“We’ll go insane,” said Lisette Greenberg into the thrumming. She gasped and buried her face against her husband’s shoulder.

  “Whoa, there.” McAndrew spoke briskly, as much for his own sake as anyone else’s. “Things are not quite that bad. We have to get pretty close to light speed before the effect becomes overwhelming. Four months from now, we’ll be moving at ninety-five per cent of c, but the tau factor will be oh-point-three. A little more than three hours will pass in your consciousness while one hour passes outside. No fun, of course, but you can stand it.”

  “Beyond that, though—” Clarice Romano whispered.

  “Uh-huh,” McAndrew nodded. “The process accelerates. In a couple of weeks more, the ratio will be ten to one. Four days later, two thousand to one. And on and on. But we can count on four months, I’d say, in which to solve our problem.”

  “Solve it how?” Sylvia Norrington challenged. “If we could get in touch with Earth, and they turned the entire scientific force of the human race out to help us, what could they do in that time? We’ve stumbled on a whole new field of knowledge. We don’t even know what data to look for, let alone how to look or how to theorize about them.”

  She appeared calmer than the rest, whose jaws were clamped together as if they held onto sanity by their teeth. Only Isabel matched her evenness in asking, “Don’t you plan to try?”

  “Certainly, dear,” Sylvia answered. “I’ll work like hell, if we can decide what to work at. But let’s be honest. We won’t succeed.” She shrugged broad smooth shoulders. “We knew there were risks. We were trained to accept the fact we might die. When I’ve failed, and can’t stand any more what’s happening to me, I’ll ask Doc for some pills and go quietly to sleep.”

  Norrington traded a glance with McAndrew. They’d talked about this. A mind, trapped in dreams for the days or weeks the brain took to die, would not go out easily.

  But best not speak of that now.

  McAndrew was jarred to note that Isabel’s eyes had joined the silent exchange. Did she read this in them, too?

  She smiled, released her clasp on him, and raised her glass. “The sooner we get organized, the better,” she said. “But first, how about a toast to our victory?”

  On and out the ship plunged, a web of force and a blaze of energy, within which the hull was little but a control center. As her speed mounted toward that of light, and mass with speed, she became herself a cosmic object; space was troubled by her passage, and perhaps—not impossible—a sun did or did not form, billions of years later, because she had crossed those particular kilometers.

  Space is not empty. Look out a port and try to count the stars; and then there are planets, meteorites, dust clouds beyond imagination. True, the way is long from one to the next. But more than radiation pervades space. There is matter: the primordial hydrogen, and every other element born in the suns and spat forth in their death pangs, but all-dominatingly the interstellar medium is hydrogen. In our part of the galaxy, the atoms number one to a cubic centimeter.

  The Emissary departed Sol on a standard reaction drive. Had that been her only means of travel, she could never have come near the ultimate speed. The mass ratio would have been too huge. But she had not accelerated very long when she could begin gathering the mass which everywhere surrounded her, the hydrogen, and use it.

  One atom per cubic centimeter? No, the thought is not ridiculous. At speeds close to light, every square centimeter of ship will encounter thirty billion atoms per second. And the energy of encounter is stupendous. Had the Emissary run directly into that interstellar atmosphere, her crew would have died: at one-half of c, they would have been blasted by thirty million Roentgens per hour.

  Since the hydrogen must be warded off in any event, why not take advantage? Scoop it up and blow it backwards, a ram jet which becomes ever more efficient as velocity increases. Light speed is the limit, but you approach that limit asymptotically, you can accelerate the entire distance. One year roughly, to come very near it: in the course of which, you will travel half a light-year. Then—scarcely any time, weeks at most, just a few days if your route takes you through a denser-than-usual region—to cover the bulk of the trip; though the cosmos will measure your transit in years.

  At midpoint, you make turnover and decelerate. A new configuration of forces is established, to interact with the gas like some titanic drogue. Even so, the engine must be operated, too. The atoms you collect must have their relative velocities reversed. No matter. You have power to spare, for the energies involved are enough to maintain a thermonuclear fire. In the end, half a light-year from journey’s termination, you will begin to come down to something like a reasonable speed, and you will note the passage of a year while you brake to rendezvous with your goal.

  Such was the theory. Practice was something else again. The airscoops, the jets, the very power plant could not be material: not when such orders of magnitude were involved, a trap whose diameter was four million kilometers at the mouth, an atmosphere cloven at three hundred thousand kilometers per second, a center of fusion reaction which was like a small sun, and which must be kept far away from the ship lest its own radiation pour too strongly through the hull shields. Nothing could have carried out the task, nothing could control that monstrousness, except the forces themselves. To balance those had been the work of three generations of engineers.

  Nor could the ship maneuver. Once launched, she was less guidable than a hurled rock. The least attempt to change the pattern of action programmed into her would have upset the force equilibrium; she would have vanished in a nova-like burst visible halfway across the galaxy.

  She might yet. A single flaw, or an unnoticed pebble afloat in her path, would spell the end. Surely they were brave who launched her. Who had dreamed more majestically than those who rode her?

  Arch McAndrew writhed in his bed. Horror mouthed at him. He had slipped into darkness, and now he fell, while an eyeless face that was his own receded before him, then came back, swelled until it filled the universe, until it was the universe, until nothing lived and nothing had ever been or would be except wrongness, they had put the sky on crooked so that he could see past the horizon into the nonexistence which lay infinite beyond, and for centuries he screamed.

  Heavy as the world, arms enfolded him. He struggled through great waters that roared, up through a surface that resisted and clung, broke past and gasped for air. Light was hideous about him. Inchmeal, his wife’s countenance moved into his view. He lay and drew life from the vision; now he could feel the breath that dragged in and out of him, the heart that wearily pumped a bloodstream gone viscous, the slow, slow cold trickle of each sweat drop down his ribs; Isabel, Isabel, you are become a statue, only an idol of what I have served, God has departed from the Ark of the Covenant and you are blank before me.

  No. No. The same dear play of expression was there. He could see it creep across her lips and eyes, the words belled in him,

  “Oh,

  “darling,

  “wake

  “up.

  “It’s

  “all

  “right,

  “the

  “Face

  “was

  “only

  “a

  “nightmare.

  “I

  “am

  “here

  “and

  “I

  “love

  “you.”

  He summoned what strength of will was left him. Not only had the past months of futile, frantic toil, scurrying from hypothesis to hypothesis and experiment to experiment like a rat in a bottle, worn him down. He could have taken that. But his body, his brain, no longer supplied what his mind needed at the rate he needed. And now they had come so far that he could feel the gap widen slowly—hourly.

  Power, he thought. Rate of doing work. But rates are relative.

  The dry physics concept was something to cling to in his exhausted confusion. He looked at the tears that slipped over Isabel’s lashes, and cheeks, and wondered: How did she know what I was dreaming?

  Word by word—while goblin birds flapped wearily past, however much he tried to believe they were hallucinations spewed out by a mind starved for knowledge of any reality beyond itself—she answered, “You didn’t yell. I just knew, in my own sleep.”

  Sleep, that knits up the ravel’d sleeve of care. Doc Norrington had gotten them onto that approach. They should be able, with a drug or a brain-wave playback, to knock themselves unconscious. They could have on Earth. They would rig automatic intravenous systems to maintain their bodies, and wait through the eleven years. Not too difficult: as far as those bodies were concerned, the question was of mere weeks. or even less.

  It should be possible.

  It wasn’t. The mind does not cease to function during sleep. It only functions differently. Prolonged coma, through accident, experiment, or therapy, had not damaged the psyche before. But that was back on Earth, where the mind worked as the brain did, where thought or dream slowed down likewise. Here, the discrepancy had become too great. Even stunned, the self knew it was coffined in a darkness that would not lift for days, and went mad with terror and loneliness.

  We’re pretty near the edge, McAndrew rehearsed. Jerry’s quit his own pet approach, finding some electronic means to slow down physiology, and sits and stares at his apparatus, the whole watch through. Lisette does nothing but giggle to herself. The Romanos have moved into separate quarters, after she tried to kill him. Doc’s hogging the liquor supply, I suspect, unless he’s raiding the drugs instead, to keep himself looped. Sylvia says never a word to anyone. And we two? Isabel’s stopped cooking—not that the crew want to watch each other eat, any more. Mostly she sits and listens to her Beethoven collection on a speeded-up taper. Me, I get one idea after another, each crazier than the last; I can’t concentrate; I can’t sleep for the nightmares, and when I’m awake they go right on gibbering at me.

  We’d better kill ourselves soon. I don’t want to spend a year feeling the bullet crash through my head. As the brain disintegrated, day by mental day, I’d know I was becoming less than human, less than real.

  —Are you so sure?

  Of course I am. We dropped long ago the silly notion that this phenomenon proves we have immortal souls. If consciousness were not produced by the brain, how could we be destroyed as we are?

  —Yet the mind isn’t affected by speed.

  Oh, it is, it is, as witness our destruction. I see what you mean, though. Well, Doc and Jerry and I developed a hypothesis that accounts for the facts. Obviously the mind is not a material object. Instead, we’ve decided it’s a, well, a space-time pattern.

  —Like music?

  Hm-m-m, I never thought of that. A good analogy. (That is NOT a real snake crawling down my throat!) In one sense, music doesn’t exist except when played: which requires material instruments and players. But in another sense, it does. I mean, the pattern of a symphony, the relationship between notes, is not identical with the sound waves. That pattern is as real on the printed page as in the air of the concert hall. It isn’t affected by acoustics…or velocity, or anything. The mind must be something similar. Of course, it’s a hitherto unsuspected law of nature that a pattern of this sort continues to operate within the inertial frame where it was first established.

  —And maybe even when the brain is gone?

  No! Can’t be, or we wouldn’t be going to pieces right now. The pattern is created and maintained by the physical organism; when that goes haywire, so does the output. When the brain dies, the process of maintaining the ego must end. Theoretically, you could recreate the ego in another matrix, just as you can play a symphony with different orchestras. But we’ve no means for doing that. We have to accept that we’re under a death sentence, and make a decent end while we still can.

  What the devil is going on?

  He had been talking to himself, within his own head, as he did more and more. Only…this time it had felt different. There had been a warmth which had long left him, a resurgence of strength and courage that drove back the inward-crowding phantasms. Besides, why should he carry on such a mono-dialogue? He’d threshed this notion out with Jerry and Doc, ad nauseam. But not with anyone else. Denis Romano had been curtly uninterested, wanting only an engineering solution, until he sank into witless apathy. Clarice, Lisette, and Sylvia had become unapproachable even earlier. McAndrew had not mentioned the idea to Isabel, because speech had grown too hard, better that they simply smile at each other.

  He looked into his wife’s face and saw the same puzzlement there. Slowly her lips parted.

  A scream came forth.

  The sound dragged on, without end. He knew that they both surged from the bed and that she led him in a race through the door and around the hall enclosing the cabins; but he had multiple minutes to spend with his ghosts. He saw that a corridor fluoroplate had been installed half a degree out of true, and could not take his gaze away from that, but brooded on the fact, on the final ugly chaos which underlay creation, while his foot rose and came down; and the chill white light, the humming and seething, took him and he went under.

  No! called through the dream. Come to me, my only dearest!

  Like a fish on a hook, he was drawn back to the universe he did not want to be in. The door stood open to the Norringtons’ cabin. Doc wasn’t there. Probably in his office, drunk or doped. Sylvia lay stretched on the deck. The blood that surrounded her was impossibly red, a shout of scarlet that also went on and on. One of her husband’s scalpels was in her hand.

  I will turn her over, McAndrew knew, and stare at the gash which grins across her throat for a day that will become a month and a year. That will be the end of my own last sanity.

  Isabel shrieked again. Not because of he sight. Through and through McAndrew burst the reason.

  Blackness, nothingness, oh, help me, I am so alone. I cry and there is no voice. There is only myself, and I am nothing. I whirl away in a million fragments, horrible in shape, fading, dying, but why must I be so slow about ceasing to exist? I am dead, but it will not let me be dead, I did not know death was haunted, I thought there would be nothing except the blessed peace. There is no silence WAIL BUZZZZ MMMMM no darkness HELL’S BLUE FLAMES no end no end no end.

  Isabel stumbled toward her man. But long before she touched him, they were one.

  —Arch, she cried, Arch, she’s gone and still I hear her!

  —And I hear her through you, he answered.

  Eyes were upon eyes, hands reaching toward hands, he had time in which to savor the beauty before him, until contact was made and he could know warmth and litheness as well. But meanwhile his mind leaped into the Real.

  The whole of six fellow human beings was opened to him. He felt Isabel’s self: no more should be said. He felt the anguish in Doc. the inward-aimed rage in Denis, the ultimate surrender of Jerry; so strange and wonderful was it to sense, to be, the femaleness of Lisette and Clarice that he did not at once read their thoughts. Lunacy fled like mist before the sun. For beyond them and beyond them—the fire that was an atom, a mind old and wise in the body of a creature light-years removed, a planet which would be born fifty million years hence and bear a race which was to find one salvation.

  But he had no chance, then, to explore. Poor Sylvia screamed so loudly. Before she became the nothing she had wished to be, she must be helped. Arch and Isabel meshed their minds. They were awkward as yet, but they spanned death and touched her.

  —Sylvia, here-now we are!

  The howling gave way to stillness, despair to joy. She clung to them, and they pulled her from the dark, world-drowning tide, made her one with them, shared what they sensed and gave reality back to her.

  All the while, McAndrew’s body had been in motion. He paused for the briefest of instants, not even many interior minutes, to hold Isabel. Then he stooped, picked up Sylvia’s drained flesh, and ran toward the hospital bay.

  His thought ran before him: Doc! Without words, he projected the entire pattern of what had happened.

  —She’s dead? wept Norrington.

  —Clinically, yes, McAndrew flung in reply. But that simply means the body has stopped functioning. Not even in entirety. Most of the cells are still alive.

  —Can you bring me back? swirled Sylvia.

  —Sure. Why not? We’ve supplies and equipment. Brain deterioration doesn’t set in for five minutes or so, even at room temperature, and yonder clock says it’s only been two minutes since we found you. Put your body in an ice bath, hook in a heart-lung machine, supply blood and oxygen, clamp off the slashed vessels till we can do surgical repair—of course, of course.

  The wave of shame and grief that smote McAndrew was so monstrous that he lurched. Almost, he could materially hear Norrington’s cry: “I can’t! I’m too doped, too clumsy. My own wife has to die because I was a coward.”

  —No, laughed Isabel. Don’t blame yourself. You did your best, and when that failed, you didn’t surrender, you merely tried to numb yourself as much as necessary. Don’t be afraid. You still know what to do. You can tell us. We have hours to learn the motions before we need start to work.

  A chorus of selves shouted the length and breadth of the ship: What’s happening? What woke us?

  Together, McAndrew and Isabel told them, and healed them.

  —The mind is a pattern, created and maintained by the nervous system as music is by an orchestra. But music is also a set of sound waves: physical. Even so must the set of experiences-thoughts-emotions-memories which is the mind have some physical embodiment. In the light of what we have just learned, we must think of the brain as a transducer, converting the energy of the cells into that ever-changing energy-field we name the human psyche. Because of its pattern character, the self remains in the cosmic frame of reference where it was born. How that can be, we don’t know; but we’ll find out! (I/We think perhaps there is some kind of signal involved which is not bound by the speed of light; because we are now listening in across the whole space-time continuum. Perhaps that signal-energy is the simple existence of everything that is.)