The Heisenberg Corollary

by C H Duryea

  “The calculations for circumventing the uncertainty,” Narissa said, “were on the whiteboard in our lab when the platform got slagged. Unfortunately, they were still mostly mathematical self-gratification, so to speak.”

  “Can we recreate those calculations?” Zeke asked.

  “I could get us close enough to start experimenting,” she admitted.

  “The problem in that case,” Augie said, “is that we would have to disassemble the Frogger in order to install an upgrade that robust. And there is no way that’s going to happen with the scrap metal that passes for tools on this ship.”

  “What about the gravitational actuator?”

  “Equally theoretical,” Harbinger said. “We weren’t even scheduled to begin R and D until after we secured the XARPA contract and the first round of funding. Besides, if Narissa’s math is right—”

  “Which it is,” Narissa inserted.

  “—which it most definitely is, we would need a gravity well of considerable size to make it work. And one look out the window tells me that we don’t have one anywhere nearby.”

  The group fell into a pensive silence as Harbinger’s dice click-clacked quietly.

  Vibeke crossed the cramped space to get a better look at the Frogger.

  “So, this is your gizmo?”

  “In all its boxy, utilitarian glory,” Zeke said.

  “How does it work?”

  “That would take a while to explain,” Harbinger said.

  “I have a doctorate in neurocybernetics,” she said. “I think I can keep up with all your fancy mumbo-jumbo.”

  “Well, Doctor Brand here did the hard math,” Harbinger said.

  “Based on the original theoretical breakthrough,” Narissa said, “by Doctor Travers here.”

  Everyone looked to Zeke, and Vibeke crossed her arms and waited.

  “Well,” he said, “it starts with the premise that the space-time fabric of the universe is stretched out on a kind of membrane that exists in a higher order reality—a meta-space. My original inquiry started with an examination of the conservation of energy law, along with gravity as a weak force in the context of a bulk theory of the multiverse—”

  “Okay, I give up,” Vibeke said. “And I don’t think any of us have all day. Explain it to me like I’m five.”

  “Our universe is like a soap bubble—but just the surface of the bubble. The multiverse is a bubble bath. When soap bubbles come together, they share surface area at certain points. So, by moving along the right part of the membrane you can access the space-time fabric common to both continua. Navigating the membrane selectively allows a traveler to transition from one bubble to the next, like—”

  “Like leapfrogging?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Vibeke said. “Let me see if I can connect the dots here. This interdimensional drive you’ve built—this piece of breakthrough technology—is actually named after an old 20th-century arcade game?”

  “So… there was this liquor store on Maui,” Zeke explained. “And they had this ancient Frogger machine—”

  Vibeke burst out laughing.

  “I spent hours on that game,” Zeke continued over Vibeke’s guffaws. “Especially after a hard day in the lab. It helped me process. I conceived of this machine standing at that machine.”

  Vibeke bent forward, running her fingers through her corn-silk hair.

  “Hezekiah Travers,” she said as she straightened again and looked at him with disbelief and bemusement. “You are priceless.”

  “That’s our boy,” Narissa said, patting Zeke on the shoulder.

  A light on the engineering console started to flash.

  “What’s that?” Augie asked.

  Harbinger spun in his seat and adjusted several sensors.

  “There’s something outside.”

  “Outside the ship?” Vibeke asked.

  Suddenly a strange and sibilant sound, like sand pelting the hull, pressed in from all around them.

  “I guess so,” Zeke said, standing up. “What are the scanners picking up?”

  “Hard to get a fix,” Harbinger said. “Looks like a mass of particulate matter. Some kind of cloud?”

  “Asteroid shrapnel?”

  “Maybe. But it’s exhibiting non-ballistic motion.”

  “Meaning what?” Vibeke pressed.

  “Whatever it is,” Harbinger said, “it’s intelligent—and or alive!”

  Six

  The strange noise from outside grew louder as Zeke and the others rushed forward into the main cabin. As he scrambled towards the flight deck, something outside the airlock window caught Zeke’s attention. He peered through the viewport, and the others stopped as well. On the other side of the window, small shingles of a gray, flaky substance floated in the vacuum and struck the hull. Where they struck against the ship, they stuck.

  “What the hell is it?” Zeke asked. “It looks like lichen.”

  “Space lichen?” Narissa guessed.

  “Whatever it is,” Augie said, “it’s accumulating!”

  As they watched the substance pile up against the window, the outside door to the airlock exploded outward. It spun away, and Zeke caught a glimpse of the gray stuff stuck to what had been the airlock’s outer shell.

  “It’s dissolving the exterior hull!”

  “But that’s a titanium hull,” Narissa said.

  “Whatever it is,” Augie said, “it must have an appetite for oxides. It’s going to eat right into the ship!”

  Zeke could already see the metal rim of the outer door frame corroding and sloughing away into the vacuum.

  “Vee!” Zeke shouted. “How many pressure suits do we have?”

  “Not counting mine,” she answered, “none. The pilot took the other one.”

  “Not good,” Augie said. “Definitely not good.”

  Zeke and Vibeke rushed to the flight deck.

  “Can we get any thrust?” he asked. “Maybe we can shake them off.”

  “I don’t know,” Vibeke said. “They look pretty adhesive to me.”

  Beyond the viewport, the gray-green flakes settled in to make a meal of the Friendly Card’s nose cone.

  An alarm sounded and warning lights started flashing.

  “The primary hull’s compromised,” Vibeke reported as she checked the monitors.

  “Where?”

  “Aft!”

  Zeke stood. “Seal the flight deck after me!”

  “But what if the airlock gives?”

  “Seal it,” Zeke reiterated. “This is the most airtight spot on the ship!”

  He dashed back to the main cabin as Augie and Narissa were frantically securing vents and ports along the perimeter of the space.

  “Where’s Chuck?” Zeke asked.

  “Still aft,” Augie said.

  Zeke punched the comm. “Chuck—get up here! I gotta seal the hold before we have a secondary hull breach!”

  “Gimme a minute to lock things down,” Harbinger’s voice buzzed over the speaker.

  “We don’t have a minute!”

  “We gotta close that seal,” Augie said. “Now!”

  “Securing the ionization energizer,” Harbinger’s voice blared, “then I’ll be right there!”

  Zeke was suddenly caught by something Harbinger said. He pounded the comm. “Chuck! Stay there! Do you see an ionic ablation system down there?”

  “Why?”

  “The hull,” Zeke said. “Is the Friendly Card self-cleaning?”

  “The actuator is right here,” Harbinger reported.

  “Then actuate it!”

  “The ionizer only effects a few molecular layers of the hull,” Harbinger protested. “Not enough to shake these organisms.”

  “Then turn it up.”

  “The hull is already compromised! You want to make it even thinner?”

  “We’re gonna have explosive decompression either way in about in fifteen seconds,” Narissa warned.

&nb
sp; “Throw the switch, Chuck,” Zeke ordered, “and patch the control to the secondary command console!”

  Zeke jumped over to the main cabin workstation as the maintenance system interface blinked onto the screens. One screen showed a pair of overlaid waveforms, the other showed the power levels of the hull ionizer.

  Augie hovered over Zeke’s shoulder. “Careful,” he warned, apparently having deduced Zeke’s reasoning. “You don’t want to turn the entire hull to plasma.”

  “It won’t get that far,” Zeke replied. He hoped he was right.

  He quickly calibrated the waveforms on the screen and twisted a knob to increase the power. As a big whine sounded throughout the ship, the two curves heightened and moved closer. He kept raising the power, and the whine increased in intensity, until the two waveforms intersected. The whine suddenly downshifted and a low hum sounded throughout the cabin, fore and aft.

  A few agonizing seconds passed. The viewport seals began to hiss. Zeke felt his heart leaping into his throat. Finally, a bank of lights on the maintenance system monitor console lit up green.

  Zeke, Augie and Narissa heaved a collective sigh.

  Harbinger bounded up the passage from the hold and toggled the pressure door behind him. Then he jumped to the airlock and looked through the window.

  “Check this out!” he exclaimed.

  They piled around the airlock viewport as Vibeke opened the flight deck seal and joined them.

  “They’re melting,” Vibeke exclaimed.

  Instead of the cloud of the ashy flakes, a fiery storm of plasmified particles surrounded the ship, pushing away from the hull rather than gravitating towards it.

  “Not all of them,” Narissa noted, pointing to small clumps that still hung on but had started to turn the green of weathered copper as they cooled. The sandstorm sound that had accompanied the cloud was gone, and only the sound of the Friendly Card’s structural and electronic agony remained.

  “What did you do?” Vibeke asked.

  “I figured if they were eating the titanium, then the ionized molecules on the outer surface would have already been taken up,” Zeke elaborated. “So I used the scanner in the maintenance system to see if there was an electromagnetic output from the organisms’ metabolic activity. Once I had that, I figured that by modulating the EM frequency transmitted through the hull, I could heterodyne it with their metabolic frequency.”

  “And in the process,” Augie added, “giving them one hell of case of heartburn.”

  “Matching the frequencies caused a chain reaction through the lichen, and turned them into plasma. It was a gamble.”

  “Some gamble,” Harbinger said. “You might have also ended up pouring the space-lichen equivalent of chocolate sauce all over the hull.”

  “It worked,” Zeke said.

  “Lucky us,” Vibeke said. “We’re still stranded out here, and now we have half the hull integrity we did an hour ago.”

  “Break out the hull gunk, gang,” Zeke said. “Looks like we’re going on a leak hunt.”

  Zeke and Vibeke opened a set of access panels in the wall under the autoslop. It was the eighth panel they had opened in their hunt for holes in the interior hull. Vibeke opened a cylinder of hull sealant and wrinkled her nose at the smell as Zeke stood up and stretched. He punched a couple of buttons on the autoslop and retrieved two cups of coffee.

  “Ugh,” Vibeke said, accepting the yellowish, extruded cup. “I don’t know what’s worse. The sealant or this mud.”

  “It does the job,” Zeke said. “And hey, it might come in handy if we need a new source of battery acid.”

  She took a swig, winced, and leaned over to rest her shoulder against the wall.

  “I suppose I should thank you,” she said.

  “For what? This swill?”

  “No. For trying to keep me safe on the flight deck. That was right gallant of you. Stupid, but gallant.”

  “So you admit that I’m not such a jerk?”

  “Don’t get sappy with me,” she said. “I still want to hit you with something breakable.”

  “Then why did you kiss me?”

  “Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to live that one down?”

  “You remember what happened,” he pressed. “Why did you do it?”

  “I don’t know—not that it’s any of your beeswax.”

  “It’s the NeuralNav isn’t it? What does that blasted thing do to you?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “I would, but apparently it’s custom wired for your circuitry. There’s a pleasure component to that gizmo, isn’t there?”

  “Pleasure’s not the right word,” she said, staring into her coffee then up at the ceiling panels. “The surrender, the mental and emotional surrender the NeuralNav requires—it’s scary. It’s like it asks everything of you. Every bit of who and what you are. You don’t just plot the ship’s course. You are the ship’s course, opening up and taking the whole shebang along for the ride. So, yeah, the NeuralNav compensates by giving the ol’ endorphins a boost. But pleasure it ain’t.”

  Her ice-blue eyes drifted off into space. Two of the slightest spots of red appeared on her cheeks.

  “But man-oh-man,” she went on. “When you hooked that machine of yours into the navigation system that kicked it up to a whole new level.”

  She threw back the rest of her coffee. “I don’t know how to describe it. I can’t. It’s indescribability cubed.”

  Zeke crossed his arms and a wide smile spread across his face.

  “So it makes you frisky?”

  Vibeke shot him a hard look, her brows knit. Then she threw her empty cup at him. It bounced harmlessly off his head and landed with a hollow clunk between them. His smile didn’t waver.

  “At least I didn’t duck that time,” he said.

  “Mind back on your job, Doctor Travers.”

  “Aye, aye, Doctor Helstrom.”

  “Hey, guys,” Narissa called from the flight deck door. “You probably want to see this.”

  “What now?” Zeke asked.

  Augie and Harbinger were already in the cockpit when Zeke and Vibeke came in. Harbinger was looking out through a set of magnifiers.

  “Take a gander at that,” Augie said, handing him the mags.

  Zeke put the glasses to his eyes. The mags took a few seconds to focus, but when they did, Zeke made out dozens, maybe hundreds, of wavering shapes emerging from the colored gasses of the nebula.

  “What are they?” Zeke asked.

  “Remind me to file that under ridiculous questions of the year,” Augie quipped.

  “Whatever they are,” Narissa said, “they’re drifting this way.”

  “Don’t suppose ionizing the hull would work again?” Zeke asked.

  “I don’t think we have enough juice for it,” Harbinger said.

  “Are there any weapons on this tub?” Vibeke asked.

  “Yes,” Augie said. “The autoslop is hostile to most forms of life.”

  “Great,” Zeke said. “I’ll go EVA and pelt them with sandwiches. Oh, wait. No pressure suits.”

  “I can go,” Vibeke said.

  “And I’d say let’s do it—except we have an airlock with only one door.”

  The floating shapes were getting closer.

  “Do those look kind of, I don’t know,” Zeke asked, “fish-like?”

  “I was thinking more like really big polliwogs.”

  “Well, at least we’re moving up to more complex life forms.”

  As they came closer, they spread out and moved in graceful silence all around the ship.

  “Do those look like suction cups to you?” Augie asked as he, Narissa and Harbinger stepped up behind.

  Zeke gestured for the magnifiers.

  “Yup,” Zeke reported as he looked. “The tops of their heads—or what I assume are their heads—are round and flat.”

  “Like remoras,” Narissa said.

  “I wonder what kind of creatures they
’re adapted to latch onto?” Harbinger asked.

  They were answered by a series of quiet hollow thunks, like something lightly impacting the primary hull in different spots. Zeke leaned over the console and peered out the viewport to the portside exterior.

  “Apparently us,” he said.

  Suddenly, the sounds of dozens of the creatures popped and pinged from all sides.

  “Are they going to eat the ship too?” Vibeke asked. “I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

  “Look,” Narissa said, pointing to the nosecone below the viewport. “They’re eating the lichen!”

  The creatures had affixed themselves to the hull, but then they slid along its surface, appearing to consume the reconstituted residue of their plasmified invaders.

  “Vacuum-dwelling polliwog-remoras,” Harbinger mused, “that feed on titanium-eating space lichen. Is anybody writing this down?”

  “I’ll let you take the honors, my friend,” Augie said. “Go ahead and name this new species after yourself.”

  They watched, captivated as the polliwog-remoras made slow, patient, but determined progress in cleaning the Friendly Card’s entire exterior of every remnant of the space lichen.

  “I wonder what they do for dessert?” Zeke asked.

  They were answered again by a soft but undeniable shuddering of the ship.

  “All right,” Narissa said. “If everybody can stop beginning sentences with the words ‘I wonder’!”

  “But what are they doing?” Vibeke asked.

  Suddenly, Zeke felt the soft pressure of acceleration, pushing him back into the pilot’s seat.

  “We’re moving!” he announced.

  Harbinger peered again out to the exterior side.

  “Good gravy,” he said. “You have got to see this.”

  Augie and Narissa crowded in behind him as Zeke and Vibeke looked out the other side.

  “What the-” Zeke muttered.

  The side of the ship was peppered with the creatures. Their bodies wavered slightly in the vacuum, and from the aft end of each of them trailed a thin line of vapor.

  The five watched speechless for a few moments.