The World at the End of Time (22 page)

He didn’t mean that, of course. He reassured himself that that was so. His marriage to Reesa was comfortable; they were used to each other; they shared a love for the kids, and the habits of a dozen years. In any case, he was never
jealous
concerning Reesa—as he had been, for instance, of the incomparable Marie-Claude Stockbridge.

To take his mind off such matters he gazed around. From outside the ship Viktor could see Newmanhome spread out below them. He didn’t like to look there; the spreading white at the poles was ice—something that Newmanhome had never seen before. Looking at the fearsome skies was even worse. The sun was still the brightest object around, but woefully dimmer than before. The cherry coal of the brown dwarf, Nergal, was almost as bright, but the sun’s other planets had dimmed with their primary. The eleven normal stars still shone as bright as ever. But there were so few of them! And the rest of the universe, separating itself into great colored clusters, red and blue, had changed into something wonderful and weird and worrying.

He was glad when their shift ended and they were back inside, though there wasn’t much there to take comfort in, either. The shuttle had been too full of people to leave room for amenities—even for food; though fortunately
Ark’s
freezers still had their stocks of frozen spare animals. But one did get tired of eating armadillo, or bat, or goat . . .

When they had raped the side of
Ark
there was little to do until
Ark
completed its slow crawl toward its younger sister ship.

“We could have used the main drives,” Captain Bu fretted.

“Don’t need them!” Captain Rodericks said sharply. “There’s plenty of power in the auxiliary thrusters. Anyway, this is
my
ship, Bu, and we’ll do it my way.”

“The slow way,” Bu sneered.

“The
safe
way,” Rodericks said resolutely. “Talk about something else!”

But the other things they had to talk about were not cheering. Word from Homeport was that the community was making progress in digging itself underground, where the soil would be their best insulation against the cooling winds; the clothing factories were doing their best to turn out parkas and gloves and wool hats, things that had never been needed on Newmanhome before.

They were cold inside the hulk of
Ark,
too. Bu wanted to cut off power to the freezer sections to use it to warm their little living quarters, but Captain Rodericks refused. His grounds were simple: “Some day we may need what’s in those freezers. Anyway, it’s
my ship.”
So they huddled together, usually in the old control room, and spent their time watching
Mayflower
drift nearer and gazing, through screens and fiber-optic tubes, at the scary skies.

It was Furhet Gaza, the welding expert, who said, “Everybody! Look at those stars.”

“What stars?” Reesa asked.

“Our own stars! The ones that aren’t shifting. They aren’t any dimmer, are they?”

“They don’t look that way,” Billy Stockbridge said cautiously. “What about it?”

“Well,” Gaza said earnestly, “maybe we’re making a big mistake. Maybe we shouldn’t wreck our ships! Maybe we should get everybody back on board and head for one of them.”

Billy Stockbridge gave him a look of disdain, but it was Captain Rodericks who said angrily, “That’s stupid talk, Gaza! What you say is impossible. In the first place, there are too many people on Newmanhome now; we wouldn’t all fit in what’s left of this old ship. In the second place, how would we get everybody up here? We don’t have a fleet of a thousand shuttles to carry them.”

“It’s worse than that, Captain,” Billy Stockbridge put in.

He got a hostile look from Furhet Gaza. “Worse how?” Gaza demanded.

“We don’t even know if those other stars have planets,” Viktor offered, but Billy was shaking his head.

“That’s not it, either. It doesn’t matter if they do have planets; they wouldn’t be any use to us. I’ve checked those stars. They’re dimming, too. It’s just that what we’re seeing is the way they were up to six years ago, so they don’t look much different—but they’re different now, Gaza. And anyway—”

He stopped there. It was Captain Rodericks who said, “Anyway what, Stockbridge?”

Billy shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, “we’ve got a better use for whatever fuel is left in the drive.”

“You mean try to take the fuel out of the drive unit, too? But that’s hard, Stockbridge; we’ve agreed that we’ll just shift the reserves. That’s where most of it is, anyway—enough to power
Ark’s
generators for another five or ten years, with a little luck. We don’t need to make our job any harder than it is already.”

Billy pursed his lips. “That’s true.” And that was all he said.

Outside of the endless work of cutting metal and preparing the fuel for the move, the biggest job was staying alive—which meant scavenging for food in
Ark’s
freezers. Viktor went with Jake Lundy as his partner when it was his turn. He didn’t think about reasons why; he simply volunteered his services, certainly not to forestall Reesa doing the same.

He still felt a certain tension in Lundy’s presence, but Lundy seemed quite at ease. He had done the food-scavenging bit before, and was friendly and forgiving when Viktor tried to pull one of the freezer drawers out and couldn’t work the catch, not at all like the ones he had seen on
Mayflower.
“Here, let an expert do it,” Lundy said amiably, showing what he meant with a quick twist and pull.

“That’s fine,” Viktor said sourly as the drawer slid easily out. It did take an expert to handle Ark’s freezers, because in Viktor’s opinion they had been badly designed in the first place.
Mayflower’s
had been a generation later, and a generation better.
Mayflower
had sensibly kept the entire freezer section at temperatures between ambient and liquid gas, while
Ark
simply clustered drawers of freezer compartments in chambers that looked like an Earthly morgue.

Viktor stood uselessly by while Lundy unsealed the drawer. Clouds of white vapor came off the contents as he poked around with the thick gloves. “Oh, shit, Viktor,” he said in disgust. “Didn’t you check the labels? This stuff’s no good, unless you expect us to eat sperm samples from the small mammals.”

“What labels?” Viktor demanded.

Lundy just gave him a patient look, then resealed the drawer again. He ran his finger over the plaques on a couple of adjacent drawers to rub the frost off, then said, “Here. This one might do. It’s got turtle eggs and, let’s see, what’s this? Some kind of fish, I guess. Hold the sack for me while I pull them out.”

Carefully he lifted out the plastic-sealed objects, unidentifiable under the coating of frost already forming on them, and placed them in the tote bag. “That’ll do for now, I guess,” he said when the sack was half-full. He resealed the remaining contents of the drawer and turned, ready to leave, when he saw the way Viktor was looking at him. “Is something the matter?” he inquired politely.

Viktor hesitated. Then, without knowing in advance he was going to say it, he said, “Do you mind telling me what’s going on?”

Lundy looked at him thoughtfully, then turned and absently rubbed the plaque on the door clean. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“The hell you don’t! I’ve asked Reesa, and she won’t tell me a thing. Neither will Billy. But I know damn well there’s some kind of secret! At first I thought—”

Viktor paused. He was unwilling to say that his first thought when he saw Reesa and Lundy whispering together had been the—well, not the
jealous
feeling that something was cooking between them, but certainly a lot of curiosity about just what it was they whispered about. He finished, “I thought all sorts of things, but none of them make sense.”

“What sorts of things?”

“I don’t know! That’s why I’m asking!” And then he took a wild plunge into speculation. “Is it Nebo, by any chance? I know Billy’s always had this idea that we had to go there. He got it from my father, of course. But it’s crazy.”

“Why do you think it’s crazy?” Lundy asked, sounding interested and not at all defensive.

“Well—it just
is.
What could we do if we got there?”

“We could try to find out about those anomalous radiation readings, for one thing,” Lundy said seriously.

“Why?”

“That,” Lundy told him, for the first time looking strained, “is what people might want to go to Nebo to find out. I don’t know what. I only know that something’s going on there, and it might be important.”

“But—” Viktor shook his head. “What would be the point? Even if the others would let you take
Ark
there, I mean? You can’t see anything through the cloud cover.”

“There’s radar,” Lundy pointed out. “And if that didn’t settle anything, we could—” He hesitated, then finished, “We could always drop a party onto the surface of Nebo to find out.”

“But—but—but our job is to transfer fuel to
Mayflower,
not go gallivanting off to satisfy somebody’s curiosity!”

“We’re doing that part of the job,” Lundy pointed out. “Then, when it’s done, we’ll still have drive fuel in
Ark.
We can’t transfer that! Once it’s in the drive itself it’s too dangerous. So when we’ve finished what we came for—then we can take a vote.”

“On what? On taking
Ark
to Nebo?”

Lundy shrugged.

“And you’ve been planning this for—how long?” Viktor demanded.

“Since Reesa first suggested it,” Lundy said simply. Reesa! Viktor stared at him with his mouth open. Lundy went on: “Now, the question is, are you going to keep your mouth shut about it until we’ve finished the fuel transfer?”

“I don’t know,” Viktor said wretchedly.

But, in the event, he did keep his mouth shut. He didn’t say a word. He ate the food they had brought back—the fish turned out to be almost too bony to eat, but the turtle eggs, roasted, were delicious—and all the time he was watching his wife and wondering what other surprises were hidden inside that familiar head.

CHAPTER 11

The fifth of Wan-To’s doppels did not have a real name. It wasn’t important enough. When Wan-To addressed it at all it was simply as Matter Copy Number Five. Still, Five was fairly important to the remnants of the human race on Newmanhome, because it happened to be the one that had set up shop on the scorched little planet the people of Newmanhome called Nebo.

Although Five was certainly very tiny, primitive and stupid by Wan-To’s standards, it was quite capable of doing everything Wan-To ordered it to do. It was even capable of figuring out how to do things Wan-To himself had never gone to the trouble of figuring out before.

There’s a human story that describes that situation pretty well. Problem: A human army lieutenant has the task of erecting a thirty-foot flagpole when he only has a twenty-foot length of rope and no hoisting machines. How does he do it? Answer: He calls over his highest-ranking noncom and says, “Sergeant, put up that flagpole.”

So when Five received its orders it exercised its built-in ingenuity to carry them out.

It had to start pretty much from scratch. It had no experience of this bizarre kind of environment (it had no experience at all, of course, except what Wan-To had implanted in its memories). It was not deterred by the odd qualities of this “planet” (solid matter! And an “atmosphere”! Five understood the concept of a gas well enough, but these particular gases were so incredibly cold—hardly more than eight or nine hundred Kelvin). Then, the task of manipulating matter all by itself was not really easy. There were so many
kinds
of matter. There were all those things called “elements” and all their molecular combinations and isotopic variations and interacting relationships. It was definitely a nasty job. But someone had to do it—Wan-To had so decreed.

The first thing Five had to do, starting with its control of magnetic and electrostatic forces, and its limited (but adequate) supply of gravitational particles, was simple excavation. It had to wrench out large quantities of matter—ill assorted, full of things Five didn’t want at all—from the surface of the planet (and from some sources pretty far below the surface) for separation into the basic building blocks it needed; call them ores. To separate the various kinds of useful things out of the ores, it invented what humans might have called a sort of mass spectrometer: vaporized matter passed through a sieve of forces that pulled out each separate atom, according to its weight and characteristics, and deposited them one at a time (but very rapidly!) in “storage bins” until such time as Five was ready to put them together in the combinations and shapes it needed. And it needed so many different shapes of matter! It needed antennae to locate and lock onto the various nearby stars it was meant to carry along. It needed chambers to contain the forces that would move them; it needed sensors to make sure they were moving properly; it needed a separate kind of antenna, just to keep in communication with its master, Wan-To.

And it needed them all in a hurry, because Wan-To was not patient. Wan-To took for granted that the doppel, Five, was moving as rapidly as possible. Five slaved to do so. It wasn’t that it was afraid of punishment. The heart of an animal doesn’t pump because it is afraid its master will be angry if it stops; it pumps because that is what it
does.