CHAPTER SEVEN: The Metagalactic Center

 

Nobody would weep if Miramon took Amalfi away now. Miramon looked like a stabler type. Doubtless the association would do Amalfi good. At least, it could hardly do New Earth any real harm. If they wanted perpetual dissidents like Amalfi on He, that was their lookout.

Hazleton was a more difficult case, for Amalfi and the New Earthmen alike. As a disciple of Gifford Bonner, he was theoretically wedded to the doctrine of the ultimate absurdity of trying to enforce order upon a universe whose natural state was noise, and whose natural trend was toward more and more noise to the ultimate senseless jangle of the heat-death. Bonner taught-and there was nobody to say him nay-that even the many regularities of nature which had been discovered since scientific method had first begun to be exploited, back in the 17th Century, were simply long-term statistical accidents, local discontinuities in an overall scheme whose sole continuity was chaos. Touring the universe by ear alone, Bonner often said to simplify his meaning, you would hear nothing but a horrifying and endless roar for billions of years; then a three-minute scrap of Bach which stood for the whole body of organized knowledge; and then the roar again for more billions of years. And even the Bach, should you pause to examine it, would in a moment or so decay into John Cage and merge with the prevailing, immitigable tumult.

Yet the habit of power had never lost its grip on Hazleton; again and again, since the "nova" had first swum into New Earth's ken, the Compleat Stochastic had been driven into taking action, into imposing his own sense of purpose and order upon the Stochastic universe of mindless jumble, like a Quaker at last goaded into hitting his opponent. During the tussle with Jorn the Apostle, Amalfi, watching the results of Mark's operations without being able to observe the operations themselves, wondered in his behalf: Is it worth it, after all these years, to be finessed into another of these political struggles they had all thought were gone forever? What does it mean for a man who subscribes to such doctrines to be putting up a fight for a world he knows is going to die even sooner than his philosophy had given him to believe?

And on the simpler level, is Dee worth it to him? Does he know what she has become? As a young woman she had been an adventurer, but she had changed; now she was really very little more than a brooding hen, a clear shot on the nest for any poacher. For that matter, what did Mark know about the sterile affair?

Well, that last question was answered, but all the others were still as puzzling as ever. Did Hazleton's abrupt decision to go with He after all represent a final relinquishing of the habit of power-or an affirmation of it? It should be visible to a man of Hazleton's acumen that power over New Earth was no longer even faintly comparable to having power over Okies; it was about as rewarding as being the chaplain of a summer camp. Or he might well have seen that the Jorn incident had proven that Amalfi remained and would remain the figure of power in the minds of the New Earthman, to be turned to whenever New Earth was confronted by a concrete menace; the rest of the New Earthmen had lost the ability to be wily, to plan a battle, to think fast when the occasion demanded it, and would not concede that anybody else still retained those abilities but their legendary ex-mayor-leaving any current mayor, even Hazleton, only the dregs of rule in peacetime when very little rule was needed or wanted. In fact, Amalfi realized suddenly and with amazement, the fraud he had practised upon Jorn the Apostle had been no fraud at all, at least to this extent: that the New Earth-men were content with randomness, just as the Stochastics professed themselves to be, and had no interest in imposing purpose upon it or upon their own lives except as it was forced upon them from outside, either by someone like Jorn, or by someone like Amalfi in opposition to Jorn. So the possibility that Stochasticism would seep into and make soggy the souls of the Warriors of God had been real all along, whether or not the New Earthmen themselves would recognize it as Stochasticism; the times and the philosophy had found each other, and it was even probable that the very erudite Gifford Bonner was only a belated intellectualization of a feeling that had been floating mindlessly about New Earth for many years. Nothing else could account for Amalfi's and Hazleton's quick success in selling Jorn the Apostle something that Jorn had at first been far too intelligent to believe- nothing else but the fact, unsuspected by Amalfi at least, and possibly by Hazleton, that it was true. If Hazleton had seen that, then he was relinquishing nothing in abandoning New Earth for He; he was, instead, opting for the only center of power that meant anything in the few years that remained to him and to the universe at large.

Except, of course, for that unknown quantity, the Web of Hercules; but of course it was beyond Hazleton's power to opt for that.

And even Amalfi was becoming infected with the Stochastic virus now. These questions still interested him, but the flavor of academicism which informed them in the face of the coming catastrophe was becoming more and more evident even to him. All that there was left to cleave to was the cannoning flight of the planet of He toward the metagalactic center, the struggle to finish the machinery that would be needed on arrival, the desperate urgency to be there before the Web of Hercules.

And so Dee's was-if not the final victory-the last word. It was her judgment of Amalfi as the Flying Dutchman that stuck to him after all his other labels and masks had been stripped off by the triumph of time. The curse lay now, as it always had lain, not in flight itself but in the loneliness that drove a man to flight everlasting.

Except that now the end was in sight.

The discovery that the great spiral nebulae, the island universes of space into which the stars were grouped, themselves tended to congregate in vast groups revolving in spiral arms around a common center of density, was foreshadowed as early as the 1950's when Shapley mapped the "inner metagalaxy"-a group of approximately fifty galaxies to which both the Milky Way and the Andromeda nebula belonged. After the Milne scholium had been proven, it had become possible to show that such metagalaxies were the rule, and that they in turn formed spiral arms curving inward toward a center which was the hub upon which the whole of creation turned, and from which it had originally exploded into being from the monobloc.

It was to that dead center that He was fleeing now, back into the womb of time.

 

There was no longer any daylight on the planet. The route that it was taking sometimes produced a brief cloudy patch in its sky, a small spiral glow in the night which was a galaxy in passage, but never a sun. Even the tenuous bridges of stars which connected the galaxies like umbilical cords-bridges whose discovery by Fritz Zworkyn in 1953 had caused a drastic upward revision in estimates of the amount of matter in the universe, and hence in estimates of the size and age of the universe- provided no relief of the black emptiness for He, not so much as a day of it; intergalactic space was too vast for that. Glowing solely by artificial light, He hurtled under the full spindizzy drive possible only to so massive a vessel toward that Place where the Will had given birth to the Idea, and there had been light.

"We are working from what you taught us to call the Mach hypothesis," Retma explained to Amalfi. "Dr. Bonner calls it the Viconian hypothesis, or cosmological principle: that from any point in space or time the universe would look the same as it would from any other point, and that therefore no total accounting of the stresses acting at that point is possible unless one assumes that all the rest of the universe is to be taken into account. This, however, would be true only in taw-time, in which the universe is static, eternal and infinite. In Mime, which sees the universe as finite and expanding, the Mach hypothesis dictates that every point is a unique point of vantage- except for the metagalactic center, which is stress-free and in stasis because all the stresses cancel each other out, being equidistant. There, one might effect great changes with relatively small expenditures of power."

"For instance," Dr. Bonner suggested, "altering the orbit of Sirius by stepping on a buttercup."

"I hope not," Retma said. "We could not control such an inadvertency. But it is not such a bagatelle as the orbit of Sirius we would be seeking to change anyhow, so perhaps that is not a real danger. What we will be trading upon is the chance-only a slight chance, but it exists- that this neutral z one coincides with such a z one hi the anti-matter universe, and that at the moment of annihilation the two neutral zones, the two dead centers, will become common and will outlast the destruction by a significant instant."

"How big an instant?" Amalfi said uneasily.

"Your guess is as good as ours," Dr. Schloss said. "We are counting on about five micro-seconds at a minimum.

If it lasts that long it needn't last any longer for our purposes-and it might last as long as half an hour, while the elements are being recreated. Half an hour would be as good as an eternity to us; but we can put our imprint on the whole future for both universes if we are given only those five micro-seconds."

"And if someone else is not already at the core and readier than we are to use it," Retma added somberly.

"Use it how?" Amalfi said. "I'm not fighting my way through your generalizations very well. Just what are our purposes, anyhow? What buttercup are we going to step on-and what will the outcome be? Will we live through it-or will the future put our faces on postage stamps as martyrs? Explain yourselves!"

"Certainly," Retma said, looking a little taken aback. "The situation as we see it is this: Anything that survives the Ginnangu-Gap at the metagalactic center, by as much as five micro-seconds, carries an energy potential into the future which will have a considerable influence on the re-formation of the two universes. If the surviving object is only a stone-or a planet, like He-then the two universes will re-form exactly as they did after the explosion of the monoblock, and their histories will repeat themselves very closely. If, on the other hand, the surviving object has volition and a little maneuverability-such as a man-it has available to it any of the infinitely many different sets of dimensions of Hilbert space. Each one of us that makes that crossing may in a few micro-seconds start a universe of his own, with a fate wholly unpredictable from history."

"But," Dr. Schloss added, "he will die in the process. The stuffs and energies of him become the monobloc of his universe."

"Gods of all stars," Hazleton said. . . . "Helleshin! Gods of all stars is what we're racing the Web of Hercules to become, isn't it? Well, I'm punished for my oldest, most comfortable oath. I never thought I'd become one-and I'm not even sure I want to be."

"Is there any other choice?" Amalfi said. "What happens if the Web of Hercules gets there first?"

"Then they remake the universes as they choose," Retma said. "Since we know nothing about them, we cannot even guess how they would choose."

"Except," Dr. Bonner added, "that their choices are not very likely to include us, or anything like us."

"That sounds like a safe bet," Amalfi said. "I must confess I feel about as uninspired as Mark does about the alternative, though. Or-is there a third alternative? What happens if the metagalactic center is empty when the catastrophe arrives? If neither the Web nor He is there, prepared to use it?"

Retma shrugged. "Then-if we can speak at all about so grand a transformation—"history repeats itself. The universe is born again, goes through its travails, and continues its journey to its terminal catastrophes: the heat-death and the monobloc. It may be that we will find ourselves carrying on as we always did, but in the antimatter universe; if so, we would be unable to detect the difference. But I think that unlikely. The most probable event is immediate extinction, and a re-birth of both universes from the primordial ylem."

"Ylem?" Amalfi said. "What's that? I've never heard the word before."

"The ylem was the primordial flux of neutrons out of which all else emerged," Dr. Schloss said. "I'm not surprised that you hadn't heard it before; it's the ABC of cosmogony, the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow premise. Ylem in cosmogony is an assumption like 'zero' in mathematics- something so old and so fundamental that it would never occur to you that somebody had to invent it."

"All right," Amalfi said. "Then what Retma is saying is that the most probable denouement, if dead-center is empty when June second comes, is that we will all be reduced to a sea of neutrons?"

"That's right," Dr. Schloss said.

"Not much of a choice," Gifford Bonner said reflectively.

"No," Miramon said, speaking for the first time. "It is not much of a choice. But it is all the choice we will have. And we will not have even that, if we fail to reach the metagalactic center in time."

Nevertheless, it was only in the last year that Web Hazleton began to grasp, and then only dimly, the true nature of the coming end. Even then, the knowledge did not come home to him by way of the men who were directing the preparations; what they were preparing for, though it was not kept secret, remained mostly incomprehensible, and so could not shake his confidence that what was being aimed at was a way to prevent the Ginnangu-Gap from happening at all. He ceased to believe that, finally and dismally, only when Estelle refused to bear him a child.

"But why?" Web said, seizing her hand with one of his, and with the other gesturing desperately at the walls of the apartment the Hevijjns1 had given them. "We're permanent now-it isn't only' that we know we are, everybody agrees we are. It isn't a taboo line for us any longer!"

"I know," Estelle said gently. "It isn't that. I wish you hadn't asked; it would have been simpler that way."

"It would have occurred to me sooner or later. Ordinarily I would have gone off the pills right away, but there was so much confusion about moving to He-anyhow I only just realized you were still on them. I wish you'd tell me why."

"Web, my dear, you'd know why if you thought a little more about it. The end is the end, that's all. What would be the sense of having a child that would live only a year or two?"

"It may not be that certain," Web said darkly.

"Of course it's certain. Actually I think I've known it was coming ever since I was born-perhaps even before I was born. I could feel it coming."

"Honestly, Estelle, don't you know that's nonsense?"

"I can see why it would sound that way," Estelle admitted. "But I can't help that. And since the end is on the way, I can't call it nonsense, can I? I had the premonition, and it was right."

"I think what this all means is that you don't want children."

"That's true," Estelle said, surprisingly. "I never have had any drive toward children-not even much drive toward my own survival, really. But that's all part of the same thing. In a way, I was lucky; a lot of people are not at home in their own times. I was born in the time that was right for me-the time of the end of the world. That's why I'm not oriented toward child-bearing-because I know that there won't be another generation after yours and mine. For all I know, I might even actually be sterile; it certainly wouldn't surprise me."

"Estelle, don't. I can't listen to you talk like that."

"I'm sorry, love. I don't mean to distress you. It doesn't distress me, but I know the reason for that. I'm pointed toward the end-in a way it's the ultimate, natural outcome of my life, the event that gives it all meaning; but you're only being overtaken by it, like most people."

"I don't know," Web muttered. "It all sounds awfully like a rationalization Jo me. Estelle, you're so beautiful .. . doesn't that mean anything? Aren't you beautiful to attract a man, so you can have a child? That's the way I've always understood it."

"It might have been for that once," Estelle said gravely. "It sounds like it ought to be an axiom, anyway. Well ... I wouldn't say so to anybody but you, Web, but I do know I'm beautiful. Most women would tell you the same thing about themselves, if it were permissible-it's a state of mind, one that's essential to a woman, she's only half a woman if she doesn't think she's beautiful ... and she is beautiful if she doesn't think she is, no matter what she looks like. I'm not ashamed of being beautiful and I'm not embarrassed by it, but I don't pay it much attention any more, either. It's a means to an end, just as you say-and the end has outlived its usefulness. In my mind, it's obvious that a woman who would commit a year-old child to the flames would have to be a fiend, if she knew that that's what she'd be doing just by giving birth. I know; and I can't do it."

"Women have taken Chances like that before, and knowingly, too," Web said stubbornly. "Peasants who knew their children would starve, because the parents were starving already. Or women in the age just before spaceflight; Dr. Bonner says that for five years there, the race stood within twenty minutes of extinction. But they went ahead and had the children anyhow-otherwise we wouldn't be here."

"It's an urge," Estelle said quietly, "that I don't have, Web. And this time, there's no escape."

"You keep saying that, but I'm not even sure you're right. Amalfi says that there's a chance"

"I know," Estelle said. "I did some of the calculations. But it's not that kind of a chance, my dear. It's something you might be able to do, or I, because we're old enough to absorb instructions, and do just the right thing at the right time. A baby couldn't do that. It would be like setting him adrift in a spaceship, with plenty of power and plenty of food—"he'd die anyhow, and you couldn't tell him how to prevent it. It's so complex that some of us surely will make fatal mistakes."

He was silent.

"Besides," Estelle added gently, "even for us it won't be for long. We'll die too. It's only that we'll have a chance to influence the moment of creation that's implicit in the moment of destruction. That, if I make it at all, will be my child, Web-the only one worth having now."

"But it won't be mine."

"No, love. You'll have your own."

"No, no, Estelle! What good is that? I want mine to be yours too!"

She put her arms around his shoulders and leaned her cheek against his.

"I know," she whispered. "I know. But the time for that is over. That's the fate we were formed for, Web. The gift of children was taken away from us. Instead of babies, we were given universes."

"It's not enough," Web said. He embraced her fiercely. "Not by half. Nobody consulted me when that contract was being drawn."

"Did you ask to be born, love?"

"Well ... no. But I don't mind. . . . Oh. That's how it is."

"Yes, that's how it is. He can't consult with us either. So it's up to us. No child of mine born to go into the flames, Web; no child of mine and yours."

"No," Web said hollowly. "You're right, it wouldn't be fair. All right, Estelle. I'll settle for another year of you. I don't think I want a universe."

Deceleration began late in January of 4104. From here on out, the flight of He would be tentative, despite the increasing urgency; for the metagalactic center was as featureless as the rest of intergalactic space, and only extreme care and the most complex instrumentation would tell the voyagers when they had arrived. For the purpose, the Hevians had much elaborated their control bridge, which was located on a 300-foot steel basketwork tower atop the highest mountain the planet afforded-called, to Amalfi's embarrassment, Mt. Amalfi. Here the Survivors- as they had begun to call themselves with a kind of desperate jocularity-met in almost continuous session.

The Survivors consisted simply of everyone on the planet whom Schloss and Retma jointly agreed capable of following the instructions for the ultimate instant with even the slightest chance of success. Schloss and Retma had been hard-headed; it was not a large group. It included all of the New Earthmen, though Schloss had been dubious about both Dee and Web, and a group of ten Hevians including Miramon and Retma himself. Oddly, as the time grew closer, the Hevians began to drop out, apparently each as soon as he had fully understood what was being attempted and what the outcome might be.

"Why do they do that?" Amalfi asked Miramon. "Don't your people have any survival urge at all?"

"I am not surprised," Miramon said. "They live by stable values. They would rather die with them than survive without them. Certainly they have the survival urge, but it expresses itself differently than yours does, Mayor Amalfi. What they want to see survive are the things they think valuable about living at all-and this project presents them with very few of those."

"Then what about you, and Retma?"

"Retma is a scientist; that is perhaps sufficient explanation. As for me, Mayor Amalfi, as you very well know, I am an anachronism. I no more share the major value system of He than you do of New Earth."

Amalfi was answered, and he was sorry that he had asked.

"How close do you think we are?" he said.

"Very close now," Schloss answered from the control desk. Outside the huge windows, which completely encircled the room, there was still little to be seen but the all-consuming and perpetual night. If one had sharp eyes and stood outside for half an hour or so to become dark-adapted, it was possible to see as many as five galaxies of varying degrees of faintness, for this near the center the galaxy density was higher than it was anywhere else in the universe; but to the ordinary quick glance the skies appeared devoid of as much as a single pinprick of light.

"The readings are falling off steadily," Retma agreed. "And there is something else odd: locally we are getting too much power on everything. We have been throttling down steadily for the past week, and still the output rises-exponentially, in fact. I hope that the curve does not maintain that shape all the way, or we shall simply be unable to handle our own machines when we reach our destination."

"What's the reason for that?" Hazleton said. "Has Conservation of Energy been repealed at the center?"

"I doubt it," Retma said. "I think the curve will flatten at the crest—"

"A Pearl curve," Schloss put in. "We ought to have anticipated this. Naturally anything that happens at the center will work with much more efficiency than it could anywhere else, since the center is stress free. The curve will begin to flatten as the performance of our machines begins to approximate the abstractions of physics-the ideal gas, the frictionless surface, the perfectly empty vacuum and so on. All my life I've been taught not to believe in the actual existence of any of those ideals, but I guess I'm going to get at least a fuzzy glimpse of them!"

"Including the gravity-free metrical frame?" Amalfi said worriedly. "We'll be in a nice mess if the spindizzies have nothing to latch onto."

"No, it cannot possibly be gravity-free," Retma said. "It will be gravitationally neutral-again making for unprecedented efficiency-but only because all the stresses are balanced. There cannot be any point in the universe that is gravitationally unstressed, not so long as a scrap of matter is left in it."

"Suppose the spindizzies did quit," Estelle said. "We're not going anywhere after the center anyhow."

"No," Amalfi agreed, "but I'd like to maintain my maneuverability until we see what our competitors are doing-if anything. Any sign of them, Retma?"

"Nothing yet. Unfortunately we don't know exactly what it is that we are looking for. But at least there are no other dirigible masses like ours anywhere in this vicinity; in fact, no patterned activity at all that we can detect."

"Then we're ahead of them?"

"Not necessarily," Schloss said. "If they're at the center right now, they could be doing a good many things we couldn't detect, under a very low screen. However, they would already have detected us and done something about us if that were the case. Let's assume we're ahead until the instruments say otherwise; I think that's a fairly safe assumption."

"How much longer to the center?" Hazleton said. "A few months, perhaps," Retma said. "If we're right in assuming that this curve has a flat spot on top of it."

"And the necessary machinery?"

"The last installation will be hi at the end of this week," Amalfi said. "We can begin countdown the moment we arrive ... providing that we can learn to handle equipment operating at ten or a hundred times its rated efficiency, without blowing some of it out in the process. We'd better start practicing the moment the system is complete."

"Amen," Hazleton said fervently. "Can I borrow your slide-rule? I've got a few setting-up exercises I'd better start on right now." He left the room. Amalfi looked uneasily out at the night. He would almost have preferred it had the Web of Hercules been there ahead of them and promptly taken a sitting-duck shot at them; this uncertainty as to whether or not someone really was lurking out there-coupled with the totally unknown nature of their opponents-was more unsettling than open battle. However, there was no help for it; and if He really was first, it gave them a sizable advantage. ...

And their only advantage. The only defenses Amalfi had been able to conceive and jury-rig for He depended importantly on actually being at the metagalactic center, able to make use of the almost instant number of weak resultant forces that could be used there to produce major responses-the buttercup-vs.-Sirius effect Bonner had so characterized. In this area he found Miramon and the Hevian council oddly uncooperative, even flaccid, as though mounting a defense for the whole planet was too big a concept for them to grasp-a hard thing to believe in view of the prodigious concepts they had mastered and put to work since Amalfi had first met them as savages up to their knees in mud and violence. Well, if he did not yet understand them, he was not going to make his understanding perfect in a few months; and at least Miramon was perfectly willing to let Amalfi and Hazleton direct Hevian labor in putting together their almost wholly theoretical breadboard rigs.

"Some of these," Hazleton had said, looking at a just-completed tangle of wires, lenses, antennae and kernels of metal with rueful respect, "ought to prove pretty potent in the pinch. I just wish I knew which ones they were." Which, unfortunately, was a perfect precis of the situation.

But the needles recording the stresses and currents of space around He continued to fall; those recording the output of Hevian equipment continued to rise. On May 23rd 4104, both sets of meters rose suddenly to their high ends and jammed madly against the pegs, and the whole planet rang suddenly with the awful, tortured roar of spindizzies driven beyond endurance. Miramon's hand flashed out for the manual master switch so fast that Amalfi could not tell whether it had been he or the City Fathers that cut the power. Maybe even Miramon did not know; at least he must have gotten to the cut off button within a hair of the automatic reaction.

The howl died. Silence. The Survivors looked at each other. "

"Well," Amalfi said, "we're here, evidently." For some reason, he felt wildly elated-a wholly irrational reaction, but he did not stop to analyze it.

"So we are," Hazleton said, his eyes snapping. "Now what the hell happened to the metering? I can understand the local apparatus going wild-but why did the input meters from outside rise instead of dropping back to zero?"

"Noise, I believe," Retma said. "Noise? How so?"

"It takes power to operate a meter-not a great deal, but it consumes some. Consequently, the input meters ran as wild as the machines did, because operating at peak efficiency with no incoming signals to register, they picked up the signals generated by their own functioning."

"I don't like that," Hazleton said. "Do we have any way of finding out on what level it's safe to run any instrument under these circumstances? I'd like to see generation curves on the effect so we can make such a calculation-but there's not much point in consulting the records if we just burn out the machine in the process."

Amalfi picked up the only instrument on the Hevian board that was "his"-the microphone to the City Fathers. "Are you still alive down there?" he said.

"YES, MR. MAYOR," the answer came promptly. Miramon looked startled; since everything of which he had any knowledge had gone dead, even the lights-they were sitting bathed only in the barely ascertainable glow of the zodiacal light, that belt of tenuous ionized gas in He's atmosphere brought to life by He's magnetic field, plus the even dimmer glow of the few nearby galaxies- the sudden voice of the speakers must have alarmed him. "Good. What are you operating on?"

"WET CELLS IN SERIES AT TWENTY-FIVE HUNDRED VOLTS."

"All of you?"

"YES, MR. MAYOR."

Amalfi grinned in the virtual darkness. "All right, apply your efficiency figures to a set of standard instrumental situations."

"DONE."

"Give me an operating level for Mr. Miramon's line down to you, allowing for pilot lights on his board so he can see his settings."

"MR. MAYOR, THAT IS NOT NECESSARY. WE HAVE ALREADY RESET THE MASTER CUTOUT AT THE NECESSARY BLOWPOINT LEVEL. WE CAN RE-ACTUATE ALL THE CIRCUITS AT ONCE."

"No, don't do that, we don't want the spindizzies back on too—"

"THE SPINDIZZIES ARE OFF," the City Fathers said, with austere simplicity.

"Well, Miramon? Do you trust them? Or would you rather have them tie in to you first and print their data for you, so you can turn the planet back on piecemeal?"

He heard Miramon draw in his breath slightly to answer, but he was never to know what that answer would have been; for at the same moment, Miramon's whole board came alive at once.

"Hey!" Amalfi squalled. "Wait for orders down there, dammit!"

"STANDING ORDERS, MR. MAYOR. AFTER COUNTDOWN BEGINS WE ARE TO ACT AT THE FIRST SIGN OF OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE. COUNTDOWN BEGAN TWELVE HUNDRED SECONDS AGO, AND SEVEN SECONDS AGO OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE BECAME STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT."

"What do they mean?" Miramon said, trying to read every instrument on his board at once. "I thought I understood your language, Mayor Amalfi, but—"

"The City Fathers don't speak Okie, they speak Machine," Amalfi said grimly. "What they mean is that the Web of Hercules-if that's who it is-is coming in on us. And coming in on us fast."

With a single, circumscribed flip of his closed fingers, Miramon turned off the lights.

Blackness. Then, seeping faintly over the windows around the tower, the air-glow of the zodiacal light; then, still later, the dim pinwheels of island universes. On Miramon's board, there was a single spearpoint of yellow-orange which was only the heater of a vacuum tube smaller than an acorn; in this central gloom at the heart and birthplace of the universe, it was almost blinding. Amalfi had to turn his back on it to maintain the profound dark-adaptation that his vision needed to operate at all in the tower on his mountain.

While he waited for his sight to come back, he wondered at the speed of Miramon's reaction, and the motives behind it. Surely the Hevian could not believe that a set of pilot lights in a tower on top of a remote mountain could be bright enough to be seen from space; for that matter, blacking out even as large an object as a whole planet could serve no military purpose-it had been two millennia since any reasonably sophisticated enemy depended upon light alone to see by. And where in Miramon's whole lifetime could he have acquired the blackout reflex? It made no sense; yet Miramon had restored the blackout with all the trained positiveness of a boxer riding with a punch.

When the light began to grow, he had his answer-and no time left to wonder how Miramon had anticipated it.

It began as though the destruction of the inter-universal messenger were about to repeat itself in reverse, encompassing the whole of creation in the process. Crawls of greenish-yellow light were beginning to move high up in the Hevian sky, at first as ghostly as auroral traces, then with a purposeful writhing and brightening which seemed as horrifyingly like life as the copulation of a mass of green-gold nematode worms seen under phase-contrast lighting. Particle counters began to chatter on the board, and Hazleton jumped to monitor the cumulative readings.

"Where is that stuff coming from-can you tell?" Amalfi said.

"It seems to come from nearly a hundred discrete point-sources, surrounding us in a sphere with a diameter of about a light year," Miramon said. He sounded preoccupied; he was doing something with controls whose purpose was unknown to Amalfi.

"Hmm. Ships, without a doubt. Well, now we know where they get their name, anyhow. But what is it they're using?"

"That's easy," Hazleton said grimly. "It's anti-matter."

"How can that be?"

"Look at the frequency analysis on this secondary radiation we're getting, and you'll see. Every one of those ships must be primarily a particle accelerator of prodigious size. They're sending streams of stripped heavy antimatter atoms right down the gravitational ingeodesics toward us-that's what makes the paths the stuff is following look so twisted. They've found a way to generate and project primary cosmics made of anti-matter atoms, and in quantity. When they strike our atmosphere, both disintegrate—"

"And the planet gets a dose of high-energy gamma radiation," Amalfi said. "And they must have known how to do it for a long time, since they're named after the technique. Helleshin! What a way to conquer a planet! They can either sterilize the populace, or kill it off, at will, without ever even coming close to the place."

"We've had the sterility dose already," Hazleton said quietly.

"That can hardly matter now," Estelle said, in an even softer voice.

"The killing dose won't matter either," Hazleton said, "Radiation sickness takes months to develop, even when it's going to be fatal."

"They could disable us quickly enough," Amalfi said harshly. "We've got to stop this somehow. We need these last days!"

"What do you propose?" Hazleton said. "Nothing that we've set up will work in a globe at a distance of a light year .. .except—"

"Except the base surge," Amalfi said. "Let's use it, and quick."

"What is this?" Miramon said.

"We've got your spindizzies set up for a single burn-out overload pulse. In the position we're in, the resulting single wave-front ought to tie space into knots for-well, we don't know how far the effect will carry, but a long way."

"Maybe even all the way to the limits of the universe," Dr. Schloss said.

"Well, what of it?" Amalfi demanded. "It's due to be destroyed anyhow in only ten days—"

"Not if you destroy it first," Schloss said. "If it isn't here when the anti-matter universe passes through it, all bets are off; there'll be nothing we can do."

"It'll still be here."

"Not in any useful sense-not if the matter in it is tied up in billions of gravitational whirlpools. Better let the Web kill us than destroy the future evolution of two universes, Amalfi! Can't you give over playing god, even now?"

"All right," Amalfi said. "Look at those dosimeters, and look at that sky. What have you to suggest?"

The sky was now one even intensity of glow, like a full overcast lit by a dull sun. Outside, the lower mountains of the range stood with their tree-covered flanks, so completely without shadow as to suggest that the windows ringing the tower were actually parts of a flat mural done by an unskilled hand. The counters had given over chattering and were putting out a subdued roar.

"Only what I just suggested," Schloss said hopelessly.

"Load up on anti-radiation drugs, and hope we can stay On our feet for ten days. What else is there? They've got us."

"Excuse me," Miramon said. "That is not altogether certain. We have some resources of our own. I have just launched one; it may be sufficient."

"What is it?" Amalfi demanded. "I didn't know you mounted any weapons. How long will we have to wait before it acts?"

"One question at a time," Miramon said. "Of course we mount weapons. We never talk about them, because there were children on our planet, and still are, the gods receive them. But we had to face the fact that we might some day be invested by a hostile fleet, considering how far afield we were ranging from our home galaxy, and how many stars we were visiting. Thus we provided several means for defense. One of these we meant never to use, but we have just used it now."

"And that is?" Hazleton said tensely.

"We would never have told you, except for the coming end," Miramon said. "You have praised us as chemists, Mayor Amalfi. We have applied chemistry to physics. We discovered how to poison an electromagnetic field by resonance-the way the process of catalysis is poisoned in chemistry. The poison field propagates itself along a carrier wave, and controlling field, almost any signal which is continuous and conforms to the Faraday equations. Look."

He pointed out the window. The light did not seem to have lessened any; but it was now mottled with leprous patches. In a space of seconds, the patches spread and flowed into each other, until the light was now confined to isolated luminous clouds, rapidly being eaten away at the edges, like dead cells being dissolved by the enzymes of decay bacteria.

When the sky went totally dark, Amalfi could see the hundred streamers of the particle streams pointed inward at He; at least it looked a hundred, though actually he could hardly have seen more than fifteen from any one spot on the planet. And these too were being eaten away, receding into blackness.

The counters went back to stuttering, but they did not quite stop.

"What happens when the effect gets back to the ships?" Web asked.

"It will poison the circuits themselves," Miramon said.

"The entities in the ships will suffer total nerve-block. They will die, and so will the ships. Nothing will be left but a hundred hulks."

Amalfi let out a long, ragged sigh.

"No wonder you weren't interested in our breadboard rigs," he said. "With a thing like that, you could have become another Web of Hercules yourselves."

"No," Miramon said. "That we could never become."

"Gods of all stars!" Hazleton said. "Is it over? As fast as that?"

Miramon's smile was wintery. "I doubt that we will hear from the Web of Hercules again," he said. "But what your City Fathers call the countdown continues. It is only ten days to the end of the world."

Hazleton turned back to the dosimeters. For a moment, he simply stared at them. Then, to Amalfi's astonishment, he began to laugh.

"What's so funny?" Amalfi growled.

"See for yourself. If Miramon's people had ever tangled with the Web in the real world, they would have lost."

"Why?"

"Because," Hazleton said, wiping his eyes, "while he was beating them off, we all passed the lethal dose of hard radiation. We are all dead as doornails as we sit here!"

"And this is a joke?" Amalfi said.

"Of course it's a joke, boss. It doesn't make the faintest bit of difference. We don't live in that kind of 'real world' any more. We have a dose. In two weeks well begin to become dizzy, and lose our hair, and vomit. In three weeks we'll be dead. And you still don't see the joke?"

"I see it," Amalfi said. "I can subtract ten from fourteen and get four; you mean we'll live until we die."

"I cant abide a man who kills my jokes."

"It's a pretty old joke," Amalfi said slowly. "But maybe it's still funny, at that; if it was good enough for Aristophanes, I guess it's good enough for me."

"I think that's pretty damn funny, all right," Dee said with bitter fury. Miramon was staring from one New Earthman to another with an expression of utter bafflement. Amalfi smiled.

"Don't say so unless you think so, Dee," he said. "It's always been a joke, after all. The death of one man is just as funny as the death of a universe. Don't repudiate the last laugh of all. It may be the only legacy we'll leave."

"MIDNIGHT," the City Fathers said. "THE COUNT IS ZERO MINUS NINE."