The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl Page A

us,” Billy promised, grinning in triumph. “And you have to be It!”
     
    Dinner the next night was a sort of ceremonial affair, a goodbye party for the ones who were going back into the deep freeze. Captain Bu gave a short speech and the chef, Sam Broad—he was really a food chemist, but he was the best cook on the ship, too—had made four big cakes with icing that said Till We Meet Again. Pal Sorricaine was especially attentive to his wife and son that night. He kept one hand in hers all through the meal, so that they both had to eat one-handed, and he told Viktor all sorts of stories about astrophysics. When he got to the point of how the Big Bang had created only hydrogen and helium, so that all the rest of the elements had to be cooked in the cores of stars that then exploded and scattered them around to form new stars and planets the Stockbridge boys crept near to listen. And when he pointed out the logical deduction from that—”So you see, most of your body—all the oxygen and carbon and nitrogen and calcium and everything—all of it was once inside a star”—they said respectively, “Oh, wow!” and “Yuk! But that isn’t in the Bible, is it?”
    Pal Sorricaine grinned at them. “The Bible’s one thing,” he told them, in full lecturing swing. “Science is another. Even scientists think about Heaven and Hell, though. Did you ever hear of a man named Arthur Eddington? Well, he was the first one to figure out what the temperature inside the core of a star had to be in order to cook all those heavier elements out of hydrogen. Only when he published his figures some other scientists told him he was wrong, because it wasn’t hot enough to do the job. So Eddington told them to go look for a hotter place.”
    He looked at the uncomprehending faces expectantly. “It was a kind of way of telling them to go to Hell,” he explained.
    “Oh,” Billy said, deciding to laugh.
    “Dr. Sorricaine?” Freddy said. “Hell’s hot like Wanda says, isn’t it? So if we get frozen that can’t be Hell, can it?”
    By the time Pal Sorricaine, startled, had reassured the boy, their parents came to take them away, and Viktor and his parents went to their own cabin. As his father tucked him in Viktor asked. “Dad? Are you really going to do it?”
    His father nodded.
    “For just a little while?” Viktor persisted.
    His father paused before answering. “I can’t say that for sure,” he said at last, reluctantly. “It depends. Viktor, this is kind of important to me. Any scientist wants to be the one that makes a big contribution. This is my chance. That flare star—well, there’s nothing like it in the literature. Oh, they’ll see it on Earth—but from long, long away, and we’re right here. I want to be the one—well, one of the ones; Fanny Mtiga’s involved, too—that they name it after. The ‘Sorricaine-Mtiga objects.’ How does that sound?”
    “It sounds okay,” Viktor told him. He wasn’t content or happy about it, but he heard the tone in his father’s voice. “Are you going to tell me a story tonight?”
    “Sure am. I know,” his father said. “Do you want me to tell you about some of the famous people before me? What they did? What they’re remembered for?”
    And when Viktor nodded, Pal Sorricaine began to talk about the men and women whose shoulders everyone stood on. About Henrietta Leavitt, the nineteenth-century Boston spinster who spent seventeen years studying Cepheid variables and found the first good way of measuring the size of the universe; of Harlow Shapley, who used her work to make the first nearly recognizable model of our own Galaxy; of Edwin Hubble, champion prizefighter turned astronomer, who found a way to employ supergiant stars in the way that Henrietta Leavitt had used Cepheids, thus extending the scale; of Vesto Slipher, who first linked red shifts with velocity and then with distance; of a dozen other forgotten names.
    Then his father got to names Viktor had