At least the winds were only winds. They did not drive blizzards of snow against the struggling men and women. The winds couldn’t do that; snow almost never fell anymore. The air of Newmanhome had been squeezed skin-cracking dry, for there were no longer any warm oceans anywhere on the planet to steam water vapor into the air so that it could come down somewhere else as rain or snow. There wasn’t any somewhere else when the whole planet was frozen over.
Squinting against the blast, Viktor could see the dark, cold sky.
It was not anything like the skies he had known before. The shrunken sun gave little heat. Even the dozen stars that were left were themselves, Viktor was almost sure, dimmer than they had been.
And then, as Newmanhome turned, red Nergal appeared, as bloodily scarlet-bright as ever. Minutes later that great puzzle, “the universe,” burst eye-blindingly white over the horizon. Viktor gazed at it and sighed.
If only his father had lived to see. If only these people were willing to try to understand! If only—
He felt Mirian tapping him on the shoulder. Viktor looked where the younger man was pointing, up toward that same eastern horizon. “Yes, the universe,” Viktor said eagerly through the mesh. “I’ve been thinking—”
Mirian looked suddenly fearful. “Hey, not that!” he cried over the sound of the wind. “Please don’t talk about that! I meant over there, next to it.”
Squinting through the mesh, Viktor saw what Mirian was calling his attention to. It was a faint spot of light, barely visible as it moved down toward its setting: Ark, in its low orbit, moving toward its final rendezvous with Mayflower.
Viktor stared at it. The time was getting close. When Ark and Mayflower were linked together the lander would be launched, and then it would all start.
He was suddenly coldly certain that Tortee was going to order him onto the shuttle. And he didn’t want to go.
When they were back in the dining hall again Mirian was charged up with optimism. “We’re going to do it,” he told Viktor positively. “We’ve got crews trained for repair all ready; they’ll be taking off for Ark in a couple of weeks, and then—”
“And then,” Viktor said, as gently as possible, “we have to hope that they can get the ship habitable again; and that these rockets will work; and that that little bit of antimatter left in Ark’s drive will hold out long enough to ferry people back and forth.”
Mirian paused, a spoonful of the stew of corn and beans halfway to his mouth. “Don’t talk like that, Viktor,” he begged.
Viktor shrugged and remembered to smile. He was beginning to thaw out after his long run outside, and even the meatless-day stew tasted good. The important thing, he told himself, wasn’t that this harebrained project should work, it was only that people could believe that it might. Even a false hope was better than no hope at all.
“I do wish,” he said, “that we had some more antimatter. We could do a lot with more power. Even maybe build some lasers or something—something better than—” He stopped himself from saying what he had been about to say about the feeble rockets Mirian was putting together. “It was pretty nice when we had Earth technology going for us,” he said wistfully.
“Is it true that you people actually made this antimatter stuff?” Mirian asked enviously.
“Not me. Not here—but, back on Earth, sure. They made all kinds of things, Mirian. Why, back on Earth . . .”
Mirian wasn’t the only one listening as Viktor reminisced about the wonders of the planet he had left as a child. A woman across the table put in, “You mean you just walked around? Outside? Without even any clothes on? And things just grew out in the open?”
“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.