There was a crowd there, all right, five or six hundred people at least. Captain Bu Wengzha was up on a flag-bedecked platform, making a speech, though most of the people were picnicking on the grass and hardly listening to the captain at all. What the speech seemed to be about was electrical power, and Reesa was nowhere in sight.
“. . . this wonderful geothermal power plant,” Captain Bu was saying, “has delivered energy for us for one year now without interruption and, God willing, will go on doing it for a thousand years to come. That is God’s gift to us, my friends, limitless energy from the geothermal heat under our feet. Let us praise His name! And let us thank, too, the skills and painstaking labor of our comrades who have given so unstintingly of themselves to create this wholly automatic technological marvel, which supplements the flood of energy being beamed down to us by that sturdy ship, New Mayflower . . .”
Viktor listened for only a second—not very interested, though a little surprised to hear the old ship’s captain sounding so godly—then turned off his ears. He spotted a young woman holding a baby, listening patiently to the captain. He nudged her. “Valerie? Have you seen Reesa?”
The young woman glanced at him. “Oh, hi, Vik. No, not lately. Is she helping them get ready for the dancing over there?”
She was looking toward a group setting up a plank dance floor on the grass. Viktor nodded thanks. “I’ll go look.”
Captain Bu’s amplified voice followed him as he stepped among the picnickers to the dance committee. “. . . and by this time next year, they promise, all of our cryonic facilities will be complete on this very spot, along with liquid-gas generators to refuel our shuttles so that our heroic friends in orbit above us can have the regular relief they rightfully . . .”
She wasn’t hammering down the flat boards for the dancing, either. Viktor buttonholed the nearest worker he recognized. “Wen, have you seen Reesa?”
The young man blinked at him. “Oh, she’s not here,” he assured Viktor. “I think she’s up at the observatory.”
“The observatory,” Viktor said, not meaning to sound disparaging. He had always thought of the “observatory” as a rather pointless hobby of his father’s. “What does she think she can see in broad daylight?”
“No, they’re not looking through the telescope. It’s the space course. You know, the astrophysics course they’re having for space pilots—it was on the bulletin boards weeks ago.”
“For space pilots?” Viktor was suddenly alert. “I wasn’t here weeks ago!”
“Oh, have you been away?” Wen asked. “I thought you’d know. After all, it’s your father that’s giving it.”
A course for space pilots! And given by his own father! Viktor was more irritated than ever as he climbed swiftly toward the little plastic dome on the peak of the hill. If there was any hope of anybody getting into space again, why hadn’t he been told?
Viktor knew, of course, that his father still had a few people interested in astronomy hanging around him. Not very many. There wasn’t any reason for anyone to be very interested, for the most exciting things in the Newmanhome sky, the flare stars, had stopped coming. There had been eight of them over a dozen Newmanhome years, then the flares had stopped.
That had left Pal Sorricaine high and dry, because the whole team of investigators into the “Sorricaine-Mtiga objects” had been disbanded. There was no longer anything for them to do. Jahanjur Singh had been co-opted by the power teams to help design transmission facilities to the new colonies on Christmas Island and the South Continent, and Fanny Mtiga had emigrated to South, with her family, to start a new career in farming. “Don’t go!” Pal had pleaded. “You’re wasting your skills! Stay here, help me.”
“Help you do what, Pal?” she asked, patiently enough. “If there’s another flare I’ll see it on South, won’t I? And I’ll get the same reading from the Mayflower instruments. And anyway, they’ve all been about the same—”
“We owe it to our profession! Back on Earth—”
“Pal,” she said gently, “back on Earth they’re seeing it all for themselves now, aren’t they? Some of those flares were closer to them than to us, and they’ve got a lot better instruments.”
“But we were the first to report!”
She shook her head. “If they elect us to the Royal Society we’ll hear. Meanwhile what the colony really needs is food. Give me a call if anything comes up—to the South Continent.”
So she had gone; and Pal Sorricaine had stayed and driven the half-dozen people who constituted his group of disciples to help him with such projects as cataloguing the nearby stars so they could have better names than they had ever been given on Earth.
Then Pal had an inspiration. He wheedled the council into letting them divert a little effort into casting some low-expansion glass blanks, then set his acolytes to grinding a mirror. It took forever to finish, but when it was done and silvered and mounted in a tube Pal Sorricaine and his class had a real telescope, right there on the surface, with which to look at their new neighbors in space: the six other planets, their dozens of moons, and the largest of the asteroids.
Of course, it was all pretty pointless in any serious astronomical sense. Any real astronomy would be done by the optics on the orbiting hulks, which still worked perfectly. The few crew members still up there, desultorily running the microwave generators and going slowly ape from loneliness, didn’t bother to tend the sensors, but they didn’t need tending. Even back on Earth, astronomers in Herstmonceux, England, had routinely operated instruments in the Canary Islands or Hawaii by remote radio control; telescopes didn’t need a human hand on the controls. But Pal was determined to force his students to look at the skies. Though the 30-centimeter was far from perfectly curved, and the sky over the hill it was mounted on was frequently obscured by clouds, at least his students could step out of the little dome and, with their naked eyes, see the stars and planets they had just seen huger or brighter inside.
And there were some pretty things to see. Sullen, red Nergal was always fascinating: it leered at you in the sky and awed you in the telescope. Three of the asteroids were naked-eye objects, once you knew where to look for them—if you had good eyes. The corpses of the former flare stars were always worth looking at, just to remind you to ponder about their mysteries. There were double stars, a fair number of comets, a gas nebula lighted from within by newborn stars—Pal Sorricaine loved to look at all of them and communicated his feeling to his students.
Nobody was using the little mirror when Viktor came puffing up to the observatory—not in broad daylight. The class wasn’t even inside the little dome. There was a teaching machine, its screen hooded against the sunlight, and a dozen or so people were gathered around it, looking at the rainbow colors of a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stellar types.
Viktor saw Reesa sitting there cross-legged on the spiky Newmanhome grass, sharing a blanket with Billy Stockbridge. That was displeasing; he hadn’t really taken his mother’s remarks seriously. He was no more pleased to see Jake Lundy in the class. Viktor didn’t really like Jake Lundy—hadn’t since they had first met, in the long-ago school days when Lundy was the older kid sometimes stuck with supervising the young ones, and something of a bully. It didn’t help that Jake, a little older than Viktor, had managed to land one of the coveted jobs as aircraft pilot, instead of being stuck with a surface ship. It also happened to be true (as Viktor knew) that Jake Lundy was the father of Reesa’s older child—not that that had anything to do with Viktor’s feelings about the man, of course.
When Viktor approached the group his father paused in his lecture long enough to give him a combination of a welcoming nod and a peremptory gesture to take a seat. Viktor sat near enough to Reesa so that she could talk to him if she wanted to, yet far enough away that he wasn’t obviously seeking conversation. She gave him a quick, absent smile and returned to the lesson.
Viktor’s father wasn’t looking well. Though his artificial limb was a high-tech device as close to the real thing as any machine could be, he limped as he moved around the teaching machine, and his voice was hoarse as he explained the natural sequence of star types Hertzsprung and Russell had described centuries earlier. It seemed to Viktor that the old man’s hands were shaking, too. But he paid attention to the lecture, and when it was finished and Pal Sorricaine asked for questions, Viktor’s hand shot up.