by Mark Alpert
David took a couple of deep breaths. “I’m beginning to see why none of the professors at your school come here.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad. The people in this area are quite interesting, actually. They have a church where they do snake handling on Sundays. They dance around the pulpit holding rattlesnakes over their heads. Amazingly, they hardly ever get bitten.”
“Come on, let’s get inside,” Monique urged. She was peering nervously at the dark canopy of leaves overhead.
David bent over again, lifted the flowerpot, and picked up a rusty key. He inserted it into the lock, and after a couple of tries the key turned and the door opened. He ran his hand along the wall until he found the light switch.
Inside, the cabin looked a little more inviting. There was a stone fireplace against the far wall and a brown shag rug on the floor. A tiny kitchen with an ancient refrigerator was on the left and two small bedrooms on the right. In the center of the room was a massive oak table holding a computer, a monitor, and several peripheral devices.
Professor Gupta led them inside. “Come in, come in. I’m afraid there’s nothing to eat, the cabin’s been empty for so long.” He went straight to the oak table to turn on the power for the computer system, but as he hunted for the power strip under the table, he saw something else. “Oh, look at this, Michael! I forgot that we left this thing here! And the batteries are still charged!”
Kneeling on the floor, Gupta flipped a few switches. David heard the whine of an electric motor and then saw a four-legged robot emerge from under the table. About two feet high and three feet long, the machine was designed to look like a miniature brontosaurus. Its body was made of shiny black plastic and its neck and tail were segmented, allowing them to undulate in a creepily realistic way as the robot lumbered across the floor. On its fist-size head were two red LEDs that looked like eyes, and on its back was a spindly black antenna. The mechanical creature halted in front of them and turned its head from side to side as if surveying the room. “Would you like to play ball, Michael?” asked a synthesized voice. The robot’s plastic jaw flapped up and down as the words came out.
The teenager stopped playing Warfighter on his Game Boy. For the first time David saw him smile, and at that moment his joyful face looked a lot like Jonah’s. Michael ran to the shag rug, picked up a bright pink ball that was lying there, and rolled it toward the dinosaur robot. The machine turned its head, following the ball with its sensors, then lumbered after it.
“It’s programmed to go after anything pink,” Gupta explained. “It has a CMOS sensor that can recognize the color.”
The professor watched his grandson with evident pleasure. Monique, though, was getting impatient. She glanced at the computer on the oak table, then at David. He could tell what she was thinking: somewhere inside that hard drive might be the Theory of Everything. She was itching to see it. “Uh, Professor?” David said. “Could we look through the files now?”
The old man snapped out of his reverie. “Yes, yes, of course! I’m sorry, David, I got distracted.” He pulled a chair up to the table and turned on the computer. David and Monique stood behind him, looking over his shoulder.
First Gupta opened the computer’s documents folder. In the window appeared an inventory of all the files created by the various professors who’d visited Carnegie’s Retreat since the computer system was installed. Gupta scrolled down to a folder labeled MICHAEL’S BOX. The contents were protected by a password, which Gupta typed in—REDPIRATE79—to open the folder. “These are the documents we made when we were here four years ago,” he said, pointing at a list of seven Microsoft Word files. “If Hans hid the theory on the computer, it has to be somewhere in this folder, because all the other files on the hard drive were created afterward.”
The seven documents were arranged in order of when they were last modified; the dates ranged from July 27, 2004 at the top to August 9, 2004 at the bottom. The first file was labeled VISUAL. The names of the next six files were all three-digit numbers: 322, 512, 845, 641, 870, and 733.
Gupta opened Visual. “I remember this one,” he said. “On our first night here, I downloaded a research paper that one of my students had written about visual-recognition programs. But I never got a chance to read it. Maybe Hans opened the file and slipped some equations into it.”
The title of the paper was “Probabilistic Subspaces in Visual Representation” and it was a typical grad-student effort: long, plodding, impenetrable. As Gupta scrolled through the pages, David kept expecting to see a sudden break in the text, a chunk of white space followed by an orderly sequence of equations that had nothing to do with visual recognition. But instead the paper went on and on, slogging through nine chapters, twenty-three figures, and seventy-two references.
“All right, that’s one down,” Gupta said when he reached the end. “Six more to go.”
He clicked on the file labeled 322. The document was very large and took some time to open. After five or six seconds a long list of names appeared on the screen, each accompanied by a telephone number. The first name was Paul Aalami and the second was Tanya Aalto. Then came at least thirty Aarons and nearly as many Aaron-sons. Professor Gupta scrolled downward and the window showed a seemingly endless parade of Abbotts, Abernathys, Ackermans, and Adamses. He scrolled faster and thousands of alphabetical entries rose from the bottom of the screen in a digital blur.
Monique shook her head, confused. “Why did you download a telephone directory?”
“Michael did it.” Gupta jerked his head toward his grandson, who was still playing catch with the robot brontosaurus. “Autistic children often have odd obsessions. Some memorize train or bus schedules. A few years ago Michael went through a phase when he was obsessed with phone numbers. He’d read telephone directories, memorize them, transcribe them. Each of these files is a directory for a different area code.”
David stared at the jumpy blur on the computer screen, which was moving much too fast to be readable. “Is there any way to tell whether Dr. Kleinman altered the files?”
“Unfortunately, the ‘Track Changes’ feature of the word-processing software was turned off, so I can’t locate the changes automatically. I may have to eyeball the pages to see if Hans added anything.”
Monique whistled. “Shit. If the other files are as long as this one, you’re gonna be staring at that screen for hours.”
Professor Gupta abruptly stopped scrolling down the directory. He gazed at the computer so intently that for a moment David thought the old man had miraculously stumbled upon Herr Doktor’s equations, shining like bright needles in the enormous haystack of data. But the screen showed nothing but a long chain of Cabots. “I have an idea,” he said, moving the cursor to the top of the screen. “Any equation has to have an equals sign, correct? So I’ll just search each file for that symbol.” He clicked on the edit menu and opened the find window. “The search may take a couple of minutes, though. The files are so large.”
David nodded. It was worth a shot.
THE ARGUN GORGE IS ONE of the most battle-scarred places in Chechnya, but in Simon’s dreams the canyon was always pristine. He glided like a hawk above the narrow Argun River, which was flanked on both sides by the granite slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. He could see a road along the river’s eastern bank, a highway built to transport Russian tanks and armored troop carriers, but now there was just a single vehicle on the road and it wasn’t military. Simon swooped down into the canyon to get a closer look. After a couple of seconds he recognized the vehicle: it was his own car, his old gray Lada sedan. In the driver’s seat was his wife, Olenka Ivanovna, her long blond hair streaming behind her, and in the backseat were his children, Sergei and Larissa. They were coming to visit Simon, who was stationed in the town of Baskhoi, about twenty kilometers farther south. The highway was safe—all the Chechen rebels in the area had either been killed or driven deeper into the mountains—but in his dreams Simon hovered over the car anyway, protectively following it along the
twisting road. And then the Lada rounded a bend and Simon saw the black helicopter loaded with Hellfire missiles.
In reality Simon never saw the attack. He didn’t hear about it until an hour afterward, when his commander informed him that the American special forces had crossed into Chechnya again. After 9/11, the Delta Force had started operating just south of the border, hunting down Al-Qaeda fighters who’d retreated with the Chechens into the Republic of Georgia. At first the Russian army had tolerated the presence of the Americans, but the alliance was already showing signs of strain. The Delta Force’s Apache helicopters kept straying into Russian territory, and they had a bad habit of firing their missiles at noncombatants. As Simon drove his troop carrier to the site of the reported American attack, he fully expected to see another peasant massacre, another burning oxcart surrounded by dead babushkas. Instead he saw the blackened shell of his Lada, with his wife’s charred skeleton still behind the wheel. The explosion had blown Sergei and Larissa out of the backseat and into a muddy ditch between the road and the river.
Simon never learned the reason for the error, never discovered how a team of specially trained commandos could have mistaken his family for a band of terrorists. Because the Delta Force operation was classified, the American and Russian generals covered up the incident. When Simon filed a protest, his commander gave him a canvas bag filled with hundred-dollar bills. A condolence payment, they called it. Simon hurled the bag at his commander and quit the Spetsnaz. He came to America, hoping to somehow locate the pilot and gunner of the Apache, but it was an impossible task. He didn’t know their names or the call sign of their helicopter. He’d have to slaughter every soldier in the special forces to be sure he got the right ones.
In Simon’s dreams, though, he saw the men’s faces. He saw the pilot holding the controls steady while the gunner launched the Hellfire. He saw the flames spurt from the back of the rocket as it lunged toward the gray Lada. Then Simon was suddenly in the backseat of the car with his children, gazing through the windshield at the approaching missile. He felt a tug on the collar of his shirt, the tug of a small hand holding him fast.
Simon opened his eyes. It was dark. He was firmly lodged between the driver’s seat of the Ferrari and the air bag that had inflated from the steering wheel. The car had struck the tree on the passenger side, mangling the right half of the vehicle but leaving the left half unscathed. And someone was indeed tugging at his collar, but it wasn’t Sergei or Larissa. It was a wizened old hillbilly, a gap-toothed sunken-cheeked native of Appalachia wearing a threadbare flannel shirt and a suspicious frown. He’d reached into the wrecked Ferrari and placed his hand on Simon’s neck to check for a pulse. The man’s pickup truck idled alongside the road, its headlight beams lancing into the woods.
Wrenching his left hand free of the air bag, Simon grasped the hillbilly by the wrist. The man jumped back. “Holy Jesus!” he yelped. “Yer alive!”
Simon kept his grip on the man’s stringy forearm. “Help me out of here,” he ordered.
The Ferrari’s door wouldn’t open, so the hillbilly pulled him out the window. Simon winced as his right foot touched the ground—the ankle was sprained. The Appalachian helped him toward the pickup. “I thought you were dead for sure,” he marveled. “Come on, we gotta git you to the hospital.”
The old man stank of sweat and tobacco and wood smoke. Filled with revulsion, Simon grabbed the hillbilly’s shoulders and threw him against the side of the truck. Keeping his weight on his left foot, he clasped both hands around the fool’s neck. “Did you see a gray Hyundai?” he demanded. “With a large dent in its rear fender?”
The man opened his mouth in astonishment. He raised his hands to his throat and tried to loosen Simon’s grip, but his small, trembling fingers couldn’t gain purchase.
“ANSWER ME!” Simon shouted in his face. “DID YOU SEE THE CAR?”
He couldn’t answer in words because Simon was crushing his windpipe, but he shook his head in a quick, spastic jitter.
“Then you’re useless.” Simon tightened his hold and felt the man’s larynx crumple under his palm. The hillbilly kicked and squirmed against the side of the pickup, but Simon felt no sympathy whatsoever. This man was just a piece of writhing filth. Why should he be allowed to live and breathe while Sergei and Larissa rotted in their graves? It was intolerable. It was unforgivable.
Once the man was dead, Simon let him drop to the dirt. Then he limped back to the Ferrari and retrieved his Uzi and sidearms, which fortunately were undamaged. He transferred the guns to the pickup truck, then took out his cell phone and dialed a number from memory. He wasn’t sure he’d get a signal because he was in such a remote area, but after a few seconds the line began to ring and a voice answered, “Brock here.”
WHILE PROFESSOR GUPTA SEARCHED THE voluminous files on his computer, David wandered over to a window at the back of the cabin. He was too agitated to watch the screen as Gupta combed through the gigabytes of data. He needed a minute to catch his breath.
He couldn’t see anything out the window at first, it was too dark. But by pressing his forehead to the glass and cupping his hands around his eyes, he could make out the silhouettes of the trees around the cabin and a gorgeous swath of night sky above them. Like all New Yorkers, David was always astounded by the multitude of stars he could see once he left the city. He spotted the Big Dipper first, hanging vertically like a question mark. He saw the Summer Triangle—Deneb, Altair, and Vega—and the zigzag of Cassiopeia. Then he looked straight up and gazed at the Milky Way, the unimaginably huge spiral arm of the galaxy.
It was sky-watching that had sparked David’s interest in science nearly forty years before. At his grandmother’s home in Bellows Falls, Vermont, he’d learned to identify the planets and the brightest stars. While his mother washed the supper dishes and his father drove into town to get drunk, he sat in the backyard and traced the constellations with his finger. By immersing his mind in the laws of physics—the theories of Kepler and Newton, Faraday and Maxwell—David found that he could distance himself from his father’s drunken rages and his mother’s mute despair. He spent his entire youth preparing to become a scientist, doggedly studying geometry and calculus in high school and going on to learn thermodynamics and relativity in college. So when his demons finally caught up to him at the age of twenty-three, pushing him out of the world of physics and into the dim barroom of the West End Tavern, it was much more than just a professional setback. He lost the great source of joy in his life. And though he later managed to crawl out of the abyss and make a successful career at the fringes of science, writing books about Newton and Maxwell and Einstein, he still felt like a failure. He knew he’d never get a chance to stand on the shoulders of those giants.
But as David stared at the sky above Carnegie’s Retreat, he felt some of the old joy return to his heart. He saw the whole array of planets and stars as a tiny drop in a cosmic wave. Nearly 14 billion years ago a quantum cauldron had exploded to the size of the universe, leaving immense trails of matter and energy in its wake. No scientist in the world knew why this Big Bang happened, or what preceded it, or how it would all end. But the answers to those questions might finally be at hand, lurking somewhere in the circuit boards of Professor Gupta’s computer. And David would be one of the first to see them.
He was so keyed up that when he felt a tap on his shoulder he nearly lost his balance. He spun around, expecting to see Gupta behind him, but the professor was still hunched over the oak table, squinting at the computer screen. Instead, it was Monique. She looked just as anxious as he was. “I want to ask you another question about the Flatland paper,” she said. “About your model of a two-dimensional black hole.”
Her request seemed to come out of nowhere, but after a moment David understood. Monique wanted to take one last guess at the Theory of Everything before Professor Gupta unveiled the equations. “What do you want to know?”
“Did your black hole contain CTCs?”
David
hadn’t heard the term in almost twenty years, but he remembered it. A CTC was a closed timelike curve. Essentially, it was a path that allowed a particle to travel back and forth in time, arriving at the same exact point where it started. “Yeah, we found CTCs in the model, but it wasn’t so surprising to see them in a two-dimensional spacetime. Flatland has all kinds of weird, nonsensical things that you wouldn’t necessarily see in a three-dimensional universe.”
“And did the spacetime have a wormhole structure?”
David nodded. A wormhole was a tunnel through the hills and valleys of spacetime, a cosmic shortcut allowing objects to travel instantaneously from one region of the universe to another. In the two-dimensional world he and Dr. Kleinman had proposed, particles diving into the black hole would emerge in a separate universe on the other side. “Yeah, that’s right. I’m surprised you know all this. I thought you said you didn’t remember the paper that well?”
“I don’t. But while we were driving down here, I started thinking about why Kleinman said your paper was close to the truth. And now I’m wondering if there might be a connection with geons.”
This was a term he wasn’t familiar with. Either he’d never learned it or he’d forgotten it completely. “Geons?”
“It stands for ‘gravitational electromagnetic entity.’ It’s an old idea, going back to the fifties. The premise is that the elementary particles aren’t objects sitting in spacetime—they’re knots in the fabric of spacetime itself. Like tiny wormholes.”
A vague recollection came to David. He’d heard the idea before, probably in a grad school class two decades ago. “Yeah, I think Kleinman might have mentioned that theory in a lecture once. But I got the impression that physicists abandoned the effort.”
“That’s because no one could formulate a stable geon. According to the equations, the energy would either implode or leak out. But a few years ago some researchers resurrected the idea as a possible unification theory. Their work is still pretty sketchy, but what they’ve come up with so far is a particle that looks like a microscopic wormhole with CTCs.”