It was Furhet Gaza, the welding expert, who said, “Everybody! Look at those stars.”
“What stars?” Reesa asked.
“Our own stars! The ones that aren’t shifting. They aren’t any dimmer, are they?”
“They don’t look that way,” Billy Stockbridge said cautiously. “What about it?”
“Well,” Gaza said earnestly, “maybe we’re making a big mistake. Maybe we shouldn’t wreck our ships! Maybe we should get everybody back on board and head for one of them.”
Billy Stockbridge gave him a look of disdain, but it was Captain Rodericks who said angrily, “That’s stupid talk, Gaza! What you say is impossible. In the first place, there are too many people on Newmanhome now; we wouldn’t all fit in what’s left of this old ship. In the second place, how would we get everybody up here? We don’t have a fleet of a thousand shuttles to carry them.”
“It’s worse than that, Captain,” Billy Stockbridge put in.
He got a hostile look from Furhet Gaza. “Worse how?” Gaza demanded.
“We don’t even know if those other stars have planets,” Viktor offered, but Billy was shaking his head.
“That’s not it, either. It doesn’t matter if they do have planets; they wouldn’t be any use to us. I’ve checked those stars. They’re dimming, too. It’s just that what we’re seeing is the way they were up to six years ago, so they don’t look much different—but they’re different now, Gaza. And anyway—”
He stopped there. It was Captain Rodericks who said, “Anyway what, Stockbridge?”
Billy shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, “we’ve got a better use for whatever fuel is left in the drive.”
“You mean try to take the fuel out of the drive unit, too? But that’s hard, Stockbridge; we’ve agreed that we’ll just shift the reserves. That’s where most of it is, anyway—enough to power Ark’s generators for another five or ten years, with a little luck. We don’t need to make our job any harder than it is already.”
Billy pursed his lips. “That’s true.” And that was all he said.
Outside of the endless work of cutting metal and preparing the fuel for the move, the biggest job was staying alive—which meant scavenging for food in Ark’s freezers. Viktor went with Jake Lundy as his partner when it was his turn. He didn’t think about reasons why; he simply volunteered his services, certainly not to forestall Reesa doing the same.
He still felt a certain tension in Lundy’s presence, but Lundy seemed quite at ease. He had done the food-scavenging bit before, and was friendly and forgiving when Viktor tried to pull one of the freezer drawers out and couldn’t work the catch, not at all like the ones he had seen on Mayflower. “Here, let an expert do it,” Lundy said amiably, showing what he meant with a quick twist and pull.
“That’s fine,” Viktor said sourly as the drawer slid easily out. It did take an expert to handle Ark’s freezers, because in Viktor’s opinion they had been badly designed in the first place. Mayflower’s had been a generation later, and a generation better. Mayflower had sensibly kept the entire freezer section at temperatures between ambient and liquid gas, while Ark simply clustered drawers of freezer compartments in chambers that looked like an Earthly morgue.
Viktor stood uselessly by while Lundy unsealed the drawer. Clouds of white vapor came off the contents as he poked around with the thick gloves. “Oh, shit, Viktor,” he said in disgust. “Didn’t you check the labels? This stuff’s no good, unless you expect us to eat sperm samples from the small mammals.”
“What labels?” Viktor demanded.
Lundy just gave him a patient look, then resealed the drawer again. He ran his finger over the plaques on a couple of adjacent drawers to rub the frost off, then said, “Here. This one might do. It’s got turtle eggs and, let’s see, what’s this? Some kind of fish, I guess. Hold the sack for me while I pull them out.”
Carefully he lifted out the plastic-sealed objects, unidentifiable under the coating of frost already forming on them, and placed them in the tote bag. “That’ll do for now, I guess,” he said when the sack was half-full. He resealed the remaining contents of the drawer and turned, ready to leave, when he saw the way Viktor was looking at him. “Is something the matter?” he inquired politely.
Viktor hesitated. Then, without knowing in advance he was going to say it, he said, “Do you mind telling me what’s going on?”
Lundy looked at him thoughtfully, then turned and absently rubbed the plaque on the door clean. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“The hell you don’t! I’ve asked Reesa, and she won’t tell me a thing. Neither will Billy. But I know damn well there’s some kind of secret! At first I thought—”
Viktor paused. He was unwilling to say that his first thought when he saw Reesa and Lundy whispering together had been the—well, not the jealous feeling that something was cooking between them, but certainly a lot of curiosity about just what it was they whispered about. He finished, “I thought all sorts of things, but none of them make sense.”
“What sorts of things?”
“I don’t know! That’s why I’m asking!” And then he took a wild plunge into speculation. “Is it Nebo, by any chance? I know Billy’s always had this idea that we had to go there. He got it from my father, of course. But it’s crazy.”
“Why do you think it’s crazy?” Lundy asked, sounding interested and not at all defensive.
“Well—it just is. What could we do if we got there?”
“We could try to find out about those anomalous radiation readings, for one thing,” Lundy said seriously.
“Why?”
“That,” Lundy told him, for the first time looking strained, “is what people might want to go to Nebo to find out. I don’t know what. I only know that something’s going on there, and it might be important.”
“But—” Viktor shook his head. “What would be the point? Even if the others would let you take Ark there, I mean? You can’t see anything through the cloud cover.”
“There’s radar,” Lundy pointed out. “And if that didn’t settle anything, we could—” He hesitated, then finished, “We could always drop a party onto the surface of Nebo to find out.”
“But—but—but our job is to transfer fuel to Mayflower, not go gallivanting off to satisfy somebody’s curiosity!”
“We’re doing that part of the job,” Lundy pointed out. “Then, when it’s done, we’ll still have drive fuel in Ark. We can’t transfer that! Once it’s in the drive itself it’s too dangerous. So when we’ve finished what we came for—then we can take a vote.”
“On what? On taking Ark to Nebo?”
Lundy shrugged.
“And you’ve been planning this for—how long?” Viktor demanded.
“Since Reesa first suggested it,” Lundy said simply. Reesa! Viktor stared at him with his mouth open. Lundy went on: “Now, the question is, are you going to keep your mouth shut about it until we’ve finished the fuel transfer?”
“I don’t know,” Viktor said wretchedly.
But, in the event, he did keep his mouth shut. He didn’t say a word. He ate the food they had brought back—the fish turned out to be almost too bony to eat, but the turtle eggs, roasted, were delicious—and all the time he was watching his wife and wondering what other surprises were hidden inside that familiar head.
CHAPTER 11
The fifth of Wan-To’s doppels did not have a real name. It wasn’t important enough. When Wan-To addressed it at all it was simply as Matter Copy Number Five. Still, Five was fairly important to the remnants of the human race on Newmanhome, because it happened to be the one that had set up shop on the scorched little planet the people of Newmanhome called Nebo.
Although Five was certainly very tiny, primitive and stupid by Wan-To’s standards, it was quite capable of doing everything Wan-To ordered it to do. It was even capable of figuring out how to do things Wan-To himself had never gone to the trouble of figuring out before.
There’s a human story that describes that situation pretty well. Problem: A human army lieutenant has the task of erecting a thirty-foot flagpole when he only has a twenty-foot length of rope and no hoisting machines. How does he do it? Answer: He calls over his highest-ranking noncom and says, “Sergeant, put up that flagpole.”
So when Five received its orders it exercised its built-in ingenuity to carry them out.
It had to start pretty much from scratch. It had no experience of this bizarre kind of environment (it had no experience at all, of course, except what Wan-To had implanted in its memories). It was not deterred by the odd qualities of this “planet” (solid matter! And an “atmosphere”! Five understood the concept of a gas well enough, but these particular gases were so incredibly cold—hardly more than eight or nine hundred Kelvin). Then, the task of manipulating matter all by itself was not really easy. There were so many kinds of matter. There were all those things called “elements” and all their molecular combinations and isotopic variations and interacting relationships. It was definitely a nasty job. But someone had to do it—Wan-To had so decreed.