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

heard of. Albert Einstein? Oh, of course! Everybody knew about Albert Einstein. He was the—wait a minute—wasn’t it relativity he discovered? And something about e equals m c squared? Right, Pal Sorricaine told him, hiding a smile, and that was the key to understanding why stars are hot—and to making atomic bombs and power plants, yes, and ultimately to designing the kind of matter-antimatter drive that was shoving New Mayflower on its way. And why the speed of light is always thirty million centimeters a second, no matter how fast the star—or spaceship—that emitted the light was going. New Mayflower might have been going a million centimeters a second, but that didn’t mean that the light, or the radio waves, that went ahead of it to carry its picture and messages were traveling at 31 million cps; no, it was always the same. c never changed, and there was nothing anyone could do that would ever change that.
    About then Viktor’s mother came in with a glass of milk and a pill. “Why do I have to take a pill?” he asked.
    “Just take it,” she said quietly, affectionately. It occurred to Viktor that it might have something to do with getting ready to be frozen again, so he did as told and kissed her back when she bent to his face.
    Then his father went on to the English Quaker, Arthur Eddington, the man who had figured out the connection between physics—stuff that people studied in laboratories on Earth—and the stars, the things that interested astronomers. You might even say, Pal Sorricaine told his son, that Eddington invented the science of astrophysics. Then there were Ernst Mach and Bishop Berkeley, and the geometers Gauss and Bolyai and Riemann and Lobachevski, and Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest; and Baade, Hoyle, Gamow, Bethe, Dicke, Wilson, Penzias, Hawking . . .
    Long before he finished his recital Viktor was asleep.
    He slept very soundly. He almost woke, half woke, to find he was being carried somewhere; and almost realized where he was being carried. But the pill had done its work, and he never opened his eyes . . . for sixteen more years.
     
    When Viktor Sorricaine woke up again he was still twelve (or, you might say, very nearly a hundred and fifty), and the first feeling that flooded through him as he gazed up at the face of his father was joy, purest joy, for he had beaten the odds one more time.
    The second feeling was not as good. The Pal Sorricaine who beamed down on him was graying and much thinner than the one who had stood by as he went to sleep. “You didn’t get frozen at all,” Viktor said to his father, accusingly, and his father looked surprised.
    “Well, no, Viktor,” he said. “I couldn’t. We had to watch that star, and—well, anyway, we’re all together again, aren’t we? And we’re there! We’re landing! The first parties have already dropped down to the surface, and we’ll be going as soon as our chutes are ready!”
    “I see,” Viktor said, not actually seeing. And then he remembered something. “I have to give Wanda’s books back.”
    His father looked startled, then saddened. Before he even spoke Viktor understood that Wanda wasn’t going to want them back, because she wasn’t alive anymore. A chill ran through him, but he didn’t really have time to think about it. The ship was incredibly noisy now. Not just the chattering of two or three hundred people, the ones already revived, the ones working to revive more, and the ones checking them over and getting them ready for the drop, but loud sounds of crashing and crunching and battering of metal to metal. The interior of the ship was being gutted, as it had been designed to be; the interior cubicles were being wrenched loose from their neighbors, since each one would be a capsule in which eight or ten human beings, or several tons of parts, machines, supplies, or other cargo would drop to the surface of the new planet. Viktor caught a glimpse of a surveillance camera, keeping an eye on crews