“That’s the universe you see pouring out across the floor, Al, but it isn’t really getting any bigger– it’s maintaining its own natural size and we’re contracting back into it. Right now the Sarafand is maybe a thousand times bigger than the universe, but soon it’ll be the same size as the universe, then we’ll shrink down through all the galaxies that make up the universe, then we’ll be the size of a single galaxy, then of a single star system, then we’ll get back to normal, but only for an instant, because we’ll be back in the dwindlar zone, and we’ll keep on shrinking till we get to zero– and then the whole process will start over again!”
There was the sound of heavy footsteps on metal and Sig Carlen appeared on the stair with a beer glass in his hand. “Why don’t you two characters stop being so…What’s that?”
Surgenor looked at the cloud of brilliant specks, the perimeter of which was now advancing across the hangar at walking pace, and then at Gillespie. “You tell him, Al– I want to hear somebody else saying it.”
By the time the Sarafand’s crew had assembled in the mess room, and had sobered up with the aid of Antox capsules, the universe was larger than the ship.
A continuous rain of galaxies was spraying up through the floor, passing through the table and chairs and human beings, and out through the ceiling into the vessel’s upper levels. The galaxies looked like slightly fuzzy stars to the naked eye, but when examined with a magnifying glass they were seen to be perface little lens-shapes or spirals, miniature jewels being squandered into space by an insane creature.
Surgenor sat at the long table, bemused, watching the motes of light pass through his own arms and hands, and tried to comprehend that each one contained a hundred million suns or more, and that vast numbers of those suns were the hearth-fires of civilizations. A reaction had set in after his first flash of inspirational understanding, and now– as with a picture in which hollows can also be seen as hills– his perceptions kept rebounding between two extremes. In one second he would be a normal-sized man watching specks of fire magically penetrating his flesh without hurting him; in the next he was a giant of inconceivable proportions, whose body was larger than the volume of space known to Earth’s astronomers…
“…can’t take this in,” Theo Mossbake was saying. “If it’s all true, it means that the ship and our bodies have been converted into the most diffuse gas imaginable– one atom every million light-years or so. I mean, we ought to be dead.”
“Forget everything you learned at school,” Mike Targett replied. “We’re dealing with dwindlar physics now, and all the rules are different.”
“I still don’t see why we aren’t dead.”
Targett, who had been the first to grasp the dwindlar’s concept, spoke with evangelical fervour. “I tell you, Theo, it’s all different. if you think about it, the laws of conventional science say we should have died when we shrank. We should have become so dense that we turned into a micro neutron star– but we didn’t. Perhaps the atoms themselves, and the particles they’re made from, were reduced in proportion in some way. I don’t know how it worked– but I do know that we’re now at the opposite end of the scale.”
Voysey clicked his fingers. “If we’re going to shrink down through our original size, does that mean that Aesop will be able to operate the ship’s drive again?”
“Afraid not,” Targett said. “Aesop will correct me on this if I’m wrong, but it takes many minutes for him to prepare and carry out a beta-space jump– and we’ll pass through our original size in some fantastically small fraction of a second. You can see the way the process is speeding up. Those galaxies are farther apart and travelling faster than they were when we sat down here. As they appear to get bigger they’ll keep on speeding up, and soon they’ll be moving so fast we won’t be able to see them.”
Targett paused to watch the upward migration of fireflies. “In fact, as far as we’re concerned, they’ll eventually have to travel thousands, millions of times faster than light– but that’s because we’ll be contracting at that speed. It’s a weird thought.”
“Talking about weird thoughts,” Christine Holmes said in a small voice, making her first contribution to the discussion, “I keep thinking of what Dave and Al told us about Billy Narvik’s body and the light coming out through it. Why did it start there, of all places?”
“Pure coincidence, Chris. Dave dragged the body into the tool store and laid it on the ship’s centre of gravity marker plate– and the centre of gravity is the one invariant point in the whole set-up. It must still be occupying its original position in the universe, and the ship is condensing towards it equally from all directions. That’s why we’re going to end up in the dwindlar zone again, and not in some other part of…of the…’
Targett’s voice faltered and his face grew visibly paler as he turned to Surgenor. “The centre of gravity, Dave– we can shift it.
“Enough?” Surgenor stared back at him through a spray of galaxies. “The equivalent of thirty million light-years?”
“That’s the width of a little finger– we’re big boys now, Dave.” Targett smiled the thin, cool smile of a man who has transcended his mortal destiny. “The calculations should be easy for Aesop, and even if we miss our chance on this cycle, we can try again next time round.” Four days later, the survey ship Sarafand–having once again engulfed the entire universe and imploded back into it–materialized in normal-space near a yellow sun. After a brief pause it began its slow, patient approach to the landing field in Bay City, on the planet called Delos.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Hear these words, Aesop,” Surgenor said. He had finished packing his belongings into his single woven-glass travelling case, and was ready to quit the room which had been his only permanent home for almost twenty years. The room was small and plain, little more than a metal box equipped with a few basic amenities, but at the last moment he felt reluctant to leave.
“I’m listening to you, Dave.” Aesop’s voice seemed louder than usual, due to the quietness of the ship.
“I…This is probably the last time I’ll be speaking to you.”
“As you are about to leave the ship, and I am due to be decommissioned in sixteen minutes from now, it is certainly the last time you will be speaking to me. What do you want?”
“Well…’ Surgenor considered the utter stupidity of saying goodbye to a computer or asking it how it felt about its imminent death. “I think I just wanted to see if you were still functioning.”
There was a protracted silence, then Surgenor realized that Aesop– having demonstrated that he was still fully operative– considered that no further words were necessary. It’s only logical, Surgenor thought, picking up his case. He left the room, walked along the bow-shaped corridor and went down the companionway into the empty mess. Extra tables had been set up in it, and they were still littered with empty glasses and plates left over from the morning’s Press reception. A half-smoked cigar had been trodden into the floor and Surgenor kicked it out of his way as he went to the stair and proceeded down it to the hangar deck.
For public safety reasons, a ring of red-painted stanchions linked by white rope had been set up around the gaping hole which he and the others had burned through the deck. Part of the tool store wall had been cut away too, the heat-rippled metal testifying to the speed at which the work had been carried out. Surgenor stared down into the darkness of the exposed engine bays, thinking about the hours of frantic, concerted activity which had wreaked so much havoc on the Sarafand’s structure.