The Overlords of War

Chapter 19

That was where the universe came to an end.

This universe, at any rate.

And they were being hurled toward that black gulf…

The wind had lost a little of its violence, but the waves grew higher and ever higher as though, somewhere ahead, they were breaking against an unseen obstacle. They hollowed now into glaucous valleys hundreds of meters deep.

At the horizon the ocean stopped dead, like the edge of a table. Beyond lay the. abyss, filling the space between the sky and the sea.

“There’s only one chance left,” Touray said. “And that’s a slim one! If a Breather comes along before…”

There was no need for him to finish. They stared, fascinated, at the edge of the world.

“Unless the wind drops,” Corson said.

Touray shrugged. “It won’t. That’s vacuum pulling us along. This whole world is going to go the same way.”

“But why?”

“Oh, something must have broken in the big machine!”

As they drew closer, the black space became populated with lights, shining motionless points which, from time to time, winked out and reappeared as though some dark object had passed in front of them. The balloon seemed to be heading toward a patch of black even more total, even more absolute, than the rest of the wall. It was haloed by bright lines that spread in all directions like forked lightning.

What it reminded Corson of was a broken window.

And that, he realized a second later, was exactly what he was looking at. A window, shattered by something dashed against it. The moveless lights were stars. That patch of blacker-than-black was a hole through which Aergistal—or at least that section of Aergistal that included the balloon—was being sucked into the void.

A colossal whirlpool bit into the surface of the sea, near the interface. The water likewise was being emptied out into nowhere.

Corson wondered whether this space was infinite, whether the whole of Aergistal with its lunatic wars, its legions and fleets and pitiable heroes, its generals and its nuclear mushrooms, would all find peace at last among those stars. Were not the creators, or the operators, of Aergistal going to step in? Was this accident beyond their powers to cope with? Or… were they simply emptying a test tube? Had Touray been right to talk about model soldiers? Could it be that after all Aergistal was nothing but an artificial world, huge but not boundless, floating in space and in the course of being drained owing to damage or by deliberate decision? What would happen if, along the fissures he could see, the “glass” shattered all of a sudden? Would the sky and the land join up again? Or would the structure of this senseless world—senseless in human terms, at least—survive forever, preserved in uncorrupting vacuum?

As the balloon approached the hole, the temperature dropped and the air grew ever thinner. Oddly, however, the gap seemed to grow narrower. A moment ago it had yawned kilometer-wide. Now, at its broadest, it was only a few hundred meters across. It was repairing itself, and swiftly at that. The balloon was so close that Corson could see circular ripples cross the interface, dying at the edges of the hole.

The sea was disappearing under an icepack which drew a white line along the straight underside of that wall of space. Not a window, then! Not a wall, even—but a force screen capable of mending itself, overloaded by an inconceivable shock.

“We’re going throughl” Touray gasped. “If it doesn’t close up too fast!”

Antonella hid her face against Corson’s shoulder. He himself, panting for breath, found energy to point toward the hole. The wreck of a vast spaceship floated in the void, a little below the level of the ocean. It might have been spindle-shaped; at any rate that was the form suggested by the stem section, which seemed to be stuck to the transparent wall. In repairing itself, the force field had trapped it.

What amazed Corson was the biological slowness of the repair process. One might better term it “healing.” He only recalled force fields which, as far as human perceptions were concerned, propagated instantly over short distances. Then he reminded himself that here the energies involved were so immense that time itself could be deformed by them. The mass equivalent of that barrier must be fantastic. Long before his own day, relativity theory had shown that time at the surface of a giant star would pass more slowly than in free space.

Even more surprising was that this time-dilation effect did not apparently extend into the space surrounding the barrier. If this was indeed a field in which time was slowed, it must have immense gravitational potential. One would have expected the balloon to be hurled toward the screen so fast that it would have burned up from friction even before it crashed.

Corson found himself able to hope again. There were only a few hundred meters to go. The healing was becoming more rapid, the fissures were vanishing. The blank black patch was shrinking. All around space seemed to glisten as though newly varnished, no doubt from a side effect of the field.

Any second now! Corson reached out to protect Antonella. Crash. Bounce! The universe spun giddily. The rope he had tied around him sawed into his ribs. He rocked, fell forward. His head struck the rim of the gondola. A steep angle. He could still hear a soft noise. The balloon smashed against the barrier, the gondola rocked. Crash. Bounce. Not so fiercely now. Something resilient in the way.

Fainted.