"I didn't, of course. I took Ragna's people's speculations and asked the design chief to come up with a design for an artifact that would more or less answer to the description. He did. And the factory crew made it a reality."
"But what is it, Jake?" Carl asked. "What is the cube? What's it for?"
"Don't know what it's for, yet," I answered. "But what it is, near as I can figure from what the design chief told me, is a continuum in which the normal properties of space and time are nonexistent. Within the confines of these six sides, neither space nor time exist at all. What's inside the cube is literally and absolutely nothing. A nonspace. A singularity. The Ahgirr scientists' speculation about it being a huge space folded up was wrong, but I can see how they arrived at the hypothesis. Nonspace is a slippery concept to grasp. Another thing: space and time are not the only thing that doesn't exist inside. Nothing else in the universe does either. Fundamental things, like the Planck Constant, or G, the gravitational constant, or any of those foundation stones of the physical universe as we know it. Inside the cube, anything goes. You could make a whole new universe in there, using physical laws different from the standard ones."
Darla said, "What about the information, the data coming out of the cube? The Movement people who examined it discovered that."
"The chief told me that stray radiation is generated at the interface of the cube's surface and the outside world. It has something to do with virtual particle creation, which goes on everywhere in the universe all the time. I can't quite grasp the reason, but somehow when these particles pop into existence near the cube, they get real nervous and instead of blinking out of existence like good little virtual particles are supposed to, they stay real and fly out into the world as electronpositron pairs."
"Man, you lost me there," Carl said.
"Forget it," I said. "I don't understand it myself."
"Jake, I have other problems with this," Darla said. "How do you know that this cube and the first one are identical?"
"I don't, now," I said. "But if I do succeed in delivering this one back to T-Maze three months in the past, it will be identical. Because this cube will be the first cube. No?"
Darla sighed in resignation. "I guess." She frowned and shook her head. "But I still don't see how you could have created something when you didn't know exactly what that something was in the first place."
I took the cube back and tossed it into the air, caught it. It was feather light. What I couldn't figure was why it wasn't completely weightless. The design chief had told me it had something to do with "inertial drag" and the fact that the frozen energies holding the cube together possessed "mass equivalence."
"Well, let's put it this way," I said. "I didn't know anything. But I had some speculations about what the cube was. Everybody had them. Prime told us that it was `an experiment in the creation of a universe.' Don't ask me how he knew. I spilled all of this to the design chief, who is a creative mind. He took these ideas and kicked it around his circuits for a while and came up with a few ideas of his own. One of them turned out to be feasible. And the technical guys did it up for us. This is how the cube got created in the first place. This was its origin."
"If you say so," Darla said.
We got on the robocart for the trip back to the receiving bay.
"There's still a paradox," Darla stated as we got moving. "Where did the idea for the cube come from?"
"I told you," I said.
"No, I mean the reason it came to be. Its reason for existing at all. The first cube prompted the speculation, which generated the motivation to create this one. But you're saying that this one is the first one. So… so, you see, it's as if-"
"The cube created itself," I said.
"Yes! That's the only way you can look at it! It's impossible, Jake. Absolutely impossible."
"Have an impossibility," I said, handing it to her.
The plant foreman was sad to see us go. "You will return sometime soon? Our brief association has been most rewarding and gratifying."
"Sure, we'll come back," I told it, not wanting to hurt its feelings.
"When?"
"Uh…" Nothing like being put on the spot.
"Will you consider postponing your departure? All our various subsystems are most distressed over your leaving. Individuals of paramount creative powers, such as yourselves, are very rare. We are very desirous of continuing to work with you on other projects."
"Well, you're very kind, but we really must run along."
There was a sound not unlike a sigh. "Then please take our good wishes with you, and do return at your earliest convenience."
"Thank you. We will."
I wondered when the plant had last entertained visitors. Thousands; millions of years ago? It was cruel, in a way.
After Arthur had inflated the spacetime ship to full size, I shot the rig into the large cargo bay, and Carl tucked his Chevy into one of two smaller ones. We all boarded the craft. The illuminated spires and domes of the plant dwindled behind us as we sped toward the edge of the world, It was night on this face of Microcosmos, which Carl had dubbed "Fiipside." The moon surrogate rode low in the sky, and stars like diamonds on black velvet dotted the dome of night. Below, city complexes lay outlined in dim crosshatches, and a few stray lights glowed feebly in the dark countryside. A still, deserted world, Microcosmos was, eerie even by day, by night a place of silence and shadows and mystery. A chill went through me. Time was a thing of substance on this world, a weight bearing down like the stone mass of an ancient temple. I felt a sudden savage longing to get free of this place, this graveyard of the ages. It was dead here. There was death here. The world-disk flipped over as we swung around the edge, and seeing- Microcosmos in daylight again made me feel a little better. But not for long, because a reception committee was on its way to meet us.
"Oh, shit," Arthur said, frantically swiping at the control box.
Dozens of variously colored fiery motes were streaking up at us. Arthur put the ship into a steep climb, but in no time a swirling orange vortex-phenomenon was hard on our tail. The thing looked very familiar. Arthur began evasive maneuvers.
"Arthur," I said, trying to sound calm, "what do those things do?"
"Oh, they eat things," Arthur said airily. "Like spacetime ships. Ingests them, sort of. An explosive device can't do much damage to us, nor can any kind of beam weapon. But that thing can snare us and slowly disintegrate us. It has enough energy to do that."
I said, "Oh."
Horrified, I looked at Carl, remembering one of his Chevy's fantastic weapons, the enigma Carl called the "Tasmanian Devil." Carl swallowed hard and nodded.
I turned to Arthur. "Are these the things that chase their targets and never give up until they destroy them?"
"Yup. How did you know?"
"Uh… what are you going to do?"
"Well, there's only one thing I can do…" Arthur said. The thing behind us was gaining, matching our every increment of speed, growing until we could see its boiling interior, a fiercely glowing furnace of demonic combustion. There was a suggestion of something else in there, a shape, a mad, implacable figure, a howling psychotic beast bent only on destruction.
"… and I think I better do it now."
Instantaneously, everything around us disappeared-the Tasmanian Devil, the sky, Microcosmos itself. And in their place were endless stars, all around us.
We were in space.
"Dearie me," Arthur wailed, "I've really gone and done it now."
He was silent, slowly moving his thick, stunted fingers over the face of the control box.
"Arthur," I said after a long moment, "what's happened?"
"Oh, nothing. We made a continuum jump, which we shouldn't have done near such a large mass as a planet, especially Microcosmos, since it has very peculiar gravitational properties. We had no choice, but that doesn't help much."
"What's the problem?"
"Well, I have no idea where or when we are. None. It'll ta
ke time to get enough readings to make an educated guess. My uneducated guess is that we've jumped over ten billion light-years."
Standing beside me, Darla put both arms around my waist and pressed herself against me. I needed someone to hug, too; I snaked my arm about her shoulders and held her closer.
"Well, this is a bit of luck," Arthur said. "Star very near. Not only did we not wind up in the middle of intergalactic space, we blundered on to a likely planet-bearing star." He snorted. "It probably has a brood of grungy ice balls and gas giants orbiting it. No good to us." He sighed. "Better check it out, anyway."
The stars shifted suddenly. Then again. And again. Each time, a single star up ahead grew brighter, and with a few more jumps it stood out as a tiny disk against the spattering of glowing points around it.
"Looks awfully familiar," Arthur said suspiciously. He shook his head. "Couldn't be. But it's the right spectral type. Let's see if we can resolve a planet or two."
Delicately, Arthur palpated the face of the box, which, I had come to believe, was some sort of direct interface or link between the ship's instrumentation and Arthur's powerful robot brain.
I scanned the star swarm around us. To our rear, the swarm thickened, congealing along a long milky band of luminescence shot through with dark clouds. I searched left and right, trying to pick out constellations.
"You won't believe this," Arthur said. "But guess where we are."
"That's Sol over there," I said. "The sun. Earth's sun."
"You just earned your astronomy merit badge, kid."
15
"I'm going home," Carl said, awestruck. "I'm really going home."
"Hold on, dearie," Arthur cautioned. "We know where we are, but not when we are. This could be Earth in one million A.D., or B.C., for that matter, or any time in between. So don't get your hopes up. That was a completely blind jump we made. The chances of our winding up here at all were approximately infinity to one." Arthur shook his head. "Amazing. If I'd aimed for here, I never would have made it. Not in one jump, anyway. To've done it with any degree of accuracy and safety, fifty would have been more like it."
"Any way of finding out when we are?" I asked.
"Well, several. I could clock the rate of a few known pulsars and get a fairly good idea of the galactic epoch we're in… if I had a few known pulsars to look at. Trouble is, I don't have much in storage about Terran astronomy, not anything like what I'd need to make those calculations."
"I thought you knew everything, Arthur," Darla said. "How much do you know about Terran astronomy?" Arthur countered.
"Not a whole lot."
"Well, there you are. Neither does this ship, although there's a lot of general astronomical data in its memory. Maybe the ship's computer can come up with something. Offhand, I'd say there's a good chance we're in the general time frame you people came from, give or take a few thousand years. I do know a few constellations; and they're not at all distorted."
"One way to find out for sure," I said.
"How?"
"Let's go to Earth and take a look at it."
"That idea makes me a little nervous," Arthur said. "Don't like to go mucking about where I don't belong. But…" He swung his ugly dog head around and gave me his grimacing, nonhuman approximation of a smile. "What the hell, eh? We have nothing to lose but our lives."
"'That's the spirit, Arthur," I told him.
"Spare me the cliches."
It took Arthur twelve hours to dodge and weave his way through the solar system, which wasn't bad time, considering that we traveled nearly two billion kilometers. In fact, I thought it was great time, but Arthur said it wasn't, giving the excuse that he had to take it easy in the midst of great gravitational stress. I don't know what he was talking about, because we didn't see any planets on the way in, not even Jupiter. And not one asteroid. But I don't know much about space. I like something firm under my feet.
We spent the time in the truck, sleeping, eating the great gobs of food that the factory people had given us, and talking. "Have you considered what you might find when we get to Earth?" I asked Carl.
"Yeah," he said, grinning. "Hot dogs, the L.A. Dodgers, cars that run on gasoline, movies, girls…"
Lori folded her arms and shot daggers at him. "Have you thought of anything else?" I said.
He shrugged. "Like what?"
I really didn't know how to tell him. "I guess it depends on when we arrive."
"When? I don't get you."
I tried another tack. "What about Lori?"
"Oh, I've thought about that."Carl pulled her over to him and hugged her with one arm. "We've decided. We're getting married."
Lori smiled winsomely. "Yeah," she said.
"Going to be complicated."
"How so?" Carl asked, frowning.
"Well, remember. Lori's time of origin is almost two hundred years in the future. There're a few adjustments she's going to have to make."
"I know," Lori said. "Imagine having to worry about tooth decay." She made a face.
"Yeah, tooth decay, and other bothersome things. But more than that, Carl, you're going to have to establish some kind of identity for Lori. Some sort of fictitious but convincing background for her. You can't very well go around telling everybody that she's from another planet."
"Why not?" He waited for my look of incredulity, then chuckled. "Yeah, I know. Nobody's ever going to believe my story. I'd get laughed out of the country. Or they'd lock me up and throw away the key."
"Right. Don't even try. And that car stays here."
"Hey… wait a minute. That car would back up my story all the way! Yeah! Why didn't I think of that?"
"Hold it, Carl."
"Let 'em laugh at my story. I'll just fire a Tasmanian Devil at 'em and let 'em see how funny it all is. Hell, I'm taking the car."
"Carl, it won't work."
"Why not? Forget it, Jake. It's my car, and I'm taking it with me."
I stared at him for a moment. "Carl, how old are you? You've never told me."
"Nineteen."
"Really? I thought you were a little older than that. You look it."
"I got used to telling people I was twenty-one. But after that year I spent driving around in outer space, I must look like I'm fifty."
"You never went into that period of your life, either. What did you do out there on the road?"
"Nothing. I'd stay in motels. Eat. Drive around a little. Sleep in the car. I stayed with a g-uh, a friend for a couple weeks. Then I thought of getting a job, but I didn't have any papers. So I kept driving around."
"Did the Militia give you any trouble?"
"I was stopped once, for not having a proper license plate. But I gave the cop two gold coins, and she let me off with a warning."
Our stalwart law enforcement personnel. "I'm surprised you were only stopped once."
"They chased me several times. But all the cops ever got was a lot of dust in their teeth."
I nodded. I knew that car very well. "What did you do for money?"
"I found all these gold coins in the trunk. I guess Prime put them there."
I didn't know how to go about telling him that I didn't think Prime had done it.
Earth.
I hadn't seen it in more than thirty years. It hung in space beneath us looking like a huge blue and white marble, its land masses faint brown texturings beneath a gauze-wrapping of cloud. Day was breaking over the Philippines, and the swirling gray fingers of a tropical depression hovered over New Guinea. Early morning sun glared off the bright blue islandfreckled Pacific.
We made our entry into the atmosphere somewhere in the vicinity of Wake Island, I think. We swept over the Hawaiians at a screaming Mach 12, then decelerated rapidly, following a flight path that hewed fairly close to the Tropic of Cancer, if I remembered my Terran geography.
We now had a fairly good idea what time frame we had jumped into. The ship had tracked numerous artificial satellites in orbit about the Earth, but not th
e profusion of my day. No power satellites, no geosynchronous space colonies, no activity in and about the moon. No space traffic whatsoever. We were obviously somewhere in the middle to late twentieth century, the dawn of the age of space travel. I had warned Arthur not to make a dead-on approach to the western coast of the United States. I did remember my Terran history, and these were very paranoid times. Carl agreed. Arthur said he didn't know whether the ship was radar-transparent, because in the era in which the ship was built, no one worried about prehistoric technologies like radar. There was a chance that alarms were already going off all over the place. So we scared the shit out of Mexico, hung a right at the tip of the Baja peninsula, and headed north following the coast and flying low.
The ship was fully transparent now. It was eerie-four humans, one improbable alien android, a futuristic trailer truck, and a contemporary automobile, streaking over coastal towns and fishing villages, blithely flying along like characters out of a surreal version of Peter Pan.
"What will the natives think?" I asked Arthur.
"Huh? Oh, the transparency's only one-way, dearie. Don't worry about that. I've got the surface of the ship tuned to a mirror finish. We'll be reflecting sky and sea. Practically invisible, except from a few angles."
"San Diego!" Carl said, pointing to the coast.
I looked. Lots of orange-tile roofs, a few tall buildings, a big harbor choked with shipping. I'd never been to San Diego. "We'd better head inland here," Carl said.
"We've got company," Arthur said.
I didn't see them until they got out of the sun: two military-looking aircraft with triangular wings. They swooped down on us and leveled off. One banked and vectored in for a closer look.
"Christ, we got the Air Force after us," Carl said worriedly. "We're a goddamn UFO."
"Not for long," Arthur said.
With a stunning burst of speed, we left the aircraft behind as if they were standing still. The sea was gone; we were streaking over semiarid land that soon turned to desert.
"Slow down!" Carl yelled. "We'll be in Arizona in another minute! Turn around and go back!"
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