“I was in love with him.”
“It’s still a bad part of town.”
“I was twenty-two years old.”
“How old do you have to be?”
“Up yours, Harry.”
Harry shook his head. “You find the wires, Butch?”
“Yes, I found the wires. They go into some kind of a glass grid.”
“Let’s have a look,” Norman said, going next door. He’d seen flight recorders before; they were long rectangular metal boxes, reminiscent of safe-deposit boxes, painted red or bright orange. If this was-
He stopped.
He was looking at a transparent glass cube one foot on each side. Inside the cube was an intricate grid arrangement of fine glowing blue lines. Between the glowing lines, blue lights flickered intermittently. There were two pressure gauges mounted on top of the cube, and three pistons; and there were a series of silver stripes and rectangles on the outer surface on the left side. It didn’t look like anything he had seen before.
“Interesting.” Harry peered into the cube. “Some kind of optronic memory, is my guess. We don’t have anything like it.” He touched the silver stripes on the outside. “Not paint, it’s some plastic material. Probably machine-readable.”
“By what? Certainly not us.”
“No. Probably a robot recovery device of some kind.”
“And the pressure gauges?”
“The cube is filled with some kind of gas, under pressure.
Maybe it contains biological components, to attain that compactness. In any case, I’ll bet this large glass is a memory device.”
“A flight recorder?”
“Their equivalent, yes.”
“How do we access it?”
“Watch this,” Beth said, going back to the flight deck. She began pushing sections of the console, activating it. “Don’t tell Barnes,” she said over her shoulder.
“How do you know where to press?”
“I don’t think it matters,” she said. “I think the console can sense where you are.”
“The control panel keeps track of the pilot?”
“Something like that.”
In front of them, a section of the console glowed, making a screen, yellow on black.
RV-LHOOQ DCOMI U.S.S. STAR VOYAGER
Then nothing.
Harry said, “Now we’ll get the bad news.”
“What bad news?” Norman said. And he wondered: Why had Harry stayed behind to look for the flight recorder, instead of going with Ted and Barnes to explore the rest of the ship? Why was he so interested in the past history of this vessel?
“Maybe it won’t be bad,” Harry said.
“Why do you think it might be?”
“Because,” Harry said, “if you consider it logically, something vitally important is missing from this ship-”
At that moment, the screen filled with columns:
SHIP SYSTEMS PROPULSION SYSTEMS
LIFE SYSTEMS WASTE MANAG (V9)
DATA SYSTEMS STATUS OM2 (OUTER)
QUARTERMASTER STATUS OM3 (INNER)
FLIGHT RECORDS STATUS OM4 (FORE)
CORE OPERATIONS STATUS DV7 (AFT)
DECK CONTROL STATUS V (SUMMA)
INTEGRATION (DIRECT) STATUS COMREC (2)
LSS TEST 1.0 LINE A9-11
LSS TEST 2.0 LINE A 12-BX
LSS TEST 3.0 STABILIX
“What’s your pleasure?” Beth said, hands on the console. “Flight records,” Harry said. He bit his lip.
FLIGHT DATA SUMMARIES RV-LHOOQ
FDS 01/01/43-12/31/45
FDS 01/01/46-12/31/48
FDS 01/01/49-12/31/51
FDS 01/01/52-12/31/53
FDS 01/01/54-12/31/54
FDS 01/01/55-06/31/55
FDS 07/01/55-12/31/55
FDS 01/01/56-01/31/56
FDS 02/01/56-ENTRY EVENT
FDS ENTRY EVENT
FDS ENTRY EVENT SUMMARY
8 amp;6!!OZ/010/Odd-000/XXX/X
F$S XXX/X% ^/XXX-X@X/X!X/X
“What do you make of that?” Norman said.
Harry was peering at the screen. “As you see, the earliest records are in three-year intervals. Then they’re shorter, one year, then six months, and finally one month. Then this entry event business.”
“So they were recording more and more carefully,” Beth said. “As the ship approached the entry event, whatever it was.”
“I have a pretty good idea what it was,” Harry said. “I just can’t believe that-let’s start. How about entry event summary?”
Beth pushed buttons.
On the screen, a field of stars, and around the edges of the field, a lot of numbers. It was three-dimensional, giving the illusion of depth.
“Holographic?”
“Not exactly. But similar.”
“Several large-magnitude stars there…”
“Or planets.”
“What planets?”
“I don’t know. This is one for Ted,” Harry said. “He may be able to identify the image. Let’s go on.”
He touched the console; the screen changed.
“More stars.”
“Yeah, and more numbers.”
The numbers around the edges of the screen were flickering, changing rapidly. “The stars don’t seem to be moving, but the numbers are changing.”
“No, look. The stars are moving, too.”
They could see that all the stars were moving away from the center of the screen, which was now black and empty. “No stars in the center, and everything moving away…” Harry said thoughtfully.
The stars on the outside were moving very quickly, streaking outward. The black center was expanding.
“Why is it empty like that in the center, Harry?” Beth said.
“I don’t think it is empty.”
“I can’t see anything.”
“No, but it’s not empty. In just a minute we should see-There!”
A dense white cluster of stars suddenly appeared in the center of the screen. The cluster expanded as they watched. It was a strange effect, Norman thought. There was still a distinct black ring that expanded outward, with stars on the outside and on the inside. It felt as if they were flying through a giant black donut.
“My God,” Harry said softly. “Do you know what you are looking at?”
“No,” Beth said. “What’s that cluster of stars in the center?”
“It’s another universe.”
“It’s what?”
“Well, okay. It’s probably another universe. Or it might be a different region of our own universe. Nobody really knows for sure.”
“What’s the black donut?” Norman said.
“It’s not a donut. It’s a black hole. What you are seeing is the recording made as this spacecraft went through a black hole and entered into another-Is someone calling?” Harry turned, cocked his head. They fell silent, but heard nothing. “What do you mean, another universe-”
“-Sssssh.”
A short silence. And then a faint voice crying “Hellooo…”
“Who’s that?” Norman said, straining to listen. The voice was so soft. But it sounded human. And maybe more than one voice. It was coming from somewhere inside the spacecraft.
“Yoo-hoo! Anybody there? Hellooo.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Beth said. “It’s them, on the monitor.”
She turned up the volume on the little monitor Edmunds had left behind. On the screen they saw Ted and Barnes, standing in a room somewhere and shouting. “Hellooo… Hel-lo-oooo.”
“Can we talk back?”
“Yes. Press that button on the side.” Norman said, “We hear you.”
“High damn time!” Ted.
“All right, now,” Barnes said. “Listen up.”
“What are you people doing back there?” Ted said.
“Listen up,” Barnes said. He stepped to one side, revealing a piece of multicolored equipment. “We now know what this ship is for.”