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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frederik Pohl has been about everything one man can be in the world of science fiction: fan (a founder of the fabled Futurions), book and magazine editor, agent, and, above all, writer. As editor of Galaxy in the 1950’s, he helped set the tone for a decade of SF-including his own memorable story such as The Space Merchants (in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth). His recent works include Man Plus, Gateway, Jem and his memoirs, The Way the Future Was. Pohi travels extensively during the year on the lecture circuit; he lives with his family in New Jersey.