Orbitsville Departure

Chapter 17

.The onset of weightlessness, gradual though it was, brought problems for Da lien.

In the early stages Cona had enjoyed her growing gymnastic ability, and had come dangerously close to hurting herself or Mikel during exuberant and ill-coordinated frolicking about the cabin. Then, as the Hawkshead’ s main drive neared total shutdown, the feeling of unnatural lightness progressed to become an outright falling sensation, and Cona's pleasure turned to fear. She clung to the frame of her bed, white-faced and whimpering, but resisted his efforts to secure her with the zero-G webbing. Mikel was more manageable, allowing himself to be tethered to his cot, and seemed less concerned with himself than with his toys' new tendency to float away in the air.

Dallen was retrieving a favourite model truck for him when a single chime from the communications panel signalled that the ship was entering the state of free fall. An uneasy lifting sensation in Dallen's stomach was accompanied by the sound of Cona retching.

Cursing himself for not having been prepared, he twisted towards her just in time to be caught in the skeins of yellowish fluid which had issued from her mouth. The acid smell of bile filled the cabin at once and Mikel began to sob.

Fighting to keep the heaving of his own stomach in check, Dallen drew a suction cleaner pipe out of the wall and used it to hunt down every slow-drifting globule. It took him another five minutes to clean himself and change his clothes, by which time his thoughts were turning away from his domestic troubles and towards truly macroscopic issues. As soon as the flickerwing drive had been deactivated the Hawkshead would have been able to enter radio contact with Orbitsville and request some kind of official explanation for what had happened to the shell. Presumably Captain Lessen already had the information, but — disturbingly — there had been no general announcement.

As one who had been born on Orbitsville, Dallen was anxious for that explanation. For him the sight of the inconceivable expanse of green fire, like a boundless ocean alive with noctilucence, had been the emotional equivalent of a severe earthquake. He had grown up on the Big O, had a primitive unquestioning faith in its permanence and immutability — and now the unthinkable was happening. Tendrils of new ideas were trying to worm their way into his mind and were making him afraid in a way that he had never known before, and it was a process he could not allow to continue. As the minutes dragged by without any word from Lessen his unease and impatience grew more intense. Finally, and not without a twinge of guilt, he took a double-dose hypopad from a locker and placed it on his thumb. He went to Cona and, while overtly trying to make her more comfortable, pressed his thumb against her wrist and fired a cloud of sedative into her bloodstream. As soon as the drug had begun to take effect, rendering her drowsy and passive, he clipped the zero-G webbing across the yielding plumpness of her body and with a reassuring word to Mikel left the cabin.

The standard-issue magnetic stirrups he had fitted to his shoes made walking difficult at first, but by the time he reached the control deck he was moving with reasonable confidence. He found Lessen, Renard and a small group of the ship's officers gathered in front of the view panels, most of which showed luminous green horizons.

"You are not permitted in here," Lessen said to him at once, puffing his chest.

"Don't be ridiculous," Dallen said. "What the hell is going on down there?"

"I must insist that you…"

"Forget all that crap." Renard turned to Dallen with no sign of his former animosity. "This is really something, old son. We talked to Traffic Central and were told that the whole shell lit up like that about five hours ago. Before that, apparently, they had a lot of green meridians chasing each other round and round the surface, but now the illumination is general.

"And you notice the pulsing? They say it started off at about one every five seconds, but now it's up to nearly one a second." Renard grinned at the discrete views of Orbitsville, excited but seemingly untroubled.

It's all part of a process, Dallen thought, remembering his conversation with Peter Ezzati, his instinctive alarm feeding on Renard's lack of concern.

"What did they say about landing?" he said. "How does it affect us?"

"It doesn't. The word from the Science Commission is that the light doesn't affect anything. It's only light. Nothing is showing up on any kind of detector — except photometers, of course — so we just ignore it and go ahead with the landing. They say it's business as usual at all the other entrances."

"I don't like it" Lessen said gloomily.

Renard clapped a hand on his shoulder. "You don't have to like it, old son. All you have to do is fly my ship, so I suggest you get on with it without wasting any more valuable time. Okay?"

"If you don't mind," Dallen said, "I'd like to stay here and watch."

Renard made a sweeping gesture. "Be my guest."

Lessen swelled visibly, looking as though he would protest, then shrugged and with a practised zero-G shuffle moved to a central console. He keyed an instruction to the snip's computer. A few seconds later Dallen felt a faint tremoring in the deck and glowing jade horizons changed their attitudes as the secondary drive came to life. A short time later Portal 36 showed up on the forward screen, visible at first as a short dark line floating in the green luminescence. The line grew longer and thicker, developing into a widening ellipse which quite abruptly became a yawning aperture in the Orbitsville shell.

Dallen, in spite of knowing what to expect, felt a coolness coursing down his spine as he saw the blue — the impossible blue — of summer skies within the portal. For a moment he had an inkling of how Vance Garamond and his crew must have responded two centuries earlier when their flickerwing nosed its way into the shaft of sunlight radiating into space from the historic Portal 1. As the aperture became a perfect thousand-metre circle of azure, Orbitsville's interior sun swam into view and stayed at the centre.

Without quite knowing why, Dallen found himself having to bunk to clear his vision. I should have been with Silvia for this, he thought, wondering if she was in the Deck 3 observation gallery.

"We're locked on station at an altitude of two thousand metres," Lessen said, glancing at Dallen to see if he was absorbing the information. "Beginning our descent now."

Dallen gave him a friendly nod, accepting the verbal peace offering, and watched the circle expand in a lateral screen. The descent was slow but continuous, and after fifteen minutes the separation between the ship and its destination had been reduced to tens of metres. Propelled and maintained in the docking attitude by computer-orchestrated thrusters, the Hawkshead was lowering itself towards one edge of the aperture. Sting-like grapples were projecting beneath the central hull, ready to clamp the ship in place. At any of Orbitsville's principal ports it would simply have been a matter of sliding into one of the huge docking cradles, but here it was necessary for the ship to find its own anchorage.

The final step, Dallen knew, would be to extend a transfer tube from an airlock and drive it through the diaphragm field which kept Orbitsville's atmosphere from spewing into space. He estimated that unloading the grass and seed samples could take no more than a day, and from that point on Silvia and he would be free to…

"I don't like this," Lessen announced, speaking with a studied calmness which had the effect of momentarily stopping Dallen's heart. "Something doesn't add up."

As if to ratify the captain's statement, crimson and orange rectangles began to flash on the control console to the accompaniment of warning bleeps. Two of the ship's officers moved quickly to separate consoles and began tapping keys with quiet urgency. The deck stirred like an animal beneath Dallen's feet.

Renard cleared his throat. "Would somebody care to tell me what's going on? I do own this thing, you know."

"The thrusters are still delivering power," Lessen said. "But the ship has stopped moving."

"But all that means is…" Renard broke off, his coppery eyebrows drawing together.

"It means something is counteracting the thrust — and our sensors can't identify it. We have a separation of twenty eight metres between the shell and the datum line of the hull, so there is no physical obstruction, but we can't detect any field-type forces. I don't like it. I'm going to back off."

"There's no need for that," Renard said. "Push a bit harder."

The officer at the smaller console to Dallen's left raised his head. "There's no indication of any threat to the ship."

"I don't care," Lessen replied, strutting nervously like a dove. "Traffic Central said conditions were normal at all other portals, but they can't vouch for anything here. We'll have to dock somewhere else."

"Lake hell we will," Renard said. "I've got an agricultural station and a team of bloody expensive research workers waiting for me down there. We’re going in right here."

"You want to bet?" Lessen palmed a master control with showy vigour, asserting his authority.

Watching him closely, Dallen saw a look of spiteful triumph which lasted only a few seconds and vanished as the patterns of red and orange on the console changed. New audio alarms began an insistent buzzing. Dallen felt vulnerable and totally helpless as he tried in vain to interpret the various information displays around him. it's all part of a process, came the fugue-thought. Orbitsville doesn't catch fire for nothing…

"We're not gaining any altitude," the officer on his left said.

"Don't tell me things I already know," Lessen snapped, specks of saliva floating away from his lips. "Get me an explanation."

His subordinate's jaw sagged. "But…"

The protest was drowned in the clamour of yet another alarm, this time not the discreet warning emitted for the benefit of flight managers but a blood-freezing bellow which deliberately mimicked the obsolete klaxon to achieve maximum effect. Three blasts were followed by a recorded announcement:

"EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY! THE PRESSURE HULL HAS BEEN BREACHED. ALL PERSONNEL MUST PUT ON SPACESUITS WITHOUT DELAY. EMERGENCY!"

The message was repeated until Lessen killed the control deck speakers, and even then it could still be heard booming through the ship's lower compartments.

Dallen watched in sluggish disbelief as Lessen and the other officers went purposefully to lockers and opened them to reveal the dark-mawed golem-figures of spacesuits. Renard, too, seemed unable to move. Looking exasperated rather than alarmed, he stood with gold-freckled arms folded across his chest and gaped at the men who were struggling into suits.

"This isn't a safety drill," Lessen called out, his gaze fixed on Dallen. "You'd better get down to your cabin and look after your family. You'll find two suits in the emergency locker and a pressure crib for the boy."

"I don't feel any pressure drop," Dallen said, unable to shake off a dull obtuseness.

That's right," Renard put in. "What's all the panic?"

Lessen, now fully suited except for the helmet, said, I don't know what's happening, but I can assure you this is a genuine emergency. Something kept us from making contact with the shell, and when we tried to back off something else pushed us back down again. Both those forces are still at work. We're in a vice and something is winding hard on the handle — that's what the strain monitors say — and the hull is beginning to split."

"You don't seem all that worried to me," Renard accused.

"That's because I’m in my suit" Lessen gave Renard a malicious smile, refusing to cease feuding with him regardless of how dire he believed the situation to be.

Renard swore and ran towards the stairs in an ungainly slouch, his stirrups clacking noisily on the metal-cored deck. Dallen followed him as in a slow-motion dream. The emergency warning continued being broadcast on the lower decks, but he still had to contend with a sense of unreality.

Lessen had spoken of a mysterious "something" which, although invisible, was exerting a crushing force on the starship — but did it actually exist? Space was a sterile vacuum, not the habitat of mysterious entities who attacked ships. The Hawkshead was long past its best, and a more likely explanation for all that had occurred was that some of its systems had gone haywire. After all, the only evidence for the putative emergency was in information displays, and such devices could easily be…

Crangf Crip-crip-crip-crip-CRANG!

The sounds of a metal structure failing under stress came as Dallen was between Decks 4 and 5, and were followed by a slamming of unseen metal doors. This time his eardrums responded to a drop in air pressure, and now the emergency was real and now he was afraid. Truly afraid. Several people, Silvia among them, were gathered on Deck 5 helping each other with the unfamiliar task of putting on spacesuits. Giving Silvia a tense half-smile, Dallen slipped by them and went into his own cabin. Mikel, a toy vehicle clutched in each hand, was staring up at him uncertainly, but Cona was drowsing in her bed, oblivious to the disturbance.

"Everything is fine, son," Dallen said. "We're going to play a new game."

Keeping up a flow of reassuring patter, he opened a red-painted closet door and removed the pressure crib. It was an egg-shaped affair, with a transparency near one end, and had ample room for an infant. His hands trembling with haste, Dallen put Mikel inside it and closed the seals. Mikel gazed at him through the transparency, startled and reproachful, then began to cry. The sound reached Dallen by way of a speaker on the crib's life support control panel.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he mumbled. "I promise it won't be for long." He took an adult suit off its clips in the closet and began the more difficult task of getting Cona inside it. She was too drug-laden to offer any wilful resistance, but the sheer flaccidity and mass of her body, coupled with the lack of leverage due to zero gravity, hindered his every action. Within seconds he was sweating profusely. His co-ordination was impaired by anxiety, the constant aural battering from the PA system and Mikel' s sobbing, plus the repetitious chanting in his head.

What's happening to the ship?

What's happening to Orbitsville?

When he finally got the suit dosed around Cona and was reaching for the helmet she flung her head back in an involuntary spasm and struck him squarely on the bridge of the nose. Half-blinded by tears, he snorted out several quivering beads of blood and fitted Cona's helmet in place. She gave him a seraphic smile through its crystal curvatures, closed her eyes and lapsed back into sleep.

Grateful for the respite, he unclipped his own suit and was partially into it when the ear-punishing warning broadcast abruptly ceased. There was a moment of silence, then Lessen's voice was heard at a more tolerable volume. He spoke with irritating deliberation, either for clarity or in an effort to inspire confidence.

"This is Captain Lessen. The ship has suffered severe damage to its pressure hull. We have no alternative but to abandon the ship. Do not be alarmed. All crew and passengers should assemble immediately in the main airlock in the first quadrant of Deck 4. I repeat — do not be alarmed. You have only thirty metres of open space to cross, and there will be ropes to prevent anyone from drifting free. Go immediately to the main airlock in the first quadrant of Deck 4."

Dallen finished donning his suit and fitted the helmet in place, an action which activated the oxygen generator and temperature control systems. He had never worn a spacesuit before, except in safety drills, and felt oddly self-conscious as he tethered the crib to his belt and went to the cabin door with Cona awkwardly in tow. The other passengers had already left the ring-shaped Deck 5, but a crewman on his way to the next level saw Dallen's difficulty and came to his aid, taking responsibility for getting Cona up the narrow stair.

"Thanks," Dallen said. "I had to give her some heavy sedation,"

"Save some for me," the man replied, his voice made disturbingly intimate by Dallen's helmet radio.

They reached the airlock and were impatiently counted into it by another suited crewman. The square chamber was large enough to hold the entire ship's company, all of whom seemed to be present judging by the babble of sound transmitted into Dallen's helmet. With the crib in his left arm and with Cona's bulk damped to him by his right, he forced his way into the throng as a metal door slid shut behind him. The noise level increased abruptly as red lights began to glow on the walls and ceiling to indicate that the chamber's air was being bled off. More tremors coursed through the deck.

Suddenly Lessen's voice, augmented by his command transmitter, cut through the din. "Quiet, please. As you will have noticed, our suit radios operate on a common frequency. Stop all unnecessary talk immediately, otherwise… Well, I'm sure you can all see the need for speed and efficiency…" His voice was lost in a renewed burst of sound which was followed at once by a guilty near-silence.

Dallen became aware of the inner skin of his suit tightening itself against his limbs. A few seconds later a different set of lights began to flash on the outer wall of the chamber and he realised he was surrounded by vacuum. The uneasy novelty of the experience faded from his mind as the airlocks outer doors parted to admit a shaft of sunlight beaming out of a breathtaking blue sky.

Until that moment Dallen had thought of the ship as hovering above the outer surface of Orbitsville — now, with a mind-wrenching shift of perception, he found himself peering upwards. The portal was a one-kilometre lake of blackness set amid Orbitsville's endless pampas, a circular well of stars, and anybody standing at its edge and looking downwards would see the Hawkshead as a huge submarine trapped below the surface. Inhabitants of the Big O lived with stars beneath their feet.

There was a multiple gasp of surprise from the assembled company as the airlock doors retreated fully and a section of the Orbitsville shell became visible at one side of the rectangular opening. It had an alien aspect, one never before seen by human eyes. In place of the inert and non-reflective darkness was a sheet of pale green radiance of an intensity which almost equalled that of the interior sky. The tight was pulsing in a way that made the shell seem alive. Dallen stared at it, stricken, filled with superstitious awe.

"Orbitsville doesn't catch fire for nothing" he thought.

It's all part of a… What frequency of pulsing did Renard mention? Was it once a second? Surety what I'm seeing is faster than once a second…

There was a flurry of activity near the edge of the airlock and the white-armoured figure of a man flew from the ship towards the portal, a line uncoiling behind him. He traversed the open space in only a few seconds, but missed the portal's edge by a short distance and Dallen saw him rebound from the invisible surface of the diaphragm field. He twisted sideways, with the brief flaring of a reaction torch, and managed to catch hold of a short ladder which was clamped to the edge. He went up it, visibly forcing himself through the field's spongy resistance, and other men — dressed normally, moving freely in Orbitsville's airy, sunlit warmth — were seen momentarily as they helped him to safety. There was a spontaneous cheer from the watchers below.

He made it, Dallen thought bemusedly. He made it, and it was so easy, and everything is going to he all right, after all…

"That single line is enough for our purpose," Lessen announced. "We will move along it hand-over-hand, starring with the supernumeraries. Attach yourself to the line with one of the short tethers you will find at your waists. There will be no difficulty, so don't worry. Now let's go!"

Dallen moved forward through the crowd with his weightless human encumbrances, steathed and assisted by willing hands. Ahead of him, figures were already linked to and ascending the line. Captain Lessen, distinguished by red triangles on his shoulders, was positioned at the rim of the airlock, personally checking that each departing passenger was properly dipped to the line. The direct sunlight glittered through crystal helmets and Dallen was able to recognise Silvia just as she set off across the void, closely followed by Renard. She went upwards towards their promised land with the fluid athleticism he would have expected.

The last passenger due to go before Dallen reached the bottom of the line was Gerald Mathieu. While his tether was being checked he gazed fixedly at Dallen, but without any sign of recognition, his face as colourless and immobile as marble. Without glancing into the starry gulf at his feet, he gripped the line and went up it slowly like a patient machine, barely advancing one hand beyond the other. Dallen tried to clip Cona on next, but Lessen prevented him.

"It'll be easier if you go first and bring your wife along behind you," Lessen said. "How is she?"

"Asleep on her feet."

"Just as well. Don't worry — we'll get her there."

"Thanks." With Lessen's help, Dallen linked himself to Cona at the waist, then connected both of them to the lifeline. The crib tethered to his waist was an additional complication, but the absence of weight and rope friction worked in his favour and he found it surprisingly easy to progress upwards with his two human satellites. Mikel had stopped sobbing and was staring placidly through the transparent panel of his ovoid. Dallen tried to concentrate all his attention on the sunlit blue sanctuary above, but there was a hungry blackness all around him and — even more distracting — the Orbitsville shell seemed to have grown brighter. The light from it was so intense as to interfere with vision, but the superimposed pulsing seemed to have increased its frequency to two or three times a second.

At this rate it will soon be continuous, Dallen thought, the first ice crystal of a new dread forming at the centre of his being. What will happen then?

He was now near the midpoint of the lifeline and was so close to Orbitsville that he could see the minutest details of what was happening at the edge of the portal. He saw Silvia and Renard, aided by other hands, force their way through the closure field and stand up, figures greatly foreshortened. Silvia removed her helmet immediately and he saw her breasts rise as she drew deeply upon Orbitville's pure air. She stood at the very rim of space, her face troubled as she looked downwards in his direction. Dallen tried to climb faster and made the discovery that he had caught up on Gerald Mathieu, who had stopped moving and was clenching the line with both fists.

"Mathieu! What the hell are you doing:1 Dallen positioned his helmet close to Mathieu's, looked closely into his face and recoiled as he saw the blind white crescents of the eyes and the fixed, frozen grin.

Captain Lessen's voice sounded dearly above a background hubbub. "What's happening up there?"

"It's Mathieu," Dallen replied. I think he's dead. He's either dead or cataleptic."

"Christ! Can you push him ahead of you?"

"I’ll try." Aware of the people below him on the line crowding nearer, Dallen gripped the nearer of Mathieu's gloved hands and tried Co prise the rigid fingers open. Then he gasped in purest terror as the impossible happened.

The universe split into separate halves.

On Dallen's left, below him, was the partially sunlit bulk of the ship, looming against the spangled backdrop of the galaxy. Down there he could see the red-glowing rectangle of the airlock, with space suited figures awaiting their turn to ascend the lifeline. Lessen was peering up at him, one hand raised to screen his eyes from Orbitsville's sun.

On Dallen's right, above him, was the inconceivable hugeness of Orbitsville itself. Up there, in one segment of his vision, he could see Silvia London and others outlined against a delicately ribbed blue sky. The remainder of his field of view on that side was taken up by the awesome green brilliance of the shell material, pulsing now at a frenetic rate, many times a second.

But in the centre, separating the two hemispheres of the universe, was a layer of utter blackness. It was narrow — barely wide enough to contain Mathieu, Dallen and his family — but he understood with an uncanny clarity that it stretched from one boundary of the cosmos to the other, that it was a dimension apart, at a remove from the normal continuum.

How…? Thought processes were painfully slow in the cryogenic chill that had descended over his brain. How can I understand what I shouldn't be able to understand?

A figure moved in the black stratum ahead of him, perhaps close, perhaps very distant. It was elongated, unlikely to be humanoid, and almost impossible to see — black sketched on black, a glass sculpture concealed in clear water.

Have no fear, Carry Dallen. Its voice was not a voice, but a thought implanted in Dallen's mind, perceived by him in the form of words, but cognisable beyond the limits of language. I serve Life, and therefore you will not be harmed. Let it be known to you that I am a member of a race which has almost complete mobility in time and space. We are the ultimate embodiment of intelligent life. A meaningful comparison cannot be made, but you would say that toe are farther ahead of humans in our evolution than humans are compared to, say, trilobites. We do not apply a generic name to ourselves, but a convenient noun far your use — fashioned according to your linguistic principles — is Ultan. I repeat that we Ultans are servants of Life, and there is no reason for you to be afraid.

I can't help being afraid, Dallen responded. Nothing could have prepared me far tins.

That is true. Chance has placed you in what may be a unique situation but its duration will be very brief even by your standards — only a matter of seconds. All we require of you is that you do not break Gerald Mathieu’s grip on the line or in any way force him towards the instrument you know as Orbitsville.

Why? What is happening? Even as he formulated the questions Dallen understood that he had already been altered by his mental contact with the other being. The mere fact of his being rational and self-controlled in the circumstances indicated that he had borrowed, no matter how temporarily, inhuman attributes from the dweller in the black dimension. He also understood that what his mind structure forced him to interpret as a human-style sequential dialogue was a near-instantaneous transfer of knowledge.

You are a fellow servant of Life, came the reply, and the ethic demands that you be informed of matters concerning your existence.

Be warned, Garry Dallen! The intervention by a different Ultan "voice" jolted Dallen, drawing his attention to another quadrant of the layer of blackness in which he was framed. As the second Ultan invaded his mind he saw it moving, blackness modifying blackness, a barely perceptible presence.

You are about to be given a false interpretation of the Ethic, the later arrival continued. I urge you to reject it and all its implications.

Wait! The human must now be allowed to reach his own conclusion and act accordingly, the first Ultan countered.

I concede that, in our present situation of deadlock, no other course is possible, but the Ethic requires that you present him with facts only. You must not influence his judgement. I am content to let reason be my advocate.

As am I — it can only be to my advantage.

Dallen sensed he was listening to implacable enemies, beings who had long been engaged in some awesome struggle and who were reluctant to arrange an armistice. While their attention was concentrated on each other he became aware of the figure of Mathieu clamped rigidly by his hands to the line just above him, and the essential mystery of what was happening grew deeper. The first Ultan wanted to prevent Mathieu reaching Orbitsville — but why? What could be the…?

Garry Dallen, an agreement has been reached. Dallen's individuality was again lost in that of the entity which had first made him aware of it. The circumstances of our meeting will be fully explained to you so that you may choose to obey the Ethic in the full light of reason.

As a foundation upon which to build your understanding, let it be known to you that the universe you inhabit is not Totality. I can see, though, that you have already encountered ideas relevant to this subject, and therefore I shall use compatible language.

It is necessary for you to know that at the instant of the Primal Event, known to you as the Big Bang four universes are created. The one you inhabit — Region I in the terminology of some of your philosophers — appears to you to be constructed of normal matter and to have a positive time flow, it is counterbalanced by another universe — Region II — which from your viewpoint is composed of antimatter and negative time flow. The Region II universe is moving farther and farther into your past, although its inhabitants naturally regard their matter as normal and their time flow as positive. They can never observe your universe, but they would conceive of it as being composed of antimatter and travelling into their fast.

In addition, as postulated by some of your cosmogonies, there is Region III — a tachyon universe, which is rushing ahead of your universe in time; and there is Region IV — an anti-tachyon universe, which is fleeing into your past ahead of Region II. In the natural scheme of things, the four universes are not due to confront each other until the curvature of the space-time continuum brings them all together again — at winch point there will be yet another Big Bang and a new cycle will begin again.

Dallen caught a memory-glimpse of a fantastic glass mosaic with its intricate petals. I confirm that these ideas are not new to me, although I personally cannot cope with the concept of time itself being curved.

The phrase "time itself" is at the heart of your difficulty, but it is enough for you to accept my statement. We Ultans are inhabitants of Region III, your tachyon universe, and our mobility in time and space gives us an overwhelming advantage in dealing with such concepts.

But I am more puzzled than before" Dallen responded. You have explained nothing.

The groundwork has to be extensive. It follows from what I have said that the universes created by each Big Bang have to be closed universes. The attractive force in each universe has to be strong enough to recall its myriad galaxies from the limit of their outward flight, thus reassembling all the matter in the cosmos in preparation for the next Big Bang.

Were it not so, all the galaxies would continue to disperse. Eventually they would grow cold, and would the, and absolute darkness would descend over a cosmos which consisted of black cinders drifting outwards into infinite blackness. There would be no more cycles of cosmic renewal. Life would have ended for ever. All that is clear to me. Dallen, in his altered state of consciousness, was aware of his infant son gazing with darkly rapt eyes from the interior of his egg-like crib. But, still, nothing has been explained.

The reason for our intervention in your affairs is this. After an unknown number of cosmic cycles an imbalance has developed. We have learned that Region II is an open universe. It cannot contract. It is destined to expand for ever, and without the contribution of its matter the nature of the next Big Bang will be radically altered. We foresee a catastrophic disruption of the cycle of cosmic renewal.

Dallen strove to concern himself with the fate of an anti-matter universe which had come into being perhaps twenty billion years earlier and had been travelling into the past ever since. How could such an imbalance occur? If the mass of the Region II universe is equal to this one its gravitation must be…

But gravity is not all, Carry Dallen. There is another and equally vital force which can augment and influence gravity, which can permeate and inform matter.

Dallen, transcending himself, made the intuitive leap. Mind!

That is so. The graviton and the mindon have a clear structural affinity, though it is one you are not yet equipped to understand. There is a major difference, however. Gravity is an inherent, universal and unavoidable property of matter — whereas mind arises locally and uncertainly, by chance, when there is sufficient complexity in the organisation of matter, and when other conditions art favourable. It then propagates throughout galactic structures, enhancing the chances of mind arising elsewhere, and at the same time potentiating the action of gravity.

Most of your philosophers regard mankind as insignificant in the cosmic scheme, hut your race and a million others are the cement which hinds universes together. It is the thinker in the quietness of his study who draws the remotest galaxies back from the shores of night.

So Kami London was on the right track! There was no time for Dallen to be swamped by awe — the information exchanges continued at remorseless speed. You are telling me that mind did not flourish in the Region II universe.

That is correct. The conditions were never favourable. Even we Ultans cannot say why, hut the probability of that situation arising naturally is so low that we suspect a malign intervention at an early stage of Region IVs history.

I protest! The second Ultan stirred in the blackness. I have allowed you uninterrupted access to the human, hut you abuse my forbearance by applying terms like malign to the natural forces which shape Totality.

I apologise, but the important thing for Carry Dallen to understand at this stage is that we have never regarded the situation as irretrievable. We have taken steps to normalise it.

But that means… Dallen's mind was a sun going nova. Orbitsville!

Yes. Orbitsville is an instrument, one which was designed to attract intelligent life forms and to transport them hack through time to the Region II universe. And the moment of Departure is close.

No! The rapport between Dallen and the Ultan began to weaken, but he was still sufficiently in thrall to the near-invisible alien to react logically rather than emotionally. "It won't work! It can't make any difference — one sphere to an entire universe.

We have deployed more than one sphere. To be sure of capturing a viable stock we constructed similar instruments in every galaxy in your universe. Each galaxy, depending en its size, has anywhere from eight to forty spheres, all If them in localities favourable to the development of intelligent life. Your race's discovery of Orbitsville was not entirely fortuitous.

A hundred billion galaxies, multiplied by…! Dallen faltered, numbed by immensity, as he tried to calculate the number of Orbitsvilles scattered through the universe.

The total may be large by human scales of magnitude but the Region II universe has as many galaxies as this one — and all have to be seeded. The Ethic requires it.

WRONG! The forceful contradiction from the second Ultan disturbed and confused Dallen, further weakening the inhuman persuasive force of the first. He took one step nearer to his normal state of being, and as emotion began to pit itself against intellect his thoughts homed in on Silvia London. She was on Orbitsville. And Orbitsville, now pulsing so rapidly that the eye detected only a frenzied hammering on the retina, was about to depart…

"Carry Dallen, you can see for yourself the fallacious nature of that interpretation of the Ethic." As the second Ultan forced itself upon Dallen's mind he detected it as an agitated swirling current of blackness. "I, in common with many of my kind, understand that we Ultans have no right to impose our will, our necessarily limited vision, upon the natural ordering of Totality. The imbalance between Regions I and II in the present cycle heralds drastic change — that is true — but it was change which produced us and all we know. Resistance to change is wrong. Totality must evolve.

Why tell me? The psychic pressure on Dallen was becoming intolerable. Vm only a man, and I have other…

Chance has placed you in a unique situation, Carry Dallen. My forces are at a disadvantage in this part of this particular galaxy, and consequently I have had to proceed by stealth.

You have learned that Orbitsville is an instrument. To nullify it I, too, constructed an instrument — one which has only to make contact with the Orbitsville shell to he absorbed into it and denature it and lock it into the Region I continuum for ever. That instrument is the physical form of the being you knew as Gerald Mathieu.

I chose him because be wanted to terminate his own life, and because in your society be existed in circumstances which would allow him to travel to Orbitsville and approach it unobtrusively. When he killed himself by deliberately crashing his aircraft I recreated him — incorporating the physical modifications necessary for my purpose — and directed him to this point.

Unfortunately, his approach was detected and the preparations for the translation of this sphere into the Region II universe was speeded up. In addition, enormous energies are being directed against the body of Gerald Mathieu, paralysing it, counteracting my energies.

And now everything depends on you, Carry Dallen.

You are at the fulcrum, at the balance point of two of the greatest personalised forces in any universe, where neither can dominate you — where your own reason, will and physical strength can decide a cosmic issue.

Only seconds remain before the sphere is due to depart, but there is time for you to break Gerald Mathieu's bold on the tine and propel hts body into contact with the shell.

I, on behalf of the Ethic, charge you with that responsibility…

Dallen sobbed aloud as the two hemispheres of the divided universe clapped together.

His senses were returning to normal, but he knew that the entire confrontation with the Ultans had .taken place between heartbeats. A confusion of gasps and startled cries from his suit radio suggested that the watchers in the Hawkshead' s airlock had shared the experience to some extent. His three companions in the centre of the extra-dimensional episode knew least of all — Cona floating in her drug-induced torpor; Mikel in his starry-eyed incomprehension; Gerald Mathieu, dead but not dead, frozen to the line which snaked upwards to…

Dallen's breathing stopped as he saw that the shell material was a plane of green fire, its pulsations now so dose together as to be almost beyond perception. The departure was imminent. There were no more reserves of time. Silvia was standing at the rim of the portal, leaning dangerously over the abyss, but restrained by Rick Renard's arms. Her lips were moving, forming words Dallen needed to hear, and her eyes were locked on his.

"Silvia," he shouted, surging up the line towards her. Mathieu's rigid body blocked the way, the blind face grinning into his. There had been talk of a great responsibility .'. . of forcing the instrument that was Mathieu across those last few metres of space… but would take time… and there was no more time… the shell material was as bright as the sun… burning steadily…

No more fairness, Dallen screamed inwardly. This is for ME!

He unclipped himself from the lifeline, from his wife's inert figure, from his son's crib. He clawed his way around Mathieu's body, frantic with haste, and launched himself upwards toward the rim of the portal. Silvia extended her arms as if to catch him…

But Orbitsville vanished.

He had missed Silvia by a second, and now she was separated from him by a gulf of time equal co twice the age of the universe.

Dallen drew his knees up to his chin, closed his eyes, and went slowly tumbling into the newly created void.