Frederik Pohl The World at the End Of Time

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

light-
278
THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME
Frederik Pohi
279
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
Page 101
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
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.
At redshifts up to 3 lay quasars. That was where the galaxies themselves were
being born.
By redshift 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 shells 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 redshift 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, pushing 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.
There should be some way! If not to see, then at least to deduce.
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.
It took even Wan-To s vast intellect a while to understand what Five was
trying to tell
278
THE WORLD AT THE END OF TIME
Frederik Pohi
279
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.
It was propelled.
Page 102
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
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 quantities. But even that wasn t quite the most astonishing thing.
Stranger still was Five s report that small, independent entities
made of
matter
had come floating down to the surface of its planet in a container that the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Wątki