It had been the worst disaster imaginable.
Ark had blown up.
Fortunately for the people on Newmanhome, Ark had still been below the horizon when it happened. It wasn't a chemical explosion that had blasted the old ship into ions, not even a nuke: it was the annihilation of matter and antimatter, pounds of mass converted into energy in the twinkling of an eye, in accordance with the old formula: e = mc2. That hemisphere directly under Ark had received a sudden flood of radiation like an instant flare from the heart of a star.
There was nothing living on that part of Newmanhome. That was fortunate. For, of course, anything that had been alive in the face of that terrible blast would have stopped living at once.
The skeleton crew on Mayflower were less fortunate. Even through the thick skin of the spaceship, they had received more radiation than the human body was meant to experience in a lifetime.
And Tortee was weeping hysterically in her room. She refused to see Viktor at all. She let Mirian in for only a moment, and when he came out he was looking very grave.
"It's over," Mirian told Viktor mournfully. "If we don't have Ark we don't have a working drive. We can't build a rocket ship big enough to attack the planet."
"No, of course not," Viktor agreed, dazed, wishing Reesa were there. "What happened?"
"Aw, who knows?" Mirian said despondently. "Tortee thinks it was the Peeps. She thinks they were so set on getting microwave power that they started fooling around with the drive—to keep us from using it again, you know? And it just went off." He stopped for a moment, gazing at Viktor with an ambiguous expression. Then he said, "I've been thinking, Viktor. You've had a pretty good run for your money."
Viktor blinked, not seeing the connection. "I have?"
"I mean," Mirian explained, "you were born on Earth. Good Freddy, Viktor, that makes you just about the oldest person in the world."
"I guess it does," Viktor said grudgingly. That was an interesting thought, but not the kind that reconciled you to anything.
"So when the council decides …" Mirian left it hanging there. Victor looked at him in puzzlement.
"What is there to decide? You said yourself, the project's over."
"I don't mean the project, I mean about you, Viktor. Tortee won't stand up for you anymore, not after this. Not after—well, you know," he said awkwardly, "we're always pressed for living space here."
"What are you talking about?" Viktor demanded, losing patience. "Are you saying I have to go live with the Peeps or something, like Reesa?"
"Oh, no, not with the Peeps. And I suppose they might keep Reesa on. But you, Viktor—well," he said fairly, "it's not like death. We don't kill people. That's against the Commandments. And, who knows, somebody, sometime—there's always the chance that someday someone will thaw you out of the freezer."
CHAPTER 19
By the time Wan-To had worn out his hundredth star he began to get uneasy again. It wasn't that he was fearing attack from his long-gone siblings, for that had not happened in many hundreds of billions of years. He certainly wasn't worrying about the matter-creatures his long-forgotten Matter-Copy Number Five had reported. No, what was bothering Wan-To was that he couldn't help noticing that his neighborhood was going downhill.
It was no longer a prime, desirable place to be. Most of the stars in this galaxy of his were aging, and everything was getting rather shabby.
Of course, with four hundred billion stars to choose from, he wasn't really out of living space. There were even a few late-generation stars of his favorite kind, type G—like Earth's long-gone sun, for Wan-To's taste in stars was very like that of the human race, in many ways. When the one he was in was showing signs of bloat, since he definitely didn't want to sit through the transformation to red giant again, he picked out the best of the available Gs and made the move.
His latest home was a G0, a good, clean star. It was brighter and bigger than most, though Wan-To found after he had moved in that it had a faintly annoying taste of metals—naturally enough, since it had been formed out of gas clouds that had already been through a star or two.
Little annoyances like that weren't really important. But the star wasn't ideal, either, and Wan-To didn't see why he should be uncomfortable in his own home. He thought about alternatives. He always had the option of moving into a different stellar type, of course—say, an elderly K, or even a little red M. He knew Ms well; that was the kind of star in which Wan-To, long since, had installed his childish companions. He had certainly done that for the children's own good (because those stars were really long-lived and stable), but it was also, to be perfectly truthful, partly for Wan-To's own sake, because those smaller stars gave the children less energy to support their constant babble.
That was what was wrong with the long-lived stars, right there. They had less energy.
That ruled them out for Wan-To, who couldn't see why he should cut back on his own life-style, no matter what. But he could see, not very far ahead, a time when there just wouldn't be any new G-type stars left.
After some thought, the solution occurred to Wan-To. It was simple enough once he had thought of it.
If this galaxy, and most of the others, had grown past the age of frequent star formation by natural processes, why should that be a problem? There was always Wan-To, with his mastery of unnatural processes, to help things along!
So he found a nice, clean gas cloud out in the galactic halo and set to work. It was simple enough. All he had to do was prod at it with a flux of gravitons, graviphotons, and graviscalars, judiciously applied in all the right places, to speed its condensation. Then he blew up a few heavy stars nearby, timing their rhythmic pulses to encourage some of the gas-cloud material to fall together in stars. He knew exactly what to do. After all, he had seen it happen often enough over the last billions of years! Once you got a density wave going, with a radiative-shock compression factor of a hundred to one or so, the gas clouds couldn't help becoming stars.
True, it would take some millions of years for them to settle down, but he had lots of time. True, he had to deplete the energies of many thousands of otherwise healthy nearby stars to get the process going … but what were a few thousand unimportant stars to Wan-To?
Whatever else he did, Wan-To was always careful to keep an eye on the galaxy he had left behind him—the old Milky Way, which he had fled when it turned into a battleground. He wondered if any of his colleagues had survived. He had spotted the star he had escaped from early in his observations—it had been no more than a ruin by then, its greenish planetary nebula already breaking up into wisps of meaningless gas, its helium-burning shell detached from the carbon and oxygen core, the core itself now no more than a white dwarf with a density of tons per cubic inch.
It looked like an abandoned home, and it was. No one could possibly have moved into that after he left, Wan-To was sure. Pretty sure. But he kept an eye on it, and on all the other stars that he suspected might once have sheltered one of his kind.
They were all ruins now, too. Possibly his siblings had all killed each other off? Possibly Mromm had been the last there was, and Wan-To needn't have run away after all?
"Possibly" wasn't good enough. Whatever else Wan-To did, he was never going back to that galaxy.