The World at the End of Time (25 page)

“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
fuel chamber, but if what was there got loose
Ark
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
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
did have one serious weapon, of course . . .

He bounded back to where Reesa was trying to find something to bind Bu Wangzha’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
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?”

“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 ship 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
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 cluster 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.

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
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 pass 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 reconstituted 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.
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 redshift; because in the long run it was only the redshift 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 redshift 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 shifted, 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 shells layered around him, separated by time as well as space. 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” shell. Farther out it got different.

Around a redshift 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.