Pal Sorricaine grinned at them. “The Bible’s one thing,” he told them, in full lecturing swing. “Science is another. Even scientists think about Heaven and Hell, though. Did you ever hear of a man named Arthur Eddington? Well, he was the first one to figure out what the temperature inside the core of a star had to be in order to cook all those heavier elements out of hydrogen. Only when he published his figures some other scientists told him he was wrong, because it wasn’t hot enough to do the job. So Eddington told them to go look for a hotter place.”
He looked at the uncomprehending faces expectantly. “It was a kind of way of telling them to go to Hell,” he explained.
“Oh,” Billy said, deciding to laugh.
“Dr. Sorricaine?” Freddy said. “Hell’s hot like Wanda says, isn’t it? So if we get frozen that can’t be Hell, can it?”
By the time Pal Sorricaine, startled, had reassured the boy, their parents came to take them away, and Viktor and his parents went to their own cabin. As his father tucked him in Viktor asked. “Dad? Are you really going to do it?”
His father nodded.
“For just a little while?” Viktor persisted.
His father paused before answering. “I can’t say that for sure,” he said at last, reluctantly. “It depends. Viktor, this is kind of important to me. Any scientist wants to be the one that makes a big contribution. This is my chance. That flare star—well, there’s nothing like it in the literature. Oh, they’ll see it on Earth—but from long, long away, and we’re right here. I want to be the one—well, one of the ones; Fanny Mtiga’s involved, too—that they name it after. The ‘Sorricaine-Mtiga objects.’ How does that sound?”
“It sounds okay,” Viktor told him. He wasn’t content or happy about it, but he heard the tone in his father’s voice. “Are you going to tell me a story tonight?”
“Sure am. I know,” his father said. “Do you want me to tell you about some of the famous people before me? What they did? What they’re remembered for?”
And when Viktor nodded, Pal Sorricaine began to talk about the men and women whose shoulders everyone stood on. About Henrietta Leavitt, the nineteenth-century Boston spinster who spent seventeen years studying Cepheid variables and found the first good way of measuring the size of the universe; of Harlow Shapley, who used her work to make the first nearly recognizable model of our own Galaxy; of Edwin Hubble, champion prizefighter turned astronomer, who found a way to employ supergiant stars in the way that Henrietta Leavitt had used Cepheids, thus extending the scale; of Vesto Slipher, who first linked red shifts with velocity and then with distance; of a dozen other forgotten names.
Then his father got to names Viktor had heard of. Albert Einstein? Oh, of course! Everybody knew about Albert Einstein. He was the—wait a minute—wasn’t it relativity he discovered? And something about e equals m c squared? Right, Pal Sorricaine told him, hiding a smile, and that was the key to understanding why stars are hot—and to making atomic bombs and power plants, yes, and ultimately to designing the kind of matter-antimatter drive that was shoving New Mayflower on its way. And why the speed of light is always thirty million centimeters a second, no matter how fast the star—or spaceship—that emitted the light was going. New Mayflower might have been going a million centimeters a second, but that didn’t mean that the light, or the radio waves, that went ahead of it to carry its picture and messages were traveling at 31 million cps; no, it was always the same. c never changed, and there was nothing anyone could do that would ever change that.
About then Viktor’s mother came in with a glass of milk and a pill. “Why do I have to take a pill?” he asked.
“Just take it,” she said quietly, affectionately. It occurred to Viktor that it might have something to do with getting ready to be frozen again, so he did as told and kissed her back when she bent to his face.
Then his father went on to the English Quaker, Arthur Eddington, the man who had figured out the connection between physics—stuff that people studied in laboratories on Earth—and the stars, the things that interested astronomers. You might even say, Pal Sorricaine told his son, that Eddington invented the science of astrophysics. Then there were Ernst Mach and Bishop Berkeley, and the geometers Gauss and Bolyai and Riemann and Lobachevski, and Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest; and Baade, Hoyle, Gamow, Bethe, Dicke, Wilson, Penzias, Hawking . . .
Long before he finished his recital Viktor was asleep.
He slept very soundly. He almost woke, half woke, to find he was being carried somewhere; and almost realized where he was being carried. But the pill had done its work, and he never opened his eyes . . . for sixteen more years.
When Viktor Sorricaine woke up again he was still twelve (or, you might say, very nearly a hundred and fifty), and the first feeling that flooded through him as he gazed up at the face of his father was joy, purest joy, for he had beaten the odds one more time.
The second feeling was not as good. The Pal Sorricaine who beamed down on him was graying and much thinner than the one who had stood by as he went to sleep. “You didn’t get frozen at all,” Viktor said to his father, accusingly, and his father looked surprised.
“Well, no, Viktor,” he said. “I couldn’t. We had to watch that star, and—well, anyway, we’re all together again, aren’t we? And we’re there! We’re landing! The first parties have already dropped down to the surface, and we’ll be going as soon as our chutes are ready!”
“I see,” Viktor said, not actually seeing. And then he remembered something. “I have to give Wanda’s books back.”
His father looked startled, then saddened. Before he even spoke Viktor understood that Wanda wasn’t going to want them back, because she wasn’t alive anymore. A chill ran through him, but he didn’t really have time to think about it. The ship was incredibly noisy now. Not just the chattering of two or three hundred people, the ones already revived, the ones working to revive more, and the ones checking them over and getting them ready for the drop, but loud sounds of crashing and crunching and battering of metal to metal. The interior of the ship was being gutted, as it had been designed to be; the interior cubicles were being wrenched loose from their neighbors, since each one would be a capsule in which eight or ten human beings, or several tons of parts, machines, supplies, or other cargo would drop to the surface of the new planet. Viktor caught a glimpse of a surveillance camera, keeping an eye on crews outside the ship. He could see that the immense stretches of the light sail were deployed in a different way now. It was not one single vast expanse of film anymore, it was a dozen smaller segments, long narrow strips like the sails of a windmill, stiffened by the dynamics of rotation around the main body of the ship. That, he knew, was for greater efficiency in the orbit-insertion maneuver; but that phase was over. Now the sails were being furled and stowed, to shape into the four hundred parachutes that would slow the fall of the paradrop capsules that would carry everything useful on New Mayflower to the ground.
When he caught a glimpse of Marie-Claude Stockbridge he saw that she was weeping. Even weeping she looked desirable, but he could not bear the thought of her being in sorrow. “What is it?” Viktor asked his mother.
“Oh, it’s Werner,” his mother told him sadly. “Poor Marie-Claude! Werner didn’t come out of the freezer. He’s dead.”
CHAPTER 3
Pal Sorricaine was not the only observer who had been thinking hard about that anomalously flaring K-5 star. So had Wan-To, with a good deal more urgency.
The mere fact that one of his misbehaving relatives had blown up a star didn’t bother Wan-To very much. There were plenty of stars to spare. The universe was littered with the things. If the idiots exploded a million of them it would make very little difference to Wan-To—there would still be hundreds of billions left in just this one little galaxy—provided, of course, that the star he lived in wasn’t one of them. (Still it would be a pity to wreck them all and have to move on to another galaxy, so soon after having had to get out of the last.)
It was the motives behind it that made this unnatural flaring of stars so distasteful to Wan-To. It was an unsettling development, and one for which, justice would have forced him to admit, he had mostly himself to blame.