The Hercules Text (1986) by Jack McDevitt

Author:Jack McDevitt [McDevitt, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-08-30T21:00:00+00:00

MONITOR

The stars are silent.

Voyager among dark harbors, I listen, but the midnight wind carries only the sound of trees and water lapping against the gunwale and the solitary cry of the night swallow.

There is no dawn. No searing sun rises in east or west. The rocks over Calumal do not silver, and the great round world slides through the void.

—Stanza 32 from DS 87

Freely translated by Leslie Davies

(Unclassified)

11

A BUBBLE UNIVERSE drifting over a cosmic stream: Rimford’s features widened into a broad grin. He pushed the mound of paper off the coffee table onto the floor and, in a sudden surge of pleasure, lobbed a ball-point pen the length of the room and into the kitchen.

He went out to the refrigerator, came back with a beer under one arm, and dialed Gambini’s office. While he waited for the physicist to answer, he pulled the tab and took a long swallow.

“Research Projects,” said a female voice.

“Dr. Gambini, please. This is Rimford.”

“He’s tied up at the moment, Doctor,” she said. “Can I have him call you?”

“How about Pete Wheeler? Is he there?”

“He went out a few minutes ago with Mr. Carmichael. I don’t know when he’ll be back. Dr. Majeski’s here.”

“Okay,” said Rimford, disappointed. “Thanks. I’ll try again later.” He hung up, finished the beer, walked around the pile of paper on the floor, and sat down again.

One of the great moments of the twentieth century and there was no one with whom to share it.

A quantum universe. Starobinskii and the others might have been right all along.

He didn’t understand all the mathematics of it yet, but he would; he was well on the way. By Christmas, he thought, he would have the mechanism of creation.

Much of it was clear already. The universe was a quantum event,, a pinprick of space-time. It had been called into being in the same way that apparently causeless events continue to occur in the subatomic world. But it had been a bubble, not a bang! And once in existence, the bubble had expanded with exponential force. There’d been no light barrier during those early nanoseconds, because the governing principles had not yet formed. Consequently, its dimensions had, within fractions of an instant, exceeded those of the solar system, and indeed those of the Milky Way. There had been no matter at first, but only the slippery fabric of existence itself erupting in a cosmic explosion. Somehow an iron stability had taken hold, expansion dropped below light speed, and substantial portions of the enormous energy of the first moments were converted into hydrogen and helium.

Not for the first time in his life, Rimford wondered about the “cause” of causeless effects. Perhaps he would find also the secret of the unaccountable: the de Sitter superspace from which the universal bubble had formed. Perhaps, somewhere in the transmission, the Altheans would address that question. But Rimford understood that, no matter how advanced a civilization might be, it was necessarily tied to this universe. There was no way to look past its boundaries or beyond its earliest moments.

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