Time Crystal

Working on Chapter 6, having polished the previous five and feeling pretty happy with them, I suddenly realise that the whole basis of one section of the plot falls apart. Don’t want to spoil things but it has to do with which way up the ocean is and why the characters need to go back in time (which is the reason I’m writing the story). A few years ago I would have fallen apart too, sinking into a state of despair, but it’s the experience of having faced and solved this type of problem many times before which gives me the confidence to say ‘Ok, let’s see where this leads.’

I sat down and set about thinking the problem through calmly, drawing story-boards, analysing the problem, exploring options, seeking new opportunities, re-writing the scenario, extending the plot. I finally found a solution which deepens and enhances the story in new ways. The moral: There is always a way round any problem. Often once you’ve found it it seems so obvious you can’t believe you didn’t see it immediately. What was a problem becomes an exciting new feature.

I’m taking August off to write, although work keeps imposing itself through emails and telephone calls. I now understand how the macroverse works in the story, and who lives in that place within which our Universe is merely a tiny part. I’ve just published Chapters 1 and 2 here, reverting to the earlier versions following fill_up_with_silence’s devastating criticism of the first version of the macroverse start.  (You can see all these earlier verions by scrolling down the Categories list on the left). It took me about a month to revise each of these. At this rate it would take about 4 years to write volume 1. Still I feel the writing and story are finally coming up to the required standard.

Thanks to everyone who’s helped and advised. I could not have done this without you. Please keep those comments coming!

Maria awoke screaming.  For a few seconds she couldn’t remember where she was, couldn’t think of anything except the pains, one stabbing into her abdomen, just below her right breast, the other spreading slowly round into her lower back.  Her eyes were stuck together as if she had been crying in her sleep.  After a few seconds of panic she remembered the breathing exercise they had taught her in the antenatal clinic and began panting, her mouth wide open, forcing herself to relax.  It’s just a contraction Maria, she told herself.  Don’t worry.  The panic subsided but fear replaced it.  She couldn’t fool herself.  It wasn’t just a contraction.  Something was very wrong down there.
Still panting, still dopey with sleep, with her eyes still stuck shut, she tried to feel her bump.  Her right arm wouldn’t move no matter how much she yanked.  It was fixed down by her side.  The panic came back and grew as she found her left arm also wouldn’t move.  She forced her eyes open like oysters.  Her head was shrouded in orange plastic.  Through the aperture she saw a man’s chest close beside her, his body at right-angles to hers.  She could not see his face.  His head and shoulders were hidden by a shifting pattern of green, red and black patches.  The instant she saw it she went cold.  The coloured areas glowed so brightly they hurt her eyes and made her squint.  I must be having some kind of migraine.  After all the stress of this morning it’s not surprising.  But at least she knew who he was and where she was.
‘What’s happening, Robert?’ Maria gasped, hardly able to speak from the pain.  He did not answer.  What’s wrong with him?  She had never had any confidence in Robert Moore.  ‘He’s very experienced,’ the chief firefighter George had said, peering down at her as she lay in the stretcher on the balcony high up on the ATLAS cavern wall.  ‘He’s an ambulance man as well as a firefighter.  He helped deliver a couple of babies in England before he came to CERN.  I think they have babies the same way there as we do here so you’ll be in very safe hands.  We’re going to attach a rope to the stretcher and winch you up through the shaft.  You’re well strapped in so you’ll be perfectly safe.’ But when Robert climbed over the handrail he almost slipped into the cavern and as George let out his rope and they swung away from the balcony Robert had seemed confused.  He didn’t speak French very well and couldn’t follow what they were saying on the radio.  Now he wasn’t even answering her.  She glanced up out of the stretcher.  The strange, coloured pattern didn’t look like any migraine she had ever had before, but today was unlike any day she had ever lived through.
‘Robert,’ she called, louder than before.  ‘What’s happening?’
# # # #
‘I can hear something, Lord.’
‘What?’ Sam could hear the excitement in Michael’s voice.
‘A woman screamed and then I think she said What’s happening, Robert?  She was a bit muffled.’
‘Is it Maria Kissov?  The pregnant woman with the broken ankle?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘She’s no use to me.  I want someone healthy.  Isn’t there anyone else?’
‘I don’t know, Lord.  I haven’t looked through all the crystals yet.’
‘Then look, Samuel, and for both our sakes be quick.  They could arrive any second.’
It took Sam several minutes to look through every one of the sixty or so crystal walls that made up his cavern.  As he did so he kept wondering what Michael meant: They could arrive any second.
# # # #
Robert still didn’t answer.  Why can’t I see his face?  A red harness was strapped around his grey uniform and clipped to a metal ring that supported the stretcher.  Maria could see a rope, straight and taut, coming down through the pattern and descending to the ring.  The rope from the shaft, she decided, and there was another rope running across from the ring, curving slightly, and going out through the side of the pattern.  It had to be George’s rope.  He had been using it to control their descent as they swung out from the balcony into the centre of the cavern.  Four thick yellow straps were tied to the bottom of the ring and came down to the corners of the stretcher.
But that strange pattern cut across the top of Robert’s torso, at about shoulder level.  She moved her eyes but still she could not see anything above his chest.  Normally a migraine only affected one part of her vision.  She should be able to see his face if she moved her eyes, but this time, no matter where she looked, she still could not see it.  The pattern kept getting in the way.  This is the strangest migraine I’ve ever had.
Another odd thing was how the whole pattern seemed to surround her, enclosing her, adding to her feeling of being trapped.  It’s like being inside a bubble, she thought.  Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like, a slowly changing, gigantic, glistening soap bubble.  It enclosed the stretcher and most of Robert’s body, everything but his head and shoulders, hiding her view of the rest of the cavern.
The contraction grew stronger and pain encompassed her lower body.  As it intensified, she tried to concentrate on the pattern, hoping that would help her to relax and take her mind off the pain.  The green areas were the largest.  They sprawled about like a child’s splash-daubed painting.  Narrow red bands ran between the green, rippling and glowing with their own inner light.  In sharp contrast, the heart of each green area was totally black.  It’s quite beautiful really, she told herself, trying to make herself relax.
This certainly didn’t look anything like her usual optical effects from migraine.  For one thing, it was not flickering.  Instead, the green areas were moving slowly, the red bands parting to let them pass, then merging behind them.  The red is like a river.  A river of blood?  No, she reassured herself, it’s not the right colour for blood; it’s more like red wine!  The contraction began to fade as she tried to imagine the taste of it, a good strong Cabernet, and suddenly realised how thirsty she was.  She started calling Robert again.
# # # #
‘No, Lord, I can’t see anyone else.’ Sam was bitterly disappointed.  He had looked through every crystal and not seen Catriona, but at least Maria was alive.
‘Then it will have to be the Kissov woman.  Is the firefighter Robert Moore still with her?’
‘Yes, she was calling him.’
‘Help her get out of the stretcher and see if she can revive Moore.  He’s our best hope.’
‘Help her?  How?  I can’t even see her.’ All Sam had seen was a white sheet of plastic with metal rivets.
‘Talk to her.  If you can hear her then she can probably hear you.’
Sam moved his head, trying to find again the crystal which contained the white plastic.  He only heard Maria when he was looking straight at that.  As he found it he heard Maria calling.
‘Can you hear me?  Help, Robert!’ Maria sounded desperate.
‘I can hear you,’ Sam said.
‘Oh thank God.  What’s happening?  What was that blue flash?  Why have–’
Sam moved his head to one side so he could not hear her.  He hoped that she would not be able to hear him as he said ‘She thinks Robert’s talking to her, Lord.’
‘Is she still in the stretcher?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Try to get her out and revive Moore.’
‘Can you get out of the stretcher?’ Sam said into the centre of the crystal.
There was a pause.  ‘Who’s there?’ Maria’s voice was not very clear but Sam thought she sounded frightened.
She knows I’m not Robert, Sam thought.  ‘It’s all right, Maria.’
‘Who are you?’ Sam heard her very clearly this time.  She was screaming.
‘She’s frightened, Lord.  She wants to know who’s talking to her.’
Michael thought for a few moments.  ‘Tell her you’re an angel who’s trying to help her.’
‘I can’t say that!  Why can’t I just tell her the truth?’
A dark shadow crossed Michael’s face.  ‘Do you know the truth?  And if you did, is this the right time to explain it all to her?  She needs urgent help and so do we. She was raised as a Roman Catholic.  She’ll believe you.  Tell her you are an angel.  You can tell her the truth later, once we have saved the Earth.’
‘I am an angel,’ Sam said into the crystal, thinking she’s never going to believe this.  ‘I’m trying to help you, Maria.  Please trust me.  You need my help and I need yours.  Can you get out of the stretcher?’
There was a long pause.  Then very slowly she said ‘Who are you?’
‘She doesn’t believe me, Lord.  I’m going to have to tell her who I am.’
‘All right then do it.  Tell her we need the crystal.  Tell her it’s urgent.’
# # # #
It was a man’s voice, muffled and hard to hear.  He was speaking English and at first she assumed it was Robert Moore.  The firefighter hardly spoke any French.  But when he said ‘I am an angel,’ she knew it wasn’t Robert.
‘It’s Sam Fitzpatrick, Maria,’ the voice said.
‘Mr Fitzpatrick?’ She lifted her head as much as she could and peered out of the aperture in the stretcher cover.  All she could see was Robert’s chest and the bubble.  ‘I can’t see you.  Where are you?’
‘I don’t know, Maria.  We were absorbed by the black hole and…’
Maria’s mind went numb.  Ever since the LHC had started up people had been talking about making black holes.  Every scientist was hoping they would make one and every crank was afraid they would.  As an Official Guide it was her job to reassure visitors.  She used to stand in the centre of the large round Globe of Innovation and repeat what she had been told to say.  ‘Scientists believe there are two types of black hole.  There are large ones formed by collapsing stars out in the Galaxy.  They last a long time.  And there are very small ones, such as we might make here in CERN, which will only last for a very short time, a tiny fraction of a second.  They are so small and so short-lived that they would be perfectly safe.’ So it had been a complete shock this morning when Michael Zhang said they had created a persistent black hole that could last for hours.
‘…Zhang says we need the crystal,’ Sam was saying.  ‘He says it’s urgent.’
‘Michael Zhang?  Has he been absorbed too?  This doesn’t make any sense.  If you were absorbed by a black hole you would be killed.’
‘No, I know we should have been but we weren’t.  Now listen, Michael says we need the–’
‘I need a doctor, Sam.  Something’s wrong.  I’ve got a terrible pain in my, in my…’ She couldn’t think of the English for abdomen. ‘…where the baby is.’
‘Is Robert still alive?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.  ‘He won’t answer.’
‘Can you get out of the stretcher?’
‘No, I’m strapped in.  I can’t move my arms.’
‘You’ve got to get out, Maria.  Try to get out.  I can’t do anything to help you.’
‘I’ll try,’ she said.  She twisted her head forward as far as she could, examining the orange flaps to see how they were fastened, and her eyes fell on something dark.  A dark patch, where the cover reached over her bump.  ‘Oh God!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’  With an effort of will she put it out of her mind.
She looked at the stretcher cover again, keeping her eyes away from the stain.  The two halves of the cover overlapped, buckled together on the outside.  For several minutes she wriggled and strained, making room by breathing out, finally managing to push one hand through the gap, undo one buckle with straining fingers and free one arm.  She reached up to touch Robert’s chest. ‘Robert?’ His chest wasn’t moving.  She shuddered.  He isn’t breathing!  She slipped her hand under his harness but could feel no heartbeat.  You’ve got to be alive, Robert!  In desperation she slid her hand up his chest as far as she could.  You’ve got to help me!  Her fingers touched the bubble and she felt a hard surface then a sharp, tingling shock flashed through her finger-tips and she pulled her hand away.
Her eyes travelled across the pattern, more afraid than before, but she had the measure of it now and could see how it wrapped around her, or rather, around the baby.  That’s where the middle of it seemed to be, although it  was hard to judge with the pattern constantly shifting.
She poked Robert like an obstinate horse and shouted but he still didn’t move.  All that effort to free my arm has got me nowhere.
‘Have you got out?’ Sam said.
‘I’ve got one arm out.  Robert won’t move.’
‘Try to get out.’
With fresh determination she pushed the flap open a bit more, managed to yank her other arm out and reached forward, bending towards the other buckles.  Excruciating pains shot through her abdomen and ankle.  After trying several times she managed to open the plastic cover.  Oh God!  Her crumpled gaping jacket revealed a large mark, dark against her white blouse.  In the light from the bubble it looked dark brown.  It’s just a flesh wound, she told herself, struggling to calm the rising tide of fear.  Looks worse than it is.  She closed the jacket and tried to button it, to hide the stain, to seal it away.  It’s not serious.  The pain isn’t too bad, not really.  I’d be in agony if something had gone into my womb.  It can’t have hurt the baby.  First thing is to talk to Robert.  He knows about birthing babies.  He’s my best hope of getting help.
Pushing the orange cover aside, Maria raised her hand, grasped Robert’s harness and began to pull herself out of the stretcher.  Pain throbbed through her ankle.  She looked down, moved her leg to avoid scraping her foot on the cover, pulled the harness again, looked up and gasped.  The bubble was moving up Robert’s neck and the pattern had completely changed.  Red and green rings were swirling round, completely encircling her.  New little red and green circles appeared in the bubble above her, opened out like coloured ripples and moved down the bubble until she was completely enclosed by moving circles of glowing colour.  She stopped pulling but the bubble kept moving slowly up Robert’s face.  She saw his chin, his mouth open in a silent shout, his flared nostrils, his eyes wide and staring, his face frozen in an agonised death-mask.
She grasped the harness to stop herself moving as a long low moan escaped her lips.
‘What’s wrong?’ Sam said.
‘He’s dead.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ she screamed.
‘I’m sorry.  Stay calm, Maria.  Everything’s going to be all right. Are you out of the stretcher?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you safe?  You won’t fall will you?’
She looked down.  ‘No.  I seem to be floating.’ For a moment she felt dizzy then realised that the stretcher below her was slowly spinning round on the ends of the four yellow straps.  As it spun the bottom part of the bubble turned with it and a blue light swept across Robert’s body.
‘I can see a blue light,’ she said.
‘Where’s it coming from?’
‘From under the flaps of the stretcher.’
She heard Sam say ‘She can see a blue light, Lord,’ and something inside her head seemed to shift to one side.  Was he talking to God?  Without thinking she began to pray quietly, her eyes closed. ‘Gegrüßet seist du, Maria, voll der Gnade, der Herr ist mit dir.’  Guiltily she began wondering how long it had been since she had said these words.
‘Michael thinks it’s a piece of crystal.  Try to get it, Maria.  It will help us.’
Michael?  She pulled on the straps running down to the stretcher.  Was it Michael that he was calling Lord?  The stretcher began to float easily up towards her.  The bottom half of the bubble moved too, coloured rings running down and closing behind the stretcher.  The pattern on the top half of the bubble stayed in random blotches.  Then she noticed a circular ridge where the two halves of the bubble met and realised she was looking through a round window, looking out of one bubble into another one.  A second bubble!  The two bubbles overlapped and merged together at the ridge, making a shape like a figure of 8.  The bottom bubble was centred on the stretcher, the top one on her bump.  She was so engrossed in watching the ridge move towards her that the stretcher almost hit her.  She had to fend it off, then grasp and hold it to stop it floating away.
She opened the orange covers and looked inside.  Something was sticking up through the hard white plastic base, something that glowed pale blue, deep down inside, near where her feet had been.
‘I can see you, Maria!’ Sam said.  ‘What can you see?’
‘It looks like a piece of glass.’
‘Can you get it?’
She pushed the flaps back and ran her fingers over the glass.  It was smooth, with straight clean edges poking through the stretcher’s base.  It glowed with an inner light, casting shadows across the flaps.
‘No, it’s stuck in the plastic.’
‘You must.  Michael says you must get it.’
She tried again but her trembling fingers could not pull it out.  With a sudden inspiration she turned the stretcher over and reached across the bottom of the base.  A larger chunk of the glass was sticking out.  She grasped it and pulled.  It came away in her hand.
‘I’ve got it.’
‘Good girl!  Now you can escape.  Use the rope to get up to the surface.’
With a shudder of relief she put the glass into her jacket pocket, eager to get away from the dead man.  As she did so the two bubbles seemed to merge into one.  She pulled on the rope, leaving the stretcher and the firefighter behind.  She glanced back.  Robert’s dead face was slipping away behind her, disappearing from sight as the coloured ripples closed over him.  I wonder what killed you, she thought.
She pulled herself along the rope as fast as she could, hand over hand.  It wasn’t hard work.  The amazing thing was that she didn’t fall back down again.  It was as if she was weightless, floating like the stretcher.  The red and green rings ran quickly past her.  It wasn’t until she reached the balcony that she realised she was pulling the wrong rope.

A sharp contraction of terror gripped Sam Fitzpatrick’s bowel as the hollow tube swung the other way, its thick electrical cable was torn from his grasp and he was hurled out of the tube, his suit jacket flapping against his body like slow hand-claps.  So it was true.  Time really does seem to slow down when your life is at stake. Coloured raindrops stung his face one at a time like a swarm of lazy wasps as he tried to stop himself shitting his pants.
The rain sprayed from a dense spiders web of pipes surrounding him.  The pipes appeared to be transparent for he could see the coloured raindrops moving along inside them. As he spun slowly through the air he saw the web curving away into the distance like a thick blanket surrounding the planet.  Sam’s incontinence problem got worse as his field of vision moved and he saw how high he was.  The pink planet was so far away it looked as smooth as a billiard ball.  The thick legs supporting the spiders web seemed to dwindle away to nothing as they ran down to it.
Sam kept spinning and something else came into view, a long white oval shape floating in the air below him like an airship.  Two human-looking arms and legs stuck out sideways from its long curving flanks.  One of the hands was holding the tube he had been hiding in.  Sam saw the hand swing the tube and smash it into one of the rain pipes.  Fragments of broken pipe fell away towards the distant ocean in a long line of tiny sparkling dots.
Sam’s stomach heaved as gravity pulled him over the smooth apex of his flight and he began to accelerate downwards.  A moment later the whole scene was lit by a white flash so bright it hurt his eyes.  All the pipes surrounding the planet had lit up as if somebody had thrown a switch on an enormous neon sign.  He closed his lids tight against the blinding light but still he saw every detail, black against a white background; the row of dots, the oval airship, the spiders web of pipes, the thick legs.
Then something brushed gently against Sam’s chest, he put out his arms and pushed the thing away.  Whatever was touching him pressed harder against his body.  It felt like a long smooth cylinder with many flat sides.  It had to be one of the rain pipes.  It was the wrong shape to be part of the airship.  Sam made himself relax, giving himself up to it, realising that this was his only hope of salvation.  He opened his eyes.  The rain had stopped.
He was sliding head-first at high speed along the smooth pipe.  The flash was fading from his retinas revealing a faint blue glow within the pipe beneath him.  The coloured raindrops had all gone.  The pipe was as transparent as blue glass.  Dead ahead, about a kilometre along the pipe, was a place where dozens of other blue pipes met this one.  They radiated out from a central point like a star-burst.  If he fell into that junction Sam knew he was going to be crushed in the narrowing crevice between the pipes.
As he neared the junction he felt the pipe he was sliding along bend so that he began going up hill and slowing down.  By the time he reached the junction he was moving very slowly.  At the centre of the star-burst he saw a gap, a place where one pipe was missing.  The junction appeared to be hollow.  At the last moment the pipe he was on tilted over and dropped him through the gap into the hollow space.  The crystal directly below him moved to break his fall.  He slithered across the floor and finally came to rest against one wall.
He lay still, dazed and amazed, looking around.  He was in a sort of crystal cave made from the flat ends of many transparent pipes.  Through them he could see how they radiated away into the distance.  Their far ends joined other pipes forming further star-burst junctions.  There was just one gap in the cave high above him, the gap he had dropped through, a place where one pipe appeared to be missing.  He was certain that these pipes had caught him, stopped him falling to his death and deposited him safely in this place, but how and why?  But uppermost in Sam’s mind was Catriona.  The last time he had seen his step-daughter she had been looking down at him from a balcony high up on the cavern wall.  Was she still alive, or had she too been absorbed by the black hole?
Sam felt the wall beside his arm move away and turned to see the wall swing out, turn and move quickly back.  Before he had time to move it hit the floor beside him and sliced a neat strip out of his jacket sleeve with a ringing musical chime.  If his hand had been a few centimetres further along it would have been chopped off.  He pulled his arm away from the wall and looked around in alarm.
All the pipes around him were moving, gently striking one another.  Even the floor was rocking, lifting and falling.  This motion was accompanied by more musical tones, like a child playing a glockenspiel.  The wall beside him moved again, a yawning gap opened up and slammed closed.  Frightened of falling through or having an arm or leg chopped away, he chose his moment and pushed himself away from the wall.  The pipes’ movements were growing more violent all the time.  Within a minute they were hammering into each other with the deafening clangs of cathedral bells.  The floor was shaking so much that Sam was tossed about like a pea on a drum, his balding head and crumpled suit unable to stop him sliding across the smooth surface, slippery as ice, towards the edges where the walls were crashing into the floor like guillotines.
The noise from the clashing pipes was so loud that Sam hardly noticed the other noise at first, but when he did it resonated in his soul.  It was a primordial blast of pure hate, the angry bellow of an insane bull, so frightful he turned his head, unable to stop himself searching for the thing that was sending out this terrible siren of disaster.  The airship was bending and thrashing about franticly trying to escape from a dense net which surrounded it.  The spiders web had collapsed around it and was now holding it fast.   The metal tube had fallen from the airship’s hand and the little arms and legs protruding from its curving flanks were pulling and kicking the web.  It was almost doubling up as it bent from side to side, twisting and distorting the net.  It was this struggle, transmitted through the network of pipes, which was causing his crystal cave to shake.  As the airship almost doubled up, Sam glimpsed both ends of its long white body and each was a vision of horror.
On one end was a face, huge as a monument carved into a mountain.  A man’s face.  A Chinese man’s face.   It was unmistakably the face of Dr. Michael Zhang.  Sam’s heart almost stopped when he saw it.  How had Zhang’s face been blown up to such enormous proportions and fixed on the airship like the figure-head on a Viking warship?  Then the airship bent the other way and the rear end of its body came into view.  Sam stared at it, unable to believe his eyes.  It was shaped like a pair of buttocks, human buttocks, and there was a dark dot in the cleft between them.  This was not an airship, it was some sort of animal.
Disbelief turned to horror when he saw the gondola hanging below them in the shape of a man’s private parts.  They were huge, much larger than the legs sticking out above, and were swinging from side to side as the airship tried to escape from the net.  Sam tried to swallow down the vomit that rose in his throat but his mouth was completely dry.  He watched the monster thrash about for a few more seconds, white, naked, bloated as a dead whale, its futile efforts to escape shaking even the little hollow cave in which he lay.
He looked at the monster and with an effort called ‘Stop!’ The sound came out of his dried lips as a stifled gasp.  Even as he tried once more he felt the floor lift like a trampoline and he was airborne, hurtling across the cave towards one crystal wall surrounded by gaps.  The noise that erupted from his throat surprised him; the visceral shriek of an animal being taken to slaughter.  It echoed around the crystal cave.  The monster heard him and stopped struggling.  The last wave of vibration travelled across the network, the walls of the cave hammered together for the final time, the shaking ceased and silence descended, broken only by the dull thud as Sam’s head crashed into the wall, followed by the crumpled mass of his limp body.  With a groan he slid down the wall, across the smooth floor and a short way up the opposite wall before falling back and gliding gently to a halt, trembling and breathless, battered and bruised, but still alive.
Then a voice like thunder rolled around inside the crystal cave.  ‘Get up, Samuel!’
Sam turned his head.  The distant monster was still trapped in the crystal net but it had stopped struggling.
‘I know you can hear me, Samuel.  Come on, get up!  I need your help and we don’t have much time.  Stand up!  Don’t you want to save the world?’
‘Of course I do, Dr. Zhang, but how–’
‘Do not use that name!’ A darkness suffused Michael’s gigantic face. ‘I used to be Michael Zhang, but now you will call me Lord.’
‘You? I certainly will not!’ You were odd before, Sam thought, but now you’ve gone totally insane.
Michael’s eyes narrowed.  ‘I am as wise as what you would call a god.  You don’t believe me?  I can easily prove it.  For example, I know everything about you.  You are Samuel James Fitzpatrick.  You were born in a labourer’s cottage on Paddy O’Hearns’ Farm at Ballycallen, near Cork, at 2:54 in the afternoon of 7th of July 1959.  You were the second child of an alcoholic called James Rossiman Fitzpatrick and a depressive woman Irene Juliet Fitzpatrick, nee Blanding.  Your family lived there for the first six years of your life.  On August 9th, 1965…’
Sam couldn’t believe it as every detail of his past was reeled out, including many facts he didn’t even know himself but which all had the ring of truth. And when Michael described his father’s infidelity with a neighbour, a close family secret, and correctly stated the woman’s name, Sam was convinced. ‘Stop!’ he cried. ‘How do you know all this?’
‘I know everything, Samuel.  Everything!  The things I have told you so far are trivial.  I know the deepest secrets of what man calls the Universe.  Every secret that science struggled to understand has been revealed to me.  Now call me Lord.’
Sam stared at Michael’s enormous face, his bloated body trapped in the crystal network, helpless, naked and obscene.  How can I use such a word for such a monster?  But Michael has clearly been changed physically and he certainly knows a lot about me.  Who knows, perhaps he really is a god.  And I haven’t got a clue what to do, so I need him as much as he seems to need me.  ‘Very well,’ Sam said, ‘I will call you Lord if that’s what you want.  Now tell me, Lord, is Catriona still alive?’
‘That’s one of the things I want you to find out.’
‘You mean you don’t know?  I thought you knew everything?’
‘I know everything that happened in the Universe from its creation until the moment we left.  I do not know–’
‘We left…’ Sam couldn’t take this in.  ‘We’ve left the Universe?’
‘That is the Universe.’ Sam looked at Michael.  His little arm was pointing straight down at the pink planet.  ‘But I do not know what happened to it after we were sucked into the black hole.’
‘Was the Earth absorbed too?’ Sam said, afraid of the answer.
‘That’s one of the things I want you to find out.  Stand up!  We don’t have much time.’
Sam tried to get to his feet.  Immediately he slipped and fell heavily back onto the shiny crystal floor.
‘Take your shoes and socks off,’ Michael said.
Sam removed his footwear and managed to stand.
‘Look down the middle of each crystal,’ Michael told him.  ‘If the Earth is still there you should be able to see it.’
Sam chose one of the crystal walls at random and moved his head sideways, not sure where the middle of the wall was.  At first he saw nothing but the long pipe tapering away into the distance.  It had seven flat sides and their edges seemed to meet in a point.  He moved his head so the converging lines looked symmetrical and for a moment he glimpsed a small rectangular shape floating like a ghost far down inside the pipe.  Slowly he moved back and saw it again.  It was only visible when one eye was in exactly the right position.  It was very small, as if it was very far away.  What was it?
He put his hand inside his jacket.  He was surprised and somehow comforted, to feel his spectacles still safely tucked away in his shirt pocket.  He put them on and saw it slightly more clearly, a blue metal cabinet with two doors, the sort you might see in a smart garage workshop, but it was still very small and very far away.  At the sight of it Sam’s heart stopped beating for a second.  This was beyond his wildest hopes.  It obviously belonged on the Earth, not on this weird pink planet.  He leaned forward, trying to get a better view, and the cabinet moved towards him so rapidly he gasped and moved back, afraid of being hit.  The cabinet moved away from him.  Its movement, he realised, was some sort of optical illusion.  He leaned forward again and once more the cabinet moved towards him, so close that he could see marks on its doors; four deep dents, two marked with a scratch.
Eagerly he turned and looked into another crystal.  Once more he moved his head so the vanishing perspective of the pipe’s edges looked symmetrical and a red metal box came into view, fixed to a white concrete wall, a cone sticking out of one end and some pipes out of the other.  Sam stared at it.  How could he see things which seemed so earthly when he clearly was not on the Earth?  Eager to see more, Sam began looking around at the other crystal walls.  In one he saw a yellow metal girder, the sort you might see a crane moving along in a warehouse.  In another wall there was a red cabinet with Savox on the glass door.  Another showed thick cables and a blue metal balcony.  Sam’s heart soared.  The last time he had seen Catriona she had been standing on a balcony, half-way up the tall cavern wall.  He was leaning forward, eager to see more, when Michael’s voice boomed across the sky like a thunderclap.
‘What can you see?’
‘I can see the cavern.’
‘Call me Lord.’
‘I can see the cavern, Lord.’
‘I knew it!’ Michael’s voice was triumphant. ‘Which parts?’
Sam described each image in turn.
‘Can you see any people?’ Michael asked.
‘No, Lord.’
‘Have you looked through every crystal?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You must look into all of them.  Be quick!’
Sam longed to see Catriona.  If only she was alive, it would give him something to live for.  Once again he began peering into the crystals, wondering why this urgency, checking them all methodically.  It was after about a dozen crystals, as he was looking at a sheet of white plastic punctured by large rivets, that he heard a woman scream.