"Fine!" Krake said sarcastically. "Then we'll know what's going on, right?"
"I'm not sure of that," Sork said. "But it's worth a try. I think we need to find some explanation of—that." And he waved a hand at the screens.
Krake looked around, puzzled. There were still the myriad suns, brighter than any stars had ever been in the home universe. "What are you talking about?"
"Oh, haven't you noticed?" Sork said. "Keep an eye on the stars for a minute. You can actually see them move now. I never saw that before, did you? And I'd really like to know what it means."
He gave them all a bland smile, and disappeared. Marco Ramos swiveled his eyes to the screens. "My God," he said. That frozen sea of stars was frozen no more. And next to him Daisy Fay cried:
"Look, Marco! Everything's speeding up!"
Without words, Marco stretched one tentacle out to intertwine it with one of Daisy Fay's. The screen was almost solidly bright now. Even when Krake, scowling, adjusted the frequency controls to shut out most of the light of the collapsing universe around them, the scene in the screens looked like one of those false-color shots of a star, mottled with spots and flares, and all in motion even as they watched.
There was a moan from the Taur.
"What is it, Thrayl?" Moon Bunderan demanded sharply, gazing up into the mournful, racked face. He lowed into her ear, pointing, and she turned to search the screen.
"I see it!" she cried, pointing. "Captain Krake, do you see there, where it's brightest? Thrayl says that's our way out."
Marco turned both eyes to try to find what the Taur was talking about. In that sea of fire almost everything was spectacular—but, yes, even in that luminous inferno there was one spot that stood out, not like one of those little flawed glass distortions like the one they had plunged through, but something vaster, brighter, more ominous.
"Is it a wormhole?" Krake demanded sharply.
Moon said, her voice trembling, "I don't know what a wormhole is! Neither does Thrayl, I think—but he says we must go into that thing."
Krake gnawed his lip. "Where'd Sork go?" he demanded. "I need to know what that is! Marco?"
The face on Marco Ramos's belly screen was grave and drawn. "I'm not sure, Francis," he said, his voice taut. "But remember what Sork said about time in this universe? Going backward? If he was right about that, and if the universe—any universe—began with a big explosion . . . then how does it end?"
Krake stared at him, uncomprehending. "With everything coming together again?" he hazarded. He glanced around, bewildered, settling on Moon Bunderan. "What does the Taur say?" he pleaded.
She was listening to Thrayl's slow, faint murmurings, her pretty face wrinkling in concentration. "He just keeps on repeating the same thing. His songs say we must go into it, Captain Krake."
"But that's not just another discontinuity," Krake said. "It's—it's big. I don't know whether the Hind could survive it!" He shook his head. "No! Get Sork," he commanded. "I'm not taking this ship into that thing on the word of a Taur!"
But Marco Ramos lifted his digits from the control board. "Francis," he said soberly, "we don't have a choice. We're going in whether we like it or not. Everything is! We're being sucked down into it with everything else. ..."
And the truth of what he said could no longer be argued. The motion on the screen was picking up speed, the great whirlpool of light was growing hugely . . . they were falling, falling. . . .
If the sight had been spectacular before, now it was terrifying. "We're watching a universe die," Daisy Fay breathed, her eyes trembling as she stared at the screen. "Look at the instruments! We're getting into a steep gravitic gradient—and so is everything else!"
For the universe was tightening around them like a closing fist, as stars and gas clouds hurtled into the burning whirlpool around the great black hole.
"Captain," called Marco Ramos from the second board. "We're getting more background radiation—heat, too! The Hind wasn't built for this kind of stress!" And, indeed, outside the entire sky was becoming incandescent.
"It's all speeding up," Kiri murmured. "Sork's lecture chips were right."
Krake swore under his breath and turned to Moon Bunderan. "Your Taur," he snapped. "Is he sensing anything?"
"I don't know. He's terribly sick," Moon said wretchedly. "But he says we must go on."
"Go on where?"
She looked at him helplessly. "Just where we're going, I guess," she said. . . .
And then they were in it.
When the shock came it was like being destroyed and born again. The whole great ship groaned and shuddered. Something crashed. Moon heard Thrayl moaning softly to himself, as though in pain. There was a tearing, shattering moment of topsy-turvy transition. . . .
And Moon found herself lying on the floor, her head throbbing. Somewhere Thrayl was whimpering, but she was too dazed to look for him. Krake stood over her, clinging to the control console, yelling, "What the hell did we hit?"
"Nothing, Francis," Marco gasped, scrambling back into sight from wherever he had been. It took him a moment to recover his voice. "It couldn't have been anything material, or we'd have been vaporized."
"It felt like a rock!"
Marco said, "I think it was magnetic fields, Francis. They'd be powerful in the contracting plasma—"
Then shock stopped his voice. The control room had gone dark. The screens winked out. That angry disk was gone, with all the blazing gas clouds and crashing suns.
"Where are we?" Krake gasped. Thrayl moaned again, and Krake's voice sharpened. "Marco! Get the lights back on again!"
"Right, Captain!" Marco began, but Daisy Fay's voice came urgently.
"Wait, Marco! There's something out there. Marco, youVe got the screen dimmed down—turn the sensitivity up again."
Marco hesitated, torn between a direct order from his captain and Daisy Fay's common sense. Common sense won out. He adjusted the screen.
At normal sensitivity it was true. The screens were not entirely black. There were tiny distant wisps of light, thousands of them.
"My God," said Krake after a moment of staring. "Those things aren't stars. Look at the shape of them. They're distant galaxies! Marco, can you get us a distance fix?"
Marco obediently reached out for the instrument adjustments—then, realizing the impossibility of obeying the order, he dropped his tentacles back. "We can't do that, Captain," he said soberly. "How can we measure their distance? When we're in our own space, the way to range an external galaxy is by red-shift—but how do we know what the shift is here? And we don't have enough of a baseline for triangulation."
"The only clue we have," said Daisy Fay, her voice low but level, "is their brightness. And that means, Francis, those things are very far away. It—it looks like we're alone in a lot of very empty space."
Krake took a deep breath. Then he was in control of himself again, and of the ship. "Turn on the lights," he ordered again, and this time was obeyed. "Marco, what does your board say about the condition of the ship? That was quite a beating we gave the Hind; did we come through all right?" And when Marco reported that there was no structural damage, no failure of systems, "All right, how about all of you? We were thrown around a lot—anyone hurt?"
Sue-ling rubbed her arm. "A couple of bruises, Francis," she said ruefully. "Do you suppose the Turtles are all right?"
Krake said, "They're pretty tough. Still, Daisy Fay—go check them out. And what about Sork?"
"I'll go, Francis," Kiri said, moving faster than usual for him. Krake nodded.
"All right. Let's sec what weVe got. Evidendy wc went through this end-of-the-universe thing and came out in a new one. I don't know why there aren't any stars nearby, but we can figure that out later." He paused, calculating. "When Sork comes back, we'll ask him what he thinks. Maybe we can get some help from the Turdes, too, and—Moon? What does Thrayl say now?"