The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

  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. Rolling 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-th
e-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 m-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-31, 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.