He didn’t wait for the permission, of course. He just went ahead and surrounded us with the study in our house on the Tappan Sea. I began to relax a little. I clapped my hands for the butlerthing to bring me a tall drink, and I sat back in comfort. Albert was watching me quizzically, but he didn’t say a word until I said to him, “I’m ready.”
He sat down, puffing on his pipe as he regarded me. “For what, exactly?”
“For you to tell me all the things you’ve been wanting to tell me for the last million years.”
“Ah, but Robin—” he smiled “—there are so many of them! Can you be specific? Which particular thing are you willing to let me explain now?”
“I want to know what the Foe have to gain from collapsing the universe.”
Albert thought that over for a moment. Then he sighed. “Oh, Robin,” he said sorrowfully.
“No,” I said, “no, ‘Oh, Robin,’ no telling me I should have done this long ago, no explaining to me that I have to learn quantum mechanics or something before I can understand. I want to know now.”
“What a hard taskmaster you are, Robin,” he complained.
“Do it! Please.”
He paused to reflect, tamping tobacco into his pipe. “I suppose I could just tell you the whole enchilada,” he said, “as I have tried to do before, and you have refused to listen.”
I braced myself. “You’re going to start with your nine-dimensional space again, aren’t you?”
“That and many other things, Robin,” he said firmly. “They are all involved. The answer to your question is meaningless without them.”
“Make it as easy on me as you can,” I begged.
He looked at me in some surprise. “You’re serious this time, aren’t you? Of course I’ll try to do that, my dear boy. Do you know what I think? I think the best way to start isn’t to tell you anything at all. I’ll just show you the pictures.”
I blinked. “Pictures?”
“I will show you the birth and death of the universe,” he said, pleased with himself. “That’s what you asked for, you know.”
“It is?”
“It is. The difficulty is that you simply refuse to grasp what a complicated question you are asking. It will take quite a while, several thousand milliseconds at least, even if you try not to interrupt—”
“I’ll interrupt whenever I want to, Albert.”
He nodded in acceptance. “Yes, you will. That’s one of the reasons it will take so long. But if you are willing to take the time required—”
“Oh, do it, for heaven’s sake!”
“But I already am doing it, Robin. Just a moment. It takes a little work to set up the display-there we are,” he finished, beaming.
And then he disappeared. Beam and all.
The last thing I saw was Albert’s smile. It lingered for a moment, and then there was nothing.
“You’re playing Alice in Wonderland games with me,” I accused—accused nothing and no one, because there was nothing to taste, see, feel, or smell.
But there was something to hear, because Albert’s reassuring voice said: “Only a bit of fun to start off with, Robin, because it gets very serious from now on. Now. What do you see?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Quite right. That is what you see. But what you are looking at is everything. It is the entire universe, Robin. It is all the matter, energy, time, and space there ever was or will be. It is the primordial atom, Robin, the monobloc, the thing in the Big Bang that banged.”
“I don’t see a goddamn thing.”
“Naturally not. You can’t see without light, and light hasn’t been invented yet.”
“Albert,” I said, “do me a favor. I hate this feeling of being nowhere at all. Can’t you let me see a little something?”
Silence for a moment. Then Albert’s beaming face came shadowily back. “I don’t suppose it would do any real harm if we could at least see each other,” he admitted. “Is that better?”
“Worlds better.”
“Fine. Only please remember there’s no real light yet. There is no light without photons, and all the photons are stifi in that single, invisible point. Not only that,” he went on, enjoying himself, “but if you could see, there’d be no place to see it from, because there isn’t any space to have a ‘place’ in. Space hasn’t been invented yet, either-or, to put it a bit more precisely, all the space, and all the light, and all the everything else is still in that single point right there.”
“In that case,” I said, sulking, “what do you mean by ‘there’?”
“Ah, Robin!” he cried in gratification. “You’re not so dumb, after all! That’s a really good question-unfortunately, like many of the best questions, it’s meaningless. The answer is that the question is wrong. There isn’t any ‘there’ there; there is only the appearance of a ‘there’ because I am trying to show you what by definition cannot be shown.”
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. Roffing 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—”