Making Light Read online

  The GOD was past arguing.

  Design Engineering's response was to make the planets completely inactive. There would be no mountains, no fluid interiors, no mobile plates—in fact, no tectonic processes of any kind. The planets would be simply featureless balls of solid rock that could never by any stretch of the imagination be considered potentially hazardous to any living thing, whether one existed or not.

  The Great Accounting Overseer didn't like it. “What do you need them for?” a GAO minion challenged a day later. “They don't serve any useful purpose at all. They're just a needless additional expense on the cost budget. Why not get rid of them completely?"

  “They've got a point,” the CDE admitted when the GOD went over to Engineering to talk about it. “I guess the only reason we put them in is because that's the way we've always done it. Yeah ... I reckon we should strike them out. No planets."

  But the Dispenser Of Energy wasn't happy about the idea of a universe consisting of nothing but stars. “It might be budgeted to last for billions of years, but it's still finite nevertheless,” an assistant of the DOE declared in a call to the GOD. “We are trying to encourage a policy of conservation, you know. This idea of having billions of stars just pouring out all that energy into empty space with none of it being used for anything at all ... well, it would be terribly wasteful and inefficient. I don't think we could possibly approve something like that."

  “But it's just as we've always done it,” the GOD protested. “The planets never used more than a drop in the ocean. The difference isn't worth talking about."

  “Quantitatively, yes, but I'm talking about a difference in principle,” the DOE assistant replied. “The waste was high in the earlier projects, but at least there was a reason in principle. This time there isn't any, and that does make a difference. We couldn't give this universe an approval stamp. Sorry."

  A day later Design Engineering had come up with a way to conserve the energy: Instead of being concentrated into masses sufficiently dense to sustain fusion reactions and form stars, the stellar material would be dispersed evenly throughout space as clouds of dust and gas, in which the small amount of free energy that remained would be conserved through an equilibrium exchange between radiation and matter. The DOE was satisfied with that. Unfortunately, the EPA was not; the clouds of dust and gas would exceed the pollution limits.

  With two days to go before the closing date for the bid, the GOD called all the department heads and senior technical staff members together to discuss the situation. The ensuing meeting went on all through the night. After running calculations through the computers several times, they at last came up with a solution they were sure had to be acceptable to everybody. Sales forwarded a revised final proposal to the customer, and the company waited nervously for the responses. Miraculously the phone on the GOD's desk didn't ring once all through the next day. The proposal was approved, and the final contract was awarded.

  * * * *

  Out at the construction site, Gabriel watched despondently as the project at last got under way. All that was left of the original plan was a pinpoint of exotic particles of matter, radiation, space, and time, all compressed together at a temperature of billions of degrees. The bizarre particles fell apart into protons, neutrons, electrons, muons, neutrinos, and photons, which after a while began clustering together through the radiation fluid as he watched. After the grandeur of the previous projects that he had witnessed, the sight was depressing. “I guess we just write this one off, forget about it, and file it away,” he murmured to the GOD, who was standing next to him. “It's not much to look at, is it? I can't see this even getting a mention in the report to the stockholders."

  He turned his head to find that the GOD's eyes were twinkling mischievously. “What's funny?” he asked, puzzled.

  The GOD tipped his yellow hard-hat to the back of his head and grinned in a conspiratorial kind of way as he scratched his forehead. “Don't worry about it,” he said quietly. “We've worked out a new method. It'll all come out just the way we planned ... everything."

  Gabriel blinked at him in astonishment. “What are you talking about? How do you mean, everything? You don't mean the stars, the planets, the oceans, the mountains...” His voice trailed away as he saw the GOD nodding.

  “And the birds, and the fish, and the animals, all the way through to the people,” the GOD told him confidently. “It'll turn out just the way we planned it in the original proposal."

  Gabriel shook his head, nonplused. “But ... how?” He gestured at the expanding fireball, in which traces of helium and a few other light nuclei were beginning to appear. “How could it all come out of that?"

  The GOD chuckled. “The research people developed some things called ‘Laws of Physics’ that they buried inside it. The angelcies will never find them. But they're in there, and they'll make it all happen just the way we planned. We ran the numbers through the IBM last night, and they work. You wait and see."

  Gabriel looked over his shoulder at the site supervisor's hut and then gazed back at the embryo universe with a new respect. “I was going to go inside for a coffee,” he said. “But this sounds interesting. I think I'll hang around a little longer. I don't want to miss this."

  The GOD smiled. “Oh, that's okay—you go get your coffee,” he said. “It will take a while yet."

  END

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