The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 8

When the engineers from the message center came after Pal Sorricaine to see if he could explain what was going wrong with their incoming transmissions from the third interstellar ship, the old man looked at them uncomprehendingly for a moment. Then he slapped his forehead and bugled like a hound. "Holy sanctified Jesus," he moaned. "I should've guessed!"

He hadn't, though. Neither had anyone else. With all the commotion and speculation and uneasy, scared excitement that the movements of the nearby stars had caused, no one had stopped to think that the arrival of the interstellar ship, New Argosy, might also be affected.

Affected it was.

True, the messages that were still coming in from New Argosy were normal enough, even cheerful. The ship was still in its deceleration phase, still a long way out. Therefore it would be the better part of a year before the comm center on Newmanhome would receive anything the third ship had to say about the sudden decision of a dozen stars and their orbiting bodies to begin running away.

The engineers hadn't expected to hear anything like that. They had expected that the incomings from Argosy would keep on their frequency lock, as they were supposed to do. The incoming messages didn't oblige.

They, too, were Doppler-shifted.

Nobody wanted to believe the probable explanation for that, but the mislock was systematic and increasing. They couldn't doubt it any more.

New Argosy was not a part of the volume of space that was theirs. Newmanhome was on the move. Argosy was not moving with it.

The scary part, the part that frizzled the nerves of the colonists, was that New Argosy didn't yet know what was happening. Their transmissions reported everything on course, no troubles at all, not even any more of those pesky, worrying flare stars— landfall at Newmanhome expected right on time!

But that was now impossible, since Newmanhome had become a moving target.

That was a personal matter for every colonist. New Argosy wasn't a mere astronomical object. It was something every one of them was waiting for. It was Santa Claus's bag, laden with gifts. New Argosy held people—more people than either of the first two ships had carried, a passenger list of three thousand more corpsicles, intended to be thawed out to join the first colonists on Newmanhome—many of them friends, colleagues, even relatives of those already there.

It also held supplies.

It was crammed full of things that had not been high enough priority to go into either Ark or Mayflower, but that the colonists wanted very much, all the same. It held grand pianos and violins, tubas and trumpets; it held a thousand new strains of flowering plants and about fifteen hundred species of birds, beasts, and arthropods that Newmanhome would never see without it. It held the wonderful solar-power satellite that was their only chance of making more antimatter to replenish the dwindling stores in orbit. It held the three small spacecraft that they could use to explore their system. Most of all, it held hope. What New Argosy contained was the promise of a future—the promise that the colonists on Newmanhome were not finally, totally, cut off from the Earth that had borne them …

And it was lost.

The colonists had to have a town meeting to talk it over. The meeting couldn't decide anything, of course—there weren't any useful decisions they could make. The meeting was just so that everyone could hear and say everything that could be said—and then, with the catharsis of getting all that out of their systems, get back to their real world—meaning Newmanhome, the only world they had left.

Although the plague had decimated Newmanhome's population, there were 3,300 people still alive. The only ones over the age of four not present there were the work crews in orbit, at sea, or in the small parties on South Continent and the other somewhat inhabited parts of the planet. Twenty-six hundred people gathered on the hill outside the town, with the loudspeakers relaying what was said to the fringes of the crowd.

They had set up a committee of twelve to put all the information together and make some kind of a report. Pal Sorricaine was on it, of course. So was Billy Stockbridge, and sick old Frances Mtiga (flown back specially from West Archipelago), and old (but far from sick or feeble) Captain Bu Wengzha. As soon as the committee had finished saying what everyone already knew, hands began to go up.

"If we can see that they're out of position, why can't the people on Argosy?" someone asked.

Pal Sorricaine stood up, tottering on his artificial leg; he hadn't been doing much drinking, in all the excitement, but he was showing signs of wear. "By now they probably can. Remember, they're still almost a light-year away. The messages we're getting from them were sent nearly two Newmanhome years ago."

Another hand, a woman from Delta: "But we notified them about what was going on, didn't we?"

"Of course we did!" Captain Bu replied. "But they haven't had time to receive the message yet. The speed of light is the same in all directions." He turned to the rest of the committee behind him, where Billy Stockbridge had said something. "What is it, Billy?"

Billy pointed. "It's my brother. He's busting to ask something."

There was Freddy Stockbridge in the front row, conspicuous in clerical garb; he had been studying for the priesthood long enough and, for lack of a handy pope or cardinal, had finally appointed himself ordained. He grabbed one of the roving microphones from an usher and shouted into it. "Can you tell us what is going on, really?"

Pal Sorricaine shrugged. "We've told you everything we can," he said. "The data is clear. Relative to the rest of the galaxy, our little local group is moving—and accelerating. It looks like some other groups are beginning to move in a different direction, too, but we're not as sure of that. As to why all this is happening—God knows."

And Freddy Stockbridge said strongly, "Yes, that's right. We don't know. But He does."

Viktor walked Reesa home from the meeting. She paused outside her house and gazed up at the stars. "They don't look any different to me," she said.

Viktor squinted up. "I can't see colors in stars most of the time anyway," he confessed. "They all look about alike, just bright spots. Anyway, we couldn't really tell the difference with the naked eye."

She shivered, although the night, like almost every Newmanhome night, was muggily warm. "Let's tuck the kids in," she said.

It didn't take long. Viktor found himself attracted in a way that he wasn't used to by the sight of Reesa cuddling the baby, whispering to him, changing his diaper, and feeding him. The feeling wasn't sexual. He didn't think it was sexual, at least, although that was certainly there, too. It was just, well, appealing. "Taking care of kids is a lot of work," he said sympathetically when they were sitting outside again.

"It is for one person," she said—rather sharply, he thought. It made him suddenly uncomfortable.

"Well, if you want," he said awkwardly, "I guess I could take the baby now and then, I mean when I'm in port."

She shook her head. "That's no good for him. He needs a home. I think what I need is a husband."

Now Viktor was definitely ill at ease, not to say alarmed. "Husband? Really? Would you want to, uh, I mean, would you be satisfied to just make love to one guy for the rest of your life?"

"As in marriage?" She thought that over seriously for a moment, then turned and faced him squarely. "Is matrimonial fidelity important to you, Viktor?"

He was beginning to feel trapped. "I—" He hesitated, pondering what he was saying, and what it might mean. "I think so," he said at last.

"Well, I probably could," Reesa said. "Yes, I'm just about sure I could—if I were married, I mean."

It was quite true that they couldn't see any change in the color of the stars, not with the naked eye, but the changes were there nevertheless. In one direction starlight was blue-shifted, in the other red. And the shifts grew, week by week.

Pal Sorricaine had something to do now. He and Billy Stockbridge spent all their time poring over the spectrograms, checking every possible reference to anything that might bear on the subject in the datastores—coming up empty, but still driven to go on trying to figure out what the hell was happening to their little pocket of space.

The spectral shifts didn't affect the nearest of the stars; they had established that early on. There were about a dozen of those within a volume of space some six light-years across—including the burnt-out cinder of one of the old "Sorricaine-Mtiga" flares. Their spectrograms were unchanged. Newmanhome's own sun was nowhere near the center of that volume, but nearly on one edge—so Sorricaine was scathing in answering the colonists who (how superstition did feed on the unexpected!) muttered that it was their blasphemous temerity in colonizing across space that had somehow changed things.

No, it just had happened (somehow!) that a volume of space had disengaged itself from the rest of the galaxy. Either their little group of twelve stars and all their associated planets, moons, and orbiting junk was (somehow!) beginning to hurry in the general direction of the Virgo clusters … or the rest of the galaxy was (again somehow—no one could think of any mechanism that might make any of this happen) hurrying away from it.

Of course, all this was terrifying.

At least, it was terrifying if you let yourself think about it. It was impossible. Fundamental natural law—law that was rock-solid at the bottom of scientific knowledge, the elements of motion that had been engraved in granite by Isaac Newton and confirmed by everybody since him—was simply being violated.

To think seriously about that was to realize that as a scientist you knew nothing at all. Science was simply wrong.

But how could that be?

The people who lived on Newmanhome couldn't question science. Science was what had brought them there! They weren't Third World peasants or stock-herders. They were chemists, engineers, physicists, geneticists, mineralogists, agrotechnicians, mathematicians, doctors, metallurgists—nearly every adult who had boarded either of the two colony ships had had advanced degrees in some scientific field, and every day they were earnestly passing on that knowledge, and that mind-set, to their children.

The result was that there was a burning dichotomy in every head on Newmanhome that simply could not be resolved.

The only way to survive it was not to think about it at all—as long as they could manage that, anyway. After all, the rest of their world was still behaving the way it should. True, there were still those unexplained emissions from the scorched surface of the planet Nebo, but Nebo was a long way away. On the surface of Newmanhome, in the orbiting hulks above it, everything stayed normal. The crops flourished.

And, best news of all, the health teams finally found a microorganism that could flourish in the human system and destroy the spores of the plague. So everyone's gauze masks came off.

But when the communications from New Argosy turned from shock to panic, through forlorn hope to despairing realization that it never would land on Newmanhome, because Newmanhome was accelerating away from the ship faster than it could possibly hope to catch up—then it all became very personal.

When Viktor and Reesa married at last—it was the 43d of Spring in Colony Year 38—the bridal party was loud and happy for the joyous occasion. But that night, out on their balcony for a last sip of wine before they went to bed, Viktor gazed for a long time at the stars. It was a clear night. They could see the spark that was Mayflower sliding across the southern horizon, on its umpty-thousandth orbit.

"Should we volunteer?" Viktor asked his bride.

She didn't have to ask him what he meant. She knew. The colony had at last considered itself strong enough to spare liquid-gas fuel for a rocket. Finally a new crew of volunteers would soon be going into space to relieve the weary orbiting crew, to let them after all these years come down and set foot on the planet they had crossed twenty-odd light-years of space to inhabit.

"Maybe next time. When the children are a little bigger," she said, her hand in his as they looked up. "Viktor? Do the stars look any different to you now?"

It was a question they went on asking each other. Viktor squinted thoughtfully at the constellations. He said at last, "I don't know. I don't think so."

Behind them little Yan came out on the balcony. His fingers were in his mouth, reaching with his other hand to clutch at Reesa's dress but with his eyes fixed on Viktor. Behind him his older half sister, Jake Lundy's daughter Tanya, was quietly playing. Yan wasn't used to seeing his parents together. He was hardly used to seeing Viktor at all, because, although Viktor had spent an hour or two, at least, with the child every time his ship was in port, Yan had seen more of a good many other men.

Viktor picked the boy up. Yan didn't resist, but he didn't let go of Reesa's skirt, either, rucking it up until, laughing, his mother pulled the little fingers loose.

"Why," Viktor said wonderingly to his son, "we're a family now, aren't we?"

Reesa studied his face. "Do you like being a family?" she asked—a serious question, wanting a trustworthy answer.

"Of course I do," Viktor said quickly, and then nodded twice to show he really meant it. "We're a great family. All of us," he added. "Yours and mine and ours—would you mind if we had Shan with us?"

"I wouldn't, but I think Alice wouldn't like it. Still, she's at sea a lot, and really she shouldn't be taking the boy along. He needs school." She stopped there, but in a way that suggested there was a sentence or two unsaid.

"What is it?" Viktor asked, puzzled.

She stroked Yan's small head. "I guess you aren't going to stop going to sea yourself," she said, not looking at him.

"No, why should I? It's my job, and—" Then a light broke over him. "Reesa, are you worried about me shipping out with Alice?"

"I'm not worried."

But she was certainly concerned. Viktor could see that clearly enough. "I suppose I could get a different ship," he offered, thinking that there were a lot of things involved in being a family that were going to take some getting used to.

"If you want to," she said.

He didn't say that the question was what she wanted; he had learned that much about being a family already. "That way I could be here when Alice was at sea some of the time, so it would make sense to have Shan with us," he pointed out.

"That would be good," she said, gazing at the stars. "Well, if you'll put Tanny back to bed—I've got to be a cow for the baby—I'll come in in a few minutes. We might as well consummate our marriage, again."

The life of the colony went on. When Viktor Sorricaine, honeymoon over, shipped out again for South Continent, he discovered some of the disadvantages of being a family. The ship's radio operator was an unattached young woman named Nureddin, and normally he would probably have expected to wind up in bed with her. Now it didn't seem right. By the time he got back to the colony he was gladder to see his wife than he had expected, even. She hadn't wasted any time. She was a quarter of a Newmanhome year pregnant by then, with a year and a bit still to go, her belly quite definitely rounded out, her movements a little clumsy—but not in bed.

If a person managed to put out of his mind some of the gnawing, unsettling questions about what the hell had happened to the outside universe, it was a pretty good time on Newmanhome. There were even some celebrations. Up in the hills over Homeport, in the growing complex by the geothermal power plant and the microwave rectennae, the big new cryonics freezers were completed at last. The first thing that meant was that now there was fuel for the long-idle landing craft, because the same gas-liquefying plants that kept the freezers cold could also manufacture liquid hydrogen and oxygen to fuel the little spacecraft.

That was a big plus—though Viktor had been disappointed to learn that he was not even on the shortlist of space pilots; there were too many others ahead of him. But it was a tempered joy, all the same. The freezers had not just been another job. They were a major philosophical commitment—no, damned near a religious commitment—to the future. They were built to last, and they were built big. They were meant to hold all the frozen specimens and tissue samples that were all the people on Newmanhome had left of horse-chestnut trees and ginkgos and aardvarks and Luna moths and salamanders. They were their best tie with old Earth, fully automatic, with power from the geothermal wells—also fully automatic—built to last a thousand years …

And now destined to remain largely empty for most of that time, because the great cargoes of frozen biological materials from New Argosy were never going to get there.

No wonder the celebration was short and not at all raucous.

There was other bad news, too. Ibtissam Khadek died that year, quite unexpectedly, still protesting that the colony should be investigating her grandfather's prize brown dwarf. Reesa's mother, Rosalind McGann, was having a bad time with her own health—no one seemed to be able to say what the problem was, exactly, except that it might be the long-delayed consequences of undetected internal "freezer burn."

And Pal Sorricaine had started drinking again.

Worse than that, Reesa told Viktor, he was making his own brew. There was plenty of native vegetation around, and it certainly fermented into alcohol readily enough, but it was stupid for anyone to drink it.

Viktor was alarmed. "What about the kids?" he asked worriedly.

"They're fine," Reesa said. "Edwina's quite a grown-up little lady now, you know. She and the boys are living with Sam and Sally Broad—they don't have any children of their own, though God knows they've tried hard enough." She hesitated. "Maybe you ought to go see them," she offered.

Viktor nodded. "I will," he said. "But first I'll talk to the old man. Not that I think he'll listen to me," he finished bitterly.

So Viktor went back to his parents' home early the next morning. His father was just getting up, and he listened to his son's fatherly advice without much patience. "What's the matter with you?" Viktor yelled at last. "Do you want to poison yourself? Don't you have anything to do with your life?"

Pal Sorricaine bent to tie his leg a little tighter. "It isn't that I don't have anything to do," he explained. "It's just that I don't know how to do the things I have to do. Nobody does. We're all stupid, Vik; we don't know what's going on. Not just about the fact that we're moving—Jesus, we don't even know what's happening on Nebo!"

"What about Nebo?" Viktor asked, distracted in spite of himself.

"I don't know what about Nebo! Have you seen any pictures of it lately? All those damned clouds! We can't see a thing now with the opticals."

"Well, clouds aren't so surprising," Viktor began.

"Don't you remember anything?" his father demanded angrily. "Nebo used to be bone-dry! Now—now I don't know where all that water vapor came from, and that's not the only thing. Something there is emitting a lot of high-energy radiation, and I don't know what it is, and I don't know why it's doing it."

"Does it have anything to do with, uh, with the fact that we're moving?"

"I don't know that, either! And did you see the new Doppler shifts? We're not only moving, we're accelerating." Pal looked wearier and more defeated than Viktor had ever seen him. "We're going to be getting up to a significant fraction of the speed of light soon, if this goes on. Do you know what that means?" he demanded.

"Why—" Viktor thought, then blinked as an idea came to him. "Are you trying to tell me there might be relativistic effects? Will we be getting into time dilation, like on the Mayflower coming out here?"

"God knows!" his father cried triumphantly. "Certainly I don't! And I never will, because nobody cares." He licked his lips, avoiding Viktor's eyes. Then, defiantly, he got up and limped over to a cupboard to take out a bottle. As he poured himself a drink he said, "I can't help thinking there's a connection with Nebo. If I could get the goddamn town meeting to send a probe, we could find out something!" he grated. "But they don't want to spend the resources."

"That's a copout, Dad," Viktor said sternly. "I don't want to talk about spaceships, I want to talk about you. You're going to kill yourself if you don't leave that stuff alone."

His father grinned at him, his face gaunt and wolfish. "Get them to send a probe, and I'll stay sober and go on it," he promised.

"I can't do that. You know I can't."

"Then," his father said, "the next best thing you can do is mind your own business."

On Viktor's next voyage his family came along.

It was an experiment. Reesa was a qualified navigator herself, though somewhat rusty. Though the ship didn't need two navigators—it hardly needed one—there was always work for extra hands to do in supervising the rotor speed and double-checking the orbital position fixes against star-sighting … though, actually, when Reesa or Viktor took a sextant reading on a star they weren't as much thinking about whether their ship was in its proper place as whether the star was. Some of the parallax shifts were now detectable even with the sextant.

Alice Begstine had proved unexpectedly unwilling to turn Shan over to the newly married couple, so they left without him. They couldn't ship out together more than once or twice, they knew, because when the new baby came Reesa would want to stay on land for a season or so, at least. But it was worth trying, and as a matter of fact they all enjoyed it. Tanya was a touch seasick at first, but it was more psychological than real—Great Ocean behaved itself, as it usually did. The children roamed the ship. One of the crew was always glad to keep an eye on them and make sure Tanny spent her allotted hours at the ship's teaching machines. The baby was as happy on shipboard as anywhere else, and Reesa enjoyed the new experience. They basked in the sun; at South Continent they explored the hills and swam in the gentle surf. On the way back Viktor almost wished they could do it forever.

There was, of course, always in the back of their minds the worry about what the hell had happened to the universe.

It bothered even little Tanya, though mostly, of course, because she could see that the grown-ups were bothered by it. And when Viktor took his turn in tucking them in at night he was eager to do for Tanya what Pal had, so often, done for him. The stories he told her were about Earth, and the long voyage to Newmanhome, and the stars. On the last night before they landed he was standing with her on the deck outside the cook house where their dinner was simmering to completion, the rotors grumbling as they turned. Tanya squinted at the sunset they were watching and asked, "What makes the sun burn?"

"Don't look at it too long, Tanny," Viktor cautioned. "It's not good for your eyes. A lot of people had their sight damaged a few years ago, when everybody was—" He hesitated. He didn't want to finish the sentence: When everybody was looking at the sun every few minutes, wondering if it was going to flare like so many of the other stars nearby, and burn them all up. "When we were first on Newmanhome," he finished. "Now it's your bedtime."

"But what makes it burn anyway?" she persisted.

"It doesn't really burn, you know," he said. "Not like a fire burns. That's a chemical reaction. What the sun does is combine hydrogen atoms to make helium atoms."

Tanny said proudly, to show she understood. "You mean if I take some hydrogen out of the stove fuel tank, and—and what would I have to do then? To make that helium, I mean?"

"Well, you couldn't really. Not just like that. It takes a lot of energy to make protons—the proton is the heavy part of the hydrogen atom, the nucleus—to make protons stick together. They're positively charged, remember? And positive charges?"

"They push each other away," Tanny said with satisfaction.

"Exactly right, honey! So you need to force them into each other. That's hard to do. But inside a star like Earthsun, or our own sun—like any star, really—the star is so big that it squeezes and squeezes."

He hesitated, wondering how far it made sense to go in describing the CNO cycle to Tanya. But, gratifyingly, she seemed to be following every word. "So tell me, Daddy," she persisted.

He couldn't resist Jake Lundy's daughter when she called him that! "Well," he began, but looked up to see Reesa coming toward them, the baby in her arms, the unborn one making her belly stick out farther every day.

"It's almost dinnertime," she warned.

Viktor looked at his watch. "We've got a few minutes," he said. "I just put the vegetables on, but you can call the crew if you want to."

"Tell me first, Daddy," Tanya begged.

"Well," Viktor said, "there are some complications. I don't think we have time to explain them right now. But if you can make four protons stick together, and turn two of them into neutrons—you remember what a neutron is?"

Tanya said, careful of how she pronounced the hard words, "A neutron is a proton with an electron added."

"That's it. Then you have the nucleus of a helium atom. Two protons, two neutrons. Only, as it happens, the mass of the helium nucleus is a little less than the combined mass of four hydrogen nuclei. There's some mass left over—"

"I know!" Tanny cried. "E equals m c squared! The extra mass turns into energy!"

"Exactly," Viktor said with pleasure. "And that's what makes the sun burn. Now help me get dinner on the table."

As they reached the door she lifted her head. "Daddy? Will it ever stop?"

"You mean will the sun cool down? Not in our lifetimes," Viktor told her confidently, not knowing that he lied.

So the voyage was absolutely perfect, right up until the end of it … but the end wasn't perfect.

It was horrible.

Probably Reesa should not have been trying to guide the grain nozzles into the holds while she had the baby in her arms. The dock operator was a new man; he couldn't get the nozzle into position; Reesa put the baby down to shove the recalcitrant nozzle.

She shoved too hard.

She lost her footing and tumbled. She only fell two or three meters, and it was onto the yielding grain—but that was enough. When Viktor frantically scrambled down after her she, was moaning, and there was blood soaking into the top layers of grain.

They got her to the hospital in time to save the baby. It was premature, of course, but a healthy young girl for all that; there was every chance the newborn would survive. And so would Reesa, but she would be a long time recovering.

Definitely, she would not be making the next voyage with her husband and the kids. When Reesa's mother came over, aching and complaining, she seemed to consider it all Viktor's fault, too. It was the first time he had thought of Roz McGann as a mother-in-law. He accepted all blame. "I shouldn't have let her do that," he admitted sadly. "Thank God she's going to be all right, anyway."

"God," Roz McGann sniffed. "What do you know about God?"

Viktor stared at the woman, feeling he had somehow missed the thread of the conversation. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about God," she said firmly. "Why didn't you marry Reesa properly? In church? With a priest?"

Viktor blinked, astonished. "You mean with Freddy Stockbridge?

"I mean properly. Why do you think we're having all these troubles, Viktor? We've turned away from religion. Now we're paying for it!"

Later on, walking away from the hospital in the moonless Newmanhome night, Viktor found himself perplexed. He knew, of course, that there had been a religious revival on Newmanhome—half a dozen of them, in fact. The Sunni Moslems and the Shi'ites hadn't stopped splintering when they broke into two groups; they schismed again over which way was East, and almost did it again over the calendar. (How could you set the time of that first sighting of the new moon that began Ramadan when there was no moon to sight?) The Baptists had refused to be ecumenical with the Unitarians; the Church of Rome had separated itself from Greek Orthodox and Episcopalian. Even Captain Bu had declared himself a born-again Christian, and every other soul on Newmanhome tragically doomed to eternal hellfire.

By the third year after the spectral shift there were twenty-eight separate religious establishments on Newmanhome, claiming fourteen hundred members—divided in everything, except in their unanimous distaste for the three thousand other colonists who belonged to no church at all.

When Viktor looked in on his father he found the old man sitting by himself in the doorway of his home, gazing at the sky—and drinking.

"Oh, shit," Viktor said, stopping short and scowling at his father.

His father looked up at him, unconcerned. "Have a drink," he said. "It isn't ropy vine, it's made out of potatoes. It won't kill you."

Viktor curtly refused the drink, but he sat down, watching his father with some puzzlement mixed in with the anger. The old man didn't really seem drunk. He seemed somber. Weary. Most of all he seemed abstracted, as though there were something on his mind that wouldn't go away. "Reesa's going to be all right, I think," Viktor volunteered—angrily, since Pal Sorricaine hadn't had the decency to ask.

His father nodded. "I know. I was at the hospital until they said she was out of danger. She's a good strong woman, Vik. You did a good thing when you married her."

Baffled, slightly mollified, too, Viktor said, "So you decided to come back here and get drunk to celebrate."

"Trying, anyway," Pal said cheerfully. "It isn't seeming to work."

"What is the matter with everybody?" Viktor exploded. "The whole town's going queer! I heard people fighting with each other over, for God's sake, whether there was one God or three! And nobody's got a smile on his face—"

"Do you know what day it is?"

"Hell, of course I do. It's the fifteenth of Winter, isn't it?"

"It's the day New Argosy was supposed to arrive," his father told him. "I wasn't the only one drinking last night. Everybody was feeling pretty lousy about it—only maybe I had more reason than most."

"Sure," Viktor said in disgust. "You've always got a reason. You can't figure out why the stars flare, you don't know what's happening on Nebo, you're all bent out of shape because of the spectral shifts—so you get drunk. Any reason's a good reason to get a load on, isn't it?"

"So I find it, yes," his father said comfortably.

"Oh, hell, Dad! What's the use of worrying about all those far-off things? Why can't you get yourself straight and live in the life we've got, instead of screwing yourself around about things a million kilometers away that really don't affect us here anyway?"

His father looked at him soberly and then poured himself another drink. "You don't know everything, Vik," he observed. "Do you know where Billy Stockbridge is?"

"Don't have a clue! Don't care. I'm talking about you."

"He's arranging for a town meeting tomorrow. We've got something to tell them, and I guess you'd say it really does affect us. We've been monitoring the insolation pretty carefully for about a month now, ever since Billy first saw something funny about it."

"What's funny?"

"I don't actually mean 'funny,' " his father said apologetically. "I'm afraid there isn't any fun in it at all. We decided not to say anything until we were absolutely sure; we didn't want everybody getting upset unless they absolutely had to—"

"Say anything about what, damn you?"

"About the insolation, Vik. It's dropping. The sun's radiating less heat and light every day. Pretty soon people will notice it. Pretty soon—"

He stopped and thought for a moment, then poured himself another drink.

"Pretty soon," he said, holding the glass up to look at it, "it's going to be getting cold around here."