Tau Zero

by Poul Anderson

My politics are conservative. I prefer tournedos to filet mignon but wish the culture tanks could supply us with either

turn to be hung, smaller portraits of her kinfolk, a Hopi kachina doll

“Never mind now, Carl. I don’t want to harass you. I want you in me again. You see, this has stopped being a matter of friendship and convenience. I’ve fallen in love with you.”

water vapor, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, acetone

and you looked wearily through your face-plate at the stars, with a band of headache behind your eyes.

Without friction or weight, it kept every gram of its considerable inertial mass.

or less the same orbit,

dewy

adjusted with nigh absolute precision;

she had hitherto been observer rather than participant.

day—no, every twenty-four hours; “day” and “night” mean nothing any longer—each

each twenty-four hours we gain 845 kilometers per second in speed.”

won’t scream, “Turn back! Turn back!”” She tried a joke of her own. “That would be too disappointing to the psychologists who checked me out.” The joke dissipated.

Chi-Yuen nodded. She, in her newest and most colorful cheongsam—among her hobbies was making over her clothes—could almost have belonged to a different species from Glassgold.

Father is an engineer in a desalinization plant, Mother an agronomist.

The Negev is beautiful when the crops are growing, and calm, friendly, not hectic like Tel Aviv or Haifa.

“Scientific interest … a whole new planetary evolution—”

countryside seemed smug and empty. I thought I might find … a purpose? … out here.

till I could not back down. And yet we were always a close family. It was such a pain leaving them.

My big, confident father, he was suddenly little and old.”

Come down to my cabin. We’ll make you a gown that does you justice. The Covenant Day party will be

three hundred thousand kilometers per second.

Einsteinian cosmos, where the mass of ship and payload increased

with speed, climbing toward infinity as that speed approached light’s.

atoms by their dipoles—no need for ionization—and control their streaming.

A titanic gas-laser effect aimed photons themselves in a beam whose reaction pushed the ship forward—and which would have vaporized any solid body

went so far as to maintain an equilibrium in the ethyl alcohol aboard.

abstemious

taper

She wasn’t ready yet, nor was the orchestra, so he allowed Elof Nilsson to lead him to the bar.

“Jawohl, if you’re supplying the drink and we can keep it short.”

ten parsecs. Plus the ability to examine gamma-ray spectra with less uncertainty,

The images they catch could be led along light conductors to eyepieces, photomultipliers, cameras inboard.

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 laid a muscular hand on Williams’ arm. The chemist tried to rise. Freiwald held him where he was.

“He’s nothing but a victim of the romantic nationalism that our too orderly world has been consoling itself with, this past generation. Pity he couldn’t be satisfied with historical fiction and bad epic poetry.”

Nilsson seemed about to pull intellectual rank.

He broke off when Jane Sadler appeared. She

Nilsson

Leonora Christine

substantial fraction of light speed,

optical effects became clear to the u...

Her velocity and that of the rays from a star added vectoria...

aberr...

apparent position...

Constellations grew lopsided, gre...

as their members crawled acro...

More and more, the stars thinned out behind the ship and ...

Doppler effect operated simu...

as...