The Black Hole (28 page)

Everyone aboard had reacted to the sudden, unprogrammed increase in velocity. Holland frantically began examining the instrumentation, trying to recall the phase-sequence of twenty-year-old circuitry. Nothing slowed the ship's acceleration nor altered its course.

"I don't understand." His muscles were tight with tension, and a little fear. Even with the null-
g
operating, they could sense an occasional tremor running through the ship as increasing gravity tugged at it.

"The field's working as it should. But none of the other controls are responding." His hands weaved futile patterns over the instruments.

"It's no good. I can't turn her."

"There's no question about it, Captain." Vincent had settled back from the console and his own efforts to influence their course. "The ship has been preprogrammed. I don't have the necessary information to override. Only two individuals might."

"Reinhardt and Maximillian." McCrae was surprised at how fast she had resigned herself to the inevitable. At least the end should be quick.

"We're locked in, then?" Pizer leaned back in his chair.

Holland nodded agreement. "Navigation is sealed. Probably in case the pilot is incapacitated, to hold the ship on course. Reinhardt was determined to make his journey, even if unconscious."

"So we're going into the black hole after all, in spite of everything."

Holland glanced over at his first officer, his friend. "Check."

Now that their destination was unavoidable, McCrae found herself speaking quite calmly. "Let's pray that he was the prophet he claimed to be."

Holland looked at her, his expression conveying a multitude of emotions it was too late to put into words. At that point, words would have been inadequate anyway.

"He who hesitates gathers no moss, and a rolling stone is lost." Vincent had moved to the back of the cockpit. The thought of being abruptly reduced to the size of a subatomic particle was one he could comprehend better than any of them. It frightened him.

Pizer patted his side comfortingly.

Holland watched the instruments. There were many he recognized and a fair number he did not. Several were evidently designed to monitor events beyond mere human perception. The probe continued to accelerate.

Ahead of them a blackness was eating the sky.

Vincent extended his arms, braced himself against the sides of the cockpit. Holland continued to gaze at McCrae and she gazed back, both sorrowing for what might have been. Pizer watched them both as the ship began to rotate, ignoring the advice of her outraged stabilizing systems.

Something was squeezing Holland's guts, pressing down on his head and up at his feet.

A readout on the console was marked in increments of several thousands. It had by now crawled patiently halfway up its length. Abruptly, simultaneous with the fading of light inside the probe, it flicked upward and vanished. Much else disappeared with it. Light, time, a sense of being alive, the efficacy of existence. A thought tickled Holland's brain, and a thousand years passed on Earth.

He was dimly aware that they must have crossed the event horizon. The line where things vanished forever—time and space together. He considered the rhyme. Then he considered something else.

He should not have been able to consider his considering.

Something else impossible was happening. Light. Light should not happen within the confines of a collapsar. Matter should not happen either. Perhaps he was no longer matter. Was pure thought affected by gravity? Did he still possess a body? He thought he was looking down at himself, but there no longer seemed to be anything there. Only darkness and quiet and peace. He was alone, adrift in an irrational dimension.

Then he imagined there were other thoughts curling and entwining among his own, though he could not immediately identify them. Kate? Charlie? Vincent? They remained infinitely distant, tantalizingly near. Only the light ahead grew clearer. He imagined it had to be ahead. His speculations turned to the possible existence of white holes, knife wounds into other universes. He wondered if Reinhardt could sense him.

Then there was something familiar again, recognizable, warm.
Come to me
, it was saying.
Come to me, Dan. It's the only way
.

Kate! And she responded.
You must join with me, Dan. And you, Charlie. And Vincent . . . if you can, Vincent. Only thoughts have a chance inside here. Physical materialities will be crushed down to nothing, but thought . . . the essences of ourselves . . . I think we have a chance . . . that way
.

Holland could feel something warm and all-encompassing reaching out to envelop him. The fragmentation of himself that had begun halted. He remained He.

It's working . . .
came the powerful thought.
It's the esplink—my thought projection ability—it will keep us together . . . if we fight for it!

They blended, flowed together, thought itself strained beyond its normal borders under the unimaginable force of the collapsar. Then they were through . . . and amazingly, still whole. Kate was Kate; Charlie, Charlie, and Dan Holland still Dan Holland. Even Vincent was there. They were themselves . . . and yet something strange and new, a galactic sea change that produced all the above and a new unified mindthing that was KateCharlieDanVincent also.

Dimly they/it perceived the final annihilation of a minuscule agglutination of refined masses—the
Palomino
. It was gone, lost in an infinite brightness. They/it remained, content and infinite now as the white hole itself.

They had been compressed, compacted, but had passed beyond and through with their selves still intact. With the passage came peace, and time to contemplate.

On a beach was a grain of sand. The sand was part of a continent, the continent a component of a world, the world a speck of substance in the sea of infinity. They were part of that world, part of every world, for in passing out the white hole their substance had become dispersed. An atom of Charlie to a nine-world system, a molecule of Kate to a local cluster of stars, a tiny diffuse section of Holland spread thin over a dozen galaxies.

Yet they could still think, for thought does not respect the trifling limitations of time and space. They were still them and this new thing they had become.

Their thoughts spanned infinity, as did their finely spread substance, and they now had an eternity in which to contemplate the universe they had become . . .