He made himself focus on the words they were speaking, words from his old language. The boy with the woman was describing some city… empty buildings… two suns. And then another one, the man with all the hair on his face, hair like that on Calder’s own cheeks, began to speak of another place—cold… darkness… heavy gravity… some name, Kobinski…

The pain in Pol’s head grew icier, numbing him, as the torrent of words washed over him largely uncomprehended. It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand the individual words; it was that they stung like knives and his damaged brain could not keep up, like a man with a limp running for a train. And always the darkness threatened to overwhelm him. But suddenly the accumulation of words reached critical mass and he understood something at least—they were each describing another world they had visited.

Just as he had done.

His pulse skyrocketed and he felt horribly ill. He knew he should continue to listen, to gather evidence. The answers he desperately needed were in that room. But he felt so weak. He could feel blackness crawling up his spine, tugging him under. For a moment he considered trying to escape. There was a stairway not all that far down the hall, and the people in the room would never see him go. But he simply didn’t have the strength. It was all he could do to crawl back to the room he had occupied earlier, pull himself onto the bed, and allow his mind to slip away.

Aharon was listening to Denton tell his story with a mild touch of chagrin. The horrors he had had to face, and the blond goy had gotten sunshine and gardens and beautiful females? Aharon’s pride plucked at him—what would these people think? What kind of monster would they take him to be to have gone where he’d gone? And also, despite all the things he had worked through on Fiori, he was confused again. He tried to assimilate what had happened to the others with the new understanding of God he had fought so hard for.

But as Denton continued his story, Aharon did comprehend. The world Denton described was beautiful and even easy, but it was also shallow, without morals or traditions, and cruel from sheer selfishness. Yes, it fit the man, or at least the man he had once been. Like to like. It was the ultimate in free will. If you wanted to head off in a certain direction, no matter how wrong, God would not stop you. You could keep going and going and going until finally you had the good sense to turn around on your own. Or not. Aharon liked it better when he’d believed God had a little more to say about it.

After the stories had been told, the group broke up for a time. Jill and Nate went down the hall to check on Farris and found him sleeping. Hannah made tea. Denton came up to Aharon and gave him a smile that offered friendship. Aharon took it and gave one back.

“Eventually, I’d love to hear everything you can remember about Kobinski,” Denton said. “I feel so bad about his death, as if I really knew him.”

“I feel bad also. But I think Kobinski’s death was a kind of redemption for him, may he rest in peace.”

“I hope so, Rabbi.”

When they all had cups of steaming tea Jill looked around reluctantly. “I guess it’s time to give you the bad news. If everyone is ready. We learned a lot about the wave technology when we were on Difa-Gor-Das,” Jill said. “But the main thing we learned is that there really is a danger—the kind of danger, Aharon, that I think you were looking for based on what you found in the code. And there’s still every possibility that if my research gets out, mine or Kobinski’s, Earth could face a disaster. That’s why we had to come back.”

“I had a feeling,” Aharon said with a sigh, “that this was not over yet.”

“It’s called a bounce event,” Nate said. “It occurs when too much stress is put on the universal wave.”

“The universal wave, the law of good and evil, the one-minus-one—they’re all the same thing,” Jill explained. “The one-minus-one is an integral part of the fabric of space-time. Maybe some of you remember an analogy Einstein made about gravity. He said space-time is like a rubber sheet and the planets are like bowling balls placed on the sheet. Their weight bends the rubber sheet and that’s how space-time is bent by gravity. A black hole is a place where gravity is so heavy it punches a hole in space-time.”

“Yes, I know,” Aharon said from experience.

Jill gave a brief smile. “That happens to protect the integrity of space-time, because it can only stand so much gravitational pressure. The same thing is true of stress put on the universal wave.”

“So that’s what would happen?” Aharon asked, paling. “Someone might build a machine and tear a hole in space-time?”

Jill nodded. “In a way, yes. If you push the universal wave too far from its natural state it will cause a black hole–like effect. The area that is out of sync with the natural laws ends up bouncing through space-time into the fifth dimension.”

“It’s similar to what happened to us,” Nate said. “But in this case instead of an individual bouncing into the fifth dimension, an entire section of the planet’s surface is bounced.”

“Unfortunately,” Jill added, “the result is a lot more violent than when we went through the gateway. It’s… well, it’s apocalyptic. And then there’s the question of where the bounced section could end up. Depending on the exact state of the stressed wave when the bounce occurs, it could end up in any number of universes, some of them hostile to human life. For example, somewhere where there isn’t any oxygen or light. In that case, even if people survived the bounce, they’d die anyway.”

Aharon was getting more red-faced by the minute as he looked from her to Nate and back again. “And this could happen? What? To an entire city?”

“Um… “ Nate looked at Jill. “It could be an area smaller than a city—or it could be much larger.”

“How much larger?”

Jill bit her lips nervously. “It’s impossible to predict. It’s so dangerous because there’s an effect that happens when you start messing with the universal wave, a kind of echo chamber effect. The wave is so interwoven with everything… changes can escalate exponentially within milliseconds, and that is when a bounce is likely to occur. In theory the bounced section could be small or it could be vast. As large as a continent, even. Maybe even bigger than that.”

Around the circle everyone was quiet.

“But would anyone be so stupid?” Aharon asked suddenly. “We had nuclear technology for sixty years and we managed not to blow ourselves up. Surely our scientists wouldn’t be so dumb.”

“We did use the atomic bomb,” Jill reminded him. “It wasn’t until we saw what it could do that we learned to respect the technology. With the wave we may never survive early experimentation. And the thing is, going through a bounce event—well, it happened to the ancestors of the people on Difa-Gor-Das, and I have a feeling there’s a good chance of it happening to most cultures that discover the one-minus-one.”

“So let’s undiscover it,” Denton said.

“Yes,” Hannah agreed. She sat up, as if collecting herself together. “I have family. I’m sure you all have family. So? What needs to be done?”

“I have to believe…” Aharon shook his head thoughtfully. “Maybe God does not interfere as much as I once thought. But I have to believe there was a purpose to my finding the Kobinski codes—to what all of us have been through. We’ve been permitted to see the danger. There must be something we can do to prevent it.”

“We have no choice but to try by any and all means,” Nate agreed.

“Absolutely. That’s why we’re here.” Jill didn’t say it, but she felt a personal sense of responsibility. The looming catastrophe was, in a very real way, her fault.