for a grand conception with long-term implications.
The book had been too advanced for a publisher, he accepted that, but the printer he’d used had kept throwing samples before him, tempting him to spend more and more money, taking advantage of his vanity. It wasn’t the money wasted, because, thanks to investments, he was pulling money out of the air, but what would a scientist think when this heavy, deluxe publication arrived in the mail? It didn’t look scientific. He had thought, another vanity, that his name alone would carry some weight, and maybe it did, but there was something about the book, he saw now, that was a kind of faux pas. And his haste in printing the thing had been matched by his haste in sending out copies, and now …
By October, he was literally tearing his hair and wringing his hands. He haunted their house, but then he began to range more widely—over to the observatory, then the Officers’ Club, then into Vallejo. On one of these days, after she had cleaned the kitchen, she picked up one of the books and looked at it herself.
She managed to glean the gist of his argument, though it took considerable perseverance, many cups of tea, and a walk down the block to clear her head. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t recognize anything—that moon-capture theory was there, set into the millions of years and millions and billions of what you would call cubic miles of space. What she understood seemed plausible. First there was gravity, which was a force exerted between masses, its strength dependent on their size. Then there was motion—those masses hurtling here and there, though not by any means quickly enough for someone such as herself to detect their movements with the naked eye. To gravity and motion, you added in the uneven population of space, empty here, full of galaxies there. When you combined that unevenness with the gravity and the motion, it was obvious (Andrew claimed) that the populous places were going to get more populous and the emptier places were going to get still emptier, because in the populous places, masses would come together and forces would get stronger and stronger until everything clumped together, and why not, given how long it was going to be? In the end, everything would clump together into one big mass, and then, within that mass, everything would change as the mass got hotter and hotter, and then the mass itself would get smaller but denser, and nothing could stop this from happening. The logical end to this process would be the disappearance of all mass, for once the mass had advanced to its logical conclusion, which was a dot that weighed as much as everything in the universe, the empty part would disappear also, though what constituted “disappearance” in this case she could not have told you. No doubt the problem was that words could not convey actual events, and, indeed, actual events were hardly imaginable. If you did find yourself, as she did, imagining something, then what you were imagining was wrong. But poor Andrew was more or less stuck with using words to describe their doom.
Except that, according to Andrew, his own researches showed that the universe, as big as it was, contained no empty space. This reminded her of something that Sherlock Holmes often did, which was to give the obvious solution, and then give the real solution, which relied on the one factor that only Holmes had discerned. The real story about the universe was that, although it appeared that gravitational force, mass, and motion would eventually produce collapse, the universe was actually filled with Something. Newton himself had known that the universe was filled with Something, and for convenience’s sake, this Something was called Ether, or, to distinguish it from the chemical ether, Aether. This Something was the substance of the universe, some kind of thing that exerted a repulsive force insofar as it counteracted the tendency of the traveling masses to clump together in accordance with gravity and therefore eventually to contract to the size of a dot or a pinprick or an invisible point. The balance of these two processes (the Something filling the universe and pushing things away from one another, and gravity pulling things toward one another) resulted in a more or less even continuum of contracting and expanding. This process, Andrew seemed to be saying, was what was called Eternity.
She felt his presence while she was