The World At The End Of Time Part 12

On the phosphor screen Viktor and Reesa watched in horror as, from the surface of the planet, an intolerably bright orange-red light winked at them-brighter than they had ever seen on a screen-so bright that the screen shut down in automatic self-defense.

And a shock shook the Ark Ark as though it had been rammed by a truck. as though it had been rammed by a truck.

Captain Bu, at the fiber-optic periscope, screamed in pain, as that intolerable brightness, unfiltered by electronics, struck his eyes. The metallic voice of the s.h.i.+p's warning system spoke up from behind Viktor: Sensor lock lost. Sensor lock lost. Sensor . Sensor lock lost. Sensor lock lost. Sensor . . . At the same time, another machine voice, deeper and calmer, announced . . At the same time, another machine voice, deeper and calmer, announced Thruster controls inoperative Thruster controls inoperative over and over, while still a third cried, over and over, while still a third cried, Systems malfunction! Systems malfunction!

It seemed that every emergency system in Ark Ark was announcing trouble at once. The crunching came again-then once more; and this time was announcing trouble at once. The crunching came again-then once more; and this time Ark Ark itself jerked under them, sending them flying, while the last of the damage reporters cried, itself jerked under them, sending them flying, while the last of the damage reporters cried, Air pressure dropping! Air pressure dropping!

There was no doubt that was true. Viktor could hear the scream of escaping air from somewhere. His ears were popping. His lungs hurt until he exhaled, and then as he tried to breathe in he was gasping. There was a faint, frightening pressure behind his eyes.

Reesa turned from trying to help the moaning, blinded Captain Bu. "Something's shooting at us!" she gasped. "Oh, G.o.d! Those poor people down there! Jake'll never get back now!"

And even in the shock and terror of that moment Viktor heard her use his name.

"We ought to get into s.p.a.ce suits," Viktor bawled, and then cursed himself. What s.p.a.ce suits? They had all gone down to the surface with the landing party.

It was Captain Bu who best kept his head, in spite of terrible pain. He cupped his hands over his blasted eyes and shouted orders, instructions, and demands to be told what was going on.

There was a well-ordered drill for air-loss incidents. True, the drill a.s.sumed that the full s.h.i.+p's company would be present to slap on the sticky patches and trigger the airtight door closings. Also true, the drill had been set up for a wholly different Ark, Ark, one that had not existed for decades, an one that had not existed for decades, an Ark Ark with all its pieces still intact. In the shedding of so much of the s.h.i.+p, to burn in the antimatter reactors or simply to be paradropped to the surface of Newmanhome, many storage s.p.a.ces had been lost, or s.h.i.+fted around, and misplaced, and the unexpected strike from Nebo had completed the damage. The compartments where the sticktight patches were kept no longer existed. with all its pieces still intact. In the shedding of so much of the s.h.i.+p, to burn in the antimatter reactors or simply to be paradropped to the surface of Newmanhome, many storage s.p.a.ces had been lost, or s.h.i.+fted around, and misplaced, and the unexpected strike from Nebo had completed the damage. The compartments where the sticktight patches were kept no longer existed.

And it no longer mattered, really. Patches wouldn't do the job. Ark Ark had not merely been holed, it had been gouged through by the laserlike blasts from the surface of Nebo. The part of the hull where the optics had been mounted was gone, burned away entirely; the s.h.i.+p was as blind as Captain Bu himself. Thruster fuel had exploded in another place. The whole center keel of the s.h.i.+p was bent; airtight doors weren't airtight anymore. The only part that still maintained integrity-almost maintained it-was what was left of the old freezer compartment. Gasping in the rapidly thinning atmosphere, Reesa and Viktor tugged the blinded, moaning captain through the bulkhead hatch to the cryonics deck and dogged it shut. had not merely been holed, it had been gouged through by the laserlike blasts from the surface of Nebo. The part of the hull where the optics had been mounted was gone, burned away entirely; the s.h.i.+p was as blind as Captain Bu himself. Thruster fuel had exploded in another place. The whole center keel of the s.h.i.+p was bent; airtight doors weren't airtight anymore. The only part that still maintained integrity-almost maintained it-was what was left of the old freezer compartment. Gasping in the rapidly thinning atmosphere, Reesa and Viktor tugged the blinded, moaning captain through the bulkhead hatch to the cryonics deck and dogged it shut.

"Wait!" Viktor cried. "What about Rodericks and the others?"

"Didn't you see? They're dead! Close that hatch!" Reesa shouted. And, when Viktor had it clamped, it was just in time. The air in the cryonics deck was thin, but at least its pressure remained steady.

"If those shots ever hit the antimatter . . ." Reesa whispered, and didn't finish.

She didn't have to. If whatever it was that was firing on them from the surface fired again, and if that shot were to strike the antimatter containment-then nothing else would count. There wasn't much antimatter left in Ark's Ark's fuel chamber, but if what was there got loose fuel chamber, but if what was there got loose Ark Ark would become a mere haze of ions. would become a mere haze of ions.

She turned to the blinded Bu, while Viktor prowled restlessly around the freezer compartment, looking for he knew not what. A weapon? But there was no one nearer than the surface of Nebo to fight. No one had dreamed that Ark Ark might ever need long-range weapons. might ever need long-range weapons.

And no one had dreamed, either, that anything on the surface of Nebo might try to kill them. Viktor wondered if anyone in the lander had survived. More likely, they were dead already-as he and Reesa and Bu were likely to be, at any moment.

Then a thought struck him. Ark Ark did have one serious weapon, of course . . . did have one serious weapon, of course . . .

He bounded back to where Reesa was trying to find something to bind Bu w.a.n.gzha's burned-out eye sockets. "We could blow up the antimatter ourselves!" he cried.

Reesa turned and stared at him. "The radiation," he explained. "If we set the antimatter off, the radiation would burn half the planet clean!"

She was staring at him unbelievingly. But she didn't have to answer. Captain Bu spoke for her. "Let go of me, Reesa," he said, sounding quite normal. He sat up, his hands over his destroyed eyes. He breathed hard for a moment, and then said, "Viktor, don't be a fool. In the first place, we're cut off from the controls. There isn't any air there. And we shouldn't blow up the planet anyway."

Viktor averted his gaze from the horrible eye sockets. "At least we'd hurt hurt them!" he said savagely. them!" he said savagely.

Bu shook his sightless head. "We couldn't destroy the whole planet. The most we could do is prove that we're dangerous-and what if they then decide that the people on Newmanhome have to pay for our act? What chance would they have against something like those lasers?"

"What chance do they have now?" Viktor snarled.

"Not much," Bu said calmly, "but better than we have up here. The air won't last forever, and there's no way we can get out of here."

"So we're dead!" Viktor snapped.

Bu gazed at him with the sightless eyes. Viktor averted his gaze, but the captain's face was almost smiling. "If you're dead," he said, "you might as well be frozen."

"What?"

"The freezers are still working, aren't they? And even blind, I think I can get the two of you stowed away."

"Captain!" Reesa gasped. "No! What would happen to you?" you?"

"Exactly what will happen to all of us if we do nothing," Captain Bu said comfortably. "Frozen, you have a chance to survive until-" He shrugged. "To survive for a while, anyway. Don't worry about me. It's a captain's job to be the last to leave- and anyway, I have faith, you see. The Lord promised salvation and eternal bliss in heaven. I know He was telling the truth." He grimaced against the pain, and then said in a businesslike way, "Now! You two get out the preparation boxes and the rest of the freezer equipment, and show me where everything is. If you start it, I think I can finish the job by touch."

"Are you sure?" Reesa began doubtfully, but Viktor caught her arm.

"If he can't, how are we worse off?" he demanded. "Here, Bu. This is the perfusor, these are the gas outlets . . ."

And he let the blind man do his job, fumblingly as he did, even while the hulk of the old s.h.i.+p shook every now and then with some new blow or some fresh excursion of the control rockets. It was the only chance they had-but he knew it was a forlorn hope. It was being done wrong, all wrong . . .

And it was wrong, a lot wronger still, when he opened his caked, sore eyes and looked up into the eyes of a red-haired woman in a black cowl. It wasn't until she said, "All right, Vik, can you stand up now?" that he realized she was his wife.

"You aren't Captain Bu," he told her.

"Of course not," she said, sobbing. "Oh, Viktor, wake up! Captain Bu's been dead for ages. Everybody has! It's been four four hundred years." hundred years."

CHAPTER 13.

The slow approach of old Ark didn't frighten the matter-copy on Nebo. Still, caution was built into Five, and it watched the thing very carefully.

Five had plenty of time for watching. Once its little fleet of stars was well launched on its aimless flight-really aimless, because it was not to anywhere, simply away-Five had very little to do.

That wasn't a problem. Five didn't become bored. It was very good at doing nothing. It simply waited there on its slowly cooling little planet, observing the dimming of its star as the stellar energies were drained away into the gravitational particles that drove the cl.u.s.ter along. Five didn't have much in the way of "feelings," but what it did have was a sort of general sense of satisfaction in having accomplished the first part of its mission. It did, sometimes, wonder if there was meant to be a second part. For Five the act of "wondering" did not imply worry or speculation or fretting over possibilities; it was more like a self-regulating thermostat constantly checking the temperature of its process batch, or a stockbroker glancing over his stack of orders before leaving for the day, to make sure none remained unexecuted. Five was quite confident that if Wan-To wanted anything else from it, Wan-To would surely let it know.

All the same, it was, well, not "startled," but at least "alerted to action," when it detected the presence of an alien artifact approaching its planet.

Five knew what to do about it, of course. Its orders included the instruction to protect itself against any threat; so when the thing fired a piece of itself toward the planet's surface, Five simply readjusted some of its forces and fired high-temperature blasts of plasma at both the object in orbit and the smaller one entering the atmosphere. When it was sure neither was functioning any longer, Five deployed a small batch of graviphotons to move the larger object away from its presence-not far; just in a sort of elliptical orbit that would keep it out at arm's length.

That left the part that was already in Nebo's atmosphere.

It was obviously too small and too primitive to be dangerous anymore. Five caught the falling thing in a web of graviscalars and lowered it to the surface of Nebo for examination.

That was when Five discovered that the object was hollow-and that it contained several queer things that moved about on their own. They weren't metallic. They were composed of soft, wet compounds of carbon, and they made acoustic sounds to each other.

They seemed almost to be alive. alive.

That was a bit of a problem for the little homunculus called Five. Its instructions had never foreseen any such bizarre situation as this. It almost wished it dared contact Wan-To for instructions.

That contact was a while in coming, because Five was not very frequently on Wan-To's mind.

Wan-To's mind was rather troubled, in fact. He didn't like to speak to his sibling/rivals, because there was always the risk of giving away some bit of strategic information to the wrong one. But he wanted something something interesting to do. interesting to do.

His billions of years of boredom had caused him to produce a lot of entertainments, and one of them was just to wonder. In that way too he was very like the human beings he had never heard of: he was insatiably curious.

One of the things he wondered about (like the humans) was the universe he lived in. Wan-To was more fortunate than the humans in that way. He could see better than they, and he could see a lot farther.

Of course, Wan-To himself couldn't "see" diddly-squat outside his own star, because the close-packed ions and nuclear fragments of his core certainly didn't admit any light from outside. It would have been far easier to peek through sheets of lead than to see through that dense plasma.

When you think of it, though, human astronomers aren't much better off. The part of them that wonders is the human brain, and the brain can't see anything at all. It needs external organs-eyes-to trap the photons of light. Even the eyes don't really "see," any more than the antenna on your TV set "sees" Johnny Carson flipping his pencil at your screen. All the human eye does is record the presence or absence of photons on each of its rods and cones and pa.s.s on that information, by way of neurons and their synapses, to the part of the human brain called the visual cortex. That's where the images from the rods and cones are reconst.i.tuted into patterns, point by point. The "seeing" is a joint effort between the photon gatherers, the pattern recognizers-and, finally, the cognitive parts of that wet lump of flabby cells the human being thinks with. So, in his own way, it was with Wan-To.

It should not be surprising that Wan-To's immensely greater brain could see immensely more.

Wan-To's eyes didn't look like any human's baby blues. They didn't look like anything much at all; they were simply the clouds of particles, sensitive to radiation of any kind, that floated outside the photosphere of his star.

Sometimes he worried about having them out there, because it was possible that a risk could be involved. The detector clouds were not a natural part of any star and it was just barely possible that one of his colleagues might find some way of detecting their presence . . . and thus of locating precious him. him. But the "eyes" were so frail and tenuous that they were not at all easy to spot. Anyway, Wan-To didn't have any choice, because he had to have the eyes-needed them for survival; after all, he had always to be watchful, for defense and for potential gain. So the small risk was worth taking. It brought the great gain of helping to ease his permanent itch of curiosity. But the "eyes" were so frail and tenuous that they were not at all easy to spot. Anyway, Wan-To didn't have any choice, because he had to have the eyes-needed them for survival; after all, he had always to be watchful, for defense and for potential gain. So the small risk was worth taking. It brought the great gain of helping to ease his permanent itch of curiosity.

So Wan-To was quite happily employed, for long stretches of time, peering out at the great cosmic expanse all around him and trying to figure out what it all meant-very like those never-encountered humans.

Wan-To was not at all color-blind-not even as much so as all human beings are, by the physical limitations of their cells as well as by their habit of living at the bottom of a well of murky air. That is to say, he wasn't limited to the optical frequencies. His eyes saw all the electromagnetic radiation there was. The difference between X rays and heat was less to him than the difference humans perceive between orange and blue. As long as energy came in photons of any kind, Wan-To saw it.

That was particularly useful to his inquiring mind because of the phenomenon of the reds.h.i.+ft; because in the long run it was only the reds.h.i.+ft that told him how far away, and how long ago, what he was seeing was.

Wan-To had realized that the universe was expanding long before Henrietta Leavitt and Arthur Eddington figured it out. He did it in the same way. He observed that the bright and dark lines in the light produced by ionizing elements in distant galaxies did not quite match the lines in the light from those nearer by.

Humans called those "Fraunhofer lines," and they moved downward with distance. Wan-To didn't call them that, of course, but he knew what they were. They were the light that a given element always produced at a given frequency when one of its electrons leaped to another orbit around the atomic nucleus. And he knew what the reds.h.i.+ft meant. It was the Doppler effect (though he did not give it that name), caused by the fact that that particular object was moving away from him. The more it s.h.i.+fted, the faster the object was running away.

It had taken Wan-To very little time (oh, maybe a couple of million years-just the wink of an eye, really) to fill in all the gaps in his understanding and realize that the faster the objects moved the farther away they were; and thus that the universe was expanding! Everything was running away from everything else-everywhere!

And, as Wan-To also was aware that every time he looked at an object a billion light-years away he was also looking a billion years into the past, he understood that he was looking at a history of the universe.

The whole thing was arranged in sh.e.l.ls layered around him, separated by time as well as s.p.a.ce. What Wan-To saw nearby was galaxies more or less like his own. They contained billions of stars, and they had recognizable structures. Mostly they whirled slowly around their centers of gravity, like the spirals of M-31 in Andromeda. Some of them had fierce radiation sources at their cores, no doubt immense black holes. Some were relatively placid. But they were all, basically, pretty much alike.

But that was only true of the "recent" sh.e.l.l. Farther out it got different.

Around a reds.h.i.+ft of 1 (say, at a time perhaps six billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only half its present size-about when Wan-To himself had been born, in fact) most galaxies seemed to have pretty well finished their burst of star formation. Farther and earlier, their gas clouds were still collapsing into the clumps that squeezed themselves into nuclear fusion and became stars.

At reds.h.i.+fts up to 3 lay quasars. That was where the galaxies themselves were being born. By reds.h.i.+ft 3 all the objects were running away from him at nearly nine-tenths the speed of light, and it was getting to the point where nothing further was ever going to be seen because they were nearing the "optical limit"-the limit of distance and velocity at which the object was receding so fast that its light could never reach Wan-To at all. And the time he was seeing was getting close to the era of the Big Bang itself.

That was a very interesting region to Wan-To. It was there, in that farthest of the concentric sh.e.l.ls of the universe, that he found the domain of the blue fuzzies-the tiny, faint, blue objects that must be newborn galaxies, tens of billions of them, so far away that even Wan-To's patient eyes could not resolve them into distinct shapes.

The blue fuzzies propounded any number of riddles to Wan-To's curious mind. The first, and the easiest to solve, was why the blue fuzzies were blue. Wan-To came up with the answer. The blue light he was seeing came from the brightest line produced by the hydrogen atom when it gets excited. (Sometimes this line was called the Lyman-alpha line, in honor of the human scientist who first studied it in detail-but not by Wan-To.) At its source, that line wasn't visible to human eyes at all; it was in the far ultraviolet. But at a reds.h.i.+ft of 3 or 4 it wound up looking blue.

The biggest question was what lay beyond the blue fuzzies. And that, Wan-To recognized with annoyance, was something he could never discover by seeing it. Not just because of their distance, pus.h.i.+ng right up against the optical limit. Most of all because there wouldn't be anything to see. Until the gas clouds that formed galaxies began to collapse they simply didn't radiate at all.

Wan-To writhed about in his warm, cozy core, very dissatisfied with the fact that natural law kept him from knowing everything. everything. There should be some way! If not to see, then at least to There should be some way! If not to see, then at least to deduce. deduce. There were all sorts of clues, he told himself, if only he had the wit to understand them- There were all sorts of clues, he told himself, if only he had the wit to understand them- The call that came in then broke his concentration.

What an annoyance! Especially as he certainly didn't want to talk to any of his siblings just then.

But then he realized, astonished, that the call wasn't from a sibling at all. It was from that contemptible, low-level intelligence, his Matter-Copy Number Five, which had had the incredible presumption to dare to call him. him.

It took even Wan-To's vast intellect a while to understand what Five was trying to tell him. No, Five insisted, the object it had destroyed was not one of those quaint, inanimate matter things like comets or asteroids. It was an artifact. artifact. It was It was propelled. propelled. It had its own energy source-which, Five had determined, came from something that was very rare indeed in the inanimate universe. It had its own energy source-which, Five had determined, came from something that was very rare indeed in the inanimate universe.

The artifact's energies were definitely derived from antimatter.

Antimatter! Wan-To was astonished. Even Wan-To had never personally experienced the presence of antimatter, though of course he had long since understood that it might exist and sometimes, rarely, did exist in small, very temporary quant.i.ties. But even that wasn't quite the most astonis.h.i.+ng thing. Stranger still was Five's report that small, independent ent.i.ties-made of matter- of matter-had come floating down to the surface of its planet in a container that the large artifact had launched. And they were still there.

Wan-To had long since forgotten any resentment he had had at Five's impudence in disturbing him. This new development was too interesting.

Of course, it wasn't important. important. There was no way such tiny, limited creatures could affect anything Wan-To was interested in. Not to mention that there was something about them that Wan-To found repellent, queer, There was no way such tiny, limited creatures could affect anything Wan-To was interested in. Not to mention that there was something about them that Wan-To found repellent, queer, repulsive. repulsive. It was not easy for him to understand how they could be alive at all. It was not easy for him to understand how they could be alive at all.

To be sure, humans would have had just as much trouble understanding Wan-To. The reasons would have been much the same, but reversed in sign. The perceptual universe of matter creatures like human beings was Newtonian; Wan-To's was relativistic and quantum-mechanical. The Newtonian world view was as instinctively alien to Wan-To as quantum mechanics was to a human, because he himself was a quantum-mechanical phenomenon. Not even the spookiest particles were strange to him, because they were what he was made up of and lived among. He could examine them all as easily as a human baby examines its fingers and toes-and in much the same way, with all of his senses, as an infant peers at them, and touches them, and flexes them, and does its best to put them into its mouth.

But when those same particles slowed down and bound their energies into quiescence-when they congealed into solid "matter"-he found them very distasteful indeed.

It struck him as quite odd that his matter-copy on Nebo didn't seem to share his distaste for those repellently solid solid things it had discovered there. Worse than that. There were the small, active ones that had presented themselves without warning on the surface of the planet, and the doppel admitted humbly that it was not actually destroying them, but was indeed apparently helping them survive. things it had discovered there. Worse than that. There were the small, active ones that had presented themselves without warning on the surface of the planet, and the doppel admitted humbly that it was not actually destroying them, but was indeed apparently helping them survive.

"But you just told me that you damaged the object they came from," Wan-To said incredulously.

"Yes, that is so, and pushed it away from me, too," the doppel confirmed. "But that was because it contained antimatter, it generated forces which could have imperiled my a.s.signment. These smaller ones are quite harmless."

"They are quite useless," useless," Wan-To snapped. The doppel was deferentially silent. Wan-To mused for a moment, then said, "You are quite sure the object with the antimatter does not present any problem?" Wan-To snapped. The doppel was deferentially silent. Wan-To mused for a moment, then said, "You are quite sure the object with the antimatter does not present any problem?"

"Oh, yes. It is now in an orbit which will keep it from this planet, and it has no capacity to change that orbit anymore." The doppel hesitated, then said humbly, "You have taught me to be curious. These 'living matter' things are of interest. Shall I continue to observe them?"

"Why not?" Wan-To said testily, and discontinued the conversation. The doppel was basically so stupid. stupid. Wan-To resolved never again to make a matter-copy of himself; they simply were no fun to talk to. Wan-To resolved never again to make a matter-copy of himself; they simply were no fun to talk to.

He wondered briefly why the doppel bothered with the things, then dismissed it.

It never occurred to Wan-To that even the doppel could be as hungry for some sort of companions.h.i.+p as himself. Wan-To had never heard of "pets."

But Wan-To's loneliness did not end, and when his core reverberated with the call of one of his least threatening "relatives," Pooketih, Wan-To answered. He said at once, "Tell me, Pooketih, have you ever encountered living beings made of matter?"

"No, never, Wan-To," Pooketih replied, but then, to Wan-To's surprise, he added, "But Floom-eppit has, I think. You could ask him."

Wan-To was silent for a moment. He knew that he couldn't ask Floom-eppit anything, because Floom-eppit had failed to respond to anyone's calls for some time-one of the early casualties, no doubt. "You tell me what Floom-eppit said," he ordered. tell me what Floom-eppit said," he ordered.

"I will try, Wan-To. It was only a mention, when we were discussing what was causing so many stars to explode. He said he had encountered living things made of matter in one of the solid objects around a star he had inhabited for a while. He said they made him uncomfortable, so he moved."

"Just moved?" moved?"

"Well," Pooketih said, "he then, of course, zapped that star. He thought them an annoyance, and it was easy to end that problem." Pooketih hesitated. "Wan-To," he said, "I have had a thought. Is it possible that when Floom-eppit zapped that star one of us thought it was a hostile act?"

"Who would be so silly?" Wan-To demanded, but he knew the answer.