The old woman might have been a religious bigot, but she was not a scientific fool. She recognized the patterns at once. “You’re checking spectra,” she announced, “and I can guess what that’s a spectrum of. Viktor, I don’t know what to do with you. You’ve been openly talking religious error—” He started to speak again, startled, but she overrode him. “Don’t deny it! Do you think people don’t report to me? Half a dozen people heard you in the dining hall today! And you’re wasting working time with your immoral habits. I can’t put up with this. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
“I’m only trying to find out the truth about what’s going on!” Viktor cried hotly.
“The truth,” Tortee said icily, “has long since been revealed to us. Blessed Freddy set it down for all to see in His Third Testament, and that’s the only truth that matters. I forbid you ever to speak of this subject again.” He was astonished to see that she was really angry. Her pudgy face was squeezed into a scowl. “Don’t try my patience too far, Viktor! I don’t want to have to punish you. You wouldn’t like it.” She stared at him for a moment, then added as an afterthought, “You can forget about using my room for your personal pleasure again, too. Now get out of here! You and Mirian are wanted at the shuttle. They’re almost ready to fuel up for the first repair crew.”
It could have been worse, Viktor thought sourly. Reesa was right. He had gone farther with Tortee—well, with all these superstition-ridden, mule-stubborn people—than was sensible.
For that matter, sending him out to the freezer complex was punishment in itself. It was late. There was little chance they would be able to get back before dark, and no one wanted to be outside when even the feeble heat of sun and star burst were gone.
Mirian did his best to hurry the workers at the liquid-gas plant along. It wasn’t hard to do, because the fuel detail wanted to be back by nightfall, too. Working at top speed, he and Viktor checked the fuel manifests, inspected the tanks’ seals, and agreed that it was all in order. But the haste was all in vain, because then they were shunted over to the cryonics caves to wait. Their four-power escort hadn’t shown up on time.
“Oh, hell,” Mirian groaned, pulling unhappily at his beard. “We’ll never get back before dark.”
“I’m sorry, Mirian,” Viktor said. “I think I got Tortee mad at me.”
“You think you did! Oh, Viktor, just shut up. Every time you open your mouth you make more trouble!” And he slumped down against a wall and closed his eyes, refusing to speak.
Absently Viktor strolled around the chilly cave, glancing at the tunnels that led off from the central chamber. Inside each tunnel was row on row of capsules. Each one held a human body—convicted “criminals” mostly—with crosses for the Greats and the Reforms, crescents for the Moslems, and five-pointed stars for the Peeps. Those were the fruits of overload, Viktor knew, and dourly thought that the chances were good that he would be joining them if he didn’t learn to keep his mouth shut.
By the time the escort arrived Viktor had made up his mind. He would never say a blasphemous word again. He would follow Reesa’s example. He would do his best to please Tortee and to make her hopeless plan work.
He couldn’t wait to see Reesa to tell her about his resolve.
It was almost dark by the time the two of them and their escort were stumbling through the freezing gale back to the dwelling tunnels. The fireball “universe” had already set, and the sun was nearly at the horizon; it was definitely getting too cold to be out of doors.
Mirian glanced at Viktor, then made a gesture of reconciliation. He pointed to the horizon. There was Mayflower, a hand’s-span north of the setting sun. The old ship was just beginning to climb up the sky from the west in its hundred-minute orbit, with Ark still out of sight below and behind it.
Mirian put his head next to Viktor’s and bawled, over the noise of the wind, “It won’t be so bad, Viktor. Once they get the repairs going Tortee will be easier to get along with, you’ll see.”
“I hope so,” Viktor shouted back, and bent his head, squinting against the cold as he trudged along. Easier to get along with! That wouldn’t be hard, he thought resentfully. He slipped on a slanting block of ice, cursed, caught himself—
And heard a strange moaning sound from Mirian.
Viktor looked up quickly. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a quick flicker of light. Startled, he stared up. It was Mayflower, suddenly shining bright, almost as suddenly darkening again.
“What is it, Mirian?” he cried.
But Mirian didn’t know. No one knew, until they had toiled back inside the tunnels again and the word from Tortee’s instruments had spread like wildfire.
The sudden brightening of Mayflower had been only reflected light from another, hidden source. And that source—
It had been the worst disaster imaginable.
Ark had blown up.
Fortunately for the people on Newmanhome, Ark had still been below the horizon when it happened. It wasn’t a chemical explosion that had blasted the old ship into ions, not even a nuke: it was the annihilation of matter and antimatter, pounds of mass converted into energy in the twinkling of an eye, in accordance with the old formula: e = mc2. That hemisphere directly under Ark had received a sudden flood of radiation like an instant flare from the heart of a star.
There was nothing living on that part of Newmanhome. That was fortunate. For, of course, anything that had been alive in the face of that terrible blast would have stopped living at once.
The skeleton crew on Mayflower were less fortunate. Even through the thick skin of the spaceship, they had received more radiation than the human body was meant to experience in a lifetime.
And Tortee was weeping hysterically in her room. She refused to see Viktor at all. She let Mirian in for only a moment, and when he came out he was looking very grave.
“It’s over,” Mirian told Viktor mournfully. “If we don’t have Ark we don’t have a working drive. We can’t build a rocket ship big enough to attack the planet.”
“No, of course not,” Viktor agreed, dazed, wishing Reesa were there. “What happened?”
“Aw, who knows?” Mirian said despondently. “Tortee thinks it was the Peeps. She thinks they were so set on getting microwave power that they started fooling around with the drive—to keep us from using it again, you know? And it just went off.” He stopped for a moment, gazing at Viktor with an ambiguous expression. Then he said, “I’ve been thinking, Viktor. You’ve had a pretty good run for your money.”
Viktor blinked, not seeing the connection. “I have?”
“I mean,” Mirian explained, “you were born on Earth. Good Freddy, Viktor, that makes you just about the oldest person in the world.”
“I guess it does,” Viktor said grudgingly. That was an interesting thought, but not the kind that reconciled you to anything.
“So when the council decides . . .” Mirian left it hanging there. Victor looked at him in puzzlement.
“What is there to decide? You said yourself, the project’s over.”
“I don’t mean the project, I mean about you, Viktor. Tortee won’t stand up for you anymore, not after this. Not after—well, you know,” he said awkwardly, “we’re always pressed for living space here.”
“What are you talking about?” Viktor demanded, losing patience. “Are you saying I have to go live with the Peeps or something, like Reesa?”
“Oh, no, not with the Peeps. And I suppose they might keep Reesa on. But you, Viktor—well,” he said fairly, “it’s not like death. We don’t kill people. That’s against the Commandments. And, who knows, somebody, sometime—there’s always the chance that someday someone will thaw you out of the freezer.”
CHAPTER 19
By the time Wan-To had worn out his hundredth star he began to get uneasy again. It wasn’t that he was fearing attack from his long-gone siblings, for that had not happened in many hundreds of billions of years. He certainly wasn’t worrying about the matter-creatures his long-forgotten Matter-Copy Number Five had reported. No, what was bothering Wan-To was that he couldn’t help noticing that his neighborhood was going downhill.
It was no longer a prime, desirable place to be. Most of the stars in this galaxy of his were aging, and everything was getting rather shabby.
Of course, with four hundred billion stars to choose from, he wasn’t really out of living space. There were even a few late-generation stars of his favorite kind, type G—like Earth’s long-gone sun, for Wan-To’s taste in stars was very like that of the human race, in many ways. When the one he was in was showing signs of bloat, since he definitely didn’t want to sit through the transformation to red giant again, he picked out the best of the available Gs and made the move.