The Burning Bridge | Page 5

don't mean that censored pap which passes for it nowadays. But there's another possibility, which I think is just as alarming. That message may be perfectly honest and sincere. But will it still be true when we get back? Remember how long that will take! And even if we could return overnight, to an Earth which welcomed us home, what guarantee would there be that our children, or our grandchildren, won't suffer the same troubles as us, without the same chance to break free?"
"Ye vote, then, to carry on?" asked Lochaber.
Pride answered: "Of course."
"Good lass. I, too."
Kivi raised his hand. Coffin recognized him, and the spaceman said: "I am not sure the crew ought not to have a voice in this also."
"What?" De Smet grew red. He gobbled for a moment before he could get out: "Do you seriously think you could elect us to settle on that annex of hell--and then come home to Earth yourselves?"
"As a matter of fact," said Kivi, smiling, "I suspect the crew would prefer to return at once. I know I would. Seven years may make a crucial difference."
"If a colony is planted, though," said Coffin, "it might provide the very inspiration which space travel needs to survive."
"Hm-m-m. Perhaps. I shall have to think about that."
"I hope you realize," said the very young man with ornate sarcasm, "that every second we sit here arguing takes us one hundred fifty thousand kilometers farther from home."
"Dinna fash yourself," said Lochaber. "Whatever we do, that girl of yours will be an auld carline before you reach Earth."
De Smet was still choking at Kivi: "You lousy little ferryman, if you think you can make pawns of us--"
And Kivi stretched his lips in anger and growled, "If you do not watch your language, you clodhugger, I will come over there and stuff you down your own throat."
"Order!" yelled Coffin. "Order!"
Teresa echoed him: "Please ... for all our lives' sake ... don't you know where we are? You've got a few centimeters of wall between you and zero! Please, whatever we do, we can't fight or we'll never see any planet again!"
But she did not say it weeping, or as a beggary. It was almost a mother's voice--strange, in an unmarried woman--and it quieted the male snarling more than Coffin's shouts.
The fleet captain said finally: "That will do. You're all too worked up to think. Debate is adjourned sixteen hours. Discuss the problem with your shipmates, get some sleep, and report the consensus at the next meeting."
"Sixteen hours?" yelped someone. "Do you know how much return time that adds?"
"You heard me," said Coffin. "Anybody who wants to argue may do so from the brig. Dismissed!"
He snapped off the switch.
Kivi, temper eased, gave him a slow confidential grin. "That heavy-father act works nearly every time, no?"
Coffin pushed from the table. "I'm going out," he said. His voice sounded harsh to him, a stranger's. "Carry on."
He had never felt so alone before, not even the night his father died. O God, who spake unto Moses in the wilderness, reveal now thy will. But God was silent, and Coffin turned blindly to the only other help he could think of.
* * * * *
Space armored, he paused a moment in the air lock before continuing. He had been an astronaut for twenty-five years--for a century if you added time in the vats--but he could still not look upon naked creation without fear.
An infinite blackness flashed: stars beyond stars, to the bright ghost-road of the Milky Way and on out to other galaxies and flocks of galaxies, until the light which a telescope might now register had been born before the Earth. Looking from his air-lock cave, past the radio web and the other ships, Coffin felt himself drown in enormousness, coldness, and total silence--though he knew that this vacuum burned and roared with man-destroying energies, roiled like currents of gas and dust more massive than planets and travailed with the birth of new suns--and he said to himself the most dreadful of names, I am that I am, and sweat formed chilly little globules under his arms.
This much a man could see within the Solar System. Traveling at half light-speed stretched the human mind still further, till often it ripped across and another lunatic was shoved into deepsleep. For aberration redrew the sky, crowding stars toward the bows, so that the ships plunged toward a cloud of Doppler hell-blue. The constellations lay thinly abeam, you looked out upon the dark. Aft, Sol was still the brightest object in heaven, but it had gained a sullen red tinge, as if already grown old, as if the prodigal would return from far places to find his home buried under ice.
What is man that thou art mindful of him? The line gave its accustomed comfort; for,