[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

to me. I never saw the Teelies after that until we met them on the street in
Maxwellville." She frowned and shook her head. "Funny, I expected to find them
at the Militia station, or at least get some indication they were there, being
held, questioned, something. The cops didn't seem to be very interested in
them."
I filed that datum away, then said, "Okay. Now, Petrovsky didn't know you had
the Cube. Right?"
"That surprised me to no end. He didn't even search my pack." Darla gave a
little sarcastic grunt and smiled strangely. "Of course, he had a personal
interest in my case."
"Even so, if he'd known you were carrying the Cube he would have searched you
and found it. No?"
"Yes." She nodded emphatically, "Most assuredly."
I wove my fingers together and put them behind my head. "So: Petrovsky didn't
know about the Cube, and Wilkes didn't, if he isn't lying again. My question
is, who did the Authority send to get it? Who is the person representing their
interests in all this?"
Darla thought about it a long time. Then she said, "There does seem to be a
void in that area. Grigory must have been acting completely on his own. His
career was ruined. I ruined it. They would have told him nothing. He was
investigating your case as a matter of routine." She considered it a bit more.
"But maybe it's a question of the timetable. Maybe whoever they sent just
didn't catch up to you in time."
"Or to you."
Page 197
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
"Me?"
"Yes," I said. "You were, and are, a fugitive. Maybe the Authority knew
exactly who had the Cube, and they knew it all along. You had it, and they
caught you! On Maxwellville! It may be that Petrovsky's and the Authority's
paths converged there. Grigory was having a devil of a time getting
cooperation from the local cops. But he was the ranking officer, and before
Reilly, the nominal CO, could get authorization to shove Petrovsky aside, we
were sprung by my mysterious doppelganger. Or whoever did it."
Darla bit her lip and shook her head slowly.
I looked at the ceiling. "Then again, I could be wrong. But I've had this
growing feeling lately, the feeling that something is missing. Or someone.
Someone who's playing it very close to the vest."
Darla looked at me, puzzled; then a startling possibility occurred to her.
"You don't mean . . . one of the Teelies?"
I sat forward. "Funny you should say that," I said.
Her eyes were wide and disbelieving. "No, they couldn't . . ." Then her face
fell and her shoulders slumped. A look of profound exhaustion came over her,
and she leaned against me.
"Oh, Jake, I'll never make sense of all this. I thought at one time I knew
what was going on. But I don't know anymore. I just don't know."
"Neither do I," I said. "Who can make sense of a paradox?"
We sat unmoving for a while. The rig seemed unusually quiet; no engine
sounds, no voices near us, just the ever-present whistle of the slipstream as
we were towed through another alien wind.
Presently I noticed my shoulder was moist. I tilted Darla's chin up with one
finger and watched a big, round tear roll down her cheek.
"What's wrong, Darla?"
She wiped the tear away and straightened up. "I've got something to tell
you," she said. "I'm pregnant."
Coming from vast eternities ahead, the wind whistled cold and drear.
"How could you . . . ?"
She laughed mirthlessly. "How?"
"I mean, how could you let it happen?"
"I'm on the cusp of a three-year pill. I wasn't in the position to go into a
clinic for another one, and I couldn't get one. They're very expensive, you
know. There wasn't much of a chance--I still had a month of 80 percent
effectiveness left, 60 percent after that. But . . ." She shrugged. "It's been
known to happen."
"How late are you?"
She shook her-head. "Doesn't matter. I have a pregnancy test kit in my pack.
Page 198
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
I knew forty-eight hours after." A slow, bittersweet smile crept across her
face. "It may have been the night before, but I think it was that day on the
beach."
I kissed her then; I didn't know why. Perhaps because, simply, I loved her.
The Bugs should have gone into the railroad business. The ride was
transcendentally smooth, incredibly fast. Planets whooshed by so quickly you
couldn't look out the ports for any length .of time without getting a little
dizzy. Lori, John, and Liam came down with motion sickness, which fortunately
responded well to the drugs we had. Roland seemed to enjoy the ride. He spent
hours in the shotgun seat, looking out, smiling enigmatically (I hesitate to
say inscrutably).
A week went by.
Every once in a while we'd come out on another service planet. The first time
it happened we thought we had arrived at our destination--but no, the Bugs
shot us through another portal, and our fateful journey continued.
We passed some of the time gabbing, at one point speculating as to why the
Bugs had put Moore's gang back in their vehicles but had deposited the
Voloshins with us. The concensus was that the Bugs somehow knew that the
humans were divided into two antagonistic factions, and, as usual, wanted to
reduce the potential for trouble. Also, they had checked all vehicles, found
little food in the Voloshins', and had put them in with us for the long
journey. The Bugs were harsh, but fair. John said that, and I laughed,
remembering an old joke.
A conversation stopper, though, was what Yuri told us about the Cube. He
thrashed the subject about with Oni over a four-day period, then called a
conference. Here's what he said:
"If I can make any sense out of what Oni has been telling me, the Cube is one
of the strangest objects in the universe." He laughed. "Odd choice of words,
as you'll see in a moment. And strictly speaking, it's not an object in the
conventional sense. It's made of almost nothing at all . . . literally nothing
at all. What it is, is a space. A space within a space. The space without is
our universe, our continuum. The one within is . . ." He scratched his beard
and hunched up his shoulders. "Another space."
"Are you saying there's a universe in there?" John asked.
Yuri sat back in his seat and shoved his hands into his pockets. "It may be
no more than a light-year across."
"Only a light-year," Susan gasped, then fanned her face with her hand in mock
relief. "You had me worried there for a minute."
"How can that possibly be?" John demanded. "You mean it's been . . . shrunk?"
"Folded," Yuri said. "Most likely. Folded and refolded along many
dimensions." He withdrew his hand and turned his pocket inside out. "Think of
it this way." He made a fold in the pocket.
"Now, keep tying this up, rolling it up, and fairly soon you can't put your
hand in anymore. But the pocket still exists, doesn't it?"
Page 199
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
"I see," John said. "I think."
"Now, all this is pure speculation on the part of the Ahgirr scientists."
"What are they basing it on then?" I asked.
"The stream of raw data that seems to be coming out of the Cube. I can't
imagine what can be supplying that data, or perhaps it's just energy that
becomes data when it gets out. It's in the form of some very exotic radiation,
part of it. And the other part is simple radio signals."
"So," I said, "this universe is losing energy."
"Yes. Now, at first blush the data doesn't seem to make much sense at all. It
didn't to the Ahgirr until somebody made the association and looked in a
cosmology text. The values coming out, and the states of energy within the
Cube that the values seem to imply, correspond very closely to what
cosmologists think existed in the very early stages of formation of our
universe."
"You mean the Big Bang?" Darla asked, amazed.
"No, long before the Big Bang. Before there was any matter at all, and very
little energy. Almost none of that either." He swung around in the driver's
seat toward his lifecompanion. "Neither of us are really qualified in this
area, but Zoya has had more exposure to the subject than I" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]