Given that first reference point I began to make sense of the nearer objects, and at last of the whole scene. On the right-hand side I was looking at a ship’s living quarters, with a crew moving around within. And on the left side, spreading all the way to the edge of the great chamber…
I peered, and puzzled. This was hard to make out: the shadow of an immense band of light, curving around on itself again and again. But I could not see any place where it closed. It formed a huge, hazy spiral, twisting away into space.
As I followed the turning band back from right to left, I made the final connection. This was not merely a crew and a ship. It was a crew in a ship with the Godspeed Drive. I had been looking at the corkscrew rear portion, drawn in luminous fog. And this was not just any crew.
I stared at the closest of the gigantic, lumbering figures. From my position close to its midriff I could not see the face, surmounting a huge body and diminished by distance. But at the level where I hovered I could see a dark band around the midsection. Stuck into it was a foggy white cylinder, thirty or forty feet long, with a bent handle. Like a pistol. Like Walter Hamilton’s pistol. Tucked into a belt. Duncan West’s belt.
As I stared another shape drifted past the static figure of Duncan, creeping forward with slow, hundred-yard strides. The hair was a dark cloud tied behind the head. Giant hands, bigger than cargo beetles, crossed a prodigious chest and gripped the biceps of arms each longer than the Cuchulain.
It was Danny Shaker. According to Jim Swift, Shaker and his whole crew had vanished forever, thrown into another universe by the power of the Godspeed Drive. Yet they walked in front of me now. I could not make out individual faces, but I thought I recognized Donald Rudden’s ponderous bulk, a hundred times as large as life, and the cloudy swirl of Tom Toole’s carroty-red hair.
I watched and watched, unable to take my eyes off the silent action before me. The crew of the Cuchulain were as slow as they were big. Each giant step took an age, each mouth gaped and closed in what I recognized at last as a pattern of glacial speech. I used my suit controls, and found that I could float toward—and through—anything in the chamber. For a long time I hovered right in front of Danny Shaker’s face, trying and failing to observe the glint of life in the fog of his grey eyes. On his scale my suited figure would be no bigger than a large beetle. There was no sign that he had any awareness of my presence.
I moved with him, hypnotized, studying his face as we crept backward and forward across the ship’s cabin. The rest of the crew was now sitting at a table talking, ten eternal minutes to each sentence. Shaker stood aloof. I decided from his actions that as usual he was worrying about the ship. He went and had a long conversation with a seated giant whom I took to be Patrick O’Rourke. From my point of view it was a perfectly silent discussion. Even with my suit amplifier as high as it would go, all I heard was a deep bass rumble like distant avalanches in the mountains far west of Lake Sheelin; far above it was the hiss of air within my own suit. At last Shaker headed off toward a different part of the chamber.
The sight of his destination, a shadowy wall filled with spectral dials, at last made me consider my own situation.
I queried my suit for the time, and could not believe what it told me. Close to five hours had passed since I had left the cargo beetle.
I took a last look at the crew. It should be safe to leave. At the rate they were going, they would sit and chat for another couple of days.
I headed back to the beetle and arrived there bursting to tell the others what I had seen. No one was present, not even Doctor Eileen, for all her threats about being late.
I went inside, replenished my suit’s air supply, and settled down to wait. Four hours later I was still waiting. In that time I had made half a dozen trips as far as the corridor branch point, but seen and heard nothing. In my sixth hour of waiting, when I was absolutely convinced that there had been a major disaster and I was alone in the space base, Jim Swift arrived at the cargo beetle.
He slowly opened the visor of his suit and nodded a greeting.
“What happened?” I asked. I couldn’t believe he was so casual.
“Not one interesting thing. Chamber after chamber of experimental equipment, all the way across to the other side of Flicker. No sign of any ship. I hope somebody else had better luck.”
“Where have you been? You’re six hours late.”
“Eh!” He scowled at me. “I’m not late—I’m a few minutes early.”
“You’ve been gone for nearly twelve hours.”
“Nonsense.” He started to query his suit, then changed his mind and pointed to the control panel of the beetle. “Six hours since I left, within a couple of minutes.”
The panel chronometer agreed with him. I queried my suit. It reported a time six hours later than the beetle’s clock. I stared at Jim Swift.
“What’s wrong, Jay?” he said. “Seeing things?”
“Hearing things. Listen.” I played out the time again, at external volume.
“I hear it.” He shrugged. “But it’s wrong. What have you been doing that might have ruined your suit’s clock?”
“I’ve been—I’ve seen—”
“Don’t babble.” He scented something interesting, so he was more sympathetic than annoyed. “Start at the beginning, and take it slow. What happened when you left here?”
I explained everything: the dark membrane, my passage through it, the world-sized spherical cavity beyond, and the Godspeed ship with its gargantuan crew.
“No,” he said, when I described the dimensions of the chamber. “I traveled miles in the interior of Flicker, and there’s no room for anything like what you’re describing. You say everyone was enormous, and they moved in slow motion?”
“I timed a blink of Danny Shaker’s eyes. It took nearly a minute.”
“That’s what you measured. But when you returned here, you believed that you had been gone for six hours. Isn’t it obvious that you were really away only a few minutes?—just the time it took you to travel along the corridor to the membrane, and then after you returned through it, the time to come back here.”
“I spent a long time inside—”
“You thought you did. And as far as you are concerned, that is valid. You, and your clock, were speeded up, by a big factor—a hundred or more. And I’ll bet you were only the same fraction of your real size, too, for a consistent change in space-time scale that preserves light-speed. Jay, you found a Godspeed space. A Godspace. A place where people can do experiments in an alternate spacetime. It’s fascinating, but it won’t help us go home.”
“What about Shaker and the crew? They didn’t vanish into another universe, the way you said. They’re still here, inside Flicker. I saw them.”
“No, you didn’t. What you saw is some kind of fading record in Godspace, a trace of what was happening to Shaker and the crew at the time when the Godspeed drive was turned on. Nothing in that chamber takes place in normal space and time. If you’ll take me there, I’ll prove it.”
He headed for the hatch. Before I could close my suit visor and follow him we were interrupted. The lock was operating. As soon as its cycle was complete, Mel popped through. Right behind her was Doctor Eileen, saying before she was fully into the cabin, “I know, I know, don’t tell me. Six hours and fifteen minutes. It doesn’t matter.”
Because she was the one who was late. But it certainly didn’t matter to Mel. She grabbed my hands. Before I knew what was happening she had spun us up and around the cabin. She didn’t have complete free-fall control, and we bounced together off walls and ceiling.