thrown together in under an hour, a towering edifice of black glass tubing, shining metal, copper spheres, and multicolored domes. At its top, dozens of shafts converged, bringing unknown forces together to clash inside a central chamber. They were apparently testing the thing when we drove through. Violet discharges snaked through the dark glass, and the machine screeched like a beast chained in the depths of hell. We got out of there.
When we returned to PL&D., Carl and Lori were there, looking worried.
'What's going on?' Carl asked. 'The whole place is going crazy.'
'Quotas to meet for the Five Year Plan.'
'Huh?'
'I got a little project cooking,' I said.
'Jesus, we thought something happened. Little project?'
A big problem came up: a power shortage. The energy requirements for final assembly of the object were beyond the plant's capacity. Calls went out to other automated industrial facilities around the planet, and most replies were favorable. They'd be willing to help. Word had gotten out about the project. We were a sensation.
The retooling went on for another twelve hours before the initial stages of final assembly commenced. It was then that a horrendous explosion rocked the plant. We tried frantically to contact the foreman. Half an hour later, our call was returned.
'Extensive damage sustained in facility housing Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Ring,' the foreman reported.
I felt guilty. 'Gee, that's terrible. What happened?'
'Failure in primary power tetrode, leading to fracture and subsequent leakage in coupling loop.'
'Oh. Anybody hurt? Uh, I mean…'
'Several worker units lost. Have been replaced.'
'I see. Maybe we'd better cancel the project before worse mishaps occur.' I was thinking more of our own safety.
'Anomalous event, recurrence statistically negligible. We urge that effort be pursued through to completion.'
'Well, I don't know.'
'Abandoning task at this point would take on tragic aspect.'
'It would?' These guys really were gung-ho. 'Okay, let's go ahead then.'
'Splendid! Your courage is to be commended.'
'My courage?'
Repairs were effected, and work was resumed.
Arthur told me he was ready to leave any time. I told him we wanted to go back with him to Emerald City.
'Fine with me,' he said, 'though you could wait here. I won't be more than an hour.'
'I think I have to get out of this place before I go nuts. Can you wait till the project's done?'
'Sure. By the way, what in the world are you people trying to do?'
'Produce your hand-tooled, genuine leather, monogrammed wallet,' I said.
'Just what I've always wanted.'
The final assembly was almost an anticlimax. Everything went smoothly. We were summoned to the showroom.
I held it in the palm of my hand and stared at it. The robot who had delivered it whooshed away.
It was a very simple object, yet a very strange thing to look at: a small, totally black featureless cube.
'A most sublime artifact,' the foreman said with almost religious solemnity.
'The cube!' Darla gasped. 'My God, Jake, why?'
'I don't really know why, not intellectually,' I told her. 'Not yet. But everything seems to revolve around this little object. A whole legend has grown up around it, around us. The legend says that when we go back, we'll arrive before we left, and I will give the cube to Assemblywoman Marcia Miller, who will in turn hand it over to the dissident movement, who will in turn give it to you. And you will give it back to me. Except that the `me' you will give it to is the me of three months ago.' I took Darla's hand and placed the cube in her palm. She stared at it in astonishment. 'My duty seemed very clear. Since somebody stole the one you gave me, I thought I'd better come up with another one to give back to you. And there it is.'
'But…' Darla was baffled.
'According to the legend,' I went on, 'the cube doesn't have an origin. It just keeps cycling from future to past and back again. Now, here I am at the end of the Skyway. It doesn't look as if I'm ever going to find an object like this. In fact, everyone here seems bent on taking the original one away from me. So, I thought I'd kill two paradoxes with one volitional act-I created the damn thing on my own. Now I have the cube again, and the cube has an origin. Well, these guys did the originating, actually. I just gave them the idea.'
'But how, Jake?' Darla asked, shaking her head in wonder. 'How did you know what to create? Nobody ever really cracked the cube's mystery. Ragna's people made some good guesses, but how did you know what the cube really was?'
'I didn't, of course. I took Ragna's people's speculations and asked the design chief to come up with a design for an artifact that would more or less answer to the description. He did. And the factory crew made it a reality.'
'But what is it, Jake?' Carl asked. 'What is the cube? What's it for?'
'Don't know what it's for, yet,' I answered. 'But what it is, near as I can figure from what the design chief told me, is a continuum in which the normal properties of space and time are nonexistent. Within the confines of these six sides, neither space nor time exist at all. What's inside the cube is literally and absolutely nothing. A nonspace. A singularity. The Ahgirr scientists' speculation about it being a huge space folded up was wrong, but I can see how they arrived at the hypothesis. Nonspace is a slippery concept to grasp. Another thing: space and time are not the only thing that doesn't exist inside. Nothing else in the universe does either. Fundamental things, like the Planck Constant, or G, the gravitational constant, or any of those foundation stones of the physical universe as we know it. Inside the cube, anything goes. You could make a whole new universe in there, using physical laws different from the standard ones.'
Darla said, 'What about the information, the data coming out of the cube? The Movement people who examined it discovered that.'
'The chief told me that stray radiation is generated at the interface of the cube's surface and the outside world. It has something to do with virtual particle creation, which goes on everywhere in the universe all the time. I can't quite grasp the reason, but somehow when these particles pop into existence near the cube, they get real nervous and instead of blinking out of existence like good little virtual particles are supposed to, they stay real and fly out into the world as electronpositron pairs.'
'Man, you lost me there,' Carl said.
'Forget it,' I said. 'I don't understand it myself.'
'Jake, I have other problems with this,' Darla said. 'How do you know that this cube and the first one are identical?'
'I don't, now,' I said. 'But if I do succeed in delivering this one back to T-Maze three months in the past, it will be identical. Because this cube will be the first cube. No?'
Darla sighed in resignation. 'I guess.' She frowned and shook her head. 'But I still don't see how you could have created something when you didn't know exactly what that something was in the first place.'
I took the cube back and tossed it into the air, caught it. It was feather light. What I couldn't figure was why it wasn't completely weightless. The design chief had told me it had something to do with 'inertial drag' and the fact that the frozen energies holding the cube together possessed 'mass equivalence.'
'Well, let's put it this way,' I said. 'I didn't know anything. But I had some speculations about what the cube was. Everybody had them. Prime told us that it was `an experiment in the creation of a universe.' Don't ask me how he knew. I spilled all of this to the design chief, who is a creative mind. He took these ideas and kicked it around his circuits for a while and came up with a few ideas of his own. One of them turned out to be feasible. And the technical guys did it up for us. This is how the cube got created in the first place. This was its origin.'
'If you say so,' Darla said.
We got on the robocart for the trip back to the receiving bay.
