Momentum carried it. I know that now. The looped coils were swept aside. The apparatus beneath it buckled and split. Beyond it, Nebel's highborn gunmen gaped aghast. They vanished behind its sleek circumference, but Wilhelm Nebel was not of their stupid breed. With a roar he flung his huge body high across the swelling arc of the sphere's circumference. A moment he slithered on its top, sprawled like a toad, his great face crimson—then it crashed him against the ceiling like a toad under a giant's heel. Fragments of concrete began to fall.
I was up the stair, the remaining sheet of Dampier's equations in my hand. I was at the outer door as the walls buckled and fell in ruin. I was running across the littered lawn, staring over my shoulder at the giant silver globe that towered a hundred feet above me. Then it burst!
The force of the explosion hurled me a hundred yards across the fields. I lay gasping in the wet grass, staring glassy-eyed at the column of violet flame that plumed into the sky. I got shakily to my feet and stared into the smoking pit where Dampier's fortress had been. At last I remembered the scrap of crumpled paper in my hand.
The margins of Dampier's paper were full of Bill's penciled notes. At the end he had added five neat equations, and below them the remaining space was filled with his closely written lines.
"These added equations prove Dampier's analysis to be incomplete," he had written. "Such a totally reflecting zone has every characteristic of the closed, intangible boundary of the Einsteinian universe. It may be considered the boundary of such a universe in miniature, containing every force and body of the greater outside universe which it reflects. Neither is more real, in the physical sense, than the other. There is no way of disproving that we may not in turn be the images of some greater universe than ours, outside of the Einsteinian boundaries of our Space and Time.
"Jeans, and others, have postulated that the size of such a closed universe must depend upon the number of physical particles included in it, and that it will expand, as our universe is expanding, until that size is reached. Dampier's closed zone, containing the same number of image-particles as our own outside universe, must expand to the same size, and at a vastly greater rate.
"It may be that the cosmic atom, postulated by Abbe Lemaitre, from which our universe was born, was the creation of some Dampier of a super-universe, who failed to check its growth, and that its swelling bubble is crushing the mighty cosmos of which it is the ultimate image, as Dampier's completed zone would crush our own."
Bill Porter's scribbled notes stop there. In the split millionth of a second before the twist of Nebel's fingers could throw the balanced sphere over the boundary to completion, his body shorted the power that fed the great machine. It was in time! Momentum of growth, gained in that instant of which Dampier had told me, swept Nebel and his gunmen to their death, and as the zone collapsed the incalculable energies trapped in it burst forth in a holocaust of atomic flame. A millionth of a second—less perhaps—but in it chance, and whatever power it is that rules chance, had checked the thing whose illimitable growth would have swept our universe before it in an avalanche of destruction.
If, as Bill Porter thought, our universe is just such a swelling bubble in the vaster world which it mirrors, I wonder whether in that world there is not another Dampier, another Nebel, another Bill Porter going to his death. I wonder if Time itself is not reflected in some contorted scale in such a cosmic bubble, and the entire history of a universe reproduced in the instant before it bursts.
I wonder, too, if one day our bubble-universe will not burst as Dampier's did, robbing us in that future instant of all reality—the snuffed out images in an almost perfect mirror. For as our Dampier did, so did the greater Dampier whose image he was. As he failed so did that other Dampier fail. Perhaps, in his turn, he but mirrored greater things beyond. Where then—in what inconceivable realm beyond Space and Time—is the reality of which we are the ultimate image?