Viktor was having none of that.
He hung around the working rooms of the ship as much as he could, watching his father and Marie-Claude Stockbridge and the others peck away at their computers, listening to snippets of conversation.
"It looks like an extra eight months travel time—that's not too bad."
"There's plenty of fuel reserve." That was his father. "I've calculated a first-approximation vector, but what about the light sail? Pull it in? Leave it out?"
"Leave it out. Just cut engine deceleration thrust. Then—" That time it was Marie-Claude Stockbridge speaking, and she looked up at the screen that showed the heavens before them. The bright blue-white flare star dominated everything, dimming that fainter, yellower one that was their destination. "Then when we get there, I wonder what we'll find. That star's putting out a lot of radiation."
What she said was what was on everybody's mind. The place they were going, the probes had said, was a livable planet—in fact, the name they had given it was "Newmanhome"—but heavy radiation could change the parameters of what was "livable." Of course, the first ship, six years ahead of them in flight, would find all that out before them—but if things were bad, what could they do about it? There was no way to return. "Newmanhome's got Van Allens and a pretty deep atmosphere, Marie," Vik's father told her. "It'll be all right. I hope."
And then there was silence for a moment until one of the others turned back to his computer and tapped a few keys. "Right now it adds up to a little under seven light-years to go," he announced. "First thrust approximation, a six-percent reduction ought to do it, adjusting it back as the flare dies away. That's the hard part, though. Anybody know how to calculate the decay rate?"
"For a regular flare star? Maybe," Viktor's father said irritably. "For this thing, how can we? It's not really flaring. It's more like it just blew up."
"But you say it isn't a nova," the man said, and then he glanced up and caught sight of Viktor. "Looks like your son's come to help us, Pal," he said to Viktor's father. It was an amiable enough remark, but it carried a message, too, and Viktor turned and got out of the room before the message had to be made explicit.
For lack of anything better to do, he turned to the teaching machine to explain some of what was going on. For instance, he knew that a light-year was a very long distance indeed. But exactly how long?
The teaching machine tried to help. It told Viktor that a light-year was the distance traveled in one year by a beam of light, speeding along at its unalterable pace of 186,000 miles per second, but it wasn't easy for Viktor to visualize even a "mile." The machine tried to be helpful. Some 734 of those "miles," it explained, lay between New York and Chicago, back on Earth. Six thousand of them took you from any point on the Earth's equator to one of its poles. But that meant little to Viktor, who had been only six years old when he and his parents launched to join the ship's crew assembling in space. He thought he remembered Los Angeles, because of the amusement parks and the seals, but he also remembered the snowman his father had made for him in the courtyard of their home—and there couldn't have been any snowmen in Los Angeles. (His mother had explained to him that had been in Warsaw, where Viktor had been born, but to Viktor "Warsaw" was only a name.)
The closest the teaching machine came to defining a mile for Viktor was to point out that it was a little more than twenty-five times around the revolving exercise treadmill where every wakeful person had to exercise his muscles and preserve the calcium in his bones.
So that was a mile. But the datum wasn't all that much help. Multiplying twenty-five laps around the revolving drum by 186,000 by the number of seconds in a year was simply beyond Viktor's capabilities. Not to do the arithmetic—the teaching machine wrote the answer out for him—but to grasp the meaning of the simple sum 25 x 186,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365.25 = 146,742,840,000,000.
Call it a hundred and fifty trillion laps around the revolving drum …
What was the use of calling it anything, though, when nobody could really grasp the meaning of a "trillion"?
And that was just one light-year. Then, of course, you had to multiply even that huge number by another 6.8 to find out how far you still had to go before landing … or by 19.7 to find out how far you were from home.
The thing about young Viktor Sorricaine was that he hated to give up. On anything. He wasn't a very impressive kid physically—tall for his age, but gangling and pretty clumsy. Viktor had nearly abandoned the hope of becoming an All-Star center-fielder, but that wasn't because he despaired of ever getting his coordination on track. It was only because he was pretty sure that no one in the place where he was going to spend the rest of his life was going to have time to organize any professional baseball teams.
Viktor was determined, but he wasn't crazy—although his parents might have thought he was, if he had told them of his other long-range ambition.
But that other ambition he didn't tell. Not to anybody.
He didn't let himself be thwarted by the teaching machine. He dismissed it and tried another tack. He turned to the outside viewers to see for himself just how distant Earth's old Sun looked. It took some doing, but then he found it—barely—an object pitifully tiny and faint among ten thousand other stars.
Then he heard the noise of scuffling and childish voices piping in rage. Of course he knew who it had to be. He groaned and went to the door. "Quiet down, you kids!" he ordered.
The Stockbridge boys didn't quiet down. They didn't even acknowledge hearing him. They were concentrating on trying to maim each other. Billy had hit Freddy, because Freddy had pushed Billy, and now the two of them were slapping and kicking at each other as they rolled slowly about the floor in the microgravity.
Viktor didn't at all mind their punching each other. What he objected to was that they were doing it in front of his family's door, where he might be blamed for any wounds they might wind up with. Not to mention the amount of noise they made and the language they used! Viktor was certain he had not known so many bad words when he was their age. When he got them pulled apart, he heard Billy pant ferociously at his sobbing brother, "I'll kill you, you whoreson!"
That did it for Viktor. He hadn't been going to tell on them, but that was too much. He would not allow even her own child to say such a think about beautiful, desirable, undoubtedly chaste Marie-Claude Stockbridge—since, improbable as any happy outcome of his ambition must seem even to Viktor, Marie-Claude Stockbridge was the other ambition he had no intention of giving up on. "All right, you two," he growled. "We're going to see your parents about this!"
But by the time he got them back to the Stockbridge family quarters on the far rim of the ship Viktor had a change of heart. Werner Stockbridge, their father, was webbed into his bed, sound asleep. He looked too frayed and worried as he snored there to be wakened for a punishment session, and their mother wasn't there at all. The phone told Viktor that Marie-Claude Stockbridge was on duty in the Operations complex at the heart of the ship, along with his own parents. He didn't want to disturb her there. He looked gloomily at the little culprits, sighed, and said, "All right, you two. How about a nice quiet game of dominoes in the rec room?"
An hour later Mrs. Stockbridge came looking for them, full of praise for Viktor. "You're a lot of help," she told him. "I don't know what I'd do without you, Viktor. Look, as soon as I get the kids in for a nap I'm going to get something to eat and then bed. Will you keep me company?"
Viktor knew perfectly well that that invitation was for the meal and certainly not for the bed. All the same he felt a sudden electrical heat at the bottom of his belly and only managed to growl, "Okay."