When we took over Heechee Heaven, we got it all. The way to control Heechee ships. The way to build Heechee ships, including the theory that makes it possible to go faster than light. No, it doesn't involve "hyperspace" or the "fourth dimension". It is very simple. Acceleration multiplies mass, so says Einstein-the real one, not Albert. But if the rest mass is zero it does not matter how many times you multiply it. It remains zero. Albert says that mass can be created, and proves it by basic logical principles: it exists, therefore it can be created. Therefore it can be eliminated, since what can be made to be can also be made to stop being. That is the Heechee secret, and with Albert's help to set up the experiment, and Morton's help to coerce the Gateway Corp into making ships available, we tried it out. It didn't cost me a cent; one of the advantages of great wealth is that you don't have to spend it. All you have to do is get other people to spend it for you, and that's what law programs are for.
So we sent two Fives out at once from Gateway. One was on lander power only, and it contained two people and a cylinder of solid aluminum with strain detectors attached. The other held a full crew, ready for an actual mission. The instrument ship had a live camera pickup with an image split three ways: one on the gravity meter, one on the second ship, one on a cesium-atom digital clock.
To my eyes the experiment didn't show a thing. The second ship began to disappear, and the gravity meter recorded its disappearance. Big deal! But Albert was elated. "Its mass began to disappear before it did, Robin! My God. Anyone could have tried that experiment any time in the last dozen years! There's going to be at least a ten-million-dollar science bonus for this!"
"Put it in petty cash," I said, and stretched, and rolled over to kiss Essie, because we happened to be in bed at the time.
"Is very interesting, dear Robin," she said drowsily, and kissed me back. Albert grinned and averted his eyes, partly because Essie has been tinkering with his program and partly because he knew as well as I did that what she said was politely untrue. Astrophysics did not much interest my Essie. What interested her was the chance to play with working Heechee machine intelligences, and that interested her very much. Eighteen hours a day much, until she had tracked down all the major systems in what was left of the Oldest One, and the Dead Men, and the Dead Non-Men whose memories went back to an African savannah the better part of a million years ago. Not that she cared a lot about what was in the memories; but how it was there was her very business, at which she was very good. Reshuffling my Albert program was the least of what Essie got out of Heechee Heaven. What we all got was a very great deal indeed. The grand charts of the Galaxy, showing everywhere the Heechee had been. The grand charts of black holes, showing where they are now. Even where Kiara is. As one tiny fringe benefit, I even got the answer to one question that on a purely subjective level had been interesting me very much: why was I still alive? The ship that carried me to Heechee Heaven had flipped over into deceleration mode after nineteen days. By all the laws of parity and common sense, that meant it would not arrive for another nineteen, by which time I should have been surely dead; but in fact it docked in five. And I wasn't dead at all, or not quite; but why?
Albert gave me the answer. Every flight ever successfully completed in a Heechee ship had been between two bodies that, relatively, were more or less at rest-a few tens or at most a few hundreds of kilometers a second difference in their relative velocities. No more. Not enough to make a difference. But my flight had been pursuing an object itself in very rapid motion. It had been almost all acceleration. The slowdown had taken only a tiny fraction of the speedup. And so I lived.
And all that was very satisfying, and yet- And yet there is always a price.
There always has been. Every big jump forward has carried a hidden cost, all through history. Man invented agriculture. That meant someone had to plant de cotton and someone had to hoe de corn. And dat's how slavery was born. Man invented the automobile, and got a dividend of pollution and highway death. Man got curious about the way the sun shines, and out of his curiosity came the H-bomb. Man found the Heechee artifacts and tracked down some of their secrets. And what did we get? For one thing, we got Payter, almost killing a world, with a power no one had ever had before him. For another we got some brand-new questions, the answers to which I have not yet quite nerved myself up to face. Questions that Albert wants to try to answer, about Mach's Principle; and that Henrietta raised, with her talk about Point X and the "missing mass". And a very big question in my own mind. When the Oldest One broke Heechee Heaven out of its orbit and sent it flying through space toward the core of the Galaxy what, exactly, was he heading toward?
The scariest, I guess, and also the most satisfying, I know, moment of my life was when we had burned the feelers off the Oldest One and, armed with Henrietta's instructions, sat down before the control board of Heechee Heaven. It took two to make it move. Lurvy Herter-Hall and I were the two most experienced pilots present-if you didn't count Wan, who was off with Janine, rounding up the waking Old Ones to tell them there had been a change in government. Lurvy took the right-hand seat and I took the left (wondering a lot just what strange-shaped butt had first sat in it). And there we went. It took more than a month to get back to orbiting the Moon, which was the point I had picked out. It wasn't a wasted month, there was plenty to do on Heechee Heaven; but it went pretty slowly, because I was in a very big hurry to get home.
It took all the nerve I had to squeeze that teat, but, you know, it wasn't all that hard. Once we understood that the main bank of controls carried the codes for all the preset objectives-there are more than fifteen thousand of them, all over the Galaxy and some outside-it was just a matter of knowing which code was which. Then, all of us really delighted with ourselves, we decided to show off. We got a squawk from the radio-astronomers on the far side because our circumlunar orbit was getting in the way of their dishes every time we came around. So we moved. You do that with the secondary boards, the ones no one has ever dared to touch in midflight and that don't seem to do much on the original launch. Main boards, preprogrammed objectives; secondary boards, any point you want, provided you can spell out its galactic coordinates. But the joker is that you can't use the secondary boards until you've nulled the primaries by setting them all down to zero-that translates to a clear deep red color on each-and if any prospector ever happened to do that on his own, he lost his programming to get back to Gateway. How simple everything is once you know. And so we put that big son-of-a-bitching artifact, half a million metric tons of it, in close Earth orbit, and invited company.
The company I wanted most was my wife. What I wanted next was my science program, Albert Einstein-that's not really a reflection on Essie, you know, because she wrote him. It was a tossup whether I went down to her or she came up to me, but not in her mind. She wanted to get her hands On the machine intelligences in Heechee Heaven, I would judge, at least as much as I wanted to get mine on her. In a 100-minute Earth orbit the transmission time isn't bad, anyway. As soon as we were in range the machine Albert had programmed for me was talking to him, pumping everything it had learned into him, and by the time I was ready to talk to him he was ready to talk back.
Of course it wasn't the same. Albert in full three-dimensional color in the tank at home was a lot more fun to chat with than black-and-white Albert on a flat plate in Heechee Heaven. But until some new equipment came up from Earth that was all I had, and anyway it was the same Albert. "Good to see you again, Robin," he said benevolently, poking the stem of his pipe toward me. "I guess you know you have about a million messages waiting for you?"
"They'll wait." Anyway, I had already had about a million, or it seemed that way. What they mostly said was that everybody was annoyed but, in the long run, delighted; and I was once again very rich. "What I want to hear first," I said, "is what you want to tell me."
"Sure thing, Robin." He tapped out his pipe, regarding me. "Well," he said, "technology first. We know the general theory of the Heechee drive,
and we're getting a handle on the faster-than-light radio. As to the information-handling circuits in the Dead Men and so on-as I am sure you know," he twinkled, "Cospozha Lavorovna-Broadhead is on her way to join you. I think we may confidently expect considerable progress there, very quickly. In a few days a volunteer crew will go to the Food Factory. We are pretty sure it, too, can be controlled, and if so it will be brought into some nearby orbit for study and, I think I can promise, duplication. I don't suppose you want to hear about minor technology in detail just now?"
"Not really," I said. "Or not right at this minute."
"Then," he said, nodding as he filled the pipe again, "let me get to some theoretical considerations. First there is the question of black holes. We have unequivocally located the one your friend, Gelle-Klara Moynlin, is in. I believe it would be possible to send a ship there with reasonable assurance that it would arrive without serious damage. Return, however, is another question. There appears to be nothing in the Heechee stores that gives us a cookbook recipe for getting anything out of a black hole. Theory, yes. But if one should desire to convert the theory into practice that will require R&D. A lot of it. I would hesitate to promise results in less than, say, a matter of years. More likely decades. I know," he said, leaning forward earnestly, "that this is a matter of personal importance to you, Robin. It also may be a matter of grave importance to all of us, by which I mean not only the human race but machine intelligences as well." I had never seen him look so serious. "You see," he said, "the destination of the artifact, Heechee Heaven, has also been unequivocally identified. May I show you a picture?"
That was rhetoric, of course. I didn't reply, and he didn't wait. He shrank down into a corner of the flatplate screen while the main picture appeared. It was a wash of white, shaped like a very amateurishly drawn Turkish crescent. It was not symmetrical. The crescent was off to one side, and the rest of the picture was black except for an irregular sprinkle of light that completed the horns of the crescent and protracted them into a hazy ellipse.
"It is too bad you cannot see this in color, Robin," said Albert, squinting up from his corner of the screen. "It is blue rather than white. Shall I tell you what you are seeing? It is orbiting matter around some very large object. The matter to your left, which is coming toward us, travels fast enough to emit light. The matter to the right, which is going away, travels more slowly relative to us. What we are seeing is matter turning into radiation as it is drawn into an extremely large black hole, which is located at the center of our Galaxy."
"I thought the speed of light was not relative!" I snapped.
He expanded to fill the screen again. "It is not, Robin, but the orbit velocity of the matter which produces it is. That picture is from the Gateway file, and until just recently it was not located in space. But now it is clear that it is at, indeed that in a sense it forms, the galactic core."
He paused while he lit his pipe, looking at me steadily. Well, that's not quite true. There was the split-second lag, and even Albert's circuits couldn't do anything about it; if I moved his gaze lingered where I had been for just long enough to be disconcerting. I didn't rush him, and when he had finished puffing the pipe alight he said:
"Robin, I am often unsure of what information to volunteer to you. If you ask me a question, that's different. About any subject you suggest, I will tell you as much of what I know as you will listen to. I will also tell you what may be so, if you ask for a hypothesis; and I will volunteer hypotheses when, according to the constraints written into my program, that seems appropriate. Gospozha Lavorovna-Broadhead has written quite complex normative instructions for this sort of decision-making, but, to simplify, they come down to an equation. Let V represent the `value' of a hypothesis. Let P represent its probability of being true. If I can complete the sum of VP so that it equals at least one, then I should, and do, volunteer the hypothesis. But, oh, Robin, how hard it is to assign the correct numerical values to P and V/In the specific case now at issue I cannot be in any way sure of any value I can give its probability. But its importance is very high. To all intents, it might as well be regarded as infinite."
By then he had me sweating. What I know for sure about Albert's programming is that the longer he takes to tell me something, the less he thinks I am going to like hearing it. "Albert," I said, "get the hell on with it."
"Sure thing, Robin," he said, nodding, but unwilling to be rushed, "but let me first say that this conjecture satisfies not only known astrophysics, although on a rather complex level, but also some other questions, e.g., where Heechee Heaven was going when you turned it around and why the Heechee themselves disappeared. Before I can give you the conjecture I must review four main points, as follows.
"One. The quantities Tiny Jim referred to as `gosh numbers'. These are numerical quantities, mostly of the sort called `dimensionless' because they are the same in any units you measure. The mass ratio between the electron and the proton. The Dirac number to express the difference between electromagnetic and gravitational force. The Eddington fine-structure constant. And so forth. We know these numbers to great precision. What we do not know is why they are what they are. Why shouldn't the fine-structure constant be, say, 150 instead of 137-plus? If we understood astrophysics-if we had a complete theory-we should be able to deduce these numbers from the theory. We do have a good theory, but we can't deduce the gosh numbers from it. Why? Is it possible," he asked gravely, "that these numbers are in some way accidental?"
He paused, puffing on his pipe, and then held up two fingers. "Two. Mach's Principle. This also turns Out to be a question, but perhaps a somewhat easier one. My late predecessor," he said, twinkling a little-I think to reassure me that this was, indeed, easier to handle-"my late predecessor gave us the theory of relativity, which is commonly understood to mean that everything is relative to something else excepting only the velocity of light. When you are at home on Tappan Sea, Robin, you weigh about eighty-five kilograms. That is to say, that is a measure of how much you and the planet Earth attract each other; it is your weight, in a sense, relative to the Earth. We also have a quality called `mass'. The best measure of `mass' is the force necessary to accelerate an object, say you, from a state of rest. We usually consider `mass' and `weight' to be about the same, and on the surface of the Earth they are, but mass is supposed to be an intrinsic quality of matter, while weight is always relative to something else. But," he twinkled again, "let's do a gedanke-experiment, Robin. Let's suppose that you're the only thing in the universe. There's no other matter. What would you weigh? Nothing. What would your mass be? Ah, that's the question. Let's suppose you have a little rocket-belt and you decided to accelerate yourself. You then measure the acceleration and compute the force to move you, and you come out with your mass-do you? No, Robin, you do not. Because there is nothing to measure movement against! `Moving', as a concept, is meaningless. So mass itself-according to Mach's Principle-depends on some external system, Mach thought it might be what he called `the entire background of the universe', to be meaningful. And according to Mach's Principle, as my predecessor and others extended it, so do all the other `intrinsic' characteristics of matter, energy and space. . . including the `gosh numbers'. Robin, am I wearying you?"
"You bet your ass you are, Albert," I snarled, "but go ahead!" He smiled and held up three fingers. "Three. What Henrietta called Point X'. As you remember, Henrietta failed her doctoral defense, but I have made a study of her dissertation and I am able to say what she meant by it. For the first three seconds after the Big Bang, which is to say the beginning of the universe as we now know it, the entire universe was relatively compact, exceedingly hot, and entirely symmetrical. Henrietta's dissertation quoted at length from an old Cambridge mathematician named Tong B. Tang and others; the point they made was that after that time, after what Henrietta called `Point X', the symmetry became `frozen'. All the constants we now observe became fixed at that point. All the gosh numbers. They did not exist before `Point X'. They have exi
sted, and are unchangeable, ever since.
"So at Point X in time, three seconds after the beginning of the Big Bang, something happened. It may have been some quite random event-some turbulence in the exploding cloud.
"Or it may have been deliberate."
He stopped and smoked for a while, watching me. When I did not react he sighed and held up four fingers. "Four, Robin, and the last. I do apologize for this long preamble. The final point in Henrietta's conjecture had to do with `missing mass'. There simply does not appear to be enough mass in the universe to fit the otherwise very successful theories of the Big Bang. Here Henrietta made an immense leap in her doctoral dissertation. She suggested that the Heechee had learned how to create mass and destroy it-and in this, as we now know, she was correct, although it was only a guess on her part, and the seniors before whom she conducted the defense of her dissertation were very quick to challenge it. She then made a further leap. She suggested that the Heechee had, in fact, caused some mass to disappear. Not on a ship, although if she had guessed that she would have been correct. On a very large scale. On a universe-wide scale, in fact. She conjectured that they had studied the `gosh numbers' as we have, and come to certain conclusions which seem to be true. Here, Robin, it gets a little tricky, so pay close attention-but we are almost home.
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon Page 29
