“Two of them,” Zak said, looking up. “There.”
The dots of light came bearing directly down on them. “One’s a chopper,” Zak called.
The airplane swept directly overhead, spotlights on. They all closed their eyes as it passed, to keep some of their night vision. Alicia was torn between watching the Cosm and the angry buzzing overhead.
Max didn’t even look up. “I have no idea, no theory, to deal with what happens when a space-time nugget like this gets swallowed by a large-scale contortion…”
“It’s gonna land!” Jill shouted against the gathering roar.
Searchlights swept the area in a hard glare. Alicia thought she would be unable to see anything in the Cosm at all now, but when she looked down, her hands shielding her face, the sphere was alive with working blue-green tendrils, like a strange standing lightning.
“Get away!” Max shouted against the hammering racket of the helicopter. It was landing a hundred meters away, blowing grit in their faces.
“We can’t escape them,” Jill said.
“Away from the Cosm!”
For a long moment she hesitated, gripped by the cascading, accelerating pace of events in the face of the Cosm. Dark clouds had blocked their view of the approaching black hole. Now those dissolved, blowing past. A yawning solid blackness rushed out of the distance. Fizzing white light burst from the surface of the Cosm.
“Come on!” He tugged her. She took a step, looked back, had to be led away.
In the Cosm’s brilliant surface she saw seething brilliance collide with somber, growing black. Events compressed. Time raced as vast forces bore down.
She shook herself. Sucked in cold, dry air. Turned and ran with Max.
They all started directly away from the helicopter and then she yelled, “No, go right! Otherwise they’ll run after us and right into the Cosm.”
They veered right. Alicia looked back and saw men jumping out of the helicopter, a big one. They immediately began pursuit.
They all ran in silence for a full minute. Shouts in the distance. A bullhorn voice babbled.
Matters moved with a prolonged gravity, as if the entire scene were underwater, events unspooling at the bottom of a well-lit swimming pool. Jill and Zak ahead ran sluggishly. The bullhorn spoke so deeply that she could hear dragging spaces between the actual words, which in turn took stretched moments to come through the chilly air. Max’s legs too were caught in the thick molassas air of the deep-sea scene. She was scarcely able to move in the heavy, unmeasurable time.
She stumbled over a stubby plant that jabbed her in the leg. The sudden jolt of pain brought back the speed of time and made her lose her stride. Max stopped, grabbed her arm to keep her from falling over. He glanced back. Behind them stabbing lights probed and his words came like the dry rustle of leaves.
“My God.”
The others kept running. Flickering shadows chased them across the rough ground. She turned to look, still reluctant to leave. The Cosm now brimmed with an acid fire. It flared suddenly, blue-white and ferocious. The fierce brilliance of it expanded and blew her backward, head over heels.
EPILOGUE
If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these lows are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to say that physical science has reached its end, that no excitement is left in further explorations, and that all that remains to a physicist is either tedious work on minor details or the self-educational study and adoration of the magnificence of the completed system. At that stage physical science will enter from the epoch of Columbus and Magellan into the epoch of the National Geographic Magazine.
—George Gamow, Physics Today, 1949
EXPLOSION IN DESERT
‘Cosm’ Leaves Ten Yard Crater
Butterworth Among Casualties
No Trace of Remnants
‘LIT UP SKY,’ SAYS DESERT RAT
ACCOMPLICE CHARGES FILED AGAINST PHYSICS GANG
Three Released from Hospital
Suffered No Radiation Exposure
UCI’S BUTTERWORTH LEAVES HOSPITAL
Placed Under Federal Arrest
Federal Marshal Accuses Her of Theft
LAWSUITS MOUNT IN DESERT ‘COSM’ EXPLOSION
State Police Officer Leaves Hospital
Helicoper ‘Totaled’ in Explosion
UCI WILL NOT PAY BUTTERWORTH LEGAL EXPENSES
Father Attacks UCI, Defends Daughter in Raucous Speech
BROOKHAVEN LAB VICINITY EVACUATED
Fears of Second ‘Cosm’ Explosion Mount
‘Could Be Megatons,’ Lab Head Says
‘Amazing’ Views Inside ‘Cosm II’ Rumored
PRESIDENT ATTACKS ‘RECKLESS SCIENCE’
National Council of Churches Applauds
Finger-Jabbing Speech
ARRESTS MADE IN BUTTERWORTH KIDNAPPING CASE
‘Foundation for God’ Followers Traced to Arizona
CLAIMS AGAINST BUTTERWORTH DISMISSED
‘No Control, So No Liability,’ Judge Says
Surprise Move Angers Critics
BUTTERWORTH KIDNAPPERS CONFESS
‘We Did Right,’ Leader Claims
BROOKHAVEN ‘COSM’ ‘EVAPORATES,’ NO DAMAGE
‘Cannot Explain,’ Lab Head Admits
‘Poof’—Gone; No Debris
CONGRESS TO INVESTIGATE PURSUIT OF ‘COSM’ DISCOVERER
Critics Call President ‘Nervous Nellie’
BUTTERWORTH RETURNS TO TEACH AT UCI
Support Rally Scene of Violence
She Rejects UC ‘Black Woman’ Award
NOBEL LAUREATES CALL FOR FURTHER ‘COSM’ EXPERIMENTS
‘Must Work at Frontier’
Technological Benefits Seen
SOCIAL ANNOUNCEMENTS
Dr. Thomas Butterworth of Palo Alto proudly announces the engagement of his daughter, Alicia, to Dr. Max Jalon, son of Mr. and Mrs. John Jalon, of Springfield, Maryland.
AFTERWORD
We are lucky to live in an age when grand questions arise, and one in which we just might find answers.
I began working on this novel in the late 1980s, spurred by papers by Alan Guth and collaborators. Alan was already famous, having constructed in the early 1980s a truly amazing new theory of our universe. I commend to you his excellent account of his invention, The Inflationary Universe. According to the inflationary model of cosmology, our universe grew out of less than ten kilograms starting in a region 10-24 cm. across. One could hold such an object in one hand.
More recently, Guth and his coworkers have made intricate calculations of the physics of universe-creation in the laboratory. This suggested a large theme, suitable to fictional treatment.
While I was at MIT on sabbatical leave, I enjoyed many delightful conversations with Alan Guth, whom I had met some years before. Ideas came readily, and I roughed out a plan for this novel. Marvin Minsky made several perceptive comments. A visit to the Brookhaven National Laboratory, hosted by old friends Lawrence and Marsha Littenberg, helped this germination along, as did conversations with Tom Ludlam, who showed me around RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider under construction.
The enormous, impressive accelerator abuilding there suggested to me a possible way that some of the ideas developed in those MIT papers might find expression in our time.
Others had been exploring such areas for quite serious reasons. When RHIC was being planned, theorists had worried about collisions in it creating “strange matter,” a kind of lower-energy state for mass that would be more stable than the kind we know. That meant that in the tiny, compressed collisions of the RHIC, ordinary mass would convert into strange matter, given the opportunity of intense conditions, cashing in on the energetic advantage. This strange matter could then gobble up the Earth, converting everything to a new lower-energy state. Just incidentally, this would destroy all the structure invested in ordinary
matter, erasing the entire slate of Creation. This would probably occur at speeds near that of light, leaving us not even time to regret our curiosity.
A theorist named Piet Hut put such fears to rest by showing that cosmic rays plunging through our atmosphere have already collided many times, creating conditions far more extreme than those in RHIC. The fact that we didn’t see strange matter created every month or two from cosmic rays meant that RHIC was no threat.
Ah, I thought, but what about even more exotic accidental offspring?
Of course, the entire matter is a huge long shot. One must consider the relatively puny energies to be available even at RHIC, compared with the energy densities of the very early universe. Only if quantum mechanics works just right will this great gap be spanned. We do not in fact know how to do the calculation. A correct one awaits a better understanding. Further, there are the great uncertainties of our current rickety ideas about what a better, true theory of quantum gravity might look like. It could well be that a solid theory will rule out everything envisioned in this novel.
Still, they stir the imagination. In planning and writing this book, I had what seemed a good notion for rounding out the book’s conceptual framework, but delayed writing the novel itself because of other obligations and other novels clamoring to be written. In early 1996 Arthur C. Clarke pointed out to me a striking paper by Edward Harrison, a noted cosmologist at the University of Massachusetts. It was the same idea I had vaguely worked out at MIT, better set out in Harrison’s hands. In the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 36, pages 193-203, he elegantly described the concept of natural selection of universes.
Harrison cites Isaiah 45:18, speaking of the “Lord… who created it not as a formless waste but as a place to be lived in,” and thinks that perhaps many would prefer his vision, “if only because of Occam’s razor, the concept of a [single] supreme being.” In his conception, one needs only one Being who starts the ball rolling with a Grandaddy Universe that has fundamental parameters roughly suited to life. Evolving intelligence then takes over, making trouble, as it must. Harrison refers to Olaf Stapledon’s classic Star Maker, in which a superior being keeps inventing universes of greater complexity, though none with the self-reproducing feature essential to explaining why we, a later generation, live in a universe admirably tuned to yield creatures at least as smart as we are. Harrison goes on to speculate that perhaps our mysterious ability to comprehend our universe arises because it was made by beings roughly resembling us. We are thus harmonized with the fine-tuned fundamental parameters we find. In this sense, we would then indeed be created in His (or Their) image.
I like audacious ideas, and this novel uses some in a context reflecting another of my repeating concerns: depicting scientists as they actually are, especially at work. Except for detectives and spies, seldom does fiction spend much time treating people at their work, yet it is a central aspect of life.
I hope that along with some intellectual excitement, I have made some aspects of the scientific enterprise and those who carry it forward at least a bit more understandable. All foreground characters herein are entirely invented. I have used the names of several actual people as background figures, for a note of authenticity.
For those who wish to trace some of the ideas further, I recommend “Is it Possible to Create a Universe in the Laboratory by Quantum Tunneling?” by Edward Farhi, Alan Guth, and Jemal Guven in Nuclear Physics, B 339, p. 417 (1990). A somewhat simpler summary by Guth alone is in Physica Scripta, T36, 237 (1991). During the last drafting of this novel I came upon Lee Smolin’s intriguing ideas in his The Life of the Cosmos, which treats some parallel ideas.
My thanks are due Alan Guth, Sidney Coleman, Riley Newman, Lawrence Littenberg, William Molson, John Cramer, and Virginia Trimble for scientific advice on the manuscript. Matt Visser provided wisdom and a figure. For insightful readings I am indebted to my wife, Joan, to Jennifer Brehl, Lawrence and Marsha Littenberg, Mark Martin, and David Brin.
—Gregory Benford
Laguna Beach,
June 1997
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