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

be carpentered from the native vegetation. Until the new mines and smelters were fully operational, metal was precious.)
    The second fact was time, also in short supply. In fact, there wasn’t any of it. Every one of the skimpy daylight hours was filled—if not with work (farmhand, construction helper, general laborer; the kids who landed from Mayflower were at once put to work at whatever they could do), then with school. School wasn’t any fun, either. Viktor was shoved into a class with thirty-two other kids of about his age, but they weren’t a congenial lot. Half of them were from the first ship, seasoned and superior in the ways of the new planet, and very aware of their superiority, and the other half were greenhorns like himself. The two kinds didn’t get along.
    That situation the teacher would not tolerate. He was a tall, one-armed man named Martin Feldhouse, chronically short of breath. Short of patience, too. “There won’t be any fighting in this school,” he decreed, coughing. “You have to live together for the rest of your lives, so start out doing it. Line up in size places for your buddies.”
    The students stood up and reluctantly milled into order. Viktor wasn’t sure how to take Martin Feldhouse; he had never seen a human being who was missing an arm before. The thing about Feldhouse was that he had gotten himself crushed under a truck of gravel out at the pit. Back on Earth, or even on the ship, he would have been patched up in no time. Not here. In this primitive place, at that early time, he had been too far from the medical facilities for immediate attention, and so when he got to the clinic the arm was too far gone to be saved, though the injuries to his chest and internal organs had been repaired. More or less repaired. Except for the persistent cough, anyway. When all his disabilities were added up the total pointed to the only job he was still fit for, so now he was a schoolteacher.
    “Now count off,” Feldhouse decreed. “When I point to you, say where you come from—Ship, or Home. You first!” And he pointed to the tallest boy, who promptly announced that he was Home, and so was the girl next behind him, but the one after that was from Mayflower and so she was paired with the first boy.
    When they got down to Viktor his “buddy” was a girl named Theresa McGann. They looked at each other with speculative hostility, but took their seats together as instructed, while Feldhouse looked on the four unpaired planet-born children. “You four belong to me,” he declared. “The rest of you are going to work together. You from the Ship, you teach your buddies as much as you can remember from what you got out of the teaching machines. You from Home, you teach geography and what the farms are like and everything else about what it’s like here—what is it, what’s your name?’’
    “I’m Viktor Sorricaine,” Viktor announced, putting his hand down. “Why do you call this place ‘Home’?”
    “Because that’s what it is,” the teacher explained. “That’s the first thing you all have to learn. This planet’s name is Enki, according to the astronomers, but its right name is Newmanhome. We call it Home for short. From now on you only have one home, and this is it.”
     
    It had taken eight months for the last of the corpsicles in New Mayflower to be thawed, oriented, and paradropped to Newmanhome’s surface. Most of that time was spent tearing the crew and cargo sections of the ship apart to make them into the modules that would carry everybody and everything down, and assembling the light-sail-parachutes and streamers that would keep the landing from being a catastrophe. The colonists already there welcomed the new arrivals, to be sure. They welcomed the cargoes each brought down even more. For that matter, the empty modules themselves were fallen upon with joy; each one, when emptied, contributed nearly half a ton of precious steel.
    In all this work everybody had to lend