The World at the End of Time Read Online Free PDF

picture wasn’t very clear. The optical overload sensors dimmed the flare star enough to let the others show, but the haze of ions streaming from the drive jets fuzzed everything. Including the star they were heading for. “That’s it,” Viktor said. “Right under that bright one.”
    “I can’t see it,” Billy whined. “I want a Coca-Cola.”
    “A what?”
    “A Coca-Cola. It’s a drink. I saw it on television. I want one.”
    “Well, I don’t have one,” Viktor said, “and if I did your mother probably wouldn’t want you to—oh, my God.”
    The boys stopped whining and looked up anxiously at him. “What is it?” Freddy demanded, apprehensive.
    “Nothing,” he said, staring at the view he had just succeeded in tuning in on the screen. “No, it’s nothing. It’s just that I, well, I kind of forgot. I forgot that half the ship would be gone by now,” Viktor said.
     
    When New Mayflower left Low Earth Orbit to begin its long journey to a new home, it was six years behind New Ark. And even before it pulled out of Low Earth Orbit the skeleton of New Argosy was beginning to take shape behind it. The three interstellar ships, combined, had a single assignment: to populate a world, and thus to establish a bridgehead for the human race in its long-term destiny of seeding the entire galaxy with people.
    That was a pretty fantastic idea, even for bumptious humans. But the project wasn’t purely a fantasy. It could be done. The whole human total on all three ships came to under four thousand people. But human beings are really good at procreating. In two or three centuries, if they put their minds to it, the population of the new planet could be bigger than that of bulging old Earth itself.
    Practicality wasn’t the question.
    The question (and some asked it) was: Why? Why travel a hundred years and more to people another planet with human beings, when the Solar System already had enough of them for any reasonable need?
    Really, there was only one answer to the question of why anyone would want to colonize the new world, and that answer was: Because it was there. Newmanhome wasn’t only there, it had life; the long-ago probe, no bigger than a washing machine, had established that definitely as it sped through the new solar system. The proof was that the presence of reactive gases in the planet’s atmosphere showed that it was a reduced-entropy world. The reactive gases in its air hadn’t reacted with each other. Something was keeping them from doing so, and thus attaining chemical equilibrium. And the only thing that could do that was the only known antientropic force in the universe:
    Life.
    Oh, not human life. Not even anything technological—the probe had detected no signs of radio, industry, cities—nothing like that. But there was an atmosphere with oxygen and water vapor, and so human people (they were nearly sure) would be able to live there.
    So New Ark was designed and (oh, after a terrible amount of argument and delay; Viktor hadn’t even been born then, but his father had told him about it) even funded and built. And even before it was finished New Mayflower had been begun.
    Each ship was purpose-designed, and the purposes were slightly different— Ark had to be self-sufficient, Mayflower would have the advantage of Ark ’s colonists already there. Also, by the time they began assembling Mayflower the state of the art had leaped a generation ahead, so the two ships didn’t look much alike. Ark was only a squat cylinder. Mayflower, with many added refinements, was longer and narrower. It started out 450 feet long and 90 feet in diameter at its widest point—it was more lozenge-shape than cylindrical—and once in orbit around the new planet its duties would have just begun. It would stay in orbit around Newmanhome indefinitely, to microwave power down to the colonies. (And, of course, Argosy, a generation more advanced still, would actually land on the planet!—but that was many years in