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 unanticipated flare would be pouring out wholly unexpected floods of photons, and, as the light sail had already been deployed to help in 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 assist 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 passed, 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 passengers 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 space 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 space 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 space 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 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?”