“We of the People’s Republic do not waste time in ‘exploring,’ ” the man in the kilt said frostily.
“Well, whatever. And things aren’t so good on Newmanhome anymore, they say—”
Viktor held up a hand, imploring. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Oh, Viktor,” his wife groaned. “Well, try this much, anyway. We’re alive.”
That at least could not be argued. As Viktor finished dressing he told himself that simply to be alive, against all odds, was wonderful in itself. Wonderful? No, close to miraculous—thawed without microwave, without the oxygenating perfusion liquid, only raw heat. But his parts seemed to work. He thought for a moment of dying, blinded Captain Bu, who had gladly given them a chance for life on the expectation of his own reward in heaven. Thank God for Bu’s born-again Christianity, Viktor thought. Without that conviction of a heavenly reward he might not have been nearly so willing to be the one who died.
Then Viktor thought of a question. “What about Earth?” he asked fuzzily. “Haven’t they sent more ships?”
Mirian turned around to gape at him. Then he laughed. “Earth!” he said, and the others were laughing, too.
Viktor looked at them in puzzlement. “Did I say something funny?” he asked plaintively.
Mirian tugged at his pale, fine beard, glancing around to see if anyone else would answer. Then he said gruffly, “We have heard nothing from Earth for hundreds of years. Come, get into the pod; it’s time to launch. And forget Earth.”
Forget Earth!
But that was impossible. As Viktor was trying to urge his creaking muscles into the contortions necessary to climb into the capsule, twist himself into his harness, and strap himself in, he was not only not forgetting, he was actually remembering again all the scenes that had stored themselves away in the back of his childhood memories. The waves breaking on the Pacific shore, the white clouds in the blue sky, the heat of the high desert, the redwoods—
The world. Could all that be gone?
Then he couldn’t think for a moment, because the hatches were grinding closed and he felt the quick nudge as the capsule fell free from its mother ship. He saw there was a window. It was tiny, and in a poor position for him to look out of it. But he did catch a quick glimpse of what had to be the proud planet of Newmanhome . . .
But it was different, terribly different! There were a few clouds, but they were hard to see, because almost everything was white. Great Ocean was a wide blue sea no longer. It was as icy as Earth’s Arctic Ocean, and, as with the Arctic, there was no clear line between sea and shore. Everything, everything, was ice.
“Hold on for retrofire!” Mirian shouted.
The sudden hammer blow of the rockets bruised Viktor’s unpracticed body. That was only the beginning. The buffeting of atmospheric reentry seemed to go on forever. Then it ended; and then they were just falling, swaying on their sail-film parachutes.
Viktor shut his eyes. They no longer stuck together when he blinked, but he could feel the incrustations at their edges, and the flakes of dirt and dead skin on his body. Everything was happening too fast. He hadn’t quite gotten used to being fired at by—whatever it was—on the planet Nebo; this unexpected new situation was more than he could take in.
Something very bright penetrated even his closed lids.
He opened them just in time to see a spot of incandescent light swing around the interior of the capsule as it rocked. Everyone was averting their eyes. The very bright something had peered in, for just a second.
“My God,” Viktor said wonderingly. “Was that the sun?”
Mirian turned to him fiercely. “The sun? No, of course not. Are you crazy?”
“Then what was it?” Viktor persisted.
Mirian stared at him for a moment. Then he shook his head. “I keep forgetting—you don’t know anything at all, do you? It wasn’t always there, they say.” He swayed as the capsule bobbed in a strong gust of wind, nearing the ground. “Brace yourself for landing!” he yelled; and then, to Viktor, he said, “That bright thing—it was what they call the ‘universe.’ ”
CHAPTER 15
As it turned out, the time before Wan-To felt secure again was a very long time indeed. An appallingly long time, when you consider that through all of it Wan-To did not dare speak to any of his colleagues.
It wasn’t because he wasn’t hungry for conversation. He was very nearly desperate. So desperate that he had split himself into fractions once or twice, for convenience in talking to himself. It wasn’t satisfying, but he had gone on trying to pretend that the echo he was hearing was really intelligent talk—until he thought that was making him almost irrational. He stopped that. He would have tried almost anything by then, though. He even began to wish that he could at least still talk to the harmless, stupid Matter-Copy Number Five. But that had long ago stopped being possible. It wasn’t the distance. Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs ignored distance. It was the relativistic effects of the speed the doppel’s plunging flight had begun to attain. At Five’s velocity, so close now to c, the pair was no longer identical. Even if the ERP had worked, the conversation would have been hopeless, because time dilation had come into play—a moment of Doppel Five’s time was tedious millennia for Wan-To and the rest of the universe—but that problem didn’t arise, because the ERP was no longer operational at all, and that was the end of that. Wan-To did not expect ever to hear from that doppel again.
Then he began to have problems of another kind.
He observed that the core of his star was filling with ash.
That was something to worry about. The stuff wasn’t really “ash” in the sense of the oxidized residue of a chemical combustion, naturally; it was a slurry of helium ions, the stuff that was left over when hydrogen fused. He regretted a little that he had picked a mainstream star slightly larger than the norm. Yes, you got more energy to play with when your home star was large, but it didn’t last as long, either.
Still, who could have guessed that he would be stuck in the thing, a prisoner, afraid to venture out?
Now and then the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky communicators called Wan-To’s name. He never replied.
Wan-To hadn’t replied to anyone for a long time. He was far too suspicious. He was convinced that any call was almost certainly a trick, just one of his adversaries hoping to find out if he was really dead. Wan-To was too wise a bunny to fall for Brer Fox’s wiles.
He was also far from happy. For the first time in his life Wan-To began to feel trapped. His jolly little stellar home had become a prison, and his cell became less comfortable every day.
It wasn’t getting smaller. Far from it. In fact, the star was entering its red giant phase. It had spent most of its young life turning hydrogen into helium, but now the central core was all helium ash, doing nothing at all but sitting there and waiting for the day when it could fuse into higher elements.
Meanwhile, the remaining hydrogen was in a thick, dense shell around the helium core. It was fusing faster than ever—producing more heat than ever—pressing ever more insistently on the mantle of thinner gases that surrounded it; and the mantle was bloating under the pressure.
Wan-To had never stayed inside a star as it left its main sequence before. He didn’t like it.
To be sure, his physical safety was not in danger. Well, not in much danger, anyway—certainly not as much as risking a hurried flight of his own to another home. But the star had swelled immensely under the thrust of that inner shell of fusing hydrogen. If it had had planets, as Earth’s Sun did, its outer fringes would have been past the orbit of Mars by now. It was a classical red giant, swollen as huge as Betelgeuse or Antares—beginning to decay.
Did that give Wan-To more room? Infuriatingly, it did not. His star’s mass did not increase. There was no more matter to fill that enlarged volume than there had been when it was its proper, normal size. Indeed there was less, because it was beginning to fall apart. The outer reaches of the star were so distant from the core and so tenuous—by Earthly standards, in fact very close to a vacuum—that the radiation pressure from within was actually shoving the farthest gases away from the star entirely. Before long those outer regions would separate completely to form that useless shell of detached gases called a planetary nebula.
And Wan-To knew that then nothing but the core would remain for him to occupy. A miserable little white dwarf, no larger than an ordinary solid-matter planet like the Earth—far too cramped to be a suitable home for anyone like Wan-To!