“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-Himinelgott!” 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 djfferent 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 sateffite. 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.”