"John DeChancie - Skyway 2 - Red Limit Freeway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dechancie John)

"Groups of groups. Supergroups of galaxies, all accessible by a major road system."
"Going where, I wonder?" another logger mused. "To the bloody limit, mate."
"The what?"
"The Beginning," Fitzgore breathed. "The very cradle of what-there-is."
"How's that?"
"When you look out at the universe," Roland lectured, his manner a trifle labored-he was drunk= `at faint
galaxies and groups of galaxies, you look back through time. Speed of light, relativity, and all that. When
you look really far out, as far as the most sophisimicated ... sophifimis=' He burped. "'Scuse me. When
you use really expensive astronomical stuff, you don't see so much out there. You're looking back to a
time when the universe was in a radically different state from what it's in now. Before galaxies formed.
You've bumped up against the limit of the perceivable universe, beyond which anything out there is
redshifted practically to invisibility."
"You've lost me there."
"It's basic cosmology," Roland contended, his tone suggesting that any six-year-old child would consider
it old hat.
"Yes, of course," Fitzgore said, more to himself than to anybody. "Shoot a portal, and you go back
through time. If you follow a road leading to the farthest reaches of space, a road that takes you in
faster-than-light jumps..."
"You will ultimately come," Roland continued for him, "to a point from which all spacetime flows
outward."
"The Big Bang," one of the loggers said.
"Absolutely, if the Skyway goes that far."
"How could it?" somebody asked.
"I have no idea," Roland said, "but that roadbuzz has it that Jake will find out."
"I ain't goin' nowhere," I said. "I'm too goddamn drunk."

Imagine the rising dough of a four-dimensional loaf of raisin bread.
You can't do it. It's impossible to imagine a four-dimensional anything, but it helps to try.
As the dough rises, the volume increases, as does the distance between each raisin. Think of each raisin
as a galaxy-really a group of galaxies-and you have the conventional representation of the theory of an
expanding universe, first proposed about a century and a half ago. Now, inside the ballooning volume of
that dough, the farther ayvay one raisin is from another, the faster their mutual rate of recession-it just
works that way geometrically. In the real universe, it happens that galactic clusters can be far enough
away from each other to put their recessional speeds at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light.
Due to the Doppler effect, light from these distant objects, infalling on the instruments of local galactic
astronomers, is "redshifted" to great degree, meaning that the lightwaves have decreased in frequency
toward the red end of the spectrum. The same thing happens to the sound waves from a passing vehicle's
warning signal. You hear the pitch change, go down, decrease in frequency. Light comes in frequencies,
too; in the visible part of the spectrum, blue is the high end and red the low. Retreating galactic clusters
doppler into the red. Redshift. The farther away they are from us, the more their light is redshifted. As
Roland said, astronomers can look out to vast distances these days, using neutrino astronomy and
graviton scanning. Once you get past the protogalactic core objects, traditionally called "quasars," you
don't see much at all. Anything out that far is a retreating red ghost, exiting our ken at near the speed of
light. At these distances, one looks beyond the red limit of the universe. If you can handle the notion that
the universe has a boundary, this is it. But there is something beyond.
Pick any point of departure in the present-day universe, any place at all. Travel from there in any
direction-you must keep that in mind-at faster-than-light speeds, and you go back in time. Go far enough,
and you hit the edge. Go over the edge, and you run smack into Creation.

I pored over Winnie's maps. There was indeed a major artery linking metaclusters. Roland and I began