The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 18

Because the plan to revive Mayflower's MHD-microwave generators had originated with the Great Transporters, it was a Great Transporter woman named Tortee who was in charge. When Viktor and Reesa reported to her room she was waiting for them. Not patiently.

Tortee turned out to be incongruously fat, and that was astonishing to Viktor. How could anyone get that much to eat in this mob of the underfed? She was lying back on a chaise longue, blankets wrapped over her plump legs, and she glared at them suspiciously. "Who are you? Where's that silly little bitch with the tea?" she demanded. "Never mind. Where were we? Oh, yes," she remembered, sounding spiteful, "what they want to do is to try to start up the orbiting power generator again. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Of course, Tortee," Reesa said, causing Viktor to look at her sharply. Her tone had been admiring and deferential. Even soapy.

"Well, it's a waste," Tortee grumbled. "What they want us to do is take the little bit of fuel that's left in Ark and transfer it to Mayflower, turn it into electricity, beam it down. It's crazy."

"I guess so," Viktor said slowly. Following his wife's lead, he was doing his best to be agreeable to the old woman—Reesa's eyes were on him, to remind him. Still, the plan didn't sound entirely crazy to him. It wasn't that different from what he had helped do a few hundred years before. But Tortee was the boss of the project that had got him off the shit detail, and he didn't want to argue with her—especially not here in her own room, with view screens and computer terminals all around her. Terminals meant data. He coveted that room—not least for its huge, wide bed.

"No, that's really crazy," Tortee was insisting. "Think! We'd have to rebuild the rectenna in the first place; they tore that down long ago for the metal—and what would we have to tear down now for metal to rebuild it? Then there's the problem of transferring fuel from the engine accumulators in one ship to the generators in another. That's a lot harder than what you did back in the old days, Viktor. Then you only had to move the whole reserve fuel storage unit, right? And that was dangerous enough, but this means taking the drive apart. I've studied the plans. A million things can go wrong—and everything's a lot older now, so the chances of an accident are a lot worse."

"Well, that's true enough," Reesa put in, looking warningly at Viktor. "I'm surprised the containment didn't give out already and blow the whole ship up."

"And then even if it succeeded," the old woman went on, "what would we have? Enough fuel for maybe ten years of power transmission, then we're back where we started. Total waste!"

"Terrible waste," Reesa agreed.

"Oh, you don't know," Tortee said moodily. "You don't have any idea how much this is costing us—we don't have resources to spare here, you know! And meanwhile …" She looked around conspiratorially. "And meanwhile there's a perfectly good planet waiting out there for us, with plenty of warmth and water and air—"

Viktor cleared his throat. "You mean Nebo, I guess, is that right? But there's also something on Nebo that shoots at us, Tortee."

She glared at him dangerously. "Are you saying you don't support my project?" Viktor was silent. "Answer me! I thought I could trust you—you were one of those who went there, centuries ago!"

"That was a matter of scientific investigation," Viktor explained.

"Scientific investigation! You went there just because you were curious?"

"What better reason could there be?"

"Because Nebo is habitable now!" Tortee cried. "At least, we think it may be—and this planet isn't, not any more. Viktor!" She studied him suspiciously for a moment. "Do you want to be back on the shit detail?" she demanded suddenly.

"No, no, not at all!" Viktor said hastily. Reesa was giving him that look again, and he knew when to surrender. Still, he was beginning to suspect that the new assignment might not altogether be a blessing. He might find himself wishing he were back enjoying the comparatively relaxed conversation with the children in the mushroom cave, because he was beginning to be convinced that his new boss, Tortee, was a certifiable nut. "The only thing that's worrying me," he said, feeling his way, "is what are we going to do about the part of Nebo that shoots at us? Nebo's not exactly inviting us to come down and start living there. It's been pretty good at keeping us out."

"Anything worth having," Tortee said firmly, "is worth fighting for. I've thought all that out. We can patch Ark with what's left of Mayflower, then all we have to do is put in some weapons."

"But—" Viktor began, meaning to finish the sentence by stating the certain fact that neither he nor Reesa knew anything about installing weapons in a spaceship; he didn't get the chance. Reesa was in ahead of him.

"Right, Tortee. That's our first job," she said quickly. "We'll have to have help, of course; I expect there's somebody who can assist in designing rockets that can be launched from orbit. And we'll need to know what the targets are; you have survey tapes to show where the attacks came from, I guess?"

"Of course," the old woman said with pride. "I've had the instruments on Mayflower surveying every inch of Nebo, and I have the readings Mirian brought down with you. I can pinpoint exactly where they fired on you. There were three places; I've got them marked. I'm sure we can deal with that, and—what is it, Viktor?"

"The instruments," Viktor said. "What do they say about that bright thing you call the universe?"

The old woman looked at him silently for a dangerous moment. "What do you want to know that for?"

Viktor blinked at her. It wasn't that he couldn't answer the question; he simply could not understand why she asked it. "Why, because—because it's there, Tortee! That's what science is all about, isn't it? Trying to understand what's going on?"

"What science is about," Tortee proclaimed, "is making life better for everybody. That's what you should be thinking about. Not just theories. Idle curiosity is the devil's work; your job is to make this project succeed!"

She was looking not only angry but definitely dissatisfied with Viktor Sorricaine now. Fortunately the door opened then and a little girl staggered in with a tray. Although it was heavy laden—a pot of steaming tea, a platter of cookies, and one of sliced bread with what looked like actual butter on it—there was only one cup. The girl quailed under the imprecations Tortee hurled at her and retreated as fast as she could, but the old woman was already greedily cramming sweet biscuits into her mouth.

"There is one other thing," Reesa said, while Tortee's mouth was full. Tortee didn't try to speak; she only raised an eyebrow at Reesa, still chewing.

"We should find a better place for us to live," Reesa explained. "It would be better if we could be near you—for the work I mean. And so if you could have them give us a room of our own here—"

"Impossible!" the woman sputtered, crumbs falling onto the tray on her lap. "The Peeps would never agree to it. Dear Freddy, woman! Don't you know how suspicious they are already? If we tried to move you in here they'd tell everybody that that just proved that the Greats were plotting to seize the ship for themselves—not that they aren't saying it already, of course."

"Oh, of course," Reesa said, nodding as though the woman's babbling made perfect sense. "Here, let me pour some more tea for you."

She gave Viktor a quick, meaningful glance which stirred him into action. He jumped gallantly forward to hold the tray while Reesa filled Tortee's cup. The old woman watched critically, a slice of buttered bread ready in one hand, then seized the cup and sipped it cautiously.

"That's better," she said. "Now, what were we talking about?"

"You explained to us why it's impossible for us to move into this sector permanently," Reesa said. "You made it very clear thank you, Tortee. Still, I do have to come here every day to work with you, of course. I suppose that Viktor and I might have the use of some workroom together—so we could do our jobs without disturbing you?"

"Ha!" the old woman said. Her eyes were suddenly gleaming. "I thought that was what it was about. What kind of room did you have in mind for your jobs? One with a bed, maybe?"

"Nothing like that," Viktor said, instinctively trying to shut the door on this invasion of his privacy; but Reesa was also speaking.

"Exactly like that, if we possibly could, Tortee," she said sweetly. "I knew you would understand."

"Ha," the old woman said again, eyeing them. Then she shifted her weight to a more comfortable position and grinned. "Why not? I'm going to work you harder than you've ever worked before, and I don't mind paying a little extra for good work. Is this room more or less what you had in mind? Because I'm going to report to the council this afternoon, and I'll be gone at least three hours."

She gazed at Reesa, who only smiled, nodding her head. The old woman licked crumbs off her fingers as she nodded back. Then she looked wistfully at her bed. "It won't do that old thing any harm to have somebody getting a little use out of it for a change—but I'm warning you! Be sure you change the sheets before I come back."

Tortee did not only have a private bedroom, she had a private bath. With their first passion spent, Reesa's second priority was a hot soak in the shallow metal tub. Viktor lay relaxed against the pillows while he waited his turn, nibbling on the staling bread and butter Tortee had left behind, listening to the faint splashing sounds from his wife's tub. Thoughtfully he considered his existence. Things had begun to look up a little, no doubt of that. It was certainly fine to be off the shit detail. It was even finer to have a job that made some sense for a person with his skills, and finer still to have had a nice warm bed to share with his nice, warm wife—in actual privacy!

There was no reason, really, why he should feel discontented. The funny thing was that, all the same, he did. They were both alive—and reasonably secure for at least the near future—but what, he asked himself, were they alive for?

It was as disconcerting for Viktor as it had been for Wan-To to step back and look at his life like that. It made him wonder what the point was.

Viktor could not help feeling that there had to be some kind of point, or at least purpose, to it. After all, he had come close enough to losing his life often enough. He counted up: Three times frozen, three times successfully thawed without harm. He had taken three good cuts at those 180-to-1 odds; in fact, as far as the third time was concerned, you couldn't really figure any realistic odds at all. They might have floated in space forever without being found, if it hadn't been for someone coveting the old interstellar ship enough to spend prodigally of scarce resources to get it—and for Mirian succumbing to one of the few generous impulses in an ungenerous world when he revived them.

For what purpose? When you survived so much for so long, shouldn't there be a reason?

It couldn't be just to shovel excrement, or, as Reesa had been doing, breeding cockroaches in offal to feed fish. Could it be to help Tortee in her plan? Because if that was it, Viktor told himself skeptically, whoever arranged purposes had picked a loser this time: there was no way old Ark could be turned into the kind of space battleship that could win a firefight with whatever it was on the planet of Nebo that killed people.

On the other hand—

On the other hand, Tortee was gone, and Tortee's computers were right there in the room with him.

There might be a purpose to his life, after all! Galvanized at the thought, Viktor leaped out of bed.

When, minutes, later, Reesa came shivering back into the bedroom skimpily wrapped in a towel, he hardly looked up.

She stopped abruptly, astonished. "Viktor! What are you doing with those machines?"

He glanced at her blankly. "What do you think I'm doing? That woman's got a data linkage—all the data banks from Ark and Mayflower, the copies are still intact! Now I'm looking for later stuff, trying to find out what kind of research anyone's done on that fireball they call the universe."

"Are you out of your mind?" she demanded. "We can't push Tortee too hard, Viktor. If you use her things without permission …"

He focused on her, his expression suddenly wrathful. Then, slowly, he relaxed. "Oh, hell," he said. "You're right, of course. But, my God, Reesa, this is the most important thing that ever happened! Just from the little bit I've been able to dig up so far, I'm pretty sure my first guess was right. Somehow or other, we've been picking up speed. Lots of speed; nearly the velocity of light! And that fireball is the universe, all right, but we're traveling so fast that all the light from it is concentrated in front of us!"

"Yes, Viktor. I see how important that is to you. But the most important thing is to stay on Tortee's good side," Reesa said firmly.

"Oh, Christ," Viktor said in disgust. "She's loopy, you know. She isn't even doing what the council ordered—they think they're going to get power out of Ark, and she wants to send it out to fight a war!"

Reesa was practicing patience. "Dear Viktor, that's their business, not ours. They told us to work for her, so we'll do what she tells us to do."

"Even if she's out of her mind? And—" He suddenly noticed that Reesa was shivering. "Hey," he said. "don't catch pneumonia on me!"

She pulled the towel tighter around her, looking demure. "Shall I get dressed?" she asked, but the mere fact that she had asked determined the answer; and, besides, he was suddenly aware that he was even barer than she, and equally cold.

"Well, not right away," he said. "Why don't you—we, I mean—why don't we get back under the covers for a while?"

"Let's just remember we have to leave time to change the sheets," Reesa said practically; but then, when they were under the covers, spooned back to front with his arm over her, she waited for him to move or to speak. He didn't.

"You're thinking about that fireball," she said into the pillow.

"I can't help it, Reesa. I—I wish I'd paid more attention to my father when I had the chance. He would have known more about it. This would have been the most interesting thing in the world to him."

"I never doubted it was interesting, Viktor," Reesa said gently, "and I understand how you feel about solving it."

"It's not just like solving a puzzle! It's important to everybody. It has something to do with what's going on on Nebo, too, I'm sure of it!"

"That's possible, Viktor. I don't see how, but I'm willing to believe it. All the same, Vik, I wouldn't try to convince Tortee, if I were you. All Tortee wants is to get Ark flying again, with guns blazing. And she's got troubles of her own. She's the one who wants to colonize Nebo, and she's got the Great Catholics behind her—but whether they'll stay that way depends on how fast she can show some kind of results. And the others—well, the Peeps are the ones who talked the council into trying to use the fuel for microwave power, and there's talk in Allahabad that colonizing another planet's a good enough idea, but it shouldn't be Nebo."

"Where then?" Viktor asked, startled.

"They're not very clear on that. Some of them think that since Ark's an interstellar ship basically they should try another star. Others have ideas about the moons of Nergal—they claim there ought to be enough heat from the brown dwarf to make something possible."

"Shades of Tiss Khadek," Viktor said, thinking. "Well, maybe that ought to be investigated, too. But that fireball—"

"Viktor, Viktor," his wife said gently. "If you play your cards right you'll have plenty of chances to see what you can find out about the fireball. In your spare time. When Tortee isn't looking. But don't push it, because she doesn't want to hear."

"I know, but—"

"Viktor. Did you know that both the Reforms and Allahabad are on overload, and the Peeps would be, too, if they hadn't been lucky enough to lose six or seven people last week? That means the whole colony has more people than they're allowed. So last week in Allahabad they froze three people for profaning shrines, and they're still eleven over their proper number."

"Profaning shrines! My God, Reesa, what kind of people are we living with?"

"We're living with people on the edge of starvation, Viktor. That's what you have to remember. All the time." She hesitated. "Do you know what else I heard? Some of the Peeps don't think even the freezers should be kept going. They're revolutionary idealists—they think they are, anyway—and they've got some pretty nasty ideas. They think they might as well thaw out some of the freezers without reviving them." She paused.

Viktor blinked at the back of her neck. "Why would they do that?" he demanded.

"Fodder," she said briefly. "Protein sources. To feed to the chickens and the gerbils, to turn the corpses into useful food."

"My God!" Viktor repeated, appalled.

"So go slow, my darling, please." She was silent for a moment, reaching up to put her hand over his as it cupped her breast. Then she said, "Viktor? Now that I'm all sweet and clean, do you think you'd like to get me all sweated up one more time while we still have the use of the bed?"

And of course that was the best idea she'd had yet … only at the end of it, when she was shuddering and moaning, there was a timbre to the sounds his wife made that reached through to Viktor, even at the peak of his own orgasm.

He had heard sounds like those before.

Not from Reesa. He had heard them from Marie-Claude in their one coupling, when her husband had died. Like Marie-Claude, Reesa was weeping even as they made love.

She didn't say anything in words. Neither did he. Only, when they were dressed again and making up the old woman's bed afresh, she stopped and looked at him. "We have to make the best of things, Viktor," she said harshly.

"Yes," Viktor agreed; and that was the end of it. Neither of them needed to mention the names of lost Shan and Yan and Tanya, and little Quinn.

Making the best of things wasn't easy. In this starved world there was hardly a "best" to aim for.

The project they were on promised more problems than rewards. Viktor had known all along that Tortee's plans were going to be exceedingly difficult. He hadn't known just how close they were going to be to outright impossible.

To begin with, there was the task of repairing Ark from what was left of Mayflower. How were they going to manage that? They didn't have an orbiting shipyard to do it in; they didn't have the big tools to do the job; they didn't have the shuttles to launch the tools they did have into orbit. They didn't even have the plans of the ships to work from. Those records might still be in the files somewhere, the stored data fiches that no one had looked at for a hundred years; but it would take a hundred years more, Viktor estimated, to find them again.

What he did have was a vast collection of pictures of the old interstellar ships, which Tortee had had taken from orbit, scaled, and computerized so that at least you could take some rough dimensions from them and hope the parts would fit where you wanted them to. Of course, no one expected a neat job. In space a few wrinkles or bumps made no difference—you didn't have to streamline a spaceship. All it had to do was hold its air and stay together under acceleration.

Assuming somehow they could deal with that, the harder job was still ahead of them: Invading hostile Nebo itself.

Tortee's promise was good there. She had provided them with a detailed mosaic of Nebo's surface, with fine-scale blowups of all the areas where the lasers (were they really lasers? The things that jolted foreign spaceships, anyway) were based.

Reesa was the one who converted all of Tortee's photos into three-dimensional plans for the computer to display. Tortee had good programs, painfully salvaged and restored from the ancient vaults. Viktor had seen most of the pictures before: the great, tulip-shaped horn antennae, the spiral things that had to be some other kind of antenna (or perhaps a sort of waveguide for some sort of discharge?). He even saw, with a shock, a familiar shape near one of the clusters that magnification revealed to be the wreck of Ark's lander.

There was no sign of bodies anywhere near the lander. There was no sign of anything alive there, either, or anywhere else on Nebo.

After a week of hard work Viktor began to believe that targeting those conspicuous artifacts might indeed be possible after all. But after you targeted them, what were you going to hit them with?

That was when Tortee delivered on another promise. She had undertaken to find someone who knew something about rocket weaponry, and when she produced him Viktor was astonished to see that it was Mirian.

Viktor met Reesa as she came in from the Peeps' chambers, and the two of them went hand in hand to the workroom next to Tortee's. Mirian was waiting for them, nervously stroking his pale beard. "Listen, Viktor," he said at once, "I didn't give you any breaks before, you know? I'm sorry about that. Things were tough for me. I hope you won't hold it against me."

"Yeah?" Viktor said, not committing himself.

"I mean it," Mirian said earnestly. "I don't blame you if you're mad, but, see, I need this job. Working in the freezers …" He looked embarrassed. "Well, when they send you there to work what they're saying is, 'Watch it, fellow, or you'll be inside them before you know it.' So this is a big chance for me. I'll do my best for you. I swear I will."

"I'm not the one you have to worry about; Tortee's in charge," Viktor said uncomfortably.

Reesa was more practical. "Do you know anything about space weapons?" she asked.

"I know as much as anybody else does." Mirian told her, and managed a grin. Which was to say, Viktor realized as the man began describing his ideas, not very much at all. There was not much call for long-range weaponry in this frozen-over world; there weren't any long-range targets. When the sects fought among themselves it was mostly with clubs and knives, and the big terror weapon was a hand grenade.

Still, grenades meant explosives; and once you had explosives you could put a bunch of them in a warhead and mount it on a rocket. There was nothing intrinsically hard about building a rocket, either—the ancient Chinese had done it when most of the world still lived in mud huts. The hard part was guidance.

But, Mirian explained eagerly, guidance only meant cannibalizing instrumentation from Ark and Mayflower and the surviving lander shuttles. In the long retreat from near-Nebo, while Reesa and Viktor had still been slumbering undiscovered in the freezer pods, Mirian had put in weeks in a space suit, roaming the old ship, investigating the resources it still provided, and planning a revengeful return. "We can do it," he promised. "Honest to Fred we can!"

"At least," Reesa said practically, "we can see if we can. If it's possible at all—"

"It has to be!" Mirian cried.

Viktor's doubts did not diminish as the days went on. He had a very clear memory of the jolting blows Ark had suffered. The idea of taking on that sort of technology with the improvised firecracker rockets Mirian was trying to build was ludicrous.

Now and then, in the privacy of pillow talk with his wife, Viktor expressed his doubts. The rest of the time he kept his mouth shut. Yet, grudgingly, he admitted to himself that whatever these people lacked in wisdom or manners they made up in courage. Nothing was easy for them. Even food was so scarce that the storehouses were tiny: food didn't need to be stored for long when Sunday's harvest was Wednesday's memory. The 2,350 inhabitants of the four colonies lived on a marginal 2,200 calories a day—yet that added up to five million calories that had to be supplied each day. So many kilograms of chicken, frogs, rabbits, and fish; so many metric tons of grains, tubers, and pulses; so many cubic meters of leafy vegetables and fruits. The vegetables were not very leafy, nor were the fruits the handsome, unblemished objects Viktor remembered from his childhood supermarkets. But there was just so much you could do about growing things in caverns under the ice. Viktor's "shit detail" mushroom farm had supplied only a tiny fraction of that everyday crush of provender, but every tiny fraction was urgently needed. The alternative was overload—and if overload wasn't checked the next step was starvation.

Still they had managed to refurbish an old chemical rocket and send it clear to Nebo's orbit, board old Ark, and get it going again. The old interstellar ship had been at the aphelion of its stretched-out orbit of the time. They had not risked coming close to the faceless enemy on Nebo—yet they had stolen old Ark away from him. Whoever he was.

Viktor disliked these people very much. All the same, there was a faint touch of admiration coloring his contempt.

Even Mirian turned out to be quite human as they worked together. The man was a lot younger than Viktor had thought. Mirian was only thirty-nine—in Newmanhome years, at that; the equivalent of an Earthly college kid. That surprised Viktor. He seemed much too young to have volunteered for the mission on Nebo. Yet it also turned out that Mirian was married and had even left a child behind when he took off for the long mission. "But of course I volunteered, Viktor," he explained. "The Greats were pretty close to overload, and when I got caught—"

"Caught at what?" Viktor asked, guessing that the girl had turned up pregnant and Mirian had had to marry. But it wasn't that.

Mirian looked shamefaced, picking at his beard. "They charged me with theft. Said I'd eaten some of the community's honey. Well, I did," he conceded, "but it was only a few drips in a broken comb. It probably would have been just wasted otherwise. So they said they wouldn't prosecute if I volunteered for Nebo duty." He looked around apprehensively and lowered his voice. "It was Tortee's honey," he whispered. "She was the one who said I had to choose between the ship or the freezer."

"Tortee seems to have a lot of authority," Viktor commented.

"You'd better say that! She's—well, listen. How old do you think she is?"

Viktor shrugged. "Maybe a hundred and twenty?" Newmanhome years, of course, but none of these people had ever counted in anything else.

"Try seventy-five," Mirian chortled, enjoying Viktor's astonishment—why, the woman was Reesa's age! "That's right. She could still be having babies, except her husband's in the freezer—he worked there, and they caught him making a fire to keep warm. So she just eats, instead of, you know, being with a man. And—"

He stopped, looking suddenly frightened. "Oh, I thought I heard her coming," he said. "Listen, we'd better get to work. Now, we've got these fuel canisters; we can use them for the body of the rockets …"

The people on Newmanhome had a fair supply of explosives. They needed them now and then. When the ice moved, as it unpredictably did, glacier lips had to be blasted to keep them from burying what was left of Homeport too deep to survive.

But explosives were too dangerous to be freely available; half a dozen little wars among the sects had proved that. The explosives plant was located three kilometers away, heavily guarded by a fully armed squad from each of the sects, and the shuttle that would someday take people back up to Ark and Mayflower was within its perimeter, guarded just as heavily.

Viktor eagerly accepted the chance to go outside to visit the launch site. It was the Peeps' day off, so Reesa was obliged to stay idle with the others in the warrens of the People's Republic, but Viktor and three others, one from each but the Peeps sect, struggled into extra layers of clothing topped with sheepskins; an electrically warmed mesh covered his mouth and nose, and a visor was over his eyes. Even so, that first Arctic-plus blast that struck him soaked through the furs and the four layers of garments in moments, leaving him shaking as he toiled after the other four to the place where stronger, colder men were tanking up the lander shuttle with liquid oxygen and alcohol.

At least the winds were only winds. They did not drive blizzards of snow against the struggling men and women. The winds couldn't do that; snow almost never fell anymore. The air of Newmanhome had been squeezed skin-cracking dry, for there were no longer any warm oceans anywhere on the planet to steam water vapor into the air so that it could come down somewhere else as rain or snow. There wasn't any somewhere else when the whole planet was frozen over.

Squinting against the blast, Viktor could see the dark, cold sky.

It was not anything like the skies he had known before. The shrunken sun gave little heat. Even the dozen stars that were left were themselves, Viktor was almost sure, dimmer than they had been.

And then, as Newmanhome turned, red Nergal appeared, as bloodily scarlet-bright as ever. Minutes later that great puzzle, "the universe," burst eye-blindingly white over the horizon. Viktor gazed at it and sighed.

If only his father had lived to see. If only these people were willing to try to understand! If only—

He felt Mirian tapping him on the shoulder. Viktor looked where the younger man was pointing, up toward that same eastern horizon. "Yes, the universe," Viktor said eagerly through the mesh. "I've been thinking—"

Mirian looked suddenly fearful. "Hey, not that!" he cried over the sound of the wind. "Please don't talk about that! I meant over there, next to it."

Squinting through the mesh, Viktor saw what Mirian was calling his attention to. It was a faint spot of light, barely visible as it moved down toward its setting: Ark, in its low orbit, moving toward its final rendezvous with Mayflower.

Viktor stared at it. The time was getting close. When Ark and Mayflower were linked together the lander would be launched, and then it would all start.

He was suddenly coldly certain that Tortee was going to order him onto the shuttle. And he didn't want to go.

When they were back in the dining hall again Mirian was charged up with optimism. "We're going to do it," he told Viktor positively. "We've got crews trained for repair all ready; they'll be taking off for Ark in a couple of weeks, and then—"

"And then," Viktor said, as gently as possible, "we have to hope that they can get the ship habitable again; and that these rockets will work; and that that little bit of antimatter left in Ark's drive will hold out long enough to ferry people back and forth."

Mirian paused, a spoonful of the stew of corn and beans halfway to his mouth. "Don't talk like that, Viktor," he begged.

Viktor shrugged and remembered to smile. He was beginning to thaw out after his long run outside, and even the meatless-day stew tasted good. The important thing, he told himself, wasn't that this harebrained project should work, it was only that people could believe that it might. Even a false hope was better than no hope at all.

"I do wish," he said, "that we had some more antimatter. We could do a lot with more power. Even maybe build some lasers or something—something better than—" He stopped himself from saying what he had been about to say about the feeble rockets Mirian was putting together. "It was pretty nice when we had Earth technology going for us," he said wistfully.

"Is it true that you people actually made this antimatter stuff?" Mirian asked enviously.

"Not me. Not here—but, back on Earth, sure. They made all kinds of things, Mirian. Why, back on Earth …"

Mirian wasn't the only one listening as Viktor reminisced about the wonders of the planet he had left as a child. A woman across the table put in, "You mean you just walked around? Outside? Without even any clothes on? And things just grew out in the open?"

"It was like that here on Newmanhome, too," Viktor reassured her.

"And they didn't worry about—" She paused, looked around, and lowered her voice. "—like, overload?"

Viktor gave her a superior smile. He knew he was rubbing salt in wounds, but he couldn't help it. "If you mean killing people because there are too many to feed, no. Not ever. Fact, they wanted more people. Everybody was supposed to have all the children they could. Reesa and I had four," he boasted, unwilling to try the explanation of what was meant by "Reesa and I" and the divided parentage of the children …

The children.

Viktor lost the thread of what he was saying. Suddenly the cooling stew and the smells of the densely packed dining hall stopped being pleasant. The children! And he would never see any of them again.

Viktor excused himself and stumbled away to the jakes. He didn't have to urinate. He just didn't want anyone to see, in case he had to cry.

When he got back Mirian gave him a quick, hooded look and went on talking about his experiences as a freezer guard. "They've got all kinds of stuff in there," he was saying. "You wouldn't believe all of it. There's one whole chamber that's full of frozen sperm and ova, animals that they brought from Earth and never started up here. Whales! Termites! Chimpanzees—"

"What's a termite?" the woman across the table asked, but she was looking at Viktor.

Viktor did his best. "It's a kind of an insect, I think. They used to worry about them eating the wood in their houses in California. And a chimpanzee's like a monkey—I think," he added honestly, because all he remembered of chimpanzees was that he had seen a lot of almost human-looking primates one day at the San Diego Zoo, and he had been more impressed by the terrible way they smelled than by his father's lectures on which was which.

There was silence for a moment. Then Mirian put in, "We saw Ark when we were outside. Only it was near the fireball, so we couldn't get a really good look at it."

Viktor saw that everyone looked a little embarrassed when Mirian mentioned the fireball. Yet the man had brought it up; it was as good a chance as any to probe. "About that fireball," he began.

Conversation stopped. Everyone's eyes were on him, and every mouth was closed. Even Mirian was looking suspiciously at him.

The hell with them, Viktor thought. "I know what that fireball is," he announced. "It's a foreshortened view of the universe. Somehow, I don't know how, we've been accelerated so fast that we're catching up with all the light from everywhere."

Silence. No response at all. Then Mirian swallowed and said, "Maybe we should be getting back to work, Viktor."

But the woman across the table reached out to touch his arm. "What are you telling us, Viktor?" she asked. "How could that happen?"

"I don't have the faintest idea," he said bitterly. "Something is pulling us. Or pushing us, maybe, but I don't know any forces that could do that. Anyway our planet, and the sun, and all the other planets around it, and a few other stars are all being pulled along very fast by something."

"What do you mean, 'something'? Do you mean by God?" the woman asked, crossing herself. "Freddy didn't say anything about that!"

"No, not God," Viktor said hastily. "It doesn't have anything to do with God, of course. It's some natural force, probably—or, well—" He stopped, angry at these people and even more at himself.

He hadn't stopped in time. "Are you saying the Great Transporter isn't God?" the woman demanded. An old man down the table stood up, his white mustaches quivering.

"I don't like this kind of talk!" he announced. "I'm going back to work!"

And Mirian, glowering as he led Viktor away from the table, warned, "You have to watch what you say, man! I'm as tolerant as the next fellow, you know that—but you don't want a charge of heresy and corruption of faith, do you?"

This day, Viktor thought gloomily, was not going well at all.

It did not occur to him that it was capable of getting a lot worse.

He was hunched over the keyboard when Tortee came back to her room. He cleared the screen quickly, but not quickly enough: She had caught a glimpse of the spectral analysis display. "What's that, Viktor?" she demanded ominously. "Have you finished the repair plans?"

"Almost done, Tortee," he said with a false smile, keeping his anger inside. "I'll have them for you this afternoon."

"I want them now! I've got a meeting with the Four-Power Repair Committee, and I need to show them what has to be done to the Ark. What've you been doing? No," she said forcefully as he opened his mouth, "I want to know what you were really doing. Show me that screen again!"

"But, really, Tortee," he began, and then knew it was no use. Sullenly he keyed in the file name and watched as the damning spectrum flashed on the board.

The old woman might have been a religious bigot, but she was not a scientific fool. She recognized the patterns at once. "You're checking spectra," she announced, "and I can guess what that's a spectrum of. Viktor, I don't know what to do with you. You've been openly talking religious error—" He started to speak again, startled, but she overrode him. "Don't deny it! Do you think people don't report to me? Half a dozen people heard you in the dining hall today! And you're wasting working time with your immoral habits. I can't put up with this. Do you have anything to say for yourself?"

"I'm only trying to find out the truth about what's going on!" Viktor cried hotly.

"The truth," Tortee said icily, "has long since been revealed to us. Blessed Freddy set it down for all to see in His Third Testament, and that's the only truth that matters. I forbid you ever to speak of this subject again." He was astonished to see that she was really angry. Her pudgy face was squeezed into a scowl. "Don't try my patience too far, Viktor! I don't want to have to punish you. You wouldn't like it." She stared at him for a moment, then added as an afterthought, "You can forget about using my room for your personal pleasure again, too. Now get out of here! You and Mirian are wanted at the shuttle. They're almost ready to fuel up for the first repair crew."

It could have been worse, Viktor thought sourly. Reesa was right. He had gone farther with Tortee—well, with all these superstition-ridden, mule-stubborn people—than was sensible.

For that matter, sending him out to the freezer complex was punishment in itself. It was late. There was little chance they would be able to get back before dark, and no one wanted to be outside when even the feeble heat of sun and star burst were gone.

Mirian did his best to hurry the workers at the liquid-gas plant along. It wasn't hard to do, because the fuel detail wanted to be back by nightfall, too. Working at top speed, he and Viktor checked the fuel manifests, inspected the tanks' seals, and agreed that it was all in order. But the haste was all in vain, because then they were shunted over to the cryonics caves to wait. Their four-power escort hadn't shown up on time.

"Oh, hell," Mirian groaned, pulling unhappily at his beard. "We'll never get back before dark."

"I'm sorry, Mirian," Viktor said. "I think I got Tortee mad at me."

"You think you did! Oh, Viktor, just shut up. Every time you open your mouth you make more trouble!" And he slumped down against a wall and closed his eyes, refusing to speak.

Absently Viktor strolled around the chilly cave, glancing at the tunnels that led off from the central chamber. Inside each tunnel was row on row of capsules. Each one held a human body—convicted "criminals" mostly—with crosses for the Greats and the Reforms, crescents for the Moslems, and five-pointed stars for the Peeps. Those were the fruits of overload, Viktor knew, and dourly thought that the chances were good that he would be joining them if he didn't learn to keep his mouth shut.

By the time the escort arrived Viktor had made up his mind. He would never say a blasphemous word again. He would follow Reesa's example. He would do his best to please Tortee and to make her hopeless plan work.

He couldn't wait to see Reesa to tell her about his resolve.

It was almost dark by the time the two of them and their escort were stumbling through the freezing gale back to the dwelling tunnels. The fireball "universe" had already set, and the sun was nearly at the horizon; it was definitely getting too cold to be out of doors.

Mirian glanced at Viktor, then made a gesture of reconciliation. He pointed to the horizon. There was Mayflower, a hand's-span north of the setting sun. The old ship was just beginning to climb up the sky from the west in its hundred-minute orbit, with Ark still out of sight below and behind it.

Mirian put his head next to Viktor's and bawled, over the noise of the wind, "It won't be so bad, Viktor. Once they get the repairs going Tortee will be easier to get along with, you'll see."

"I hope so," Viktor shouted back, and bent his head, squinting against the cold as he trudged along. Easier to get along with! That wouldn't be hard, he thought resentfully. He slipped on a slanting block of ice, cursed, caught himself—

And heard a strange moaning sound from Mirian.

Viktor looked up quickly. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a quick flicker of light. Startled, he stared up. It was Mayflower, suddenly shining bright, almost as suddenly darkening again.

"What is it, Mirian?" he cried.

But Mirian didn't know. No one knew, until they had toiled back inside the tunnels again and the word from Tortee's instruments had spread like wildfire.

The sudden brightening of Mayflower had been only reflected light from another, hidden source. And that source—

It had been the worst disaster imaginable.

Ark had blown up.

Fortunately for the people on Newmanhome, Ark had still been below the horizon when it happened. It wasn't a chemical explosion that had blasted the old ship into ions, not even a nuke: it was the annihilation of matter and antimatter, pounds of mass converted into energy in the twinkling of an eye, in accordance with the old formula: e = mc². That hemisphere directly under Ark had received a sudden flood of radiation like an instant flare from the heart of a star.

There was nothing living on that part of Newmanhome. That was fortunate. For, of course, anything that had been alive in the face of that terrible blast would have stopped living at once.

The skeleton crew on Mayflower were less fortunate. Even through the thick skin of the spaceship, they had received more radiation than the human body was meant to experience in a lifetime.

And Tortee was weeping hysterically in her room. She refused to see Viktor at all. She let Mirian in for only a moment, and when he came out he was looking very grave.

"It's over," Mirian told Viktor mournfully. "If we don't have Ark we don't have a working drive. We can't build a rocket ship big enough to attack the planet."

"No, of course not," Viktor agreed, dazed, wishing Reesa were there. "What happened?"

"Aw, who knows?" Mirian said despondently. "Tortee thinks it was the Peeps. She thinks they were so set on getting microwave power that they started fooling around with the drive—to keep us from using it again, you know? And it just went off." He stopped for a moment, gazing at Viktor with an ambiguous expression. Then he said, "I've been thinking, Viktor. You've had a pretty good run for your money."

Viktor blinked, not seeing the connection. "I have?"

"I mean," Mirian explained, "you were born on Earth. Good Freddy, Viktor, that makes you just about the oldest person in the world."

"I guess it does," Viktor said grudgingly. That was an interesting thought, but not the kind that reconciled you to anything.

"So when the council decides …" Mirian left it hanging there. Victor looked at him in puzzlement.

"What is there to decide? You said yourself, the project's over."

"I don't mean the project, I mean about you, Viktor. Tortee won't stand up for you anymore, not after this. Not after—well, you know," he said awkwardly, "we're always pressed for living space here."

"What are you talking about?" Viktor demanded, losing patience. "Are you saying I have to go live with the Peeps or something, like Reesa?"

"Oh, no, not with the Peeps. And I suppose they might keep Reesa on. But you, Viktor—well," he said fairly, "it's not like death. We don't kill people. That's against the Commandments. And, who knows, somebody, sometime—there's always the chance that someday someone will thaw you out of the freezer."