“The men weren’t sure. The observations are hard to make. But they started to wonder… if we might not have underestimated the distance we’ve gone. They checked Doppler shifts extra carefully. Especially of late, when we seem to pass through more and more galaxies and the gas between them seems to be growing denser.

“They found that what they observed could not be explained in full by any tau we can possibly have. Another factor had to be involved. The galaxies are crowding together. The gas is being compressed. Space isn’t expanding any longer. It’s reached its limit and is collapsing inward again. Elof says the collapse will go on. And on. To the end.”

“We?” he asked.

“Who can tell? Except the figures show we can’t stop. We could, I mean. But by the time we did, nothing would be left… except blackness, burned-out suns, absolute zero, death, death. Nothing.”

“We don’t want that,” he said stupidly.

“No. What do we want?” Strange that she was not crying. “I think— Carl, shouldn’t we say good night? All of us, to each other? A last festival, with wine and candlelight. And afterward go to our cabins. You and I to ours. And love, if we can, and say good night. We have morphine for everyone. And oh, Carl, we’re so tired. It will be so good to sleep.”

Reymont drew her close to him again.

“Did you ever read Moby Dick?” she whispered. “That’s us. We’ve pursued the White Whale. To the end of time. And now… that question. What is man, that he should outlive his God?”

Reymont put her from him, gently, and sought the view-scope. Looking forth, he saw, for a moment, a galaxy pass. It must be only some ten thousands of parsecs distant, for he saw it across the dark very large and clear. The form was chaotic. Whatever structure it had once had was disintegrated. It was a dull, vague, redness, deepening at the fringes to the hue of clotted blood.

It drifted from his sight. The ship went through another, storm-shaken by it, but of that one nothing was visible.

Reymont hauled himself back to the command deck. Teeth gleamed in his visage. “No!” he said.

CHAPTER 20

From the stage, he and she looked upon their assembled shipmates.

The gathering was seated, safety-hamessed into chairs whose legs were secured with bond grips to the gymnasium deck. Anything else would have been dangerous. Not that weightlessness prevailed. The past week had seen conditions change so rapidly that those who knew could not have deferred an explanation longer had they wanted to.

Between the tau which interstellar atoms now had with respect to Leonora Christine; and the compression of lengths in her own measurement because of that tau; and the dwindling radius of the cosmos itself: Her ramjets drove her at a goodly fraction of one gee across the outermost abysses of interclan space. And oftener and oftener came spurts of higher acceleration as she passed through galaxies. They were too fast for the interior fields to compensate. They felt like the buffeting of waves; and each time, the noise that sang in the hull was more shrill and windy.