Time

But it had been enough, he saw with an immense relief; still starfished, passive, spinning, she was drifting toward him. He rolled up the tether hastily and slung it over his arm.

She came sliding past him like a figure in a dream, not two feet away. He reached up and grabbed her good leg. He pulled her down to him until he had her in his arms once more. Under his gloved hand something crumbled away from Emma’s suit. It was a fine layer of white soot.

Clumsily he pushed up her gold visor. There was her face, lit by the still-brilliant orange glow of the sky. Her eyes were closed, the fringe of hair that poked out of her comms hat plastered against her forehead by big, unearthly beads of sweat. It was hard to judge her color, but it looked to him as if her face was pink, burned, even blistered in a few places, on her cheekbones and chin. He reached out without thinking, meaning to touch her face, but of course his gloved hand just bumped against the glass of her faceplate.

Enough. He was still in the business of survival, here. He got a tether rope and knotted it around his waist and Emma’s, making sure they couldn’t drift apart again.

What next?

Emma’s leg. It was still bleeding, pumping blood. A tourniquet, then. He grabbed a loop of tether rope.

But now somebody was clambering over his back. It was Cornelius, of course, pulling himself along with big clumsy grabs. Malenfant felt a thump at the back of his helmet and heard a muffled shouting that carried through the fabric of Cornelius’ helmet and his own.

“… that you? Malenfant? Is that…”

Malenfant yelled back, as loudly as he could. “Yes, it’s me.”

“… portal. Have you tethered us to the portal?” The words were very muffled, like somebody shouting through a wall. “The portal. Can you see it? Malenfant…”

The portal. That’s what Cornelius had been signaling, even as he drifted away into space, with his circle gestures. The portal. The most important object in the world right now, because it was their only way out of this place.

And it hadn’t even occurred to Malenfant to think about it.

“Malenfant, I’m blind. All this light. I can’t see… The portal, Malenfant. Get us back to the portal.”

So, adrift in this featureless universe, he had another tough call. The portal, or Emma’s tourniquet.

He shouted back to Cornelius. “I have Emma. I’ll find the portal. But she needs a tourniquet. Do you understand? A tourniquet.”

“…tourniquet. The trooper. I remember…”

Malenfant reached down and guided Cornelius’ hands to Emma’s damaged leg. As he touched Cornelius’ suit he kicked up another cloud of ash particles. He showed Cornelius by touch where the wound was, gave him a length of tether.

Tentatively at first, then with more confidence, Cornelius began to work, pulling the rope around the damaged leg. Malenfant watched until he was sure Cornelius was, at least, going to do no more harm.

Then Malenfant clambered over Cornelius’ back, turning this way and that, looking for the portal.

There. It was an electric-blue circle, containing its disc of inky darkness, its color a painful contrast with the dimming, orange-red background of the sky. But it was drifting away fast. And when the portal was out of reach, it would be gone forever, and this little island of humanity would be stuck here for good.

Hastily Malenfant prepared his tether, weighted with a piton to which asteroid dust still clung. Anchoring himself against Cornelius’ back, he whipped the tether around his head and flung it toward the portal. The tether was drifting well wide of the portal. Malenfant dragged it back, tried again, paying out the tether hastily. He tried again, and again.

If he had been blinded, Cornelius had had it so much worse. But even so he had been thinking; he knew immediately how important it was to grab hold of the portal, and alone, blinded, overheating, he had even tried to signal the fact to whoever might be watching.

Cornelius was one smart man.

On the fifth or sixth time, the piton sailed neatly through the black mouth of the portal, dragging the uncoiling tether after it. He let it drift on. It was, in fact, a little eerie. He could see that the piton had just disappeared when it hit the portal surface, and now the tether, too, was vanishing as it snaked into the darkness.

He began to pull the tether back, cautiously, hardly daring to breathe.

My God, he thought. Here I am fishing for a spacetime worm-hole. On any other day this would seem unusual.

The tether grew taut.

He pulled, hand over hand, gently. He felt the combined inertia of the three of them, a stiff resistance to movement. But he was patient; he kept the pressure on the tether light and even.

“We’removing. . .”

Cornelius’s voice, radio transmitted, had blared in his ear. Malenfant winced and tapped at the touchpad on his chest.

“Cornelius? Can you hear me?”

Cornelius’ voice was heavily laden with static, as if he were shouting into a conch shell, but he was comprehensible. “Are we moving? Did you—”

“Yes, I got hold of the portal.” He added reflexively, “I think we’ll be okay now.”

Cornelius managed a croaky laugh. “I doubt that very much, Malenfant. But at least the story goes on a little longer. What about Emma?”

“She hasn’t woken up yet. You know, Cornelius, sometimes eyes recover. A few days, a week…”

Cornelius drifted alongside him, sullen, silent.

Let it pass, Malenfant.

They reached the portal. It loomed over Malenfant, huge and blue and enigmatic, brilliant against the reddening sky. Malenfant touched the surface, tried to figure a way to attach a tether or a piton to it.

He discussed the problem with Cornelius.

“Just hold on to it, Malenfant,” he said, and he had Malenfant pull him around until he was doing just that, his hands loosely wrapped over the portal’s blade-sharp rim.

Malenfant turned to Emma. She was still unconscious, but she seemed to be sleeping peacefully now. He saw a soft mist on her faceplate close to her mouth. “I wish I could get this damn suit off of her, give her a drink.”

Cornelius turned blindly. “Maybe something will come along, Malenfant. That’s what you always say, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I always say. How’s your suit?”

“I’m out of orange juice. And I think my diaper is full… Malenfant, what color is the sky?”

“Red.” Malenfant lifted up his gold visor. It was still bright, just a uniform glow, but it was not so bright he couldn’t look at it with his unprotected eyes. “Like hot coals,” he said.

“That makes sense,” Cornelius said. “After all our radios work again. So this universe must have become transparent to electromagnetic radiation. Radio waves—”

This universe. “What are you talking about, Cornelius?”

“Malenfant, where do you think we are?”

Malenfant looked around at the sky’s uniform glow. “In some kind of gas cloud.” He tried to think out of the box. “Maybe we’re in the outer layers of a red giant star.”

“Umm. If that’s so, why was the sky white hot when we got here? Why is it cooling down so fast?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the cloud is expanding—”

“Can you see a source? A center? Any kind of nonuniformity in the glow?”

“It looks the same to me every which way. Come on, Cornelius. Time’s a little short for riddles.”

“I think we fell into another universe.”

“ What other universe? How?”

Cornelius managed a laugh, his voice like a dry, crumpling leaf. “You know, Malenfant, you always have trouble with the big picture. You didn’t seem disturbed philosophically by the idea of a gateway that takes you instantaneously to another time. Well, now the portal has just taken us to another spacetime point, instantaneously, like before. It’s just that this time that point is in another universe, somewhere else in the manifold.”

“The manifold?”

“The set of all possible universes. Probably one related to ours.”

“Related? How can universes be related?… Never mind.”

Cornelius turned blindly. “Damn it, I wish I could see. There’s no reason why this universe should be exactly like ours, Malen-fant. Most universes will be short-lived, probably on the scale of the Planck time.”

“How long is that?”

“Ten to power minus forty-three of a second.”

“Not even time to make a coffee, huh.”

“I think this universe is only a few hours old. I think it just expanded out of its Big Bang. Think of it. Around us the vacuum itself is changing phase, like steam condensing to water, releasing energy to fuel this grand expansion.”

“So what’s the glow we see?”

“The background radiation.” Cornelius, drifting in red emptiness, huddled over on himself, wrapping his suited arms around his torso, as if he was growing cold.

“How can universes be different?”

“If they have different physical laws. Or if the constants that govern those laws are different…”

“If we fell into a Big Bang, it occurs to me we were lucky not to be fried.”

“I think the portal is designed to protect us. To some extent anyhow.”

“You mean if we had been smart enough to come through with such luxuries as air and water and food, we might live through all this?”

“It’s possible.”

“Then where did Michael go? “

Cornelius sighed. “I don’t know.”

“The Sheena squid came through the portal, and she found herself in the future. Seventy-five million years downstream. Staring at the Galaxy.”

“I do remember, Malenfant,” Cornelius said dryly.

“So how come we didn’t follow her?”

“I think it was the Feynman radios. The crude one we built at Fermilab. Whatever was put into the heads of the Blue kids, Michael and the others. The messages from the future changed the past. That is, our future. Yes. The river of time took a different course.”

“If this isn’t the future—”

“I think it’s the past,” Cornelius whispered. “The deepest past.”

“I don’t understand.”