Gaynor shrugged his shoulders and closed another switch. The dial quivered and swung over. Then seconds crawled by, and then the automatic relays in the lab seemed to have reacted, because the power intake needle quivered faintly. It came to rest at a point infinitesimally removed from zero. "Faint is right," said Gaynor.
Clair touched the prime switch. Nothing happened. The tube didn't even glow.
He shoved the rheostat over viciously. At the very peak-end of its arc, when the power flowing through the tube under normal conditions would have been inconceivable, the tractor tube very faintly reddened.
And that was all. With common accord the three voyagers looked out of the window. The scene had not changed an iota. Blackness swirled indescribably before them, on the other side of a meager inch of metal, quartz, and plastic.
IV. Baby Universe
A full minute passed as they stared out of the port. Jocelyn interrupted the dismal silence with, "It looks as if we'll have to plan on being here for a hell of a long time, gentlemen. Apparently, I'll never write those feature stories."
"Yeah," said Clair vaguely. "A hell of a long time." He cut off the trickle of power, and the indicator needle ticked back to zero. "Maybe we'd better get some sleep," he said. "We might dream of a solution."
Silently Gaynor swung down the three bunks and drew curtains between them, and they vanished into their improvised compartments.
Clair was nearly asleep when Gaynor hissed at him through the thin barrier. "What do you want now?" he asked drearily.
"It occurs to me," said Gaynor, "that we've made a mistake."
"That's about as obvious an understatement as ever I've heard in a long and aimless career. What do you mean?"
"Listen: the logical train is as follows. We haven't figured a way out because we have no power. And if we have no power we have no proto. And if we have no proto we have no pull. And now, colleague, tell me just what good it would do us if we had any power?"
"Pavlik, I'm too tired for riddles. What have you found?"
"Just this—proto attracts 99. It doesn't repel it. It can't attract us any closer because we're where the proto comes from in the first place. So even if we build up the 99—what happens then? There wouldn't be any effect!"
"Then that means," said Clair, suddenly tense, "we've reached a perfect impasse. You're right, of course. But it doesn't do us any good. Less than no good at all, in fact, because now we know that we wouldn't know how to get away if we had the power in the first place."
"Then that sums it up," said Gaynor bitterly. "We not only can't get out, but we don't know how we could get out if we could. Funny things happen to logic when you have a universe all to yourself."
Suddenly Jocelyn's sleepy voice rang out. "What," it said, "are you two conspirators muttering about? Are you planning to sacrifice the sacred virgin to the Great God Proto?"
"We've just decided," said Gaynor dolefully, "that we're here almost for good. Or at least that we'll be here until the vapor pressure of our bodies disperses us uniformly through our universe—which, as any chemist will tell you, is a long and longer time."
"Good," she said astonishingly. "Now that you've decided maybe you can get some sleep. Good night, all."
"A very unusual girl," whispered Clair hoarsely. "If it didn't seem sort of silly under the circumstances I'd propose to her."
"And what makes you think," snapped Gaynor nastily, "that she'd hate you? In fact, I had some thoughts along that line myself. Do you mind, esteemed colleague?"
"Not at all. Maybe it'll come down to the flip of a coin."
There was a long pause. Then Gaynor said nervously, "Do you suppose, Art, that we'll have to eat one another?"
"What's that?"
"You know. Cannibalism. It's customary."
"No," said Clair thoughtfully. "It would be irrational in this case. Cannibalism is called for only when there is a question of outside influence. Thus, if we were waiting to be saved by a passing space-scow there would be some point to it; that is, one might survive and live a full life at the expense of the others. However in our case while we might eat Miss Earle on running out of food the chance of survival is too small to counterbalance the degradation of human instincts involved.
"I took the precaution of hiding a bottle of Scotch—where you'll never find it, esteemed colleague—and we have enough medicine aboard to furnish us with an overdose of any variety we desire. So we simply dump some veronal into goblets, add a few jiggers, touch glasses, and say goodbye."
"Thanks, Art," said Gaynor gratefully. "You think of everything. Well—good night."
"Good night."
Breakfast was a grim and desultory affair. To raise their spirits they were playing a sort of word game. It circled gruesomely about the adjective, "apodyr tic." Jocelyn would ask, "Am I apodyctic?" and the two men would airily answer that she was and so were they and the ship and breakfast and plumbers' pipe and suspenders. "But," said Gaynor ominously, "a Springfield rifle is not."
"Well, then—is the window apodyctic?"
The two physicists looked at each other. "I'm inclined to think that it is," said Gaynor reflectively.
"I don't know," mused Clair, glancing at the little square of, quartz. Then—
"My God!" he cried thinly. "Look at that!"
The others spun around and stared. The amorphous, stirless utter black that had been outside the port was there no longer. Instead there was motion and a mad spectrograph of colors which blended into a sort of gray sworl. A congeries of glowing spheres blazed past the window. Great looping ribbons of flame snaked past them and curled around the ship cracking quietly to themselves as they struck.
The darkness was light, and the silence was sound; they stared and saw depth of space beyond vast depth; incredible shapes and sizes and colors stirring and awakening for as far as the eye could see. Vague, glowing areas weirdly collapsed into tense spheres that screamed off in any direction. Vast shapes smashed into each other to explode into far-scattering pellets of blazing green or blue or gold.
Huge gouts of flame assailed one another. An incredibly vast rod of light that must have rivalled a solar system for magnitude collided with a great, spinning disk and absorbed it, then swelled and shattered into a million fragments that blazed with all the lights of the stars and shot off in unison to some distant goal.
Globes battled with one another near the ship, lancing out immense spears of gleaming force, smashing at each other in Jovian combat, ravening their might into the incredible void. A nebulous anthropomorphic figure the size of a galaxy strode immensely through the deeps to crumble into vast glowing discs as it neared a mighty ophidian of flame.
The three voyagers stared insanely at the colossal spectacle, nearer to madness than a human being can safely approach. It was Jocelyn who slammed the metal shutter against the port, shutting out the awful view.
"Sit down," she commanded. "You've seen all you can stand of that." Limply the two men obeyed.
"I don't think dying would matter much to me now, Art," said Gaynor flatly. "What was happening out there?"
Stupidly, pedantically, Clair said, "Every accepted cosmogony states that at one time the entire universe consisted of a single homogeneous spread of matter-energy permeating all of space. They say that this all-embracing and infinitely tenuous cloud was at absolute rest with neither motion nor the possibility of motion. There was not, there could not have been thesis or antithesis or synthesis.
"Nobody knows what happened to it after that, before it became what it is today, with most of it vacuum and the rest of it densely packed matter and energy."
"I see," said Gaynor. "What's going on—outside—is the birth of a universe. Or perhaps only its birth-pains. As yet there is no law save that law must struggle to assert itself over the insanity of matter and energy on the loose. Possibly this primitive stress-material has a will of its own—at least that's one explanation of what we saw. Possibly the eternal combat-motif is merely the expression of the ascendancy of law so long outraged by the impossible state of rest that obtained for so long....