Making sure he was leaving nothing in a dangerous condition, he followed Affleck towards the control deck, trying to guess why he had been summoned. He knew that Megan Fleischer was deeply unhappy about the weak acceleration, and that she had been engaged in bitter arguments with Hepworth, but he had no responsibilites in that area. Perhaps Montane, increasingly concerned with the trivia of shipboard routine, wanted to discuss illumination levels or the canteen rota. Or, could it be… could it possibly be… ?
Orbitsville!
Nicklin’s premonition gave way to numb certainty as he entered the control room.
In spite of some magnification the main screen now depicted a much greater area of the Orbitsville shell, with the result that the pattern of green lines appeared to have become more intricate. There were hundreds of regularly spaced foci, generating sprays of interlocking curves, resembling flower petals, which confused and dazzled the eye. The vast design had not only increased greatly in brightness, but was now pulsing at a rate of about once a second. Each peak of brilliance washed through the control room, garishly outlining the high-backed seats and their occupants—Montane, Voorsanger, Fleischer and Hepworth.
“You’re entitled to see this, Jim,” Hepworth said without turning his head. “Something is going to happen.”
Nicklin moved to stand behind Hepworth. “When did the pulsing start?”
“A couple of minutes ago—and it’s speeding up.”
Frozen, entranced, Nicklin stared at the living image as the tempo of light beats increased. It became an eye-stabbing frenzy, the intervals between the peaks lessening, shrinking to zero. And then the screen steadied at an intolerable level of brightness.
A second went by; two seconds; three seconds…
Scott was right, Nicklin thought, sick with apprehension, half-blinded by the glare. Something is going to happen.
…four seconds; five seconds…
The incredible filigree of green fire ceased to exist—and in its place there was a new pattern.
Blue-white crescents suddenly filled the entire screen. Row upon row, line upon line, layer upon layer. The largest were in the centre of the field of view, and outwards from them, graduating downwards in size to star-like points, there ran countless curving meridians of dwindling beads. The farther they were from the centre of the screen the fuller were the crescents. In their entirety they formed concentric gauzy spheres, depth leading to depth, at the centre of which was a small yellow sun.
Nicklin’s gaze fixed on one of the largest of the side-lit globes, but long before he had brought it into perfect focus—identifying the blue and green variegations as oceans and continents—an inner voice had told him he was looking at a new-born planet.
Orbitsville—equal in area to millions of Earths—had become millions of Earths.
Chapter 19
The utter silence in the control room lasted for minutes, during which the image on the screen continued to evolve.
Unable to take his gaze off the spectacle, Nicklin groped his way around the empty seat beside Hepworth and sat down. As his eyes gradually recovered from the punishing overload of green light he began to take in more and more details of the fantastic scene and to interpret some of its elements.
He saw that the sun was not enclosed by the blackness of space. The multiple layers of planets in the foreground had prevented him from realising that the sun was at the centre of a pale blue disk. The circle of blue exhibited shifting moire patterns of a paler shade, and—in spite of the alien nature of the visual setting—it looked achingly familiar.
“That’s the sky,” he breathed. “I mean… We’re looking at the inside of Orbitsville.”
“You’re right.” Hepworth sounded calm and emotionless, the scientist in him having displaced the merely human observer. “Feast your eyes on it while you can, my boy. You have slightly less than eighteen minutes—then it will disappear for ever.”
“Eighteen minutes?” The precision of the term added to Nicklin’s sense of awe. “How do you know that?”
“Well, it seems that the Orbitsville shell has been converted into smaller spheres, each about the size of a small planet.” Hepworth glanced along the row of seats. “Are we in agreement on that one? Nobody wants to claim it’s all an optical illusion?”
Fleischer nodded. Montane and Voorsanger, gaping at the screen, appeared not to have heard.
“I think we can assume that the conversion was universal and simultaneous,” Hepworth went on, seizing the best opportunity he would ever have to deliver one of his impromptu lectures. “That feels right to me, if nothing else. The entire shell broke up all at once, and was converted into smaller spheres all at once—but we can’t see it that way because Orbitsville was eighteen light minutes in diameter. For us, the conversion will appear to be progressive…”
Nicklin lost the sound of the physicist’s voice as soon as he had, belatedly, worked out for himself what was happening. He watched in fascination as the blue disk expanded in the view screen, its edge appearing to dissolve and vaporise into a mist of planets. The disk, with its crazed pattern of day and night bands, was the sunlit interior of Orbitsville—but he knew that it no longer existed, that he was seeing it by virtue of light which had started on its journey while he was still in a lower part of the Tara, working on the gangway.
For the first time in his life, he began to get some inkling of Orbitsville’s true size. The vast sphere had already met its enigmatic end, but by virtue of sheer immensity it was clinging to an illusory existence, reluctantly yielding up its substance at the speed of light.
To suffer a C-change, Nicklin marvelled, into something rich and strange…
The circle of striated blue expanded off the edges of the screen. Fleischer touched a camera control, dropping the magnification to zero, and the field of view was increased by a factor of ten. The circle continued its growth, spewing millions of new worlds in a silver fog at its rim, but the pace of enlargement slowed with the light front reaching the widest aspect of the shell. It was still racing across Orbitsville’s doomed, dreaming landscapes—annihilating them at a rate of 300,000 kilometres a second—but, as the direction was nearly parallel to the watchers’ line of sight, lateral change was temporarily minimised.
There was a period of near-stasis which lasted for more than a minute, then the azure circle began to shrink.
The contraction was barely perceptible at first, but in accordance with the laws of spherical geometry there was an acceleration—and an acceleration of acceleration. The blue circle dwindled fiercely, boiling itself away in a steam of planetary creation. In a final silent implosion it vanished behind the stellar corona.
The sun remained—unaffected and unchallenged—at the centre of a spherical cloud of new-born worlds.
Nicklin was frozen in his seat, breathing at only the shallowest level, staring at the incredibly beautiful display on the main screen. His mind was scoured out. He felt cold, chastened and uniquely privileged—as though the whole of Creation had been reprised especially for his benefit. He felt that he ought to speak—but what was there to say?
“My eyesight isn’t what it used to be,” Hepworth came in, “but those are planets, aren’t they?”
Nicklin nodded, forcing his larynx into action. “They look like planets to me.”
Montane emitted a hoarse sobbing sound. “They are not planets! It’s all part of the Devil’s trickery! It’s an illusion.”