Across a Billion Years by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4804-1810-3
Publisher: Open Road Media

ten

November 16? 17? 18? 2375 Somewhere in Ultraspace

A MONTH HAS PASSED, I know, since I last fingered a message cube. Something about voyages in ultraspace discourages my impulse to communicate. I’m not even sure what day it is. There’s an Earthstyle calendar somewhere aboard, but I can’t bother to look for it.

We closed up shop on Higby V right on schedule, leaving the site sealed so that the next archaeologists to work it—hopefully, a less flighty bunch than we turned out to be—will find it intact. The cruiser arrived and picked us up on the twenty-first. We did not inform Galaxy Central that we’ve taken the globe with us. That makes us renegades of sort, but it’ll be months before the bureaucrats back home find that out, and by then, maybe, we’ll have some gaudy new find to calm them. As Mirrik learned after his boozy prance through the lab, any sinner can find redemption if the yield of his sin is spectacular enough.

Our ship is a standard interstellar cruiser, making an upper quadrant run between Rigel and Aldebaran. The stop at GGC 1145591 is slightly out of the way, but not too much, and wasn’t hard to arrange. All it took was stash. Old Earthside proverb: Stash buys. We will have a rented planetship at our disposal so that we can search the GGC 1145591 system for our asteroid. It’s already on its way there from Aldebaran to await us. That took stash too. Dr. Schein overdrew our thumb account long ago, but he has a glib way with computers and is running on credit now; we’ll manage so long as Galaxy Central doesn’t find out. May the Almighty Proton protect us if we draw a blank on this expedition—if we have, to use the fine medieval expression, gone off to chase the wild duck.

Our quarters are comfortable, as before. Spacious cabins, good library, recreation facilities, decent food. The crewmen keep to themselves, we to ourselves. Time blurs strangely aboard an ultradrive trip, and I find myself doing without sleep for what may possibly be two or three days in a row, and then sleeping for days. Or so it seems.

Everybody is much keyed up, especially Drs. Schein and Horkkk. They walk around perpetually surprised that they ever found the slice to abandon Higby V for the present quest. Dr. Horkkk, you know, is hardly a charming romantic liberated adventurous type, and as near as I can read his expression, he seems to be saying, “How can this be me?” Dr. Schein looks equally baffled. Pilazinool, on the other hand, is quietly confident, rarely unlaces his limbs any more, seems to feel that we have been blessed by destiny. We’ll see.

My chief social accomplishment on the trip so far has been to push Jan back to her obsession with Saul Shahmoon.

I’m not sure how I managed that. I thought Jan and I were working on the same wavelength.

I don’t mean that anything very passionate had happened between us, or that we were about to apply even for temporary marriage status, or anything remotely like that.

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