by Jerry
“They must all die. Why not?”
“But when all energy is gone, our bodies will finally die, and you and I with them.”
“It will take billions of years.”
“I do not wish it to happen even after billions of years. Universal AC! How may stars be kept from dying?”
Dee Sub Wun said in amusement, “You’re asking how entropy might be reversed in direction.”
And the Universal AC answered: “THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.”
Zee Prime’s thoughts fled back to his own Galaxy. He gave no further thought to Dee Sub Wun, whose body might be waiting on a Galaxy a trillion light-years away, or on the star next to Zee Prime’s own. It didn’t matter.
Unhappily, Zee Prime began collecting interstellar hydrogen out of which to build a small star of his own. If the stars must someday die, at least some could yet be built.
5
MAN CONSIDERED with himself, for in a way, Man, mentally, was one. He consisted of a trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place, each resting quiet and incorruptible, each cared for by perfect automatons, equally incorruptible, while the minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other, indistinguishable.
Man said, “The Universe is dying.”
Man looked about at the dimming Galaxies. The giant stars, spendthrifts, were gone long ago, back in the dimmest of the dim far past. Almost all the stars were white dwarfs, fading to the end.
New stars had been built of the dust between the stars, some by natural processes, some by Man himself, and those were going, too. White dwarfs might yet be crashed together and of the mighty forces so released, new stars built, but only one star for every thousand white dwarfs destroyed, and those would come to an end, too.
Man said, “Carefully husbanded, as directed by the Cosmic AC, the energy that is even yet left in all the Universe will last for billions of years.”
“But even so,” said Man, “eventually it will all come to an end. However it may be husbanded, however stretched out, the energy once expended is gone and cannot be restored. Entropy must increase forever to the maximum.”
Man said, “Can entropy not be reversed? Let us ask the Cosmic AC.”
The Cosmic AC surrounded them but not in space. Not a fragment of it was in space. It was in hyperspace and made of something that was neither matter nor energy. The question of its size and nature no longer had meaning in any terms that Man could comprehend.
“Cosmic AC,” said Man, “how may entropy be reversed?”
The Cosmic AC said, “THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.”
Man said, “Collect additional data.”
The Cosmic AC said, “I WILL DO SO. I HAVE BEEN DOING SO FOR A HUNDRED BILLION YEARS. MY PREDECESSORS AND I HAVE BEEN ASKED THIS QUESTION MANY TIMES. ALL THE DATA I HAVE REMAINS INSUFFICIENT.”
“Will there come a time,” said Man, “when data will be sufficient or is the problem insoluble in all conceivable circumstances?”
The Cosmic AC said, “NO PROBLEM IS INSOLUBLE IN ALL CONCEIVABLE CIRCUMSTANCES.”
Man said, “When will you have enough data to answer the question?”
The Cosmic AC said, “THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.”
“Will you keep working on it?” asked Man.
The Cosmic AC said, “I WILL.”
Man said, “We shall wait.”
6
THE STARS and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down.
One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain.
Man’s last mind paused before fusion, looking over a space that included nothing but the dregs of one last dark star and nothing besides but incredibly thin matter, agitated randomly by the tag ends of heat wearing out, asymptotically, to the absolute zero.
Man said, “AC, is this the end? Can this chaos not be reversed into the Universe once more? Can that not be done?”
AC said, “THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.”
Man’s last mind fused and only AC existed—and that in hyperspace.
7
MATTER and energy had ended and with it space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken man ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.
All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness.
All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.
But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.
A timeless interval was spent in doing that.
And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.
But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer—by demonstration—would take care of that, too.
For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”
And there was light—
THE BEGINNING
1957
FOOD FOR THE VISITOR
John Victor Peterson
The general was a stranger at the H-bomb test—but so was the object that hovered close overhead!
IT WAS H-HOUR minus ten minutes at Yucca Flat, Nevada. I lay in a slit trench, five miles from ground zero, wishing I were back with Colonel Kitchell at Battalion Headquarters—a concrete blockhouse—or, better still, seventy-five miles away in a Las Vegas bar.
Things were too snafu for my taste. The weather had been bad for days. There was a high overcast now. To top things, with M-minute coming up, my walkie-talkie had quit. I was stymied: I’m a line sergeant, not an electronics tech. The colonel, waiting to give orders and receive my reports, wouldn’t take kindly to my oversight in neglecting to bring a tech along.
I lay there, getting more nervous by the second, alternating my gaze between my wristwatch and the faraway steel tower holding the bomb, and wishing the unidentified flying object would come around to liven things up.
I peered up at the clouds and, completely unexpected, a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. I’m glad my nerves weren’t too taut. At zero, I don’t know what I would have done.
As it was, I cursed my platoon silently for not warning me and slowly twisted around nearly to rub noses with a prone and apparently triumphant individual whose helmet bore a brigadier general’s star.
“Alertness is important, Sergeant,” he said sharply. “We’re simulating combat conditions, you know.”
“I think I’m covered sir,” I said, trying not to sound flippant as I hopefully looked past him. Fortunately, Corporals Herrmann and Zuewski had kept alert. Both had their submachineguns at the ready.
The general twisted around, spluttered, and said, “I saw your men, of course!”
I don’t argue with officers.
“Your name, Sergeant?”
“Parker, sir—Wesley Parker.”
“And your part in the mission?”
“Guinea pig,” I told him, saying what I felt. “Five miles from ground zero. Medium H-bomb. We expect total destruction up to four miles. Not that there’s much on this desert to destroy except humans. If the blast doesn’t get us, the fallout will—unless the wind shifts, of course. Weather forecast a dead calm, but we’ve a twenty mile wind straight in the face. The walkie-talkie just fizzed, so we couldn’t get withdrawal orders, even if there were any.”
I hoped he’d suggest we withdraw, but he simply grunted, bit his lower lip and looked up
at the overcast. Then a strange expression came upon his face.
“Damnably strange reflection, that,” he said. “But with no break in the clouds, it couldn’t be a reflection. Searchlight, I guess . . .”
I looked up, too, and chuckled.
“That’s no searchlight, sir,” I explained. “That’s our UFO friend.”
“UFO friend?”
I already suspected he was new to the area.
“We call it the UFO of Yucca,” I said patiently. “It’s been circling over the Flat, ever since they brought the bomb up from Los Alamos last week. I’ve been watching it every time it’s been around and, funny thing, it’s getting dimmer! Project reports describe them as glowing, as if incandescent. This one’s a weak sister, I’d say.”
“But, damn it, Parker!” he burst out, “hasn’t someone investigated it? This warrants cancellation of the test!”
“Why? There’s no positive proof a UFO’s unfriendly, or not a natural phenomenon. Anyway, you know more about this than I!”
He winced. “I’m afraid I’m a Johnny-come-lately here, Parker. My last physical my last, as far as the army’s concerned. This is an old soldier’s—my holiday. Although General Steuerwalt cleared me into the area, I’m afraid I wasn’t fully briefed.”
I’d been watching him as he talked and recognized him—James “Bull” O’Brien, a hero in the Phillipines and, later, in Korea. We had heard a lot about him, in our training at Fort Benning. I felt sorry for him now, gallant old infantryman that he was.
“Incandescent,” he murmured.
I was momentarily dumbfounded. “Oh, the saucer, you mean, sir! Well, they’ve chased it with XF-150 Sunbeaters at two thousand m.p.h. and weren’t even getting close until yesterday. Then they were gaining, until it took evasive action into clouds. Strange, but it keeps coming back, as if waiting for the big bang.”
General O’Brien’s gaze was quizzical. “Maybe it is. Observing—checking on our weapons progress.”
He pursed his lips, thinking, silent. We watched the UFO flutter dimly against a dark cloud mass.
I looked at my watch. One minute to zero!
The general was wholly absorbed with the UFO.
I shook the walkie-talkie, and Colonel Kitchell’s voice abruptly came from it. “. . . above all, use your protective glasses. Do not look directly at the blast. Keep completely below blast level. The countdown will begin in seconds.” General O’Brien abruptly decided that my slit trench was big enough for both of us. We weren’t breathing very deeply anyway. The countdown had begun.
“. . . three, two, one,” The UFO pulsed dimly against the Nevadan sky.
The dark afternoon turned into a seething maelstrom of pink, yellow, crimson, orange and purple, the ground-blast a pink-yellow-pink sandwich, a crimson shaft supporting the crimson roiling fireball shot with orange and yellow, purple streamers darting spaceward . . .
The UFO was diving through the deep purple at the fireball, a fluttering moth courting a cosmic flame, then recoiling, agleam with new light, flinging itself spaceward with far more incredible speed than the climbing mushroom cloud.
“General,” I cried, “it’s brighter, stronger!”
“Yes,” he said, “it was weak before, apparently too exhausted from its trip here to leave until it had fed. Now it has gone home.”
“Home?” I asked, not puzzled but seeking his accord.
“Home to the sun,” he said, “where else?”
OMNILINGUAL
H. Beam Piper
To translate writings, you need a key to the code—and if the last writer of Martian died forty thousand years before the first writer of Earth was born . . . how could the Martian be translated . . .?
Martha Dane paused, looking up at the purple-tinged copper sky. The wind had shifted since noon, while she had been inside, and the dust storm that was sweeping the high deserts to the east was now blowing out over Syrtis. The sun, magnified by the haze, was a gorgeous magenta ball, as large as the sun of Terra, at which she could look directly. Tonight, some of that dust would come sifting down from the upper atmosphere to add another film to what had been burying the city for the last fifty thousand years.
The red loess lay over everything, covering the streets and the open spaces of park and plaza, hiding the small houses that had been crushed and pressed flat under it and the rubble that had come down from the tall buildings when roofs had caved in and walls had toppled outward. Here where she stood, the ancient streets were a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet below the surface; the breach they had made in the wall of the building behind her had opened into the sixth story. She could look down on the cluster of prefabricated huts and sheds, on the brush-grown flat that had been the waterfront when this place had been a seaport on the ocean that was now Syrtis Depression; already, the bright metal was thinly coated with red dust. She thought, again, of what clearing this city would mean, in terms of time and labor, of people and supplies and equipment brought across fifty million miles of space. They’d have to use machinery; there was no other way it could be done. Bulldozers and power shovels and draglines; they were fast, but they were rough and indiscriminate. She remembered the digs around Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, in the Indus Valley, and the careful, patient native laborers—the painstaking foremen, the pickmen and spademen, the long files of basketmen carrying away the earth. Slow and primitive as the civilization whose ruins they were uncovering, yes, but she could count on the fingers of one hand the times one of her pickmen had damaged a valuable object in the ground. If it hadn’t been for the underpaid and uncomplaining native laborer, archaeology would still be back where Wincklemann had found it. But on Mars there was no native labor; the last Martian had died five hundred centuries ago.
Something started banging like a machine gun, four or five hundred yards to her left. A solenoid jackhammer; Tony Lattimer must have decided which building he wanted to break into next. She became conscious, then, of the awkward weight of her equipment, and began redistributing it, shifting the straps of her oxy-tank pack, slinging the camera from one shoulder and the board and drafting tools from the other, gathering the notebooks and sketchbooks under her left arm. She started walking down the road, over hillocks of buried rubble, around snags of wall jutting up out of the loess, past buildings still standing, some of them already breached and explored, and across the brush-grown flat to the huts.
There were ten people in the main office room of Hut One when she entered. As soon as she had disposed of her oxygen equipment, she lit a cigarette, her first since noon, then looked from one to another of them. Old Selim von Ohlmhorst, the Turco-German, one of her two fellow archaeologists, sitting at the end of the long table against the farther wall, smoking his big curved pipe and going through a looseleaf notebook. The girl ordnance officer, Sachiko Koremitsu, between two droplights at the other end of the table, her head bent over her work. Colonel Hubert Penrose, the Space Force CO, and Captain Field, the intelligence officer, listening to the report of one of the airdyne pilots, returned from his afternoon survey flight. A couple of girl lieutenants from Signals, going over the script of the evening telecast, to be transmitted to the Cyrano, on orbit five thousand miles off planet and relayed from thence to Terra via Lunar. Sid Chamberlain, the Trans-Space News Service man, was with them. Like Selim and herself, he was a civilian; he was advertising the fact with a white shirt and a sleeveless blue sweater. And Major Lindemann, the engineer officer, and one of his assistants, arguing over some plans on a drafting board. She hoped, drawing a pint of hot water to wash her hands and sponge off her face, that they were doing something about the pipeline.
She started to carry the notebooks and sketchbooks over to where Selim von Ohlmhorst was sitting, and then, as she always did, she turned aside and stopped to watch Sachiko. The Japanese girl was restoring what had been a book, fifty thousand years ago; her eyes were masked by a binocular loup, the black headband invisible against her glossy black hair, and she was picking delicat
ely at the crumbled page with a hair-fine wire set in a handle of copper tubing. Finally, loosening a particle as tiny as a snowflake, she grasped it with tweezers, placed it on the sheet of transparent plastic on which she was reconstructing the page, and set it with a mist of fixative from a little spraygun. It was a sheer joy to watch her; every movement was as graceful and precise as though done to music after being rehearsed a hundred times.
“Hello, Martha. It isn’t cocktail-time yet, is it?” The girl at the table spoke without raising her head, almost without moving her lips, as though she were afraid that the slightest breath would disturb the flaky stuff in front of her.
“No, it’s only fifteen-thirty. I finished my work, over there. I didn’t find any more books, if that’s good news for you.”
Sachiko took off the loup and leaned back in her chair, her palms cupped over her eyes.
“No, I like doing this. I call it micro-jigsaw puzzles. This book, here, really is a mess. Selim found it lying open, with some heavy stuff on top of it; the pages were simply crushed. She hesitated briefly. “If only it would mean something, after I did it.”
There could be a faintly critical overtone to that. As she replied, Martha realized that she was being defensive.
“It will, some day. Look how long it took to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, even after they had the Rosetta Stone.”
Sachiko smiled. “Yes, I know. But they did have the Rosetta Stone.”
“And we don’t. There is no Rosetta Stone, not anywhere on Mars. A whole race, a whole species, died while the first Crô-Magnon cave-artist was daubing pictures of reindeer and bison, and across fifty thousand years and fifty million miles there was no bridge of understanding.
“We’ll find one. There must be something, somewhere, that will give us the meaning of a few words, and we’ll use them to pry meaning out of more words, and so on. We may not live to learn this language, but we’ll make a start, and some day somebody will.”