larger numbers, had been an even wider variety of interportal ships, many of which had been en route when their destinations had ceased to exist. In some extreme cases, maintenance workers on exterior port structures had been left floating in space, clinging to sliced-off sections of docking cradles.
The salvage operation had been facilitated by the fact that everything left behind was in a stable and tidy orbit around the sun, and was also provided with stellar heat. As a preliminary to the retreat to Earth, all personnel with only spacesuits or unpowered habitats to keep them alive had been located and rescued by small craft. Next, all ships — large and small — had gathered in a single orbiting swarm, and the interstellar vessels had taken on board every human being left in that region of space. That stage of the operation had been complicated by the arrival of twelve ships from Earth and one from Terranova, all of which had been locked in warp transfer at the time of the disappearance, but the problems had been mostly concerned with credibility and had eventually been resolved. The thesis that Orbitsville no longer existed, although astonishing, was remarkably easy to demonstrate.
The logistics of assembling the return fleet had been such that Dallen had plenty of time to rescue his family's possessions from the condemned Hawkshead and transfer them to an aging but grandiose passenger liner, the Rosetta, in which they had been assigned a suite. And it had been while repacking some oddments that he had found the reading list folded and tucked into a rarely-used tobacco pouch. Cona had prepared it for his benefit three years earlier. It detailed four hundred books she regarded as important and which she had urged him to read.
'That's purely for starters,' she had said, smiling. 'Just to give you some idea of where you came from and where you ought to be going.'
The old Dallen had refused the intellectual gift, inflicting unknown pain by not trying even one of the suggested books, but the new Dallen had been determined to make amends. Standing there in the special sunlight of that special morning, he touched the oiled wood of the bookcase, recognising and respecting all that remained to him of his former wife. The body which had once belonged to Cona was now inhabited by a cheerful and uncomplicated young woman who had a mental age of about thirteen and whose home was on a nearby farm owned by the Foundation. Belatedly accepting his former physician's advice, Dallen had renamed her Carol and used the name automatically in his thoughts.
He went to visit Carol once a month and occasionally they would go horseback riding together, and he was always glad that their relationship, although pleasant, was cool and undemanding. Carol treated him as she would an uncle, sometimes enjoying his visits a lot and at others showing impatience over being dragged away from the stables. The active farming life had pared her figure down, taking years off her apparent age, with the result that when Dallen saw her from a distance there was little to remind him of his former wife — Cona Dallen doesn't live here any more — and he had learned that all grief has to fade.
'Coffee in five minutes,' he shouted, hearing the first subdued thump from the old-style percolator in the kitchen. He arranged settings for three people at the breakfast bar, then returned to the study and sat down at his desk. The computer displayed his job notes for the day, but he found it hard to concentrate on the symbols when the lawns and shrubs beyond his window were glowing with a phosphorescent nostalgic brilliance and the Columbus was circling up there beyond the atmosphere, making ready for deep space. Dallen reached for his pipe and, while filling it, allowed his thoughts to drift back over the previous nine years.
Dwelling in the past was psychologically inadvisable for most people, but in his case it had literally become a way of life, a profession. Project Recap had been set up within weeks of his return to Earth after the Orbitsville departure, with Dallen as a principal director. In the early stages all but three of the thirty-four men and women who had witnessed and been affected by the seminal encounter with the Ultans had been part of the team, each making a unique contribution to the collective memory. The ineffable moment of wordless, mind-to-mind contact had been shared by all, but the common experience had been interpreted by individuals in different ways, modified by their intelligence, outlook and education.
Holorecordings of the event — with their hazy images of black entities shimmering in blackness — had proved to the rest of humanity that something had happened, but it had been the very diversity of the participants' reactions which had finally eliminated all theories about mass hysteria. Doctor Glaister, for example, with her background in particle physics, had emerged from the experience with recollections which varied a great deal from Dallen's in some places, especially where the 'dialogue' had touched on the relationship between mindons and gravitons. The detailed insights she had received — cameos of cold logic, engraved in permafrost, with the black ice of eternity showing through' was how she once described them — revitalised her entire field of learning, in spite of the fact that only one in a thousand of its workers had not been translated into the Region II universe.
The effect had been similar, though to a lesser extent, with some technical and engineering experts of the Hawkshead's crew, and it was largely as a result of their subsequent work that the exploration ship Columbus would be able to fly at close to tachyon speeds, bringing the core of the galaxy within mankind's reach. Other members of the same group had formed a cadre of inspired technocrats who, with material assistance from Terranova, were playing a vital role in the Renaissance.
The after-effects of the unique encounter had not been uniformly beneficial, however. The three men who had not been able to participate in Project Recap had been jolted by their experience into a profound autism which still gave little sign of abating. Dallen himself, prime target for the Ultans' psychic energies, had been disturbed for weeks, prone to nightmares and loss of appetite, alternating between periods of torpor and hyperactivity. When he had learned that his work for the Project would involve repeated and full-scale mental regression to the encounter he had at first refused to cooperate in any way, and only gradually had overcome his instinctive fears. There had also been the problem of his disbelief in the essential proposition.
The central idea was that the Ultans could be used retrospectively as a kind of sounding board for scientific and philosophical beliefs to be specially implanted in Dallen's mind. By drug-intensified hypnotic regression he would be able to meet the superhuman entities again and again, recreating a special state of consciousness, continuing to harvest or corroborate knowledge, to glean and scavenge until the law of diminishing returns made the exercise pointless.
His scepticism had gradually faded when he discovered he had already, in association with Billie Glaister, helped change men's dunking about no less a question than the ultimate fate of the universe. Cosmologists had never been able to find enough mass in the universe, even with allowance for black holes, to guarantee that it was closed and therefore cyclic. The best they had been able to hope for was the Einstein-de Sitter model of a marginally open or flat universe, one which barely expanded but would go on doing so for ever. However, the mindon graviton component imposed a positive curvature on space time, promising an infinite sequence of Big Squeezes and Big Bangs. The cosmological timescales were such that Dallen could feel little personal concern, but he could see that a cyclic universe was more pleasing to philosophers.
Of much greater interest to him were the questions posed by the mindon science of the Renaissance. The very fact that it not only accepted personal immortality, but had it as a cornerstone, made it unlike any scientific discipline that had gone before. It was exuberant, optimistic, mystical, life-centred, full of wild cards, boasting as one of its creeds a statement hypnotically retrieved by Dallen from the Ultan encounter: It is the thinker in the quietness of his study who draws the remotest galaxies back from the shores of night.
Dallen liked to regard himself as an integral part of the universe, and he savoured the irony in the way in which human beings, who had until recently accepted a life expectancy of some eighty years, were now debating their prospects of surviving the next Big Bang as mindon entities. 'Science used to be preoccupied with tacking on more and more decimal places,' a colleague told him. 'Now we add on bunches of zeroes.'
It had been that moral buoyancy, the powerful life-enhancing elements of mindon science, which had given Dallen the necessary incentive to join Project Recap. To the world at large the demanding aspect of his work had been the mental wear and tear caused by the periods of intensive study of abstruse subjects followed by regressions and the subsequent debriefings. Dallen had found the process intellectually harrowing, but the principal strain had been emotional — for it entailed his losing Silvia London time after time. One system of thought demanded that he regard her as having lived out her life billions of years before the oldest stars in the universe were formed; but in another — the one which was instinctive and natural to Dallen — she was vitally alive, separated from him only by some malevolent trick of cosmic geometry. And both systems had exacted their due of bitter tears.
For months after the premature death of his mother Dallen had been haunted by fantastic dreams in which she was still alive, and on his awakening his grief had returned with almost its original force. A similar sequence
