Forever Free (26 page)

One of them, fortunately, was a thick text about theoretical mechanics, so I could start on what was going to be my life's work. I'd discussed it with some Man physicists on Earth: all of us had to go back to Square One and find out how much of physics was still intact. If the whole thing was just a set of constraints that the nameless had set up, and changed at whim, then it behooved us to find out what the current state of whims was! And it seemed like a good idea to do the experiments on other planets, as well as Earth, to see whether the laws were uniform.

Bill joined me in the laboratories that winter, acting as my assistant while we reproduced the basic experiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century physics. Weights and springs. We did have the advantage of accurate atomic clocks, or so we thought. Within a year we'd find out, from Earth, that the nameless had left us a truly Sisyphean job: the speed of light was still finite, but it had changed by about 5 percent. That screwed up everything, down around the fourth decimal place. Little things like the charge on the electron, Planck's constant. While he was at it, he should have made pi equal to three.

But things were all right with us, waiting out the cold in our warm lab, rolling balls down inclines, measuring pendulums, stretching springs, then going home to the women. Bill had met Auralyn when they'd both volunteered to become Man, and they fell in love before any damage had been done, and came back here. She was going to have a baby in the spring.

Meanwhile, we chip ice, shovel snow, thaw pipes, scrape windows. Winter lasts forever on this god-forsaken world.