“We’removing. . .”

Cornelius’s voice, radio transmitted, had blared in his ear. Malenfant winced and tapped at the touchpad on his chest.

“Cornelius? Can you hear me?”

Cornelius’ voice was heavily laden with static, as if he were shouting into a conch shell, but he was comprehensible. “Are we moving? Did you—”

“Yes, I got hold of the portal.” He added reflexively, “I think we’ll be okay now.”

Cornelius managed a croaky laugh. “I doubt that very much, Malenfant. But at least the story goes on a little longer. What about Emma?”

“She hasn’t woken up yet. You know, Cornelius, sometimes eyes recover. A few days, a week…”

Cornelius drifted alongside him, sullen, silent.

Let it pass, Malenfant.

They reached the portal. It loomed over Malenfant, huge and blue and enigmatic, brilliant against the reddening sky. Malenfant touched the surface, tried to figure a way to attach a tether or a piton to it.

He discussed the problem with Cornelius.

“Just hold on to it, Malenfant,” he said, and he had Malenfant pull him around until he was doing just that, his hands loosely wrapped over the portal’s blade-sharp rim.

Malenfant turned to Emma. She was still unconscious, but she seemed to be sleeping peacefully now. He saw a soft mist on her faceplate close to her mouth. “I wish I could get this damn suit off of her, give her a drink.”

Cornelius turned blindly. “Maybe something will come along, Malenfant. That’s what you always say, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I always say. How’s your suit?”

“I’m out of orange juice. And I think my diaper is full… Malenfant, what color is the sky?”

“Red.” Malenfant lifted up his gold visor. It was still bright, just a uniform glow, but it was not so bright he couldn’t look at it with his unprotected eyes. “Like hot coals,” he said.

“That makes sense,” Cornelius said. “After all our radios work again. So this universe must have become transparent to electromagnetic radiation. Radio waves—”

This universe. “What are you talking about, Cornelius?”

“Malenfant, where do you think we are?”

Malenfant looked around at the sky’s uniform glow. “In some kind of gas cloud.” He tried to think out of the box. “Maybe we’re in the outer layers of a red giant star.”

“Umm. If that’s so, why was the sky white hot when we got here? Why is it cooling down so fast?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the cloud is expanding—”

“Can you see a source? A center? Any kind of nonuniformity in the glow?”

“It looks the same to me every which way. Come on, Cornelius. Time’s a little short for riddles.”

“I think we fell into another universe.”

“ What other universe? How?”

Cornelius managed a laugh, his voice like a dry, crumpling leaf. “You know, Malenfant, you always have trouble with the big picture. You didn’t seem disturbed philosophically by the idea of a gateway that takes you instantaneously to another time. Well, now the portal has just taken us to another spacetime point, instantaneously, like before. It’s just that this time that point is in another universe, somewhere else in the manifold.”

“The manifold?”

“The set of all possible universes. Probably one related to ours.”

“Related? How can universes be related?… Never mind.”

Cornelius turned blindly. “Damn it, I wish I could see. There’s no reason why this universe should be exactly like ours, Malen-fant. Most universes will be short-lived, probably on the scale of the Planck time.”

“How long is that?”

“Ten to power minus forty-three of a second.”

“Not even time to make a coffee, huh.”

“I think this universe is only a few hours old. I think it just expanded out of its Big Bang. Think of it. Around us the vacuum itself is changing phase, like steam condensing to water, releasing energy to fuel this grand expansion.”

“So what’s the glow we see?”

“The background radiation.” Cornelius, drifting in red emptiness, huddled over on himself, wrapping his suited arms around his torso, as if he was growing cold.

“How can universes be different?”

“If they have different physical laws. Or if the constants that govern those laws are different…”

“If we fell into a Big Bang, it occurs to me we were lucky not to be fried.”

“I think the portal is designed to protect us. To some extent anyhow.”

“You mean if we had been smart enough to come through with such luxuries as air and water and food, we might live through all this?”

“It’s possible.”

“Then where did Michael go? “

Cornelius sighed. “I don’t know.”

“The Sheena squid came through the portal, and she found herself in the future. Seventy-five million years downstream. Staring at the Galaxy.”

“I do remember, Malenfant,” Cornelius said dryly.

“So how come we didn’t follow her?”

“I think it was the Feynman radios. The crude one we built at Fermilab. Whatever was put into the heads of the Blue kids, Michael and the others. The messages from the future changed the past. That is, our future. Yes. The river of time took a different course.”

“If this isn’t the future—”

“I think it’s the past,” Cornelius whispered. “The deepest past.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course not, Malenfant. Why should you?”

“Cornelius. I think the sky is getting brighter.”

It was true; the reddening seemed to have bottomed out, and a strengthening orange was creeping back into the sky.

Malenfant said, “That’s bad, right? We’re heading for a Big Crunch. We just lived through a Big Bang, and now we’re facing a Crunch. One damn thing after another.”

“We can’t stay here,” Cornelius whispered.

Malenfant looked around at the glowing sky, tried to imagine it contracting around him, the radiation that filled it compressing, rattling around the walls of the universe like gas in a piston, growing hotter and hotter. “Cornelius, will there be life here? Intelligence?”

“Unlikely,” Cornelius whispered. “Our universe was a big, roomy, long-lived place. Lots of room for structure to self-organize, atoms and stars and galaxies and people. Here, even the atoms will exist for just a few hours.”

“Then what’s the point? An empty universe, no life, no mind, over in a few hours? Why?”

Cornelius coughed. “You’re asking the wrong person.”

Malenfant gathered the others — Cornelius curled into a fetal ball, Emma sleeping, starfished, the tether length on her leg dangling — and he faced the portal.

The sky was getting brighter, hotter, climbing the spectral scale through orange toward yellow. “Visors down.”

Cornelius dropped his own gold sun visor into place, reached over, and did the same for Emma, by touch.

Malenfant wrapped his suited arm around Emma’s waist and grasped Cornelius firmly by the hand. He turned his back on the collapsing, featureless sky without regret, and pulled them both into the portal.

Maura Della:

Houston was hot, muggy, fractious. The air settled on her like

a blanket every time she hurried between airport terminal and

car, or car and hotel, as if it was no longer a place adapted for

humanity.

She booked into her hotel, showered and changed, and had her car take her out to JSC, the NASA Johnson Space Center. The car pulled into the JSC compound off NASA Road One, and she drove past gleaming, antiquated Moon rockets: freshly restored, spectacularly useless, heavily guarded from the new breed of antiscience wackos.

She was dismayed by the depression and surliness of the staff who processed her at the NASA security lodge. The mood in Houston seemed generally sour, the people she encountered overheated, irritable. She knew Houston had special problems. The local economy relied heavily on oil and chemicals and was taking a particular beating as the markets fluctuated and dived over rumors of the supertechnology that the Blue children had been cooking up, stuff that would make fossil-fuel technology obsolete overnight. But she had come here with a vague hope that at least at NASA — where they were all rocket scientists, for God’s sake — there might be a more mature reaction to what was going on in the world. But the national mood of fear and uncertainty seemed to be percolating even here.