Between the Strokes of Night

My Wolfgang is dead, long dead; but the great wager goes on. On days like this I feel that I am the only person in the Universe who cares about the outcome. If Wolfgang and his friends are right, who but I will know and be here to applaud him? And if we win, who but I will know the cost of victory?

It is significant that I record this death first, before acknowledging the report of a faster-than-light drive from Beacon Four. Gulf City is throbbing with the news, but I have heard the same rumor a hundred — a thousand? — times before. For 28,000 years our struggle to escape the yoke of relativity has continued; still it binds us, as strongly as ever. In public I say that the research must go on even if Beacon Four has nothing, that the faster-than-light drive will be the single most important discovery in human history; but deep within me I deny even the possibility. If the Universe is apprehensible to the human mind, then it must have some final laws. I am not permitted to admit it, but I believe the light-speed limit is one. As humans explore the galaxy, it must be done at a sub-light crawl.

I wish I could believe otherwise. But most of all today I wish that I could spend one hour again with Wolfgang.

* * *

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear
and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking,
and sent him down the sky.
But now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of gray ashes, long, long ago at rest.
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For death he taketh all away; but these he cannot take.

* * *

PART ONE: A.D. 2016

CHAPTER ONE

The Road to Armageddon

The snow was drifting down in tiny flakes. Its fall, slow and steady, had added almost four inches of new crystals to the frozen surface. Two feet below, torso curled and nose tucked into thick fur, the great she-bear lay motionless. Walls of translucent ice caverned about the shaggy, light-brown pelt.

The voice came through to the cave as a disembodied thread of sound. “Sodium level still dropping. Looks really bad. Jesus Christ. Try one more cycle.” On the periphery of the cave a flicker of colored light began to blink on and off. The walls shone red, clear blue, then sparkled with dazzling green. A stippling of pure colors rippled a pattern to the beast’s closed eyelids. The bear slept on at the brink of death. Its body temperature held steady, ten degrees above freezing point. The massive heart pumped at a sluggish two beats per minute, the metabolic rate down by a factor of fifty. Breathing was steadily weakening, betrayed now only by the thin layer of ice crystals in the fringe of white beard and around the blunt muzzle.

“No good.” The voice held an added urgency. “Still dropping, and we’re losing the pulse trace. We have to risk it. Give her a bigger jolt.”

The light pattern altered. There was a stab of magenta, a rapid twinkle of sapphire and cyan, then a scattershot of moving saffron and ruby dots on the icy wall. As the rainbow modulated, the bear responded to the signal. Slate-gray eyes flickered in the long, smooth head. The massive chest shuddered. “That’s as far as I dare take it.” The second voice was deeper. “We’re beginning to get more heart fibrillation.”

“Hold the level there. And keep an eye on that rectal temperature. Why is it happening now, of all times?”

The voice echoed anguished through the thick-walled cavern. The chamber where the bear lay was fifteen meters across, and through the outer wall ran a spidery filament of fiber optics. It passed beneath the ice to a squat box next to the beast’s body. Faint electronic signals came from needles implanted deep in the tough skin, where sensors monitored the ebbing currents of life in the great body. Skin conductivity, heartbeat, blood pressure, saliva, temperature, chemical balances, ion concentrations, eye movements and brain waves were continuously monitored. Coded and amplified in the square box, the signals passed as pulses of light along the optic bundle to a panel of equipment set outside the chamber’s wall.