"You've got that backwards!" Viktor howled in triumph. "You spent more time frozen!"
She scowled, flushed, and quickly backtracked. "But that's not the important point," she insisted. She had spent six more Earth years than he had on Newmanhome. That made her older, because Newmanhome had twice as many years, just about, as Earth in any given period of time.
Viktor strongly protested her arithmetic.
It was true, of course, that the Earth calendar didn't match up well against the realities of Newmanhome. Newmanhome's day, sunrise to sunrise, was about twenty-two and a half Earth hours; and it swung around its sun so fast that it only had about a hundred and ninety-eight of those days in each year. So a Newmanhome "year" was not much more than half an Earth (or "real") year.
The discrepancy played hell with birthdays. That wasn't much of a practical problem, but it made a major annoyance when you got into arguments like the one with Reesa McGann. Viktor's birthdays were terminally confused, anyway. Everybody's were, for how could you allow for a couple of stretches of freeze time? Of course, you could count back to time of birth. At any time the teaching machines could easily tell you the exact Earth day, year, and minute it was right then in Laguna Beach, California, U.S.A., Earth (or, in Viktor's case, should they reckon from Warsaw, nearly a dozen time zones away?). But Reesa flatly refused to consider Earth standards applicable.
Viktor pondered over the question at school. It wasn't just birthdays. Even worse was the question of holidays. Where in the Newmanhome calendar did you put Christmas, Ramadan, or Rosh Hashanah? But as it was birthdays that established the pecking order between him and Reesa, Viktor took time to do a lot of arithmetic on the teaching machine, and then he presented his teacher with a plan to recalculate everybody's age in Home years.
Mr. Feldhouse squashed it firmly. "You haven't allowed for relativistic effects," he pointed out. "A lot of the transit time for both ships was at forty percent of the speed of light or better; you have to figure that in."
So grimly Viktor put in some more of his precious few hours of spare time with the teaching machines … which Mr. Feldhouse approved, grinning, because it was wonderful math practice for the whole class.
Slowly, painfully slowly, the reinforced colony digested its new additions and began to incorporate the cargoes Mayflower had brought into their lives. Steel from the ship wouldn't last them forever. Ore bodies existed, taconite mostly, but the surface outbreaks were limited and there wasn't the manpower to dig deep mines.
That was where Marie-Claude Stockbridge's machines came in, and that was when Viktor got closer to his life's ambition—though, of course, Reesa spoiled it for him.
She came to Viktor's tent early one morning and leaned in. "Get up," she ordered. "If we get there first we can help Stockbridge with her Von Neumanns."
Viktor pulled the sheet indignantly up to his chin and glared at her fuzzily. "Do what?" he asked.
"Help Marie-Claude Stockbridge," she repeated impatiently. "They've given her the okay to send the machines out, and she's going to need help—us, if you get off your dead ass and get there before everybody else does."
That woke him up. "Get out of here so I can get dressed," he ordered, suffused with joy, and pulled on his shorts and shoes in no time at all. He knew about the Von Neumanns, of course. Everybody did. They were going to be very important to the colony, but they'd had to take their turn, like every other very important project, until the utterly urgent ones of survival had been taken care of.
On the way to the machine shed Reesa explained. "Jake Lundy told me about it. He's kind of got eyes for me, you know; he's helping Stockbridge prepare the machines, and I think he liked the idea of having me around for a few days. So right away I thought of you."
"Thanks," Viktor said happily. He didn't much care for Jake Lundy—five years older than Reesa or himself, a tall, muscular man who was already known to have fathered at least one child for the colony, though he showed no signs of wanting to marry. But Viktor could put up with Lundy—could even put up with Reesa—if it also meant being near Marie-Claude.
Then he stopped because what she was babbling on about had just reached him. He glared at her. "What did you say?"
"I said I think Stockbridge is kind of hot for Jake, too, you know? I mean, he's a gorgeous hunk of man." Then she paused to peer at him. "What's the matter with you?"
"Nothing's the matter with me!" he snapped.
She walked around him, looking at him curiously from every side as he stood, mute and belligerent. "Oh, I get it," she said wisely. "You've got a crush on Marie-Claude."
"Shut your mouth," he said, trembling.
She did her best to be patient with him. "But, Vik, that's just normal, you know? You shouldn't get pissed because she's making it with a guy. She's a woman, isn't she?" She stepped back a pace before the look he gave her. "Hey, don't get mad at me! I didn't do anything!"
"Just shut up," he blazed.
She looked at him thoughtfully, then led the way toward the machine sheds. But she couldn't keep quiet indefinitely, and just before they got there she cleared her throat. "Viktor? Don't get sore if I ask you something. When you were all on the ship, did you ever see Marie-Claude and her husband make love?"
"Don't be disgusting!"
"Oh, Viktor," she sighed. "Doing it isn't disgusting. Watching somebody is, maybe, so the reason I asked—"
"I said shut up."
And for a wonder she did, because his tone was really dangerous. But his internal pain didn't heal.
Marie-Claude Stockbridge had in her charge a dozen prototypes of Von Neumann finder-homer machines, great, simpleminded automata that weren't in any real way alive, but shared with living things the ability to forage in their environment, to ingest the kind of chemicals that they were made up of, and to replicate themselves, as people do when they have babies, by making copies of themselves to grow up and do the same thing all over again, generation after generation. And each had a "homing circuit," like that of the freshwater salmon or the migratory birds, which would bring it back to the place it started from (or its ancestors had) when it was of a certain size, there to be dismantled and forged into whatever metal parts the colony needed.
They were ugly things, but they sure beat the hell out of digging holes in the ground.
The Von Neumann machines came in several varieties. There were digging kinds, that looked like iron bedbugs; there were swimming kinds, to exploit the thermal springs they hoped to find at the bottom of Great Ocean, that looked like chromium-plated versions of the sort of shell people picked up on Earthly beaches. They weren't purely mechanical. The iron-miner, for instance, had a complex "digestive" system like the second stomach of a ruminant, where genetically tailored iron-concentrating bacteria helped extract the metal from the rock after the jaws of the Von Neumann miner had pulverized it.
What Reesa and Viktor and a couple of other drudges did was only to fetch and carry, to hoist the Von Neumanns in slings while Marie-Claude and Jake Lundy pried off their inspection hatches and checked their circuits, and to test the seals and make sure the mechanical parts were freed from their shipping constraints. It was hard, hot work. Viktor was stiffly ill at ease at first, eyes always on Marie-Claude and Jake Lundy to see if there was any visible affection going on between them; but in the pursuit of her specialty Marie-Claude was all business. And best of all, she was there. She was where he was hardly an arm's length away, for hours at a time; and if she thought of him as a child she treated him as a colleague. Even Jake Lundy wasn't so bad. His muscles were a big help when the massive machines needed hoisting or turning, but Viktor was getting pretty strong, too, and he was the one Lundy yelled for when something hard had to be done.