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

Was that why people like his parents drank this stuff?
    Now that his mother had realized her son wasn’t dying she was sipping her own drink, but not in any relaxed or jovial manner. Her gaze stayed on Viktor. Pal Sorricaine tried to jolly her out of it, without much success. Viktor ignored them both. He sat hunched over the empty tumbler, staring into it as he turned it in his hands, as he had seen an actor in a transmitted Earth film do when he, like Viktor, discovered the woman he loved had been bedding another man.
    Viktor was crushed.
    For Marie-Claude to make love with her husband had been bad enough. This was incomparably worse. There was a sudden knot of physical pain in Viktor’s stomach, like a stab wound. Even the warm, ginny glow didn’t stop the pain.
    His mother turned from studying her son to face her husband. “Pal,” she said seriously, “we’ve got to talk to Viktor.”
    Viktor felt the tips of his ears burning with resentment. He refused to look up. He heard his father sigh. “All right,” Pal Sorricaine conceded. “I guess it’s about time. Viktor? Vik, listen to me. Are you—” He fumbled for the right words. “Uh, all right?”
    Viktor raised his head to give his father the cold stare of a stranger. “Sure I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
    “I mean about, you know, Mrs. Stockbridge,” his father persisted. He looked more embarrassed than Viktor had ever seen him, but determinedly sympathetic. “Son, I didn’t mean to say anything that would get you upset. Do you understand that? Listen, it’s only natural for a b—for a young man to be attracted to an older woman, especially when the woman is as sexy and—” He caught his wife’s look just in time. “When she’s as nice a person, I mean, as Marie-Claude. There’s nothing wrong about that. I remember, when I was sixteen, there was a dancer in the ballet school at the Warsaw Opera, about twenty, so thin and graceful—”
    He stopped, on the verge of another unexpected precipice. He carefully avoided looking at his wife. She regarded him thoughtfully but didn’t speak.
    “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” his son said severely.
    Viktor had never spoken to his father that way before. He stood up, testing for dizziness, and headed with precise, careful steps for the door. He left Pal Sorricaine biting his lip behind him. His son’s glare had looked pretty nearly like hatred, and Pal Sorricaine had never expected that sort of emotion from the son he had always loved and cherished, and thought loved him back.
     
    Outside Viktor paused, leaning against the door.
    Because they had been one of the lucky families in the lottery they had two rooms now, two cubicles together, in the long row that lined the muddy street, joined like ancient American tourist cabins. Behind him, through the thin film windows—last and longest use for the remaining scraps of light-sail/parachutes—he could hear his parents muttering to each other.
    But, queerly, there were people muttering to each other in the street, too. They were standing in clumps, faces uplifted to the summery Newmanhome sky. Viktor instinctively glanced up himself. In the starlight he could make out that there were patches of warm-weather convection clouds obscuring much of the moonless heavens, but there were hundreds of stars shining through the gaps, too.
    Well, there always were clouds and stars, weren’t there? Why were these people staring so? True, one star, all by itself, seemed quite bright, almost as bright (Viktor dimly remembered) as the planet Venus from Earth, brighter than any Newmanhome star had ever seemed . . .
    With a shock he saw that the star was getting brighter.
    How strange! And it kept on getting brighter still, almost Moon bright, bright enough to throw a shadow; and Viktor realized that it had been that incredibly bright all along. What had deceived him was that he had seen it only through a clump of cloud at first. When the last fringe of