The World at the End of Time (3 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He turned and glanced up at her. “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe,” Viktor’s mother said.

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

Viktor shrugged, scowling into his bowl.

“Got a case on her, have you?” his father asked, grinning. “I can’t say I blame you.”

“Pal!” his wife warned.

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

Viktor made a face. “What is there to do?”

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

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

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

“You’ll see. Come on.”

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

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

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

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