The World at the End of Time (6 page)

He entered Wanda’s room diffidently. It smelled terrible. He saw that it wasn’t in any way like the one Viktor shared with his parents. It had started out identical, of course—every room on the ship was basically the same standard cubicle, since each one would become a separate landing pod when the colonists arrived at their destination—but over a hundred years she had decorated it and painted it and added bits of furnishings and knickknacks that were her own . . . and it had one bit of furnishing that Viktor had not at all expected and saw with astonished delight.

Wanda Mei had a cat!

The cat’s name was Robert, a whole tom who was, Wanda said, nearly twenty years old. “He won’t last any longer than I will,” she said, sighing as she sat down. The cat stalked toward her, then soared into her lap, but she gave him a quick stroke and handed him generously to Viktor. “You hold him while I find the books,” she ordered. Viktor was glad to oblige. The old cat turned around twice in his lap and then allowed his back to be stroked, nuzzling his whiskery cheek contentedly into Viktor’s belly.

Viktor was almost sorry when Wanda produced the books. But they were grand. She had
Tom Sawyer
and
Two Little Savages
and
Mistress Masham’s Repose
and a dozen others—worn, dog-eared, the bindings sometimes cracked, but still entirely readable.

Only the catbox smell of the room began to get to him. He stood.

“I have to go now,” he announced. She looked surprised but didn’t object. “Thank you for the books,” he remembered to say, politely. She nodded.

And then, as he reached the door, he asked the question that had been on his mind all along. “Wanda? Why did you do it?”

“Why did I do what?” she demanded crossly.

“Why did you let yourself get old?”

She glared at him. “What impudence, Viktor! And what a question! Everyone gets old, that is what human beings do. You will get old, too!”

“But I’m not old now,” he pointed out reasonably.

“You are not even grown-up enough to be courteous!” Then she said, softening, “Well, I told you. I was afraid. I didn’t want to die . . . only,” she sighed, “it appears that I am going to die before very long anyway. I did want to see the new planet, Viktor. All the planets. Nebo and the one we’re going to live on, Enki. What they call Newmanhome. And Ishtar and Nergal—”

“And Marduk and Ninih,” he finished for her. Everyone knew the names of the planets in the system they would live in. “Yes. But why don’t you—”

“Why don’t I get frozen now, after all?” she demanded bitterly. “Because now it’s too late, Viktor. What would they do with an old useless woman when we land? What would my husband do?”

Viktor stared at her. He hadn’t known she had ever had a husband.

“Oh,” she said, nodding. “Yes, I was married once. For seven years, while Thurhan was thawed out for his turn at engineering duty. Why do you think my name is Mei now? But we didn’t have any children, and he went back into the freezer, when his tour was over, and when he wakes up again what would he want with a wife older than his grandmother? And besides—”

She hesitated, looking at him sadly. “And besides,” she finished, “I’m still afraid.”

He spent the rest of the day alone, reading. When he got to the refectory for the evening meal almost everyone was there, looking excited. The rumor was now fact. The emergency crews weren’t needed anymore, and they were being sent back to cryonic storage.

Most people looked pleased at the word that the emergency was over, but Viktor’s mother wasn’t looking pleased, and his father looked abashed. All the feelings of the last days came back to Viktor. Something had been kept from him. “What’s the matter?” he demanded, alarmed.

“I had to make a decision,” Pal Sorricaine said reluctantly. “See, I’m going to stay awake for a while, Viktor. Not long—well, maybe not long; it’s too soon to tell. But they need an astronomer-navigator to keep an eye on the flare star, and I guess I’m it.”

Viktor pondered, blinking. “You mean my mother and I are going to be frozen, but you’re not?”

“It’ll be all right, Vik,” his mother put in. “For us, anyway. For your father, well—well, perhaps it will only be for a few months. Or a couple of years at the outside—don’t you think, Pal?” she appealed, turning to his father.

“I’ll do it as soon as I can,” he promised. “After all, the flight’s got sixteen years to go—I don’t want to wind up that much older than you!”

Across the room, Werner Stockbridge was whispering in his wife’s ear when he caught sight of Viktor. He detached himself and burrowed through the crowded hall, aiming a friendly slap, or pat, at his son, Billy, on the way. He lowered his head to Viktor’s level and said confidentially, “You’re just the man I’m looking for, Viktor. Do me a favor?”

“Sure, Mr. Stockbridge,” Viktor said at once, though his tone was doubtful.

“Take the kids off our hands for a while, will you? I mean, we’re going back in the deep freeze in a little while and—and Marie-Claude and I need a little private time first, if you know what I mean.”

Viktor flushed and looked away, because he did know. “Okay, Vik?” Stockbridge persisted. Viktor nodded without looking up. “Give us an hour then, all right? Two would be better—say, two hours, and I’ll owe you a favor.”

Viktor checked ship’s time on the wall clock: 1926 hours. Without very good feelings about it, partly because of the thought of two hours with the Stockbridge kids, mostly because of the thought of what the elder Stockbridges would be doing with those two hours, he led the boys to his own family’s room and turned on the teaching machine. “I’m going to show you where we’re going,” he promised.

Freddy looked startled. “Heaven? You mean because we’re going to die? Mrs. Mei said—”

“You’re not going to
die,
and it doesn’t matter what Mrs. Mei said,” Viktor told them sourly. “I mean I’m going to show you the planets. Look,” he said as the blue-white one flashed on the screen. “That’s where we’re going to live.”

“I know,” Billy said, bored. “It’s called Newmanhome, but its real name is Enki. It’s just like the Earth.”

“It isn’t
just
like the Earth. The days are a little bit shorter, and the year is a
lot
shorter.”

“Dummy,” Billy said scornfully. “How can a year be shorter than a year?”

“It is, though. There are twice as many years there.” He tried to explain, and when he had, more or less, succeeded, they were first appalled, then delighted.

“Twice as many birthdays!” Billy caroled.

“Twice as many
Christmases!”
his brother shouted. “Show us some more planets!”

But really they weren’t much interested in baked little Nebo, so close to its sun, or the far-out Marduk and Ninih. And when Viktor showed them the glowing coal of Nergal, squat and cherry red, and told them it was a brown dwarf, they rebelled. “It isn’t brown,” Billy pointed out. “It’s red.”

“It’s
called
a brown dwarf. That’s its
name,
because it’s almost a star, but not quite. You see,” he lectured, having listened to his father’s explanations a few nights earlier, “a
star
has nuclear energy, like a bomb.”

“What’s a bomb?” Billy asked.

“Like our ship’s drive, I mean. A
planet
is just like rock and things. But in between a star and a planet there are these other things. They don’t have nuclear energy. They’re only hot because they’re so big that they’re all squeezed together.”

“It’s dumb to call them brown when they’re red,” Freddy said, siding with his brother. “Viktor, have you got a crush on our mother?”

Viktor stopped short, suddenly flushed and angry. “Have I
what?”
he demanded.

“Have you got a crush on her?” Freddy insisted. “Mrs. Mei says boys get crushes on older women and you follow Mom around all the time.”

“Now you’re being really stupid, if you want to know what’s
stupid,”
Viktor said furiously, gritting his teeth. “Don’t ever say anything like that again.”

“We won’t if you’ll play treadmill tag with us,” Billy promised, grinning in triumph. “And you have to be It!”

Dinner the next night was a sort of ceremonial affair, a goodbye party for the ones who were going back into the deep freeze. Captain Bu gave a short speech and the chef, Sam Broad—he was really a food chemist, but he was the best cook on the ship, too—had made four big cakes with icing that said
Till We Meet Again.
Pal Sorricaine was especially attentive to his wife and son that night. He kept one hand in hers all through the meal, so that they both had to eat one-handed, and he told Viktor all sorts of stories about astrophysics. When he got to the point of how the Big Bang had created only hydrogen and helium, so that all the rest of the elements had to be cooked in the cores of stars that then exploded and scattered them around to form new stars and planets the Stockbridge boys crept near to listen. And when he pointed out the logical deduction from that—”So you see, most of your body—all the oxygen and carbon and nitrogen and calcium and everything—all of it was once inside a star”—they said respectively, “Oh, wow!” and “Yuk! But that isn’t in the Bible, is it?”

Pal Sorricaine grinned at them. “The Bible’s one thing,” he told them, in full lecturing swing. “Science is another. Even scientists think about Heaven and Hell, though. Did you ever hear of a man named Arthur Eddington? Well, he was the first one to figure out what the temperature inside the core of a star had to be in order to cook all those heavier elements out of hydrogen. Only when he published his figures some other scientists told him he was wrong, because it wasn’t hot enough to do the job. So Eddington told them to go look for a hotter place.”

He looked at the uncomprehending faces expectantly. “It was a kind of way of telling them to go to Hell,” he explained.

“Oh,” Billy said, deciding to laugh.

“Dr. Sorricaine?” Freddy said. “Hell’s hot like Wanda says, isn’t it? So if we get frozen that can’t be Hell, can it?”

By the time Pal Sorricaine, startled, had reassured the boy, their parents came to take them away, and Viktor and his parents went to their own cabin. As his father tucked him in Viktor asked. “Dad? Are you really going to do it?”

His father nodded.

“For just a little while?” Viktor persisted.

His father paused before answering. “I can’t say that for sure,” he said at last, reluctantly. “It depends. Viktor, this is kind of important to me. Any scientist wants to be the one that makes a big contribution. This is my chance. That flare star—well, there’s nothing like it in the literature. Oh, they’ll see it on Earth—but from long, long away, and we’re right here. I want to be the one—well, one of the ones; Fanny Mtiga’s involved, too—that they name it after. The ‘Sorricaine-Mtiga objects.’ How does that sound?”

“It sounds okay,” Viktor told him. He wasn’t content or happy about it, but he heard the tone in his father’s voice. “Are you going to tell me a story tonight?”

“Sure am. I know,” his father said. “Do you want me to tell you about some of the famous people before me? What they did? What they’re remembered for?”

And when Viktor nodded, Pal Sorricaine began to talk about the men and women whose shoulders everyone stood on. About Henrietta Leavitt, the nineteenth-century Boston spinster who spent seventeen years studying Cepheid variables and found the first good way of measuring the size of the universe; of Harlow Shapley, who used her work to make the first nearly recognizable model of our own Galaxy; of Edwin Hubble, champion prizefighter turned astronomer, who found a way to employ supergiant stars in the way that Henrietta Leavitt had used Cepheids, thus extending the scale; of Vesto Slipher, who first linked red shifts with velocity and then with distance; of a dozen other forgotten names.

Then his father got to names Viktor had heard of. Albert Einstein? Oh, of course! Everybody knew about Albert Einstein. He was the—wait a minute—wasn’t it relativity he discovered? And something about
e
equals
m c
squared? Right, Pal Sorricaine told him, hiding a smile, and that was the key to understanding why stars are hot—and to making atomic bombs and power plants, yes, and ultimately to designing the kind of matter-antimatter drive that was shoving
New Mayflower
on its way. And why the speed of light is always thirty million centimeters a second, no matter how fast the star—or spaceship—that emitted the light was going.
New Mayflower
might have been going a million centimeters a second, but that didn’t mean that the light, or the radio waves, that went ahead of it to carry its picture and messages were traveling at 31 million cps; no, it was always the same.
c
never changed, and there was nothing anyone could do that would ever change that.

About then Viktor’s mother came in with a glass of milk and a pill. “Why do I have to take a pill?” he asked.

“Just take it,” she said quietly, affectionately. It occurred to Viktor that it might have something to do with getting ready to be frozen again, so he did as told and kissed her back when she bent to his face.

Then his father went on to the English Quaker, Arthur Eddington, the man who had figured out the connection between physics—stuff that people studied in laboratories on Earth—and the stars, the things that interested astronomers. You might even say, Pal Sorricaine told his son, that Eddington invented the science of astrophysics. Then there were Ernst Mach and Bishop Berkeley, and the geometers Gauss and Bolyai and Riemann and Lobachevski, and Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest; and Baade, Hoyle, Gamow, Bethe, Dicke, Wilson, Penzias, Hawking . . .