The World at the End of Time (2 page)

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.)