Dominici frowned, muttered a couple of words aloud experimentally, and gave up. “It’s hopeless. Even if I could figure out all the words, I’d never get the sense. Take it back.”
Bernard retrieved his book. Odd, he thought; he had taken naturally to old English, and read it without a hitch now. But, he had to admit, it was not really very much like contemporary Terran. Hundreds of years of transmat civilization had blended the languages of Earth into one homogeneous tongue, founded on English but vastly different.
It was strange to think of a time when men had spoken hundreds of different languages, thousands of subdialects. But so the world had been, not many centuries ago. Only the transmat, enabling a person to outstrip the lightning in his travels, ensured the continuing uniformity of Terran language and culture everywhere.
He put the book away. Concentration was impossible; too many extraneous fears intervened. His hands were cold with tension. He paced the narrow cabin. The viewscreen showed nothing but gray; it was impossible to tell that they were moving—but they were, incalculable strides each fragment of a moment, plunging on toward Earth.
Bernard did not want to see the Technarch McKenzie’s face when he received the news of the Norglan ultimatum. He wished there were some way of submitting a written report instead. But there would be no help for it; they would have to report in person. It would be an ugly little moment, Bernard was certain.
The cabin was silent. Havig was sunk in that impenetrable cloak of abstraction of his, communing with his God; no use seeking company there. Dominici had gone to sleep. Stone stared at the viewless vision screen, no doubt thinking of his shattered diplomatic career. A man who goes forth to negotiate a treaty and returns with an enemy ultimatum jammed down his gullet does not rise to the Archonate.
Bernard made his way forward, past the walls studded with rivets, past the galley, into the control cabin at the nose of the ship. The door was open. Within, he could see all five of them at work, parts of the same organism, extensions of the ship. For minutes, no one took notice of the sociologist as he stood at the entrance to the control cabin peering at the flashing lights, listening to the droning click of the computer. Then Laurance saw him. Turning, the Commander’s eyes narrowed; his face, Bernard thought, looked strangely rigid, almost tortured.
“Sorry, Dr. Bernard. We’re very busy. Would you mind remaining in your cabin?”
“Oh—of course. Sorry to intrude…”
Rebuked, Bernard returned to the passenger half of the ship. Nothing had changed. The clock showed that nearly fourteen hours of no-space travel remained.
He was growing hungry. But as the clock-hands crawled on, no one appeared from the crew to announce that it was meal-time. Bernard waited.
“Getting hungry?” Stone asked.
“Plenty. But they looked busy up front when I went fore,” Bernard said. “Maybe they can’t take time out for a meal break yet.”
“We’ll wait another hour,” Stone decided. “Then we eat without them.”
The hour went by, and half an hour more. Stone and Bernard went fore. Tiptoeing past the galley, Bernard glanced into the control cabin and saw the five crewmen as frantically busy as ever. Shrugging, he stole away again, unnoticed.
“They don’t look as if they plan to eat,” he told Stone; “we might as well help ourselves.”
“What about the other two?”
“Dominici’s asleep, Havig’s meditating. They can eat whenever they feel like it, after all.”
“You’re right,” Stone agreed.
They fell to, dishing out the synthetics. Nakamura kept the galley spotlessly, everything in its place. Staring into the storage cabinets, Bernard discovered with some surprise that the ship carried enough food to last for months. In case of emergency, he thought automatically. Then he checked himself. Emergency? For the first time he realized that the XV-ftl, was an experimental ship, that faster-than-light travel was in its puling infancy.
He prepared the synthetics with something less than Nakamura’s culinary skill, and they ate a silent meal. It was the seventh hour of no-space travel by the time they finished. In less than half a day, the XV-ftl would wink back into the familiar universe somewhere near the orbit of Pluto.
Returning to the cabin, Bernard settled himself in his bunk. Dominici had awakened. “Did I miss lunch?” he wanted to know.
“The crew’s too busy to take a break,” Stone said. “We made lunch ourselves. You were sound asleep, so we didn’t wake you.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Dominici went forward to see about his meal; after a moment, Havig followed him. Bernard lay back, nestling his head on his hands, and dozed for a while. When he woke, six hours remained; he was hungry again.
“You haven’t missed a thing,” Dominici assured him. “They’re awfully busy up front.”
“Still?” Bernard asked. He began to feel uneasy.
The hours trickled away. Three hours left, two, one. He counted minutes. The seventeen-hour no-space interim had expired. They ought to be converting back, but no news came from the control cabin. Conversion was twenty minutes overdue, thirty minutes. An hour.
“Do you think there’s some reason why we should spend more time in no-space on the way back than on the way out?” Stone asked.
Dominici shrugged. “In no-space theory almost anything goes. But I don’t like this. Not at all.”
When they were three hours past the conversion time, Bernard said through lips dry with tension: “Maybe we ought to go up front and find out what’s what?”
“Not yet,” Stone said. “Let’s be patient.”
They tried to be patient. Only Havig succeeded, sitting wrapped in his unbreakable calm. Another hour went by, more tortuously than any of the others. Suddenly the gong sounded, three times, reverberating through the entire ship.
“At last,” Bernard muttered. “Four hours late.”
The lights dimmed; the indefinable sensation of transition came over them, and the viewscreen blazed with light. They had returned to the universe!
Then Bernard frowned. The viewscreen…
He was no astronomer, but even so he spied the wrongness. These were not the constellations he knew; the stars did not look this way in the orbit of Pluto. That great blazing blue double, with its attendant circlet of smaller stars—he had never seen that formation before. Panic swirled coldly through him.
Laurance entered the cabin suddenly. His face was paper-white, his lips bloodless.
“What’s going on?” Bernard and Dominici demanded in the same instant.
Laurance said quietly, “Commend yourselves to whatever gods you happen to believe in. We went off course the moment we converted yesterday. I don’t know where we are —but it’s most likely better than a hundred thousand light-years from home.”
ELEVEN
“You mean we’re lost?” Dominici asked, his voice rising to an incredulous screech.
“I mean just that.”
“Why didn’t you tell us about this before?” Bernard demanded. “Why did you leave us to stew here in uncertainty all this time?”
Laurance shrugged. “We were making course compensations, trying to find our way back to the right path; but it didn’t work. There wasn’t even a trace of a single one of our course referents. And everything we did only seemed to make things worse. In the final analysis we really don’t know the first bit about faster-than-light navigation.” Laurance’s shoulders slumped wearily. “We decided to give up trying, a little while ago, and converted back to the normal universe. But there isn’t a single familiar landmark. We’re as lost as can be.”