Digby's Era of Eminence, Chapter Six

After Digby had gone, Pop found himself reading from the book which remained open on the table. There were pictures as well as words -- ink sketches of physical models, and equations with some symbols Greek and some unrecognizable. The book was about gravity. Pop was not particularly skilled at abstract or mathematical thought, but he did have a sharp intuition and an insatiable curiosity for the odd or fanciful. And as he was still rolling the idea of competing in the bowling tournament over in his head, a connection sparked, like two atoms bonding. All massive objects have a gravitational pull, and bowling balls are quite massive. Usually they don't draw objects in, however, because their force is very weak. But if he could construct a ball heavy enough, he might be able to suck the pins in, even if he missed entirely!

The books Digby had been reading all day would be of no further use; they were inspiration books, and genius was only one percent inspiration. This would be an engineering project.

For the sake of being prepared, he did it backwards. He started at the arena in the great hall, standing humbled beneath the floating tetrahedron. This was where he would tackle the pins with his mega-strike. The ball would arrive at this location from down the lane, behind the boundary. In order for it to get moving in the first place, it would need to be accelerated somehow. From here he trekked out the door, up the beach, and toward the rolling bluffs at the center of the island. He scaled to the summit and gazed out across the lush, bustling tropics. This point would be his workspace.

As his workspace was currently lacking a supermassive bowling ball, he supposed it would have to come together somehow. To stick all the pieces together densely, a tremendous force would be required. Furthermore, it would need to come from all directions at once. The above and below directions were the easy part; a Boeing 747 was both heavy and exceedingly fast, and the earth was utterly immovable. For the other directions he rounded up a herd of ninety-nine angry bulls.

The material was critical. After much deliberation, Pop settled on Osmium, which is twice as heavy as lead, and not even unstable (it was no good to have precious particles lost to radiation). Over the course of two days, he collected all the osmium from Earth, Goksanpok, and Epsilon-667A59, which together turned out to be the size of a Ford Explorer with the stones placed haphazardly in a two-foot-deep hole in the ground.

Pop was forced to fly by himself the plane he had hijacked, since it was difficult to find volunteers for a suicide bombing mission from a crowd of touring sports-fans. The bulls drove themselves because they were angry. They converged on the hunk of metal just as the aircraft was coming down, and there was a blinding light and a deafening sound, as bones and cockpits shattered and atoms fused.

Pop came to his senses several minutes later, drifting amongst the reef. Excited and terrified, he darted through the streets and hiked up the hills, to the place where his experiment awaited conclusion. After he burrowed through the smoking wreckage and blackened beef, he discovered his rock in a deep crater. It was a bit smaller, but not impressively so. However, there was something mysterious about it. Pop watched it curiously for several minutes.

"Hot chocolate! The osmium -- it's changing shape!" he exclaimed. It was true. The ore had been nudged over a peculiar sort of edge, such that it was collapsing under its own weight, but very slowly. Pop worked out the date and time in his head; the tournament was to begin in fourteen hours. That gave him fourteen hours to dig a path through the mountain for what he hoped would be a well-formed ball by the time it was done.

Digby had gotten himself into a good bit of trouble. After leaving the library, he had traveled backwards through time to inform Albert Einstein that he should go with his gut feeling and publish his theory of special relativity, in spite of his peers' arrogant criticism. From there he had journeyed to 520 BC, where he met a man named Siddhartha Guatama Buddha. He was a kind man, and let the weary traveler stay with him despite Digby's horrid appearance. For thirty-six years, the mutant goat listened with childlike wonder to the resonant teachings of the Buddha. Digby reached enlightenment himself in 487 BC. Three years later, the renowned monk passed away, and Digby was swept off by the currents of fate. He did not mourn for his departed father. He became lost in the tendrils of time, and when a light appeared before him, he found himself in a great pearly white sphere, like a snowglobe with no up or down. The sky was warmly golden in the morning and ocean blue in the evening. In this place was a being, not human, but wise and gently passionate beyond measure. He lived in this celestial sphere with many other beings like him. Digby told him about the places he had been, and about humans who would in their own time, whenever that was relative to now, solve the universe's greatest mysteries. This being went on to become a king, and as the kingdom of heaven stretched toward the far horizons, many of his people grew to feel that his rule and decrees were oppressive, and that his authority was absolute and uncompromising. 

Having lived with these people for many centuries, Digby attempted to persuade the king to appease them, but he would not be moved. Digby inspired one of his good friends, who was then named Belial, to organize an insurrection. However, the king, irrevocably bent on establishing a unified nation, defeated their army, and the lot of them, Digby included, was banished to the underworld.

Now one hundred and eight million Earth-years of age, Digby knew that he was reaching the inevitable end of his long life. But one task remained still. He traveled with heavy hardship from the pits of Hell back to his home planet. Landing roughly two millenia before the birth of Christ, he sought a courageous, clever boy with a strong, deep heart to be the vessel of the sum of his knowledge and experiences. The one he chose was named Melchizedek. He lived with and mentored Melchizedek for fifty years. At the end of those fifty years, Digby lay down, weary and sick with the weight of consciousness, and died. 

This vessel, this man who had loved the hallowed wayfarer that was born a goat, would go on to visit where no man had ever gone or would ever go again. He would confront the most sinister evils in all space and time, he would teach mankind to be good and to love, and he would save them from the looming darkness by leading them to their true promised land.

Tanni collapsed on a bench by the wall, exhausted. She had just finished her first match in the tournament, against a tall man with the head of an alligator. She had won. However, she was worried, since Digby was supposed to be competing next, and no one seemed to be able to find him. They would announce his opponent's victory in less than five minutes if he did not make an appearance. Of course, she knew that Digby had gone away, but she had half expected Pop to step in for him. She guessed that he had gone home to Earth after their tumultuous date. She didn't dislike him. Actually, she had hoped to see him again before they parted ways.

Tanni pushed her way to the front of the line at the concession stand. Competitors were not to be burdened with waiting for refreshments, as per the official rules of Trips. She ordered a slushee and was sipping absently when she noticed a commotion on the other side of the arena. Someone was yelling.

"I'm here!" Pop shouted, gasping. "I'm here. Don't kick me out of the tournament."

"Digby?"

"That's me."

The host made a mark on his clipboard, then signaled to someone across the room. "Are you ready to play?"

"Am I first?"

"Yes. Where is your ball?"

"I need to go get it."

The host placed his hand on his hip. "How long?"

Pop leaned over, panting miserably. "Five more minutes. Can you wait?"

"Fine," he said indifferently. "In five minutes, I'm declaring you dead."

"Not a problem."

The man glared at him, tapping his wristwatch. Pop stiffened, a fresh wave of adrenaline washing through his veins. He sprang back out the door from whence he had come.

"All right, little osmium ball," said Pop to his grandest creation. It had been compressed to a size not much smaller than Pop himself, and almost as round. "It's showtime."

He then proceeded to press against it with all the strength in his body, in desperate attempt to set it in motion. It would not budge. He retrieved his shovel, which he had used to construct a shaft in the mountain as a passageway for the ore, and set to digging at its front end. The packed dirt underneath began crumbling and sliding, and seeing this, Pop hurried excitedly around behind the ball and gave one final, fateful shove. The massive object started to turn.

Pop rushed outside and shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand, afraid to miss a moment of the glory of his invention in action as it barreled down the hillside at an incredible speed. "Go, osmium, go!" he cried, his eyes swelling with tears.

Strangely, though the ball had spent the past several hours decreasing in volume, suddenly it was getting fatter. One could see plainly from where the extra pounds had been drawn -- the path of the osmium sphere had been stripped of earth. The monstrous thing was consuming everything in its route, and the relatively soft materials which were accumulating were being absorbed like water into a sponge. With every new addition, the ball grew denser, and its gravity more unforgiving. By the time it had reached the bottom of the mountain, it was collapsing faster than it could expand.

The massive object tore through the south wall of the arena, incorporating nearly all of it. In its journey it had acquired seven hundred palm trees, a hundred tons of earth, eighty gallons of water, forty-four chickens, twenty unsuspecting tourists, twelve truckloads of sand, two pairs of swim trunks from the backsides of sunbathers, and a partridge in a pair tree. Now it was heavier than the entire Triple-Isle Planet and its two moons together. 

Everyone in the arena was screaming and panicking, but it was all no use. They had made their moves, and now it was the prodigious devourer's turn. The pins buckled into its maw like dust flakes into a vacuum cleaner. The wooden planks of the lane snapped up in an unbroken belt and coiled itself around its master. The roof of the hall yielded and poured down, chasing the flying ball in vain. Finally the very foundation of the planet gave in, reaching up to envelop the beast in a dark, titanic blanket. Next to submit was the very fabric of space itself, and then time. An event horizon, no, a god, had been born. Light furiously endeavored to escape its clutches, but to no avail. It was a baneful deity, a black fissure in the sky, and it was growing. It was accelerating.

And then there was nothing.