7 August, Sunday. Decided not to go to the campus today, though I knew it would mean (as it did) Martha would nag me about church. Slept late, watched baseball on TV. Got to talking about the microverse with Sis, and she wanted to tell the “people” about us. Silly, but she was so fired up I couldn’t refuse to help her. She made little drawings on a sheet of paper so it could be folded to make a booklet, beginning with the arc discharge and ending with me watching the Yankees drop one to the Angels. We went over to the campus and reduced it half a dozen times on the good copier, and she folded it up. Maybe I shouldn’t say it here, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt prouder in my life than when I showed her the microverse—she was that thrilled. (She’s already talking about putting in a few cells of her own.) But when I used the glass myself, why horrors! The critters were eating the spore pods or whatever they are. I want to have a better look at those, so I began casting about for a way of scaring them off. There was a fruit fly circling the apple core in my wastebasket, and I caught it and put it in. It worked like a charm, and off they scampered. Sis said we ought to title her book, but we couldn’t think of anything appropriate. After a lot of talk, we just wrote our names, “Gene” and “Sis,” on the cover and dropped it in.

  II. Re-creation

  1 September, Thursday. Completed turnover of the new universe to the Astronomy Department today. As I told Dr. Ramakrishna, we will eventually have to draw some sort of line between their claims to new universes and ours. Anyway, it certainly appears that Gene-eration (as I’ve christened it) has moved into theirs. They say it’s already outside the orbit of Pluto and headed in the direction of Vega; there’s a red shift too. (Dr. Ramakrishna suggested it be called “Ramajetta.” I treated that as a joke, and intend to continue to do so.) Now back to work on my article for Physical Review C.

  2 September, Friday. Received a most disturbing airmail letter from Dr. Cramer in West Germany. He points out that if my experiment created only a single monopole, then it created a net magnetic charge. (Which he calls a “no-no.” He’s always kidding. But about this?) To paraphrase Cramer: If Gene-eration was seeded by a north monopole, then there must also be a south monopole floating around somewhere. And that must have seeded another universe—call it “Sis-eration” after Sis, who was my sounding board for the first one. That’s particularly apt because “sis” is a simple palindrome, read backward the same as forward, and Cramer actually goes so far as to suggest that time might run backward in Sis-eration, so that it was destroyed at the moment Gene-eration was created. If Cramer’s right, Sis-eration obviously doesn’t grow as fast as Gene-eration. Which may make it even more valuable. I’ll have a good look for it tomorrow.

  3 September, Saturday. No classes today, so I was able to go over the lab with a fine-tooth comb looking for Sis-eration. Started with the accelerator target where I found Gene-eration and worked out from there—nothing. But see here: there’s only one monopole in our universe. After all, I’ve proved that Gott (Harvard) was right about it being the seed of our universe. So it is a net magnetic charge—so far as our universe is concerned. Aha, Cramer, I’ve got you! Sis-eration is mythical, the Atlantis of physics.

  4 September, Sunday. No reason to go to the campus today, so I didn’t. Went to church with Martha and got to musing during the sermon. Don’t know what to call it—a waking dream. Anyway, while I was sitting there studying the grain in the oak pew in front of me, I remembered that yesterday while I was shaving I had a vision. It started with one of those little vagrant spots that cross my eye sometimes. (I think the biologists call them “floaters” and say they’re single body cells.) Anyway, the thing was right in the middle of my eye when I was trying to scrape that tough bit under my nose. It interfered with my vision, and somehow, I suppose because I unconsciously linked not seeing with darkness, I wanted more light. Then it happened. I saw what Ramakrishna and his gang call the Big Bang. I saw that primordial supersun the old philosophers called the Ylem—saw it open like a milkweed pod and scatter the galaxies. And then it was gone. But here’s the part that scares me: I swear I’ve never thought about that vision from yesterday morning until I was sitting in church today. My subconscious must have decided it was irrational and blocked it out completely. God, what a frightening thought! If I’ve got a censorship mechanism like that, what else have I lost because of it?

  5 September, Monday. Spent most of my day musing at my desk, I’m afraid. Replaying the vision of Saturday morning in my memory. The way the Ylem acted and why it acted like that. It’s always been assumed that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts—parity seems to require it. And it’s also been assumed that when an atom met an anti-atom, they returned to energy again. Therefore there was some kind of segregation principle at work that put all the matter to the right (let’s say) and all the antimatter to the left—because if they were mixed together, they’d eliminate each other perfectly. But that segregation principle is a violation of parity itself. It’s God, or Maxwell’s Demon, or some such, looking at each little atom and saying, “You sit in smoking, you in nonsmoking, you in smoking.” And so on. But suppose it wasn’t really like that at all? Suppose those atoms were much more stable than we think? Two atoms meet, and each has a dense, high-energy core of protons (or antiprotons) and neutrons. But far outside those cores each has the classical valence shells of electrons (or positrons), stuff that’s much more diffuse and has much less mass and consequently much less energy. Now suppose that only those outer electron shells react—the atoms bounce violently apart, and deprived of their outer shells decay to simpler elements. But of course when an atom meets another of the same matter, there’s no bounce. Do the atoms tend to segregate themselves? You bet! What’s more, here’s an explanation for one of the oldest mysteries of astrophysics: Why is there so much hydrogen and so little of anything else?

  6 September, Tuesday. Ramakrishna called to tell me that Gene-eration (that’s what he called it) has shifted into the infrared. I thought, okay, if you’re a nice guy, I’m a nice guy. So I said, “Dr. Ramakrishna, I want you to stop thinking about the Big Bang. Think about the Big Blossom instead. Think of that primeval fireball unfolding and scattering out stuff that slowly picks up speed.” He wanted to call me a damn fool politely, but his English isn’t good enough. I told him, “Trust me,” and hung up. Wonder if anybody’s gotten the Nobel for physics twice. N.B. Look it up.

  7 September, Wednesday. It’s only 6:00 A.M., and I don’t usually write this journal so early, but I can’t sleep. Last evening, as I was getting ready to go to bed, I remembered—No, I can’t write it. Suppose somebody (Martha) finds this? I’d be locked away. Remembered something, a visit to Sis-eration, I couldn’t possibly have forgotten, but that I’ve never remembered before. My God, the continents rising from the water like whales. Cramer’s right—I just didn’t understand him. It was created when I performed my experiment, and it’s propagating through our past. What will it do to us? Got to talk this over with Sis. But I can’t—what if I’m really crazy?

  III. The Sister’s Account

  My brother and I were never ordinary children. We shared a secret, though it was not until we were both nearly grown that we understood just how extraordinary a secret it was. TV assured us that other children were transported to strange places—Dorothy to Oz, Wendy and her brothers to Never-Never Land. Why then shouldn’t Gene and I find ourselves in a place equally strange, though somewhat less interesting?

  The first time, we were on a camping trip; and because we were a few hundred miles from home, we believed for a long time afterward that unless we left home it wouldn’t happen at all.

  And yet that first time was not terribly interesting, and only a little frightening. We were camping in the Sierras. Mom and Dad were setting up the tent and Barque was superintending the job from the vantage of a fallen log. We were given a water can and told where the spring was.

  It wasn’t. We stood shivering in country of brown sand and tan and red stones. The towering Sierras were gone, but pinnacles of stone that seemed very high to us (as high, that is to say, as large trees) cast shadows that stretched for miles across the sand. Dark though the sky was, it was not dark with cloud, and no bird flew there.

  It seemed to us that we walked forever; no doubt it was really three miles or so. Then there was a beach where glassy waves raised by the cold, thin wind crashed on the sand, sweeping it forward and back as I had swept the floor the year before in kindergarten, when I was too young to know that the broom had to be lifted after each stroke.

  “Look!” I called to Gene. “There they are!” And I could see the tent quite clearly in the lifted surface of every wave, with Dad coming out of it and Barque yapping under his feet, just as if I were seeing the same picture again and again in the TVs in a department store. I ran forward, Dad picked me up, and a minute later Gene was there too.

  We told Mom and Dad all about it, of course. Mom decided there was a little patch of desert nearby. Dad said that was completely impossible, as of course it was. He took us to the spring, and we found our footprints in the soft soil near the water. But all the footprints pointed away from the tent, as though we had walked into the spring and swum into the earth. Dad was something of a woodsman, and he was frightened by that. He frightened us too by making us promise not to tell Mom. After that we never told anyone.

  The second time, we were at the beach raiding the tide pools for our high-school biology class. The waves reminded me of that first experience, but there had been a storm far out in the Pacific, and they were dark and opaquely green. We had not talked about the desert for a long time, but I called Gene over and asked if he couldn’t see something—trees, it seemed to me—beyond the bottom of the pool I’d found.

  It was just such a forest as you see in the pictures in old books, the trees ten feet across, wrapped in moss, each sleeping in its own wisp of night. A door opened in the tenth we passed, and a dark man led us down into his underground home, where his shy and lovely wife nursed their child.

  The man and woman fed us nuts and mushrooms, the boiled fiddleheads of ferns, and bread made without wheat; they talked to us with many gestures and drew pictures of trees and deer on paper that was white again each time the dark man turned it over. We understood very little of what they said, but now I think they were trying to explain that they lived beneath the ground so that the trees and the deer, who could not, might live above it; and that there were many, many such families.

  At last the child fell asleep, and the dark woman opened a crumpled little mirror for us so it was as large and smooth as a pier glass. In it we saw ourselves, and beyond ourselves the ocean; and in a moment its spray was in our faces.

  Gene and I talked about it for a long time that night, and we decided (or rather, he decided) that there was too much danger. We had been lucky thus far; but we could not hope to be lucky always. We thought we had seen two different worlds. Perhaps we had.

  After that he tried to forget, and I believe he succeeded. I went only once more, when Gene had married and it was clear I never would. I stood before the vanity in my bedroom and looked beyond my reflected face and saw the sea.

  At first I thought it the same world we had visited when we were children, because it was a landscape of stones and dust, but now the sun was hot, and there was kelp on the beach and a thousand tiny crabs. I sat on a boulder for a while, thinking and looking out at the water, never seeing a sail or a gull. And I understood as I sat there that all three had been one world, and that in my own short life I had seen its senility and its flower, and now I saw its beginning.

  I had carried a mirror with me, having learned something at least from the beautiful, dark woman who had been so much younger than I now was; but there was no need of it. The shore held many pools, and each showed me my bed, the coverlet neatly spread for the repose of my rag doll.

  Beyond it, my closet door stood open, with tiny silver fish swimming among my coats and dresses. I reached for one, but in my hand it became a wisp of embroidered scarf.

  This afternoon, I found a letter on Gene’s desk from his friend Dr. Cramer, who is teaching for a year in West Germany. It said: “Congratulations on your creation of the monopole! But I have a slight quibble. You didn’t mention it, but you must surely have made a pair, a ‘north’ monopole and a ‘south’ monopole. Otherwise you would have created a net magnetic charge, which is a no-no. So you must have two universes (for the price of one). The one you describe must be like ours, but the other should contain antimatter and have time running in reverse.”

  I believe that Dr. Cramer is correct; and since you had Gene’s account of the first, you should have mine of the second. It is gone now, so that when I stand before my mirror, I see only my own face.

  Or perhaps that second universe was ours, and it is we who are gone, leaving as our only trace these words upon a printed page.

  Lukora

  This is my report, the report of Meirax Andros, alone. Michael is not with me; Michael may be dead.

  On 11J89 we chose this site, landed, and set up camp. Here a good-sized stream enters a lake of some six thousand hectares. Undesignated mountains rise to the east. To the west are steep slopes, covered in many places with needle-trees and brush. It seemed to both of us a promising location. Its elevation is four hundred ninety-two meters, its coordinates are fifty point eight and fifty-three point four.

  For five days we scouted for signs. (Reference previous report, ASP ninety-six six.) Such signs as we found were stale. There was no indication of Small Folk, and I told Michael we had better move on.

  He disagreed.

  · · · ·

  “They shift their hunting grounds,” he said; he was sitting on a boulder, searching the valley with his eyes. “Someday soon they’ll be back. There’s a lot of game.” Meirax shook her head. “Our orders were to find them.”

  He would not look at her. “Our orders were more extensive than that. They’ll come back soon, and when they come we’ll be here, familiar with the country, knowing where to find water, where the game trails run.”

  That night as she lay drowsy in her bag, she heard his bag open—the soft, stealthy noise of the slider. She believed that he was coming for her and wondered for a moment how she should receive him. Surprised? Outraged? With eagerness? She inched her own slider down, readied her arms to embrace him.

  He did not come. For a long while she waited in the dark. When she rose, his bag was no longer warm. She went out, where the strange, wide moon gave her a shadow like a ghost. The day had been warm and sunny, but the night wind was keen with cold. The needle-trees sighed to see her, and the brook laughed at her. When she returned to her bag, she wept.

  Next morning she expected to find him in his bag; he would deny having left it, tell her she had dreamed. But his bag was empty, his clothing gone, his boots and dragonette gone too. She ran a square search pattern that by afternoon stretched two kilometers in all directions.

  At sunset she found him, wearily returning to their camp. “Were you lost?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “For a while.”

  “You went out last night,” she said.

  He nodded. “I heard something—something prowling around the tent, I thought. And then there was something farther on. It seemed worth investigating.”

  “You should have awakened me, Michael.”

  “You were already awake. You said you heard me.”

  Back at the camp he washed in the brook, ate a little, then crawled into his bag and slept, though it was scarcely dark. She was tired as well, yet she remained awake watching the valley and thinking of various things she had observed in her search and the direction from which he had come, west by northwest.

  That night he was gone when she woke. She got up, dressed in the dark, and went outside. The uncanny moon rode high, but it was nearly dawn. She went to the brook for a drink and sat beside it a while, wondering what else might have come to drink there. The brook water tasted better than lake water, to her at least. When she returned to the tent, the first pale shards of day had streaked the sky. She did not search for him, but busied herself about the camp, pitching the tent and weaving mattresses of boughs.

  As she had expected, Michael returned late that afternoon. She had resolved not to question him and did not; but he said, “They’re back.”

  It startled her; she had convinced herself that this had nothing to do with the mission. She asked, “You’ve seen them?”

  “No, but I’ve seen fresh signs.” He hesitated, reluctance so clear she grew certain he would not speak again. At least he added, “And I’ve heard them.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Listen, Meirax, and tell me what you think.” He took the smallest recorder from a pocket. She had not been aware that it was gone; she switched it on, held it to her ear, and closed her eyes.

  The needle-trees wrapped her in their impalpable sorrow. It was dark and far colder than she had expected; a light rain fell. A voice—not a human voice—moaned far away: “Uo-o-o-o, ou-o-o, o-o-o-o-o.” Suddenly, she was terribly afraid. She opened her eyes and groped for her dragonette, but it was back in the tent. Michael was no longer with her, but down at the brook, washing.

  Finished washing himself, he washed his clothes and spread them on the rocks to dry. She said, “You don’t have to sit up. I’ll bring them in for you. I’ll fold them, and lay them beside your bag.”