“That would be motion without purpose,” Miramon said solemnly. “I agree with you that it would be dangerous and unwise to risk any entanglement with the Web of Hercules, whatever that may be; but I can see no better point in cruising from one galaxy to another solely in the bare hope of encountering a high civilization which might be able to help us, and all the rest of the universe with us. We have that hope, but it cannot be the final goal of our journey; our ultimate destination must be the center of the metagalaxy, the hub of all the galaxies of space-time. It is only there, where all the forces of the universe lie in dynamic balance, that anyone can hope to take any action to escape or to modify the end which is coming. There is, after all, not much time left before that moment is due. And above all, Mayor Amalfi, it is not simply a technical problem; it is an ending which was written organically into the fundamental structure of the universe itself, written in the beginning by what hands we know not; all that we can know now is that it was foreordained.”
And from this conclusion, though Amalfi’s own psyche had been fighting against its acceptance since the moment that he himself had realized it was so, there was really no escape. Conceptually, the universe had been a reasonably comfortable place to live in, in primitive atomic theory which offered the assurance that everything, earth, air, fire or water, steel and oranges, man or star, was ultimately composed of submicroscopic vortices called protons and electrons leavened a little with neutrons and neutrinos which had no charge, and bound together by a disorderly but homely family of mesons. The type case was the hydrogen atom, one proton sitting cosily on the hearth, contentedly positive in charge, while about it wove one electron, surrounded by its negative field like crackling cat’s fur. That was the simple case; but one was assured that even in the heaviest and most complicated atoms, even those man-made ones like plutonium, one need only add more and heavier logs to the fire, and more cats would come droning about it; it would be hard to tell one cat from another, but this is the customary penalty the owner of hundreds pays.
The first omen that there was something wrong with this chromo of sub-microscopic and universal domesticity appeared, as all good omens should, in the skies. Back on Earth, nearly half a century before space flight, some astronomer whose name is quite lost had noticed that two or three of the millions of meteors that entered Earth’s atmosphere every day exploded at a height and with a violence which could not be accounted for by an eccentricity of orbit or velocity; and in one of those great flights of fancy which account in the long run for every new link in the great chain of understanding, he had a dream of something which he called “contra-terrene” matter—a matter made of fire with cat’s fur, which would be circled by cats in flames: matter in which the fundamental hydrogen atom would have a nucleus which would be an anti-proton, with the mass of a proton but carrying a negative charge, around which would orbit an anti-electron, with the negligible mass of an electron, but carrying a positive charge. A meteor of atoms constructed on this model, he reasoned, would explode with especial violence at the first contact with even the faintest traces of Earth’s normal-matter atmosphere; and such meteors would suggest that somewhere in the universe there were whole planets, whole suns, whole galaxies composed of such matter, whose barest touch would be more than death—would be ultimate and complete annihilation, each form of matter converting the other wholly into energy in a flaming and total embrace.
Curiously, the contra-terrene meteors died out of the theory shortly thereafter, while the theory itself survived. The exploding meteors were found to be easier to explain in more conventional terms, but anti-matter survived, and by the middle of the Twentieth Century experimental physicists were even able to produce the stuff a few atoms at a time. Those topsy-turvy atoms proved to be nonviable beyond a few millionths of a micro-second, and it gradually became clear that even in this short lifetime the time in which they lived was running backwards. The particles of which they were made were born, in the great clumsy bevatrons of that age, some micro-seconds in the future, and their assembly into atoms of antimatter in the present time of the observers was in fact the moment of their death. Obviously anti-matter was not only theoretically possible, but could exist; but it could not exist in this universe in any assemblage so gross as a meteor; if there were worlds and galaxies made of anti-matter, they existed only in some unthinkable separate continuum where time and the entropy gradient ran backwards. Such a continuum would require at least four extra dimensions, at a minimum, in addition to the conventional four of experience.
As the universe of normal matter expanded, unwound and ran down toward its inevitable heat-death, somewhere nearby and yet in a “somewhere” unimaginable by man, a duplicate universe as vast and complex was contracting, winding up, approaching the supernal concentration of mass and energy called the monobloc. As complete dispersion, darkness and silence was to be the fate of the universe in which the arrow of time pointed down the entropy gradient, so in the anti-matter universe the end was to be mass beyond mass, energy beyond energy, raw glare and fury to the ultimate power raging in a primeval “atom” no bigger across than the orbit of Saturn. And out of one universe might come the other; in the universe of normal matter the monobloc was the beginning, but in the universe of anti-matter it would be the end; in a universe of normal entropy, the monobloc is intolerable and must explode; in a universe of negative entropy, the heat-death is intolerable and must condense. In either case, the command is:
What the visible, tangible universe had been like before the monobloc was, however, agreed to be forever unknowable. The classic statement had been refuted many centuries earlier by St. Augustine, who, when asked what God might have been doing before He created the universe, denied that He was constructing a hell for persons who asked such questions; thus “pre-Augustinean time” came to be something that a historian could know all about, but a physicist, by definition, nothing.
Until now; for if the Hevians were right, they had lifted that curtain a little way and caught an instant’s glimpse of the unknowable.
To have looked it full in the face could have been no more fatal.
During the course of their exultant drive upon the Andromeda galaxy, the Hevians had discovered that one of their spindizzies— oddly, it was one of the machines which had been new-built for the project, not one of the old and somewhat abused drivers which had been dismounted from the Okie city—was beginning to run somewhat hot. This was a problem which was then brand new to them, and rather than take chances on the to them unknown effects which might be produced by such a machine were it to run really wild, they shut down their entire spindizzy network while repairs were made, leaving behind only a 0.02 per cent screen necessary to protect the planet’s atmosphere and heat budget.
And it was then and there, in the utter silences of intergalactic space, that their instruments detected for the first time in human history the whispers of continuous creation: the tiny
This would alone and in itself have been a sobering enough experience for any man of a thoughtful cast of mind, even one who lacked the Hevians’ history of preoccupation with religious questions; no one could view the birth of the raw material from which the whole known universe was built, out of what was demonstrably nothingness, without being shaken by the conviction that there must also be a Creator, and that He must be in the immediate vicinity of where His work was proceeding. Those tiny pings and pips in the Hevians’ instruments seemed at first to leave no room in the long arguments of cosmogony and cosmology for any cyclical theory of the universe, any continuous and eternal systole-diastole from mono-bloc to heat-death and back again, with a Creator required only at the remote inception of the rhythmic process, or not at all. Here was creation in process: the invisible Finger touched nothingness, and from nothing came something; the ultimate absurdity, which, because it was ultimate, could be nothing else but divine.
Yet the Hevians were sophisticated enough to be suspicious. Historically, fundamental discoveries were dependably ambiguous; this discovery, which on the face of it seemed to provide a flat answer to 25,000 years of theological speculation, and in effect to bring God into inarguable being for the first time since He had been postulated by some Stone Age sun-worshipper or mushroom-eating mystic, could not be as simple as it seemed. It had been won too easily; too much else is implied by the continual creating existence of a present God to make it tenable that that existence should be provable by so simple and single a physical datum, arrived at by what could honestly only be described as ordinary accident.
Gifford Bonner was later to remark that it had been fortunate beyond belief that it had been the Hevians, a people only recently winning back to some degree of scientific sophistication, but which had never lost its sense of the continuity and the overwhelming complexity of theology in a scientific age, who had first been allowed to hear these tiny birth-cries in the nursery of time. The typical Earthman of the end of the Third Millennium, with his engineer’s bias, philosophically wedded in about equal measure to a sentimentally hard-headed “common sense” and a raw and naive mystique of Progress (it was at about this point in Bonner’s analysis that Amalfi had felt a slight impulse to squirm), might easily have taken the datum at face value and walked the plank on it directly into a morass of telepathy, the racial unconscious, personal reincarnation or any of a hundred other traps which await the
