That was small comfort. His journey along the lowest level had convinced him that the Hero’s Return was dying, and far faster than the ship’s computer was willing to admit. Jettisoning the defensive shields had been necessary for the ship’s immediate survival when they arrived in the ocean of Limbo, but the same act had guaranteed long-term and irreversible failures.
He reached the last two sections, and discovered worse news. On the ship’s arrival on Limbo its forward motion had finally been halted by an underwater ledge. Even at a speed of a few meters a second, the impact of the ship’s bow with unyielding rock had buckled and twisted the outer and inner hulls and mashed them into each other. Worse than the damage to the hull was the destruction of the vital navigational instruments mounted at the bows. The Hero’s Return would be ready for another trip to space only after major refurbishing had been performed; which, in practice, meant never.
Bony made his final assessment as he clambered up a tight spiral staircase leading to one of the main corridors, and from there headed for what had once been the fire control room. It was the most likely place to find Chan Dalton and Dag Korin and give them his report. Bony’s message would be a grim one: the ship could not be used for a Link transition, and it would become totally uninhabitable in a few days.
Chan and the General were not in the control room. Tully O’Toole and Liddy Morse were; also — a surprise to Bony — the Angel, Gressel, immobile and apparently asleep on a broad-based pot of black earth, while next to it Elke Siry sat at a terminal frowning and grimacing and biting her lips. She was hammering a keypad at a furious rate. Tully O’Toole and Liddy Morse hovered by, apparently urging her on.
Bony opened the visor of his helmet and sank down into a seat next to them. His suit was covered with sticky ooze, but he was too bushed to care. Even though the onboard robots were close to imbecility, a simple cleaning job should not be beyond them.
“Well?” Liddy came closer, but she did not try to touch him. He could hardly blame her. But she knew where he had been, and what he had been doing.
“I give us three days, if we push everything to the limit.”
Elke had frowned in irritation when Liddy first spoke, but at Bony’s words she spun around in her chair. “Three days for what?”
“Three days until we’re forced to abandon the Hero’s Return and try our luck ashore. This ship is dying around us.” Bony’s wave took in the tilted floor, sweating ceiling, and fading wall lights. “It’s on its last legs. Any word from Deb and the others while I’ve been below? They’ve been gone nearly ten hours, and it must be getting dark up there.”
Tully shook his head. “Nothing. But that’s not so strange, because Chan doesn’t want radio signals until we know more about whatever destroyed our orbiters. We’ll hear from the shore party when they come back and report, not before. Let’s hope they make it fast, ’cause this old ship won’t last.”
“Three days,” Elke said. “Damnation. Just when this is getting really interesting.” That wasn’t the word that Bony would have chosen, but Elke went on, “We’re making great progress mapping the multiverse, and we have some guesses about the way the new Link might work; but I can’t continue the analysis without a computer.”
Liddy looked at Bony. “I suppose we can’t take it ashore with us?”
“The computer? Not a chance. It’s a distributed system with elements scattered all the way through the ship. It would be easier to take the power plant, and that weighs three hundred tons.”
Gressel showed sudden signs of life, rippling its fronds from top to bottom. “Computer,” the Angel said in a deep, dreamy voice. “Hmmm, computer. Yes, a computer is indeed useful in defining the Link transition that a homebound ship must make. But that abstract problem, despite Dr. Siry’s modesty, is close to being solved, and our own internal computational power should suffice to handle the remainder. Of far more concern, we suggest, is the absence of a ship that can make the Link transition. Recall the human recipe for making a rabbit pie: First catch your rabbit. Accepting what Mr. Rombelle tells us, we ask: Where is our ship?”
“The aliens on shore have a ship, and more,” Tully said.
“But will they make one available to us?”
“Well, if they don’t and if they won’t, we’ll—”
“Do not continue with that thought.” The Angel’s voice deepened. “Remember, violence is never the answer. There are always peaceful solutions. We will not pursue that subject. Instead, we suggest that a summary of our current state of knowledge is in order. Dr. Siry, would you like to proceed?”
“You could do it better than I.”
“How true. But this is to an audience of humans , with its own curious cultural referents.” Gressel waved a succulent side frond. “Horses for courses. Better, we think, if you offer the summary.”
“We-e-ll …” Elke sighed, but as she turned to face the others she did not seem displeased. “The amazing thing about the multiverse is not that we’ve discovered its existence. It’s that we’ve been blind to it for so long while it was staring us in the face. We’ve used the Links to make interstellar jumps for — how long?” No one spoke. “Well, hundreds of years at least. All that time, theorists have argued that the only way you can go somewhere through a Link is by passing through an intermediate space, one that’s connected differently from our own spacetime. Points that are widely separated in our universe are close together in the other one.”
“But I thought that `other universe’ was just sort of a mental picture,” Liddy objected. “Just a way of visualizing things.”
“If it were just a picture, how could it work?” Elke’s blue eyes were sparkling and she displayed more passion than anyone on the Hero’s Return had ever seen. “No, this is a real alternate universe — it has to be, because we travel through it. Our mistake was in thinking that there was one alternate universe, and it was the only possible alternate universe. What Gressel and I have discovered is a large number — possibly an infinite number — of other universes, all just as real as the one we came from, or the one we’re in here on Limbo. And we’re finding out a lot of things about them. For instance, there are universes in which all the basic physical constants are widely different from what we’re used to. A transition to one of them would be fatal, because nothing like us could survive. We were lucky. This universe and ours are very close in properties. We know that, because we’re alive. Also, the universe that the land aliens came from, no matter how alien it may be in other ways, must also be close in its physical constants. Otherwise they couldn’t survive here, either.”
Tully asked, “How do you know they’re not from our universe?”
He had moved closer when Elke began to speak, and now to his amazement she reached forward and placed her hand on his arm. “The nature of the Link tells us that! It’s completely different from what we’re used to, different from anything we’ve imagined. For one thing, it’s on an air-water boundary, which before we came here I would have said was impossible. For another, if the Link had been present in the Geyser Swirl for years, the Stellar Group aliens would have found it. But the Angel and I are beginning to understand it, and how everything works.”
She finally realized that she was touching Tully and pulled her hand away. “It’s all right,” he said, but she turned quickly to the display controls and went on, “See, we’re starting to map the structure of the multiverse. It contains a whole spectrum of energy levels. Just knowing that those exist is half the battle. I’ve made a diagram of what I’ve been calling `uphill’ and `downhill’ universes. Here it is.” The screen showed a set of nodes connected by a complicated network of lines. “The yellow arrows are to places that call for a greater energy expenditure to reach them, the blue to ones that you can reach more easily. The aliens who made the Link here on Limbo probably came uphill, because the ships we’ve seen from orbit don’t seem to have huge power units. They’ll find it easier to go home than they did to come here. We think the same is true of us. We’ll go home” — she ignored Bony’s murmured If we go home — “easier than we came, because the power drain getting to this place was enormous, much bigger than it usually is for a single transition.” She paused in annoyance. A buzzing tone like a giant bee was ringing through the ship, interrupting her final words. “What on earth is that?”