The Burning Bridge | Page 7

"Follow me." She led him down a short passage, hand-over-hand along
the null-gee rungs. "I've warned the other girls to stay away. You
needn't fear being shocked." At the end of the hall was a little
partitioned-off room. Few enough personal goods could be taken along,

but she had made this place hers, a painting, a battered Shakespeare, the
works of Anker, a microplayer. Her tapes ran to Bach, late Beethoven
and Strauss, music which could be studied endlessly. She took hold of a
stanchion and nodded, all at once grown serious.
"What do you want to ask me, captain?"
Coffin secured himself by the crook of an arm and stared at his hands.
The fingers strained against each other. "I wish I could give you a clear
reply," he said, very low and with difficulty. "You see, I've never met
anything like this before. If it involved only men, I guess I could handle
the problem. But there are women along, and children."
"And you want a female viewpoint. You're wiser than I had realized.
But why me?"
He forced himself to meet her eyes. "You appear the most sensible of
the women awake."
"Really!" She laughed. "I appreciate the compliment, but must you
deliver it in that parade-ground voice, and glare at me to boot? Relax,
captain." She cocked her head, studying him. Then: "Several of the
girls don't get this business of the critical point. I tried to explain, but I
was only an R.N. at home, and I'm afraid I muddled it rather. Could
you put it in words of one and a half syllables?"
"Do you mean the equal-time point?"
"The Point of No Return, some of them call it."
"Nonsense! It's only--Well, look at it this way. We accelerated from Sol
at one gravity. We dare not apply more acceleration, even though we
could, because so many articles aboard have been lightly built to save
mass--the coldvats, for example. They'd collapse under their own
weight, and the persons within would die, if we went as much as
one-point-five gee. Very well. It took us about one hundred eighty days
to reach maximum velocity. In the course of that period, we covered
not quite one-and-a-half light-months. We will now go free for almost

forty years. At the end of that time, we'll decelerate at one gee for some
one hundred eighty days, covering an additional light-month and a half,
and enter the e Eridani System with low relative speed. Our star-to-star
orbit was plotted with care, but of course the errors add up to many
Astronomical Units; furthermore, we have to maneuver, put our ships
in orbit about Rustum, send ferry craft back and forth. So we carry a
reaction-mass reserve which allows us a total velocity change of about
one thousand kilometers per second after journey's end.
"Now imagine we had changed our minds immediately after reaching
full speed. We'd still have to decelerate in order to return. So we'd be
almost a quarter light-year from Sol, a year after departure, before
achieving relative rest. Then, to come back three light-months at one
thousand K.P.S. takes roughly seventy-two years. But the whole round
trip as originally scheduled, with a one-year layover at Rustum, runs
just about eighty-three years!
"Obviously there's some point in time beyond which we can actually
get home quicker by staying with the original plan. This date lies after
eight months of free fall, or not quite fourteen months from departure.
We're only a couple of months from the critical moment right now; if
we start back at once, we'll still have been gone from Earth for about
seventy-six years. Each day we wait adds months to the return trip. No
wonder there's impatience!"
"And the relativity clock paradox makes it worse," Teresa said.
"Well, not too much," Coffin decided. "The tau factor is 0.87.
Shipboard time during eighty years of free fall amounts to about
seventy years; so far the difference isn't significant. And anyhow, we'll
all spend most of the time in deepsleep. What they're afraid of, the ones
who want to go back, is that the Earth they knew will have slipped
away from them."
She nodded. "Can't they understand it already has?" she said.
It was like a blade stabbed into Coffin. Though he could not see why
that should be: surely he, of all men, knew how relentlessly time

flowed. He had already come back once, to an Earth scarcely
recognizable. The Society had been a kind of fixed point, but even it
had changed; and he--like Kivi, like all of them--was now haunted by
the fear of returning again and not finding any other spacemen
whatsoever.
But when she spoke it--
* * * * *
"Maybe they're afraid to understand," he said.
"You keep surprising me, captain,"