COSM

by Gregory Benford

  Certainly the director had not been more than minimally cordial; the suits kept their distance even now, clustering around the coffee urns and leaving her alone. Fair enough, she supposed. But maybe the rank and file had an innate feeling for why she had done it, something conveyed by her voice and manner, an unspoken intuition of their tribe?

  She retreated and sat silently in a back room and slurped coffee—it was midnight, she noted abstractly—and somehow her mind would not focus on the moment. She thought of Brad, and now the second life claimed here. Then there was more talk and she finally got away. The apartment they gave her to sleep in was a good deal better than the usual accommodations.

  She had a small conference with the director and his pals the next morning, just before her flight. She could not add much to measures and measurements here, and meanwhile she had not seen her own Cosm for four days.

  “Can you assure us that this globe will not grow, Dr. Butterworth?” the director wanted to know.

  “Of course not. Ours has both grown and shrunk, with no apparent cause. I think it’s adjusting to minor effects we don’t know about.”

  “How much larger could this globe become?” the director asked.

  “Ours varied in radius by a few percent. Yours? I have no idea whether it could swell to the size of Long Island in the next minute.”

  Everyone looked stunned. She said mildly, “The possibilities are inversely proportional to how much you know.”

  “Because we do not have a theory of strong gravity,” the head of the theoretical division said.

  She smiled very slightly. “I would say it was because we do not have enough experience with such objects. After all, you don’t know that this is primarily a gravitational effect here.”

  “It must be. Curved space-time—”

  “Is a model. I’d rather trust some hands-on experience.”

  “That is precisely what I do not want to acquire,” the director said rather antiseptically. “Your own student died from exposure to the first one.”

  “And it was a lot smaller,” she agreed. “We can’t be sure its time coordinates correspond to ours the way”—she hesitated, about to say “my sphere,” then said—“UCI’s sphere does. It could start emitting a lot of UV or other stuff at any time.”

  The director looked as though he had not slept much the night before. “I suppose I will have to evacuate the area.”

  “If you don’t have some people close enough to study it, you’ll learn nothing,” she said.

  “We will have to ask for volunteers.”

  She did not envy the man his job. She hadn’t mentioned to Dave or anybody else that she had warned them not to run uranium again; they had legitimate complaints about her, too.

  “We will expect full access to your data,” the director said stiffly.

  “You’ll get it,” she said and left for JFK. The Lab guards fended off the media multitude, which had grown to be quite a mob. The rain helped keep them at bay. They gave her a staff car and Dave went with her. He was quite pleasant, considering. They discussed the speculations put forward by the head of the theoretical division, which sounded like Max’s early work. It was all very preliminary, she said, and believed it. Physics had abandoned ideas like the corpuscular theory of light and the transmutability of elements, then had to go back and allow as how, yes, they could be resurrected. Theory lay at the mercy of experiment, which after all was just orderly experience.

  A TV crew overhauled them on the way to the airport and tried to get shots of her through the sedan window. She turned away.

  Well, here it was, the Big Time, nature red in tooth and claw. “You aimed for this, girl,” she whispered to herself. “So don’t come on all sorry about hitting it.”

  3

  “Heddo, ‘tranger,” she said to Max through her stuffed sinuses.

  “Ah, so the goddess has a cold.”

  “Hunh?”

  “We have a name for entities of your sex who go around creating whole universes.” Max sat on a lab bench and grinned.

  “Goddedded don’t ged culds.”

  “Well, this one does. I’ve been reading about you, too.”

  “What?”

  “First page, The New York Times.”

  She caught the headline as he handed her the newspaper.

  PHYSICS LAB ACCIDENT LINKED TO EARLIER DISCOVERY

  California Professor ‘Stole’ Singular Sphere

  “Oh noooo…” She sat down heavily on a makeshift desk she had jammed against the outer observatory wall, the only spot not squeezed with diagnostic equipment. The Times piece was reasonably fair, but it still made her angry. “There wad no press ad th’ talk ah gave ‘em!”

  “Mouths move.”

  “The dire’tor said he wad goin’ ta keep all dis udder wraps ta preven’ a panic.”

  “Ummmm. I’ll bet he approved the leak and even chose the word.”

  “Wha’ woud?”

  “Why, ‘stole’ of course.”

  “Etablushin’ Brookhaden’s rights?”

  “Sure, Brookhaven wants to establish that they rightfully own both, then push blame off on you for not warning them.”

  “Ah did.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “Lemme see, where’d I pud dat…”

  Neither Dave’s nor her e-mail was on her hard disk. “Must’ve misfiled ‘em,” she said. Then she remembered that she had it in hard copy, stuck in the briefcase she had carried on the plane.

  “Great,” Max said, reading the messages carefully. “Now you get into action.”

  “Uh, how?” Her head had been stuffed with cotton since she got off the plane from JFK, slowing her thinking until she felt even more like a dunce.

  “Let them know you have this.” He waved the hard copy. “And that you don’t appreciate their buddies erasing it from your hard disk.”

  She gaped, then looked dubious. Max shook his head in pity. “My my, such an innocent. There are several people here who might do a favor for an old friend back at poor Brookhaven, y’know. Especially if they think you committed a true breach of professional ethics.”

  “Mah files have a password…”

  “Which any real keyboard weenie can get around within microseconds.”

  “Maybe ah erased th’ files…”

  “Maybe.” Raised eyebrows, a grin.

  “Ah’m… surprised.”

  “I’ll bet my explanation is right. Y’know, you’ve had your nose pressed so close to the Cosm, you’re not registering how this is going over. It’s big, really big.”

  “I’m… naive?”

  “Charmingly so. Next thing, you publish. Get out in front with physicists, post your discovery online.”

  “Uh, I don’t feel like—”

  “Point is, get there first. And if Brookhaven knows you can prove you warned them, they won’t lean on you so hard in the media.”

  “The media aren’t supposed to know!” Somehow her rising anger was clearing her sinuses.

  A sardonic smile. “Yeah, right, Snow White.”

  Publish? It felt like somebody suggesting that you stop to take photographs while in a fistfight, but…

  The time needed to publish a paper depended linearly on the number of hurdles put up by the anonymous referees. The journals were perhaps the last citadels of science as a meritocracy; even giants could find their precious papers shredded by dwarfs. Irksome duels with masked referees were a favorite genre of physics lunchtime tales. They could block her for months, even years.

  She balanced this with the time it would take her to write up a complete description of the object, how it came to be, methods and failures, comparing theory and experiment, alternative explanations…

  Too much; she was not a fast writer anyway, sharing the common affliction of those who had to read slowly to ferret out dense arguments in compact notation and acronym-choked jargon. Having tracked at such snail speeds, one could not then quickly write. In a way this
was a blessing for the field—or else the journals would be even more fat.

  “Y’know, you could follow a riskier strategy,” Max pointed out. “Go the ‘oral publication’ route. Fly around to a half-dozen places, give seminars, gotta be the fastest way to publicize results.”

  “And take me away from doing any experiments.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  No, the answer was to get out a terse description of “discovering” the object and a list of its properties. Period. No speculations, maybe a few graphs of data, some numbers. Leave ‘em with their tongues lolling out for more. Send it to Physical Review Letters, the linchpin of the profession? Most likely it would get jammed up. She knew an editor at Physics Letters; why not there?

  Then there was Max. She had leaned so heavily on him for so long it seemed he had been around from the beginning. Could he write up the theory?

  No, and he didn’t want his name on the paper, either. She was surprised; he “set her straight,” as he put it: Data first, theory a distant second.

  “But you gave me ideas of what to measure,” she countered. “The tidal stress—”

  “We’ll publish later. Right now, you’re at bat.”

  “Why do men always resort to sports analogies?”

  “Why do women always make a big deal about our doing it?”

  “Look, sticking your nose into things is pretty easy. Pointing the nose the right way, that’s hard.”

  He grinned. “Gee, this is the first fight I’ve ever seen over not taking credit.”

  She laughed. “Okay, sport.”

  Somehow it came out easily. She sat down at her laptop and started to write, using the basics: no passive voice, simple declarative statements, linear logic. Only a few times did she even need to consult her lab notebooks; the numbers were seared into her memory. To her surprise, she got it all down in a few hours.

  She asked Jim in the department staff to send out the colloquium announcement with merely her name and, as a title, “Topic to Be Announced.” Lesser lights never used this ploy, lest they speak to an empty room. But she knew the rumor mill would summon the entire department, while probably spreading slowly enough to bring few from other campuses, and if lucky, no press at all.

  Zak had the latest data on the Cosm in good shape, so she could end her meticulous, many-viewgraphed talk with a smooth curve showing the cooling of the background photon emission. The relic radiation, cosmologists had called it, yet she could not forget that it had killed Brad only seven weeks before. She had opened the colloquium by dedicating it to him. She had made Brad and Zak coauthors on the paper. At the conclusion she asked for a moment’s silence for Brad and left the cooling curve for an entire universe on the projector, his death marked in red.

  It all went well, though a senior figure in the particle physics group asked several stinging questions about the propriety of taking the sphere from Brookhaven. Suddenly she felt that Max had been right about her warning to Brookhaven, mysteriously missing from her computer. Could this older man be the hard disk scrubber? She eyed her esteemed colleague and wondered. Quite probably she would never know.

  She had expected e-mail about the spheres but had forgotten that the final exam was only a few days in the past, and students were now getting their grades. She was unprepared for the messages from her Physics 3B students that had stacked up.

  “I’m looking for a break here,” one said. “I *really need* a B in this course for med school.” Another pleaded, “If I don’t get at least a C from you, UCI will kill my scholarship!” Since mostly biology students took the course, and most bio majors were thinly disguised med school candidates, she got a lot of “My life is over unless I can get a full letter grade increase!” Several had left phone messages asking her to call them; no explaining message, of course, but she recognized their names.

  Still, they weren’t as bad as the sad-eyed types who showed up at her office door. “Professor Butterfield? I was in your 3B? I, uh, got a B and wondered is there anything I can do to raise it?”

  She was tempted to respond, “Isn’t it a little too late? Do you fear declarative sentences?” Perhaps so, for the grade-seekers all shared a dislike of definitive statements, of grades that wouldn’t budge, of fulcrum moments which, once pivoted about, were forever gone. Instead, they believed that the esteem-building smiley faces of grade school carried over to the university; artful begging should bring a higher grade, right? Final grades, done and posted, simply announced a last chance to whine for more. Just asking should count for something, shouldn’t it? Points could be added to a score, like freebie burgers or T-shirts. After all, out in the big world fame and wealth often went to those with no love of knowledge at all; why should the world of academia be different? They wanted to do extra credit after the course was over or partial credit instead of taking the exams. Getting a right answer was, after all, only part of the learning process.

  But bridges fell down if you calculated the stresses wrong, people died on the operating table if a med school graduate miscalculated a dosage. Such possibilities did not affect their quaint feeling that they should be doing better, so something was wrong with the system. Only about ten percent of the class acted this way, but they roused her ire. They wanted to be judged on their “potential” and wondered why the world didn’t see it that way.

  She laid low for a few days, resting and getting over her cold. That helped a lot, because the media were perking up to the news.

  The photographer from Newsweek bobbed and clicked around the observatory lab, apparently trying for a sort of still-shot cinema verité effect. There was a journalist with him who kept slipping in insinuating questions. An anxious UCI publicist accompanied them, torn between her joy at having a national print medium team here and the fact that UCI had not had time to figure out how to put the right spin on Alicia’s actions.

  She let them all fidget and work around her. The journalist wore a severe black suit, very New York, with thinning black hair dulled by a dye job, combed straight back and plastered to his skull. Between his oily questions and the photographer’s “Coudja turn a little this way,” she made her routine measurements, wishing she had worn something better than an old blouse and black jeans.

  Then she took a telephone call on her private cellular—she never used her university number anymore and didn’t check for messages there, either—which proved to be somebody from Scientific American. “I already have a subscription,” she said and had nearly hung up before the voice blurted out that she was an editor.

  “Just checking some background facts. I mean, you haven’t published very much—”

  “None, actually.”

  “But we hear from a little bird that you’re about to.”

  “So why not wait until I do?”

  “Coming with the Brookhaven disaster, your invention has so stimulated debate—”

  “Discovery, not invention.”

  “Well, of course, though some say you are not interpreting what you’ve found correctly—”

  “So I’m ‘inventing’ it?”

  “Uh, I wondered if you would comment on several quotations in the piece we’re doing—”

  “Read them.”

  “We’re devoting nearly two full pages to the issue in the ‘Science and the Citizen’ section. Here is one professor who says, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ And—”

  “Sounds like he wants into the lab, is all.”

  “Yes, doesn’t it?” she said cheerily.

  “Who said that?”

  “Uh, that’s one of our not-for-attributions. Sorry. The next critic—”

  “And you want me to respond to anonymous insults?”

  “I realize this is not—”

  “Just print this, okay? Dogs bark and the parade moves on.”

  “What?”

  She repeated it, knowing it would sound more than a bit arrogant and not giving a damn.

  “I’m not sure I can use that.”

&n
bsp; “That’s all you’re getting.” She hung up. Shaking her head, she went back to work, putting it all out of mind as well as she could.

  During the colloquium and in her paper, she had followed an unconscious pattern that only slowly came to the surface of her mind.

  She had referred to the Cosm as “it,” or “anomaly,” partly because the name still felt a bit odd in her mouth, but also, she ruefully recognized, out of a small-minded impulse: maybe they would name it after her. Butterworth’s Object? The thought was petty and she shoved it aside the moment it came to mind, but then it returned. Astronomers named asteroids after those who spotted them in the skies, though bigger objects like planets and stars had appellations from mythology. In science notable results could carry a scientist into immortality: Avogadro’s Number, Planck’s constant, Boyle’s Law. There was even Millikan’s Falling Oil Drop Experiment, though that skirted close to the modern danger of a term so long that the effect became named for its acronym: the laser stood for Light Amplified by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, and only professionals knew the men who had invented it.

  Finally she realized that her saying “it” all the time was making her feel guilty, so she quit. It might as well come to be known as the Butterworth-Jalon Object, anyway, since he had been rash enough to figure out what the hell it was… if, in fact, he was right. And there was an outside chance that, given her own dimensions, some would term it the Butterworth Ball.

  4

  Alicia:

  We’ve followed your procedures for observing the globe and have picked up the UV radiation. The distribution is blackbody and it’s cooling off fast. We estimate the recombination will occur in about two weeks, so we’re fairly close to your sphere’s development.

  Our theory group thinks maybe the big flash of emission at the recombination era is due to some adjustment of the sphere, so that more photons get through. We’re wondering if this “neck,” as you called it, is dynamically changing. Any further evidence from your end?