Gradually Reymont entered the pattern, until he could steer alone. The rhthms of rebirth were wild, but they were there. Ease on starboard… vector at nine o’clock low… now push that thrust! …brake a little here… don’t let her broach… swing wide of that flame cloud if you can… Thunder brawled. The air was sharp with ozone, and cold.

The screen blanked. An instant later, every fluoropanel in the ship turned simultaneously ultraviolet and infrared, and blackness plunged down. Those who lay harnessed alone, throughout the hull, heard invisible lightnings walk the corridors. Those in command bridge, pilot bridge, engine room, who manned the ship, felt a heaviness greater than planets— they could not move, nor stop a movement once begun— and then felt a lightness such that their bodies began to shake asunder— and this was a change in inertia itself, in every constant of nature as space-time-matter-energy underwent its ultimate convulsion— for a moment infinitesimal and infinite, men, women, child, ship, and death were one.

It passed, so swiftly that they could not tell if it had been. Light came back, and outside vision. The storm grew fiercer. But now through it, seen distorted so that they flew, fountaining off in two huge curving sheets, now came the nascent galaxies.

The monobloc had exploded. Creation had begun. Reymont went over to full deceleration. Leonora Christine started slowly to slow; and she flew out into a reborn light.

CHAPTER 22

Boudreau and Nilsson nodded at each other. They grinned. “Yes, indeed,” the astronomer said.

Reymont looked restlessly around the observatory. “Yes, what?” he demanded. He jerked one thumb at a visual screen. Space swarmed with little dancing incandescences. “I can see for myself. The galactic groups are still close together. Most of them are still nothing but hydrogen nebulae. And hydrogen atoms are still thick between them, comparatively speaking. What of it?”

“Computation on the basis of data,” Boudreau said. “I have been consulting with the team leaders here. We felt you deserved as well as needed to hear in confidence what we have learned, so that you might make the decision.”

Reymont stiffened. “Lars Telander is the captain.”

“Yes, yes. Nobody wants to go behind his back, especially when he is once more doing a superb job with the ship. The folk within the ship, though, they are another matter. Be realistic, Charles. You know what you are to them.”

Reymont folded his arms. “Well, proceed, then.”

Nilsson went into lecture gear. “Never mind details,” he said. “This result came out of the problem you set us, to find in which directions the matter was headed, and which the antimatter. You recall, we were able to do this by tracing the paths of plasma masses through the magnetic fields of the universe as a whole while its radius was small. And thereby the officers were enabled to bring this vessel safely into the matter half of the plenum.

“Now in the course of making those studies, we collected and processed an astonishing amount of data. And here is what else we have come up with. The cosmos is new and in some respects disordered. Things have not yet sorted themselves out. Within a short range of us, compared to distances we have already traversed, are material complexes— galaxies and protogalaxies— with every possible velocity.