They defrosted a mathematician named Jahanjur Singh to help them out, but Viktor could tell from the way his father kept staring into space that it wasn't helping enough. Still, Viktor found with pleasure that his parents had time to relax with their son. Amelia kept as busy as Pal—her own specialty of thermodynamic engineering wasn't very relevant, but at least she could run a computer for the astrophysical team—but still there were times when they all played tag together in the centrifuge; they watched tapes of Earthly TV together; they even cooked fudge together, one night, and Viktor's mother didn't stop him however much he ate.
Viktor was no fool. He could tell that there was something on his parents' minds that went beyond the astrophysical problem and the navigation of the ship, but he expected they would tell him about it when they were ready. Meanwhile he had the ship to explore. With so few humans awake, he had a lot of freedom to do it in. Even Captain Bu tolerated his exploration.
Before he was frozen Viktor had been pretty much afraid of Captain Bu Wengzha. It took him a while after defrosting to get over the feeling, too, because Captain Bu wasn't happy about the jawbone course corrections he had to make when he was thawed out himself. New Mayflower was, after all, his ship.
Captain Bu was the oldest man aboard Mayflower—well, to be accurate, he wasn't anymore; he'd spent more than eighty years frozen, daring the odds to be thawed out for a while every decade to make sure the ship was shipshape in all its myriad parts. People like Wanda Mei had had their biological clocks running much longer than he. Bu was still biologically fifty-two, with a wide, strong-toothed mouth in a wide, plump face the color of the beach sand at Malibu. He had no hair on his head at all, but he had carefully cultivated a wispy beard. Most of the time he didn't smile. He didn't smile when things were going smoothly, because that was simply the way they were supposed to go, and he certainly didn't smile when Fifth Officer Sorricaine came apologetically to the bridge to tell him that that day's sail-setting order, still in the process of being carried out, had to be revised because the flare's light pressure hadn't fallen off quite the way the model predicted.
Peering over the captain's shoulder in one of those discussions, trying to be invisible so as not to be sent off the bridge, Viktor looked wonderingly at the sail. It spread out in an untidy sprawl at the bow of the ship—which was now, of course, its stern—like a drop cloth for untidy house painters. Only it was not meant to catch spilled paint, but photons. The sail was almost more nuisance than it was worth, except that, of course, everything on New Mayflower was designed to serve at least two purposes and some of the sail's later purposes made it, in sum, very worthwhile. The trouble with it now was that at stellar distances there weren't very many photons for it to catch.
The film of the sail was tough, tricky stuff. It was "one-way" plastic, and it weighed very little. But to keep it spread at all, with the dynamic force of the ship's engines tearing at it, it needed a lot of structural support; nearly a quarter of its mass went into the struts and cables that spread it at the right orientation (complex to figure, because the thrust on the sail varied with the square of the cosine of the angle it made with the source, doubly complex because there were many sources), and the motors that changed the orientation as needed. Even so, the sail's contribution to Mayflower's acceleration and deceleration could be measured only in tiny fractions of one millimeter per second squared.
But those tiny delta-Vs all added up, when you had to bring a vast ship from near relativistic velocities to relative rest in just the place you wanted to insert it into orbit. So the varying flux from the flare star mattered a lot to Captain Bu, and to everyone on the ship.
Captain Bu wasn't always fierce. He turned out to have a weakness for kids—at least, as long as there weren't very many of them to get in the way. He not only didn't chase Viktor from the bridge, he actually encouraged him to visit there. He even tolerated the Stockbridge boys there—for brief periods, until they began acting up, and always with Viktor clearly understanding that his life was held hostage if the kids got in trouble.
Captain Bu even joined Viktor and the two boys in the gravity drum, laughing and shouting, his wispy beard flying about—and then afterward, when they were all cleaned up and hungry, he shared almond-flavored bean-curd sweets with them out of his private stock. Viktor didn't like the bean curd much, but he did like the captain. Captain Bu was a lot better than the teaching machines (though not really, Viktor was loyal enough to believe, as good as his own father) at explaining things.
When the bean curd was finished and the boys made less sticky, he showed Viktor and the Stockbridge kids just where everything was. "This is my ship," he said, putting a spoon on the table before him, "and Freddy's plate there is the star we're heading for, six point eight light-years away. It has an astronomical name, but we just call it Sun. Like the one we left." He made a fist and held it in the air over the table. "And my hand is the flare star, about five light-years from us, about four point six from the destination, and here"—another spoon—"is the Ark, maybe a tenth of a light-year from landing. They've already felt the radiation. It comes at a bad time for them, velocities are getting critical, but it won't bother them much, I think. They're a lot farther from the flare than from the new Sun."
"Where's home?" Freddy Stockbridge piped.
"Shut up," Viktor said, but Captain Bu shook his head forgivingly.
He bared those big white teeth at the boy. "That is home, boy," he said, tapping Freddy's plate. "The place we're going to. I know when you said that you meant Earth, though—well, that's back somewhere by the door."
And as Freddy turned to look at the door he saw his mother standing there, hesitant to invade the captain's quarters until Bu nodded to her to come in.
"Captain," Marie-Claude Stockbridge said, nodding. She looked very beautiful—as always, Viktor told himself yearningly. "Viktor dear, how are you? Are my little wretches giving you any trouble today, Captain?"
"Not a bit, Dr. Stockbridge," Captain Bu told her stiffly. Now in the presence of an adult the smile was gone. "I do have to go back to the bridge, though," he mentioned, and nodded them out of his room. Marie-Claude looked wryly back at the closed door.
"Doesn't he like 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.