It was obviously too small and too primitive to be dangerous anymore. Five caught the falling thing in a web of graviscalars and lowered it to the surface of Nebo for examination.
That was when Five discovered that the object was hollow—and that it contained several queer things that moved about on their own. They weren’t metallic. They were composed of soft, wet compounds of carbon, and they made acoustic sounds to each other.
They seemed almost to be alive.
That was a bit of a problem for the little homunculus called Five. Its instructions had never foreseen any such bizarre situation as this. It almost wished it dared contact Wan-To for instructions.
That contact was a while in coming, because Five was not very frequently on Wan-To’s mind.
Wan-To’s mind was rather troubled, in fact. He didn’t like to speak to his sibling/rivals, because there was always the risk of giving away some bit of strategic information to the wrong one. But he wanted something interesting to do.
His billions of years of boredom had caused him to produce a lot of entertainments, and one of them was just to wonder. In that way too he was very like the human beings he had never heard of: he was insatiably curious.
One of the things he wondered about (like the humans) was the universe he lived in. Wan-To was more fortunate than the humans in that way. He could see better than they, and he could see a lot farther.
Of course, Wan-To himself couldn’t “see” diddly-squat outside his own star, because the close-packed ions and nuclear fragments of his core certainly didn’t admit any light from outside. It would have been far easier to peek through sheets of lead than to see through that dense plasma.
When you think of it, though, human astronomers aren’t much better off. The part of them that wonders is the human brain, and the brain can’t see anything at all. It needs external organs—eyes—to trap the photons of light. Even the eyes don’t really “see,” any more than the antenna on your TV set “sees” Johnny Carson flipping his pencil at your screen. All the human eye does is record the presence or absence of photons on each of its rods and cones and pass on that information, by way of neurons and their synapses, to the part of the human brain called the visual cortex. That’s where the images from the rods and cones are reconstituted into patterns, point by point. The “seeing” is a joint effort between the photon gatherers, the pattern recognizers—and, finally, the cognitive parts of that wet lump of flabby cells the human being thinks with. So, in his own way, it was with Wan-To.
It should not be surprising that Wan-To’s immensely greater brain could see immensely more.
Wan-To’s eyes didn’t look like any human’s baby blues. They didn’t look like anything much at all; they were simply the clouds of particles, sensitive to radiation of any kind, that floated outside the photosphere of his star.
Sometimes he worried about having them out there, because it was possible that a risk could be involved. The detector clouds were not a natural part of any star and it was just barely possible that one of his colleagues might find some way of detecting their presence . . . and thus of locating precious him. But the “eyes” were so frail and tenuous that they were not at all easy to spot. Anyway, Wan-To didn’t have any choice, because he had to have the eyes—needed them for survival; after all, he had always to be watchful, for defense and for potential gain. So the small risk was worth taking. It brought the great gain of helping to ease his permanent itch of curiosity.
So Wan-To was quite happily employed, for long stretches of time, peering out at the great cosmic expanse all around him and trying to figure out what it all meant—very like those never-encountered humans.
Wan-To was not at all color-blind—not even as much so as all human beings are, by the physical limitations of their cells as well as by their habit of living at the bottom of a well of murky air. That is to say, he wasn’t limited to the optical frequencies. His eyes saw all the electromagnetic radiation there was. The difference between X rays and heat was less to him than the difference humans perceive between orange and blue. As long as energy came in photons of any kind, Wan-To saw it.
That was particularly useful to his inquiring mind because of the phenomenon of the redshift; because in the long run it was only the redshift that told him how far away, and how long ago, what he was seeing was.
Wan-To had realized that the universe was expanding long before Henrietta Leavitt and Arthur Eddington figured it out. He did it in the same way. He observed that the bright and dark lines in the light produced by ionizing elements in distant galaxies did not quite match the lines in the light from those nearer by.
Humans called those “Fraunhofer lines,” and they moved downward with distance. Wan-To didn’t call them that, of course, but he knew what they were. They were the light that a given element always produced at a given frequency when one of its electrons leaped to another orbit around the atomic nucleus. And he knew what the redshift meant. It was the Doppler effect (though he did not give it that name), caused by the fact that that particular object was moving away from him. The more it shifted, the faster the object was running away.
It had taken Wan-To very little time (oh, maybe a couple of million years—just the wink of an eye, really) to fill in all the gaps in his understanding and realize that the faster the objects moved the farther away they were; and thus that the universe was expanding! Everything was running away from everything else—everywhere!
And, as Wan-To also was aware that every time he looked at an object a billion light-years away he was also looking a billion years into the past, he understood that he was looking at a history of the universe.
The whole thing was arranged in shells layered around him, separated by time as well as space. What Wan-To saw nearby was galaxies more or less like his own. They contained billions of stars, and they had recognizable structures. Mostly they whirled slowly around their centers of gravity, like the spirals of M-31 in Andromeda. Some of them had fierce radiation sources at their cores, no doubt immense black holes. Some were relatively placid. But they were all, basically, pretty much alike.
But that was only true of the “recent” shell. Farther out it got different.
Around a redshift of 1 (say, at a time perhaps six billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only half its present size—about when Wan-To himself had been born, in fact) most galaxies seemed to have pretty well finished their burst of star formation. Farther and earlier, their gas clouds were still collapsing into the clumps that squeezed themselves into nuclear fusion and became stars.
At redshifts up to 3 lay quasars. That was where the galaxies themselves were being born. By redshift 3 all the objects were running away from him at nearly nine-tenths the speed of light, and it was getting to the point where nothing further was ever going to be seen because they were nearing the “optical limit”—the limit of distance and velocity at which the object was receding so fast that its light could never reach Wan-To at all. And the time he was seeing was getting close to the era of the Big Bang itself.
That was a very interesting region to Wan-To. It was there, in that farthest of the concentric shells of the universe, that he found the domain of the blue fuzzies—the tiny, faint, blue objects that must be newborn galaxies, tens of billions of them, so far away that even Wan-To’s patient eyes could not resolve them into distinct shapes.
The blue fuzzies propounded any number of riddles to Wan-To’s curious mind. The first, and the easiest to solve, was why the blue fuzzies were blue. Wan-To came up with the answer. The blue light he was seeing came from the brightest line produced by the hydrogen atom when it gets excited. (Sometimes this line was called the Lyman-alpha line, in honor of the human scientist who first studied it in detail—but not by Wan-To.) At its source, that line wasn’t visible to human eyes at all; it was in the far ultraviolet. But at a redshift of 3 or 4 it wound up looking blue.
The biggest question was what lay beyond the blue fuzzies. And that, Wan-To recognized with annoyance, was something he could never discover by seeing it. Not just because of their distance, pushing right up against the optical limit. Most of all because there wouldn’t be anything to see. Until the gas clouds that formed galaxies began to collapse they simply didn’t radiate at all.