“Will somebody give me a hand to move him?” he said. “He’s dead.”
“It isn’t worth it,” Burt Schilling replied. “He won’t be there for long anyway.”
The men leaning on the handrail moved away. Surgenor hesitated, knowing that Schilling was right, but unwilling to leave the remains of a human being crumpled on the hangar floor like so much machine shop waste. He took hold of Narvik’s wrists and hauled the body towards the store room which was built into the massive column forming the ship’s spine. As he opened the door, lights came on automatically. He espied the circular alloy plate, flush mounted in the floor, scribed with radial lines which marked the ship’s centre of gravity and major axes for the benefit of structures teams. In his state of mind it seemed to have an appropriately symbolic or ceremonial appearance. He dragged the body on to it and left the store room, closing the door behind him.
“Hear these words, Aesop,” he said.
“I’m listening to you, David.” The voice emanated from the dimness all round.
“Billy Narvik fell down the stair to the hangar deck a couple of minutes ago. I’ve examined him—and he’s dead. I’ve put the body in the hangar deck tool store, and I’m requesting you to keep that door locked.”
“If that is what you want, I have no objection.” There followed the faint sound of solenoid bolts slipping into place, directed from Aesop’s central units far above.
Surgenor went back upstairs and, ignoring several offers of drinks, passed through the mess and climbed to the deck above. He found Christine standing at the top of the steps, smoking a cigarette, one hip casually upthrust as if she was posing for a dude ranch photograph. Again, he felt an irrational anger.
“Did you hear all that?” he said, keeping his voice calm.
“Most of it.” She eyed him impassively through a filigree of smoke.
“You won’t have to worry about Billy Narvik again.”
“I wasn’t worried about him in the first place.”
“Bully for you.” Surgenor slipped past her, went to his room and locked the door. He threw himself on the bed and at once his mind was drawn back into the whirlpool of confused speculation.
The ultimate jackpot, he knew, eventually came up for everybody—and in rare moments of spiritual malaise he had tried to predict how his own turn might come about. Life in the Cartographical Service was not particularly hazardous, but it offered a great deal of variety, a multitude of ways for the wheels of chance to judder to a halt and lock on to the combination which signified the end of the game for yet another player. He had visualized freakish mechanical failures in his survey module, the risks of contracting exotic diseases, the ironic possibility that he might become a traffic casualty back on Earth—but not even in nightmare had he foreseen anything like the prospect which now lay before him.
After his initial talk with Mike Targett, he had retired to his room and had conferred privately with Aesop. In the churchly solitude, free from the distractions the other crew members would have created, he had been able to absorb the news that Aseop was establishing a set of physical laws for the inverted microcosm. The laws were few in number, reflecting the paucity of data, but the third one had profound implications. It stated, simply, that the rate of shrinkage of any body within a dwindlar was inversely proportional to its mass.
In specific, practical terms this meant that a sun would take many millions of years to achieve zero dimensions—but that the same fate would overtake a body the size of a spaceship in less that one day. The exponential equations derived by Aesop from successive graviton measurements indicated that at 21.37 the Sarafand and all its crew would cease to exist.
Surgenor stared at the ceiling of his room and tried to comprehend what Aesop had told him.
The clock on his wall recorded a time of 20.02 hours, which meant there were roughly ninety minutes left. It also meant, by Aesop’s reckoning, that the Sarafand—once a metal pyramid eighty metres high—had been reduced to the size of a child’s toy. The proposition that the entire ship was no larger than a paperweight outraged Surgenor’s mind, and the corollary that his own body had been reduced in proportion engendered both terror and disbelief.
There had to be a reasonable limit, he assured himself, to what could be deduced from a couple of astrophysical measurements. After all, what hard facts were there to go on? All right, the light from the stars in the cluster exhibited some degree of blue shift, and Aesop—a computer proven to be fallible by the ship’s very own presence in this part of the universe—said it showed the stars were moving inwards. But did it? Was it not a fact that nobody had ever actually measured the speed of a star or a galaxy, and that the whole conceptual edifice of expanding or contracting systems depended on the interpretation of red or blue shift as a Doppler effect? Had anybody ever proved that interpretation to be correct? Beyond any doubt?
Surgenor gave a numb, humourless smile as he realized he had been driven to pitting his sketchy knowledge of formal astronomy against the awful powers of Aesop’s data banks and processing units. All he had proved was that he was so afraid of what lay ahead that he was beginning to fantasize. The realities of the situation were that he had stayed in the Service too long, that he had travelled too far, that he had run out of time, that it was too late for him to cease being a wilful stranger, that he would never make the real meaningful journeys embarked on by those who remain in one chosen place long enough to know the tilted seasons, that he was totally alone and would be for the rest of his life, that it had all been one ghastly mistake, and that there was no longer any damned thing he could do about it…
The red-glowing digits of the clock continued to flicker, squandering Surgenor’s life, and he watched them in bleak fascination. An occasional raucus laugh or the sound of a glass shattering reached him from the mess room, but their frequency diminished as his vigil wore on and he knew the alcohol was taking effect. Some of the crew had elected to spend their final hour in the observation chamber. The idea of joining them recurred several times, but that would have involved making a decision and implementing it, and the effort seemed too great. A merciful torpor had settled over him, turning his limbs to unfeeling lead, slowing his mental processes to the point at which it took him a full minute to complete a single thought.
I…have…seen…too…many…stars.
The gentle tapping on his door struck Surgenor as being something related to another place and time. He listened to it, uncomprehending, then glanced at the clock. Twenty minutes left. He arose with an effort, walked to the door and fumbled it open. Christine Holmes was standing in the corridor, looking at him with pain-filled, puzzled eyes.
“I think I made a mistake,” she said in a low voice. “It’s all too…’
“You don’t have to say anything. It’s all right.” He opened the door wider, allowing her to walk into the room, then locked it again. When he turned to Christine she was standing in the centre of the room with her back to him, shoulder sagging. He went to her and—somehow knowing right from wrong—picked her up in his arms and placed her gently on the bed. Her gaze remained fixed on him as he brushed traces of cigarette ash from her blouse and slacks, then lay down beside her, cradling her head in his left arm. He kissed her once, very lightly, asexually, before lowering his head on to the pillow. She slid her knee forward to rest on his thigh, and a stillness descended on the room.