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

a hand, kids included. Kids also had to go to Mr. Feldhouse’s school (if they were twelve to fourteen biological Earth years; there were other schools for younger and older ones). For three hours a day they used the teaching machines and drilled each other in grammar and trigonometry and Earth history and music and drawing, under Feldhouse’s short-tempered and sketchy supervision. The good part of the school was that Viktor had other children of his own age for company, even if one of them was the bratty Reesa McGann the teacher had forced on him the first day. The bad part was that almost all of the kids were strangers. And a lot of them—the children from the first ship, that was—were really stuck up.
    Because he and Reesa were “buddies” they shared a seat in the crowded school hut, and she was the one who had the privilege of pointing out to him how little he knew about how to live on Newmanhome. Every time he complained about shared books or heavy labor, she was sure to tell him how very much worse it had been six years before, when they landed. Their Ark hadn’t been designed for disassembly, like the Mayflower. All the first colonists could do was strip it of its cargo and most of its moveables. Then, reluctantly, they abandoned it. It was still up there in orbit, drive almost dead except for the trickle of power that fed its freezer units, otherwise just a hulk. With all its precious steel.
    “If you’d been a little smarter,” Viktor told the girl in a superior tone as he was trying to make a fire in the fireplace outside their tent, “you’d at least have fixed the drive so it could beam power down, like our ship.”
    “If we were smarter,” she answered, “we’d have come in the second ship like you, so somebody else would have done all the hard work for us before we got here.” And then she added, “Pull out all that wood and start over. You’ve got the heavy chunks on the bottom and all the kindling on top. Don’t you know anything?” And then she pushed him out of the way and did it herself. The girl was so physical.
    If Viktor had really looked at Theresa McGann he would have discovered that she wasn’t such a bad girl after all. True, she kept reminding him of his immense areas of ignorance (but he was grimly repairing them as fast as he could). True, she had scabby knees. True, she was several centimeters taller than he, but that was only because fourteen-year-old girls are generally taller than fourteen-year-old boys. He didn’t look at her that way, though. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in the opposite sex, even such a touchy-squeezy physical specimen of it as Reesa McGann. He was often obsessed with the opposite sex, like any healthy, horny male teenager, but the focus of his interest hadn’t changed. It remained the beautiful (and now widowed) Marie-Claude Stockbridge.
    Marie-Claude remained widowed, too. Suffering, Viktor observed that she often “saw” other men, but he took some comfort in noting that she seemed to have no intention of marrying one of them.
    Apart from his schoolwork Viktor’s contribution to the community was officially defined as “scutwork”—meaning the kinds of low-skilled jobs other people didn’t have time for. When he possibly could, he tried to get into a work party with Marie-Claude, but most of the time he possibly couldn’t. There was too much work, of too many kinds. Up on the rapidly emptying Mayflower the cleanup crews were emptying the cargo holds and launching the contents to the surface. The most precious and fragile of the new supplies came down in one or another of the three-winged, rocket-driven landing craft Mayflower had carried in its hold, but there wasn’t enough fuel made yet to use them for more than one trip each. Sturdier shipments, including passengers, came down in the big pods.
    There were all kinds of things in those pods—tractors, stills, hand tools, lathes, stores, drilling equipment, rifles,