The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 2

One of those "human beings" Wan-To had never heard of was a boy named Viktor Sorricaine. Of course, Viktor had never heard of Wan-To, either; their paths had never crossed in Wan-To's long life and Viktor's so far fairly short one.

On Viktor's twelfth birthday (or, you could say, his one hundred and fifteenth), he woke up, sweating and itchy, to stare into someone's eyes. "Mom?" he asked fuzzily. "Mom, are we there yet?"

It wasn't his mother looking down at him. It was an old woman he had never seen before. She didn't hold herself like an old woman, bent-backed and tottering. She stood straight and her eyes were clear, and she looked at Viktor in a way that made him uneasy—sad and amused, tolerant and angry, all at once. He thought she looked as though she knew everything there was to know about Viktor Sorricaine, and forgave him for it. She was definitely old, though. Her hair was thinning, and her face was terribly lined. "You don't remember me, do you, Viktor?" she asked, and sighed to show that she forgave him for that, too. "I'm not surprised. I'm Wanda. Your mother will be here in a moment, so don't worry. We've just had a little problem."

"What kind of problem?" Viktor asked, rubbing his stinging eyes, too polite to ask her what it was she thought he should have remembered.

"Your dad will take care of it," the woman said. Viktor couldn't press her, because she had already turned away to call for someone to help her get Viktor out of the shallow saucer kind of thing he was lying in.

Viktor was beginning to wake up. Certain things were clear to him at once. He knew that he was still on the interstellar ship New Mayflower, from the fact that he weighed so little. That meant that, no, they hadn't arrived yet. He knew what the pan he was lying in was, because he had expected all along that sooner or later he would find himself in one like it. It was the warming pan where frozen passengers were thawed back to life when the journey was through. But since it seemed the journey wasn't through, what could be the reason for waking him now?

He allowed himself to be helped up and was badly surprised to find that the help was needed; his young limbs were shaky. He let himself be tugged, like a skiff towed by a motorboat—only the old woman who said her name was Wanda was the motorboat—to a shower cubicle. There the woman gently stripped off his thin freezer robe to bathe him. It was a rougher bath than he was used to. There were many decades of dried perspiration and dead skin for the warm jets to flush away, but that was what they were for. They did their job, and the hissing, gulping suction pumps sucked the wastewater away.

By the time he came out he knew exactly where he was. He was in the ship's sick bay.

Viktor knew all about the sick bay. He had seen it from time to time, had in fact spent several boring hours there before it was time for his family to be frozen, when the last of his baby molars had had to be helped out so his adult ones would come in straight. The old woman patted him dry. He let her. He was more interested in what was going on in the warming pan he had awakened in. Two little kids, no more than four or five years old, were in it now, huddled in each other's arms under the bath of directed infrared and microwave as they warmed. The pan around them was filled with the thick, milky liquid that kept them oxygenated through perfusion until their lungs began to work, and their limbs were already beginning to move with tiny random twitches. He even recognized the kids: Billy and Freddy Stockbridge, the sons of his dad's navigation partner—two nasty little bits of business if he'd ever seen any.

By the time he was dressed in tunic and shorts and had drunk two enormous glasses of something sweet and hot, his mother came hurrying in from the next chamber, white robe fluttering behind her. "Are you all right?" she asked anxiously, reaching out for him.

He allowed her to give him a quick kiss, then fended her off with dignity. "I'm fine," he said. "Why aren't we there?"

"I'm afraid there was a little complication, Vik," she told him, her voice uneasy. "There's something wrong with the flight plan, so they've got your father up to straighten it out. It'll be all right."

"Sure it will," he said, surprised. There wasn't really any doubt in his mind about that; after all, the man who was in charge of straightening such things out was his father.

"Marie-Claude's up, too," she said fretfully, touching his forehead as she used to do when she thought he might have a fever. "Between the two of them they'll have it all cleared up, but I've got to go help out. Are you sure you'll be—"

"I'm sure," he said, exasperated and a little embarrassed at being treated like a child.

The old woman interrupted. "Vik needs to eat and get himself oriented, Mrs. Sorricaine-Memel," she said. "I'll see that he's all right; you go ahead."

Amelia Sorricaine-Memel looked at her curiously, as though trying to place her, but only said, "I'll be back again as soon as I can."

When she was gone, the old woman took Viktor's hand. "You're supposed to go in the treadmill for a few minutes," she told him. "Then the doctors will check you over. Do you want to do that now?"

"Why not?" he asked, shrugging. "But I'm hungry."

"Of course you're hungry," she said, laughing a little. "You always were. You stole my chocolates when I was on the teaching machines, and your mother took away your candy for a week."

Viktor frowned at the woman. It was true that he had stolen chocolates and been punished for it, but the child he had stolen them from had been Wanda Sharanchenko, the tiny blond daughter of one of the engineering officers, two years younger than himself. "But—" he began.

The woman nodded. "But that was a long time ago, wasn't it? More than a hundred years, while you were a corpsicle. But it's me, all right, Viktor; I'm Wanda."

The ship New Mayflower wasn't "there." It wasn't even close to the "there" they were aiming for. According to the original flight plan there was to be more than twenty-eight years of deceleration time left before they would be at the planet they were meant to colonize.

But, unbelievably, it seemed that the original flight plan was wrong.

Wanda tried to explain it to Viktor as she led him to the huge rotating barrel that was the ship's treadmill, spun at nine revolutions a minute to simulate enough of normal Earth gravity to prevent calcium migration and muscle loss.

The treadmill was familiar enough to Viktor. He'd spent plenty of hours in it in the two years before he went into the freezer; it was where he played games with the other children in their compulsory daily exercise routine. He trotted around the barrel like a veteran, working out a century's worth of kinks in his young muscles, achieving a sweat and a decently high pulse without trouble. Wanda was hanging at the hub of the wheel, talking to him as he ran.

When he asked her what had happened, she called, "Flare star."

"A what star?" he panted.

"A flare star. Or maybe a nova, I don't know—they say there are some funny things about it. Anyway, something blew up. It's really bright, Vik. Wait till you see it. And it's only about thirty degrees off our course, so—"

She didn't have to explain. Viktor had heard enough from his father to see the problem. The unanticipated flare would be pouring out wholly unexpected floods of photons, and, as the light sail had already been deployed to help in Mayflower's long, slow deceleration, the flare would be shoving them off course and their speed would be decreasing too rapidly. New course settings had to be calculated, and so, of course, all the navigators had been recalled from freezing, nearly three decades ahead of schedule, to assist in the work.

Even for Viktor, who had spend most of the unfrozen part of his conscious life as the son of one of the ship's navigators, that was not easy to understand completely. What made it worse was the person who was telling it all to him. He could not reconcile the hundred-year-old Wanda Sharanchenko (no—even that was wrong—her name turned out to be Wanda Mei now) who was telling him all this with his quite fresh memory of the tiny little girl who had cried and tried to bite him after he ate her chocolates. Panting, he called up to her perch on the hub, "But why didn't you get frozen, like everybody else?"

She paused, peering at him while she thought her answer out. "I suppose," she said finally, "it was fear."

"Fear of freezing?" Viktor demanded, incredulous. How silly could you be? What was there to fear in being gently frozen and then reawakened when the time came? It wasn't any different from going to sleep and waking up in the morning, really. Was it?

But, Wanda told him, it was. "Not everyone survives freezing. About one person out of a hundred and eighty can't be thawed. Something goes wrong, in the freezing, or the suspension, or the thawing, and they die, you know."

Viktor hadn't known that. He swallowed. "But that's not bad odds," he protested, for his own sake mostly.

"It's bad odds if you're the one that dies," she said decisively. "My parents thought so. And that's not counting the ones that get freezer-damaged. They can come out blind, or paralyzed. Who wants that?"

"Have you ever seen somebody blind from the freezer?" he challenged.

"Keep running," she ordered. "No, but I never saw a dead one, either. I still know they're there! Anyway, my parents volunteered to stay on as part of the caretaker crew, and I stayed with them … all these years. Now come off the wheel, Viktor, you're ready for your physical."

Which he passed, of course, with flying colors. But what he was to do after that was much less clear. If the ship had been where it should have been when they woke Viktor up there would have been no problem. Even a little kid had things to do to get ready for landing.

But they weren't there yet, and Wanda was no help. "Just stay out of the way," she advised, and hurried off to some kind of work of her own.

The fact that Viktor had been revived early from the freezer didn't mean that anyone wanted him up and about. The grownups he encountered made that clear. It would have been better all around if he had stayed cold and senseless, like the eleven hundred other passengers in the freezatoria. But that wasn't Viktor's fault. It was his parents who had opted for storage as a family unit, Mommy and Daddy and young Viktor all in the same capsule in the cryonic chambers, and once the process of resuscitating his father had well started the other two had already been much more than halfway back to life.

They couldn't, after all, break the sleepers apart with a fork, like a block of frozen spinach. They had to thaw a bit before they could be separated, and then—well, there was always that one-in-a-hundred-and-eighty chance Wanda had mentioned.

The room Viktor was supposed to share with his parents was no bigger than his own personal bedroom had been in California, back down on the surface of Earth, before they left to join the interstellar colony ship. It was pretty cramped.

That was not the fault of the ship's designers. They had allowed ample living space for the handful of men and women who were to take their turns on unfrozen watch as the other eleven hundred aboard slumbered at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. But they had only planned for thirty-five or forty watchkeepers to be awake at any one time. Now, with thirty others roused unexpectedly to deal with the problem of the flare star, living space was in short supply. Not quite as short as it had been in the first moments after launching, of course, when Viktor's family had taken the first watch until the ship was well clear of the solar system. And by no means as short as it would be when the ship arrived at its destination and all the corpsicles were defrosted to get ready for landing. Then it would be ten in a room instead of three, and in around-the-clock sleeping shifts, too.

Still, living space was pretty cramped. Worse, Viktor was bored. When his parents were out working, or at least awake, he could watch old films from Earth. He could even see whole recorded baseball games, taped by broadcast from Earth as they were played, though of course there was not much suspense in watching them. The results had been history for decades. Come to that, if he got desperate enough he could even dial up the teaching machines and please his parents with a few hours' study of algebra or antimatter engine maintenance or the history of the Holy Roman Empire.

None of that was enough to keep a young boy busy. Viktor didn't want to watch baseball. He wanted to play it. But there were never eighteen people to make up two sides, even if any of the grown-ups had been willing. He was lonesome. Grownups were about all he had for company, because all the other kids on Mayflower were still corpsicles. Not counting the Stockbridge infants. They certainly couldn't be counted as friends, and none of the adults on the ship had much time for them, either. The adults were all busy, not to say obsessed, with the unexpected, and definitely unusual, flare star. The general idea, as much as any of the adults thought about it at all, was that the teaching machines would keep the children busy most of the time, and Viktor could look after the two little ones the rest of it.

Viktor was having none of that.

He hung around the working rooms of the ship as much as he could, watching his father and Marie-Claude Stockbridge and the others peck away at their computers, listening to snippets of conversation.

"It looks like an extra eight months travel time—that's not too bad."

"There's plenty of fuel reserve." That was his father. "I've calculated a first-approximation vector, but what about the light sail? Pull it in? Leave it out?"

"Leave it out. Just cut engine deceleration thrust. Then—" That time it was Marie-Claude Stockbridge speaking, and she looked up at the screen that showed the heavens before them. The bright blue-white flare star dominated everything, dimming that fainter, yellower one that was their destination. "Then when we get there, I wonder what we'll find. That star's putting out a lot of radiation."

What she said was what was on everybody's mind. The place they were going, the probes had said, was a livable planet—in fact, the name they had given it was "Newmanhome"—but heavy radiation could change the parameters of what was "livable." Of course, the first ship, six years ahead of them in flight, would find all that out before them—but if things were bad, what could they do about it? There was no way to return. "Newmanhome's got Van Allens and a pretty deep atmosphere, Marie," Vik's father told her. "It'll be all right. I hope."

And then there was silence for a moment until one of the others turned back to his computer and tapped a few keys. "Right now it adds up to a little under seven light-years to go," he announced. "First thrust approximation, a six-percent reduction ought to do it, adjusting it back as the flare dies away. That's the hard part, though. Anybody know how to calculate the decay rate?"

"For a regular flare star? Maybe," Viktor's father said irritably. "For this thing, how can we? It's not really flaring. It's more like it just blew up."

"But you say it isn't a nova," the man said, and then he glanced up and caught sight of Viktor. "Looks like your son's come to help us, Pal," he said to Viktor's father. It was an amiable enough remark, but it carried a message, too, and Viktor turned and got out of the room before the message had to be made explicit.

For lack of anything better to do, he turned to the teaching machine to explain some of what was going on. For instance, he knew that a light-year was a very long distance indeed. But exactly how long?

The teaching machine tried to help. It told Viktor that a light-year was the distance traveled in one year by a beam of light, speeding along at its unalterable pace of 186,000 miles per second, but it wasn't easy for Viktor to visualize even a "mile." The machine tried to be helpful. Some 734 of those "miles," it explained, lay between New York and Chicago, back on Earth. Six thousand of them took you from any point on the Earth's equator to one of its poles. But that meant little to Viktor, who had been only six years old when he and his parents launched to join the ship's crew assembling in space. He thought he remembered Los Angeles, because of the amusement parks and the seals, but he also remembered the snowman his father had made for him in the courtyard of their home—and there couldn't have been any snowmen in Los Angeles. (His mother had explained to him that had been in Warsaw, where Viktor had been born, but to Viktor "Warsaw" was only a name.)

The closest the teaching machine came to defining a mile for Viktor was to point out that it was a little more than twenty-five times around the revolving exercise treadmill where every wakeful person had to exercise his muscles and preserve the calcium in his bones.

So that was a mile. But the datum wasn't all that much help. Multiplying twenty-five laps around the revolving drum by 186,000 by the number of seconds in a year was simply beyond Viktor's capabilities. Not to do the arithmetic—the teaching machine wrote the answer out for him—but to grasp the meaning of the simple sum 25 x 186,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365.25 = 146,742,840,000,000.

Call it a hundred and fifty trillion laps around the revolving drum …

What was the use of calling it anything, though, when nobody could really grasp the meaning of a "trillion"?

And that was just one light-year. Then, of course, you had to multiply even that huge number by another 6.8 to find out how far you still had to go before landing … or by 19.7 to find out how far you were from home.

The thing about young Viktor Sorricaine was that he hated to give up. On anything. He wasn't a very impressive kid physically—tall for his age, but gangling and pretty clumsy. Viktor had nearly abandoned the hope of becoming an All-Star center-fielder, but that wasn't because he despaired of ever getting his coordination on track. It was only because he was pretty sure that no one in the place where he was going to spend the rest of his life was going to have time to organize any professional baseball teams.

Viktor was determined, but he wasn't crazy—although his parents might have thought he was, if he had told them of his other long-range ambition.

But that other ambition he didn't tell. Not to anybody.

He didn't let himself be thwarted by the teaching machine. He dismissed it and tried another tack. He turned to the outside viewers to see for himself just how distant Earth's old Sun looked. It took some doing, but then he found it—barely—an object pitifully tiny and faint among ten thousand other stars.

Then he heard the noise of scuffling and childish voices piping in rage. Of course he knew who it had to be. He groaned and went to the door. "Quiet down, you kids!" he ordered.

The Stockbridge boys didn't quiet down. They didn't even acknowledge hearing him. They were concentrating on trying to maim each other. Billy had hit Freddy, because Freddy had pushed Billy, and now the two of them were slapping and kicking at each other as they rolled slowly about the floor in the microgravity.

Viktor didn't at all mind their punching each other. What he objected to was that they were doing it in front of his family's door, where he might be blamed for any wounds they might wind up with. Not to mention the amount of noise they made and the language they used! Viktor was certain he had not known so many bad words when he was their age. When he got them pulled apart, he heard Billy pant ferociously at his sobbing brother, "I'll kill you, you whoreson!"

That did it for Viktor. He hadn't been going to tell on them, but that was too much. He would not allow even her own child to say such a think about beautiful, desirable, undoubtedly chaste Marie-Claude Stockbridge—since, improbable as any happy outcome of his ambition must seem even to Viktor, Marie-Claude Stockbridge was the other ambition he had no intention of giving up on. "All right, you two," he growled. "We're going to see your parents about this!"

But by the time he got them back to the Stockbridge family quarters on the far rim of the ship Viktor had a change of heart. Werner Stockbridge, their father, was webbed into his bed, sound asleep. He looked too frayed and worried as he snored there to be wakened for a punishment session, and their mother wasn't there at all. The phone told Viktor that Marie-Claude Stockbridge was on duty in the Operations complex at the heart of the ship, along with his own parents. He didn't want to disturb her there. He looked gloomily at the little culprits, sighed, and said, "All right, you two. How about a nice quiet game of dominoes in the rec room?"

An hour later Mrs. Stockbridge came looking for them, full of praise for Viktor. "You're a lot of help," she told him. "I don't know what I'd do without you, Viktor. Look, as soon as I get the kids in for a nap I'm going to get something to eat and then bed. Will you keep me company?"

Viktor knew perfectly well that that invitation was for the meal and certainly not for the bed. All the same he felt a sudden electrical heat at the bottom of his belly and only managed to growl, "Okay."

In the refectory Marie-Claude Stockbridge had the tact to let Viktor carry her tray to the table. He was extremely careful about it. In the gentle gravity of the ship's fractional-G acceleration slippery foods could slide right off the plate if you moved too fast in the wrong direction, but he delivered the trays to the table magnets in perfect order. Then he set himself the task of making grown-up dinner-table conversation. "Vegetable protein again," he announced, stirring the thick stew. "I can't wait to get there and get a decent meal."

"Well, don't get your hopes too high. The meals might not be too good right away," Mrs. Stockbridge said politely. There were plenty of food animals in the livestock section of the freezers, but of course they would have to be allowed to breed and multiply before many of them could be turned into steaks or pork chops or fried drumsticks. "Although the first-ship colonists ought to have some stocks built up by the time we're there." She looked absently past Viktor, catching a glimpse of herself in the wall mirror—half the walls on the ship were mirrored to make the rooms seem more spacious. She touched her hair and said remorsefully, "I'm a mess."

"You look all right," Viktor growled, frowning down at the rest of his stew.

But that wasn't the whole truth. Marie-Claude looked a lot better than "all right" to his lascivious pubescent eyes. She was taller than his father, and more curved than his mother. Her hair was tangled, and her fingernails were still cracked from the freezer, and there was a faint, sweet smell of healthy female perspiration about her … and all of that was inexpressibly alluring to twelve-year-old Viktor Sorricaine.

Although Viktor wished no harm at all to Werner Stockbridge, one of his best daydreams (and sometimes night dreams) involved Marie-Claude's husband somehow losing the power of reproduction. He had learned that such things sometimes happened to men. He viewed it as a potential opportunity for himself. After all, everyone knew that when the ship landed it would be everyone's duty to have children. Lots of children—the planet had to be populated, didn't it? Lacking the ability to participate in the process himself, Werner Stockbridge would surely accept the necessity of his wife becoming pregnant now and then—and who better to do the job for him than their good family friend, young (but by then, with any luck, not too young to do the job) Viktor Sorricaine?

Some of the details of Viktor's fantasy were pretty hazy. That was all right. The important parts of the fantasy came later on. After all, Mr. Stockbridge was much older than his wife—thirty-eight to her twenty-five—and males were at their sexual peak in their teens. (Viktor knew a lot about the subject of reproductive biology. The teaching machines had not always been a disappointment.) After that age male vigor slowly declined, while the sexuality of women grew from year to year. Viktor took comfort in the fact that the thirteen-year difference between Marie-Claude's age and her husband's was exactly the same as between hers and Viktor's own, though of course in the opposite direction. So (Viktor calculated, as he gallantly escorted Marie-Claude back to the room where her husband and sons slept) in a few years, say seven or so, he would be nineteen and she would be no more than thirty-two; very likely, he speculated, the very peak years for both of them, while old Werner Stockbridge would be well into his forties and definitely well on the downhill path at least, if not actually out of it …

He turned and glanced up at her. "What?"

Marie-Claude was smiling at him. "We're here, Viktor. And, oh, Viktor, I know what a nuisance those two little monsters can be. Thank you!" And she reached down and kissed his cheek before she disappeared into the family cubicle.

So, of course, then there was no help for it. From then on Viktor doggedly baby-sat the two Stockbridge brats, however hateful they got. Which could be pretty hateful. When they awoke from their nap he organized a game of gravity-tag in the treadmill, hoping to tire them out. When they still wouldn't tire he took them on a tour of the ship. By the time it was their bedtime he realized it was also his own; he had never before understood how wearying taking care of small children could be for an adult, or anyway a near-adult, like himself.

When he woke up it was because his parents were calling him. "I thought we'd all have breakfast together for a change," his mother said, smiling at him. "Things are almost getting back to normal."

Breakfast was no different from any other meal except that they had porridge instead of stew, but what was different was the atmosphere. His father was relaxed for the first time since their defrosting. "The flare star's dying out," he told his son. "We're watching it pretty closely—there are some funny things about it."

Viktor always had permission to ask for explanations. "Funny how, Dad?" he asked, settling down for one of those wonderful father-and-son talks he remembered from the old days. His father was one of those priceless few who didn't think little children should ever be told "You'll understand when you're older." Pal Sorricaine always explained things to his son. (So did Amelia Sorricaine-Memel, but other things, and not as interesting to Viktor.) Some of the things Pal had explained as he tucked his son in, instead of telling silly children's stories about the three bears, were the Big Bang, the CNO hydrogen-to-helium cycle that made stars burn, the aging of galaxies, the immensity of the expanding universe. Of course, Amelia had interesting technical things to talk about, too, but her specialty was physics and mechanics. Things like entropy and the Carnot efficiency of heat engines weren't nearly as wondrous to a child as the stories of the stars they were wandering among.

This time Viktor was disappointed. All his father said was, "It just doesn't match any of the known profiles of flare stars. It might be a nova, but it's a funny one. It's got two big jets. Matter of fact. I've sent a report to the International Astronomical Society about it—who knows, they may even name it after me as a new class of objects!"

"They ought to," Viktor said decisively, pleased because his father looked pleased too—almost as pleased as he was puzzled. But his father shook his head.

"It'll be twenty years before they hear it and another twenty before they acknowledge, remember?" he said. "Anyway, it looks as though we can handle the navigation."

"Maybe," Viktor's mother said.

"Well, yes, maybe," his father conceded. "There's always a maybe." He pushed aside his empty porridge bowl and took a deep swallow of the one cup of coffee he was allowed each day. Fifth Officer Pal Sorricaine was a plump, smooth-faced, blue-eyed man with a cheery disposition. He smiled often. He was smiling now, though with a little quizzical twist of the lip to acknowledge the "maybe." He had close-cropped pale hair, and he ran his hand over it as he gazed benignly at his son. "Marie-Claude says you've been a sweetheart about her kids," he said.

Viktor shrugged, scowling into his bowl.

"Got a case on her, have you?" his father asked, grinning. "I can't say I blame you."

"Pal!" his wife warned.

Sorricaine relented. "I was only teasing you a little, Vik," he apologized. "Don't be touchy, okay? Anyway, I think we can go back in the deep freeze in a day or two, after all. So if there's anything you specially want to do on the ship this time …"

Viktor made a face. "What is there to do?"

"Not much," Pal Sorricaine agreed. "Still—have you taken a good look at the ship? It's changed a lot since we took off, you know. And you'll never see it this way again."

Later on, being a surly "sweetheart" once more for Marie-Claude Stockbridge, Viktor was minding the kids in a roughhouse game of catch. After a wildly thrown ball had bounced around a corner of the passage and hit one of the maintenance crew in the face, Viktor remembered what his father had said. "Enough ball playing," he announced. "I want to show you something."

"What?" Freddy demanded, wresting the ball away from his brother.

"You'll see. Come on."

Viktor's parents were both at work, so he had the little room uncontested. For a wonder, the Stockbridge brothers were reasonably quiet as Viktor turned on the screen and found the menu for exterior real-time observation.

It took him a little experimentation before he was able to lock onto the view he wanted, but then he had it.

New Mayflower was a ramshackle contraption. You could have held it together with string—it would never experience any strong forces to tear it apart—and the designers pretty nearly did. The bits and pieces of it were random, irregular objects, but the screen clearly showed the vast bulk of the light sail, half deployed.

Even the little kids knew about the light sail. To travel from star to star took vast amounts of energy. The antimatter mass thrusters were not enough. Light sails had helped lift Mayflower out of the gravity well of the Sun's attraction, using the Sun's own endless flood of photons to help thrust it away. The same light sail was now already half deployed to use the light of the new star to help slow the ship down. There it was, fanning out from the ship like a huge frail ruff of silver—but only halfway deployed. "Look at it," he commanded.

"It's crooked," Freddy announced.

"You're crooked," Billy told him. "Give me my ball!"

"Yes, give him the damn ball," Viktor gritted.

"It isn't his."

"It is so!"

"No, it's mine, because you lost it and I found it. Finders keepers!"

"Well, I don't have it anyway," Freddy lied, concealing the ball as he ducked behind Viktor. "It's home."

"It isn't home! I see it—"

"Will you two shut up about the stinking ball?" Viktor roared. "Here, let me show you where we're going."

"I don't want to see where we're going," Billy whined, but Viktor was already adjusting the image. Now it was direct line of sight—toward the "stern" of the ship, naturally, because Mayflower had long since been turned around so the main engines could thrust in the direction that would slow it down. It wasn't a very good picture. Around the edges the stars were bright, ten thousand of them or more, hues from firebox red to sapphire and white, and the ghostly pale haze of the Milky Way washing out one corner of the screen. But the center of the picture wasn't very clear. The optical overload sensors dimmed the flare star enough to let the others show, but the haze of ions streaming from the drive jets fuzzed everything. Including the star they were heading for. "That's it," Viktor said. "Right under that bright one."

"I can't see it," Billy whined. "I want a Coca-Cola."

"A what?"

"A Coca-Cola. It's a drink. I saw it on television. I want one."

"Well, I don't have one," Viktor said, "and if I did your mother probably wouldn't want you to—oh, my God."

The boys stopped whining and looked up anxiously at him. "What is it?" Freddy demanded, apprehensive.

"Nothing," he said, staring at the view he had just succeeded in tuning in on the screen. "No, it's nothing. It's just that I, well, I kind of forgot. I forgot that half the ship would be gone by now," Viktor said.

When New Mayflower left Low Earth Orbit to begin its long journey to a new home, it was six years behind New Ark. And even before it pulled out of Low Earth Orbit the skeleton of New Argosy was beginning to take shape behind it. The three interstellar ships, combined, had a single assignment: to populate a world, and thus to establish a bridgehead for the human race in its long-term destiny of seeding the entire galaxy with people.

That was a pretty fantastic idea, even for bumptious humans. But the project wasn't purely a fantasy. It could be done. The whole human total on all three ships came to under four thousand people. But human beings are really good at procreating. In two or three centuries, if they put their minds to it, the population of the new planet could be bigger than that of bulging old Earth itself.

Practicality wasn't the question.

The question (and some asked it) was: Why? Why travel a hundred years and more to people another planet with human beings, when the Solar System already had enough of them for any reasonable need?

Really, there was only one answer to the question of why anyone would want to colonize the new world, and that answer was: Because it was there. Newmanhome wasn't only there, it had life; the long-ago probe, no bigger than a washing machine, had established that definitely as it sped through the new solar system. The proof was that the presence of reactive gases in the planet's atmosphere showed that it was a reduced-entropy world. The reactive gases in its air hadn't reacted with each other. Something was keeping them from doing so, and thus attaining chemical equilibrium. And the only thing that could do that was the only known antientropic force in the universe: Life.

Oh, not human life. Not even anything technological—the probe had detected no signs of radio, industry, cities—nothing like that. But there was an atmosphere with oxygen and water vapor, and so human people (they were nearly sure) would be able to live there.

So New Ark was designed and (oh, after a terrible amount of argument and delay; Viktor hadn't even been born then, but his father had told him about it) even funded and built. And even before it was finished New Mayflower had been begun.

Each ship was purpose-designed, and the purposes were slightly different—Ark had to be self-sufficient, Mayflower would have the advantage of Ark's colonists already there. Also, by the time they began assembling Mayflower the state of the art had leaped a generation ahead, so the two ships didn't look much alike. Ark was only a squat cylinder. Mayflower, with many added refinements, was longer and narrower. It started out 450 feet long and 90 feet in diameter at its widest point—it was more lozenge-shape than cylindrical—and once in orbit around the new planet its duties would have just begun. It would stay in orbit around Newmanhome indefinitely, to microwave power down to the colonies. (And, of course, Argosy, a generation more advanced still, would actually land on the planet!—but that was many years in the future, because the funding battles had begun all over again. The building of Argosy was still going on, but at a snail's pace.)

The ships all had one thing in common, though. To travel through interstellar space, each of them had to eat part of itself.

So the new shape of his ship was startling to Viktor. His eyes refused to recognize it. Mayflower was far shorter and stubbier than when last he had seen it, ten decades earlier. The long mass thruster, shaped like a skinny tulip, stuck straight out from the back of the ship where once it had been almost completely within the fabric of the ship itself.

To power its flight to the new star, Mayflower had fed more than half of itself into the plasma reactors already.

The string ball of fuel—twisted cables, thick as girders, of antimatter iron—had unraveled and reacted with the normal steel structure that had once enclosed it. The normal iron and the antimatter iron destroyed each other to produce the vast flood of charged particles that drove the ship.

Of course, not all the real iron in the ship was annihilated in the suicide pact with the anti-iron. Even interstellar travel didn't need that much energy. Most of the normal iron simply flashed into plasma and streamed out the thrust nozzles as reaction mass. There was no mystical reason why the normal matter had to be iron, either—iron didn't need anti-iron for the two to annihilate each other; it was just what was easiest to spare.

It was a very efficient reaction. Much better than that pathetic "atomic power" the old people used to use.

It is always true that e = mc², all right, but it is not easy to get all of the e out of the m. The sort of nuclear power plant that human beings built in the late twentieth century had a lot of mass left over when its reactions were complete. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the fuel mass remained mass and stubbornly refused to turn into energy at all.

But when antimatter reacts with an equal amount of normal matter no mass whatever is left. It isn't only a tenth of a percent of the mass that becomes driving force when you react normal matter with its antiparticles. It is all of it.

By the fourth day after Viktor's unplanned defrosting, the crew of Mayflower had gotten over their first heart-stopping fear. The flare star showed signs of dimming. The situation didn't seem critical, exactly. Puzzling, yes: Why had a very ordinary little K-5 star suddenly blossomed into flame? But it didn't seem to be life-threatening.

As panic subsided to surprised resentment aboard the New Mayflower, and then as the resentment changed to the work of coping with the consequences, Viktor Sorricaine's days became routine. Everybody's did. Fifth (Navigator) Officer Pal Sorricaine stopped being a navigator so he could become an astrophysicist, since one of his CalTech degrees had been on the dynamics of stellar cores. That was what was needed. The problem wasn't just how to rig the light sails and decide how much thrust to order from the deceleration engines, it was to predict how long the flare would last—and precisely what its curve toward extinction would be.

For that even Viktor's father's skills weren't quite enough, so they defrosted Mayflower's best astrophysical brain. And so Frances Mtiga (three months, or you could say ninety-odd years, pregnant) woke up, blinking, to find a dandy dissertation problem facing her.

When she was thawed and bathed and fed and dressed Pal Sorricaine sat her before a screen and punched up the relevant menu for her. "This is what we've got on the flare star, Frances," he said. "I've filed it under NEWFLARE, and here are all the relevant studies I've been able to find—they're under FLARECITES—and this is the preliminary report that I sent back to Earth. That file's marked TENTATIVE. Maybe I should have called it GUESSWORK. It doesn't matter much anyway, Fanny. By the time any of this gets to Earth and back we'll be getting ready to land on the new planet."

"Or we won't," Frances Mtiga said dourly, rubbing her belly for reassurance as she studied the citation file.

"Or we won't," Pal Sorricaine agreed, grinning. "But there isn't any real reason to doubt that we will, Fanny. It looks like it's an interesting problem in astrophysics, that's all. Not any real threat to the mission. Anyway, we just won't go back into the freezer until we've got the whole thing studied out and under control."

Mtiga sighed, scratching her belly again. It was barely beginning to round out. "We'll give it as long as it takes," she said fretfully. "But tell me, Pal, don't you think my husband's going to have a surprise when he wakes up and finds he has a ten-year-old kid?"

Indeed it began to look that way. The astrophysical information stored in New Mayflower's databank was comprehensive, but there wasn't much that was useful on flaring K-5 stars, because K-5 stars of that spectral type had never previously been observed to flare that way.

Viktor happily shared his father's puzzlement, all the more happily because no one expected him to solve the conundrum of the flare. His father was less lucky. He laid out the latest stretch of film to show his son, scowling at it. Although Viktor knew that it was supposed to be a spectrum, because his father had told him so, the film wasn't in color. It wasn't a rainbow. "It's a spectrogram, Vik," his father explained. "It shows the frequencies of the light from a star, or anything else. The diffraction grating bends the light, but the different frequencies bend to different amounts. The shorter the wavelength, the more it bends, so the red end doesn't get bent very much and the violet bends way over to here. Well, actually," he corrected himself, "this end is really the far ultraviolet, and down here is infrared. We can't see them with our eyes, but the film, can … Only it's not a very good spectrogram," he finished, scowling again. "That grating's been out there for a hundred years, and all that time it's been bombarded with gases and fine particles of interstellar dust. The lines are blurred, do you see?"

"I guess so," Viktor said, peering uncertainly at the ribbon of grayed lines. "Can you fix it?"

"I can put a new one in," his father said, and displayed the thing he meant. It was a curved bit of metal, as long as Viktor's forearm, the shape of a watermelon rind when the flesh has been eaten away. His father handled it with care, showing Viktor the infinite narrow lines that had been ruled onto its concave face.

Well, that part was pretty exciting—it meant someone would have to suit up and crawl out onto the skin of New Mayflower to pull the fuzzed grating out and put the new one in—anyway, it would have been exciting, if Viktor had seen it. To his annoyance it all happened while he was asleep. By the time he knew it was over his father was pondering over a newer, sharper, but still baffling spectrogram.

"Christ," he grumbled, "look at the thing. It looks like that star's spilling its guts two ways at once. Only Doppler interferometry doesn't show any increase in diameter, so it's not a nova-type explosion. So what is it?"

No one expected Viktor to answer that question. They did expect it of his father and of Frances Mtiga, but the astrophysicists didn't know the answer either. Every day they checked twenty-four hours of observations, which the computer matched against the latest revised models Sorricaine and Mtiga had prepared to draw its best-fit curves. And every day the fit wasn't really good enough.

"But it's going to be all right, Pal," Viktor's mother told her husband. The three of them, for once, were having dinner together in the big refectory. "I mean, isn't it? There's plenty of fuel. You can just shove the ship around on the drive and forget about the sails, can't you?"

"Sure we could," Pal Sorricaine said absently. "Oh, we'll get there all right, I guess."

"Then—"

"But it's not very goddamn elegant!" he barked.

Viktor understood what his father meant. The wondrous thing about astrophysics was that the more you learned, the better everything fit together. Things didn't get more complicated, they got more breathtakingly clear. In Pal's view (as in the view of all scientists) oddball events spoiled the symmetry of the laws that ruled the universe. They were a disgrace that could only be repaired by figuring out how, after all, they did fit. "Anyway," Pal Sorricaine said after a moment, "there's a price tag on this thing. That fuel's not just supposed to get us there. It's going to power industry and stuff. The more we use, the more we're stealing from our future." And that was true enough, because when Mayflower was just a hulk in orbit the colony would need the microwaves it would be beaming down to the surface. "But mostly it's not elegant," he said again dismally. "We're supposed to know all about these things. And we don't!"

They defrosted a mathematician named Jahanjur Singh to help them out, but Viktor could tell from the way his father kept staring into space that it wasn't helping enough. Still, Viktor found with pleasure that his parents had time to relax with their son. Amelia kept as busy as Pal—her own specialty of thermodynamic engineering wasn't very relevant, but at least she could run a computer for the astrophysical team—but still there were times when they all played tag together in the centrifuge; they watched tapes of Earthly TV together; they even cooked fudge together, one night, and Viktor's mother didn't stop him however much he ate.

Viktor was no fool. He could tell that there was something on his parents' minds that went beyond the astrophysical problem and the navigation of the ship, but he expected they would tell him about it when they were ready. Meanwhile he had the ship to explore. With so few humans awake, he had a lot of freedom to do it in. Even Captain Bu tolerated his exploration.

Before he was frozen Viktor had been pretty much afraid of Captain Bu Wengzha. It took him a while after defrosting to get over the feeling, too, because Captain Bu wasn't happy about the jawbone course corrections he had to make when he was thawed out himself. New Mayflower was, after all, his ship.

Captain Bu was the oldest man aboard Mayflower—well, to be accurate, he wasn't anymore; he'd spent more than eighty years frozen, daring the odds to be thawed out for a while every decade to make sure the ship was shipshape in all its myriad parts. People like Wanda Mei had had their biological clocks running much longer than he. Bu was still biologically fifty-two, with a wide, strong-toothed mouth in a wide, plump face the color of the beach sand at Malibu. He had no hair on his head at all, but he had carefully cultivated a wispy beard. Most of the time he didn't smile. He didn't smile when things were going smoothly, because that was simply the way they were supposed to go, and he certainly didn't smile when Fifth Officer Sorricaine came apologetically to the bridge to tell him that that day's sail-setting order, still in the process of being carried out, had to be revised because the flare's light pressure hadn't fallen off quite the way the model predicted.

Peering over the captain's shoulder in one of those discussions, trying to be invisible so as not to be sent off the bridge, Viktor looked wonderingly at the sail. It spread out in an untidy sprawl at the bow of the ship—which was now, of course, its stern—like a drop cloth for untidy house painters. Only it was not meant to catch spilled paint, but photons. The sail was almost more nuisance than it was worth, except that, of course, everything on New Mayflower was designed to serve at least two purposes and some of the sail's later purposes made it, in sum, very worthwhile. The trouble with it now was that at stellar distances there weren't very many photons for it to catch.

The film of the sail was tough, tricky stuff. It was "one-way" plastic, and it weighed very little. But to keep it spread at all, with the dynamic force of the ship's engines tearing at it, it needed a lot of structural support; nearly a quarter of its mass went into the struts and cables that spread it at the right orientation (complex to figure, because the thrust on the sail varied with the square of the cosine of the angle it made with the source, doubly complex because there were many sources), and the motors that changed the orientation as needed. Even so, the sail's contribution to Mayflower's acceleration and deceleration could be measured only in tiny fractions of one millimeter per second squared.

But those tiny delta-Vs all added up, when you had to bring a vast ship from near relativistic velocities to relative rest in just the place you wanted to insert it into orbit. So the varying flux from the flare star mattered a lot to Captain Bu, and to everyone on the ship.

Captain Bu wasn't always fierce. He turned out to have a weakness for kids—at least, as long as there weren't very many of them to get in the way. He not only didn't chase Viktor from the bridge, he actually encouraged him to visit there. He even tolerated the Stockbridge boys there—for brief periods, until they began acting up, and always with Viktor clearly understanding that his life was held hostage if the kids got in trouble.

Captain Bu even joined Viktor and the two boys in the gravity drum, laughing and shouting, his wispy beard flying about—and then afterward, when they were all cleaned up and hungry, he shared almond-flavored bean-curd sweets with them out of his private stock. Viktor didn't like the bean curd much, but he did like the captain. Captain Bu was a lot better than the teaching machines (though not really, Viktor was loyal enough to believe, as good as his own father) at explaining things.

When the bean curd was finished and the boys made less sticky, he showed Viktor and the Stockbridge kids just where everything was. "This is my ship," he said, putting a spoon on the table before him, "and Freddy's plate there is the star we're heading for, six point eight light-years away. It has an astronomical name, but we just call it Sun. Like the one we left." He made a fist and held it in the air over the table. "And my hand is the flare star, about five light-years from us, about four point six from the destination, and here"—another spoon—"is the Ark, maybe a tenth of a light-year from landing. They've already felt the radiation. It comes at a bad time for them, velocities are getting critical, but it won't bother them much, I think. They're a lot farther from the flare than from the new Sun."

"Where's home?" Freddy Stockbridge piped.

"Shut up," Viktor said, but Captain Bu shook his head forgivingly.

He bared those big white teeth at the boy. "That is home, boy," he said, tapping Freddy's plate. "The place we're going to. I know when you said that you meant Earth, though—well, that's back somewhere by the door."

And as Freddy turned to look at the door he saw his mother standing there, hesitant to invade the captain's quarters until Bu nodded to her to come in.

"Captain," Marie-Claude Stockbridge said, nodding. She looked very beautiful—as always, Viktor told himself yearningly. "Viktor dear, how are you? Are my little wretches giving you any trouble today, Captain?"

"Not a bit, Dr. Stockbridge," Captain Bu told her stiffly. Now in the presence of an adult the smile was gone. "I do have to go back to the bridge, though," he mentioned, and nodded them out of his room. Marie-Claude looked wryly back at the closed door.

"Doesn't he like you?" one of her sons asked.

"Captain Fu Manchu doesn't let himself like grown-ups. He puts up with a lot from you two, though," Marie-Claude told her sons, and then had to explain who Fu Manchu was.

"He was showing us where all the stars and ships and things were," Freddy volunteered. "Viktor said he was going to tell us why messages take so long, but he didn't."

"Oh," Marie-Claude said, "that's easy enough. See, the star flared about five years ago, and the light reached the ship just a week or so ago, that's when they started reviving us. And then—"

"Excuse me," Viktor interrupted. "I have to go home now."

Of course, he didn't, really. His reasons were quite different. He just didn't want Marie-Claude explaining things to him as though he were a child.

Not even the hope of an ultimate fleshly reward—well, another kiss, anyway—could make Viktor Sorricaine tend to the Stockbridge boys in all of his free time. True, his main hope was so faint and improbable that he hardly dared admit even to himself, but that wasn't what made him hide from them. The boys caused that all by themselves. They were simply unbearable. Viktor was amazed at the troubles they could get into, and even more amazed at the energy stored up in those small bodies to do it with. No twelve-year-old has ever remembered what he himself was like at five.

So, with the boys at least temporarily in the custody of their mother, Viktor arranged to keep it that way by getting out of sight. After a little thought he headed for the most remote habitable part of the ship, the freezatorium.

"Habitable" was almost too strong a word. The narrow aisles between the frost-clouded crystal coffins were freezing cold. The crystal was a good thermal insulator, but the liquid-gas cold inside each casket had had a hundred years to chill through it. Each casket was rimed with hoarfrost. The air was deliberately kept dryer than comfort would suggest in that section of the ship—Viktor could feel his throat getting raw as he breathed it—but even those faint residual traces of water vapor had condensed out on the crystal.

Although Viktor had had the forethought to borrow a long-sleeved sweater of his mother's, it wasn't enough. He had no clothes warm enough for that place. As he tiptoed along the corridors he was shivering violently.

He rubbed some of the frost off one of the caskets with the sleeve of the sweater. Inside was a woman alone, dark-skinned, her eyes closed but her mouth open, looking as though she were trying to scream. The card in the holder at the corner of the casket said Accardo, Elisavetta (Agronomist—plant breeder), but Viktor had never seen that woman before, or heard that name. Likely enough she was one of the ones already in the freezer by the time his parents joined the ship.

And he wasn't much interested in thinking about her, either. The cold was getting serious. It would be better even to face the Stockbridge boys again than to stay here, he thought.

As he turned to hurry back through the double thermal doors, he heard his name called. "Viktor! What are you doing here, dressed like that? Are you crazy?"

It was Wanda Mei, furred and gauntleted, her old eyes peering out at him over a thick scarf that wound over her head and across the lower part of her face. Viktor greeted her uneasily. He didn't particularly want to see Wanda Mei; he had been making a point of avoiding her, because it gave him an uneasy feeling in his stomach to know that this decrepit human wreck had once been his bouncy playmate. "Well," she said, "as long as you're here you can give me a hand. We'll have to put some more clothes on you, though." And she tugged him down to a bend in the corridor where it widened out to a little workshop. From a locker she pulled out a furred jacket like her own and furred overshoes and a soft, warmly lined helmet that came down over his ears, and then she set him to work.

Her job had been tugging some of the huge crystal caskets out of their wall racks, setting them in place at the workshop. Empty, they weren't heavy, but Viktor's help was welcome. "Why are we doing this?" he asked.

"For the people that are going into the freezer again, of course," she said crossly. "What, are you too weak to help me? I was doing it myself until you came along, an old woman like me." And indeed the work was mostly just awkward. "That one," she said, pointing to one already stacked, "that one was yours, Viktor. For you and your family. How did you like it, all those years you slept there?"

He swallowed, looking at it without joy. "Are we going to be frozen again?"

"Not right away, no, not you; that's why yours is on the bottom. But before long, I think. This one here, this is for the Stockbridges; they go back in about three days, I think."

"In three days?"

She sighed. "It is my hearing that should be weakening, not yours. Can't you understand me? The emergency is over, they say, so the extra people can be corpsicles again." She looked at him, then softened. "Ah, are you worrying?"

"You told me to worry!"

She smiled, then apologized. "If I am frightened, that is my business. I didn't mean to scare you. You've already been frozen once, and survived. Was it so bad?"

"I don't remember," Viktor said truthfully. All he remembered was being given a tiny shot that caused him to fall asleep, with the freezer technicians hovering reassuringly around him; and then waking up again. Whatever had happened in between had happened without his consciousness present to observe.

He worked silently with ancient Wanda Mei for a while, doing as he was told but thinking about Marie-Claude going back into the freezer. A thought had occurred to him. He would, he calculated, be sure to gain at least a few days on her by staying unfrozen longer than she. If only there were some way of prolonging that time— If he could stay thawed and living on the ship until it landed— Why, then he would be almost her own age, even old enough to be taken seriously by her!

That thought, however, still left the problem of her husband unsolved. "Hell," he said, softly but aloud, and Wanda looked at him.

"You're tired," she said, which wasn't true, "and you're cold—" which certainly was. "Well, we've done enough; thank you for your help, Viktor." And then, back in the warm part of the ship, she thought for a moment and then said: "Do you like books, Viktor? I have some in my room."

"There are plenty of books in the library," he pointed out.

"These are my books. Kid's books," she amplified. "From when I was your age. I've just kept them. You can borrow them if you want."

"Maybe some time," Viktor said vaguely.

She looked cross. "Why not this time? Come on, you haven't seen my room."

Indeed he hadn't. Actually, he didn't much want to now. There wasn't any real reason for that, only the kind of queasy, uneasy feeling that Wanda gave him. It wasn't just that she was old. He'd seen plenty of old people—well, not usually as old as Wanda, of course; but for a twelve-year-old anyone past thirty is pretty much in the same general age cohort anyway. Wanda was different. She was both old and his own age, and seeing her reminded Viktor, in terms he could not ignore, that one day he, too, would have wrinkles and age spots on the backs of his hands and graying hair. She was his future displayed for him, and unwelcome. It shattered his child's confidence that he would remain a child.

He entered Wanda's room diffidently. It smelled terrible. He saw that it wasn't in any way like the one Viktor shared with his parents. It had started out identical, of course—every room on the ship was basically the same standard cubicle, since each one would become a separate landing pod when the colonists arrived at their destination—but over a hundred years she had decorated it and painted it and added bits of furnishings and knickknacks that were her own … and it had one bit of furnishing that Viktor had not at all expected and saw with astonished delight.

Wanda Mei had a cat!

The cat's name was Robert, a whole tom who was, Wanda said, nearly twenty years old. "He won't last any longer than I will," she said, sighing as she sat down. The cat stalked toward her, then soared into her lap, but she gave him a quick stroke and handed him generously to Viktor. "You hold him while I find the books," she ordered. Viktor was glad to oblige. The old cat turned around twice in his lap and then allowed his back to be stroked, nuzzling his whiskery cheek contentedly into Viktor's belly.

Viktor was almost sorry when Wanda produced the books. But they were grand. She had Tom Sawyer and Two Little Savages and Mistress Masham's Repose and a dozen others—worn, dog-eared, the bindings sometimes cracked, but still entirely readable.

Only the catbox smell of the room began to get to him. He stood.

"I have to go now," he announced. She looked surprised but didn't object. "Thank you for the books," he remembered to say, politely. She nodded.

And then, as he reached the door, he asked the question that had been on his mind all along. "Wanda? Why did you do it?"

"Why did I do what?" she demanded crossly.

"Why did you let yourself get old?"

She glared at him. "What impudence, Viktor! And what a question! Everyone gets old, that is what human beings do. You will get old, too!"

"But I'm not old now," he pointed out reasonably.

"You are not even grown-up enough to be courteous!" Then she said, softening, "Well, I told you. I was afraid. I didn't want to die … only," she sighed, "it appears that I am going to die before very long anyway. I did want to see the new planet, Viktor. All the planets. Nebo and the one we're going to live on, Enki. What they call Newmanhome. And Ishtar and Nergal—"

"And Marduk and Ninih," he finished for her. Everyone knew the names of the planets in the system they would live in. "Yes. But why don't you—"

"Why don't I get frozen now, after all?" she demanded bitterly. "Because now it's too late, Viktor. What would they do with an old useless woman when we land? What would my husband do?"

Viktor stared at her. He hadn't known she had ever had a husband.

"Oh," she said, nodding. "Yes, I was married once. For seven years, while Thurhan was thawed out for his turn at engineering duty. Why do you think my name is Mei now? But we didn't have any children, and he went back into the freezer, when his tour was over, and when he wakes up again what would he want with a wife older than his grandmother? And besides—"

She hesitated, looking at him sadly. "And besides," she finished, "I'm still afraid."

He spent the rest of the day alone, reading. When he got to the refectory for the evening meal almost everyone was there, looking excited. The rumor was now fact. The emergency crews weren't needed anymore, and they were being sent back to cryonic storage.

Most people looked pleased at the word that the emergency was over, but Viktor's mother wasn't looking pleased, and his father looked abashed. All the feelings of the last days came back to Viktor. Something had been kept from him. "What's the matter?" he demanded, alarmed.

"I had to make a decision," Pal Sorricaine said reluctantly. "See, I'm going to stay awake for a while, Viktor. Not long—well, maybe not long; it's too soon to tell. But they need an astronomer-navigator to keep an eye on the flare star, and I guess I'm it."

Viktor pondered, blinking. "You mean my mother and I are going to be frozen, but you're not?"

"It'll be all right, Vik," his mother put in. "For us, anyway. For your father, well—well, perhaps it will only be for a few months. Or a couple of years at the outside—don't you think, Pal?" she appealed, turning to his father.

"I'll do it as soon as I can," he promised. "After all, the flight's got sixteen years to go—I don't want to wind up that much older than you!"

Across the room, Werner Stockbridge was whispering in his wife's ear when he caught sight of Viktor. He detached himself and burrowed through the crowded hall, aiming a friendly slap, or pat, at his son, Billy, on the way. He lowered his head to Viktor's level and said confidentially, "You're just the man I'm looking for, Viktor. Do me a favor?"

"Sure, Mr. Stockbridge," Viktor said at once, though his tone was doubtful.

"Take the kids off our hands for a while, will you? I mean, we're going back in the deep freeze in a little while and—and Marie-Claude and I need a little private time first, if you know what I mean."

Viktor flushed and looked away, because he did know. "Okay, Vik?" Stockbridge persisted. Viktor nodded without looking up. "Give us an hour then, all right? Two would be better—say, two hours, and I'll owe you a favor."

Viktor checked ship's time on the wall clock: 1926 hours. Without very good feelings about it, partly because of the thought of two hours with the Stockbridge kids, mostly because of the thought of what the elder Stockbridges would be doing with those two hours, he led the boys to his own family's room and turned on the teaching machine. "I'm going to show you where we're going," he promised.

Freddy looked startled. "Heaven? You mean because we're going to die? Mrs. Mei said—"

"You're not going to die, and it doesn't matter what Mrs. Mei said," Viktor told them sourly. "I mean I'm going to show you the planets. Look," he said as the blue-white one flashed on the screen. "That's where we're going to live."

"I know," Billy said, bored. "It's called Newmanhome, but its real name is Enki. It's just like the Earth."

"It isn't just like the Earth. The days are a little bit shorter, and the year is a lot shorter."

"Dummy," Billy said scornfully. "How can a year be shorter than a year?"

"It is, though. There are twice as many years there." He tried to explain, and when he had, more or less, succeeded, they were first appalled, then delighted.

"Twice as many birthdays!" Billy caroled.

"Twice as many Christmases!" his brother shouted. "Show us some more planets!"

But really they weren't much interested in baked little Nebo, so close to its sun, or the far-out Marduk and Ninih. And when Viktor showed them the glowing coal of Nergal, squat and cherry red, and told them it was a brown dwarf, they rebelled. "It isn't brown," Billy pointed out. "It's red."

"It's called a brown dwarf. That's its name, because it's almost a star, but not quite. You see," he lectured, having listened to his father's explanations a few nights earlier, "a star has nuclear energy, like a bomb."

"What's a bomb?" Billy asked.

"Like our ship's drive, I mean. A planet is just like rock and things. But in between a star and a planet there are these other things. They don't have nuclear energy. They're only hot because they're so big that they're all squeezed together."

"It's dumb to call them brown when they're red," Freddy said, siding with his brother. "Viktor, have you got a crush on our mother?"

Viktor stopped short, suddenly flushed and angry. "Have I what?" he demanded.

"Have you got a crush on her?" Freddy insisted. "Mrs. Mei says boys get crushes on older women and you follow Mom around all the time."

"Now you're being really stupid, if you want to know what's stupid," Viktor said furiously, gritting his teeth. "Don't ever say anything like that again."

"We won't if you'll play treadmill tag with us," Billy promised, grinning in triumph. "And you have to be It!"

Dinner the next night was a sort of ceremonial affair, a goodbye party for the ones who were going back into the deep freeze. Captain Bu gave a short speech and the chef, Sam Broad—he was really a food chemist, but he was the best cook on the ship, too—had made four big cakes with icing that said Till We Meet Again. Pal Sorricaine was especially attentive to his wife and son that night. He kept one hand in hers all through the meal, so that they both had to eat one-handed, and he told Viktor all sorts of stories about astrophysics. When he got to the point of how the Big Bang had created only hydrogen and helium, so that all the rest of the elements had to be cooked in the cores of stars that then exploded and scattered them around to form new stars and planets the Stockbridge boys crept near to listen. And when he pointed out the logical deduction from that—"So you see, most of your body—all the oxygen and carbon and nitrogen and calcium and everything—all of it was once inside a star"—they said respectively, "Oh, wow!" and "Yuk! But that isn't in the Bible, is it?"

Pal Sorricaine grinned at them. "The Bible's one thing," he told them, in full lecturing swing. "Science is another. Even scientists think about Heaven and Hell, though. Did you ever hear of a man named Arthur Eddington? Well, he was the first one to figure out what the temperature inside the core of a star had to be in order to cook all those heavier elements out of hydrogen. Only when he published his figures some other scientists told him he was wrong, because it wasn't hot enough to do the job. So Eddington told them to go look for a hotter place."

He looked at the uncomprehending faces expectantly. "It was a kind of way of telling them to go to Hell," he explained.

"Oh," Billy said, deciding to laugh.

"Dr. Sorricaine?" Freddy said. "Hell's hot like Wanda says, isn't it? So if we get frozen that can't be Hell, can it?"

By the time Pal Sorricaine, startled, had reassured the boy, their parents came to take them away, and Viktor and his parents went to their own cabin. As his father tucked him in Viktor asked. "Dad? Are you really going to do it?"

His father nodded.

"For just a little while?" Viktor persisted.

His father paused before answering. "I can't say that for sure," he said at last, reluctantly. "It depends. Viktor, this is kind of important to me. Any scientist wants to be the one that makes a big contribution. This is my chance. That flare star—well, there's nothing like it in the literature. Oh, they'll see it on Earth—but from long, long away, and we're right here. I want to be the one—well, one of the ones; Fanny Mtiga's involved, too—that they name it after. The 'Sorricaine-Mtiga objects.' How does that sound?"

"It sounds okay," Viktor told him. He wasn't content or happy about it, but he heard the tone in his father's voice. "Are you going to tell me a story tonight?"

"Sure am. I know," his father said. "Do you want me to tell you about some of the famous people before me? What they did? What they're remembered for?"

And when Viktor nodded, Pal Sorricaine began to talk about the men and women whose shoulders everyone stood on. About Henrietta Leavitt, the nineteenth-century Boston spinster who spent seventeen years studying Cepheid variables and found the first good way of measuring the size of the universe; of Harlow Shapley, who used her work to make the first nearly recognizable model of our own Galaxy; of Edwin Hubble, champion prizefighter turned astronomer, who found a way to employ supergiant stars in the way that Henrietta Leavitt had used Cepheids, thus extending the scale; of Vesto Slipher, who first linked red shifts with velocity and then with distance; of a dozen other forgotten names.

Then his father got to names Viktor had heard of. Albert Einstein? Oh, of course! Everybody knew about Albert Einstein. He was the—wait a minute—wasn't it relativity he discovered? And something about e equals m c squared? Right, Pal Sorricaine told him, hiding a smile, and that was the key to understanding why stars are hot—and to making atomic bombs and power plants, yes, and ultimately to designing the kind of matter-antimatter drive that was shoving New Mayflower on its way. And why the speed of light is always thirty million centimeters a second, no matter how fast the star—or spaceship—that emitted the light was going. New Mayflower might have been going a million centimeters a second, but that didn't mean that the light, or the radio waves, that went ahead of it to carry its picture and messages were traveling at 31 million cps; no, it was always the same. c never changed, and there was nothing anyone could do that would ever change that.

About then Viktor's mother came in with a glass of milk and a pill. "Why do I have to take a pill?" he asked.

"Just take it," she said quietly, affectionately. It occurred to Viktor that it might have something to do with getting ready to be frozen again, so he did as told and kissed her back when she bent to his face.

Then his father went on to the English Quaker, Arthur Eddington, the man who had figured out the connection between physics—stuff that people studied in laboratories on Earth—and the stars, the things that interested astronomers. You might even say, Pal Sorricaine told his son, that Eddington invented the science of astrophysics. Then there were Ernst Mach and Bishop Berkeley, and the geometers Gauss and Bolyai and Riemann and Lobachevski, and Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest; and Baade, Hoyle, Gamow, Bethe, Dicke, Wilson, Penzias, Hawking …

Long before he finished his recital Viktor was asleep.

He slept very soundly. He almost woke, half woke, to find he was being carried somewhere; and almost realized where he was being carried. But the pill had done its work, and he never opened his eyes … for sixteen more years.

When Viktor Sorricaine woke up again he was still twelve (or, you might say, very nearly a hundred and fifty), and the first feeling that flooded through him as he gazed up at the face of his father was joy, purest joy, for he had beaten the odds one more time.

The second feeling was not as good. The Pal Sorricaine who beamed down on him was graying and much thinner than the one who had stood by as he went to sleep. "You didn't get frozen at all," Viktor said to his father, accusingly, and his father looked surprised.

"Well, no, Viktor," he said. "I couldn't. We had to watch that star, and—well, anyway, we're all together again, aren't we? And we're there! We're landing! The first parties have already dropped down to the surface, and we'll be going as soon as our chutes are ready!"

"I see," Viktor said, not actually seeing. And then he remembered something. "I have to give Wanda's books back."

His father looked startled, then saddened. Before he even spoke Viktor understood that Wanda wasn't going to want them back, because she wasn't alive anymore. A chill ran through him, but he didn't really have time to think about it. The ship was incredibly noisy now. Not just the chattering of two or three hundred people, the ones already revived, the ones working to revive more, and the ones checking them over and getting them ready for the drop, but loud sounds of crashing and crunching and battering of metal to metal. The interior of the ship was being gutted, as it had been designed to be; the interior cubicles were being wrenched loose from their neighbors, since each one would be a capsule in which eight or ten human beings, or several tons of parts, machines, supplies, or other cargo would drop to the surface of the new planet. Viktor caught a glimpse of a surveillance camera, keeping an eye on crews outside the ship. He could see that the immense stretches of the light sail were deployed in a different way now. It was not one single vast expanse of film anymore, it was a dozen smaller segments, long narrow strips like the sails of a windmill, stiffened by the dynamics of rotation around the main body of the ship. That, he knew, was for greater efficiency in the orbit-insertion maneuver; but that phase was over. Now the sails were being furled and stowed, to shape into the four hundred parachutes that would slow the fall of the paradrop capsules that would carry everything useful on New Mayflower to the ground.

When he caught a glimpse of Marie-Claude Stockbridge he saw that she was weeping. Even weeping she looked desirable, but he could not bear the thought of her being in sorrow. "What is it?" Viktor asked his mother.

"Oh, it's Werner," his mother told him sadly. "Poor Marie-Claude! Werner didn't come out of the freezer. He's dead."