The girl from New Mexico shook her head worriedly. "Thrayl isn't saying anything, Captain Krake. He's still in some kind of trouble."
"He looks all right!" Indeed, the needle-sharp horns were again glowing with a subdued iridescence, though the great purple-blue eyes were clouded.
"It's his songs," Moon said. "If I understand him, he's hearing a different kind of song now, one he's never heard before. It's—repulsive to him. And it drowns his true songs out."
Krake said angrily, "That's not good enough, Moon. This situation is all his fault! If he hadn't interfered we'd still be in our own universe."
"I can't help it, Captain. Neither can Thrayl. There's something here that hurts him. He says the smallsongs are evil, and they drown out the good ones." She looked at the
Taur with woeful eyes. Then she said, "Captain? Can't we get home somehow, even if Thrayl can't help?"
Krake tugged at his beard unhappily. "I don't see how," he said.
"But isn't there any chance at all?"
Krake looked at her with compassion. "Oh," he said, trying to soften the blow that could not be softened, "I suppose there's always a chance. But the odds are stacked against us. If I understood what those old scientists were saying, there arc many universes, maybe even an infinite number of them."
"We can't just keep trying different ones?"
"Moon," he said patiently, "I don't even know how to get out of this one. If Thrayl could guide us, then maybe, with a little luck, we could find another wormhole. But even if we do, how can we know what it would lead to? My guess is it would probably take us farther from Earth, not nearer. With an infinite number of possible chances—all but one of them wrong—how likely is it that we could blunder back home?"
There was silence then, until Daisy Fay spoke up. "We're all still alive, though."
"And—we could be in a lot worse shape than this, I think," Marco put in.
"Worse how?" Moon asked.
Marco said slowly, "At least this universe hasn't killed us outright. I've been listening to a lot of those old lectures, and they talked about all kinds of possibly different universes— places where the physical laws were different from our own."
Krake was looking at him with new interest. "Yes?"
"Well, Francis," Marco said, "as Daisy Fay says, here at least we're alive. But what would've happened if we'd blundered into one of those where life—our kind of life anyway— would be impossible? Where the laws that allowed atoms to form and chemical reactions to happen didn't apply, so we couldn't eat or breathe or digest food? Or we could find ourselves in one where the physical constants just happened to be a little different in some other way, so stars never formed, or formed early and died before life had time to evolve."
Moon offered, "Couldn't we just move on to another universe then?"
"Through what kind of gate? How could we do that if stars never formed in the first place? Without stars, how could there be black holes? Or wormholes?"
The Turtles were listening uneasily. Krake gave them a quick look, then returned to Marco Ramos. "I think I see what you're saying. But then, if there weren't any wormholes at all, we couldn't have come to a universe like that in the first place, could we?"
Marco thought that over. "I guess not. Still, what if there had been some other kind of change in the basic physical laws? Something that would have altered the binding force of atoms, so that we'd simply disintegrate as soon as we entered that one?"
"What you're saying," Krake said, trying to follow, "is that there's a real danger every time go through a wormhole? That the next universe we wind up in might kill us?"
"That's what the chips say, Captain," Marco confirmed. "Of course, they could be wrong."
Krake gave him a sour grin. There was nothing to say to that. If the chips were wrong they had even less to go on— and already,without Thrayl, they had next to nothing.
After a moment Marco turned silendy back to his keyboard, searching sector after sector of the speckled sky. Daisy Fay shook herself. "I think I'd better take over in the sick bay," she said. "Kiri can probably use some relief."
Krake nodded to her absently. He had almost forgotten about Sork, lying near death a few dozen meters away—had even almost forgotten about Sue-ling Quong. He wished she would wake up. He wanted very much to talk to her, in private. There were things they had to say to each other, he thought.
Although Francis Krake knew that his ideas of sexual morality were several centuries out of date, he also knew that even in New Mexico in 1944 the fact that a man and woman had happened to make love once did not necessarily imply any kind of commitment (though actually, in that time and that place, it had come close). Sue-ling Quong didn't owe him anything, he told himself. But then he rejected his own statement, because he felt strongly that at least he was entitled to a friendly look, even a word or two in private. That was how it had been with Madeleine, long ago; there had been days of sharing that delightful secret, public decorum and, each night, a few hours of private bliss. That was how a love affair should be! But this woman simply would not even meet his eye. . . .
He rubbed his brisdy beard irritably, and hardly heard Marco Ramos's voice until the machine-man called him again.
He blinked at Marco. "What did you say?"
"I said look at the screen, Captain. I've located an object that's not so far away."
The Turtles were clucking excitedly to each other as everyone turned to see what Marco had found. It was worth looking at. It wasn't a mere point of light; it was an actual disk. On the screen, it was the size of an apple, a sphere that glowed with a dull, tindery red.
"What is it?" Krake demanded.
"I don't know, but whatever it is, it's relatively near," Marco insisted. "Of course, we don't know what its actual size is. Still, if it were a normal star we wouldn't get this kind of resolution at any distance over a light-year or two."
Krake looked around. "I wish we had Sork here. Any ideas about what we're looking at, anybody?"
"It is possible—" Litlun began, but his Elder Brother overrode him.
"We have no knowledge of this," Chief Thunderbird squawked, glaring commandingly with both eyes at the other
Turtle. "No such star has ever been observed in the records of the Brotherhood. It is an entirely unfamiliar object." Litlun opened his beaked mouth to speak again, but thought better of it and simply waved his stubby arms helplessly.
Krake gave the Turdes a puzzled look, but from his board Marco was being insistent. "We could get closer, Captain. Then we might be able to figure it out."
"For what?" the captain demanded. "Is this just to satisfy your curiosity, or do you think that might help us find our way home?"
"Captain, I don't know if anything's going to do that, so why not take a look?"
Krake sighed and looked around. Then he nodded. "Go for it," he ordered.
Wave-drive travel was a great leveler of distances; the short trip to the vicinity of the darkly glowing cinder would take only a matter of hours, nothing like proportionate to the vast billions of light-years they had already traveled in only days.
Krake thought of sleeping for a bit, then vetoed the idea; there was too much on his mind. The Turdes departed for another of their angry gabbling to each other in private. Kiri appeared briefly, then went off to sleep, and Sue-ling came in, rubbing her eyes, just back from checking on Sork Quintero.
"How is he?" Moon Bunderan asked at once.
"He's still unconscious," Sue-ling told her, "but his vital signs are good. I think he'll be all right."
"Thrayl and I will watch him for a while," Moon decided.
"That's good," said Marco. "Then Daisy Fay and I can get something to eat."
"Shall I start something for you?" Sue-ling offered, gesturing at the food warmer.