Read The World at the End of Time Online
Authors: Frederik Pohl
Tags: #Science fiction, #Fantasy, #General, #Science Fiction - General, #Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fiction - Science Fiction, #Non-Classifiable
The World at the End of Time (9 page)
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?”