It did not happen; but the way to escape was not open. The gallery was shuddering under repeated explosions from the disasters in the cave, and as he rounded a turn he saw that some of those quakes had brought down the roof.
The tunnel was blocked.
There was no longer any way back to the surface.
FOURTEEN
And now I wake to desperate danger.
Unholy intruders are stumbling on HIS most precious secrets. They are violating the forbidden spaces, attempting to destroy HIS masterwork, in which HE lives, as HE must live forever.
There are urgent things to be done. Though the first clumsy desecrations have failed to end HIS eternal being, as all others in the past have failed, grave damage has been done. Graver danger still exists. I summon the clustered servants that cling to the inner shell and dispatch them to the scene. They are ready. They have rested and fed and grown fat in the flood of energy from the central source. For centuries of centuries of centuries they have been ready to protect and repair HIS everlasting body, and they are eager.
I trace the star-girdling rings for further damage and further danger. I find HIS great creation still supported by its shells of superatomic rings. No ring is broken. None must ever be, for there even HE is vulnerable.
I find no breaks. As yet the shell is safe.
The driving-mouths at the poles are safe. They continue to slow us for entrance into the new galaxy and they are ready to maneuver us when the time is here.
The billion clones are safe, in their liquid-helium baths.
I am safe, in spite of the intruders within my fabric, for they do not even know I exist.
And HE is yet safe.
I need not wake HIM yet. But soon.
Now I long for the moment of HIS awakening because my fear of him is drowned in my dutiful concern for the eternal wonder of HIS plan. HE will end all danger when HIS holy moment comes. When every mind has surrendered to HIM, even every parasite within HIS eternal being and every crawling thing in the galaxy ahead, none will remain free to profane HIS ultimate plan.
That time is near. And when it comes—
When it comes there will be no safety for anyone, anywhere, except the ultimate terminal safety of surrender to HIM.
FIFTEEN
Down below them, Cuckoo's huge weather engine was building up a great cyclonic storm. The engine ran on heat, as in every other astronomical body, but Cuckoo's heat transport came from the inside to escape into space. Cuckoo's storm had been growing for weeks, and it had its counterpart on the orbiter, a slow, vast vortex that swept beings Jen Babylon had never seen before in toward the center of the structure. That was where the huge computer farlink whispered to itself, surrounded by its banks of flat-picture screens and stereostage enclosures for holograms. In one stage the great virtual-image globe of Cuckoo itself turned slowly, most of its surface still blank or only vaguely sketched in from satellite reconnaissance; a few sections thick with detail of continents, mountains, seas. But the globe of Cuckoo was not the display the beings swarmed toward. That display came from Doc Chimp's tachyon camera, far below the surface.
The stereostage images were terribly disturbing. They were also terribly poor in quality, for the chimpanzee's hand-held camera caught only quick and fragmentary glimpses. But that was where farlink came in. Its powerful circuits selected every bit of information, assayed it for validity, weighed it for importance, assigned it a place in a greater picture. It edited, interpreted, selected, so that its algorithms extracted maximum information from the most corrupt signal. The result was displayed in the central stereostage, while details were shown flat on any of the half- hundred circling screens. What the horde of beings saw was not a moving hologram but a series of stills—but it was enough. The entire orbiter was in a flap, as the vortex drew every living thing into that single room.
There was no calm in this storm's eye. The great dome was bedlam. Shouts, screeches, roars; rataplan of Scorpian robots, neighing sobs of Canopans. Doc Chimp, tugging fretfully at the long green feather in his cap, dodged a dense cloud of Boaty-Bits and muttered to Jen Babylon, "It's feeding time at the zoo!" His shoe-button eyes were fixed woefully on the image his other self was transmitting from so far away.
Babylon nodded, his face drawn. "Smells worse than any zoo I've been in," he agreed absently, and was rewarded with a burnt-rubber smell of indignation as the T'Worlie that had hovered by his shoulder flounced away. He sighed, wincing as a Scorpian hissed past, drumming at the top of its timpani. His Pmal was overloaded; with every being trying to communicate at once its language matches were completely unable to keep up. What came to his ears was a jumble of words and phrases, and simple static.
For no one understood what was happening. That the expedition was traveling downward into the heart of Cuckoo was obvious; that they were passing through metallic tunnels, galleries, chambers was apparent. But what did it mean? Everyone—every being—had a theory. The Scorpians had discovered secret plans of the tunnel, leading to some incredible trove or treasure; the Scorpians denied it with fury. The Sheliaks were in league with the deltaforms to trigger tectonic forces and destroy Cuckoo entirely—the Sheliak nearest that theorizer nearly destroyed him in response. The Canopans accused the Sirians of having enslaved their one representative in the expedition with an illegal Purchased People unit; the Sirians screeched that the facts were right, but the enslavement had gone the other way. No species accepted responsibility. Every one vowed that its conspecific was a rogue who had been acting oddly for some time. Was there truth in any of it? There was no way to be sure—and no way, really, to discuss any of these things intelligently with the overloaded Pmals faltering in the incessant din.
And meanwhile Doc Chimp's little camera recorded a journey that went down, down, down, toward no one could guess what.
Ben Pertin sailed through the whirlwind of beings to link arms with Babylon and bring himself to a stop. Babylon glanced around warily, then whispered: "Anything new?"
Pertin shook his head angrily. The one secret they had retained was the tachyon cap; in Pertin's own chamber Zara was wearing it, trying to eavesdrop on the Purchased People in the expedition. "You can't pick out the ones you want," he complained, "and then when you do get one it doesn't tell you anything." He moodily watched the slow build-up of images on the stereostage and detail screens for a moment. "What we need," he said, "is a Watcher. They know more than we do!"
Org Rider, hanging close by in the little group of Earth primates, shook his head. "There's none on the orbiter now," he said positively. "And that one"—he frowned at the stereostage—"is insane." And indeed, the image looked very much that way; the hideous being had been captured in midflight, against a background of dull metal tunnel ceiling and walls, its horrid face screwed up in an expression of rage and fear.
Emotions were running high everywhere, Jen Babylon thought. The crowd in the room was seething with anger, resentment, fear—and other, less guessable emotions, which had no clear counterpart in the human repertory. You could not tell what the Boaty-Bits, for instance, were feeling. Angry or overjoyed, they still danced in their dense swarm like flies in the light over a swimming pool on a summer's eve. The T'Worlie alone seemed unmoved. Nothing of smaller scope than galactic could touch their ancient feelings. They did not possess either fear or resentment in any personal sense; what they wanted of life was to learn and ponder, and all the revelations of secrets and conspiracy provided for them was a set of new phenomena to study.