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

you?” one of her sons asked.
    “Captain Fu Manchu doesn’t let himself like grown-ups. He puts up with a lot from you two, though,” Marie-Claude told her sons, and then had to explain who Fu Manchu was.
    “He was showing us where all the stars and ships and things were,” Freddy volunteered. “Viktor said he was going to tell us why messages take so long, but he didn’t.”
    “Oh,” Marie-Claude said, “that’s easy enough. See, the star flared about five years ago, and the light reached the ship just a week or so ago, that’s when they started reviving us. And then—”
    “Excuse me,” Viktor interrupted. “I have to go home now.”
    Of course, he didn’t, really. His reasons were quite different. He just didn’t want Marie-Claude explaining things to him as though he were a child.
     
    Not even the hope of an ultimate fleshly reward—well, another kiss, anyway—could make Viktor Sorricaine tend to the Stockbridge boys in all of his free time. True, his main hope was so faint and improbable that he hardly dared admit even to himself, but that wasn’t what made him hide from them. The boys caused that all by themselves. They were simply unbearable. Viktor was amazed at the troubles they could get into, and even more amazed at the energy stored up in those small bodies to do it with. No twelve-year-old has ever remembered what he himself was like at five.
    So, with the boys at least temporarily in the custody of their mother, Viktor arranged to keep it that way by getting out of sight. After a little thought he headed for the most remote habitable part of the ship, the freezatorium.
    “Habitable” was almost too strong a word. The narrow aisles between the frost-clouded crystal coffins were freezing cold. The crystal was a good thermal insulator, but the liquid-gas cold inside each casket had had a hundred years to chill through it. Each casket was rimed with hoarfrost. The air was deliberately kept dryer than comfort would suggest in that section of the ship—Viktor could feel his throat getting raw as he breathed it—but even those faint residual traces of water vapor had condensed out on the crystal.
    Although Viktor had had the forethought to borrow a long-sleeved sweater of his mother’s, it wasn’t enough. He had no clothes warm enough for that place. As he tiptoed along the corridors he was shivering violently.
    He rubbed some of the frost off one of the caskets with the sleeve of the sweater. Inside was a woman alone, dark-skinned, her eyes closed but her mouth open, looking as though she were trying to scream. The card in the holder at the corner of the casket said Accardo, Elisavetta (Agronomist—plant breeder), but Viktor had never seen that woman before, or heard that name. Likely enough she was one of the ones already in the freezer by the time his parents joined the ship.
    And he wasn’t much interested in thinking about her, either. The cold was getting serious. It would be better even to face the Stockbridge boys again than to stay here, he thought.
    As he turned to hurry back through the double thermal doors, he heard his name called. “Viktor! What are you doing here, dressed like that? Are you crazy?”
    It was Wanda Mei, furred and gauntleted, her old eyes peering out at him over a thick scarf that wound over her head and across the lower part of her face. Viktor greeted her uneasily. He didn’t particularly want to see Wanda Mei; he had been making a point of avoiding her, because it gave him an uneasy feeling in his stomach to know that this decrepit human wreck had once been his bouncy playmate. “Well,” she said, “as long as you’re here you can give me a hand. We’ll have to put some more clothes on you, though.” And she tugged him down to a bend in the corridor where it widened out to a little workshop. From a locker she pulled out a furred jacket like her own and furred overshoes and a soft, warmly lined helmet that came down over his ears, and then she set