The World at the End of Time (4 page)

“It’s crooked,” Freddy announced.

“You’re
crooked,” Billy told him. “Give me my ball!”

“Yes, give him the damn ball,” Viktor gritted.

“It isn’t his.”

“It is so!”

“No, it’s mine, because you lost it and I found it. Finders keepers!”

“Well, I don’t have it anyway,” Freddy lied, concealing the ball as he ducked behind Viktor. “It’s home.”

“It
isn’t
home! I see it—”

“Will you two shut up about the stinking ball?” Viktor roared. “Here, let me show you where we’re going.”

“I don’t want to see where we’re going,” Billy whined, but Viktor was already adjusting the image. Now it was direct line of sight—toward the “stern” of the ship, naturally, because
Mayflower
had long since been turned around so the main engines could thrust in the direction that would slow it down. It wasn’t a very good picture. Around the edges the stars were bright, ten thousand of them or more, hues from firebox red to sapphire and white, and the ghostly pale haze of the Milky Way washing out one corner of the screen. But the center of the picture wasn’t very clear. The optical overload sensors dimmed the flare star enough to let the others show, but the haze of ions streaming from the drive jets fuzzed everything. Including the star they were heading for. “That’s it,” Viktor said. “Right under that bright one.”

“I can’t see it,” Billy whined. “I want a Coca-Cola.”

“A what?”

“A Coca-Cola. It’s a drink. I saw it on television. I want one.”

“Well, I don’t have one,” Viktor said, “and if I did your mother probably wouldn’t want you to—oh, my God.”

The boys stopped whining and looked up anxiously at him. “What is it?” Freddy demanded, apprehensive.

“Nothing,” he said, staring at the view he had just succeeded in tuning in on the screen. “No, it’s nothing. It’s just that I, well, I kind of forgot. I forgot that half the ship would be gone by now,” Viktor said.

When
New Mayflower
left Low Earth Orbit to begin its long journey to a new home, it was six years behind
New Ark.
And even before it pulled out of Low Earth Orbit the skeleton of
New Argosy
was beginning to take shape behind it. The three interstellar ships, combined, had a single assignment: to populate a world, and thus to establish a bridgehead for the human race in its long-term destiny of seeding the entire galaxy with people.

That was a pretty fantastic idea, even for bumptious humans. But the project wasn’t purely a fantasy. It could be done. The whole human total on all three ships came to under four thousand people. But human beings are really good at procreating. In two or three centuries, if they put their minds to it, the population of the new planet could be bigger than that of bulging old Earth itself.

Practicality wasn’t the question.

The question (and some asked it) was:
Why?
Why travel a hundred years and more to people another planet with human beings, when the Solar System already had enough of them for any reasonable need?

Really, there was only one answer to the question of why anyone would want to colonize the new world, and that answer was: Because it was there. Newmanhome wasn’t only there, it had
life;
the long-ago probe, no bigger than a washing machine, had established that definitely as it sped through the new solar system. The proof was that the presence of reactive gases in the planet’s atmosphere showed that it was a reduced-entropy world. The reactive gases in its air hadn’t reacted with each other. Something was keeping them from doing so, and thus attaining chemical equilibrium. And the only thing that could do that was the only known antientropic force in the universe:

Life.

Oh, not
human
life. Not even anything technological—the probe had detected no signs of radio, industry, cities—nothing like that. But there was an atmosphere with oxygen and water vapor, and so human people (they were
nearly
sure) would be able to live there.

So
New Ark
was designed and (oh, after a
terrible
amount of argument and delay; Viktor hadn’t even been born then, but his father had told him about it) even funded and built. And even before it was finished
New Mayflower
had been begun.

Each ship was purpose-designed, and the purposes were slightly different—
Ark
had to be self-sufficient,
Mayflower
would have the advantage of
Ark
’s colonists already there. Also, by the time they began assembling
Mayflower
the state of the art had leaped a generation ahead, so the two ships didn’t look much alike.
Ark
was only a squat cylinder.
Mayflower,
with many added refinements, was longer and narrower. It started out 450 feet long and 90 feet in diameter at its widest point—it was more lozenge-shape than cylindrical—and once in orbit around the new planet its duties would have just begun. It would stay in orbit around Newmanhome indefinitely, to microwave power down to the colonies. (And, of course,
Argosy,
a generation more advanced still, would actually
land
on the planet!—but that was many years in the future, because the funding battles had begun all over again. The building of
Argosy
was still going on, but at a snail’s pace.)

The ships all had one thing in common, though. To travel through interstellar space, each of them had to eat part of itself.

So the new shape of his ship was startling to Viktor. His eyes refused to recognize it.
Mayflower
was far shorter and stubbier than when last he had seen it, ten decades earlier. The long mass thruster, shaped like a skinny tulip, stuck straight out from the back of the ship where once it had been almost completely within the fabric of the ship itself.

To power its flight to the new star,
Mayflower
had fed more than half of itself into the plasma reactors already.

The string ball of fuel—twisted cables, thick as girders, of antimatter iron—had unraveled and reacted with the normal steel structure that had once enclosed it. The normal iron and the antimatter iron destroyed each other to produce the vast flood of charged particles that drove the ship.

Of course, not all the real iron in the ship was annihilated in the suicide pact with the anti-iron. Even interstellar travel didn’t need
that
much energy. Most of the normal iron simply flashed into plasma and streamed out the thrust nozzles as reaction mass. There was no mystical reason why the normal matter had to be iron, either—iron didn’t need anti-iron for the two to annihilate each other; it was just what was easiest to spare.

It was a very efficient reaction. Much better than that pathetic “atomic power” the old people used to use.

It is always true that
e
=
mc
²
,
all right, but it is not easy to get all of the
e
out of the
m.
The sort of nuclear power plant that human beings built in the late twentieth century had a lot of mass left over when its reactions were complete. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the fuel mass remained mass and stubbornly refused to turn into energy at all.

But when antimatter reacts with an equal amount of normal matter no mass whatever is left. It isn’t only a tenth of a percent of the mass that becomes driving force when you react normal matter with its antiparticles. It is all of it.

By the fourth day after Viktor’s unplanned defrosting, the crew of
Mayflower
had gotten over their first heart-stopping fear. The flare star showed signs of dimming. The situation didn’t seem critical, exactly. Puzzling, yes: Why had a very ordinary little K-5 star suddenly blossomed into flame? But it didn’t seem to be life-threatening.

As panic subsided to surprised resentment aboard the
New Mayflower,
and then as the resentment changed to the work of coping with the consequences, Viktor Sorricaine’s days became routine. Everybody’s did. Fifth (Navigator) Officer Pal Sorricaine stopped being a navigator so he could become an astrophysicist, since one of his CalTech degrees had been on the dynamics of stellar cores. That was what was needed. The problem wasn’t just how to rig the light sails and decide how much thrust to order from the deceleration engines, it was to predict how long the flare would last—and precisely what its curve toward extinction would be.

For that even Viktor’s father’s skills weren’t quite enough, so they defrosted
Mayflower’s
best astrophysical brain. And so Frances Mtiga (three months, or you could say ninety-odd years, pregnant) woke up, blinking, to find a dandy dissertation problem facing her.

When she was thawed and bathed and fed and dressed Pal Sorricaine sat her before a screen and punched up the relevant menu for her. “This is what we’ve got on the flare star, Frances,” he said. “I’ve filed it under NEWFLARE, and here are all the relevant studies I’ve been able to find—they’re under FLARECITES—and this is the preliminary report that I sent back to Earth. That file’s marked TENTATIVE. Maybe I should have called it GUESSWORK. It doesn’t matter much anyway, Fanny. By the time any of this gets to Earth and back we’ll be getting ready to land on the new planet.”

“Or we won’t,” Frances Mtiga said dourly, rubbing her belly for reassurance as she studied the citation file.

“Or we won’t,” Pal Sorricaine agreed, grinning. “But there isn’t any real reason to doubt that we will, Fanny. It looks like it’s an interesting problem in astrophysics, that’s all. Not any real threat to the mission. Anyway, we just won’t go back into the freezer until we’ve got the whole thing studied out and under control.”

Mtiga sighed, scratching her belly again. It was barely beginning to round out. “We’ll give it as long as it takes,” she said fretfully. “But tell me, Pal, don’t you think my husband’s going to have a surprise when he wakes up and finds he has a ten-year-old kid?”

Indeed it began to look that way. The astrophysical information stored in
New Mayflower’s
databank was comprehensive, but there wasn’t much that was useful on flaring K-5 stars, because K-5 stars of that spectral type had never previously been observed to flare that way.

Viktor happily shared his father’s puzzlement, all the more happily because no one expected him to solve the conundrum of the flare. His father was less lucky. He laid out the latest stretch of film to show his son, scowling at it. Although Viktor knew that it was supposed to be a spectrum, because his father had told him so, the film wasn’t in color. It wasn’t a rainbow. “It’s a spectrogram, Vik,” his father explained. “It shows the frequencies of the light from a star, or anything else. The diffraction grating bends the light, but the different frequencies bend to different amounts. The shorter the wavelength, the more it bends, so the red end doesn’t get bent very much and the violet bends way over to here. Well, actually,” he corrected himself, “this end is really the far ultraviolet, and down here is infrared. We can’t see them with our eyes, but the film, can . . . Only it’s not a very good spectrogram,” he finished, scowling again. “That grating’s been out there for a hundred years, and all that time it’s been bombarded with gases and fine particles of interstellar dust. The lines are blurred, do you see?”

“I guess so,” Viktor said, peering uncertainly at the ribbon of grayed lines. “Can you fix it?”

“I can put a new one in,” his father said, and displayed the thing he meant. It was a curved bit of metal, as long as Viktor’s forearm, the shape of a watermelon rind when the flesh has been eaten away. His father handled it with care, showing Viktor the infinite narrow lines that had been ruled onto its concave face.

Well, that part was pretty exciting—it meant someone would have to suit up and crawl out onto the skin of
New Mayflower
to pull the fuzzed grating out and put the new one in—anyway, it would have been exciting, if Viktor had seen it. To his annoyance it all happened while he was asleep. By the time he knew it was over his father was pondering over a newer, sharper, but still baffling spectrogram.

“Christ,” he grumbled,
“look
at the thing. It looks like that star’s spilling its guts two ways at once. Only Doppler interferometry doesn’t show any increase in diameter, so it’s not a nova-type explosion. So what is it?”

No one expected Viktor to answer that question. They did expect it of his father and of Frances Mtiga, but the astrophysicists didn’t know the answer either. Every day they checked twenty-four hours of observations, which the computer matched against the latest revised models Sorricaine and Mtiga had prepared to draw its best-fit curves. And every day the fit wasn’t really good enough.

“But it’s going to be all right, Pal,” Viktor’s mother told her husband. The three of them, for once, were having dinner together in the big refectory. “I mean, isn’t it? There’s plenty of fuel. You can just shove the ship around on the drive and forget about the sails, can’t you?”

“Sure we could,” Pal Sorricaine said absently. “Oh, we’ll get there all right, I guess.”

“Then—”

“But it’s not very goddamn
elegant!”
he barked.

Viktor understood what his father meant. The wondrous thing about astrophysics was that the more you learned, the better everything fit together. Things didn’t get more complicated, they got more breathtakingly clear. In Pal’s view (as in the view of all scientists) oddball events spoiled the symmetry of the laws that ruled the universe. They were a
disgrace
that could only be repaired by figuring out how, after all, they did fit. “Anyway,” Pal Sorricaine said after a moment, “there’s a price tag on this thing. That fuel’s not just supposed to get us there. It’s going to power industry and stuff. The more we use, the more we’re stealing from our future.” And that was true enough, because when
Mayflower
was just a hulk in orbit the colony would need the microwaves it would be beaming down to the surface. “But mostly it’s not elegant,” he said again dismally. “We’re supposed to know all about these things. And we don’t!”