Except that now the end was in sight.
The discovery that the great spiral nebulae, the island universes of space into which the stars were grouped, themselves tended to congregate in vast groups revolving in spiral arms around a common center of density, was foreshadowed as early as the 1950’s when Shapley mapped the “inner metagalaxy”—a group of approximately fifty galaxies to which both the Milky Way and the Andromeda nebula belonged. After the Milne scholium had been proven, it had become possible to show that such metagalaxies were the rule, and that they in turn formed spiral arms curving inward toward a center which was the hub upon which the whole of creation turned, and from which it had originally exploded into being from the monobloc.
It was to that dead center that He was fleeing now, back into the womb of time.
There was no longer any daylight on the planet. The route that it was taking sometimes produced a brief cloudy patch in its sky, a small spiral glow in the night which was a galaxy in passage, but never a sun. Even the tenuous bridges of stars which connected the galaxies like umbilical cords-bridges whose discovery by Fritz Zworkyn in 1953 had caused a drastic upward revision in estimates of the amount of matter in the universe, and hence in estimates of the size and age of the universe—provided no relief of the black emptiness for He, not so much as a day of it; intergalactic space was too vast for that. Glowing solely by artificial light, He hurtled under the full spindizzy drive possible only to so massive a vessel toward that Place where the Will had given birth to the Idea, and there had been light.
“We are working from what you taught us to call the Mach hypothesis,” Retma explained to Amalfi. “Dr. Bonner calls it the Viconian hypothesis, or cosmological principle: that from any point in space or time the universe would look the same as it would from any other point, and that therefore no total accounting of the stresses acting at that point is possible unless one assumes that all the rest of the universe is to be taken into account. This, however, would be true only in tau-time, in which the universe is static, eternal and infinite. In t-time, which sees the universe as finite and expanding, the Mach hypothesis dictates that every point is a unique coign of vantage—except for the metagalactic center, which is stress-free and in stasis because all the stresses cancel each other out, being equidistant. There, one might effect great changes with relatively small expenditures of power.”
“For instance,” Dr. Bonner suggested, “altering the orbit of Sirius by stepping on a buttercup.”
“I hope not,” Retma said. “We could not control such an inadvertency. But it is not such a bagatelle as the orbit of Sirius we would be seeking to change anyhow, so perhaps that is not a real danger. What we will be trading upon is the chance—only a slight chance, but it exists—that this neutral zone coincides with such a one in the anti-matter universe, and that at the moment of annihilation the two neutral zones, the two dead centers, will become common and will outlast the destruction by a significant instant.”
“How big an instant?” Amalfi said uneasily.
“Your guess is as good as ours,” Dr. Schloss said. “We are counting on about five micro-seconds at a minimum. If it lasts that long it needn’t last any longer for our purposes—and it might last as long as half an hour, while the elements are being recreated. Half an hour would be as good as an eternity to us; but we can put our imprint on the whole future of both universes if we are given only those five micro-seconds.”
“And if someone else is not already at the core and readier than we are to use it,” Retma added somberly.
“Use it how?” Amalfi said. “I’m not fighting my way through your generalizations very well. Just what are our purposes, anyhow? What buttercup are we going to step on—and what will the outcome be? Will we live through it—or will the future put our faces on postage stamps as martyrs? Explain yourselves!”
“Certainly,” Retma said, looking a little taken aback. “The situation as we see it is this: Anything that survives the Ginnangu-Gap at the metagalactic center, by as much as five micro-seconds, carries an energy potential into the future which will have a considerable influence on the re-formation of the two universes. If the surviving object is only a stone—or a planet, like He—then the two universes will re-form exactly as they did after the explosion of the monobloc, and their histories will repeat themselves very closely. If, on the other hand, the surviving object has volition and a little maneuverability—such as a man—it has available to it any of the infinitely many different sets of dimensions of Hilbert space. Each one of us that makes that crossing may in a few micro-seconds start a universe of his own, with a fate wholly unpredictable from history.”
“But,” Dr. Schloss added, “he will die in the process. The stuffs and energies of him become the monobloc of his universe.”
“Gods of all stars,” Hazleton said …. “Helleshin! Gods of all stars is what we’re racing the Web of Hercules to become, isn’t it? Well, I’m punished for my oldest, most comfortable oath. I never thought I’d become one—and I’m not even sure I want to be.”
“Is there any other choice?” Amalfi said. “What happens if the Web of Hercules gets there first?”
“Then they remake the universes as they choose,” Retma said. “Since we know nothing about them, we cannot even guess how they would choose.”
“Except,” Dr. Bonner added, “that their choices are not very likely to include us, or anything like us.”
“That sounds like a safe bet,” Amalfi said. “I must confess I feel about as uninspired as Mark does about the alternative, though. Or—is there a third alternative? What happens if the metagalactic center is empty when the catastrophe arrives? If neither the Web nor He is there, prepared to use it?”
Retma shrugged. “Then—if we can speak at all about so grand a transformation—history repeats itself. The universe is born again, goes through its travails, and continues its journey to its terminal catastrophes: the heat- death and the monobloc. It may be that we will find ourselves carrying on as we always did, but in the antimatter universe; if so, we would be unable to detect the difference. But I think that unlikely. The most probable event is immediate extinction, and a re-birth of both universes from the primordial ylem.”
“Ylem?” Amalfi said. “What’s that? I’ve never heard the word before.”
“The ylem was the primordial flux of neutrons out of which all else emerged,” Dr. Schloss said. “I’m not surprised that you hadn’t heard it before; it’s the ABC of cosmogony, the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow premise. Ylem in cosmogony is an assumption like ‘zero’ in mathematics—something so old and so fundamental that it would never occur to you that somebody had to invent it.”
“All right,” Amalfi said. “Then what Retma is saying is that the most probable denouement, if dead-center is empty when June second comes, is that we will all be reduced to a sea of neutrons?”
“That’s right,” Dr. Schloss said.
“Not much of a choice,” Gifford Bonner said reflectively.
“No,” Miramon said, speaking for the first time. “It is not much of a choice. But it is all the choice we will have. And we will not have even that, if we fail to reach the metagalactic center in time.”
Nevertheless, it was only in the last year that Web Hazleton began to grasp, and then only dimly, the true nature of the coming end. Even then, the knowledge did not come home to him by way of the men who were directing the preparations; what they were preparing for, though it was not kept secret, remained mostly incomprehensible, and so could not shake his confidence that what was being aimed at was a way to prevent the Ginnangu-Gap from happening at all. He ceased to believe that, finally and dismally, only when Estelle refused to bear him a child.
“But why?” Web said, seizing her hand with one of his, and with the other gesturing desperately at the walls of the apartment the Hevians had given them. “We’re permanent now—it isn’t only that we know we are, everybody agrees we are. It isn’t a tabu line for us any longer!”
“I know,” Estelle said gently. “It isn’t that. I wish you hadn’t asked; it would have been simpler that way.”
“It would have occurred to me sooner or later. Ordinarily I would have gone off the pills right away, but there was so much confusion about moving to He—anyhow I only just realized you were still on them. I wish you’d tell me why.”
“Web, my dear, you’d know why if you thought a little more about it. The end is the end, that’s all. What would be the sense of having a child that would live only a year or two?”
“It may not be that certain,” Web said darkly.
“Of course it’s certain. Actually I think I’ve known it was coming ever since I was born—perhaps even before I was born. I could feel it coming.”
“Honestly, Estelle, don’t you know that’s nonsense?”
“I can see why it would sound that way,” Estelle admitted. “But I can’t help that. And since the end is on the way, I can’t call it nonsense, can I? I had the premonition, and it was right.”
