“I guess so,” Viktor said, peering uncertainly at the ribbon of grayed lines. “Can you fix it?”
“I can put a new one in,” his father said, and displayed the thing he meant. It was a curved bit of metal, as long as Viktor’s forearm, the shape of a watermelon rind when the flesh has been eaten away. His father handled it with care, showing Viktor the infinite narrow lines that had been ruled onto its concave face.
Well, that part was pretty exciting—it meant someone would have to suit up and crawl out onto the skin of New Mayflower to pull the fuzzed grating out and put the new one in—anyway, it would have been exciting, if Viktor had seen it. To his annoyance it all happened while he was asleep. By the time he knew it was over his father was pondering over a newer, sharper, but still baffling spectrogram.
“Christ,” he grumbled, “look at the thing. It looks like that star’s spilling its guts two ways at once. Only Doppler interferometry doesn’t show any increase in diameter, so it’s not a nova-type explosion. So what is it?”
No one expected Viktor to answer that question. They did expect it of his father and of Frances Mtiga, but the astrophysicists didn’t know the answer either. Every day they checked twenty-four hours of observations, which the computer matched against the latest revised models Sorricaine and Mtiga had prepared to draw its best-fit curves. And every day the fit wasn’t really good enough.
“But it’s going to be all right, Pal,” Viktor’s mother told her husband. The three of them, for once, were having dinner together in the big refectory. “I mean, isn’t it? There’s plenty of fuel. You can just shove the ship around on the drive and forget about the sails, can’t you?”
“Sure we could,” Pal Sorricaine said absently. “Oh, we’ll get there all right, I guess.”
“Then—”
“But it’s not very goddamn elegant!” he barked.
Viktor understood what his father meant. The wondrous thing about astrophysics was that the more you learned, the better everything fit together. Things didn’t get more complicated, they got more breathtakingly clear. In Pal’s view (as in the view of all scientists) oddball events spoiled the symmetry of the laws that ruled the universe. They were a disgrace that could only be repaired by figuring out how, after all, they did fit. “Anyway,” Pal Sorricaine said after a moment, “there’s a price tag on this thing. That fuel’s not just supposed to get us there. It’s going to power industry and stuff. The more we use, the more we’re stealing from our future.” And that was true enough, because when Mayflower was just a hulk in orbit the colony would need the microwaves it would be beaming down to the surface. “But mostly it’s not elegant,” he said again dismally. “We’re supposed to know all about these things. And we don’t!”
They defrosted a mathematician named Jahanjur Singh to help them out, but Viktor could tell from the way his father kept staring into space that it wasn’t helping enough. Still, Viktor found with pleasure that his parents had time to relax with their son. Amelia kept as busy as Pal—her own specialty of thermodynamic engineering wasn’t very relevant, but at least she could run a computer for the astrophysical team—but still there were times when they all played tag together in the centrifuge; they watched tapes of Earthly TV together; they even cooked fudge together, one night, and Viktor’s mother didn’t stop him however much he ate.
Viktor was no fool. He could tell that there was something on his parents’ minds that went beyond the astrophysical problem and the navigation of the ship, but he expected they would tell him about it when they were ready. Meanwhile he had the ship to explore. With so few humans awake, he had a lot of freedom to do it in. Even Captain Bu tolerated his exploration.
Before he was frozen Viktor had been pretty much afraid of Captain Bu Wengzha. It took him a while after defrosting to get over the feeling, too, because Captain Bu wasn’t happy about the jawbone course corrections he had to make when he was thawed out himself. New Mayflower was, after all, his ship.
Captain Bu was the oldest man aboard Mayflower—well, to be accurate, he wasn’t anymore; he’d spent more than eighty years frozen, daring the odds to be thawed out for a while every decade to make sure the ship was shipshape in all its myriad parts. People like Wanda Mei had had their biological clocks running much longer than he. Bu was still biologically fifty-two, with a wide, strong-toothed mouth in a wide, plump face the color of the beach sand at Malibu. He had no hair on his head at all, but he had carefully cultivated a wispy beard. Most of the time he didn’t smile. He didn’t smile when things were going smoothly, because that was simply the way they were supposed to go, and he certainly didn’t smile when Fifth Officer Sorricaine came apologetically to the bridge to tell him that that day’s sail-setting order, still in the process of being carried out, had to be revised because the flare’s light pressure hadn’t fallen off quite the way the model predicted.
Peering over the captain’s shoulder in one of those discussions, trying to be invisible so as not to be sent off the bridge, Viktor looked wonderingly at the sail. It spread out in an untidy sprawl at the bow of the ship—which was now, of course, its stern—like a drop cloth for untidy house painters. Only it was not meant to catch spilled paint, but photons. The sail was almost more nuisance than it was worth, except that, of course, everything on New Mayflower was designed to serve at least two purposes and some of the sail’s later purposes made it, in sum, very worthwhile. The trouble with it now was that at stellar distances there weren’t very many photons for it to catch.
The film of the sail was tough, tricky stuff. It was “one-way” plastic, and it weighed very little. But to keep it spread at all, with the dynamic force of the ship’s engines tearing at it, it needed a lot of structural support; nearly a quarter of its mass went into the struts and cables that spread it at the right orientation (complex to figure, because the thrust on the sail varied with the square of the cosine of the angle it made with the source, doubly complex because there were many sources), and the motors that changed the orientation as needed. Even so, the sail’s contribution to Mayflower’s acceleration and deceleration could be measured only in tiny fractions of one millimeter per second squared.
But those tiny delta-Vs all added up, when you had to bring a vast ship from near relativistic velocities to relative rest in just the place you wanted to insert it into orbit. So the varying flux from the flare star mattered a lot to Captain Bu, and to everyone on the ship.
Captain Bu wasn’t always fierce. He turned out to have a weakness for kids—at least, as long as there weren’t very many of them to get in the way. He not only didn’t chase Viktor from the bridge, he actually encouraged him to visit there. He even tolerated the Stockbridge boys there—for brief periods, until they began acting up, and always with Viktor clearly understanding that his life was held hostage if the kids got in trouble.
Captain Bu even joined Viktor and the two boys in the gravity drum, laughing and shouting, his wispy beard flying about—and then afterward, when they were all cleaned up and hungry, he shared almond-flavored bean-curd sweets with them out of his private stock. Viktor didn’t like the bean curd much, but he did like the captain. Captain Bu was a lot better than the teaching machines (though not really, Viktor was loyal enough to believe, as good as his own father) at explaining things.
When the bean curd was finished and the boys made less sticky, he showed Viktor and the Stockbridge kids just where everything was. “This is my ship,” he said, putting a spoon on the table before him, “and Freddy’s plate there is the star we’re heading for, six point eight light-years away. It has an astronomical name, but we just call it Sun. Like the one we left.” He made a fist and held it in the air over the table. “And my hand is the flare star, about five light-years from us, about four point six from the destination, and here”—another spoon—“is the Ark, maybe a tenth of a light-year from landing. They’ve already felt the radiation. It comes at a bad time for them, velocities are getting critical, but it won’t bother them much, I think. They’re a lot farther from the flare than from the new Sun.”