Charlene saw devices, familiar and unfamiliar, in a thousand deserted chambers. None of them interested her. She realized that her pleasures — all her pleasures — came from living things, people and animals. She had joined the Institute not because she cared about sleep research, but because it had offered her a chance to work with the nervous marmots and the great, gentle Kodiak bears.
It was a mixed blessing when the time came to return to the central chamber and meet with the others. She knew she had little to say to them, but she craved human company.
They drifted in, in ones and twos. Emil came in with Eva Packland, but he moved at once to sit next to Charlene.
“Where have you been? I looked everywhere — even back on board the Argo.” “Wandering about. Thinking.” If you could call it that.
But Sy’s arrival cut off further conversation. He looked as tired as Charlene felt, and he at once slumped down in a chair at the side of the room. Even if he didn’t want to be a leader, many of the others still treated him that way. They all stared at him expectantly. He glared back at them.
“What are you all looking at me for? Don’t any of you have anything better to do?”
“Yes.” It was Dan Korwin, as belligerent as Sy. He was the center of a group of five people, two men and three women. “I knew what I wanted to do ages ago, before we arrived at Gulf City. Hell, I knew it even when we were stuck close to Urstar. We” — his nod took in his companions — “have never been satisfied with the line of talk we were given by the aliens there. We’re going to load one of the research vessels with special equipment, and we’re going back. I want to know how anything could stop a ship that’s going at a fair fraction of light-speed dead in its tracks. What happened to inertia as an invariant property of matter?”
If Korwin was hoping to start an argument with Sy, it didn’t work. They stared at each other for a few seconds, then Sy nodded. “I’d be as interested in hearing the answer to that as you are. Good luck. Anyone else?”
“Yes.” Eva Packland spoke diffidently. “One of the free-space colonies is building special instruments to observe the universe at the greatest distances and earliest times. There’s a message in the files, posted recently, saying they could use a few well-qualified researchers. Libby and Gretchen and I already sent a message back to them, saying we’ll soon be on our way. They need to know what we were told about the logic the beings we encountered presented in favor of stellarforming. The colony we’re going to is five hundred and sixty light-years from here, but they’re doing all their work in S-space. In terms of S-time we’ll be with them pretty quickly, so they’ll still be able to use our help when we get there.”
There was a silence, then Gus Eldridge said, “Well, that makes me feel a good deal better. I thought we were going a long way, Chang and Rolf and me, but you make us look like stay-at-homes. We plan to head for Tellus Prime, where the focus is on the Pipistrelles and the Gossameres. We figure that the records the Argo made when we were marooned near Urstar might come in useful. We don’t understand what we saw, but maybe the people on Tellus will have ideas.” He glanced across at Eva. “Tellus is only ninety-seven light-years, hardly like travelling at all after what we’ve been through getting to Urstar and back.” A feeling was growing around the chamber, not exactly of excitement but of resolve to seek new challenges. People piped up, in twos and threes, choosing from a growing number of projects all around the spiral arm. Some were intrigued by the information offered by the Judith Niles’ embodiment, that no world where intelligence might develop would see its primary star changed. Checking such a statement would be a long and difficult job, calling for a cooperative effort among hundreds of groups in widely scattered locations. The biologists in the party wanted to see what life forms might thrive on planets circling red dwarf stars. If that was the future of the galaxy, better know what it looked like. Others wanted to be near a star when the change to a red dwarf first began. Techniques to predict when and where that would happen needed to be developed. Finally, almost everyone had spoken. Gretchen Waltz, standing close to Charlene, turned to her smiling and said, “What about you, Charlene? You haven’t said a word.”
“I know.” Charlene felt her face turning red. “This probably sounds stupid, but I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
“Well, no hurry.” Gretchen switched to Emil. “How about you?”
He shrugged his great shoulders and shook his head, with its bald and cratered dome. “I’m the same as Charlene. Give me a few more days, and I’ll know where I want to go and what I want to do.”
Charlene felt a surge of gratitude. He did know his own plans, she felt sure he did — but he was saying he didn’t, so she wouldn’t feel like the odd exception. Emil went farther, turning deliberately away from Gretchen toward Sy and saying, “You’ve asked everybody else, but you’ve been very coy about your own intentions. What will you be doing?”
“I wish I knew. I can assure you of one thing, I won’t be working as part of a group.”
Everyone laughed, and Charlene was astonished. Sy had actually made a joke about his own solitary preferences.
“I can tell you my goal,” Sy went on. “The beings performing the stellarforming may seem omnipotent and omniscient so far as we are concerned, but they made it clear that there’s one thing they don’t understand. The Kermel Objects are as much a mystery to them as they are to us. I want to take a closer look at them and see what I can learn.”
“But they’re outside the galaxy,” Eva Packland objected. “Tens of thousands of light-years, and some of them a lot farther than that.”
“So?” Sy shrugged. “Did I say I was in a hurry? I’m willing to travel in T-state, or in cold sleep, or whatever it takes. We don’t even know the best time rate at which to study them — it could require some new state we haven’t discovered yet.”
“But the time it will take — “ Eva paused.
“ — is nothing to worry about, considering how much time we’ve got. Even if we question the motives of the disembodied aliens we met at Urstar, we know from our own work on stellar evolution that a small red dwarf star can sustain fusion processes for a hundred billion years or more. If understanding takes that long, I’m willing to wait.”
“But that’s so far ahead, general expansion will have made the universe unrecognizable — probably incomprehensible. Acceleration may make everywhere inaccessible beyond the local galactic cluster.”
“So the universe may become beyond our comprehension. Do you understand the universe as it is now, Eva? I certainly don’t.”
“You may not be able to survive in what the universe becomes.”
“True. That would be bad, because you know what I really want? I’ll tell you: I want to live forever. But I’m willing to risk death in order to do it. Now, that’s enough talk about me. We all have things to do. Let’s go and do them.” Sy promptly left the control chamber. Other people, following his lead, began to drift out in small groups of three or four. Finally, only Charlene and Emil were left. He leaned back in his chair and said, “What now?”
“I don’t know. You pretended you didn’t know where you were going, just so I wouldn’t feel bad. I appreciate that, but you shouldn’t have done it.” “I didn’t do it. I spent most of last night and this morning trying to find you. Where were you?”
“Nowhere. Everywhere. Wandering around Gulf City.”
“Well, that’s a shame. I wanted to talk to you. You’ve been restless ever since we started back from Urstar. I wanted to ask why.”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m out of place among the rest of you. I was never a super-brain or a super-achiever. Just a normal person, with average abilities.” “I don’t see you that way, and I never have. The reason I wanted to find you was to make a proposition.”
He was rubbing his head, shielding the scarred and battered area. Charlene stared at him, afraid she was misunderstanding.
“A proposition? What sort of proposition?”
“I could say, the usual kind, but that’s not true. Look, Charlene, I’m tired of life out in open space. I want to get back to a planet. I know I’m a pretty battered object, and not much of a catch.” He hesitated. “Not a catch at all, you might say, for any rational person. But I wondered if you might be willing to go with me.”
Charlene stared at him and said nothing.
“I mean, as my partner,” Emil went on at last. “Live together. Maybe even start a — “
“Emil, I’m old. I’m at least fifty thousand years older than you are.” “Not really. I’ve thought about that, and I’ve done the calculations. If you allow for all the time you’ve spent in S-space, and in cold sleep, you are still a
