Between the Strokes of Night

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.