The World at the End of Time (35 page)

“It was like that here on Newmanhome, too,” Viktor reassured her.

“And they didn’t worry about—” She paused, looked around, and lowered her voice. “—like, overload?”

Viktor gave her a superior smile. He knew he was rubbing salt in wounds, but he couldn’t help it. “If you mean killing people because there are too many to feed, no. Not ever. Fact, they
wanted
more people. Everybody was supposed to have all the children they could. Reesa and I had four,” he boasted, unwilling to try the explanation of what was meant by “Reesa and I” and the divided parentage of the children . . .

The children.

Viktor lost the thread of what he was saying. Suddenly the cooling stew and the smells of the densely packed dining hall stopped being pleasant. The children! And he would never see any of them again.

Viktor excused himself and stumbled away to the jakes. He didn’t have to urinate. He just didn’t want anyone to see, in case he had to cry.

When he got back Mirian gave him a quick, hooded look and went on talking about his experiences as a freezer guard. “They’ve got all kinds of stuff in there,” he was saying. “You wouldn’t believe all of it. There’s one whole chamber that’s full of frozen sperm and ova, animals that they brought from Earth and never started up here. Whales! Termites! Chimpanzees—”

“What’s a termite?” the woman across the table asked, but she was looking at Viktor.

Viktor did his best. “It’s a kind of an insect, I think. They used to worry about them eating the wood in their houses in California. And a chimpanzee’s like a monkey—I think,” he added honestly, because all he remembered of chimpanzees was that he had seen a lot of almost human-looking primates one day at the San Diego Zoo, and he had been more impressed by the terrible way they smelled than by his father’s lectures on which was which.

There was silence for a moment. Then Mirian put in, “We saw
Ark
when we were outside. Only it was near the fireball, so we couldn’t get a really good look at it.”

Viktor saw that everyone looked a little embarrassed when Mirian mentioned the fireball. Yet the man had brought it up; it was as good a chance as any to probe. “About that fireball,” he began.

Conversation stopped. Everyone’s eyes were on him, and every mouth was closed. Even Mirian was looking suspiciously at him.

The hell with them, Viktor thought. “I know what that fireball is,” he announced. “It’s a foreshortened view of the universe. Somehow, I don’t know how, we’ve been accelerated so fast that we’re catching up with all the light from everywhere.”

Silence. No response at all. Then Mirian swallowed and said, “Maybe we should be getting back to work, Viktor.”

But the woman across the table reached out to touch his arm. “What are you telling us, Viktor?” she asked. “How could that happen?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea,” he said bitterly. “Something is pulling us. Or pushing us, maybe, but I don’t know any forces that could do that. Anyway our planet, and the sun, and all the other planets around it, and a few other stars are all being pulled along very fast by
something.”

“What do you mean, ‘something’? Do you mean by God?” the woman asked, crossing herself. “Freddy didn’t say anything about that!”

“No, not God,” Viktor said hastily. “It doesn’t have anything to do with God, of course. It’s some natural force, probably—or, well—” He stopped, angry at these people and even more at himself.

He hadn’t stopped in time. “Are you saying the Great Transporter isn’t God?” the woman demanded. An old man down the table stood up, his white mustaches quivering.

“I don’t like this kind of talk!” he announced. “I’m going back to work!”

And Mirian, glowering as he led Viktor away from the table, warned, “You have to watch what you say, man! I’m as tolerant as the next fellow, you know that—but you don’t want a charge of heresy and corruption of faith, do you?”

This day, Viktor thought gloomily, was not going well at all.

It did not occur to him that it was capable of getting a lot worse.

He was hunched over the keyboard when Tortee came back to her room. He cleared the screen quickly, but not quickly enough: She had caught a glimpse of the spectral analysis display. “What’s that, Viktor?” she demanded ominously. “Have you finished the repair plans?”

“Almost done, Tortee,” he said with a false smile, keeping his anger inside. “I’ll have them for you this afternoon.”

“I want them
now!
I’ve got a meeting with the Four-Power Repair Committee, and I need to show them what has to be done to the
Ark.
What’ve you been doing? No,” she said forcefully as he opened his mouth, “I want to know what you were
really
doing. Show me that screen again!”

“But, really, Tortee,” he began, and then knew it was no use. Sullenly he keyed in the file name and watched as the damning spectrum flashed on the board.

The old woman might have been a religious bigot, but she was not a scientific fool. She recognized the patterns at once. “You’re checking spectra,” she announced, “and I can guess what that’s a spectrum of. Viktor, I don’t know what to do with you. You’ve been openly talking religious error—” He started to speak again, startled, but she overrode him. “Don’t deny it! Do you think people don’t report to me? Half a dozen people heard you in the dining hall today! And you’re wasting working time with your immoral habits. I can’t put up with this. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“I’m only trying to find out the truth about what’s going on!” Viktor cried hotly.

“The
truth,”
Tortee said icily, “has long since been revealed to us. Blessed Freddy set it down for all to see in His Third Testament, and that’s the only truth that matters. I forbid you ever to speak of this subject again.” He was astonished to see that she was really angry. Her pudgy face was squeezed into a scowl. “Don’t try my patience too far, Viktor! I don’t want to have to punish you. You wouldn’t like it.” She stared at him for a moment, then added as an afterthought, “You can forget about using my room for your personal pleasure again, too. Now get out of here! You and Mirian are wanted at the shuttle. They’re almost ready to fuel up for the first repair crew.”

It could have been worse, Viktor thought sourly. Reesa was right. He had gone farther with Tortee—well, with all these superstition-ridden, mule-stubborn people—than was sensible.

For that matter, sending him out to the freezer complex was punishment in itself. It was late. There was little chance they would be able to get back before dark, and no one wanted to be outside when even the feeble heat of sun and star burst were gone.

Mirian did his best to hurry the workers at the liquid-gas plant along. It wasn’t hard to do, because the fuel detail wanted to be back by nightfall, too. Working at top speed, he and Viktor checked the fuel manifests, inspected the tanks’ seals, and agreed that it was all in order. But the haste was all in vain, because then they were shunted over to the cryonics caves to wait. Their four-power escort hadn’t shown up on time.

“Oh, hell,” Mirian groaned, pulling unhappily at his beard. “We’ll never get back before dark.”

“I’m sorry, Mirian,” Viktor said. “I think I got Tortee mad at me.”

“You
think
you did! Oh, Viktor, just shut up. Every time you open your mouth you make more trouble!” And he slumped down against a wall and closed his eyes, refusing to speak.

Absently Viktor strolled around the chilly cave, glancing at the tunnels that led off from the central chamber. Inside each tunnel was row on row of capsules. Each one held a human body—convicted “criminals” mostly—with crosses for the Greats and the Reforms, crescents for the Moslems, and five-pointed stars for the Peeps. Those were the fruits of overload, Viktor knew, and dourly thought that the chances were good that he would be joining them if he didn’t learn to keep his mouth shut.

By the time the escort arrived Viktor had made up his mind. He would never say a blasphemous word again. He would follow Reesa’s example. He would do his best to please Tortee and to make her hopeless plan work.

He couldn’t wait to see Reesa to tell her about his resolve.

It was almost dark by the time the two of them and their escort were stumbling through the freezing gale back to the dwelling tunnels. The fireball “universe” had already set, and the sun was nearly at the horizon; it was definitely getting too cold to be out of doors.

Mirian glanced at Viktor, then made a gesture of reconciliation. He pointed to the horizon. There was
Mayflower,
a hand’s-span north of the setting sun. The old ship was just beginning to climb up the sky from the west in its hundred-minute orbit, with
Ark
still out of sight below and behind it.

Mirian put his head next to Viktor’s and bawled, over the noise of the wind, “It won’t be so bad, Viktor. Once they get the repairs going Tortee will be easier to get along with, you’ll see.”

“I hope so,” Viktor shouted back, and bent his head, squinting against the cold as he trudged along. Easier to get along with! That wouldn’t be hard, he thought resentfully. He slipped on a slanting block of ice, cursed, caught himself—

And heard a strange moaning sound from Mirian.

Viktor looked up quickly. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a quick flicker of light. Startled, he stared up. It was
Mayflower,
suddenly shining bright, almost as suddenly darkening again.

“What is it, Mirian?” he cried.

But Mirian didn’t know. No one knew, until they had toiled back inside the tunnels again and the word from Tortee’s instruments had spread like wildfire.

The sudden brightening of
Mayflower
had been only reflected light from another, hidden source. And that source—

It had been the worst disaster imaginable.

Ark
had blown up.

Fortunately for the people on Newmanhome,
Ark
had still been below the horizon when it happened. It wasn’t a chemical explosion that had blasted the old ship into ions, not even a nuke: it was the annihilation of matter and antimatter, pounds of mass converted into energy in the twinkling of an eye, in accordance with the old formula:
e = mc
²
.
That hemisphere directly under Ark had received a sudden flood of radiation like an instant flare from the heart of a star.

There was nothing living on that part of Newmanhome. That was fortunate. For, of course, anything that had been alive in the face of that terrible blast would have stopped living at once.

The skeleton crew on
Mayflower
were less fortunate. Even through the thick skin of the spaceship, they had received more radiation than the human body was meant to experience in a lifetime.

And Tortee was weeping hysterically in her room. She refused to see Viktor at all. She let Mirian in for only a moment, and when he came out he was looking very grave.

“It’s over,” Mirian told Viktor mournfully. “If we don’t have
Ark
we don’t have a working drive. We can’t build a rocket ship big enough to attack the planet.”

“No, of course not,” Viktor agreed, dazed, wishing Reesa were there. “What happened?”

“Aw, who knows?” Mirian said despondently. “Tortee thinks it was the Peeps. She thinks they were so set on getting microwave power that they started fooling around with the drive—to keep us from using it again, you know? And it just went off.” He stopped for a moment, gazing at Viktor with an ambiguous expression. Then he said, “I’ve been thinking, Viktor. You’ve had a pretty good run for your money.”

Viktor blinked, not seeing the connection. “I have?”

“I mean,” Mirian explained, “you were born on
Earth.
Good Freddy, Viktor, that makes you just about the oldest person in the world.”

“I guess it does,” Viktor said grudgingly. That was an interesting thought, but not the kind that reconciled you to anything.

“So when the council decides . . .” Mirian left it hanging there. Victor looked at him in puzzlement.

“What is there to decide? You said yourself, the project’s over.”

“I don’t mean the project, I mean about you, Viktor. Tortee won’t stand up for you anymore, not after this. Not after—well, you know,” he said awkwardly, “we’re always pressed for living space here.”

“What are you talking about?” Viktor demanded, losing patience. “Are you saying I have to go live with the Peeps or something, like Reesa?”

“Oh, no, not with the Peeps. And I suppose they might keep Reesa on. But you, Viktor—well,” he said fairly, “it’s not like
death.
We don’t
kill
people. That’s against the Commandments. And, who knows, somebody, sometime—there’s always the chance that someday someone will thaw you out of the freezer.”

CHAPTER 19

By the time Wan-To had worn out his hundredth star he began to get uneasy again. It wasn’t that he was fearing attack from his long-gone siblings, for that had not happened in many hundreds of billions of years. He certainly wasn’t worrying about the matter-creatures his long-forgotten Matter-Copy Number Five had reported. No, what was bothering Wan-To was that he couldn’t help noticing that his neighborhood was going downhill.