On his way back to his apartment after the meeting, Pearce tried to find out more about the missing ship but what Sundar had read to him was all he could find.
Someone's covering up.
There wasn't much Pearce could do. His one contact in the industry, Dave Reynolds, wasn't talking to him. He would just have to get on with his work for Sundar.
“While there is life there is hope. I beg to assert...that as long as a man's heart beats, as long as a man's flesh quivers, I do not allow that a being gifted with thought and will can allow himself to despair.”
Pearce switched from his book to the call coming in.
“Hello?”
“Pearce is that you? This is Dave.”
“Dave Reynolds?”
“Yeah. I know you probably don't want to hear from me after what happened but the company was adamant that I break all contact with you.”
“So why are you contacting me now?”
“Well circumstances have changed. We have recovered something concerning the missing Cosmic Traveler. And we are looking for someone to assist us in our investigation.”
“Me?”
“Yeah your name was one of the first that came up. You're an expert in the field.”
“I would think that Dr. Eiffel was the expert.”
“Doesn't matter. We can't find her.”
“So I'm second choice?”
“Not exactly but we do need your help.”
“When?”
“As soon as possible.”
“But why is Galactic interested, wasn't it one of the competitor's installations?”
“Yeah but it reflects on the whole industry and not in a good way.”
“Okay but not until I have a contract. You know what happened last time.”
“Okay.”
“With a lucrative termination clause.”
“Okay.”
“Good, send me the contract and let me read it over and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.”
Pearce signed the employment contract and ended up at Galactic Transport working with Dave Reynolds. He also arranged for a leave of absence with Sundar.
“We've got it over in B4 Pearce.”
They started walking out of Reynolds' office. They took an electric and headed towards the giant B4 building.
“What have you found Dave?”
“Not much. The crew wheel Pearce, it's encased in a bubble-like a giant globe. We haven't been able to breach it.”
“How can that be? It's just a bubble of negative energy, it should have dissipated on its own.”
“A lot of questions to be answered Pearce. Including what happened to the crewmen on board.”
“What about the front command room, was it ever found?”
“Nothing. The ship obviously broke up. Where the bow ended up is anybody's guess.”
They arrived at B4.
“This place is huge Dave.”
“It has to be to accommodate the crew wheel and spheroid surrounding it.”
They checked in at the guard station. Dave led Pearce through a series of hallways and then through the double doors into the cavernous heart of the building.
Pearce stopped and looked up towards the ceiling of the building.
“That's huge Dave. I mean I know a crew wheel can be over seven-hundred feet across but you never can get a sense of its size in space.”
“Yeah. And the spheroid adds some to that width.”
“It looks like a giant slightly flattened, cloudy marble.”
“That's what everyone says Pearce. But the strange thing is it's not completely flat.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well you know that theoretically as the spheroid tends to infinite flatness, time tends to zero.”
“Yeah, frozen time, it's called.”
“Right. But I think what we have here is frozen time but without the infinite flatness.”
“How?”
“That's the question.”
“I mean even if it is a bubble of frozen time, how did you ever get it in this building.”
“It wasn't too hard. We used a system of spin-two drives to lower it through the Earth's atmosphere to the tarmac outside. From there it was simple to continue using a drive to shove it, so to speak, into here.”
“You mean it still displays negative gravity?”
“Yeah, textbook for a bubble its size.”
“Another how in the world?”
“Right.”
“So what do I do first?”
“Well to me the obvious question is, are we really looking at frozen time? And if we are why isn't the wheel and the spheroid infinitely flat as the theory predicts? And if that theoretical prediction is wrong then what else is wrong with the theory of QTD?”
“Well that should keep me busy a couple of days. What are you focusing on?”
“I'm supposed to figure out if the crew is in there and if so are they still alive? And if they are how do we get them out? That's where some new theoretical work might come in handy.”
“I should get started then.”
“Let me show you to your office.”
Over the next few days Pearce met with Dave at lunch.
“I think it's a point of view problem.”
“What do you mean Pearce?”
“Going through the theory it came to me that the theory describes what we would see not what is actually happening.”
“I don't understand?”
“QTD is different from all other quantum field theories in that it describes not an actor on the stage but the stage itself.”
“Like General Relativity?”
“Yeah, except at a quantum level. What we are seeing when we look at the spheroid is just a snapshot in time. Kind of like one frame of a movie.”
“So how do we see the other frames?”
“We can't not from our perspective. We have to view the spheroid from a different vantage point.”
“But how Pearce?”
“I don't know yet.”
“Well then it's still just speculation until you come up with a test we can run. Meantime the company is getting more frantic about recovering those crewmen or at least their bodies. I'm under a lot of pressure to do something Pearce.”
“I wouldn't Dave. Until we understand a bit more any effort to extract that wheel from the spheroid could lead to disaster.”
“I know,” said Dave closing his eyes.
Chapter 7
From The PopSci Encyclic
2700 A.D. Edition
If loop quantum gravity is correct, and there are reasons to think it is, then there is a quanta of volume which is extremely small, on the order of the Planck scale.
In LQG the links of force that make up the loops stitching together the quanta volumes of spacetime are usually local, that is they are causally related. But not always. It is possible that a link between nodes of volume could have been established early in the history of the universe and then separated. Somewhere across the universe there could be an entangled quanta of volume corresponding to a local quanta of volume.
Surprisingly these nonlocal links aren't that rare. It's estimated that there could, on average, be more than one per cubic nanometer of space. Not enough to disrupt the smooth aspect of spacetime we experience but enough to explain entanglement of distant particles.
Now because of our difficulties dealing with such a large collection of objects we must resort to statistics to describe their collective actions. Like the temperature of a body of water is a thermodynamic property derived from the statistical spread of molecular motion. Some molecules in the water are moving very fast while other molecules are moving very slow but the vast majority are moving at speeds around the mean which we call the temperature.
Something similar holds for quanta of volume but that is not the most interesting feature. What is most interesting is that the same distribution holds for the links, or the loops in LQG, that connect t
he volume quanta. Most of the links are around the mean, most are local and this is why we have the illusion that everything must be in contact, whether physically or through an intermediate field, to have a cause and effect.
But the links far from the mean, the ones we would consider nonlocal, are the really interesting ones. They can be used to send information and mass over vast distances.
Pearce was stumped. The physics of QTD wasn't showing him the way. He couldn't see how to deconstruct the spheroid. Then he had an idea although not a solution.
I wonder if this is like a black hole? Except instead of spacetime, it's time only. A black hole of time?
He didn't know a great deal about black hole physics. He would have to learn. After a few days of study he had an idea which he explained to Dave.
“Like an event horizon.”
“What?”
“What we are seeing Dave is like an event horizon. You know the place near a black hole where just beyond nothing can escape? Well if you, as a faraway observer, were to watch an object fall into an event horizon it would seem to never actually get there. That's what we are seeing, not in space but in time.”
“Time in the spheroid has closed itself off from time outside?”
“I think so. And we are seeing the last image just before that moment.”
“Well if it's like a black hole then inside they are continuing towards the time equivalent of a singularity.”
“Yeah, to frozen time.”
“So how do we get them out?”
“Well the only way I know to get something out from behind an event horizon is to evaporate the horizon, the time horizon in this case.”
“But evaporation of a black hole requires Hawking radiation. And Hawking radiation requires that a black hole be hotter than its surroundings. And the spheroid is in equilibrium with its surroundings.”
“Yes. It's just one of the differences between a time singularity and a black hole singularity.”
“And that was true even in space, so that means that the spheroid adapts to its surroundings. So the question becomes again, how do we evaporate the time horizon even though it is in equilibrium?”
“Well there is one big difference between a time horizon and an event horizon, one is in time and one is in space. One is a quantum field theory effect and one is a classical field theory effect.”
“Yeah, QTD and GR. So?”
“We know that the surface of a spheroid in which time is slowed down is dominated by the chron- particle. If we could neutralize this surface layer of chron- particles then the time inside the spheroid would merge with the time outside.”
“We could only cancel those particles by introducing their anti-particle. And the energy of annihilation would be huge.”
“If we had to cancel all of them that would be true. But I think the spheroid will break down after only a percent or so of chron- particles have been annihilated by their anti-particles.”
“Still, that would be a huge energy release.”
“Yes, we would have to do it in space again which would also keep the crew wheel from crashing to Earth when the spheroid evaporates.”
“All we need are antichron- particles,” said Dave.
“Right. Well I'll start working on how to produce the anti-particles. Maybe you can prepare the wheel Dave?”
“We put it back in space?”
“Right.”
“Okay Pearce, but I'll have to run this past management,” he shrugged and left Pearce's office.
Pearce worked on the physics for a couple of weeks. Making anti-matter wasn't a problem. But making the anti-particle to a particle as heavy as a chron- required a huge amount of energy. It would take over five-hundred million times the energy to make an antichron- as it took to make a positron. And though the creation of anti-matter had undergone a revolution since it was first produced it still took ten-thousand times the energy to create an anti-particle as the particle gave up during annihilation. So a major part of the project would be to design an energy source.
To make an antichron- Pearce would start by accelerating an electron to huge energies. Encountering a heavy nucleus the electron would be diverted. When diverted the electron would radiate away some of its energy as high-energy photons. The photons when they came close to another nucleus could spontaneously decay into a chron-, antichron- pair. The antichron- having a positive charge could be diverted into a Penning trap and stored. Everything had to be fortified. The magnetic fields, the electric fields, the energy imparted to the electrons.
But it required no new physics just clever engineering and Pearce only needed about twice the energy that found the Higgs particle, about thirty trillion electron-volts, 30 TeV.
It required clever engineering for two months. It required Dave Reynolds to defend Pearce's efforts in front of the board every week of those two months. It required Pearce to work eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Until finally he was ready to test his theory.
Looking at the device he had created Pearce thought about the lines of the book he was reading the night before.
He caught up the lamp swiftly, and carried it, flaring red, through the door into the corridor. We followed him. There in the flickering light of the lamp was the machine sure enough, squat, ugly, and askew, a thing of brass, ebony, ivory, and translucent glimmering quartz. Solid to the touch—for I put out my hand and felt the rail of it—and with brown spots and smears upon the ivory, and bits of grass and moss upon the lower parts, and one rail bent awry.
The Time Traveller put the lamp down on the bench, and ran his hand along the damaged rail. “It’s all right now,” he said.
Pearce's device looked like an old science fiction description of a ray gun. The wakefield particle accelerator was cylindrical and about thirty centimeters long and eight centimeters wide and contained a dense hot helium plasma. A laser fed a short powerful pulse into one end which punched a hole in the plasma. Like a boat through water, waves of hot plasma expanded away from this hole and electrons were carried on these waves to high energy.
The high energy (30 trillion electron-volts) electrons were then fed into a box with powerful magnetic superconducting field coils wrapped around it which caused the electrons to divert and decelerate and radiate away high-energy photons. At the end of the box about twenty centimeters away the photons crashed into a solid cube of Mach-metal. Dense and almost impenetrable by laser beam, with the Mach-metal as their target nearly all the photons encountered an atomic nucleus where the majority interacted and the encounter results were the heavy mass chron- particles in particle, anti-particle pairs.
The mass and charge of the antichron- particles allowed them to be separated from their pair particles and then cooled (kinetic energy lowered) and deposited in a Penning trap.
The Penning trap was another cylinder that holds the antichron- particles in suspension by using a strong magnetic field for radial confinement and strong electrical fields for axial confinement. It is about thirty centimeters long also so that the entire mechanism had a symmetrical appearance.
At the far end of the Penning trap was another box with one end open to the environment. Strong magnetic fields in this box would deflect the antichron- particles when they were released from the Penning trap while strong electric fields would accelerate them. Someone called this section a ray gun silencer. Pearce would then direct the flow of antichron- particles over a wide-angle as if he were spraying the target.
Pearce was ready to test. He planned to create a spheroid and see if his theory would dissipate it at a greater rate than it would dissipate naturally. In the large hangar after the spheroid containing the crew wheel had been removed a spin-two drive had created a flattened spheroid of slow time. Pearce had his device ready.
After a few minutes the anti-chron- particles had built up in the Penning trap. Pearce opened the barrier between the Penning trap and the silencer. The electric and magnetic fields changed in such a way as to shoot the particl
es out of the trap and into the silencer. The silencer then spread the particles over the outside of the spheroid. This continued for a few seconds.
Soon the spheroid's surface seemed to sparkle as sunshine off the ripples of a pond. A sound like a sizzling of electricity started to rise in intensity. Pearce wasn't sure how long he should “spray” the spheroid, that was one reason he was performing the test, but he thought he would err on the side of too little because too much could cause the spheroid to come apart explosively. He cut the stream of particles.
The spheroid continued to sparkle. The sound of sizzling electricity continued to rise. Pearce was waiting for the noise to abate and signs of the spheroid dissipating to become apparent. But instead the sparkles became more intense until the whole of the spheroid was shining. The annihilation energy being given off by the many particles and anti-particles combining had started to heat the air. The air was shimmering in wave after wave of heat which was being radiated from the surface of the spheroid. Pearce was feeling it even a hundred feet away.
Pearce started to think he should evacuate the building and get everyone out when a roaring hissing was heard. The surface of the spheroid began rippling and then collapsed like a balloon expelling air. Pearce relaxed. The spheroid was dissipating and quickly, his theory was correct. Those assisting congratulated him. He didn't feel so much successful as lucky. But at least it looked like it would work.
The encased crew wheel had been linked to within ten AU of its original destination. Pearce's de-chron device, as he called it, had been mounted on a fusion ship in front of the particle shield. Pearce was on the ship to manage the dissipation of the spheroid. In space there would be no heating of the air but an intense radiation would be shed outward from the much larger sphere without air to block it. Pearce hoped that they would be safe in the forward control room behind the massive shield.
Time's End: A Future Chron Novel (Future Chron Universe Book 34) Page 5