Chi-Yuen hugged Reymont. “You were marvelous,” she sobbed.

His mouth tightened. He looked from her, from Lindgren, across the assemblage, to the enclosing bulkheads. “Thanks,” he replied curtly. “Wasn’t much.”

“Oh, but it was. You gave us back hope. I am honored to live with you.”

He didn’t seen to hear. “Anybody could have presented a shiny new idea,” he said. “They’ll grasp at anything, right now. I only expedited matters. When they accept the program, that’s when the real trouble begins.”

CHAPTER 11

Force fields shifted about. They were not static tubes and walls. What formed them was the incessant interplay of electromagnetic pulses, whose production, propagation, and heterodyning must be under control at every nanosecond, from the quantum level to the cosmic. As exterior conditions— matter density, radiation, impinging field strengths, gravitational space-curvature— changed, instant by instant, their reaction on the ship’s immaterial web was registered; data were fed into the computers; handling a thousand simultaneous Fourier series as the smallest of their tasks, these machines sent back their answers; the generating and controlling devices, swimming aft of the hull in a vortex of their own output, made their supple adjustments. Into this homeostasis, this tightrope walk across the chance of a response that was improper or merely tardy— which would mean distortion and collapse of the fields, novalike destruction of the ship— entered a human command. It became part of the data. A starboard intake widened, a port intake throttled back: carefully, carefully. Leonora Christine swung around onto her new course.

The stars saw the ponderous movement of a steadily larger and more flattened mass, taking months and years before the deviation from its original track was significant. Not that the object whereon they shone was slow. It was a planet-sized shell of incandescence, where atoms were seized by its outermost force-fringes and excited into thermal, fluorescent, synchrotron radiation. And it came barely behind the wave front which announced its march. But the ship’s luminosity was soon lost across light-years. Her passage crawled through abysses which seemingly had no end.

In her own time, the story was another. She moved in a universe increasingly foreign— more rapidly aging, more massive, more compressed. Thus the rate at which she could gulp down hydrogen, burn part of it to energy and hurl the rest off in a million-kilometer jet flame… that rate kept waxing for her. Each minute, as counted by her clocks, took a larger fraction off her tau than the last minute had done.

Inboard, nothing changed. Air and metal still carried the pulse of acceleration, whose net internal drag still stood at an even one gravity. The interior power plant continued to give light, electricity, equable temperatures. The biosystems and organocycles reclaimed oxygen and water, processed waste, manufactured food, supported life. Entropy increased. People grew older at the ancient rate of sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour.

Yet those hours were always less related to the hours and years which passed outside. Loneliness closed on the ship like fingers.