The gathering was seated, safety-harnessed into chairs whose legbolts had been secured at the proper places to the gym deck. Anything else would have been dangerous. Not that weightlessness prevailed yet. Between the tau which atoms now had with respect to Leonora Christine, and the compression of lengths in her own measurement because of that tau, and the dwindling radius of the cosmos itself, her ram jets drove her at a goodly fraction of one gee across the outermost deeps of interclan space. But oftener and oftener came spurts of higher acceleration as she passed through galaxies. They were too fast for the interior fields to compensate. They felt like the buffeting of waves; and each time the noise that sang in the hull was more shrill and windy.
Four dozen bodies hurled against each other could have meant broken bones or worse. But two people, trained and alert, could keep their feet with the help of a handrail. And it was needful that they do so. In this hour, folk must have before their gaze a man and a woman who stood together unbowed.
Ingrid Lindgren completed her relation. "—that is what is happening. We will not be able to stop before the death of the universe."
The muteness into which she had spoken seemed to deepen. A few women wept, a few men shaped oaths or prayers, but none was above a whisper. In the front row, Captain Telander bent his head and closed his eyes. The ship lurched in another squall. Sound passed by, throbbing, groaning, whistling.
Lindgren's hand briefly clasped Reymont's. "Now the constable has something to tell you," she said.
He trod a little forward. Sunken and bloodshot, his eyes appeared to regard them in ferocity. His tunic was wolf-gray, and besides his badge he wore his gun, the ultimate emblem. He said, quietly but with none of the mate's compassion:
"I know you think this is the end. We've tried and failed, and you think you should be left alone to make your peace with yourselves or your God. Well, I don't say you shouldn't do that. I have no idea what is going to happen to us. I don't believe anyone can predict any more. Nature is becoming too alien to our whole past experience of it. In honesty, I agree that our chances do look extremely poor.
"But I don't think they are zero, either. I think we have a duty—to the race that begot us, to the children we might yet bring forth ourselves—a duty to keep trying, right to the finish. For most of you, that won't involve more than continuing to live, continuing to stay sane. I'm well aware that that could be as hard a task as human beings ever undertook. The crew and the scientists who have relevant specialties will, in addition, have to carry on the work of the ship. Which may turn out to be pretty difficult.
"So make your peace. Interior peace. That's the only kind which ever existed anyway. The exterior fight goes on. I propose we wage it with no thought of surrender."
His words rang aloud: "I propose we go on to the next cycle of the cosmos."
That snatched them to alertness. Above a collective gasp and inarticulate cries, a few stridencies could be made out: "No! Lunacy!"—"Good man!"—"Impossible!"—"Blasphemy!"
Reymont drew his gun and fired. The shot shocked them into abrupt quiet.
He grinned into their faces. "Blank cartridge," he said. "Better than a gavel. We'll discuss this in orderly fashion. Captain Telander, will you preside?"
"No," said the Old Man faintly. "You. Please."
"Very well. Comments . . . ah, probably Navigator Boudreau should speak first."
The officer said, in an almost indignant voice: "The universe took somewhere between fifty and a hundred billion years to complete its expansion. It won't collapse in less time. Do you seriously believe we can acquire such a tau that we will outlive the cycle?"
"We can try," Reymont said. The ship trembled and bellied. "We gained a few more per cent right there. As matter gets denser, we naturally accelerate faster. Space itself is being pulled into a tighter and tighter curve. We couldn't circumnavigate the universe before, because it didn't last that long, in the form we knew it. But we should be able to circle the shrinking universe again and again. I'm no expert on theoretical cosmology, but I did check with Professor Chidambaran who knows more about the subject than anyone else aboard, and he agrees. Would you like to explain, sir?"
"Yes," the Indian said, rising. "Time as well as space must be taken into account. The characteristics of the whole continuum will change quite radically. In effect, our present exponential decrease of the tau factor in ship's time should itself increase to a much higher order." He paused. "At a rough estimate, I would say that the time we experience, from now to the ultimate collapse, will be less than three months."
Into the hush that followed, he added, "However, as I told Constable Reymont when he requested me to make this calculation, I do not see how we can survive. Apparently the theory of an oscillating universe is correct. It will be reborn. But first all matter and energy will be collected in a monobloc of ultimate density and temperature. We might pass through a star, at our present velocity, and be unharmed. But we can scarcely pass through the primordial nucleon. My personal suggestion is that we cultivate serenity." He sat down.
"Not a bad idea," Reymont said. "But I don't think that's the sole thing we should do. We should keep flying also. Bear in mind, nobody knows for sure what's going to happen. My guess is that everything will not get squeezed into a single zero-point Something. That's the kind of oversimplification which helps our math along but never does tell a whole story. I think the central core of mass is bound to have an enormous hydrogen envelope, even before the explosion. The outer parts of that envelope may not be too hot, or radiant, or dense for us. Space will be so small, though, that we can circle around and around the monobloc as a kind of satellite. When it blows up and space starts to expand again, we'll naturally spiral out ourselves. I know this is a very sloppy way of phrasing, but it hints at what we can perhaps do . . . Mr. Williams?"
"I never thought of myself as a religious man," the chemist said. It was odd and disturbing to see him so humbled. "But this is too much. We're—well, what are we? Animals. My God—very literally, my God—we can't go on . . . having regular bowel movements . . . while creation happens!"
Beside him, Emma Glassgold looked startled, then angry. Her hand shot aloft.
"Speaking as a believer myself," she said, "I must say that that is sheer nonsense. I'm sorry, Norbert, dear, but it is. God made us the way He wanted us to be. There's nothing shameful about any part of His handiwork. I would like to watch Him fashion new stars and praise Him, as long as He sees fit that I should."
"Good for you!" Ingrid Lindgren called.
"I might add," Reymont said, "I being a man with no poetry in his soul, and I suspect no soul to keep poetry in . . . I might suggest you people look into yourselves and ask what psychological twists make you so unwilling to live through the moment where time begins again. Isn't there, down inside, some identification with—your parents, maybe? You shouldn't see your parents in bed, therefore you shouldn't see a new cosmos begotten. Now that doesn't make sense." He paused. "Of course, what's about to happen is awesome. But so was everything. Always. I never thought stars were more mysterious, or had more magic, than flowers."
Others wanted to talk. Eventually, everyone did. But their sentences threshed wearily around and around the point. It was not to no purpose. They had to unburden themselves. But by the time they could finally adjourn the meeting, Reymont and Lindgren were near a collapse of their own.
They did seize a moment's low-speaking privacy, as the people broke into small groups and the ship roared with the hollow noise of her passage. "I can't move in with you tonight after all," Reymont said. "We'd have to help move personal gear, not to mention explaining to our cabin partners, and I'm so tired I can't. Tomorrow."
"No, not then, either," Ingrid Lindgren answered. "I'm sorry, but I've changed my mind."
Stricken, he exclaimed: "You don't want to?"
"You'll never know how much I want to, darling. But can we risk it? The emotional balance is so fragile. Anything might let chaos loose
in anyone of us. Suppose Elof or Ai-ling took it hard that we left . . . left now, when death is so near. The despair, maybe the suicide of a single person could bring the whole ship down in hysteria." She gripped both his hands. "Afterward, of course. When we're safe. I'll never let you go then."
"We may never be safe," he said. "Chances are we won't. I want you back before we die."
"And I want you. But we can't. We mustn't. They depend on you. Absolutely. You're the only man who can lead us through what lies ahead. You've given me enough strength that I can help you a little. But even so . . . Carl, it was never easy to be a king."
She wheeled and walked quickly from him.
XIV
Leonora Christine shouted, shuddered, and leaped.
Space flamed around her, a firestorm, hydrogen kindled to fluorescence by that supernal sun which was forming at the heart of existence, which burned brighter and brighter as the galaxies rained down into it. The gas hid the central travail behind sheets, banners and spears of radiance, aurora, flame, lightning. Forces, unmeasurably vast, tore through and through the atmosphere: electric, magnetic, gravitational, nuclear fields; shock waves bursting across megaparsecs; tides and currents and cataracts. On the fringes of creation, through billion-year cycles which passed as moments, the ship of man flew.
Flew.
There was no other word. As far as humanity was concerned, or the most swiftly computing and reacting of machines, she fought a hurricane—but such a hurricane as had not been known since last the stars were melted together and hammered afresh.
"Yah-h-h!" screamed Aeropilot Lenkei, and rode the ship down the trough of a wave whose crest shook loose a foam of supernovae. The haggard men on the steering bridge with him stared into the screen that had been built. What raged in it was not reality—present reality transcended any picturing or understanding—but a representation of exterior forcefields. It burned and roiled and spewed great sparks and globes. It bellowed in the metal of the ship, in flesh and skulls.
"Can't you stand any more?" Reymont shouted from his own seat. "Barrios, relieve him."
The other flyboat man shook his head. He was too stunned, too beaten by the hour of his own previous watch.
"Okay." Reymont unharnessed himself. "I'll try. I've handled a lot of different types of craft." No one heard him through the fury around, but all saw him fight across the pitching, whirling deck, against two full gravities. He took the auxiliary control chair, on the opposite side of Lenkei from Barrios, and laid his mouth close to the pilot's ear. "Phase me in."
Barrios nodded. Together their hands moved across the control board.
They must hold Leonora Christine well away from the growing monobloc, whose radiation would surely kill them; at the same time, they must stay where the gas was so dense that tau could continue to decrease for them, turning these final phoenix begayears into hours; and they must keep the ship riding safely through a chaos that, did it ever strike her full on, would rip her into nuclear particles. No computers, no instruments, no precedents might guide them. It must be done on instinct and trained reflex.
Slowly, Reymont entered the pattern, until he could steer alone. The rhythms of rebirth were wild, but they were there. Ease on starboard . . . vector at nine o'clock low . . . now push that thrust! . . . brake a little here . . . don't let her broach . . . swing wide of the flame if you can . . . Thunder brawled. The air was sharp with ozone, and cold.
The screen blanked. An instant later, every fluoropanel in the ship turned simultaneously ultraviolet and infrared, and darkness plunged down. Those who lay harnessed in aloneness, throughout the hull, heard invisible lightnings walk down the corridors. Those on command bridge, pilot bridge, engine room, who manned the ship, felt a heaviness greater than planets—they could not move, nor stop a movement once begun—and then felt a lightness such that their bodies began to break asunder—and this was a change in inertia itself, in every constant of nature as space-time-matter-energy underwent its ultimate convulsion—for a moment infinitesimal and infinite, men, women, ship and death were one.
It passed, so swiftly that they were not certain it had ever been. Light came back and outside vision. The storm grew fiercer. But now through it, seen distorted so that they appeared to be blue-white firedrops that broke into sparks as they flew, now came nascent galaxies.
The monobloc had exploded. Creation had begun.
Reymont went over to deceleration. Leonora Christine started slowly to slow; and she flew out into a reborn light.
XV
Boudreau and Nilsson nodded at each other. They chuckled. "Yes, indeed," the astronomer said.
Reymont looked restlessly around the clutter of meters and apparatus which was the observatory. "Yes, what?" he demanded. He jerked one thumb at a screen which offered a visual display. Space swarmed with little dancing incandescences. "I can see for myself. The galaxies are still close together. Most of them are still nothing but clouds of hydrogen. And hydrogen is still quite thick between them. But what of it?"
"Computation on the basis of data," Nilsson said mysteriously. "We felt you deserved, as well as needed, to hear in confidence, so that you might be the one who makes the announcement."
"Well?"
"Never mind details," Boudreau said. "This result came out of the problem you set us, to find which directions the matter was headed in, and which directions the antimatter. You recall, we were able to do this by tracing the paths of plasma masses through the magnetic fields of the universe as a whole. And so this vessel is safely into the matter half of the plenum.
"Now in the course of making those studies, we collected and processed an astonishing amount of data. And here is what else we have learned. The cosmos is new, in some respects disordered. Things have not yet sorted themselves out. Within a short range of us, as such distances go, are material complexes—galaxies and proto-galaxies—with every possible velocity.
"We can use that fact to our advantage. That is, we can pick whatever clan, family, individual galaxy we want to make our goal—pick in such a way that we can arrive with zero relative speed at any point of its development that we choose. Within fairly wide limits, anyhow. We couldn't get to a galaxy which is more than about ten billion years old by the time we arrived; not unless we wanted to approach it circuitously. Nor can we overhaul any before it is about one billion years old. But otherwise, we can choose what we like.
"And . . . whatever we elect, the maximum shipboard time required to arrive, braked, will be no longer than a few weeks!"
Reymont said an amazed obscenity.
"You see," Nilsson added, "we can select a galaxy whose velocity is almost identical with ours."
"Oh, yes," Reymont muttered. "I can see that much. But I'm not used to having luck in our favor."
"Not luck," Nilsson said. "Given an oscillating universe, this development was inevitable. Or so we perceive by hindsight. We need merely use the fact.
"Best you decide on our goal," he urged. "Now. Those other idiots, they would wrangle for hours, if you put it to a vote. And every hour means untold cosmic time lost, which narrows our choices. If you will tell us what you want, we'll plot an appropriate course, and the ship can start off very shortly with that vector. The expedition will accept any fait accompli you hand them, and thank you for it. You know that."
Reymont ran a hand through his hair. It was quite gray, and his tone was always flat with weariness. "What we want is a suitable planet," he said.
"Yes," Nilsson agreed. "May I suggest a planet—a system—of the same approximate age as Earth had? Say, four or five billion years? It seems to take about so long for a fair probability of the kind of biosphere we like having evolved. That is, we could live in a Mesozoic type of environment, I suppose, but we would rather not."
"Seems reasonable," Reymont nodded. "How about metals, though?"
"Ah, yes. We want a planet as rich in heavy elements as Earth was. Not too much less, or an industrialized civilization will be hard t
o establish. Not too much more, or we could find numerous areas where the soil is metal-poisoned. Since higher elements are formed in the earlier generations of stars, we should look for a galaxy that will be as old, at rendezvous, as ours was."
"No," Reymont said. "Younger."
"Eh?" Boudreau blinked.
"We can probably find a planet like Earth, also with respect to metals, in a young galaxy," Reymont said. "A globular cluster ought to have had plenty of supernovae in its early stages, which ought to have enriched the interstellar medium, so that G-type suns forming later would have about the same composition as Sol. As we enter our target galaxy, let's scout for such a cluster.
"But supposing we end up on a planet less well endowed with iron and uranium than Earth was . . . that won't matter. We have the technology to make do with light alloys and organics. We have hydrogen fusion for power.
"The important thing is that we be just about the first intelligent race alive."
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