He stared at his father. “Is that really going to happen?”
Pal Sorricaine nodded. “The project has already been approved. We’re making more oxy-hydrogen fuel for the old shuttle right now, and the ship’s still operational. Of course, it hasn’t been used for years, since the last crew rotation—”
Viktor didn’t let him finish. “I want to go along,” he declared.
“I thought you would,” his father said mildly. “So do Captain Bu and Captain Rodericks—” New Ark’s original commander on the long-ago voyage from Earth “—and, naturally, Billy and Jake and Reesa. But we’ll need at least twenty volunteers. We’ll be there at least six months, and then—”
“And then what?” Viktor demanded.
His father looked at him speculatively. Jake and Billy kept their eyes carefully averted. “And then,” his father said, “maybe we can get around to other important things. Now here comes Reesa, so let’s get this party started. Billy? Can you play “Happy Birthday” on your guitar?”
The launch was scary and bruising, but it got them there. Then the hard work started.
It was the first time in more than thirty Newmanhome years that Viktor had been inside New Mayflower. Muscles used to planet living had forgotten the skills of operating in microgravity. He bashed himself a dozen times against walls and ceilings before he learned to control his movements.
In the rush of landing, the colonists had not left a tidy ship, and the skeleton crews that had remained aboard to care for the MHD generators hadn’t bothered to waste much time in cleaning up. Trash was everywhere outside the tiny space the crews had occupied. Broken bits of furnishings, discarded papers. Spoiled food. Even, in the freezer section, a dead horse, long mummified but still direly stinking if you came too close. The shuttle left a dozen of its crew there to start preparing Mayflower’s fuel systems for replenishing. Then Viktor and fourteen others pushed off for the slow orbital drift around to Ark.
Down below, Newmanhome was spread out for them to see. It wasn’t blue anymore. Most of it was white, and not all the white was cloud tops. The oceans nearest the pole had already begun to freeze over. Some mountain lakes were now glaciers, and there were immense storms over most of Great Ocean. Viktor and Reesa gazed down at the cloud tops where Homeport seemed to be in the process of being battered by another winter storm. The town had already begun digging in—it was easier to keep warm underground than in the vicious winds of the surface.
“I hope Edwina’s keeping the kids covered up,” Reesa murmured.
From behind them, Jake Lundy said comfortingly, “She’s a good mother, Reesa, even if she’s getting some strange ideas. And anyway, once we get this done there’ll be plenty of energy—for a while, anyway.”
When they entered New Ark it was even worse than Mayflower had been. Its crews had had no reason to leave a livable ship at all. The internal power generators still worked, supplied with the mere trickle of energy they needed from the tiny fraction of Ark’s store of antimatter that remained in the engines. So, for all those abandoned years, the ship had been kept—well, not warm, but at least above the freezing point. Ark’s freezers, with their untouched reserve supplies of organisms and cell cultures, were still in good shape. What was mostly missing was light. Ark’s colonists had thriftily removed nearly all the light tubes, along with everything else that could be cannibalized from the ship, for a more immediate use down below on Newmanhome. Even the station-keeping thrusters were still operational—everyone sighed with relief at that, because otherwise their task of transferring fuel would have been much harder.
Indeed, there was enough energy left in the main-drive fuel chamber and station-keepers to send Ark completely around its solar system—if anyone had wanted to do that.
When they fired up the drive for the rendezvous with Mayflower it didn’t protest. It began pouring out its floods of plasma as though its engines had been last used only days before. Ark crept toward Mayflower in its orbit, and the work crews began the hard work of cutting up the interior bulkheads and carefully—oh, very carefully—beginning to dismantle the restraining magnets that held its antimatter fuel in place.
There was no room for error in that. If the antimatter had been allowed to brush against normal matter, even for a moment, even the barest touch, the resulting blast would have scattered all of it—and people on Newmanhome would have seen a major flare star in their sky, just before they were scorched blind in the blast.
So Captains Bu and Rodericks and the three surviving Engineer Officers from the two ships—Wilma Granczek had died giving birth to her fourth child on the Archipelago—began the precarious work of shifting the fuel.
It wasn’t easy. When Ark was designed, no provision had been made for such a project. Of course, it wasn’t only the fuel that had to be moved, it was the magnetic restraints that held it free of contact with anything else, and the steel shell that surrounded the captor fields, and the power source that kept the fields fed and working.
There was no way to move that sort of awkward mass through the ship’s ports. They had to cut a hole in the side of Ark, to get the stuff out, while the other crew was cutting another just as big in the hull of Mayflower to insert it there.
Outside the ship, secured by cables, Viktor wielded the great plasma torch, Jake Lundy at his side.
He hadn’t planned it that way. He didn’t seek out Lundy’s company. It was, he thought in an abstract way, just considering the possibilities, better to have Lundy out there with him than inside with, possibly, Reesa—though what they could have been doing, in the cramped confines of the livable part of Ark would hardly have been much, anyway. But he was getting really tired of Jake Lundy’s company. It even crossed Viktor’s mind for a moment that it wouldn’t be awful, really, if Lundy’s cables had somehow broken and the man had drifted helplessly away into space, never to return. He even thought, though not seriously—he told himself that of course it wasn’t a serious thought—how easy it would be to misaim the plasma torch, now eating through the tough steel of the hull, to burn away Lundy’s cables .
He didn’t mean that, of course. He reassured himself that that was so. His marriage to Reesa was comfortable; they were used to each other; they shared a love for the kids, and the habits of a dozen years. In any case, he was never jealous concerning Reesa—as he had been, for instance, of the incomparable Marie-Claude Stockbridge.
To take his mind off such matters he gazed around. From outside the ship Viktor could see Newmanhome spread out below them. He didn’t like to look there; the spreading white at the poles was ice—something that Newmanhome had never seen before. Looking at the fearsome skies was even worse. The sun was still the brightest object around, but woefully dimmer than before. The cherry coal of the brown dwarf, Nergal, was almost as bright, but the sun’s other planets had dimmed with their primary. The eleven normal stars still shone as bright as ever. But there were so few of them! And the rest of the universe, separating itself into great colored clusters, red and blue, had changed into something wonderful and weird and worrying.
He was glad when their shift ended and they were back inside, though there wasn’t much there to take comfort in, either. The shuttle had been too full of people to leave room for amenities—even for food; though fortunately Ark’s freezers still had their stocks of frozen spare animals. But one did get tired of eating armadillo, or bat, or goat . . .
When they had raped the side of Ark there was little to do until Ark completed its slow crawl toward its younger sister ship.
“We could have used the main drives,” Captain Bu fretted.
“Don’t need them!” Captain Rodericks said sharply. “There’s plenty of power in the auxiliary thrusters. Anyway, this is my ship, Bu, and we’ll do it my way.”
“The slow way,” Bu sneered.
“The safe way,” Rodericks said resolutely. “Talk about something else!”
But the other things they had to talk about were not cheering. Word from Homeport was that the community was making progress in digging itself underground, where the soil would be their best insulation against the cooling winds; the clothing factories were doing their best to turn out parkas and gloves and wool hats, things that had never been needed on Newmanhome before.
They were cold inside the hulk of Ark, too. Bu wanted to cut off power to the freezer sections to use it to warm their little living quarters, but Captain Rodericks refused. His grounds were simple: “Some day we may need what’s in those freezers. Anyway, it’s my ship.” So they huddled together, usually in the old control room, and spent their time watching Mayflower drift nearer and gazing, through screens and fiber-optic tubes, at the scary skies.