A. Warren Merkey

by Far Freedom

  Scientific theories and their proofs are hard-won by brilliant people. They are things of immense beauty and personal pride. They are also ideas of hard-won understanding by millions of toiling students. Thus, due to effort and pride, scientific theory takes on the rigidity of religious dogma, however temporary, until experiment casts doubt on the logic. My theory, with only a couple of strange machines as possible proof, remained heresy, and was my own dogma. I no longer tried to explain the theory and justify the Circuits’ existence. After my escape from the Hole to breathe some fresh air and to worry my wife, ending in tragedy and my personal shame, I probably no longer had any intellectual standing among my peers.

  Waiting for my wounds to heal, I was at least content with knowing my wife loved me. I tried to reciprocate. I wished I could better demonstrate the honest affection I felt for Milly, affection I had too well learned to quell over my years with her. But I was not content enough to hide my disappointment from her. My curiosity about the magic of the universe burned holes in my patience. There would soon come a time when the Big Circuits would be moth-balled. Personnel were disappearing from the roster of those maintaining the cryogenics of the Big Circuits. Security was tighter on those lower levels. We had to test the Big Circuits soon, or inevitable maintenance failure would doom their purpose. There is no greater object of pride than one’s intellect, when one thinks he is so intelligent and imaginative. Why was I never smart enough or sensitive enough to imagine how much my wife meant to me - and how much I meant to her?

  “We’ll do it on our own,” she said.

  “Do what?” I asked, in the middle of reading the only important part of a week-old newspaper: the comics.

  “Run the vacuum tests on the Big Circuits.”

  “How?” I didn’t even look up from the comics.

  “With these.” I looked up. She held two perforated three-by-five file cards over her scrambled eggs and waved them at me.

  “What is that supposed to be?”

  “The security keys to the Big Circuits.”

  “Looks like you took a hole punch to some index cards.”

  “I did. I knew the console key slots were three inches wide.”

  “How did you know where to put the holes?”

  “I memorized both cards when I saw them.”

  “When did you last see them? I haven’t seen them since sometime last year.”

  “Same time I saw them. That’s when I made the copies.”

  “All the way back then? I didn’t think you were ever in favor of turning on the Big Circuits.”

  “Back then I had other stupid reasons for wanting to do it. I thought that at worst it would be a painless way to commit suicide. No. I wasn’t that far gone.”

  “I knew you were depressed. I should have done something.”

  “Damn right! You should have smothered me with kisses. Which is what you’ll have to do to get these keys from me.”

  I thought I could do even better than that.

  END OF PART 2

  Part 3 THE LADY IN THE MIRROR

  Section 000 Losing Him

  I didn’t want to do it. Yet I was curious, perhaps as curious as he was. For something that began for me as a tongue-in-cheek (or thumb-on-nose) frivolous exercise in wasting brain power, we worked so very hard on putting the theory into physical form. A great many innovations were needed to build the Big Circuits. I don’t think anyone else had constructed something that size to the geometric precision we required. It took almost half a year to stabilize temperatures to maintain tolerances. Everywhere you looked, laser interferometry monitored critical distances. I was afraid our precision still wasn’t good enough. Lack of precision would be quite lethal to Kansas and perhaps to other states. And other countries. And other planets.

  I didn’t want to do it. But I’ve been known to do things I shouldn’t have wanted to do. That’s how I put myself in this damned wheelchair. Now I was going to help Sam test the Big Circuits. I had a feeling something would go wrong. We were far beyond the limits of acceptable scientific theory, even far beyond what we thought we had proved about quantum circuit theory.

  We got through the security door without tripping any alarms. Since I was stuck in a wheelchair, bored, and afraid of being trapped underground, I entertained myself by learning all the secrets of the Hole. I was everywhere, watching everyone and everything. I knew the computer system better than the system administrator. The security door was no problem. It pleased my ego to be able to show Sam what I could do, to help make his dream a reality. All too soon we found ourselves in the control room of the Big Circuits.

  “Key, please,” he said.

  I removed a three-by-five punched index card from under the blanket in my lap. It was as heavy as that grenade was, and far more dangerous. He reached for it. I pulled it back, my imagination still violated by the hideous possibilities it represented. I was profoundly afraid. It must have shown in my face. I shivered. It was cold in the control room. The future suddenly felt cold.

  Sam knelt beside me and waited. He didn’t plead or argue with me. I absolutely knew how important this was to him. He absolutely knew how afraid I was. We fought for our views on too many bloody battlefields. I lost the war, but only because I couldn’t face losing him. I put my hand on his shoulder. He took it and pressed it against his cheek. He released my hand, stood up, turned around to view the room, as if looking at it for the last time.

  “This really is pushing it. Just as you said. It’s a miracle we got this far with my crazy ideas. All I thought I wanted to do was make you proud of me. Quantum circuits. What crap. There must be some other explanation. Let’s go on back.”

  I knew he struggled to not sound as disappointed as I knew he was. He was never so alive as when he talked to me about starlight and gravity and maybe even atoms being quantum circuits. Maybe the Small Circuit was an accident, a small miracle, but I also felt it pointed the way to something even greater. The Small Circuit, as scary as it was, was the answer to the world’s future energy needs. The Big Circuits might be the door through which humanity entered the rest of the universe. It was Sam’s ultimate gesture of love for me, that he would label his quantum circuits as crap. I wanted to cry. I held the key up, offering it to him, if he would just turn around and look. He did.

  The expression on his face was priceless. He kissed me. His hand shook a little as he took the card from me. “I’m scared, too,” he said.

  “I don’t believe in miracles,” I said, “but I believe in you. There’s still the tensor we disagree on.” I was trying to raise myself out of that pit of snakes that was my fear. “Your manifold needs one more dimension.” It was old territory on our cosmological battleground, taken and retaken many times. I was never sure he understood how the numbers worked. I was sure his imagination had skipped a step beyond what I could follow, into the magic realm of abnormal entities.

  “That implies distance and direction,” he said, helping me fill the scary quiet of humming death machines with familiar conceptual artillery. “If we fire both circuits we provide that.”

  “If you fire both,” I said, going through the traditional argument, “you add yet another dimension to the manifold. I don’t know what that does.”

  “Let’s stop, then.”

  “I’m just saying what I’ve always said, hoping you’ve found a new idea to soothe my troubling equations. It’s your postulate. We’re creating an entity. Every entity requires at least one external quantum circuit. It’s got to be a huge loop, perhaps proportional to the entity. Where does it go? What does it do? This gives us two loops. I worry about it.”

  “Then let’s look for it in the feedback data. There’s usually an image of reality in mathematics. It will be important. Shall we do it? Are you ready?”

  “God, no! But it’s all just funny numbers and make-believe. Do it.”

  Sam unlocked the console with my handmade key. He started the program to cycle the North Circuit. In my mind I could ima
gine the electric potential building in the capacitor banks, arranged all around us in the rock in miles of tunnels, all of their discharge circuits equalized in length down to millimeters. Meters started surging upward in their digital increments, hundreds of red glowing numbers in banks of metal cases fed by thousands of omnipresent cables. The numbers slowed their counting and reached some engineering limit, causing rows of red idiot lights to extinguish and their opposites turn green. Finally there were no more red lights, only green. That was ominous perfection. We never before turned all the red to green on the first try. This was as far as we were permitted to go in the past. Now we were on the runway and revving the engines for a flight that would either open up the universe or destroy us all.

  The computer CRT cleared its list of program steps and displayed the number 10 in foot-high red characters on a white background. The number changed to 9.

  We looked at the television monitor which showed the aperture of the North Circuit. Hopefully it would show us nothing, or at most a flash of light. What we saw was the inside of a gray tunnel that seemed to diminish quickly in diameter, making it appear far longer than it was. The circle in the middle was the aperture, and it had a diameter of about five feet. Sam called it the puncture site, the place where we would put a spherical hole in the fabric of space and time.

  How many stray atoms of gas and dust floated in that aperture? How many would be caught in the avalanche of electric field lines - the only quantum circuits we could manipulate - when they merged and sheared apart the dimensional integrity of reality? How many atoms would be split, despite the vacuum and the particle-scavenging devices? Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. As wrong as it was, Einstein’s little equation was at least as practical as Newton’s equation for gravity. A few too many atoms in the hole, and Kansas would disappear.

  The big numbers ticked away to 0, my heartbeat doubling in amplitude with each smaller digit. We saw nothing. The gages registered zero matter converted to energy. My heart, which was about to burst through my heavy coat, suddenly became calmed by the anticlimax. It worked just as Sam said it would. No cataclysm, no end of the world, just a few gazillion electrons converging on a small area of space and time in a nearly coherent wavefront, smearing their quantum circuits into a spherical sheet of impenetrable force. Never mind the weird quantum string required by theory and the vector-like geometry suggested by the mathematics.

  “Key, please,” Sam said. He was almost laughing with the release of his tension. He was almost bouncing up and down, despite the mending bullet wounds.

  We did it again with the South Circuit.

  “And now the secret ingredient. Simultaneity.”

  My heart started hammering again. Perfect spherical entities were perfectly simple - and perfectly impossible. There had to be that umbilical of a quantum circuit, that loop to infinity. It played hell with the mathematics. Too many imaginary values popped up, geometry curling into never-never-land. Were we ignoring too many odd bits of equations that refused to tidy-up? Perhaps our less-than-perfect wavefront negated the umbilical. And how could we produce real simultaneity? We could talk all day about nanoseconds and picoseconds of error, but zero timing error was only by chance. All I could do was watch the big numbers count down on the two CRTs in my peripheral vision, while I watched the two sets of television monitors show cold vacuum.

  Nothing happened. Nothing was supposed to happen. But my heart was still thumping loudly. My heart finally slowed and I marveled again at Sam and his imagination. Why did I ever doubt him? Even if the rest of the experiment failed, I would never doubt him again. I was lost in wonder longer than I thought. The next thing I knew, Sam was already doing the gymnastics required to feed himself into his moon suit - with a leg and a shoulder still recovering from wounds. I went down the checklist with him to make sure of all the connections, with nothing left but his helmet.

  It’s difficult for someone in a spacesuit to bend over far enough to kiss a woman in a wheelchair, but I was determined to make him do it. I kissed him like he’d never been kissed before! I loved him. I was proud of him. And I was very very afraid I was going to lose him, if only through some stupid thing like him tripping over a cable, breaking some wiring or plumbing, and not being able to get up again. He could die in vacuum or the cold before I could summon help.

  “I’ll be back,” Sam said, smiling with pure joy and installing his helmet.

  I made gestures to him to remind him how much time he had before his generator would die. He grinned as he bowed to me. I placed the target loop on a convenient hook of his suit. I listened to his mechanical sounds as he maneuvered his bulk through the door. The door closed behind him and I tried desperately to ignore how final his departure felt. It was just my morbid imagination fertilizing my fear. It was no longer a fear of the Hole. I had gained so much from Sam and now it was only a fear of losing him.

  I watched him travel out to the North Circuit aperture on the closed circuit television. I watched him cycle through the airlock. I watched him maneuver the platform into the circuit tunnel and suspend the target - a paper butterfly on a very thin steel wire - in the aperture. God, how many atoms in that? What if the magnetic field failed to keep the butterfly suspended? What if the magnetic field disrupted the quantum circuit wavefront? Sam complained of the time it was taking, but to me time was racing by, out of control.

  Sam cycled back through the airlock and gave me the signal to initiate another simultaneous firing of both circuits. I could see him leaning on a railing, rather nonchalantly, as the countdown progressed. I don’t think he was calm, not in the least. It was a stance probably imposed on him by the weight of the moon suit. It weighed much more than Sam did. I almost forgot to watch the television monitors.

  “What happened?” Sam asked, barely a second after the countdown reached zero.

  I looked from one TV monitor to the other and what I saw made me draw a deep breath and tremble with the effort to not scream. It was so small but so wrong. My hands shook so badly I could hardly push the button to make the TV camera zoom, and I kept losing the object when my shakes pushed the joystick too far on the pan.

  “You didn’t see it reappear in the South aperture?” he asked.

  “There’s something in the South aperture,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

  “What’s wrong? We didn’t teleport the target?”

  “There’s something that isn’t our butterfly in the South Circuit!”

  I tried to slow my breathing and find some calm. This wasn’t like me. Daddy raised me to be fearless. But this was too unexpected, too unnatural, too beautiful.

  “What? What is it?”

  “I don’t know what it is! It’s just floating there, like a tiny helium balloon. It doesn’t look real.”

  “Floating? There isn’t any air in the circuit, is there?”

  “I don’t know. Some of the gages are differing from those of the North Circuit. I just don’t think it should float like that.”

  “How big is it?”

  ” Small. Maybe two inches long. Like an Easter egg. It’s very colorful. Sam, it scares me!”

  “I’ll go get a look.”

  “I love you!” I don’t think he heard me. All I could hear was his heavy breathing until he was beyond the range of the transceiver. When Sam reached the South Circuit, I watched him cycle through the airlock. When the transceiver picked up his signal all I could do was whisper, “Be careful! Be careful!” I watched him push the platform into the circuit tunnel.

  The camera was mounted on the platform. I struggled with the focus and zoom of the television camera to try to keep Sam in the picture. I had slow panning control and he often blocked my view. I watched his arm reach out to the object, as though I was looking over his shoulder.

  The television screen went to snow.

  I screamed. There could have been a simple malfunction. Near-cryogenic temperatures were hard on TV cameras, no matter how spec
ially they were designed. I called his name three times and got no response. I turned the gain to maximum and called again. Then I became aware of several little red lights blinking on a console with which I was not familiar.

  I rolled out of the control room and into the elevator. There were no thoughts in my head that could be heard before the roar of my desperation. I didn’t call for help. I didn’t believe what my morbid imagination was pumping into my lower brain. Then I hopefully imagined I would rush out to the South Circuit, find Sam strolling down the tunnel toward me, and I would scream at him in righteous, terrified anger!

  I descended to that cold tunnel that gave access to both aperture sites. I turned left and opened the throttle on my electric wheel chair. South Circuit seemed miles away. I couldn’t see Sam strolling toward me. The air burned my face with its icy temperature. The tunnel never felt this cold before. I hoped I wore enough insulation to keep my toes from freezing. My wheelchair began to feel strange as I rolled close to the exterior framework of the South Circuit. The rubber tires disintegrated to the steel rims. I thought there must have been a major coolant leak of the superconducting aperture. I feared what could be happening to my feet, but I feared what might have happened to Sam even more. Viewing the masses of pipes and cabling, I tried to see what was wrong. There was a bright light shining through the gaps in the plumbing, right at the constriction, the heavily reinforced puncture site, the place where things went poof. I knew that wasn’t right. I yelled for Sam. Silence answered me. I yelled again, panicking. Then I realized it hurt to yell. It hurt to breathe.