Death's End

白 Ice’s last sentence had an effect. Vasilenko stared at him in silence for a few seconds, then nodded slowly. “All right, Dr. Bai, I’ll listen to you. Revelation will depart from the slip and back off one thousand kilometers. We’ll leave just a pinnace to monitor it…. Maybe two thousand kilometers?”

白 Ice let Vasilenko go and wiped his forehead. “You decide. I suggest, the farther the better. I will write a formal report as soon as possible and let Command know of my theories.” Stumbling, he drifted away.

—————

Revelation left the slip. It passed through the ship’s hull and was reexposed to space. Since the background was dark again, it once again appeared to be an opaque white slip of paper.

Revelation pulled away from the slip until the two were about two thousand kilometers apart, then continued to sail in parallel, waiting for the arrival of Tomorrow. A pinnace with a crew of two stayed about ten meters from the slip to monitor it continuously.

The gravitational waves emitted by the paper slip continued to diminish, and its light gradually dimmed.

On Revelation, 白 Ice shut himself in the laboratory. Around him, he set up more than a dozen information windows, all connected to the ship’s quantum computer, which was carrying out massive computations. The windows were packed with equations, curves, and matrices. Surrounded by the windows, 白 Ice was anxious and irritable, like a trapped animal.

Fifty hours after the separation from Revelation,

the gravitational wave emitted from the paper slip disappeared completely. The white light from it blinked twice and also went out. The slip of paper was gone.

“Has it evaporated?” Vasilenko asked.

“I don’t think so. But we can’t see it anymore.” 白 Ice shook his head wearily and closed the information windows around him one by one.

After another hour during which no signs of the slip could be detected, Vasilenko ordered the pinnace to return to Revelation. But the two crew members on duty in the pinnace didn’t acknowledge the order; the radio only transmitted a hurried conversation between them.

“Look out below! What’s going on?”

“It’s rising!”

“Don’t touch it! Get out!!”

“My leg! Ahhh—”

After the scream, the monitoring terminal on Revelation showed one of the crew members leaving the pinnace and activating the thrusters on his space suit in an attempt to escape. They saw a bright light; the source was the bottom of the pinnace, which was melting! The pinnace looked like a scoop of ice cream dropped onto a scalding sheet of glass: The bottom was melting and spreading in every direction. The “glass” was invisible, and the plane’s existence was indicated only by the spreading pool of melted pinnace material. The pool spread into an extremely thin sheet and emitted bewitching, colorful lights, like fireworks scattered through a sheet of glass.

The escaped crewman flew some distance but seemed to be pulled by gravity toward that plane marked by the melted pinnace. His feet touched the plane and immediately melted into a shiny puddle. The rest of his body also began to spread out on the plane, and he had time only for a scream that was abruptly cut off.

“All hands to hypergravitation seats! Full Ahead!”

As soon as he saw the escaping crewman’s feet touch the invisible plane, Vasilenko gave the order. Revelation wasn’t a stellar ship, so when it engaged in Full Ahead acceleration, the crew did not need to enter into the protective deep-sea state. But the hypergravity was enough to sink everyone deep into their seats. Since the order was given in such a hurry, a few couldn’t get to their seats in time and fell to the stern of the ship with injuries. Revelation’s exhaust nozzles emitted a plasma stream several kilometers long that pierced the dark night of space. Far in the distance, where the pinnace was still melting, they could see the phosphorescent glow like will-o’-the-wisps in the wilderness.

From the zoomed-in view on the monitoring terminal, they could see that only the very top part of the pinnace was left, and that too soon disappeared into the brilliant plane. The body of the dead crewman was also diffused into the plane, showing up as a gigantic, man-shaped glow. His body had been transformed into a slice on the plane without thickness. Though large in area, it had no volume.

“We’re not moving,” the pilot of Revelation said. He had trouble talking through the hypergravity. “The ship isn’t accelerating.”

“What are you babbling about?” Vasilenko wanted to shout, but the hypergravity turned it into a whisper.