Obsidian took us far across space again. For the first time we came to another vehicle. It was like a raft the size of a football field, with some sort of invisible, impalpable shield, like a dome, over it to keep in an atmosphere that would preserve workable temperatures and pressures for the massive engineering equipment it carried. Barring the star scene that arched over us in every direction, it was like nothing so much as being in the engine room of an incredibly monstrous battleship.
All the way out to this star raft in Obsidian’s quarters, and for nearly two weeks of Earth time after we got there, Porniarsk and I were force-fed with information from the teaching machines Obsidian had talked about. It was an unnerving process. We were like blank cassette tapes in a high speed duplicator. There was no physical sensation of being packed with instruction; and in fact, the information itself did not become usable until later, when contact with some of the actual engineering work going on aboard the raft tapped it, the way a keg of wine might be tapped. But at the same time, there was a psychic consciousness of mental lumber being added to our mental warehouses that was curiously exhausting in its own way. The sensation it produced was something like that which can come from weeks of overwork and nervous strain, to the point where the mind seems almost physically numb.
How Porniarsk reacted to it was something I had no way of knowing, because we were kept separated. Emotionally isolated by my own purpose, I was generally indifferent to what was being done to me, physically or mentally; and when, in due time, the process of information-feeding ended, I fell into a deep sleep that must have lasted well beyond the six hours of my normal slumber period. When I woke, suddenly, all the knowledge that had been pumped into me exploded from the passive state into the active.
I had opened my eyes in the same unstressed state of thoughtlessness that normally follows a return from the mists of sleep. I was at peace, unthinking—and then, suddenly the reality of the universe erupted all about me. I was all at once bodiless, blind, and lost, falling through infinity, lifetimes removed from any anchor point of sanity or security.
I tumbled; aware—too much aware—of all things. Panic built in me like a deep-sea pressure against the steel bulkhead of my reason, threatening to burst through and destroy me. There was too much, all at once, crowding my consciousness. Suddenly I had too much understanding, too much awareness...
I felt the pressure of it starting to crack me apart; and then, abruptly, my long-held purpose came to my rescue. Suddenly I was mobilized and fighting back, controlling the overwhelming knowledge. I had not come this far in time and space and learning to disintegrate now in an emotional spasm. The universe was no bigger than my own mind. I had discovered that for myself, before this. I had touched the universe, not once, but several times previously. It was no great frightening and unknowable entity. It was part of me, as I was part of it. A thing did not frighten itself. An arm did not panic at discovering it was attached to a body.
I surged back. I matched pressure for pressure. I held.
But my mind was still far removed from my body, back on the raft. It felt as if, at the same time, I was floating motionless, and flying at great speed through infinity. My vantage point was somewhere between the island universes, out in intergalactic space. In a sense, it was as if I stood on the peak of a high mountain, from which I could see the misty limits of all time and space. Almost, it seemed, I could see to the ends of the universe; and for the first time, the total action of the time storm activity became a single pattern in my mind.
“So, Marc,” said a voice—or a thought. It was both and neither, here where there were no bodies and no near stars—“you survived.”
It was Dragger speaking. I looked for her, instinctively, and did not see her. But I knew she was there.
“Yes,” I said. I was about to tell her that I had never intended anything else, but a deeper honesty moved me at the last second. “I had to.”
“Evidently. Do you understand the temporal engineering process, now?”
“I think so,” I said; and as I said it, the knowledge that had been pumped into me began to blend with what I was now experiencing, and the whole effort they were making unrolled into order and relationship, like a blueprint in my mind.
“This isn’t the way I imagined it,” I said. “You’re actually trying to stop the time storm, by physical efforts, to reverse its physical effect on the universe.”
“In a sense.”
“In a sense? All right, say in a sense. But it’s still physical reversal. To put it crudely, in the sort of terms you’re most familiar with, the normal decay of entropy began to stop and reverse itself when the universe stopped expanding. Then, when the farther stars and the outer galaxies started falling back here and there, they set up areas where entropy was increasing rather than decaying. Isn’t that right, Dragger? So it had to be these stresses, these conflicts between the two states of entropy in specific areas, that spawned the nova implosions and triggered the time faults, so that on one side of a sharp line, time was moving one way, and on the other, a different way. So that’s what made the time storm! But I assumed you’d be attacking the storm directly to cure it.”
“We’re after the root cause.”
“Are you, Dragger? But this way—this is using sheer muscle to mend things.”
“Do you know of a better way?”
“But—using energy to reverse the falling back of these physical bodies, to force them to move apart again? There ought to be some way that wouldn’t require tapping another universe. Isn’t that what you’re doing—and tapping a tachyon universe at that? You’re working with forces that can tear this universe apart.”
“I asked you,” repeated Dragger, “do you know a better way?”
“No,” I said. “But I’ve got to see this for myself. I can’t believe you can control something that powerful.”
“Look, then,” said Dragger. “S Doradus is only a thought away from us here.”
It was true. Merely by thinking of it, we were there, with no time spent in the movement. Bodiless, with Dragger bodiless beside me, I hung in space and looked at the great spherical darkness that was the massive engine enclosing the young blue-white giant star called S Doradus. It was an engine that trapped all the radiation from that vast sun, to use it as a focus point, a lens in the fabric of our universe, through which then flowed the necessary jet of energy from the tachyon universe that was being tapped for power-to push not only stars, but galaxies around.
A coldness took my mind. Through that lens, we were touching another place where every physical law, and time itself, was reversed from ours. As long as the lens aperture was controlled, as long as it remained small and unvarying, the reaction between the two universes was under command. But if die lens should tear and open further, under the forces it channelled, the energy flow could flash to proportions too great to be constrained. The fabric between the universes would break wide open; it would be mutual annihilation of both—annihilation in no-time.
“You see now,” said Dragger, “why we didn’t think it was possible for you to do this work. In fact, if you hadn’t been able to make the conceptual jump that set you free to survey the situation, like this, there’d have been no point in even considering it.”
“Made the jump? Just a minute,” I said. “This isn’t something I’ve done all on my own. I must be getting some technological assistance to let my point of view go wheeling through infinite distances, like this.”
“Of course you are,” said Dragger. “But the only person who could make it possible for your mind to endure such assistance was you, yourself. You’re strong enough to endure the sense of dislocation involved. We didn’t think you were. I didn’t think you were. I was wrong.”