The World at the End of Time (17 page)

And inside the little observers’ room he sat down at the keypad without another word. “This is an old star photograph,” he explained over his shoulder as a sky view appeared on the screen, a negative, black dots on a white background. “Now I’m superimposing one I just took.” The number of stars suddenly doubled and then began to move about as Billy worked over the keypad. “Just a moment till I get them registered . . .” The stars abruptly coalesced, as far as Viktor could see, but Billy was busy setting up another program.

Then he leaned back as the image began to pulse, like a fast heartbeat, twice a second. “Now look,” he ordered.

Viktor glanced at his father, silently staring at the screen with his brows screwed together in perplexity—or worry? “I am looking,” Viktor said, annoyed. “I don’t see anything, but— hey! Isn’t that one jumping back and forth? And that one, too—and that over there . . .”

“My God,” Pal Sorricaine said softly.

Billy nodded grimly. “In this segment of the sky I’ve found twenty-three stars that show movement on the blink comparator. As soon as I made those Doppler measurements I had to make an optical observation. The Dopplers were right. Look again, Viktor. Look at the ones on the edges of the screen. This one—” He put a finger on a large dot near the left edge. “—and this little one over here on the right. Wait a minute, I’ll slow the blinks down.”

And when he did, Viktor saw that as the dot on the left jumped left, the dot on the right jumped right. “They’re all moving away from the middle!” he cried. And then, on second thought, “Or toward it?”

“Away is right,” Billy told him soberly. “That’s why I picked this frame to show you. The ones we see moving are the nearest stars—some of them, anyway—the ones with the largest parallax. They’re all in motion.”

Viktor stared at him in silent consternation. “But they can’t be!”

And from behind him his father said, “You’re right, Viktor. They’re not moving. But somehow or other—and goddam rapidly, too—all of a sudden
we
are!”

CHAPTER 7

It was a pity that Pal Sorricaine never had any possible chance of meeting Wan-To, because of course Wan-To could have explained it all to him. Wan-To might even have been happy to discuss it, because he was pleased with his work.

After Wan-To, observing through his Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pair, saw the first batch of stars begin to pick up speed, he paused to enjoy the spectacle. It was good work, he thought contentedly. It was also a very smart ruse de guerre. He was sure that if he had seen this happening, without warning, his first reaction would have been to zap every one of those stars. Immediately, without second thought. They were definitely unnatural.

His sibs were bound to do the same. They might try to figure out just what was causing it, but they were very unlikely to have any ERP setups near enough for quick study, and they wouldn’t find his matter doppel. It would make little difference if they did. They would assume one of those stars held a fleeing Wan-To—or somebody—and they would zap them.

It was such a good ploy that he did it again. If it was a good strategy to set up one false target it would be even better to set up several.

That was no problem for him, but it was a somewhat boring prospect. However, he didn’t have to do it
himself.
Anything that Wan-To had ever done once he never had to do a second time, unless he wanted to for the fun of it—not when he could so easily make a copy of enough of himself to do the job. So he duplicated those parts of himself that were needed for that task, as a small “doppel” inside his own star, and instructed it to repeat the process with a few other groups of stars. The more the better, when it came to confusing his opponents; let them have a lot of things to worry about. Anyway, it was very little trouble. Making such copies of parts of himself was no harder for Wan-To than copying a computer file was for a human being. He didn’t even bother to oversee his copy’s work, so he didn’t notice that one of the groups of stars included the star that held the planets that included the world humans had come to call Newmanhome.

Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered to Wan-To if he had.

Then, for the first time in quite a while, Wan-To felt sufficiently at ease to think about relaxing for a bit. He wondered what was happening with his neighbors, and he was beginning to feel a little lonesome.

Not much had changed in his immediate vicinity. If a human astronomer had been sitting on the surface of Wan-To’s G-3 star and gazing at the heavens—assuming the human could somehow have avoided flashing into a wisp of ions long enough to gaze at anything at all—he would have seen little change. He would have observed that most of the stars in Wan-To’s sky were not perceptibly moving or changing color. For that matter, to the human observer it would have appeared that hardly any of them had flared into “Sorricaine-Mtiga objects,” as so many had in fact been doing for the past few dozen Earth years; the human observer would have been woefully behind the news.

The reason that was so was that the human eye doesn’t see anything but light. And light is bound by its limiting velocity of 186,000 miles a second. That’s pretty slow—far too
dreadfully
slow for Wan-To’s kind. Things were happening, all right, but a human observer would have had to wait a long time to find out what they were.

Wan-To, with his ERP pairs and his tachyons, was a lot better off, observationally speaking. He knew almost instantly what was happening many hundreds of light-years away. For example, he knew that nearly eighty stars had in fact been zapped by someone. He still didn’t know who the someone was—well, the someones. He knew that more than one someone was involved, if only because he had zapped six of the stars himself, laying down a little probing fire of his own. He also knew that one or two of those random shots had come uncomfortably close to his own G-3, though he was pretty sure that was just an accident. He didn’t guess at that. It was too important; he worked it out carefully. Wan-To had his own equivalent of chi-squared analysis, and the most rigorous interpretation of the positions of the flared stars he could make showed a highly random distribution.

The other thing Wan-To didn’t know was whether anybody had been hit.

Wan-To did care about that, after his fashion. True, at least some of his neighbors seemed to be trying to kill him. But they were the only neighbors he had—not to mention that, in fact, they were in some sense his own flesh and blood.

Then he heard a signal he hadn’t heard in some time. Someone was calling him.

When one of Wan-To’s kind wanted to talk to another he simply activated the appropriate Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky cluster and announced his name—that is, he made the sound that passed for a name, among the plasma minds like Wan-To. They didn’t make real sounds, of course. “Sound” is a matter of vibrations in the air, and certainly there was no gaseous atmosphere where any of them lived. But even in the interior of a star there are what are called acoustic phenomena—you might as well call them sounds, though no human ear could have heard them—and each one of Wan-To’s siblings made a characteristic sound. There was Haigh-tik, who was actually (in a sense) Wan-To’s first-born, and took after Wan-To a lot—friendly, deceitful, and very, very smart. There was Gorrrk (it was a sound rather like the cooing of a basso-profundo pigeon), and Hghumm (guttural white noise, like a cold engine finally starting), and poor, defective Wan-Wan-Wan, the dumbest of the lot, whose “name” was a little like the sound of a motorcyclist gunning his motor at a red light. Nobody paid much attention to Wan-Wan-Wan. Wan-To had made him late in his “parenthood,” when he had become very cautious about how much of his own powers he passed on to his progeny, and poor Wan-Wan-Wan was pretty close to an idiot. There were eleven of them, all told, Wan-To himself included, and seven of them had tried to call him while he was busy setting his stars in motion.

Wan-To considered that fact. Very likely one (or more) of the seven was the one who was trying to kill him, calling to see if he was still alive.

But there were the three silent others to think about. They hadn’t called. That might be even more significant. Perhaps they had been zapped; or perhaps they were the ones who were doing the zapping, lying low in the hope that the others would think they were gone.

What a pity it was, Wan-To thought ruefully, that it should always come to this in the end.

Restlessly he checked his sensors. Everything was going as planned. Five separate groups of stars, the smallest with only half a dozen members, the largest with well over a hundred, were already accelerating out of their positions in the sky, in random directions. (Let Haigh-tik try to figure
that
out, Wan-To thought gleefully.) They would be going pretty fast before long; his constructs tapped the energy of the stars themselves to drive them, converting their interior particles in gravitons to create attractors, even bending the curvature of space around them to isolate them and speed things up.

He wondered if Haigh-tik and the others would really assume that Wan-To himself was in one of those clusters, running away. That would be a useful deception—if it worked—but Haigh-tik in particular was too much like Wan-To himself to be fooled very long.

No, Wan-To thought regretfully, deception wouldn’t work very long between Haigh-tik and himself. Sooner or later one of them would have to destroy the other.

It was a great pity, he told himself soberly. Then, for something to do, he sent out the pulses that would turn three more possible targets into seminovae.

It would have been so nice if they could all have lived together in peace . . .

But, things being as they were, he had to protect himself. Even if it meant blowing up every star in the galaxy but his own.

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 . . .