“But I’m scaredl”
“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 0 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 blanidy 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 future.”
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—”