The Annals of the Heechee

by Frederik Pohl

  “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 scared!”

  “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 G 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 blankly 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 fut
ure.”

  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—Himmelgott!” 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 different 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 satellite. 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, thinking. “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 ankle, and he said, very seriously:

  “Robin, I don’t have a clue.”

  11

  Heimat

  I’ve told you about some good people and some flawed people, and now it is time to tell about a really bad person. You won’t like him, but you need to know him. I mentioned him briefly when I was talking about terrorists, but I didn’t do him justice. I would certainly have liked to do him justice—plenty of justice, preferably at the end of a rope—but that hadn’t happened. Unfortunately.