Read Online The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl - Free Book Online

outside the ship. He could see that the immense stretches of the light sail were deployed in a different way now. It was not one single vast expanse of film anymore, it was a dozen smaller segments, long narrow strips like the sails of a windmill, stiffened by the dynamics of rotation around the main body of the ship. That, he knew, was for greater efficiency in the orbit-insertion maneuver; but that phase was over. Now the sails were being furled and stowed, to shape into the four hundred parachutes that would slow the fall of the paradrop capsules that would carry everything useful on New Mayflower to the ground.
    When he caught a glimpse of Marie-Claude Stockbridge he saw that she was weeping. Even weeping she looked desirable, but he could not bear the thought of her being in sorrow. “What is it?” Viktor asked his mother.
    “Oh, it’s Werner,” his mother told him sadly. “Poor Marie-Claude! Werner didn’t come out of the freezer. He’s dead.”
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 3
     
     
    Pal Sorricaine was not the only observer who had been thinking hard about that anomalously flaring K-5 star. So had Wan-To, with a good deal more urgency.
    The mere fact that one of his misbehaving relatives had blown up a star didn’t bother Wan-To very much. There were plenty of stars to spare. The universe was littered with the things. If the idiots exploded a million of them it would make very little difference to Wan-To—there would still be hundreds of billions left in just this one little galaxy—provided, of course, that the star he lived in wasn’t one of them. (Still it would be a pity to wreck them all and have to move on to another galaxy, so soon after having had to get out of the last.)
    It was the motives behind it that made this unnatural flaring of stars so distasteful to Wan-To. It was an unsettling development, and one for which, justice would have forced him to admit, he had mostly himself to blame.
    He excused himself, though. He couldn’t help the fact that he had been lonely.
    The game Wan-To’s “family” was playing with him had its counterpart on Earth. Artillery officers called it “probing fire,” meaning that you pulled the lanyard and wondered if you’d hit anything. The fact that they hadn’t, this time, didn’t mean anything very reassuring. If they kept it up, in the long run they were sure to score a bull’s-eye . . . and when Wan-To thought about anything, it was always the long run he thought about.
    Wan-To liked his star. It was big, but not too big, and it was comfortable. Its diameter was just under a million miles, its surface temperature was between six and seven thousand Kelvin—it varied a little, because Wan-To’s star was just a touch variable. Well, that was what you got when you chose a medium-sized star. But you also got a lot of energy to play with, and, anyway, he had made sure that it was prudently below the “Chandrasekhar limit” beyond which the damned thing might go supernova. Its actual mass was about 2.4 times 10 27 tons. Getting a little bit smaller all the time, of course. It was, like any star of its class, turning more than four million tons of hydrogen mass into energy every second, but that wasn’t worrisome. Wan-To knew well that it had some twenty-four sextillion of those 4,000,000-ton masses to spend. So it had a good long life expectancy to begin with. It should still have at least a few billion years to go before it began to swell unpleasantly toward the red-giant stage.
    Of course, it had used up quite a lot of that life expectancy already. It had not been new when Wan-To moved into it. Wan-To knew that. Like any suburban householder aware of doors that were beginning to stick as his house settled and damp spots where the roof was almost beginning to leak, Wan-To understood that some day or other he would want to move into something newer and less likely to give trouble . . . but not for a while yet.
    For now he was perfectly happy in his snug little