The Annals of the Heechee

10 IN DEEP TIME

Cassata was doing his dreamy, draggy two-step with his eyes closed and the little Oriental woman’s head on his shoulder. Incredible! She looked exactly like a normal human being with any human’s common sense, and yet she was actually cuddling up to the man! I snarled, “Cassata, what the hell is going on?”

He gave me a peculiar look. I don’t know how else to describe it. It wasn’t apologetic, it wasn’t arrogant. What it seemed to be was-I don’t know-maybe the word is “doomed.” To be sure, he was. What was waiting for him when he got back to his meat-time original was termination, but he’d known that for a long time and he hadn’t looked that way. He seemed to be waiting for an ax to fall.

He courteously released his partner, kissed her forehead, and turned to me. “You want to talk to me,” he said.

“Damn-eye right I—”

He headed me off. “I suppose we might as well,” he sighed, “but not here. Not your ship, either. Something nice. Something I can enjoy.”

I opened my mouth to tell him how little I cared what he enjoyed, but Albert was ahead of me. “The Rue de la Paix, perhaps, General Cassata? A little open-air cafe along the Left Bank?”

“Something like that would be fine,” Cassata agreed . . . and there we were, seated around a metal table on a sunny boulevard, under a striped umbrella that advertised an aperitif, while a white-aproned waiter was taking our orders.

“Nice choice, Albert,” Cassata said appreciatively, but I was having none of that.

“Cut the crap,” I barked. “Why’ve you blacked out all Earthside radio?”

Cassata picked a Campari-soda off the waiter’s tray and sniffed at it thoughtfully. “I don’t know,” he said, and added, “yet.”

“But you know why you embargoed my ship!”

“Oh, yes, Robin. It was an order.”

“And embargoing ship from core?” Essie put in, not waiting her turn-I was nowhere near through with Cassata. He shrugged. That was all Essie needed. She gave him a killing look, then turned one on me. “You believe this? Even Heechee Ancient Ancestors must report first to JAWS! Then will see if rest of us are grown-up enough to hear before releasing data!”

Cassata repeated, “Orders.” Then he took a better look at Essie and said placatingly, “It’s only a technicality, Mrs. Broadhead.”

“Stupid technicality! Robin? Send order off to Institute; these uncultured clowns don’t deserve cooperation.”

“Well, now, wait a minute,” he said hastily, doing his best to be agreeable. “This is just an emergency measure. Later on, I’m sure that if you and Robinette want to access any of the information there’s not going to be any difficulty-I mean, real difficulty; but they have to be debriefed by the Joint Assassin Watch Service before any public disclosure, of course.”

“Not ‘of course’! No ‘of course’ involved!” She turned to me, eyes blazing. “Robin, tell this soldier man is not a question of personal favor for you and me, is information which belongs to all.”

I said, “It’s information which belongs to everybody, Cassata.”

Essie wasn’t letting it go at that. “Tell him, Robin!” she snapped, so fiercely that the passersby on the Rue de la Paix glanced at us curiously. They weren’t real, of course, just part of the surround, but when Essie programs surrounds, she goes all the way. One pretty little dark woman seemed fascinated by us-more so than you would have expected from mere stage dressing. I took a second look, and it was the woman Cassata had been dancing with; evidently Cassata had left a trail of bread crumbs so she could sneak into our new surround.

I stepped up the voltage. I told him, “You don’t have a choice. Look, Cassata, this isn’t a question of classifying material so an enemy won’t get it. There aren’t any enemies on this matter except the Foe themselves. Do you think we’re spying for them?”

“No, of course not,” he said unhappily, trying to please. “But these are high-level orders.”

“We’re high-level people!”

He gave me one of those I-just-work-here shrugs. “Of course you are, only—” He paused, having caught a glimpse of the young woman in the fringe of the crowd. He shook his head at her; she grinned, blew him a kiss, and ducked away.

“Sorry,” he said. “Friend of mine; I told her this was a private meeting. What were you saying?”

I snarled, “You know damn well what I was saying!” And I would have gone on, but Cassata’s expression suddenly changed.

He wasn’t listening to me anymore. His face froze. His eyes were vacant, as though hearing something none of the rest of us could hear.

And indeed he was, for I recognized the look. It was the way someone in machine storage looks when he is being told something on a private band. I even had a pretty good idea of what he was going to say. He frowned, shook himself, looked around vacantly for a moment, and then said it.

“Oh, still,” said General Julio Cassata.

I felt Essie’s hand slip into mine. She knew something bad was coming, too. “Tell us!” I demanded.

He sighed a deep sigh. “I’ve got to get back to JAWS,” he said. “Give me a lift, will you?”

That time he surprised me. The first thing I said was only a reflexive, “What?” And then I got better organized. “You change your mind pretty fast, Cassata! First you tell me to stay away entirely, then you freeze my ship—”

“Forget that,” he said impatiently. “It’s a new ball game. I have to get there right away, and you’ve got the fastest ship. Will you take me?”

“Well—Maybe, but—But what—”

He said, “I just got word. The blackout isn’t an exercise. It’s real. I think the Foe have a base on Earth.”

To give a machine-stored intelligence like General Cassata (or, for that matter, me) a lift somewhere doesn’t take much space. All you have to do is take the storage chip, fan, tape, or cube and put it in the ship, and away you go. Cassata was in a hurry. He had a workthing moving it even as he asked me for permission, and as it reached the hatch we buttoned down and went.

Total elapsed time for the transfer, less than three minutes.

Long enough.

I didn’t waste the three minutes. While we were waiting the long, long time for the workthing to get from one bay to another, I was paying my last respects to a lost love.

It didn’t take long. The word of the blackout had reached even the meat people by now, and those stone-statue folks were drifting toward the PV plate, where a news program was telling the asteroid that all radio communciation had been cut off.

My doppel was standing well back from the others, looking unhappy. I saw why at once. There was Klara, and there was her-her husband—and they were holding each other tighter than ever.

I wished .

I wished mostly (or at least, most reasonably) that I had had a chance to know Harbin Eskladar better. Strange that Klara should have married a former terrorist! Strange that she should ever have married anyone but me, I thought—And then I thought, Robin, old sod, you’d better get out of this. And I zapped myself back to the True Love and zipped myself in, and we were gone.

“Robin! Come look!” cried Essie, and I swooped into the control room to do as I was ordered. Julio Cassata was looking hangdog and depressed under the viewscreen, and Essie was pointing at it with fury. “Warships!” she cried. “Look, Robin! Trigger-happy JAWS is getting ready to wipe out world!”

Cassata glowered at me. “Your wife’s driving me crazy,” he said. I didn’t look at him. I was looking at the screen. In that first moment before we went into FFL drive the screens had picked up the JAWS satellite, a hundred thousand kilometers away; even in our far-out orbit it was almost hidden by the bulge of the Earth, but I could see that JAWS was not alone. Midges swarmed around it.

Ships. Essie was right. Warships.

Then we were moving into FTL. The screen clouded, and Cassata protested: “They’re not going to attack anything. They’re just a precaution.”

“Precaution to send out whole fleet with weapons ready,” Essie scolded. “Of such precautions are wars made!”

“Would you rather have us do nothing?” he demanded. “Anyway, you’ll be there soon. You can complain right to him if you want to-I mean—”

He stopped, looking glum again; because of course the “him” was himself, in his meat version.

But he was right. “We right well will complain,” I told him. “Starting with why this ‘message’ was kept secret from us.”

Albert coughed politely. “It wasn’t, Robin,” he said.

Cassata chimed in belligerently, “You see! You’re always going off half-cocked. The whole message was broadcast in burst transmission, just as it was received first time out. I’ll bet Albert recorded it.”

Albert said apologetically, “It was only a sort of synoptic report on everything about the Heechee and the human race, Robin. There’s nothing in it that you couldn’t find in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and so on.”

“Hah,” said Essie, still disgruntled, but she stopped there. She thought for a moment. Then she shrugged. “You fellows, you help yourself to drinks et cetera,” she said, remembering her duties as a hostess. “Me, I go listen to this burst for self.”

I started to follow, because Essie’s company on the worst day of her life was still better than Julio Cassata’s, but he stopped me. “Robin,” he said, “I didn’t want to say anything while she was here—”

I looked at him in astonishment. I could not believe there was anything he and I could ever share as a confidence. Then he said, “It’s about that guy your old girlfriend is married to.”

“Oh,” I said. That didn’t seem to satisfy Cassata, so I added, “I never met him before, but his name’s Harbin Eskiadar, I think.”

“His name’s Esidadar, all right,” Cassata said savagely, “and I know. I hate his effing guts.”

I can’t deny that that perked me up right away. The topic of what a lousy person Kiara’s husband might be was quite congenial to me. “Have a drink,” I said.

He looked hesitant, then shrugged. “Just a quick one,” he said. “You don’t remember him? Well, do you remember me? I mean, like thirty or forty years ago, when we first met? I was a brigadier at the time?”

“I remember that, sure,” I said, producing drinks.

He took what I offered without looking to see what it was. “Did it ever occur to you to wonder why it took me all these years to be promoted a lousy two grades?”

Actually, I never had. I hadn’t even thought about Cassata very much, far less about how he was doing in his job, because he had been nothing but bad news even back in the High Pentagon, when I was still meat and all the armed forces had to worry about was human terrorists.

My opinion of Cassata at that time was that he was a wart on the face of the human race. Nothing had changed it since, but I said politely, “I guess I never knew why.”

“Esidadar! Eskiadar was why! He was my aide-de-camp, and I damn near got thrown out of the service because of him! The son of a bitch was moonlighting, and what he did for an after-hours job was terrorism. He was part of General Beaupre Heimat’s old secret terrorist cell in the High Pentagon!”

After a moment, I said again, “Oh,” and this time Cassata nodded angrily, as though I had said it all.

In a sense I had, because anyone who had been through the days of misery and terrorism needed no discussion of what they were like. It was not something you forgot. For twenty years and more the whole planet had been bombed, raped, ravaged, and gouged by people whose fury had so exceeded their judgment that the only thing they could think of to do to express their discontent was to kill somebody. Not just one somebody; hundreds of thousands had died, one way and another, in virus-poisoned water supplies or wrecked buildings or bombed cities. And not even any particular somebody, because the terrorists had struck at anyone, the innocent as well as the guilty-or the ones they considered guilty, anyway.

And the worst part of it was that trusted people, high-ranking military officers and even heads of state, had been secret members of terrorist groups. A whole nest of them had been uncovered in the High Pentagon itself.

“But Eskladar broke up the ring,” I said, remembering.

Cassata tried to laugh. It came out more like a snarl. “He turned over to save his own skin,” he said-and then, reluctantly, “Well, maybe not just to save himself. He was an idealist, I guess. But as far as I was concerned, it didn’t matter. He was my ADC, and he cost me promotion for twenty years.”

He finished his drink. Brightening, he said, “Well, I don’t want to keep her waiting—” And then he stopped, but a little too late.

“Keep who waiting?” I asked, and he winced at the way I said it.

“Well, Robin,” he said abjectly, “I didn’t think you’d mind if I, uh, if besides me there was-well—”

“A woman,” I said, cleverly deducing. “We’ve got a stowaway on board.”

He looked unrepentant. “She’s just a canned deader, like you,” he said-diplomacy had never been Cassata’s strength. “I just had them put her store on along with mine. It won’t take up much room, for God’s sake, and I’ve only got . . .

He stopped there without quite saying just what he’d only got a little of left. He was a little, just a very little, too proud to beg.

He didn’t have to. “What’s her name?” I asked.

“Alicia Lo. She’s the one I was dancing with.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s only for this one flight. All right. Go keep your friend company.”

I didn’t add, “Just stay out of my sight.” I didn’t have to. That was exactly what he was certain to do, and if I had been in his position I expect I would certainly have done exactly the same thing myself.

And then there was nothing to get through but the interminable trip itself.

In the True Love, it takes only twenty-three minutes for a faster-than-light trip from Wrinkle Rock to JAWS. That’s actually real slow. In fact, it isn’t even faster than light, because eleven and a half of those minutes go into getting up speed at one end, and eleven and a half to slowing down again at the other; the actual trip time is, oh, a wink and a half~ Still, twenty-three minutes isn’t much-by meat-person standards.

We were not on Meat Standard Time. But, oh, how many milliseconds a single minute holds.

By the time we were well free of the asteroid, and Albert was setting course for the satellite, I was (metaphorically) biting my metaphoric nails. We keep True Love pretty much in the Earth solar system, hardly ever very far from the Earth itself, and so I always have contact with all the many projects I’ve got going on Earth to keep me amused-slow, yes, but only seconds slow, not eternities. Not this time. This time there was the radio blackout. I could have sent messages, all right (though Cassata forbade it furiously), but answers I could have none.

What I had to entertain me was Essie, and Albert, and my memories. Cassata wasn’t much good. My memories are plentitudinous (they include, after all, everything we could fit into True Love’s datastores, which is a lot), but the memories on top were largely Klara and largely sad.

Essie, on the other hand, is always rewarding . . . or almost always. The only times she isn’t rewarding is when I’m stuck in a tangle of irritation or worry or misery, and I’m afraid that’s where I was just then. After she’d arranged our Johore surround, pretty palace overlooking the straits and Singapore, and I just sat glumly, ignoring the Malaysian meal she’d ordered up, she gave me one of her searching Oh-Godis-he-getting-gboopy-again looks. “Something is bothering you,” she asserted. I shrugged. “Not hungry, I guess,” she offered, spearing a ball of rice with some kind of black things in it and chewing lustily. I made the pretense of picking up something in a leaf and chewing it. “Robin,” she said, “have two choices. Talk to me. Or talk to Albert-Sigfrid-any damn body, only talk. No sense twisting poor old head around alone.”

“I guess I will,” I said, because it was true. I was getting gloopy again.

Albert found me back on Wrinkle Rock, or anyway the simulation of it I had created to match my mood. I was on Level Tango, where the ships docked, wandering around and looking at the places where people I knew had departed from and never come back.

“You seemed a little depressed,” he said apologetically. “I thought I’d just see if there was anything I could do.”

“Not a thing.” I said, but I didn’t tell him to go away. Especially since, I was sure, Essie had sent him there.

He pulled out his pipe, lit it, puffed thoughtfully for a while, and then said, “Would you like to tell me what is on your mind right now?”

“Not a bit,” I said.

“Is it because you think I’m tired of hearing the same old things, Robin?” he asked, and there was real affection in those make-believe eyes.

I hesitated, then took the plunge. I said, “What’s on my mind is everything, Albert. Now, wait, I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say which of all the things in everything is right on top. Okay. That’s the Foe. They scare me.”

He said peacefully, “There is a lot to be afraid of in that context, yes, Robin. The Foe certainly threaten us all.”

“No, no,” I inid impatiently, “I don’t mean the threat, exactly. I mean it’s so hard to understand.”

“Ah,” he said, smoking his pipe and gazing at me.

“I mean, I just don’t have any good idea of what’s going on with the universe,” I said.

“No, Robin,” he agreed kindly. “You don’t. You could, though. If you’d let me explain nine-dimensional space and a few of the other concepts—”

“Shut up about that,” I ordered, knowing I was making a mistake. I have a right to be humanly capricious, everybody agrees to that, but sometimes I think I carry it too far.

You see, there’s an infinity of knowledge reachable to me, because I’ve been vastened.

I don’t like to speak of what happened to me as being “vastened” when I talk to meat people, because it makes them think I feel superior to them. I don’t want them to think that, especially because, of course, I really am superior. That infinite resource of data is only one part of the difference between me and meat.

The available datastore wasn’t truly infinite, of course. Albert doesn’t let me use words like “infinite” for anything that can be counted, and as all of that knowledge existed in chip, fan, or track storage somewhere, certainly someone could have counted the stores. Someone. Not me. I wasn’t about to try to count the quantum bits of data, and I wasn’t about to try to absorb it all because I was scared.

Oh, God, I was scared! What of? Not just the Foe, though they were fearsome. I was frightened by my own vastness, which I dared not fully explore.

I feared, I hugely feared, that if I let myself expand to absorb all that knowledge I would no longer be Robinette Broadhead at all. I feared I would not then be human. I feared that the tiny parcel of data that was me would simply be drowned in all that accumulated information.

When you are only a machine-stored memory of a human being, you do your best to defend your humanity.

Albert has often got impatient with me about that. He says it is a failure of nerve. Even Essie chides me now and then. She says things like, “Dear dumb Robin, why not take what is yours?” And then she tells me little stories from her own childhood to buck me up. “When I was young girl at akademy, pounding brain over some damn nonsense reference volume on maybe Boolean algebra or chip architecture in Lenin Library, would often look around me in horror. Oh, real horror, dear Robin! Would see all ten million volumes surrounding me, and feel sick. I mean, Robin, sick. Almost physical sickness. Almost to point of throwing up at thought of swallowing all those gray and green and yellow books, to know all that could know. Was impossible for me!”

I said eagerly, “That’s exactly it, Essie, I—”

“But is not impossible for you, Robin!” she cut in severely. “Chew, Robin! Open mouth! Swallow!”

But I couldn’t.

At least, I wouldn’t. I held tightly to my physical human shape (however imaginary), and to my meat-human limitations, however self-imposed.

Naturally I dipped into that vast store from time to time. Just dipped. I only nibbled at the feast. When I wanted, as you might say, one particular volume, I would access that file. I kept my eyes resolutely fixed on that single “volume” and ignored the endless shelves of “books” all around. Or, better still, I would call on my retinue of savants.

Kings used to do that. I had all the prerogatives of any king. I did what kings did. When they wanted to know something about counterpoint, they would send for Handel or Salieri. If they had a moment’s curiosity about the next eclipse, Tycho Brahe would come running. They kept on hand a lavish retinue of philosophers, alchemists, mathematicians, and theologians. The court of Frederick the Great, for instance, was almost a university turned upside down. There was a faculty of all the experts in all the disciplines he could afford to feed, and a student body of one. Him.

More kingly than any king who ever lived, I could afford better than that. I could afford every authority on every subject. They were cheap enough, because I didn’t have to feed them or pay off their mistresses, and it wasn’t even a “them.” They were all subsumed into my one all-purpose data-retrieval program, Albert Einstein.

So when I complained to Essie, “I wish I understood what all this talk about shrinking the universe meant,” she simply looked at me for a moment.

Then she said, “Ha.”

“No, I mean it,” I said, and I really did.

“Ask Albert,” she said sunnily.

“Oh, hell! You know what that means. He’ll tell me anything I want to know, but he’ll go on telling me until it’s a lot more than I want to know.”

“Dear Robin,” she said, “is it not possible that Albert knows better than you how much is enough?”

“Oh, hell,” I said.

But, standing there with Albert in the gloomy metal tunnel of the (simulated) asteroid ship docks, it seemed to me that the time had come. There wasn’t any help for it anymore.

I said, “Albert, okay. Open my head. Dump everything into it. I guess I can stand it if you can.”

He gave me a sunny smile. “It won’t be that bad, Robin,” he promised, and then corrected himself. “It won’t be wonderful, though. I admit it’s going to be hard work. Maybe—” He glanced around. “Maybe we should start out by getting a little more comfortable. With your permission?”

He didn’t wait for the permission, of course. He just went ahead and surrounded us with the study in our house on the Tappan Sea. I began to relax a little. I clapped my hands for the butlerthing to bring me a tall drink, and I sat back in comfort. Albert was watching me quizzically, but he didn’t say a word until I said to him, “I’m ready.”

He sat down, puffing on his pipe as he regarded me. “For what, exactly?”

“For you to tell me all the things you’ve been wanting to tell me for the last million years.”

“Ah, but Robin—” he smiled “—there are so many of them! Can you be specific? Which particular thing are you willing to let me explain now?”

“I want to know what the Foe have to gain from collapsing the universe.”

Albert thought that over for a moment. Then he sighed. “Oh, Robin,” he said sorrowfully.

“No,” I said, “no, ‘Oh, Robin,’ no telling me I should have done this long ago, no explaining to me that I have to learn quantum mechanics or something before I can understand. I want to know now.”

“What a hard taskmaster you are, Robin,” he complained.

“Do it! Please.”

He paused to reflect, tamping tobacco into his pipe. “I suppose I could just tell you the whole enchilada,” he said, “as I have tried to do before, and you have refused to listen.”

I braced myself. “You’re going to start with your nine-dimensional space again, aren’t you?”

“That and many other things, Robin,” he said firmly. “They are all involved. The answer to your question is meaningless without them.”

“Make it as easy on me as you can,” I begged.

He looked at me in some surprise. “You’re serious this time, aren’t you? Of course I’ll try to do that, my dear boy. Do you know what I think? I think the best way to start isn’t to tell you anything at all. I’ll just show you the pictures.”

I blinked. “Pictures?”

“I will show you the birth and death of the universe,” he said, pleased with himself. “That’s what you asked for, you know.”

“It is?”

“It is. The difficulty is that you simply refuse to grasp what a complicated question you are asking. It will take quite a while, several thousand milliseconds at least, even if you try not to interrupt—”

“I’ll interrupt whenever I want to, Albert.”

He nodded in acceptance. “Yes, you will. That’s one of the reasons it will take so long. But if you are willing to take the time required—”

“Oh, do it, for heaven’s sake!”

“But I already am doing it, Robin. Just a moment. It takes a little work to set up the display-there we are,” he finished, beaming.

And then he disappeared. Beam and all.

The last thing I saw was Albert’s smile. It lingered for a moment, and then there was nothing.

“You’re playing Alice in Wonderland games with me,” I accused—accused nothing and no one, because there was nothing to taste, see, feel, or smell.

But there was something to hear, because Albert’s reassuring voice said: “Only a bit of fun to start off with, Robin, because it gets very serious from now on. Now. What do you see?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Quite right. That is what you see. But what you are looking at is everything. It is the entire universe, Robin. It is all the matter, energy, time, and space there ever was or will be. It is the primordial atom, Robin, the monobloc, the thing in the Big Bang that banged.”

“I don’t see a goddamn thing.”

“Naturally not. You can’t see without light, and light hasn’t been invented yet.”

“Albert,” I said, “do me a favor. I hate this feeling of being nowhere at all. Can’t you let me see a little something?”

Silence for a moment. Then Albert’s beaming face came shadowily back. “I don’t suppose it would do any real harm if we could at least see each other,” he admitted. “Is that better?”

“Worlds better.”

“Fine. Only please remember there’s no real light yet. There is no light without photons, and all the photons are stifi in that single, invisible point. Not only that,” he went on, enjoying himself, “but if you could see, there’d be no place to see it from, because there isn’t any space to have a ‘place’ in. Space hasn’t been invented yet, either-or, to put it a bit more precisely, all the space, and all the light, and all the everything else is still in that single point right there.”

“In that case,” I said, sulking, “what do you mean by ‘there’?”

“Ah, Robin!” he cried in gratification. “You’re not so dumb, after all! That’s a really good question-unfortunately, like many of the best questions, it’s meaningless. The answer is that the question is wrong. There isn’t any ‘there’ there; there is only the appearance of a ‘there’ because I am trying to show you what by definition cannot be shown.”

I was beginning to lose heart. “Albert,” I said, “if that’s the way this show is going to go—”

“Now, hang on,” he ordered. “Don’t quit now. The show hasn’t started yet, Robin; I am only setting the stage. To understand the beginning of the universe you must throw off all your preconceptions of ‘time’ and ‘space’ and ‘seeing.’ None of them exist at this point, some eighteen billion years ago.”

“If time doesn’t exist yet,” I said cleverly, “how do you know it was eighteen billion years ago?”

“Another fine question! And the same fine answer. It is true that before the Big Bang there was no such thing as time. So what you are looking at could be eighteen billion years ago. It could also be eighteen billion trillion quadrillion quintillion whatever-you-like years ago. The question does not apply. But this-object-did exist, Robin, and then it blew up.”

I flinched back. It did blow up, right in front of my eyes! Nothing suddenly became something, a point of intolerably bright light, and the point exploded.

It was like an H-bomb going off in my lap. I could almost feel myself shriveled, vaporized, turned into plasma, and dispersed. Roffing thunders of sound battered my nonexistent ears and pounded my incorporeal body.

“My God,” I yelled.

Albert said thoughtfully, “Possibly so.” The idea seemed to please him. “Not in the sense of a personal deity, I mean-you know me too well for that. But there surely was a Creation, and this was it.”

“What happened?”

“Why, the Big Bang just banged,” said Albert in surprise. “That’s what you saw. I thought you’d recognize it. The universe has started.”

“It has also stopped,” I said, beginning to recover, because the great burst had frozen.

“I’ve stopped it, yes, because I want you to see this point. The universe isn’t very old yet-approximately ten-to-the-minus-thirty seconds later. I can’t say much about anything earlier, because I don’t know anything much. I can’t even tell you how big the universe, or that what-do-you-call-it that existed before the universe, was. Bigger than a proton, probably. Smaller than a Ping-Pong ball, maybe. I can tell you-I think-that the dominant force in there was probably the strong nuclear force, or, possibly, gravity, maybe-because it was so compact, the gravity was of course high. Very high. So was the temperature. How high I don’t know exactly. Probably as high as possible. There is some theoretical reason to believe that the highest possible temperature is something of the order of ten-to-the-twelfth Kelvin-I could give you the argument, if you like—”

“Only if absolutely necessary, please!”

He said reluctantly, “I don’t suppose that particular point is absolutely necessary. All right. Let me tell you what else I can’t say. I can’t even say anything much about the stage you are looking at now, except to point out a few things that may not be apparent to you. For instance, that fireburst you are looking at contains everything. It contains the atoms and particles that now constitute you, and me, and the True Love and the Watch Wheel and the Earth and the Sun and the planet Jupiter and the Magellanic Clouds and all the galaxies in the Virgo clusters and—”

“And everything, right,” I said, to stop him. “I get the picture. It’s big.”

“Ah,” he said, in satisfaction, “but you see, you don’t. It isn’t big. I’ve taken a few liberties, you see. I’ve magnified it a lot, because the Big Bang wasn’t very big at all. How big would you say that fireball was?”

“I have no way of telling. A thousand light-years across?”

He shook his head and said thoughtfully, “I don’t think so. Smaller. Maybe before the Bang it had no size at all, because space hadn’t been invented yet, and it’s not far from that now. But it’s definitely small. And yet it contained everything. Have you got that so far?”

I just looked at him, and he relented. “I know this is dreary for you, Robin, but I want to make sure you understand. Now, about the ‘bang.’ There wasn’t any sound, of course. There wasn’t any medium to carry sound. For that matter, there wasn’t any place to carry it to; that was just another little liberty I took. More important, the Big Bang wasn’t the kind of explosion that starts from a firecracker and spreads out into the air as the gases expand, because—”

“Because there wasn’t any air, right? Or even space?”

“Very good, Robin! But there’s another way in which that bang was different from all other bangs. It didn’t expand like a balloon or a chemical or a nuclear explosion. It was something quite different. You’ve seen those Japanese paper flowers that you put into an aquarium? As they soak up water, they expand? It was more like that, Robin. But what crept in between the parts of the original-thing, whatever you want to call it, primordial atom or whatever-wasn’t water. It was space. The universe didn’t explode. It swelled. Very fast and very far, and it’s still doing it.”

I said, “Oh.”

Albert looked at me searchingly for a moment. Then he sighed, and the burst began to go on bursting.

It surrounded us. I thought it would consume us. It didn’t, but we were drenched in a sea of terrible light. From the middle of it came Albert’s voice.

“I am going to back us away some light-years,” he said. “I don’t know how many, just enough so we can see it at a respectable distance.” The great ball of fire contracted and fled from us until it was no larger than the full Moon.

“Now, the universe is pretty old,” he said. “About a hundredth of a second. It’s hot. The temperature is around ten-to-the-eleventh degrees Kelvin, and it’s dense. I don’t mean dense as matter is dense. There wasn’t any matter. It was too dense for that. The universe was a mass of electrons, positrons, neutrons, and photons. Its density was about four times ten-to-the-ninth times as dense as water. Do you know what that means?”

“I think I know how dense dense is, but how hot is hot?”

Albert said reflectively, “There’s no good way to tell you, because there isn’t anything that hot to compare it with. Now I have to use one of those terms you hate. The whole thing was in ‘thermal equilibrium.”

“Well, Albert,” I began.

“No, listen to me,” he snapped. “That just means that all those particles were interacting and changing. Think of it like a billion trillion light switches, all going on and off at random. But at any time there are as many going on as there are going off, so the total balance is always preserved; that’s equilibrium. It wasn’t light switches, of course. It was electrons and positrons annihilating each other to produce neutrinos and photons, and so on; but as many events went one way as went the other. Result, equilibrium. Even though inside that state of equilibrium everything was constantly bouncing around like crazy.”

I said, “I guess so, Albert, but you’re taking a hell of a long time over the first hundredth of a second, if we’re going to go eighteen billion years.”

“Oh,” he said, “we’re going to go much farther than that. Don’t anticipate, please, Robin. Here we go.” And the distant puff of flame expanded. “A tenth of a second-now the temperature’s dropped to three times ten-to-the-tenth Kelvin. One second, it’s dropped by another factor of three. Now-here, let me stop it for a moment. This is fourteen seconds after the Big Bang. It has cooled by another factor of three; it’s only three times ten-to-the-ninth Kelvin now. This means that equilibrium is upset for a while, because the electrons and positrons now can annihilate each other faster than they’re recreated in the opposite reaction. We’ll come back to around this point, Robin, because that’s where the answer to your question is.”

“Well,” I said, as tactfully as I could, “actually, if it’s all the same to you, why don’t you just give me the answer now and we can skip the rest of the show?”

“It is not the same to me,” he said severely, “and you won’t understand. We’ll speed up, though. Here we are a few minutes after the bang. The temperature’s fallen by two-thirds again; it’s only ten-to-the-ninth Kelvin. It’s so cool, in fact, that actual protons and neutrons exist—they’ve even begun to combine in nuclei of hydrogen and helium. Actual matter!—or almost; they’re only nuclei, not whole atoms. And all that so-called matter put together is only a tiny fraction of the mass of the universe. Most of it is light and neutrinos. There are a few electrons, but hardly any positrons.”

“How come?” I asked, surprised. “What happened to all the positrons?”

“There were more electrons than positrons in the first batch. So when they annihilated each other, there were electrons left over.”

“Why?”

“Ah, Robin,” he said seriously, “that’s the best question of all. I will give you an answer that I don’t expect you to understand: Since electrons and positrons, and all the other particles for that matter, are only harmonics of closed strings, the numbers that were created are essentially random. Do you want to get into superstring theory? I didn’t think so. Just remember the word ‘random,’ and let’s get on with it.”

“Wait a minute, Albert,” I said. “Where are we now?”

“About two hundred seconds after the Big Bang.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Albert? We’ve still got billions and billions of years to go—”

“More than that, Robin. Much more.”

“Oh, wonderful. And it’s taken us this long to go a couple of minutes, so, really—”

“Robin,” he said, “you can call it off any time you like, but then how can I answer the questions you will certainly keep on asking? We can take a break if you want a little time to assimilate all this. Or, better still, I can just speed things up.”

“Yeah,” I said, staring without pleasure at that fuzzy, blinding glob of everything there was.

I didn’t really want to take a break. What I wanted was for this to be over.

I admit that Albert always knows what’s good for me. What he doesn’t understand is that “good” is an abstract concept, and there are lots of times when what is good for me is something I really don’t want.

I was nearly sorry I’d brought the whole thing up, because I wasn’t enjoying this.

So I knew exactly what I wanted of Albert’s three alternatives. I would much have preferred the first, because I was getting really tired of heat and pressure and, most of all, of sitting nowhere in the middle of nothing. Second choice would have been to take a break and maybe relax a little with Essie.

So I picked the third. “Just speed it up a little, okay, Albert?”

“Sure thing, Robin. Here we go.” The glob swelled menacingly. It still was really nothing but a glob. There weren’t any stars or planets or even lumps in the pudding; it was just an unsorted mass of stuff, very bright. It did, however, seem a little less eye-destroyingly bright than it had been.

“Now we’re a good long jump ahead,” Albert said happily. “About half a million years have gone by. The temperature has gone way down. It’s only about four thousand Kelvin now-there are plenty of stars hotter than that, but of course we’re not talking about isolated points of heat here, we’re talking about the average temperature of the whole thing. Notice that it’s not quite as bright anymore? Up until now, Robin, the universe was ‘radiation-dominated.’ The dominant thing was photons. Now matter dominates radiation.”

“Because there aren’t so many photons anymore, right?”

“Wrong, I’m afraid,” Albert said apologetically. “There are still plenty of photons, but the overall temperature is lower which means the average energy per photon is lower. Therefore its mass is lower. From now on, matter outweighs radiation in the universe and-here we go-“The glob inflated and darkened. “Now we’re a couple hundred thousand years later and the temperature has dropped another thousand degrees. This is according to Weinberg’s Law: ‘The time it takes for the universe to cool from one temperature to another is proportional to the difference in the inverse squares of the temperatures.’ I don’t suppose you really need to understand that, Robin,” he added wistfully, “although there’s a really neat demonstration in ten-dimensional super-symmetry—”

“Cut it out, Albert! Why’s the damn thing so dark?”

“Ah,” he said, gratified, “that’s an interesting point. There are so many nuclear and electron-like particles now that they get in the way of the light. So the universe is opaque. But that will change. Up to now we’ve had electrons and we’ve had protons, but the universe was so hot that they just stayed that way. As free particles. They couldn’t combine. Or, rather, they kept combining all the time to make atoms, but the heat just blew them apart again. Now we roll the cameras”—and the glob enlarged itself again, and suddenly brightened-“and all of a sudden, look, Robin! The mixture has cleared! Light shines through! The electrons and protons have combined to make atoms, and the photons can move freely again!”

He paused. His shadowy face was beaming in pure pleasure.

I thought hard for a moment, staring at the glob. It was beginning to show-oh, no real structure, but at least hints that maybe something was happening somewhere inside there, like the planet Uranus seen from afar. “Albert?” I said. “That’s all fine, but, look, there are still plenty of photons, right? So why don’t they collide and make more particles to make it all opaque again?”

“Oh, Robin,” he said affectionately, “Sometimes I think you’re not really stupid, after all. I’ll give you the answer. Remember my famous e equals rn-c-squared? The photons have energy, e. If two of them collide and their combined energy equals the mass of any particle, m, times the square of the speed of light, then they can create that particle in their collision. When the universe was young-the threshold temperature is somewhere around ten-to-the-ninth Kelvin-they had plenty of energy and they could create hellish big particles. But it has cooled down. Now they can’t. They just don’t have it anymore, Robin.”

“Oh, wow,” I said. “You know? I almost have the illusion that I nearly understand!”

“Don’t put yourself down,” he chided-meaning, I supposed, that I should leave that sort of thing to him. He was silent for a moment, then he fretted, “I haven’t told you about the creation of quarks and hadrons. I haven’t even said anything about acceleration, and that’s important. You see, for the model to work, you have to account for the fact that at some point in the Big Bang the outward expansion got faster. I can give you an analogy. It’s as though you had an explosion that kept on exploding for a time, so instead of slowing down it expanded faster. The actual explanation is more complicated, and—”

“Albert! Do I have to know this?”

“Not really, Robin,” he said after a moment. His tone was wistful but not insistent.

“So why don’t you just roll the camera some more?”

“Oh, very well.”

I suppose every kid loves electric trains. Watching Albert’s model of the universe grow was almost like having the most hellishly huge set of trains to play with that any boy could imagine.

I couldn’t make them run, of course. But just watching was a lot of fun. The glob roiled and swirled and began to break up. Our “camera” zoomed in tight on one particular smudge in the swarm, and I saw that, too, breaking up into smaller blobs. Clusters and metagalaxies formed, and actual galaxies began to pinwheel into their familiar spiral forms. Individual points of light blew up and died; new ones formed in the center of clouds of gas.

“We have actual stars now, Robin,” Albert announced from beside me. “This is the first generation. Clouds of hydrogen and helium fall together and contract and start nuclear fusion in their interiors. That’s where they cook all the heavier elements, the ones your meat body was made of-carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the elements higher than helium. Then, when they blow up as supernovae—” he pointed to one particular star, that obligingly exploded in a tiny torrent of light “—all those elements float around in space until they happen to contract into another star and its planets. And then they form other things. Like you, Robin.”

I yelped, “You mean all the atoms that make me up used to be in the core of a star?”

“That made up your meat body,” he corrected. “Yes, Robin. In fact, our own Galaxy is in there now. See if you can pick it out.”

He froze the expanding cloud so I could peer around. “They all look alike,” I complained.

“Most of them do, pretty much,” he conceded. “But there’s M-3 1, and there are the Magellanic Clouds. And that spiral there, that’s us.”

He was pointing to a glowing whirlpool of firefly light, surrounded by other firefly patches in a vast thinly sprinkled darkness. “I don’t see you and me anywhere in there,” I said, trying for a joke.

He took it seriously. He coughed. “I’m afraid I let it run a little past present time,” he apologized. “All of human history, including the formation of the solar system and the expansion of the sun into a red giant, has already taken place. You missed it.”

I turned to look at his shadowy face. “I don’t know if I want to hear this,” I said, and very nearly meant it.

He looked gently chiding. “But it’s only reality, Robin,” he said. “It’s a truth, whether you want to know it or not. I suppose that, in a sense, it might shake your notions of your own personal importance in the universe—”

“Damn right it does!”

“Well,” he said, “that’s not a bad thing. But don’t get too crushed. Remember, it is this-all of this-that the Foe are trying to change.”

“Oh, fine! Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

He studied me for a moment. “Not better, exactly, no. But more in touch with reality. After all, remember that you, and I, and all the rest of the human race and the Heechee and the machine intelligences have only two choices. We can let the Foe do what they’re doing. Or we can try to oppose them.”

“And how, exactly, are we supposed to do that?”

He looked thoughtfully at the frozen model. “Shall I run it a little further?” he asked.

“You’re changing the subject!”

“I know I am, Robin. I’m going to run the model. Perhaps if you understand what all this entails you may, in some way, contribute to the solution of this problem. Perhaps not. Perhaps it can’t be solved; but in any case I don’t see that we, or someone else sooner or later, have any choice but to try; and you can’t effectively even try without knowledge.”

“But I’m scaredl”

“You’d be crazy if you weren’t, Robin. Now, do you want to see what happens next or not?”

“I don’t know if I do!”

I meant it. I was beginning to get really nervous. I gazed at that patchy glow that had once held me and Essie and Klara and all the pharaohs and kings and saviors and villains and Heechee explorers and Sluggard singers and dinosaurs and trilobites-all once there and now gone-all gone, long gone, as far behind us as the birth of the Sun itself.

I was scared, all right. It was all too big.

I felt tinier and more helpless and unreal than I had felt ever before in my life. In either of my lives. It was worse than dying, worse even than when I had been vastened. That had certainly been terrifying, but it had had a future.

Now the future was past. It was like looking at my own grave.

Albert said impatiently, “You do want to see. I’ll go ahead.”

The Galaxy spun like a top. I knew it was taking a quarter-billion years to the turn, but it whirled madly, and something else was happening. The surrounding satellite galaxies crept away. “They’re spreading out,” I cried.

“Yes,” Albert agreed. “The universe is expanding. It can’t make any more matter or energy, but it keeps on making more space. Everything gets farther apart from everything else.”

“But the stars in the Galaxy aren’t doing that.”

“Not yet. Not exactly, anyway. Just watch; we’re heading for a hundred billion years in the future.”

The Galaxy spun faster still, so fast that I couldn’t make out the actual motion, only a blur. What I did see was that even the Local Group was beginning to move almost out of sight.

“I’ll stop it for a moment,” Albert said. “There. Do you notice anything about our own Galaxy?”

“Somebody turned off a lot of stars.”

“Exactly. It is dimmer, yes. What turned the stars off is time. They got old. They died. You will note that the Galaxy is reddish in color now, rather than white. The big white stars die first; the old red ones die slowly. Even the little F and 0 stars, the yellow dwarfs, no bigger than our own Sun, have already burned up all their nuclear fuel. The dim red ones will go soon, too. Watch.”

Slowly, slowly, the Galaxy . . . went out.

There was nothing visible anywhere but the shadowy outlines of our imaginary bodies, and Albert’s imaginary face. Gazing. Pondering. Sad.

As to myself, the word “sad” does not begin to describe it. Everything else that had ever happened to me, every formless fear that had ever kept me awake at night-they were all nothing.

I was looking at The End.

Or so I thought, and so it felt, and all human concerns dwindled to nothingness by comparison; but when I said, “Is this the end of the universe, then?” Albert looked surprised.

“Oh, no, Robin,” he said. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“But there’s nothing there!”

He shook his shadowy head. “Wrong. Everything is still there. It has grown old, and the stars have died, yes. But they’re there. They even still have their planets, most of them. The planets are dead, of course. They’re not much above absolute zero; there’s no more life, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s exactly what I mean!”

“Yes, Robin,” he said patiently, “but that’s just your anthropomorphic view. The universe has kept right on cooling as it kept on making space to expand into. But it’s dead. And it will keep on being dead, forever . . . unless . . .

“Unless what?” I barked.

Albert sighed. “Let’s get comfortable again,” he said.

I blinked as I found myself again in the world.

That awesome blackness was gone from around us. I was sitting on the lanai of my house on the Tappan Sea, with my still cold drink still unfinished in my hand, and Albert was calmly stoking his pipe in the wicker armchair.

“My God,” I said faintly.

He just nodded, deep in thought. I finished my drink in a single gulp and rang for another.

Albert said, out of his reverie, “That’s how it would be if the universe kept on expanding.”

“It’s scary!”

“Yes,” he agreed, “it is frightening even to me, Robin.” He struck a wooden kitchen match on the sole of his scuffed shoe and puffed. “I should point out to you that this demonstration has taken quite a bit longer than I planned. We are almost ready to dock at the Joint Assassin Watch satellite. If you would like a closer look . . .

“It can wait!” I snapped. “You took me this far, now what about the rest of it? What does all this stuff you’ve been showing me have to do with the Foe?”

“Ah, yes,” he said reflectively. “The Foe.”

He seemed lost in thought for a moment, sucking the pipestem, staring blanidy into space. When he spoke, it sounded as though he were discussing something else entirely.

“You know,” he said, “when I was-alive-there was considerable argument among cosmologists about whether the universe would go on expanding, as I have just displayed for you, or only expand to a certain point and then fall back on itself~ like the water in a fountain. You understand that, basically, that depends on how dense the universe is?”

“I think so,” I said, trying to keep up with what he was telling me. “Please be sure so,” he said sharply. “That’s the cornerstone of the argument. If there is enough matter in the universe, its combined gravitation will stop the expansion, and then it will fall back on itself again. If there isn’t, it won’t. Then it will go on expanding forever, as you have seen.”

“I sure have, Albert.”

“Yes. Well, the critical density-that is, the total mass of everything in the universe, divided by the total volume of the universe-turns out to be about five times ten-to-the-minus-thirtieth power grams per cubic centimeter. In more familiar terms, that amounts to about one atom of hydrogen in a space equal to your body.”

“That’s not much, is it?”

“Unfortunately,” he sighed, “that’s an awful lot. The universe isn’t that dense. There aren’t that many atoms in an average volume. People have been looking for mass for a long time, but nobody has ever been able to find enough stars, dust clouds, planets, physical bodies of any kind, or photons of energy to add up to that much mass. There would have to be a least ten times as much as we can find to close the universe. Maybe a hundred times as much. More than that. We can’t even find enough mass to account for the observed behavior of galaxies rotating around their own cores. That’s the famous ‘missing mass.’ The Heechee worried about that a lot, and so did a lot of my own colleagues . . . But now,” he said somberly, “I think we know the answer to that problem, Robin. The deceleration parameter measurements are right. The mass estimates are wrong. Left to itself, the universe would go on expanding forever, an open universe. But the Foe have closed it.”

I was floundering badly, still numb from the spectacle of that terrible history. The housething came with my next margarita, and I took a deep swallow before I asked, “How could they do that?”

He shrugged reprovingly. “I don’t know. I could guess that somehow they’ve added mass, but that’s only an idle speculation; in any case, that isn’t relevant to your question. I mean your original question; do you remember what it was?”

“Of course I do!” Then I qualified, “That is, it had something to do with—Oh, right! I wanted to know what the Foe had to gain by collapsing the universe again, and instead of answering you took me about a zillion years in the future.”

He looked faintly apologetic, but only faintly. “Perhaps I got carried away,” he conceded, “but it was interesting, wasn’t it? And it does have a bearing. Here, let’s take another look at the universe at about the one-trillion-year mark—”

“Let me finish my damn drink, damn it!”

“Of course you can,” he said, soothing me. “I’ll just display it for you; you can stay right where you are, and I won’t suppress the ambience. Now!”

A great frame of blackness spread itself across the view of the Tappan Sea. The windsailers and fishermen disappeared, along with the hills on the opposite shore, replaced by that hatefully familiar black void sprinkled with faint red dots.

“We’re looking at a time about a million million years from now,” he said comfortably, gesturing with the stem of his pipe.

“And what are those little pimply things? Let me guess-red dwarf stars?” I said cleverly. “Because all the big ones are burned out? But why are we going into the future again, anyhow?”

He explained, “Because even for the Foe the universe has a lot of momentum. It can’t stop on a dime and turn around. It has to go on expanding for a while until the extra drag of the ‘missing mass’ that they have-somehow-added can begin to draw it back. But now watch. We are at the limit of expansion, and I’m going to show what happens next. We will see the universe shrink, and I’ll speed it up so we’ll go back pretty rapidly. Watch what happens.”

I nodded, sitting back comfortably and sipping my drink. Perhaps the unreal alcohol was having its soothing effect on my unreal metabolism, or perhaps it was only that I was sitting in a comfortable chair in pleasant surroundings. One way or another, it didn’t seem as scary this time. I stretched out my bare feet and wriggled my toes in front of that vast black backdrop that blotted out the sea, marking the progression of the galaxies as they began to creep back together. They didn’t seem very bright. “No more big stars?” I asked, somehow disappointed.

“No. How could there be? They’re dead. But watch as I speed things up a little.”

The black backdrop began to gray and brighten, though the galaxies themselves didn’t. I yelped, “There’s more light! What’s happening? Are there stars I can’t see?”

“No, no. It’s the radiation, Robin. It’s getting brighter because of the blue shift. Do you understand that? All the time the universe was expanding, the radiation from distant objects was shifted into the red—the old Doppler effect, remember? Because they are going away from us. But now they’re coming toward us as the universe contracts. So what must then happen?”

“Light shifts toward the blue end of the spectrum?” I hazarded.

“Wonderful, Robin! Exactly. The light shifts in the direction of the blue-all of it, way beyond the visible range. That means that the photons become more energetic. The temperature of space-the average temperature of the universe-is already a good many degrees above absolute zero, and it’s getting rapidly warmer. Do you see those little dark blobs floating together?”—

“They look like raisins in Jell-O.”

“Yes, all right, only what they really are is what’s left of the galaxies. Really, they’re mostly enormous black holes. They’re falling together, even beginning to coalesce. Do you see that, Robin? They’re eating each other up.”

“And the whole thing’s getting a lot brighter,” I said, shading my eyes. I couldn’t even see the sailboats beyond the edges of the picture now; the brightness blanked them out.

“Oh, much brighter. The background temperature’s in the thousands of degrees now, as hot as the surface of the Sun. All those old, dead stars are getting a kind of new life again, like zombies, because the external heat is warming them up. Most of them will simply be vaporized, but others-there!” A point of light rushed toward us and past. “That was a big old one, big enough to have a little fusible matter left. The heat started its nuclear fires again, a little.”

I flinched from the-unreal-heat.

Albert shook his pipe at me, back in the lecture mode. “What’s left of all the stars and galaxies are racing together! The black holes are merging, all the photons are now far into the ultraviolet and past-the temperature is now in the millions of degrees-Himinelgott!” he shouted, and I cried out too, as the whole scene shrank and brightened to one intolerable ultimate flare of light.

Then it was gone.

The windsurfers were still on the Tappan Sea. The mild breeze stirred the leaves on the azaleas. My sight began to return.

Albert wiped his eyes. “I should have slowed it down a little at the end, I think,” he said reflectively. “I could do it over-no, of course not. But you get the idea.”

“I do indeed,” I said shakily. “And now what?”

“And now it rebounds, Robin! The universe explodes and starts up all over again, new-and different!” He looked around at the pleasant scene wonderingly. Then he turned toward me. “Do you know,” he said, “I think I would like a little something myself. Perhaps some dark beer, Swiss or German?”

I said seriously, “You never fail to astonish me, Albert.” I clapped my hand, of course quite unnecessarily, and in a moment the workthing appeared with a tall ceramic stein, golden froth humped over the top.

“And that’s what the Foe want to do, make a new universe?”

“A djfferent universe,” Albert corrected, wiping foam off his lip. He looked at me repentantly. “Robin? I’m neglecting my other duties to you. We’re approaching the JAWS sateffite. Perhaps you wish to join your friends at the viewscreens?”

“What I wish,” I said, “is to get this the hell over with. Finish up! What do you mean, a ’different’ universe?”

He inclined his head. “That’s where my old friend Ernst Mach comes in,” he explained. “Do you remember what I told you about the positrons and electrons annihilating each other? Only electrons were left, because there had been more of them to start out? Well, suppose the universe started with an equal number so that, at the end of the process, there were no electrons left? And no protons or neutrons, either; what would we have?” I shook my head. “A universe without matter, Robin! Pure radiation! Nothing to perturb or upset the free flow of energy-or of energy beings!”

“And is that what the Foe want?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It is one possibility, perhaps. But if Mach was correct there are other, more serious possibilities. At that same point in the history of the universe, when the balance of electrons and positrons was determined by random events—”

“What sort of random events?” I demanded.

“I don’t know that, either. All particles are, really, only harmonics of closed strings, though. I suppose the properties of the strings can produce any kind of harmonics you like. Please be patient with me here, Robin, because as you know I have some difficulty with this concept of indeterminacy, or random events-it was always a difficulty for me in my meat life, you remember.” He twinkled.

“Don’t twinkle! Don’t be cute at all!”

“Oh, very well. But if Mach is correct, such random fluctuations determined not only the balance of particles, but many other things, including the physical constants of the universe.”

“How can that be, Albert? I mean, those are laws.”

“They are laws arising from facts, and the facts themselves are what Mach says were generated at random. I’m not sure how many ‘fundamental facts’ are really fundamental in any universal sense-perhaps I should say, in any multiuniversal sense. Did it ever occur to you to ask yourself why, for example, Bolzmann’s constant should equal zero point zero zero zero zero eight six one seven electron volts per degree Kelvin, and not some other number?”

I said truthfully, “The thought never crossed my mind.”

He sighed. “But it has mine, Robin. There should be a reason why this number is what it is. Mach says sure, there is a reason, it is that at some early point things just happened to go that way. So indeed all of the physical constants might be different if those random fluctuations had fluctuated just a bit differently.”

He took another pull at his beer, thinldng. “This point where things can change-the Heechee call it the ‘Phase Locus,’ because it represents a phase change, like the transformation of water into ice. It is where random events became frozen, and all the ‘gosh numbers’ were established. I don’t mean the trivial or man-made ones, I mean the ones that are fundamental to the laws we know, but that we cannot account for from basic principles. Pi. The base of the natural logarithms. The speed of light. The fine-structure constant. Planck’s number-I don’t know how many others, Robin. Perhaps in a different universe arithmetic would be noncommutative and there would be no law of inverse squares. I cannot believe this is likely-but then, none of this sounds so, does it?”

“And you think the Foe are just going to keep on remaking the universe until they get it right?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps they have some hope of being there to make it right-right for them, I mean. Change the laws of the universe! Create new laws! Construct a universe which will be more congenial to life like theirs . . .”

I was silent for a long time, trying to grasp it all. Failing.

I said, “Well, what would that universe be like?”

Albert took a long pull of his stein and set it down carefully. His eyes were on infinity. In his left hand was his pipe; he was scratching his wrinkled forehead slowly with the stem.

I blinked and shifted position. “Would it have nine-dimensional space?”

No answer. Nothing but that vacant look directed at nothing. I was feeling alarm. I said, “Albert! I asked you a question! What sort of universe would the Foe want to create?”

He looked at me without recognition. Then he sighed. He reached down reflectively to scratch his bare anlde, and he said, very seriously:

“Robin, I don’t have a clue.”