Between the Strokes of Night

Over the centuries and millennia, Gulf City had grown from a docking port and temporary facility to an extended space city. Charlene, carried to any preferred destination by service robots when in S-space, had never had a feeling for Gulf City’s swelling dimensions. Now, walking along corridors and through chambers in N-space, she became aware of the city’s size and complexity. Without the guidance robots, she and Emil would have been helpless. The idea of a systematic search of the whole of Gulf City for possible human presence was unthinkable. “Won’t be necessary,” Emil said in answer to her question. His tone was grim. “We have reason to believe that we will find no other humans anywhere on Gulf City.”

“Everyone left?”

“They did; but they also left messages.”

“What did they say?”

“Better if you see for yourself, rather than my trying to summarize. We’re there.”

The robot guide was leading them into a place that seemed oddly familiar. It was the old control center for Gulf City, but a control center that had been modified by the addition of arrays of unfamiliar equipment. Most of the crew of the Argo slumped in chairs around the periphery of the chamber, with expressions ranging from suspicion to despair.

Four people stood in front of a narrow two-meter-high cylinder with rounded contours, a machine unlike anything that Charlene had ever seen before. The four were members of the Argo’s crew: Sy Day, Gus Eldridge, Eva Packland, and a taciturn technician named Delsy Gretz who was the Argo’s specialist in hardware interfaces. Gretz was holding a small gray handset, and pressing a sequence of points on its surface.

“There’s the complete set,” he said. “A hundred and seventy-eight of them.” A long list of names, each with stellar coordinates, stood out against the gray surface of the machine. Charlene recognized maybe a dozen of them: Pentecost, Kallen’s World, Wendell, Derville, Marsden, Lysander. The rest were unfamiliar, scattered more widely through the spiral arm than the stars and settled planets that she knew.

“Colonies of widely varying ages,” Delsy Gretz went on. “All apparently thriving, all working at the same time rate — N-space, no one is using S-space. And all of them apparently in communication with each other. Gulf City receives messages from every world in the galactic web, but it seems to generate none of its own.”

“I don’t get it,” Gus Eldridge said. “Gulf City is the central hub for development of this spiral arm. Decisions on new colonies, and pacing for use of resources, all come from here.”

“Not any more.” Sy had been peering at the list of worlds. He moved backward and flopped onto a chair. It was a mark of his unusual emotional condition that the man he sat down next to was Dan Korwin. “Don’t you get it?”

No one spoke, until Charlene — better a fool who would ask questions than one who would hide ignorance — said, “I don’t get anything, Sy, except that Gulf City is nothing like we expected.”

He nodded. “Right. But not just Gulf City, Charlene — the whole of the spiral arm. When we left on the Argo to travel to Urstar, we all realized we were going off on a long journey. We spent most of the trip out in T-state or cold sleep, so not much subjective time passed for us, but we knew that back here on Gulf City more than seven S-years would flash by while we were on the way there. It would take another S-year for us to return, so far as people here were concerned — our time dilation on the way back because of relativistic effects did not apply to them at all.

“We knew all this; knew, no matter what happened, that so far as anyone on Gulf City was concerned we might be gone for ten S-years, allowing a reasonable span for us to explore Urstar and try to discover what had happened there. “Our logic seemed impeccable when we left, but there was one huge flaw in it. We assumed that the way to measure time was as intervals in S-space, which is where we and the majority of people on Gulf City were and would be living. “We were wrong. Most of the new colonies are down on planetary surfaces. We have known since S-space was first discovered that even a modest surface gravity makes existence in S-space impossible, because no one would be able to walk or even stand up. They would be flat on the ground before they knew they were off balance.

“So people living on planets inhabit N-space, because they have no choice. From their point of view, the ship that left for Urstar would not be gone for just ten years or so. The Argo was gone for more than twenty thousand of their years. Long enough for many new planets to be colonized, long enough to establish an interstellar communications web, long enough to discover new branches of science totally unknown to the living fossils — us — aboard the Argo.”

Sy swept his arm around the control chamber, indicating the arrays of instruments and equipment. “How much of this do you recognize? If you are anything like me, damned little.”