"Eat your dinner," Viktor commanded sourly. He didn't want, for a whole complex of reasons, to hear any more about the virtues of Billy Stockbridge.
Because of the epidemic everything was delayed, disorganized, generally screwed up. Viktor's ship had unloaded in record time, but the cargo of machines and chemicals for the return trip was late. The ship's sailing was put off.
The day before it finally sailed Viktor looked up Reesa McGann. She had their son with them, as well as her toddler by Jake Lundy. As a matter of fact, there were twenty-two infants under her care, because she was trying her luck with a day-care job. "What happened to space piloting?" he asked.
She didn't even smile. It wasn't much of a joke; she didn't have to say that obviously there weren't going to be any space-piloting jobs around now because the epidemic had pushed everything back to the edge of bare survival.
Then, without at all planning it, he found himself saying, "Reesa, my mother told me just before she died that I ought to marry you. So did—someone else."
"Who else?" she asked curiously. When he didn't answer, she said, "They're right, of course. You ought to."
He blinked at her, surprised and amused. "Do you want me to?"
She thought that over for a moment while she propped a bottle for one of the younger ones under her care. Then she said, "Yes, no, and maybe. Yes, first: Screwing at random and making babies with different people is kind of kid stuff. There's a time to settle down, and both you and I are right about at that time. Then, no: You've been horny for Marie-Claude Petkin since you were in diapers yourself. There's no point thinking about marrying you until you get her off your mind."
Viktor flushed, half angry, half laughing. She stopped there. "You didn't tell me what the maybe was," he protested.
"Well, isn't that obvious? If you ever get over having the hots for Marie-Claude, then maybe I'll still be around. Give me a call if you do, okay?"
He grinned at her—unwilling to take the discussion seriously, trying to keep it light and jocular. "I have to be the one who calls? You won't call me?"
"Viktor," she said earnestly, "I've been calling you since we were both school kids. I just keep getting a busy signal."
It turned out Viktor was going to another funeral—Alice's older child had died, along with all those thousands, and so had her mother—and so, as it also turned out, he wasn't going to have a ready-made bunkmate that trip. Alice was going to stay home with Shan for a while.
The funeral was worse than the one the day before. The town meeting had settled very little when it had authorized separate burials for Moslems. Kittamur Haradi was a Moslem, all right, but he was a Sunni. He didn't want his late wife buried with the Shi'ites. So a separate, smaller ditch was dug for the second Moslem sect.
And then the community's chief working rabbi (there were only two) got the segregationist fever, declaring that Jewish burials should be in a place of their own, where a star of David could be erected.
Viktor couldn't see the sense of it. When the bodies were laid into their great, shallow pits they all looked much the same. At least, he thought, with what remained of his identification as a Christian who hadn't been to a service since the landing, the Catholics and all the Protestants, even the Quakers and Unitarians, had all raised no objection to a common grave for their dead.
Not then, anyway.
That night he let his father persuade him to come and see what Billy Stockbridge had been doing. It wasn't just that he thought it might be interesting, although he did; it was a way of keeping some sort of contact with the old man. Not making up, exactly. But not building the wall between them any higher, at least.
They didn't go to the observatory, they went to the little cubicle under the radio dish that Pal Sorricaine had begged for an astronomy center. But Billy wasn't there. "I don't know where he could have got to," Pal Sorricaine said, frowning. "Everything's so mixed up with all the deaths—I haven't really talked to him for weeks. Well, let's see what he's got. I think that's his current program that he left up. Let me take a look …"
He stumped over to the console and sat down to study the screen, first cursorily, then frowning.
"But this isn't Nebo," he said, scratching absently at his gauze mask with one hand, rubbing his stump with the other. "Look at this. Bill's been doing stellar spectrometry—lots of it. See here, he's been taking observations on a bunch of bright stars; here's Betelgeuse, here's Fomalhaut, here's— Wait a minute," he said suddenly. He scowled at the screen. "Look at that."
Viktor looked obediently, trying to remember what he knew about stellar spectra. What he mostly remembered was that you couldn't tell much just by glancing at them; you needed careful comparisons against standards to see anything meaningful. "Look at what?" he asked.
"The absorption lines are all mixed up," Pal Sorricaine complained. "Look at the hydrogen alphas! See, Bill's got two sets of spectra for each star, one's recent, the other's a year or two ago. Their frequency shifted! Not much; it could even be an instrument screwup …" He stared at the screen, gnawing his lip under the mask. Then he said, "No. Bill's a better observer than that. He wouldn't get them all wrong. Something systematic is going on."
Viktor said, not quite understanding, "Are all the stars screwed up?"
"No! Look at this nearby bunch—stars within five or six light-years. They haven't changed. But these more distant ones— But that's impossible!" he cried angrily.
"What's impossible?"
"Look, damn it! Here, everything in this direction is red-shifted—all these others are blued. And that couldn't happen, Viktor, not possibly. Unless—"
"Come on, Dad! Unless what?" Viktor demanded, angry and uneasy.
Pal Sorricaine shook his head. "Let's find Billy," he growled, and Viktor heard with alarm the worry in his father's voice.
They didn't find Billy Stockbridge. Billy found them. He was coming up the hill, very fast, when he saw them coming down. When Pal Sorricaine started his angry questioning, Billy just shook his head. "Come into the observatory," he said. "Let me show you."
And inside the little observers' room he sat down at the keypad without another word. "This is an old star photograph," he explained over his shoulder as a sky view appeared on the screen, a negative, black dots on a white background. "Now I'm superimposing one I just took." The number of stars suddenly doubled and then began to move about as Billy worked over the keypad. "Just a moment till I get them registered …" The stars abruptly coalesced, as far as Viktor could see, but Billy was busy setting up another program.
Then he leaned back as the image began to pulse, like a fast heartbeat, twice a second. "Now look," he ordered.
Viktor glanced at his father, silently staring at the screen with his brows screwed together in perplexity—or worry? "I am looking," Viktor said, annoyed. "I don't see anything, but— hey! Isn't that one jumping back and forth? And that one, too—and that over there …"
"My God," Pal Sorricaine said softly.
Billy nodded grimly. "In this segment of the sky I've found twenty-three stars that show movement on the blink comparator. As soon as I made those Doppler measurements I had to make an optical observation. The Dopplers were right. Look again, Viktor. Look at the ones on the edges of the screen. This one—" He put a finger on a large dot near the left edge. "—and this little one over here on the right. Wait a minute, I'll slow the blinks down."