The World At The End Of Time

THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME.

by Frederik Pohl.

CHAPTER 1.

Although Wan-To wasn"t at all human, he (or one might prefer to refer to him as "it," but "he" was not an inappropriate p.r.o.noun) would have put that statement in a very different way. Wan-To would have said he was at least least human. He certainly had all the human characteristics that he would have considered worth having-if he had known that such a thing as the human race existed, which he did not. He was strong. He was intelligent. He had an inquiring mind-which meant he had a scientific one-which meant that, technologically, Wan-To was a very slick article indeed. human. He certainly had all the human characteristics that he would have considered worth having-if he had known that such a thing as the human race existed, which he did not. He was strong. He was intelligent. He had an inquiring mind-which meant he had a scientific one-which meant that, technologically, Wan-To was a very slick article indeed.

He had, too, that quintessentially human trait that you never seem to find in things like tarantulas or termites. He had a h.e.l.l of a great sense of humor. His idea of what was funny was not subtle. Basically, it was the pie-in-the-face or the pull-the-chair-out-from-under-you kind of thing. But that"s just as true of a lot of human beings.

He was also an extraordinarily (and very humanly) compet.i.tive individual. Wan-To definitely wanted to be the best of his kind. He wanted that at least. at least. Sometimes, when things got dicey with his only "friends," he wanted to be the only one. Sometimes, when things got dicey with his only "friends," he wanted to be the only one.

Of course, the ways in which Wan-To was all these things was not exactly a human way, but that would not have troubled Wan-To. He would have been sure his way was better.

The place where Wan-To lived-which was not exactly a "place," since Wan-To was a dispersed sort of being-was the interior of a medium-sized G-3 star not readily visible from the surface of the Earth. He hadn"t always lived there. He certainly hadn"t been "born" there, or in any place near it, but that is a whole other story and even Wan-To didn"t know all of it. Wan-To could move easily enough when he wanted to. In fact, he had packed up and moved about as often as any American city apartment dweller, from one star to another-and once, long ago, he had moved a lot farther than that. But, like a New Yorker blessed with a rent-controlled apartment, he did his best to stay put. Moving was a great annoyance to him. It was also a little dangerous, since going out there into interstellar s.p.a.ce, away from the friendly multimillion-degree heat and pressure of his star, frightened him. At such times he was naked and exposed, like a molting crab hiding while it grew a new sh.e.l.l. Leaving his star left him vulnerable to the attentions of predators-who were no less frightening because they were, in some degree, himself.

Of course, Wan-To enjoyed his star. He knew it as intimately as a man knows his bedroom. He could easily have moved about it in the dark, if there had ever been any dark. Human astrophysicists would have envied him that first-hand knowledge. For a human astronomer to make a model of what the inside of a star was like was an exercise in observation, deduction, and just plain guessing. Humans could never see inside a star. The longer the humans worked at it, the better their guesses on the subject got-but Wan-To didn"t have to guess. He knew. knew.

That isn"t all an Earth person might have envied Wan-To for. Really, he had a pretty joyous life-at least, when he wasn"t terrified. For Wan-To, living in a star was fun. fun. In any star he happened to occupy he could always find a satisfying variety of environments. He could even find a wide choice of "climates," and he had all sorts of vastly differing particles to amuse himself with, though some elements were a lot scarcer than others. For instance, if you took a random sample of a million atoms out of Wan-To"s star, mixed well from all of its parts, only one of those atoms would be the element argon. Two or three atoms each would be aluminum, calcium, sodium, and nickel; sixteen would be sulfur; thirty or forty each would be silicon, magnesium, neon, and iron. You"d probably find eighty or ninety atoms of nitrogen, 400-plus of carbon, nearly 700 of oxygen. (If you took a larger sample-if you counted every atom in the star-of course you"d find a lot of other elements. In fact, you"d find In any star he happened to occupy he could always find a satisfying variety of environments. He could even find a wide choice of "climates," and he had all sorts of vastly differing particles to amuse himself with, though some elements were a lot scarcer than others. For instance, if you took a random sample of a million atoms out of Wan-To"s star, mixed well from all of its parts, only one of those atoms would be the element argon. Two or three atoms each would be aluminum, calcium, sodium, and nickel; sixteen would be sulfur; thirty or forty each would be silicon, magnesium, neon, and iron. You"d probably find eighty or ninety atoms of nitrogen, 400-plus of carbon, nearly 700 of oxygen. (If you took a larger sample-if you counted every atom in the star-of course you"d find a lot of other elements. In fact, you"d find all all the other elements, from beryllium to the transuranics. Inevitably some freak of fusion would manufacture at least a few of every atom that could possibly be made, somewhere inside Wan-To"s star. But all the elements named-every element that ever existed, save two-would still amount to fewer than 2,000 atoms in your sample of a million.) the other elements, from beryllium to the transuranics. Inevitably some freak of fusion would manufacture at least a few of every atom that could possibly be made, somewhere inside Wan-To"s star. But all the elements named-every element that ever existed, save two-would still amount to fewer than 2,000 atoms in your sample of a million.) The rest of your million-atom sample would be just those two heavy hitters, though not at all in equal proportions. You would find some 63,000 atoms of helium; and then the rest, 935,000 atoms out of the million, would be hydrogen. So you might think of Wan-To"s star as being a very dry Martini indeed. Hydrogen was the gin, helium the dash of vermouth, and all the rest were just contaminants leached off the olive, the stirring rod, and the gla.s.s it came in.

There were plenty of all these things in Wan-To"s dense central core to play with, and anyway, if he tired of them he didn"t have to stay in the core. He had the whole star to play in, and it was a million miles across, with a hundred different regimes. He could "wander" at will from "room" to "room" of his "home"-spending some time in the outer sh.e.l.ls, even the photosphere; venturing (with care, because they were so thrillingly diffuse) into the corona and the nearer parts of the solar wind; riding up and down in the upwellings of hot gases that made sunspots and speculae.

That part of Wan-To"s star was the convection zone, and in some ways it was the best of all. The convection zone was the layer of the star where simple mechanical transport took over from radiation in the escape of energy from the star"s core. For the first four-fifths of its escape from core to surface, a photon of energy traveled purely radiatively. Not exactly in a straight line, of course; it bounced from particle to particle, like a ball in a pinball machine. But a fifth of the way down from the surface the pressure was lessened enough so that the gases could move about a bit-which is to say, convectively, and so it was called the convection zone. There the heat from the core made its way the rest of the distance to the surface by being transported in cells of hot gas, like the outwelling of warmth from a hot-air heating system. Some of the gas rose to the surface and again began radiating, ejecting its heat away into s.p.a.ce. Some, cooling, fell back. In the convection zone Wan-To could cavort freely, letting himself be carried along by the convection cells when he chose, twisting their paths into amusing tangles when that seemed more interesting. Oh, there were a million places to play inside a star!

For that matter, there was no reason for him to be bored with the core. There was plenty of variety even there. If he decided the center was a little too warm (it ran about fifteen million degrees), there were cooler spots farther up. He enjoyed the physical sensations the star"s interior offered. The varying rotation rates (its poles slower than the equator, its core faster than any part of the surface) and the twisting magnetic field lines that looped below the surface and, here and there rising above it, produced sunspots-they were to Wan-To as a Jacuzzi is to a Hollywood film writer.

So for Wan-To his star was a house with many mansions. It should be stated, though, that Wan-To didn"t exactly move move when he "went" from place to place. In a sense, he was always in all the places at once. It was more a matter of paying attention to one place rather than another, like a TV addict with a wall of sets, each tuned to a different channel, now looking at this one, now at another. when he "went" from place to place. In a sense, he was always in all the places at once. It was more a matter of paying attention to one place rather than another, like a TV addict with a wall of sets, each tuned to a different channel, now looking at this one, now at another.

Even a medium-sized G-3 star is a vast place, and so the pieces of Wan-To were separated by thousands of miles. What held him together was the network of neutrinos that served him for neurons. Only neutrinos could do that for him, for nothing else could move freely about in the choked, squeezed interior of the star, but that was all right. The neutrinos worked just fine.

What Wan-To was composed of was that strange state of being called plasma. Plasma isn"t matter, isn"t energy, is some of both; it is the fourth phase of matter (after solid, liquid, and gas) or the second phase of energy, whichever you prefer to call it. In Wan-To"s view, it was simply the stuff that intelligent beings were made of. (He had never heard of "human beings," and wouldn"t have cared about them if he had.) Sometimes, some of Wan-To"s colleagues (or children, or brothers-they were a little bit of all three) did suspect that a kind kind of intelligence might have developed from other things, like solid matter. Sometimes Wan-To thought that himself, but any such thing could not be very important, he was pretty sure, because no "matter" ent.i.ty could ever amount to much on a cosmic scale. No, the logical home for a truly sentient being, like himself, had to be in the great compact core of plasma at the heart of a star. of intelligence might have developed from other things, like solid matter. Sometimes Wan-To thought that himself, but any such thing could not be very important, he was pretty sure, because no "matter" ent.i.ty could ever amount to much on a cosmic scale. No, the logical home for a truly sentient being, like himself, had to be in the great compact core of plasma at the heart of a star.

It was a great pity, in Wan-To"s view, that there were so many stars.

Although only a tiny fraction of them had managed to become "alive"-and then only because he or one of the others had made them so-sometimes he would have preferred to be the only one there was.

It wasn"t that Wan-To didn"t enjoy company. He did, very much, but he didn"t like paying the price for it. He could see, now, that he had made some serious mistakes in indulging his desire for companionship. It had been a dumb idea to create siblings. For that matter, it had been a dumb idea the first time it had been done, long ago and very far away, and what made Wan-To sure of that was that in that particular case he had been one of the ones that had been created.

Still, Wan-To could understand how his unfortunate progenitor had felt, because no one liked being entirely alone. alone. Creating companions hadn"t worked out well this time. The ones he had already made weren"t much company anymore, because few of them dared communicate with any of the others in the present uneasy situation. But it was still an attractive idea. It was just that next time he would have to do it in a different way. It would be quite all right, he thought, to have more of his kind around-provided the others were just a little less strong, smart, and compet.i.tive than himself. Creating companions hadn"t worked out well this time. The ones he had already made weren"t much company anymore, because few of them dared communicate with any of the others in the present uneasy situation. But it was still an attractive idea. It was just that next time he would have to do it in a different way. It would be quite all right, he thought, to have more of his kind around-provided the others were just a little less strong, smart, and compet.i.tive than himself.

When they weren"t, they were dangerous.

Stars generally live a very long time. So would Wan-To; in fact, he could easily outlive most stars by quite a lot. He intended to see that he did; in fact, he meant to make his life last about as close to forever as possible.

The difficulty with that plan was that it wasn"t entirely up to Wan-To. The companions he had created had their own views on the subject. Indeed, at least one of them was doing his best to murder Wan-To at that very moment.

CHAPTER 2.

One of those "human beings" Wan-To had never heard of was a boy named Viktor Sorricaine. Of course, Viktor had never heard of Wan-To, either; their paths had never crossed in Wan-To"s long life and Viktor"s so far fairly short one.

On Viktor"s twelfth birthday (or, you could say, his one hundred and fifteenth), he woke up, sweating and itchy, to stare into someone"s eyes. "Mom?" he asked fuzzily. "Mom, are we there yet?"

It wasn"t his mother looking down at him. It was an old woman he had never seen before. She didn"t hold herself like an old woman, bent-backed and tottering. She stood straight and her eyes were clear, and she looked at Viktor in a way that made him uneasy-sad and amused, tolerant and angry, all at once. He thought she looked as though she knew everything there was to know about Viktor Sorricaine, and forgave him for it. She was definitely old, though. Her hair was thinning, and her face was terribly lined. "You don"t remember me, do you, Viktor?" she asked, and sighed to show that she forgave him for that, too. "I"m not surprised. I"m Wanda. Your mother will be here in a moment, so don"t worry. We"ve just had a little problem."

"What kind of problem?" Viktor asked, rubbing his stinging eyes, too polite to ask her what it was she thought he should have remembered.

"Your dad will take care of it," the woman said. Viktor couldn"t press her, because she had already turned away to call for someone to help her get Viktor out of the shallow saucer kind of thing he was lying in.

Viktor was beginning to wake up. Certain things were clear to him at once. He knew that he was still on the interstellar ship New Mayflower, New Mayflower, from the fact that he weighed so little. That meant that, no, they hadn"t arrived yet. He knew what the pan he was lying in was, because he had expected all along that sooner or later he would find himself in one like it. It was the warming pan where frozen pa.s.sengers were thawed back to life when the journey was through. But since it seemed the journey wasn"t through, what could be the reason for waking him now? from the fact that he weighed so little. That meant that, no, they hadn"t arrived yet. He knew what the pan he was lying in was, because he had expected all along that sooner or later he would find himself in one like it. It was the warming pan where frozen pa.s.sengers were thawed back to life when the journey was through. But since it seemed the journey wasn"t through, what could be the reason for waking him now?

He allowed himself to be helped up and was badly surprised to find that the help was needed; his young limbs were shaky. He let himself be tugged, like a skiff towed by a motorboat-only the old woman who said her name was Wanda was the motorboat-to a shower cubicle. There the woman gently stripped off his thin freezer robe to bathe him. It was a rougher bath than he was used to. There were many decades of dried perspiration and dead skin for the warm jets to flush away, but that was what they were for. They did their job, and the hissing, gulping suction pumps sucked the wastewater away.

By the time he came out he knew exactly where he was. He was in the ship"s sick bay.

Viktor knew all about the sick bay. He had seen it from time to time, had in fact spent several boring hours there before it was time for his family to be frozen, when the last of his baby molars had had to be helped out so his adult ones would come in straight. The old woman patted him dry. He let her. He was more interested in what was going on in the warming pan he had awakened in. Two little kids, no more than four or five years old, were in it now, huddled in each other"s arms under the bath of directed infrared and microwave as they warmed. The pan around them was filled with the thick, milky liquid that kept them oxygenated through perfusion until their lungs began to work, and their limbs were already beginning to move with tiny random twitches. He even recognized the kids: Billy and Freddy Stockbridge, the sons of his dad"s navigation partner-two nasty little bits of business if he"d ever seen any.

By the time he was dressed in tunic and shorts and had drunk two enormous gla.s.ses of something sweet and hot, his mother came hurrying in from the next chamber, white robe fluttering behind her. "Are you all right?" she asked anxiously, reaching out for him.

He allowed her to give him a quick kiss, then fended her off with dignity. "I"m fine," he said. "Why aren"t we there?"

"I"m afraid there was a little complication, Vik," she told him, her voice uneasy. "There"s something wrong with the flight plan, so they"ve got your father up to straighten it out. It"ll be all right."

"Sure it will," he said, surprised. There wasn"t really any doubt in his mind about that; after all, the man who was in charge of straightening such things out was his father.

"Marie-Claude"s up, too," she said fretfully, touching his forehead as she used to do when she thought he might have a fever. "Between the two of them they"ll have it all cleared up, but I"ve got to go help out. Are you sure you"ll be-"

"I"m sure," sure," he said, exasperated and a little embarra.s.sed at being treated like a child. he said, exasperated and a little embarra.s.sed at being treated like a child.

The old woman interrupted. "Vik needs to eat and get himself oriented, Mrs. Sorricaine-Memel," she said. "I"ll see that he"s all right; you go ahead."

Amelia Sorricaine-Memel looked at her curiously, as though trying to place her, but only said, "I"ll be back again as soon as I can."

When she was gone, the old woman took Viktor"s hand. "You"re supposed to go in the treadmill for a few minutes," she told him. "Then the doctors will check you over. Do you want to do that now?"

"Why not?" he asked, shrugging. "But I"m hungry."

"Of course you"re hungry," she said, laughing a little. "You always were. You stole my chocolates when I was on the teaching machines, and your mother took away your candy for a week."

Viktor frowned at the woman. It was true that he had stolen chocolates and been punished for it, but the child he had stolen them from had been Wanda Sharanchenko, the tiny blond daughter of one of the engineering officers, two years younger than himself. "But-" he began.

The woman nodded. "But that was a long time ago, wasn"t it? More than a hundred years, while you were a corpsicle. But it"s me, all right, Viktor; I"m Wanda."

The ship New Mayflower New Mayflower wasn"t "there." It wasn"t even close to the "there" they were aiming for. According to the original flight plan there was to be more than twenty-eight years of deceleration time left before they would be at the planet they were meant to colonize. wasn"t "there." It wasn"t even close to the "there" they were aiming for. According to the original flight plan there was to be more than twenty-eight years of deceleration time left before they would be at the planet they were meant to colonize.

But, unbelievably, it seemed that the original flight plan was wrong.

Wanda tried to explain it to Viktor as she led him to the huge rotating barrel that was the ship"s treadmill, spun at nine revolutions a minute to simulate enough of normal Earth gravity to prevent calcium migration and muscle loss.

The treadmill was familiar enough to Viktor. He"d spent plenty of hours in it in the two years before he went into the freezer; it was where he played games with the other children in their compulsory daily exercise routine. He trotted around the barrel like a veteran, working out a century"s worth of kinks in his young muscles, achieving a sweat and a decently high pulse without trouble. Wanda was hanging at the hub of the wheel, talking to him as he ran.

When he asked her what had happened, she called, "Flare star."

"A what star?" he panted.

"A flare star. Or maybe a nova, I don"t know-they say there are some funny things about it. Anyway, something blew up. It"s really bright, Vik. Wait till you see it. And it"s only about thirty degrees off our course, so-"

She didn"t have to explain. Viktor had heard enough from his father to see the problem. The unantic.i.p.ated flare would be pouring out wholly unexpected floods of photons, and, as the light sail had already been deployed to help in Mayflower"s Mayflower"s long, slow deceleration, the flare would be shoving them off course and their speed would be decreasing too rapidly. New course settings had to be calculated, and so, of course, all the navigators had been recalled from freezing, nearly three decades ahead of schedule, to a.s.sist in the work. long, slow deceleration, the flare would be shoving them off course and their speed would be decreasing too rapidly. New course settings had to be calculated, and so, of course, all the navigators had been recalled from freezing, nearly three decades ahead of schedule, to a.s.sist in the work.

Even for Viktor, who had spend most of the unfrozen part of his conscious life as the son of one of the ship"s navigators, that was not easy to understand completely. What made it worse was the person who was telling it all to him. He could not reconcile the hundred-year-old Wanda Sharanchenko (no-even that was wrong-her name turned out to be Wanda Mei now) who was telling him all this with his quite fresh memory of the tiny little girl who had cried and tried to bite him after he ate her chocolates. Panting, he called up to her perch on the hub, "But why didn"t you get frozen, like everybody else?"

She paused, peering at him while she thought her answer out. "I suppose," she said finally, "it was fear."

"Fear of freezing?" Viktor demanded, incredulous. How silly could you be? What was there to fear in being gently frozen and then reawakened when the time came? It wasn"t any different from going to sleep and waking up in the morning, really. Was it?

But, Wanda told him, it was. "Not everyone survives freezing. About one person out of a hundred and eighty can"t be thawed. Something goes wrong, in the freezing, or the suspension, or the thawing, and they die, you know."

Viktor hadn"t known that. He swallowed. "But that"s not bad odds," he protested, for his own sake mostly.

"It"s bad odds if you"re the one that dies," she said decisively. "My parents thought so. And that"s not counting the ones that get freezer-damaged. They can come out blind, or paralyzed. Who wants that?"

"Have you ever seen somebody blind from the freezer?" he challenged.

"Keep running," she ordered. "No, but I never saw a dead one, either. I still know they"re there! Anyway, my parents volunteered to stay on as part of the caretaker crew, and I stayed with them . . . all these years. Now come off the wheel, Viktor, you"re ready for your physical."

Which he pa.s.sed, of course, with flying colors. But what he was to do after that was much less clear. If the ship had been where it should have been when they woke Viktor up there would have been no problem. Even a little kid had things to do to get ready for landing.

But they weren"t there yet, and Wanda was no help. "Just stay out of the way," she advised, and hurried off to some kind of work of her own.

The fact that Viktor had been revived early from the freezer didn"t mean that anyone wanted him up and about. The grownups he encountered made that clear. It would have been better all around if he had stayed cold and senseless, like the eleven hundred other pa.s.sengers in the freezatoria. But that wasn"t Viktor"s fault. It was his parents who had opted for storage as a family unit, Mommy and Daddy and young Viktor all in the same capsule in the cryonic chambers, and once the process of resuscitating his father had well started the other two had already been much more than halfway back to life.

They couldn"t, after all, break the sleepers apart with a fork, like a block of frozen spinach. They had to thaw a bit before they could be separated, and then-well, there was always that one-in-a-hundred-and-eighty chance Wanda had mentioned.

The room Viktor was supposed to share with his parents was no bigger than his own personal bedroom had been in California, back down on the surface of Earth, before they left to join the interstellar colony ship. It was pretty cramped.

That was not the fault of the ship"s designers. They had allowed ample living s.p.a.ce for the handful of men and women who were to take their turns on unfrozen watch as the other eleven hundred aboard slumbered at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. But they had only planned for thirty-five or forty watchkeepers to be awake at any one time. Now, with thirty others roused unexpectedly to deal with the problem of the flare star, living s.p.a.ce was in short supply. Not quite as short as it had been in the first moments after launching, of course, when Viktor"s family had taken the first watch until the ship was well clear of the solar system. And by no means as short as it would be when the ship arrived at its destination and all the corpsicles were defrosted to get ready for landing. Then it would be ten in a room instead of three, and in around-the-clock sleeping shifts, too.

Still, living s.p.a.ce was pretty cramped. Worse, Viktor was bored. When his parents were out working, or at least awake, he could watch old films from Earth. He could even see whole recorded baseball games, taped by broadcast from Earth as they were played, though of course there was not much suspense in watching them. The results had been history for decades. Come to that, if he got desperate enough he could even dial up the teaching machines and please his parents with a few hours" study of algebra or antimatter engine maintenance or the history of the Holy Roman Empire.

None of that was enough to keep a young boy busy. Viktor didn"t want to watch baseball. He wanted to play it. But there were never eighteen people to make up two sides, even if any of the grown-ups had been willing. He was lonesome. Grownups were about all he had for company, because all the other kids on Mayflower Mayflower were still corpsicles. Not counting the Stockbridge infants. They certainly couldn"t be counted as friends, and none of the adults on the ship had much time for them, either. The adults were all busy, not to say obsessed, with the unexpected, and definitely unusual, flare star. The general idea, as much as any of the adults thought about it at all, was that the teaching machines would keep the children busy most of the time, and Viktor could look after the two little ones the rest of it. were still corpsicles. Not counting the Stockbridge infants. They certainly couldn"t be counted as friends, and none of the adults on the ship had much time for them, either. The adults were all busy, not to say obsessed, with the unexpected, and definitely unusual, flare star. The general idea, as much as any of the adults thought about it at all, was that the teaching machines would keep the children busy most of the time, and Viktor could look after the two little ones the rest of it.

Viktor was having none of that.

He hung around the working rooms of the ship as much as he could, watching his father and Marie-Claude Stockbridge and the others peck away at their computers, listening to snippets of conversation.

"It looks like an extra eight months travel time-that"s not too bad."

"There"s plenty of fuel reserve." That was his father. "I"ve calculated a first-approximation vector, but what about the light sail? Pull it in? Leave it out?"

"Leave it out. Just cut engine deceleration thrust. Then-" That time it was Marie-Claude Stockbridge speaking, and she looked up at the screen that showed the heavens before them. The bright blue-white flare star dominated everything, dimming that fainter, yellower one that was their destination. "Then when we get there, I wonder what we"ll find. That star"s putting out a lot of radiation."

What she said was what was on everybody"s mind. The place they were going, the probes had said, was a livable planet-in fact, the name they had given it was "Newmanhome"-but heavy radiation could change the parameters of what was "livable." Of course, the first ship, six years ahead of them in flight, would find all that out before them-but if things were bad, what could they do about it? There was no way to return. "Newmanhome"s got Van Allens and a pretty deep atmosphere, Marie," Vik"s father told her. "It"ll be all right. I hope."

And then there was silence for a moment until one of the others turned back to his computer and tapped a few keys. "Right now it adds up to a little under seven light-years to go," he announced. "First thrust approximation, a six-percent reduction ought to do it, adjusting it back as the flare dies away. That"s the hard part, though. Anybody know how to calculate the decay rate?"

"For a regular flare star? Maybe," Viktor"s father said irritably. "For this thing, how can we? It"s not really flaring. It"s more like it just blew up."

"But you say it isn"t a nova," the man said, and then he glanced up and caught sight of Viktor. "Looks like your son"s come to help us, Pal," he said to Viktor"s father. It was an amiable enough remark, but it carried a message, too, and Viktor turned and got out of the room before the message had to be made explicit.

For lack of anything better to do, he turned to the teaching machine to explain some of what was going on. For instance, he knew that a light-year was a very long distance indeed. But exactly how long?

The teaching machine tried to help. It told Viktor that a light-year was the distance traveled in one year by a beam of light, speeding along at its unalterable pace of 186,000 miles per second, but it wasn"t easy for Viktor to visualize even a "mile." The machine tried to be helpful. Some 734 of those "miles," it explained, lay between New York and Chicago, back on Earth. Six thousand of them took you from any point on the Earth"s equator to one of its poles. But that meant little to Viktor, who had been only six years old when he and his parents launched to join the ship"s crew a.s.sembling in s.p.a.ce. He thought he remembered Los Angeles, because of the amus.e.m.e.nt parks and the seals, but he also remembered the snowman his father had made for him in the courtyard of their home-and there couldn"t have been any snowmen in Los Angeles. (His mother had explained to him that had been in Warsaw, where Viktor had been born, but to Viktor "Warsaw" was only a name.) The closest the teaching machine came to defining a mile for Viktor was to point out that it was a little more than twenty-five times around the revolving exercise treadmill where every wakeful person had to exercise his muscles and preserve the calcium in his bones.

So that was a mile. But the datum wasn"t all that much help. Multiplying twenty-five laps around the revolving drum by 186,000 by the number of seconds in a year was simply beyond Viktor"s capabilities. Not to do the arithmetic-the teaching machine wrote the answer out for him-but to grasp the meaning meaning of the simple sum 25 x 186,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365.25 = 146,742,840,000,000. of the simple sum 25 x 186,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365.25 = 146,742,840,000,000.

Call it a hundred and fifty trillion laps around the revolving drum . . .

What was the use of calling it anything, though, when n.o.body could really grasp the meaning of a "trillion"?

And that was just one light-year. Then, of course, you had to multiply even that huge number by another 6.8 to find out how far you still had to go before landing . . . or by 19.7 to find out how far you were from home.

The thing about young Viktor Sorricaine was that he hated to give up. On anything. He wasn"t a very impressive kid physically-tall for his age, but gangling and pretty clumsy. Viktor had nearly abandoned the hope of becoming an All-Star center-fielder, but that wasn"t because he despaired of ever getting his coordination on track. It was only because he was pretty sure that no one in the place where he was going to spend the rest of his life was going to have time to organize any professional baseball teams.

Viktor was determined, but he wasn"t crazy-although his parents might have thought he was, if he had told them of his other long-range ambition.

But that other ambition he didn"t tell. Not to anybody.

He didn"t let himself be thwarted by the teaching machine. He dismissed it and tried another tack. He turned to the outside viewers to see for himself just how distant Earth"s old Sun looked. It took some doing, but then he found it-barely-an object pitifully tiny and faint among ten thousand other stars.

Then he heard the noise of scuffling and childish voices piping in rage. Of course he knew who it had to be. He groaned and went to the door. "Quiet down, you kids!" he ordered.

The Stockbridge boys didn"t quiet down. They didn"t even acknowledge hearing him. They were concentrating on trying to maim each other. Billy had hit Freddy, because Freddy had pushed Billy, and now the two of them were slapping and kicking at each other as they rolled slowly about the floor in the microgravity.

Viktor didn"t at all mind their punching each other. What he objected to was that they were doing it in front of his family"s door, where he might be blamed for any wounds they might wind up with. Not to mention the amount of noise they made and the language they used! Viktor was certain he had not known so many bad words when he was their age. When he got them pulled apart, he heard Billy pant ferociously at his sobbing brother, "I"ll kill you, you wh.o.r.eson!"