“But—Ken!” Lilith’s voice was dry with dread. “Can’t we do—• anything?”

  “Nothing.” His old voice was slow with dull despair. “Nothing we haven’t done.”

  “Your theory did prove out?” I insisted. “You did come through into another space and time?”

  “I’ll tell you what I can.” He nodded stiffly. “In whatever time there is.”

  “Come.” Old Habibula waved a bottle of his precious wine. “Sit. If we are doomed to

  die like vermin in a blessed sterilizer—let’s not die famished!”

  We joined him at the table, where once I had presided at meetings of the station staff. Habibula handed around his bottle of wine, his flat shallow eyes watching jealously. Lilith and I let it go by. We all looked at Ken Star.

  “Captain, we followed your proposed path into the anomaly.” Ken Star took the bottle and sipped lightly. “With the rockets dead, we let the capsule drift at the angle and velocity you had computed. Ten minutes from the station, the invaders picked us up.

  “Our forward ports began flashing with an intermittent blue fluorescence. We knew they were tracking us with some kind of black radiation—something that worked in the anomaly. We kept waiting for a micro-missile or a heat beam.

  “I don’t know yet why they didn’t fire. Maybe they did—maybe our course had already carried us into a space where their missiles couldn’t reach us. Anyhow, before we were halfway to the center of the anomaly, the stars went out.”

  Startled, I recalled the strange last words that miner’s wife had written on the ore-barge which drifted into Nowhere.

  “We didn’t feel anything.” Ken Star’s dry old voice was papery and faint, but firmly controlled and carefully intelligent. “None of the shock or jolt or pain you might expect. But suddenly we were in another space-time universe—”

  “A wicked space!” old Habibula wheezed. “A dark and fearful universe!”

  A glaze of dread had dulled Ken Star’s eyes.

  “At first it seemed absolutely dark,” he said. “Black and empty everywhere. But then, with the glasses, we did pick up two or three distant galaxies—the nearest must have been a dozen times as far from us as Andromeda is from here. I thought we had dropped into an empty universe—”

  “What did you find there?”

  “Mortal danger!” Old Habibula’s cold-colored eyes peered at me over another open can of caviar. “Fearful things to freeze the precious breath of life. Monstrous evil older than the universe. Ah, it was worse than the worlds of the fearful Cometeers!”

  Ken Star had stopped to stare at the telescope screen. It was darker now. The infall of debris from the station must have ceased, because we saw no new sparks or plumes of flame drifting ahead of us into that dreadful chasm. As the last wisps and flecks of incandescence faded, the illuminated image of that unbelievable space fortress faded into darkness. The screen looked empty, dead.

  “But the fearful thing is still out there!” old Habibula croaked hoarsely. “Waiting for us in the dark.”

  Even in the bright-lit drum, I felt a cold tingle at the back of my neck.

  “In that other space—” I swung anxiously back to Ken Star. “What did you find?”

  “Nothing, for a long time,” he said. “In that universal darkness, we couldn’t see a thing. Our radar and laser gear didn’t work at first. Later, when we had drifted away

  from the other end of the anomaly, we began to pick up objects—”

  “My weapon!” Lilith interrupted him, her face white and desperate. “Would it work there?”

  “I don’t know.” The droop of Ken Star’s thin shoulders expressed a dull futility. “Anyhow, they’re on this side now. We’ll have no chance to try it.”

  “What were those objects?” Anxiously I urged him on.

  “Iron asteroids,” he said. “Like those you have been observing, Captain, drifting in and out through the anomaly. A great swarm of them. When we got the laser going we charted eleven hundred.

  “Later, we landed on several of them. They’re the same queer rocks you have seen. The same tough alloy. The same size—a few miles long. Covered with the same adhering cosmic dust. Old dust. Dust of matter born thirty billion years ago.”

  His haunted eyes looked blindly up at me.

  “Queer rocks!” he muttered. “But one of them you know about. Years ago—even in your time here—it came through the anomaly. Miners have built a town on it. Then it drifted back again.”

  “You don’t mean—Lodestone?”

  “That’s what they called it.”

  “Did you find the miners—the people?”

  His face turned bleak.

  “We landed there,” he said. “We spent weeks—maybe months— of that other time, looking for clues. We found empty structures. Abandoned machines. Even frozen supplies that helped us keep alive. But no people. In the time of that other universe, you see, that colony must have been marooned many thousand years ago.”

  I heard the sharp intake of Lilith’s breath.

  “The people did survive for several generations,” Ken Star continued. “We found notes and diaries, even a graveyard. A pretty grim story. They were trying to find where they were and how to get back. They explored some of the other rocks. Though they were spinning theories, they never cracked the secret. They had no Habibula.”

  “In life’s name, Ken!” Old Habibula blinked uncomfortably. “Don’t poke jokes at me!”

  “I’m not joking,” Ken Star said. “The death of Lodestone is certainly no joke. It died of energy-famine. It had no sun. Its radium and thorium had long ago decayed. Most of the desperate survivors left it at last to look for our universe. What they found was that mother machine. It picked them off with micro-missiles. The last few men left fragmentary records on the rock.”

  He fell silent, his haggard eyes peering at the blank, greenish screen.

  “What are those rocks?” I tried to smooth the hoarseness from my voice. “They seem

  as queer as the anomaly, as strange as that machine. Did you find out—”

  “We learned what they had been.” His bright, sunken eyes flashed at me and back at the screen, like the eyes of something hunted. “At one time—I think before our space and time were born—they had been ships!”

  Multiplex Universe

  A shocked stillness filled the drum and vibrated through the whirling rum of Nowhere Near. Turning blankly to peer at the charted creature that had swallowed us, I heard the stifled catch of Lilith’s breath. I started at the click of old Habibula’s bottle on the table.

  “They couldn’t be ships!” I swung to stare at Ken Star. “What makes you think they are?”

  “We explored a number of them,” Ken Star said. “We found records on Lodestone— narratives written by desperate men who had explored others. Some of them are visibly artifacts. A few still have the shape of ships—queer, enormous ships—even after tune we can’t calculate.”

  “But—ships?” A stubborn unbelief shook my voice. “They’re miles long!”

  His gaunt head nodded at the blank screen.

  “So is that thing.”

  “What—” I had to get my breath. “What happened to them?”

  “Tune.” In the vibrant silence of the drum, his precise old voice echoed like a gong of doom. “Time and catastrophe. I think their last voyage was begun before our own space and time were born.”

  “You know where they came from?”

  About to speak, he stopped to watch that blank screen again. Old Habibula dropped an empty caviar can, which made a shocking clatter. Glancing at Lilith, I found her staring into the mocking ruby eyes of that small skull. Her face was bloodless and desperate. I caught her hand, covering the poison ring. She turned slowly to watch Ken Star, her cold hand limp in mine.

  “I think we know,” he said at last. “I believe I told you long ago about my theory that our own space-time universe has grown from the space and mass ejected from an exploding galaxy in that mother universe? Well, I think the fleet carried refugees from that galaxy.

  “A tremendous, tragic saga! Its heroes, I imagine, were creatures a little like ourselves. We found doorways, anyhow, not much too large for men, and dust of phosphorous and calcium where one of them must have died. Their biochemistry is lost beyond reconstruction, but those ships prove a high technology.

  “Only old galaxies explode. Their race must have been ancient and powerful. They have left the traces of an awesome struggle to survive. They must have fled first to the

  fringes of their galaxy, ahead of the explosion.

  “There, with the whole galaxy behind them exploding like a hundred million supernovas, they built their fleet. Apparently the expansion of their old universe had left their galaxy isolated, with no other near enough to reach. Anyhow, they took the dangerous path that the galactic explosion had revealed. They attempted interspatial flight.”

  He paused again to watch that black circle of greenish darkness, with its dim fringe of shifted stars.

  “That one surviving ship is manned with robots,” he said. “Its survival is ironic, because it was built to take the greatest danger. The refugees built it to open a way from space to space, for their escape. When the way was open, it was to come through first, to survey the new space and secure a bridgehead for their invasion.”

  Lilith’s cold hand clenched hard on mine.

  “I’m not sure what all went wrong,” Ken Star said. “We found no records we could read—none except those old machines. But I believe part of the fleet was trapped in that galactic explosion. Nothing less could have fused and battered those magnificent ships into the things we took for natural asteroids.

  “I think more of them were mauled when they came into the new universe too soon— while its expanding mass was still as deadly as the exploding galaxy. Perhaps there were other fatal excursions—we can only speculate. But the deadliest surprise of all must have been the anomaly of time.”

  “And that’s a fearful thing!” gasped old Habibula. “But for Lil’s precious serum I’d be frozen and dead a thousand years ago in that foreign universe!”

  Shivering, he drained his wine.

  “The crippled fleet must have been left to wait while the robots came through to prepare for their invasion,” Ken Star said. “At the different rates of time, a million years—or a hundred million—may have passed for the fleet before the robots could send the signal for it to follow.

  “By that time, the invading race was dead—”

  “So we’ve just machines to fight?” I whispered. “No living things at all?”

  “Just machines.” Ken Star nodded. “Such machines as those four robots we saw.”

  “Mortal great machines!” gasped old Habibula. “On their fearful scale of time and size, we’re less than any insect!”

  “But still they are machines.” Ken Star smiled bleakly at him. “They are excellent machines. They do what they were built to do, and that is all—I am quoting Giles. He observed them. He saw their function in their form. That’s how we escaped alive—”

  “I thought we had escaped.” Old Habibula sat staring sadly at the empty bottle. “Until we found we were still caught in this old game the robots play.”

  “A game?” Squeezing Lilith’s hand, I tried not to shiver. “With robots?”

  “I suppose they’ve been playing it, in different times and spaces, since our universe was born. They make a crossing. They prepare a base. They signal for the fleet. Of course it cannot come—except for those few hulks that are caught and drawn through by the forces of the nexus itself.”

  “What happens then?”

  Sitting hunched and tense and old, Ken Star peered at the screen.

  “We’re waiting to find out,” he said. “I hope the robots conclude that the invasion point was somehow unsuitable. I hope they retreat, to try some other point—perhaps in some other universe.”

  “Do you think they will?”

  “The evidence hints that in the past they have.” His gaunt head nodded. “Hundreds of thousands of times, I imagine. The mother machine is old enough itself—though time is almost stopped in the anomaly and those wrecked ships have been exposed to perhaps a billion-fold the time—

  “Look at that!” His voice lifted sharply. “Another spray of debris, I suppose, from the shot that hit this asteroid.”

  The screen glowed again, with sparks and plumes of pale green fire. Born among the dim stars around that circle of darkness, they flowed into it, spilling over the lip of that dreadful funnel, flowing before us in a giddy torrent toward that midnight universe. They lit the mother machine.

  It looked bright and near, terribly huge and terribly strange. Parts of it sprang out at me—jutting things that were not booms or planes or antennas or jets. It was swiftly turning—swinging so that its seven fused spheres merged into one, so that their enclosing cage became three projecting tabs.

  “It’s pointing straight at us!” Alarmed, I turned to Ken Star. “What does that mean?”

  “We’ll soon know.”

  Desperately, I swung to the chart on the opposite wall. The green point of Nowhere Near was deep in the creature’s belly. The machine was a bright red point. They were creeping together.

  “A collision course!” I gasped. “That’s what the computer shows. We’re going to hit it!”

  “I don’t think so.” Ken Star’s old voice seemed oddly calm. “They won’t let that happen—whatever they do.” His hollowed eyes flashed at old Habibula. “Giles, what do you think?”

  “They’re machines.” Habibula’s pebble-colored eyes blinked uneasily. “They’re doing what they were built to do. They hold us no malice at all. They aren’t wicked like nature or men. But if they read the movement of the asteroid as a threat to their task, they’ll destroy us instantly.”

  “Shall we abandon Nowhere Near?” I looked anxiously at Ken Star. “We might get

  away in your escape rocket, under cover of the station—”

  “Too late to think of that.” His haggard head shook grimly. “The station wouldn’t give us cover long enough. The robots would pick up the flare of our rockets, and they’re programmed to shoot any unidentified craft.”

  His haunted eyes went back to the dark funnel about to swallow us, to that enormous alien ship waiting in its throat. Now the ship looked like a single globe, ring-marked and greenish, bright in the fall of fire around it.

  “We’ll have to wait,” he muttered huskily. “We’ll have to see—”

  Old Habibula sat staring at the screen, clutching his empty bottle as if it held some promise of escape.

  “Tell ‘em how we found that fearful ship,” he gasped. “Tell ’em how the laser signal flamed out of it, burning red as blood, to call their fleet—that couldn’t answer. Tell ‘em how we came to the signal, clinging in the precious shadow of a dead and drifting ship.”

  Haggard eyes fixed on that black, unthinkable passage before us, on the bright-green image of that monster machine in the ring of falling fire, Ken Star said nothing.

  “Tell ‘em how we got aboard,” croaked old Habibula. “Tell ’em how I found the wave-guide duct. Tell ‘em how I opened it. Tell ’em how we had to leave the rocket and climb through that cold steel gut.”

  The fall of fire that rimmed that dreadful funnel was spreading out to take us in. The bright globe of the robot ship was swelling fast ahead.

  “Tell ‘em how we hid and schemed and fought to learn the mortal secret of the ship,” old Habibula whined forlornly. “Tell ’em how we got into the quarters of the vanished master-creatures. Tell ‘em how the wicked robots hunted us. Tell ’em how we got inside that fearful main computer.”

  Lit by that circular torrent of toppling greenish fire, every part of the alien ship looked bright and cold, unbelievably enormous, chillingly strange. I saw things in motion. Clutching Lilith’s icy hand, I braced myself—for precisely what, I could not guess.

  “Tell ‘em how we got away,” whimpered old Habibula. “Tell ’em how we worked it out. Tell ‘em how we got back inside our own precious rocket. Tell ’em how we waited till the mortal robot ship had brought us halfway back from that fearful universe. Tell ‘em how we pushed off beneath that fan of falling fire.”

  Watching the bright-green disk of the alien ship growing wider on the screen, I made a quick computation. Its apparent diameter had doubled in the last forty seconds. ‘1 hat meant our falling station had covered half the distance to it in the same forty seconds. We had forty seconds to live—unless something happened.

  “Tell ‘em how we got back,” old Habibula rasped. “Tell ’em how you computed the angle of the sterilizing ray. Tell ‘em how we gained our velocity in the shadow of the mortal ship itself, and slipped beneath the fan of fire with all rockets dead, and coasted on to the precious station—

  His rusty voice sobbed and stopped.

  “Lars!” Lilith’s hand squeezed mine desperately, vibrant and alive again. “Oh, Lars!”

  The anomaly was gone.

  Black funnel and green machine had flickered off the telescreen. The northward stars shone clear where they had been, no longer dimmed or reddened. Nowhere was nowhere—with a small letter now.

  Unbelievingly, I looked at the other end of the drum. That devouring creature had become a thin gray ghost fading from the electronic chart. The bright magnetic web dissolved. In a moment all the chart was blank, except the bright green dot of Nowhere Near.

  “They’ve closed the gate.” Ken Star’s voice was faint and shaken. “I knew—I nearly knew they would. Giles said they wouldn’t let us strike them.”

  “They’re machines,” old Habibula wheezed. “They do what they must. When the fleet didn’t follow, they had to go back.”

  “I thought—” I had to catch my breath. “I thought they’d fire on us.”

  “We got inside their main computer,” old Habibula puffed. “We smashed a hatful of transistors to take care of that.”

  “Giles!” Lilith threw her arms around him, gay malice glinting in her wide bronze eyes and breathless laughter ringing in her voice. “I never quite believed the yarns you used to tell—”

  “But now you know I’m an immortal hero!” He kissed her on the mouth. “A mortal hungry hero! We found wonder and danger and secrets enough in that dead universe, but precious little to eat and drink. Let’s find my caviar and wine!”

 

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