"Niven, Larry - The Missing Mass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

“Greeting, elder. Greet Roger Teng-Hui and the Terminator Beaver.”
“Greet you both. Greet Scylla, whose kind only recently made fire. A great accomplishment it was.”
We spoke; the translators spoke; talk grew raucous, then stalled. Into a moment’s pause I asked, “What’s the largest life form the Chirpsithra know of?”
“Extinct now,” the Chirp said. “They were larger than galaxies. They formed the galaxies. Your telescopes will one day be powerful enough to watch them. Would you witness this now?”
Teng wanted to speak. The Beaver wanted to speak. But they both looked at me first, and Scylla’s snore rang out. “Please show us this wonder.”
“Our monitors…but you have a local computer, I see.” The creature’s long red armored hand reached out for the Beaver’s Macintosh computer and opened it facing the jellyfish. “Do not disconnect.” The chirp produced a little box of its own and plugged it into a piece of the Beaver’s equipment. Her fingers played over a surface.
The Beaver was still attached; he twitched. The Mac’s screen raced, went black, then blue-white. “Fast-forward,” the Chirp said.
We watched. A wash of violet light dimmed to blue, to green, to yellow, then broke into an expanding chaos of filaments and dimmed further.
The Chirp’s translator spoke. “Roger Teng-Hui, how do galaxies form?”
Teng said, “It’s a puzzle. Current attempts to model the early universe usually give us a universe that is too uniform to form galaxies. Inflationary theories make galaxies more likely. It’s one of the attractive things about inflation.”
She said, “You have not yet seen the universe forming. It was too uniform. Without galaxies there would be few stars, yet galaxies would never form. But like all here—even Scylla, whose sea-locked kind breed transparent jellyfish to make ever more powerful telescopes—we became able to watch.”
Out of the chaos came whirlpools of light.
“It may be you cannot see the mechanism. Teng, your people have wondered about the missing mass.” Teng recoiled; she chittered laughter. “What is unfalsifiable might still be proven true.”
“You’ve been eavesdropping,” I said.
“Our translators note key phrases, as ‘missing mass’ in conjunction with ‘energy of empty space’. If engineers must use the power in the vacuum, and those engineers are yet to evolve, then they will be undiscoverable. But these life forms we call the Firstborn evolved very early. They metabolized the energy of the vacuum. Wherever there was a bloom of Firstborn, an orgy of uncontrolled breeding, there too were sudden concentrations of mass. Disappearance of volume leaves mass behind, yes? There sudden stars flowered.
“We would study the Firstborn further, but we cannot find them. We fear them extinct. The rage of light and heat may kill them when galaxies form, or else matter around them might grow denser until a black hole swallows all, and remain behind to anchor a galaxy.
“Yet we hope that they still survive between galactic clusters. See this great emptiness—” She showed us on the Mac, a vast hole in the universe where there were no galactic clusters. “We have never traveled that far. If we could study the Firstborn, we might learn their secret.”
The Beaver demanded, “But what drives your ships?”
“Our ships use a lesser effect. The Firstborn hold the key to vast wealth. If we have not learned it, we, in our billions of years…well. Some younger race might. Teng, Beaver, Rick, it is not in our interest that you should give up striving.”
#
Scylla’s magnetic floatplate floated out from under the table, and she drifted out onto the tundra. The rest followed. I watched them go, thinking that we must be a common thing to the Chirpsithra. A civilization is only beginning to learn the structure of the universe, when interstellar liners appear and alien intelligences blurt out all the undiscovered secrets.
Primitive peoples die when powerful intruders mock their lifestyles. Whole worlds might be saved, if Chirp diplomats can be trained to imply that vast secrets remain untapped, awaiting the touch of young and ambitious minds.
“Paid you too much,” the Beaver told me. “Did you see animals the size of a galaxy? I did not. I saw blobs and colors.” He ambled out.
Teng caught up with him. I heard him say, “Let’s think about expanding that ‘Helmuthdip’ website. Get some of my colleagues involved. Maybe some passengers too.” Teng was bouncing, his spirits restored. In a young universe there were still wonders to achieve, secrets for a young species to learn.
END