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The tiny speck of silver dust, which Moshendiar’s tentacle had dropped into the box, curved through the inky blackness and rapidly approached the universe at its centre. What had appeared from outside like a tiny tangle of thin blue threads consisted in fact of long thick crystal pipes. They enclosed the whole enormous universe and dwarfed the speck to insignificance.
Glowing dots of light flickered back and forth along these pipes, bright with the hues of limes and marigolds, of cherries and saffron, optical signals running from pipe to pipe like multicoloured fireflies trying to escape from a bizzare transparent maze, their lights joining and forking within the intricately interconnected mesh.
When the speck reached the outer pipes it sparkled with their reflected light, as if it was happy to see them, and began to fall between them. They were arranged in layers like busy motorways stacked on top of each other hundreds of levels deep. As it fell the speck hit many of the pipes, bouncing away with a tiny ping before curving downwards once more on its long descent. And it was not the only thing falling towards the inner universe.
From beneath every pipe there emerged a fine spray of coloured droplets, each one glowing brightly with its own hue, apricot or asparagus, beryl or bronze, droplets which fell and bounced and dripped off the layers of pipes below until the speck was falling in a dense chromatic mist.
Although far smaller than any of these droplets, yet the speck exerted a powerful influence over them. Those nearby felt a strong inward force and moved towards it, merging together to form first a drop then a ball so large that air resistance distorted it, pulling out a tear-shaped tail. This ball periodically collided with one of the pipes, splattering itself back into a thousand droplets. As the speck descended so the mist around it increased in density, supplemented by fresh supplies spraying out from every new layer of pipes until it formed a heavy shower of coloured lights.
After a long fall, the speck reached the lowest layer of pipes and emerged into a clear space filled only by the glowing rain. Now it fell freely towards the universe, gaining speed. Once more it gathered nearby droplets into a ball which, lacking horizontal pipes to collide with, grew larger than ever before. It was now falling so fast that air resistance began to evaporate droplets from its lower surface, dragging them out into a long tail, until an equilibrium was reached and the ball obtained its maximum size hundreds of metres in diameter and with a tail several kilometres long.
This liquid comet headed rapidly towards a fluffy layer of cloud which lay like a thick blanket over the inner universe far below. The cloud appeared white, the result of mixing all the colours in the droplets which it contained. From this cloud there arose dozens of huge vertical pipes, like the trunks of giant trees in a tropical rain forest, supporting the overhead pipe network like the canopy of branches in the forest. Coloured dots ran up inside these massive trunks, filtering out into the overhead pipes and spraying down to maintained the endless supply of falling rain.
It took the speck’s comet several minutes to reach the cloud. As it descended the atmosphere around it became increasingly dense. When it penetrated the cloud the comet was going so fast that it created a sonic shock wave. This precipitated a thunder storm unlike any this universe had ever experienced. Lightening flashed around it like a police escort accompanying an important new visitor.
The comet, with the speck still enclosed, fell rapidly through the cloud and, less than a minute later, finally reached the universe itself. It struck a pink layer of material which was neither a liquid nor a solid but somewhere in between, like a huge ball of pink jelly. When the comet plunged into this glutinous surface the energy of its impact immediately evaporated the droplets, boiling them into a steam-cloud which blasted a hole in the pink surface. This created a slow-moving tsunami which began to spread out from the point of impact across the viscous ocean.
Meanwhile the speck, released from its enclosing liquid comet, sank rapidly into the pink surface and entered the universe proper. It now found itself in a radically different environment. The pink ocean and feeder pipes were nowhere to be seen. Instead the speck was hurtling across a huge open space surrounded by distant walls of light. It was moving faster than it should have been possible to move, according to the laws of physics inside this universe. In a journey that should have taken hundreds of millions of years it traversed the empty space in a matter of minutes and approached one of these walls.
The wall contained what looked like millions of tiny dots of light arranged in clusters. These dots, however, were radically different from the dots of light falling from the pipes outside the universe. For one thing, these dots were all white. Also their smallness was a delusion, caused by their huge distance from the speck. Their true size only became clear when the speck, hurtling between them, actually collided with one of them.
What from a distance had seemed like a tiny white dot proved, from inside, to be a huge oval array consisting of billions of smaller glowing balls of light, red, blue and white. The speck had found a galaxy of stars, each star far larger than the speck itself. As the speck traversed this galaxy, still travelling at unnaturally high speed, the passing stars exerted upon it a weak gravitational force but the speck was so tiny that this force had almost no effect.
However the stars also had another field of force around them, a magnetic field, and this had a profound influence on the speck. It was pulled out of its previously straight path into a curve, following the lines of magnetic force, and at the same time it slowed down. Each star it passed took away a little of its energy, yet it was still travelling at colossal speed when it emerged from the galaxy. It passed through several more galaxies, giving up more and more of its energy in each one, before it completely left the wall of galaxies and travelled out into another huge empty space.
Once more it traversed the space and reached the opposite wall. The whole universe was organised into a honeycomb-structure, almost empty spaces separated by sheets of millions of galaxies arranged in clusters. The speck crossed many spaces, passed through many walls, entered many galaxies, passed close to many stars, gradually slowing down. At lower speeds its path curved more and more, following the invisible lines drawn through space by the stars’ magnetic fields.
Eventually the speck was travelling so slowly that it did not have enough energy to escape and found itself orbiting round inside one of the galaxies. Like many another it had passed through, this galaxy had the shape of a pancake whose bulging centre was crossed by a shining bar packed with stars. From the ends of this bar two long arms of gas, dust and stars were being flung out like the spiral spray from a Catherine Wheel. Newly formed blue stars glowed within the molecular clouds in these spirals, creating beautiful three-dimensional sculptures in space.
Guided by magnetic fields, the speck passed through these spiral arms many times, as well as several minor arms, loosing energy whenever it came close to any star. In the end, near the edge of one minor arm, it was captured by the field surrounding one of the stars and went into orbit. Ahead of it was a tiny dark round object. A planet. A planet so small that its gravitational field alone would not have held the speck. But the little lump of rock had something else, something emanating from its nickel and iron core, a magnetic field which pulled the speck inwards along its curving field lines.
And so it was that, after a journey lasting only a few hours, the speck reached the surface of planet Earth.
