Its course would continue to take it towards the Galaxy itself and in time, perhaps, it would approach some of the inhabited worlds within mere light-years.
But that time would be too late to matter to anyone. It was a matter of thousands of years from even the fringe stars of the Galaxy, and by men there would be little left of even the dust of its crew. They had been written off.
Meanwhile, the deceleration phases were getting longer, the zero-G pauses for observation shorter and less frequent. Sun One had lost interest in the observations that could be conducted from Aurora. They were only waiting for the probe to go into orbit.
All through the ship, the living crewmembers were showing the effects. They were weaker and less rational, less capable of fine distinctions. The automatic machinery was running the ship.
As it poured the last of its fuel reserves into space to break its flight, it manufactured enormous clouds of radioactive gas.
They were not a hazard to the ship’s crew; it was too late for such trivial affairs to matter to the doomed beings. But they had caused some concern to the planners on Sun One. A thousand generations later perhaps they would be a pollution problem, as the newly manufactured clouds of gas preceded the ship in entering well-travelled portions of space. But by then some of the deadlier elements would have burned themselves out, their short half-lives expended. In any case, that was a problem for I lie thousandth generation - by which time, no doubt, tachyon transport would itself have been superseded, and no one would any longer trouble with such primitive concerns as the crude slower-than-light transport of mass.
The gas clouds as they departed did leave some trace of ionizing radiation, added to the larger increments from the blasts themselves and from the tachyar. The combined radiation was a witches” brew of gammas and alphas and betas, now and then primary particles that coursed through the entire space of the ship from hull to hull and did little harm, except when they struck an atomic nucleus and released a tiny, deadly shower of secondaries.
It was the secondaries, the gammas, that did the dirty work.
They interfered with the electronic functions of the computers, robots and metal beings. They damaged the instrumentation of the ship. Above all, they coursed through the organic matter they encountered, knocking out an electron here, loosening a molecular bond there, damaging a cell nucleus, making a blood vessel more permeable. The whole organic crew was on hourly doses of antirads, giving support to their internal workings. It was not enough. Still the radiation soaked in and struck at them. Blood, ichor, sap or stew or exotic biologies, the fluids that circulated in their bodies changed and grew less capable of supporting life. Physically they grew weaker. Mentally they became cloudy.
Taken out of the environment and rushed to an antirad clinic, like the victims of an industrial accident, most of them still could have been saved.
There was no hope of that. There was no place to take them. No part of the ship was free of penetrating ionizing radiation now, and every hour more and more of the chemistry of their bodies was damaged.
“Ben James, Ben James,” sobbed the voice of Doc Chimp.
Pertin roused himself. The thud and screech of the drive was still loud in his ear. Every time the floor drove up to meet the cocoon the single huge bruise that his body had become screamed with pain. Inside his chest his lungs felt as if they had broken loose and were being beaten sore against the inside of his rib cage.
He peered blearily out of the cocoon. The chimp was staring pathetically up at him. The great green plume of his hat was broken, his fur splotched with dirt and blood. The rubbery features of his face looked almost as they always had, except for an open cut along the flat, sculptured nose.
“What?” demanded Pertin thickly.
“I have to hide, Ben James. The Sheliaks are after me.”
Pertin tried to sit up and could not. “They’re not here to hurt you,” he pointed out.
The chimp whimpered, bobbing on all four limbs as he braced himself against the rocket thrust. “They will! They’re mad, Ben James. They killed the T’Worlie, for nothing, just killed him. And they almost killed me,”
“What were you doing?”
“Nothing! Well, I - I was watching their mating ritual. But that wasn’t it...”
“You idiot,” groaned Pertin. “Look, can you climb in here with me?”
“No, Ben James, I don’t have the strength,”
“It’s either that or let them catch you.”
The chimpanzee whimpered in fear, then abruptly, on the upsurge of the ship against its shock absorbers, sprang to the side of the cocoon. Pertin grabbed at him and pulled him inside just as the next thrust caught them. Doc Chimp weighed some two hundred pounds at Earth’s surface. The delta-V gave him a momentary weight of nearly half a ton, all concentrated on Pertin’s shoulder and chest. He grunted explosively. The chimp was caught with part of his side still across the metal lip of the cocoon, but he made no sound beyond the steady sotto-voce mumble of fear.
Pertin tried to make room behind him, in a place where the cocoon had never been designed to take a load. It tried its mechanical best to give support to the double mass. It was not adequate to the job. Pertin discovered when the next thrust came that his arm was still caught under the chimp. He yelped, managed to free it on the upsurge, discovered it was not broken. He slammed down the privacy curtain, hoping the Sheliaks would not look inside if they came.
“Now,” he panted, “what did you say about Nummie?”
“He’s dead, Ben James. They killed him. I didn’t mean any harm,” the chimp sobbed. “You know how the Sheliaks reproduce - by budding, like terrestrial plants. The young ones sprout out of the old ones, and grow until they’re mature enough to be detached.”
“I know.” Pertin had only the vaguest acquaintance with Sheliaks, but everybody knew that much. They didn’t have sexes, but the conjugation provided a union that shuffled up the genes.
“Well, that didn’t look like fun to me, but I wanted to see. Nummie told me to go away. He couldn’t; he was in one of the spare cocoons and couldn’t move. But he said they’d be mad.”
The chimp switched position and Pertin shouted in pain as his upper thigh took part of the chimp’s weight on a rocket thrust.
“Sorry, Ben James. It was disgusting, the way they did it! Any two of them can get the urge. They sort of melt down and flow together like jelly. All the body cells migrate, pair off and fuse.
Finally they form again into a sort of cactus-shaped vegetable thing that buds off haploid, mobile creatures. Those are the Sheliaks we see.”
“You wanted to watch that?” asked Pertin, almost able to laugh in spite of his discomfort, in spite of Nummie, in spite of everything.
“Yes, Ben James. Just for curiosity. And then “There’s my friend, Fireball. He’s the Sheliak who was here all along. He was nice, Ben James. I miss him.”
“I didn’t know you knew any Sheliaks.”
“Not well. But he was with me, helping to guard all of you, and we talked.”
“You sound as if he’s dead, too.”
“Might as well be. That union is a sort of individual suicide. It’s something you do for the race, and because your glands push you that way. But it’s the end for the individual. It wipes out all conscious memory and individual personality. I guess that’s why Fireball couldn’t understand our notions of sex.
“Anyway,” he said, “it was all right while Fireball was here alone. He wasn’t lonely; or anyway, he didn’t want any other Sheliaks around. When they’re in danger, you see, they can’t help conjugating. It’s a survival mechanism. The radiation was danger, and he knew that the only way for him to keep alive was to stay away from his own people. When the new ones came aboard he was actually afraid of them. He knew when they came close they were likely to set off a biological process they couldn’t control. And when it was over—”