Tau zero by Poul Anderson Read Free Book Online Page A

single long one. Hence, between meals, it could double as a club. Some of the men built a bar at one end to dispense ice and mixers. Others made roll-down curtains for the bulkheads, so that the decorous murals could be hidden during boozing hours behind scenes a little more ribald. A taper generally kept background music going, cheerful stuff, anything from sixteenth-century galliards to the latest asteroid ramble received from Earth.
    On a particular date at about 2000 hours, the club stood empty. A dance was scheduled in the gym. Most off-duty personnel who wished to attend it—the majority—were getting dressed. Garments, all ceremony, were becoming terribly important. Machinist Johann Freiwald shone in a gilt tunic and silvercloth trews that a lady had made for him. She wasn't ready yet, nor was the orchestra, so he allowed Elof Nilsson to lead him to the bar.
    "Can we not talk business tomorrow, though?" he asked. He was a large, amiable young man, square-featured, his scalp shining pink through close-cropped blond hair.
    "I want to discuss this with you at once, while it's new in my mind," said Nilsson's raspy voice. "It came to me in a flash as I was changing clothes." His appearance bore him out. "Before carrying my thought further, I wish to check the practicality."
    "Jawohl, if you're supplying the drink and we can keep it short."
    The astronomer found his personal bottle on the shelf, picked up a couple of glasses, and started for a table. "I take water—" Freiwald began. The other man didn't hear. "That's Nilsson for you," Freiwald told the overhead. He tapped a pitcherful and brought it along.
    Nilsson sat down, got out a note pad, and started sketching. He was short, fat, grizzled, and ugly. It was known that an intellectually ambitious father, in the ancient university town Uppsala, had forced him to become a prodigy at the expense of everything else. It was surmised that his marriage had been the result of mutual desperation and had turned into a prolonged catastrophe, for despite a child it dissolved the moment he got a chance to go on this ship. Yet when he talked, not about the humanities he failed to understand and hence disdained, but about his own subject . . . then you forgot his arrogance and flatulence, you remembered his observations which had finally proven the oscillating universe, and you saw him crowned with stars.

    "—unparalleled opportunity to get some worthwhile readings. Only think what a baseline we'll have: ten parsecs! Plus the ability to examine gamma-ray spectra with less uncertainty, high precision, when they're red-shifted down to less energetic photons. And more and more. Still, I'm not satisfied.
    "I don't believe it's really necessary for me to peer at an electronic image of the sky—narrow, blurred, and degraded by noise, not to mention the damned optical changes. We should mount mirrors outside the hull. The images they catch could be led along light conductors to eyepieces, photomultipliers, cameras inboard.
    "No, don't say it. I'm well aware that previous attempts to do this failed. One could build a machine to go out through an airlock, shape the plastic backing for such an instrument, and aluminize it. But induction effects of the Bussard fields would promptly make the mirror into something appropriate for a fun house in Grona Lund. Yes.
    "Now my idea is to print sensor and feedback circuits into the plastic, controlling flexors that'll automatically compensate these distortions as they occur. I would like your opinion as to the feasibility of designing, testing, and producing those flexors, Mr. Freiwald. Here, this is a rough drawing of what I have in mind—"
    Nilsson was interrupted. "Hey, there you are, ol' buddy!" He and the machinist looked up. Williams lurched toward them. The chemist held a bottle in his right hand, a half-full tumbler in the left. His face was redder than usual and he breathed heavily.
    "Was zum Teufel?" Freiwald exclaimed.
    "English, boy,"