The World at the End of Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

a maybe.” He pushed aside his empty porridge bowl and took a deep swallow of the one cup of coffee he was allowed each day. Fifth Officer Pal Sorricaine was a plump, smooth-faced, blue-eyed man with a cheery disposition. He smiled often. He was smiling now, though with a little quizzical twist of the lip to acknowledge the “maybe.” He had close-cropped pale hair, and he ran his hand over it as he gazed benignly at his son. “Marie-Claude says you’ve been a sweetheart about her kids,” he said.
    Viktor shrugged, scowling into his bowl.
    “Got a case on her, have you?” his father asked, grinning. “I can’t say I blame you.”
    “Pal!” his wife warned.
    Sorricaine relented. “I was only teasing you a little, Vik,” he apologized. “Don’t be touchy, okay? Anyway, I think we can go back in the deep freeze in a day or two, after all. So if there’s anything you specially want to do on the ship this time . . .”
    Viktor made a face. “What is there to do?”
    “Not much,” Pal Sorricaine agreed. “Still—have you taken a good look at the ship? It’s changed a lot since we took off, you know. And you’ll never see it this way again.”
     
    Later on, being a surly “sweetheart” once more for Marie-Claude Stockbridge, Viktor was minding the kids in a roughhouse game of catch. After a wildly thrown ball had bounced around a corner of the passage and hit one of the maintenance crew in the face, Viktor remembered what his father had said. “Enough ball playing,” he announced. “I want to show you something.”
    “What?” Freddy demanded, wresting the ball away from his brother.
    “You’ll see. Come on.”
    Viktor’s parents were both at work, so he had the little room uncontested. For a wonder, the Stockbridge brothers were reasonably quiet as Viktor turned on the screen and found the menu for exterior real-time observation.
    It took him a little experimentation before he was able to lock onto the view he wanted, but then he had it.
    New Mayflower was a ramshackle contraption. You could have held it together with string—it would never experience any strong forces to tear it apart—and the designers pretty nearly did. The bits and pieces of it were random, irregular objects, but the screen clearly showed the vast bulk of the light sail, half deployed.
    Even the little kids knew about the light sail. To travel from star to star took vast amounts of energy. The antimatter mass thrusters were not enough. Light sails had helped lift Mayflower out of the gravity well of the Sun’s attraction, using the Sun’s own endless flood of photons to help thrust it away. The same light sail was now already half deployed to use the light of the new star to help slow the ship down. There it was, fanning out from the ship like a huge frail ruff of silver—but only halfway deployed. “Look at it,” he commanded.
    “It’s crooked,” Freddy announced.
    “You’re crooked,” Billy told him. “Give me my ball!”
    “Yes, give him the damn ball,” Viktor gritted.
    “It isn’t his.”
    “It is so!”
    “No, it’s mine, because you lost it and I found it. Finders keepers!”
    “Well, I don’t have it anyway,” Freddy lied, concealing the ball as he ducked behind Viktor. “It’s home.”
    “It isn’t home! I see it—”
    “Will you two shut up about the stinking ball?” Viktor roared. “Here, let me show you where we’re going.”
    “I don’t want to see where we’re going,” Billy whined, but Viktor was already adjusting the image. Now it was direct line of sight—toward the “stern” of the ship, naturally, because Mayflower had long since been turned around so the main engines could thrust in the direction that would slow it down. It wasn’t a very good picture. Around the edges the stars were bright, ten thousand of them or more, hues from firebox red to sapphire and white, and the ghostly pale haze of the Milky Way washing out one corner of the screen. But the center of the