There followed a mad scramble along the springy softness of the transfer tube and into the space-lock of the provost-craft itself. Here, the impression of something amiss had already gained hold, and the inner door of the lock refused to open to the automatic switch. Penemue swore and applied himself to the emergency handwheel, struggling to override the insistence of the automatic mechanism that the door should remain closed. A blast of electron fire through the opening gap warned them that the two provost-men still in the ship were prepared to make a fight of it.
Wildheit finally found a way out of the dilemma. He surmised that the men who had remained within the ship would not be vacuum-suited. He turned and
with a rapid volley of gas-propelled projectiles punctured a large portion of the space-transfer tube, thus allowing air to escape not only from the tube and the lock but also from the interior of the vessel via the partly-opened lock door. Then he helped Penemue hold the violent handwheel which the automatic system tried to turn to close the door. Meanwhile, Kasdeya, with careful positioning, was sniping around the edge of the door to prevent the occupants from taking any more decisive action.
Finally the electron fire from within died away, and the trio entered to find two vacuum-asphyxiated bodies, which they dragged into the leaking space-transfer tube before closing the lock behind them. Penemue’s first concern was to restore a breathable atmosphere in the provost-craft, and fortunately there was a sufficient supply of air to enable this to be done rapidly. While this maneuver was in progress, Wildheit and Kasdeya, still vacuum-suited, had run a quick check of their prize to ensure that no more provost-men were aboard the ship. They finally reached the flight-bridge where Kasdeya was taking a wary look at a most unfamiliar control assembly.
Penemue joined them shortly. With the air pressure being rapidly restored, he was able to assist Kasdeya in understanding the controls. The umbilical cord of the space-transfer tube was jettisoned, and the provost-craft swung to new coordinates before it blasted away from the vicinity of the space station and the Chaos Weapon itself.
Unable to assist in these operations, Wildheit waited until the atmosphere was back to normal and then removed his suit. Already the engine song was rising high as the two Ra renegades at the controls pushed the pace of escape as fast as the strong engines would allow. Shortly he was able to watch the gradually illuminating screens as Kasdeya and Penemue defined navigation channels and began to bring to life the rest of the control boards. The instruments gave him
a good view of the starless junction environment and the rapidly receding Chaos Weapon.
The sight made him stop in sudden concern. Remembering the last time they had peered down the focused barrel of the weapon he had no wish to repeat the performance. Yet before their own trajectory had hardened into a course the great space assembly had been leveled and was waiting, so accurately placed that the scanners gave him a clear view straight down the concentric axis.
More than that, he could see the great filaments of unspun star-stuff twisting across the featureless firmament in prodigious loops and whirls, hurrying to be swallowed by the gigantic horn and converted into the very force from which great catastrophes were formed. Whole suns were somewhere being peeled, and their frantic energies twisted into a luminous thread that leaped ever faster into the gigantic funnel’s maw.
His unease was greatly intensified by the idea that Roamer’s hands and Roamer’s foreknowledge of Chaos probably guide the weapon’s controls. He shouted a warning to Kasdeya and Penemue, but the pair had already seen the danger for themselves and were spurring the engines of the provost-craft to even greater efforts that began to be effective about the same instant as the Chaos Weapon fired.
This time there was no doubt that the bolt from the weapon reached them. They felt a lifting sensation as it caught the ship, and their velocity received a tremendous boost that no amount of engine power could have imparted. The engine song rose to a scream as its burden was suddenly borne by other energies, which forced the rate of acceleration up to completely unprecedented levels and strained to the limit the null-G counter-force which prevented the occupants from being smashed to pulp by the conflict between inertia and their rapidly increasing velocity. Their transition through the trans-continuum barrier was nonetheless made more durable by a great wave of painful darkness which smashed
the senses from their bodies and left them unconscious and inert.
Time passed.
How much time flowed was uncertain, but when he awoke, Wildheit felt drained and empty, as if his sleep had lasted many days. He found Kasdeya on his knees, attempting to stand on legs that signaled weak uncertainty. Penemue was conscious but trying to explore critically the nature of the circumstance which had withdrawn most of the energy from his limbs. Kasdeya finally reached a cabinet and distributed soft tubes which, when crushed in the mouth, exuded a liquid like an aromatic dextrose. Something in its sugary sweetness appeared to do the trick, and they all gained sufficient energy to permit them to stand.
“What the hell happened?” Wildheit asked weakly.
Penemue grimaced slowly. “We hit the trans-continuum septum so fast we must have created some sort of warp in it—a bulge that took us right out beyond physics and back again.”
“Assuming we did get back again,” said Kasdeya. “Let’s try and find out where we are now.”
The screens were still illuminated, but they told no particular story. It was not until Kasdeya had played with the controls for some moments that he gave a sudden gasp of understanding and then dimmed them all from a state of classic overload. Then they saw a sight that was difficult to believe—a density of stars and galaxies so great that the view was even more incredible than the magnificent display Wildheit had seen aboard Kasdeya’s ship. Their light formed an absolutely continuous wall in every direction, and only the slight differences in distance, temperature, and color made any sort of interpretation of the scene possible. Here was the most fantastic, the most marvelous and the most dreadful backcloth in creation, and an appreciation of its scope, depth, and scale left their minds numb and amazed.
“The old universe, for sure,” Penemue said finally. “But somewhere near the core, I think. All these stars
are drawing in. Soon a group will start to coalesce. That will attract more, and then the sheer pressure of gravity and starlight will force all the others to join in a cascade which will grow faster the larger the core becomes. Finally all the matter in this universe will be contained in that one single mass.”
“What happens then?” asked Wildheit.
“We don’t know. We can only speculate. Certainly it will form a singularity of matter and energy so compacted that a black hole would seem like a vacuum by comparison. A sort of a stewpot of unknown physics forming the end of Creation. One surmises and hopes that ultimately comes the Big Bang and the birth of a new universe.”
“A phoenix reborn,” said Wildheit quietly. “When will all this happen?”
“There’s no way of knowing. Even the Ra couldn’t pin the time too accurately with their Chaos scans. I suppose the truth is that events on that scale take place relatively slowly when viewed against cosmic time. It could start tomorrow and last for a million years, yet such is the balance of forces that the thing which triggers it off could be something so small and slight as to be cosmically imperceptible—an atom, or a starquake …”
“… or a man?” asked Wildheit.
“Yes, I think perhaps a man,” said Penemue. He was following the direction of Wildheit’s attention—the corner of a table’s edge. That edge no longer had a sharp appearance, but was fringed with a minute halo, as if the light path was being partially diffracted by an imperceptible fog.
“Roamer!” said Wildheit heavily. “We might have guessed! Somehow she got me here—the trigger man in the center of the greatest conceivable potential catastrophe. And we’re still lined up under the crossed-hairs of the Chaos Weapon. Here’s all the power their Chaos tests predicted—millions upon millions of suns and galaxies waiting for the trigger to signal the end of the universe in the most unequivocal way.”
“But it’s the
Ra’s own weapon,” objected Kasdeya. “They wouldn’t let her do that with it.”
“How could they know what she was doing. She’s promised to help them destroy the marshal, and they’ve programmed the weapon to make just that happen. The marshal’s great disaster is due, but their own is too diffuse to fix with certainty. Only Roamer could see that the two disasters were one and the same event.”
“And the time paradox?” asked Kasdeya.
“There is none, except that the marshal is at the center of the event, and they are spread far from it. Under gravitational attraction, the movement of these stars is going to be limited to the velocity of light. Just how many centuries do you think its going to take for all of them to reach the singularity?”
“Then,” said Kasdeya, “it appears that Saraya’s catalyst is about to fulfill its function.”
Although the build-up was slow, there was no doubting the great stress which was winding the continuum. As the hours passed, so the haloed fringes began to appear on every line and surface in the ship. Articles acquired a slippery sensation that gave the impression that everything was covered with a layer of slime. Small objects unaccountably slipped out of spring fixtures and slid out of grooves in which they had previously been safely maintained. Later, the loss of static friction became even more marked; heavy objects began to move down even the slightest incline in the surfaces on which they rested; and the deck had all the retentive security of a sheet of polished ice.
On Wildheit’s shoulder, Coul began to quiver, and the marshal went to a lower deck where they could speak unobserved.
“How much longer, Coul, before you leave?”
“Not very long. But I shall stay with you until the last second.” The symbiotic god sounded grave. “We gods are much troubled. My leaving will be a betrayal of the life-bond we formed between us. I wish there was another way.”
“I don’t see
it as a betrayal,” said Wildheit. “Even gods are not infallible. It’s better that one of us survives than neither.”
“If the situation were reversed—if you were a god and I a human—would you leave me?”
“There’s no answer to that question. My present thinking is colored by human emotions I would not possess if I were a god.”
“Then you would not leave. For that I thank you. I’m in communion with Talloth. Do you wish to speak with Marshal Hover?”
“If that can be arranged.”
“Then breathe …”
“Jym, for Heaven’s sake!” Hover’s voice was immediate and concerned. “Where are you and what the devil are you doing now?”
“How long since we spoke last time, Cass?”
“All of twelve months.”
“Not according to my book. About three weeks is all. The chance to pick up all that back pay would be a fine thing.”
“Quit fooling! We’ve got a war on. Did you manage to fix the Chaos Weapon?”
“No, but it’s got a fix on me, right now. And if it’s any consolation, I’m programmed to take the Ra universe with me when I go. How’s that for a finale?”
“Honestly, Jym! I’m supposed to write a report on all this!”
“If you can spell Big Bang you haven’t got a problem. Tell Saraya it’s just about to begin. It’s the best—and the last—thing I shall be able to do for you. Did many of their ships get through?”
“Plenty too many. Fortunately some of them tangled with the aliens round the Rim and took a pasting, which saved us having to fight them ourselves. Their main fleet, however, came in from deep-space, and we went out to intercept. But after a short and very wild engagement, they quite literally disappeared.”
“They did what?”
“They disappeared. They wound
up their speed like crazy and jumped clean out of space.”
“Oh no!”
“What’s funny about that?”
“They have standard subspace capability, Cass, but when they really want out, they’ve a tendency to go where you wouldn’t want to follow—into time-dilation. The chances are that units of that fleet are spread right over the next ten centuries, waiting for a supply backup which isn’t going to show up.”
“Jym, it’s becoming a good job you do only report in once a year or so, because you invariably leave me greatly confused. I’ve only just come to understand your last communication.”
“Never mind. Saraya will get the point. In hours, or days at the most, the Ra universe will start to end. That’s the Chaos resultant Saraya foresaw, and what his catalyst was designed to achieve. I only wish I could be around for the celebrations, but there’s one thing about a catalyst I’ve only just come to appreciate.”
“What’s that?”
“To be effective, Cass, you have to be right at the heart of the reaction.”
Vision even of gross details was now becoming blurred, and the friction between his shoes and the floor had become less than that of wet ice on wet ice. The ascent back to the upper levels of the craft was a nightmare journey, because it was impossible to grasp anything that did not slip through the fingers. Only by crooking his wrist and arms around stanchions and fittings could he gain sufficient purchase to make any progress at all.
Kasdeya and Penemue were sitting on the floor, having tired of slipping off the control seats, and they were resignedly watching screws, bolts, and fixtures unfix themselves and drop in a continuous rain of small parts that soon, they feared, would be followed by larger structures. It was obviously only a matter of time before something vital came apart in the ship’s
engines or power plant which would destroy the vessel entirely. That this blow-up would itself initiate the destruction of the universe seemed unlikely, and Wildheit found himself waiting for the one final shock to the continuum which would trigger the greatest catastrophe of all.
By some trick of inspired acrobatics, Wildheit managed to depolarize the dome above the flight-bridge to such an extent that the great unbroken wall of stars shone brilliantly down on them as they lay slithering on their backs among errant bolts, washers, and springs. All the nearer, more easily-delineated stars seemed to have acquired their own stress-haloes, as if whatever forces gripped the ship also fanned far and wide beyond. If the same interference with natural forces continued down to the molecular scale and up to the stellar, then whole suns would soon become unknit and verify Penemue’s prediction of a vast coalescence to form the nucleus of the death of a universe.