“That’s quite clear.” Gillespie jerked into an upright position. “Aesop, are you saying you might have made a mistake about what’s outside the ship?”
“Not about what is outside– but an internal event is taking place which I am unable to explain and which appears to transcend all my frames of reference.”
“Aesop, don’t waffle about,” Surgenor chipped in. “What’s happening? Why did you call us?”
“Before I describe the phenomenon, I wish to clarify the position with regard to inter-crew relationships. In normal circumstances I make important announcements to all crew members simultaneously, but I have no way to estimate or judge the psychological effects of what I have to say, and I fear they may be harmful. You two have assumed positions of responsibility– do you accept the further responsibility of transmitting my message in what you deem to be a suitable form to the other nine members of the ship’s company?”
“We do,” Surgenor and Gillespie said together. Surgenor, his heart beginning to lurch, cursed Aesop’s inhuman tendency to wordiness.
“Your acceptance is noted,” Aesop said, and there followed a delay which intensified Surgenor’s unease.
“Aesop, will you please get on with…
“Albert, at 00.09 hours this morning, during the general meeting of the ship’s company, you uttered the following words with respect to the deceased crewman William Narvik– ‘If you see his ghost coming out of the tool room store let me know.” Do you remember saying that?”
“Of course I remember it,” Gillespie said, “but it was only a joke, for God’s sake. You’ve heard us making jokes before this, Aesop.”
“I am familiar with all the various tropes associated with humour. I am also familiar with various writings of a religious, metaphysical and superstitious nature which describe a ghost as resembling a patch of white, misty radiance.” Aesop’s voice was calm, inflexible.
“And I must inform you that an object which has the classical attributes of a ghost is now emerging from the corpse of William Narvik.” “Bull,” Surgenor said, and he repeated the word to himself numerous times as he and Gillespie made their way downstairs, quietly crossed the mess room and went down the wider stair which led to the hangar deck. He was still intoning it when the door of the tool store slid open at Aesop’s command and they saw– enveloping Billy Narvik’s torso and expanding outwards from it– a lens-shaped cloud of cold, white brilliance.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Surgenor was surprised to discover– after the passing of a single, unmanning spasm of alarm– that he was unafraid.
He advanced into the tool store with Gillespie and saw that what he had taken to be a simple hemisphere of light was, in fact, complex in its topography and had traces of an internal structure. Its surface was ill-defined, rendering the curvatures more bewildering to the eye, and the regions of varying density within overlapped and shone through each other in a way which made it difficult for Surgenor to focus on individual features.
The object was about a metre in diameter, a dome of icy luminance shrouding most of Narvik’s body. As he looked at it from close quarters Surgenor developed a conviction that he was seeing only half of a spheroid, that an equal amount of it curved downwards through the floor and the underlying supports. Obeying his instinct, he knelt down, extended one hand and briefly passed it through the glowing surface. There was no sensation of any kind.
“It’s getting bigger,” Gillespie said. He took a step backwards and pointed at the nearer rim, which was silently spreading across the metal floor. In the space of a few seconds Narvik’s head was entirely lost to view beneath the intangible shell of light. The two men linked hands like small children and backed to the door, their eyes white with reflection, minds brimming with wonder– and in the centre of the room the enigmatic hemisphere continued its growth at a visibly increasing pace.
“What is it?” Gillespie whispered. “It looks like a brain, but…’
Surgenor felt his mouth go dry as the fear he should have experienced earlier stirred within him. Its source lay not in the awesome strangeness of the shining object, but– incredibly– in his slow-dawning sense of recognition. With an effort he managed to focus his eyes on a single part of the cloud, instead of taking it in as a whole, and thought he could see the beginnings of corpuscularity. As the object grew larger its structure was showing discontinuity, revealing itself to be composed of millions of motes of light.
“Hear these words, Aesop,” he said, forcing the speech sounds into existence. “Can you get a microscope on to that thing?”
Not yet– my diagnostic microscopes are limited in traverse to the main floor area of the hangar,” Aesop replied. “But at its present rate of progress the object will penetrate the tool store wall in approximately two minutes, and I will then be able to subject it to high magnification.”
“Penetrate?” Surgenor recalled his idea that they could see only half of the luminous entity. “Aesop, how about the engine bays below us– can you see anything unusual in there?”
“I am unable to see directly into the box columns of the spine, but there is a light source there. The implication is that the object extends downwards through the floor of the tool store.”
“What’s going on?” Gillespie said, his gaze hunting over Surgenor’s face. “Do you know what that thing is?”
“Don’t you?” Surgenor gave a numb, uncertain smile as he stared into the spreading billows of light. “That’s the universe, Al. You’re looking at the whole of creation.”
Gillespie’s jaw sagged, then he moved away, symbolically dissociating himself from Surgenor’s statement. “You’re crazy, Dave.”
“Think so? Watch that screen.”
The glowing cloud had reached the limits of the circular tool room and now was expanding into the hangar area, spilling through the metal walls as though they had no objective reality. There were a number of furtive movements in the overhead beams as Aesop’s long-range microscopes, normally used for inspecting faults in the survey modules, swung into new positions. At the same instant the monitoring screens came to life with the sort of images Surgenor had never expected to see on them– deep, dark and dizzy perspectives of thousands of lenticular galaxies in flight, moving, swarming, coming into focus and blurring out of it. The impression was that millions of years of observation through a powerful telescope had been compressed into a short film– a film designed to ensnare the mind and chasten the soul of any intelligent being who watched it. Surgenor strove to come to terms with the reality behind the words he had so glibly uttered a minute earlier.
Gillespie staggered a little, pressing both hands to his temples, as the blizzard of galaxies went on and on.
“Mike Targett should be down here to watch this,” Surgenor said, partly to himself. “We’re still in the grip of his dwindlar, you see. It’s a cyclic process– just like the universe itself. It shrank us to nothing, and then– because conservation is conserved– something happened…the stresses were relieved, or the signs were reversed…the opposite to a balloon being blown up until it finally bursts…and we went from micro to macro, from zero dimensions to the ultimate dimensions.”
“Dave!” There was a note of pleading in Gillespie’s voice. “Take it slower, will you?”