The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [46]
“He was doing that before,” Teng said. “It’s an interesting ... notion.”
“We must suppose that early Chirpsithra—” The Beaver saw us about to object. “No? Then think of engineers who find a way to attain the energy of the vacuum. When work is done, something always disappears, does it not? Not energy nor potential nor mass, unless one into the other, but something is gone.”
“Entropy,” Teng said. “Disorder increases. Energy becomes less available.”
“Yes, but what is gone when energy is taken from the vacuum?” The Beaver’s silver goggles flickered as he studied our faces. “You cannot pull energy from the same volume over and over!” he snapped. “Vacuum must disappear!”
I said, “Okay—”
“They learn the ultimate secret, these Engineers. They may be the first of many. Their numbers and ambitions expand. Peculiar and active galaxies may show their work. There is no missing mass,” the Beaver said. “The universe is expanding too fast, the Bang was too energetic, but expansion slows because space is disappearing. In the limit, space will be flat.”
I asked, “Teng? Is this even sane?”
The man said, “Oh ... sane. Look, there’s no way you can take the same energy out of the same block of emptiness forever. Energy has to become less available. Sure something has to go, and it’s probably volume. Space shrinks where the Engineers have passed. Why the Chirpsithra?”
“Look about you. They have such a power source! How many suspects can you identify?” the Beaver demanded, rather unfairly, since the bar had been nearly emptied.
Teng said, “Well, that’s my point. This universe has had around ten to the tenth years to produce a species capable of using the energy of the vacuum. We expect the universe to last ... how long before interesting things stop happening? Ten to the fortieth years? Ten to the ten to the eighty? We are in the earliest moment of the universe. Most of time is in front of us. The Engineers might not even have a planet to evolve on yet! They may evolve after all the protons have disappeared.”
I said to the Beaver, “You have asked the Chirpsithra, haven’t you?”
“To us the Chirpsithra said nothing. To another race they once said that the secret of their drive was to be taken as a puzzle. ‘Just another cursed intelligence test.’ ”
Teng burst out, “Your damn hypothesis isn’t even falsifiable!”
I asked, “What?”
“When you’ve got a decent theory, you try to falsify it, Rick. You don’t want someone else making you look like a fool, so you try to disprove it yourself first. If a statement can’t be disproved, falsified if it’s false, it’s useless. Beaver, if the Engineers won’t start chewing up galaxies for a trillion trillion years, what evidence would you expect to find now?”
“Any species may ask.”
“Not us,” Teng said, suddenly bitter. “There weren’t even human footprints on Mars when the Chirpsithra came. If ever there are, they’ll be around a Chirpsithra landing site. Passengers. Why would they give us an interstellar drive? We can’t even build landers, and they use antimatter just for reaction jets!”
I made two cappuccinos while I thought. All talk stopped in the scream of steam.
It seems I’m doomed to spend my life with entities brighter and more knowledgeable than myself. They gather to talk, all these different shapes and minds, and I am privileged to listen. I love it. But sometimes they talk and talk, and never act.
A mathematician once told me that all of math is a mind game. The strangest thing is that any of mathematics can be fitted into the way any part of the universe behaves. The huge vacuum energies that fall out of mathematical formulations needn’t be taken seriously. I knew that without ever seeing the equations, let alone being able to read them.
Then again ... “Come with me,” I said. “Let me do the talking. Teng, you may not know it, but any ongoing conversation should not be interrupted. It’s a custom.”
“Right. What have you got in mind?” But I was in motion, and what I had in mind was very little.
The big table was down to Herman, three Chirpsithras, the silent Wheesthroo,