to catch and measure the radio waves from galaxies whose red-shifts
approached the limit. The stars they visited and the galaxies they gazed
at were almost identical with those seen from Earth-astronomical time does
not trouble with a few hundred thousand years-but they saw more keenly and
understood more thoroughly.
And what they saw and understood was, at the end, of surpassing
importance to them. For Albert's conjecture was true-nearly true-true in
every detail up to the point at which it became terribly false.
As a result of their understanding, the Heechee did what seemed to them
best.
They recalled all their far-flung expeditions, tidying behind them to
carry away everything that might be useful and could be moved.
They studied some million stars and from those chose a few
thousand-some to cast away, because they were dangerous, some to bring
together. It was not hard for them to do. The ability to cancel mass or
create meant that the forces of gravity were their servants. They selected
a population of stable stars and long-lived, winnowed out the dangerous
ones, and brought them together, or near enough together to do what they
wanted off them. Black holes come in all sizes. A certain concentration of
matter in a certain volume of space and gravity wraps it closed. A black
hole can be as big as a galaxy, with its component stars hardly closer
than in our own. The Heechee's plans were not so grand. They sought a
volume of space a few dozen light-years across, filled it with stars,
entered it in their ships..
And watched it close around them.
From that time on the Heechee were sealed off from the rest of the
universe, burrowed into their nest of stars. Time changed for them. Within
a black hole the flow of time slows-slows greatly. In the universe outside
more than three-quarters of a million years went by. Within, what seemed
to Captain no more than a couple of decades. While they were stamping out
comfortable nests for themselves in their captured planets (long since
hewn into livability; they had had nearly a century in which to work), the
mild, gentle Pliocene epoch gave place to the storms and siroccos of the
Pleistocene. The Gtinz ice crept down from the north, and retreated; then
the Mindel, the Riss, the Worm. The Australopithecines Captain had
kidnapped-to help along, perhaps, or at least to study in the hope of
finding hope in them-disappeared, a failed experiment. Pithecanthropus
appeared, and was gone; Heidelberg man; the Neanderthalers. They crept
north and south as the ice directed, inventing tools, learning to bury
their dead and ring them with a circle of ibex horns, learning-beginning
to learn-to speak. Land bridges sprouted between the continents, and were
washed away. Over some of them scared, starving primitive tribes crept, a
wave from Asia that ultimately flowed down from Alaska to Cape Horn,
another wave that stayed where it was, growing pads of fat around the
sinuses to shield its lungs against the stinging Arctic cold. The children
that Captain fathered in the warrens of Venus, and kept with him while he
and his teams surveyed the Earth and selected the most promising of its
primates for acquisition, were not yet fully grown when homo sapiens
learned the uses of fire and the wheel.
And time passed.
Each beat of Captain's twin hearts took half a day in the universe
outside. When the Sumerians came down from their mountains to invent the
city on the Persian plateau, Captain was invited to participate in the
forthcoming anniversary talk. As he prepared his guest list, Sargon built
an empire. While he instructed his machines with the program for the
meeting small, shivering men hewed blue stone into menhirs to form
Stonehenge. Columbus discovered America while Captain was fretful over
last-minute cancellations and changes; he finished his evening meal while
the first human rockets tottered into orbit and decided to stretch his
legs before retiring as a human explorer, wild with surprise, broke into
the first Heechee tunnel on Venus. He slept through the time of Robin
Broadhead's growth, puberty, voyage to Gateway and voyages from it, the
discovery of the Food Factory, the decision to explore it. He half woke
just as the Herter-Hall party was starting its four-year climb to orbit,
and went back to sleep-to him it was the equivalent of less than an
hour-through all their wearying trip. Captain, after all that, was still
relatively young. He had the equivalent of a good ten years of active,
energetic life ahead of him-or what the outside universe would see as a
quarter of a million years.
The purpose of the anniversary meeting was to review the Heechee
decision to retreat to a black hole, and to contemplate what else might
need be done.
It was a short meeting. All Heechee meetings were short, when they were
not social and prolonged purely for the pleasure they gave;
machine-mediated discussions eliminated so much waste that the fate of a
world could be settled in minutes.
Settled many things were. There was disquieting news. The F-type star
they had, somewhat hesitantly, included in their nest was showing some
signs which might indicate ultimate instability. Not soon. But it might be
well to consider expelling it from their neighborhood. Some of the news
was unhappy but expected. The most recent messenger ship from outside
revealed no trace of another spacefaring civilization coming to life. Some
of it was expected and discounted in advance. The most rigorous
theoretical tests had shown that the theory of oscillating universes was
correct; and that, indeed, the Mach's-Principle hypothesis (they did not
call it by that name) which suggested that at an early point in the Big
Bang the dimensionless numbers could be changed was valid. Finally, the
decision to so situate themselves that time outside passed forty thousand
times faster than in their closed-up sphere was reopened for discussion.
Was 40,000 to 1 enough of a gain? It could be made more-as much more as
anyone could wish-simply by contracting the size of the hole, and perhaps,
at the same time, excluding that troublesome F. Studies were ordered.
Congratulations were exchanged. The meeting was over.
Captain, his work for the time through, went once again to the surface
for a stroll.
It was daylight now. The transparent screens had darkened themselves
accordingly. Even so, fifteen or twenty bright stars shone in the
blue-green sky, defying their sun. The captain yawned widely, thought of
breakfast, decided instead to relax. He sat drowsily in the tawny
sunshine, thinking of the meeting and all that surrounded it.
Heechee-human similarities were great enough for the captain to be a
little disappointed, on the personal level, that those creatures he
himself had chosen and established in the artifact had not come to
anything much. Of course, they might yet. The messenger rockets came in
only every year or two, as they might have estimated it-more like every
fifty thousand years by the standards of human beings on Earth-and a
star-going civilization might slip between the cracks. Even if his own
project failed, there were still fifteen or sixteen others, all around the
Galaxy, where they had seen at least hopeful traces of some-day
intelligent life. But most were not even as advanced as the
Australopithecines.
The captain sat back in his forked bench, his life-support capsule
comfortably resting in the angle beneath him, and squinted up at the sky.
If they came, he wondered, how would they know when they came? Would the
sky split open? (Softly, he chided himself.) Would the thin Schwarzschild
shell of their black hole simply evaporate, and a universe of stars shine
in? Not much more likely.
But, if and when it happened, they would know. He was sure of that.
The evidence was sure.
It was not the sort of evidence that only the Heechee could read. If
any of their experiments did attain civilization and science, they would
see it too. The anisotropic nature of the 3K cosmic background radiation,
showing an inexplicable "drift". (Human beings had learned to read that,
if not to understand it.) The physical theory that suggested such
fundamental numbers as made life possible in the first place could be
changed. (Human beings had learned to understand that, but not to be sure
it was true.) The subtle clues from distant galaxies that showed their
rate of expansion was slowing down, had already for some of them begun to
reverse. This was past the point of human capability for observation-yet;
but only, perhaps, by a matter of years or decades.
When it became clear to the Heechee not only that the universe might be
destroyed in order to rebuild it-but that Someone, somewhere was actually
doing it-they were appalled. Try as they would, they could get no fix on
Who was doing it, or where They might be. All that was sure was that, with
Them, the Heechee wanted no confrontation.
So Captain, and all the other Heechee, wished their experiments great
wisdom and prosperity. Out of charity and kindness. Out of curiosity. And
out of something else. The experiments were more than experiments. They
were a sort of buffer state.
If any of the experimental races the Heechee had started truly had
flourished, they might by now be truly technological. They might by now be
finding traces of the Heechee themselves, and how awed they might be, the
captain thought, by those evidences the Heechee had left behind. He tried
to smile as he formed the equation in his mind: "Experiments" (are to)
"Heechee" (as) "Heechee" (are to)... "Them."
Whoever "They" were.
At least, Captain thought grayly to himself, when They do come back to
reoccupy this universe that They are reshaping to suit Their whims,
They'll have to get through those others before They get to us.
approached the limit. The stars they visited and the galaxies they gazed
at were almost identical with those seen from Earth-astronomical time does
not trouble with a few hundred thousand years-but they saw more keenly and
understood more thoroughly.
And what they saw and understood was, at the end, of surpassing
importance to them. For Albert's conjecture was true-nearly true-true in
every detail up to the point at which it became terribly false.
As a result of their understanding, the Heechee did what seemed to them
best.
They recalled all their far-flung expeditions, tidying behind them to
carry away everything that might be useful and could be moved.
They studied some million stars and from those chose a few
thousand-some to cast away, because they were dangerous, some to bring
together. It was not hard for them to do. The ability to cancel mass or
create meant that the forces of gravity were their servants. They selected
a population of stable stars and long-lived, winnowed out the dangerous
ones, and brought them together, or near enough together to do what they
wanted off them. Black holes come in all sizes. A certain concentration of
matter in a certain volume of space and gravity wraps it closed. A black
hole can be as big as a galaxy, with its component stars hardly closer
than in our own. The Heechee's plans were not so grand. They sought a
volume of space a few dozen light-years across, filled it with stars,
entered it in their ships..
And watched it close around them.
From that time on the Heechee were sealed off from the rest of the
universe, burrowed into their nest of stars. Time changed for them. Within
a black hole the flow of time slows-slows greatly. In the universe outside
more than three-quarters of a million years went by. Within, what seemed
to Captain no more than a couple of decades. While they were stamping out
comfortable nests for themselves in their captured planets (long since
hewn into livability; they had had nearly a century in which to work), the
mild, gentle Pliocene epoch gave place to the storms and siroccos of the
Pleistocene. The Gtinz ice crept down from the north, and retreated; then
the Mindel, the Riss, the Worm. The Australopithecines Captain had
kidnapped-to help along, perhaps, or at least to study in the hope of
finding hope in them-disappeared, a failed experiment. Pithecanthropus
appeared, and was gone; Heidelberg man; the Neanderthalers. They crept
north and south as the ice directed, inventing tools, learning to bury
their dead and ring them with a circle of ibex horns, learning-beginning
to learn-to speak. Land bridges sprouted between the continents, and were
washed away. Over some of them scared, starving primitive tribes crept, a
wave from Asia that ultimately flowed down from Alaska to Cape Horn,
another wave that stayed where it was, growing pads of fat around the
sinuses to shield its lungs against the stinging Arctic cold. The children
that Captain fathered in the warrens of Venus, and kept with him while he
and his teams surveyed the Earth and selected the most promising of its
primates for acquisition, were not yet fully grown when homo sapiens
learned the uses of fire and the wheel.
And time passed.
Each beat of Captain's twin hearts took half a day in the universe
outside. When the Sumerians came down from their mountains to invent the
city on the Persian plateau, Captain was invited to participate in the
forthcoming anniversary talk. As he prepared his guest list, Sargon built
an empire. While he instructed his machines with the program for the
meeting small, shivering men hewed blue stone into menhirs to form
Stonehenge. Columbus discovered America while Captain was fretful over
last-minute cancellations and changes; he finished his evening meal while
the first human rockets tottered into orbit and decided to stretch his
legs before retiring as a human explorer, wild with surprise, broke into
the first Heechee tunnel on Venus. He slept through the time of Robin
Broadhead's growth, puberty, voyage to Gateway and voyages from it, the
discovery of the Food Factory, the decision to explore it. He half woke
just as the Herter-Hall party was starting its four-year climb to orbit,
and went back to sleep-to him it was the equivalent of less than an
hour-through all their wearying trip. Captain, after all that, was still
relatively young. He had the equivalent of a good ten years of active,
energetic life ahead of him-or what the outside universe would see as a
quarter of a million years.
The purpose of the anniversary meeting was to review the Heechee
decision to retreat to a black hole, and to contemplate what else might
need be done.
It was a short meeting. All Heechee meetings were short, when they were
not social and prolonged purely for the pleasure they gave;
machine-mediated discussions eliminated so much waste that the fate of a
world could be settled in minutes.
Settled many things were. There was disquieting news. The F-type star
they had, somewhat hesitantly, included in their nest was showing some
signs which might indicate ultimate instability. Not soon. But it might be
well to consider expelling it from their neighborhood. Some of the news
was unhappy but expected. The most recent messenger ship from outside
revealed no trace of another spacefaring civilization coming to life. Some
of it was expected and discounted in advance. The most rigorous
theoretical tests had shown that the theory of oscillating universes was
correct; and that, indeed, the Mach's-Principle hypothesis (they did not
call it by that name) which suggested that at an early point in the Big
Bang the dimensionless numbers could be changed was valid. Finally, the
decision to so situate themselves that time outside passed forty thousand
times faster than in their closed-up sphere was reopened for discussion.
Was 40,000 to 1 enough of a gain? It could be made more-as much more as
anyone could wish-simply by contracting the size of the hole, and perhaps,
at the same time, excluding that troublesome F. Studies were ordered.
Congratulations were exchanged. The meeting was over.
Captain, his work for the time through, went once again to the surface
for a stroll.
It was daylight now. The transparent screens had darkened themselves
accordingly. Even so, fifteen or twenty bright stars shone in the
blue-green sky, defying their sun. The captain yawned widely, thought of
breakfast, decided instead to relax. He sat drowsily in the tawny
sunshine, thinking of the meeting and all that surrounded it.
Heechee-human similarities were great enough for the captain to be a
little disappointed, on the personal level, that those creatures he
himself had chosen and established in the artifact had not come to
anything much. Of course, they might yet. The messenger rockets came in
only every year or two, as they might have estimated it-more like every
fifty thousand years by the standards of human beings on Earth-and a
star-going civilization might slip between the cracks. Even if his own
project failed, there were still fifteen or sixteen others, all around the
Galaxy, where they had seen at least hopeful traces of some-day
intelligent life. But most were not even as advanced as the
Australopithecines.
The captain sat back in his forked bench, his life-support capsule
comfortably resting in the angle beneath him, and squinted up at the sky.
If they came, he wondered, how would they know when they came? Would the
sky split open? (Softly, he chided himself.) Would the thin Schwarzschild
shell of their black hole simply evaporate, and a universe of stars shine
in? Not much more likely.
But, if and when it happened, they would know. He was sure of that.
The evidence was sure.
It was not the sort of evidence that only the Heechee could read. If
any of their experiments did attain civilization and science, they would
see it too. The anisotropic nature of the 3K cosmic background radiation,
showing an inexplicable "drift". (Human beings had learned to read that,
if not to understand it.) The physical theory that suggested such
fundamental numbers as made life possible in the first place could be
changed. (Human beings had learned to understand that, but not to be sure
it was true.) The subtle clues from distant galaxies that showed their
rate of expansion was slowing down, had already for some of them begun to
reverse. This was past the point of human capability for observation-yet;
but only, perhaps, by a matter of years or decades.
When it became clear to the Heechee not only that the universe might be
destroyed in order to rebuild it-but that Someone, somewhere was actually
doing it-they were appalled. Try as they would, they could get no fix on
Who was doing it, or where They might be. All that was sure was that, with
Them, the Heechee wanted no confrontation.
So Captain, and all the other Heechee, wished their experiments great
wisdom and prosperity. Out of charity and kindness. Out of curiosity. And
out of something else. The experiments were more than experiments. They
were a sort of buffer state.
If any of the experimental races the Heechee had started truly had
flourished, they might by now be truly technological. They might by now be
finding traces of the Heechee themselves, and how awed they might be, the
captain thought, by those evidences the Heechee had left behind. He tried
to smile as he formed the equation in his mind: "Experiments" (are to)
"Heechee" (as) "Heechee" (are to)... "Them."
Whoever "They" were.
At least, Captain thought grayly to himself, when They do come back to
reoccupy this universe that They are reshaping to suit Their whims,
They'll have to get through those others before They get to us.