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’s. 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, “Gospozha 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 flat-plate 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 existed, 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.
“You see, these fundamental constants like the ‘gosh numbers’ determine whether or not life can exist in the universe. Among very many other things, to be sure. But if some of them were a little higher or a little lower, life could not exist. Do you see the logical consequence of that statement? Yes, I think you do. It is a simple syllogism. Major premise, the ‘gosh numbers’ are not fixed by natural law but could have been different if certain different events had taken place at ‘Point X.’ Minor premise, if they were different in certain directions, the universe would be less hospitable to life. Conclusion? Ah, that’s the heart of it. Conclusion: If they were different in certain other directions, the universe might be more hospitable to life.”
And he stopped talking, and sat regarding me, reaching down into a carpet slipper with one hand to scratch the sole of his foot.
I don’t know which of us would have outwaited the other then. I was trying to digest a lot of very indigestible ideas, and old Albert, he was determined to give me time to digest them. Before either of those could happen Paul Hall came trotting into the cubicle I had made my own yelling, “Company! Hey, Robin! We’ve got visitors!”
Well, my first thought was Essie, of course; we’d talked; I knew she was on her way to the Kennedy launchport at least, even if not actually waiting there for our orbit to settle down and get off. I stared at Paul and then at my watch. “There hasn’t been time,” I said, because there hadn’t.
He was grinning. “Come and see the poor bastards,” he chortled.
And that’s what they were, all right. Six of them, crammed into a Five. Launched from Gateway less than twenty-four hours after I had taken off from the Moon, carrying enough armament to wipe out a whole division of Oldest Ones, ready to save and profit. They had flown all the way out after Heechee Heaven, reversed course and flown all the way back. Somewhere en route we must have passed them without knowing it. Poor bastards! But they were pretty decent guys, volunteers, taking off on a mission that must have seemed insecure even by Gateway standards. I promised them that they would get a share of the profits—there was plenty to go around. It wasn’t their fault that we didn’t need them, especially considering how much we might have needed them if we had.
So we made them welcome. Janine proudly showed them around. Wan, grinning and waving his sleep-gun around, introduced them to the gentle Old Ones, placid in the face of this new invasion. And by the time all that settled down I realized that what I needed most was food and sleep, and I took both.
When I woke up the first news I got was that Essie was on her way, but not due for a while yet. I fidgeted around for a while, trying to remember everything Albert had said, trying to make a mental picture of the Big Bang and that critical third-second instant when everything got frozen…and not really succeeding. So I called Albert again and said, “More hospitable how?”
“Ah, Robin,” he said—nothing ever takes him by surprise—“that’s a question I can’t answer. We don’t even know what all the Machian features of the universe are, but maybe—Maybe,” he said, showing by the crinkle at the corners of his eyes that he was only guessing to humor me, “maybe immortality? Maybe a faster synaptic speed of an organic brain, i.e., higher intelligence? Maybe only more planets that are suitable for life to evolve? Any of the above. Or all of them. The important thing is that we can theorize that such ‘more hospitable’ features could exist, and that it should be possible to deduce them from a proper theoretical basis. Henrietta went that far. Then she went a little further. Suppose the Heechee (she suggested) learned a little more astrophysics than we, decided what the right features would be—and set out to produce them! How would they go about it? Well, one way would be to shrink the universe back to the primordial state, and start over again with a new Big Bang! How could that happen? If you can
create and destroy mass—easy! Juggle it around. Stop the expansion. Start it contracting again. Then somehow stay outside of the point concentration, wait for it to explode again—and then, from outside the monobloc, do whatever had to be done to change the fundamental dimensionless numbers of the universe, so that a new one was born that would be—well, call it heaven.”
My eyes were popping. “Is that possible?”
“To you or me? Now? No. Absolutely impossible. Wouldn’t have a clue where to begin.”
“Not to you or me, dummy! To the Heechee!”
“Ah, Robin,” he said mournfully, “who can say? I don’t see how, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t. I can’t even guess how to manipulate the universe to make it come out right. But that might not be necessary. You have to assume they would have some way of existing, essentially, forever. That’s necessary even to do it once. And if forever, why, then you could simply make random changes and see what happened, until you got the universe you wanted.”
He took time to look at his cold pipe thoughtfully for a moment, and then put it in his sweatshirt pocket unlit. “That’s as far as Henrietta got with her dissertation before they really fell in on her. Because then she said that the ‘missing mass’ might in fact prove that the Heechee had really begun to interfere with the orderly development of the universe—she said they were removing mass from the outer galaxies to make them fall back more rapidly. Perhaps, she thought, they were also adding mass at the center—if there is one. And she said that that might explain why the Heechee had run away. They started the process, she guessed, and then went off to hide somewhere, in some sort of timeless stasis, maybe like a big black hole, until it ran its course and they were ready to come out and start things over again. That’s when it really hit the fan! No wonder. Can you imagine a bunch of physics professors trying to cope with something like that? They said she should try for a degree in Heechee psychology instead of astrophysics. They said she had nothing to offer but conjecture and assumption—no way to test the theory, just a guess. And they thought it was a bad one. So they refused her dissertation, and she didn’t get her doctorate, and so she went off to Gateway to be a prospector and wound up where she is. Dead. And,” he said thoughtfully, pulling the pipe out again, “I do actually, Robin, think she was wrong, or at least sloppy. We have very little evidence that the Heechee had any possible way of affecting matters in any galaxy but our own, and she was talking about the entire universe.”