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 out-waited 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 crinide 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.
