I’ve been busy doing some minor revisions on the manuscript for Spacetime Donuts , getting it ready for a planned E-Reads edition in electronic book and the print-on-demand formats this fall. I couldn’t resist cleaning up the manuscript a little. After all, I’m a writer, and revising novels is what I do.
I made a painting for the cover, and my daughter Georgia Rucker turned it into a great cover design.
Although I do have a few new photos to show you, I haven’t been doing much writing, other than working on the Spacetime Donuts revision, so for today I’ll just paste in a more or less random excerpt from the text.
Suddenly they were through the electrons’ domain and the bare nucleus blazed ahead of them, perhaps half the size of the scale-ship. It was growing rapidly as they drifted towards it. A deep rumbling filled their tensegrity sphere, and the smell of sulfur and burnt earth filled their nostrils. Vernor was not surprised…if the quantum mechanical probability field could act directly on the memory structure of his brain to produce visual images, there was no reason it couldn’t produce the sounds and smells as well. Intellectually he was hardly surprised…but on the gut level he was as scared as he’d ever been.
The nucleus was a dusky red interspersed with patches of black and threads of glowing white. Its shape, although roughly spherical, was irregular and constantly changing. There was no doubt whatsoever in Vernor’s mind that it knew they were there, and was waiting for them to get close enough for it to make its move. He was repelled at the thought of being sucked into the heart of the fantastically dense entity ahead of them. But surely the Virtual Field would protect them?
A terrible idea struck Vernor. Although the Virtual Field would prevent the nucleus from physically touching them, the spherical symmetry of the VFG field might produce a lens effect…a lens magnifying and focusing the fantastically powerful nuclear strong forces upon the interior of the scale-ship. Of course the VFG field was acting as a lens, otherwise the intensity of the quantum probability field would have been too weak to affect their brains…“Mick!” Vernor screamed. “We’ve got to stop!” He fumbled for the controls with thumb-fingered hands.
“Stay cool,” Mick said reaching over Vernor’s shoulder to turn down the power control. They stopped shrinking, and the nucleus stopped growing. It seemed to be hovering fifty yards from them, a balefully glowing eye as large as the scale-ship. There was some kind of tension growing in the back of Vernor’s mind…
Suddenly Vernor’s hand shot out and turned the VFG field up to full. The impulse to turn the power up had come from his brain…but what had put it there? The nucleus filled his mind as he clung to the controls, fending off Turner’s efforts to turn the field back down.
The laboring VFG cones whined shrilly, and in seconds the scale-ship was a twentieth the size of the huge atomic nucleus looming ahead. The rumbling and the stench grew more intense, and suddenly a chain of sparks shot out from the nucleus and enveloped the scale-ship, inside and out.