The World at the End of Time (21 page)

“Don’t get too cold,” Edwina called to Quinn and her own children, who nodded without looking up from their work.

“Reesa? Oh, Jake came by for her a couple of hours ago. They’re taking Father’s refresher course; I expect Billy’s there, too.”

Viktor frowned. Of course, Jake Lundy had to be accorded some sort of status—would you call him a friend of the family? Well, of some parts of the family, since he was the father of one of Edwina’s children, too. (The man was really excessively active, Viktor thought.) It was quite normal for him to come around to see his daughter, but Viktor hadn’t known he was spending time with his daughter’s mother again. “What refresher course?” he asked.

“Dad’s course. The one he’s giving on space piloting. No, not astrophysics this time; I said piloting. They’re using the old trainers.”

“For what?” Viktor demanded, astonished.

“What else could you use them for but practicing space piloting?” his sister asked witheringly. “Don’t ask me, anyway. You’d know more about that sort of thing than I would, and it’s just an idea of Dad’s.”

Her contemptuous tone made Viktor blink in surprise. Edwina had always been Daddy’s girl. She had consistently taken Pal Sorricaine’s side against Viktor—probably, Viktor believed, because she had been too little to be aware of what was going on when their mother died. He said, as tactfully as he could, “I thought you liked Dad’s ideas—whatever this one is.”

“It’s not my business, is it?” she replied with a shrug. “I think the kids ought to come in now,” she fretted. “Vik? We’re going to have a birthday party for Quinn right at sundown—they ought to be back by then. But I’d really appreciate it if you could take the kids out of the way until then, so I can get things ready.”

“Sure,” Viktor said, still looking at her with that inquiring gaze.

She flushed and then said angrily, “Oh, what the hell. They can do what they want, but I don’t have to like it. What’s the point? What’s happening is obviously Divine will!”

What Viktor really wanted to do was to find out what his father’s “refresher course” was all about, but since it was Quinn’s birthday, after all, that would have to wait. As a good father/uncle, he took Quinn and Edwina’s three littler ones on a tour of his ship as she lay at dockside.

It was one of his better ideas. The children were thrilled. There were serious stinks in the passenger holds, where the work crews were doing their best to sluice them clean after the nasty voyage and only beginning to make a dent in the filth, but the bad smells only made the children giggle and complain. Then he took them down into the engine room, where the hydrogen turbines provided the force to spin the ship’s rotors against the wind. That was a different kind of stink, oil and hot metal, and the big machines were very satisfying to look at for young children.

Viktor was having as good a time as the children were, but when he stopped to think he wasn’t quite at ease. It wasn’t so much that Reesa seemed to be getting unexpectedly friendly again with Jake Lundy—that was a minor irritation, sure, but Viktor wasn’t really
jealous.
It wasn’t even that the outlook for the colony was grim and getting worse; they had all had to factor that prospect into their lives long since. What was mostly on Viktor’s mind was his younger sister, Edwina. It was getting obvious that Edwina was attracted to a new sort of cult that had grown up on Newmanhome. The cult wasn’t exactly a religion. It wasn’t any sort of conventional one, anyhow; it cut across the various sects. As far as Viktor could tell it was more mystical than religious: Its adherents seemed to believe that whatever had made the stars flare and then some of them move, and their own sun begin to dim, was, if not God, at least a supernatural power; and perhaps they shouldn’t thwart it. Viktor knew it had made some stormy scenes in Edwina’s marriage. Billy’s point of view was that if they didn’t thwart—whatever it was—they would all die; Edwina’s seemed to be that if that was what the Divine wanted them to do, then that was all right, too.

It was not only the weather that was turning bad on Newmanhome. Everything else seemed to be going sour, too.

When he brought the kids back to Edwina’s home Reesa was there before him, helping to set the table with paper favors. She wasn’t alone. Billy, Pal Sorricaine, and Jake Lundy were in one corner of the living room, having a private drink. Reesa looked up and nodded to Viktor as he came in, but her attention went mostly to the children. “You go in and get cleaned up,” she scolded her daughter. “You shouldn’t be seeing any of this until it’s ready, anyway.” And then she lifted her lips to Viktor for a kiss.

It wasn’t much of a kiss. He was aware of Jake Lundy gazing benignly at them and it made him uncomfortable. “Can I help?” he asked, as much to reproach the other men as to make a genuine offer of service.

“You already did by taking the kids off our hands,” Reesa said absently, gazing around. “Oh, the presents!” she said, remembering. “I’ll go home to get them. Take your coat off, Viktor. Bily’ll give you a drink if you want it.”

The drink was applejack with apple juice. When Viktor had one he looked challengingly at his father. Pal Sorricaine shook his head. “Just the juice, Vik,” he said, holding up his glass. “Taste it if you want to, but I can’t afford to drink now. There’s too much to do.”

“What, exactly?” Viktor asked. “What’s this about giving refresher courses in space navigation? Do you still think they’ll let you take a ship to Nebo?”

“They should,” his father told him seriously. “There’s still anomalous radiation coming from there, and I’m positive it has something to do with what’s happened—it started when everything else started, and that’s no coincidence.”

He paused to light a thin cigar. “But they won’t, of course,” he finished. He didn’t have to say why; the subject had been debated at length. Most of the colonists thought it was a waste of scarce resources—
New
Mayflower
couldn’t be used, because it was their source of microwave energy, and even
New Ark
might be needed for something else, sometime. And a lot of the rest were filled with that silly antiscience feeling that had been growing—the “Divine will” people, like Edwina.

“What’s going to happen,” Billy Stockbridge said, “is that we’re going to get some new fuel for the microwave generators.
Mayflower’s
antimatter is running out. We can’t get along without the microwave power.

“But we’re digging more geothermal shafts,” Viktor objected.

Billy shrugged. “Maybe when all the shafts are down and the generators are installed we won’t need microwave anymore, but that’s years away. So we’re going to cannibalize
Ark.”
Viktor blinked at him uncomprehendingly. “For fuel,” Billy explained.
“New Ark
still has some residual antimatter left over from its trip. We can tow
Ark
to meet
Mayflower
in orbit and transfer its fuel to add to
Mayflower’s.”

“Holy shit,” Viktor said, his glass forgotten in his hand. But when he thought about it, it made sense, if one didn’t mind taking risks. Certainly transferring the reserve fuel would be hard, dangerous work. They would be handling
Ark’s
highly lethal, extraordinarily touchy remaining antimatter store in ways that had never been intended—but if the project worked it would give Homeport extra years of life, even if the sun continued to cool.

He stared at his father. “Is that really going to happen?”

Pal Sorricaine nodded. “The project has already been approved. We’re making more oxy-hydrogen fuel for the old shuttle right now, and the ship’s still operational. Of course, it hasn’t been used for years, since the last crew rotation—”

Viktor didn’t let him finish. “I want to go along,” he declared.

“I thought you would,” his father said mildly. “So do Captain Bu and Captain Rodericks—”
New Ark’s
original commander on the long-ago voyage from Earth “—and, naturally, Billy and Jake and Reesa. But we’ll need at least twenty volunteers. We’ll be there at least six months, and then—”

“And then what?” Viktor demanded.

His father looked at him speculatively. Jake and Billy kept their eyes carefully averted. “And then,” his father said, “maybe we can get around to other important things. Now here comes Reesa, so let’s get this party started. Billy? Can you play “Happy Birthday” on your guitar?”

The launch was scary and bruising, but it got them there. Then the hard work started.

It was the first time in more than thirty Newmanhome years that Viktor had been inside
New Mayflower.
Muscles used to planet living had forgotten the skills of operating in microgravity. He bashed himself a dozen times against walls and ceilings before he learned to control his movements.

In the rush of landing, the colonists had not left a tidy ship, and the skeleton crews that had remained aboard to care for the MHD generators hadn’t bothered to waste much time in cleaning up. Trash was everywhere outside the tiny space the crews had occupied. Broken bits of furnishings, discarded papers. Spoiled food. Even, in the freezer section, a dead horse, long mummified but still direly stinking if you came too close. The shuttle left a dozen of its crew there to start preparing
Mayflower’s
fuel systems for replenishing. Then Viktor and fourteen others pushed off for the slow orbital drift around to
Ark.

Down below, Newmanhome was spread out for them to see. It wasn’t blue anymore. Most of it was white, and not all the white was cloud tops. The oceans nearest the pole had already begun to freeze over. Some mountain lakes were now glaciers, and there were immense storms over most of Great Ocean. Viktor and Reesa gazed down at the cloud tops where Homeport seemed to be in the process of being battered by another winter storm. The town had already begun digging in—it was easier to keep warm underground than in the vicious winds of the surface.

“I hope Edwina’s keeping the kids covered up,” Reesa murmured.

From behind them, Jake Lundy said comfortingly, “She’s a good mother, Reesa, even if she’s getting some strange ideas. And anyway, once we get this done there’ll be plenty of energy—for a while, anyway.”

When they entered
New Ark
it was even worse than
Mayflower
had been. Its crews had had no reason to leave a livable ship at all. The internal power generators still worked, supplied with the mere trickle of energy they needed from the tiny fraction of
Ark’s
store of antimatter that remained in the engines. So, for all those abandoned years, the ship had been kept—well, not warm, but at least above the freezing point.
Ark’s
freezers, with their untouched reserve supplies of organisms and cell cultures, were still in good shape. What was mostly missing was light.
Ark’s
colonists had thriftily removed nearly all the light tubes, along with everything else that could be cannibalized from the ship, for a more immediate use down below on Newmanhome. Even the station-keeping thrusters were still operational—everyone sighed with relief at that, because otherwise their task of transferring fuel would have been much harder.

Indeed, there was enough energy left in the main-drive fuel chamber and station-keepers to send
Ark
completely around its solar system—if anyone had wanted to do that.

When they fired up the drive for the rendezvous with
Mayflower
it didn’t protest. It began pouring out its floods of plasma as though its engines had been last used only days before.
Ark
crept toward
Mayflower
in its orbit, and the work crews began the hard work of cutting up the interior bulkheads and carefully—oh,
very
carefully—beginning to dismantle the restraining magnets that held its antimatter fuel in place.

There was no room for error in that. If the antimatter had been allowed to brush against normal matter, even for a moment, even the barest touch, the resulting blast would have scattered all of it—and people on Newmanhome would have seen a major flare star in their sky, just before they were scorched blind in the blast.

So Captains Bu and Rodericks and the three surviving Engineer Officers from the two ships—Wilma Granczek had died giving birth to her fourth child on the Archipelago—began the precarious work of shifting the fuel.

It wasn’t easy. When
Ark
was designed, no provision had been made for such a project. Of course, it wasn’t only the fuel that had to be moved, it was the magnetic restraints that held it free of contact with anything else, and the steel shell that surrounded the captor fields, and the power source that kept the fields fed and working.

There was no way to move that sort of awkward mass through the ship’s ports. They had to cut a hole in the side of
Ark,
to get the stuff out, while the other crew was cutting another just as big in the hull of
Mayflower
to insert it there.

Outside the ship, secured by cables, Viktor wielded the great plasma torch, Jake Lundy at his side.

He hadn’t planned it that way. He didn’t seek out Lundy’s company. It was, he thought in an abstract way, just considering the possibilities, better to have Lundy out there with him than inside with, possibly, Reesa—though what they could have been doing, in the cramped confines of the livable part of
Ark
would hardly have been much, anyway. But he was getting really tired of Jake Lundy’s company. It even crossed Viktor’s mind for a moment that it wouldn’t be awful, really, if Lundy’s cables had somehow broken and the man had drifted helplessly away into space, never to return. He even thought, though not seriously—he told himself that of course it wasn’t a serious thought—how easy it would be to misaim the plasma torch, now eating through the tough steel of the hull, to burn away Lundy’s cables .