Going Interstellar Read Online Free PDF

possibility made Ignatiev’s blood simmer.
    And me? he asked himself. A pawn, nothing more. But then he thought, maybe I’m a rook, stuck off in a corner of the board, barely noticed by anybody.
    “Dr. Ignatiev is correct,” said Gregorian, trying to regain control of the conversation. “The proper term is astrogator.”
    “Whatever,” said Nikki, her eyes returning to Gregorian’s handsome young face.
    “Young” was a relative term. Gregorian was approaching sixty, although he still had the vigor, the attitudes and demeanor of an obstreperous teenager. Ignatiev thought it would be appropriate if the Armenian’s face were blotched with acne. Youth is wasted on the young, Ignatiev thought. Thanks to life-elongation therapies, average life expectancy among the starship crew was well above two hundred. It had to be.
    The scoopship was named Sagan , after some minor twentieth-century astronomer. It was heading for Gliese 581, a red dwarf star slightly more than twenty light years from Earth. For Ignatiev, it was a one-way journey. Even with all the life-extension therapies, he would never survive the century-long round trip. Gregorian would, of course, and so would Nikki.
    Ignatiev brooded over the unfairness of it. By the time the ship returned to Earth, the two of them would be grandparents and Ignatiev would be long dead.
    Unfair, he thought as he pushed himself up from the plush banquette and left the lounge without a word to either one of them. The universe is unfair. I don’t deserve this: to die alone, unloved, unrecognized, my life’s work forgotten, all my hopes crushed to dust.
    As he reached the lounge’s hatch, he turned his head to see what the two of them were up to. Chatting, smiling, holding hands, all the subverbal signals that lovers send to each other. They had eyes only for one another, and paid absolutely no attention to him.
    Just like the rest of the goddamned world, Ignatiev thought.
    He had labored all his life in the groves of academe, and what had it gotten him? A membership in the International Academy of Sciences, along with seventeen thousand other anonymous workers. A pension that barely covered his living expenses. Three marriages: two ruined by divorce and the third—the only one that really mattered—destroyed by that inevitable thief, death.
    He hardly remembered how enthusiastic he had been as a young post-doc all those years ago, his astrophysics degree in hand, burning with ambition. He was going to unlock the secrets of the universe! The pulsars, those enigmatic cinders, the remains of ancient supernova explosions: Ignatiev was going to discover what made them tick.
    But the universe was far subtler than he had thought. Soon enough he learned that a career in science can be a study in anonymous drudgery. The pulsars kept their secrets, no matter how assiduously Ignatiev nibbled around the edges of their mystery.
    And now the honor of being the senior executive on the human race’s first interstellar mission. Some honor, Ignatiev thought sourly. They needed someone competent but expendable. Send old Ignatiev, let him go out in a fizzle of glory.
    Shaking his head as he trudged along the thickly carpeted passageway to his quarters, Ignatiev muttered to himself, “If only there were something I could accomplish, something I could discover, something to put some meaning to my life.”
    He had lived long enough to realize that his life would be no more remembered than the life of a worker ant. He wanted more than that. He wanted to be remembered. He wanted his name to be revered. He wanted students in the far future to know that he had existed, that he had made a glowing contribution to humankind’s store of knowledge and understanding. He wanted Nikki Deneuve to gaze at him with adoring eyes.
    “It will never be,” Ignatiev told himself as he slid open the door to his quarters. With a wry shrug, he reminded himself of a line from some old English poet: “Ah, that a man’s