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Little time passed for them inside the Well, for time had hardly any meaning there. The Well World was being kept separate, apart from the rest of the universe as it always had been. The rest of the Markovian universe, too, went along at the old rate and would continue to do so until they slowed everything to match Markovian time.

They checked on the Well, saw that special circuits were already modifying, changing, repairing, even rebuilding damaged sections. They had been in time.

An hour passed. Half a billion years passed. It was all the same thing. The universe expanded. Tremendous gases and other material continued to spin out, swirling as it did so from the forces at the vortex of the big bang.

Twelve hours passed. Six billion years passed. It was all the same thing. Expansion continued. Cooling and congealing continued, even accelerated. Galaxies were forming, and inside those galaxies stars and even planets. The process continued on.

Brazil idly flicked a control. The time rate slowed. By the end of the day it was down to a very small length of time, relatively speaking: barely a few million years an hour.

On the second day he singled out the target worlds and started adjusting the processes by which life would form. The proper conditions were established for life, and on the third day, slowing time even more, he energized those elements, not merely on the planets he was going to use but on all those other worlds as well, worlds which, formed naturally, were good havens for life of one form or another but for which he had no people.

Time slowed more on the fourth day. The amino acids, the crystalline structures, the building blocks of lifeforms North and South on the Well World formed; the carbon-based in the sea while plants now ruled the land, what there was of it.

On the fifth day he slowed the rate still more, with Mavra’s assistance, and activated secondary lifeform programming. Animal life appeared, first in the sea, then on the land, all in its proper evolutionary order, all stemming from the single, inevitable first cause.

And they looked at the millions of worlds and saw that they had done it right. It was working—not 100 percent, but more than enough for their needs. They spent most of the time doing this checking, using the Well computer itself to match worlds to lifeforms. A very few couldn’t be exactly matched, and that bothered them, Brazil in particular.

“The Gedemondans,” he remarked. “That explains the Gedemondans. Once you lay down the physical laws, you have to live by them, obey ’em implicitly. Last time, for some reason, the Gedemondans couldn’t be properly matched to a world that formed in this mess. Won’t be that problem with them this time, though. I’ve kept my word on that. They have a world that looks damned near tailor-made. We may have some problems with a few of the others, but we’ll do the best we can.”

Complex animal life was developing now, the ancestral prototypes of the dominant races of those worlds, flowing logically out of how Brazil and the Well programming had combined those first acids in the initial process, based on the world’s material and resources, as well as the biological and climatologic conditions they had to work under. But the Well was very good at predicting how a world would develop, and it made no mistakes. The prototypical new sentient races weren’t exactly like their counterparts on the Well World, but, overall, they were remarkably close. Natural selection was taking its toll along the main line of dominance, too, leading to the one minor branch that provided what was necessary for sentience, for dominance.

Brazil checked out the Well World. Most hexes had complied with the demands placed on them, but there were a few too disorganized or too primitive to comply, and Brazil now took steps to include them indiscriminately. When their time came, any who fell short of the minimums would find their populations halved by Well fiat.

Some of the Markovians, so long ago—Mavra was now beginning to realize just how long ago—had been reluctant, too.

Both of them were prepared by midnight on the fifth day. It was time, they knew, time to insert what was needed to complete the exercise, as Brazil called it.

Every few seconds, between midnight and midnight, another racial group was activated, sent through the Well Gate, out to their predestined planets. Physically, they would never arrive. They would inhabit the bodies prepared for them through billions of years of evolution. These included the millions saved from oblivion by Brazil’s actions with the Markovian Gates, who would now be able to carry on their own races, rebuild and grow or die as they themselves decided by their actions.

Because there were still temporal differentials between the Well World and the universe, they were spread at different points, and some would reproduce, grow old, and die, and be thousands, perhaps millions of years different from other races placed on their worlds only minutes later, Well World time.

But for those occasional ones of races not destined for those planets who, accidentally but unavoidably, went along for the ride, there was only an instantaneous trip. But they were incongruities on a primitive world not meant for or designed for them. Most died out quickly, or became half-whispered legends among the generations that followed, but a few would hold on, manage somehow to survive, at least for a time.

At the end of the sixth day, when midnight came, the barriers to the Well Gate were removed, the Zone Gates shifted back to their normal patterns, all was as it was before.

And across the Well World there was heaved a collective sigh of relief.

Temporally, too, they were back on track. Six days had passed for them, almost fourteen for the new universe now being maintained by a repaired, repro-grammed, and revitalized Well.

Nathan Brazil sighed and settled back on his tentacles. Mavra made some final checks and then did the same. It was over.

“Until some new damn fool decides to play around with the Markovian mathematics, anyway,” Brazil commented sourly. He reached out to her. “What are your plans now?”

“I need a rest, and I want to think about it,” she replied.

And so on the seventh day they did nothing at all.

“Decided yet?” he asked her early in the morning of the next day.

“Yeah. I think so, anyway. Maybe it’s a mistake, I don’t know. But I have to play along with you, I suppose. Your way, for now. What about you?”

“Oh, this is the fun part, the interesting part,” he told her. “Going down there and watching how they develop. It’s only after they get there that it starts driving you crazy.”

She laughed. “I think it’s going to be fascinating,”

“Okay,” he told her. “Let’s get going, then. It’s pre-civilization time in the new world, but by the time we get through all this, it’ll be the dawn of so-called civilization. Ugh. You decided pretty much what you’re going to be?”

She nodded. “Pretty much the same, I think,” she told him. “Matched a little closer to our exit-point culture, of course, but pretty much the same. You?”

“I’m afraid I proved to myself the last time that I couldn’t be anybody but what I always was. No matter what, I always seem to come out the same, more or less.”

He flickered; the grand Markovian brilliance vanished. Nathan Brazil stood there, much as he had before. There was a slight difference in his color, and his beard was fuller, but it was still undeniably Nathan Brazil.