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By Root 1342 0

horizon of a black hole toward the dread singularity. Or maybe this isn't a black hole and I'm headed toward a naked singularity. That's what the physicists called it, a naked singularity. Near a singularity, causality could be violated, effects could precede causes, time could flow backward, and you were unlikely to survive, much less remember the experience. For a rotating black hole, she dredged up from her studies years before, there was not a point but a ring singularity or something still more complex to be avoided. Black holes were nasty. The gravitational tidal forces were so great that you would be stretched into a long thin thread if you were so careless as to fall in. You would also be crushed laterally. Happily, there was no sign of any of this. Through the gray transparent surfaces that were now the ceiling and floor, she could see a great flurry of activity. The organosilicate matrix was collapsing on itself in some places and unfolding in others; the embedded erbium dowels were spinning and tumbling. Everything inside the dodec-including herself and her companions- looked quite ordinary. Well, maybe a bit excited. But they were not yet long thin threads.

These were idle ruminations, she knew. The physics of black holes was not her field. Anyway, she could not understand how this could have anything to do with black holes, which were either primordial-made during the origin of the universe-or produced in a later epoch by the collapse of a star more massive than the Sun. Then, the gravity would be so strong that-except for quantum effects-even light could not escape, although the gravitational field certainly would remain. Hence "black," hence "hole." But they hadn't collapsed a star, and she couldn't see any way in which they had captured a primordial blackhole. Anyway, no one knew where the nearest primordial black hole might be hiding. They had only built the Machine and spun up the benzels.

She glanced over to Eda, who was figuring something on a small computer. By bone conduction, she could feel as well as hear a low-pitched roaring every time the dodec scraped the wall, and she raised her voice to be heard. "Do you understand what's going on?"

"Not at all," he shouted back. "I can almost prove this can't be happening. Do you know the Boyer- Lindquist coordinates?"

"No, sorry." "I'll explain it to you later." She was glad he thought there would be a "later." Ellie felt the deceleration before she could see it, as if they had been on the downslope of a roller coaster, had leveled out, and now were slowly climbing. Just before the deceleration set in, the tunnel had made a complex sequence of bobs and weaves. There was no perceptible change either in the color or in the brightness of the surrounding light. She picked up her camera, switched to the long-focal-length lens, and looked as far ahead of her as she could. She could see only to the next jag in the tortuous path. Magnified, the texture of the wall seemed intricate, irregular, and, just for a moment, faintly self-luminous.

The dodecahedron had slowed to a comparative crawl. No end to the tunnel was in sight. She wondered if they would make it to wherever they were going. Perhaps the designers had miscalculated. Maybe the Machine had been built imperfectly, just a little bit off; perhaps what had seemed on Hokkaido an acceptable technological imperfection would doom their mission to failure here in…in wherever this was. Or, glancing at the cloud of fine particles following and occasionally overtaking them, she thought maybe they had bumped into the walls one time too often and lost more momentum than had been allowed for in the design. The space between the dodec and the walls seemed very narrow now. Perhaps they would find themselves stuck fast in this never-never land and languish until the oxygen ran out. Could the Vegans have gone to all this trouble and forgotten that we need to breathe? Hadn't they noticed all those shouting Nazis? Vaygay and Eda were deep in the arcana of gravitational physics-twistors, renormalization of ghost propagators,