Some of the details of Viktor’s fantasy were pretty hazy. That was all right. The important parts of the fantasy came later on. After all, Mr. Stockbridge was much older than his wife—thirty-eight to her twenty-five—and males were at their sexual peak in their teens. (Viktor knew a lot about the subject of reproductive biology. The teaching machines had not always been a disappointment.) After that age male vigor slowly declined, while the sexuality of women grew from year to year. Viktor took comfort in the fact that the thirteen-year difference between Marie-Claude’s age and her husband’s was exactly the same as between hers and Viktor’s own, though of course in the opposite direction. So (Viktor calculated, as he gallantly escorted Marie-Claude back to the room where her husband and sons slept) in a few years, say seven or so, he would be nineteen and she would be no more than thirty-two; very likely, he speculated, the very peak years for both of them, while old Werner Stockbridge would be well into his forties and definitely well on the downhill path at least, if not actually out of it . . .
He turned and glanced up at her. “What?”
Marie-Claude was smiling at him. “We’re here, Viktor. And, oh, Viktor, I know what a nuisance those two little monsters can be. Thank you!” And she reached down and kissed his cheek before she disappeared into the family cubicle.
So, of course, then there was no help for it. From then on Viktor doggedly baby-sat the two Stockbridge brats, however hateful they got. Which could be pretty hateful. When they awoke from their nap he organized a game of gravity-tag in the treadmill, hoping to tire them out. When they still wouldn’t tire he took them on a tour of the ship. By the time it was their bedtime he realized it was also his own; he had never before understood how wearying taking care of small children could be for an adult, or anyway a near-adult, like himself.
When he woke up it was because his parents were calling him. “I thought we’d all have breakfast together for a change,” his mother said, smiling at him. “Things are almost getting back to normal.”
Breakfast was no different from any other meal except that they had porridge instead of stew, but what was different was the atmosphere. His father was relaxed for the first time since their defrosting. “The flare star’s dying out,” he told his son. “We’re watching it pretty closely—there are some funny things about it.”
Viktor always had permission to ask for explanations. “Funny how, Dad?” he asked, settling down for one of those wonderful father-and-son talks he remembered from the old days. His father was one of those priceless few who didn’t think little children should ever be told “You’ll understand when you’re older.” Pal Sorricaine always explained things to his son. (So did Amelia Sorricaine-Memel, but other things, and not as interesting to Viktor.) Some of the things Pal had explained as he tucked his son in, instead of telling silly children’s stories about the three bears, were the Big Bang, the CNO hydrogen-to-helium cycle that made stars burn, the aging of galaxies, the immensity of the expanding universe. Of course, Amelia had interesting technical things to talk about, too, but her specialty was physics and mechanics. Things like entropy and the Carnot efficiency of heat engines weren’t nearly as wondrous to a child as the stories of the stars they were wandering among.
This time Viktor was disappointed. All his father said was, “It just doesn’t match any of the known profiles of flare stars. It might be a nova, but it’s a funny one. It’s got two big jets. Matter of fact. I’ve sent a report to the International Astronomical Society about it—who knows, they may even name it after me as a new class of objects!”
“They ought to,” Viktor said decisively, pleased because his father looked pleased too—almost as pleased as he was puzzled. But his father shook his head.
“It’ll be twenty years before they hear it and another twenty before they acknowledge, remember?” he said. “Anyway, it looks as though we can handle the navigation.”
“Maybe,” Viktor’s mother said.
“Well, yes, maybe,” his father conceded. “There’s always a maybe.” He pushed aside his empty porridge bowl and took a deep swallow of the one cup of coffee he was allowed each day. Fifth Officer Pal Sorricaine was a plump, smooth-faced, blue-eyed man with a cheery disposition. He smiled often. He was smiling now, though with a little quizzical twist of the lip to acknowledge the “maybe.” He had close-cropped pale hair, and he ran his hand over it as he gazed benignly at his son. “Marie-Claude says you’ve been a sweetheart about her kids,” he said.
Viktor shrugged, scowling into his bowl.
“Got a case on her, have you?” his father asked, grinning. “I can’t say I blame you.”
“Pal!” his wife warned.
Sorricaine relented. “I was only teasing you a little, Vik,” he apologized. “Don’t be touchy, okay? Anyway, I think we can go back in the deep freeze in a day or two, after all. So if there’s anything you specially want to do on the ship this time . . .”
Viktor made a face. “What is there to do?”
“Not much,” Pal Sorricaine agreed. “Still—have you taken a good look at the ship? It’s changed a lot since we took off, you know. And you’ll never see it this way again.”
Later on, being a surly “sweetheart” once more for Marie-Claude Stockbridge, Viktor was minding the kids in a roughhouse game of catch. After a wildly thrown ball had bounced around a corner of the passage and hit one of the maintenance crew in the face, Viktor remembered what his father had said. “Enough ball playing,” he announced. “I want to show you something.”
“What?” Freddy demanded, wresting the ball away from his brother.
“You’ll see. Come on.”
Viktor’s parents were both at work, so he had the little room uncontested. For a wonder, the Stockbridge brothers were reasonably quiet as Viktor turned on the screen and found the menu for exterior real-time observation.
It took him a little experimentation before he was able to lock onto the view he wanted, but then he had it.
New Mayflower was a ramshackle contraption. You could have held it together with string—it would never experience any strong forces to tear it apart—and the designers pretty nearly did. The bits and pieces of it were random, irregular objects, but the screen clearly showed the vast bulk of the light sail, half deployed.
Even the little kids knew about the light sail. To travel from star to star took vast amounts of energy. The antimatter mass thrusters were not enough. Light sails had helped lift Mayflower out of the gravity well of the Sun’s attraction, using the Sun’s own endless flood of photons to help thrust it away. The same light sail was now already half deployed to use the light of the new star to help slow the ship down. There it was, fanning out from the ship like a huge frail ruff of silver—but only halfway deployed. “Look at it,” he commanded.
“It’s crooked,” Freddy announced.
“You’re crooked,” Billy told him. “Give me my ball!”
“Yes, give him the damn ball,” Viktor gritted.
“It isn’t his.”
“It is so!”
“No, it’s mine, because you lost it and I found it. Finders keepers!”
“Well, I don’t have it anyway,” Freddy lied, concealing the ball as he ducked behind Viktor. “It’s home.”
“It isn’t home! I see it—”
“Will you two shut up about the stinking ball?” Viktor roared. “Here, let me show you where we’re going.”
“I don’t want to see where we’re going,” Billy whined, but Viktor was already adjusting the image. Now it was direct line of sight—toward the “stern” of the ship, naturally, because Mayflower had long since been turned around so the main engines could thrust in the direction that would slow it down. It wasn’t a very good picture. Around the edges the stars were bright, ten thousand of them or more, hues from firebox red to sapphire and white, and the ghostly pale haze of the Milky Way washing out one corner of the screen. But the center of the picture wasn’t very clear. The optical overload sensors dimmed the flare star enough to let the others show, but the haze of ions streaming from the drive jets fuzzed everything. Including the star they were heading for. “That’s it,” Viktor said. “Right under that bright one.”
“I can’t see it,” Billy whined. “I want a Coca-Cola.”
“A what?”
“A Coca-Cola. It’s a drink. I saw it on television. I want one.”
“Well, I don’t have one,” Viktor said, “and if I did your mother probably wouldn’t want you to—oh, my God.”
The boys stopped whining and looked up anxiously at him. “What is it?” Freddy demanded, apprehensive.