If a person managed to put out of his mind some of the gnawing, unsettling questions about what the hell had happened to the outside universe, it was a pretty good time on Newmanhome. There were even some celebrations. Up in the hills over Homeport, in the growing complex by the geothermal power plant and the microwave rectennae, the big new cryonics freezers were completed at last. The first thing that meant was that now there was fuel for the long-idle landing craft, because the same gas-liquefying plants that kept the freezers cold could also manufacture liquid hydrogen and oxygen to fuel the little spacecraft.
That was a big plus—though Viktor had been disappointed to learn that he was not even on the shortlist of space pilots; there were too many others ahead of him. But it was a tempered joy, all the same. The freezers had not just been another job. They were a major philosophical commitment—no, damned near a religious commitment—to the future. They were built to last, and they were built big. They were meant to hold all the frozen specimens and tissue samples that were all the people on Newmanhome had left of horse-chestnut trees and ginkgos and aardvarks and Luna moths and salamanders. They were their best tie with old Earth, fully automatic, with power from the geothermal wells—also fully automatic—built to last a thousand years . . .
And now destined to remain largely empty for most of that time, because the great cargoes of frozen biological materials from New Argosy were never going to get there.
No wonder the celebration was short and not at all raucous.
There was other bad news, too. Ibtissam Khadek died that year, quite unexpectedly, still protesting that the colony should be investigating her grandfather’s prize brown dwarf. Reesa’s mother, Rosalind McGann, was having a bad time with her own health—no one seemed to be able to say what the problem was, exactly, except that it might be the long-delayed consequences of undetected internal “freezer burn.”
And Pal Sorricaine had started drinking again.
Worse than that, Reesa told Viktor, he was making his own brew. There was plenty of native vegetation around, and it certainly fermented into alcohol readily enough, but it was stupid for anyone to drink it.
Viktor was alarmed. “What about the kids?” he asked worriedly.
“They’re fine,” Reesa said. “Edwina’s quite a grown-up little lady now, you know. She and the boys are living with Sam and Sally Broad—they don’t have any children of their own, though God knows they’ve tried hard enough.” She hesitated. “Maybe you ought to go see them,” she offered.
Viktor nodded. “I will,” he said. “But first I’ll talk to the old man. Not that I think he’ll listen to me,” he finished bitterly.
So Viktor went back to his parents’ home early the next morning. His father was just getting up, and he listened to his son’s fatherly advice without much patience. “What’s the matter with you?” Viktor yelled at last. “Do you want to poison yourself? Don’t you have anything to do with your life?”
Pal Sorricaine bent to tie his leg a little tighter. “It isn’t that I don’t have anything to do,” he explained. “It’s just that I don’t know how to do the things I have to do. Nobody does. We’re all stupid, Vik; we don’t know what’s going on. Not just about the fact that we’re moving—Jesus, we don’t even know what’s happening on Nebo!”
“What about Nebo?” Viktor asked, distracted in spite of himself.
“I don’t know what about Nebo! Have you seen any pictures of it lately? All those damned clouds! We can’t see a thing now with the opticals.”
“Well, clouds aren’t so surprising,” Viktor began.
“Don’t you remember anything?” his father demanded angrily. “Nebo used to be bone-dry! Now—now I don’t know where all that water vapor came from, and that’s not the only thing. Something there is emitting a lot of high-energy radiation, and I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know why it’s doing it.”
“Does it have anything to do with, uh, with the fact that we’re moving?”
“I don’t know that, either! And did you see the new Doppler shifts? We’re not only moving, we’re accelerating.” Pal looked wearier and more defeated than Viktor had ever seen him. “We’re going to be getting up to a significant fraction of the speed of light soon, if this goes on. Do you know what that means?” he demanded.
“Why—” Viktor thought, then blinked as an idea came to him. “Are you trying to tell me there might be relativistic effects? Will we be getting into time dilation, like on the Mayflower coming out here?”
“God knows!” his father cried triumphantly. “Certainly I don’t! And I never will, because nobody cares.” He licked his lips, avoiding Viktor’s eyes. Then, defiantly, he got up and limped over to a cupboard to take out a bottle. As he poured himself a drink he said, “I can’t help thinking there’s a connection with Nebo. If I could get the goddamn town meeting to send a probe, we could find out something!” he grated. “But they don’t want to spend the resources.”
“That’s a copout, Dad,” Viktor said sternly. “I don’t want to talk about spaceships, I want to talk about you. You’re going to kill yourself if you don’t leave that stuff alone.”
His father grinned at him, his face gaunt and wolfish. “Get them to send a probe, and I’ll stay sober and go on it,” he promised.
“I can’t do that. You know I can’t.”
“Then,” his father said, “the next best thing you can do is mind your own business.”
On Viktor’s next voyage his family came along.
It was an experiment. Reesa was a qualified navigator herself, though somewhat rusty. Though the ship didn’t need two navigators—it hardly needed one—there was always work for extra hands to do in supervising the rotor speed and double-checking the orbital position fixes against star-sighting . . . though, actually, when Reesa or Viktor took a sextant reading on a star they weren’t as much thinking about whether their ship was in its proper place as whether the star was. Some of the parallax shifts were now detectable even with the sextant.
Alice Begstine had proved unexpectedly unwilling to turn Shan over to the newly married couple, so they left without him. They couldn’t ship out together more than once or twice, they knew, because when the new baby came Reesa would want to stay on land for a season or so, at least. But it was worth trying, and as a matter of fact they all enjoyed it. Tanya was a touch seasick at first, but it was more psychological than real—Great Ocean behaved itself, as it usually did. The children roamed the ship. One of the crew was always glad to keep an eye on them and make sure Tanny spent her allotted hours at the ship’s teaching machines. The baby was as happy on shipboard as anywhere else, and Reesa enjoyed the new experience. They basked in the sun; at South Continent they explored the hills and swam in the gentle surf. On the way back Viktor almost wished they could do it forever.
There was, of course, always in the back of their minds the worry about what the hell had happened to the universe.
It bothered even little Tanya, though mostly, of course, because she could see that the grown-ups were bothered by it. And when Viktor took his turn in tucking them in at night he was eager to do for Tanya what Pal had, so often, done for him. The stories he told her were about Earth, and the long voyage to Newmanhome, and the stars. On the last night before they landed he was standing with her on the deck outside the cook house where their dinner was simmering to completion, the rotors grumbling as they turned. Tanya squinted at the sunset they were watching and asked, “What makes the sun burn?”
“Don’t look at it too long, Tanny,” Viktor cautioned. “It’s not good for your eyes. A lot of people had their sight damaged a few years ago, when everybody was—” He hesitated. He didn’t want to finish the sentence: When everybody was looking at the sun every few minutes, wondering if it was going to flare like so many of the other stars nearby, and burn them all up. “When we were first on Newmanhome,” he finished. “Now it’s your bedtime.”
“But what makes it burn anyway?” she persisted.
“It doesn’t really burn, you know,” he said. “Not like a fire burns. That’s a chemical reaction. What the sun does is combine hydrogen atoms to make helium atoms.”
Tanny said proudly, to show she understood. “You mean if I take some hydrogen out of the stove fuel tank, and—and what would I have to do then? To make that helium, I mean?”