Brian Ball - Singularity Station

“Don’t!” he yelled suddenly, aware that the tenuous glories of the eerie field were creeping beyond the space where the bridge had been.

“Maran—don’t let it touch them!”

Horrified, he watched as the bizarre forces of time-locked tunnel and strange Quasi-warp met and merged. The strange warp began to invest more of the Altair Star; but Buchanan’s eyes were riveted on the splayed, fresh bodies.

“It has to be done!” boomed Maran.

“But they—they’re not dead!”

He would have hurled himself at Maran had he not been rendered stiff with fresh horror by the sight of the bodies; for, as the Quasi-warp reached them, merging with the tunnel’s coruscating white-gold, the processes of death reasserted themselves; and Buchanan saw time run its course. The bodies decayed. Preston was a ghastly gray-green sight, his handsome features billowing with mold; and, within seconds, the features had gone and only white bone remained. Time surged on and bone crumbled, turned to dust, was swept about in the gusting fields so powerfully countered by the combined drives of the station and the little raft. Buchanan breathed a prayer.

It was for himself. He did not want to think of what was happening throughout the lounges and private cabins of the Altair Star.

“They were always dead!” Maran snapped. “Buchanan, nothing can reverse death—nothing! It was held back, but that’s all—there was never anything you could do for them!” There was more than anxiety in his voice, Buchanan recognized; the man was oppressed by the aura of the doomed ship. The ghosts clamored throughout its deck, now released from some weird limbo that had held them, while outside, in the slowly wheeling Galaxy, three years had passed.

“Buchanan, order the machines to regard me as commander, and then return to the station!” Buchanan moved ponderously toward the small dust-heaps. Why not help Maran? There was nothing he could do now for the Altair Star. Its frozen moment was over. Only he was left, after the passage of the years. The time-locked tunnel had released the undead. The fabric of its grotesque white-gold fields had been burst open. Why not let Maran get what he wanted from its depths?

He passed more heaps of dust where clusters of men and women had waited. Terrified groups, facing eternity together. He reached a master-console and was not even surprised when it glowed into life at his touch. He gave the brief instructions and returned.

“Ask Miss Deffant to watch,” Maran said.

Watch what? But Buchanan did not care.

Maran moved decisively. He pointed to the battered raft, edging Buchanan toward the port. “Go back, Buchanan. Go to Miss Deffant! Tell her Maran said she should watch!”

“I’ll tell her,” said Buchanan.

The last he saw of Maran was his broad back, unnaturally huge in the deep-space armor, radiant with the fires of the Quasi-warp.

Liz Deffant saw the return of the life-raft with anguish. She rushed to the hold to see Buchanan, huge and armored against the gold-shot tiny black pits which opened in the fabric of the station. She waited as the robots took off his suit

She knew that he had seen things too terrible to speak of.

“Come,” she said.

Buchanan did not notice that she was unsurprised to see him return alone. She half pushed, half led him to the grav-chute and the cabin above. Only when they reached the bridge did Buchanan speak.

“Liz,” he said with a disbelieving calm, “Liz, they were there. They were all there—in the ship.”

“Later, Al,” whispered Liz. “See!”

Buchanan automatically reached for sensor-pads as the big screen burst into life. Scanners roved; the screen pulsed, cleared, and settled. It was the Altair Star.

Buchanan and Liz Deffant were fascinated by the rippling, bunding, utterly alien surge of power as the massive engines of the ship began to weave the impossible, monstrous web of forces summoned into being by Maran’s strange genius. They saw a great band of energies eerily combine to form a single Quasi-warp that pushed aside the eddying configurations of the time-locked tunnel.

“He’s going,” whispered Liz Deffant, but the words were barely audible, only a thin breathing, an automatic carry-over from a forgotten state of mind. The majesty of the thing she and Buchanan watched obliterated all else.

The big lifeboat of the Altair Star was the source of the Quasi-warp. It nosed out of the rent in the lost ship’s side, and colossal shards of the strange tunnel gave way before it. The Quasi-warp bent the fabric of the tunnel.

The scanners held the terrible majesty of the scene. The screen flowered with renewed violence; the lifeboat was a star-center. Waves of energies began to rock the station. Buchanan’s hands shook. His mind cleared at last. “Maran!” he said urgently. “He’s using the boat to escape!” It hadn’t been at all important aboard the lost ship; but here, at the station, Buchanan was again a Galactic Service employee, responsible to the Council and aware of Maran’s inexplicable and unholy powers.

Liz Deffant gripped his arm. “Al—watch!”

By her tone he knew that she was in possession of information he had missed. There was a resigned, sad tone in her voice that he recognized. He had no time to consider it, for the lifeboat became a blossoming cancer, white-gold in a sea of fragmented, blistered, impossibly complex black-lighted powers. The Quasi-warp was demolishing the entire time-locked tunnel.

From the center of the sea of black shards, the lifeboat rose up and hung, poised. The station was hurled away by the hurricane that was its wake. Yet the scanners kept to their task; Buchanan and Liz Deffant clearly saw the end of the Altair Star.

It was one of a score of ships that danced, whirled, and spun zanily in the wash set up by Maran’s overpowered boat. The Altair Star lurched end over end. A tiny, ancient rocketship cannoned into it. Were its crew even now joining the ranks of the dead? It was a grotesque, fantastic sight; the thought of the crew of the ancient, tiny ship which had adventured so many centuries before across the gulfs, was strangely haunting. Other ships smashed into one another. Fragments of lost ships too joined the crazy corybantics set up by the Quasi-warp.

The two appalled watchers saw the lifeboat begin to surge forward, full of power. Blackness boiled around the wrecks. The Quasi-warp completed the destruction of the impossible runnel that held them,

“He’s going out!” Buchanan began to say. “Maran’s—”

“No,” said Liz, with a surprising harshness. “See!” Buchanan looked into the depths behind what was left of the tunnel.

A blank, terrifying emptiness had opened at the core of the Singularity. Buchanan’s thoughts spun. Somewhere among his memories was Maran’s triumphant yell: “ An entire new Universe!” Was it?

It was a hole, a pit, a sink of energy, a nothingness, an alien and empty pathway of pure night, black, and lost, blank and void.

The poised lifeboat seemed to hesitate.

“No!” Liz Deffant cried, responding to the eerie emptiness of the gaping pit. “No, Maran!” Flooding with tendrils of white-gold glory, the great drive that had once powered the Altair Star built to a crescendo. The lifeboat pulsed, glowing, blasting, roaring forward, driven by the huge engines. Straight into the black hole.

“Gone!” breathed Buchanan.

There was more to follow, equally strange.

“Dear God, the Altair Star!” Buchanan gasped.

He and Liz saw the ghost-fleet spin slowly around the wreckage of the time-locked tunnel. And then they resumed their interrupted voyages.