“I don’t know. Maybe the cloud is expanding—”
“Can you see a source? A center? Any kind of nonuniformity in the glow?”
“It looks the same to me every which way. Come on, Cornelius. Time’s a little short for riddles.”
“I think we fell into another universe.”
“ What other universe? How?”
Cornelius managed a laugh, his voice like a dry, crumpling leaf. “You know, Malenfant, you always have trouble with the big picture. You didn’t seem disturbed philosophically by the idea of a gateway that takes you instantaneously to another time. Well, now the portal has just taken us to another spacetime point, instantaneously, like before. It’s just that this time that point is in another universe, somewhere else in the manifold.”
“The manifold?”
“The set of all possible universes. Probably one related to ours.”
“Related? How can universes be related?… Never mind.”
Cornelius turned blindly. “Damn it, I wish I could see. There’s no reason why this universe should be exactly like ours, Malen-fant. Most universes will be short-lived, probably on the scale of the Planck time.”
“How long is that?”
“Ten to power minus forty-three of a second.”
“Not even time to make a coffee, huh.”
“I think this universe is only a few hours old. I think it just expanded out of its Big Bang. Think of it. Around us the vacuum itself is changing phase, like steam condensing to water, releasing energy to fuel this grand expansion.”
“So what’s the glow we see?”
“The background radiation.” Cornelius, drifting in red emptiness, huddled over on himself, wrapping his suited arms around his torso, as if he was growing cold.
“How can universes be different?”
“If they have different physical laws. Or if the constants that govern those laws are different…”
“If we fell into a Big Bang, it occurs to me we were lucky not to be fried.”
“I think the portal is designed to protect us. To some extent anyhow.”
“You mean if we had been smart enough to come through with such luxuries as air and water and food, we might live through all this?”
“It’s possible.”
“Then where did Michael go? “
Cornelius sighed. “I don’t know.”
“The Sheena squid came through the portal, and she found herself in the future. Seventy-five million years downstream. Staring at the Galaxy.”
“I do remember, Malenfant,” Cornelius said dryly.
“So how come we didn’t follow her?”
“I think it was the Feynman radios. The crude one we built at Fermilab. Whatever was put into the heads of the Blue kids, Michael and the others. The messages from the future changed the past. That is, our future. Yes. The river of time took a different course.”
“If this isn’t the future—”
“I think it’s the past,” Cornelius whispered. “The deepest past.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course not, Malenfant. Why should you?”
“Cornelius. I think the sky is getting brighter.”
It was true; the reddening seemed to have bottomed out, and a strengthening orange was creeping back into the sky.
Malenfant said, “That’s bad, right? We’re heading for a Big Crunch. We just lived through a Big Bang, and now we’re facing a Crunch. One damn thing after another.”
“We can’t stay here,” Cornelius whispered.
Malenfant looked around at the glowing sky, tried to imagine it contracting around him, the radiation that filled it compressing, rattling around the walls of the universe like gas in a piston, growing hotter and hotter. “Cornelius, will there be life here? Intelligence?”
“Unlikely,” Cornelius whispered. “Our universe was a big, roomy, long-lived place. Lots of room for structure to self-organize, atoms and stars and galaxies and people. Here, even the atoms will exist for just a few hours.”
“Then what’s the point? An empty universe, no life, no mind, over in a few hours? Why?”
Cornelius coughed. “You’re asking the wrong person.”
Malenfant gathered the others — Cornelius curled into a fetal ball, Emma sleeping, starfished, the tether length on her leg dangling — and he faced the portal.
The sky was getting brighter, hotter, climbing the spectral scale through orange toward yellow. “Visors down.”
Cornelius dropped his own gold sun visor into place, reached over, and did the same for Emma, by touch.
Malenfant wrapped his suited arm around Emma’s waist and grasped Cornelius firmly by the hand. He turned his back on the collapsing, featureless sky without regret, and pulled them both into the portal.
Maura Della:
Houston was hot, muggy, fractious. The air settled on her like
a blanket every time she hurried between airport terminal and
car, or car and hotel, as if it was no longer a place adapted for
humanity.
She booked into her hotel, showered and changed, and had her car take her out to JSC, the NASA Johnson Space Center. The car pulled into the JSC compound off NASA Road One, and she drove past gleaming, antiquated Moon rockets: freshly restored, spectacularly useless, heavily guarded from the new breed of antiscience wackos.
She was dismayed by the depression and surliness of the staff who processed her at the NASA security lodge. The mood in Houston seemed generally sour, the people she encountered overheated, irritable. She knew Houston had special problems. The local economy relied heavily on oil and chemicals and was taking a particular beating as the markets fluctuated and dived over rumors of the supertechnology that the Blue children had been cooking up, stuff that would make fossil-fuel technology obsolete overnight. But she had come here with a vague hope that at least at NASA — where they were all rocket scientists, for God’s sake — there might be a more mature reaction to what was going on in the world. But the national mood of fear and uncertainty seemed to be percolating even here.
Dan Ystebo came to collect her. He led her across the compound, past blocky black-and-white buildings and yellowing lawns, the heat steamy and intense. Dan seemed impatient, irritable, his shirt soaked with the sweat of his bulky body. He had spent a week here at her behest, crawling over plans and mock-ups and design documents and budgets, in order to brief her.
Maura had been coopted onto the UN-led international task force that was seeking to investigate and manage all aspects of the Blue-children phenomenon. And she, in turn, had coopted Dan Ystebo, much against his will.
Dan took her to Building 241, where, it turned out, NASA had been running life-support experiments for decades. Now the building was the focus of NASA’s response to the government’s call to return to the Moon, to establish a presence on the Moon alongside the children.
Dan was saying, “It isn’t ambitious — not much beyond space station technology. The modules would be launched to lunar orbit separately, linked together and then lowered as a piece to the Moon’s surface, as close as you like to the kids’ dome. A couple of robot bulldozers to shovel regolith over the top to protect you from radiation and stuff, and there you are, instant Moon base.”
Dan walked her through mocked-up shelters, tipped-over cylinders with bunks and softscreens and simple galleys and bathrooms. Most of the equipment here was thrown together from painted wood panels, but at least Maura got a sense of the scale and layout. She had to get from one shelter to another by crawling along flexible tubes — difficult, but presumably that would be easier in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity. All of this was set out in a huge hangarlike room; fixed cranes ran along the ceiling, and there was a lot of litter on the floor: wood and metal shavings, piled-up plans, hard hats. The sense of rush, of improvisation, was tangible.