Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 40
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    CHAPTER FORTY

    Don Andrews was talking with Weissenbaum again. The old man was up to his usual tricks, weaving theories in and out of folklore from a thousand years ago.
    "Someday we will truly understand the loophole," the great physicist expounded, "and how the universe is slipping. But there will always remain another unscientific fact, another loophole through which we pass, when we are born and when we die. There is no explanation, no way to understand. You are yourself. You enter, you exist, and then you leave."
    Silly old fool, Don Andrews thought. Death is not so hard to grasp. The suicide of hundreds had not bothered him. Why should one more?
    He could not move. Don Andrews called out for the doors of the cathedral to open. He too would be a colonist. The only response was a gurgle deep within his throat.
    What did the Culminate understand? Was it so far beyond him? Turbulence destroyed the Pinta. Nothing in the theory of the loophole could account for turbulence. The theory was unscientific, the truth was not. To a superior intelligence, the loophole had to have a structure. Was it possible somehow to ride a standing wave in the flow of space, to pull apart the alpha quanton into its local partials, and to choose among them like a fistful of arrows? Could the Culminate travel anywhere on such an arrow, harnessing the power that had thrown the Pinta uncontrollably around the moon? The answer lay beyond. Don Andrews would follow.
    He was not breathing now. Once more his darkened mind called out for the cathedral doors to open. And at that moment something stirred along the wall. The doors began to move.
    As all the air roared out around him, Don Andrews could see that portion of the sky in which the Culminate was floating, invisible, transparent. High above the crater, in its space behind the moon, a sudden flash filled up the sky. I recognize now, just as I write, this was the jump that made the northern lights last spring, when I first went out on the beach to join the whales. It was the Culminate, passing through the loophole, forming one last image on Don Andrews' open eye.
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