The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 27

In the middle of that feebly expiring universe, Wan-To suddenly felt almost young again. There was still nuclear fusion going on somewhere!

Then the last of the ancient memories fell into place, and his next thought was to curse himself.

He had been such a fool. Why hadn't he thought ahead? Why hadn't he planned for this? It would have been so easy for him to do this same trick on any scale he liked, to send whole galaxies of stars off in the long-term storage of fast-as-light travel, so that he would have billions upon billions of them ready for his use in this time of his need!

For that matter, why hadn't he built some sort of homing impulse into the matter-doppel's instructions, so that they could have returned to normal space nearby?

The list of charges Wan-To could make against himself had suddenly become almost endless, but he gave up on them as common sense reasserted itself. Self-recrimination wasn't really Wan-To's style. Anyway he had more exciting things to think about.

Yes, yes, the memories were clear. There were twelve stars, and they were still alive! Still even young! And all his!

True, they had been somewhat depleted by the drain of energies that had been needed to send them hurtling across the universe, and certainly they were now a terribly long way away—but they were his. He searched eagerly through his specific memories of that offhand action. There was not much there, but he was certain that some of them had billions of years yet to go even on the main sequence—then they would be long-lived dwarfs for much longer than that.

Cheerful for the first time in many eons, Wan-To began the task of planning how to make use of this wholly unexpected new gift.