“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you check the idea out, first, with the temporal engineers?”
“They might want to stop me; and maybe they could,” I said. “They can’t help me, Ellen. The time storm’s too much inside all of them, just like my inner storm was too much inside me. I’m the only one who can do anything; and the only thing I can think of to do is go through the lens.”
She said nothing for a moment. The wraith of Sunday lay waiting, trusting, leaving it all up to me.
“If you don’t, we all die?”
“I believe so.”
She sighed.
“Then you do have to go. There actually is no choice,” she said. “All right. I’m going along.”
“I don’t think you can,” I said. “Where are you? Back down in the summer palace asleep?”
“I’m in my own bedroom at the summer palace,” said Ellen, “lying on the bed. But I don’t think I’m asleep.”
“You’re there, though. I’m here. Tell me, can you feel the downdraft?”
“The what?”
I explained what it was. She was quiet for a little while after I finished. Finally, she spoke.
“No,” she said.
“I thought so,” I said. “I’m probably reaching down to you, as much as you’re reaching up to me. You see, I really am out here in a sense. I’m an energy pattern projected by the engineering devices of the temporal engineers. I can go from place to place at faster than light speeds only because I can turn off my projection in one spot and turn it on at another.”
“If you’re a pattern of energy, then the energy coming through the lens can destroy you! Or at least, change you. Energy is material.”
“Maybe. I’ve got to try it, anyway.”
“There has to be some way I can go with you!”
“I don’t think so; and that’s good. Because then I couldn’t stop you from coming; and there’s no sense in both of us... going.”
“Let’s try and find a way. Wait a bit. You said we had nine months.”
“Nine months before the axe falls; but it may be already too late to stop its swing. I can’t wait. I’ve got to go, now.”
“Wait just a little bit. Come back home for a couple of days, or even one, so we can talk it over first.”
“If I did that, I might not go after all. Particularly not now, with the two of you around. Ellen, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go now!”
We flowed together, we ghosts. She held me. Sunday held me. I held them.
“All right, go then,” she said at last. “Go now.”
“Goodby,” I said. “I love you. I love you both. I’ll be back.”
“You’ll be back,” said Ellen.
I pulled away from them and shut them out of my mind. I was alone among the stars; and, by reaching out for it, I could feel the funnel of energy and also the downdraft—weak, as Dragger had said, way out here, but unceasing, relentless.
I let the pull of the downdraft fill my mind. I let myself go with it. At first there was nothing; it was like floating on a lake. Then I noticed a slight movement, a drifting, and I became aware of the fact that I was dropping down below the galactic plane. I revolved and saw the direction of my movement, toward the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and a darkness there enclosing a young, blue-white giant star, a darkness I was still too far off to distinguish.
I let myself drift....
The plane of the galaxy receded above me. I was in intergalactic space. There was nothing to measure the speed of my movement now, but I sensed that it was increasing. I was falling faster and faster, down the funnel of extra-universal energy, reaching from the lens at S Doradus to our galaxy.
I fell a hundred and forty thousand light-years; and time became completely arbitrary. It may have been minutes, and it may have been months, that I fell with steadily increasing velocity until I must have been travelling faster than any pulsar measured in my early, original time. I think it was probably minutes rather than months, or at least hours rather than months, because I could feel that my acceleration was not merely steady, but steadily increasing all that time. I had no ordinary way to measure this—I only knew it, with some measuring back part of my mind.
It became plain to me, finally, that I would not see the lens before passing through it. By the time I would be close enough to make out the dark circle of the engine among the lights of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, I would be only a fractionless fraction of a second from entering the tachyonic universe, too small a moment of time for perception. I relaxed, letting myself go....
And it happened.
There was a shock that felt as if the subatomic particles of the energy pattern that was my identity were being torn apart and spread through endless spaces. Following that, incomprehensibility.
I was afloat in darkness, streaked by lines of light that shot past me on every side almost too fast to see. Other than these, there was nothing. But the darkness had a value and the lights had a value—even if I could not read them. Feeling stricken and dismembered, I floated helplessly, watching the shooting lights.
I had no power of movement. I had no voice. I could find no means by which I might measure the time, the space, or anything else about me. If I had indeed come into the tachyon universe, I had arrived completely helpless to learn what I needed to know, and helpless to take the knowledge back with me. Look about as best I might, I could see nothing left to me but to give up; and the only reason I did not do so immediately was because I was not sure if I was even able to do that.
I floated; and gradually, like a shocked heart starting to beat again, my ancient weird woke again in me. I could not give up, because even here, I was still lacking the reverse gear I had been born without. Alive, dead, or in living pieces less than electron size, I was still committed to chewing at any cage that held me until I could gnaw a way out.
But what way was there? Where do you begin when there is no starting point on which to stand? A journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step; but where to begin—if you are not standing still, but skating across eternity in total darkness, with meteor-like lights flashing all around you? I hunted through myself for something to hang to, and found nothing. Then Ellen came to my rescue.
“Remember?” she said. “When you first found me, I was lost like that; and I found a way back.”
She was not speaking out loud to me. She was not even talking in my mind, as she had as I hung in space, normal space, just before I had come here. It was the Ellen which had become a part of me, speaking to me out of a corner of myself, as Sunday had come bounding back from death to hug me with nonexistent paws, out of a corner of myself where he had been all this time, without my realizing.
“If I did it, you can do it,” Ellen-that-was-me said. “Do it the way I did it before. Take what there is, and build from there.”
She was right, of course; and I drew strength from her. If she had been able to do it once, she was able to do it again. Therefore, I could do it, as long as she was part of me. I drew certainty from her and looked about once more at what I had.
I had the darkness and the lights. The lights were totally incomprehensible; but with Ellen’s certainty that I could build with them, I started to watch them. They were too momentary to form patterns... or were they?
I floated, watching; and the watching became a studying.
All that underwent change fell into patterns of alteration, eventually. It was a long time resolving to my understanding, but finally, I began to see the elements of patterns in the streaking lights. They were not entirely random after all.
If they had patterns, they were part of a larger identity in which such patterns could be held, a larger identity which was the universe of their context—whether that universe was as small as an atom of an atom, or larger than all other universes put together. If this was so, then there was a relationship between the universe that held them and the patterns that it held.