Finagling mist demons, he thought. This artifact is a factory for stasis boxes, and I’ve turned the damn thing on!
While he was coming to grips with that, he was slow to notice something else. His lower legs tingled, from the feet up past his knees, and he found difficulty in walking toward the intersecting tunnel. He took a step with his right leg, to make sure he wasn’t imagining things. He wasn’t. There was an unmistakable increase in resistance as he progressed toward this small wormhole’s pinch point.
Flex scanned some basic material on “the dichotomy paradox,” whereby ancient Earth mathematicians such as Zeno noted that for an object to move from point A to point B, it first had to reach the midpoint between the two. But to reach that midpoint, the object first had to reach the quarter point, and so on. The paradox was that if one had to overtake an infinite number of intermediate points, one could never reach the destination. The mystery took thousands of years for mankind to unravel, by the invention of calculus.
One speculation about non-traversable wormholes that caught Flex’s attention concerned time traps. One theory supposed that because space was squashed inside, time literally slowed as one progressed inward, until it stopped completely at the pit of the wormhole. So, he concluded, this was how the Slavers built and stocked the variety of stasis boxes found scattered throughout known space. This could be the most important technological advance since the conquest of hyperspace.
Thank you Institute of Knowledge, he thought.
The wormhole was only about ten meters in diameter, so there was a distracting sort of Coriolis effect-a differing temporal disparity between his head and feet. It was manageable but caused the tingling in his legs. He felt bloated, and his heart raced to pump blood to feet that plodded through congealing time.
Flex heightened his awareness of things unseen ahead, but doubted the kzin could make it to the stasis boxes, much less past them. The cylinder was open on both ends, and its contents symmetrical, so it was logical to assume that a mirror wormhole stretched out in the opposite direction.
Flex stumbled as he turned back to face the center, and he realized that the spin of the tunnel had slowed. The kzin! He was running himself, trying to de-spin the thing. As the cylinder slowed, Flex helped it, blindly running the same way around as his opponent. The rolling slowed, then picked up rapidly in the other direction.
The phantom tunnel above widened, and then another one opened up at an odd angle to it. Tempted, Flex ran as hard as he could, spinning the cylinder to a breakneck pace, clockwise. As if on cue, three more lighted tunnels opened up, each at an equal angle of separation from the others, forming five spokes of a wheel around the axle spun by Flex and S’larbo.
“Tabam!” said Flex to himself. This isn’t just a Zeno’s Wormhole, or even two or three. It’s a roulette of wormholes meeting at the hub, feeding into the machine. But feeding from where? He wanted to get nearer to the center to be able to peer into one of the adjoining tunnels-he’d be the first to see into them in over a billion years-unless the expedition that had discovered the artifact had already been sucked into eternity.
He pressed on, feeling a thickening of space with each latent step. His left foot kept straying outward, and his right would tend to trip into the left, so he crouched to lower his center of mass and lessen the Coriolis effect.
The next step was a toughie. To his eyes, the tunnel ahead appeared level, but his muscles told him that the floor sloped up like a summitless mountain. Just a few more arduous steps for mankind, he thought, and I should be able to get a look into the other tunnels. Then retreat.
Another step, as through thick mud, then another, through hardening cement. “You’re a Jinxian,” he told himself, “the strongest race in known space, by weight. Now move your Finagling feet.”
Aside from the difficulty in walking, Flex could only assume that the nearer he was to the stasis boxes, the slower time must be moving for him, relative to home. It was a sobering thought, but he recalled an old Jinxian adage: Only a fool wastes time worrying about time. Wisdom for a race of short lifespan, his father once said.
When he was a swindler’s dozen paces from the center, he craned his neck to look up into one of the other spokes in the roulette. As it rolled away and out of sight, he thought he saw inside a huge vehicle of some kind, so huge that it should not have been able to fit inside. It was a transport laden with dozens of terra-movers with mounted guns. Or so it appeared to Flex. Whatever it was, it looked like it was meant to build entire worlds-or destroy them. He could analyze the fleeting image later because his helmet imager was recording.
He gazed into the next wormhole as it wheeled into view to his right. Inside was a star field, and against that, what looked like a fleet of ships in an attack formation. The ships matched the configuration of those he had seen in a research project many years back: Slaver battleships. How a fleet of ships could fit in a tunnel not much larger than a personal yacht he did not know. Perhaps the wormhole could compress space as well as time. The fleet may have fallen into a larger wormhole that pinched into the roulette an eon ago.
Flex kept his feet apace with the rolling floor, and tried to peer into another tunnel. To do that, he had to step aside to see past a trio of the largest stasis boxes, that were large enough to hold a groundcar. He ran opposite the tunnel’s rotation, slowing it into darkness, and then picking up speed counter-clockwise. The light from the other spokes returned, only this time their contents were different.
In the tunnel directly above, the mechanical armatures began to move, and Flex watched in horror as a huge spindly gray creature-or robot-darted through the lowering arms like a bizarre monkey in high steely branches. The leggy creature grabbed two of the crane arms and beat them together until they came untangled. Immediately, the crane separated into two parts, each a cage of curved girders. No longer binding together, the cages lowered until they were just above the tumbling metal boxes ahead. Arms protruding from the cages unfolded to corral the boxes, holding each in the vacuum above the turning floor. What the crane was attached to up in the vertical tunnel was a mystery; it could not be affixed to the inner surface of a rotating cylinder.
I’ll be damned, Flex thought. The robot just repaired this whole thing.
He realized that not only had the wormhole been harnessed into a stasis factory, but that he had the opportunity of a lifetime-if he didn’t end up frozen in the jaws of time. No, it was Jarko-S’larbo who would be caught!
Humans hold a great part of their reflexes in the spinal cord, so that a hand may be pulled from fire without even thinking about it. On the other hand, humans also have instincts to freeze and to flee. Kzinti had a larger part of their reflexes in the spine, hence the “scream and leap” before thinking. Sometimes freezing or fleeing was better than charging. This evolutionary difference was to determine what happened next. With all the technology, knowledge, wisdom, and experience, what matters most at times is a construction of nature that was intended for primordial worlds, not rotating wormholes.
Flex calculated what might make Jarko-S’larbo leap, and decided it was time to reveal himself. He backpedaled, gradually slowing the tunnel’s rotation until the roulette faded into darkness.
“Ratcat!” he said.
“I see where you are now, Jinxian. You’re dead!”
“Don’t you want my name and title first, so you can claim bragging rights? I’m Flex Bothme, the guy who dropped the bomb on your kits!”
“Skalazaal!” bellowed Jarko-S’larbo in a cry meant to freeze prey. “Flex Bothme?”