The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 14

By the time Viktor got his eyes well open he almost wanted to close them again. Even the long, still sleep of the freezers was better than this madhouse! First it was Reesa, shaky, fearful, trying to explain things to him—

"We're about to land on Newmanhome. These people found us and thawed us out …"

And then it was a man in a kilt, bearded and belligerent. "If you want him landed, get him awake, do you hear me? There's no time to waste!"

And then there were "these people" themselves. He managed to pry his sticky eyelids apart far enough to see "these people" for himself. None were familiar. Every one was a stranger, and strange to look at. There was the tall, olive-skinned man who wore the kilt, bare-chested and bare-legged in spite of the chill. There was another man, beardless, with a page-boy bob of sparse blond hair, who wore a ragged red pullover that came down to his knees, showing something like red tights underneath. Reesa herself wore an all-black outfit, like jogging sweats—cottony-flannelly pants and blouse, with a cowl covering most of her face. Another woman had the same outfit, except that instead of being black her sweatsuit was striped gray and white, like a prison uniform. "Who are 'these people'?" Viktor croaked.

His wife's face disappeared, and the angry, hostile countenance of a bearded man in the same all-black took her place. "I'm Mirian," the man said savagely, "and we've saved your worthless life. You've been frozen here for hundreds of years."

"I warned you we should have left them that way," called the woman in the prisoner stripes.

Mirian disregarded her. "You're awake," he told Viktor, "and you're coming down with us."

"Down?" Viktor murmured dazedly. "Down where?" But nobody was answering him. There were eight or ten people in the old cryonics deck, and they were all busily rigging one of the pods for a drop. Reesa came over to him, wobbly and worried, holding out a set of the black sweats.

"Put these on," she begged. "If you're not ready I think they'll just leave us here!"

"Leave us here?" Viktor blinked. "Then why did they bother to come to save us?"

There was a sudden bark of unfriendly laughter from the man who called himself Mirian. "Oh, we didn't come to get you. We need this ship. We didn't even know you were here till we opened this pod up, looking for something to eat."

"And we should've left them frozen," the woman in red insisted. "Now what are we going to do?"

"We're going to drop them," the man in the kilt said belligerently. "Mirian, too. He woke them up; he takes them away, before they get in our way anymore."

"Not me!" Mirian shouted. "I'm part of this team, Dorro!"

"You're dropping with them," the kilted man snapped, "because I say so, and I'm the captain."

"You Greats are all alike," the woman sneered, but she turned to finish rigging slings in the pod.

Viktor turned helplessly to his wife. She shook her head, helping him knot the drawstrings of his sweats. "They only woke me half an hour ago, Vik. I don't know much more than you do. They wanted Ark—I'm not sure if it's for the antimatter fuel, so they can replenish the generators on Mayflower, or maybe to use it to explore the rest of the solar system—"

"We of the People's Republic do not waste time in 'exploring,' " the man in the kilt said frostily.

"Well, whatever. And things aren't so good on Newmanhome anymore, they say—"

Viktor held up a hand, imploring. "I don't understand," he said.

"Oh, Viktor," his wife groaned. "Well, try this much, anyway. We're alive."

That at least could not be argued. As Viktor finished dressing he told himself that simply to be alive, against all odds, was wonderful in itself. Wonderful? No, close to miraculous—thawed without microwave, without the oxygenating perfusion liquid, only raw heat. But his parts seemed to work. He thought for a moment of dying, blinded Captain Bu, who had gladly given them a chance for life on the expectation of his own reward in heaven. Thank God for Bu's born-again Christianity, Viktor thought. Without that conviction of a heavenly reward he might not have been nearly so willing to be the one who died.

Then Viktor thought of a question. "What about Earth?" he asked fuzzily. "Haven't they sent more ships?"

Mirian turned around to gape at him. Then he laughed. "Earth!" he said, and the others were laughing, too.

Viktor looked at them in puzzlement. "Did I say something funny?" he asked plaintively.

Mirian tugged at his pale, fine beard, glancing around to see if anyone else would answer. Then he said gruffly, "We have heard nothing from Earth for hundreds of years. Come, get into the pod; it's time to launch. And forget Earth."

Forget Earth!

But that was impossible. As Viktor was trying to urge his creaking muscles into the contortions necessary to climb into the capsule, twist himself into his harness, and strap himself in, he was not only not forgetting, he was actually remembering again all the scenes that had stored themselves away in the back of his childhood memories. The waves breaking on the Pacific shore, the white clouds in the blue sky, the heat of the high desert, the redwoods—

The world. Could all that be gone?

Then he couldn't think for a moment, because the hatches were grinding closed and he felt the quick nudge as the capsule fell free from its mother ship. He saw there was a window. It was tiny, and in a poor position for him to look out of it. But he did catch a quick glimpse of what had to be the proud planet of Newmanhome …

But it was different, terribly different! There were a few clouds, but they were hard to see, because almost everything was white. Great Ocean was a wide blue sea no longer. It was as icy as Earth's Arctic Ocean, and, as with the Arctic, there was no clear line between sea and shore. Everything, everything, was ice.

"Hold on for retrofire!" Mirian shouted.

The sudden hammer blow of the rockets bruised Viktor's unpracticed body. That was only the beginning. The buffeting of atmospheric reentry seemed to go on forever. Then it ended; and then they were just falling, swaying on their sail-film parachutes.

Viktor shut his eyes. They no longer stuck together when he blinked, but he could feel the incrustations at their edges, and the flakes of dirt and dead skin on his body. Everything was happening too fast. He hadn't quite gotten used to being fired at by—whatever it was—on the planet Nebo; this unexpected new situation was more than he could take in.

Something very bright penetrated even his closed lids.

He opened them just in time to see a spot of incandescent light swing around the interior of the capsule as it rocked. Everyone was averting their eyes. The very bright something had peered in, for just a second.

"My God," Viktor said wonderingly. "Was that the sun?"

Mirian turned to him fiercely. "The sun? No, of course not. Are you crazy?"

"Then what was it?" Viktor persisted.

Mirian stared at him for a moment. Then he shook his head. "I keep forgetting—you don't know anything at all, do you? It wasn't always there, they say." He swayed as the capsule bobbed in a strong gust of wind, nearing the ground. "Brace yourself for landing!" he yelled; and then, to Viktor, he said, "That bright thing—it was what they call the 'universe.' "