"Jeans, and others, have postulated that the size of such a closed universe must depend upon the number of physical particles included in it, and that it will expand, _as our universe is expanding_, until that size is reached. Dampier's closed zone, containing the same number of image-particles as our own outside universe, must expand _to the same size_, and at a vastly greater rate.
"It may be that the cosmic atom, postulated by Abbe Lemaitre, from which our universe was born, was the creation of some Dampier of a super-universe, who failed to check its growth, and that its swelling bubble is crushing the mighty cosmos of which it is the ultimate image, as Dampier's completed zone would crush our own."
Bill Porter's scribbled notes stop there. In the split millionth of a second before the twist of Nebel's fingers could throw the balanced sphere over the boundary to completion, his body shorted the power that fed the great machine. It was in time! Momentum of growth, gained in that instant of which Dampier had told me, swept Nebel and his gunmen to their death, and as the zone collapsed the incalculable energies trapped in it burst forth in a holocaust of atomic flame. A millionth of a second--less perhaps--but in it chance, and whatever power it is that rules chance, had checked the thing whose illimitable growth would have swept our universe before it in an avalanche of destruction.
If, as Bill Porter thought, our universe is just such a swelling bubble in the vaster world which it mirrors, I wonder whether in that world there is not another Dampier, another Nebel, another Bill Porter going to his death. I wonder if Time itself is not reflected in some contorted scale in such a cosmic bubble, and the entire history of a universe reproduced in the instant before it bursts.
I wonder, too, if one day our bubble-universe will not burst as Dampier's did, robbing us in that future instant of all reality--the snuffed out images in an almost perfect mirror. For as our Dampier did, so did the greater Dampier whose image he was. As he failed so did that other Dampier fail. Perhaps, in his turn, he but mirrored greater things beyond. Where then--in what inconceivable realm beyond Space and Time--is the reality of which we are the ultimate image?