The same size—a few miles long.
Covered with the same adhering cosmic dust. Old dust. Dust of matter born thirty billion years ago.”
His haunted eyes looked blindly up at me.
“Queer rocks!” he muttered.
“But one of them you know about.
Years ago—even in your time here—it came through the anomaly.
Miners have built a town on it.
Then it drifted back again.”
“You don’t mean—Lodestone?”
“That’s what they called it.”
“Did you find the miners—the people?”
His face turned bleak.
“We landed there,” he said.
“We spent weeks—maybe months— of that other time, looking for clues.
We found empty structures.
Abandoned machines.
Even frozen supplies that helped us keep alive. But no people. In the time of that other universe, you see, that colony must have been marooned many thousand years ago.” I heard the sharp intake of Lilith’s breath. “The people did survive for several generations,” Ken Star continued.
“We found notes and diaries, even a graveyard.
A pretty grim story.
They were trying to find where they were and how to get back.
They explored some of the other rocks.
Though they were spinning theories, they never cracked the secret.
They had no Habibula.”
“In life’s name, Ken!”
Old Habibula blinked uncomfortably.
“Don’t poke jokes at me!”
“I’m not joking,” Ken Star said.
“The death of Lodestone is certainly no joke.
It died of energy-famine.
It had no sun.
Its radium and thorium had long ago decayed.
Most of the desperate survivors left it at last to look for our universe.
What they found was that mother machine.
It picked them off with micro-missiles.
The last few men left fragmentary records on the rock.”
He fell silent, his haggard eyes peering at the blank, greenish screen.
“What are those rocks?”
I tried to smooth the hoarseness from my voice.
“They seem as queer as the anomaly, as strange as that ma-chine.
Did you find out—”
“We learned what they had been.”
His bright, sunken eyes flashed at me and back at the screen, like the eyes of something hunted.
“At one time—I think before our space and time were born—they had been ships!”
12 Multiplex Universe
A shocked stillness filled the drum and vibrated through the whirling rum of Nowhere Near.
Turning blankly to peer at the charted creature that had swallowed us, I heard the stifled catch of Lilith’s breath.
I started at the click of old Habibula’s bottle on the table.
“They couldn’t be ships!”
I swung to stare at Ken Star.
“What makes you think they are?”