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

cloud had rolled away it was a blue-white beacon in the sky, brighter, Viktor was sure, than any possible star should be—
    And he went running back into the house, stumbling but now suddenly cold sober, to shout to his parents that another nearby star had gone flare.
     
    After that, there was no objection to Pal Sorricaine becoming a full-time astronomer again. Pressed though the colony was for able-bodied workers, everyone agreed that this second Sorricaine-Mtiga object definitely needed to be studied. Pal was released from his scavenging duties, Frances Mtiga from her school, Jahanjur Singh from his work as an accountant for the stores comptroller, and Ibtissam Khadek from the guidance systems for the rectenna.
    The difficulty came when the four of them asked, no, demanded, that the colony instruct the orbiting crews to put aside other work in order to make the observations only they could make, with the ship’s sensors that were the only eyes the colony had for investigating what was going on in space.
    It took a full-scale colony meeting to decide—more than three thousand people crowding around the open-air platform where the speakers urged their cases.
    When Pal Sorricaine heard that the decision would go to a meeting he swore and poured himself a drink. That meant it would go by majority vote, and Pal Sorricaine, like a lot of Mayflower people, thought the majority was unfair. The second shipload had begun by outumbering the first, 1,115 to 854—but then the first colonists had had six Earth years to make more babies, so the combination of the colonists from New Ark and their Home-born offspring now totaled 1,918, while Mayflower’s total had only reached a little over 1,300. Of course the newborns weren’t old enough to vote, but who was, exactly? At what age did the franchise begin? And by what sort of calculation?
    Sorricaine went to the meeting grimly determined to battle out the voting age question. But this time the line wasn’t drawn between the two ships’ people. The question split both factions almost down the middle. There was one side—headed by Pal Sorricaine and his little group, along with Captain Rodericks from the first ship and Marie-Claude Stockbridge—who insisted that the star had to be studied with all the resources possible. There was another side that included Reesa McGann’s parents, but also Sam and Sally Broad from Mayflower and a lot of others from both ships, who were even more emphatic that the orbiting crews had all they could handle to finish converting the drive engines to MHD microwave generation, and didn’t the others understand the colony needed that power?
    They all settled in for a long town-meeting argument. Even allowing only three minutes to each speaker meant long hours of debate. Worse, they were unproductive hours. Men and women debating policy were not planting crops or putting up houses or exploring the planet.
    It took them an hour just to decide, by raucous voice vote, how many could be allowed to speak. The decision was a hundred—three hundred minutes—five hours of talk; and, even though some of the lottery winners immediately turned their times over to allies more articulate and convincing than themselves, a lot of those three-minute talks amounted only to saying, over and over, “The safety of the colony is threatened!”
    What they couldn’t agree on was which threat—whether the threat from the sky was more dangerous than the threat of postponing the arrival of beamed power from the ship.
    It ended badly for Pal Sorricaine. He and his colleagues got their observing time, but with a bad condition. The allotment of ship time was to become effective only after the ten Newmanhome days of additional work it would take for the microwave installation to be completed.
    By then the flare was still bright, but not as bright; the vital first spectra had been missed. Sorricaine, Mtiga, and the others did what they could with the data that began to flood down