Variable Star by Robert A. Heinlein; Spider Robinson

Author:Robert A. Heinlein; Spider Robinson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Composers, Interstellar travel, General, Science Fiction, Space colonies, Fiction
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2007-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

"It'd chew mine."

My mind rejected Matty's problem. I could tell it was going to take a lot of time to imagine what it must have been like to have known about this, for years, and been unable to do anything about it. I was busy now.

"You said two possibilities. What's the other one?"

His face became as perfectly expressionless as Dr. Amy's should have been. Except the eyes, they looked as haunted as hers. "Just before Hal disarmed him and put him out, the last thing Matty was screaming was, The paradox is fucking resolved, Enrico! I told you so!' "

"What?"

His meaning slowly percolated in.

Enrico Fermi asked, Where is everybody?

If intelligent life can arise once, it must arise more than once. There must be other star-going civilizations, lots of them. Where are they all?

Answer: maybe laying up in the tall bushes. Behind cover, wearing camo gear and face paint. Slowly and methodically quartering the battlefield through sniperscopes. Looking for game big enough to be tasty, but stupid enough to step out on the plain and start yelling, "Yoo hoo! Anybody out there?" Every millennium or so, one gets lucky.

I rejected the question, as I had Matty's torment. The emotional impact was just beginning to arrive, then. To start arriving.

It started to sink in that everyone I knew who wasn't aboard this ship was dead. Irretrievably, beyond any resuscitation, even if anyone were left to resuscitate them. Everybody, from Terra to Pluto. Everyone from the Secretary General of the System down to whoever ranked lowest in Coventry�hell, down to the last virus. Dead and already cremated. Tens of billions of human beings. Martians. Venerian dragons. All animals of all planets, cooked. All birds, baked in a pie. All fish, fried. Uncountable lower life-forms gone extinct ahead of schedule.

Lucky humanity. The cockroach did not outlive it after all. We had none aboard.

I started to ask how we even knew what had happened, when death must have arrived out of the sky before any possible warning could be given or received. But before I got the question completed, I knew the answer.

Two of the System halves of the Sheffield's three telepath pairs had, for obvious reasons, been well paid to locate themselves equidistantly around Terra. One of them, Herb's sister, must have chanced to be on the nightside of Terra. Perhaps with several minutes of useless warning, before the wave of superheated steam arrived at well below lightspeed�

I glanced down. There were three lights on the panel, now, all ruby red, all flashing.

And the third System twin, I recalled, had lived at the north pole of Ganymede, which could easily have been in the blast shadow of Jupiter. I found myself trying to picture what Jupiter must have looked like from behind as she was being destroyed by her bigger sister. The nature of the cataclysm must have been as unmistakable as it was inconceivable.

And the precise relative timing of the two telepathic reports would have nailed it down.

At that point it started to sink in that everyone I cared about who was not aboard this ship was dead.

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