“Now, listen, Luce. You know the conversational inseparability link will cut out as soon as you go into Susy-space. But I’ll be — with you in spirit.”

“How cheering.”

The pod shuddered once — twice — and the stars blurred.

“It’s time,” Wyman said. “Godspeed, Michael—”

The antique expression surprised me.

Something slammed into the base of the pod; I dangled in my webbing. For as long as I could I kept my eyes fixed on the Ghost world.

I lit up a hemisphere.

Then the planet crumpled like tissue paper, and the stars turned to streaks and disappeared.

Wyman had boasted about his Susy drive. “Hyperspace travel is just a slip sideways into one of the Universe’s squashed-up extra dimensions. Whereas with supersymmetry you’re getting into the real guts of physics…”

There are two types of particles: fermions, the building blocks of matter, like quarks and electrons, and force carriers, like photons. Supersymmetry tells us that each building block can be translated into a force carrier, and vice versa.

“The supersymmetric twins, the s-particles, are no doubt inherently fascinating,” said Wyman. “But for the businessman the magic comes when you do two supersymmetric transformations — say, electron to selectron and back again. You end up with an electron, of course — but an electron in a different place…”

And so Wyman hoped to have me leapfrog through Susy-space to the lithium-7 object. What he wasn’t so keen to explain was what it would feel like.

Susy-space is another Universe, laid over our own. It has its own laws. I was transformed into a supersymmetric copy of myself. I was an s-ghost in Susy-space. And it was… different.

Things are blurred in Susy-space. The distinction between me, here, and the stars, out there, wasn’t nearly as sharp as it is in four-space.

Can you understand that?

Susy-space is not a place designed for humans. Man is a small, warm creature, accustomed to the skull’s dark cave.

Susy-space cut through all that.

I was exposed. I could feel the scale of the journey, as if the arch of the Universe were part of my own being. Distance crushed me. Earth and its cozy Sun were a childhood memory, lost in the grief of curved space.

Eyes streaming, I opaqued the window.

I slept for a while. When I woke, things hadn’t got any better.

Trying to ignore the oppressive aura of Susy-space I played with the new monitor configurations, looking for the Susy-drive controls. It took me two hours of growing confusion to work out that there weren’t any.

The Susy drive had been discarded after pushing me on my way, like a throwaway rocket in the earliest human flights.

I could see the logic of it. Why carry excess baggage?

There were two problems.

The trip was one way. And Wyman hadn’t told me.

I’m not a strong man; I don’t pretend to be. It took some time to work through my first reaction.

Then I washed my face and sipped a globe of coffee.

The translator box lit up. “Luce. What’s your status?”

I crushed the globe; cooling coffee spurted over my wrist. “Wyman, you bastard. You’ve hijacked me… And I thought the inseparability link wouldn’t work over these distances.”

“We have a packet link; but apart from that, it doesn’t. This isn’t Wyman. I’m a Virtual representation stored in the translator box. I should think you’re pleased to hear my voice. You need the illusion of company, you see. It’s all quite practical. And this is a historic trip. I wanted some small part of me to be out there with you…”

I breathed hard, trying to control my voice. “Why didn’t you tell me this trip was no return?”

“Because you wouldn’t have gone,” said the Wyman Virtual — mentally I started calling him “sWyman.”

“Of course not. No matter what the fee. — And what about my fee? Have you paid it over yet?”

sWyman hesitated. “I’d be happy to, Michael. But… do you have an estate? Dependents?”

“You know I don’t. Damn you.”

“Look, Michael, I’m sorry if you feel tricked. But I had to make sure you’d take the trip. We have to put the interests of the race first, don’t we?…”

After that my courage began to fail once more. sWyman had the decency to shut up.

We popped out of Susy-space, sparkling with selectrons and neutralinos.

My time in that metal box had seemed a lot longer than ten days. I don’t remember a lot of it. I’d been locked inside my head, looking for a place to hide from the oppression of distance, from the burden of looming death.

Now I breathed deeply; even the canned air of the pod seemed sweet out of Susy-space.

I checked my status. I’d have four days’ life support at the lithium-7 site. It would expire — with me — just when the Ghosts arrived. Wyman had given me the bare bones.

I de-opaqued my window and looked out. I was spinning lazily in an ordinary sky. There was a powdering of stars, a pale band that marked a galactic plane, smudges that were distant galaxies.

Earth was impossibly far away, somewhere over the horizon of the Universe. I shivered. Damn it, this place felt old.

There was something odd about one patch of sky. It looked the size of a dinner plate at arm’s length. There were no stars in the patch. And it was growing slowly.

I set up the monitors. “sWyman — what is it?”

“All I see is a dull infra-red glow… But that’s where the lithium object is hiding, so that’s the way we’re headed.”

The patch grew until it hid half the sky.

I started to make out a speckled effect. The speckles spread apart; it was as if we were falling into a swarm of bees. Soon we reached the outskirts of the swarm. A hail of huge objects shot past us and began to hide the stars behind us—

“They’re ships.”

“What?”

I straightened up from my monitor. “Ships. Millions of ships, sWyman.”

I swung the focus around the sky. I picked out a little family of cylinders, tumbling over each other like baby mice. There was a crumpled sphere not much bigger than the pod; it orbited a treelike structure of branches and sparkling leaves. Beyond that I made out bundles of spheroids and tetrahedra, pencils of rods and wands — my gaze roved over a speckling of shape and color.

I was at the heart of a hailstorm of ships. They filled the sky, misting into the distance.

But there was no life, no purposeful movement. It was a desolate place; I felt utterly alone.

I looked again at the tree-thing. The delicate ship was miles wide. But there were scorch marks on the leaves, and holes in the foliage bigger than cities.

“sWyman, these are wrecks. All of them.”

A motion at the edge of my vision. I tried to track it. A black, birdlike shape that seemed familiar—

“Luce, why the junk yard? What’s happened here?”

I thought of a shell of lithium-stained light growing out of this place and blossoming around the curve of the Universe. At its touch flocks of ships would rise like birds from the stars… “sWyman, we’re maybe the first to travel here from our Galaxy. But races from further in, closer to this event, have been flooding here from the start. As soon as the lithium-7 light reached them they would come here, to this unique place, hoping as we hope to find new understanding. They’ve been seeking the lithium treasure for billions of years… and dying here. Let’s hope there’s still something worth dying for.”

Something was growing out of the speckled mist ahead. It was a flattened sphere of blood-colored haze; starlight twinkled through its substance.

It was impossible to guess its scale. And it kept growing.

“sWyman. I think that’s another ship. It may not be solid… but I know we’re going to hit. Where’s my intrasystem drive?”

“Fifteen billion light years away.”