“Shut up, Tom! Listen! Before Point X, essentially the whole universe was packed into a tiny glob, no more than a matter of kilometers through, super-dense, super hot, so squeezed it had no structure. Then it exploded. It began to expand-up to Point X, and that part is pretty clear. Do you follow me so far, Tom?”
“Yes, dear. That’s basically simple cosmology, isn’t it?”
Pause. “Just pay attention,” Henrietta’s voice said at last. “Then, after Point X, it continued to expand. As it expanded, little bits of ‘matter’ began to condense out of it. First came nuclear particles, hadrons and pious, electrons and protons, neutrons and quarks. Then ‘real’ matter. Real hydrogen atoms, then even helium atoms. The exploding volume of gas began to slow. Turbulence broke it into immense clouds. Gravity pulled the clouds into clumps. As they shrank the heat of contraction set nuclear reactions going. They glowed. The first stars were born. The rest,” she finished, “is what we can see going on now.”
The program picked up its cue. “I see that, Henrietta, yes. How long are we talking about, now?”
“Ah, good question,” she said, in a voice not at all complimentary. “From the beginning of the Big Bang to Point X, three seconds. From Point X to right now, about eighteen billion years. And there we have it.”
The program was not written to deal with sarcasm, but even in the flat metal voice sarcasm hung. It did its best. “Thank you, dear,” it said, “and now will you tell me what is special about Point X?”
“I would tell you in a thick minute, my darling Tomasino,” she said sunnily, “except that you are not my darling Tomasino. That ass-head would not have understood one word of what I just said, and I don’t like being lied to.”
And no matter what the program tried, not even when Robin Broadhead dropped the pretense and spoke to her direct, Henrietta would say no more. “Hell with it,” said Broadhead at last. “We’ve got enough to worry about in the next couple of hours. We don’t have to go back eighteen billion years for it.”
He hit a pressure release on the side of the processor and caught what came out: the thick, soft rag-flop tape that had caught everything Henrietta had said. He waved it aloft. “That’s what I came for,” he said, grinning. “And now, Paul, let’s take care of your little problem-and then go home and spend our millions!”
In the deep, restless sleep of the Oldest One there were no dreams, but there were irritations.
The irritations came faster and faster, more and more urgent. From the time the first Gateway prospectors had terrifyingly come until he had written (he thought) the last of them off, only the wink of an eye-not more than a few years, really. And until the strangers and the boy were caught, hardly a heartbeat; and until he was awakened again to be told the female had escaped no time at all-none! Hardly even time for him to decouple sensors and effectors and settle down; and now there was still no peace. The children were panicked and quarrelsome. It was not their noise alone that disturbed him. Noise could not awaken the Oldest One; only physical attack, or being addressed directly. What was most irritating about this racket was that it was not quite addressed to him, but not quite not, either. It was a debate-an argument; a few frightened voices demanding he be told something at once, a few even more frightened ones pleading against it.
And that was incorrect. For half a million years the Oldest One had trained his children in manners. If he was needed, he was to be addressed. He was not to be awakened for trivial causes, and certainly not by accident. Especially now. Especially when each effort of waking was more of a drain on his ancient fabric and the time was in sight when he might not wake at all.
The fretful rumpus did not stop.
The Oldest One called on his external sensors and gazed upon his children. Why were so few of them there? Why were nearly half of them sprawled on the floor, evidently asleep?
Painfully he activated his communications system and spoke: “What is happening?”
When, quailing, they tried to answer and the Oldest One understood what they were saying, the bands of color on his shell raced and blurred. The female not recaptured. The younger female and the boy gone too. Twenty more of the children found hopelessly asleep, and scores of others, gone to search the artifact, not reporting back.
Something was terribly wrong.
Even at the very end of its useful life the Oldest One was a superb machine. There were resources seldom used, powers not tapped for hundreds of thousands of years. He rose on his rollogons to tower over the quaking children and reached down into his deepest and least-used memories for guidance and knowledge. On his foreplate, between the external vision receptors, two polished blue knobs began a faint drone, and atop his carapace a shallow dish glowed with faint violet light. It had been thousands of years since the Oldest One had used any of his more punitive effectors, but as information from the great stores of memories gathered he began to believe that it was time to use them again. He reached into the stored personalities, even, and Henrietta was open to him; he knew what she had said, and what the new interlopers had asked. He understood (what Henrietta had not) the meaning of the hand weapons Robin Broadhead had been waving around; in the deepest of all memories, the ones that went back even before his own flesh-and-blood life, there was the lance that made his own ancestors go to sleep, and this was clearly much the same.
Here was trouble on a scale he had never known before, of a kind he could not readily cope with. If he could get at them-But he could not. His great bulk could not travel through the artifact’s passages, except the gold- skeined ones; the weapons that were ready to destroy would have no targets. The children? Yes, perhaps. Perhaps they could hunt out and overcome the others; certainly it was worth the effort to order them to do so, the few survivors, and he did. But in the rational, mechanical mind of the Oldest One the capacity for computation was unimpaired. He could read the odds well. They were not good.
The question was, was his great plan endangered?
The answer was yes. But there, at least, there was something he could do. The heart of the plan was the place where the artifact was controlled. It was the nerve center of the entire construct; it was where he had dared to set in motion the final stages of his plan.
Before he had finished framing the decision he was acting it out. The great metal bulk shifted and turned, and then rolled out across the spindle, into the wide-mouthed tunnel that led to the controls. Once there, he was secure. Let them come if they chose! The weaponry was ready. Its great drain on his dwindling powers was making him slow and unsteady to move, but there was power enough. He could blockade himself and let the flesh-and- blood things settle things however they might, and then-He stopped. Ahead of him one of the wall-aligning machines was out of place. It sat squarely in the center of the corridor, and behind it-If he had been just a trifle less drained, the fraction of a second faster. . . . But he was not. The glow from the wall aligner washed over him. He was blind. He was deaf. He felt the external protuberances burn off his shell, felt the great soft cylinders he rolled on melt and stick.
The Oldest One did not know how to feel pain. He did know how to feel anguish of the soul. He had failed.
