Ship of Strangers

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Surgenor was surprised to discover– after the passing of a single, unmanning spasm of alarm– that he was unafraid.

He advanced into the tool store with Gillespie and saw that what he had taken to be a simple hemisphere of light was, in fact, complex in its topography and had traces of an internal structure. Its surface was ill-defined, rendering the curvatures more bewildering to the eye, and the regions of varying density within overlapped and shone through each other in a way which made it difficult for Surgenor to focus on individual features.

The object was about a metre in diameter, a dome of icy luminance shrouding most of Narvik’s body. As he looked at it from close quarters Surgenor developed a conviction that he was seeing only half of a spheroid, that an equal amount of it curved downwards through the floor and the underlying supports. Obeying his instinct, he knelt down, extended one hand and briefly passed it through the glowing surface. There was no sensation of any kind.

“It’s getting bigger,” Gillespie said. He took a step backwards and pointed at the nearer rim, which was silently spreading across the metal floor. In the space of a few seconds Narvik’s head was entirely lost to view beneath the intangible shell of light. The two men linked hands like small children and backed to the door, their eyes white with reflection, minds brimming with wonder– and in the centre of the room the enigmatic hemisphere continued its growth at a visibly increasing pace.

“What is it?” Gillespie whispered. “It looks like a brain, but…’

Surgenor felt his mouth go dry as the fear he should have experienced earlier stirred within him. Its source lay not in the awesome strangeness of the shining object, but– incredibly– in his slow-dawning sense of recognition. With an effort he managed to focus his eyes on a single part of the cloud, instead of taking it in as a whole, and thought he could see the beginnings of corpuscularity. As the object grew larger its structure was showing discontinuity, revealing itself to be composed of millions of motes of light.

“Hear these words, Aesop,” he said, forcing the speech sounds into existence. “Can you get a microscope on to that thing?”

Not yet– my diagnostic microscopes are limited in traverse to the main floor area of the hangar,” Aesop replied. “But at its present rate of progress the object will penetrate the tool store wall in approximately two minutes, and I will then be able to subject it to high magnification.”

“Penetrate?” Surgenor recalled his idea that they could see only half of the luminous entity. “Aesop, how about the engine bays below us– can you see anything unusual in there?”

“I am unable to see directly into the box columns of the spine, but there is a light source there. The implication is that the object extends downwards through the floor of the tool store.”

“What’s going on?” Gillespie said, his gaze hunting over Surgenor’s face. “Do you know what that thing is?”

“Don’t you?” Surgenor gave a numb, uncertain smile as he stared into the spreading billows of light. “That’s the universe, Al. You’re looking at the whole of creation.”

Gillespie’s jaw sagged, then he moved away, symbolically dissociating himself from Surgenor’s statement. “You’re crazy, Dave.”

“Think so? Watch that screen.”

The glowing cloud had reached the limits of the circular tool room and now was expanding into the hangar area, spilling through the metal walls as though they had no objective reality. There were a number of furtive movements in the overhead beams as Aesop’s long-range microscopes, normally used for inspecting faults in the survey modules, swung into new positions. At the same instant the monitoring screens came to life with the sort of images Surgenor had never expected to see on them– deep, dark and dizzy perspectives of thousands of lenticular galaxies in flight, moving, swarming, coming into focus and blurring out of it. The impression was that millions of years of observation through a powerful telescope had been compressed into a short film– a film designed to ensnare the mind and chasten the soul of any intelligent being who watched it. Surgenor strove to come to terms with the reality behind the words he had so glibly uttered a minute earlier.

Gillespie staggered a little, pressing both hands to his temples, as the blizzard of galaxies went on and on.

“Mike Targett should be down here to watch this,” Surgenor said, partly to himself. “We’re still in the grip of his dwindlar, you see. It’s a cyclic process– just like the universe itself. It shrank us to nothing, and then– because conservation is conserved– something happened…the stresses were relieved, or the signs were reversed…the opposite to a balloon being blown up until it finally bursts…and we went from micro to macro, from zero dimensions to the ultimate dimensions.”

“Dave!” There was a note of pleading in Gillespie’s voice. “Take it slower, will you?”

“That’s the universe you see pouring out across the floor, Al, but it isn’t really getting any bigger– it’s maintaining its own natural size and we’re contracting back into it. Right now the Sarafand is maybe a thousand times bigger than the universe, but soon it’ll be the same size as the universe, then we’ll shrink down through all the galaxies that make up the universe, then we’ll be the size of a single galaxy, then of a single star system, then we’ll get back to normal, but only for an instant, because we’ll be back in the dwindlar zone, and we’ll keep on shrinking till we get to zero– and then the whole process will start over again!”

There was the sound of heavy footsteps on metal and Sig Carlen appeared on the stair with a beer glass in his hand. “Why don’t you two characters stop being so…What’s that?”

Surgenor looked at the cloud of brilliant specks, the perimeter of which was now advancing across the hangar at walking pace, and then at Gillespie. “You tell him, Al– I want to hear somebody else saying it.”

By the time the Sarafand’s crew had assembled in the mess room, and had sobered up with the aid of Antox capsules, the universe was larger than the ship.

A continuous rain of galaxies was spraying up through the floor, passing through the table and chairs and human beings, and out through the ceiling into the vessel’s upper levels. The galaxies looked like slightly fuzzy stars to the naked eye, but when examined with a magnifying glass they were seen to be perface little lens-shapes or spirals, miniature jewels being squandered into space by an insane creature.

Surgenor sat at the long table, bemused, watching the motes of light pass through his own arms and hands, and tried to comprehend that each one contained a hundred million suns or more, and that vast numbers of those suns were the hearth-fires of civilizations. A reaction had set in after his first flash of inspirational understanding, and now– as with a picture in which hollows can also be seen as hills– his perceptions kept rebounding between two extremes. In one second he would be a normal-sized man watching specks of fire magically penetrating his flesh without hurting him; in the next he was a giant of inconceivable proportions, whose body was larger than the volume of space known to Earth’s astronomers…

“…can’t take this in,” Theo Mossbake was saying. “If it’s all true, it means that the ship and our bodies have been converted into the most diffuse gas imaginable– one atom every million light-years or so. I mean, we ought to be dead.”

“Forget everything you learned at school,” Mike Targett replied. “We’re dealing with dwindlar physics now, and all the rules are different.”

“I still don’t see why we aren’t dead.”

Targett, who had been the first to grasp the dwindlar’s concept, spoke with evangelical fervour. “I tell you, Theo, it’s all different. if you think about it, the laws of conventional science say we should have died when we shrank. We should have become so dense that we turned into a micro neutron star– but we didn’t. Perhaps the atoms themselves, and the particles they’re made from, were reduced in proportion in some way. I don’t know how it worked– but I do know that we’re now at the opposite end of the scale.”

Voysey clicked his fingers. “If we’re going to shrink down through our original size, does that mean that Aesop will be able to operate the ship’s drive again?”

“Afraid not,” Targett said. “Aesop will correct me on this if I’m wrong, but it takes many minutes for him to prepare and carry out a beta-space jump– and we’ll pass through our original size in some fantastically small fraction of a second. You can see the way the process is speeding up. Those galaxies are farther apart and travelling faster than they were when we sat down here. As they appear to get bigger they’ll keep on speeding up, and soon they’ll be moving so fast we won’t be able to see them.”

Targett paused to watch the upward migration of fireflies. “In fact, as far as we’re concerned, they’ll eventually have to travel thousands, millions of times faster than light– but that’s because we’ll be contracting at that speed. It’s a weird thought.”

“Talking about weird thoughts,” Christine Holmes said in a small voice, making her first contribution to the discussion, “I keep thinking of what Dave and Al told us about Billy Narvik’s body and the light coming out through it. Why did it start there, of all places?”

“Pure coincidence, Chris. Dave dragged the body into the tool store and laid it on the ship’s centre of gravity marker plate– and the centre of gravity is the one invariant point in the whole set-up. It must still be occupying its original position in the universe, and the ship is condensing towards it equally from all directions. That’s why we’re going to end up in the dwindlar zone again, and not in some other part of…of the…’

Targett’s voice faltered and his face grew visibly paler as he turned to Surgenor. “The centre of gravity, Dave– we can shift it.

“Enough?” Surgenor stared back at him through a spray of galaxies. “The equivalent of thirty million light-years?”

“That’s the width of a little finger– we’re big boys now, Dave.” Targett smiled the thin, cool smile of a man who has transcended his mortal destiny. “The calculations should be easy for Aesop, and even if we miss our chance on this cycle, we can try again next time round.” Four days later, the survey ship Sarafand–having once again engulfed the entire universe and imploded back into it–materialized in normal-space near a yellow sun. After a brief pause it began its slow, patient approach to the landing field in Bay City, on the planet called Delos.