Starborne

Noelle’s old idea that what is intervening between her and her sister is some physical effect analogous to sunspot static — that it is the product of radiation emitted by this or that giant star into whose vicinity they have come during the course of their travels — is brought up again, and is in the end rejected again. There is, both Roy and Sieglinde point out, no energy interface between realspace and nospace, no opportunity for any kind of electromagnetic intrusion. That much had been amply demonstrated long before any manned voyages were undertaken. Hesper’s scanning instruments, yes, are able to pick up information of a nonelectromagnetic kind out of the realspace continuum, information that can be translated into comprehensible data about that continuum; but no material thing belonging to realspace can penetrate here. The nospace tube is an impermeable wall separating them from the continuum of phenomena. They are effectively outside the universe. They could in theory pass, and perhaps they already have, right through the heart of a star in the course of their journey without causing any disruption either to the star or to themselves. Nothing that has mass or charge can leap the barrier between the universe of real-world phenomena and the cocoon of nothingness that the ship’s drive mechanism has woven about them; nor can a photon get across, nor even a slippery neutrino.

But something, it seems,is getting through, and is doing damage. Many speculations excite the voyagers. The one force thatcan cross the barrier, Roy observes, is thought. Thought is intangible, immeasurable, limitless. The ease with which Noelle and Yvonne maintained contact on an instantaneous basis throughout the first five months of the voyage has demonstrated that.

“But let us suppose,” Roy says — it is clear from his lofty tone that this is merely some hypothesis he is putting forth, an airygedankenexperiment — “that the interference Noelle is experiencing is caused by beings of powerful telepathic capacity that live in the space between the stars.”

“Beings that live between the stars,” Paco repeats in wonderment. Plainly he thinks that Roy has launched into something crazy, but he has enough respect for the power of Roy’s intellect to hold off on his scorn until the mathematician has finished putting forth his idea.

“Yes, between the stars,” Roy goes on. “Orin the stars, or surrounding them. Who can say? Let us suppose that each of these beings is capable of emitting mental transmissions, just as Noelle is, but that their sending capacity is far more powerful than hers. As these transmissions go flooding outward, perhaps each one sweeping out a sphere with a radius of many light-years, the trajectory of the Wotan carries them in and out of these spheres and the telepathic impulses cross the nospace barrier just as readily as the thoughts of Noelle and Yvonne do. And it is these alien mental emanations, let us suppose, that are smothering the signal coming from Earth.”

Paco is ready to jump in now with objections; but Heinz is already speaking, extending Roy’s suggestion into a different area of possibility.

“What if,” Heinz says, “these beings that Roy has suggested are denizens not of the space between the stars but of nospace itself? Living right here in the tube, let us say, and as we travel along we keep running into their domains.”

“The nospace tube must be matter-free except for the ship that moves through it,” Sieglinde observes acidly. “Otherwise a body moving at speeds faster than light, as we are, would generate destructive resonances, since in conventional physical terms our mass is equal to infinity, and a body with infinite mass leaves no room in its universe for anything else.”

“Indeed true,” Heinz replies, unruffled as always. “But I don’t remember speaking of these beings as material objects. What I imagine are gigantic incorporeal beings as big as asteroids, as big as planets, maybe, that have no mass at all, no essence, onlyexistence — great convergences of pure mental force that drift freely through the tube. They are the native life-forms of nospace. They are not made up of anything that we can regard as matter. They are something of a nature absolutely unknown to us, occupying this otherworldy zone that we call nospace, living out there the way angels live in Heaven.”

“Angels,” Paco snorts.

“Angels, yes!” cries Elizabeth, as though inspired, and claps her hands in a sort of rapture of fantasy.

“Of course, I don’t mean that literally,” says Heinz, a little sourly. He casts an annoyed look in Elizabeth’s direction. “But let’s postulate that they are there, whatever they are, these alien beings, these strange gigantic things. And as we pass through them, they give off biopsychic transmissions that disrupt the Yvonne-Noelle circuit—”

“Biopsychic transmissions,” Paco repeats mockingly.