Narcís D’Aragó spoke. He was the only other military veteran at Space Camp. The man had fought in the North African campaigns, beneath the skies gray with deathclouds. Montrose and D’Aragó had shared the unspoken bond that men in uniform had even when out of uniform, even when among civilians. He had been included on the expedition for his breakthroughs in the Linear Programming problem, particularly regarding strongly polynomial time-performance in the number of constraints and variables.

Menelaus was confident that this grim young soldier would back him.

“On the one hand,” D’Aragó spoke in a voice as colorless as ice, “anyone brave enough to bollix his own brain does not need to listen to anyone less brave. If we are not willing to face his needle ourselves, we don’t have a say in how he spends or wastes his life.”

But then Menelaus was disappointed to hear him continue, with no change of tone, “On the other hand, we are still a unit. Let us not waste a man whom the expedition needs. These things should be done in the proper order, controlling the variables, with a medical crew standing by. Captain Grimaldi is the senior expedition officer: He had not given permission.”

Montrose said, “By the letter of the law, he ain’t got no jurisdiction until we rendezvous.”

Narcís D’Aragó made an noise in his throat like someone tearing a handkerchief. “Then talk to Del Azarchel! He is the pilot here, and outranks you!”

Now Del Azarchel had rotated his cot so he faced aft. He was about two meters away, and was staring at Menelaus: he had strong, dark features, eyes that flashed greenish-gray, and the stubble of his shaven cheek gave his jaw a wolfish look. From Menelaus’s point of view, he seemed to be hanging like a bat upside down (if that word had any meaning in microgravity). He looked like a lazy panther, perhaps ready to sleep, perhaps ready to strike. His eyes were cold, but a half-smile seemed to play around his lips, as if this whole drama had been organized for his personal amusement.

The pilot said laughingly, “Gentlemen, why talk this little talk? We are involved in a great emprise, a bold expedition! Does Señor Montrose contemplate anything as dangerous as the great star voyage ahead, when we shall fling a two-thousand-meter-long space vessel at ninety-five percent of the speed of light into the pathless night? An asteroid the size of a small coin, striking us head on, would have the comparative velocity of a bullet from a supercollider: the energy would be like an atomic bomb. None of our odds are good. And when we reach there, what do we find? A puzzle box! A big dumb object! Ah, perhaps an intelligence test? Gentlemen, what happens if we fail that test? The universe is waiting outside the frail little walls of our bubble of air, indifferent stars in their billions, endless wastelands of empty vacuum. What if that cruel universe puts us to trial and we fail?”

Melchor de Ulloa answered, “But what will Captain Grimaldi say? Montrose, he is your friend: You will listen to him! You cannot just throw a friendship like that out the window—we all know you only got aboard this expedition because of your pull with Grimaldi.”

Sarmento i Illa d’Or said, “Well, maybe he should jab himself, then. He comes from one of those Anglo lands, where for three hundred years nothing is done but to dream of past glories.”

Melchor de Ulloa said back, “Discord is always caused by selfishness. We are a unit, like D’Aragó said. We have to act as one body. Captain Grimaldi is the head of that body. What can one member do if he does not consult the head?”

Del Azarchel flashed his white teeth in his wolfish smile. “Montrose! Consult only your mad and fiery heart! We are the Paladins of Charlemagne, the Knights of the Table Round. Our King is that dream we share: that dream to which we proffer our very lives! What other loyalty is there? We are the new people, the new race: the first interstellar men. Would you have the first act of our newborn species be hesitation?” His eyes blazed with wild emotion, and he called out: “Montrose! Are we not closer than brothers? Do not flinch! I will protect you, no matter what sort of monster you become!”

Montrose was staring with haunted eyes at his friend. Who had once likened the quest for the future to be like unto a knight-errantry? Montrose could not recall.

Ramananda said urgently, “Anything could be in that needle! So you said, Montrose! When you turn into the superman, the man after man, here and now, how can we trust you? We would be Neanderthals to you … or apes. You might treat us as a man treats his hound, with love and care, or a man treats a wolf, as a beast to be killed.”

Del Azarchel said triumphantly, “It is too late. See the look in his eye!”

“I will remember,” said Montrose. “I will remember my humanity.”

Sarmento said, “The Anglo will never do it. He is craven.”

“I ain’t no Anglo. I’m from Texas!”

Just like looking down the barrel of a pistol. Menelaus pulled the trigger.

4. Dreams

A.D. 2235–2306

There were dreams like water, waves that lashed and lapped at him, pulling him from dizzying fear to disorienting pain, and his thoughts flicked like little fishes and vanished before he could capture them. He dreamed he was falling in an elevator whose cable had snapped. But no, it was not an elevator, but a nuclear-chemical punt. He was surrounded by friends, Del Azarchel was there, but Menelaus could focus on nothing.

There were dreams of smoke, painted rose-hue clouds of ecstasy. In highest spirits, giddy with discovery, he was trying to explain Fermat’s Last Theorem to the people around him, and relating it to how the dust motes stirred by the airlock’s ventilation system glinted so prettily in the lights from the life support controls. The motions were not random, of course: He could see the wave functions involved in his head. But then he was distracted by his visualization of each particular motion of his tongue and throat, conceiving it as a fourth-dimensional tube function, merely a complex geometry.

He realized the inefficiencies of the idiom he was using, and he saw how a universal language of verb-to-noun formations was merely one more application of the zeta function, distributed over complex planes of two related variables. A much simpler language was easy to devise, with the two variables for nouns and verb correlation related to pitch and amplitude, and he began yodeling in it, sure that his companions would quickly catch on to the nuances.

Even this was not efficient enough: if he played with the airlock controls, he could get them to reflect and refract from the dust-motes to express even more channels of communication. Amazing how everything was so filled with meaning, so filled with mathematics. He saw a way of improving the efficiency of the airlock process. All he had to do was adjust the flow dynamics.…

He was quite lucid and reasonable when they hauled him, screaming in the harmonic pitches of a new language he had invented, away from the lock controls.

He was aware of being carried belowdeck, away from the axis. His weight increased, and he watched the stream of orange juice curve from a container to the cup meant for him, and the expression for the Coriolis forces acting on the stream glittered in his mind. Hands forced the nozzle of the cup in his mouth while he laughed and squirmed and broke their fingers between his teeth, and the molecular geometry of the medicines the orange juice hid he deduced from the sour taste on his tongue, and the complex expression for his tongue surface with all its intricate molecular niches.

When the morphine hit, his dreams grew clear and distant, and he was standing with godlike beings outside the universe, timeless creatures of light, gazing gravely down into a dark well from which no signal would ever return.