"What?" Freddy demanded, wresting the ball away from his brother.
"You'll see. Come on."
Viktor's parents were both at work, so he had the little room uncontested. For a wonder, the Stockbridge brothers were reasonably quiet as Viktor turned on the screen and found the menu for exterior real-time observation.
It took him a little experimentation before he was able to lock onto the view he wanted, but then he had it.
New Mayflower was a ramshackle contraption. You could have held it together with string—it would never experience any strong forces to tear it apart—and the designers pretty nearly did. The bits and pieces of it were random, irregular objects, but the screen clearly showed the vast bulk of the light sail, half deployed.
Even the little kids knew about the light sail. To travel from star to star took vast amounts of energy. The antimatter mass thrusters were not enough. Light sails had helped lift Mayflower out of the gravity well of the Sun's attraction, using the Sun's own endless flood of photons to help thrust it away. The same light sail was now already half deployed to use the light of the new star to help slow the ship down. There it was, fanning out from the ship like a huge frail ruff of silver—but only halfway deployed. "Look at it," he commanded.
"It's crooked," Freddy announced.
"You're crooked," Billy told him. "Give me my ball!"
"Yes, give him the damn ball," Viktor gritted.
"It isn't his."
"It is so!"
"No, it's mine, because you lost it and I found it. Finders keepers!"
"Well, I don't have it anyway," Freddy lied, concealing the ball as he ducked behind Viktor. "It's home."
"It isn't home! I see it—"
"Will you two shut up about the stinking ball?" Viktor roared. "Here, let me show you where we're going."
"I don't want to see where we're going," Billy whined, but Viktor was already adjusting the image. Now it was direct line of sight—toward the "stern" of the ship, naturally, because Mayflower had long since been turned around so the main engines could thrust in the direction that would slow it down. It wasn't a very good picture. Around the edges the stars were bright, ten thousand of them or more, hues from firebox red to sapphire and white, and the ghostly pale haze of the Milky Way washing out one corner of the screen. But the center of the picture wasn't very clear. The optical overload sensors dimmed the flare star enough to let the others show, but the haze of ions streaming from the drive jets fuzzed everything. Including the star they were heading for. "That's it," Viktor said. "Right under that bright one."
"I can't see it," Billy whined. "I want a Coca-Cola."
"A what?"
"A Coca-Cola. It's a drink. I saw it on television. I want one."
"Well, I don't have one," Viktor said, "and if I did your mother probably wouldn't want you to—oh, my God."
The boys stopped whining and looked up anxiously at him. "What is it?" Freddy demanded, apprehensive.
"Nothing," he said, staring at the view he had just succeeded in tuning in on the screen. "No, it's nothing. It's just that I, well, I kind of forgot. I forgot that half the ship would be gone by now," Viktor said.
When New Mayflower left Low Earth Orbit to begin its long journey to a new home, it was six years behind New Ark. And even before it pulled out of Low Earth Orbit the skeleton of New Argosy was beginning to take shape behind it. The three interstellar ships, combined, had a single assignment: to populate a world, and thus to establish a bridgehead for the human race in its long-term destiny of seeding the entire galaxy with people.
That was a pretty fantastic idea, even for bumptious humans. But the project wasn't purely a fantasy. It could be done. The whole human total on all three ships came to under four thousand people. But human beings are really good at procreating. In two or three centuries, if they put their minds to it, the population of the new planet could be bigger than that of bulging old Earth itself.
Practicality wasn't the question.
The question (and some asked it) was: Why? Why travel a hundred years and more to people another planet with human beings, when the Solar System already had enough of them for any reasonable need?
Really, there was only one answer to the question of why anyone would want to colonize the new world, and that answer was: Because it was there. Newmanhome wasn't only there, it had life; the long-ago probe, no bigger than a washing machine, had established that definitely as it sped through the new solar system. The proof was that the presence of reactive gases in the planet's atmosphere showed that it was a reduced-entropy world. The reactive gases in its air hadn't reacted with each other. Something was keeping them from doing so, and thus attaining chemical equilibrium. And the only thing that could do that was the only known antientropic force in the universe: Life.
Oh, not human life. Not even anything technological—the probe had detected no signs of radio, industry, cities—nothing like that. But there was an atmosphere with oxygen and water vapor, and so human people (they were nearly sure) would be able to live there.
So New Ark was designed and (oh, after a terrible amount of argument and delay; Viktor hadn't even been born then, but his father had told him about it) even funded and built. And even before it was finished New Mayflower had been begun.
Each ship was purpose-designed, and the purposes were slightly different—Ark had to be self-sufficient, Mayflower would have the advantage of Ark's colonists already there. Also, by the time they began assembling Mayflower the state of the art had leaped a generation ahead, so the two ships didn't look much alike. Ark was only a squat cylinder. Mayflower, with many added refinements, was longer and narrower. It started out 450 feet long and 90 feet in diameter at its widest point—it was more lozenge-shape than cylindrical—and once in orbit around the new planet its duties would have just begun. It would stay in orbit around Newmanhome indefinitely, to microwave power down to the colonies. (And, of course, Argosy, a generation more advanced still, would actually land on the planet!—but that was many years in the future, because the funding battles had begun all over again. The building of Argosy was still going on, but at a snail's pace.)
The ships all had one thing in common, though. To travel through interstellar space, each of them had to eat part of itself.
So the new shape of his ship was startling to Viktor. His eyes refused to recognize it. Mayflower was far shorter and stubbier than when last he had seen it, ten decades earlier. The long mass thruster, shaped like a skinny tulip, stuck straight out from the back of the ship where once it had been almost completely within the fabric of the ship itself.
To power its flight to the new star, Mayflower had fed more than half of itself into the plasma reactors already.
The string ball of fuel—twisted cables, thick as girders, of antimatter iron—had unraveled and reacted with the normal steel structure that had once enclosed it. The normal iron and the antimatter iron destroyed each other to produce the vast flood of charged particles that drove the ship.
Of course, not all the real iron in the ship was annihilated in the suicide pact with the anti-iron. Even interstellar travel didn't need that much energy. Most of the normal iron simply flashed into plasma and streamed out the thrust nozzles as reaction mass. There was no mystical reason why the normal matter had to be iron, either—iron didn't need anti-iron for the two to annihilate each other; it was just what was easiest to spare.