"I know," Estelle said gently. "It isn't that. I wish you hadn't asked; it would have been simpler that way."
"It would have occurred to me sooner or later. Ordinarily I would have gone off the pills right away, but there was so much confusion about moving to He-anyhow I only just realized you were still on them. I wish you'd tell me why."
"Web, my dear, you'd know why if you thought a little more about it. The end is the end, that's all. What would be the sense of having a child that would live only a year or two?"
"It may not be that certain," Web said darkly.
"Of course it's certain. Actually I think I've known it was coming ever since I was born-perhaps even before I was born. I could feel it coming."
"Honestly, Estelle, don't you know that's nonsense?"
"I can see why it would sound that way," Estelle admitted. "But I can't help that. And since the end is on the way, I can't call it nonsense, can I? I had the premonition, and it was right."
"I think what this all means is that you don't want children."
"That's true," Estelle said, surprisingly. "I never have had any drive toward children-not even much drive toward my own survival, really. But that's all part of the same thing. In a way, I was lucky; a lot of people are not at home in their own times. I was born in the time that was right for me-the time of the end of the world. That's why I'm not oriented toward child-bearing-because I know that there won't be another generation after yours and mine. For all I know, I might even actually be sterile; it certainly wouldn't surprise me."
"Estelle, don't. I can't listen to you talk like that."
"I'm sorry, love. I don't mean to distress you. It doesn't distress me, but I know the reason for that. I'm pointed toward the end-in a way it's the ultimate, natural outcome of my life, the event that gives it all meaning; but you're only being overtaken by it, like most people."
"I don't know," Web muttered. "It all sounds awfully like a rationalization Jo me. Estelle, you're so beautiful .. . doesn't that mean anything? Aren't you beautiful to attract a man, so you can have a child? That's the way I've always understood it."
"It might have been for that once," Estelle said gravely. "It sounds like it ought to be an axiom, anyway. Well ... I wouldn't say so to anybody but you, Web, but I do know I'm beautiful. Most women would tell you the same thing about themselves, if it were permissible-it's a state of mind, one that's essential to a woman, she's only half a woman if she doesn't think she's beautiful ... and she is beautiful if she doesn't think she is, no matter what she looks like. I'm not ashamed of being beautiful and I'm not embarrassed by it, but I don't pay it much attention any more, either. It's a means to an end, just as you say-and the end has outlived its usefulness. In my mind, it's obvious that a woman who would commit a year-old child to the flames would have to be a fiend, if she knew that that's what she'd be doing just by giving birth. I know; and I can't do it."
"Women have taken Chances like that before, and knowingly, too," Web said stubbornly. "Peasants who knew their children would starve, because the parents were starving already. Or women in the age just before spaceflight; Dr. Bonner says that for five years there, the race stood within twenty minutes of extinction. But they went ahead and had the children anyhow-otherwise we wouldn't be here."
"It's an urge," Estelle said quietly, "that I don't have, Web. And this time, there's no escape."
"You keep saying that, but I'm not even sure you're right. Amalfi says that there's a chance"
"I know," Estelle said. "I did some of the calculations. But it's not that kind of a chance, my dear. It's something you might be able to do, or I, because we're old enough to absorb instructions, and do just the right thing at the right time. A baby couldn't do that. It would be like setting him adrift in a spaceship, with plenty of power and plenty of food—"he'd die anyhow, and you couldn't tell him how to prevent it. It's so complex that some of us surely will make fatal mistakes."
He was silent.
"Besides," Estelle added gently, "even for us it won't be for long. We'll die too. It's only that we'll have a chance to influence the moment of creation that's implicit in the moment of destruction. That, if I make it at all, will be my child, Web-the only one worth having now."
"But it won't be mine."
"No, love. You'll have your own."
"No, no, Estelle! What good is that? I want mine to be yours too!"
She put her arms around his shoulders and leaned her cheek against his.
"I know," she whispered. "I know. But the time for that is over. That's the fate we were formed for, Web. The gift of children was taken away from us. Instead of babies, we were given universes."
"It's not enough," Web said. He embraced her fiercely. "Not by half. Nobody consulted me when that contract was being drawn."
"Did you ask to be born, love?"
"Well ... no. But I don't mind. . . . Oh. That's how it is."
"Yes, that's how it is. He can't consult with us either. So it's up to us. No child of mine born to go into the flames, Web; no child of mine and yours."
"No," Web said hollowly. "You're right, it wouldn't be fair. All right, Estelle. I'll settle for another year of you. I don't think I want a universe."
Deceleration began late in January of 4104. From here on out, the flight of He would be tentative, despite the increasing urgency; for the metagalactic center was as featureless as the rest of intergalactic space, and only extreme care and the most complex instrumentation would tell the voyagers when they had arrived. For the purpose, the Hevians had much elaborated their control bridge, which was located on a 300-foot steel basketwork tower atop the highest mountain the planet afforded-called, to Amalfi's embarrassment, Mt. Amalfi. Here the Survivors- as they had begun to call themselves with a kind of desperate jocularity-met in almost continuous session.
The Survivors consisted simply of everyone on the planet whom Schloss and Retma jointly agreed capable of following the instructions for the ultimate instant with even the slightest chance of success. Schloss and Retma had been hard-headed; it was not a large group. It included all of the New Earthmen, though Schloss had been dubious about both Dee and Web, and a group of ten Hevians including Miramon and Retma himself. Oddly, as the time grew closer, the Hevians began to drop out, apparently each as soon as he had fully understood what was being attempted and what the outcome might be.
"Why do they do that?" Amalfi asked Miramon. "Don't your people have any survival urge at all?"
"I am not surprised," Miramon said. "They live by stable values. They would rather die with them than survive without them. Certainly they have the survival urge, but it expresses itself differently than yours does, Mayor Amalfi. What they want to see survive are the things they think valuable about living at all-and this project presents them with very few of those."
"Then what about you, and Retma?"
"Retma is a scientist; that is perhaps sufficient explanation. As for me, Mayor Amalfi, as you very well know, I am an anachronism. I no more share the major value system of He than you do of New Earth."
Amalfi was answered, and he was sorry that he had asked.
"How close do you think we are?" he said.
"Very close now," Schloss answered from the control desk. Outside the huge windows, which completely encircled the room, there was still little to be seen but the all-consuming and perpetual night. If one had sharp eyes and stood outside for half an hour or so to become dark-adapted, it was possible to see as many as five galaxies of varying degrees of faintness, for this near the center the galaxy density was higher than it was anywhere else in the universe; but to the ordinary quick glance the skies appeared devoid of as much as a single pinprick of light.
"The readings are falling off steadily," Retma agreed. "And there is something else odd: locally we are getting too much power on everything. We have been throttling down steadily for the past week, and still the output rises-exponentially, in fact. I hope that the curve does not maintain that shape all the way, or we shall simply be unable to handle our own machines when we reach our destination."
"What's the reason for that?" Hazleton said. "Has Conservation of Energy been repealed at the center?"
"I doubt it," Retma said. "I think the curve will flatten at the crest—"
"A Pearl curve," Schloss put in. "We ought to have anticipated this. Naturally anything that happens at the center will work with much more efficiency than it could anywhere else, since the center is stress free. The curve will begin to flatten as the performance of our machines begins to approximate the abstractions of physics-the ideal gas, the frictionless surface, the perfectly empty vacuum and so on. All my life I've been taught not to believe in the actual existence of any of those ideals, but I guess I'm going to get at least a fuzzy glimpse of them!"
"Including the gravity-free metrical frame?" Amalfi said worriedly. "We'll be in a nice mess if the spindizzies have nothing to latch onto."
"No, it cannot possibly be gravity-free," Retma said. "It will be gravitationally neutral-again making for unprecedented efficiency-but only because all the stresses are balanced. There cannot be any point in the universe that is gravitationally unstressed, not so long as a scrap of matter is left in it."
"Suppose the spindizzies did quit," Estelle said. "We're not going anywhere after the center anyhow."
"No," Amalfi agreed, "but I'd like to maintain my maneuverability until we see what our competitors are doing-if anything. Any sign of them, Retma?"
"Nothing yet. Unfortunately we don't know exactly what it is that we are looking for. But at least there are no other dirigible masses like ours anywhere in this vicinity; in fact, no patterned activity at all that we can detect."
"Then we're ahead of them?"
"Not necessarily," Schloss said. "If they're at the center right now, they could be doing a good many things we couldn't detect, under a very low screen. However, they would already have detected us and done something about us if that were the case. Let's assume we're ahead until the instruments say otherwise; I think that's a fairly safe assumption."
"How much longer to the center?" Hazleton said. "A few months, perhaps," Retma said. "If we're right in assuming that this curve has a flat spot on top of it."
"And the necessary machinery?"
"The last installation will be hi at the end of this week," Amalfi said. "We can begin countdown the moment we arrive ... providing that we can learn to handle equipment operating at ten or a hundred times its rated efficiency, without blowing some of it out in the process. We'd better start practicing the moment the system is complete."
"Amen," Hazleton said fervently. "Can I borrow your slide-rule? I've got a few setting-up exercises I'd better start on right now." He left the room. Amalfi looked uneasily out at the night. He would almost have preferred it had the Web of Hercules been there ahead of them and promptly taken a sitting-duck shot at them; this uncertainty as to whether or not someone really was lurking out there-coupled with the totally unknown nature of their opponents-was more unsettling than open battle. However, there was no help for it; and if He really was first, it gave them a sizable advantage. ...
And their only advantage. The only defenses Amalfi had been able to conceive and jury-rig for He depended importantly on actually being at the metagalactic center, able to make use of the almost instant number of weak resultant forces that could be used there to produce major responses-the buttercup-vs.-Sirius effect Bonner had so characterized. In this area he found Miramon and the Hevian council oddly uncooperative, even flaccid, as though mounting a defense for the whole planet was too big a concept for them to grasp-a hard thing to believe in view of the prodigious concepts they had mastered and put to work since Amalfi had first met them as savages up to their knees in mud and violence. Well, if he did not yet understand them, he was not going to make his understanding perfect in a few months; and at least Miramon was perfectly willing to let Amalfi and Hazleton direct Hevian labor in putting together their almost wholly theoretical breadboard rigs.
"Some of these," Hazleton had said, looking at a just-completed tangle of wires, lenses, antennae and kernels of metal with rueful respect, "ought to prove pretty potent in the pinch. I just wish I knew which ones they were." Which, unfortunately, was a perfect precis of the situation.
But the needles recording the stresses and currents of space around He continued to fall; those recording the output of Hevian equipment continued to rise. On May 23rd 4104, both sets of meters rose suddenly to their high ends and jammed madly against the pegs, and the whole planet rang suddenly with the awful, tortured roar of spindizzies driven beyond endurance. Miramon's hand flashed out for the manual master switch so fast that Amalfi could not tell whether it had been he or the City Fathers that cut the power. Maybe even Miramon did not know; at least he must have gotten to the cut off button within a hair of the automatic reaction.
The howl died. Silence. The Survivors looked at each other. "
"Well," Amalfi said, "we're here, evidently." For some reason, he felt wildly elated-a wholly irrational reaction, but he did not stop to analyze it.