The World at the End of Time Read Online Free

ship’s crew assembling in space. He thought he remembered Los Angeles, because of the amusement parks and the seals, but he also remembered the snowman his father had made for him in the courtyard of their home—and there couldn’t have been any snowmen in Los Angeles. (His mother had explained to him that had been in Warsaw, where Viktor had been born, but to Viktor “Warsaw” was only a name.)
    The closest the teaching machine came to defining a mile for Viktor was to point out that it was a little more than twenty-five times around the revolving exercise treadmill where every wakeful person had to exercise his muscles and preserve the calcium in his bones.
    So that was a mile. But the datum wasn’t all that much help. Multiplying twenty-five laps around the revolving drum by 186,000 by the number of seconds in a year was simply beyond Viktor’s capabilities. Not to do the arithmetic—the teaching machine wrote the answer out for him—but to grasp the meaning of the simple sum 25 x 186,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365.25 = 146,742,840,000,000.
    Call it a hundred and fifty trillion laps around the revolving drum . . .
    What was the use of calling it anything, though, when nobody could really grasp the meaning of a “trillion”?
    And that was just one light-year. Then, of course, you had to multiply even that huge number by another 6.8 to find out how far you still had to go before landing . . . or by 19.7 to find out how far you were from home.
     
    The thing about young Viktor Sorricaine was that he hated to give up. On anything. He wasn’t a very impressive kid physically—tall for his age, but gangling and pretty clumsy. Viktor had nearly abandoned the hope of becoming an All-Star center-fielder, but that wasn’t because he despaired of ever getting his coordination on track. It was only because he was pretty sure that no one in the place where he was going to spend the rest of his life was going to have time to organize any professional baseball teams.
    Viktor was determined, but he wasn’t crazy—although his parents might have thought he was, if he had told them of his other long-range ambition.
    But that other ambition he didn’t tell. Not to anybody.
    He didn’t let himself be thwarted by the teaching machine. He dismissed it and tried another tack. He turned to the outside viewers to see for himself just how distant Earth’s old Sun looked. It took some doing, but then he found it—barely—an object pitifully tiny and faint among ten thousand other stars.
    Then he heard the noise of scuffling and childish voices piping in rage. Of course he knew who it had to be. He groaned and went to the door. “Quiet down, you kids!” he ordered.
    The Stockbridge boys didn’t quiet down. They didn’t even acknowledge hearing him. They were concentrating on trying to maim each other. Billy had hit Freddy, because Freddy had pushed Billy, and now the two of them were slapping and kicking at each other as they rolled slowly about the floor in the microgravity.
    Viktor didn’t at all mind their punching each other. What he objected to was that they were doing it in front of his family’s door, where he might be blamed for any wounds they might wind up with. Not to mention the amount of noise they made and the language they used! Viktor was certain he had not known so many bad words when he was their age. When he got them pulled apart, he heard Billy pant ferociously at his sobbing brother, “I’ll kill you, you whoreson!”
    That did it for Viktor. He hadn’t been going to tell on them, but that was too much. He would not allow even her own child to say such a think about beautiful, desirable, undoubtedly chaste Marie-Claude Stockbridge—since, improbable as any happy outcome of his ambition must seem even to Viktor, Marie-Claude Stockbridge was the other ambition he had no intention of giving up on. “All right, you two,” he growled. “We’re going to see your parents about this!”
    But by the time he