This led to the question of the permanency of the universe. Hunt asked how the universe could still exist at all let alone still be evolving if all the matter in it was decaying at the rate that the Ganymeans had indicated, which was not slow on a cosmic time scale; there ought not to have been very much of the universe left.
The universe went on forever, he was told. All the time, throughout the whole volume of space, particles were appearing spontaneously as well as vanishing spontaneously, the latter process taking place predominantly inside matter-naturally, since that was where there were more of them to vanish from in the first place. Thus the evolution of progressively more complex mechanisms of creating order out of chaos-basic particles, interstellar clouds, stars, planets, organic chemicals, then life itself and after that intelligence-formed a continuous cycle, a perpetual stage where the show never stopped but individual actors came and went. Underlying it all was a unidirectional pressure that strove always to bring high levels of organization from lower ones. The universe was the result of a conifict of two opposing, fundamental trends; one, represented by the second law of thermodynamics, was the tendency for disorder to increase, while the other-the evolutionary principle-produced local reversals by creating order. In the Ganymean sense, the term evolution was not something that applied only to the world of living things, but one that embraced equally the whole spectrum of increasing order, from the formation of an atomic nucleus from stellar plasma to the act of designing a supercomputer; within this spectrum, the emergence of life was reduced to just another milestone along the way. They compared the evolutionary principle to a fish swimming upstream against the current of entropy; the fish and the current symbolized the two fundamental forces in the Ganymean universe. Evolution worked the way it did because selection worked; selection worked because probability worked in a particular way. The universe was, in the final analysis, all a question of statistics.
Basic particles thus appeared, lived out their mortal spans, and then vanished. Where did they come from and where did they go to? This question summed up the kinds of problem that had existed at the frontier of Ganymean science at the time of the Shapieron’s departure. The whole universe perceived by the senses was compared to a geometric plane through which a particle passed, to be observable for a while as it made its contribution to the evolving histories of the galaxies. But in what kind of superuniverse was this plane embedded? Of what kind of truer reality was everything that had ever been observed just a pale and insignificant shadow? These were the secrets that the researchers of Minerva had been beginning to probe and which, they had
confidently believed, would eventually yield the key not only to practicable intergalactic travel, but also to movement in domains of existence that even they were incapable of imagining. The scientists from the Shapieron wondered how much their descendants had learned in the years, decades, or even centuries, that had elapsed after their departure from Minerva. Could the abrupt disappearance of a whole civilization have a connection with some undreamed of universe that they had discovered?
The newsmen present were interested in the cultural basis of the Minervan civilization, particularly the means of conducting everyday commercial transactions between individuals and between organizations. A freely competing economy based on monetary values seemed incompatible with the noncompetitive Ganymean character and raised the question of what alternative system the aliens used to measure and control the obligations between an individual and the rest of society.
The Ganymeans confirmed that their system had functioned without the motivational forces of profit and a need to maintain any kind of financial solvency. This was another area in which the radically different psychology and conditioning of the Ganymeans made a smooth dialogue impossible, mainly because they had no comprehension of many of the facts of living that were accepted as self-evident on Earth. That some means of control was desirable to insure that everybody put into society at least as much as he took out was strange to them; so was the concept that any measure of a “normal” input-output ratio could be specified since, they maintained, every individual had his own preferred ratio at which he functioned optimally, and which it was his basic right to choose. The concept of financial necessity or any other means of coercing somebody to live a life that he would not otherwise follow was, to them, a grotesque infringement of freedom and dignity. Besides that, they seemed unable to understand why it should be necessary to base any society on such principles.