Megalomania by Ian Wallace

Author:Ian Wallace [Wallace, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-17T21:00:00+00:00

In the course of her uptiming, the Sterbenräuber had made a drastic and swift lateral move in space, to a position completely outside the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.

From this viewpoint, not only was Lesser viewed whole with Greater beyond, but also Least, the third cloud invisible from Erth, could be partially descried between Lesser and Greater.

Now also noticeable was a sort of glowing and partially starred ribbon or sweeping mantle between Greater and the others, as though at some time in the past the two smaller clouds had broken away from Greater and moved away leaving behind them a trail of stardust. Generally accepted theory held that precisely this had happened some two billion years in the past. Dino was about to verify that theory in the process of verifying some other cosmic theories—and weaving all of them into explosive pattern.

Something else was visible when you viewed the three clouds in transcolor as Flaherty and Dino and Roily now did. What they now perceived in arousing color-drama were three galactic ion-fountains in hyper-energized upward-downward play, one arising out of the heart of each Magellanic Cloud, fed by and reenergizing the ionic mantle that cocooned each galaxy. In columns of blue-hot plasmic flow, the fountains ascended tens of thousands of light-years into intergalactic celestiality, while in-between columns of somewhat cooler red-hot gas descended back into the mantles. In her stirred fancy, Roily could imagine the ferocity of the supernova explosions, about one per century per galaxy, which powered the spectacular eruptions and therefore wove the transcolor-glowing cocoons.

Dino murmured: “Roily, have you experienced transcolor displays before this one?”

“I should hope so! They’ve been around since the twentieth century, haven’t they?”

“Not quite. Way back then, what they used was called false color; it was added by computer to telemetrically transmitted unicolor photos. But our transcolor is direct imagery with the human visual range expanded to embrace a far wider spectrum of frequencies, enabling us to see these ionic mantles and fountains just as we really would see them if our naked eyes could accept a wider range of light-colors…But that’s enough theory for now. Flaherty?”

“Sir?”

“Be good enough to approach the clouds in such a way that their images on your major viewscreen will be as follows: they will almost fill your screen both laterally and vertically, including the fountains, yet each of the three clouds will continue to be visible.”

Having executed, Flaherty queried: “Shall I hold this position, sir?”

“Hold relative spatial position only, while we are changing temporal position.”

Then, concentrating on continuance of his enwrapment by Flaherty, Dino time-dove. Or, in another phrasing, perversely and with enormous energy expenditure he uptimed profoundly from the already deep uptime position of Sterbenräuber, moving up-current into remote past. And Flaherty did stay with him; and consequently, so did entranced Kolly.

The pastward-travel principle was simple enough, and Kolly had learned to understand it without comprehending it. Advanced tempigation theory was based on the analog that the passing of time ( = the course of germinal development) generates an

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