When a star’s core has turned to iron, the nuclear furnace at its core weakens, until it can no longer fight off the terrible gravitational squeeze of the dead weight of its outer layers. The star collapses on itself….
And then it rebounds in a titanic explosion, pouring out new treasuries of heavier elements still, manufactured in the condign heat of that explosion, to turn into tiny particles that will enrich the next patch of interstellar gas.
That was what would inevitably happen, sooner or later, in the normal course of events, and it didn’t require any action on the part of Bill. It would be taken care of by those simple Newtonian-Einsteinian laws of gravitation that the Grand Galactics had never seen any reason to change.
As we say, “sooner or later,” but the Grand Galactics preferred sooner. Bill chose to speed things up. He scanned a considerable volume of adjacent space and was lucky enough to find a trickle of nearby dark matter…coaxed it to flow into his patch…and was pleased. One of the Grand Galactics’ main objectives was being helped along.
And what was that objective?
There is no way of expressing it in terms a human being could understand, but one step in its achievement was known to be an increase in the proportion of heavy elements to light—in this case “heavy” meaning those elements with at least twenty or so protons in their nuclei, along with crowds of neutrons. The kind of elements, that is, that the original creation of the universe had omitted entirely.
Changing all those light elements to heavy would take much work, and vast amounts of time…but time, after all, belonged to the Grand Galactics.
24
CALIFORNIA
The American East Coast might consider itself the center of power, of government, or of culture. (Of course, that would depend on which East Coast city you were talking about, New York, Washington, or Boston.) But in one very important way it was definitely inferior to the other edge of the North American continent. Oh, it wasn’t the palm trees and the flowers blooming everywhere that thrilled the Subramanians. After all, Myra and Ranjit were Lankans, and a riot of exotic vegetation was their natural ambience. No, the best thing about California was that it was warm! It never got painfully cold, especially around the Los Angeles area, where it wasn’t ever really cold at all.
So Pasadena, where Ranjit discovered he was based, was a great place to live. Well, it was if you didn’t count the possibility of earthquakes. Or wildfires that could flatten a whole subdivision of homes in a dry year. Or floods that could pull down some other subdivision, one that had been built on precipitous lots because all the flat lots had been built on already, floods that were always ready to do this in a year when some relatively minor fire had killed off enough of the brush to weaken the ground’s hold on the substrate.
Never mind. Those things might not happen. At least they might not before the Subramanian family had packed up and gone somewhere else. Meanwhile it was a splendid place to raise a child. Myra happily pushed Natasha’s carriage through the local supermarket, along with all the other mothers doing the same, and thought she had never been so lucky in her life.
Ranjit, on the other hand, had some doubts.
Oh, he loved the good parts of their life in Southern California as much as Myra did. Took pleasure in their excursions to the points of interest that were so unlike anything in Sri Lanka, the La Brea tar pits in the heart of the city, where millennia of ancient beasts had been trapped and preserved for humans to wonder over well into this twenty-first century. The movie studios, with their brilliantly engineered rides and exhibits. (Myra had been a little doubtful about taking Tashy to such a chancy place, but in the event, Natasha chortled and loved it.) Griffith Observatory with its seismographs and telescopes and its grand picnic area overlooking the city.
What he didn’t like was his job.
It gave him everything T. Orion Bledsoe had promised, that was true, and even a fair number of things Ranjit hadn’t expected at all. He had his own private office, which was spacious (three meters by more than five) if windowless (because, like all the rest of this installation, it was nearly twenty meters underground) and furnished with a large desk and a large leather armchair for his own use and several less pricey other chairs, at a clear oak table, for guests and meetings. And no fewer than three separate computer terminals, with unlimited access to almost everything. Now all it took was pushing a few keys for Ranjit to get his personal copies of just about every mathematical journal there was in the world. Not only did he get the journals themselves—hard copies when there were hard copies to begin with, electronic copies when that was all the original “publishers” had produced. He also received translations—horribly expensive, but paid for by the agency, out of their apparently limitless bank account—of at least the abstracts from those journals that happened to be in languages Ranjit had no hope of ever comprehending.
What was wrong was that he had nothing to do.
The first few days were busy enough, because Ranjit had to be walked through the places where red tape was generated so that they could generate Ranjit’s own contribution to the supply—identity badge to prepare, documents to sign, all the unavoidable flotsam of any large enterprise in the twenty-first century. Then nothing.
By the end of the first month, Ranjit, who was never grumpy, was waking up grumpy almost every workday morning. There was a cure. A prescribed dose of Natasha, along with one of Myra, usually cleared the symptoms up before he finished breakfast, but then by the time he came home for dinner, he was morose again. Apologetic about it, of course: “I don’t mean to take it out on Tashy and you, Myra, but I’m just wasting time here. No one will tell me what I’m supposed to be doing. When I find someone to ask, he just gets all mock-deferential and says, Well, that would be up to me, wouldn’t it?” But then, by the time he had finished dinner, and given Tashy her bath or changed her diaper or just dandled her on his knee, who could stay morose? Not Ranjit, and he was then his usual cheery self until the next time he had to get up to go to his nonwork.
By the end of the second month the depression was deeper. It took longer to lift, because, as Ranjit told his wife—over and over!—“It’s worse than ever! I cornered Bledsoe today—not easy to do, because he’s hardly ever in his office—and asked him point-blank what kind of work I was supposed to be doing. He gave me a dirty look, and do you know what he said? He said, ‘If you ever find out, please tell me.’ It seems he had orders from high up to hire me, but nobody ever told him what my job was to be.”
“They wanted you because you’re famous and you add class to the operation,” his wife informed him.
“Good guess. I sort of had the same idea myself, but it can’t be right. That whole operation’s so secret nobody knows who’s working in the next office.”
“So do you want to quit?” Myra asked.
“Huh. Well, I don’t think so. Don’t know if I can, really, because I’m not sure what all I signed, but anyway I promised Gamini.”
“Then,” she said, “let’s just learn to love it. Why don’t you solve that P equals NP problem you talk about? And anyway, tomorrow’s Saturday, so why don’t we take Tashy to the zoo?”
The zoo, of course, was a delight, although in the rest of the world things were going as badly as ever. Recent developments? Well, Argentina’s vast herds of cattle were keeling over by the thousands with a new variety of the old disease called bluetongue. It had just been confirmed that the plague was a biowarfare strain. What wasn’t clear was who had spread it. Maybe Venezuela or Colombia, some people around the agency thought, because Argentina had contributed heavily to the international force that was trying to keep the Venezuelan and the Colombian armies apart. (They weren’t very successful at it, but the Venezuelans and the Colombians hated them for trying.) The rest of the world was as unquiet as ever. In Iraq nightly outbreaks of car-bombings and beheadings showed that the two kinds of Iraqi Muslims were again trying to ensure that there was only one true Islamic faith by exterminating each other. In Africa the number of officially recognized wars had grown to fourteen, not counting several dozen tribal skirmishes. In Asia the Adorable Leader’s North Koreans were issuing communiqué after communiqué charging most of the world’s other states with spreading lies about them.