“I’m scared out of my wits,” Jay Dunn said. “I wish you two would talk a little.”

  “We’ve got to start some kind of work on this exit from hyper-space problem. Maybe we can solve it before it comes time to come out into normal space?”

  “There are two other ships . . . out there somewhere,” Dunn said, “and they probably know what we know by now. Maybe . . . well not be the ship which gets through?”

  “Shut up, both of you,” Hoyt said without looking up. “I’ll have no panic on my ship.”

  Dunn turned to him and said, “I only meant to—”

  Hoyt suddenly threw his knife and fork into his plate and stood up, pushing his chair back noisily.

  “Everybody relax, Rescher said. “Please sit down, Captain.”

  “Look,” Drum said, eager to inject a hopeful note into the scene, “the whole mess revolves around what we know and don’t know about hyper-space and the ships drive. For example, how the hell does it know exactly where to go in hyper-space?”

  Rescher looked up at Hoyt, who seemed to be looking down at them as if in mockery. Then the tall man sat down, seemingly calmer, and resumed eating.

  “I’m going to get some answers, good answers,” Dunn said, “because we have to have them.” Rescher thought he detected a note of hysteria in the young man’s words, but he knew that they would all have to convince themselves, each in his own way, of some kind of hope. He was certain that Jay was thinking off the top of his brains. What he was saying seemed hopelessly vague, and probably all wrong.

  “Go on,” Hoyt said, calm now.

  “Well—for starters we can set up a hyper-spatial chamber and try to determine the properties inside. You know, the space inside, whatever it is.”

  “I don’t recommend it; it’s dangerous aboard ship,” Hoyt said. “You know what Frank said about triggering anomalies. I won’t order you to do it.”

  “It’s trying something which might work . . . or spend the rest of our lives aboard this tombship,” said Rescher.

  Hoyt nodded reluctantly. “Get on it, then.”

  “I know that tinkering is easy,” Dunn said. “I’ll be careful, Captain. I only hope that we have the know-how aboard this ship to interpret what results I get to make some sense.”

  Dunn’s chamber was a fistful of gray nothingness on the lab table, enclosed in a clear alloy the shape of a foot square box. Inside it the ship’s drive field did not apply, thus permitting the other-space from outside the hull to spill into the restricted chamber. Rescher watched the box with Dunn. The light trained on the table in the lab was very bright.

  “I don’t see what this tells us,” Dunn said. “Hoyt will be disappointed.”

  “I keep expecting it to move around in there,” Rescher said, “like smoke, you know. But it only sits. And still I get the feeling that it’s something tangible.”

  Hopelessness was a gnawing thing in his belly which he had not been able to shake. Maybe he should go back into long-sleep, and when he woke up again for his fourth watch the problem would be solved. He hated to see even Jay’s normal optimism shaken. It would all be fixed when he wakened the next time. New worlds would be there for the taking by the eighth watch, and all he would have to do would be to reach out . . . he remembered the long-haired woman he had seen laughing at him from the lounge screen.

  “Look!” Dunn said. “Look at that.”

  In the gray murk of the chamber the woman was smiling at them. Her entire body was visible this time, a beautiful long legged form, luxurious in thigh and breast; her hair reached to her waist, and it drifted around her as she turned and tumbled slowly in the gray field. Rescher was almost certain it was the same girl.

  Suddenly she was no longer naked; she was blonde now and wearing a silver bikini.

  “I like dark-haired girls,” Rescher said.

  And again her hair was dark, but flecked with dazzles of red this time.

  “We did that,” Dunn said. “I like blondes. But how in all hell?”

  Near the door the screen intercom buzzed.

  Rescher walked over; flicked the switch and watched Hoyt’s face appear on the screen.

  “Both of you get up to the control area. I’ve just turned off the simulated tie-in with normal space.”

  In a moment they were both out in the hallway and walking toward the elevator.

  “I know he has the authority,” Dunn said, “but I wish he’d told us.”

  Rescher imagined that the Captain might have been brooding about the truth of what it was like outside the ship. Perhaps he had been displeased with himself for accepting the lie of the screens?

  When they came into the control area, Captain Hoyt was sitting in the central command station, staring into the gray murk on the forward screen. All the screens showed the same view. Rescher and Dunn walked up to the seated figure and stood at his right hand. He did not look at them, but continued staring into the screen, seemingly shaken and overwhelmed by this great fact of nothingness.

  “It is true, it’s all true. I convinced the computer to break the circuit between itself, the black box below and the screens,” Hoyt said. “Watch . . . what happens every.” Rescher noted that there was little strength in his voice, as if something had been taken out of him, some personal pride in his relation to reality.

  Before them on the forward screen . . . things . . . began to appear out of the great void. Worlds rushed out of the grayness toward the ship, rich green worlds, and orange-yellow suns to warm them, vivid against the gray spaces. They seem to burst into the nothingness; one moment they were infinitesimal points, the next huge physical bodies.

  Rescher saw Hoyt grip the armrests of his command seat. He watched as the strange light from the screen played upon the Captain’s tense features.

  Now suddenly the space before them was a green vortex of vines and vegetation, a virgin green forest, a great mass floating in other-space.

  The ship plowed into it and kept going.

  “You two see it?” Hoyt asked. He turned to Rescher and repeated his question. “Frank, you see it, don’t you?”

  “I see it,” Rescher said. Hoyt tried not to look at him directly, Rescher noticed.

  “Is it real, can it be real?”

  “It’s as real as whatever real means,” Rescher said. He noticed that Hoyt’s hands were shaking a bit as he gripped his armrests.

  The ship burst out of the green mass of vines and floating plants, and the gray space ahead was now laced with the darkness of normal space, running in with the fluid gray like a mixture of liquid plastics. An eternity away a few stars seemed to twinkle.

  “Captain, get a grip on yourself,” Dunn said. “You can . . . try and make it go away!” Hoyt ignored Dunn’s sudden outburst. At another time it would have received a careful comment on how to address a commanding officer.

  Hoyt closed his eyes and his tall frame seemed to hunch over in the chair. He was breathing heavily and shifting his body around now, like a man possessed.

  On all four screens in the control room the new worlds continued to appear out of the grayness, heralds of a new cosmos. They seemed to originate from one point and move outward to fill the emptiness. If they are ours, Rescher thought, we reach out with our hunger, create with our hope . . .

  “Captain!” Dunn was shouting.

  “I can’t,” Hoyt said. He sat up and opened his eyes.

  Rescher thought, we cannot ‘just create’ anything. The power which our minds control moves within a given set of structures, categories according to which we think. Our ability should seem no more fantastic than the use of nuclear power, or the harnessing of any new force. A doubt crossed his mind: there might easily be an absolute chaos outside our minds, but we select and order and arrange from it to produce order for us. It might be a different order for an alien being. Sometimes it seems different for other people . . . how much order is out there and how much is ours, he wondered.

  On the screens the worlds were gems swimming in a gray-black ocean, rushing past the ship as it came upon them at unimaginable speed; it was the first indication of motion in the new continuum, the first possibilities of space and order within that other-space. It is a tangible thing, Rescher thought; not a sterile desert useful only for swift passage from point to point in another universe. Reality abides here also, and the possibility of it welled up inside him. It was the age-long conviction of all intelligent life, the basis of all achievement and struggle—that here there will be something, and not nothing.

  “It seems to be acquiring its own permanence,” Dunn said, “it won’t change or go away like the girl in the lab.”

  Hoyt turned in his chair and looked up at Rescher, while Dunn continued to stare at the forward screen, overcome by his own conclusion. “I made those worlds,” Hoyt said slowly, “I was sitting here after I turned off the tie-in. I knew we were all doomed, all those below and those still to be born. Failure was in the cards for me if we could not exit from this gray wasteland—and then it began happening, Frank, and I could not decide whether it was a good or bad thing.” Hoyt covered his face with his hand and Rescher knew that something inside the man had broken. He looked away from him to the forward screen, a petty kindness to the tall man huddled in the command chair.

  In Resellers mind some of the pieces began to fall into place. The solar system anomaly, the recent events on and outside the ship and Hoyt’s words—these seemed to link up in a patchwork, which when supported by further events, would fuse into a finished explanation. He looked at Dunn, and he was sure that the younger man was pacing him with his own reasonings as he watched the forward screen. Later, the main computer would help them consolidate all their findings. One element seemed to be lacking from his rough scheme: the power, the force which could shape the hyper-spatial stuff into anything, where did it come from? Was it everywhere around them? He knew that his mind could use it, but where was the source?

  He told Dunn what he thought. Hoyt seemed to be recovering his composure.

  “Sure,” Dunn said, “agreed. But how in hell?” A moment of silence. “The computer will vomit when we try to feed it all this kind of stuff. We’ll have to be careful.”

  IV

  “The computer now knows everything we knew about hyper-space on earth,” Dunn said, “and what we’ve learned here and in the ship’s lab. We might get a first approximation answer. I’ve tried to program the computer for extreme flexibility by removing certain kinds of conceptual bias. I’ve tried to weight its operations toward the use of the group of abilities we call imagination. I’m going to try it now.”

  Slowly he punched the keys. The three men sat in their command stations in front of the console and waited. Only the forward screen was on, showing the forward rush of the starship into what seemed more densely star-filled space. Rescher was worried about the Captain, who seemed content to let Dunn and himself handle things. He seemed withdrawn, fearful of any reality which seemed impermanent, Rescher thought. All his life the Captain had counted on the fact of a reality beyond himself unchanging and dependable.

  The sing-song of the computer at work echoed in the hard acoustics of the control room. In five minutes the waiting was over, and the computer began spewing nut its results, in a compact printed type, indicating that there would be a good amount of material. They each started to read their copy, which came out on rolled paper into their laps.

  Hypothesis: the term hyper-space refers to a highly plastic substance or potential which exists in a free state outside the various possible universes. Historical scientific thought postulated it as an unformed potential, the substratum of reality.

  Hypothesis: this substance or potential seems to be affected by the thinking of intelligent entities. A few of the discontinuous bodies which have appeared on the ships screens are such mind-dependent creations; but until now they have been unconscious, lacking in continuity.

  It is certain that the solar anomaly was caused by the unleashing of sub-space potentials into normally formed space-time; the immediate cause was the experimentation directed toward the development of a hyper-spatial drive. Space around the sun was affected by the spill-over caused by such experimentation. Various rival human theorizings about the nature of the universe thus vied to become concrete and destroyed the permanence of previously familiar reality: the competition of an indefinite range of human beliefs, from superstition to the problematical areas of modern physics, resulted in the chaotic discontinuity which we refer to as the solar anomaly.

  The previous continuum, if it still exists, cannot be entered again without complete destruction of the object attempting it. As the laws within the solar system grow even more inconsistent, the entire grouping of bodies will contract to an infinitesimal point and disappear.

  Observation: in the unformed potential around this ship a new cosmos is taking shape. Steps must be taken to direct it consciously before it takes on permanence. Complete consistency is impossible, and undesirable, since it would result in a static creation lacking in variety and the capacity for change and development The plasticity of the basic materials of reality is the ultimate scientific description. An explanation of this first fact seems to rest on a principle outside the system, not open to proof or examination, but clearly true.

  Fact: once a matrix is forged it becomes independent of its efficient creators—minds—and takes on an existence of its own. The beginning must be sufficient to insure that laws which later become apparent will not seem binding and arbitrary. However, openness is bought with the inevitability of the final and necessary inconsistency, which previously was known as entropic decline.

  Fact: each of the three ships which left the solar system is now the center of its own continuum; each new universe is expanding rapidly, and shortly they may impinge on one another. The effect of the radical adjustment which will occur then cannot be predicted. . . .

  Rescher let the tissue thin paper unroll to the floor. The earth, the sun, they became real in a vast desert of unreality—and now the desert had taken it all back. And it would do so again and again. An eternal creation would be impossible, too binding and static. Complete knowledge, exhaustive explanation at the basic level, was impossible. Too little knowledge could be frustrating; too much a bore. Powerlessness would be pathetic, but omnipotence would exclude accomplishment. What is left? Something like this—a life which leaves existence its mystery, pain its warning sting, pleasure its delights, mind the fulfillment of its curiosity. Only a certain kind of being can have these things. A god can t, nor can an animal. When we press the limits we lose our individual kind of being; the precarious balance of mortality and finitude is precious, the source of that share of glory which is ours.

  Rescher watched Drum finish reading the printout. The young man got up from his station seat Rescher watched him bite his lower lip, and drop the roll of paper hanging out of the computer.

  “Jay,” Rescher said, “you know, there must have been gods, at some other beginning a long time ago.”

  “I would like to know,” Hoyt said coldly, “how our puny minds can direct all these forces?”

  Immediately Dunn seemed to resent the Captain’s critical tone of voice. “We’ve been directing forces in one way or another throughout our whole history, Captain. Think of all this potential as sitting at the top of a large hill precariously. Our minds give a push and the show starts. Only a small push is needed. We’ve been doing that since the wheel, in some sense, and the hyper-drive research on earth is another example—and another what we three are doing now.”

  “If the fields surrounding the other two ships combine with ours, then we will be able to communicate with them?” Hoyt asked.

  “Maybe,” Dunn said. “They might be trapped in their own cosmos.”

  “Trapped . . .” Hoyt stared at the floor plates at his feet.

  “I guess,” Rescher said trying to break the Captain’s mood, “that Captain Hoyt will contribute to the pessimistic aspects or our next world.” He grinned weakly to Dunn, who shrugged at him.

  But Hoyt looked up at them suddenly and shouted, “Damn both of you! The devil knows what will happen—maybe we are all insane, did you think of that?”

  “Take it easy, Captain,” Rescher said. For a moment he felt the unreality of the whole scene. He didn’t trust his senses, or his sanity. A moment of terror passed through him, like a cold knife slowly being drawn through his guts. He thought of all those asleep in the central hold of the ship. And he remembered that they could not dream. Their sleep state was deep, deliberately induced and maintained to avoid dreams. A man could suffer, even in a dream; every possible way to mark time had been taken from the sleepers. He shuddered at the impossible thought of what their unrestrained dreaming might have done in the present situation, the contortions reality might have been subjected to if their thoughts had been able to reach out from their sleeping forms. Perhaps in a small way some of their thoughts were trickling out?

  He turned to say something to his troubled Captain . . .

  And faced an ocean. On the far horizon it touched an azure sky, cloudless, solid in color. Below the dune he stood on, the breakers rolled in gently from the sparkling green sea.

  He was afraid. A stronger mind could completely sweep away the reality of a weaker mind; control probability according to its designs; become god for a host of lesser minds. In an unjust creation this might all be possible. Who had done this to him?

  Or was this merely himself?

  He closed his eyes and tried to visualize the control room on the starship, the floorplates, the computer console with its myriad lights, the giant screens on the four walls . . .

  She came up behind him on the dune and locked her arms around his waist He wrenched himself free.

  “Rita!”

  Her eyes looked up at him invitingly from where she lay on the sand. She was so much more vivid, more sensual, than he had remembered.