The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 25

When Wan-To became aware that a fresh burst of tachyons had struck his receptors, he did not respond very quickly. (He didn't do anything very quickly these days.) It took him a while to switch from one mode of activity to another.

Torpidly, almost groaning in protest, he bestirred himself to see what this latest batch of tachyons was like. Naturally, his detectors had recorded them in case he wanted to examine them in detail—though that was probably hardly worth the trouble. Or wouldn't have been, if he had had anything more worthwhile to do.

Wan-To was not excited about the event. He had lost the habit of excitement, in this dead universe where there was no light, no X rays, no cosmic rays, no anything but the distant purring, popping sound of the protons of his own star as they gave up the ghost. Even so, it wasn't unusual for batches of stray radiation of one kind or another to reach him. Infrequent, yes—everything was infrequent these days. But not startling. Such things were simply the showers of particles that were the ghosts of some immense stellar catastrophes from long ago—from the time when any immense event could still happen, in this moribund universe.

But this time … This time …

This time it was the most exciting thing that had happened to Wan-To in a very long time indeed. Although he could hardly believe it at first, he was soon certain that this was no random burst of particles. It was a message.

It was a wonder that Wan-To could read the message at all. The coded pulses were of the very lowest-energy tachyons—therefore almost the fastest of all—and yet they had taken a long time to reach him (so vast had the always-expanding universe become, in ten to the fortieth years). They had to have been transmitted with considerable power, too. Wan-To knew this to be true not merely because of the distance they had traveled, but because he observed that the tachyons had not been transmitted in a tight, economical beam. They had been broadcast.

Broadcast! So the sender hadn't known where he was! But they were definitely meant for Wan-To—the opening pulses said so.

That fact was as much of a thrill to Wan-To as the first ecstatic sight of a sail on the horizon to any shipwrecked mariner. Impossible though it was to believe, even now, in this terminal coma of the universe, there was someone somewhere who had something to say to him.

But what was this message?

To find that out was a labor requiring much energy out of Wan-To's slender store, as well as a great deal of long, hard concentration. The message had come in very fast. The whole burst had taken only a matter of seconds, and it had been many ages since Wan-To had been able to operate at that speed. He had almost forgotten what it was like to do things at the speed of nuclear reactions. In order to interpret the message at all, he had to slow it down by orders of magnitude and ponder its meaning bit by bit.

Then, too, although the message had been stored automatically for examination at his own pace, the poverty of Wan-To's resources meant that even the basic storage was sketchy. Some sections of the message seemed to be missing. Some of the content was doubtful. Wan-To found it necessary to reactivate large parts of his "mind" from inactive storage to help in puzzling out what the message meant, and that in itself was a considerable drain on his meager strength.

But, in the final analysis, he didn't need to read it all. The signature alone was enough to tell him nearly all there was to know.

It had come from that long-forgotten idiot, the one he had charged with sending a little flock of stars on a wild-goose chase—Matter-Copy Number Five.

Five's stars were still alive.

Those long-ago stars had been careening through space so fast that time dilation had frozen them nearly immobile. They had not aged. They hadn't rotted into decay with the rest of the universe.

In a universe where everything else had decayed into stagnant death, they were still young … and bursting with power!