Cosmic radiation fed itself into their immortality radiogens. Electrical energy, the warmth of life in the last analysis, gradually built up as in a storage battery. The stunned cells, knocked out by the force of the super-explosion, slowly returned to normal.
It took a year.
During that time, happy at escaping the death that had seemed inexorable, they conversed mentally. They spoke of things past, wondering of things present, and looked forward to things future, once they were free. Well inured to the dragging of time in their 2,000 years of life, the short year passed quickly to them, where it might have driven an ordinary mortal mad.
Anton York felt the twitch of some buried muscle one day. Others came alive quickly, as if it were a signal. The involuntary muscles instantly took up their given tasks. The heart beat and the diaphragm pumped up and down, sucking air into the lungs.
York leaped up suddenly, only to collapse again with a groan. The atrophied muscles refused to take up their burden that quickly.
A few minutes later he arose again, stronger, and turned to help Vera up. He supported her while her body went through the same phases. Finally they embraced each other, knowing the supreme joy of life, when death had seemed inevitable.
“Tony, dearest, are we truly immortal?” Vera spoke, using her vocal chords instead of the tiring telepathy. They noticed immediately that the sound echoed, in the same queer doubling effect of their vision. She went on. “Disease and old age can’t touch us. Now even that terrible explosion, violent death, failed! We’re like the legendary gods.”
“Don’t think that way!” York returned almost sharply. “We must never lose our perspective. We’re immortals through science. And some principle of science accounts for our escape. I had our energy coils loaded to capacity with power enough to shatter a sun. When the Three Eternals shoved a dis-beam at us and released it, the explosion acted on every atom simultaneously, blowing ship and all away as a unit. Probably at the speed of light and out into remote space.”
“The Three Eternals!” Vera burst in suddenly. “If they survived the explosion too, they may be near now, ready to blast us again—”
York, reminded of their deadly enemies, was already leaping toward the visiscreen, for an all-around view of surrounding space. Like their eyes, the view-plate seemed afflicted with the singular doubling effect. The firmament of stars around them contained all pairs. But no alien ship blocked out any part of the sky.
“The Eternals aren’t here,” York announced, his nerves easing. “They must have been destroyed then—no, wait! I see their ship now. Just a speck far away, where they were blown in a different direction.”
Vera bent close to the view-plate suddenly.
“And look. Another ship is approaching theirs! A queer ship.
“Hsst!” York warned. A totally alien ship might be friend or enemy. “Tune in mentally, if you make contact with the Three Eternals.”
Opening their minds full range, they waited to—hear any telepathic radiations from the distant scene. At last they heard a voice, in the universal language of telepathy. Yet they recognized it for an alien, non-human voice, by its mental overtones.
“What ship is this?” challenged the voice, as though it were a patrol ship on the high seas. “Answer immediately!”
York and Vera waited breathlessly. At last one of the Three Eternals answered groggily, as though he, too, had just emerged from the same suspended state following the explosion.
“The ship of the Three Eternals. We just survived a tremendous explosion, miraculously. Who are you? Where are you from?” The psychic voice was staccato, peremptory.
“From Earth.” And then, typically, the Eternal spoke angrily. “But who are you to make demands? I resent your insolence.”
“Earth!” It seemed to be a startled exclamation from the alien. “The J-X seventy-seven creatures! You’ve come to rescue—” The words broke off. Then came a horribly merciless tone. “I am sorry.”
In the view-plate, York and Vera saw a green energy-ray stab from the alien ship to the Three Eternals. In a supernal flash of sparks, the ship of the Three Eternals vanished!
The back dot of the alien ship hovered for a moment, as though to make sure of their work. Then it scudded away, disappearing into the void beyond.
Vera shuddered. “I’m glad the Three Eternals are gone, though I’ve never wanted the death of a human before. They were such evil beings.”
“Evil beings?” York’s voice was tense. “What about those ruthless aliens? They did us a favour, destroying the Three Eternals, but we’d get the same if they found us. Who are they? From what system? Why are they patrolling space?”
Vera had no answer.
“I wonder where we are,” York mused. “We have a lot of things to do and find out. First, this queer doubling of our sight and voices.”
A strange expression came over his face. He strode to his laboratory workroom and for the next few hours laboured with his intricate instruments. Vera brought in hot food, in answer to their reawakened appetites. She found her husband tapping his finger on the barrel of an electronic spectroscope. He was frowning, and behind the frown was startled disbelief.
“Tony,” Vera asked, “have you found out where we are? Let’s return to Earth. I don’t like the thought of meeting those aliens.”
“Return to Earth?” York had started. He gripped her shoulders. “I just made a rough measurement of the velocity of light here. It’s only a hundred-and-eighty-one miles a second—five thousand miles a second slower than it should be! And the velocity of sound is quite a bit below eleven hundred feet per second!”
“That accounts for the doubling phenomenon,” Vera returned quickly, for she was no less of a scientist than her husband. “Our eyes and ears are attuned to different rates. But, Tony, you look so worried.” At the same instant it struck her. “Why should light and sound travel slower?” she gasped.
For an answer, York swept his hand toward the nearest port. Out there lay the eternal stars, but what had happened to them? Even they were changed. In their many lifetimes of Wandering, Anton York and Vera had come to know the star map almost as minutely as one knows the streets of a city.
“Those are not our stars,” York said in a low voice. “Vera, this is not the Universe we used to know!”
After eating in stunned silence, York spoke again, more calmly.
“I see It quite clearly now. The explosion blew us up as unit—completely out of normal space-time—into a new universe! I’ve suspected for some time that different universes lie side by side, or wrapped up in one another. They occupy the same space and time, but not the same space-time. Notice that distinction. It’s like taking two chemical reagents and mixing them in various proportions, to get many different compounds.
“This space-time, with its ‘shorter’ time and ‘longer’ space—judging from the low light speed—is separate and distinct from our Universe. Yet the two universes are contained in one another like alcohol in water. Earth, in one sense, is no more than a few miles away in space and a few hours in time. In another sense, it’s remoter than the most distant nebula and several eternities removed on an all-embracing time scale.”
Vera’s brows came together over a white anxious face.
“Tony, it confuses me. I’m afraid. I feel as if we’re dropping into an endless pit here. I never felt that way in our space. Tony, let’s go back to our Universe right away.”
He shook his head, telling her with his eyes to prepare for greater shock.
“We can’t. At least for the present Our engine, Our energy-coils, our generators—all our motivating machines are dead. I tried them. You see, there’s slower energy here too. We’re marooned in this other universe, and drifting like a wandering comet. We’re helpless, too. If those patrolling aliens happen to spy us…”