“So far you’re on familiar ground,” Camacho said. “But go on.”

  “The same principle applies to the astronomical universe,” Vahdati said. “On one hand, we can employ the Einsteinian image of a cosmos finite but unbounded, the galaxies contained in a curved space which is expanding.

  “On the other hand, for many purposes we do better to think of an infinite, flat Euclidean space, pervaded by the matter-creation field. In this picture, the galaxies are simply moving away from each other. The faster they go—as seen from any arbitrary point—the more they are contracted and the more of them can be packed into a unit volume. Thus each galaxy observes itself as being in the middle of a universe whose oldest, outermost members are receding with the speed of light. The radius of that universe is equal to c times its age, approximately twenty billion years.

  “This second picture is the one we must use in trying to learn what became of Ian.”

  He stopped. The sun went below the horizon. In this tenuous atmosphere there was no twilight. The stars leaped forth with pyrotechnic suddenness, crowding the dark in their wintry myriads. Camacho looked out toward Andromeda, and beyond and beyond. To the rim of creation—

  Lawson snapped a switch, and the office lights came on, driving back that too enormous spectacle. “The project was one of pure astronomical research,” he said. “You can well imagine how significant data about the far galaxies can be. To name only one item, is their number finite or infinite? That can be settled empirically by making counts from widely separated points.”

  However academic the words, his tone was overlaid with emotion. For the moment he had forgotten that he was hostile to his guest. His face might have been Saul’s on the road to Damascus.

  Camacho nodded. “I know,” he said. “The popular press, all us laymen, have been as excited about the undertaking as you yourselves. Though to us who weren’t in on it, things seemed to move awfully slow.”

  “We had to establish a tremendous number of way stations,” Lawson said. “And at such distances, that task must be done almost by random search. Open a gate on a galaxy, identify a star, range in on it, check whatever planets it has. Mostly the job was automated.”

  “Yes, I know that too,” Camacho said. “After a while, the public got bored. So you’d pushed out a billion parsecs—so what? You hadn’t found a colonizable world. That’s what people really want.”

  “The chance of finding one by accident is infinitesimal,” Lawson snorted. “Almost as small as the chance of opening a gate on a stellar interior. Besides, we weren’t looking for a copy of Earth. So remote, your bold pioneers would need too many transfers. There must be enough planets closer to home.”

  “Sorry,” Camacho said. “I didn’t mean to grasshop. But the subject is complicated. Okay, how far out were you when the…the event occurred?”

  “About fifteen billion light-years,” Vahdati replied. In a near whisper: “How casually I said that!”

  “And you proposed to go another billion in one step?”

  “Not to any planet. Simply to intergalactic space, for a…ah…a look. So that we could construct a map and plan a route.”

  “What of the hydrogen problem? I mean, as I understand it, the velocity of recession with respect to us, fifteen or sixteen billion light-years away, is beginning to approach light. Even if there isn’t a lot of gas between the galaxies, what there is should come through the gate like a bomb blast. Shouldn’t it?”

  “No explosive force,” Lawson grunted contemptuously. “Radiation due to atomic collisions, yes, that would amount to millions of roentgens.”

  “You are forgetting, Senator,” Vahdati put in, “that the last step was not made directly from Mars. It was made from our most advanced base. So the distance was only one billion light-years. We had no reason to expect too formidable a velocity difference. Furthermore, the gate was oriented outward. Hydrogen would, in effect, stream past it, but not enter. True, such atoms as happened to strike the door frame would give off energy. But according to all calculation, this should not produce too high a count.”

  “And then our instruments reported nothing,” Lawson said. “Nothing that made sense, anyhow.”

  Camacho leaned back, lit a fresh cigarette and pondered. So far he hadn’t been told one damn thing that hadn’t been in the newspapers at home. Well, maybe there wasn’t anything more, except for the columns of data he had seen.

  Mentally, he reviewed those and tried to make from them a picture in phenomenological (read: ordinary human) terms. An automatic cart loaded with telemetric and recording instruments had rolled into one of the booths yonder on the Mare Erythraeum. The gate had been activated. The cart went through to the first way station, somewhere in this galaxy. And so to the next…and the next…and the next…an incredible journey, zigzagging back and forth across the cosmos, piling up energy by increments until after days—tens of thousands of threshold crossings—it was fifteen billion light-years from home and itself crowding the speed of light.

  Then it stood—no, not in any booth; it didn’t need air—it stood on the surface of a bare, otherwise useless little world, under alien stars. Here had been planted the receivers for its data, which men would later collect. Machinery swung wide the terminal gate. The cart positioned itself. Telescopes, spectroscopes, counters, cameras, a dozen kinds of meters peered at the open frame.

  They should have recorded what had so often been observed before, darkness studded with small, faint clouds that were galactic families. Instead, they got no reading. Absolute blank. The circuits might as well never have closed. Yet monitor instruments, collected later at the penultimate station, said that every switch had operated.

  With the saintliness of a good machine, the cart moved forward and thrust a probe into the space gaping before it. Somehow, then, it must have been snatched away. Because it never returned.

  “We tried four times altogether, using various approaches,” Vahdati said. “The results were uniformly negative where they were not baffling. So Ian Birkie proposed a man should go. He pointed out what we have discovered again and again in the past—an instrument cannot record anything it is not designed and set to record. A human is more versatile. He shouted down our protests. How could we forbid him?”

  How indeed? Camacho closed his eyes in pain. It had to be thus. The jumpgates meant too much for anything unknown about them to remain unexplored. The greatest glory of the race was those times when men had been glad to set their lives at stake for a cause which was all men’s—Columbus, Magellan, Cook, Scott, the first who dared go beyond the sky, those who today trod planets beyond Earth’s sight—Camacho could so well imagine the young man, his red head lifted high, demanding his right to be brave.

  “We took every possible precaution,” Lawson said. “He traveled in a small vehicle. That was partly because he would need supplies and environment for such a lengthy trip, partly because mechanical shock absorbers shortened the trip by making fewer transfers necessary. However, it was extra protection for him. At the terminal gate, he was not supposed to do more than open it on the problem region and spend five minutes looking. Merely looking. Remember, we had not so much as recorded any radiation danger. Furthermore, he was to have direct radio connections with us on Mars, via relays set up on uninhabited planets. That series of openings would be made at the end of the five-minute period. He was to describe what he had seen, then start returning. Who could have known?”

  “And instead,” Camacho muttered, “when you activated his voice line—”

  “What came through was not a blast of energy,” Lawson said. “We don’t know what. Metal, glass, plastic—everything broke apart chemically as well as physically along the whole relay series. Ground temperature dropped to a hundred or more below zero in the immediate neighborhoods. Then, naturally, the connection was broken.

  “We sent men after him. They found the shattered remnants of his vehicle. Of him, no trace.”

  “You haven’t any theories whatsoever?”

  “We have a number of them,” Vahdati said. “They are all half-baked. How should they not be? These days, scientific information is coming in too fast to be assimilated. We live in chaos…and Ian loved it.”

  “He would,” Camacho said. “Every day a fresh adventure.” He finished his cigarette. “What do you yourself think?”

  Vahdati looked shy. “Precisely because we can’t be sure, not even reasonably sure, we are holding back our thoughts,” he said at last. “We plan to return to instrumentation and—”

  “I know!” Camacho barked in a flare of temper. “You’re afraid of giving ammunition to us reactionaries. Well, God damn it, who are you to decide anything? Who am I? The people have that right. They’re the ones who pay us and the ones whose future is up for grabs. How arrogant do you dare be?”

  Lawson opened his mouth to get indignant. Camacho went on, faster and more quietly: “Never mind: Of course a man in a responsible position has to be discreet. But I’m not, repeat not your enemy. My committee passes on your whole program; and don’t tell me you aren’t generously financed. I’m every bit as concerned as you to find the right answer. Give me a break.”

  He left unspoken the threat to use his authority and the fact that he had taken the trouble to come in person. But Vahdati gazed at him with surprise before saying, “Why, if you wish, Senator, I shall be glad to tell you what I myself think is the best guess. However, it is too radical for most of my colleagues, and it doesn’t fit all the facts either.”

  “Go ahead, please,” Camacho invited.

  Vahdati did.

  At the end, the Iranian said in a troubled voice, “But you can see that this hypothesis is also untenable. The second cart disappeared like the first. But nothing happened to the third and fourth, which were not programmed to go through the last gate. They returned safely, having merely recorded nothing. Literally nothing; as if they had looked out on absolutely empty space. And that was precisely what Ian was supposed to do.”

  Camacho sucked in a breath. Understanding struck him like a physical blow.

  “But Ian didn’t!” be cried.

  “What?” They both started and stared at him.

  “Certainly not. I knew him better than you could have, the year or so he’d spent on Mars.” Camacho sprang to his feet. He paced before them, waving his hands, memory torrenting forth, “I used to go into the mountains with him, surfing, boating, anything breakneck and fun. He wasn’t stupid. But he could not have sat for five minutes gawking at silly emptiness. He would have had to leave his vehicle for a peek through the door. Not much of one—but I’ll bet anything you like, at the last moment before his contact home was to open, he couldn’t resist Maybe he didn’t stick his head out. Maybe he just edged too close, so close that the otherness grabbed him. It must bulge in a little through the opening, there must be an intermediate region, however thin—can’t you see?”

  “But…but—” Lawson slumped and shook his head.

  “If that’s correct,” Camacho said, “you’ll never get any result from all your probes or from all your cautious little men who stick by their orders. Everything they’ll ever see is nothing. And so you—we—will never be sure we’re right in our guess.”

  Lawson stiffened. “Have you an alternative?” he clipped.

  “Why, yes.” Camacho didn’t stop to weigh his words. He was too caught up, borne along on a tide, he had to know how Ian had died and what it meant for the race’s entire tomorrow. “Yes. You don’t go the long way around. You go directly from here to there, sixteen billion light-years in a step!”

  Silence. The stars beat their rays against the tiny luminescence of the turret. A dust devil whirled beneath them.

  After a long while, Lawson said, “You’re crazy.”

  “Perhaps,” Camacho said. “I’m still the politician you’ve got to deal with.”

  “But—no, the idea is potential suicide. None but a lunatic would go. Where can we find a man?”

  A stranger might have been using Camacho’s throat: “If nobody else,” he said, “you have me.”

  -7-

  Compromise, as always. Mars might be expendable, but was nonetheless expensive. Besides, if the test broke apart the planet, a fragment might conceivably hit Earth. So Twin became the base.

  Twin was the second attendant of a red dwarf about fifty light-years from Sol. It was a little bigger than Mars. The atmosphere was thin, mostly carbon dioxide and argon. The hydrosphere was frozen. The entire body had precisely one interesting characteristic. Between its own orbit and rotation, the proper motion of its sun, and the gravitational potential difference, transition energy from it to Mars was very nearly a permanent zero. Synodic fluctuations were negligible and would remain so for several thousand years.

  The fact had been noted with laughter. Twin was the one extra-Solar planet which would never become a way station! But now the gates opened. Men and material flowed through. An environmental dome was quickly erected. A disassembled gate generator followed, to be reestablished at the other end of its own shed. Before long, the first tests were conducted.

  Drama would have demanded that human beings undertake them. But common sense is rarely dramatic. Automated equipment was sent. The results were exciting enough.

  Still, they remained enigmatic in several ways. Decades would be needed to work out proper instrumentation for conditions so strange. And decades were not available. Earth had to know now if the doors onto space were really safe. Men had a shortcut: the universal instrument, themselves.

  Volunteers were numerous. Camacho had ample excuses for staying behind. They included the fact that his going would look to the opposition like a cheap political stunt. But in an obstinate way that he himself did not quite comprehend, he felt he must. Since he had instigated this project, and since it was possible for him to suffer whatever penalties there might be, he could not delegate another young man like Ian.

  Wherefore he thundered and buttered until the last objections were overcome. Lawson was officially absolved of all blame. Senator Camacho had insisted in documents to that effect.

  Not that Lawson wishes me ill, Camacho thought as they made an awkward good-bye handshake. I do believe I’ll have a friend in him if…when…I come back.

  He went through the tunnels with Vahdati. Technicians waited at the locker to help him suit up, for they must be armored against vacuum and worse.

  Clumsy in their gear, they stood a moment alone in the booth. “I still don’t know why you are coming in person, Pez,” Camacho said out of a dry mouth.

  The Iranian’s voice was tinny in his earphones, but sounded amused. “Nor am I sure about you, Ray. However, I remain a qualified gate operator. Perhaps I want to assert manhood this final time, before sinking into comfortable paunchiness.

  “I think I prefer the latter.”

  “You can still cancel out.”

  “After shooting off my mouth the way I’ve done? Funny, aren’t you?”

  Meters flickered. Vahdati opened the door. They stepped through to the shed on Twin.

  Camacho was proud at not losing his balance, though the change in weight was small. He made his way past crowding apparatus to a port. Bleakness lay outside, ice and rock and jagged hills which had never known life. The sky was nearly black, and the lowering red sun hid few stars.

  Vahdati closed the gate through which they had come and started the pumps to evacuate this chamber. In his bulky suit and helmet, he looked as inhuman as the machines.

  Camacho identified a few constellations. They hadn’t changed much. Fifty light-years was little in the galaxy—and he was about to go sixteen billion. “Where’s Sol?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Vahdati said. He spoke through his radio to the men standing by in the dome, well beyond the estimated danger zone: “We have commenced gas exhaustion. Nothing unusual noted.”

  Camacho stared out at the planetscape. Nothing unusual, he thought. Great God in heaven! But then, I suppose our daily round is more fantastic than we imagine. The overwhelming bulk of the universe is emptiness, with a few lonely atoms; nearly all of what remains is great globes of incandescent gas; who are we to call ourselves ordinary?

  Vahdati threw a switch, and the small nuclear power-unit of the gate on Twin warmed to operating level. He checked the instrument cart. “Everything satisfactory,” he said.

  “Good.” Camacho wished his heart would slow down. “Uh, Pez, what’re you thinking?”

  “Do you wish a last· mutual exchange of confidences?” the Iranian asked sardonically.

  “No, I guess not. Let’s get on with the job.”

  Shadows grew knife-edged as the diffusing air was swept away. Some molecules inevitably remained. The shed was turgid, compared with what lay between the galaxies. But there would be no escaping gale when the gate opened.

  “Are you ready?” Vahdati inquired.

  Camacho tried to remember the Our Father and couldn’t. He held Alice’s name close to him and said, “Sure, go ahead.”

  “We shall now establish contact,” Vahdati reported.

  Power surged.

  Vahdati activated the cart. It rolled. The door swung inward.

  Absolute, all-swallowing night stood within the frame. Nothing more, nothing less. Camacho thought faintly. Well, isn’t that what the unmanned instruments reported?

  Vahdati squinted at the readings of the meters on the cart. “Not a quantum of radiation,” he said. “Ah—yes, see here, the same result we got last time. Our own infrared is pouring forth as if into an absolute zero…but not quite. The rate is too high. The electromagnetic properties of space are different beyond this gate.”

  He turned to the other man. In the chill fluorescent light, and the redness which trickled through the ports from the sun of Twin, his face behind the helmet plate was drawn tight. “So far, so good,” he said. “We have shown that men, as well as the mice we are following, can survive a look at the X region, with or without benefit of passage through way stations. But that is hardly a surprise. Can we also live if we put a material object through?”