World without Stars Read Online Free Page B

toward me, and said, low under the racket:
    “No, skipper, I’m neither impotent nor homosexual. Matter’s very simple. I fell in love once for all, when I was young. And
     she loves me. We’re enough for each other. We don’t want more. You see?”
    He hadn’t shown it before, but he was plainly pretty drunk. “I suppose I see,” I told him with care. “Wouldn’t be honest to
     claim I feel what you mean.”
    “Reckon you don’t,” he said. “Between them, immortality and star travel changed everything. Not necessarily for the worse.
     I pass no judgments on anybody.” He pondered. “Could be,” he said, “if I’d stayed on Earth, Mary and I would’ve grown apart
     too. Could be. But this wanderin’ keeps me, well, fresh. Then I come home and tell her everything that happened.”
    He picked up his omnisonor again, strummed a few bars, and murmured those lyrics I had heard when first we met.
“
I’ll sing me a song about Mary O’Meara, with stars like a crown in her hair
.
    Sing of her memory rangin’ before me whatever the ways that I fare
.
    My joy is to know she is there
.”
    Well
, I thought with startling originality,
it takes all kinds
.

V
    W E WERE ready to jump.
    Every system was tuned, every observation and computation finished, every man at his post. I went to the bridge, strapped
     myself into recoil harness, and watched the clock. Exact timing isn’t too important, as far as a ship is concerned; the position
     error caused by a few minutes’ leeway is small compared to the usual error in your figures. But for psychological reasons
     you’d better stay on schedule. Pushing that button is the loneliest thing a man can do.
    I had no premonitions. But it grew almighty quiet in my helmet as I waited. The very act of suiting up reminds you that something
     could go wrong; that something did go wrong for others you once knew; that our immortality isn’t absolute, because sooner
     or later some chance combination of circumstances is bound to kill you.
    What a spaceship captain fears most, as he watches the clock by himself on the bridge, is arriving in the same place as a
     solid body. Then atoms jam together and the ship goes out in a nuclear explosion. But that’s a stupid fear, really. You set
     your dials for emergence at a goodly distance from the target sun, well off the ecliptic plane. The probability of a rock
     being just there, just then, is yanishingly small. In point of fact, I told myself, this trip we’d be in an ideal spot. We
     wouldn’t even get the slight radiation dosage that’s normal: scarcely any hydrogen for our atoms to interact with, between
     the galaxies.
    Nevertheless, we were going two hundred and thirty thousand light-years away.
    And I do not understand the principle of the space jump. Oh, I’ve studied the math. I can recite the popular version as glibly
     as the next man: “Astronomers showed that gravitational forces, being weak and propagating at light velocity, were insufficient
     to account for the cohesion of the universe. A new theory then postulated that space has an intrinsic unity, that every point
     is equivalent to every other point. One location is distinguished from another only by the n-dimensional coordinates of the
     mass which is present there. These coordinates describe a configuration of the matter-energy field which can be altered artificially.
     When this is done, the mass, in effect, makes an instantaneous transition to the corresponding other point in space. Energy
     being conserved, the mass retains the momentum—with respect to the general background of the galaxies—that it had prior to
     this transition, plus or minus an amount corresponding to the difference in gravitational potential.”
    It still sounds like number magic to me.
    But a lot of things seem magical. There are primitives who believe that by eating somebody they can acquire that person’s
     virtue. Well, you can train an animal, kill it, extract the RNA from