"Like your diagram?"

"Yes, very like this diagram which I find in my data banks, a representation of the structure of the accretion disk around the black hole in Cygnus X-1."

"Oh!" He had not seen that diagram during his rammer training. His rammer training had not even told him how to avoid stellar-sized black holes, because there were none to be expected on his planned course. He had seen something very like that diagram in an article in Scientific American!

"Yes, Corbel. Your wonderland of lights is being absorbed by a black hole of galactic mass. Its spin must be enormous, from the way it has flattened the mass of stars around it. Eventually the entire galaxy may disappear into-Corbell? Are you ill?"

"No," Corbell said, his hands covering his face, muffling his voice.

"Don't be depressed. This is our chance for life."

"What?"

"A thin chance to see Earth again before you die. A unique experience, win or lose. Isn't that what you want? Let me explain...

IV

At the thirteenth awakening he tried to sit up too fast. He woke again, dizzy, flat on his back in the coffin, with Peerssa calling in his ear. "Corbell! Corbell?"

"Here. Where would I go?"

"Be more careful. Lie there for a minute."

Lean as death he was, and old. Arthritis grated in his knobby joints. With the familiar hunger came nausea. He ran a hand over his scalp- he had been half bald when he entered Forest Lawn- and more of his hair came away.

"Where are we?"

"One month from the black hole and closing. The view will please you.', He emerged from the cold-sleep tank like a sick Dracula. He made his limping way to the Kitchen, then to the Health Club. His muscles were slack and tended to cramp. The exercises were hard on him. But the pain and the nausea and the creeping years meant little. He felt good. At worst he had found a brand-new way to die.

He asked of the ubiquitous microphones, "Suppose we go too far in? We won't ever die, will we? We'd be stopped above the Schwarzschild radius."

"Only to an outside observer. Not to ourselves. Are you about to change my orders?"

Some minutes later he eased himself into the Womb Room chair. He sipped the last of the broth. "Full view."

Don Juan raced above a sea of churning stars. In a normal galaxy they would have been crowded enough. Here, forced into a plane by the spin of the giant black hole at the center, they were crowded to death. Dying stars burned with a terrible light. They stood like torches in a field of candles. It must be common enough for star to ram star here, or for tides to rip stars apart.

Commoner toward the center, Corbell thought The center of the sea burned very bright ahead of him. He could see no dark dot at the axis. He hadn't expected to.

"How far away are we in normal space?"

"Rest space? Three point six light-years."

"No problems?"

"I believe I can hold us above the plane of the disk until we have passed that very active swelling ahead of us, between two and three light-years from the singularity."

Corbell looked down at his drive flame, a dim wisp of white between his feet. There was very little matter above the disk, he guessed. "Suppose you can't? Suppose we have to go through it?"

"You'll never feel a thing. That region is where the stars lose their identity. They become streamers of dense plasma with nodules of neutronium in them. Most of the light comes from there. Beyond, there is very great flattening and some radiation due to friction in the matter spiraling inward."

"What about the black hole itself?"

"I still don't have a view of it. I estimate a circumference of two billion kilometers and a mass of one hundred million solar masses. The ergosphere will be large. We should have no trouble choosing a path through it."

"You said circumference?"

"Should I have given you the radius? The radius of a black hole may be infinite."

There was simply no grasping the size of that disk of crushed stars. It was like flying above another universe. At two billion kilometers, the black hole would almost have contained the orbit of Jupiter; but if Corbell could have seen past that swelling ahead, that Ring of Fire, he would have found the black hole invisibly small.

Light caught the corner of his eye, and he turned to see a supernova glaring white-on-red. He'd just missed seeing a sun torn apart by tides, its ten-million degree heart spilled across the sky.

He asked what he had never asked before. "Peerssa, what are you thinking?"

"I don't quite know how to answer that."

"I'm not thinking anything. My decisions are made. They are mathematically rigorous. I face no choices."

"How are you going to find Earth?"

"I know where Sol will be in three million years."

"Three-! Won't it be more like seventy thousand?"

"We're diving deep into a tremendous gravity field. Time will be compressed for us. The black hole is large enough that tides will not tear us apart, but we'll lose almost three million years before I fire the fusion motor. What more can I do? The odds are finite that we will find Sol. Or the State may have spread through a million cubic light-years of space before we arrive."

"The odds are finite. Peerssa, you're strange." But Corbell felt no urge to laugh. Seventy thousand years B.C., there had been Neanderthal Man and a few Cro-Magnon. Humans. Three million years ago, nothing but a club-swinging, meat-eating ape. What would inhabit the Earth three million years from now?

Corbell spent most of his time in the Womb Room, watching the accretion disk swirl past. He liked the uncorrected view, the display that showed the universe distorted by Don Juan's velocity.

Since turnover, the ship had shed most of its enormous relativistic mass. Don Juan had been moving faster after Corbell's first term in the cold-sleep tank. But it was still traveling near light-speed, and accelerating steadily under the pull of a point-source one hundred million times the mass of the Sun. The accretion disk showed rainbow colored ahead of him, with the Ring of Fire a violet-white hill coming near. The stars were jammed together; you couldn't tell one from the next unless the next had exploded. They graded back through the rainbow until the sea of flame behind Don Juan was deep red and frozen in place, with the occasional supernova showing yellow-white or greenish-white.

The Ring of Fire-the swollen region where the heat trapped within the streaming star-stuff grew even more powerful than the black hole's compression effect-came near. It was blinding-bright before Corbell gave up. "Reduce that light," he said, half covering his eyes.

"I've cut it to ten percent. Let me know when I must cut it again."

"Are you all right? Will it burn out your cameras?"

"I think not. Remember, you were to dive almost into Sol to decelerate at the end of your mission. We can handle high intensities of light."

The Ring of Fire was a flattened doughnut twenty light-years in circumference, a quarter of a light-year thick: four or five cubic light-years of green-to-blue-white star, with every possible grade of fusion and fission going on in it. As if Hell were a tremendous mountain coming near... and Don Juan crossed it on a fan of fusion flame, thrusting hard. Corbell felt the thrust drop away. He sat forward as the ship dropped along the inner gradient and left the Ring of Fire behind, a dull red wall. The inner accretion disk was drastically thinner, savagely compressed. Corbell peered toward where the black hole ought to be. All he saw was more star-matter, hurtingly violet-white at the center.

It was all happening terribly fast now. Minutes left, or seconds. Peerssa was firing the attitude jets at strange angles. There were no stars to see in this inner disk: no detail at all. It was as uniform as peanut butter.