"Tortee seems to have a lot of authority," Viktor commented.
"You'd better say that! She's—well, listen. How old do you think she is?"
Viktor shrugged. "Maybe a hundred and twenty?" Newmanhome years, of course, but none of these people had ever counted in anything else.
"Try seventy-five," Mirian chortled, enjoying Viktor's astonishment—why, the woman was Reesa's age! "That's right. She could still be having babies, except her husband's in the freezer—he worked there, and they caught him making a fire to keep warm. So she just eats, instead of, you know, being with a man. And—"
He stopped, looking suddenly frightened. "Oh, I thought I heard her coming," he said. "Listen, we'd better get to work. Now, we've got these fuel canisters; we can use them for the body of the rockets …"
The people on Newmanhome had a fair supply of explosives. They needed them now and then. When the ice moved, as it unpredictably did, glacier lips had to be blasted to keep them from burying what was left of Homeport too deep to survive.
But explosives were too dangerous to be freely available; half a dozen little wars among the sects had proved that. The explosives plant was located three kilometers away, heavily guarded by a fully armed squad from each of the sects, and the shuttle that would someday take people back up to Ark and Mayflower was within its perimeter, guarded just as heavily.
Viktor eagerly accepted the chance to go outside to visit the launch site. It was the Peeps' day off, so Reesa was obliged to stay idle with the others in the warrens of the People's Republic, but Viktor and three others, one from each but the Peeps sect, struggled into extra layers of clothing topped with sheepskins; an electrically warmed mesh covered his mouth and nose, and a visor was over his eyes. Even so, that first Arctic-plus blast that struck him soaked through the furs and the four layers of garments in moments, leaving him shaking as he toiled after the other four to the place where stronger, colder men were tanking up the lander shuttle with liquid oxygen and alcohol.
At least the winds were only winds. They did not drive blizzards of snow against the struggling men and women. The winds couldn't do that; snow almost never fell anymore. The air of Newmanhome had been squeezed skin-cracking dry, for there were no longer any warm oceans anywhere on the planet to steam water vapor into the air so that it could come down somewhere else as rain or snow. There wasn't any somewhere else when the whole planet was frozen over.
Squinting against the blast, Viktor could see the dark, cold sky.
It was not anything like the skies he had known before. The shrunken sun gave little heat. Even the dozen stars that were left were themselves, Viktor was almost sure, dimmer than they had been.
And then, as Newmanhome turned, red Nergal appeared, as bloodily scarlet-bright as ever. Minutes later that great puzzle, "the universe," burst eye-blindingly white over the horizon. Viktor gazed at it and sighed.
If only his father had lived to see. If only these people were willing to try to understand! If only—
He felt Mirian tapping him on the shoulder. Viktor looked where the younger man was pointing, up toward that same eastern horizon. "Yes, the universe," Viktor said eagerly through the mesh. "I've been thinking—"
Mirian looked suddenly fearful. "Hey, not that!" he cried over the sound of the wind. "Please don't talk about that! I meant over there, next to it."
Squinting through the mesh, Viktor saw what Mirian was calling his attention to. It was a faint spot of light, barely visible as it moved down toward its setting: Ark, in its low orbit, moving toward its final rendezvous with Mayflower.
Viktor stared at it. The time was getting close. When Ark and Mayflower were linked together the lander would be launched, and then it would all start.
He was suddenly coldly certain that Tortee was going to order him onto the shuttle. And he didn't want to go.
When they were back in the dining hall again Mirian was charged up with optimism. "We're going to do it," he told Viktor positively. "We've got crews trained for repair all ready; they'll be taking off for Ark in a couple of weeks, and then—"
"And then," Viktor said, as gently as possible, "we have to hope that they can get the ship habitable again; and that these rockets will work; and that that little bit of antimatter left in Ark's drive will hold out long enough to ferry people back and forth."
Mirian paused, a spoonful of the stew of corn and beans halfway to his mouth. "Don't talk like that, Viktor," he begged.
Viktor shrugged and remembered to smile. He was beginning to thaw out after his long run outside, and even the meatless-day stew tasted good. The important thing, he told himself, wasn't that this harebrained project should work, it was only that people could believe that it might. Even a false hope was better than no hope at all.
"I do wish," he said, "that we had some more antimatter. We could do a lot with more power. Even maybe build some lasers or something—something better than—" He stopped himself from saying what he had been about to say about the feeble rockets Mirian was putting together. "It was pretty nice when we had Earth technology going for us," he said wistfully.
"Is it true that you people actually made this antimatter stuff?" Mirian asked enviously.
"Not me. Not here—but, back on Earth, sure. They made all kinds of things, Mirian. Why, back on Earth …"
Mirian wasn't the only one listening as Viktor reminisced about the wonders of the planet he had left as a child. A woman across the table put in, "You mean you just walked around? Outside? Without even any clothes on? And things just grew out in the open?"
"It was like that here on Newmanhome, too," Viktor reassured her.
"And they didn't worry about—" She paused, looked around, and lowered her voice. "—like, overload?"
Viktor gave her a superior smile. He knew he was rubbing salt in wounds, but he couldn't help it. "If you mean killing people because there are too many to feed, no. Not ever. Fact, they wanted more people. Everybody was supposed to have all the children they could. Reesa and I had four," he boasted, unwilling to try the explanation of what was meant by "Reesa and I" and the divided parentage of the children …
The children.
Viktor lost the thread of what he was saying. Suddenly the cooling stew and the smells of the densely packed dining hall stopped being pleasant. The children! And he would never see any of them again.
Viktor excused himself and stumbled away to the jakes. He didn't have to urinate. He just didn't want anyone to see, in case he had to cry.
When he got back Mirian gave him a quick, hooded look and went on talking about his experiences as a freezer guard. "They've got all kinds of stuff in there," he was saying. "You wouldn't believe all of it. There's one whole chamber that's full of frozen sperm and ova, animals that they brought from Earth and never started up here. Whales! Termites! Chimpanzees—"
"What's a termite?" the woman across the table asked, but she was looking at Viktor.
Viktor did his best. "It's a kind of an insect, I think. They used to worry about them eating the wood in their houses in California. And a chimpanzee's like a monkey—I think," he added honestly, because all he remembered of chimpanzees was that he had seen a lot of almost human-looking primates one day at the San Diego Zoo, and he had been more impressed by the terrible way they smelled than by his father's lectures on which was which.
There was silence for a moment. Then Mirian put in, "We saw Ark when we were outside. Only it was near the fireball, so we couldn't get a really good look at it."