“Well, you couldn’t really. Not just like that. It takes a lot of energy to make protons—the proton is the heavy part of the hydrogen atom, the nucleus—to make protons stick together. They’re positively charged, remember? And positive charges?”
“They push each other away,” Tanny said with satisfaction.
“Exactly right, honey! So you need to force them into each other. That’s hard to do. But inside a star like Earthsun, or our own sun—like any star, really—the star is so big that it squeezes and squeezes.”
He hesitated, wondering how far it made sense to go in describing the CNO cycle to Tanya. But, gratifyingly, she seemed to be following every word. “So tell me, Daddy,” she persisted.
He couldn’t resist Jake Lundy’s daughter when she called him that! “Well,” he began, but looked up to see Reesa coming toward them, the baby in her arms, the unborn one making her belly stick out farther every day.
“It’s almost dinnertime,” she warned.
Viktor looked at his watch. “We’ve got a few minutes,” he said. “I just put the vegetables on, but you can call the crew if you want to.”
“Tell me first, Daddy,” Tanya begged.
“Well,” Viktor said, “there are some complications. I don’t think we have time to explain them right now. But if you can make four protons stick together, and turn two of them into neutrons—you remember what a neutron is?”
Tanya said, careful of how she pronounced the hard words, “A neutron is a proton with an electron added.”
“That’s it. Then you have the nucleus of a helium atom. Two protons, two neutrons. Only, as it happens, the mass of the helium nucleus is a little less than the combined mass of four hydrogen nuclei. There’s some mass left over—”
“I know!” Tanny cried. “E equals m c squared! The extra mass turns into energy!”
“Exactly,” Viktor said with pleasure. “And that’s what makes the sun burn. Now help me get dinner on the table.”
As they reached the door she lifted her head. “Daddy? Will it ever stop?”
“You mean will the sun cool down? Not in our lifetimes,” Viktor told her confidently, not knowing that he lied.
So the voyage was absolutely perfect, right up until the end of it . . . but the end wasn’t perfect.
It was horrible.
Probably Reesa should not have been trying to guide the grain nozzles into the holds while she had the baby in her arms. The dock operator was a new man; he couldn’t get the nozzle into position; Reesa put the baby down to shove the recalcitrant nozzle.
She shoved too hard.
She lost her footing and tumbled. She only fell two or three meters, and it was onto the yielding grain—but that was enough. When Viktor frantically scrambled down after her she, was moaning, and there was blood soaking into the top layers of grain.
They got her to the hospital in time to save the baby. It was premature, of course, but a healthy young girl for all that; there was every chance the newborn would survive. And so would Reesa, but she would be a long time recovering.
Definitely, she would not be making the next voyage with her husband and the kids. When Reesa’s mother came over, aching and complaining, she seemed to consider it all Viktor’s fault, too. It was the first time he had thought of Roz McGann as a mother-in-law. He accepted all blame. “I shouldn’t have let her do that,” he admitted sadly. “Thank God she’s going to be all right, anyway.”
“God,” Roz McGann sniffed. “What do you know about God?”
Viktor stared at the woman, feeling he had somehow missed the thread of the conversation. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about God,” she said firmly. “Why didn’t you marry Reesa properly? In church? With a priest?”
Viktor blinked, astonished. “You mean with Freddy Stockbridge?
“I mean properly. Why do you think we’re having all these troubles, Viktor? We’ve turned away from religion. Now we’re paying for it!”
Later on, walking away from the hospital in the moonless Newmanhome night, Viktor found himself perplexed. He knew, of course, that there had been a religious revival on Newmanhome—half a dozen of them, in fact. The Sunni Moslems and the Shi’ites hadn’t stopped splintering when they broke into two groups; they schismed again over which way was East, and almost did it again over the calendar. (How could you set the time of that first sighting of the new moon that began Ramadan when there was no moon to sight?) The Baptists had refused to be ecumenical with the Unitarians; the Church of Rome had separated itself from Greek Orthodox and Episcopalian. Even Captain Bu had declared himself a born-again Christian, and every other soul on Newmanhome tragically doomed to eternal hellfire.
By the third year after the spectral shift there were twenty-eight separate religious establishments on Newmanhome, claiming fourteen hundred members—divided in everything, except in their unanimous distaste for the three thousand other colonists who belonged to no church at all.
When Viktor looked in on his father he found the old man sitting by himself in the doorway of his home, gazing at the sky—and drinking.
“Oh, shit,” Viktor said, stopping short and scowling at his father.
His father looked up at him, unconcerned. “Have a drink,” he said. “It isn’t ropy vine, it’s made out of potatoes. It won’t kill you.”
Viktor curtly refused the drink, but he sat down, watching his father with some puzzlement mixed in with the anger. The old man didn’t really seem drunk. He seemed somber. Weary. Most of all he seemed abstracted, as though there were something on his mind that wouldn’t go away. “Reesa’s going to be all right, I think,” Viktor volunteered—angrily, since Pal Sorricaine hadn’t had the decency to ask.
His father nodded. “I know. I was at the hospital until they said she was out of danger. She’s a good strong woman, Vik. You did a good thing when you married her.”
Baffled, slightly mollified, too, Viktor said, “So you decided to come back here and get drunk to celebrate.”
“Trying, anyway,” Pal said cheerfully. “It isn’t seeming to work.”
“What is the matter with everybody?” Viktor exploded. “The whole town’s going queer! I heard people fighting with each other over, for God’s sake, whether there was one God or three! And nobody’s got a smile on his face—”
“Do you know what day it is?”
“Hell, of course I do. It’s the fifteenth of Winter, isn’t it?”
“It’s the day New Argosy was supposed to arrive,” his father told him. “I wasn’t the only one drinking last night. Everybody was feeling pretty lousy about it—only maybe I had more reason than most.”
“Sure,” Viktor said in disgust. “You’ve always got a reason. You can’t figure out why the stars flare, you don’t know what’s happening on Nebo, you’re all bent out of shape because of the spectral shifts—so you get drunk. Any reason’s a good reason to get a load on, isn’t it?”
“So I find it, yes,” his father said comfortably.
“Oh, hell, Dad! What’s the use of worrying about all those far-off things? Why can’t you get yourself straight and live in the life we’ve got, instead of screwing yourself around about things a million kilometers away that really don’t affect us here anyway?”
His father looked at him soberly and then poured himself another drink. “You don’t know everything, Vik,” he observed. “Do you know where Billy Stockbridge is?”
“Don’t have a clue! Don’t care. I’m talking about you.”
“He’s arranging for a town meeting tomorrow. We’ve got something to tell them, and I guess you’d say it really does affect us. We’ve been monitoring the insolation pretty carefully for about a month now, ever since Billy first saw something funny about it.”
“What’s funny?”
“I don’t actually mean ‘funny,’ ” his father said apologetically. “I’m afraid there isn’t any fun in it at all. We decided not to say anything until we were absolutely sure; we didn’t want everybody getting upset unless they absolutely had to—”
“Say anything about what, damn you?”
“About the insolation, Vik. It’s dropping. The sun’s radiating less heat and light every day. Pretty soon people will notice it. Pretty soon—”
He stopped and thought for a moment, then poured himself another drink.
“Pretty soon,” he said, holding the glass up to look at it, “it’s going to be getting cold around here.”
CHAPTER 9
Although Wan-To was vastly more than any human, he did have some human traits—even some that some humans might have considered endearing. He took the same joys in a job well done as any human hobbyist.
So when he finished putting his star-moving project together, he took a little time to watch it run. It gave him pleasure to see how well his matter analogues had carried out their tasks. The star clusters he had selected were all in motion now, and picking up speed. Each of the stars involved was dimming slightly—naturally enough, as much of each star’s energy was going into the manufacture of graviscalars rather than radiating away as light and heat. Each star carried with it its planets, moons, comets, and asteroids, all caught up in the graviscalar sweep. His five matter analogues were still there. He could talk to them and give them further instructions if he had any to give. But they had slowed to standby mode, waiting out the time until their program called on them to go into action again.