“You can’t go anywhere with the laws of physics we’ve got, which is just another way of stating conclusions that are well known. But I think it’s a mistake to believe that there just wasn’t anything, in the causal sense, before that –if ‘before’ means anything like what we usually think it means.” Pernak sat forward and moistened his lips. ‘TII give you a loose analogy. Imagine a flame. Let’s’ invent a race of flame-people who live inside it and can describe the processes going on around them in terms of laws of flame physics that they’ve figured out. Okay?” lay frowned but nodded. “Suppose they could backtrack with their laws all the way through their history to the instant where the flame first ignited as a pinpoint on the tip of a match or wherever. To them that would be the origin of their universe, wouldn’t it.”
“Oh, okay,” lay said. “Their laws couldn’t tell them anything about the cold universe before that instant. Flame physics only came into existence when the flame did.”
“A phase-change, evolving its own new laws,” Pernak confirmed, nodding.
“And you’re saying the Big Bang was something like that?”
“I’m saying it’s very likely. What triggers a phase-change
is a concentration of energy–energy density–like at the tip of a match. Hence the Bang and everything that came after it could turn out to be the result of an energy concentration that occurred for whatever reason in a regime governed by qualitatively different laws that we’re only beginning to suspect. And that’s what my line of research is concerned with.”
Another flash of stars and they were in Idaho, one of the two fixed modules that carried the main support arms to the Spindle. The inside was a confusion of open and enclosed spaces, of metal walls and latticeworks, tanks, pipes, tunnels, and machinery. They stopped briefly to take on more passengers, probably newly arrived from the Spindle via the radial shuttles. Then the capsule moved away again.
“It could open up possibilities that’ll blow your mind,” Pernak resumed. “Suppose, for instance, that we could get to understand those laws and. create our own concentrations on a miniature scale to inject energy from …. let’s. call it a hyperrealm, into our own universe–in other words make ‘small bangs’–mini white holes. Think what an energy source that would be. it’d made fusion look like a firecracker.” Pernak waved his hands about. “And how about this, Jay. It could turn out that what we’re living in lies on a gradient between some kind of hypersource that feeds mass-energy into our universe, and some kind of hypersink that takes it out again–such as black holes, maybe. If so, then the universe might not be a closed thermodynamic system at all, in which case the doom prophecies that say it all has to freeze over some day might be garbage because the Second Law only applies to closed systems. In other words we might find we’re flame people living in a match factory.”
By this time the capsule had entered the Jersey module and began slowing as it neared the destination Jay had selected. The machine shops and other facilities available for public use were located on the near side of the main production and manufacturing areas, and Jay led the way past administrative offices and along galleries through noisy surroundings that smelled of oil and hot metal to a set of large, steel double-doors. A smaller side door brought them to a check in counter topped by a glass partition behind which the attendant and a watchman were playing cribbage across a scratched and battered metal desk. The attendant stood and shuffled over when Jay and Pernak appeared, and Jay presented a school pass which entitled him to free use of the facilities. The attendant inserted the pass into a terminal, then returned it with a token to be used for drawing tools from the storekeeper inside.
“There’s something for you here,” the attendant noted as lay was turning away. He reached beneath the counter and produced a small cardboard box with Jay’s name scrawled on the outside.
Puzzled, lay broke the sealing ‘tape and opened the box to reveal a layer of foam padding and a piece of folded notepaper. Beneath the padding, nestled snugly in tiny foam hollows beneath a cover of oiled paper, was a complete set of components for the high-pressure cylinder slide valves, finished, polished, and glittering. The note read: