The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 12

It was a long trip to Nebo, a hundred and twenty hard days, tough times for any small group of people locked into each other's company. For Viktor the trip was grim.

Black worry began creeping over him as soon as they pulled out of Low Newmanhome Orbit. It got worse. First it was the radio; the surprised, then frantic, then furious calls began to come in from the surface. It got worse still when his sister Edwina got on to plead with him, worst of all when she turned the microphone over to little Tanya. That was pretty close to heartbreaking, the sweet, worried little voice, begging. "Mommy? Daddy Jake? Daddy Viktor? Won't you please come home?" It sent Reesa fleeing into a dark and empty cargo compartment, and when Viktor found her she was weeping uncontrollably. Then she closed up, would hardly talk at all. Not just Reesa, either. Everyone was having second thoughts; everyone was in a touchy, grouchy mood. By the time Captain Rodericks had inserted Ark into its parking orbit around Nebo and the lander was stocked and ready to take a crew down to the surface, hardly anyone was speaking to anyone else.

In Viktor's black cloud of worry he kept turning their decision over and over in his mind, asking himself the same nagging questions. Did the kids really need them at home? Well, of course they did, but … And did the people need them there, for that matter? Wasn't it, maybe, their duty to be there, sharing whatever came of this unexpected, this unexplained new calamity that was (maybe) threatening the colony's very survival? Well, maybe that was so, but still …

But still what they were doing was necessary! They had to find out what was happening on Nebo! Didn't they?

And even if they didn't, if the whole thing was criminal folly, it was long too late to be asking any of those questions. They were committed.

The other part of Viktor's black cloud was the unhappy state of his relations with Reesa. Something had gone very wrong. In all those hundred and twenty days they did not make love once. True, there wasn't any privacy to speak of in the stripped-down ship. True, Captain Rodericks (who took as an article of faith that only a busy crew could possibly be a happy crew—however laughable it was to use the word "happy" in the present circumstances) had set up an elaborate routine of drills and practice emergencies, Captain Bu backing him up all the way, and everybody was exhausted most of the time. But Reesa hardly even talked to Viktor any more.

What made that particularly hard to accept was that there were people she did talk to, and one of them was Jake Lundy. So to all Viktor's doubts and discomforts there was added the thing he had never wanted to believe himself capable of. He was jealous.

Four people were to go down to the surface of Nebo in the ship's lander. No one volunteered. No one refused, either; they drew lots.

When Jake Lundy turned out to be one of the chosen ones—and Viktor and Reesa were not—Viktor didn't rejoice, exactly, but it certainly did not break his heart.

"We're going to be ready for anything," Captain Rodericks had decreed, and so they pretty nearly were. Contingency plans were made for everything anyone could imagine. Emergencies were invented. Ways of dealing with them were devised. Every day, sometimes more than once a day, without warning, there was a ship's drill. Over and over the crew rehearsed what to do in case of sudden air loss (helmets on, suits already in place), or power outage (standby batteries kept constantly recharged), or the sudden death or incapacitation of any crew member—backups for every job, everyone trained to do everything.

"Just what the hell do you think is going to happen?" Viktor demanded, tired past the point of tolerance.

Rodericks only shook his head and ordered, "Get on with it! Run that leak-patch drill again! The way you deal with emergencies is to plan ahead for them—then you can survive."

When they weren't doing make-work drills, they were stocking the lander for its indispensable job. That wasn't easy, because there was little left on old Ark to scavenge, but they stripped themselves bare to give the lander everything they could. Communications equipment. Recording equipment—Captain Bu even dismantled Ark's old log, and made them stow it aboard the lander. Hot-weather clothing, cold-weather clothing—they could not be sure what they would find. Dried foods from the ship's ancient emergency rations. Fresh (well, recently unfrozen) food from the capsules on the cryonics deck. That was one of Viktor's principal tasks, salvaging everything that seemed edible from the old capsules (how quaint they were, and how unlike Mayflower's! They were no more than pods, stacked on aisles that were no colder than any of the rest of the spaceship—what a wasteful way to design them!). Then they added plastic sacks of water, and flashlights, and Geiger counters, and infrared viewers, and cameras—everything anyone could think of that the resources of the old ship and the personal possessions of the crew could produce. It all went in. And, at the very end, even four rifles, too. Captain Rodericks himself had produced them out of a long-forgotten hoard—not because anyone on Ark really expected anything to shoot at, but because Captain Rodericks insisted.

And then they were there. The lander was stocked. There was nothing left to do but the launch.

For all that long voyage Ark's sensors had been fixed on one target only, the planet they were about to invade. What the people aboard Ark saw of the surface of the mystery planet depended on how they looked at it. Through the fiber-optic links to the external telescopes there was very little to see. The cloud cover was in the way—featureless white by day, emptily black when they were in the nightside portion of their orbit around the planet—except for a few spots, where something bright beneath the clouds lighted them ruddily from below.

The instruments told them a lot more. They had long been detecting definite, large-scale emissions from the surface—gamma rays, X rays, radio static. The infrared sensors showed the clear-cut heat sources under the clouds. And radar was the most useful of all. The radar plot had grown more detailed with every day. The radar images were displayed as holograms, and they showed a variety of hard-edged structures. There were flat, broad things that looked almost like buildings. There were tulip-shaped things, like the horn on an old acoustic phonograph, all apparently oriented toward the dimming sun. There were ribbed metal shells like the carapace of a turtle, and those came in two varieties. Some had things like horn antennae nearby; others were surrounded by great spiky clusters of spiral metal, like Art Deco lightning rods.

None of the sensors detected anything moving. Nothing seemed to be in any physical action anywhere on the surface of Nebo. Captain Rodericks, defending his gift of weapons, argued that there had to be life of some kind there—how else to explain the machines? Could they have built themselves? But there was no sign of the kind of movement that one associated with life, especially of civilized, technological life—nothing like trucks, planes, trains—nothing like anything that might have held whoever it was who built the metal structures. For that matter, there was no sign of any living, moving thing at all.

All the same, when Viktor studied the radar he said, "Even if we don't see them, I guess you were right, Captain Rodericks. It stands to reason there's somebody down there." And then he added, "My father was right."

Captain Rodericks barked at him, "Your father was right about what? Do you know what those things are?"

Viktor looked up from the scan. "I don't know what they are," he said, keeping his temper, "but I can see what they're doing. My father always thought that Nebo and the astronomical events were connected. Obviously they are! Look at those antennae; They're all pointed right at the sun!"

Jake Lundy stood up. He glanced at Viktor, then walked over and studied the plot.

When he turned around he was smiling—not a happy smile, the small smile of relief of someone who has had his mind made up on a tough question. "I'd say that settles the first landing place. We check those things out."

On the next to the last orbit, they had a farewell dinner for the chosen four. It wasn't gourmet food. It all came out of the ancient cryonics stores of Ark, and it had been put there in the first place for its value as biological specimens, not for epicures. But they managed a sort of stew out of seed corn and a kind of hard, flat peas, and the main course was the last of a small breeding stock of dwarf sheep, roasted.

Captain Bu said a short, reverential grace. There was no wine. There was not much conversation, either. Once Bu looked up from stirring the stew around his plate and said, to no one in particular, "You know, the lander has to come back. Otherwise there won't be any way for us to get down to the surface of Newmanhome again."

Jake Lundy laughed. "What's the matter, Captain? Do you think they'll maroon you in Ark, for taking the ship?" But that was obviously what Bu did think. Jake shrugged and changed the subject. "It's a pity," he said deliberately, gnawing at a tiny chop, "that none of these strains will ever live on Newmanhome now."

And little Luo Fah, who also had drawn one of the four slips in the lottery, stood up. "I'm not hungry," she declared. "Do we have to wait for another whole orbit? Can't we launch the lander now?"

Then, all of a sudden, it was happening. The four got up. Some stretched. Some yawned. Some rubbed their chins, or shook hands with one or more of the others. Lundy, after a quick and noncommittal glance at Viktor, pulled Reesa to him and kissed her. (She wasn't the one who had started it—but she didn't resist at all, Viktor observed.) Then they filed slowly into the lander and sealed it down. Viktor and two others closed the inner seals and retreated to the control room, where Captain Rodericks was on the radio to the ship, his eyes glued to the course plot. The little dot that was Ark was creeping across the face of the planet Nebo. Captain Bu cleared his throat, looking around, and then began to pray aloud. "Dear Almighty God Who is all-seeing judge and eternal master of us all, I pray You care for these, our friends, who embark on this dangerous mission in Your service—"

"Launch!" Captain Rodericks cried. And the ship shook slightly, and the lander was gone.

On the radio speaker, Jake Lundy's voice unemotionally reported distance, altitude, and speed every few moments. On the navigation radar, the lander was a blip of bright red, paralleling their course but falling behind. As it passed out of the shadow of Nebo the optics picked it up, too, a glimmer of metal, dropping away into Nebo's air. Everyone was watching, Captain Rodericks hunched over his controls, Captain Bu with his eyes glued to the fiber-optic tubes, everyone else staring at the wall displays.

And as they stood there, Viktor felt Reesa's hand creep into his.

He didn't respond. He didn't pull away, but he left his hand limp and uncooperative in hers.

She removed it and turned to look at him. "Is something wrong?" she asked.

He was stubbornly mute. He didn't even look at her. He kept his eyes on the screen.

"Come on, Viktor," she said, her tone unfriendly. "Are you pissed because I kissed Jake Lundy good-bye?" She was scowling now. "He's going into real danger, damn it! I would've kissed Rodericks if it'd been him!"

Viktor allowed his gaze to turn to her. "Would you have been off in a corner whispering with Rodericks all this time, too?"

"Viktor! What the hell are you talking about? Are you jealous?"

"I thought you were my wife, not his," he said stiffly.

"I am your wife, damn you! I'm not your possession. But I'm your wife, all right!"

"A wife is supposed to be true to her husband," he pointed out. "You agreed to that."

"Viktor!" she blazed, flushed with anger. "What do you think we were doing? He wanted someone to talk to—who better than me? Oh, Viktor," she said, her voice thick, "you're a dirty, suspicious man. I don't want to talk about it now. I don't want to talk to you at all! We'll have to settle this later."

"We certainly will," Viktor said grimly. But he didn't know, neither of them knew, how much longer "later" was going to be …

A shout of shock and anger from Bu took their minds off the quarrel. "The lander! It's been hit!" he cried; and the others watching the wall screens were shouting, too—and then everything went bad at once.

The radio communications from the lander stopped in the middle of a sentence, and a vast warbling sound filled the speakers.

On the phosphor screen Viktor and Reesa watched in horror as, from the surface of the planet, an intolerably bright orange-red light winked at them—brighter than they had ever seen on a screen—so bright that the screen shut down in automatic self-defense.

And a shock shook the Ark as though it had been rammed by a truck.

Captain Bu, at the fiber-optic periscope, screamed in pain, as that intolerable brightness, unfiltered by electronics, struck his eyes. The metallic voice of the ship's warning system spoke up from behind Viktor: Sensor lock lost. Sensor lock lost. Sensor … At the same time, another machine voice, deeper and calmer, announced Thruster controls inoperative over and over, while still a third cried, Systems malfunction!

It seemed that every emergency system in Ark was announcing trouble at once. The crunching came again—then once more; and this time Ark itself jerked under them, sending them flying, while the last of the damage reporters cried, Air pressure dropping!

There was no doubt that was true. Viktor could hear the scream of escaping air from somewhere. His ears were popping. His lungs hurt until he exhaled, and then as he tried to breathe in he was gasping. There was a faint, frightening pressure behind his eyes.

Reesa turned from trying to help the moaning, blinded Captain Bu. "Something's shooting at us!" she gasped. "Oh, God! Those poor people down there! Jake'll never get back now!"

And even in the shock and terror of that moment Viktor heard her use his name.

"We ought to get into space suits," Viktor bawled, and then cursed himself. What space suits? They had all gone down to the surface with the landing party.

It was Captain Bu who best kept his head, in spite of terrible pain. He cupped his hands over his blasted eyes and shouted orders, instructions, and demands to be told what was going on.

There was a well-ordered drill for air-loss incidents. True, the drill assumed that the full ship's company would be present to slap on the sticky patches and trigger the airtight door closings. Also true, the drill had been set up for a wholly different Ark, one that had not existed for decades, an Ark with all its pieces still intact. In the shedding of so much of the ship, to burn in the antimatter reactors or simply to be paradropped to the surface of Newmanhome, many storage spaces had been lost, or shifted around, and misplaced, and the unexpected strike from Nebo had completed the damage. The compartments where the sticktight patches were kept no longer existed.

And it no longer mattered, really. Patches wouldn't do the job. Ark had not merely been holed, it had been gouged through by the laserlike blasts from the surface of Nebo. The part of the hull where the optics had been mounted was gone, burned away entirely; the ship was as blind as Captain Bu himself. Thruster fuel had exploded in another place. The whole center keel of the ship was bent; airtight doors weren't airtight anymore. The only part that still maintained integrity—almost maintained it—was what was left of the old freezer compartment. Gasping in the rapidly thinning atmosphere, Reesa and Viktor tugged the blinded, moaning captain through the bulkhead hatch to the cryonics deck and dogged it shut.

"Wait!" Viktor cried. "What about Rodericks and the others?"

"Didn't you see? They're dead! Close that hatch!" Reesa shouted. And, when Viktor had it clamped, it was just in time. The air in the cryonics deck was thin, but at least its pressure remained steady.

"If those shots ever hit the antimatter …" Reesa whispered, and didn't finish.

She didn't have to. If whatever it was that was firing on them from the surface fired again, and if that shot were to strike the antimatter containment—then nothing else would count. There wasn't much antimatter left in Ark's fuel chamber, but if what was there got loose Ark would become a mere haze of ions.

She turned to the blinded Bu, while Viktor prowled restlessly around the freezer compartment, looking for he knew not what. A weapon? But there was no one nearer than the surface of Nebo to fight. No one had dreamed that Ark might ever need long-range weapons.

And no one had dreamed, either, that anything on the surface of Nebo might try to kill them. Viktor wondered if anyone in the lander had survived. More likely, they were dead already—as he and Reesa and Bu were likely to be, at any moment.

Then a thought struck him. Ark did have one serious weapon, of course …

He bounded back to where Reesa was trying to find something to bind Bu Wangzha's burned-out eye sockets. "We could blow up the antimatter ourselves!" he cried.

Reesa turned and stared at him. "The radiation," he explained. "If we set the antimatter off, the radiation would burn half the planet clean!"

She was staring at him unbelievingly. But she didn't have to answer. Captain Bu spoke for her. "Let go of me, Reesa," he said, sounding quite normal. He sat up, his hands over his destroyed eyes. He breathed hard for a moment, and then said, "Viktor, don't be a fool. In the first place, we're cut off from the controls. There isn't any air there. And we shouldn't blow up the planet anyway."

Viktor averted his gaze from the horrible eye sockets. "At least we'd hurt them!" he said savagely.

Bu shook his sightless head. "We couldn't destroy the whole planet. The most we could do is prove that we're dangerous—and what if they then decide that the people on Newmanhome have to pay for our act? What chance would they have against something like those lasers?"

"What chance do they have now?" Viktor snarled.

"Not much," Bu said calmly, "but better than we have up here. The air won't last forever, and there's no way we can get out of here."

"So we're dead!" Viktor snapped.

Bu gazed at him with the sightless eyes. Viktor averted his gaze, but the captain's face was almost smiling. "If you're dead," he said, "you might as well be frozen."

"What?"

"The freezers are still working, aren't they? And even blind, I think I can get the two of you stowed away."

"Captain!" Reesa gasped. "No! What would happen to you?"

"Exactly what will happen to all of us if we do nothing," Captain Bu said comfortably. "Frozen, you have a chance to survive until—" He shrugged. "To survive for a while, anyway. Don't worry about me. It's a captain's job to be the last to leave— and anyway, I have faith, you see. The Lord promised salvation and eternal bliss in heaven. I know He was telling the truth." He grimaced against the pain, and then said in a businesslike way, "Now! You two get out the preparation boxes and the rest of the freezer equipment, and show me where everything is. If you start it, I think I can finish the job by touch."

"Are you sure?" Reesa began doubtfully, but Viktor caught her arm.

"If he can't, how are we worse off?" he demanded. "Here, Bu. This is the perfusor, these are the gas outlets …"

And he let the blind man do his job, fumblingly as he did, even while the hulk of the old ship shook every now and then with some new blow or some fresh excursion of the control rockets. It was the only chance they had—but he knew it was a forlorn hope. It was being done wrong, all wrong …

And it was wrong, a lot wronger still, when he opened his caked, sore eyes and looked up into the eyes of a red-haired woman in a black cowl. It wasn't until she said, "All right, Vik, can you stand up now?" that he realized she was his wife.

"You aren't Captain Bu," he told her.

"Of course not," she said, sobbing. "Oh, Viktor, wake up! Captain Bu's been dead for ages. Everybody has! It's been four hundred years."