Starborne

“Metabolic balances remain normal, although, as earlier reported, some of the older members of the expedition have begun to show trace deficiencies of manganese and potassium. We are, of course, taking appropriate corrective steps, and—”

Noelle halts him with a brusque gesture. The year-captain waits. She bends forward, forehead against the table, hands pressed tightly to her temples.

“Static again,” she says. “It’s worse than ever today.”

“Are you getting through at all?”

“I’m getting through, yes. But I have to push, to push, push. And still Yvonne asks me for repeats.” She lifts her head and stares at him, her eyes locking on his in that weird intuitive way of hers. Her face is taut with tension. Her forehead is furrowed, and it glistens with a bright film of sweat. The year-captain wants to reach out to her, to hold her, to comfort her. She says huskily, “I don’t know what’s happening, year-captain.”

“The distance—”

“No!”

“Better than twenty light-years.”

“No,” she says again, a little less explosively this time. “We’ve already demonstrated that distance effects aren’t a factor. If there’s no falling off of signal after a million kilometers, after one light-year, after ten light-years — no measurable drop in clarity and accuracy whatever — then there shouldn’t be any qualitative diminution suddenly at any greater distance. Don’t you think I’ve thought about this?”

“Of course you have, Noelle.”

“It’s not as if we’re getting out of earshot of each other. We were in perfect contact at ten light-years, perfect at fifteen. Those are already immense distances. If we could manage that, we ought to be able to manage at any distance at all.”

“But still, Noelle—”

“Attenuation of signal is one thing, and interference is another. An attenuation curve is a gradual slope. Remember, Yvonne and I have had complete and undistorted mental access from the moment we left Earth until just a short while ago. And now — no, year-captain, it can’t be attenuation. This has to be some sort of interference. A purely local effect that we’re encountering in this region of the galaxy.”

“Yes, like sunspots, I know. Perhaps when we head out for Planet A, things will clear up.”

“Perhaps,” Noelle says crisply. “Let’s start again, shall we, year-captain? Yvonne’s calling for signal. Go on from’manganese and potassium.’ ”

” — manganese and potassium. We are taking appropriate corrective steps—”

The year-captain visualizes the contact between the two sisters as an arrow whistling from star to star, as fire speeding through a shining tube, as a river of pure force coursing down a celestial wave guide. He sees the joining of those two minds as a stream of pure light binding the moving ship to the far-off mother world. Sometimes he dreams of them both, Yvonne and Noelle, Noelle and Yvonne, standing facing each other across the cosmos with their hands upraised and light streaming from their fingertips, and the glowing bond that stretches across the galaxy between the two sisters gives off so brilliant a radiance that he stirs and moans and presses his forehead into the pillow.

I have a funny idea,” Sieglinde says, and everyone looks up, for Sieglinde is not noted for fanny ideas. Nor is there anything at all comic in the unusually thin, high, strained tone in which she is speaking now. But something has been building up in her for the past half hour, and now it comes erupting forth. “What if we throw the switch and the ship doesn’t want to come out of nospace?” she asks. “What if we find that we simply can’t reach this Planet A, or any other realspace destination? What do we do then? Do we have a fallback plan?”

This is the first brainstorming session for the group that is planning the change of course. They are meeting in the control cabin. Intelligence readouts embedded in the curved wall glow all around them, soft emanations of pulsing light, amethyst and amber and jade. Sieglinde and Roy and Heinz and Paco and Julia and the year-captain have been talking for two hours straight and they are all getting tired and a little silly now.

“If that happens, then we find a nice nospace planet somewhere and we settle down there instead,” Paco answers. “That’s our fallback plan.”

Roy gives him a glowering stare. “What you say is absurd and irrelevant. There aren’t any nospace planets. Such a thing is a logical impossibil—”

Heinz, smiling as always but displaying an edge of controlled annoyance, says to Sieglinde, “Why do you even ask these things? This is a meeting to discuss a survey mission into realspace. You’re conjuring up imaginary demons for us. The stardrive wasn’t designed to fail. It will not fail.”

“And if it does?” Sieglinde asks.

“Heinz is right,” says the year-captain wearily. “It won’t fail. It simply won’t. You can count on that.”