Navigating on the surface of the Earth, there were three-hundred-and-sixty directions in which you could go, and some of that was limited by features of the terrain — mountains, water, heavy undergrowth, preexisting roads. In the air you had the full three hundred sixty degrees; he’d grown used to that, flying a light plane.
But out here there were all those directions, multiplied into three dimensions… 360 to the three-sixtieth power, maybe? Up, down, and all the permutations and combinations of angles in between.
The universe is too big… thank God we have the computer… all the crowding multiplicity of stars, vastness beyond imagining… we talk glibly of light-years. But the light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth. Think of something so distant that the light takes a year, a whole year, to reach it… that’s a light-year… the simple explanation he had been given in kindergarten, their whole education aimed at making these monstrous things close and simple and familiar and comfortable….
Ravi shut his eyes, to shut out the thousand blinking lights of the bridge, and the millions of blinking stars behind it. There was just too much of it. These distances were not made by man at all, man could not envision them. The mudfish in the water hole in the outback had mapped the Great Barrier Reef… but was this arrogance, was it meant that mankind should do this?
Behind his closed eyes pictures formed, faces in a crowded Bombay slum, starving faces, packed filthy faces; but he had grown up clean and well-fed, educated almost beyond human possibility, to do a deed at the very limits of the possible. Why me, why was I chosen with these others? Why millions to starve and die and bumble along from day to’day, and the six of us to live in luxury and attain the limits of human possibility? Dare I think that the Great Architect of the Universe has chosen me? Is it any better to think that it was the work of random Chaos and chance?
He knew he could go mad this way, and opened his eyes, fastening them on the navigation console. His eyes slid past Peake to Moira, and, trying to wrench his mind away from vastnesses too great to contemplate, he forced himself to think of the mundane and familiar. Moira. He had, briefly, been one of her lovers. Somehow he had begun to think, seeing Peake and Jimson, separated, that they had chosen a crew with no sexual ties to one another. He thought, trying to control an unseemly laugh, that it would have been hard to find any man in her year who had not been, at least briefly, Moira’s lover. No, he didn’t think was promiscuous, though one or two of the women were, but she had experimented widely, and she was a friendly girl with no special sexual inhibitions; he thought that Teague, for instance, had also been chosen, a year or so ago, to share Moira’s favors.
Was she thinking about that? he wondered. Two ex-lovers on the Ship? It was simpler to lose himself into a frankly erotic reverie than to contemplate that painful vastness outside the ship, or to try and wrestle some meaning for it all from the unyielding cosmos.
Moira was not thinking about anyone, or anything, human, at all. The faint apprehension she felt, she forced down into calm; she told herself that the view from outside the dome made her dizzy, with all the stars, the Space Station moving sedately past their window every few seconds, disturbing her visual orientation. When she closed her eyes she felt quite comfortable, her stomach in place, the DeMag gravitation strong enough so that she did not lose her up-down orientation with the control board.
Peake said, “Well, it’s like one of those old Navy novels — should I yell out ‘Engineer, set all sails’…”
“You’re mixing your metaphors,” Fontana said. “In the days when they set sails, in the Navy, they didn’t have engineers.” She too was in one of the supernumerary seats; they had all chosen to be present for that moment when Survey Ship 103 moved away from the Space Station, From being as nearly at rest as any body in the universe could be — moving in free-fall orbit around the Space Station — they would begin their long, slow, but steady acceleration which, within a year, would bring them to 99.3 per cent of light-speed; the highest practical speed for space travel. And so rapid would this acceleration be that, from just outside the orbit of the Moon, they would leave Pluto’s orbit behind within thirteen days.
Moira wet her lips, checked the panel before her, then, deliberately, touching the buttons with gentle fingers, she pressed a certain sequence which would activate the drives. Although the drive was in another module, and the intervening total vacuum of space would not convey even a fragment of sound, she fancied that she could feel a faint vibration, somewhere, the drives setting up their vibration… not a sound. Not a vibration. Had it to do with her extra-sensory perception, so that she felt it somewhere inside herself, that the drives were running, like a heartbeat?
She checked the green light on the console which telemetered information, looked at a small visual panel which gave video information from the drive module. There were, of course, no moving parts, but energy was being transmitted, and outside the dome window, the Space Station began to recede, grow smaller against the background of stars. It was no longer passing their window every few seconds. It was moving away… no. They were moving away, Survey Ship 103 was accelerating away from the Space Station at nine point eight meters per second per second…. at an ever-increasing velocity. Moira was not the natural mathematician Ravi was, and could not keep track of the continuing velocity without flicking a glance at the tell-tales giving velocity, and the percentage of Tau — light-speed.
“There it goes,” Fontana said suddenly. “We might as well take a last look.”
Earth had come into their viewfield, a dim blue wraith, the size of a small dinner plate, diminishing, distant… a raindrop. Moira blinked, shook the tears from her eyes, concentrating on the drive tell-tale. Now, when they were clear of the last fragments of gravitational pull from the Moon and from the Space Station… now, slowly, gently… she pressed another sequence of buttons in a memorized order, feeling the faint drag from the DeMag units; possibly it would be easier when they could turn off the DeMags for a while, but at this moment none of them were emotionally or physiologically prepared for less than half gravity. The ship rotated, modules turning for favorable light exposure. She watched what she was doing on her video tell-tales as the light-sail panels, enormous, thin sheets of mylar film, were slowly extruded. She could see a corner of one of them coming, slowly, into sight across the dome, a smear of translucence blotting out a few of the stars across the lower edge of the lenticular observation window. Trim it just a little toward the sun, Moira thought, pressing buttons gently, watching the sail veer ever so slightly, rotate a little, streaming gently. Her tell-tales told her of other sails, great sheets of film sensitive to solar pressure… light as a tangible force, making the sails just shiver… the film was so delicate it would tear at a touch, but in space, friction-less, airless, there was nothing to tear it. Yet Moira’s fingers moved as delicately on the studs as if her fingers could rip through the sails themselves, and she watched the movement, the imperceptible shiver of the streaming mylar, with a lump in her throat. That’s right, just a fraction more to the left… now you, back there by the Life-Support module… come on, darling, easy now ,, . just a little further… she was whispering to the sails as they moved, slowly and with a silken elegance, into position. She felt like a spider, spinning out her silken web into every direction, surrounded by the feathery streaming of filmy sails, responding to the light… feeding the endless energies of light into the drives. The awareness shimmered inside her nerves with the violence of orgasm, and she closed her eyes in momentary ecstasy.