“He’s going,” whispered Liz Deffant, but the words were barely audible, only a thin breathing, an automatic carry-over from a forgotten state of mind. The majesty of the thing she and Buchanan watched obliterated all else.
The big lifeboat of the Altair Star was the source of the Quasi-warp. It nosed out of the rent in the lost ship’s side, and colossal shards of the strange tunnel gave way before it. The Quasi-warp bent the fabric of the tunnel.
The scanners held the terrible majesty of the scene. The screen flowered with renewed violence; the lifeboat was a star-center. Waves of energies began to rock the station. Buchanan’s hands shook. His mind cleared at last. “Maran!” he said urgently. “He’s using the boat to escape!” It hadn’t been at all important aboard the lost ship; but here, at the station, Buchanan was again a Galactic Service employee, responsible to the Council and aware of Maran’s inexplicable and unholy powers.
Liz Deffant gripped his arm. “Al—watch!”
By her tone he knew that she was in possession of information he had missed. There was a resigned, sad tone in her voice that he recognized. He had no time to consider it, for the lifeboat became a blossoming cancer, white-gold in a sea of fragmented, blistered, impossibly complex black-lighted powers. The Quasi-warp was demolishing the entire time-locked tunnel.
From the center of the sea of black shards, the lifeboat rose up and hung, poised. The station was hurled away by the hurricane that was its wake. Yet the scanners kept to their task; Buchanan and Liz Deffant clearly saw the end of the Altair Star.
It was one of a score of ships that danced, whirled, and spun zanily in the wash set up by Maran’s overpowered boat. The Altair Star lurched end over end. A tiny, ancient rocketship cannoned into it. Were its crew even now joining the ranks of the dead? It was a grotesque, fantastic sight; the thought of the crew of the ancient, tiny ship which had adventured so many centuries before across the gulfs, was strangely haunting. Other ships smashed into one another. Fragments of lost ships too joined the crazy corybantics set up by the Quasi-warp.
The two appalled watchers saw the lifeboat begin to surge forward, full of power. Blackness boiled around the wrecks. The Quasi-warp completed the destruction of the impossible runnel that held them,
“He’s going out!” Buchanan began to say. “Maran’s—”
“No,” said Liz, with a surprising harshness. “See!” Buchanan looked into the depths behind what was left of the tunnel.
A blank, terrifying emptiness had opened at the core of the Singularity. Buchanan’s thoughts spun. Somewhere among his memories was Maran’s triumphant yelclass="underline" “An entire new Universe!” Was it?
It was a hole, a pit, a sink of energy, a nothingness, an alien and empty pathway of pure night, black, and lost, blank and void.
The poised lifeboat seemed to hesitate.
“No!” Liz Deffant cried, responding to the eerie emptiness of the gaping pit. “No, Maran!” Flooding with tendrils of white-gold glory, the great drive that had once powered the Altair Star built to a crescendo. The lifeboat pulsed, glowing, blasting, roaring forward, driven by the huge engines. Straight into the black hole.
“Gone!” breathed Buchanan.
There was more to follow, equally strange.
“Dear God, the Altair Star!” Buchanan gasped.
He and Liz saw the ghost-fleet spin slowly around the wreckage of the time-locked tunnel. And then they resumed their interrupted voyages.
They were free of the grip of the bizarre enigma.
One by one, the long-lost ships followed the still-writhing wake of Maran’s lifeboat. In a stately procession, like carriages in a funeral cortege, the ships descended into the terrible emptiness. Buchanan was nerveless, stupefied.
He watched the end of the Altair Star. For seconds, it was outlined against the white-gold translucence, and then it was gone. The dust of so many human beings was on its way to the most weird interment ever known. The great infragalactic liner, at last, was gone.
“It’s over,” said Liz.
Buchanan felt a curious sense of relief. His ghosts were truly laid. And then he thought of Maran. What strange Universe had received him!
“Maran?” he asked Liz.
“He left a message.”
Together, they listened to the deep, powerful recorded voice: “Miss Deffant! Buchanan! The station is now yours. Maran will trouble you no longer. If Maran is wrong, he will trouble the Galaxy no more.” There was a change of tone, and Buchanan sensed an edge of regret. No human being could renounce all he had known without some feeling of apprehension. “Maran recognized your nobility of spirit, Miss Deffant. Buchanan is a fortunate man. As for Maran, he will try to enter into the Universe he saw. It may be that in another kind of life, he will be able to continue his investigations into the greatest of all mysteries. For, make no mistake, the structure which exists in the Jansky Singularity is no accident!
Maran recognizes the handiwork of an intelligent entity. So Maran leaves you and the Galaxy that rejected him to find beings capable of understanding his ambitions.” Quietly, he added: “Think of Maran, Miss Deffant.”
Buchanan shivered.
It was like listening to a recording of a dead man’s words.
“It is all over,” he said.
“Is it?” Liz asked.
“Yes! For us, yes!”
CHAPTER 21
Lientand saw that the station had suffered. Unguessable forces had eaten at its fabric. Whole sections had been smashed clear away. No darting scanners roamed before it. It was a blind, crippled, failing nugget of technology that had just managed to stagger clear of the appalling chaos within the Singularity. Nevertheless, helpless as the station appeared, Lientand kept his cruisers’ main armament on it.
“Still no beamed transmissions, sir,” reported his lieutenant “The life-support systems are working, but there’s not much power.”
“Get him,” said Lientand.
He wondered if he should risk his crew. His humanity struggled against a growing conviction that Maran should be put down as one would a mad dog.
A launch set out, but before it covered the short distance to the station, a port opened in the scarred side. The launch followed.
“Take no chances,” ordered Lientand, when the raft was inboard. Seconds passed and then slowly a crack appeared in the bent and burned life-raft. A small port swung aside.
Restraint tentacles, hand-weapons, blast-screens: all were ready.
Then a crewman yelled incredulously: “It’s a woman!”
Lientand began to believe in miracles.
When he heard the uproar, Rosario crawled from his bed, to the accompaniment of robotic protest. He ignored it and dragged himself to the hold. All over the cruiser, men were roaring their delight. Buchanan helped Liz out. When he saw the way she looked at the lean, craggy-faced man, Rosario shrugged regretfully and listened.
“Where’s Maran?” asked Lientand,
Buchanan still looked dazed. “Maran chose to go into the Singularity.” Lientand knew shock when he saw it, but there had to be the few vital, immediate questions. Then, and for days later, Buchanan could only give an account of what he had seen—when trained interrogators began their subtle questioning to see what he knew of Maran’s motives, he could do nothing to help shed light on the inexplicable dynamics of the bizarre genius.