“We already knew we were in an imploding cluster,” Surgenor said, still puzzled.
“Ah, but that’s the whole point—we aren’t.” Some animation returned to Targett’s eyes. “I’m glad I managed to work this out—the whole notion of a star cluster falling in on itself was an offence to reason.”
“Are you saying that Aesop’s instruments are wrong? That the stars in this cluster aren’t moving in towards the centre?”
Not quite. What I’m saying is that no matter where you went in the cluster, no matter where you carried out your observations from, you would find that the stars appeared to be moving towards you, with the most distant moving fastest.”
Surgenor shifted his weight. “Mike, does that make sense?”
“Unfortunately—yes. Long-range astronomy has always been familiar with this type of effect, only in reverse. When an astronomer measures the speeds of distant galaxies, he always finds that the most distant ones are retreating fastest—but it isn’t because he’s positioned at a real central point. In an expanding universe, everything moves outward uniformly from everything else—and—by simple arithmetic—the farther an object is from an observer, the faster it will appear to be retreating from him.”
“That’s in an expanding universe,” Surgenor said slowly, his thoughts beginning to leap ahead. “Are we…’
“The evidence is that we’ve jumped into the centre of a contracting volume of space. That’s why there are so many suns packed so close together. The space between them is shrinking. The suns themselves are shrinking. We must be shrinking, Dave.”
Surgenor glanced involuntarily at his own hands before his common sense asserted itself. “That doesn’t make sense. In an expanding system our bodies didn’t get bigger—and even if they had done it wouldn’t have made any difference…’ He stopped speaking as he saw Targett was shaking his head.
“We’re in a different kind of set-up,” Targett said. “It’s not as if somebody had grabbed a big gear lever and thrown the entire cosmos into reverse. We’re in a kind of inclusion—like a diamond in a rock, or a bubble in a glass paperweight—only a few tens of light-years across, and everything in it is shrinking. And that includes us.”
“But there’s no way to know that. Our measuring rules would be shrinking at exactly the same rate as everything we tried to measure, so…’
“Except gravitons, Dave. The gravity quantum is a universal constant. Even here.”
Surgenor thought again, trying to adapt to alien concepts. “Aesop said it was an increasing variable.”
“Appeared to be an increasing variable. That’s because we’re getting smaller, and that’s what screwed up his whole astrogation and control complex.”
Surgenor sat down on the room’s only chair. “If all this is true, doesn’t it mean we’re making progress? If Aesop now knows that the problem is…’ “There isn’t time Dave.” Targett leaned back on his bed, stared at the ceiling and spoke in a dreamy, almost peaceful voice. “In just over two hours from now we’ll all be dead.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The sound of a woman’s voice raised in anger was followed by a man’s hoarse sobbing and an irregular clamour of footsteps. Surgenor ran to the door of his own room, threw it open and saw Billy Narvik and Christine Holmes locked together in struggle a short distance along the corridor. Her blouse had been partially torn open and her face was haggard with fury. Narvik, who was grappling with her from behind, had a dark stain around his mouth and his eyes showed only the whites beneath tremulant lids. His face was ecstatic.
“Let go of her, Billy,” Surgenor ordered. “You know this isn’t a good idea.”
“I can handle this little tick,” Christine said in a bitter monotone. She was kicking back at Narvik’s shins, her heel connecting solidly every time, but he appeared not to notice. Surgenor moved in close, caught hold of Narvik’s wrists and tried to force them apart.
Suddenly aware of a third presence, Narvik widened his eyes and the lines of his face altered as he saw Surgenor. “Stay out of this, big Dave,” he panted. “I want this, and I’ve got to…There’s nothing else left.”
Christine renewed her struggles to break free as Surgenor increased the outward pull on Narvik’s wrists. The smaller man was surprisingly strong and to break his hold Surgenor had to bend his own knees and lower himself into a position from which he could exert maximum effort. This brought his face almost into contact with Christine’s and he felt the pressure of her hips against his as the unnatural intimacy was prolonged. The trio remained in a strained equilibrium for several seconds, then Narvik’s arms began to weaken.
“Dave, Dave!” Narvik began a conspiratorial pleading as his grip was finally broken. “You don’t understand, man—it’s years since I’ve managed to…’
He fell silent as Christine ducked out of the cincture of arms, spun round and in the same movement struck him a loose-fingered blow across the mouth. Surgenor released Narvik’s wrists, allowing him to shrink away against the curving wall of the corridor. Narvik pressed the back of a hand to his lips and gazed accusingly from Surgenor to Christine.
“I get it! I get it’ Narvik gave a quavering laugh. “But it’s only for two hours. What use is two hours to anybody?” He walked away in the direction of the companionway, moving with an incongruously dignified gait.
“You shouldn’t have hit him,” Surgenor said. “You can tell he’s been chewing some kind of weed.”
“That makes rape all right, does it?” Christine began fastening her blouse.
“I didn’t say that,” Surgenor stared at her in frustration, obscurely angry because she had remained as she was, because she had failed to metamorphose in some indefinable way which would have helped him to see a purpose in life or meaning in death. It had seemed to him that, with a term of two hours placed on their existence, it was the duty of the crew members to transcend their old selves and thus, if only in token, make the short time that remained worth putting in the scales against the decades they were being denied. He knew it had been a straightforward fear reaction, that his subconscious—in an effort to deny the facts—was setting up spurious short-range goals, but a part of him clung obstinately to the notion, and he still wished that Christine would be what she could be.
“I’m going to my room,” she said. “And this time I’ll make sure the door is locked.”
“It might be better to be with somebody.”
She shook her head. “You do it your way, and I’ll do it mine.”
“Sure.” Surgenor was trying to think of something worth adding when he heard a commotion break out in the mess room below, and felt an abrupt wave-crash of surprise and alarm. Force of habit caused him to sprint to the companionway and half-run, half-slither down it. The group of men who had chosen to drink themselves into oblivion were positioned in different parts of the mess, some of them already stupefied, but all had their eyes fixed on the head of the metal stair which led down to the hangar deck.
Surgenor strode to the stairwell, leaned over the rail and saw Billy Narvik’s body lying on the floor below. It was distorted and deathly still, the only movement being that of two rivulets of blood which were groping their way out from beneath the body like furtive tentacles.
“He was trying to fly,” somebody breathed. “I swear he thought he could fly.”
“That’s one way out,” another man said, “but I think I’ll wait.”
Surgenor went on down the stair and knelt beside Narvik’s body, confirming what he already knew. The Sarafand’s induced gravity system did not produce a full 1G of acceleration in a falling body, but the impact on the metal floor had been enough to break Narvik’s neck. Surgenor looked about him at the survey modules in their stalls, then up at the faces visible at the top of the stairwell.