"How clever of you to hit exactly the right spot! But if you did, when your finger got within — oh —
something like a millimeter, I'd guess — the gravitational tidal forces would start to tear away at it. As soon as the first few atoms fell into the field, they'd give up all their mass-energy — and you'd think that a small hydrogen bomb had gone off in your face. The explosion would probably blow you out of the tube
at a fair fraction of the speed of light."
Duncan gave an uncomfortable little laugh.
"It would certainly take a clever man to steal one of your babies. Doesn't it ever give you
nightmares?"
"No. It's the tool I'm trained to use, and I understand its little ways. I can't imagine handling power lasers — they scare the hell out of me. You know, old Kipling had it all summed up, as usual. You
remember me talking about him?"
"Yes."
"He wrote a poem called ‘The Secret of the Machines,’ and it has some lines I often say to myself when I'm down here:
"But remember, please, the Law by which we live,
We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.
If you make a slip in handling us you die!
"And that's true of all machines — all the natural forces we've ever learned to handle. There's no real difference between the first caveman's fire and the node in the heart of the Asymptotic Drive."
An hour later, Duncan lay sleepless in his bunk, waiting for the Drive to go on and for Sirius to begin the ten days of deceleration that would lead to her rendezvous with Earth. He could still see that tiny flaw in the structure of space, hanging there in the field of the microscope, and knew that its image would haunt him for the rest of his life. And he realized now that Warren Mackenzie had betrayed nothing of his trust; all that he had learned had been published a thousand times. But no words or photos could ever
convey the emotional impact he had experienced.
Tiny fingers began to tug at him; weight was returning to Sirius. From an infinite distance came the
thin wail of the Drive; Duncan told himself that he was listening to the death cry of matter as it left the known universe, bequeathing to the ship all the energy of its mass in the final moment of dissolution.
Every minute, several kilograms of hydrogen were falling into that tiny but insatiable vortex — the hole that could never be filled.
Duncan slept poorly for the rest of the night. He had dreams that he too was falling, falling into a
spinning whirlpool, indefinitely deep. As he fell, he was being crushed to molecular, to atomic, and
finally to subnuclear dimensions. In a moment, it would all be over, and he would disappear in a single flash of radiation...
But that moment never came, because as Space contracted, Time stretched endlessly, the passing
seconds becoming longer... and longer — until he was trapped forever in a changeless Eternity.
16
Port Van Allen
When Duncan had gone to bed for the last time aboard Sirius, Earth was still five million kilometers
away. Now it seemed to fill the sky — and it was exactly like the photographs. He had laughed when
more seasoned travelers told him he would be surprised at this; now he was ruefully surprised at his
surprise.
Because the ship had cut right across the Earth's orbit, they were approaching from sunward, and the
hemisphere below was almost fully illuminated. White continents of cloud covered most of the day side, and there were only rare glimpses of land, impossible to identify without a map. The dazzling glare of the Antarctic icecap was the most prominent surface feature; it looked very cold down there, yet Duncan
reminded himself that it was tropical in comparison with much of his world.
Earth was a beautiful planet; that was beyond dispute. But it was also alien, and its cool whites and
blues did nothing to warm his heart. It was indeed a paradox that Titan, with its cheerful orange clouds, looked so much more hospitable from space.
Duncan stayed in Lounge B, watching the approaching Earth and making his farewells to many
temporary friends, until Port Van Allen was a dazzling star against the blackness of space, then a
glittering ring, then a huge, slowly turning wheel. Weight gradually ebbed away as the drive that had
taken them halfway across the Solar System decreased its thrust to zero; then there were only occasional nudges as low-powered thrustors trimmed the attitude of the ship.
The space station continued to expand. Its size was incredible, even when one realized that it had
been steadily growing for almost three centuries. Now it completely eclipsed the planet whose commerce it directed and controlled; a moment later a barely perceptible vibration, instantly damped out, informed everybody that the ship had docked. A few seconds later, the Captain confirmed it.
"Welcome to Port Van Allen — Gateway to Earth. It's been nice having you with us, and I hope you