But there was a poison in the air. Ann stopped talking, or annoyedly allowed Eve to talk t© her once in a while. She threw the toe bones over and over, her lips tightening, whispering to herself and clamming up when Eve came near her.
There was a lot of whispering going on in which Eve was not included. And a lot of silences. And a lot of absences. Eve's own husband was spending more and more of his time up in the lookout bubble, peering through the spotter scope or sometimes just with the unaided eye. What was he watching? As far as Eve could see, nothing. It was astonishing to her how interesting nothing was to her husband.
The trip was turning sour in Eve's mouth. But she did not know how sour, or what the spreading sickness was, until Jerry Letski woke her out of a sound sleep. She had curled up on a nest of blankets under the broccoli trays, dreaming of multiple fornications with unbelievably handsome men, and her name was called. Ski spotted her and came racing and flying between the carrots and the mint patch. "Come on, for Christ's sake, there's a meeting. Where've you been?" He caught her by the arm, his gentle, triangular face working with fury. At her? she wondered. No, not at her. But it was not until she got to the common room that she understood to whom the rage belonged, and how terribly it changed everything.
They were all there, and all upset. They showed it in their own individual ways, Dot Letski with her knees folded and eyes closed, communing with who knew what; Shef cursing to himself as he punched out programs on his calculator and fumed at the results. He had been letting his hair grow, Eve saw; it made him look gaunt and wild.
But they all looked wild. Flo Jackman grabbed her by the shoulder as she came in and pushed her face into Eve's. "Well? Shall we do it?" she shouted, spraying Eve's cheek.
Eve pulled away, as much frightened by the intensity in the group as thrilled by the experience of someone asking her advice or consent to anything, for the first time in weeks. "Shall we do what?" she asked, and then they all began talking at once—Shef without looking up, Dot without opening her eyes, even Will Becklund, in his rustly, hoarse whisper, from whatever corner he was hiding in. Ann cast the bones at Eve's feet and cried, "Don't you see? We're screwed!"
Eve gazed at the bones, but the hexagram she could not read. Nor did she have time to try to figure it out because Flo was shouting in her ear. "Dot can write a grammar," she shouted, "in which the whole planet Earth stops rotating. Ski says—"
"Ski says it's too big an investment of our resources," Letski yelled, from Eve's other side. "No way! Now Shef says—"
Shef turned from his calculator to take up his part: "Shef says we go back and beat the piss out of them."
"We can't do that," Eve objected, startled out of her mute confusion.
"Almost! Maybe not quite. We're blowing seven fifty centimeters per second squared against the relativistic mass increase; we can decelerate to zero, turn around, build up to point zero four c, coast, and still have enough to decelerate and maneuver. Of course the time's bad, thirty-three years. On the other hand—-"
"And then what?" Letski shouted. "Go back and live among them again?"
And then everyone stopped talking for a moment, considering what it would be like to return to the familiar life of Earth. Shef started to speak, scratched his stubbly beard, shook his head, and subsided. Ann gathered up her toe bones,' stared at them, then shook her blond head wildly and threw them against the wall. "Any way you look at it," she said, "we're screwed."
"We might as well just keep on going," said Letski, and, one by one, the others began to nod. All but Eve.
"I don't understand!" she cried. "Has something happened I don't know about?"
Ann stared at her, combing her long hair through her fingers. "I thought you knew," she said.
"Knew what? Please! What's it all about?"
Ann's expression softened. "I forgot you haven't been involved," she said apologetically. "It's confirmed. We've all double-checked it. It's been in the hexagrams for weeks, Shef worked it out from a personality analysis of Knefhausen, Jim verified it by direct observation. There's no planet around Alpha Centauri. We have no place to go!"
10
THE THIRD WORST THING IN DIETER VON KNEFHAUSEN'S LIFE was that conditions in Washington had continued to worsen. There were ominous rumblings of tank treads at night, and now and then a flight of low-flying jets overhead that made one ask whom they might belong to. Knefhausen slept now on a cot in the little office next to his own; some days even his secretary could not make it in to the office, though one would expect she was protected by the badge of her skin color. And the food he had to eat! Such food the Army even turned up its nose at, desiccated hash and gummy fruit bars that defied recognition.
The second worst thing was that the President had put him in the doghouse again. Back in the isolation ward, where there were no armored helicopters and no favors offered. He could not ask the President for any, even, be-cause the President was "traveling." Traveling where? One could not be told, because of security. Perhaps he was orbiting in Air Force One, out of the range of any possible heat- seeking missiles in the hands of black insurrectionists or campus rowdies. Perhaps in the rabbit warrens under Camp David. Perhaps, most likely of all, simply cowering in the White House and refusing to be seen.
But it was almost better that the President did not see him and he could go nowhere; because there was the worst thing of all. From the Constitution, nothing! No telemetry. No regular reports. Not even one word, not even a bad one! There had been ample time for his scolding order to reach them and a response to return. No response. One could not even say that they were angered by the curtness of his tone, because they must have stopped transmitting long before that was received.
So, then, what? Some terrible accident? A collision with some misplaced asteroid or comet body in the Oort cloud?
It would almost be better if that were the case, Knefhausen grieved. The alternative was worse. The alternative was that, no matter what assurances he had given the President, the ruse had been discovered, heaven could only guess how. And so the experiment was out of control; and worse than that, his participation in it was at an end.
So much had been risked! So much already lost! But that was not important to Knefhausen; he would wager more than that and accept a losing roll of the dice—gladly!—if only he could see the end of his work.
So he pored over the old reports, and dispatched messages — wheedling, pleading, begging—that might never reach the spacecraft, much less be answered. And if he had known how to pray he would have prayed for a message, any message at ail! Anything would be better than this!
Or so he thought until, at last, a message came.
11
THIS IS SHEF AGAIN AND IT'S OH, LET ME SEE, MAYBE ABOUT day two hundred and fifty? Three hundred? No, I don't think it can be that much. Look, I'm sorry about the ship date, but I honestly don't think much in those terms anymore. I've been thinking about other things. Also I'm still a little upset. We've all calmed down a lot (you can tell that by the fact that you're getting this!), but when I tossed the ruble the hexagram was K'an, which is danger, over Li, the Sun. That's a crappy modality to be communicating in—with you, I mean. "Danger" is too close to true to be funny. We aren't vengeful types, but the fact is that some of us were pretty sore when we found out what you'd done. For God's sake, why did you do it? Didn't you know it would piss us off transcendentally? I don't think you need to worry about what's going to happen, because we've decided to take no action for the present; but I wish I'd got a better hexagram.