The Voices of Heaven by Frederik Pohl Page B

I was waking up in was a freezer-thawer capsule and a long time had passed, I got the picture fast.
    It was a whole new picture, because it was a whole new life; it was a life that was no longer ever again likely to include Alma or my job or my comfortable existence as a fuelmaster on the Moon, because if I ever saw any of those things again, which I very likely would not, nearly half a century would have passed and I would no longer be involved. "Shit," I said, peering up at Captain Tscharka. "What the hell am I going to be doing on Pava?"

7
     
     
    THEN you did not voluntarily choose to come to join the human colony on Pava?
    Hell, no. I was fucking shanghaied by that bastard Rannulf Enderman. The worst part is I should have seen it coming. He practically spelled it all out for me; I guess I just didn't think he had the guts to do anything like that. So I let him dope me and send me off to the stars so he'd have half a century or so to stay back in the plush and comfortable ease of life on the Moon—with my girl.
    So I was seriously pissed when I found out I was an inadvertent volunteer to join the colony at Delta Pavonis. For that matter, so was Captain Garold Tscharka. "What's going on here?" he demanded, glaring down at me. And when I told him what Rannulf had done his face got purple. "But you're needed. I mean he is needed. He's supposed to help defreeze the others!" he snapped—by "he," meaning the absent Rannulf, of course. "God," he said—it wasn't meant as a swear word; his eyes were resentfully raised to the skies—"why does everything have to go wrong at once?"
     
    I got out of there. I didn't want any more of Tscharka's bad mood; my own mood was murderous enough for two, and my body was seriously achy from its decades as a corpsicle. When I noticed I was walking on the floor of the ship's passage instead of pulling myself along in micro-G, I realized the ship was in full deceleration mode, killing velocity to achieve a stable orbit around Pava. I climbed to the control-room level and found Jillen Iglesias talking on the radio to somebody on the surface of the planet.
    She craned her neck to stare at me in astonished displeasure. "But you're what's-his-name, Barry something? The fuelmaster? What're you doing here?" she demanded.
    She looked a little older and a lot more harried than the last time I had seen her, and when I told her my story, she looked even more astonished. "Well, hell," she said, grudgingly sympathetic. "That's tough. But, look, we're kind of busy, so just stay out of the way, okay?" I could see that she'd picked up a lot of habits from her captain. "I've got a little problem here," she added.
    " You 've got a problem?"
    She thought that was worth a little smile. "Not like your problem, Barry. It's just that the captain expected that some things would have been done here while we were in transit, and they haven't happened, that's all. Please. Let me get on with it."
    At least she'd said please. I did as ordered, pushing myself over to a corner of the room and staying out of the way. I didn't eavesdrop on her radio talk. I had other things on my mind.
    I don't know if I can make you understand what a terrible shock it was for an average adult human male like me—set in his ways, with a place in the world and plans for the future—to find himself suddenly twenty-odd years later and eighteen-plus light-years away from everything he cared about. Well, if it happened to you it probably would be just as disorienting, I suppose. But not in the same way, because you don't care about the same things we do.
    I cared a lot. The more I thought about all the things I had lost, the more I cared. I thought about my girl, Alma. I thought about my son, Matthew. (Jesus, I thought, the kid's got to be pushing forty years old by now! I've got a son older than I am! I could be a grandfather and not even know it.) I thought about sending them both a message. (But what could I say that they wouldn't long since