Fifteen minutes left.
Christine raised her head to look at him, and now he found it difficult to see any trace of hardness in her face. “I never told you,” she said. “My son died just before he was born. It was at a construction camp on Newhome. The doctor was away. I could feel the baby dying, but I couldn’t help him. He was right there inside me, and there was nothing I could do to help him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. I never tell anybody, you see. I was never able to talk about it.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Chris.” He drew her head back down on to his shoulder.
“If I’d only stayed at home. If I’d only waited for Martin at home.”
“You weren’t to know.” Surgenor uttered the age-old commonplace, the ritual absolution, with no trace of embarrassment, in the full understanding that the uniqueness of every human being and every human circumstance infused the words with new meaning. “Try not to think about it.”
Don’t sadden yourself by dwelling on past misfortunes, he thought. Not now.
Ten minutes left.
“Martin never forgave me. He died in a tunnel collapse, but that was four years after we’d split up. So I told you a lie this morning, Dave. I didn’t have a husband who died—he dumped me because of what I’d done, then he died years later. On his own. Unilaterally, you might say.”
This morning? Surgenor was momentarily baffled. What’s she talking about? He cast his mind back over recent events and felt a dull amazement when he realized that less than a day had elapsed since he had strolled out of the Service hostel on a blue-domed, glitter-bright morning—on a planet which was thirty million light-years away. I’m caught in a squeeze play—between macro and micro. And what happens when the diameter of my pupils is less than the wavelength of light?
Five minutes left.
“You wouldn’t have done that, would you, Dave? You wouldn’t have handed me all the blame.”
“There’s no blame Chris—believe me.” To prevent the words being nothing more than words, Surgenor tightened his arm around Christine and felt her move in closer against him. It’s not as bad as it was, he thought in wonderment. It helps when you have somebody…
No minutes left.
No seconds.
No time at all.
The first sound in the new existence was a chiming of bells.
It was followed by Aesop’s voice making a general announcement. “…there is nothing outside. The ship and all its systems are undamaged, but there is nothing outside. There are no stars, no galaxies, no detectable radiation of any kind—nothing but blackness. “It appears that we have an entire continuum to ourselves.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Surgenor found himself running towards the observation room.
He felt an unutterable gladness at still being alive against all the odds, but the feeling was counterbalanced by a new kind of dread—not fully acknowledged as yet—and it seemed imperative that he should scan the universe with his own eyes. Two men, Mossbake and Kessler, were swaying drunkenly outside the observation room door, their expressions a mixture of bleary triumph and surprise. Surgenor brushed past them and walked on to the gallery-like viewing area. The surrounding blackness was complete. He looked into it, absorbing the psychic punishment, then lowered himself into a chair beside Al Gillespie.
“It took no time at all,” Gillespie said. “The sky looked the same right up to the last second. Then I got a feeling the stars were changing colours—then there was this. Nothing!”
Surgenor stared into the ocean of unrelieved night, his eyes darting here and there, uncontrollably, as his optic nerves registered spurious glimmers of light, creating and immediately destroying distant galaxies. Only by an effort of will was he able to prevent himself from shaking his head in denial.
“It looks as though conservation is conserved,” Gillespie said, almost to himself. “Matter and energy aren’t wasted. Go down a black hole—come up through a white hole. Go down a dwindlar—and you get a continuum to yourself.”
“We’ve only got Aesop’s word for that. Where are the suns that must have come through before us?”
“Don’t look at me, friend.”
“Hear these words, Aesop,” Surgenor said. “How do you know all your receptors and pick-ups are functioning properly?”
“I know because my triplex monitoring circuits tell me so,” Aesop replied gently.
“Triplication doesn’t mean a thing if each circuit has been given the same treatment.”
“David, you are venturing opinions on a highly specialized subject—one in which, according to your personal dossier, you have no qualifications or experience.” The computer’s choice of words turned a statement of fact into a reproof.
“When it comes to going through a dwindlar,” Surgenor said doggedly, “I have as much experience as you, Aesop. And I want access to the direct vision ports.”
“I have no objections to that,” Aesop replied, “even though the request is unusual.”
“Good!” Surgenor got to his feet and glanced down at Gillespie. “You coming?”
Gillespie nodded and stood up, and the two men left the observation room. On the way upstairs past the living quarters they were joined by Mike Targett, who seemed to sense where they were going. They reached the first of the computer decks, where the geognostic data banks occupied rows of metal cabinets, then climbed a little-used stair leading towards Aesop’s central processing units.
Massive vacuum-tight doors slid aside to admit them to a circular gallery which skirted a forest of multicoloured cables, the enormously complex spinal cord which connected the Sarafand’s brain to its body. The computer itself still lay above them, beyond hatches which could be opened only by base maintenance teams. At four equidistant points around the gallery were circular ports which permitted direct vision of the ship’s environment. Spaceship designers had a powerful aversion to putting holes in pressure shells, and in the case of the Mark Six they had grudgingly provided four small transparencies in a part of the ship which could be hermetically sealed off from the other levels.
Surgenor went to the nearest port, looked through it and saw nothing but a man’s face peering at him. He eyed the reflection for a moment, vainly trying to see through it, then asked Aesop to cut the interior lights. An instant later the deck was plunged into darkness. Surgenor looked out of the circular window, and the blackness was like an enemy lying in wait.
“There’s nothing out there,” Targett whispered, from his position at another port. “It’s like we’re sunk in pitch.”
“I can assure you,” Aesop said, speaking unexpectedly, “that the surrounding medium is more transparent than interstella space. The amount of matter per cubic metre is precisely zero. Under these conditions my telescopes could detect a galaxy at a range of billions of light-years—but there are no galaxies to detect.”
“Let’s have the light again Aesop.” Surgenor resisted an impulse to apologize to the computer for having doubted its word. He was relieved when the glowtubes sprang into brightness once more, shuttering the portholes with reflections.
“Well, we’re not dead—at least I think we’re not—but this is worse than the last time,” Targett said. He held up his hands and examined them, frowning.
Gillespie looked at him curiously. “Shakes?”
“No—not yet. One of the old classical philosophers—I think it was Kant—used to talk about a situation like this. He said, suppose there was nothing anywhere in the whole universe but one human hand–would you be able to state that it was a left hand or a right hand? His answer was that you would, and this proved to him that there was a handedness about space itself, but he was wrong. Later thinking brought into account the idea of rotation through four-space…’