Frederik Pohl - The World at the End Of Time

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278THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME Frederik Pohi 279
THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME
by Frederik Pohl
CHAPTER 1
Although Wan-To wasn’t at all human, he (or one might prefer to refer to him as “it,” but
“he” was not an inappropriate pronoun) would have put that statement in a very different way.
Wan-To would have said he was at least human. He certainly had all the human characteristics
that he would have considered worth having—if he had known that such a thing as the human
race existed, which he did not. He was strong. He was intelligent. He had an inquiring mind—
which meant he had a scientific one—which meant that, technologically, Wan-To was a very
slick article indeed.
He had, too, that quintessentially human trait that you never seem to find in things like
tarantulas or termites. He had a hell of a great sense of humor. His idea of what was funny was
not subtle. Basically, it was the pie-in-the-face or the pull-the-chair-out-from-under-you kind of
thing. But that’s just as true of a lot of human beings.
He was also an extraordinarily (and very humanly) competitive individual. Wan-To
definitely wanted to be the best of his kind. He wanted that at least. Sometimes, when things got
dicey with his only “friends,” he wanted to be the only one.
Of course, the ways in which Wan-To was all these things was not exactly a human way,
but that would not have troubled Wan-To. He would have been sure his way was better.
The place where Wan-To lived—which was not exactly a “place,” since Wan-To was a
dispersed sort of being—was the interior of a medium-sized G-3 star not readily visible from the
surface of the Earth. He hadn’t always lived there. He certainly hadn’t been “born” there, or in
any place near it, but that is a whole other story and even Wan-To didn’t know all of it. Wan-To
could move easily enough when he wanted to. In fact, he had packed up and moved about as
often as any American city apartment dweller, from one star to another—and once, long ago, he
had moved a lot farther than that. But, like a New Yorker blessed with a rent-controlled
apartment, he did his best to stay put. Moving was a great annoyance to him. It was also a little
dangerous, since going out there into interstellar space, away from the friendly multimillion-
degree heat and pressure of his star, frightened him. At such times he was naked and exposed,
like a molting crab hiding while it grew a new shell. Leaving his star left him vulnerable to the
attentions of predators—who were no less frightening because they were, in some degree,
himself.
Of course, Wan-To enjoyed his star. He knew it as intimately as a man knows his
bedroom. He could easily have moved about it in the dark, if there had ever been any dark.
278THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME Frederik Pohi 279
Human astrophysicists would have envied him that first-hand knowledge. For a human
astronomer to make a model of what the inside of a star was like was an exercise in observation,
deduction, and just plain guessing. Humans could never see inside a star. The longer the humans
worked at it, the better their guesses on the subject got—but Wan-To didn’t have to guess. He
knew.
That isn’t all an Earth person might have envied Wan-To for. Really, he had a pretty
joyous life—at least, when he wasn’t terrified. For Wan-To, living in a star was fun. In any star
he happened to occupy he could always find a satisfying variety of environments. He could even
find a wide choice of “climates,” and he had all sorts of vastly differing particles to amuse
himself with, though some elements were a lot scarcer than others. For instance, if you took a
random sample of a million atoms out of Wan-To’s star, mixed well from all of its parts, only one
of those atoms would be the element argon. Two or three atoms each would be aluminum,
calcium, sodium, and nickel; sixteen would be sulfur; thirty or forty each would be silicon,
magnesium, neon, and iron. You’d probably find eighty or ninety atoms of nitrogen, 400-plus of
carbon, nearly 700 of oxygen. (If you took a larger sample—if you counted every atom in the
star—of course you’d find a lot of other elements. In fact, you’d find all the other elements, from
beryllium to the transuranics. Inevitably some freak of fusion would manufacture at least a few of
every atom that could possibly be made, somewhere inside Wan-To’s star. But all the elements
named—every element that ever existed, save two—would still amount to fewer than 2,000
atoms in your sample of a million.)
The rest of your million-atom sample would be just those two heavy hitters, though not at
all in equal proportions. You would find some 63,000 atoms of helium; and then the rest, 935,000
atoms out of the million, would be hydrogen. So you might think of Wan-To’s star as being a
very dry Martini indeed. Hydrogen was the gin, helium the dash of vermouth, and all the rest
were just contaminants leached off the olive, the stirring rod, and the glass it came in.
There were plenty of all these things in Wan-To’s dense central core to play with, and
anyway, if he tired of them he didn’t have to stay in the core. He had the whole star to play in,
and it was a million miles across, with a hundred different regimes. He could “wander” at will
from “room” to “room” of his “home”—spending some time in the outer shells, even the
photosphere; venturing (with care, because they were so thrillingly diffuse) into the corona and
the nearer parts of the solar wind; riding up and down in the upwellings of hot gases that made
sunspots and speculae.
That part of Wan-To’s star was the convection zone, and in some ways it was the best of
all. The convection zone was the layer of the star where simple mechanical transport took over
from radiation in the escape of energy from the star’s core. For the first four-fifths of its escape
from core to surface, a photon of energy traveled purely radiatively. Not exactly in a straight line,
of course; it bounced from particle to particle, like a ball in a pinball machine. But a fifth of the
way down from the surface the pressure was lessened enough so that the gases could move about
a bit—which is to say, convectively, and so it was called the convection zone. There the heat
from the core made its way the rest of the distance to the surface by being transported in cells of
hot gas, like the outwelling of warmth from a hot-air heating system. Some of the gas rose to the
surface and again began radiating, ejecting its heat away into space. Some, cooling, fell back. In
the convection zone Wan-To could cavort freely, letting himself be carried along by the
convection cells when he chose, twisting their paths into amusing tangles when that seemed more
interesting. Oh, there were a million places to play inside a star!
For that matter, there was no reason for him to be bored with the core. There was plenty
of variety even there. If he decided the center was a little too warm (it ran about fifteen million
278THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME Frederik Pohi 279
degrees), there were cooler spots farther up. He enjoyed the physical sensations the star’s interior
offered. The varying rotation rates (its poles slower than the equator, its core faster than any part
of the surface) and the twisting magnetic field lines that looped below the surface and, here and
there rising above it, produced sunspots—they were to Wan-To as a Jacuzzi is to a Hollywood
film writer.
So for Wan-To his star was a house with many mansions. It should be stated, though, that
Wan-To didn’t exactly move when he “went” from place to place. In a sense, he was always in all
the places at once. It was more a matter of paying attention to one place rather than another, like a
TV addict with a wall of sets, each tuned to a different channel, now looking at this one, now at
another.
Even a medium-sized G-3 star is a vast place, and so the pieces of Wan-To were separated
by thousands of miles. What held him together was the network of neutrinos that served him for
neurons. Only neutrinos could do that for him, for nothing else could move freely about in the
choked, squeezed interior of the star, but that was all right. The neutrinos worked just fine.
What Wan-To was composed of was that strange state of being called plasma. Plasma
isn’t matter, isn’t energy, is some of both; it is the fourth phase of matter (after solid, liquid, and
gas) or the second phase of energy, whichever you prefer to call it. In Wan-To’s view, it was
simply the stuff that intelligent beings were made of. (He had never heard of “human beings,”
and wouldn’t have cared about them if he had.) Sometimes, some of Wan-To’s colleagues (or
children, or brothers—they were a little bit of all three) did suspect that a kind of intelligence
might have developed from other things, like solid matter. Sometimes Wan-To thought that
himself, but any such thing could not be very important, he was pretty sure, because no “matter”
entity could ever amount to much on a cosmic scale. No, the logical home for a truly sentient
being, like himself, had to be in the great compact core of plasma at the heart of a star.
It was a great pity, in Wan-To’s view, that there were so many stars.
Although only a tiny fraction of them had managed to become “alive”—and then only
because he or one of the others had made them so—sometimes he would have preferred to be the
only one there was.
It wasn’t that Wan-To didn’t enjoy company. He did, very much, but he didn’t like paying
the price for it. He could see, now, that he had made some serious mistakes in indulging his
desire for companionship. It had been a dumb idea to create siblings. For that matter, it had been
a dumb idea the first time it had been done, long ago and very far away, and what made Wan-To
sure of that was that in that particular case he had been one of the ones that had been created.
Still, Wan-To could understand how his unfortunate progenitor had felt, because no one
liked being entirely alone. Creating companions hadn’t worked out well this time. The ones he
had already made weren’t much company anymore, because few of them dared communicate
with any of the others in the present uneasy situation. But it was still an attractive idea. It was just
that next time he would have to do it in a different way. It would be quite all right, he thought, to
have more of his kind around—provided the others were just a little less strong, smart, and
competitive than himself.
When they weren’t, they were dangerous.
Stars generally live a very long time. So would Wan-To; in fact, he could easily outlive
most stars by quite a lot. He intended to see that he did; in fact, he meant to make his life last
about as close to forever as possible.
The difficulty with that plan was that it wasn’t entirely up to Wan-To. The companions he
had created had their own views on the subject. Indeed, at least one of them was doing his best to
murder Wan-To at that very moment.
278THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME Frederik Pohi 279
CHAPTER 2
One of those “human beings” Wan-To had never heard of was a boy named Viktor
Sorricaine. Of course, Viktor had never heard of Wan-To, either; their paths had never crossed in
Wan-To’s long life and Viktor’s so far fairly short one.
On Viktor’s twelfth birthday (or, you could say, his one hundred and fifteenth), he woke
up, sweating and itchy, to stare into someone’s eyes. “Mom?” he asked fuzzily. “Mom, are we
there yet?”
It wasn’t his mother looking down at him. It was an old woman he had never seen before.
She didn’t hold herself like an old woman, bent-backed and tottering. She stood straight and her
eyes were clear, and she looked at Viktor in a way that made him uneasy—sad and amused,
tolerant and angry, all at once. He thought she looked as though she knew everything there was to
know about Viktor Sorricaine, and forgave him for it. She was definitely old, though. Her hair
was thinning, and her face was terribly lined. “You don’t remember me, do you, Viktor?” she
asked, and sighed to show that she forgave him for that, too. “I’m not surprised. I’m Wanda.
Your mother will be here in a moment, so don’t worry. We’ve just had a little problem.”
“What kind of problem?” Viktor asked, rubbing his stinging eyes, too polite to ask her
what it was she thought he should have remembered.
“Your dad will take care of it,” the woman said. Viktor couldn’t press her, because she
had already turned away to call for someone to help her get Viktor out of the shallow saucer kind
of thing he was lying in.
Viktor was beginning to wake up. Certain things were clear to him at once. He knew that
he was still on the interstellar ship New Mayflower, from the fact that he weighed so little. That
meant that, no, they hadn’t arrived yet. He knew what the pan he was lying in was, because he
had expected all along that sooner or later he would find himself in one like it. It was the
warming pan where frozen passengers were thawed back to life when the journey was through.
But since it seemed the journey wasn’t through, what could be the reason for waking him now?
He allowed himself to be helped up and was badly surprised to find that the help was
needed; his young limbs were shaky. He let himself be tugged, like a skiff towed by a
motorboat—only the old woman who said her name was Wanda was the motorboat—to a shower
cubicle. There the woman gently stripped off his thin freezer robe to bathe him. It was a rougher
bath than he was used to. There were many decades of dried perspiration and dead skin for the
warm jets to flush away, but that was what they were for. They did their job, and the hissing,
gulping suction pumps sucked the wastewater away.
By the time he came out he knew exactly where he was. He was in the ship’s sick bay.
Viktor knew all about the sick bay. He had seen it from time to time, had in fact spent
several boring hours there before it was time for his family to be frozen, when the last of his baby
molars had had to be helped out so his adult ones would come in straight. The old woman patted
him dry. He let her. He was more interested in what was going on in the warming pan he had
awakened in. Two little kids, no more than four or five years old, were in it now, huddled in each
other’s arms under the bath of directed infrared and microwave as they warmed. The pan around
them was filled with the thick, milky liquid that kept them oxygenated through perfusion until
278THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME Frederik Pohi 279
their lungs began to work, and their limbs were already beginning to move with tiny random
twitches. He even recognized the kids: Billy and Freddy Stockbridge, the sons of his dad’s
navigation partner—two nasty little bits of business if he’d ever seen any.
By the time he was dressed in tunic and shorts and had drunk two enormous glasses of
something sweet and hot, his mother came hurrying in from the next chamber, white robe
fluttering behind her. “Are you all right?” she asked anxiously, reaching out for him.
He allowed her to give him a quick kiss, then fended her off with dignity. “I’m fine,” he
said. “Why aren’t we there?”
“I’m afraid there was a little complication, Vik,” she told him, her voice uneasy. “There’s
something wrong with the flight plan, so they’ve got your father up to straighten it out. It’ll be all
right.”
“Sure it will,” he said, surprised. There wasn’t really any doubt in his mind about that;
after all, the man who was in charge of straightening such things out was his father.
“Marie-Claude’s up, too,” she said fretfully, touching his forehead as she used to do when
she thought he might have a fever. “Between the two of them they’ll have it all cleared up, but
I’ve got to go help out. Are you sure you’ll be—”
“I’m sure,” he said, exasperated and a little embarrassed at being treated like a child.
The old woman interrupted. “Vik needs to eat and get himself oriented, Mrs. Sorricaine-
Memel,” she said. “I’ll see that he’s all right; you go ahead.”
Amelia Sorricaine-Memel looked at her curiously, as though trying to place her, but only
said, “I’ll be back again as soon as I can.”
When she was gone, the old woman took Viktor’s hand. “You’re supposed to go in the
treadmill for a few minutes,” she told him. “Then the doctors will check you over. Do you want
to do that now?”
“Why not?” he asked, shrugging. “But I’m hungry.”
“Of course you’re hungry,” she said, laughing a little. “You always were. You stole my
chocolates when I was on the teaching machines, and your mother took away your candy for a
week.”
Viktor frowned at the woman. It was true that he had stolen chocolates and been punished
for it, but the child he had stolen them from had been Wanda Sharanchenko, the tiny blond
daughter of one of the engineering officers, two years younger than himself. “But—” he began.
The woman nodded. “But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? More than a hundred years,
while you were a corpsicle. But it’s me, all right, Viktor; I’m Wanda.”
The ship New Mayflower wasn’t “there.” It wasn’t even close to the “there” they were
aiming for. According to the original flight plan there was to be more than twenty-eight years of
deceleration time left before they would be at the planet they were meant to colonize.
But, unbelievably, it seemed that the original flight plan was wrong.
Wanda tried to explain it to Viktor as she led him to the huge rotating barrel that was the
ship’s treadmill, spun at nine revolutions a minute to simulate enough of normal Earth gravity to
prevent calcium migration and muscle loss.
The treadmill was familiar enough to Viktor. He’d spent plenty of hours in it in the two
years before he went into the freezer; it was where he played games with the other children in
their compulsory daily exercise routine. He trotted around the barrel like a veteran, working out a
century’s worth of kinks in his young muscles, achieving a sweat and a decently high pulse
without trouble. Wanda was hanging at the hub of the wheel, talking to him as he ran.
When he asked her what had happened, she called, “Flare star.”
278THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME Frederik Pohi 279
“A what star?” he panted.
“A flare star. Or maybe a nova, I don’t know—they say there are some funny things about
it. Anyway, something blew up. It’s really bright, Vik. Wait till you see it. And it’s only about
thirty degrees off our course, so—”
She didn’t have to explain. Viktor had heard enough from his father to see the problem.
The unanticipated flare would be pouring out wholly unexpected floods of photons, and, as the
light sail had already been deployed to help in Mayflower’s long, slow deceleration, the flare
would be shoving them off course and their speed would be decreasing too rapidly. New course
settings had to be calculated, and so, of course, all the navigators had been recalled from freezing,
nearly three decades ahead of schedule, to assist in the work.
Even for Viktor, who had spend most of the unfrozen part of his conscious life as the son
of one of the ship’s navigators, that was not easy to understand completely. What made it worse
was the person who was telling it all to him. He could not reconcile the hundred-year-old Wanda
Sharanchenko (no—even that was wrong—her name turned out to be Wanda Mei now) who was
telling him all this with his quite fresh memory of the tiny little girl who had cried and tried to
bite him after he ate her chocolates. Panting, he called up to her perch on the hub, “But why
didn’t you get frozen, like everybody else?”
She paused, peering at him while she thought her answer out. “I suppose,” she said
finally, “it was fear.”
“Fear of freezing?” Viktor demanded, incredulous. How silly could you be? What was
there to fear in being gently frozen and then reawakened when the time came? It wasn’t any
different from going to sleep and waking up in the morning, really. Was it?
But, Wanda told him, it was. “Not everyone survives freezing. About one person out of a
hundred and eighty can’t be thawed. Something goes wrong, in the freezing, or the suspension, or
the thawing, and they die, you know.”
Viktor hadn’t known that. He swallowed. “But that’s not bad odds,” he protested, for his
own sake mostly.
“It’s bad odds if you’re the one that dies,” she said decisively. “My parents thought so.
And that’s not counting the ones that get freezer-damaged. They can come out blind, or
paralyzed. Who wants that?”
“Have you ever seen somebody blind from the freezer?” he challenged.
“Keep running,” she ordered. “No, but I never saw a dead one, either. I still know they’re
there! Anyway, my parents volunteered to stay on as part of the caretaker crew, and I stayed with
them . . . all these years. Now come off the wheel, Viktor, you’re ready for your physical.”
Which he passed, of course, with flying colors. But what he was to do after that was much
less clear. If the ship had been where it should have been when they woke Viktor up there would
have been no problem. Even a little kid had things to do to get ready for landing.
But they weren’t there yet, and Wanda was no help. “Just stay out of the way,” she
advised, and hurried off to some kind of work of her own.
The fact that Viktor had been revived early from the freezer didn’t mean that anyone
wanted him up and about. The grownups he encountered made that clear. It would have been
better all around if he had stayed cold and senseless, like the eleven hundred other passengers in
the freezatoria. But that wasn’t Viktor’s fault. It was his parents who had opted for storage as a
family unit, Mommy and Daddy and young Viktor all in the same capsule in the cryonic
chambers, and once the process of resuscitating his father had well started the other two had
already been much more than halfway back to life.
They couldn’t, after all, break the sleepers apart with a fork, like a block of frozen
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spinach. They had to thaw a bit before they could be separated, and then—well, there was always
that one-in-a-hundred-and-eighty chance Wanda had mentioned.
The room Viktor was supposed to share with his parents was no bigger than his own
personal bedroom had been in California, back down on the surface of Earth, before they left to
join the interstellar colony ship. It was pretty cramped.
That was not the fault of the ship’s designers. They had allowed ample living space for
the handful of men and women who were to take their turns on unfrozen watch as the other
eleven hundred aboard slumbered at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. But they had only
planned for thirty-five or forty watchkeepers to be awake at any one time. Now, with thirty others
roused unexpectedly to deal with the problem of the flare star, living space was in short supply.
Not quite as short as it had been in the first moments after launching, of course, when Viktor’s
family had taken the first watch until the ship was well clear of the solar system. And by no
means as short as it would be when the ship arrived at its destination and all the corpsicles were
defrosted to get ready for landing. Then it would be ten in a room instead of three, and in around-
the-clock sleeping shifts, too.
Still, living space was pretty cramped. Worse, Viktor was bored. When his parents were
out working, or at least awake, he could watch old films from Earth. He could even see whole
recorded baseball games, taped by broadcast from Earth as they were played, though of course
there was not much suspense in watching them. The results had been history for decades. Come
to that, if he got desperate enough he could even dial up the teaching machines and please his
parents with a few hours’ study of algebra or antimatter engine maintenance or the history of the
Holy Roman Empire.
None of that was enough to keep a young boy busy. Viktor didn’t want to watch baseball.
He wanted to play it. But there were never eighteen people to make up two sides, even if any of
the grown-ups had been willing. He was lonesome. Grownups were about all he had for
company, because all the other kids on Mayflower were still corpsicles. Not counting the
Stockbridge infants. They certainly couldn’t be counted as friends, and none of the adults on the
ship had much time for them, either. The adults were all busy, not to say obsessed, with the
unexpected, and definitely unusual, flare star. The general idea, as much as any of the adults
thought about it at all, was that the teaching machines would keep the children busy most of the
time, and Viktor could look after the two little ones the rest of it.
Viktor was having none of that.
He hung around the working rooms of the ship as much as he could, watching his father
and Marie-Claude Stockbridge and the others peck away at their computers, listening to snippets
of conversation.
“It looks like an extra eight months travel time—that’s not too bad.”
“There's plenty of fuel reserve.” That was his father. “I’ve calculated a first-
approximation vector, but what about the light sail? Pull it in? Leave it out?”
“Leave it out. Just cut engine deceleration thrust. Then—” That time it was Marie-Claude
Stockbridge speaking, and she looked up at the screen that showed the heavens before them. The
bright blue-white flare star dominated everything, dimming that fainter, yellower one that was
their destination. “Then when we get there, I wonder what we’ll find. That star’s putting out a lot
of radiation.”
What she said was what was on everybody’s mind. The place they were going, the probes
had said, was a livable planet—in fact, the name they had given it was “Newmanhome”—but
heavy radiation could change the parameters of what was “livable.” Of course, the first ship, six
278THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME Frederik Pohi 279
years ahead of them in flight, would find all that out before them—but if things were bad, what
could they do about it? There was no way to return. “Newmanhome’s got Van Allens and a pretty
deep atmosphere, Marie,” Vik’s father told her. “It’ll be all right. I hope.”
And then there was silence for a moment until one of the others turned back to his
computer and tapped a few keys. “Right now it adds up to a little under seven light-years to go,”
he announced. “First thrust approximation, a six-percent reduction ought to do it, adjusting it
back as the flare dies away. That’s the hard part, though. Anybody know how to calculate the
decay rate?”
“For a regular flare star? Maybe,” Viktor’s father said irritably. “For this thing, how can
we? It’s not really flaring. It’s more like it just blew up.”
“But you say it isn’t a nova,” the man said, and then he glanced up and caught sight of
Viktor. “Looks like your son’s come to help us, Pal,” he said to Viktor’s father. It was an amiable
enough remark, but it carried a message, too, and Viktor turned and got out of the room before
the message had to be made explicit.
For lack of anything better to do, he turned to the teaching machine to explain some of
what was going on. For instance, he knew that a light-year was a very long distance indeed. But
exactly how long?
The teaching machine tried to help. It told Viktor that a light-year was the distance
traveled in one year by a beam of light, speeding along at its unalterable pace of 186,000 miles
per second, but it wasn’t easy for Viktor to visualize even a “mile.” The machine tried to be
helpful. Some 734 of those “miles,” it explained, lay between New York and Chicago, back on
Earth. Six thousand of them took you from any point on the Earth’s equator to one of its poles.
But that meant little to Viktor, who had been only six years old when he and his parents launched
to join the ship’s crew assembling in space. He thought he remembered Los Angeles, because of
the amusement parks and the seals, but he also remembered the snowman his father had made for
him in the courtyard of their home—and there couldn’t have been any snowmen in Los Angeles.
(His mother had explained to him that had been in Warsaw, where Viktor had been born, but to
Viktor “Warsaw” was only a name.)
The closest the teaching machine came to defining a mile for Viktor was to point out that
it was a little more than twenty-five times around the revolving exercise treadmill where every
wakeful person had to exercise his muscles and preserve the calcium in his bones.
So that was a mile. But the datum wasn’t all that much help. Multiplying twenty-five laps
around the revolving drum by 186,000 by the number of seconds in a year was simply beyond
Viktor’s capabilities. Not to do the arithmetic—the teaching machine wrote the answer out for
him—but to grasp the meaning of the simple sum 25 x 186,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365.25 =
146,742,840,000,000.
Call it a hundred and fifty trillion laps around the revolving drum . . .
What was the use of calling it anything, though, when nobody could really grasp the
meaning of a “trillion”?
And that was just one light-year. Then, of course, you had to multiply even that huge
number by another 6.8 to find out how far you still had to go before landing . . . or by 19.7 to find
out how far you were from home.
The thing about young Viktor Sorricaine was that he hated to give up. On anything. He
wasn’t a very impressive kid physically—tall for his age, but gangling and pretty clumsy. Viktor
had nearly abandoned the hope of becoming an All-Star center-fielder, but that wasn’t because he
despaired of ever getting his coordination on track. It was only because he was pretty sure that no
278THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME Frederik Pohi 279
one in the place where he was going to spend the rest of his life was going to have time to
organize any professional baseball teams.
Viktor was determined, but he wasn’t crazy—although his parents might have thought he
was, if he had told them of his other long-range ambition.
But that other ambition he didn’t tell. Not to anybody.
He didn’t let himself be thwarted by the teaching machine. He dismissed it and tried
another tack. He turned to the outside viewers to see for himself just how distant Earth’s old Sun
looked. It took some doing, but then he found it—barely—an object pitifully tiny and faint
among ten thousand other stars.
Then he heard the noise of scuffling and childish voices piping in rage. Of course he knew
who it had to be. He groaned and went to the door. “Quiet down, you kids!” he ordered.
The Stockbridge boys didn’t quiet down. They didn’t even acknowledge hearing him.
They were concentrating on trying to maim each other. Billy had hit Freddy, because Freddy had
pushed Billy, and now the two of them were slapping and kicking at each other as they rolled
slowly about the floor in the microgravity.
Viktor didn’t at all mind their punching each other. What he objected to was that they
were doing it in front of his family’s door, where he might be blamed for any wounds they might
wind up with. Not to mention the amount of noise they made and the language they used! Viktor
was certain he had not known so many bad words when he was their age. When he got them
pulled apart, he heard Billy pant ferociously at his sobbing brother, “I’ll kill you, you whoreson!”
That did it for Viktor. He hadn’t been going to tell on them, but that was too much. He
would not allow even her own child to say such a think about beautiful, desirable, undoubtedly
chaste Marie-Claude Stockbridge—since, improbable as any happy outcome of his ambition must
seem even to Viktor, Marie-Claude Stockbridge was the other ambition he had no intention of
giving up on. “All right, you two,” he growled. “We’re going to see your parents about this!”
But by the time he got them back to the Stockbridge family quarters on the far rim of the
ship Viktor had a change of heart. Werner Stockbridge, their father, was webbed into his bed,
sound asleep. He looked too frayed and worried as he snored there to be wakened for a
punishment session, and their mother wasn’t there at all. The phone told Viktor that Marie-
Claude Stockbridge was on duty in the Operations complex at the heart of the ship, along with his
own parents. He didn’t want to disturb her there. He looked gloomily at the little culprits, sighed,
and said, “All right, you two. How about a nice quiet game of dominoes in the rec room?”
An hour later Mrs. Stockbridge came looking for them, full of praise for Viktor. “You’re
a lot of help,” she told him. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Viktor. Look, as soon as I get
the kids in for a nap I’m going to get something to eat and then bed. Will you keep me
company?”
Viktor knew perfectly well that that invitation was for the meal and certainly not for the
bed. All the same he felt a sudden electrical heat at the bottom of his belly and only managed to
growl, “Okay.”
In the refectory Marie-Claude Stockbridge had the tact to let Viktor carry her tray to the
table. He was extremely careful about it. In the gentle gravity of the ship’s fractional-G
acceleration slippery foods could slide right off the plate if you moved too fast in the wrong
direction, but he delivered the trays to the table magnets in perfect order. Then he set himself the
task of making grown-up dinner-table conversation. “Vegetable protein again,” he announced,
stirring the thick stew. “I can’t wait to get there and get a decent meal.”
“Well, don’t get your hopes too high. The meals might not be too good right away,” Mrs.
278THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME Frederik Pohi 279
Stockbridge said politely. There were plenty of food animals in the livestock section of the
freezers, but of course they would have to be allowed to breed and multiply before many of them
could be turned into steaks or pork chops or fried drumsticks. “Although the first-ship colonists
ought to have some stocks built up by the time we’re there.” She looked absently past Viktor,
catching a glimpse of herself in the wall mirror—half the walls on the ship were mirrored to
make the rooms seem more spacious. She touched her hair and said remorsefully, “I’m a mess.”
“You look all right,” Viktor growled, frowning down at the rest of his stew.
But that wasn’t the whole truth. Marie-Claude looked a lot better than “all right” to his
lascivious pubescent eyes. She was taller than his father, and more curved than his mother. Her
hair was tangled, and her fingernails were still cracked from the freezer, and there was a faint,
sweet smell of healthy female perspiration about her . . . and all of that was inexpressibly alluring
to twelve-year-old Viktor Sorricaine.
Although Viktor wished no harm at all to Werner Stockbridge, one of his best daydreams
(and sometimes night dreams) involved Marie-Claude’s husband somehow losing the power of
reproduction. He had learned that such things sometimes happened to men. He viewed it as a
potential opportunity for himself. After all, everyone knew that when the ship landed it would be
everyone’s duty to have children. Lots of children—the planet had to be populated, didn’t it?
Lacking the ability to participate in the process himself, Werner Stockbridge would surely accept
the necessity of his wife becoming pregnant now and then—and who better to do the job for him
than their good family friend, young (but by then, with any luck, not too young to do the job)
Viktor Sorricaine?
Some of the details of Viktor’s fantasy were pretty hazy. That was all right. The important
parts of the fantasy came later on. After all, Mr. Stockbridge was much older than his wife—
thirty-eight to her twenty-five—and males were at their sexual peak in their teens. (Viktor knew a
lot about the subject of reproductive biology. The teaching machines had not always been a
disappointment.) After that age male vigor slowly declined, while the sexuality of women grew
from year to year. Viktor took comfort in the fact that the thirteen-year difference between Marie-
Claude’s age and her husband’s was exactly the same as between hers and Viktor’s own, though
of course in the opposite direction. So (Viktor calculated, as he gallantly escorted Marie-Claude
back to the room where her husband and sons slept) in a few years, say seven or so, he would be
nineteen and she would be no more than thirty-two; very likely, he speculated, the very peak
years for both of them, while old Werner Stockbridge would be well into his forties and definitely
well on the downhill path at least, if not actually out of it . . .
He turned and glanced up at her. “What?”
Marie-Claude was smiling at him. “We’re here, Viktor. And, oh, Viktor, I know what a
nuisance those two little monsters can be. Thank you!” And she reached down and kissed his
cheek before she disappeared into the family cubicle.
So, of course, then there was no help for it. From then on Viktor doggedly baby-sat the
two Stockbridge brats, however hateful they got. Which could be pretty hateful. When they
awoke from their nap he organized a game of gravity-tag in the treadmill, hoping to tire them out.
When they still wouldn’t tire he took them on a tour of the ship. By the time it was their bedtime
he realized it was also his own; he had never before understood how wearying taking care of
small children could be for an adult, or anyway a near-adult, like himself.
When he woke up it was because his parents were calling him. “I thought we’d all have
breakfast together for a change,” his mother said, smiling at him. “Things are almost getting back
摘要：

278THEWORLDATTHEENDOFTIMEFrederikPohi279THEWORLDATTHEENDOFTIMEbyFrederikPohlCHAPTER1AlthoughWan-Towasn’tatallhuman,he(oronemightprefertorefertohimas“it,”but“he”wasnotaninappropriatepronoun)wouldhaveputthatstatementinaverydifferentway.Wan-Towouldhavesaidhewasatleasthuman.Hecertainlyhadallthehumanchar...

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