'How could it?' somebody asked.
'I have no idea,' Roland said, 'but that roadbuzz has it that Jake will find out.'
'I ain't goin' nowhere,' I said. 'I'm too goddamn drunk.'
Imagine the rising dough of a four-dimensional loaf of raisin bread.
You can't do it. It's impossible to imagine a four-dimensional anything, but it helps to try.
As the dough rises, the volume increases, as does the distance between each raisin. Think of each raisin as a galaxy?really a group of galaxies?and you have the conventional representation of the theory of an expanding universe, first proposed about a century and a half ago. Now, inside the ballooning volume of that dough, the farther away one raisin is from another, the faster their mutual rate of recession?it just works that way geometrically. In the real universe, it happens at galactic clusters can be far enough away from each other to put their recessional speeds at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light. Due to the Doppler effect, light from these distant objects, infalling on the instruments of local galactic astronomers, is 'redshifted' to great degree, meaning that the lightwaves have decreased in frequency toward the red end of the spectrum. The same thing happens to the sound waves from a passing vehicle's warning signal. You hear the pitch change, go down, decrease in frequency. Light comes in frequencies, too; in the visible part of the spectrum, blue is the high end and red the low. Retreating galactic clusters doppler into the red. Redshift. The farther away they are from us, the more their light is redhifted. As Roland said, astronomers can look out to vast distances these days, using neutrino astronomy and graviton scanning. Once you get past the protogalactic core objects, traditionally called 'quasars,' you don't see much at all. Anything out that far is a retreating red ghost, exiting our ken at near the speed of light. At these distances, one looks beyond the red limit of the universe. If you can handle the notion that the universe has a boundary, this is it. But there is something beyond.
Pick any point of departure in the present-day universe, any place at all. Travel from there in any direction?you must keep that in mind?at faster-than-light speeds, and you go back in time. Go far enough, and you hit the edge. Go over the edge, and you run smack into Creation.
I pored over Winnie's maps. There.was indeed a major artery linking metaclusters. Roland and I began to fit pages together, with Winnie's help.
'See, Jake? The intercluster road comes in here at Andromeda and exits at the same point. Let's call it the Intercluster Thruway.'
'And if you follow it,' I said, 'you go… wait a minute. Is the Local Group associated with other galactic clusters? Or do we go our own way?'
'I don't know. We'll have plenty of time to check this. It may be that the Intercluster Thruway and the big road, the intermetacluster one, are one and the same, at least locally.'
'Okay. So, whatever this big road is, we have to take the Transgalactic Extension to Andromeda in order to pick it up. On the way we hit these little globular galaxies. Did you say you knew the names for them?'
'They're just New General Catalogue numbers. Can't remember.'
'Doesn't matter. Okay, you come into Andromeda here, presumably with the option of taking local routes into the galaxy or making a huge jump to the next cluster or metacluster, whatever the case may be.'
Roland refilled his mug. 'Yes, that's the way it looks.'
I sat back and puffed on a long clay pipe someone had handed me. It was charged with an untobaccoish weed. 'So what does it all mean?'
'It means,' Roland said, 'that as you travel the main intermetacluster road, you take backward leaps in time in billions of years.'
'Yeah.' I puffed. 'Yeah. But are we sure of that?'
'No. But put this all together with what we know about how the Skyway works, along with the legends that have grown around you, and it makes sense.' Roland was drunker than I was. A dizzy spell hit him, and he shook his head to clear it. 'But what the punk do I know,' he added thickly.
'I think it makes perfect sense,' Fitzgore said. 'And I wish to hell I were going with you.'
'Where am I going?' I wanted to know.
'To the Big Bang, mate,' another of the loggers said.
I nodded toward the maps. 'It's one hell of a long way to the end of the road.' I slid one sheet over to Fitzgore and pointed to it. 'Look at the Local Group map. You pick up the big road in Andromeda. Now, from here, that means you have to somehow get on the Galactic Beltway and go about 10,000 light-years to the rim of the Milky Way. How many road klicks would that be?'
'Doesn't Winnie's journey-poem give some indication?' Fitzgore asked.
'Darla's still working on the translation,' I said. 'Anyway, you then take the Transgalactic Extension out to this little splotch here. Hey, Roland. What did you say this could be?'
'Huh?'
'Wake up. This little cloud here?'
'Oh. Uh, an undiscovered extra burp galactic star cloud. Makes a nice little bridge to Andromeda.'
'Yeah, but even with that, the jump is in the neighborhood of a million light-years.'
'Prolly is. Gimme that pitcher, willya?'
'Sure you can handle it, Egg Roll?' a mountain-size logger said.
'Don't call me 'Egg Roll,' you tree-humping moron.'
'Easy, son. Didn't mean anything by it.'
'Then shut up and gimme that pitcher, or I'll teach you
some punking manners.'
'You'll find me a willing pupil, mate. Anytime you've got the tune.'
'The time,' Roland breathed, struggling to his feet, 'is now. Would you care to take the evening air with me, sir?'
'I would indeed.'
'Gee, that rhymes,' Susan said, nose wrinkling as she smiled. 'Would you care… to take the eve-ning airrr…' She had a good singing voice.
'Oh, Roland,' John said. 'Sit down. Your honor has hardly been besmirched.'
Susan laughed.
''Besmirched'?' I said. 'How 'bout just smirched?' I took a good inhale on the pipe and let it out. 'Never did understand what the `be' was for.'
Roland and the logger left.
'Well, anyway?'
In another part of the bar, someone fell, or was thrown, over a table.
Fitzgore said, 'You were saying, Jake?'
'Huh? Oh, yeah. What I was going to ask was?did you ever hear of a portal jump of that distance?'
'Hardly. But who knows?'
'Just what the hell is in this pipe, if I may ask?'
'Cruising weed, we calls it,' someone said.
'Cruising weed. I've been inhaling this shit.'
'Good idea, that.'
'Pretty good shit, actually.'
'Have some more beer, Jake,' Fitzgore said, sloshing suds into my mug.
'Don't mind if I do, thank you.' I relit the pipe with a long kitchen match. 'Uh, your buddy there… he's got at least fifty kilos on Roland.'
'Liam won't hurt him. He's a good man, Jake. Never hurt anyone, so far as I know.'
'Well, I guess it's okay, then.' I took a deep drag on the pipe. The weed was rather good, in its own way. Not smooth on the draw, but satisfying. Rather peppery. At any rate, I was cruising along just fine. 'Getting back to the issue at hand,' I went on. 'My guess is we're talking about millions of kilometers of road, billions maybe, to get to the big road?the whachmacallit. Red Limit Freeway.'
Fitzgore's eyes lit up. 'Fine name for it!' Then he shook his head. 'Not that much, Jake. It would be a long trek, surely, but I should think it would depend on the distances covered by each jump along the Galactic Beltway.' He leaned back and hooked his thumbs in his suspenders. 'Maybe there's a shortcut somewhere.'
I nodded. 'Maybe. Still…' I took the pipe from my mouth and used it to point at one of Winnie's drawings.
