The fact that they were out of wave-drive now was some consolation. At least in the control room she wasn't surrounded by that frightening sphere of stars and empty space. Only the panels that circled the room were lit, but what they showed was almost as unpleasing to Moon Bunderan.
The strangest thing of all was that none of this stressful weirdness had affected Thrayl. As far as Moon could see, her Taur was quite content. He was gazing peacefully up at that awful great swirl of evil light that was called a "black hole," huge in the lower left-hand corner of one screen—still fiercely bright, though it had been dimmed by the instruments so that its brilliance didn't wipe out everything else in view. Thrayl was even rumbling softly to himself—"purring," Moon called it. She took solace from that fact. If Thrayl was at peace, no real harm could be very near. . . .
Or so Moon Bunderan hoped.
No one else was contented, though. The two Turtles were jabbering to each other, transposes off, and both Sork Quintero and Captain Krake were studying the screens with worry on their faces. When Moon stirred, Krake glanced at her. He smiled, though it was a worn, tense smile. He waved a hand at the screen. "See our present problem? I mean the ships?"
Moon squinted at the screen. There was nothing resembling a waveship, only a faint dusting of green in one spot, hardly visible. "Wait a minute," he said, "I'll brighten the ID signal." As he touched the keypad, abruptly, the dusting turned into a flock of what looked like little green birds, all around the place where the Mother planet should have been.
They were tiny, bright triangles, green as the grass in her own mother's little front yard.
"What are they?" she asked.
"Turtle spacecraft," Krake said briefly. "The bright spots are ID markers projected from the navigation gear. They aren't light, you know. You couldn't see them with the naked eye. They're signals, so one ship can know when another is nearby."
"There are dozens of them!"
He nodded. "They're orbiting something. Do you see what it is they're orbiting?"
She peered hard. Then shook her head. There was nothing there—nothing except, maybe, just possibly—"Is there something there, in among them?" she asked. "That little sort of, I don't know, squiggly thing that I can hardly see?"
Krake nodded somberly, staring at the same object. More than anything else, it looked like a flaw in window glass. "That's it," he said. He peered more closely at the object, looking disgruntled. "I'm not surprised that you don't know what it is. I don't either. I'd say it was a little black hole, except there's no accretion disk around it. I know what should be there, though. The Turde planet. But it's not there."
"I think it might be what they call a wormhole," Sork Quintero said abrupdy.
Moon turned to look at him sharply, wondering if he were making some kind of joke. He saw her expression, and laughed sharply. "Oh, not like a hole in an apple, Moon," he said. "There aren't any real worms in space. But in those old tapes the scientists talked about something like this—about the way a black hole might produce a kind of tunnel through space—or, no, not through space exactly, but—"
He stopped, shaking his head irritably. "I don't understand it," he complained. "The Turtles keep asking me about it, but all I can tell them is what's on the tapes—that some people thought these Svormholes' were actually a kind of gateway to another universe. If that means anything. ..."
Moon blinked at him. "How can there be more than one universe, Sork? I thought a universe was, well, everything there was."
He laughed again. "See what I mean? All of this stuff is just too confusing to take in. Maybe it's all nonsense, I don't know. The Turtles seemed to think so, until just now—"
He broke off, suddenly realizing that the Turtles had stopped their private bickering. Both were listening to him. He said quickly, trying to placate them, "I didn't mean to say anything to offend you."
Chief Thunderbird turned on his transposer. "You cannot offend truth," he said somberly. "But truth—"
Litlun finished for him. "Truth has many guises," he said. "That is right, one believes," rasped Chief Thunderbird, glowering up at the screen with both his eyes. "That place is where our holy home used to be, and now it is gone!"
"And if that is indeed what this human calls a wormhole, perhaps that is where it has gone," Litlun confirmed, glaring at Sork Quintero, who was looking haggard from the long ordeal of his questioning.
Sork shrugged angrily. Captain Krake cleared his throat. "Well, then," Krake said, "that's that, isn't it? What should we do now, turn around and go back to Earth?" A wordless squawk from both Turtles was answer enough. He said, puzzled, "Well, what else can we do? I don't mean to sound insensitive—I know what it means to you. But if the planet's gone, it's gone, isn't it?"
Both pairs of Turtle eyes were on him now—angrily, Moon thought. "The planet has gone somewhere," Litlun corrected him. "If what Sork Quintero says is true—"
"Hey, no!" Sork cried in alarm. "I don't know what's true and what isn't in this stuff—I only told you what the lecture chips said!"
"If it is true," Litlun rasped on, ignoring him, "then this is perhaps a wormhole, and in that case there is much to consider."
"And on that," added Chief Thunderbird, "we must meditate in our own quarters. We will return with our decision when we can."
"Wait a minute!" Krake cried. "What do you mean, 'decision'? We have to talk—"
But they were already gone. "What the hell?" Krake said, in general. "What kind of decision are they talking about? Sork? Do you know?"
Sork Quintero was gazing after them. Then he blinked and looked at Krake. "Do I know?" he repeated. "No. All I can do is guess, and I don't want to do that . . . because it scares me."
Krake fixed him with a hard stare. "Hold it there, Sork. I don't care if you're scared out of your mind. I want to hear what you think."
"It's only a guess," Sork said obstinately.
"Damn it, Sork!"
Sork shrugged. "I think they think the Mother planet has slipped through that wormhole and disappeared into some other universe." And when he saw the looks Moon and the captain were giving him: "And I think they want to follow it."
"Is that possible?" Krake demanded.
"How the hell do I know that?" Sork asked reasonably. "Ask Moon. Ask her Taur, for that matter—they know as much about it as I do!"
Krake was puzzling over the new thought, hardly listening. Then he looked up. "Wait a minute. I thought the lecture chips said these wormholes only lasted for a skillionth of a second—and, real time, it's almost a hundred and fifty years now since the planet disappeared—"
"The chips also said that wormholes were too tiny to be seen," Sork reminded him, and waved to the immense curva-tare on the screen. He was smiling as he turned back to Krake. "Meditating," he said, "sounds like a good thing to do right now, doesn't it? I think I'll do some myself—if I can find something to help the meditation along."
When Sork was gone, Moon Bunderan asked the captain, "What did he mean about that?"
"He's been hitting my whiskey," Krake told her.
In alarm, Moon said, "But Sue-ling says he shouldn't drink!"
Krake cut her off. "He's a big boy, Moon. He can make his own decisions." He shook his head, dismissing Sork. "I don't know what to do," he complained. "I thought the Turtles would want to contact those other Turtle ships, at least. I wish I knew what they've got on their minds."
Moon shivered without answering. She gripped Thrayl's reassuring paw more tightly and Krake, seeing, pursed his lips. "You're lucky," he said somberly. "At least youVe got your pet to comfort you."
Moon said seriously, "Thrayl is not my 'pet,' Captain Krake. He's my friend."