The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 4

The innocent bystander named Pal Sorricaine was now (biologically) in his sixties. That was a lot, compared to his wife's biological thirty-eight, but he still had youth enough to do his duty by the colony. Accordingly, when Viktor was (again biologically, anyway) fourteen, his mother provided him with a sibling.

Viktor had some trouble welcoming the thing. It was female. It was also tiny and noisy at all hours of the day and night; and, in Viktor's view, it was very ugly.

For reasons Viktor could not understand, the wretched look of the thing didn't seem to worry his mother. It didn't put his father off it, either. They held it and fondled it and fed it, just as though it were beautiful. They didn't even appear to mind the bad smells it made when it fouled itself, as it did often.

Its name was Edwina. "Don't call her an 'it,' either," Viktor's mother commanded. "Call her by her name."

"I don't like her name. Why couldn't you call her Marie or something?"

"Because we picked Edwina. Why are you so crazy about the name Marie?"

"I'm not crazy about it. I just like it."

Amelia Sorricaine-Memel gave her son a thoughtful look but decided not to press the matter. "Marie's a pretty name," she conceded, "but it isn't hers."

"Ed-wee-na," Viktor sneered.

His mother grinned at him. She rumpled his hair fondly and offered a compromise. "You can call her Weeny if you want to, because she is kind of weeny. Now let me show you how to change her diaper."

Viktor gazed at his mother with teenage horror and despair. "Oh, God," he moaned. "As if I didn't have enough to do already!"

In fact he had plenty to do. Everybody did. Building a new colony wasn't just a challenge. It was work, and every colonist had to face the facts of frontier life.

The first fact of Viktor's new life had been the dwelling he and his parents were given to live in. It was a long, long way from the beach house in Malibu. It was bigger than the cubicle on Mayflower, but that was all you could say for it. It wasn't even a cubicle. It was a tent. More accurately it was three tents run together, each made out of several plies of the light-sail/parachute material, and all they had to furnish it with was a couple of beds—pallets, really; they had no springs—and some metal cupboards brought down from Mayflower. (Even those they would have to give up, they were warned, as soon as wood equivalents could be carpentered from the native vegetation. Until the new mines and smelters were fully operational, metal was precious.)

The second fact was time, also in short supply. In fact, there wasn't any of it. Every one of the skimpy daylight hours was filled—if not with work (farmhand, construction helper, general laborer; the kids who landed from Mayflower were at once put to work at whatever they could do), then with school. School wasn't any fun, either. Viktor was shoved into a class with thirty-two other kids of about his age, but they weren't a congenial lot. Half of them were from the first ship, seasoned and superior in the ways of the new planet, and very aware of their superiority, and the other half were greenhorns like himself. The two kinds didn't get along.

That situation the teacher would not tolerate. He was a tall, one-armed man named Martin Feldhouse, chronically short of breath. Short of patience, too. "There won't be any fighting in this school," he decreed, coughing. "You have to live together for the rest of your lives, so start out doing it. Line up in size places for your buddies."

The students stood up and reluctantly milled into order. Viktor wasn't sure how to take Martin Feldhouse; he had never seen a human being who was missing an arm before. The thing about Feldhouse was that he had gotten himself crushed under a truck of gravel out at the pit. Back on Earth, or even on the ship, he would have been patched up in no time. Not here. In this primitive place, at that early time, he had been too far from the medical facilities for immediate attention, and so when he got to the clinic the arm was too far gone to be saved, though the injuries to his chest and internal organs had been repaired. More or less repaired. Except for the persistent cough, anyway. When all his disabilities were added up the total pointed to the only job he was still fit for, so now he was a schoolteacher.

"Now count off," Feldhouse decreed. "When I point to you, say where you come from—Ship, or Home. You first!" And he pointed to the tallest boy, who promptly announced that he was Home, and so was the girl next behind him, but the one after that was from Mayflower and so she was paired with the first boy.

When they got down to Viktor his "buddy" was a girl named Theresa McGann. They looked at each other with speculative hostility, but took their seats together as instructed, while Feldhouse looked on the four unpaired planet-born children. "You four belong to me," he declared. "The rest of you are going to work together. You from the Ship, you teach your buddies as much as you can remember from what you got out of the teaching machines. You from Home, you teach geography and what the farms are like and everything else about what it's like here—what is it, what's your name?"

"I'm Viktor Sorricaine," Viktor announced, putting his hand down. "Why do you call this place 'Home'?"

"Because that's what it is," the teacher explained. "That's the first thing you all have to learn. This planet's name is Enki, according to the astronomers, but its right name is Newmanhome. We call it Home for short. From now on you only have one home, and this is it."

It had taken eight months for the last of the corpsicles in New Mayflower to be thawed, oriented, and paradropped to Newmanhome's surface. Most of that time was spent tearing the crew and cargo sections of the ship apart to make them into the modules that would carry everybody and everything down, and assembling the light-sail-parachutes and streamers that would keep the landing from being a catastrophe. The colonists already there welcomed the new arrivals, to be sure. They welcomed the cargoes each brought down even more. For that matter, the empty modules themselves were fallen upon with joy; each one, when emptied, contributed nearly half a ton of precious steel.

In all this work everybody had to lend a hand, kids included. Kids also had to go to Mr. Feldhouse's school (if they were twelve to fourteen biological Earth years; there were other schools for younger and older ones). For three hours a day they used the teaching machines and drilled each other in grammar and trigonometry and Earth history and music and drawing, under Feldhouse's short-tempered and sketchy supervision. The good part of the school was that Viktor had other children of his own age for company, even if one of them was the bratty Reesa McGann the teacher had forced on him the first day. The bad part was that almost all of the kids were strangers. And a lot of them—the children from the first ship, that was—were really stuck up.

Because he and Reesa were "buddies" they shared a seat in the crowded school hut, and she was the one who had the privilege of pointing out to him how little he knew about how to live on Newmanhome. Every time he complained about shared books or heavy labor, she was sure to tell him how very much worse it had been six years before, when they landed. Their Ark hadn't been designed for disassembly, like the Mayflower. All the first colonists could do was strip it of its cargo and most of its moveables. Then, reluctantly, they abandoned it. It was still up there in orbit, drive almost dead except for the trickle of power that fed its freezer units, otherwise just a hulk. With all its precious steel.

"If you'd been a little smarter," Viktor told the girl in a superior tone as he was trying to make a fire in the fireplace outside their tent, "you'd at least have fixed the drive so it could beam power down, like our ship."

"If we were smarter," she answered, "we'd have come in the second ship like you, so somebody else would have done all the hard work for us before we got here." And then she added, "Pull out all that wood and start over. You've got the heavy chunks on the bottom and all the kindling on top. Don't you know anything?" And then she pushed him out of the way and did it herself. The girl was so physical.

If Viktor had really looked at Theresa McGann he would have discovered that she wasn't such a bad girl after all. True, she kept reminding him of his immense areas of ignorance (but he was grimly repairing them as fast as he could). True, she had scabby knees. True, she was several centimeters taller than he, but that was only because fourteen-year-old girls are generally taller than fourteen-year-old boys. He didn't look at her that way, though. It wasn't that he wasn't interested in the opposite sex, even such a touchy-squeezy physical specimen of it as Reesa McGann. He was often obsessed with the opposite sex, like any healthy, horny male teenager, but the focus of his interest hadn't changed. It remained the beautiful (and now widowed) Marie-Claude Stockbridge.

Marie-Claude remained widowed, too. Suffering, Viktor observed that she often "saw" other men, but he took some comfort in noting that she seemed to have no intention of marrying one of them.

Apart from his schoolwork Viktor's contribution to the community was officially defined as "scutwork"—meaning the kinds of low-skilled jobs other people didn't have time for. When he possibly could, he tried to get into a work party with Marie-Claude, but most of the time he possibly couldn't. There was too much work, of too many kinds. Up on the rapidly emptying Mayflower the cleanup crews were emptying the cargo holds and launching the contents to the surface. The most precious and fragile of the new supplies came down in one or another of the three-winged, rocket-driven landing craft Mayflower had carried in its hold, but there wasn't enough fuel made yet to use them for more than one trip each. Sturdier shipments, including passengers, came down in the big pods.

There were all kinds of things in those pods—tractors, stills, hand tools, lathes, stores, drilling equipment, rifles, flashlights, cooking utensils, plates, surgical instruments, coils of copper wire, coils of fencing, coils of light-conducting tube, coils of flexible pipe; then there were cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats, carp, tilapia, trout, bees, dung beetles, earthworms, kelp, algae, catfish—each fresh out of the freezer, wrapped in protective foam or immobilized in a plastic bag. The living things didn't all come down at first; many of them (and many, many tubes of ova and sperm and seeds and spores) stayed frozen on the ship against a future need.

The pods kept coming. Almost every time Mayflower came around in orbit in the right position—only about one orbit in twenty was right, because of the planet's rotation—the orbital crews launched clusters of twelve or fourteen separate loads, linked until the retrofire rockets slowed them, then shaking apart, popping their light-sail-parachutes, coming down in fleets of bright gold film canopies, with the gray metal pods hanging underneath. Those were smart parachutes. Each one had sensors that kept it posted on where it was drifting and shroud controls that could maneuver it toward its planned drop point—fairly well, anyway—at least, well enough, provided the linked pods had been ejected at just the right moment and the retrofire burn had been precise.

But even with everything going right, the chutes could land anywhere within a ten-kilometer radius of the drop point, inshore of the colony on the shore of what they were calling Great Ocean.

It would have been nice if the drop point could have been right on the little town itself. But that would have meant that half the pods would surely have fallen into Great Ocean, and that meant a whole different order of difficulty in getting them back. It was easier to send people like Viktor out to drag them back on tractor-drawn sledges. So that was what he did—half a dozen times a week.

The most urgent cargoes to reclaim were the living ones. They had to be put in pens, tanks, barns, or breeding ponds at once (sometimes when their new homes were still being built for them by other sweating, hurrying laborers). Then the next priority was the machines that were needed ASAP, so the colony could live and grow—the plows, the tractors, the helicopters, the outboard motors for the colony's growing little fleet, and the spare parts to keep them all going. Fortunately fuel was not a problem after the first few weeks. The fuel wasn't liquid gases of the kind the rockets used—that would have to wait a while yet—nor was it diesel fuel or gasoline. There was oil on Newmanhome, everyone knew that, but there hadn't been time to drill much of it out. So, instead, the first-ship people had filled huge ponds with Newmanhome flora of all kinds, chopped up and drenched, making a kind of sour beer mash that they distilled into vats of alcohol fuel. That drove the tractors that brought in the goods, and Viktor helped. Almost every waking hour of the day when he wasn't in school, and every day of every week.

It was, at least, certainly good exercise.

As though Viktor didn't have anything else to do, he was assigned care of the baby when his parents were at work. He even had to bring the brat to school with him sometimes. Luckily, the thing slept a lot, in a basket behind his desk, but when it woke and began to cry he had to take it outside to shut it up. Sometimes it only needed to be fed, but when it—no, she—when she had wet herself, or worse, he had to face the disgusting job of changing the damned thing.

The only saving graces were that he wasn't the only kid with a baby sister or brother, and he didn't always have to do it alone. Theresa McGann took her buddying seriously. "You don't know diddly-shit about babies," she told him, watching critically as he tried to stretch one leghole of the rubber pants to fit around Edwina's waist.

"I suppose you do," he snarled.

"Ought to. I've had the practice." And she proved it by shoving him out of the way and taking over.

Reesa not only did not seem to mind changing little Edwina's filthy messes, it appeared she could even put up with the Stockbridge boys. In her free time she showed them things to do in the little town. When they were standing by, thumbs in their mouths, watching the older kids square dancing in an exercise period, she was the one who invited them in and taught them some steps. (She even taught Viktor a few.) She even once, when everyone was miraculously free at the same time, took Viktor and the boys to picnic in the hills north of the settlement.

Viktor had reservations about all that. Her taking care of Billy and Freddy deprived him of one more chance to keep a high profile in the eyes of Marie-Claude, but then he didn't really have the time to do much of that, anyway. And the picnic was fun. Reesa's very best quality, in Viktor's opinion, was that like himself she was planning to be a space pilot. Or if there weren't any openings along that line, as there was every reason to think there would not, at least an air pilot. There was plenty of flying to be done in the air of Newmanhome—whole continents to explore, and shoals of islands; the orbiting Mayflower kept sending down photographs taken along its orbit, but there was more to see than an orbiting hulk could cover. And then, someday …

"Someday," Reesa said, gazing up at the emerging stars, and she didn't have to say someday what. They both knew.

The sun had set. The campfire had been stomped out, and the Stockbridge boys sent grumbling off to haul water to pour on the coals. Overhead were the stars and planets of the Newmanhome sky.

"Someday," Viktor agreed confidently, "I'll be up there again. We will," he amended, to avoid a fight. Then he craned his neck toward where the boys had disappeared into the scrubby Newmanhome woods and lost a little of his confidence. Viktor had never lived on the edge of the unknown before.

He saw that Reesa was grinning at him and reddened; one of the things that he hated about Reesa was that she always seemed to know what he was thinking. "The kids are okay," she reassured him, with another of those friendly pats. "There's nothing out there to hurt them. They can't even get lost, because they can see the town lights."

He didn't dignify the remark with an answer. He said firmly. "After Argosy gets here there'll be spaceships again. Have to be. We're not going to be stuck on one lousy little planet all our lives."

"And we'll be just about the right age," Reesa agreed. "Where do you want to go? First, I mean?"

Then, of course, there was an argument. Neither of them wanted to bother with Ishtar: it was big—Jupiter-sized—but that meant no one was ever going to land on it, because it didn't have any more of a surface to land on than Jupiter did. It didn't even have Jupiter's interesting retinue of moons, because gravitational interaction with giant Nergal seemed to have stolen them all away. Nergal was Viktor's choice. "All those moons!" he said. "Some of them have to be decent, and anyway it's a brown dwarf—nobody's ever got near a brown dwarf before!"

"That's what Tiss Khadek says," Reesa said.

"Well, she's right."

"She's always right," Reesa told him, "or anyway says she is. She thinks she owns this place."

Viktor snickered. The Iraqi astronomer from Ark, Ibtissam Khadek, was the granddaughter of the man who had run the first robot probe and named the planets after his "ancestral" Babylonian gods, as was his privilege. "The fact that you don't like her doesn't mean she's wrong," he told Reesa. "Where would you go?"

"I want to go to Nebo," Reesa declared.

"Nebo!"

"Captain Rodericks thinks so, too. He says we ought to establish an outpost somewhere, and that's the best place."

Viktor said pityingly, "There are moons bigger than Nebo!"

But she was insistent. Nebo was the nearest planet to their new sun, the size of Mars but hotter than Mercury. "It's got an atmosphere, Vik. Why does it have an atmosphere?"

"Who cares?" Viktor asked.

"I care. I want to know why…" And the argument continued until the Stockbridge boys were back and they were nearly home. It was a fun argument. It made it seem as though they really were going to have the chance to get back into space, though both knew that the day when that would be possible would not come until they were a great deal older.

Funnily, one of the worst spats between Viktor and Reesa McGann came over the question of getting old—or, anyway, over just how old they were.

It started when they were sprawled on the spiky Newmanhome grass in the schoolyard, panting, just after finishing the morning's calisthenics. What they all usually wore when they exercised was the plain white jockey shorts that were standard issue for all colonists as underwear; what was annoying Viktor that particular day was that Reesa had done ten more pushups than he had, and so he looked at what she was wearing and sneered, "Why are you wearing a top?"

She looked at him with understanding contempt. "I'm a girl," she informed him.

She wasn't the only female teenager to wear a shirt, but there weren't many others. "You've got nothing to hide," he pointed out.

She said, adult to child, "That's not why I wear the top. I wear the top to show what I will have. Anyway," she added, "I'm older than you are."

It began with that. The argument went on for days. They had both been six when her ship, the New Ark, moved out of orbit. When Viktor's Mayflower landed, they were both twelve—so Viktor insisted, because they had each spent the same length of time frozen, just about, and the same number of Earth years growing.

But, Reesa said with that superior old-timer sneer that made Viktor's blood boil, he hadn't calculated right. Mayflower was a tad faster than Ark, being a generation later, so she had spent less time in the freezer and more growing up.

"You've got that backwards!" Viktor howled in triumph. "You spent more time frozen!"

She scowled, flushed, and quickly backtracked. "But that's not the important point," she insisted. She had spent six more Earth years than he had on Newmanhome. That made her older, because Newmanhome had twice as many years, just about, as Earth in any given period of time.

Viktor strongly protested her arithmetic.

It was true, of course, that the Earth calendar didn't match up well against the realities of Newmanhome. Newmanhome's day, sunrise to sunrise, was about twenty-two and a half Earth hours; and it swung around its sun so fast that it only had about a hundred and ninety-eight of those days in each year. So a Newmanhome "year" was not much more than half an Earth (or "real") year.

The discrepancy played hell with birthdays. That wasn't much of a practical problem, but it made a major annoyance when you got into arguments like the one with Reesa McGann. Viktor's birthdays were terminally confused, anyway. Everybody's were, for how could you allow for a couple of stretches of freeze time? Of course, you could count back to time of birth. At any time the teaching machines could easily tell you the exact Earth day, year, and minute it was right then in Laguna Beach, California, U.S.A., Earth (or, in Viktor's case, should they reckon from Warsaw, nearly a dozen time zones away?). But Reesa flatly refused to consider Earth standards applicable.

Viktor pondered over the question at school. It wasn't just birthdays. Even worse was the question of holidays. Where in the Newmanhome calendar did you put Christmas, Ramadan, or Rosh Hashanah? But as it was birthdays that established the pecking order between him and Reesa, Viktor took time to do a lot of arithmetic on the teaching machine, and then he presented his teacher with a plan to recalculate everybody's age in Home years.

Mr. Feldhouse squashed it firmly. "You haven't allowed for relativistic effects," he pointed out. "A lot of the transit time for both ships was at forty percent of the speed of light or better; you have to figure that in."

So grimly Viktor put in some more of his precious few hours of spare time with the teaching machines … which Mr. Feldhouse approved, grinning, because it was wonderful math practice for the whole class.

Slowly, painfully slowly, the reinforced colony digested its new additions and began to incorporate the cargoes Mayflower had brought into their lives. Steel from the ship wouldn't last them forever. Ore bodies existed, taconite mostly, but the surface outbreaks were limited and there wasn't the manpower to dig deep mines.

That was where Marie-Claude Stockbridge's machines came in, and that was when Viktor got closer to his life's ambition—though, of course, Reesa spoiled it for him.

She came to Viktor's tent early one morning and leaned in. "Get up," she ordered. "If we get there first we can help Stockbridge with her Von Neumanns."

Viktor pulled the sheet indignantly up to his chin and glared at her fuzzily. "Do what?" he asked.

"Help Marie-Claude Stockbridge," she repeated impatiently. "They've given her the okay to send the machines out, and she's going to need help—us, if you get off your dead ass and get there before everybody else does."

That woke him up. "Get out of here so I can get dressed," he ordered, suffused with joy, and pulled on his shorts and shoes in no time at all. He knew about the Von Neumanns, of course. Everybody did. They were going to be very important to the colony, but they'd had to take their turn, like every other very important project, until the utterly urgent ones of survival had been taken care of.

On the way to the machine shed Reesa explained. "Jake Lundy told me about it. He's kind of got eyes for me, you know; he's helping Stockbridge prepare the machines, and I think he liked the idea of having me around for a few days. So right away I thought of you."

"Thanks," Viktor said happily. He didn't much care for Jake Lundy—five years older than Reesa or himself, a tall, muscular man who was already known to have fathered at least one child for the colony, though he showed no signs of wanting to marry. But Viktor could put up with Lundy—could even put up with Reesa—if it also meant being near Marie-Claude.

Then he stopped because what she was babbling on about had just reached him. He glared at her. "What did you say?"

"I said I think Stockbridge is kind of hot for Jake, too, you know? I mean, he's a gorgeous hunk of man." Then she paused to peer at him. "What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing's the matter with me!" he snapped.

She walked around him, looking at him curiously from every side as he stood, mute and belligerent. "Oh, I get it," she said wisely. "You've got a crush on Marie-Claude."

"Shut your mouth," he said, trembling.

She did her best to be patient with him. "But, Vik, that's just normal, you know? You shouldn't get pissed because she's making it with a guy. She's a woman, isn't she?" She stepped back a pace before the look he gave her. "Hey, don't get mad at me! I didn't do anything!"

"Just shut up," he blazed.

She looked at him thoughtfully, then led the way toward the machine sheds. But she couldn't keep quiet indefinitely, and just before they got there she cleared her throat. "Viktor? Don't get sore if I ask you something. When you were all on the ship, did you ever see Marie-Claude and her husband make love?"

"Don't be disgusting!"

"Oh, Viktor," she sighed. "Doing it isn't disgusting. Watching somebody is, maybe, so the reason I asked—"

"I said shut up."

And for a wonder she did, because his tone was really dangerous. But his internal pain didn't heal.

Marie-Claude Stockbridge had in her charge a dozen prototypes of Von Neumann finder-homer machines, great, simpleminded automata that weren't in any real way alive, but shared with living things the ability to forage in their environment, to ingest the kind of chemicals that they were made up of, and to replicate themselves, as people do when they have babies, by making copies of themselves to grow up and do the same thing all over again, generation after generation. And each had a "homing circuit," like that of the freshwater salmon or the migratory birds, which would bring it back to the place it started from (or its ancestors had) when it was of a certain size, there to be dismantled and forged into whatever metal parts the colony needed.

They were ugly things, but they sure beat the hell out of digging holes in the ground.

The Von Neumann machines came in several varieties. There were digging kinds, that looked like iron bedbugs; there were swimming kinds, to exploit the thermal springs they hoped to find at the bottom of Great Ocean, that looked like chromium-plated versions of the sort of shell people picked up on Earthly beaches. They weren't purely mechanical. The iron-miner, for instance, had a complex "digestive" system like the second stomach of a ruminant, where genetically tailored iron-concentrating bacteria helped extract the metal from the rock after the jaws of the Von Neumann miner had pulverized it.

What Reesa and Viktor and a couple of other drudges did was only to fetch and carry, to hoist the Von Neumanns in slings while Marie-Claude and Jake Lundy pried off their inspection hatches and checked their circuits, and to test the seals and make sure the mechanical parts were freed from their shipping constraints. It was hard, hot work. Viktor was stiffly ill at ease at first, eyes always on Marie-Claude and Jake Lundy to see if there was any visible affection going on between them; but in the pursuit of her specialty Marie-Claude was all business. And best of all, she was there. She was where he was hardly an arm's length away, for hours at a time; and if she thought of him as a child she treated him as a colleague. Even Jake Lundy wasn't so bad. His muscles were a big help when the massive machines needed hoisting or turning, but Viktor was getting pretty strong, too, and he was the one Lundy yelled for when something hard had to be done.

They worked from sunup to school, two or three hours every morning. Reesa was always the first one to tell Viktor it was time to leave, because Viktor had no incentive to leave Marie-Claude's company for the schoolmaster's—except one day. On that day Reesa disappeared into the backhouse for several minutes when work was through, and when she appeared she grabbed his arm, looking oddly triumphant. "Look at this, doofus," she ordered, flushed and excited.

"We're going to be late for class," he complained. He wasn't much annoyed. He was only irritated by the fact that she was touching him again—he tolerated with difficulty the fact that she was a touching, hugging kind of person, always wanting physical contact—until he saw what she was displaying for him. Then he recoiled from the scrap of stained white fabric in disgust. "Ugh! Gross!" he cried. "It's your dirty underwear!"

Her face was rosy with pride. "Look at what it's dirty with! That's blood!" she crowed. "That means I'm a grown-up woman now, Viktor Sorricaine, and you're still just a dumb little kid."

He looked around apprehensively, to see if anyone was observing this, but the others were still hard at work. He understood what she was showing him. What he didn't understand was why. Of course he knew what menstruation was, because the teaching machines had been quite specific about all the physiological details of sex. But, as far as the female reproductive systems were concerned, the overriding impression Viktor had come away with was that it was messy. Viktor wasn't a male chauvinist pig. At least, he didn't think he was. He didn't consider himself superior to females simply because of gender. What he thought about sexual dimorphism was mostly charitable compassion for the nasty predicaments females found themselves in every month, and the even worse ones that confronted them in childbearing.

It had never occurred to him that any female would boast about it.

"That means I could have a baby!" Reesa chortled.

"Not without some guy to help you," Viktor pointed out defensively.

"Oh," Reesa said, starry-eyed, "there isn't going to be any problem with that."

And the colony grew.

Even while Marie-Claude was turning loose the first few of her Von Neumanns, her fingers crossed in the hope that they wouldn't break down, that they would work the way they were supposed to, that they would find their way back as they should—even then the construction workers were finishing the great steel skeleton of the vast rectenna that, very soon, would deliver the first Mayflower-generated microwave power to the colony. A model steel plant was half done, ready for the first of Marie-Claude's Von Neumanns to come back with raw metal. And wells were being sunk into the hot water that underlay the hills behind the town they were beginning to call Homeport. When those geothermal wells were beginning to produce electricity there would be plenty to spare, enough to run the immense freezers whose foundations were being dug, to store all the samples still on Mayflower and Ark.

That wasn't all. Real homes were being built, with a lottery every week to see which half-dozen lucky families would get to move out of their tents into something with walls. The beamed broadcasts from Earth still came in, all the hours of every day, along with the regular reports from New Argosy, now more than halfway to Newmanhome; but people watched them now only for entertainment, not with the hopeless yearning of the first years.

It was a time for—well, not for rejoicing, exactly, because there were still endless years of hard work ahead. But at least it was a time when the three thousand and more (every day more) human beings could look back on how much had been accomplished, and look around at the farms and the docks and the sprawling town with satisfaction that the planet was being tamed to their needs.

Of course, they hadn't yet seen any new strange objects in the sky.

Fifth (Navigator) Officer Pal Sorricaine had no ship to be an officer of anymore, and nowhere to navigate anyway.

It meant a considerable comedown for him. He was still a kind of astronomer, of course. But the flare star was only a memory, which meant there was nothing much to do about that still-troubling puzzle, and anyway there wasn't much he could have done about solving it. There weren't any decent-sized telescopes on the surface of Newmanhome. Mayflower's sensors were still operating, but they weren't telling anybody anything they didn't already know, except for some peculiar readings from the innermost planet, Nebo. There was a little group of interested people who got together to talk about it from time to time, Sorricaine and Frances Mtiga and the Iraqi woman, Tiss Khadek. They spent hours trying to find in the datastores some suggestion of why the hot little planet had an atmosphere, and what the gamma radiation that seemed to come from parts of its surface might mean, but there was nothing in previous astronomical history to help. It didn't seem very urgent, even to them. No one thought the readings were important enough to spend scarce man-hours on, not while the rectenna was still unfinished and the new food warehouses were still almost empty.

So Pal Sorricaine did odd jobs.

It was the kind of work the kids did when not in school. Unskilled work. Hard labor, sometimes, and in inconvenient places. He was away from the community two or three days at a time, with a team of other men similarly among the technologically unemployed. They spent their time collecting the low-priority cargo pods that had fallen at the inconveniently far perimeter of the drop zone, or even outside it. They sledged them into the city; not only hard work, but not even very interesting.

Pal Sorricaine didn't seem to mind. He took on the job of cartography when he was out in the wildwoods, searching for lost pods, and his maps became the best the community had. When he was home he was cheerful. He took his turn at minding Baby Weeny. He was loving to his wife and affectionate to Viktor. It was puzzling to Viktor that his mother seemed to worry about her husband. But when he asked her about it she simply laughed and said, "It's a kind of a problem for your dad, Viktor. He was one of the most important men on the ship. Now he's sort of—well—general labor, you know? When things get more settled and he can do real astronomy again …"

She let it trail off there. Viktor didn't bother to ask her when she thought things would be that settled. Of course, she didn't know any more than he did. Maybe the only right answer would have been "never." But that night, when his father returned with the tractor team, four great pods of steel bumping and scraping behind them, he seemed content enough. Pal was in a good mood, anxious to hear about what had been going on in the town while he was away, and bursting with a couple of pieces of gossip he had brought back from long night talks with the other men. "Do you know what Marie-Claude's been doing?" he asked his wife, chuckling. "She's pregnant, that's what!"

Viktor dropped the spoon he was trying to feed his baby sister with. "But—her husband's dead!" he cried, appalled at the news.

"Did I say anything about a husband?" Pal Sorricaine asked good-naturedly. "I just said she's going to have a baby. I didn't say she was getting married. I guess she likes the idea of being a merry widow."

"Pal," Viktor's mother said warningly, looking at her son. "Don't make it sound awful, Pal. Marie-Claude's a good person, and besides we need more babies."

Pal grinned at her. "So it's all okay with you? You wouldn't mind if I, uh, volunteered to help out along those lines next time?"

"Pal," she said again, but the tone was different; she was almost laughing. "What's the matter, aren't I keeping you happy?"

His father grinned and began to mix a cocktail. Halfway through, he paused and looked thoughtfully at his son. Then he glanced at his wife and added more of the gin—it was real gin, almost the last they had—to the mix. "You're old enough to try one now, Vik," he said kindly.

In pain and misery, Viktor took the plastic tumbler and gulped a mouthful. The juniper stung the inside of his nasal passages; the alcohol scorched the inside of his mouth. He swallowed and coughed at the same time.

"Viktor!" his mother cried in alarm. "Pal!"

But Pal was already beside his son, arm around his shoulder. "It's better if you just sip it a little at a time," he said, laughing.

Viktor was having none of that. He wrenched free and, as soon as he could postpone a cough long enough to swallow, downed the rest of the drink. Fortunately, there wasn't much of it; his father had measured out only a junior-sized amount for his son's first official cocktail.

Viktor wasn't short of willpower. He used it all. He managed to strangle the coughing fit, though his voice was hoarse while he was reassuring his mother that, really, he was absolutely all right. His throat burned. His eyes were watering. His nose still stung. But there was a warmth, too, that started in his chest and spread through his whole body.

It almost seemed to numb his stark interior pain. It was, really, not a bad sensation at all. Was that why people like his parents drank this stuff?

Now that his mother had realized her son wasn't dying she was sipping her own drink, but not in any relaxed or jovial manner. Her gaze stayed on Viktor. Pal Sorricaine tried to jolly her out of it, without much success. Viktor ignored them both. He sat hunched over the empty tumbler, staring into it as he turned it in his hands, as he had seen an actor in a transmitted Earth film do when he, like Viktor, discovered the woman he loved had been bedding another man.

Viktor was crushed.

For Marie-Claude to make love with her husband had been bad enough. This was incomparably worse. There was a sudden knot of physical pain in Viktor's stomach, like a stab wound. Even the warm, ginny glow didn't stop the pain.

His mother turned from studying her son to face her husband. "Pal," she said seriously, "we've got to talk to Viktor."

Viktor felt the tips of his ears burning with resentment. He refused to look up. He heard his father sigh. "All right," Pal Sorricaine conceded. "I guess it's about time. Viktor? Vik, listen to me. Are you—" He fumbled for the right words. "Uh, all right?"

Viktor raised his head to give his father the cold stare of a stranger. "Sure I am. Why wouldn't I be?"

"I mean about, you know, Mrs. Stockbridge," his father persisted. He looked more embarrassed than Viktor had ever seen him, but determinedly sympathetic. "Son, I didn't mean to say anything that would get you upset. Do you understand that? Listen, it's only natural for a b—for a young man to be attracted to an older woman, especially when the woman is as sexy and—" He caught his wife's look just in time. "When she's as nice a person, I mean, as Marie-Claude. There's nothing wrong about that. I remember, when I was sixteen, there was a dancer in the ballet school at the Warsaw Opera, about twenty, so thin and graceful—"

He stopped, on the verge of another unexpected precipice. He carefully avoided looking at his wife. She regarded him thoughtfully but didn't speak.

"You don't know what you're talking about," his son said severely.

Viktor had never spoken to his father that way before. He stood up, testing for dizziness, and headed with precise, careful steps for the door. He left Pal Sorricaine biting his lip behind him. His son's glare had looked pretty nearly like hatred, and Pal Sorricaine had never expected that sort of emotion from the son he had always loved and cherished, and thought loved him back.

Outside Viktor paused, leaning against the door.

Because they had been one of the lucky families in the lottery they had two rooms now, two cubicles together, in the long row that lined the muddy street, joined like ancient American tourist cabins. Behind him, through the thin film windows—last and longest use for the remaining scraps of light-sail/parachutes—he could hear his parents muttering to each other.

But, queerly, there were people muttering to each other in the street, too. They were standing in clumps, faces uplifted to the summery Newmanhome sky. Viktor instinctively glanced up himself. In the starlight he could make out that there were patches of warm-weather convection clouds obscuring much of the moonless heavens, but there were hundreds of stars shining through the gaps, too.

Well, there always were clouds and stars, weren't there? Why were these people staring so? True, one star, all by itself, seemed quite bright, almost as bright (Viktor dimly remembered) as the planet Venus from Earth, brighter than any Newmanhome star had ever seemed …

With a shock he saw that the star was getting brighter.

How strange! And it kept on getting brighter still, almost Moon bright, bright enough to throw a shadow; and Viktor realized that it had been that incredibly bright all along. What had deceived him was that he had seen it only through a clump of cloud at first. When the last fringe of cloud had rolled away it was a blue-white beacon in the sky, brighter, Viktor was sure, than any possible star should be—

And he went running back into the house, stumbling but now suddenly cold sober, to shout to his parents that another nearby star had gone flare.

After that, there was no objection to Pal Sorricaine becoming a full-time astronomer again. Pressed though the colony was for able-bodied workers, everyone agreed that this second Sorricaine-Mtiga object definitely needed to be studied. Pal was released from his scavenging duties, Frances Mtiga from her school, Jahanjur Singh from his work as an accountant for the stores comptroller, and Ibtissam Khadek from the guidance systems for the rectenna.

The difficulty came when the four of them asked, no, demanded, that the colony instruct the orbiting crews to put aside other work in order to make the observations only they could make, with the ship's sensors that were the only eyes the colony had for investigating what was going on in space.

It took a full-scale colony meeting to decide—more than three thousand people crowding around the open-air platform where the speakers urged their cases.

When Pal Sorricaine heard that the decision would go to a meeting he swore and poured himself a drink. That meant it would go by majority vote, and Pal Sorricaine, like a lot of Mayflower people, thought the majority was unfair. The second shipload had begun by outumbering the first, 1,115 to 854—but then the first colonists had had six Earth years to make more babies, so the combination of the colonists from New Ark and their Home-born offspring now totaled 1,918, while Mayflower's total had only reached a little over 1,300. Of course the newborns weren't old enough to vote, but who was, exactly? At what age did the franchise begin? And by what sort of calculation?

Sorricaine went to the meeting grimly determined to battle out the voting age question. But this time the line wasn't drawn between the two ships' people. The question split both factions almost down the middle. There was one side—headed by Pal Sorricaine and his little group, along with Captain Rodericks from the first ship and Marie-Claude Stockbridge—who insisted that the star had to be studied with all the resources possible. There was another side that included Reesa McGann's parents, but also Sam and Sally Broad from Mayflower and a lot of others from both ships, who were even more emphatic that the orbiting crews had all they could handle to finish converting the drive engines to MHD microwave generation, and didn't the others understand the colony needed that power?

They all settled in for a long town-meeting argument. Even allowing only three minutes to each speaker meant long hours of debate. Worse, they were unproductive hours. Men and women debating policy were not planting crops or putting up houses or exploring the planet.

It took them an hour just to decide, by raucous voice vote, how many could be allowed to speak. The decision was a hundred—three hundred minutes—five hours of talk; and, even though some of the lottery winners immediately turned their times over to allies more articulate and convincing than themselves, a lot of those three-minute talks amounted only to saying, over and over, "The safety of the colony is threatened!"

What they couldn't agree on was which threat—whether the threat from the sky was more dangerous than the threat of postponing the arrival of beamed power from the ship.

It ended badly for Pal Sorricaine. He and his colleagues got their observing time, but with a bad condition. The allotment of ship time was to become effective only after the ten Newmanhome days of additional work it would take for the microwave installation to be completed.

By then the flare was still bright, but not as bright; the vital first spectra had been missed. Sorricaine, Mtiga, and the others did what they could with the data that began to flood down on them, but they learned nothing they hadn't known before. The star had somehow pulled itself apart, and no one could guess why.

The star continued to dominate the night sky for more than a hundred Newmanhome days. Then Pal Sorricaine filed his last report to the distant Earthly astronomers, gave up his privileges, and went resentfully back to laboring, mourning the lost chance.

At least he wasn't reclaiming lost pods any more. The last of them had been found and brought in; someone else had done that for him. He found other jobs. He drove a tractor on the farms; he sailed to an island a hundred miles south of the colony, to seed it with earthworms and Earthly clover to prepare it, one day, for crops; he shifted goods in the storehouses with a forklift … and that was the job that did him in, for one day he stacked the sacks of seed potatoes too high, and the lift overturned.

There was not enough of Pal Sorricaine's right leg left to save when they got him to the hospital.

It was a torment to him that, in the next year, there were two new flare stars, two months apart. "I think we didn't pick a good part of the galaxy to colonize," he told his son, wincing as he tried to find a comfortable position for the stump of his right leg. "Pieces of it keep blowing up." And then he asked his teenage son, please, to save his liquor allotment for him—to help, he said, with the unremitting pain.