outside the ship and fall into rank. Heaven by any definition. The company's lost plenty of spacemen there. Chance to become immortal, you know. I suspect that the Choir's time is infinity and past; present and future would cease to exist for you. Your body would wither away and you'd become an essence, still with a vague sense of your old name and address but totally wrapped up in the glory hallelujah and the singing. On the whole, not a bad place to spend the rest of eternity."

"Immortality," I breathed. "But—why—"

"According to the law of discontinuity," said Radwick, "the basic assumptions which make its existence impossible are wrong. In other words, we don't believe it could happen because of the known physical facts of the human body and the known facts of space. But if any step of reasoning along the way is wrong, then it could exist. So one link in our reasoning is wrong—and it exists."

I didn't get that and he sat down with his half of the can of beans and tried to explain it to me with his semantics blocks.

I remember arguing the point of meaning and insanity with Radwick while we were passing through the layers of time. The ship would give a jerk each time we cut into a new strip in the piled-up layers. First we would be in our own time which Radwick called white time. Then we would bump over into blue time and there was a pervading sense of oddness while our eyes adjusted to a new system of angles which made everything look like a parallelogram in shape. In blue time our drinking water was a rubbery chunk of blue stuff and the solid walls of our ship shimmered into opaque, running liquid that forever eddied and whirled and yet never drained away. You could put your hand into it and feel the walls splash and splatter like water. But our hands, and indeed, our whole bodies shifted in gaseous uncertainty, both Radwick and I becoming shapeless things of floating motion in a time where liquids were solid, solids liquid, and organic matter gaseous. Together we expanded to fill the cabin and I was fascinated by the shifts in form.

I felt the logical hammer strokes of Radwick's thinking. "You've heard ideal sound that pleases the auditory nerves. You've experienced the perfect tyranny of pain and pleasure. You've witnessed the extreme wonder of spiritual Heaven—now, my friend, feel freedom. A perfect, ideal freedom of mind and body and being that men who grub after freedom will never know."

Then we broke back into white time and everything became normal.

 Prev. P 9/15 next