Indeed, there was enough energy left in the main-drive fuel chamber and station-keepers to send Ark completely around its solar system—if anyone had wanted to do that.
When they fired up the drive for the rendezvous with Mayflower it didn't protest. It began pouring out its floods of plasma as though its engines had been last used only days before. Ark crept toward Mayflower in its orbit, and the work crews began the hard work of cutting up the interior bulkheads and carefully—oh, very carefully—beginning to dismantle the restraining magnets that held its antimatter fuel in place.
There was no room for error in that. If the antimatter had been allowed to brush against normal matter, even for a moment, even the barest touch, the resulting blast would have scattered all of it—and people on Newmanhome would have seen a major flare star in their sky, just before they were scorched blind in the blast.
So Captains Bu and Rodericks and the three surviving Engineer Officers from the two ships—Wilma Granczek had died giving birth to her fourth child on the Archipelago—began the precarious work of shifting the fuel.
It wasn't easy. When Ark was designed, no provision had been made for such a project. Of course, it wasn't only the fuel that had to be moved, it was the magnetic restraints that held it free of contact with anything else, and the steel shell that surrounded the captor fields, and the power source that kept the fields fed and working.
There was no way to move that sort of awkward mass through the ship's ports. They had to cut a hole in the side of Ark, to get the stuff out, while the other crew was cutting another just as big in the hull of Mayflower to insert it there.
Outside the ship, secured by cables, Viktor wielded the great plasma torch, Jake Lundy at his side.
He hadn't planned it that way. He didn't seek out Lundy's company. It was, he thought in an abstract way, just considering the possibilities, better to have Lundy out there with him than inside with, possibly, Reesa—though what they could have been doing, in the cramped confines of the livable part of Ark would hardly have been much, anyway. But he was getting really tired of Jake Lundy's company. It even crossed Viktor's mind for a moment that it wouldn't be awful, really, if Lundy's cables had somehow broken and the man had drifted helplessly away into space, never to return. He even thought, though not seriously—he told himself that of course it wasn't a serious thought—how easy it would be to misaim the plasma torch, now eating through the tough steel of the hull, to burn away Lundy's cables .
He didn't mean that, of course. He reassured himself that that was so. His marriage to Reesa was comfortable; they were used to each other; they shared a love for the kids, and the habits of a dozen years. In any case, he was never jealous concerning Reesa—as he had been, for instance, of the incomparable Marie-Claude Stockbridge.
To take his mind off such matters he gazed around. From outside the ship Viktor could see Newmanhome spread out below them. He didn't like to look there; the spreading white at the poles was ice—something that Newmanhome had never seen before. Looking at the fearsome skies was even worse. The sun was still the brightest object around, but woefully dimmer than before. The cherry coal of the brown dwarf, Nergal, was almost as bright, but the sun's other planets had dimmed with their primary. The eleven normal stars still shone as bright as ever. But there were so few of them! And the rest of the universe, separating itself into great colored clusters, red and blue, had changed into something wonderful and weird and worrying.
He was glad when their shift ended and they were back inside, though there wasn't much there to take comfort in, either. The shuttle had been too full of people to leave room for amenities—even for food; though fortunately Ark's freezers still had their stocks of frozen spare animals. But one did get tired of eating armadillo, or bat, or goat …
When they had raped the side of Ark there was little to do until Ark completed its slow crawl toward its younger sister ship.
"We could have used the main drives," Captain Bu fretted.
"Don't need them!" Captain Rodericks said sharply. "There's plenty of power in the auxiliary thrusters. Anyway, this is my ship, Bu, and we'll do it my way."
"The slow way," Bu sneered.
"The safe way," Rodericks said resolutely. "Talk about something else!"
But the other things they had to talk about were not cheering. Word from Homeport was that the community was making progress in digging itself underground, where the soil would be their best insulation against the cooling winds; the clothing factories were doing their best to turn out parkas and gloves and wool hats, things that had never been needed on Newmanhome before.
They were cold inside the hulk of Ark, too. Bu wanted to cut off power to the freezer sections to use it to warm their little living quarters, but Captain Rodericks refused. His grounds were simple: "Some day we may need what's in those freezers. Anyway, it's my ship." So they huddled together, usually in the old control room, and spent their time watching Mayflower drift nearer and gazing, through screens and fiber-optic tubes, at the scary skies.
It was Furhet Gaza, the welding expert, who said, "Everybody! Look at those stars."
"What stars?" Reesa asked.
"Our own stars! The ones that aren't shifting. They aren't any dimmer, are they?"
"They don't look that way," Billy Stockbridge said cautiously. "What about it?"
"Well," Gaza said earnestly, "maybe we're making a big mistake. Maybe we shouldn't wreck our ships! Maybe we should get everybody back on board and head for one of them."
Billy Stockbridge gave him a look of disdain, but it was Captain Rodericks who said angrily, "That's stupid talk, Gaza! What you say is impossible. In the first place, there are too many people on Newmanhome now; we wouldn't all fit in what's left of this old ship. In the second place, how would we get everybody up here? We don't have a fleet of a thousand shuttles to carry them."
"It's worse than that, Captain," Billy Stockbridge put in.
He got a hostile look from Furhet Gaza. "Worse how?" Gaza demanded.
"We don't even know if those other stars have planets," Viktor offered, but Billy was shaking his head.
"That's not it, either. It doesn't matter if they do have planets; they wouldn't be any use to us. I've checked those stars. They're dimming, too. It's just that what we're seeing is the way they were up to six years ago, so they don't look much different—but they're different now, Gaza. And anyway—"
He stopped there. It was Captain Rodericks who said, "Anyway what, Stockbridge?"
Billy shrugged. "Anyway," he said, "we've got a better use for whatever fuel is left in the drive."