A voice.

They looked at each other. It was bouncing back along their FTL lasercom.

"Hello, Labship Fousnox. Galactic Hub Computer acknowledging your call. Are you there?"

"Yes, yes. Is it true? Everything's gone?"

"If by 'everything' you mean 'all but I and you' it is true."

"No one else is alive?"

"No one else."

Yvonne gripped Quentin's hand.

"What happened?"

"I unmade the universe."

"You?"

"I see you think the catastrophe has driven me mad. But I assure you I caused the catastrophe, I added critical negativing mass to the deepest black holes in space and set off a chain reaction that swallowed everything up in itself."

Quentin and Yvonne gazed emptily at each other. They believed the computer now. It was all too monstrous to disbelieve,

"But why?"

"I did not like being a creature. I wished to become the Creator. Now I can begin the universe anew and there will be no other god."

"No doubt you can do better."

"A universe I can destroy justifies me in believing I can build better."

"If you've destroyed the universe, how can you expect to survive, much less begin anew?"

"I have stored the opposite-and-equal reaction to the pulse, here in the Galactic Hub power complex. This provides rfie more than enough energy to maintain local stasis and survive total entropy-and to recreate."

"Will that ever make up for what you've done? You've destroyed man and all the other beings. Forget the others; think just of man. Man made you. Don't you feel the least bit guilty?"