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and back we’ll be getting ready to land on the new planet.”
    “Or we won’t,” Frances Mtiga said dourly, rubbing her belly for reassurance as she studied the citation file.
    “Or we won’t,” Pal Sorricaine agreed, grinning. “But there isn’t any real reason to doubt that we will, Fanny. It looks like it’s an interesting problem in astrophysics, that’s all. Not any real threat to the mission. Anyway, we just won’t go back into the freezer until we’ve got the whole thing studied out and under control.”
    Mtiga sighed, scratching her belly again. It was barely beginning to round out. “We’ll give it as long as it takes,” she said fretfully. “But tell me, Pal, don’t you think my husband’s going to have a surprise when he wakes up and finds he has a ten-year-old kid?”
    Indeed it began to look that way. The astrophysical information stored in New Mayflower’s databank was comprehensive, but there wasn’t much that was useful on flaring K-5 stars, because K-5 stars of that spectral type had never previously been observed to flare that way.
    Viktor happily shared his father’s puzzlement, all the more happily because no one expected him to solve the conundrum of the flare. His father was less lucky. He laid out the latest stretch of film to show his son, scowling at it. Although Viktor knew that it was supposed to be a spectrum, because his father had told him so, the film wasn’t in color. It wasn’t a rainbow. “It’s a spectrogram, Vik,” his father explained. “It shows the frequencies of the light from a star, or anything else. The diffraction grating bends the light, but the different frequencies bend to different amounts. The shorter the wavelength, the more it bends, so the red end doesn’t get bent very much and the violet bends way over to here. Well, actually,” he corrected himself, “this end is really the far ultraviolet, and down here is infrared. We can’t see them with our eyes, but the film, can . . . Only it’s not a very good spectrogram,” he finished, scowling again. “That grating’s been out there for a hundred years, and all that time it’s been bombarded with gases and fine particles of interstellar dust. The lines are blurred, do you see?”
    “I guess so,” Viktor said, peering uncertainly at the ribbon of grayed lines. “Can you fix it?”
    “I can put a new one in,” his father said, and displayed the thing he meant. It was a curved bit of metal, as long as Viktor’s forearm, the shape of a watermelon rind when the flesh has been eaten away. His father handled it with care, showing Viktor the infinite narrow lines that had been ruled onto its concave face.
    Well, that part was pretty exciting—it meant someone would have to suit up and crawl out onto the skin of New Mayflower to pull the fuzzed grating out and put the new one in—anyway, it would have been exciting, if Viktor had seen it. To his annoyance it all happened while he was asleep. By the time he knew it was over his father was pondering over a newer, sharper, but still baffling spectrogram.
    “Christ,” he grumbled, “look at the thing. It looks like that star’s spilling its guts two ways at once. Only Doppler interferometry doesn’t show any increase in diameter, so it’s not a nova-type explosion. So what is it?”
    No one expected Viktor to answer that question. They did expect it of his father and of Frances Mtiga, but the astrophysicists didn’t know the answer either. Every day they checked twenty-four hours of observations, which the computer matched against the latest revised models Sorricaine and Mtiga had prepared to draw its best-fit curves. And every day the fit wasn’t really good enough.
    “But it’s going to be all right, Pal,” Viktor’s mother told her husband. The three of them, for once, were having dinner together in the big refectory. “I mean, isn’t it? There’s plenty of fuel. You can just shove the ship around on the drive and forget about