That slow smile gone, he sat staring bleakly at Lilith.
“Nobody wanted to believe our results,” he said.
“We repeated the thorium tests.
We ran a control experiment with Uranium-238— which normally decays to another lead isotope, Lead-207, after a half-life of four and a half billion years.
Always our answers supported the disquieting theory that we had come to check.”
His bloodshot eyes looked haunted.
“Our test results show that these anomalous asteroids now contain less than one percent of the original Uranium-238 and no more than twenty-five percent of the original Thorium-232.
That means that the indicated age of these rocks is at least twenty-five billion years.
“They are four times older than our universe!”
Old Habibula’s pink moon-face turned pale.
He flinched back apprehensively, almost as if the age of those ancient rocks had been a contagious disease that he was afraid of catching from Star.
“Commander,” I broke in, “may I ask one question?”
He inclined his bandaged head.
“I’ve been watching these rocks too, for several years,” I said.
“They seem peculiar in many ways.
How do you know that they are a representative sample of the original matter—wherever they come from!
Couldn’t the thorium and uranium have been removed by some other process than age?”
“Thank you, Captain.” He answered with a methodic, painful care.
“I know these rocks are anomalous in other ways than age—in size and shape and composition.
But I think we took account of every possible source of error.
What we measured was not the total amount of thorium or uranium, but the ratio of each to its own peculiar isotope of lead.
What we analyzed was not just the various alloys of the asteroids themselves, but also collected samples of adhering surface dust.”
As if he had forgotten me and my objection, he turned stiffly back to Lilith.
His frail hand was clutching hers on the tabletop, as if hi desperate anxiety.
“Even that dust is four times older than the oldest things known outside of the anomaly,” he told her.
“Even the dust speaks for the theory that brought me here.”
Her lean face looked pale and taut as his.
“What is that theory, Ken?”
Pausing as if to organize his thoughts, he took an absent sip of old Habibula’s wine.
“It developed from my work on Contra-Saturn,” he said.
“I was studying the objects once called quasars—the quasi-stellar objects which looked like stars but turned out to be exploding galaxies.
The biggest bombs in the universe!
A single quasar explosion has the force of one hundred millions suns turned into raw energy.”
“A fearful thing!” Old Habibula blinked his dull-colored eyes.
“Such monstrous bombs make our best weapons seem like mortal foolish toys.
I hope you don’t expect Lil and me to face such wicked weapons as that!”
“I hope we can keep our battles on a somewhat smaller scale.” Star grinned bleakly.
“But the enemy is deadly enough.”
“Ken, I don’t understand.”
Lilith’s eyes had darkened with dread.
“What have exploding galaxies to do with the age of these anomalous rocks—or with that enemy machine?”
Moving stiffly in his chair, Star raised his hands to rub at his temples under the edge of that white bandage, as if to ease an ache in his head.
“One possible source exists for such an explosion.”
His voice was weaker and more weary, yet still painfully precise.
“A hundred million supernovas, all touched off at once, would not be enough.
The only possible source is a blowout of space itself.”
Shivering, old Habibula gulped another glass of wine.
“You know mass curves space,” Ken Star said.
“When the curvature reaches what is called the Schwarzschild radius, space is bent back until it meets itself.
The closed space, with the mass that made it close, is separated from our space-time.