“You had better not go out by yourself,” he had told her. It would take some time, he knew, to sort out who had started the war, but the bulerite disaster had certainly contributed. Placing blame, however, was a matter of degree, involving primary and secondary responsibility, he told himself, knowing that he was in agreement with the man who had accosted Janet; the ugly side of the problem was that in all likelihood the people singled out for blame were the proud possessors of tendencies belonging to all humankind. Wonderful, Sam thought. Next I’ll blame the victims for their own deaths.
“You think he was right, don’t you?” Janet had asked.
He had not answered. Later he had realized that he should have said something, no matter how harsh; a free exchange was better than a crushing silence.
Meanwhile Alard’s physicists, together with Richard, were trying to make sense of the anomaly that was swallowing the earth. Sam imagined strange electrical storms dancing across a grotesque night sky, ragged survivors crouching in ruins, terrified by the shaking earth and the mad heavens. Something had swallowed the planet as a frog swallows a fly. Earth was now in the bowels of another universe….
And the bubble was expanding, forcing Alard to prepare for moving Asterome into a sun orbit.
“We suspected what was happening,” Richard said, “just before I left.” He cleared his throat and looked around at the gathering. There were about fifty people scattered across the hall, Sam estimated. Most of the chairs were empty; for some reason attendance always fell off toward the end of the week.
“Could you review what we know to date for us?” Alard asked.
“Bulerite obeys its own laws,” Richard said loudly. “We thought that we had made a stable substance.” Sam was startled by the “we,” since Richard had played no part in the development or manufacture of the family element. “We knew that there had to be a lot of energy locked up in it to give it its strength, but we failed to see that the stuff was a process, until it reached its limits.” As Sam listened to the familiar explanation, he found himself caught up again in its implications. “We now believe,” Richard continued, “that bulerite is strong because it absorbs energy. Any kind—kinetic in the form of air molecules striking it, earth tremors, sunlight, cosmic rays, any kind of radiation. You hit it with your hand and it will accept the blow as a contribution to its equilibrium. But it doesn’t always need energy. It was stable when it left our factories. In physical terms its binding is a kind of extended quark binding—a force that increases with distance of separation and can be made to do this over the atomic scales. Thus bulerite is dense and arrayed in a tight lattice, unlike any other solid. But the force can in a certain density regime extend over larger and larger distances, so once a certain amount of energy is absorbed by the lattice, which converts some of it into mass and achieves even higher density, the stuff starts to grow—among other things—unevenly, creating striations in the exotic lattice, destroying the material. It took a while for it to drift from stability and become chaotic. Until then only minute absorptions of energy were enough to keep it stable, apparently. If it had been an obvious energy sink, then a chunk of it sitting in a room would have made the room cold and we would have known.”
“The time element hid the problem,” Alard said.
“Right. Bulerite absorbs energy slowly for years, then goes wild. It may then grow to become super-dense in ways we don’t understand.”
Sam thought of Antaeus, the giant who renewed his strength whenever he was thrown to the ground, turning the energy used against him to his advantage.
“Can’t we make it stable?” Alard asked.
Richard shook his head. “We don’t know how. I’m not even very sure of the explanations I’ve given, except that something like this must be true. Look at it this way: matter is locked-up energy, solid to our way of perceiving things. Bulerite is a way of freezing energy into an untried state of matter. Basic realities may be involved—the realm below the Wheeler-Planck unit of length, ten to the minus thirty-third centimeters smaller than atomic structures, where the statistical regularities of our scale of nature may not hold. What if these effects spill into our larger scale of things whenever a sample of bulerite loses its stability and goes into flux?” He paused, waved his hand, and shook his head. “We thought we’d left behind the problems of metal fatigue, structural flaws, and materials limitations, believing we could build with a virtually permanent material. But bulerite is an intruder. It belongs perhaps to an untried possibility of the universe. Our natural elements range from simplicity to complex instability, but bulerite seems to belong to a completely different periodic table, beyond our island of stable elements. Maybe zones of chaos separate the endless series of possible periodic tables. We bridged one such zone and brought a new material into our realm of experience, where we saw it as being orderly according to our mode of perception, in the way our senses slice time. Somewhere, universes will begin differently than our own, and in one of them bulerite will be a normal element—but not here.”
Richard was silent, as if he had cast a spell over himself.
“What about this new thing?” Alard asked. “What is it?”
“We don’t know. Forces we don’t understand have been set in motion, distorting space-time around earth. Physical laws may be…inconsistent inside.”
“Can’t you tell us anything?” Alard asked.
“The bubble, whatever it is, may expand until it reaches the limit of bulerite’s capacity to cast the field. If it is a field. There’s no science for this, I’m just speculating…”
“How big can it get?”
Richard shook his head and looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe as far as the moon…maybe the entire sunspace.” He shifted his gaze to Sam. “Maybe there’s no limit. Maybe the fault we’ve opened in the fabric of space is permanent.” Richard sat down stiffly, like a mannequin whose limbs were being bent to fit the chair. Margot leaned close to him as Alard started to ask another question.
Janet sat by the window in the bedroom, eyeing the empty street ten stories below. The dispersion of the tribeam was down to resemble moonlight. She peered to her left and followed the curving ground upward, until she was looking at the continuation of Main Street miles overhead in the clear night. The lack of a horizon always startled her. Here the stars were underground, literally beneath one’s feet, and the land closed around its store of humanity like the protective husk of a spore. Richard would say that it was a spore, the core center of a new world.
The hollow planetoid was slowly moving out of L-5, she had been told, into a powered sun orbit that would put it near Mars within six months; once it was there, a decision would be made whether to go on to Ganymede or not.
She was calm in the stillness. Sam was asleep in the bed behind her. The plan to depart from earth-moon space had settled his mind, despite the harrowing difficulties with the lunar communities. Asterome was already overloaded with refugees from earth; now more people were coming up from the moon as it became certain that the bubble would expand to touch earth’s satellite. Alard had agreed to admit another hundred thousand, most of the lunar population—there was nothing else to do—but with the proviso that Asterome would act as a ferry to Mars, where all the refugees, including most of those from earth, would have to disembark. Asterome had also agreed to evacuate the remaining lunar population if no other means were found for them to reach Mars. These were mostly technicians, scientists, and engineers, who were anxious to salvage resources that might be needed by humankind later—hardware, cultural artifacts, and the old Space Navy, which was being reconditioned rapidly.
She looked down at the closed shops across the street, remembering the people she had watched go by during the day, especially those who had spilled in from the tent villages. She had watched vehicles running around the ribbon of road, the toy like trolleys that ran overhead and around the inner equator; but she no longer went out to talk to people, afraid of their reactions. Only a little while ago, s
he thought, Asterome had been a place untouched by recent events, free of the past, a place for her to rest; she sympathized with some of the citizens, who felt that a prolonged stay by the refugees would inevitably change the worldlet.
Maybe her roommate from college was among the tent dwellers, or the boy who had first made love to her in high school; she could not imagine them as grown people. Would they also reproach her for having driven them from their homes?
She would never again see her parents’ graves in Vermont or the town in Maine where she had attended grade school…
She thought of the strange bubble around the earth. A cancerous something. A few hours ago she had watched the giant transparent cell eclipse the sun; the earth had been a dark nucleus floating inside.
She got up from the window and turned to look at Sam. He was sleeping on his stomach, his hair a mask looking at her in the pale light. Suddenly she wanted to turn him over and strike his face—to tell him that she had looked ahead to see what kind of life was waiting for them and that it would not be worth living….
“Is it certain that the moon will be engulfed?” Sam asked in the screen room. “Maybe it won’t reach that far.”
Richard shrugged from behind Alard’s desk. “As certain as practical people need to have it.” Sam was surprised at how easily Richard was able to fill a few of Alard’s functions.
The screen chamber was almost deserted in the early morning hours, with only a half dozen people keeping vigil.
“Can it grow large enough to enclose all of sunspace?” Orton asked.
Richard threw up his hands, sat back, and sighed. “I don’t know. It’s growing slowly, but steadily. It might stop. Maybe it will shrink and disappear out of our space-time.” He reached over to the controls on his desk and turned on the screens.
Earth was wrapped in a shimmering albumen. Bright points of light were bursting inside with clockwork regularity.
“The increase in diameter,” Richard said, “can be measured easily from day to day.”
“God damn,” Orton whispered next to Sam, and crumpled up an empty pack of cigarettes. “The last Gauloises anyone will ever see again.”
“The moon will be nudged in a matter of weeks,” Richard said. “I hope the remaining personnel leave themselves enough time to get away.”
“Don’t you think they will?” Sam asked.
“They should be able to—but remember, they’re staying behind to save what they can. They’ll skeleton-crew every last ship after they’ve packed everything they can aboard, and they’ll be using the mass driver catapults to launch Mars-bound containers into unpowered orbits. We’ll be picking up stuff near Mars for years. I hope that in their zeal they don’t forget to leave themselves enough time or that they don’t spread themselves too thin.”
Sam thought of Janet, alone up in the room. He would have to bring her meals to her again today. Her appetite was not good. He felt her fears inside him, adding to his own sense of loss. He would never again see the places he had known as a child, or visit all the places he had meant to see; no one else he knew would visit them, either. The sunlight on Mars would be cooler; the countryside on Ganymede would be dark and stony; only Asterome offered a semblance of earth….
The bubble shimmered on the screens. The earth swam silently inside, unmindful of the destruction raging on its surface, where an age of order was ending and one of chaos beginning.
We will not come alive again, Sam thought. Those of us who survive will become moribund, our existence marginal, unless we begin to dream, and soon enough to do some good. He looked at Richard, wondering if there were any effective dreamers left, or any good dreams.
Richard sat alone in the darkened screen room, viewing the magnified image of the moon. Its cities were diamonds in the rough terrain, the bright lights of an old house on the night when the inhabitants are preparing to leave.
Slowly, steadily, Asterome’s velocity was increasing, as the hard-shelled societal container moved along the powered orbit that would bring it into a more distant sun orbit, for a rendezvous with Mars in six months.
He looked at the huge, glistening field of force that imprisoned the earth. Occasionally a surface feature would become visible, greatly enlarged by the random distortions of the shroud: a ghostly view of ocean; a field of arctic snow; a half-glimpsed shadow of a ruined city; the red glow of a new volcano streaming a river of red. A whole world transfigured in a crystal paperweight…
He almost hoped that the anomaly would expand without limit, swallowing the sun and all its planets, driving mankind away from its sun-filled cradle.
Alard, Margot, and Orton shared his view, as did the interstellar group; but this was not the time to discuss it openly. For the moment it was enough that certain types of research were going on, and succeeding; the time would come when more people would care, if humanity survived. It remained to find out what kind of leadership was present on Mars, in the asteroids, and on Ganymede. The research teams and facilities at Ganymede City were especially important to have intact. But if cooperation became impossible, for one reason or another, he knew that Asterome would have to make its own decisions.
Margot came into the room, and he watched her as she crossed the empty hall toward the desk.
“I know I’m early for my shift,” she said, “but I couldn’t sleep, so you might as well get some.”
He started to get up. “How’s Janet?”
“Not too good—and Sam’s too wrapped up with her problems to care for anything else.”
Powered by the giant communications transmitter at the Lunar University at Plato, the continuous laser beam was streaming the world’s accumulated wisdom across space to data storage on Asterome. No human mind could ever hope to master even a small portion of what was being received every second, Sam thought, but it would all be there—the literature, the science and engineering, the records of unfinished research, in all the languages of history, indexed and accessible through any terminal. He wondered how much new work had been lost, because it had not yet been recorded.
The last ships were readying to leave the moon. Sam was grateful that so much rescue of knowledge and culture had been possible. The loss of the library at Alexandria would not be repeated on a grand scale.
“The transmission is over,” Alard said.
“I wonder,” Sam said as he paced back and forth on the black floor, “how much of it is useless knowledge.” He was alone with Alard and
Orton in the screen room. “How much of it will seem like so much dark-age groping a thousand years from now—if we survive.”
“You’re tired,” Blackfriar said, sounding irritated.
“The index is coming through now,” Alard said.
Sam looked around at the screens. The bubble now covered the entire field of vision, and only the most distant pickups could frame the entire anomaly. It was difficult to shake off the mood of cynicism and doubt. Sam imagined Asterome’s laser receptors pointing back toward the moon, listening, the attentive ears of a child trying to hear the words of a dying parent.
At eight o’clock in the evening, four weeks out from L-5, a large crowd gathered to watch the end of the moon.
Richard watched them fill the screen room. Throughout the worldlet, people were gathering in homes and public places; but these were the settlement’s leaders—biologists, electricians, agricultural specialists, builders, engineers, academicians, area leaders, generalists, mathematicians, and troubleshooters; they were Russians and Japanese, Africans and Indians, Americans and Polynesians, Englishmen and Europeans—the mix of two generations born away from earth. The community worked, Richard had come to realize, because its people carried around in their minds a picture of their society, the same vision of macrolife that had so affected Orton, a knowledge of who they were and what they wished to accomplish; their world was humanity’s other basket of life and dreams, now more important than ever. It might not have happened, he thought, and we would be dying with the
earth.
He was becoming part of this world very quickly. Alard was not merely allowing Orton, Margot, and him to help; he was allowing them to learn how to manage a world. Orton was already convinced that he would cast his lot with Asterome, wherever it might go; the skills that he would contribute would be his tie to the future, he had said, in place of his unborn children.
Alard stood behind the desk. Richard saw a different man for a moment; as he looked at the mixture of Asian and African features, he saw a kind of satisfaction. Alard seemed to lack the charisma of powerful leaders; perhaps the look of satisfaction came from an unpretentious self-respect. As the switching center for the ideas and demands of his community, Alard was the eye of the storm, where a thousand differing demands were reconciled and prepared for implementation; any kind of posturing beyond simple pride-in-work would impair Alard’s unspecialized receptivity, especially his ability to grasp relationships among blocks of information from areas in which he was not a specialist. In his capacity for assessment, he could integrate technical-scientific ideas with psychosocial issues—using information-processing systems, both human and artificial—with a sureness undreamed of by the last century’s futurists; yet he was not unique, since this kind of information handling was a basic part of Asterome’s educational system, whether or not an individual went into social management. Alard’s individual contribution came from the harnessing of his imagination, in his way of demanding, and getting, things that more specialized innovators would not ask of themselves.
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