Chapter 36

At long last, after five grueling weeks of crushing on-board gravitational excess and unremitting tension, the crucial day had arrived. There remained but hours before the nova's killing burst of radiation would reach the Eden system, and before the Ark would at last attain the minimum speed that would allow it to pass into worm space and escape.

And Meiersdottir was still in a coma. Even the optimistic O'Bannion now referred to her condition as "critical," and was increasingly guarded in her reports to Igwanda and his wife. But she continued to cling to life.

MacPherson was now glued to the console with its array of monitors and gauges, his attention especially focused on the key speed indicator. He'd assigned to Cromartie the task of manning the controls that governed creation of the wormhole ahead of them, and had drilled the mate repeatedly in the sequence of switches that would need to be activated.

"Minu'es may coun', e'en secon's," he'd warned his subordinate. "'Twill be a nearr thing, we'rre rrigh' a' th'marrgin. Ye mus' be able t'do i' in yer sleep."

In the mechanics of interstellar travel the ship would send out a series of pulses in front of it. The pulses, moving at light speed, would blast open a hole in "real" space that would remain open for only a fraction of a second. Provided it was moving fast enough, the entire ship would pass through that hole and into the anomaly known as worm space to emerge at a far-distant location elsewhere. The emergence point was determined by the particular configuration of the hole, which was controlled by the pulses creating it.

Technically the hole was called an Einstein-Rosen bridge (or sometimes a Lorentzian traversable wormhole), a transitory link between two widely separated points in space. In the "real" universe the ship's passage would be instantaneous; to a theoretical observer who could watch both entry and exit points its disappearance and reappearance light-years distant would appear to be simultaneous. But a still-little-understood phenomenon of the transition meant that a measurable amount of perceived time would seem to pass on board the ship itself between entry into and exit from the wormhole, its duration seemingly related to the physical distance being traversed; between Eden and Earth this lag would seem to be about two weeks.

The whole thing was necessarily keyed to the ship's velocity. Moving rapidly enough the entire vessel could enter the wormhole before it closed. Without adequate speed, though, the hole would close before the entire ship made it through. In the early days of experimentation the result had invariably been instantaneous destruction of the vessel, total conversion of its mass into energy in a blast far exceeding any nuclear explosion ever seen. It was this fate that MacPherson had been pressing acceleration of the ship to avoid.