractive. Unfortunately, her hang-ups wouldn’t ever permit any such statement.
“The work to track down Urstar,” he went on, “it wasn’t all my doing. Back on Gulf City a lot of it was done by teams working in N-space. I felt like I was in the old fairy stories. Again and again I’d be stumped and go to bed with a tough unsolved problem sitting on my desk. I didn’t leave out any cookies or glass of milk, but as often as not I’d wake up next morning and find a written solution waiting for me.”
Charlene could understand that. So far as she was concerned, once the Urstar location had been determined this whole giant ship, the Argo, had appeared magically, overnight, ready to fly far off across the spiral arm. She said, “Did you ever meet your N-space colleagues?”
“Not once. I believe the N-space team on Gulf City regarded my notes as a direct challenge. They had eight S-hours before I’d be up and about, and that gave them a couple of their years. There wasn’t much they couldn’t crack in that time.” “But you laid out the overall design for what had to be done. Urstar wouldn’t have been found without you. You deserve the main credit.”
This time Emil rubbed at his nose, whose off-center shape suggested that it too had seen its share of woes. “I’m not sure I like to hear you put it that way.” “Why on earth not?”
“Charlene, suppose I’m wrong. We’ve come all this way, and we are getting close to our destination. But suppose our analysis selected the wrong star as Urstar? Would you like to be known as the person who took the Argo and a full crew of thirty-eight specialists in everything from physics to animal behavior more than two thousand light-years, and all for nothing?”
“I don’t believe it will be for nothing. And we’ve spent most of the journey either in cold sleep, or in T-state. It hasn’t felt like a long time for anyone on board.”
“I know. But not everyone in the universe is aboard this ship. Watch.” Emil took a coin from his pocket and flipped it into the air. It rose maybe a meter and a half, then dropped back into his hand.
He closed his big fist on the coin and stared at Charlene. “How long did that coin toss take? Maybe one second, start to finish? But we’re in T-state. That flip lasted twenty-three N-days, more than three weeks on Earth or Pentecost or Kallen’s World. And people are all back there, waiting for results from us. Even if we find what we hope for at Urstar, it will have been one hell of a long wait for answers for them. At its fastest this ship travelled at more than sixteen percent of light speed, faster than anything ever flown before by humans; but when we arrive at our destination we’ll have been on the way for more than fifteen thousand N-years. Do you wonder I’m nervous? Aren’t you nervous, too?” “I am. But not for the same reason as you are.” Charlene turned in her chair, so that she could place her lips just a few inches from Emil’s ear.
He flinched away. “What are you doing?”
“Not what you seem to think I’m doing.” Charlene reached out and pulled Emil’s bald head close to her face. She felt almost guilty, deliberately changing the subject from his concerns to hers; yet it was the right thing to do, to stop his own brooding on a possibly wrong destination. She whispered, “I don’t want anyone else to hear this. And I mean anyone.”
Emil froze. He said in a deep growl, and just as softly, “Charlene, I’ll tell you a secret: blow in my ear and I’ll follow you anywhere. But what’s this about?”
“I want you to do something for me, without making it at all obvious. I’d like you to observe Judith Niles as closely as you can, without ever letting her suspect that you’re doing it.”
“The Director?” Emil turned his head, so that his brown eyes gazed into Charlene’s from just a few inches away. “Charlene, that makes me uneasy. What are you getting at?”
“I’m not sure.” They were still whispering, although the chance that anyone could overhear the conversation was negligible. “I’ve known JN for an awfully long time, in both objective and subjective time. Ever since we came
